The Secularization of Christianity Part XIV - Religion Apart From God?

Secularism, even if in religious dressing, tends to do one thing - it seeks to divorce man from God, and to deny divine intervention in human affairs.   In that aspect, it presupposes that the answer to the question, "why does God allow evil if he is so good?" is simply that God is aloof and disconnected from human affairs.  In the past this position was known as Deism, and ironically is the very religion that so many of the "Christian" Founding Fathers of America embraced.  It asserts essentially that God is just a "great Watchwinder" in the universe - it acknowledges that He created it (albeit incorporating Darwinian evolution for its proponents in many cases) but after creating it He just sort of left it to its own development.  In other words, instead of God being either a loving Father or having a certain maternal bond even with His creation, to the Deist God is essentially similar to a mother snake or turtle - he laid the egg, buried it, and once the offspring hatches it's on its own.  This view, however, is in contradiction to the historic teaching of both Scripture and the Church, but it does seem to be embraced by some secularist theologians, notably Paul van Buren.  It is at this point we refer back to Mascall and address this issue from his text.

The discussion of this issue in Mascall's text begins on page 61, and van Buren's linguistic empirical approach as discussed earlier has the outcome of a detached Deism rather than a devout Christianity.  The impetus of van Buren's thesis seems to center on the word "religion," and for him religion is unnecessary.  In discussing the views of other theologians, such as Bonhoeffer and his mentor Bultmann, van Buren remarks that "religion" is that which consists of appealing to God as a means of justifying, explaining, or otherwise in his words "filling in the picture" in regard to the world and human affairs.  The religionless posture on the other hand - Deism, to define it - is in coming to reality apart from God.  Although acknowledging that Christianity doesn't accept this divorce of reality from God, van Buren nonetheless persists in his view.  Interesting enough though, he does note that the classic definition of "religion" for him is the Gospel proclaiming that it is God who orders man's actions for His own purpose.  This bears some discussion at this point.  For those of us who are Christian, there is no doubt for us that God is actively present in human affairs, as the Gospel indeed proclaims - it goes back to Romans 8:28, which affirms that all things work together for good for those who love God and follow His commands essentially.  It is also affirmed by Psalm 37:43, which also affirms that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by God.   Further, there is Acts 17:28, which reminds the Christian that in Him we live, move, and have our being.   The very Kerygma itself also would proclaim this, as what the Kerygma is about is the ordering of events to bring to fruition God's plan for mankind.   If we look at it from the point of metaphysics too, there is a Thomistic dimension to the whole discussion as well.  One of the transcendental properties of being that is attributed to God is goodness (which, along with beauty and truth, constitute what are called the three attributes of God).  God is good, simple as that, and those who seek the good are led to God.  Truth, interrelating to this, is also an ultimate good as well as being a divine attribute in itself.  Within each and every human being is what can be called a drive of the will toward a fullness of being which can be described as the "pure good."  As God is the ultimate Good for the Christian, it means that in seeking what is good, we ultimately are led to God (W. Norris Clarke, The One and the Many.  Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.  p. 15).  As Fr. Clarke points out, the drive of the will and the drive of the mind together seek to lead us to know this "good," and therefore contrary to van Buren's position, man needs God, whether this is fully realized by the individual or not.  Something just drives the mind and the will to seek the ultimate Good, and that Good is found in God.  The standard definition for "religion" is that it entails man's efforts to find God, and in this respect it is the correct thing to do.  Thing is though, man's search is also imperfect, and this leads to false religion and false gods as well, which means for the Christian there is another dimension - God reaches to us, and the Kerygma embodies His plan to do so, and it ultimately leads the seeker to a Person, Jesus Christ.  That is the part that liberal theologians such as van Buren miss, although others such as Bonhoeffer often find it in adversity. 

That being said, and returning to Mascall's text, there is a strange dichotomy noted by a wide spectrum of "mainstream" theologians from Barth to Ogden of what religion is - to them, it is a question of whether man uses God to solve some human problem, or whether as the Gospel states that God uses man (unexpectedly) for his own purposes.   If one examines the evidence, it actually is both - the old saying, "God works in mysterious ways," means that God reaches into the human condition in order to bring about His purposes, and often a human problem can be an opportunity for seeing God work.   In that scenario, man and God both benefit from the situation in that man has a solution to a problem while God uses that to reveal Himself.  This, for me, is the more balanced approach, and the Biblical record bears that out from Genesis forward.  The irony in this is that even when man tries to deny God or divorce him from religion and reality, God still can use the situation to reveal aspects of either Himself or His plan to others.  A good example I want to cite is from Fr. Elias Friedman's text Jewish Identity (New York:  The Miriam Press, 1987) is where he cites Maritain on page 124 as saying "The Jewish Diaspora within Christian Europe is one long Via Delorosa."  In citing that quote, Friedman goes on to explain on page 125 that a Christological iconography can be observed in both the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.   The Holocaust was in a sense a typology in modern times of the Passion of Christ - like Christ was beaten and crucified on a cross at Calvary, so the Jews were sacrificed with Zyklon B gas in the chambers at Auschwitz - the Holocaust is the "Good Friday" of the Jewish nation, in other words.  But, there is always an Easter after Good Friday, and just like Jesus rose from the tomb in His Resurrection, so from the ash-heaps of Auschwitz did the modern nation of Israel rise.  As he notes on page 126, Fr. Friedman makes a stunning observation of the Holocaust as a Christological event - "The presence of the Jew became a measure of the Gentile's capacity for charity. In his own way, the Jew revealed the secrets of the Gentile's heart and brought judgment upon him."  Persecution, as Friedman notes on the same page (based on Matthew 10:22) is a note of both the true Church and of Jewish identity.  God was at work, then, even in the most hideous of human events, and the ultimate aim of it all, as seen on page 127, is that God's answer to Auschwitz was the platform for the ingrafting of the Jews and the glory of the "resurrection of the dead" to follow.   It also relates to Christian minorities - notably the Armenians - who have endured similar persecution as well.  The existence today of both Israel and Armenia as nations, and the fact that millions of each still survive, is a testimony in itself.  The Church has always maintained that Jewish people are our "older brothers" in the faith, and as such they are promised to have full inclusion in the Messiah's salvation - the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms this in CCC 674, but it is also noted elsewhere that this will have its culmination at the end of days (CCC 840).  In the picture of the Jewish nation, we see how God uses even adverse human events to bring about His own purposes, and although "Christian Zionism" is not synonymous with this idea, the existence of a modern Jewish state of Israel, as well as the Holocaust that preceded it, may be what God uses for the promised "ingrafting" to come.  The example of the Jewish nation is one of many that could be used drawing from history, and another is the conversion of the Emperor St. Constantine, who like the Apostle St. Paul saw a sign in the heavens that led him to the truth.  So, unlike the either/or situation of man using God to solve a human problem vs. God using man to fulfill His purposes, it is a both/and - God can use both simultaneously. 

Mascall correctly notes that the weakness in van Buren's approach is a simple one - he utilizes Protestant theologians (many of a liberal brand) who tend to speak of God in worldly terms.  The goal of this existentialist approach on the part of these theologians is to eliminate all objectification of God in thought and word, and the name of God for them then becomes essentially meaningless.  The linguistic empirical approach that van Buren favors, as Mascall notes on page 64, is one that says there is no necessity for talking about God at all - because we cannot know what "God" is, as this line of thinking positions, we cannot therefore understand the usage of the term.  In doing so, van Buren only references theologians and authors who support his thesis, and ignores others who rightly understand the "reality of mystery" that is God.   He then notes on page 63 the real intention of this linguistic empiricist approach of van Buren from his own writings - van Buren seeks to divorce natural theology from the rest of theological reality by reducing God to a neutral "it," an abstraction if you will, whose existence is assumed but not proven.  In reading this (and van Buren's verbose and heady ramblings as noted by Mascall are hard to follow, as is any irrational intellectual justification of apostate viewpoints) you get the impression that essentially van Buren is an atheist who is using theology against the true existence of an actual God.  Let's talk about that for a moment. 

It is natural to assume that someone who is a "theologian" must be necessarily a believer, but in reality this is not the case.  There are atheistic theologians who devote a lot of time to trying to disprove Christianity and the existence of God by dickering over semantics and other issues.  That is what the whole idea of linguistic empiricism as it relates to theology is about.   Many of these atheistic theologians even hold nominal membership in churches (in the case of van Buren, as an Anglican, and in Ogden's case as a Reformed Churchmen) in order to give them some sort of ecclesiastical clout.   In reality though this is a deception - an atheistic theologian who hasn't come to terms with the reality of Jesus Christ and without a personal encounter with Him is still an atheist, even while having a nominally Christian identification.  This, for me, is an ultimate deception of Satan to deceive less-informed laymen and clergy of certain denominations, and unfortunately they are not all Protestants - there have been nominally Catholic theologians (unfortunately many who are part of the Jesuit order, which has had a falling-away in a dramatic turn from its devoutly Catholic founder, St. Ignatius) who are just as atheistic as Protestants such as van Buren and Bultmann, and they unfortunately do at times have more influence in the Church than they should.  The atheistic theologian should rightly be a contradiction in terms, but academia unfortunately baptizes them as "religious authorities."  And, they are not new either - in Jesus's time, they would have been known as Saduccees among the Jewish class of priests and Levites in that age.  Much theological training in recent years has also been infected with this ideology, and in order for Christianity to redeem itself, a reform in theological education may be warranted.  Theological atheism is therefore a secularizing influence on the Church attempting to neutralize and sterilize it. 

Going on with this language thesis, the root issue for van Buren is seen in what he defines "God" as being.  On pages 63-64 of Mascall's text, van Buren's thesis is laid out and it is essentially this - the definition of the term (or name) "God" must either be as a neutral force (an "it") of natural theology, or a Person who embodies grace and self-revelation as believed by historic Christian theology.  What van Buren is doing here is setting up a false contradiction between Revelation and Nature, and as a Thomist I (as well as Mascall) would differ with this false distinction.  The Thomist understands properly that God authored two "books" if you will - Revelation and Nature.  Revelation is defined as that which God has revealed about Himself through specific means (mainly Scripture).  Nature, on the other hand, is that which God created and bears His authoritative stamp which witnesses to His reality - this goes back to Genesis as well, where all God had created was in its being good, and God said so Himself.  Of course, at the Fall as recorded in Genesis 3 Nature became corrupted, and therefore it inherited an imperfection, but in its being it is still good because God is still its Creator.  In order to redeem Nature, and as an important part of the Kerygma, there is the reality of supernatural grace - defining supernatural grace in Thomistic terms, it is what God gives in order to elevate, heal, and perfect fallen Nature, and is restorative.  Man, as the pinnacle of God's creation, is where this starts - by restoring man through the gift of ultimate salvation in Christ, man can then begin to work through the supernatural grace God endows to restore Nature to what God intended. This is the traditional Catholic view, which Mascall further affirms on page 64 as he explains the orthodox view of natural theology.  Mascall correctly notes that natural theology, as the Church teaches, certainly asserts that there is a valid way of apprehending the world which enables one to see it as the creation of a transcendent self-existent Being (God).  The further way of knowing is due to God's revelation of Himself - essentially, Mascall states in another manner what I have just said, and he is correct.  He notes, however, that a common weakness in Protestant theology is that it views God as being known by a revelation apart from man's natural apprehension of the world in which he lives, and that it is impossible to know God apart from supernatural revelation.  This is called a strictly "religious" understanding, and is inherent from the beginning in Protestant theology, leading to a misunderstanding centuries later by liberal (and dare I say, atheistic) theologians such as van Buren because they have an incomplete understanding of supernatural Revelation.  This warrants a few thoughts of my own at this point.

Although van Buren represents the extreme of this mentality of confining God to just supernatural Revelation, it is seen across the spectrum of all Protestant theology.  From the conservative point of Protestant theology, it can at times be seen in the quasi-Gnostic attitudes of certain Evangelicals and Pentecostals.  Having grown up in that tradition prior to my own conversion to the Catholic faith, I know that mantra well.  It is evident in phrases you hear, especially in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles, of things they don't agree with as being "in the flesh" or "in the natural."  For such people holding this position, man's natural apprehension and understanding are totally divorced from the reality of divine Revelation, rather as properly being seen as perfecting it.  It is, as noted, reminiscent of the Gnostics who caused many problems for the early Church in asserting that all matter was somehow "evil" and that only the "spiritual reality" mattered.  That extreme led to the other extreme of the secularized Protestant theologian such as van Buren, who insists the opposite - only matter is real, and therefore the supernatural is a semantic faux pas that has no identity.  As opposed as these extremes are, they are both endemic to the Protestant attitude, and this creates problems for those holding either extreme in that on one hand, the extremely dogmatic Pentecostal essentially slaps God in the face by calling His creation "evil," while the secularist/linguistic empiricist essentially denies God's existence because the rational mind cannot understand supernatural reality, and therefore such reality cannot be in essence "real."  Both positions, it could be argued, are vestigial remnants of traditional Protestantism, in that the same convictions that underlie both positions are rooted in the Reformation rejection of much of what they deemed "Catholic."

To conclude this, a few observations.  First, God is a God of balance and order, and not only did He create the natural order, but He called it "good" Himself.  Therefore, God's natural order does reveal much about Him.  But, it is an incomplete picture, in that supernatural Revelation is also vital, and the realities of both Nature and Revelation are complimentary rather than contradictory - they are two "books" with the same Author (God) which tell the same story from two dimensions.  The Church has historically affirmed that too, and the Catechism affirms this in plain language, noting that the existence of God can be known with certainty through His works, by the light of human reason, even if at times that knowledge is often obscured and disfigured by error (CCC 286).  In other words, what was seen was made out of things not which do not appear (Hebrews 11:3).  In other words, the natural world has a supernatural source for its existence. Even the human person, which is indeed the pinnacle of God's creation, has an inherent openness to truth and beauty, a sense of moral goodness, and a longing for the infinite and for happiness, which is an endowment from God to bring man to willful communion with Him (CCC 33).   As Mascall correctly notes on page 65, those like van Buren, by utilizing a non-cognitive view of religious language, divorce (or demolish, as Mascall states it) God as a God of grace and revelation from the same who is also the God of natural theology, and this in turn is what creates theological confusion.  And, in the extreme of favoring natural reality over supernatural truth, instead of rightly seeing the former as having its origins in the latter, leads to a rejection of the supernatural that secularizes faith and limits it, in essence denying the very God who should be the object of faith.  It is the reason why I also would rightly question if van Buren could in reality be called a "Christian theologian," Protestant or otherwise, in that he essentially denies and dismisses the essential core of Christian faith - that a supernatural God created the natural order, and when that natural order became corrupted by sin and death, He sent Himself as God the Son to restore and redeem fallen creation by offering salvation to the highest of the created order, mankind himself.  We will pick up the next part of the discussion at that point.