By Roger Lenaers
Introduction
Looking at the question “Can
Christianity and modernity go together?” at first glance the answer is no. It
has been observed that where modernity grows, to the same extent does religion,
nevertheless, the Christian faith is decreasing. The reason is that modern
science which developed in Europe has shown since the Enlightenment the
certainty that natural phenomena are not the result of divine intervention, but
are explained perfectly well by natural causes. Thus discovering the autonomy
of the universe and of man, modernity began to walk away from religion, since
it is essentially the belief in a Theos, a supernatural being from whom
everything would depend, which denies autonomy. So the Christian faith could
not enter modernity to save it, although this is its mission. Fortunately
Christianity is not by nature a religion: it has become one. By nature it is a
faith in Jesus and God, as Jesus experienced it and lived. We cannot free ourselves
from all religions, but we can free ourselves from the image of a Theos in
order to meet the Absolute Reality which is Absolute Love. The article develops
in detail what this demands from us.
1 Videtur quod non (It seems not)
The answer to this question
should begin in the same manner as Aquinas in his Summa Theologica starts his
treatment of such questions, i.e. with a videtur quod non, it seems they
cannot. Then where the modernity,
i.e. the actual western culture, has become dominant, in Europe, in the United
States, in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, in the same Christianity has
dwindled. There is no need of many statistics to prove that. This one will do.
Till about 1750 in
the western world church attendance still reached nearly the 100 % mark, such
as it had been since the Christianizing of Europe had been completed, hence
since about the year 1000. But by the middle of the 20ieth century it had
fallen to about 65 %, what means that in two centuries about 35 % or one third
of the church members had said farewell to the churches, had become at least
indifferent or had given up
It could seem that at a religious
earthquake had taken place. In reality, it had not been an earthquake but a
kind of so-called bradysism, i.e. the slow but continuous raising up of the
earth crust that makes that after a time buildings begin to collapse. Likewise
in the course of two centuries the western culture, pushed by the evolution of
the cosmos, had changed slowly but continuously and had lost her once religious
nature. The roots of that fundamental change were the humanism of the 15th
century, kindled by the rebirth of the ancient Greek-Roman culture, that itself
had been kindled by Byzantine scholars, who had sought refuge in the West after
the Turks in 1453 had besieged and conquered Constantinople. That ancient
GreekRoman culture that came back to life in the renaissance, was like all
ancient cultures a religious culture and did not undermine the Christian
worldview of the West. However, it meant also the rediscovering of the
scientific culture of ancient Greece. That rediscovery produced already in the
16th century a number of famous scholars such as Copernicus, Mercator, Justus
Lipsius, van Helmont, but it was the 17th century that laid really the foundations
of the modern sciences. For that century was that of geniuses such as Galilei,
Torricelli, Kepler, Newton, Descartes, Pascal and many others. All of them were
convinced Christian believers. Science and Religion were still friends.
Nevertheless, religion was not any longer the undisputed queen of the sciences.
Things changed radically in the second half of the 18th century, first in
France, that was at that time the think-tank of Europe. A group of French
scholars began to draw the consequences of the new ideas that there and in
Britain had already germinated for some time. Reason became more important than
religious belief and, consequently, where these two conflicted – and the two
conflicted more and more often – reason prevailed. That showed that a new
worldview was emerging, the modernity.
The church leaders saw too well
that those new ideas were hardly to reconcile with the traditional religious
conceptions and that they menaced to undermine their authority and their
privileged position in the state. Therefore, they attacked and condemned
vehemently that new worldview. Nevertheless, by doing so, they cut themselves
and the Christianity of from the enrichment modernity promised. Because of this
blindness, the churches lost already in the 18th century the adhesion of a
great part of the intellectual elites, who turned away from a religion that
rejected human values and scientific certainties. In addition, in the 19th
century by neglecting the aspirations and protests of the proletarian victims of
the industrial revolution, they lost a great part of the working class that
turned socialist and anticlerical. That explains the situation in about 1960:
of the former church members, two thirds were gone, even lost forever. However,
since that time the number of the remaining members has not stopped to drop,
and to drop even much faster than before. Why much faster than before? Because
till to the first half of the 20th century the church leaders had still
succeeded in preserving their faithful more or less from the contact with the
modern ideas. They had managed that by organizing and promoting a catholic
press, a catholic party, catholic labour unions, catholic social and cultural
organizations and institutions, and especially a network of catholic schools,
run by priests and nuns, in order to instil into the pupils the catholic ideas
and convictions. However, in the half century between 1960 and 2010, the modern
media of communication developed in a frantic tempo and soaked the whole
society, and the church members, with the ideas of the modernity. The former
measures of prevention became totally ineffective. Moreover, those modern ideas
obviously pleased more and seemed to promise more happiness than the church
doctrine. In addition, in a half century church attendance fell in Europe from
65 % to about 10 to 15 %, an incredible plunge down for an institute that had
been in the past so dynamic, that it had spread over the whole world. And that
number is dropping further, because the elder generations, who form the chief
part oft he remaining church population, die slowly away and the younger
people, who have grown up in the modern culture and have been modelled by it,
show very little interest for the realm of religion, so they stay away from the
churches. Statistically in still another half century, Christianity in the
western world will almost be wiped out. This is not only almost inconceivable,
but means also a terrible lost for the whole humanity. For despite the human
deficiencies that stick also to the Christian faith, as stemming from the
cultures in which it inculturated itself, such as greed, cruelty, lust of
power, contempt of the feeble, lack of true humanism, it still remains the
guard of the rich visions and the creative lifestyle of the community that is
born from the faith in Jesus and shows the way to a new and human world.
2
The roots of this antagonism
Undoubtedly, modern culture and
Christianity drift away from each other. The question is why. What are the
deeper roots of their antagonism? To find them, we should go back to the
origins of religion. These coincide with the humanisation process. For although
the forbearers of the homo sapiens, the primates, have already attained a
certain degree of intelligence and of ethics, they do not have religion.
Religion must be the fruit of a further evolution that the primates had missed.
Humans knew fear no less than the primates do and tried like these to escape
from the dangers that menaced them, but in contrast to their forbearers they
tried to understand what happened to them, they asked questions, sought
answers, and not finding those in the visible world, they sought them
spontaneously in an invisible world high over their heads. For the inexplicable
and most menacing phenomena, such as lightning and thunder and hurricanes came
from there. However, deep in their psyche humans must have had and have still,
engraved in them, a veiled consciousness, a very implicit feeling of a reality
that transcends them, without which religion were never born. The occasional
confrontation with the often terrific, sometimes beneficial, natural phenomena,
that transcended them as well, awoke that sleeping conscience of a transcending
reality, and the combination of the two gave birth to the representation of humanlike
supernatural beings, narrowly linked with those phenomena, hence of gods of
lightning and thunder, of rain, of storm, of fertility, of sexual passion, of
warfare. Toward those they behaved themselves spontaneously as they did towards
the social powers from which they depended, such as father, mother, chief,
leader, they honoured and even venerated that invisible powers, praised them,
implored their help or their mercy, thanked them, tried with presents to gain
or to regain their favour. This enumeration lists all the essential elements of
religion. Hence, religion is the collective expression of a worldview that sees
all things as depending from humanlike powers in an invisible world. Like human
powers, these too can be terrifying but also occasionally kind, they can meddle
at will in our affairs and we can enter in contact with them by praying and
offering them gifts. This worldview is called theism, either polytheism, when
those powers or gods are conceived of as multiple, or monotheism, when that multiplicity
has melted into a unity. Therefore, has it been since our forbearers, the
primates, driven by the mysterious impulse of the evolution, have crossed the
threshold of humanity, i.e. perhaps since a million years. That means that this
worldview has had more than ample time to enter so deep in the human psyche
that it has become nearly indelible. But the fast progress of the sciences in
the 17th century had lead in the 18th to the discovery that many of the
enigmatic and inexplicable happenings had been mistaken for an intervention of
gods or God out of a supernatural world, whereas they were perfectly explicable
with the aid of the natural laws of this world, discovered progressively by the
modern sciences. Because of these discoveries, the need of an intervention of
God to explain what happened waned. Whereas before everybody had meant to see
God intervening in lots of events, at the end they did not see him any more.
Bit by bit people forgot him; he became superfluous, at the end even
improbable. In addition, as the sciences proved finally the impossibility of
extra cosmic interventions in the natural order (the cosmos would collapse, if
only one of its laws was infringed), it became easy and soon normal to deny the
existence of that invisible and inactive Being, that could not even prove its
reality. Consequently, theism seemed
not any longer meaningful, for there was no Theos, no God in the highest.
Therefore, the modernity became a non-theistic culture, the only one in the
whole history of humanity. Even today that western worldview is only an isle in
an ocean of religious fervour. One ought only to look to the Islamic countries
or to India. However, if Christianity is a religion, i.e. a form of theism and
modernity is explicitly non-theist, atheist, the two not only seem to exclude
each other: they exclude each other really and even necessarily. If this is
true, our Christian message of salvation cannot penetrate in that culture and
impregnate it, and that were catastrophic both for the church and for the
modernity. For the church could not succeed in doing that for what she exists
and to what she is sent: to transform the world, hence also the modern world,
into the Reign of God, and she could no more even justify her existence.
In addition, the modern western
culture, of which the deficiencies and problems are blatant, together with the
whole humankind that becomes slowly infiltrated by the ideas of the modernity
could not be healed by the salutary influence of Jesus.
3 Sed contra est quod
But there is an escape from that
menace. For by Thomas after the videtur quod non and after the arguments that
seem to prove that, follows always the sed contra est quod, "against it
stays" and then he develops the opposite position, the right one. Indeed,
from that menace there is an escape, but the price of that escape is very high
and the major part of the church, to begin with the hierarchy, will not be
willing to pay a so high price. Christianity should namely stop to be
theistic, to be a religion. On that condition, but only on that, the
conflict of faith and atheistic western culture can end. For atheism is in
itself not a denial of transcendence, it is only the denial of the existence of
a Theos, an instance in a supernatural world from whom all depends, who could
impose us its laws and who would rob us so of our autonomy. But does that
condition make any sense? Is Christianity not essentially a religion? No, it is
not! It has only in the course of time become a religion. Originally and
essentially it is the community of those that let themselves lead by their
faith in Jesus of Nazareth, because they recognize in him the immortal
revelation of the Ultimate Mystery, or formulated in pre-modern words: in
Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God. This community has soon given up the
Jewish religion from which she had risen, with its traditions such as
circumcision, food precepts, sacrifices, prohibition of labour on Sabbath,
Jewish rites and Jewish holidays. But growing and developing itself in an other
deeply religious environment, first that of the Hellenistic, later that of the
German and the Slavic polytheism, it became on her part a religion, i.e. it
assumed all the elements that characterize religions, such as, priests,
sacraments, holy books, vows, temples, prayers. Whereas in he first two
centuries it had not known sacrifices, from the 3rd century on the Eucharist
became regarded as a sacrifice, in order to appear a true religion like the
others. But in its essence is not at all a religion, it is a faith in Jesus,
i.e. an attitude of devotion toward Jesus of Nazareth. While it is not
essentially a religion, it can abandon all that it has by and by assumed from
religion, and in the first place theism, that is the root of it. The
churches should therefore abandon their image of God as a Theos, an almighty
Lord in the Highest, that can intervene at will in the human affairs and from
which we can get help, if we beseech him. They should instead develop a
nontheistic image of God, that is not any longer incompatible with the
non-theistic (or a-theistic) worldview of the modernity. But is such a
non-theistic image of God conceivable? Yes it is. To develop such an image,
we can start from a saying of the atheist Albert Einstein: "To be aware
that behind all we can experience, something is hidden, that our intellect is
unable to catch, something of which the beauty and the majesty come only
imperfectly and as a feeble shine to us, to be aware of that, is true
religiosity. In that sense am I a deeply religious atheist." If it can
be made plain that this nameless non-theistic "something" is wide
enough to absorb the two basic elements of the Christian image of God, that
are: Creator and Father, then nothing more will stay in the way of the
reconciliation between the atheistic modernity and the non-theistic faith.
First to Creator of heaven and earth, i.e. of all that is. Precisely that idea
seems to block utterly every attempt of conciliation between modernity and
faith, for it stresses the absolute dependence of the cosmos and cements so the
denial of our autonomy. But that's a bridge to far. For to create does not at
all mean to produce. Machines produce, but cannot create. To create means to express its own
interiority in the materiality. Just that is what the creative artist does. His creations are
his spiritual self that takes a material form. If we then interpret the
cosmos as the slowly evolving self-expression of an absolute Spirit, there is
no more opposition, only distinction, between "God" and the cosmos.
For if "God" means not any longer an extracosmic instance, but the spiritual
Depth of all that exists, even our liberty and autonomy belong to this
self-expression. When we than conceive of that Something that hides behind and
in in all things, as a selfexpressing Reality, we are already very near to that
what modern Christians mean, when they say "God". But the authentic
Christian tradition, that we should not give up, calls that wonderful and
creative Something also "Father". As followers of Jesus, who
often called the Mystery in which we live by that name, we too should do that.
And he called it by that name, because his deep mystical experience of that
Ultimate Reality evoked in him in a transcending degree what he had experienced
as a boy in his contact with his father: unconditional care, but at the same
time unchallenged authority. Sure, "God", the Ultimate Reality, that
he experienced as absolute love to him and absolute appeal on him, was not
really his father, but was for him (and for all people, even for the whole
creation) like a father, and he was like his son. He/She/It was loving him, he
knew for sure, and was prodding him always to love, whatever it costed, because
the Ultimate Reality is also the Ultimate Love. That Ultimate Love dwells
not in heaven, but in the heart of all that exists und pushes all things
incessantly to evolve, and pushes us, humans, to become more human, more love.
That "Something" therefore is an absolute "Thou", that says
"thou" to us. Only on the condition that we think about God in that
new manner, we can be at the same time truly faithful and truly citizens of the
modern world and "inculturate" our faith in that modern world and be
in that way a source of healing for that modern world. Therefore we should
avoid to speak of "God". For in the ears of the no more theistic
western world, that name evokes always the Theos of the tradition, and so
denies our autonomy and is therefore a red cloth for every true atheist. But by
ourselves we can still pray to "God", conscious that this appellation
means no more the pre-modern Theos, but the loving Mystery, the wonderful
Something that reveals itself in every thing and in us and of which the most
radiant image is the very model of love Jesus of Nazareth. As has been
said, the price of leaving the traditional theistic image of God for a new and
non theistic image is high. We must indeed change our course and take leave
from apparent but deep grounded evidences and certitudes and must learn to take
self decisions, instead of accepting and doing what has been ordered by the
religious authorities and that all people are doing. And that is very
difficult.
Which changes are most necessary?
First of all the creed ought to be formulated anew. For by abandoning the
theistic image of God that the Christian tradition has inherited from the
millenarian history of the human race, the modern faithful can not any longer
confess with the creed that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, born before
all centuries from the Father (for how could humans know that?), that has
descended from heaven (for there are no more two realms, ours and that of God,
and hence no passing at all from the one to the other), and that he has risen
from the grave and has ascended into heaven (for that contradicts flatly all
the laws of nature) and will come back to judge us and everybody. Put
briefly, the confession that Jesus is God of God, true God from the true God,
and which since the council of Nicea has become the central pillar of the
Christian faith, cannot more be held. There are still more grounds that
force us to give up the creed in its Nicene formulation. In the modernity every
statement has to prove that it rests on controllable bases, not on mere
beliefs. But how could ever be proved that a human is at the same time the all
transcending God? And how could be the psychology of a human, who necessarily
is limited and marked by a particular culture and hence can get wrong, but who
at the same time should be the almighty and all knowing Theos? Moreover we
should not forget that in the first half century after his death, Jesus has
clearly not been regarded and venerated as (a) God. The Nicene dogma, that
Jesus is true God from the true God is thus a later development, brought about
by historical causes, and is in some sense even a deviation form the
original faith. But by what should that Nicene dogma be replaced, so that
Jesus can remain the centre of our existence and the source of our salvation?
By the confession, based on his deeds and words, that in him the Ultimate
Love has revealed itself in a most expressive way. That indeed is the heart
of our Christian faith. We should not expect another saviour, he is for us the
Alpha and Omega. We have only to follow him. But this Nicene dogma is only one
article of the creed that clearly supposes a theistic image of God. There are
some more. First the virgin birth of that saviour of mankind. Indeed, the two
tales of the conception and birth of Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew and that of
Luke, deny explicitly the role of a male partner that for a conception is
biologically necessary. Thus the mother of Jesus would have remained a virgin.
His birth should then have been a case of parthenogenesis. But in the family of
the mammals, to which we, humans, belong, parthenogenesis is unthinkable.
Moreover the lack of the fecondating male semen would have as consequence that
in the zygote the chromosom pair XY, that is constitutiv for the male sex,
would fail. The foetus in Marys womb would posses only the XX-pair, so that
Jesus would be a girl. That matter-of-fact conclusion, to which the modern
sciences lead, can seem blasphematory and heretic. But if we reject the
absolutely reliable scientific conclusions, we cannot longer hope to harmonize
faith and modernity, and for both parts this would be catastrophic. But in the
case of the virgin birth we encounter only the pre-modern, prescientific
formulation of a real experience. The followers of Jesus have experienced that
he was not like everyone of us, egocentric, faulty, disappointing, that in hem
a new and wonderful kind of humans was born, a new creation, because pure
selfexpression of God. If a son bears the traits of his father, Jesus did bear
much less the traits of the man who had fathered him, than those of God
himself. Thus, with before their eyes the adult Jesus, whom they announced,
both evangelists ascribe his conception in a kind of retrospective look not to
a man, to flesh and blood, but to the creative activity of the Spirit of God,
expressing so that the whole life of Jesus from its beginning on, had been
connected with and conducted by the Spirit of God. In the biblical tradition
indeed the Spirit or Breath of God, is the creative force that fills the
universe with life and renews it and pushes it forward to its perfection. The
plenitude of life that the followers of Jesus experienced in him, is the
reality that underlays the mythology of his conception without human semen.
Understood in that manner, that article of the creed can be accepted by every
modern person, either faithful or even atheist.
5 The impossibility of the bodily
resurrection
But this adult Jesus has been
already dead for fast 2000 years! How could he be the source of our salvation
today? For that supposes that he can reach us and that we can reach him. The
answer of the tradition to that objection is based on a fully theistic image of
a God for whom nothing is impossible. That answer is the resurrection of
Jesus: the third day after his death he has risen from the grave. But everyone that has gone to
school, knows today that the human brain, after being deprived from oxygen for
less than a quarter of an hour, begins to decompose and soon cannot more
organize and steer the functions of the human body. And that after 24 hours it
has been irreparably reduced to a useless mass of further decomposing cells.
Hence it is utterly unthinkable now that a dead person could ever return to
life: he lacks the brain that therefore is indispensable. Likewise as to admit
the virgin birth of Jesus is to admit his bodily resurrection a denial of the
scientific truth, and that denial makes the integration of the faith in the
modernity impossible. How does the modern faith (i.e. that faith that has left
the theistic image of God and its mythology) for that of the Ultimate Love that
expresses itself in all that exists, solve the problem, that on the one hand
the modernity to which he belongs, cannot admit the miracle of the resurrection
of a dead person, and that on the other hand this article of faith, together
with that of the divinity of Jesus, is the heart of the Christian confession?
Paul indeed emphasizes this in 1 Kor. 15 by stating several times in a few
verses that without the resurrection of Jesus the Christian faith, to the grand
damn of the faithful, collapses utterly. The modern faith solves this
antagonism in the same manner as the problem of the divine nature of Jesus: by
looking for the experience that is hidden behind the formula. This formula
shows clearly the influence of the time in which it came into being and does
therefore not remain unchanged for ever and ever, but be replaced, if necessary
(and now it is necessary), when the times change profoundly. Which experiences
lay at the base of the image of resurrection? The experiences of the Jewish
people that they were the object of the never lasting care of the transcendent
Power, that they named Yahweh, and that promised and gave life to his faithful.
They spoke even of a Covenant between Yahweh and them. The inspired prophets
dared even to speak of a love-story, a marriage. These images expressed their
certainty, based on experience, that Jahweh rewarded his faithful worshippers
with happiness. But the cruel persecution of their Jewish faith in the 2nd
century B.C. by Antiochus Epiphanes showed them that fidelity to Yahweh could
bring instead of life torture and death. Their unbroken trust in Yahweh gave
them the confidence that he would give the victims promised life in an other
form. But as the Jewish culture was not a compound of an immortal soul in a
mortal body, but a unity, the whole person should be given a new chance. The
new span of life the victims should get, would therefore be corporal and
earthly. But as Jews did not cremate their dead, but laid them in the earth, as
if they slept, arose the representation that Jahweh would awake them on his day
and that they would get up. The idea of resurrection was born. But this idea
supposes that we accept as valid and timelessed a set of timebound convictions
and customs, such as the Jewish concept of the human person, that differs from
the dualistic concept of the hellenism (that itself is also timebound) , and
the Jewish manner of burying, and above all their pre-modern, and hence
theistic image of God. For without a God for whom nothing is impossible, the
return to life of a dead and alread decomposing body, is unthinkable. If we
don't say farewell to that image of God, we will never be able to replace the
concept of resurrection by one that for the modernity is accessible.
An approach to a non theistic
image of God, that renders possible to speak in a modern way of the event the
biblical tradition has called resurrection, has been made already above. To
resume it briefly, God is the Ultimate Love of whom the cosmos is the
evolving self-expression. This self-expression culminates in the selfless
love that emerges in the human species and above all in Jesus. For by loving
to the limit and abandoning for that everything, even his life, Jesus has
become fully one being with that Eternal Love and participates fully in its
creative power. And therefore, just as we can say of God that he lives without
measure, being the Source of all life, we can say also that Jesus lives, no
more in a biological, but in an existential way, and that we can reach him and
that he can reach us and let us participate in his fullness. That is the modern answer of the
question above how a man who is dead for already 2000 years can still reach us
today and inspire and move us and be so our saviour. Therefore we should have
care to replace the theistic formula of "resurrection" for instance
by that of achievement, or of final transition in the Ultimate Love, or of
becoming one with God, even by eternal life, if eternal is not unterstood
in terms of time, as never ending; eternal life means here: achieved life,
fullfilled life, life that shares the unconceivable essence of the Ultimate
Love. But 2000 years of tradition and 1500 years of repetition in our
churches of the literally taken expression "resurrection", have
caused the illusion that this is the exact description of what happened to
Jesus in (or after) his death. And so, although it says in other words just the
same as the old term resurrection, for most Christians it will be very
difficult to agree to that new way of speaking. Surely it is much more abstract
than that of a bodily resurrection of Jesus with its oft touching trail of
apparitions. What can we answer, when they ask us then what the gain is of
speaking in those new terms? That it makes our Christian message not any longer
inaccessible for all modern humans that are at least a little bit acquainted
with the sciences. But if resurrection is only a mythological word for the
renewing effects of loving, Jesus cannot be the only one that has resurged. Of
every human, according to the degree of his love, we should than say that he
resurges in his death. With this statement we meet St Paul in his letter to the
Romans 9:28 . The more we let influence us by him, the more we participate
already now in that fullness of life, that in mythological and even misleading
terms is called his resurrection. So appears also more clearly the intimate
connection that Paul in 1 Cor.15 stresses so strongly between the resurrection
of Jesus and that of the faithful. If Jesus is not ressurrected, he repeats
there several times in that few verses, then neither we, and if we don't
resurrect, neither he. Therefore he can call the resurrected Jesus the
firstborn among many brethren (and, of course, sisters). He is the firstborn,
because his love superates a long way the love of us all, but we all take part,
according to the degree of our love, in his unity with the Primordial Love.
Whereas he loves and lives in a transcending measure, we do that in the measure
of our human insufficiency.
7 ... and to the resurrection of the
dead
All this all applies at any rate
in the first place for those that we call the saints. To venerate them means
indeed to confess them as living and inspiring, and therefore as resurrected
without even the slighstest idea of an empty grave. Their
"resurrection" is the fruit of their unity with the living Jesus,
of having part in his attitude and his mind. We have allways known that
they live beyond their death, that they over-live, survive, their death. For we
have never venerated their soul, even when we pelgrimated to their tombs, where
their bodily remains are buried, we venerated themelves. And when a saint
appeared (of Mary it is said that she has already appeared in several places)
those who have seen her or him, have never doubted that they saw the saint
himself and not his/her soul. But what applies to the saints, applies to
everbody who has let lead himself by love. For the Primorial Love that is
God, pushes everybody towards loving his fellow men. The saints distinguish
themselves from the common Christians less by their long prayers or their
penances or their mystical experiences, than by this, that they responded in an
eminent degree to the impulses of God who orientated them to their fellow
humans. But as everyone lets move himself at least a little bit by the love
of his fellow humans, in the same degree everybody "rises from
death", i.e. survives death. But to be moved by love, it is not even
necessary to know Jesus and his message, although to know him and to be
attracted to him and to follow him, is a very precious help to grow in love.
Indeed, also outside of every Christian context we meet men and women that are
wonder of selfless love. Like of the Christians saints, we can say of people
that live in that manner that in their death they experience resurrection. In
the case of sages as Socrates, Buddha, Kon-fu-tse, LaoTse their renewing and
healing influence in the course of human history renders even visible for all
eyes that they live. From dead people does not sprout life, inspiration,
renewal as it does from them. But because they have lived outside of the
Christian traditions and representations, we will not easily speak of resurrection.
We are wrong. We should not confine resurrection (not understood in the
mythological way, but as becoming one reality with he Primordial and Eternel
Love), to the Christian part of mankind, for compared to the whole of
humankind in time and space, Christians are only an insignificant minority.
Indeed to confine "resurrection" to that minority would represent God
as a biased ruler, and would contradict so our own Christian confession that He
is the all encompassing love. Indeed. That view throws also a new light on the
last article of the creed, the resurrection of the dead and the eternal life.
For modern people this article is stunning and almost ridiculous. The billions
of people that have in the course of millenia been decomposed into their molecules
and atoms, should all of a sudden be recomposed and rise up, living and well,
with flesh and bones and skin and hair. So the traditional church has always
thought. The famous frescoes of Luca Signorelli in the Dome of Orvieto are a
colourful illustration of this impossible belief. Where and how that billions
could come together to be judged, is of course another insoluble problem. Here
appears in which deadend it leads, if one takes literally the visionary
decriptions of the Bible that have inspired the creed. But all these
disconcerting ideas proceed from the belief in a Theos for whom nothing is
impossible. From its fruits one can judge the quality of the tree. But if
we understand resurrection in a modern way, as to live through death in the
measure of our love, which is the same as the measure of our participating in
the Ultimate Love, disappears that dead-end and the accompanying irritation and
anger. For then everybody lives through death more or less, according to the
development of the divine germ of love in his depth. And resurrection of
the dead is then identical with the eternal life, the final words of that last
article of the creed. If we understand resurrection in that modern way two
other mythological articles of the creed appear in a new light, that for modern
faithful makes sense. Heaven being used in the Bible as a reverential password
for "God", so as to avoid using that holy name, the ascension of
Jesus to heaven (since the first Sputnik easy to ridicule) becomes identical with
his being absorbed in the Ultimate Love. On the other hand his coming to judge,
Last Judgment, that has since the Middle Ages been a source of black terror and
panic (as is testified by the Dies Irae), can then easily be understood as his
appearance in the world through the community that lets guide its way of life
by his inspiration. This way of life makes clearly visible that which is good
and that which is bad and pronounces in this sense continually not a condamning
or acquiting verdict, but an enlightening judgment.
8
Consequences for the church doctrine
So far as for the creed. But on
its theistic formulation the whole church doctrine is based. The whole of it
should therefore be examined, and much of it would appear as being outdated and
calling for a modern reformulation. But because of the limited size of this
article, can that only be done here for some of the statements and convictions
of that doctrine. Only the following ten points will be treated
a. The marian dogmas and the confession of the
Trinity.
First of all
for the statements and traditions that flow directly from the Nicene dogma that
Jesus is "true God from the true God" become meaningless.
Therefore we should stop calling Mary "Mother of God". She is
simply the mother of Jesus of Nazaret. But with the farewell to that first
marian dogma collapses also the dogma of her conception without original sin,
promulgated in 1854 and that of her bodily resurrection and assumption into
heaven, promulgated in 1950. They cannot be replaced by a modern formultion. Their
contant is simply too premodern. Moreover even the doctrine of the Trinity,
as it is understood commonly, and that means: commonly misunderstood and
misrepresented as the confession of three equal Gods, cannot longer be held.
To be sure, in a modern view remains unchallenged the confession of God as the
Creator of heaven and earth, understood as the Ultimate Love, that in the
course of the cosmic evolution expresses and reveals itself progressively,
first as matter, then as life, then as conscience, than as human intelligence,
finally as selfless love in Jesus and in those in which Jesus lives on. Further
the confession of Jesus as his most perfect self-expression. And finally
the confession of the Spirit as the vivifying activity of that Ultimate Love.
b. The Bible as a book with "words of
God".
But there is much more that
should change, if we have to take leave from theism and hence from the
organised form of it: the religion. First our attitude towards the
Bible, for all the statements of the creed are based on that Bible. But the
belief in holy books, that should have come from God in the highest and
therefore are considered as unfallible and binding, is a typical trait of
religions. The church also considers her Bible as a book of supernatural
revelations and calls it the "Word of God". As faithful Christians
that belong to the modernity we need a new approach to that "holy
book". For we can not any longer call the Bible word(s) of God. Why not?
Because words are the result of human speaking, and of the Ultimate Reality we
cannot say any longer that it can speak. A speaking God is a fully
anthropomorphic being. Indeed, to be able to speak one needs a human physiology
with lungs, vocal cords, mouth tongue etc. Moreover it supposes a human language
system and every such system is depending from human conventions. To ascribe
that all to God, is robbing him of his a absolute transcendence Why the
primitive church has nevertheless thought so? Because she consisted of Jews.
And these considered the Bible as the collection of words that Yahweh had
communicated or even dictated Moyse and other prophets. Because of our
belonging to the modernity we cannot any longer think as they thought. Moreover
the behaviour of Muslims and orthodox Jews, that still consider so their holy
books and refer to them to justify inhuman deeds, shows too clear to which
problems such a belief can lead. We as modern faithful can cannot longer say
that God speaks, we can only say that the Ultimate Love expresses itself, for that
is the modern way of understanding creation, this self-expression being the
evolving cosmos, that culminates in man and finally in Jesus. Therefore is
the Bible for us not a book with unerring words of a Theos in the highest and
cannot any longer serve as the absolutely sure base of doctrinal statements or
of the liability of personal ideas and it makes no sense to weigh and
discuss every word of it. What is then the Bible for the modern faithful? A
book with words of humans, but in which mystically gifted authors have tried to
express their intense experience of the transcendent Wonder. For that Wonder
continuously expresses itself in the cosmos and especially in those human minds
that are receptive for it. But human minds are always minds with personal and
cultural limitations and these adhere to their words, and are a source of
deficiencies and even errors. Because of this mixture of divine inspiration and
human deficiencies and because of the deep cultural gap between those authors
and the modern readers, and because the frequent misunderstandings that arise
from that gap, we should read the Bible with a critical mind. One could compare
it rightly with a goldmine, for a goldmine means concretely: tons of useless
stones and grit, and therein often some ounces of gold. That's true also for
the Bible. Because of this gold, and despite those tons of grit, she remains
fur us holy. At the same time she is the safe reference for making out (that
applies in the first place to the New Testament) if something lies still within
the limits of our Christian worldview and what lies already outside of it.
c. The Ten Commandments.
A third consequence of abandoning
theism and hence religion, is a farewell to the Ten Commandments. If the Theos,
that celestial lawgiver and punishing (or rewarding) judge, disappears, then
disappear with him also his commandments, the biblical ten (the Jews have 318),
that formulate in reality the ethical experiences of the Jewish people, and
those made by the church that refers to that Theos. These ethics of law need
absolutely to be replaced. Even Nietzsche in his parable of the fool who
prophesized the total collapse of the western culture as a consequence of the
"death of God", saw that most urgent necessity. What will take the
place of the ethics of law? The ethics of love. For the Ultimate
Reality pushes us to love and this pushing is the really absolute imperative.
In this ethics, the good is not any longer that which corresponds to a law, but
that which is born out of love and in the measure that is born out of love.
These new ethics will to a large extent coincide with old ones, for these also
proceeded from the impulse of the cosmic evolution, that itself is
the progressively purer self-expression of the Ultimate Love. This ever active
impulse explains that the ethics progress towards humanisation. To the manifestations of that progression
belong for instance the ban on slavery, torture, oppression, the proclamation
of the absolute rights of the human person, democracy, the equality of the
sexes, tolerance, all of them forms of ethical progress, accepted also, however
reluctantly, by the church leaders in Rome. But the new ethics will differ
clearly from the traditional church ethics on sexuality. These have been indeed
formulated and imposed by celibates, tabooing each form of sexual lust outside
a sacramental marriage and many forms of it within such marriages. But in the
new ethics the norm to observe is not any longer the law, work of humans that
ascribe their own decisions arbitrarily to the will of a Theos. It is now
selfless love. This has of course important consequences for homosexuality,
premarital sex or remarriage. The soon coming Conference of Bishops in Rom,
will show in how far the church leaders are ready to welcome these new ethics.
d. The ecclesiastical power
structure or hierarchy.
A fourth consequence of abandoning theism and
hence religion, is the necessary farewell to the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Indeed, the new image of God means the end of every institution that
justifies its claims with a mandate from a Theos, a God in the highest. In
the modernity authority does not any longer descend from invisible powers in
the highest, because there are no more such powers. How by the way could
anybody prove that the mandate he claims as coming from the Theos, is not a
fake? In the view of the modern faith, authority rises now from the depth
of the human reality in which the Original Love expresses and reveals itself. That
means that no pope or bishop can claim, more than any other faithful, a right
to teach and govern, the so called magisterium. For whence would they have that
magisterium? Texts in the New Testament to corroborate their claim, are of
no help, for those texts are not infallible "words of God", but
express only the honest views of pre-modern believers, for which all was coming
from the high. But must this farewell to the hierarchy and its magisterium not
inevitably lead to arbitrariness and chaos? By no means. For every human
community, surely also that one that has sprung from the radiation of the risen
Jesus, produces spontaneously the structures it needs. Also the indispensable
structures of authority. But those who in the community exercise power,
receive their mandate from the community, in which the creative Spirit is at
work, and no more from an imaginary God in the highest, who via his only
begotten Son and through him via the popes and their Curia would let descend
some part of his power on the hierarchs. And these reserve that power for their
own male half of mankind. But in the new view there's no reason for that
inequality. Therefore it plays not any longer a role, whether the person that
the community invests with authority is male or female. And to appeal to the Bible (that does by the
way not pronounces itself on that subject) to oppose that equality, is useless,
for the Bible is not a book of divine oracles, but depends from the culture in
which the authors lived, and in that culture the woman played almost no role.
e. The end of the priesthood.
With the pre-modern hierarchy
disappears also the priesthood. Priests belong to the world of the religions, where they always were
regarded and even venerated as the indispensable mediators between the gods or
God and mankind. But for the modern faithful there is no more need of such
mediators, because God is the Ultimate Love that expresses itself in all
things and above all in us, humans. And would there be such need, we have
Jesus and don't need other mediators. The priests exercised their
function as mediators primarily by making sacrifices of the offerings the
believers brought to them. But sacrifices make unconsciously a caricature of
God, as will be shown in nr. 6, where the criticism of the cultic sacrifice, is
developed a little longer. At any rate, the community around Jesus had in
the two first centuries neither sacrifices nor priests. The two appear
together in the third century, when the church tried to legitimate its
existence by presenting itself as a religion. For whereas the Judaism in the
Roman Empire was accepted as a licit religion, Christianity because it had
whether sacrifices nor priests, was considered as an illicit union or club or
as a kind of philosophical circle. But when God is not any longer a Theos
in the highest, there is of course no more need of priests. There is still
more. The new image of God does away with the idea of which the Christian past
is full, that God in the highest should by means of human representatives, the
popes and the bishops, select and appoint men (never women) and endow them with
the magical power, of which no other human disposes, to change with a
particular formula bread in a human body and wine in human blood. Consequently
an image of God that is accessible for the modernity, does not let room for the
so called consecrations or ordinations of priests, that should elevate men
(never women) to a level that for the other humans is inaccessible. So
instead of priests, modern faithful know only community leaders, men or women indistinctly, judges suited
to animate the faith in Jesus and through him in God, and therefore chosen
and appointed by the community.
g. The end, not of the religious
rituals, but of the sacraments.
This statement will provoke an
outcry of protest. But it is the quite inevitable consequence of the new image
of God and the farewell to religion. Sacraments indeed are rituals at the
occasion of which God in the highest is thought to intervene with healing and
blessing. Of this healing and these blessing, it's true, we don't see or feel
anything, so we must believe that they happen, and they happen only if a number
of prescriptions are observed. But if there is no such God in the highest,
of course nothing happens at all. That is very bad news for our
romancatholic church, that gives the sacraments a so central place in the
Christian life, that it even holds that our eternal salvation depends from
them. Of course, humans need rituals (chimps and bonobo do not) because they
need to meet often the holy depth of the daily reality. And rituals
manage that, just because they don't serve as means to attain some practical
goal, are not useful, the category of usefulness belonging justly to the
surface of life. So every culture has spontaneously developed its own rituals,
both religious and others, The church too has developed rituals. She calls them
sacramentalia. Seven of these she calls sacraments. These sacraments have begun
as church rituals with a rich symbolical content. Think e.g. of baptism
originally a bath that evoked renewing, rebirth. But they have gradually lost
their symbolic expressivity. To blame for this is the premodern theological
error that the only important thing in the sacrament is the intervention of God
in the highest with his saving grace, not what we, unimportant humans, do. So the sacramental rites have
been reduced little by little to the absolute minimum that was required in
order that the Theos could come in action. The baptismal bath became a handful
of water over the head of a baby, the bread became a paper-thin host that
hardly can be called bread. So the sacraments became mere signals
addressed to heaven that it could open its holy floodgates. What will then
replace advantageously those signals, that are regarded without reason as
triggering the healing intervention of God in the highest? New inspiring
rituals, that can enrich, enlighten, heal us, not by a divine intervention from
the outside but by fostering by their own symbolic force our humanisation. The
new image of God requires hence that we create new rituals or renew the
existing ones, and create so a new liturgy, of which will treat point 8.
h. The end of the sacrifice of the Mass.
That new image of God means also
the farewell to the so called sacrifice of the Mass and to everything that in
the liturgy of the Mass recalls the idea of sacrifice. And this is a whole lot.
Sure, Rome forbids explicitly to deny the sacrificial character of the Mass and
to alter any word in the prescribed texts. Never mind, we have to look
unconditionally for another concept and for other texts. Indeed, the concept of
cultic sacrifice supposes an anthropomorphic God, whose favour, like that of
human authorities, one can try to win with the aid of presents. In the
social life and in politics such attempts are frowned upon and even condemned
as bribing and corruption. But sacrifices are the religious equivalent of that
bribing. But if we stop tempting to bribe God in the highest and say
farewell to the traditional interpretation of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, by
which other and better interpretation can we replace it? What becomes the Mass
in the light of a new image of God? It becomes the inspiring ritual memory of
the symbolic gesture with which Jesus as a sign of farewell with the aid of
bread and wine made clear his desire to feed his disciples with the best of
himself. This ritual memory should be an appeal to do in the daily life as
Jesus has done in the Last Supper, i.e. to be there for our fellow humans,
to become like bread and wine for them. The whole magic doctrine of the
transsubstantiation that the Middle Ages have developed, has to be discarded
too, because it can only be held, if one believes that there is a God in the
highest, who in the moment that a priest pronounces some magic words,
miraculously intervenes to change the nature of things. If something really
changes, is it not the bread, for this rests bread, but the signification we
give the bread. Before, it was only food that laid in the bakery and could be
bought, now for the faithful it becomes the symbol of the presence of Jesus
in the community, who calls by that symbol upon all the members of that
community to be and to do like he is and does. In two ways he is present
there: really present in the hearts of the faithful community, for faith in him
and through him in God means real unity with him, and symbolically present in
the bread and the wine. But a symbolic presence too is a kind of real presence.
For what is not real, is not existing either.
i .
The end of the liturgy as a whole of rules of protocol
As has been
said, the new image of God, calls for a new liturgy, and not only for the
Eucharist. The actual liturgy is a kind of protocol, that unconsciously copies
the protocol that in past ages (also in some measure still today) one had to
observe, if he approached a king or a pope. As if God were a king that sits
enthroned in heaven and had issued himself all those liturgical prescriptions.
That protocol prescribes meticulously what the celebrating priest has to put on
in order to appear before God, which texts he has to read aloud, which prayers
he has to say, which gestures he has to make, such as to fold his hands or to
rise hem to heaven or to kneel or bow down to moisten his fingertips, to swing
the censer, etc and when precisely this all has to be done. In a pre-modern
belief that protocol is considered as the express Will of God, so that one
burdens himself with guilt, if he does not observe it careful. But in the light
of the new image of God as the Ultimate, all penetrating Love, it becomes
senseless. By what should it be replaced? By reunions of prayer of the
faithful in which they try (or the president of the reunion tries) to express a
well as possible, their union with Jesus and through him with God. And they
should do that with words and images and gestures of their own time, and not
any longer with those of the early Middle Ages as it is the case in the
pre-modern liturgy. And in an old peoples home they should do that with other
words and forms than for a youth group. And in black Africa with others than in
Rome.
j. The end of supplication and of
intercession.
The new image
of God means also a farewell to the prayer of supplication. For the creative
Ultimate Love is by no means an anthropomorphic and omnipotent ruler, whom one
could move, by beseeching him long enough, to intervene in the course of the
human affairs, what means to switch of for a brief moment the inflexible
natural laws. But if he cannot intervene anyway, it makes no sense to invocate
his help. That Jesus exhorts us to beseech God, proves only that also he
belonged to the pre-modern world, in which everybody thought that God that
could intervene at will and didn't know that this would mean the collapse of
the universe. The only form of supplication that makes sense, is praying
that our love may grow. Then it is the Ultimate Love itself that
inspires us that desire and if we respond to that impulse by praying that we
may love more, we let this love enter us. The farewell to the prayer of
supplication means at any rate the end of invoking the intercession of the
saints. For to invoke them is a kind of square, for it is to attempt to move
them to attempt to move the divine ruler, whom we think we cannot move by
ourselves because we are too insignificant in his eyes. This invoking of the
saints is a very human reaction, but makes a caricature of the Ultimate Love.
For He/She/It is not a for us inaccessible ruler who can be approached only
with the help of go-betweens. It is interesting to know that till about the end
of the first millennium the official prayers of the church don't mention the
intercession of the saints. What replaces then that very human praxis of the
prayer of supplication, with or without intercessors, that stems from time
immemorial, as humans felt themselves confronted with invisible powers they
feared and in the same time the help of which they needed, and did not yet know
what was really the matter? A spirituality of abandon, born from the conscience
that the Ultimate Love urges us to further humanisation, and that we
have nothing else to do as to follow its impulse. Prayer of supplication
makes only sense, if it springs from our essential need, our lack of love, and
is not a call for things that are accidental and transitory, but a desire
that the Love, that is God, may fill us more and more. For then is it the
Spirit that cries in us to God, as St Paul says in Rom. 8:26.
k. The waning of the so called vertical
dimension of the faith.
That new image of God means also the waning of
the traditional emphasis on piety and obedience That emphasis suggests too
clear that one sees God as a ruler in the highest, a view that marks the
pre-modern Christianity. Should what replace that? By an emphasis on the
horizontal dimension, that means on care, on service, on selfless commitment
for a more human society, called by Jesus the Kingdom of God. Then God, the
Ultimate Love, cannot but push the cosmos, that is his evolving
self-expression, towards more love, and the more this happens, the more he
reigns. And he pushes us humans towards that goal by urging us to give up our
ego and to unite us with our fellow humans. That is why the essential task
of a Christian consist in the commitment for mankind and cosmos, the so
called diaconia, much more than in the liturgy. Jesus himself lets us know
that, where he gives the reconciliation with the "brother" priority
to the making of sacrifices, and where he does not at all agree with them that
call "Lord, Lord", but only with them that do the will of his Father.
And the will of his Father is his
formulation of that was has been called here the urging of the Ultimate Love.
Conclusion
What rests
after that all of the millenarian catholic monument, if one gives up the Theos
and factually becomes an a-theistic faithful? Don't wonder: the essence rests.
And that is not the formulation of the creed, not a book with infallible words
of God himself, not the ten commandments, not an autocratic hierarchy, not the
sacraments and the priesthood and the sacrifice of the Mass and the minute
rules of a liturgical protocol, not the prayer of supplication and not the
obedience to church rules. It is the conscience that we participate in a
cosmos that is the always further evolving self-expression of a creative
Spirit, who is Love, together with the willingness to let move us by that love,
following Jesus, whom we know as the forever living, because he was and is the
totally loving. For someone who thinks so, of course it is difficult to feel
at home in the pre-modern church life with its conceptions and uses and
forms of piety. But he should not leave the community. He should consider that
the pre-modern way of faith has been the way that has guided countless
Christians to a deep union with the Ultimate Love and to an outstanding degree
of humanity. It remains such a way for all our fellow Christians who don't yet have seen that times have changed. It has seemed in the beginning that
faith and modernity exclude each other. Not only they don't, but even they
complete and enrich each other. The Christian faith enriches the
modernity by freeing her from her blindness to a Reality that transcends us
absolutely and in the same time embraces us. Without that insight, the
humanist confession of the absolute value of the human person and the human
rights misses its indispensable fundament. For without the creative Absolute
love that urges the cosmos and mankind to a further evolution, the human race
is only a little more evolved branch of the mammal family that has not such
absolute value. And that evolution to homo
sapiens would be only the accidental result of blind mutations and natural
selection during astronomic long periods. Moreover the human person with his
inviolable rights would only be the result of the organic evolution of a
zygote, that in the view of the modern humanism has no rights at all. Where
from could then this absolute value come? The modernity on the other hand
enriches our faith and completes it, by freeing it from the anthropmorphic
image of a Theos in the highest, that it has inherited from prehistoric
generations and that it has not yet risked to give up, although it was only the
consequence of sheer ignorance. That image is in reality a screen between us
and the Ultimate Love. At best it is a finger which refers us to Him/Her/It.
And we shall look to that Ultimate Reality and not to that finger. Moreover,
if the cosmos is the self-expression of the Mystery that is God, then I too
belong to that self-expression and God becomes in an unconceivable way near to
me, becomes deeper myself than my deepest self. And so I can find him, who
is my deepest need, always and everywhere. At the same time modernity
purifies the traditional faith from the intolerance, the striving for
power, the fanaticism, the superstitions, the illusions and fears that
proliferate in all religions. And it enriches faith by its insistence on the
existential, the intramundane, the rational, the real. Modernity and faith go
indeed together. And that is good so. For thy need each other very much.
Roger Lenaers
Horizonte, Belo
Horizonte, vol. 13, no. 37, p.163-
http://servicioskoinonia.org/LibrosDigitales/LDK/HORIZONTE37PUC-MinasBeloHorizonte.pdf
