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The End of Theism?

Must Christianity be ‘Supranaturalist’?

TRADITIONAL Christian theology has been based upon the proofs for the existence of God. The presupposition of these proofs, psychologically if not logically, is that God might or might not exist. They argue from something which everyone admits exists (the world) to a Being beyond it who could or could not be there. The purpose of the argument is to show that he must be there, that his being is ‘necessary’; but the presupposition behind it is that there is an entity or being ‘out there’ whose existence is problematic and has to be demonstrated. Now such an entity, even if it could be proved beyond dispute, would not be God: it would merely be a further piece of existence, that might conceivably not have been there – or a demonstration would not have been required.

Rather, we must start the other way round. God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like – whether, for instance, in the last analysis what lies at the heart of things and governs their working is to be described in personal or impersonal categories. Thus, the fundamental theological question consists not in establishing the ‘existence’ of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls ‘the ground of our being’.

What he has to say at this point is most readily summarized in the opening pages of the second volume of his Systematic Theology,¹ where he restates the position he has argued in the first volume and defends it against his critics.

The traditional formulation of Christianity, he says, has been in terms of what he calls ‘supranaturalism’. According to this way of thinking, which is what we have all been brought up to, God is posited as ‘the highest Being’ – out there, above and beyond this world, existing in his own right alongside and over against his creation. As Tillich puts it elsewhere, he is

a being beside others and as such part of the whole of reality. He certainly is considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole . . . He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being, not being-itself.²

The caricature of this way of thinking is the Deist conception of God’s relation to the world. Here God is the supreme Being, the grand Architect, who exists somewhere out beyond the world – like a rich aunt in Australia – who started it all going, periodically intervenes in its running, and generally gives evidence of his benevolent interest in it.

It is a simple matter to shoot down this caricature and to say that what we believe in is not Deism but Theism, and that God’s relationship to the world is fully and intimately personal, not this remote watchmaker relationship described by the Deists. But it is easy to modify the quality of the relationship and to leave the basic structure of it unchanged, so that we continue to picture God as a Person, who looks down at this world which he has made and loves from ‘out there’. We know, of course, that he does not exist in space. But we think of him nevertheless as defined and marked off from other beings as if he did. And this is what is decisive. He is thought of as a Being whose separate existence over and above the sum of things has to be demonstrated and established.

It is difficult to criticize this way of thinking without appearing to threaten the entire fabric of Christianity – so interwoven is it in the warp and woof of our thinking. And, of course, it is criticized by those who reject this supra-naturalist position as a rejection of Christianity. Those who, in the famous words of Laplace to Napoleon, ‘find no need of this hypothesis’ attack it in the name of what they call the ‘naturalist’ position. The most influential exponent of this position in England today, Professor Julian Huxley, expressly contrasts ‘dualistic supernaturalism’ with ‘unitary naturalism’.³ The existence of God as a separate entity can, he says, be dismissed as superfluous; for the world may be explained just as adequately without positing such a Being.

The ‘naturalist’ view of the world identifies God, not indeed with the totality of things, the universe, per se, but with what gives meaning and direction to nature. In Tillich’s words,

The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Erigena and Spinoza, does not say that God is identical with nature but that he is identical with the natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects. In modern naturalism the religious quality of these affirmations has almost disappeared, especially among philosophising scientists who understand nature in terms of materialism and mechanism.⁴

Huxley himself has indeed argued movingly for religion⁵ as a necessity of the human spirit. But any notion that God really exists ‘out there’ must be dismissed: ‘gods are peripheral phenomena produced by evolution’.⁶ True religion (if that is not a contradiction in terms, as it would be for the Marxist) consists in harmonizing oneself with the evolutionary process as it develops ever higher forms of self-consciousness.

‘Naturalism’ as a philosophy of life is clearly and consciously an attack on Christianity. For it ‘the term “God” becomes interchangeable with the term “universe” and therefore is semantically superfluous’.⁷ But the God it is bowing out is the God of the ‘supranaturalist’ way of thinking. The real question is how far Christianity is identical with, or ultimately committed to, this way of thinking.

Must Christianity be ‘Mythological’?

Undoubtedly it has been identified with it, and somewhere deep down in ourselves it still is. The whole world-view of the Bible, to be sure, is unashamedly supranaturalistic. It thinks in terms of a three-storey universe with God up there, ‘above’ nature. But even when we have refined away what we should regard as the crudities and literalism of this construction, we are still left with what is essentially a mythological picture of God and his relation to the world. Behind such phrases as ‘God created the heavens and the earth’, or ‘God came down from heaven’, or ‘God sent his only-begotten Son’, lies a view of the world which portrays God as a person living in heaven, a God who is distinguished from the gods of the heathen by the fact that ‘there is no god beside me’.

In the last century a painful but decisive step forward was taken in the recognition that the Bible does contain ‘myth’, and that this is an important form of religious truth. It was gradually acknowledged, by all except extreme fundamentalists, that the Genesis stories of the Creation and Fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were none the less valid for that. Indeed, it was essential to the defence of Christian truth to recognize and assert that these stories were not history, and not therefore in competition with the alternative accounts of anthropology or cosmology. Those who did not make this distinction were, we can now see, playing straight into the hands of Thomas Huxley and his friends.

In this century the ground of the debate has shifted – though in particular areas of Christian doctrine (especially in that of the last things⁸) the dispute that raged a hundred years ago in relation to the first things has still to be fought through to its conclusion, and the proper distinction established between what statements are intended as history and what as myth. But the centre of today’s debate is concerned not with the relation of particular myths to history, but with how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all. Is it necessary for the Biblical faith to be expressed in terms of this world-view, which in its way is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically? May it not be that the truth of Christianity can be detached from the one as much as from the other – and may it not be equally important to do so if it is to be defended properly today? In other words, is the reaction to naturalism the rehabilitation of supranaturalism, or can one say that Julian Huxley is performing as valuable a service in detaching Christianity from the latter as we now see his grandfather was in shaking the Church out of its obscurantism in matters scientific?

This is the problem to which Bultmann has addressed himself. And he answers boldly, ‘There is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.’⁹ The New Testament, he says, presents redemption in Christ as a supranatural event – as the incarnation from ‘the other side’ of a celestial Being who enters this earthly scene through a miraculous birth, performs signs and wonders as an indication of his heavenly origin, and after an equally miraculous resurrection returns by ascent to the celestial sphere whence he came. In truth, Bultmann maintains, all this language is not, properly speaking, describing a supranatural transaction of any kind but is an attempt to express the real depth, dimension and significance of the historical event of Jesus Christ. In this person and event there was something of ultimate, unconditional significance for human life – and that, translated into the mythological view of the world, comes out as ‘God’ (a Being up there) ‘sending’ (to ‘this’ world) his only-begotten ‘Son’. The transcendental significance of the historical event is ‘objectivized’ as a supranatural transaction.

I do not wish here to be drawn into the controversy which Bultmann’s programme of demythologizing has provoked.¹⁰ Much of it has, I believe, been due to elements in his presentation which are to some extent personal and fortuitous. Thus,

(a) Bultmann is inclined to make statements about what ‘no modern man’ could accept (such as ‘It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and believe. . .’) which reflect the scientific dogmatism of a previous generation. This gives to some of his exposition an air of old-fashioned modernism.

(b) The fact that he regards so much of the Gospel history as expendable (e.g. the empty tomb in toto) is due to the fact that purely in his capacity as a New Testament critic he is extremely, and I believe unwarrantably, distrustful of the tradition. His historical scepticism is not necessarily implied in his critique of mythology.

(c) His heavy reliance on the particular philosophy of (Heidegger’s) Existentialism as a replacement for the mythological world-view is historically, and indeed geographically, conditioned. He finds it valuable as a substitute for the contemporary generation in Germany; but we are not bound to embrace it as the only alternative.

One of the earliest and most penetrating criticisms of Bultmann’s original essay was made by Bonhoeffer, and to quote it will serve as a transition to his own contribution. ‘My view of it today’, he writes from prison in 1944,

would be not that he went too far, as most people seem to think, but that he did not go far enough. It is not only the mythological conceptions such as the miracles, the ascension and the like (which are not in principle separable from the conceptions of God, faith and so on) that are problematic, but the ‘religious’ conceptions themselves. You cannot, as Bultmann imagines, separate God and miracles, but you do have to be able to interpret and proclaim both of them in a ‘non-religious’ sense.¹¹

Must Christianity be ‘Religious’?

What does Bonhoeffer mean by this startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God?¹²

I will try to define my position from the historical angle. The movement beginning about the thirteenth century (I am not going to get involved in any arguments about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (under which head I place the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art, ethics and religion) has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions concerning science, art, and even ethics, this has become an understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt at any more. But for the last hundred years or so it has been increasingly true of religious questions also: it is becoming evident that everything gets along without ‘God’, and just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, what we call ‘God’ is being more and more edged out of life, losing more and more ground.

Catholic and Protestant historians are agreed that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be discerned, and the more they bring in and make use of God and Christ in opposition to this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world which has attained to a realization of itself and of the laws which govern its existence is so sure of itself that we become frightened. False starts and failures do not make the world deviate from the path and development it is following; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varying forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of ‘God’. Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ultimate questions – death, guilt – on which only ‘God’ can furnish an answer, and which are the reason why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to some extent by these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without ‘God’? . . .