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Si comprehendis, non est Deus.

St. Augustine

Religion in a Violent World

On the 12th of September, 2001, the following paragraph appeared in the English newspaper the Guardian:

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them the false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful.3

A much shorter version of the same message appeared on the wall of the Presbyterian College in Montreal in the form of a huge graffito. It read simply, “RELIGION KILLS!” All of us who taught in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill had to walk past this taunt. That particular wall had borne many other antireligious slogans over the years, but this one was punctuated by the dramatic collapse of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, an image seared on all our minds. The graffito didn’t single out any one religion, though we all knew that it had been a debased form of Islam that had inspired the event of 9/11. In our Faculty, most of the great religions of the world were represented, some more prominently than others; so the accusation was intended for—and, I think, felt by—all of us.

Nor has that message been lost on the general populous. Professor Richard Dawkins’s statement in the Guardian makes sense to a great many people, and though Dawkins is famous for his “new atheism,” more than a few of those of us who eschew atheism find much to commend that statement; for, as Christians, we have our own quarrel with religion, as I shall explain presently. The current resurgence of public interest in atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism has been stimulated by the dastardly events of 9/11, but it has been lingering beneath the surface of public consciousness throughout the Modern period. The horrifying image of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers has only pinpointed and made concrete a disdain for religious zeal that has long been a subtheme beneath the song of technological triumph that our civilization has been so lustily singing. Now the subtheme, roused not only by 9/11 but by a whole host of catastrophic occurrences (perhaps the most characteristic occurrences of the twentieth century and beyond!), has risen to a pitch and, for many, quite drowned out that old triumph song. Until now it has been possible for most people, even skeptics and agnostics, to assume that on the whole religion is a good thing. But when so much of the planet’s violence seems inextricably bound up with religion, this assumption is increasingly questioned by large numbers of people. It does not take great insight to come to the conclusion that if indeed “religion kills” or creates attitudes that may well result in the degradation and destruction of life, it would be better to avoid religion, or at least to exercise a certain caution in that area. This too contributes incalculably to the exodus from the churches, especially from those churches that have encouraged people to think for themselves.

In the face of this renewed questioning of religion, many who are committed to a faith tradition are prone to become defensive. Typically, their defense, when it is not just emotional, draws upon three observations: (1) While, throughout recorded history, religion may have caused occasional harm, its major contribution to human civilization has been positive. (2) Religious factions that create or foster hostility and violence are usually distortions of the faiths they imagine they are serving. (3) Very often where religion is blamed for destructive attitudes or events, the truth is that the religion is being used to bolster causes that are ideologically or politically driven. For example, few if any informed persons believed that “the troubles” in Northern Ireland were really the consequence of genuinely Catholic and Protestant agendas, even though the media invariably referred to the situation in those terms.

Such defense of religion is legitimate enough when it is sensitively stated; but it rarely gets at the heart of the problem. For the problem is not only that religion is frequently misinterpreted and misused; the problem is that there are dangerous and vulnerable spots in most if not all religious faiths, which, if they are not recognized and their practical effects closely monitored within the communities holding these faiths, are likely under certain social conditions to become vehicles for the expression of suspicion, prejudice, fear, or hatred of others. And the really subtle aspect of all this is that such dangerous and vulnerable spots in a religious system cannot be confined to those rather obvious places where religious belief treads a fine line between strong personal faith and bigotry with respect to others; rather, such flash points can and do emerge in connection with the most apparently innocent or seemingly positive affirmations of a faith tradition. It is obvious enough, for instance, that a religious community that blatantly excludes from salvation or fullness of humanity any who do not consent to its self-same dogmas is actively courting conflict with others. But it is not at all obvious that belief in a deity whose compassion abounds, or a sacred text that marvelously illumines the mind, or a moral code that affirms the unique value of each individual, or a faith community in which human mutuality and unity are fostered—it is not at all obvious that such highly affirmative and apparently humane affirmations of faith might be or become the spiritual heritage out of which a religion . . . “kills.”

Immediately within the ecumenical Christian community itself, however, we have witnessed over the past four or five decades how it happens that precisely such well-established and seemingly salutary teachings of our faith can become the occasions for tension, alienation, and the exclusion or oppression of minorities. The central figure of Christianity—the Christ—pictured by pietistic and liberal theologies of the nineteenth century in the most gentle and inclusive terms, has been perceived by significant numbers of Christians and others a century later as an excluding representation of the divine: as a white, male image of God, the Jesus of ecclesiastical doctrine and practice has conveyed to many women and non-Caucasians an extension and legitimization of patriarchy and Western domination. Moreover, his cross, the chief symbol of the faith, has been felt by significant numbers of thoughtful Christians to valorize suffering and impede the liberation of marginalized people. Again, the prominence of anthropological interest in the Bible, which heretofore was taken for granted and even lauded, began—in the face of the crisis of the biosphere and the degradation of the natural order by aggressive Western technocracy—to seem to many a highly questionable and even perilous anthropocentrism.

In short, we have been through a period of intense scrutiny of our faith, a quest for its unexamined assumptions, its implicit biases and hidden messages. Most of us over the past thirty years have learned—a little—to listen to the words of Scripture, liturgy, hymnody, theology, and preaching with the ears of others: women; racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; economically or otherwise disenfranchised people. We have not achieved all we should have in this respect, but some significant practical and attitudinal changes have been made, at least in liberal and moderate Christian circles.

But it is, one suspects, only a beginning. Not only is the habit of self-critical reflection on our beliefs and pronouncements limited to a minority of thinking Christians, albeit a significant minority, it is still very much an in-house phenomenon. I mean that those of us in the churches of Europe and its satellites who do ask how our faith and witness may be heard by others have still not encompassed in our horizon of consciousness those others who exist outside the boundaries of our more conventional, more familiar occidental sphere. To some extent, we have learned since World War II to listen to our own preaching and theology with the ears of Jews: the catastrophe of the Holocaust, together with the testimony of the Jewish community in our midst, have awakened us from our centuries-long sleep with respect to Christendom’s active and passive roles in the sufferings of its parental faith. In a less consistent manner we have begun to recognize, some of us, the role that our religion has played in the humiliation of the indigenous peoples of our continent and the planet at large. Certainly more of us today have learned to listen to Christian doctrinal and moral teachings—for instance on marriage and sexuality—with the ears of persons spontaneously inclined toward members of their own sex. In these and other ways, speaking at least for significant minorities within the remnants of classical Protestantism, I think it may be said without undue exaggeration that our awareness of those who are other has expanded significantly by comparison with the past. We are more inclusive in our thinking today—not only in terms of whom we welcome into our congregations but in terms of our basic perception of the great variety of human life: of the multitude out there who hear or overhear or partially hear or mishear what we are saying and praying and singing and writing in our churches and Christian councils, and who are affected, willy-nilly, by what we say and do, and do not say or do.

Still, I think we should have to conclude that this consciousness of others is only in its initial stages, for the multitude out there is much greater and more diverse than we have yet been able to grasp. I suppose we shall never grasp it fully, for the contemporary, wired world is indeed a multitude; its diversity is scarcely imaginable, yet in its immense variety it is no longer far away but part of our immediate environment—as any five-minute surfing of the Internet demonstrates. The mandate that is issued to Christians, in this opening up of the great world that we call globalism, means that we shall have to attempt a more informed consciousness of and compassion for the entire world than Christianity heretofore has ever had, or even felt that it ought to have. For without such consciousness we shall never be able even to formulate our witness, let alone to anticipate the effects of our witness, for good or ill, on those who hear it—all of whom, regardless of race or clime or creed are, according to our faith, beloved children of God.

In other language, ecumenical thinking in the future Christian movement will have to be almost infinitely more expansive than it has been before. The Oikoumene—the known world—for the early church meant the territories, tribes, and peoples clustered around the Mediterranean Sea. After the sixteenth-century European discoveries of new lands, even whole continents, the Oikoumene had to be enlarged, and this enlargement has continued apace throughout the centuries ever since, as knowledge of the planet and its vast spaces and myriad cultures grew. Moreover, we know that this expansion of the Oikoumene has not been an easy or automatic process, so far as the church’s intellectual and emotional appropriation of it is concerned. It is one thing to discover a new fact about the world, for example to find out about cultures heretofore unknown; it is something else to absorb such facts to the point of letting them affect our thinking—including our theologies. Such absorption requires time. Religious communities taking shape initially within well-established and relatively monocultural frameworks (such as the Roman empire or, later on, the European community of nations and their colonies, or nineteenth-century America) quite naturally reflect the mentality of their geopolitical context; and it takes a very long time for religious communities to transcend their cultural conditioning long enough to take in, mentally and spiritually, the new, enlarged world of their present. Euro-American theology and ecclesiastical policy still today has conspicuous difficulty encompassing in its purview even the reality and the meaning of theologies developed in Latin America. For most of us in the West, the whole southern hemisphere and the Orient, including the near East, remain virtually terra incognita.

Avoiding False Scandals

This opening up of the globe that is a consequence of the combined expansion of science and technology, facilitated by modern communications, presents the Christian movement, then, with an unprecedented spiritual and intellectual challenge: the challenge to expand our working awareness of our worldly context to include lands and peoples and creatures and processes unknown by our own grandparents. We are obliged now not by something external but by our world commitment as ambassadors of the incarnate One to listen to our own theologies and sermons and liturgies and hymns and ethical counsels with the ears not only of Jews but also of Muslims (to name only one, the most prominent, of the religious others of our expanded global context). We are obliged by our own commitment to the whole of God’s good creation to reflect on the implications of what we are saying or not saying in our churches and councils about the extrahuman creatures and natural processes that, on the whole, we have heretofore ignored. While our congregations in most once Christian Western lands are depleted, our listening audience, so to speak, has expanded phenomenally in this age of ubiquitous and instantaneous communications. How can we achieve an informed and compassionate sensitivity to the multitude that is overhearing us? More important, how can we open ourselves to all these others while at the same time remaining faithful to our own foundational credo as Christians? How can we avoid giving false offense, where these others are concerned, while remaining faithful to the gospel of the cross, with its own offense, its own “stumbling block,” its own skandalon (1 Corinthians 1–2).

For that, I think, is how the question—the basic, confronting question of the Christian mission in our global context today—has to be formulated. This is no time to avoid the true stumbling block and scandal of our faith, which is certainly inextricably bound up with the crucified Christ. To escape that, to avoid that, would be to opt out of this faith-tradition altogether. The ultraliberalism and modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate very clearly that the adjective Christian and the noun Christianity are hollow and puerile if “Jesus Christ and him crucified” is replaced by some allegedly less particularized center. More important, precisely this christocentric center, for all its particularity, when it is deeply understood, is infinitely more inclusive than are most of the allegedly universal religious messages put forward to replace that center—messages whose seeming universality usually cloak highly chauvinistic and biased assumptions. The point, therefore, is not how to avoid the skandalon of “the crucified God” (Luther/Moltmann), but how to avoid the false scandals that have indeed plagued the course of Christendom throughout its history and are still extraordinarily and virulently at work today. The point is not how to make ourselves and our message, as Christians, entirely and painlessly accessible to the multitude; rather, it is to try as steadfastly as we can to ensure that what the multitude hears is really the gospel and not some culturally biased religious doctrine or secular ideology that obscures the gospel and offends and alienates others wrongly or needlessly. The point is not how to achieve superlative political correctness of the kind that forfeits, in the end, the possibility of saying anything at all decisively, lest it offend; rather, the point is to avoid elevating to the status of the essential accidental, peripheral, or secondary concerns that too easily become the occasion for confrontation, conflict, and violence.

That is why, in these chapters, my purpose will be to identify certain misrepresentations of Christianity, which, though they all concern matters indeed closely bound up with this faith both historically and doctrinally, when they are raised to the status of Christianity’s essence or core confession must be perceived as false scandals poised to become flash points of conflict and alienation vis à vis others who are not of this fold—and also (let us acknowledge right away!) some who are of this fold. In a word, I want to identify some of these vulnerable spots of Christianity so that what this faith really is, what it really claims, what it wants of us, what it wants to give us—so that this core confession or kerygma might have a better chance of shining through the thick fog and darkness of the myriad claims to Christianity in today’s global village.

What really is Christianity? As one who has tried over nearly half a century to answer that question in the affirmative, I can testify to the near impossibility of doing so in a really satisfying way! But perhaps it is possible to say what Christianity is not. It is always more difficult to say what something is, especially when that something is an organic, moving, changing historical entity, than to say what it is not. Of course we must assume some more or less integrated, if tentative or intuitive, understanding of what a thing is in order to specify what it isn’t.4 But if we can eliminate what the thing is not, we may leave, at the center, a space where das Ding in sich (the thing in itself) may identify itself or (to say the same thing in other language) may come to us in all its ineffable mystery. If we exercise enough nuanced care and enough modesty about our own witness to God’s Word—if we “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, KJV)—we may succeed in leaving room for the divine Spirit to fill in the holy silence that we cannot precisely or accurately name. That is my object here.

Theology via Negativa

What is Christianity not? What, among all the many things that Christianity is reputed to be, or has tried to be, or still presents itself here and there as being, ought we to rule out? What should we eliminate from our understanding of the core or essence of this faith tradition? The methodology upon which I shall be drawing as I undertake this project is certainly not new, though in Western Christendom it has been employed with any kind of consistency only sporadically. It is called negative theology or theology undertaken via negativa, by way of negation. Under the nomenclature apophatic theology, this approach has informed much of the theological thinking of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. While a few historic theologians of the Christian West, mystics chiefly, made considerable use of the via negativa (one thinks of Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, John of the Cross, and others), the West has usually preferred the via affirmativa, or kataphatic theology; that is, it has wanted to advance positive theological statements and systems—partly, one has to say, because such an approach serves more directly than any negative theology could have done the powerful hierarchic institutions of Western Christendom. Ecclesiastical establishments like papal Rome at its height, or even the less powerful Protestant state churches of Europe, seem to require equally definitive and triumphantly positive theologies. But for some sensitive Christian thinkers of the East, these Western theologies have seemed to diminish or violate the essential mystery of God and the things of God. Theologians like the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cappadocian fathers, John Chrysostom, and John of Damascus were so conscious of the ineffability of the deity that they found human attempts to describe God affirmatively to be lacking in humility and quite possibly to be courting idolatry. One has the impression that neither Catholic nor Protestant theology has been particularly worried about that possibility! And with hindsight, it seems to me, we might well lament the fact. Looking back over some of the immense and exhaustive systems of theology developed in Western Christendom, not to speak of such modern expressions of religious omniscience as Christian fundamentalism, one is often a little embarrassed today. It strikes many of us, I think, that too much Western theology knows a lot more about God than it should—or could! It lacks the kind of humility that contemplation of the Infinite ought surely to induce in finite creatures; and at a time when (as I’ve already suggested) modesty on the part of religion is no longer a bourgeois nicety but a condition for human survival, this theological omniscience of Western Christendom gives one pause. For the avoidance of giving false offense, whatever else it means, must first mean honestly recognizing the abysmal limitations of our own knowledge of God and the things of God, and therefore not putting ourselves forward as infallible authorities with exclusive claims to truth. There are no experts where the knowledge of God is concerned! The apophatic theology of the Eastern Christian tradition at its best is grounded, I think, in that recognition.

To be sure, all inspired and authentic theology is premised on the experience of divine revelation. The revelation that the presence of God conveys to faith, however, is not so much extraordinary and compelling knowledge (scientia)—and certainly it is not just information!—as it is sheer awe and humility before the holy, and the wisdom (sapientia) that can only be the fruit of such wonder. It is surely a sophomoric kind of mysticism that grounds itself in the sheer unknownness of the ultimate. Authentic Christian mysticism is born of the wonder that is revealed in the Christ: that the world—that we!—should be so loved! (John 3:16).

Of course exceptions arise to the generalization about Western preference for kataphatic and Eastern preference for apophatic theological approaches. I already alluded to the Western mystics, who were always a rather countercultural element in the West. Indeed that quintessentially Western theologian, Augustine of Hippo, who was perhaps the main architect of Western theology, in one of his several phases or personae manifests a highly mystical strain. No statement may be more exemplary of the apophatic tradition than Augustine’s terse phrase, Si comprehendis, non est Deus (If you [think that you] understand, it isn’t God you’re thinking about.)5 It was of course Augustine’s more kataphatic side, especially in his later or so-called Catholic phase that set the tone for the Western Middle Ages. During the High Middle Ages, when Scholasticism achieved what may be thought the pinnacle of kataphatic or affirmative theology, Christian mysticism was almost an underground movement; but the alternative the mystics stood for was never wholly submerged, and in fact it was found sometimes in the personal devotion of the Scholastic theologians themselves. Even the highest schoolman of them all, St. Thomas Aquinas, was drawn to mysticism after he had experienced a spiritual crisis, a dark night of the soul and the light that was given him in that darkness. In the aftermath of this mystical experience of the divine, Thomas told his secretary, Reginald, that he could not go on with his great Scholastic project, the Summae, because, he said, “everything I have written seems to me straw!” More significantly still, when around the middle of the fifteenth century the medieval Scholastic project ground to an effective halt, it was the mystical approach to the comprehension of the things of faith that emerged to fill the vacuum, and perhaps save Western Christendom from early dissolution.

This is not uninteresting to Protestants, because we remember that Martin Luther was profoundly influenced by some of these late mystical thinkers, especially the so-called German Mystics and Meister Eckhardt. So it is not surprising when one finds in Luther’s writings a frequent and lively use of the via negativa. And while the mystical dimension of the Reformation was rather pushed aside by later forms of both Lutheran and Calvinist Orthodoxy, it was never wholly vanquished. In fact, I would maintain that Luther’s theology of the cross (theologia crucis) is at its core a type of apophatic theology; for in its rejection of religious triumphalism (the theologia gloriae)6, its refusal of eschatological finality, its embrace of a faith that must not be mistaken for sight and a hope that must not be mistaken for consummation, the theologia crucis opts for a spiritual and intellectual humility that may claim confidence [con + fide] but never certitude. I was not surprised, therefore, when in conducting my research for this study I found an article that declared that Søren Kierkegaard, that extraordinary nineteenth-century spiritual son of Luther, must be considered the apophatic theologian of the West.

Now, as the mention of Kierkegaard, father of existentialism, suggests that what lies at the heart of the apophatic tradition is the insistent sense that where living realities are concerned, fullness of human comprehension and definition is ipso facto impossible. That is why, as Augustine’s luminous phrase shows, this tradition has application first of all to the deity, for God defies containment or codification. Indeed, much of the negative theology of the mystics draws quite specifically on the biblical text, in Acts, where St. Paul addresses the Athenians on Mars Hill using as his point of contact with them the concept of “the unknown God” (Acts 17:16–17). God for biblical faith is above all a living God—a God whose presence—not the idea of God’s existence but the experience of God’s presence—is the crucial factor. God for the whole tradition of Jerusalem transcends all else, is unique, beyond compare; as Anselm of Canterbury put it in a famous phrase, Deus non est genere (God is not one of a species). Therefore God remains the unknown one, even when God reveals Godself—no, especially then! For, as Luther insisted, it is the revealing God (Deus revelatus) who, precisely in revealing conceals, precisely in manifesting hides, precisely in self-giving remains unpossessible (Deus absconditus). The living, self-revealing God of biblical faith transcends all our preconceptions of deity, shatters our idols and images of divinity, even the highest and most philosophically sophisticated of them, and is simply present as Thou, defying objectification, defying every attempt of ours to define and describe and specify and so (in Buber’s famous language) turn this Thou into an It. It should not be forgotten that the most sacred name for God in Hebrew faith is not a proper name at all but almost a conundrum—the tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh), which seems to mean “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” Strictly speaking, this means that theology, a doctrine of God, is impossible!

To speak autobiographically for a moment, I remember when that insight first struck me with full force. I had just begun my seminary teaching career, and the insight nearly stopped me in my tracks! If God is truly God, if God is “not one of a species,” but absolutely unique, unnameable, absolutely transcendent; if we, who cannot even describe our own spouses and children without falling into graven-image making, set out to describe God, then have we not committed the ultimate blasphemy? (It was about that time, in fact, that Ursula Niebuhr said to me quite earnestly, “Theology always walks close to blasphemy.”) I began to think, then, that I had chosen the wrong profession! But fortunately a second insight came to me. I wrote it down on a four-by-six index card, and stashed it away in the midst of a whole boxful of such cards in my study. I suppose it is still there to this day. I never look for it, but I know it is there. In fact, I remember it better than any of the other hundreds of index cards I’ve filed away over the years. It reads, “God permits theology.” As a discipline, a science, theology is impossible, for its object is no object but a living Subject. Yet God—with great condescension and forbearance—permits it . . . for the time being. So long as we know that it is not possible, only permitted, we may try our hand at it. It’s when we start thinking we are really quite good at it that we had better watch out!

What I mean to say in this homely autobiographical way is this: there must always be a prominent element of modesty, or even tentativeness and hesitancy, in what we profess concerning the knowledge of God. The Creed (any Christian creed!) should be whispered, not shouted. What prevents this modesty from becoming sheer agnosticism and devolving into theistic relativism is that, knowing and trusting God as those who sometimes feel themselves to be caught up in God’s presence, we may at least identify false gods, idols, demons, and unworthy images of the divine. We may not claim for our positive statements about God anything more than awkward and hesitant attempts to point to One whom we do not understand and can only stand under; but we may (not arrogantly, not self-righteously, yet with a certain confidence) sometimes say, No, this is not God, and neither is this . . . nor this . . . nor this . . . And if we do this consistently, and especially with regard to our own ideas and wishful thinking and fond, familiar images of God, it may be that the Spirit who is God will now and then come to us and whisper to us reassuringly . . . (Or was it only the wind?)

So theology via negativa is made necessary first of all because it feels impelled—is indeed “under necessity” (1 Corinthians 9:16)—to speak of God. And God—the God who at last allowed Moses to see his back—permits us to look for words that, transformed by the divine Spirit, can perhaps—perhaps!—bear witness to the great and holy silence evoked by God’s presence to us. It is to protect and honor the Word that names that silence that we who would be theologians are under necessity to take the greatest care about our words—“For the ear trieth words as the mouth tasteth meat” (Job 34:3, KJV).

But while theology by way of negation applies in this special sense to the deity, the apophatic tradition extends itself also to all other aspects of theological inquiry, for it understands the whole of reality to be characterized by an aura of wonder that cannot be reduced to words, formula, description or, doctrine. Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process thought, spoke of the “livingness of things,” and this fits rather precisely, I think, the mindset of this tradition. If what strikes one most about the experienced world is the life force within it—its livingness, its organic and always-moving nature—then one is likely to be less than absolute in one’s descriptions and depictions of it; one will find oneself drawn to the way of negation because one realizes how little trust one can put in one’s feeble attempts to do justice to “the livingness of things.”

One of the (relatively few!) developments that gives one hope today is the manner in which the public perception of the world—of nature, certainly, but also of human life—seems to be moving away from the wholly materialistic, objectifying mentality of the technological society to a more organic, more fluid, more animate conception of reality. Not that the technocratic, managerial mentality has disappeared—far from it! But more of us today than was the case even two or three decades ago, I think, have em-braced a worldview that looks with a certain awe upon the natural order, including ourselves within that order. Partly because we have experienced great and abiding threats to nature and all life, we have learned to look upon the world with different eyes. Trees are not just lumber, and polar bears are not just cute big fuzzy creatures for zoos, and the Precambrian shield is not just a barren place for mining, and the oceans are not just for fishing, and people are not just statistics! James Lovelock, instigator of the so-called Gaia Theory, believes that the planet itself is a kind of living organism, and not just a rather amazing ball of substances and processes that we may get to understand and use as we please!7

This new public awareness, so far as it is able to conquer or at least counter the materialistic, technological approach to reality, is where I think religious faith must turn for human dialogue today. For faith—certainly Christian faith—shares with this mentality, even when it is driven by nontheistic or secular impulses, a sense of the great mystery of all reality as the good creation of an omniscient God. And wherever that sense of mystery is entertained among men and women, there is an opening for dialogue with faith.

That faith, however, must itself be true to the depths of mystery that it confesses. That faith must not devolve into sight, into brave religious pronouncements, into propositions and doctrines and dogmas and ironclad fundamentals. When it does that, it betrays the very Source of wonder to which it is supposed to be bearing witness.

This means that theological modesty is required today, not only where our statements about God—our theologies in the narrower sense—are concerned, but in all things. And the way of negation, at bottom, is nothing more or less than a manner of honoring the mystery of God and the things of God—all the things of God: that is, the heavens and earth and “all creatures great and small,” including our own strange and perhaps impossible species.

The Intention of this Study

My intention in the chapters that follow, then, is simply to apply that way of negation to the question about Christianity itself. At a time when definitive statements about a religion—any and every religion—are bound to occasion immediate dispute and rejection, may we nevertheless preserve something of the integrity of the Christian faith by trying to identify what it is not?

Recently I attended in our university an interesting doctoral oral examination. The basic question of the dissertation being examined was whether the eschatology of Augustine, as presented in his magnum opus, The City of God, could have any relevance for feminist theology. It was a good thesis, but an extremely difficult one—more so, I think, than appeared on the surface. As a result, the examiners found themselves frustrated and floundering at many points. Could one, they wondered, legitimately compare a theology developed in the context of fourth-century Rome (already in a state of decay) with theologies emerging out of contemporary Western societies more than a millennium and a half later?

In the final moments of the long examination, the chair or pro-dean of the examining committee, himself a Muslim, was moved to ask, “Are there not perhaps many Christianities?”

That was a very perceptive question, and the one that had been begged throughout the discussion. It is also the question that we must ask ourselves here. With a modicum of knowledge of church history, one realizes that Christianity has indeed shown up throughout these twenty-plus centuries in many different forms and guises. And when one encounters Christians from other parts of the world today, one is often struck more by differences than by similarities—differences of spirituality; differences of moral concerns; differences in attitudes toward the Scriptures, church authority, tradition, politics, sexuality, and so forth. Whole Christian denominations are torn apart by such differences. Meetings of ecumenical bodies are often bedeviled by them. Globalization has only increased our knowledge of the bewildering variety of Christian communities and types. Some suggest that the present-day split between Christians of the northern and the southern hemispheres, in this respect, is fraught with more ecclesiastical grief than the Great Schism of East and West in the eleventh century, traditionally dated 1054 CE.8 Right here on our own continent are diverse and—at least in some cases—wholly incompatible expressions of this ancient faith, all insisting that they are bodying forth Christianity. It is tempting, therefore, as it was for the examiners of that thesis, to conclude that there are simply many Christianities.

But that, it seems to me, is a too-easy way out of what is certainly a dilemma. I am tempted to say that it is in fact an evasion of the problem. Where it is not the product of sheer weariness or indifference (a mood that was certainly observable in the aforementioned doctoral examination!), it courts a numbing relativism and leaves serious Christians in the lurch. Are we to say, simply, that there are all these sorts of Christianity, one as legitimate as the next, so take your pick? Are we ready to give up on the biblical and traditional mark of Christian unity—simply to leave out the word “one” when we repeat marks of the church in the Nicene Creed and elsewhere, and opt for this smorgasbord of Christianities that characterizes the worldwide religious scene today?

I do not wish to imply that Christian unity translates into uniformity. It never has and never will. Indeed, it never should! Nor do I wish to suggest that we should, or can, aim for some immutable, permanently true definition of what authentic Christianity is. It seems obvious to me that in the twenty-first century we cannot and should not even attempt to construct binding definitions, in whatever form, of what constitutes true Christianity. Of course many would like to do that, provided their own definitions were the ones accepted! But surely we have learned enough from history to realize that, besides not resolving anything, such regulatory definitions would only add to the estrangement, suspicion, and violence that already exists among Christians and churches. Few of us are ready for the kinds of excommunications, denunciations, damnations, and burnings at the stake (well, yes—probably that too!) that would prove the logical course of such a procedure.

But neither, on the other hand, can we settle for the status quo, with its plethora of churches and sects and causes and creeds and moralities all claiming to be expressions of Christianity. We cannot rest easy with that existing situation, however we may tolerate it in the meantime, because some of these alleged Christianities are dynamite. They are brimful of potentiality for chaos and violence, overflowing with the very stuff out of which “religion kills.” Perhaps in an earlier, less volatile age than ours, there was room for the kind of laissez faire that simply left in abeyance the question of truth or legitimacy or authenticity. But we know now that this is not our present situation. In today’s world (the world after 9/11, if you wish), what Christians think and do, and do not think or do, matters not only to other Christians but to the whole species—affects indeed the future of the planet. We Christians, who in our heyday as Christendom thought we could control everything, in our humiliated and reduced state are apt to underestimate our own responsibility for the preservation of life. We have become very concerned, many of us, about the Islamic faith, which we feel threatens the planetary future because so much of it seems to have fallen into extremism. Where are the moderate Muslims?, many Christians ask. But Muslims might just as legitimately ask, Where are the moderate and responsible Christians? For in large areas of the Muslim world the Christians, when they do not show up as plain proselytizers, seem the chief spiritual force of imperial Western societies that want to rob Eastern and other peoples of their birthright, and thus foment hostilities.

No, we may not, I think, prescribe what Christianity is and must always be. Even if we could do that, theoretically, it would be a disastrous project, adding untold weight to an already chaotic and potentially lethal religious situation. It would also, of course, be completely impracticable, even absurd. But what we may and can and ought to do, I shall argue here, is to hold up to one another in the churches and to those who care in the world at large some of the ways in which Christianity is being misrepresented and made part of the world’s problem, not its redemption, by groups and movements and causes that identify this faith with some of its parts and elements and associations writ too large. Perhaps we may no longer speak clearly of the essence of Christianity, as did nineteenth-century theologians and historians like Adolf von Harnack; but surely—humbly, more tentatively, yet with a certain confidence born of faith and historical necessity—we may still have a sufficiently shared sense of the “kerygmatic core” or “heart” of this faith—its Innerlichkeit—to be able, in the face of these dangerous misrepresentations of it, to say what it is not.9

3. Richard Dawkins, copied from an article on Dawkins in Wikipedia.

4. See in this connection the conclusion and afterword of this study.

5. Sermo 52, 16: PL 38, 360. I was delighted to see this phrase quoted in the Christmas 2005 encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI titled Deus caritas est [God Is Love] (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 53.

For a fuller examination of the thought of Augustine on this subject, see the complete translation of Sermon 52 by the Rev. R. G. MacMullen on the Internet at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf106.vii.iv.html/. The pertinent passage reads: “What then, brethren, shall we say of God? For if thou hast been able to comprehend what thou wouldest say, it is not God; if thou has been able to comprehend it, thou has comprehended something else instead of God. If thou has been able to comprehend Him as thou thinkest, by so thinking thou hast deceived thyself. This then is not God, if thou has comprehended it; but if it be God, thou hast not comprehended it. How therefore wouldest thou speak of that which thou canst not comprehend?”

6. What Luther means by theologia gloriae is in fact nothing more nor less than a heightened expression of affirmative theology—theology that answers everything, explains everything, leaves nothing to mystery and the unfolding of the future.

7. See in this connection Reintegrating God’s Creation: A Paper for Discussion. Church and Society Document 3 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987). This booklet (62 pages) is the documentary remains of one of the most interesting ecumenical meetings in which I have ever participated. It was part of that seven-year process undertaken by the World Council at its sixth assembly (in Vancouver in 1983) and known by the phrase, “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.”

In May of 1987 I was one of a small group of ten or twelve persons—scientists, theologians, journalists—who were called together by the WCC to meet for several days in a small Franciscan convent in Amsterdam. One of the other senior participants was a scientist of whom, at the time, I had never heard. His name was James Lovelock, and he had just made public what at the suggestion of his friend William Golding, the English novelist, he had named the Gaia Theory. In its briefest form, the Gaia Theory states that the planet Earth is a living reality, and not merely a collective of inanimate substances and processes; and that therefore our human attitude toward and relationship with the planet needs to avoid the kind of objectification or “thingification” that has in fact characterized the whole modern scientific approach to nature.

Perhaps because we were the two eldest participants in the group, James Lovelock and I quickly recognized a certain commonality in our approaches to the world—though his was of course scientific and mine theological—and we found ourselves being turned to by the others for some procedural guidance; for it was a rather amorphous group, without previous acquaintance, and we had had no briefing by the organizers.

From the start, I found Lovelock’s thinking both compatible and stimulating, as, e.g., Rosemary Radford Ruether has done since: see Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). To look upon the planet as though it were alive, even if one had to use that term somewhat metaphorically, seemed an important breakthrough in the human attempt to find a better way of understanding both the world and ourselves in it. Yet I wondered how such a bold thesis would fare under the gaze of the more objective or hard sciences.

As it happened, our little conference was occurring at the same time as a large professional gathering of scientists under the auspices of the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Free University of Amsterdam; and one day it was arranged that our group should visit that consultation. I was astonished at the respect and interest with which James Lovelock was received by the international scientists on that occasion. I believe that his Gaia Theory is still regarded with some skepticism among scientists, but that is not so significant as is the fact that it has stimulated the thinking of many within the scientific community as well as a great many others who reflect deeply on the future of the planet under the impact of human demand, neglect, and contempt.

The above-named booklet did not achieve a wide circulation, but it deserves to be studied at least for its exemplification of profitable dialogue between science and theology today.

8. See, e.g., Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

9. Reluctantly I find myself in some disagreement with what my colleague and friend of many years, the Catholic theologian Gregory Baum, has recently written on this subject:

“Let me first say a few words about the internal pluralism of religious traditions. At one time, scholars believed that it was possible to gain a deep insight into a religion and define its essential characteristics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack, the famous Protestant theologian and historian, published The Essence of Christianity; Leo Beck, the learned German rabbi, published The Essence of Judaism. Today scholars no longer suppose that religions have an essence. What is recognized today is that religions are produced by communities of interpretation whose faith is based on sacred texts or sacred persons, sources that summon them to worship and guide them in their daily life. Religions are constituted by faith communities that read and reread their sacred texts in the ever-changing circumstances of history. In the search for fidelity to the originating texts or persons, the hermeneutic communities are involved in internal debates and in conversation with the culture in which they dwell. Religions thus have no permanent essence: their identity is created by their effort to remain faithful to the sacred texts. Religions are therefore inevitably marked by an internal pluralism. Each religion has many faces.” (Baum, Signs of the Times: Religious Pluralism and Economic Injustice[Toronto: Novalis, 2007], 20–21.)

This may be true enough as a description of the religious situation, but apart from its reference to “sacred texts,” it does not address the knotty question of authenticity, nor does it leave us with any criteria for recognizing great distortions of given religious traditions. One can readily agree that the concept of an essence of a religion evokes the language of another time; nevertheless, the basic inquiry in which Harnack and Beck and others of that age were involved is hardly one that can be abandoned by serious faith and theology. Whether we call it the ongoing quest for the core or kernel or inwardness (Innerlichkeit) of the faith, or for contemporary expression of our common heritage, or for a way of articulating the apostolic tradition today, or whatever else, theology—certainly theology in the Christian mode—must constantly attempt to say what belongs to this faith centrally and profoundly, what is peripheral, and what is simply wrongheaded and misleading. The whole task of theology, Christianly conceived, is precisely about that. Without it, Christian intellectual discourse is reduced to history and sociology.