May 2018

Where does belief in God come from?

Psychological interpretations of God generally fail, turning God into some sort of psychic crutch. Sigmund Freud argued that God is a based on the childish idea of a powerful and protective father (The Future of an Illusion). D. W. Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst working a generation after Freud, approached the question of God from a different direction, asking where he was located. If God were just an external being, he would lack emotional meaning and resonance. This is the God of a petrified religion, composed of a list of do’s and don’ts, a religion in which ritual has become sleepwalking.

But if God were just an internal reality, he would be no more than our fantasy. The God who feels real, the God who excites us (and God should be exciting) is the God whom we discover because we help to make him real.

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God is the one who remembers

God is the one who remembers. Everything. Everyone, every being, is remembered by God. A God who understands human weakness, but also a God who judges each of us. Everything you or I do matters, because it will be remembered by God. Those who made the Holocaust possible will be remembered by God. My Grandson, who contributes a large portion of his small salary to charity will be remembered. Remembered and judged by God. For all eternity. But that’s it. God does not punish the bad or reward the good. In the end we return to the stardust from which we came. But God knows. Forever. Kind acts and cruel acts are not the same. God knows the difference and remembers, even when humans have forgotten. Everything you do is of eternal significance.

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What do Niebuhr, Barth, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, and Tillich have in common? More than you might imagine.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich are the most well-known Protestant theologians of the twentieth-century. All downplay the mythical worlds of heaven and hell. The eschaton is now; we have already been saved by Christ’s intervention in history; he need not come again. What we have to do is live up to what we have been given gratis. Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, and Barth hold this view most strongly, Niebuhr less so, and I’m ignoring important differences among them.

Bultmann and Barth come to this view because there is nothing left but faith. If we regard the Bible as historically bound, while at the same time conveying an essential truth, then that truth must be known by faith alone. The Bible provides symbols, such as the cross, to help us discover and express that faith.

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Paul Tillich and existential Christianity

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a popular theologian* who reinterpreted the Bible in terms of existential themes. Existentialism was fashionable in the 1950’s, for it addressed the loneliness and absence of meaning that many felt after World War Two. We had won the war, the economy was booming, but what was the point of it all, especially when the population of the planet could be annihilated in an hour; for this was the height of the Cold War?

Unusual for a popular author, Tillich was also esteemed by his colleagues for his intellectual rigor, above all his three-volume masterwork, Systematic Theology. There and in his more popular works, Tillich transformed the language of the Bible into the language of existentialism. God became our “ultimate concern” and sin became estrangement, separation from God, from self, and from neighbor (Essential, pp 165-166).

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