GOD IN REALITY
Scriptures: Isaiah 44:6-8
Romans 5:1-11
In the middle years of the 1960’s – a decade full of fads and quickly burnt-out fashions – a fascinating (some would even say incredible) thing happened in the realm of religion: a fad that came to be called the “death of God” theology. Wafted on the wings of the popular press and intensified by the inconsistent spectacle of theologians talking about the death of God, this theology seemed to die out as quickly as it was born. But in its wake came a whole new set of theological fads like “the secular city”, “the theology of hope”, “liberation theology”, “autobiography as theology” – and perhaps most recently “New Age theology”.
Now, the unfortunate thing about theological fads is that important ideas may be lost in the flurry of popularized confusion caused by such faddism. The so-called “death of God” theologians were offering some interesting thoughts which, in the rush either to deny or to climb on the bandwagon, were not taken very seriously. Now, some 40 years later, maybe we can step back with a bit of perspective and look at some of the issues that were raised.
Two weeks ago we said that now is a particularly helpful time to look again at the “God question” for our own lives in the wake of the number of anti-God books that have been published and because students and adults alike are forcefully bringing this question to the forefront. Maybe, therefore, some of the questions raised 40 years ago by the “death of God” theologians could be helpful to this process. We are looking at these questions because, as we have said, we are concerned not only with the how of God (how we come to know God, which is by being revealed to us through our material world) or the what of God (what God’s nature is, which is a God who IS but who is also in the process of becoming) but also because we are concerned about the why of God – why we worship God, why the Lord is the basic fact of our existence, why we should bother to be worried about the meaning of God for us.
Let me remind you briefly of the ground rules I laid down for this discussion of God over these three hot summer Sundays: we are speaking about God as a community of believers and not trying to set up “proofs” for God’s existence; we see God through the prism of the centrally revealing event of Jesus Christ (recall the scripture we read last week from II Corinthians: “in Christ God was revealing the world to Godself”); and though I am initially doing all the talking my chief hope in speaking this way about God is to spark discussion and thinking about your own ideas of who God is for you.
Possibly the most important and lasting contribution of the “death of God” theology was to prepare us to live in this world as though there is no God. What I mean by that is that our past ideas of God are inadequate in a world in which human beings are becoming more and more aware of their own potential – a world where life is created in laboratories and test tubes and surrogate mothers and where cloning will become commonplace; a world where humans walk upon moons and (soon) other planets; a world where men and women thumb their noses at mortality by being frozen now to be “resurrected” many years later when (supposedly) a cure has been found for their disease. These and other scientific advances have helped us destroy our image of God as primarily a “problem-solver” – the one to whom we turn out of infantile dependency needs when the mystery of creation becomes too much to understand. And the destruction of this image of God as problem-solver is all to the good, the “death of God” theologians have maintained.
To this point I would agree, for such thinking is consistent with what we said last week: that a God who is in the process of becoming allows humanity complete freedom to reach its highest potentials. A God who is a problem-solver, a God upon whom we project our dependency-needs, a God who is held up as THE ANSWER just because we have hit a metaphysical stumbling-block – this God needs to die in order that humankind might more fully and freely live. And the wonderful, peculiar paradox in all this is that our scriptural tradition tells us so clearly that faith in the God who IS is only really possible when we are thus fully and freely living.
If, indeed, we have been freed to reach our own highest human potential as though there is no God, then how do we react to and relate with the God we have said is affected by what we do and who is revealed to us through all of matter? Tough question. And to try to get a handle on an answer I invite you, as I did the last couple of weeks, to come on a brief journey with me into the thought of two of the influential thinkers of the 20th century – Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich – and then look at the Biblical understanding of the reality of God.
You’ve heard me quote Bonhoeffer before; he is, of course, one of my true religious heroes. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor executed in a Nazi concentration camp for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. But he also lived an intense devotional life. His little book, Life Together, deserves to be placed alongside Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Augustine’s Confessions as devotional literature, showing us how to live a Christian life. However, Bonhoeffer was also very critical of the way Christianity was reacting to 20th century life. In particular, he criticized its irrelevance and its reliance on out-moded forms and institutional structures. His catch-phrases – such as “the world come of age” and “religionless Christianity” – became rallying slogans for many Christians. Bonhoeffer saw Christianity not as a religion (which is a sociological concept, something that people “join”) but as a total way of life, something that releases us from the bonds of institutionalized religion and frees us to live as men and women within the world.
In his own life-style Bonhoeffer pursued life in a “world come of age” in the middle of the incredible evil of Nazism. It was a life of contemplation and spiritual withdrawal in community, but also it was one of activism within the structure of the German state of his time. It was a life of commitment: he returned to Germany in 1939 from his seminary studies in the United States, knowing exactly what he was getting into. Devotion, activism, commitment – this is what it meant for Bonhoeffer to live in our time as though there is no God. It was a style of living that he called a “costly grace”, one that runs risks and accepts others’ burdens, rather than the “cheap grace” of belief in God as a problem-solver. Is it any wonder that he is a role model for Christians in the latter part of the 20th century and still in the 21st? Because, paradoxically, the God of scriptural faith became real for Bonhoeffer only as his way of life encountered a world which feels that it can get on quite well without reference to God.
Paul Tillich adds to our picture at this point when he talks about God as “being-itself”. I know that in recent decades it has become popular to pooh-pooh this notion as too philosophical and abstract a way to refer to God. How can you worship something called “being-itself”? But along with questioning the idea of God as a problem-solver, we also need to question the image of God as a specific being – our “grandfather in heaven”, or some such, who can be placed alongside of other beings. Rather, if God is to have any meaning at all for us today in this early part of the 21st century, it will only be as the basis for all being, all existence. This concept certainly squares with our understanding of God as revealed to us through matter and who is in the process of becoming, even as the universe is in the process of becoming. To say with Tillich that God is the basis for all existence is to discover a basic reality for God that helps us to implode all of the inadequate images we hold of our Lord. (And this, incidentally, is probably why the “death of God” theology was only a passing fad, because it did see God as a specific being who can “die”.)
Where, then, does this leave us in our search for the reality of God? The “world come of age”, living in our time as though there is no God, and God as being-itself all bring us around full circle back to the centering event: the fact that we affirm God’s reality through God becoming human, which we call the incarnation – through Jesus-who-is-the-Christ.
When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans part of his purpose was to show us that what Christ had done was to reconcile us to God. So, we “have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; we “boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ”. Our peace and our boasting are not in Jesus as he himself was but only as he was able to point through himself to God. It is not directly the love of Christ which upbuilds us, but “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” And, finally, Christ’s death was not just a great sacrifice, but “while we were still weak [and this includes us, today] Christ died for the ungodly.” This is our redemption. Would we trust that redemption to any human, be that person a Gandhi or a Schweitzer or a Mother Teresa or even the human Jesus of Nazareth? No, only the Jesus who became the Christ, only the Human who was also divine, could be so entrusted. It is to God through Christ that we give our obedience, since it is God who, through Christ has become incarnate – has become human.
Why do we worship God? Why do we want God in our lives? Most simply and directly put: because God IS and because God is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. The flip answer of the mountain-climber to the question, “Why did you climb that mountain?” (“Because it was there.”), becomes in theological terms the central fact of meaning. We worship God because God IS. In a world come of age when doubt and questioning are two necessary hallmarks of human existence, this is the single most important affirmation we can make.
What does this mean for the way in which we live our lives? Schubert Ogden clarifies faith for us when he says, “the real issue of faith at the deepest, existential level is never whether we are to believe in God, or even, as is sometimes said, what God we are to believe in; the issue, instead, is how we are to believe in the only God in whom anyone can believe and in whom each of us somehow must believe. And here there are but the two possibilities clarified once for all by the Protestant Reformers: either we are so to believe in God that we finally place our trust in God alone; or else we are so to believe in God that we divide our ultimate trust by placing it in part in some idol alongside God.”
The decision ultimately to place all our trust in God alone is the whole point toward which these three sermons have been pointing. To speak of God as revealed to us in matter, to speak of God who is in the process of becoming, to speak of God who enters this “world come of age” as being-itself, to speak of God as creator, redeemer, revealed in history, incarnate in the Christ, triumphant over death and entropy through resurrection – to speak of all this is nonsense….. if in doing so we are not led to a basic commitment which consigns to second place all of the idols we in our pride would raise up alongside of God.
Each one of us has any number of idols that we could and do raise up alongside of the God who IS: money, status, popularity, the desire to be accepted, nation, fame, family. And there are other, more subtle, idols because these in times past have been sanctioned by religion: God as problem-solver, God as being on “our side”, God as giver of an ethical system, God as made in the image of humanity. In our 21st century secular world none of these idols can meaningfully be a part of our total commitment to the God who IS. If, in fact, they are, then it will be true for us that God has died. Rather, our affirmation is no different from that of Second Isaiah 2500 years ago: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no God.” ”Do not fear or be afraid,” this same God continues, for “You are my witnesses!”
To this God who in reality IS may all glory be given. And to us who are those witnesses, may our commitment match the steadfastness of our God.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
July 22, 2007