Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

The nineteenth century had seen the formulation of the opinion that religion belonged to the subjective, private realm and should have its place there.

What remained was the figure of Jesus, who of course appeared now, no longer as the Christ, but rather as the embodiment of all the suffering and oppressed and as their spokesman, who calls us to rise up, to change society.

the attitude that faith in God is something subjective, which belongs in the private realm and not in the common activities of public life

we ought to wonder whether God might not in fact be the genuine reality, the basic prerequisite for any “realism”, so that, without him, nothing is safe.

in its interior boredom, the search for mysticism, for any sort of contact with the divine, has sprung up anew. Everywhere there is talk about visions and messages from the other world,

But with Jesus, what matters is precisely his Person,

no longer can an essential difference be noted between theistic and nontheistic forms of religion.

It admonishes us to trust the mystery of God in its incomprehensibility.

Will not a new ruling class, then, take hold of the keys to human existence and become the managers of mankind?

Faith in the Logos, the Word in the beginning, understands moral values as responsibility, as a response to the Word, and thus gives them their intelligibility as well as their essential orientation.

But Romano Guardini correctly pointed out that the higher form of humility consists in allowing God to do precisely what appears to us to be unfitting and to bow down to what he does, not to what we contrive about him and for him.

the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe.

In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.

“What is the meaning and significance of the Christian profession ‘I believe’ today, in the context of our present existence and our present attitude to reality as a whole?”

because man is fashioned in such a way that his eyes are only capable of seeing what is not God, and thus for man God is and always will be the essentially invisible, something lying outside his field of vision.

It means that man does not regard seeing, hearing, and touching as the totality of what concerns him,

In other words, belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point that cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, that encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.

only in a lifelong conversion can we become aware of what it means to say “I believe”.

And who wants to do that in an age when the idea of “tradition” has been replaced by the idea of “progress”?

it is much more concerned with God in history, with God as man.

We are inclined today as a matter of course to suppose that only what is palpably present, what is “demonstrable”, is truly real.

That is to say, all that we can truly know is what we have made ourselves. It seems to me that this formula denotes the real end of the old metaphysics and the beginning of the specifically modern attitude of mind.

For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true, in other words, apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it.

Conversely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, logos, truth.9 It follows from this traditional view that human thinking is the rethinking of being itself, rethinking of the thought that is being itself. Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.

For this reason ancient and medieval philosophy took the view that knowledge of human things could only be techne, manual skill, but never real cognition and, hence, never real science.

The dominance of the fact began, that is, man’s complete devotion to his own work as the only certainty.

At the very moment when radical anthropocentrism set in and man could know only his own work, he had to learn to accept himself as merely a chance occurrence, just another “fact”.

what is knowable, tending toward truth, is what man has made and what he can now contemplate—was replaced by the new program verum quia faciendum—the truth with which we are now concerned is feasibility.

To put it again in another way: The truth with which man is concerned is neither the truth of being, nor even in the last resort that of his accomplished deeds, but the truth of changing the world, molding the world—a truth centered on future and action.

So the conviction was bound to spread more and more that in the final analysis all that man could really know was what was repeatable,

what he could put before his eyes at any time in an experiment. Everything that he can see only at secondhand remains the past and, whatever proofs may be adduced, is not completely knowable.

he can look his future in the eye with the determination to make himself into whatever he wishes; he does not need to regard it as impossible to make himself into the God who now stands at the end as faciendum, as something makable, not at the beginning, as logos, meaning.

the reduction of man to a “fact” is the precondition for understanding him as a faciendum, which is to be led out of its own resources into a new future.

Faith is thereby defined as taking up a position, as taking a stand trustfully on the ground of the word of God.

Essentially, it is entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself and never could be made and which precisely in this way supports and makes possible all our making. But

The penetrating “perhaps” that belief whispers in man’s ear in every place and in every age does not point to any uncertainty within the realm of practical knowledge; it simply queries the absoluteness of this realm and relativizes it, reminding man that it is only one plane of human existence and of existence in general, a plane that can only have the character of something less than final. In other words, we have now reached a point in our reflections where it becomes evident that there are two basic forms of human attitude or reaction to reality, neither of which can be traced back to the other because they operate on completely different planes. It

There must therefore be both: calculating thought, which is concerned with “makability”, and reflective thought, which is concerned with meaning.

By thinking only of the practicable, of what can be made, he is in danger of forgetting to reflect on himself and on the meaning of his existence.

every man must adopt some kind of attitude toward the realm of basic decisions, decisions that, by their very nature, can only be made by entertaining belief. There is a realm that allows no other response but that of entertaining a belief, and no man can completely avoid this realm. Every man is bound to have some kind of “belief”.

What makes this Marxist belief seem so attractive today and so immediately accessible is the impression it evokes of harmony with practical knowledge.

What is belief really? We can now reply like this: It is a human way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable with knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up. For in fact man does not live on the bread of practicability alone; he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning.

Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.

to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.

Christian belief—as we have already said—means opting for the view that what cannot be seen is more real than what can be seen.

Thus “Amen” simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it. It expresses the abandonment of oneself to what we can neither make nor need to make, to the ground of the world as meaning, which first of all discloses to me the freedom to make.

But the consequence of this is that it no longer inquires after truth. It achieves its successes precisely by renouncing the quest for truth itself and by directing its attention to the “rightness”, the “soundness” of the system whose hypothetical design must prove itself in the functioning of the experiment. In other words, practical knowledge does not inquire what things are like on their own and in themselves, but only whether they will function for us. The turn toward practical knowledge was accomplished precisely by contemplating, no longer being in itself, but only how it functioned with regard to our own work.

The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself.

I think this is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning.

its central formula is not “I believe in something”, but “I believe in you.”

Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the “you” of his mother.