"Religious Shock Therapy"
“All names that divide ‘religion’ are to us of little consequence compared with religion itself.” I am fond of quoting that statement from one of our ministers, William Ellery Channing, of three-quarters of a century ago.
You recall the way it goes, “Whoever loves truth and lives the Good is, in a broad sense of our religious fellowship; whoever loves the one or lives the other better than ourselves is our teacher, whatever church or age he may belong to.”
It has seemed to me, though these people would not claim it perhaps, that those of our religious fellowship who belong to many other churches and some to no churches, are growing in number all the time and at a quickened pace. All names that divide religion are to us of little consequence compared with religion itself! It could be that we have been the teachers of others or that they came to some of our evolving Unitarian insights all on their own, but the number of churchmen of many faiths who can now read William Ellery Channing and accept nearly every word has become legion.
Probably we Unitarians would today disagree with this father of the American Unitarianism more so than those of other churches. His views now look too conservative to us.
Today, we see Bishop Pike abandoning the trinity, or Bishop Robinson of New England telling the Christian world, “God is not ‘up there’ or ‘out there,’ God is not what we have thought He was at all.”
Countless Unitarians have been saying these things for a century and more. Not that we should develop any false pride in this. Our task is to continue the religious quest—to go where our best insights, knowledge, and faith lead us, continuing to value the True and the Good from whatever source, and offering our dynamism and our free religious approach to all who may learn from it.
What is happening in the Protestant theological world? Paul Tillich, who died nine days ago, has been a friend and mentor for many a religious liberal. He made theological thinking again respectable and relevant in a century which had largely given it up.
He reinterpreted the Christian language and we learned much from him, much about Christianity and much about some of our own ideas.
With a boost in theology from him and others, particularly Bultman and Bonhoeffer, the younger, and I think some of the more significant theologians of our day, are breaking new Christian ground. It is my opinion that Unitarians have already plowed these fields and I shall get to that later, but the work of the new “God-is-dead” theologians is not to be neglected. Particularly because they have the ear of a large segment of Christianity (at least they do potentially).
These men, among them Thomas Altizer of Methodist Emory University in Atlanta, Paul van Buren, Episcopalian at Temple University, WIlliam Hamilton at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, and Harvey Cox of Andover Newton Theological School—these men, though they would not agree with each other in a number of respects, are trying to answer some questions raised by a German martyr of 20 years ago. Their attempts are leading to what some of them and Time magazine calls “Christian atheism” or the “God is dead” movement.
The man they have been reading and pondering was the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His Letters and Papers from Prison, in book form, includes the poem reproduced on the front of this morning’s Order of Service. Read his letters if you want to know from the inside where a good bit of the inspiration for this current religious shake up came from.
Bonhoeffer, who could have remained safe in this country in 1939 when he was on a tour, chose to return to Germany to minister to his own people. His and his friends’ activities in the Resistance led to his arrest in 1943. He was hanged two years later. During that two year his study and writing continued and we have much of the writing.
Let me try to summarize some of the things he was saying that led to what I have called Religious Shock Therapy in current Christian theological thinking.
In April 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend, “We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all. How do we speak of God without religion? How do we speak in secular fashion of God?”
He elaborates that God is becoming superfluous because he has been pushed to the fringes of knowledge, yet man continues to nibble away at the fringes, leaving the area that is specifically God’s smaller and smaller.
People have used God the way the Greeks used deities in Greek plays—figures brought on stage to alter the course of events. People have used God for magic, saying, “God, get me out of this scrape.” People have used God to help human weakness or at the borders of human existence.
But man will continue to push these borders back making God superfluous. “God is not at the border,” says, Bonhoeffer, “he is at the center. He is not where we do not know, He is in the center of what we do know. God as a stop-gap is bound to fail—is failing.”
In so many words he is saying that God is dying, or the old God is, and we ought to help kill him off.
Furthermore, he is saying that we have much more important things to be bothered about than personal salvation. The Old Testament says nothing about saving one’s soul. The book of Romans in the New Testament focuses on God alone as righteousness and not in any individualistic doctrine of salvation.
“It is not,” says our theologian, “with the next world that we are concerned, but with this world” (sounds familiar, doesn’t it). Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions of science, art, and even ethics, this has become an understood thing.”
“The world has come of age,” says Bonhoeffer, yet “efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of God…so the preachers say only God can answer the ultimate personal questions of death and guilt, but our prisoner-thinker asks, ‘What if one day they too can be answered without God?’”
And here Bonhoeffer lays into secularized offshoots of religion: existentialism and psychotherapy. He maintains that they are keeping the old worn out idea of religion alive, even if feebly, and we ought to let it die. The existentialist philosophers and the psychotherapists are trying to demonstrate to contented and happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate.
Listen to what he says with feeling, “The ordinary man who spends his everyday life at work, and with his family, and of course, with all kinds of hobbies and other interests too, is not affected. He has neither time not inclination for thinking about his intellectual despair and regarding his modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble or a disaster.”
Religion needs to do that—try to make people feel guilty or miserable so it could step in to save them, thus keeping them in bondage. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has some very unkind things to say about religion and about psychotherapists. Incidentally, he was the son of a famous German psychiatrist. Perhaps that says enough, but it does not dismiss his judgments altogether anymore than the fact that there were many parsons in his family, and that he was one himself, makes his criticism of clergy and church invalid.
So, again, he points out what many have already discovered, that “there is no longer any need for God as a working hypothesis,” and says paradoxically, “God is teaching us that we must live as man who can get along very well with Him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.”
The Christian God is a suffering God and what is required of the Christian is “to plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of religion.”
Like Hammarskjold, Bonhoeffer is saying the way of the holy in today’s world lies through the world of action in a suffered society.
We meet God or transcendence not far off, not in “tasks beyond our scope and power but in the nearest thing to hand. God in human form,” not in abstractions like the absolute, the metaphysical or the infinite. We meet God in “man existing for others.”
So, you see, he says we have to get along without a hypothesis of God, but he still seeks God in human action. He reveres and wants to keep the Bible but admits, and I use his words, “I find it’s very slow going trying to work out a non-religious interpretation of Biblical terminology.” One reason he found it so difficult was that he was a man who loved his religion and loved his God, as the poem on our Order of Service indicates.
Here was a man who worked to throw out the old but who brought something of it back in through the rear door, saying the world “is really better understood than it understands itself, namely on the basis of the gospel, and in the light of Christ.”
Here was a man who was saying to find God we have to do away with God and yet, in the next breath he says, “May God in His mercy lead us through these times. But above all may He lead us to Himself.” This is paradoxical thinking—not untrue—truth is often paradoxical.
Here was a man who hinted that things like the Apostle’s Creed are antiquated controversies, and who said that the question, “What must I believe?” is the wrong question.
Here was a man who, like the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, said, “After all, personal relationships count for more than anything else” and “people are more important in life than anything else,” yet he ends that very same letter sticking to language he seems to have rejected intellectually but holds on to emotionally.
He ends the letter saying, “God does not give us everything we want, but he does fulfill his promises, i.e., he still remains Lord of the earth and still preserves his Church, constantly renewing our faith and not laying on us more than we can bear, and gladdening with us his nearness and help, hearing our prayers and leading us along the best and straightest road to himself. “In this way, God creates in us praise for Himself.”
Here was a man who was truly a prisoner for God, which was the original title of the book of his letters and papers from prison. And here was the man who, more than any other perhaps, led the way for the younger Christian theologians to “God-is-dead theology.”
Actually, I doubt if this will really amount to religious shock therapy. Most of the theologians will not be read by the general public. Paul Tillich is a cocktail party topic but even he is not well understood. And while he shocked a few who were close within the professional religious circle, it takes a long time for such ideas to filter through to the membership of Christian churches.
So my guess is that the new theologians will be read by seminary students and other theologians and a small percentage of ministers but not by the public. Rather the public will wake up some day to find that the old God truly is dead, but it will not be so much the theologians who killed him, rather people in general who outgrew him.
All the same, we ought to know what is happening at the intellectual level in Protestantism because as bits of it get to the popular level, like Time magazine, we will know what is happening behind the excitement.
Altizer is writing a book called The Gospel of Christian Atheism. I will be interested to read it, not because it will be new so much as to see how the intellectual process in Christian apologetics manages to keep Jesus Christ central with no more God the Father.
Let’s see something of what two or three of these men who have been reading Bonhoeffer have come up with. William Hamilton of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, the school I attended 16 years ago as a Baptist, jumps right in to asset that “faith does not mean that one affirms that God exists as an historical entity, for he does not, or that Jesus certainly said or did this or that, for he may not have.”
Faith to Hamilton, speaking from within his Christian framework, is somehow saying that the events that led up to the death of Christ are events in my own life, that his death caused something to affect my despair, sin, and death.
According to Hamilton, the Christian hope is not that we shall be spared death. Rather, it is the conviction “that God will not break the relationship (with him) we have laid hold of. We are not the immortal ones; the relationship we have laid hold of by faith, that is what is ‘immortal.’”
“But since God is dead,” says the professor, “man all the more, is summoned to follow Jesus as an example of conduct the old faith and hope are gone. All that is left is love, so we must be committed to love and to the service of our fellow man.” And that has been the commitment of the greatest religious leaders.
Jesus was reported to have repeated, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And Hamilton asks, “If Jesus can wonder about being forsaken by God, are we to be blamed if we wonder?”
It was the philosopher, Nietzsche, who first said “God is dead.” You will recall how the writer in Time ended the article on this theological movement. He said, “Those who are still with God are likely to reply by quoting that old play on Nietzsche’s statement. It goes thus:
GOD IS DEAD! (Signed) Nietzsche
NIETZSCHE IS DEAD! (Signed) God
It begins to look like the theologians will not settle the question now anymore than they have in the past. And I am tempted; I will repeat that old chestnut that a philosopher is a man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. And a theologian is a man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there, and he finds him.
The God-is-dead theologians, I think, are looking for God, whom they are saying isn’t there, and yet they are finding him in new language. But this is not idle game playing. It is a serious attempt to bring to life again a faith people crave, yet whose language and whose symbols are losing or have lost their power of persuasion. New language is being sought—and new symbols even if they be the symbols of no symbolization—even if the language be the religion of no religion, which, after all, is a pretty widespread religion.
Episcopalian Paul van Buren is making a valiant effort. He maintains that statements of faith are simple ways of seeing the world and other people and oneself and statements of faith go on to set forth a way of acting appropriately to that way of seeing.
Theology is something, he feels, that one does within and for the church. So he keeps to the Christian way of theologizing—of seeing as having to do with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But van Buren is trying to “do” this theology without a doctrine of God. He not only avoids the word “God” but substitutes for it as well, words like “ground of being” or “transcendence” or “ultimate concern.”
He concludes, “Christianity will have to strip itself of supernaturalism to become believable again, just as alchemy had to abandon its mystical overtones to become the useful science of chemistry. This is old stuff to Unitarians, we might say, but it is dangerous territory in the dominant religious community, too much religious shock, perhaps, for van Buren has been attacked and charged with clarifying Christian doctrine to the point where there is hardly anything left of it.
Then along comes Harvey Cox of Andover Newton Theological School writing the book, The Secular City, in which, finally, he brings us back to the overshadowing question of Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno: Is man alone in the universe or not?
And with all his God-is-dead theology, with all his insistence that God is a sociological issue and a political issue—that God is a politician and we ought to set about finding out what he is up to and get to working alongside him—Cox has to try to face Unamuno’s question, “Are we alone in the universe or not?”
And Cox, though he says we may have to give up the word “God” sometime, at the same time states his faith that we are not alone in the universe.
God is not a thing or a being, but God is the name we have given to the transcendent which we meet, not up in the sky but in the world. Reality is not different as it is encountered by the theist and the non-theist. But reality is given a different name by theist and non-theists and, he maintains, the name they give affects the way they live.
The name the theist has used in the English speaking world is God, but the word God doesn’t mean anything—one has to remember again that God is not a thing or a being—God is a name given to happenings just as it was when, in the legend or the myth, Moses wanted to know God’s name and was told to tell the curious, “My name is Nameless” or Moses was to tell them he was sent by “I will do what I will do.” No name then—God is “I will be as what I will do.”
It seems to me that the new theologians are doing what many have done before them but they are doing it more abruptly now and, occasionally with intellectual brilliance. They too are not trying to make meaningful religious involvement in a religionless world or one that is headed that way.
Unitarians did this, started doing this with the reactions to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and particularly to Theodore Parker, over a century ago. It was carried further in our movement in the middle of the last century when it became clear that one did not have to be a Christian to be a Unitarian or to be religious.
The important thing then was the love and fellowship of ethical people and their relationships just as it was over two decades ago to Bonhoeffer who said, “People are more important than anything else in life.”
The process continued for us in the twenties and thirties during the humanism-theist controversy within Unitarianism, when many ministers and large numbers of Unitarian laypeople not only rejected supernaturalism but said the question of God is irrelevant.
The universe has no purpose in itself, they said, “It is we who read our purposes into it or those humanist who did not deny that there might be a purpose in the universe simply said they failed to see one.”
In any case, they were concerned about the life, not some possible future one; they were concerned about man, not about God. They were concerned about the ethical life and the enhancement of human life and not about the abstractions of theology and they were sometimes concerned about Jesus as a good man among other good men in history but not about the cross or the resurrection.
In some ways this controversy between humanists and theists within Unitarianism amounted to our own brand of religious shock therapy in the 1920’s and 1930’s. It resulted in strengthening the principle of “individual freedom of belief” into becoming not just a goal but a very real fact in our churches.
We came to accept and to live by the idea that anyone is welcome in our churches, be he humanist, atheist, agnostic, naturalist, or theist, and that is the way it still is.
And we can be proud that our principles of the freedom of thought, the high place of ethics and spiritual democracy have weathered the hurricane of serious differences.
Courtesy was not forsaken. We had no heresy trials. And our free religious movement is stronger than ever.
Today, humanism vs. theism is a mild issue in a few of our churches or no issue at all. I think this is because we have learned that humanists, theists, and non-theists have no reason to fight with each other.
The new Christian theologians are struggling to find a way of experiencing God, or knowing God, or working alongside God by doing away with God. Perhaps, if they succeed, the people will become more godly or at least will find a way back to “the sacred” once everything they were calling “sacred” disappears.
Perhaps what lies ahead in many of the Christian churches is a controversy similar to the one we Unitarians have already been through with those who hold to God-theology on one side and the God-is-dead movement on the other.
And I wish for them that it may work out as well as it has for us. It may be that they will have to face up, not alone, to the idea that the old God is dead, but also that it may be possible to be a Christian without Christ.
It will, perhaps, make the going a little tougher for the Christian who seriously wishes to examine all the roots of his faith and that is what has made Unitarianism a difficult religious movement because we ask ourselves to be open-minded and encourage ourselves to examine in the light of our best knowledge all the roots of any faith. Then, individually, we must decide our faith, and life and that is difficult—more so than being told what to believe and what to do.
What theologians want is to make religion live again even if they have to kill it. We can wish them luck and we can learn from them as they learn. At the same time our history can, perhaps, be instructive to some of them. I believe, personally, that we have already been through the God is dead shock. And, having been there, those who have discovered God in a different light have something far stronger than they ever had before. And those who are non-theists have come to see that they simply give reality a different name and that is perfectly all right to do so.
And all of us together are working at that reality which has always been more important than anything else—human love in a broad and deep sense—that love is crucial, central and call it “love of God” or “love of man” or love of both, we find it best in the living world of men.
