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Reluctant Revolution

Up There or Out There?

THE Bible speaks of a God ‘up there’. No doubt its picture of a three-decker universe, of ‘the heaven above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth’, was once taken quite literally. No doubt also its more sophisticated writers, if pressed, would have been the first to regard this as symbolic language to represent and convey spiritual realities. Yet clearly they were not pressed. Or at any rate they were not oppressed by it. Even such an educated man of the world as St Luke can express the conviction of Christ’s ascension – the conviction that he is not merely alive but reigns in the might and right of God – in the crudest terms of being ‘lifted up’ into heaven, there to sit down at the right hand of the Most High.¹ He feels no need to offer any apology for this language, even though he of all New Testament writers was commending Christianity to what Schleiermacher called its ‘cultured despisers’. This is the more remarkable because, in contrast, he leaves his readers in no doubt that what we might regard as the scarcely more primitive notions of God entertained by the Athenians,² that the deity lives in temples made by man and needs to be served by human hands, were utterly superseded by Christianity.

Moreover, it is the two most mature theologians of the New Testament, St John and the later Paul, who write most uninhibitedly of this ‘going up’ and ‘coming down’.

No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.³

Do you take offence at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before?⁴

In saying, ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is he who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.⁵

They are able to use this language without any sense of constraint because it had not become an embarrassment to them. Everybody accepted what it meant to speak of a God up there, even though the groundlings might understand it more grossly than the gnostics. For St Paul, no doubt, to be ‘caught up to the third heaven’⁶ was as much a metaphor as it is to us (though for him a considerably more precise metaphor). But he could use it to the spiritually sophisticated at Corinth with no consciousness that he must ‘demythologize’ if he were to make it acceptable.

For the New Testament writers the idea of a God ‘up there’ created no embarrassment – because it had not yet become a difficulty. For us too it creates little embarrassment – because, for the most part, it has ceased to be a difficulty. We are scarcely even conscious that the majority of the words for what we value most are still in terms of height, though as Edwyn Bevan observed in his Gifford Lectures,⁷ ‘The proposition: Moral and spiritual worth is greater or less in ratio to the distance outwards from the earth’s surface, would certainly seem to be, if stated nakedly like that, an odd proposition.’ Yet it is one that we have long ago found it unnecessary to explain away. We may indeed continue to have to tell our children that heaven is not in fact over their heads nor God literally ‘above the bright blue sky’. Moreover, whatever we may accept with the top of our minds, most of us still retain deep down the mental image of ‘an old man in the sky’. Nevertheless, for most of us most of the time the traditional language of a three-storeyed universe is not a serious obstacle. It does not worry us intellectually, it is not an ‘offence’ to faith, because we have long since made a remarkable transposition, of which we are hardly aware. In fact, we do not realize how crudely spatial much of the Biblical terminology is, for we have ceased to perceive it that way. It is as though when reading a musical score what we actually saw was not the notes printed but the notes of the key into which mentally we were transposing it. There are some notes, as it were, in the Biblical score which still strike us in the old way (the Ascension story, for instance) and which we have to make a conscious effort to transpose, but in general we assimilate the language without trouble.

For in place of a God who is literally or physically ‘up there’ we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically ‘out there’. There are, of course, those for whom he is almost literally ‘out there’. They may have accepted the Copernican revolution in science, but until recently at any rate they have still been able to think of God as in some way ‘beyond’ outer space. In fact the number of people who instinctively seem to feel that it is no longer possible to believe in God in the space-age shows how crudely physical much of this thinking about a God ‘out there’ has been. Until the last recesses of the cosmos had been explored or were capable of being explored (by radio-telescope if not by rocketry), it was still possible to locate God mentally in some terra incognita. But now it seems there is no room for him, not merely in the inn, but in the entire universe: for there are no vacant places left. In reality, of course, our new view of the universe has made not the slightest difference. Indeed, the limit set to ‘space’ by the speed of light (so that beyond a certain point – not all that much further than our present range – everything recedes over the horizon of visibility) is even more severe. And there is nothing to stop us, if we wish to, locating God ‘beyond’ it. And there he would be quite invulnerable – in a ‘gap’ science could never fill. But in fact the coming of the space-age has destroyed this crude projection of God – and for that we should be grateful. For if God is ‘beyond’, he is not literally beyond anything.

But the idea of a God spiritually or metaphysically ‘out there’ dies very much harder. Indeed, most people would be seriously disturbed by the thought that it should need to die at all. For it is their God, and they have nothing to put in its place. And for the words ‘they’ and ‘their’ it would be more honest to substitute ‘we’ and ‘our’. For it is the God of our own upbringing and conversation, the God of our fathers and of our religion, who is under attack. Every one of us lives with some mental picture of a God ‘out there’, a God who ‘exists’ above and beyond the world he made, a God ‘to’ whom we pray and to whom we ‘go’ when we die. In traditional Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity witnesses to the self-subsistence of this divine Being outside us and apart from us. The doctrine of creation asserts that at a moment of time this God called ‘the world’ into existence over against himself. The Biblical record describes how he proceeds to enter into contact with those whom he has made, how he establishes a ‘covenant’ with them, how he ‘sends’ to them his prophets, and how in the fullness of time he ‘visits’ them in the person of his Son, who must one day ‘come again’ to gather the faithful to himself.

This picture of a God ‘out there’ coming to earth like some visitor from outer space underlies every popular presentation of the Christian drama of salvation, whether from the pulpit or the presses. Indeed, it is noticeable that those who have been most successful in communicating it in our day – Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, J. B. Phillips – have hesitated least in being boldly anthropomorphic in the use of this language. They have not, of course, taken it literally, any more than the New Testament writers take literally the God ‘up there’, but they have not apparently felt it any embarrassment to the setting forth of the Gospel. This is sufficient testimony to the fact that there is a ready-made public for whom this whole frame of reference still presents no difficulties, and their very achievement should make us hesitate to pull it down or call it in question.

Indeed, the last thing I want to do is to appear to criticize from a superior position. I should like to think that it were possible to use this mythological language of the God ‘out there’ and make the same utterly natural and unself-conscious transposition as I have suggested we already do with the language of the God ‘up there’. Indeed, unless we become used to doing this and are able to take this theological notation, as it were, in our stride, we shall cut ourselves off from the classics of the Christian faith, just as we should be unable to read the Bible were we to stumble at its way of describing God. I believe, however, that we may have to pass through a century or more of reappraisal before this becomes possible and before this language ceases to be an offence to faith for a great many people. No one wants to live in such a period, and one could heartily wish it were not necessary. But the signs are that we are reaching the point at which the whole conception of a God ‘out there’, which has served us so well since the collapse of the three-decker universe, is itself becoming more of a hindrance than a help.

In a previous age there came a moment when the three-decker likewise proved an embarrassment, even as a piece of mental furniture. But in this case there was a considerable interval between the time when it ceased to be taken literally as a model of the universe and the time when it ceased to perform a useful function as a metaphor. An illustration of this is to be seen in the doctrine of hell. In the old scheme, hell was ‘down there’. By Shakespeare’s time no one thought of it as literally under the earth, but still in Hamlet it is lively and credible enough as a metaphor. But a localized hell gradually lost more and more of its purchase over the imagination, and revivalist attempts to stoke its flames did not succeed in restoring its power. The tragedy in this instance is that no effective translation into terms of the God ‘out there’ was found for the Devil and his angels, the pit and the lake of fire. This element therefore tended to drop out of popular Christianity altogether – much to the detriment of the depth of the Gospel.

But the point I wish to make here is that the supersession of the old scheme was a gradual one. After it had been discredited scientifically, it continued to serve theologically as an acceptable frame of reference. The image of a God ‘up there’ survived its validity as a literal description of reality by many centuries. But today I believe we may be confronted by a double crisis. The final psychological, if not logical, blow delivered by modern science and technology to the idea that there might literally be a God ‘out there’ has coincided with an awareness that the mental picture of such a God may be more of a stumbling-block than an aid to belief in the Gospel. There is a double pressure to discard this entire construction, and with it any belief in God at all.

Moreover, it is not merely a question of the speed of adjustment required. The abandonment of a God ‘out there’ represents a much more radical break than the transition to this concept from that of a God ‘up there’. For this earlier transposition was largely a matter of verbal notation, of a change in spatial metaphor, important as this undoubtedly was in liberating Christianity from a flat-earth cosmology. But to be asked to give up any idea of a Being ‘out there’ at all will appear to be an outright denial of God. For, to the ordinary way of thinking, to believe in God means to be convinced of the existence of such a supreme and separate Being. ‘Theists’ are those who believe that such a Being exists, ‘atheists’ those who deny that he does.

But suppose such a super-Being ‘out there’ is really only a sophisticated version of the Old Man in the sky? Suppose belief in God does not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the ‘existence’ of some entity, even a supreme entity, which might or might not be there, like life on Mars? Suppose the atheists are right – but that this is no more the end or denial of Christianity than the discrediting of the God ‘up there’, which must in its time have seemed the contradiction of all that the Bible said? Suppose that all such atheism does is to destroy an idol, and that we can and must get on without a God ‘out there’ at all ? Have we seriously faced the possibility that to abandon such an idol may in the future be the only way of making Christianity meaningful, except to the few remaining equivalents of flat-earthers (just as to have clung earlier to the God ‘up there’ would have made it impossible in the modern world for any but primitive peoples to believe the Gospel)? Perhaps after all the Freudians are right, that such a God – the God of traditional popular theology – is a projection, and perhaps we are being called to live without that projection in any form.

That is not an attractive proposition: inevitably it feels like being orphaned. And it is bound to be misunderstood and resisted as a denial of the Gospel, as a betrayal of what the Bible says (though actually the Bible speaks in literal terms of a God whom we have already abandoned). And it will encounter the opposition not only of the fundamentalists but of 90 per cent of Church people. Equally it will be resented by most unthinking non-churchgoers, who tend to be more jealous of the beliefs they have rejected and deeply shocked that they should be betrayed. Above all, there is the large percentage of oneself that finds this revolution unacceptable and wishes it were unnecessary.

This raises again the insistent question, Why? Is it really necessary to pass through this Copernican revolution? Must we upset what most people happily believe – or happily choose not to believe? And have we anything to put in its place?

Some Christian Questioners

In some moods, indeed, I wonder. But I know in my own mind that these are questions that must be explored. Or rather, they are questions that are already being explored on many sides. The only issue is whether they remain on the fringe of the intellectual debate or are dragged into the middle and placed squarely under men’s noses. I know that as a bishop I could happily get on with most of my work without ever being forced to discuss such questions. I could keep the ecclesiastical machine going quite smoothly, in fact much more smoothly, without raising them. The kind of sermons I normally have to preach do not require one to get within remote range of them. Indeed, such is the pressure of regular priorities that I should not have been able, let alone obliged, to let them occupy my mind for long enough to write this, were it not that I was forcibly laid up for three months. But they were questions that had long been dogging me, and I felt from the beginning the spiritual necessity laid upon me to use this period to allow them their head.

The only way I can put it is to say that over the years a number of things have unaccountably ‘rung a bell’; various unco-ordinated aspects of one’s reading and experience have come to ‘add up’. The inarticulate conviction forms within one that certain things are true or important. One may not grasp them fully or understand why they matter. One may not even welcome them. One simply knows that if one is to retain one’s integrity one must come to terms with them. For if their priority is sensed and they are not attended to, then subtly other convictions begin to lose their power: one continues to trot these convictions out, one says one believes in them (and one does), but somehow they seem emptier. One is aware that insights that carry their own authentication, however subjective, are not being allowed to modify them.

And then, equally, there are certain other things which have not rung a bell, certain areas of traditional Christian expression – devotional and practical – which have evidently meant a great deal for most people but which have simply left one cold. The obvious conclusion is that this is due to one’s own spiritual inadequacy. And there is clearly a very large amount of truth in this. But I have not forgotten the relief with which twenty years ago, back at my theological college, I discovered in a conversation of the small hours a kindred spirit, to whom also the whole of the teaching we received on prayer (as it happened to be in this case) meant equally little. There was nothing about it one could say was wrong. Indeed, it was an impressive roundabout: but one was simply not on it – and, what was worse, had no particular urge to be. To realize that after all one might not be the chief of sinners, or the only man out of step, lifted a load of secret, yet basically unadmitted, guilt. And since then I have found others – and in each situation a surprisingly large minority – who confess to the same blind spot. The traditional material is all true, no doubt, and one recognizes it as something one ought to be able to respond to, but somehow it seems to be going on around one rather than within. Yet to question it openly is to appear to let down the side, to be branded as hopelessly unspiritual, and to cause others to stumble.

And this is only one particular instance. Indeed, as one goes on, it is the things one doesn’t believe and finds one doesn’t have to believe which are as liberating as the things one does. James Pike, the Bishop of California, is one who has admitted to finding the same. In a stimulating – and thoroughly constructive – article,⁸ which rocked the American Church and even drew the charge of heresy from the clergy of one diocese, he wrote: ‘I stand in a religious tradition . . . which really does not know very much about religion. The Roman Catholics and the Southern Baptists know a great deal more about religion than we do. And . . . I feel that many people within my own church – and some of them write tracts for the book-stalls of churches – know too many answers. I do not deny the truth of these answers; I simply don’t know as much as the authors of the pamphlets.’

But the point I want to make is that I gradually came to realize that some of the things that rang bells and some of the things that didn’t seemed to be connected. I began to find that I was questioning one whole set of presuppositions and feeling towards another in its place. All I am doing in this book is to try to think this process aloud and help to articulate it for others. For I believe it is a process common in some form or other to many in our age. Indeed, it is the number of straws apparently blowing in the same direction that strikes me as significant. I have done little more than pick a few of them up and I am conscious that in this book, more than in any other I have written, I am struggling to think other people’s thoughts after them. I cannot claim to have understood all I am trying to transmit. And it is for this reason partly that I have chosen to let them speak, through extended quotations, in their own words. But it is also because I see this as an attempt at communication, at mediation between a realm of discourse in which anything I have to say is very familiar and unoriginal and another, popular world, both within and without the Church, in which it is totally unfamiliar and almost heretical.

At this stage, to indicate what I am talking about, let me instance three pieces of writing, all brief, which contain ideas that immediately found lodgement when I first read them and which have since proved seminal not only for me but for many of this generation.

The first of these in date for me (though not in composition) was a sermon by Paul Tillich, which appeared in his collection The Shaking of the Foundations, published in England in 1949.⁹ It was called ‘The Depth of Existence’ and it opened my eyes to the transformation that seemed to come over so much of the traditional religious symbolism when it was transposed from the heights to the depths. God, Tillich was saying, is not a projection ‘out there’, an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very being.

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God.¹⁰

I remember at the time how these words lit up for me. I did what I have never done before or since: I simply read Tillich’s sermon, in place of an address of my own, to the students I was then teaching. I do not remember looking at the words again till I came to write this, but they formed one of the streams below the surface that were to collect into the underground river of which I have since become conscious. I shall return to them, as to the other influences I mention in this chapter, subsequently. Here it is enough to say they seemed to speak of God with a new and indestructible relevance and made the traditional language of a God that came in from outside both remote and artificial.

Next, I must register the impact of the now famous passages about ‘Christianity without religion’ in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.¹¹ I first encountered extracts from these in The Ecumenical Review for January 1952, shortly after their first publication in German. One felt at once that the Church was not yet ready for what Bonhoeffer was giving us as his last will and testament before he was hanged by the SS: indeed, it might be understood properly only a hundred years hence. But it seemed one of those trickles that must one day split rocks. Hitherto, Bonhoeffer was saying, the Church has based its preaching of the Gospel on the appeal to religious experience, to the fact that deep down every man feels the need for religion in some form, the need for a God to whom to give himself, a God in terms of whom to explain the world. But suppose men come to feel that they can get along perfectly well without ‘religion’, without any desire for personal salvation, without any sense of sin, without any need of ‘that hypothesis’? Is Christianity to be confined to those who still have this sense of insufficiency, this ‘God-shaped blank’, or who can be induced to have it? Bonhoeffer’s answer was to say that God is deliberately calling us in this twentieth century to a form of Christianity that does not depend on the premise of religion, just as St Paul was calling men in the first century to a form of Christianity that did not depend on the premise of circumcision.

What that meant I hardly began to understand. But I knew that this was something we must learn to assimilate: the system could not simply eject it. And now after a bare decade it feels as if we have been living with it for very much longer.

Then, thirdly, there was an essay which created an almost immediate explosion when it appeared in 1941, though I did not read it in detail till it was translated into English in 1953. This was the manifesto by Rudolf Bultmann entitled, ‘New Testament and Mythology’.¹²

Once more Bultmann seemed to be putting a finger on something very near the quick of the Gospel message. For when he spoke of the ‘mythological’ element in the New Testament he was really referring to all the language which seeks to characterize the Gospel history as more than bare history like any other history. The importance of this ‘plus’ is that it is precisely what makes events of two thousand years ago a preaching or gospel for today at all. And his contention was that this whole element is unintelligible jargon to the modern man. In order to express the ‘trans-historical’ character of the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Testament writers used the ‘mythological’ language of pre-existence, incarnation, ascent and descent, miraculous intervention, cosmic catastrophe, and so on, which according to Bultmann, make sense only on a now completely antiquated world-view. Thus, modern man, instead of stumbling on the real rock of offence (the scandal of the Cross), is put off by the very things which should be translating that historical occurrence into an act of God for him, but which in fact merely make it incredible. The relevance of Bultmann’s analysis and of his programme of ‘demythologizing’ to the whole question of God ‘out there’ from which we started is obvious enough. If he is right, the entire conception of a supernatural order which invades and ‘perforates’¹³ this one must be abandoned. But if so, what do we mean by God, by revelation, and what becomes of Christianity?

Theology and the World

Now all these three writers might appear to have been raising theological issues fairly far removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary men. But what convinced me of their importance was not simply the spark they struck in myself. It was that for all their apparent difficulty and Teutonic origin they so evidently spoke not only to intelligent non-theologians but to those in closest touch with the unchurched masses of our modern urban and industrial civilization. Tillich is one of the few theologians to have broken through what he himself calls, in another connection, ‘the theological circle’. Bonhoeffer is talked of where ‘religion’ does not penetrate, and the kind of ideas he threw out have been taken up by two men, the Bishop of Middleton¹⁴ and Dr George Macleod,¹⁵ who are as exercised as any in our generation by the relation of theology to the real world. Again, I was astonished to discover how Bultmann’s ideas, for all their forbidding jargon, seemed to come like a breath of fresh air to entirely untheological students. Indeed, he had in the first instance been driven to them by the practical impossibility of communicating the Gospel to soldiers at the front. And one of my valued possessions is a copy of a letter written by Bultmann to the Sheffield Industrial Mission, setting out with a profound simplicity the Gospel as he would present it to steel-workers in a demythologized form.

Moreover, though I said earlier that such thinking would be rejected and resented by those who had turned their backs on Christianity, I find that it comes with refreshing relevance to many who have nothing to undo. It seems to speak far more directly to their entirely non-religious experience than the traditional ‘popular’ apologetic.

Nevertheless, despite its practical reference, such thinking is still nowhere near being assimilated or digested by the ordinary man in the pew, nor by most of those who preach to him or write for him. I believe there must come a time when in some form or another it will be so digested, and when our everyday thinking about God will have become as subtly transformed by it as by the earlier transposition of which I have spoken. But that is probably not the task of this generation. The first stage is to get it out of the world of the professional theologians into that of the intelligent thinking churchman – so that, for instance, one could presuppose that it was deeply affecting the way doctrine was taught in our theological colleges and lay training courses: indeed, I suspect that its relevance may be more immediately sensed for the development of a genuinely lay theology.

One test is how long it takes really to become Anglicized. For it has not as yet seriously influenced the main stream of English theology or churchmanship.¹⁶ To take an extreme but not unrepresentative example, I doubt whether any sign of it could be traced in however prolonged a perusal of The Chronicle of the Convocation of Canterbury. And this is not simply a factious allusion. For I am not writing this book as a professional theologian: indeed, this is not my own academic field. I am deliberately writing as an ordinary churchman, and one moreover who is very much an ‘insider’ as far as church membership is concerned.

I stress this standpoint because I find myself coming to so many of the same conclusions, though from a completely opposite direction, as a fellow Anglican, Dr John Wren-Lewis, a young industrial scientist and lay theologian, whose pungent criticisms of the contemporary religious scene in articles and broadcasts have attracted some attention in recent years. He has recorded his spiritual pilgrimage in his contribution to the collection of essays edited by Dewi Morgan, They Became Anglicans. Apart from the fact that we were both born in Kent within a few years of each other, our paths could hardly have been more different. I was born into the heart of the ecclesiastical ‘establishment’ – the Precincts at Canterbury: he was the son of a plumber, brought up as an outsider to the Church and its whole middle-class ethos. He is a scientist, a layman, a convert. I am not a scientist; I never seriously thought of being anything but a parson; and, however much I find myself instinctively a radical in matters theological, I belong by nature to the ‘once-born’ rather than to the ‘twice-born’ type. I have never really doubted the fundamental truth of the Christian faith – though I have constantly found myself questioning its expression.

Yet for this very reason I may be in the better position to convince the ordinary middle-of-the-road man, who accepts without too much difficulty the things that I accept, that we really are being called to a ‘Copernican revolution’. None of us enjoys that, and I am only too conscious of the forces of inertia within myself. It is for me a reluctant revolution, whose full extent I have hardly begun to comprehend. I am well aware that much of what I shall seek to say will be seriously misunderstood, and will doubtless deserve to be. Yet I feel impelled to the point where I can no other. I do not pretend to know the answers in advance. It is much more a matter of sensing certain things on the pulses, of groping forward, almost of being pushed from behind. All I can do is to try to be honest – honest to God and about God – and to follow the argument wherever it leads.