Alternative Theology
ALTERNATIVE THEOLOGY
92. An inward Legacy: Selections from Letters to his Friends (by Forbes Robinson; 1956)
INTRODUCTION [About the Author and his Letters]—[Forbes Robinson was the William Law, Brother Lawrence, or Thomas Kelly for his generation]. Born in a Somerset vicarage in 1867 into a family of 13 children, Robinson’s short life was centered at Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow at Christ’s College in 1896, and died 8 years later at the age of 37. He was a man of prayer, a prophet of loving concern, a student of holy obedience. A friend has suggested to me that these letters might be more acceptable to us today if they were 200 years old instead of 50. 2 or 3 centuries work wonders for some people.
Let him speak to us just as he is. He stands in one particular tradition, nourished by one particular cultus, but always working his way sincerely and bravely toward the universal ground of inward truth. He speaks of the trinity, but we can feel his goal of dwelling in the living truth which unites God’s various dispensations and revealings. Likewise he seeks the interior meaning of all sacraments. Here is the ecumenical ground our generation is seeking. His writings are fragmentary as passages from letters are apt to be, but there runs through them an inward, [binding] unity—the force of Grace as received into his own life. GILBERT KILPACK
It takes time to make a saint. We cannot trust God too much. If we forget our self, He will see that our truest self is ultimately realized.
Pray to Him that the outward and visible may ever more and more be an expression of something inward and unseen and spiritual. For beauty, grace intellect, everything is doomed unless it is sacramental—unless it draws its life from God below, unless it lives but to testify of him who is.” Forbes Robinson
WHEN GOD WISHED TO REDEEM MAN, He did it from the inside. If we want to look at others from the inside, we must love, love the Christ, the Spirit in them. We must be right, inside ourselves; [none of us are]. There is in us a Son who will make us true sons, a Brother who will teach us to be brothers, a Human Being who will show us what is in all human beings; a Love who will teach us what we think we know. What is the difference between good & bad men? The best men say they are possessed by faith & love; they yield to the Spirit. It is in them, not of them, not belonging to them. God is in all detail; not to think of Him is not to understand that detail. Every detail is the expression of a Person.
I HAVE MORE & MORE come to the conclusion that the only reality underlying & explaining the world must be personal. All my ideas of justice & purity & goodness are bound up with persons. The world & things [& we who are] in it are only real in so far as they & we are thoughts of God. I cannot help feeling that persons who attract me in a wonderful way are a kind of faint picture of One who is better than all of them. I believe that we are intended to rise from them to Him who made them. If we stop short with the creature, we lower ourselves and them. If we rise from them to the Personal Being, we see more in them than we ever saw before.
Life is a circle whose center is God. We are unconnected with each other, but connected with the center. The nearer the center, the nearer we get to each other. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they are spirits. God is Three Persons in One. I try to get closer to those I love, yet something, someone is keeping us apart. It is a malicious, a devilish person. I look out on life; again and again death, and someone worse than death is separating us, misinterpreting motives, keeping people apart.
Our life is a copy; God’s life is the original. The unity of Deity is a pledge of the unity of humanity. The more we make our life like the original the more shall we realize what we long to realize—truer, deeper, more eternal unity. We are not trying to be one, we are one. Others live over their life again in us, and we are living our lives in other people. When I almost stop thinking, and listen, I am quite sure that a Personal Being comes to me, and brings some of His own life to flow into my life; [those who live in Him come too]. If I let them, they live their lives in my life, making me what I should not be without them.
What I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing which I intensely long to realize; life is love; love is life. Love for one person, if it be true, [unselfish] love, leads you at once to God, for “God is Love.” As we love, God is there; we see God, we are in God. We are led from unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made and love in.
IT IS VERY CURIOUS—how very, very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into if you could. Very few of us wish to lose “me”; most of us perhaps never will. It is a good thing to think that whatever we do is done for eternity, is part of ourselves and of others—that we live on in others. We are playing with big issues: we call them small and secular, we treat them as such—yet every speck of dust is big with infinity. Correct your thoughts to fit in with His thoughts, not His thoughts to fit in with your thoughts.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING LATELY of the self-sacrifice of God’s life. I suppose that is why He can enter our lives. We are made in His image—made to go out of self, & find our self by losing it. Each time we go out, & enter another “ego,” we return the richer for our sacrifice. When the other “ego” is most unlike our own, when the sacrifice is great, if we would [totally adopt the ego’s perceptions & perspective], then is the time when we are peculiarly rewarded for our pains. Our consciousness is larger, more human, more divine than before.
OH, IF BREAD AND WINE AND WATER are capable of being transformed into the highest means of grace and hopes of glory; may not living human persons be sacraments as well? [Making human life a sacrament too brings [all] into relation with real life, and transforms poor magical abstractions into eternal realities. Thank God when you see a good, beautiful, man or woman, a pure and simple family. For beauty, grace, intellect, everything is doomed, unless it is sacramental, unless it lives to testify of Him who is.
One who is beautiful & who knows God, leaves the blessing of such beauty to descendants who are little conscious of their beauty’s source, who have little thought of God. How can a flirt exist when beauty should surely be a sign not of unspirituality, but of the Supreme? The answer lies in the sacraments. They are a pledge that someday the outward & visible shall correspond to the inward & invisible. When you feel every one is a hypocrite, & you are the worst of all, kneel down & pray all you love may enter more into the meaning of [Communion] service, that they too may flee from self to One who is stronger than self. All life is a sacrament.
God has an inheritance for us to be saints. It is our selfishness & stupidity that prevents us recognizing the fact. We want to be able to enter into the meaning of what we see without becoming slaves of the visible & the finite. As we see Christ in men & men in Christ—we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough into life; we must get into its heart. The moment we see anyone whose [qualities] attract us, we ought to pray for that person, to thank God for the manifestation of His character, which we see as in a riddle.
Then we shall be prepared to realize deeper relationships. Think what it is to see a relationship in God, to see it existing there in His life, as His thought, long, long before we were born. [All our] old relationships seem so common & natural, & yet they are intensely awful & sacred & mysterious. & then think what it is to see God in them. This is bringing heaven down to earth, the holy city coming down from heaven. Around us—nay in us—are others, some whom we can see, some we cannot, all one, one, forever one, working out one big purpose.
LIFE IS LARGE, & I AM FEARFUL, lest I should exclude as wrong some elements which are God-given. We have to bring our affections and our longing for beauty to their source that He may interpret them. I scarcely yet understand anything about the meaning of Beauty. If I see human beauty, I feel that I am on holy ground. I feel that I have a duty in return for the revelation that has been given. The connection [of beauty and holiness is more perfect in nature; in man something has occurred, something anomalous, which mars the whole.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING TODAY of “I no longer call you slaves …but I have called you friend.” We cannot understand the riddle of life, the necessity of all the details in the great scheme of redemption, the reasons for certain means of grace, the real significance of the hope for glory while we are still slaves. Become a friend of a man and all is changed. Each act in his life, each thought in his life, each word from his lips has not ceased to be a problem but there must be a purpose running through the whole.
So too, become a friend of Him who alone is, and all is changed. Gradually, perhaps painfully, as we become like little children, the meaning of the whole dawns upon us. We only see one side of him ever, and the rest is only known to God. Yet we do know in part, and we are content to know no more. What we know is good; what we do not know must also be good. We shall learn that His methods are simpler and better than ours, that His thoughts are surer, deeper, higher than all our schemes and plans. God Himself provides institutions and customs, and had waited until I was old enough to learn their use and to bless Him as I used them.
We must be the friends of Jesus Christ before we understand His life now upon earth. Sometimes I see how some who are infinitely nobler & better than I are struggling to find Truth. I know that I hold an advanced book in God’s great school in trust for them, that as I learn I must live out truth, & teach as well as learn from them. Why was I entrusted with truth? Why cannot I communicate it? Such unsolved problems do stir me up from my natural laziness, and make me try to develop all my faculties in due proportion in the service of Him.
If you take my advice you will try to get a certain amount of time alone with yourself. [Then] we just see how much we really believe, how much is mere enthusiasm excited at the moment. Then we see how poor, hol- low and unloving we are. This hollowness, this unloving void can only be filled by Him who fills all in all. If we are ever to be or to do anything, if we are ever to be full of deep, permanent, rational enthusiasm, we must know God, [be alone with God]. Let us learn to make every thought of admiration and love a kind of prayer of intercession and thanksgiving. Thus human love will correct itself with, and find its root in, Divine love.
THERE ARE IN EVERY LIFE drawbacks and discouragements, for we live by faith and not by sight; faith must be perfected in the midst of perplexities and contradictions. I think there will be more need of faith hereafter than we usually think. I imagine that the riddles of life will still need faith for their solution hereafter. The faith perfected in the mists of life will, in the sunshine of eternity, see deeper into the meaning of events. It is easier to cast off a number of definite bad habits, clearly inconsistent with the ideal just at first, than to perfect self-sacrifice, humility and self-discipline. We are advancing though we know it not. I often think of the great unsatisfied heart of God, and then I think of this poor unsatisfied heart made in His image. I feel that He under-stands me, and that I understand Him better than I used to do, before this terrible hunger of love began.
THE MORE HE TRIES YOU BY HIS SILENCE, the greater to my mind is the proof that He believes in you. He knows you will come through. A man who had lived in the presence of God for years says: These surface troubles come & go,/Like rufflings of the sea;/The deeper depth is out of reach/To all, my God, but Thee. I believe in beginning by praying for what is easiest. The distress occasioned by wandering thoughts, & the attempt to trace the stages by which they wandered, I regard as the devil’s temptations. I bring the whole contradictory, weary and unintelligible mass of my sins to God, & leave them with Him. Prayer often renewed must at length attain its end. He understands our weakness and weariness. He knows what loneliness and sadness mean. And He is not extreme to mark what we do amiss. It may be that even in the mist we had gone further than we thought.
You will find that one [friend] understands one side, another appreciates another side. There are sides of our being which no one but God seems to be able to apprehend. He works slowly in nature, & I'm not surprised if human nature is more stubborn material for Him to work upon. He doesn't let us see many results, just enough to help us go forward. Remember Kant’s maxim: “Treat humanity whether in thy self or in another, always as an end, not simply as a means. Your influence, your life, your all, depends on prayer. Just try to pray for some one person committed to your charge & you will begin really to love him. It is quite worth your while to take a day off sometime, & to force yourself to pray. It will be the best day’s work you have ever done in your life.
It is a marvelous thought that God can reveal God's self to man—even primitive man. It is good for us as children to read these stories to realize that heaven is very near to earth. [As adults we] read them again to realize that heaven is even near earth than we thought as children. The child should surely be the father of the man.
I USE MY REASON/I AM SLOW TO SUGGEST—I USE MY REASON, but I am more than half affection, & it is that which helps me most. I don't pray so much because my reason bids me as because my affection forces me. I ask Him to develop & satisfy good, & to exterminate evil. I cannot help trusting Him.
I AM SLOW TO SUGGEST to another that what seems bad luck is in reality the voice of God making itself felt in one’s busy life, calling him to fuller sacrifice. Yet the absence of human help is not accidental. It must be designed, in order that we may learn to fall back on the everlasting arms. As I think over [Christ’s teachings], I find that I have to revise my moral arithmetic, change my standard, revise more ideas of great and little, happy and misery, importance and insignificance.
God comes unutterably near in trouble. If we can only get nearer to God, we shall get nearer to those we love; they too are in God. One sees one’s life as a whole, when one is helpless, [in pain], & can do nothing; the whole looks very poor & mean. But you still can make the future better, more honest, more noble than the past. I felt so selfish & so surprised at the goodness they showed. I saw something of pain's mystery. My consolation was that it isn't necessarily a sign of God’s displeasure. If one voluntarily says, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” then one enters into the highest life, & the pain becomes a new method of serving & knowing God.
There is no time on a sickbed for praying or thinking much of God unless one is accustomed to do so in health. I comforted myself with the thought that in the highest Life ever seen on earth, there was a full measure of spiritual, mental, and physical pain. When one accepted with faith certain suffering, one was in sympathy with the will of the universe, “working together with God” in some mysterious way. Jesus came, showing us that Heaven is on our side in our wrestle with all that deforms and degrades human nature.
LIFE IS SACRIFICE, RENUNCIATION/THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE—LIFE IS SACRIFICE, RENUNCIATION: true life is dependence on God. We must learn that our wills are ours to make them God’s; that if we have a hope or thought which He doesn’t inspire, which true humanity can’t share, the hope & thought are wrong. THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE not all the sympathy, manly help & advice that you wish for, will I trust, force you to depend with simpler confidence upon the unchanging Ground of all human sympathy. [I hope that] you will grasp the truth that God uses the sin of this world as an instrument in the education of His people.
Our own puny individualistic life of morbid self-consciousness and sensibility must be transformed by the fuller, Universal Life in which all may have a share; and thus we shall come think less of ourselves and what others think of us. Because the life there manifested is divine as well as human, we shall realize also with fuller force what it is to be a child of a Father who is in heaven. Life is life in so far as it is unselfish. May He who has called us and given to us all our privileges teach us to live out that which we know and believe.
HE TOOK MANHOOD/I FOUND WALKING/GREEK HISTORY WAS SHORT—HE TOOK MANHOOD in its weakness and strength—up into God. He was tempted. That thought helps me immensely. Foul thoughts only become sins when entertained as welcome guests. Human life is based on faith. If we get this idea into our minds Christ’s temptations become more real; they are temptations to faithlessness.
I FOUND WALKING a pleasant change after reading philosophy. I feel now more than ever we can’t divide our selves into watertight compartments, & think of reason, will, & feeling as separate things, lying side by side. In actual life you never find one without the other. Thought requires attention [will], will requires desire [feeling, & learning; what our feelings are teaching requires thought]. Reason, will & feeling are involved in faith of a poor cottager, more so in a thoughtful man. GREEK HISTORY WAS SHORT compared with Hebrew; I suppose because intellectual & artistic ideals are more easily realized than ethical & religious. It takes time to make a saint. We can't trust God too much. If we forget our self, God will see our truest self is ultimately realized.
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99. A Deeper Faith: The Thought of Paul Tillich (by Carol R. Murphy; 1958)
About the Author—Carol Murphy is a writer on religious philosophy & pastoral psychology. She studied political science at Swarthmore College and was a student in religious philosophy while at Pendle Hill. She studied pastoral counseling at: Garrett Biblical Institutes, MA Gen. Hospital, & Worcester State Hospital. She is the author of 4 previous Pendle Hill pamphlets: The Faith of an Ex-Agnostic, The Ministry of Counseling, Religion and Mental Illness, and The Examined Life.
[Introduction/ Opposites of Great Truths]—Wilbur D. Steele writes in "The Man Who Saw through Heaven" of Rev. Hubert Diana, who [had his universes expanded] by an astronomer, who said the reverend's opal ring may be a universe, & our universe may be an opal ring on a cosmic Finger. The experience was catastrophic. He vanished into darkest Africa, leaving a trail of crude clay images of the cosmic ring-bearer. The final figure was a man, head bent over a ring in an "attitude of intense & static, breathless & eternal interest focused on the ring," [somehow observing in the ring's atoms & electrons a hill & a 2-legged mite there about to die].
Paul Tillich was enough of a courageous and deep thinker to stand in thought at the boundary between philosophy and theology, human and God, and receive the shock of his encounter. Tillich writes: "The result of tension [between religion and classical humanism for me] was a split-consciousness which drove one to attempt to overcome the conflict constructively." He finds the element of truth of 2 opposing viewpoints, and lets them wrestle with each other in his mind until they bless each other. Niels Bohr said: [In] trivial truths & great truths, the opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. Tillich would say to Rev. Diana: "You are moving from naive certainty, through doubt, to the faith that includes and overcomes doubt." Culturally, there is a parting from the original tribal or family consciousness to the awareness that "I am I, standing alone, wondering how I can know other things or love other men.
Pray to Him that the outward and visible may ever more and more be an expression of something inward and unseen and spiritual. For beauty, grace intellect, everything is doomed unless it is sacramental—unless it draws its life from God below, unless it lives but to testify of him who is.” Forbes Robinson
WHEN GOD WISHED TO REDEEM MAN, He did it from the inside. If we want to look at others from the inside, we must love, love the Christ, the Spirit in them. We must be right, inside ourselves; [none of us are]. There is in us a Son who will make us true sons, a Brother who will teach us to be brothers, a Human Being who will show us what is in all human beings; a Love who will teach us what we think we know. What is the difference between good & bad men? The best men say they are possessed by faith & love; they yield to the Spirit. It is in them, not of them, not belonging to them. God is in all detail; not to think of Him is not to understand that detail. Every detail is the expression of a Person.
I HAVE MORE & MORE come to the conclusion that the only reality underlying & explaining the world must be personal. All my ideas of justice & purity & goodness are bound up with persons. The world & things [& we who are] in it are only real in so far as they & we are thoughts of God. I cannot help feeling that persons who attract me in a wonderful way are a kind of faint picture of One who is better than all of them. I believe that we are intended to rise from them to Him who made them. If we stop short with the creature, we lower ourselves and them. If we rise from them to the Personal Being, we see more in them than we ever saw before.
Life is a circle whose center is God. We are unconnected with each other, but connected with the center. The nearer the center, the nearer we get to each other. The more truly we understand persons, the more we shall find they are spirits. God is Three Persons in One. I try to get closer to those I love, yet something, someone is keeping us apart. It is a malicious, a devilish person. I look out on life; again and again death, and someone worse than death is separating us, misinterpreting motives, keeping people apart.
Our life is a copy; God’s life is the original. The unity of Deity is a pledge of the unity of humanity. The more we make our life like the original the more shall we realize what we long to realize—truer, deeper, more eternal unity. We are not trying to be one, we are one. Others live over their life again in us, and we are living our lives in other people. When I almost stop thinking, and listen, I am quite sure that a Personal Being comes to me, and brings some of His own life to flow into my life; [those who live in Him come too]. If I let them, they live their lives in my life, making me what I should not be without them.
What I have written is not a mere philosophy of life; it is the only thing which I intensely long to realize; life is love; love is life. Love for one person, if it be true, [unselfish] love, leads you at once to God, for “God is Love.” As we love, God is there; we see God, we are in God. We are led from unselfish love on earth to that unselfish family life of Three in One in heaven; we are led on to Him in whose image we are made and love in.
IT IS VERY CURIOUS—how very, very few people, if any, you would deliberately wish to change into if you could. Very few of us wish to lose “me”; most of us perhaps never will. It is a good thing to think that whatever we do is done for eternity, is part of ourselves and of others—that we live on in others. We are playing with big issues: we call them small and secular, we treat them as such—yet every speck of dust is big with infinity. Correct your thoughts to fit in with His thoughts, not His thoughts to fit in with your thoughts.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING LATELY of the self-sacrifice of God’s life. I suppose that is why He can enter our lives. We are made in His image—made to go out of self, & find our self by losing it. Each time we go out, & enter another “ego,” we return the richer for our sacrifice. When the other “ego” is most unlike our own, when the sacrifice is great, if we would [totally adopt the ego’s perceptions & perspective], then is the time when we are peculiarly rewarded for our pains. Our consciousness is larger, more human, more divine than before.
OH, IF BREAD AND WINE AND WATER are capable of being transformed into the highest means of grace and hopes of glory; may not living human persons be sacraments as well? [Making human life a sacrament too brings [all] into relation with real life, and transforms poor magical abstractions into eternal realities. Thank God when you see a good, beautiful, man or woman, a pure and simple family. For beauty, grace, intellect, everything is doomed, unless it is sacramental, unless it lives to testify of Him who is.
One who is beautiful & who knows God, leaves the blessing of such beauty to descendants who are little conscious of their beauty’s source, who have little thought of God. How can a flirt exist when beauty should surely be a sign not of unspirituality, but of the Supreme? The answer lies in the sacraments. They are a pledge that someday the outward & visible shall correspond to the inward & invisible. When you feel every one is a hypocrite, & you are the worst of all, kneel down & pray all you love may enter more into the meaning of [Communion] service, that they too may flee from self to One who is stronger than self. All life is a sacrament.
God has an inheritance for us to be saints. It is our selfishness & stupidity that prevents us recognizing the fact. We want to be able to enter into the meaning of what we see without becoming slaves of the visible & the finite. As we see Christ in men & men in Christ—we shall be more stable, less childish, less fickle. We never go deep enough into life; we must get into its heart. The moment we see anyone whose [qualities] attract us, we ought to pray for that person, to thank God for the manifestation of His character, which we see as in a riddle.
Then we shall be prepared to realize deeper relationships. Think what it is to see a relationship in God, to see it existing there in His life, as His thought, long, long before we were born. [All our] old relationships seem so common & natural, & yet they are intensely awful & sacred & mysterious. & then think what it is to see God in them. This is bringing heaven down to earth, the holy city coming down from heaven. Around us—nay in us—are others, some whom we can see, some we cannot, all one, one, forever one, working out one big purpose.
LIFE IS LARGE, & I AM FEARFUL, lest I should exclude as wrong some elements which are God-given. We have to bring our affections and our longing for beauty to their source that He may interpret them. I scarcely yet understand anything about the meaning of Beauty. If I see human beauty, I feel that I am on holy ground. I feel that I have a duty in return for the revelation that has been given. The connection [of beauty and holiness is more perfect in nature; in man something has occurred, something anomalous, which mars the whole.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING TODAY of “I no longer call you slaves …but I have called you friend.” We cannot understand the riddle of life, the necessity of all the details in the great scheme of redemption, the reasons for certain means of grace, the real significance of the hope for glory while we are still slaves. Become a friend of a man and all is changed. Each act in his life, each thought in his life, each word from his lips has not ceased to be a problem but there must be a purpose running through the whole.
So too, become a friend of Him who alone is, and all is changed. Gradually, perhaps painfully, as we become like little children, the meaning of the whole dawns upon us. We only see one side of him ever, and the rest is only known to God. Yet we do know in part, and we are content to know no more. What we know is good; what we do not know must also be good. We shall learn that His methods are simpler and better than ours, that His thoughts are surer, deeper, higher than all our schemes and plans. God Himself provides institutions and customs, and had waited until I was old enough to learn their use and to bless Him as I used them.
We must be the friends of Jesus Christ before we understand His life now upon earth. Sometimes I see how some who are infinitely nobler & better than I are struggling to find Truth. I know that I hold an advanced book in God’s great school in trust for them, that as I learn I must live out truth, & teach as well as learn from them. Why was I entrusted with truth? Why cannot I communicate it? Such unsolved problems do stir me up from my natural laziness, and make me try to develop all my faculties in due proportion in the service of Him.
If you take my advice you will try to get a certain amount of time alone with yourself. [Then] we just see how much we really believe, how much is mere enthusiasm excited at the moment. Then we see how poor, hol- low and unloving we are. This hollowness, this unloving void can only be filled by Him who fills all in all. If we are ever to be or to do anything, if we are ever to be full of deep, permanent, rational enthusiasm, we must know God, [be alone with God]. Let us learn to make every thought of admiration and love a kind of prayer of intercession and thanksgiving. Thus human love will correct itself with, and find its root in, Divine love.
THERE ARE IN EVERY LIFE drawbacks and discouragements, for we live by faith and not by sight; faith must be perfected in the midst of perplexities and contradictions. I think there will be more need of faith hereafter than we usually think. I imagine that the riddles of life will still need faith for their solution hereafter. The faith perfected in the mists of life will, in the sunshine of eternity, see deeper into the meaning of events. It is easier to cast off a number of definite bad habits, clearly inconsistent with the ideal just at first, than to perfect self-sacrifice, humility and self-discipline. We are advancing though we know it not. I often think of the great unsatisfied heart of God, and then I think of this poor unsatisfied heart made in His image. I feel that He under-stands me, and that I understand Him better than I used to do, before this terrible hunger of love began.
THE MORE HE TRIES YOU BY HIS SILENCE, the greater to my mind is the proof that He believes in you. He knows you will come through. A man who had lived in the presence of God for years says: These surface troubles come & go,/Like rufflings of the sea;/The deeper depth is out of reach/To all, my God, but Thee. I believe in beginning by praying for what is easiest. The distress occasioned by wandering thoughts, & the attempt to trace the stages by which they wandered, I regard as the devil’s temptations. I bring the whole contradictory, weary and unintelligible mass of my sins to God, & leave them with Him. Prayer often renewed must at length attain its end. He understands our weakness and weariness. He knows what loneliness and sadness mean. And He is not extreme to mark what we do amiss. It may be that even in the mist we had gone further than we thought.
You will find that one [friend] understands one side, another appreciates another side. There are sides of our being which no one but God seems to be able to apprehend. He works slowly in nature, & I'm not surprised if human nature is more stubborn material for Him to work upon. He doesn't let us see many results, just enough to help us go forward. Remember Kant’s maxim: “Treat humanity whether in thy self or in another, always as an end, not simply as a means. Your influence, your life, your all, depends on prayer. Just try to pray for some one person committed to your charge & you will begin really to love him. It is quite worth your while to take a day off sometime, & to force yourself to pray. It will be the best day’s work you have ever done in your life.
It is a marvelous thought that God can reveal God's self to man—even primitive man. It is good for us as children to read these stories to realize that heaven is very near to earth. [As adults we] read them again to realize that heaven is even near earth than we thought as children. The child should surely be the father of the man.
I USE MY REASON/I AM SLOW TO SUGGEST—I USE MY REASON, but I am more than half affection, & it is that which helps me most. I don't pray so much because my reason bids me as because my affection forces me. I ask Him to develop & satisfy good, & to exterminate evil. I cannot help trusting Him.
I AM SLOW TO SUGGEST to another that what seems bad luck is in reality the voice of God making itself felt in one’s busy life, calling him to fuller sacrifice. Yet the absence of human help is not accidental. It must be designed, in order that we may learn to fall back on the everlasting arms. As I think over [Christ’s teachings], I find that I have to revise my moral arithmetic, change my standard, revise more ideas of great and little, happy and misery, importance and insignificance.
God comes unutterably near in trouble. If we can only get nearer to God, we shall get nearer to those we love; they too are in God. One sees one’s life as a whole, when one is helpless, [in pain], & can do nothing; the whole looks very poor & mean. But you still can make the future better, more honest, more noble than the past. I felt so selfish & so surprised at the goodness they showed. I saw something of pain's mystery. My consolation was that it isn't necessarily a sign of God’s displeasure. If one voluntarily says, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” then one enters into the highest life, & the pain becomes a new method of serving & knowing God.
There is no time on a sickbed for praying or thinking much of God unless one is accustomed to do so in health. I comforted myself with the thought that in the highest Life ever seen on earth, there was a full measure of spiritual, mental, and physical pain. When one accepted with faith certain suffering, one was in sympathy with the will of the universe, “working together with God” in some mysterious way. Jesus came, showing us that Heaven is on our side in our wrestle with all that deforms and degrades human nature.
LIFE IS SACRIFICE, RENUNCIATION/THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE—LIFE IS SACRIFICE, RENUNCIATION: true life is dependence on God. We must learn that our wills are ours to make them God’s; that if we have a hope or thought which He doesn’t inspire, which true humanity can’t share, the hope & thought are wrong. THE FACT THAT YOU HAVE not all the sympathy, manly help & advice that you wish for, will I trust, force you to depend with simpler confidence upon the unchanging Ground of all human sympathy. [I hope that] you will grasp the truth that God uses the sin of this world as an instrument in the education of His people.
Our own puny individualistic life of morbid self-consciousness and sensibility must be transformed by the fuller, Universal Life in which all may have a share; and thus we shall come think less of ourselves and what others think of us. Because the life there manifested is divine as well as human, we shall realize also with fuller force what it is to be a child of a Father who is in heaven. Life is life in so far as it is unselfish. May He who has called us and given to us all our privileges teach us to live out that which we know and believe.
HE TOOK MANHOOD/I FOUND WALKING/GREEK HISTORY WAS SHORT—HE TOOK MANHOOD in its weakness and strength—up into God. He was tempted. That thought helps me immensely. Foul thoughts only become sins when entertained as welcome guests. Human life is based on faith. If we get this idea into our minds Christ’s temptations become more real; they are temptations to faithlessness.
I FOUND WALKING a pleasant change after reading philosophy. I feel now more than ever we can’t divide our selves into watertight compartments, & think of reason, will, & feeling as separate things, lying side by side. In actual life you never find one without the other. Thought requires attention [will], will requires desire [feeling, & learning; what our feelings are teaching requires thought]. Reason, will & feeling are involved in faith of a poor cottager, more so in a thoughtful man. GREEK HISTORY WAS SHORT compared with Hebrew; I suppose because intellectual & artistic ideals are more easily realized than ethical & religious. It takes time to make a saint. We can't trust God too much. If we forget our self, God will see our truest self is ultimately realized.
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99. A Deeper Faith: The Thought of Paul Tillich (by Carol R. Murphy; 1958)
About the Author—Carol Murphy is a writer on religious philosophy & pastoral psychology. She studied political science at Swarthmore College and was a student in religious philosophy while at Pendle Hill. She studied pastoral counseling at: Garrett Biblical Institutes, MA Gen. Hospital, & Worcester State Hospital. She is the author of 4 previous Pendle Hill pamphlets: The Faith of an Ex-Agnostic, The Ministry of Counseling, Religion and Mental Illness, and The Examined Life.
[Introduction/ Opposites of Great Truths]—Wilbur D. Steele writes in "The Man Who Saw through Heaven" of Rev. Hubert Diana, who [had his universes expanded] by an astronomer, who said the reverend's opal ring may be a universe, & our universe may be an opal ring on a cosmic Finger. The experience was catastrophic. He vanished into darkest Africa, leaving a trail of crude clay images of the cosmic ring-bearer. The final figure was a man, head bent over a ring in an "attitude of intense & static, breathless & eternal interest focused on the ring," [somehow observing in the ring's atoms & electrons a hill & a 2-legged mite there about to die].
Paul Tillich was enough of a courageous and deep thinker to stand in thought at the boundary between philosophy and theology, human and God, and receive the shock of his encounter. Tillich writes: "The result of tension [between religion and classical humanism for me] was a split-consciousness which drove one to attempt to overcome the conflict constructively." He finds the element of truth of 2 opposing viewpoints, and lets them wrestle with each other in his mind until they bless each other. Niels Bohr said: [In] trivial truths & great truths, the opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. Tillich would say to Rev. Diana: "You are moving from naive certainty, through doubt, to the faith that includes and overcomes doubt." Culturally, there is a parting from the original tribal or family consciousness to the awareness that "I am I, standing alone, wondering how I can know other things or love other men.
"In a universe of relationships it is necessary for its constituent beings to be apart and relatively self-ruling as well as participants in the whole. In the Christian view, the separation from God is as necessary to the divine love as the divine reunion with God; God must be the Thou whom we encounter. Why can we not find our way back from a loss of faith easily? Why is humankind prey to fear and ignorance? Why do we hate our finitude? Why does God sometimes seem to be an Enemy rather than a Father? Why do we become enemies to ourselves? This human separation from God Tillich calls estrangement. In Tillich's mind, freedom and destiny are polar to each other. Human freedom shapes human destiny, and human destiny shapes human freedom.
[Imperfect, Mechanistic Theology and Estrangement]—The theologian is like Mr. Diana, a finite man in the dark, seeking for God with the rest of us, speaking of revelation not as its giver, but as its imperfect receiver. [His life should reveal having been answered by God]. Some 18th century thinkers have an optimistic, mechanistic belief that nature reveals its Maker the way the mechanism of a watch implied a watchmaker. At the other end are some Calvinists—old and new—to whom nature appears bereft of divinity and God, who is forever hidden from human reason. Tillich can agree with neither; but he can accept the spark of truth in each.
[Mr. Diana grew up in a restrictive, absolute, externally imposed theology and morality, with very narrow blinkers on. In the first flush of emancipation from his tradition, when he paraded naked before scandalized shipmates], he was testing a repudiation of external claims. His [bearded Jehovah] had been too small—and it had burst at the seams, leaving him (apparently) with nothing. There is conflict between external authority and self-rule. Thomas Kelly writes: "Just when the humanist is playing the part of Jehovah ... he is pretty sure to find that humanity has, in its very depths, elements of experience which lead out ... into a divine MORE ... Religious thought oscillates between transcendent separation and immanent divinity."
The history of the Society of Friends has shown that the resolution of elderism vs. Ranterism, consistency vs. compromise, revivalism vs. rationalism comes only through the Inward Light. What is the ground of: our own and all being; the ground of causality; essential being; goodness? If [the Creator] seems to recede behind the gulf fixed between created and Creator, he/she is also closer to us than breathing, for that is our ground, and holiness can grasp us through any finite symbol.
Tillich believes that the infinite can be present in the finite, that nature is the finite expression of the ground of all things. The infinite could thus grasp Mr. Diana and shake his foundations and turn him into an atheist. Truth-seeking atheism's history has been one of overcoming the blasphemy of making a dubious and finite thing of God. The knowledge Mr. Diana needed was an insight into the mind of God in its bearing on his destiny. In his state of ultimate concern, he encountered the Holy, which fulfilled a need no other encounter can fill. The experience is real and immediate. A faith built on its reality is founded on a rock. Our understanding of it and thinking about it is always inadequate and subject to critical doubt and deep anxiety. Like Diana's clay figures, humanity's road is strewn with discarded symbols and systems intended to portray the meaning of holiness. Beliefs perish while faith remains.
[Tillich and symbols]—Tillich's genuine symbol bears with it some of the power of being. To Mr. Diana, the immensity of space powerfully symbolized God's greatness. To everyone great spaces brings awe, even when we know better than to worship mere bigness. Symbols do not live forever, but while they live they are powerful over the spirit of man. The symbol itself is finite, while it points to the infinite and unconditioned. Hence it is always in danger of becoming an idol when men fail to look beyond it. [Native Americans may go no further than finding] "God in clouds or hear him in the wind." But equally pitiable are those in a religious void for whom no natural thing is freighted with divinity: "It moves us not—Great God! I'd rather be/ A Pagan suckled in a creed out worn ..." We must bring to every symbol the double attitude: This is not Thou, even this is Thou.
When minds are entangled in estrangement, symbol usurps ultimate's place, to point to itself; God becomes an idol. Men too, made in God's image, reject their finitude; their creative power becomes demonic. Jesus saw that it was Pharisees, not "sinners" who manifested estrangement's results. In Communism, political survival be-comes the goal rather than the working classes' good. The church tends to speak as God rather than for God, to work for the hierarchy's success rather than the Kingdom's coming. [When the Church seeks] tyranny over man's mind, [it's small wonder] that free man prefers democratic pluralism, moral autonomy & skeptical secularism.
[Courage, Anxiety & Despair]—Mr. Diana's early courage & faith was found within human culture, & was authoritarian, over-literal, & Pharisaic. This courage he lost, to be replaced by primal anxiety of one threatened by the void. He regained courage when he found new faith in reunion with an accepting God. Tillich believes religion is culture's task & substance; culture is religion's form. [Anxiety took different forms in the past]. It was fear of fate & death for pagans; guilt & moral condemnation in the Middle Ages, with fear of Hell & the insufficiency of penance towards its end. Fear of death & condemnation is still a factor in Western civilization. We are awaiting a key symbol's birth; it will speak to our time's condition. We need assurance of where we are & why.
In courage and despair glimpses can be seen of the wholeness [and unitedness] which could have been ours. For Tillich, theonomy is an attitude of reliance on the uncreated, divine inner light in the human soul, reason united with its own depth. Theonomy is divine law. It shone in Mr. Diana face when he had completed his final image and came forth with a new freedom and a new commitment to kneel down in prayer and die.
[Revelation, Salvation, & Reunion]—In feeling ultimate concern, man transcends limitations, to touch the ultimate [in a revelation-moment]. Mr. Diana's revelation wasn't new; it was a coming home to him of Christ's revelation in Jesus. Humankind is caught in a struggle between holiness & the idols' inadequacy. Diana's idols had the power to pull the soul together into wholeness at first, but when god becomes demon, the soul is shattered & estranged. Humankind has been prepared by "the invisible process which secretly moves through history." This universal principle has concrete expression in Jesus received as the Christ. Imagine a Mr. Diana of ancient times, an earnest Jew whose faith had been shaken by Greek metaphysical speculation, who had [forsaken the Law, and who then sought in fear and trembling to know how God could be mindful of one.
How could new teachings of someone from Galilee, teachings which weren't Pharasaic, be revelatory? How did the "historical Jesus"—the man from Nazareth & his teachings, doctrines about him—have saving power? Not everyone who saw the physical Jesus saw him as Christ. Tillich reminds us; we have an interpretive portrait, not Jesus' photo. Whoever saves must be more than Jesus, or a new moral standard, or a new demand, doctrine, or religion. Jesus isn't creator of a new religion, but a victor over religion. Jesus as Christ can only save as a new reality, Tillich's New Being. [Since a Messiah might be] worshiped for himself, becoming a Demon, a symbol of Godmanhood needs to be self-sacrificing ("Believe not in me, but in God who sent me)."
One is saved by being transformed from ones estrangement. Asking about salvation is the 1st step. Hence, Jesus forgives sinners, lifts the Law's burden, & shares in the despair of those who can wreck their own natures by rejecting God who created them. One accepting forgiveness is able to forgive oneself, & to respond to God with love, [& is reconciled]. One is reunited with God, & other people in community, which means healing, physical, mental & social wholeness. Christ as resurrected shows that through reunion with God's eternal life, God-manhood isn't conquered by death or alienated by the hostility of estranged creation.
[Kingdom of God: Father and Prodigal Sons]—One who is saved participates in the spiritual community of those who are animated by the same Abba-crying Spirit of reunion that was in Jesus as Christ; the latent church, with its body of myth & symbolism to carry the power of Christ's revelation. "Without [power-filled] symbols in which the holy is experienced as present, experiencing the holy vanishes."
Mr. Diana was initially unchurched, even though he belonged to a religious organization. At his death, though far away from fellow-believers, he was a church member with his ancient prayer: "Our father, which art in heaven ..." The church as human community is as subject to estrangement as is any other community, all claims to infallibility notwithstanding. Only continuing, self-correcting protest to all such claims keeps the church from being idolatrous. Tillich stands at the boundary between religion & politics, neither exiling God from politics, or consecrating any political order. What is the relation of God's Kingdom to temporal society?
[In using the father-family analogy for God's Kingdom], the father is the family's head—a structure of a human community with a power-hierarchy. The father, because of maturity, has natural authority over his sons, & [struggles to] use compulsion without impairing individuality of the children he must protect. Every son has suspected that his father uses power on his own behalf rather than for the children, & that the family smothers rather than fosters ones own powers. Prodigal sons ask for their inheritance & leave home. Elder sons don't question, but often feel that his sense of justice is offended when partiality is shown to the prodigal on his return. The father is presented with the dilemma between weakness & destructive coercion, & between rigidity & partiality.
Dilemmas of power & justice were resolved by the father through love. Love [transforms power into reunion & justice into healing forgiveness]. God's Kingdom is a creative & energizing process; it isn't static perfection in a tangible Utopia. Tillich criticizes pacifism; it assumes too easily a desirability of achieving conflictless, un-tragic unity among men where growth is sacrificed to agreement. In demonic pacifism, peace is corrupted to passivity & consensus to "groupthink." "It is progress' price that there can never be complete consensus. All creative advances are essentially a departure from agreed-upon ways of looking at things ... " (William H. Whyte, Jr.).
[The human family] will always have its prodigal sons. [Disunity within the Society of Friends was caused by] tensions between Inward Light's unity and formalism, rationalism and moralism. The Kingdom of God wears its crown of thorns among and within us now. Tillich's thought energizes the mind to wrestle with his views. [It does not cover] the nature of the Holy Spirit or the individual's sanctification. Tillich writes: "To live serenely and courageously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depth of one's souls and in the depth of the divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought."
Suggested Tillich Reading: Dynamics of Faith; Systematic Theology; The Courage to Be; The Shaking of the Foundation; The New Being.
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154. The reality of God; thoughts on the “death of God” controversy (by Alexander C. Purdy; 1967)
About the Author—Hoemer Professor of New Testament (NT) & Dean at Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut. Visiting Professor at Earlham School of Religion. Contributor to Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. This pamphlet is written neither from a theological nor philosophical approach, [but as a] NT student.
1.—Much of the present-day discussion [involves] outgrown images of God that have been abandoned without necessarily affecting the essential reality of God. [The ancient] creeds may be likened to trenches dug in to secure ground gained. They help hold the line, but it is hard to move out of these trenches when new ground needs to be gained. The phrase “death of God” covers a wide range of meaning. [Saying] that there is no God is not new. [In] a vast & complex universe, the temptation to deny all meaning is inevitable, not surprising.
Agnosticism may mean that one doesn’t claim to know God’s ultimate reality, or that man can't know God or anything about him. [When faced with the universe's mystery], most of us find ourselves in the [former form] of agnosticism. [Scientists echo this sentiment. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington writes: “If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. . . So too in religion we need not turn aside from the light that comes in our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.” [An imperfect understanding of the universe] does not mean that definite, blessed meanings are excluded from the relationship.
2.—The “death of God” phrase covers some genuine atheists both inside & outside the churches; it covers many other ideas. It is the importance of rethinking our conception of God that attracts me. Much of the recent discussion revolves around Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, & Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bultmann was made to rethink his Christian position as a chaplain in WW I. Most German soldiers were pretty much untouched by their religion. Bultmann proposed to demythologize the records. [What is left after that process?]
Myth may express truth on another deeper level than the more prosaic ways. [Truth can also be presented in formulas & syllogisms]. A formula is true “if it represents correctly the way in which certain physical elements act in relation to each other.” A syllogism is true “when the final statement is derived by rational necessity from the others in a series.” Most will agree that not all of reality can be expressed in formula or syllogism.
[We say that the sun “rises” & “sets,” when we know that] the sun itself does not move. But the appearance and disappearance of the sun are not illusions, even if we misperceive what happens. When we say that NT records is presented as figures of speech and in myths, we are not dismissing these records as mere fiction. The forms in which the NT writers set forth their convictions were those appropriate to their time and readers.
Paul Tillich holds that to relegate religion to the realm outside or above nature is doomed to failure. [Religion] fills the gaps left in scientific knowledge; more and more of those gaps are closing. What’s left is mysticism and the narrow, ritualistic performance in the churches passing for worship.] Tillich undertook to interpret the Christian religion as inside the realm of being. The prevalent religious vocabulary must be radically revised.
Does not the accumulative effect of traditional phrases tend to make God remote and unessential to life as we know it? God is neither “up there” or “out there.” A power not our own exists and man can and ought to respond personally with all his mind and heart to this Depth and Ground of reality. [“Ground of reality” says that] God is intimately related to the system of reality accepted by the sciences. This “God” includes the personal area of existence [but is not a “Person.”]
3.—Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid for his allegiance to his faith with his life. “Religion” is used in 2 main ways. When “religion” stands for the inescapable urge to find meaningful relationship with the universe & with other human beings it has a positive & creative meaning. Bonhoeffer’s rejection of “religion” is a protest against organized, systematized, institutionalized ways of the churches as a substitute for genuine worship. [In] this protest against formality & externality of much worship, [Bonhoeffer stands in the tradition of many Old Testament (OT) prophets (e.g. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah)]. Jeremiah asked: Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely... and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘we are delivered’ ... Has this house . . . become a den of robbers in your eyes? Micah asked: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
The sting of Jesus’ word is in his repudiation of these worship exercises as outward, formal patterns of worship “to be seen of men.” [Jesus rejects the Pharisee’s meticulous observances, respectability and self-righteousness, and embraces] the brokenhearted cry of the Tax Collector, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” [It is] deeds of mercy and kindness [that will be judged worthy in the end]. The highest moment of formal worship must wait upon and be informed by an act of reconciliation before it is meaningful.
[It is easy to imagine that] the real life [events] of a Galilean village furnishes the setting for the Sermon on Mount. No kind of “religion” which is abstracted from the rough and tumble of actuality finds any justification in Jesus’ teaching. Martin Buber said: “What the Bible says is not religious but holy. The holy means simply to let everything in social, economic, political life, all life, be subjected to the kingly rule of God.”
4.—Can the forms & institutions of religion be scrapped? Should ours be the role of iconoclasts? Each fresh reformation has produced new forms when it cooled. Even George Fox concerned himself in the last years of his life with organizing the new society. People cannot worship together without some kind of order. The apostle Paul said: “God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” (I Corinthians 14:33). Speaking immediately at the meeting’s beginning or after a very short wait after the last speaker is not according to the order of Friends.
Bishop Robinson said: "The presence of Christ with his people is tied to a right receiving of the communion, to a right relationship with one’s neighbor.” The acid test of every form, every ceremony, is its relevance to the common life we live. It is not likely that any one form is valid for and will meet the needs of all. I do not fear that religion will cease to be. Dag Hammarskjold writes in Markings: “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity. . . We die when our lives cease to be illumined by the source of [radiance and wonder] which is beyond all reason.” Howard Brinton says that if a man finds the Holy of Holies, [and all that is there is] himself, he is not likely to go there again. A revival of authentic religion is inevitable.
We need to hesitate in defining God. The Bible vividly illustrates its writers’ changing views. The Hebrew concept developed in the opposite direction from the Greek, who moved to monotheism by emptying the idea of God of everything human, [& arriving at an] Absolute Being. The Hebrew mind progressively theomorphized man by using loftier & loftier views of human capacity; the Greeks arrived at philosophy; the Hebrews at ethical monotheism. Will we be able to arrive at a satisfying conception of God? Is there any other direction for thinking to take? Can God be thought of as a Person, as a Person unlimited by the personal, or as Impersonal? I am completely certain that my response is to be for the right as I am given to know it.
5.—The most meaningful way to think of the reality of God is in terms of Spirit. Saying “God is spirit” stresses that there is that in the God of the universe that makes true worship a possibility for man. The winds of heaven are mysterious, being in themselves invisible but in their effect quite observable, and the breath of man is coexistent with his life. It is not far to go to correlate this breath with a man’s thoughts and feelings, and to reflect on spirit as the ultimate reality, the soul stuff of God and man. For the Hebrews, spirit was the word for the way God acts and the way man responds rather than as describing the nature of either God or man. The Spirit of God in the OT is the [extraordinary] agency producing a wide variety of effects, an ad hoc endowment rather than a permanent possession. Spirit is used primarily of the inspiration of prophets. The great prophets’ message came to them directly and immediately without the mediation of the spirit.
6.—In the Synoptic Gospels it is clear that Spirit was increasingly regarded as characteristic of the coming Messianic age. [On the other hand], the Book of Acts is filled with evidence of the guidance and motivation of the Spirit. What may be new in Acts is the recovery of the group experience, “they were all together in one place.” Is the koinonia also a result of the gift of the Spirit? According to Paul, the Spirit motivates all the leaders of the church, however lofty or humble their status, including mere “helpers.” The supreme gift of the Spirit is not a classifiable function but the way in which all functions must be exercised. In the Gospel of John Jesus is reported as saying, “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
The Spirit moves men to do and be what they could not otherwise achieve. A power not their own moves but does not obliterate their personalities. Amos Wilder sees false spirituality as “the kind of dualism which locates Christian experience in the soul rather than in the whole man.” In the Bible the “heart” designates the intimate center and the totality of the human personality where intelligence, feeling and will reside.” Spirit is the energizing power, purging our whole creaturely and practical being, involving all our natural and moral relationship. We ought to say the God’s Spirit comes through rather than comes down. [Being] gathered into the worshipping company brings a new sense of human situations and human relationships.
Frederick Buechner says: “The Christian faith flatly contradicts [the notion that life does not care what we make of it]. Whether you call it the Spirit of God or the life force, its most basic characteristic is that it wishes us well and is at work toward that end. Deep within [wherever] the hidden spring that life wells up from there comes a power to heal, to breathe new life into us. I believe that for our sakes this Spirit beneath our spirit will make Christs of us before we are done, or for our sakes will destroy us.”
7.—We are under obligation as thinking, reasoning beings to understand, in as far as we are able, the nature and character of the Ultimate Reality which makes a Universe. Can it be that we have been engaged in the wrong quest, [seeking God as the object of it, rather than seeing God as the divine mover in our search for something more]? The quest which has a thing as an end, must leave us dissatisfied; only that quest which can lead us through a doorway into ever deeper exploration can sustain us. We can only be satisfied at the end of our quest if we have met a person not a thing. God is not the ends, but the moving power which inspires us to continue the quest for abundant life for us and for all people everywhere.
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154. The reality of God; thoughts on the “death of God” controversy (by Alexander C. Purdy; 1967)
About the Author—Hoemer Professor of New Testament (NT) & Dean at Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut. Visiting Professor at Earlham School of Religion. Contributor to Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. This pamphlet is written neither from a theological nor philosophical approach, [but as a] NT student.
1.—Much of the present-day discussion [involves] outgrown images of God that have been abandoned without necessarily affecting the essential reality of God. [The ancient] creeds may be likened to trenches dug in to secure ground gained. They help hold the line, but it is hard to move out of these trenches when new ground needs to be gained. The phrase “death of God” covers a wide range of meaning. [Saying] that there is no God is not new. [In] a vast & complex universe, the temptation to deny all meaning is inevitable, not surprising.
Agnosticism may mean that one doesn’t claim to know God’s ultimate reality, or that man can't know God or anything about him. [When faced with the universe's mystery], most of us find ourselves in the [former form] of agnosticism. [Scientists echo this sentiment. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington writes: “If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. . . So too in religion we need not turn aside from the light that comes in our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.” [An imperfect understanding of the universe] does not mean that definite, blessed meanings are excluded from the relationship.
2.—The “death of God” phrase covers some genuine atheists both inside & outside the churches; it covers many other ideas. It is the importance of rethinking our conception of God that attracts me. Much of the recent discussion revolves around Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, & Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bultmann was made to rethink his Christian position as a chaplain in WW I. Most German soldiers were pretty much untouched by their religion. Bultmann proposed to demythologize the records. [What is left after that process?]
Myth may express truth on another deeper level than the more prosaic ways. [Truth can also be presented in formulas & syllogisms]. A formula is true “if it represents correctly the way in which certain physical elements act in relation to each other.” A syllogism is true “when the final statement is derived by rational necessity from the others in a series.” Most will agree that not all of reality can be expressed in formula or syllogism.
[We say that the sun “rises” & “sets,” when we know that] the sun itself does not move. But the appearance and disappearance of the sun are not illusions, even if we misperceive what happens. When we say that NT records is presented as figures of speech and in myths, we are not dismissing these records as mere fiction. The forms in which the NT writers set forth their convictions were those appropriate to their time and readers.
Paul Tillich holds that to relegate religion to the realm outside or above nature is doomed to failure. [Religion] fills the gaps left in scientific knowledge; more and more of those gaps are closing. What’s left is mysticism and the narrow, ritualistic performance in the churches passing for worship.] Tillich undertook to interpret the Christian religion as inside the realm of being. The prevalent religious vocabulary must be radically revised.
Does not the accumulative effect of traditional phrases tend to make God remote and unessential to life as we know it? God is neither “up there” or “out there.” A power not our own exists and man can and ought to respond personally with all his mind and heart to this Depth and Ground of reality. [“Ground of reality” says that] God is intimately related to the system of reality accepted by the sciences. This “God” includes the personal area of existence [but is not a “Person.”]
3.—Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid for his allegiance to his faith with his life. “Religion” is used in 2 main ways. When “religion” stands for the inescapable urge to find meaningful relationship with the universe & with other human beings it has a positive & creative meaning. Bonhoeffer’s rejection of “religion” is a protest against organized, systematized, institutionalized ways of the churches as a substitute for genuine worship. [In] this protest against formality & externality of much worship, [Bonhoeffer stands in the tradition of many Old Testament (OT) prophets (e.g. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah)]. Jeremiah asked: Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely... and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘we are delivered’ ... Has this house . . . become a den of robbers in your eyes? Micah asked: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
The sting of Jesus’ word is in his repudiation of these worship exercises as outward, formal patterns of worship “to be seen of men.” [Jesus rejects the Pharisee’s meticulous observances, respectability and self-righteousness, and embraces] the brokenhearted cry of the Tax Collector, “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” [It is] deeds of mercy and kindness [that will be judged worthy in the end]. The highest moment of formal worship must wait upon and be informed by an act of reconciliation before it is meaningful.
[It is easy to imagine that] the real life [events] of a Galilean village furnishes the setting for the Sermon on Mount. No kind of “religion” which is abstracted from the rough and tumble of actuality finds any justification in Jesus’ teaching. Martin Buber said: “What the Bible says is not religious but holy. The holy means simply to let everything in social, economic, political life, all life, be subjected to the kingly rule of God.”
4.—Can the forms & institutions of religion be scrapped? Should ours be the role of iconoclasts? Each fresh reformation has produced new forms when it cooled. Even George Fox concerned himself in the last years of his life with organizing the new society. People cannot worship together without some kind of order. The apostle Paul said: “God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” (I Corinthians 14:33). Speaking immediately at the meeting’s beginning or after a very short wait after the last speaker is not according to the order of Friends.
Bishop Robinson said: "The presence of Christ with his people is tied to a right receiving of the communion, to a right relationship with one’s neighbor.” The acid test of every form, every ceremony, is its relevance to the common life we live. It is not likely that any one form is valid for and will meet the needs of all. I do not fear that religion will cease to be. Dag Hammarskjold writes in Markings: “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity. . . We die when our lives cease to be illumined by the source of [radiance and wonder] which is beyond all reason.” Howard Brinton says that if a man finds the Holy of Holies, [and all that is there is] himself, he is not likely to go there again. A revival of authentic religion is inevitable.
We need to hesitate in defining God. The Bible vividly illustrates its writers’ changing views. The Hebrew concept developed in the opposite direction from the Greek, who moved to monotheism by emptying the idea of God of everything human, [& arriving at an] Absolute Being. The Hebrew mind progressively theomorphized man by using loftier & loftier views of human capacity; the Greeks arrived at philosophy; the Hebrews at ethical monotheism. Will we be able to arrive at a satisfying conception of God? Is there any other direction for thinking to take? Can God be thought of as a Person, as a Person unlimited by the personal, or as Impersonal? I am completely certain that my response is to be for the right as I am given to know it.
5.—The most meaningful way to think of the reality of God is in terms of Spirit. Saying “God is spirit” stresses that there is that in the God of the universe that makes true worship a possibility for man. The winds of heaven are mysterious, being in themselves invisible but in their effect quite observable, and the breath of man is coexistent with his life. It is not far to go to correlate this breath with a man’s thoughts and feelings, and to reflect on spirit as the ultimate reality, the soul stuff of God and man. For the Hebrews, spirit was the word for the way God acts and the way man responds rather than as describing the nature of either God or man. The Spirit of God in the OT is the [extraordinary] agency producing a wide variety of effects, an ad hoc endowment rather than a permanent possession. Spirit is used primarily of the inspiration of prophets. The great prophets’ message came to them directly and immediately without the mediation of the spirit.
6.—In the Synoptic Gospels it is clear that Spirit was increasingly regarded as characteristic of the coming Messianic age. [On the other hand], the Book of Acts is filled with evidence of the guidance and motivation of the Spirit. What may be new in Acts is the recovery of the group experience, “they were all together in one place.” Is the koinonia also a result of the gift of the Spirit? According to Paul, the Spirit motivates all the leaders of the church, however lofty or humble their status, including mere “helpers.” The supreme gift of the Spirit is not a classifiable function but the way in which all functions must be exercised. In the Gospel of John Jesus is reported as saying, “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
The Spirit moves men to do and be what they could not otherwise achieve. A power not their own moves but does not obliterate their personalities. Amos Wilder sees false spirituality as “the kind of dualism which locates Christian experience in the soul rather than in the whole man.” In the Bible the “heart” designates the intimate center and the totality of the human personality where intelligence, feeling and will reside.” Spirit is the energizing power, purging our whole creaturely and practical being, involving all our natural and moral relationship. We ought to say the God’s Spirit comes through rather than comes down. [Being] gathered into the worshipping company brings a new sense of human situations and human relationships.
Frederick Buechner says: “The Christian faith flatly contradicts [the notion that life does not care what we make of it]. Whether you call it the Spirit of God or the life force, its most basic characteristic is that it wishes us well and is at work toward that end. Deep within [wherever] the hidden spring that life wells up from there comes a power to heal, to breathe new life into us. I believe that for our sakes this Spirit beneath our spirit will make Christs of us before we are done, or for our sakes will destroy us.”
7.—We are under obligation as thinking, reasoning beings to understand, in as far as we are able, the nature and character of the Ultimate Reality which makes a Universe. Can it be that we have been engaged in the wrong quest, [seeking God as the object of it, rather than seeing God as the divine mover in our search for something more]? The quest which has a thing as an end, must leave us dissatisfied; only that quest which can lead us through a doorway into ever deeper exploration can sustain us. We can only be satisfied at the end of our quest if we have met a person not a thing. God is not the ends, but the moving power which inspires us to continue the quest for abundant life for us and for all people everywhere.
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326. Liberation Theology for Quakers (by Alice and Staughton Lynd; 1996)
About the Authors—Staughton Lynd's cousin was David Hartley, an ambulance driver with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Italy during WWII, & Staughton's 1st conscientious objector. Alice recalls going to Friends Meeting with her parents, Henry Niles, & Mary Howard Niles. Staughton & Alice were married at Stony Run Friends Meeting House in 1951. They joined Society of Friends in Atlanta in 1963. Among Meetings they have belonged to is 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, where they still carry non-resident membership.
Liberation Theology—Quaker beliefs are: potential good and inner light in every person, which needs no priestly or churchly meditation; equality, nonviolence, and forgiveness; direct speaking; speaking truth to power; living life consistent with our values; simplicity; responsible stewardship of the earth. Roman Catholics would seem to be opposite with its ritual, liturgy and fixed creed. Yet our most powerful spiritual experiences have been with Roman Catholics in Nicaragua, the popular Church, a community influenced by liberation theology.
Liberation theology has this conviction: God doesn't want anyone poor; God's Kingdom should be lived out here on earth. This approach focuses on confronting & changing institutional violence & structural injustice. It calls for standing on the poor's side. There is God's choice for the poor, [choosing a birthplace for his son, a cow's stall, that resembled homelessness], who found his followers [among "poor working class"] fishermen, & who was executed in a way used to silence slaves & rebels. [People like Sister Helen Prejean choose service to the poor]; she said: "I came to St. Thomas as part of a Catholic reform movement, seeking to harness faith to social justice ... reluctantly. I didn't want to struggle with politics & economics. We were nuns, not social workers ... [Sister Marie Augusta Neal], pointed out that being apolitical or neutral when seeing injustice would uphold the status quo—a very political position to take on the oppressors' side. The poor weren't to meekly accept poverty & suffering as God's will, but struggle to obtain necessities of life." Archbishop Oscar Romero used the word "accompaniment" for acting with the poor & oppressed & then living the consequences of that choice.
The dignity and self-activity of poor and working people is another cardinal belief of liberation theology. Poor and working people tend to internalize the oppressor's image of them as unworthy, dumb, incapable of solving problems. Liberation theology says every one has his or her own dignity. Pastoral agents of the new Catholicism teach the poor that they must not be passive victims. Liberation theology promotes the institution of a base community that exists in a neighborhood or village, meets regularly, reads the Gospel, and applies it to their own life situation. A Nicaraguan base community reflecting on the Good Samaritan story states: "We have to go to work, and to our homes./ We are not able to stop using the [dangerous] road./ What shall we do?// The traveler was alone ... The robbers ... assaulted him ... We must travel very much together ... We must organize ourselves./ And do all things as a community."
Early Friends/ Our Formation: Macedonia Cooperative Community—Like radical Catholics in Latin America today, yeomen & craftsmen [that made up] early Quakers stressed institutional not individual sin. "The Quaker sense of the meeting" carried into today a desire for unanimity like that which meant so much to medieval communities. North America's 1st Friends expressed a thoroughgoing social, religious radicalism. North American Quakers are now "very white, suburban & well-heeled." The question is whether Friends can be a group that serves the poor directly, & seeks to create new society with no disparities between rich & poor.
The 3 years we spent at the Macedonia Cooperative Community, 1954-1957 were the period of our formation, establishing lifetime values & teaching us ways of community living to last a lifetime. The Northeastern Georgia community was better off than those in the surrounding area, but lived in "voluntary poverty." The community earned a meager living from a dairy & making wooden educational toys. The way people listened at Macedonia was such that [speaking was followed by long pauses]. We came in 1954, joined in 1955. We had long [Quaker-like discussions, & practiced careful discernment, though we didn't use the word]. We also practiced "direct speaking." If you were irritated by someone, you went to that person & tried to work it out. When a childcare worker & I [Alice] had different approaches, we met, reached a turning point & appreciated our differences.
We thought it was as important to straighten out things with someone before a business meeting, or before working together in the barn as it was before "going to the altar." [We recognized] that different persons might use quite different words to describe a common religious experience. We left Macedonia in 1957 when they decided to merge with a different religious group. Macedonia showed us people could live together in a manner qualitatively different from the dog-eat-dog ambience of capitalist society. We found [that Macedonian attitude] again to some extent, in the Southern civil rights movement, in the solidarity of rank-and-file workers, & in Latin notions about "accompanying" each other in the search for "el reino de Dios," (God's Kingdom). We found it because we were looking for it and knew it could happen.
Accompaniment: The Southern Civil Rights Movement—We looked for a way to go South & join the Civil Rights Movement; a black parent with a child in our daughter's kindergarten suggested teaching in a "Negro" college. Good things flowed from having a free apartment on the Spelman College (Atlanta) campus. Spelman students proved full of life, including Alice Walker, The Color Purple's future author. We felt that our children & children of other families who believed in integration, needed one another & found support at Quaker House. After our son's near fatal fall, the operation, days in the hospital, & miraculous recovery, we found that we were Quakers; joining the meeting seemed to acknowledge [the belonging] we had already experienced. We protested President Kennedy's escalation of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in a picket line in downtown Atlanta. 2 years later I [Alice] started the position of Freedom School director in the 1964 Mississippi Summer project.
Accompaniment: Draft Counseling—I [Stoughton] was involved in 1965 anti-war protest, & was arrested at the Assembly of Unrepresented People in Washington D.C., there to declare peace with the people of Vietnam. I [Alice] became a draft counselor to do what I could about the war. Students from Yale University, and especially a group of divinity students who asked to meet with us weekly asked what they should do about the draft. [The resulting discussions] led to me collecting & editing a book of personal accounts of war objectors, which became a way for war resisters to show family and friends that others were struggling with the same dilemmas.
I [Alice] loved draft counseling. [In spite of initial distress at their appearance], I [quickly felt privileged to touch others at this moment when they were struggling with decisions that involved the whole meaning of their lives. I could not give legal advice, and did not want to engage in "mindbending" in the decision-making process. Lawyers would take a case into their own hands, and argue on the basis of their own theories, rather than the refuser's beliefs. Counselors would not take control out of the hands of the refuser. Years later, we both became lawyers. Our labor law clients knew more about the workings of the shop than we could, so we would find out facts and present a legal theory that accurately reflected what our clients believed the problem to be.
Accompaniment: Moving to Youngstown—In the 70's we needed a new livelihood. The 1960's Movement was at an end, coming to grief partly because of class. Student activists in universities who protested sensed a lack of support off-campus; radicals tried to make up for it by escalating tactics, which only increased alienation of those who supported the students. We resolved to strike up conversations with industrial workers.
Jesus often asked the rich to become the poor. St. Vincent DePaul once saw a slave faint at the oars. He clambered down to the oar, and took [up] the oar. He took the place of the stricken rower. [Going to] work in the steel mills would never change how people saw me [i.e. a well-educated, upper middle class man]. So we resolved to offer what we hoped would be useful skills, but not to pretend to be other than what we were. We began as oral historians, taping recollections of rank-and-file workers and put them together in a book.
During the industry-wide Basic Steel Contract negotiations, I [Stoughton] helped to draft an imaginary steel contract made up of the most radical demands of the many competing Gary-Chicago union caucuses. We put a copy in the mail to a Youngstown group called the Rank and File Team (RAFT). We met in Washington, D.C., where they were picketing. We adjourned to a coffee shop and got to know each other. John Barbero and Ed Mann were advocates of racial equality as well as civil liberties. Former Marines, each had opposed the Korean War and Vietnam War. We had never met workers like these, who believed nearly all the things that we believed. We moved to Youngtown in 1976 to work as lawyer and paralegal.
Using One's Pain/ Nicaragua—I was assigned to work primarily on Social Security disability cases. The most I could get for any client was money; the disabled needed far more than money. I had been disabled, unable to work for more than 2 years, after surgery that did not heal properly. So I knew that physical hardship affects your mind and spirit. I began to love the infinite ways people found to cope with disability, and how people found personhood in their work. Preparing disability cases became for me a way of expressing love to people. Learning about their work history and limitations, I would glimpse the person behind the mask of disability.
In December 1983, I gave my full attention to TV news about a group called Witness for Peace, who were going into areas of conflict and stand between the warring parties as a deterrent. There was a nonviolent dimension to the Nicaraguan revolution that caught our attention: amnesty for Somoza's soldiers who had not committed [war crimes]; forgiveness and release for a torturer by the the tortured. [We ended up going] with the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization 6 years after the Sandinista revolution. We had the opportunity to tape record a discussion with Father Miguel D'Escoto, a Catholic priest who served as Foreign Minister. When the Sandinista Front for National Liberation invited him to join their effort, he had told them he has non-violent. They said: "We would like for you to inject that dimension into our revolution."
Nicaragua: St. Mary of the Angels/ In El Bonete—This St. Mary's church is in Barrio Riguero in Managua. During 3 of our 2 or 3 week stays, we stayed in a home a few blocks from St. Mary's. The liturgy celebrated by Father Uriel Molina at the church was the Campesino Mass, composed by Carlos Mejia Godoy in 1975. [The chorus of "You Are the God of the Poor" follows]: You are the God of the poor./ The God that's human and simple,/ The God that sweats in the streets,/ The God with the weather-beaten face.// And so when I talk to you,/ I speak as my people do./ Because you're the working-class God, The Christ who is laborer too." One liturgy feature is the Peace of God, when people would circulate during the service embracing or shaking hands. "We Shall Overcome" was sung in Spanish and in English as a regular part of the liturgy at St. Mary's.
After pointing out that Christians were once called atheists, Father Uriel said: "There is a need for a kind of atheist vision where the idols need to be knocked over & the true God is found, because the old conception of God doesn't speak to people today ... We may not be the ones to discover our role; others may point us to it." A young man, William, urged Father Uriel to stay in the struggle, saying, "If you do [pull out], the whole community will lose their hope, because your presence here is during the day like an open door & at night, a light."
El Bonete is a village near the Honduran border where 2 nuns live, [worship, & work].
Carmencita is from El Salvador, Nelly from Argentina; They belong to Little Sisters of Jesus. Their altar is a tree stump with a vase of flowers. On a cloth with pictures of priests slain in San Salvador ('89) Carmencita embroidered Romero's famous words about corn grains that must die so that there [is] new growth. El Salvador's campesino mass begins with: "When the poor come to believe in the poor/ We will ... sing of freedom. When the poor come to believe in the poor/ We ... build fraternity." & ends with: When the poor seek out the poor/ organization is born/ ... freedom begins./ When the poor proclaim to the poor/ The hope that he gave us/ His Kingdom is born among us.
Our new friends in Nicaragua were not pacifists. D'Escoto considered revolutionary violence a "concession for a world in transition." Father Uriel spoke of university students who went into the mountains to fight in the armed struggle. [The barrio] felt that we were forming the ... spiritual rear guard for the people fighting in the mountains. Sister Carmencita concluded: "I think there is a right to defend oneself."
Return to Quakerism: The Gulf War/ Retirees—During the Gulf War in 1991, we picketed every day at noon in downtown Youngstown. It became a regular part of what we did to step out of the picket line and talk with any heckler or obvious opponent; respectful relationships were established. My [Alice's] view is that retaliation and retribution only lead to more suffering, & more hatred; intransigent obstacles remain to be overcome for generations. I experienced stepping forward, with one hand restraining while the other hand offers a better way, maintaining one's own presence and dignity while respecting the very different experience and outlook of ones adversary, appealing to basic values that all human can understand.
I [Staughton, expected my picketing to adversely affect if not end 15 years of work in Youngstown]. But we had to do it anyway. 2 men from my community came up while I was picketing. One said he disagreed with me, and one said he agreed. For both men the critical thing was that they had known us for years. It made no difference whatsoever to our work or to the way in which the community viewed us.
In 1986, the 2nd largest steel company declared bankruptcy and cut off medical benefits for retirees. An activist organization of retirees quickly formed, named Solidarity USA. A decision was made to go and confront whomever it was they thought had the capability of doing something that was needed. The chairperson said, "Since 1986, we've not had one violent hand in this group. We've had our words. We've had our arguments. We've told them just what we felt. They don't like it. But that's the way to do it."
Return to Quakerism: A Believable Jesus—In John Dominic Crossan's Historical Jesus, Jesus is depicted as: a poor man, who experienced the oppression of people under the Roman Empire; as someone who rejected guerrilla war; a healer, convincing others that "God's kingdom is within you"; a believer in the inner light & in equality, not church-building. He lived among the poor, [& shared their lot]. He believes that canonical authors [sought out] what must happen if the life & death of Jesus were to fulfill prophecies about the Messiah.
Crossan believes that myth is basic faith in story form. Whether or not an incident took place, the message is what is important. In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells the disciples that what they look for is already present; to seek to discover rather than await its coming. The way of life Jesus urged on his companions was sharing food for the body and healing for the soul. Jesus' healing was empowerment, telling the poor not to take the ideology of the oppressor as their own, not to internalize the oppressor's self-image. Jesus' program was empowerment from the bottom up, not waiting for God to do it. Jesus says that people who [serve those in need], will experience salvation, even if they are unaware of Jesus and give no thought to him.
Conclusions—Our experience suggests to us that there is a middle ground between living in the inner city & giving all one has to the poor, & confining one's well-doing to financial contributions, demonstrations, & other occasional support for worthy causes. Our goal must be a society of equals. Friends should be wary of mediation that leaves in place the inequality between rich, powerful people, & poor, oppressed people, [i.e. that doesn't address] giving more voice in decision-making. Friends need to encounter in a day-to-day manner the life situation of the poor & oppressed. Acquire a skill useful to the disadvantaged, and then go to live where that skill could be made available. Friends must be willing to go to out-of-the-way places and stay there for a long time.
We want to encourage people to change the circumstances that bear down hard on them. To help them requires our individual growth and insights through sharing experience and action with others. Travellers on this path also need periodically to meet with a community of seekers to re-center and re-energize themselves. We urge Friends to trust the idea that God's Kingdom is available here and now. We are meeting a friend serving a long prison sentence, in a visiting room there, surrounded by children, parents, and siblings of the imprisoned men, all in animated conversation, laughing, expressing love. [Society needs to give these prisoners the chance to make a living. Going to that room is more like going to church than any other experience we have. A fictional character, a volunteer in revolutionary Nicaragua writes: "The very least you can do is figure out what is it you hope for? And then live right in it, under its roof. I want [among other things] the possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers or the destroyed."
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422. Reclaiming the Transcendent: God in Process (by Thomas Gates; 2013)
About the Author—Thomas Gates is a member of Lancaster (PA) MM; he has served the Committee for Worship and Ministry locally, and the Working Group on Deepening and Strengthening Our Meeting from Philadelphia YM. He spent the 1st 8 years of his medical career as a family doctor in rural NH. He and his family lived and worked at Friends Lugulu Hospital in Kenya (Stories from Kenya; PHP #319). Since 1995, he has been a member of the faculty of the Family Medicine Residency at Lancaster General Hospital.
This is the ultimate knowledge of God: to know that we do not know. Thomas Aquinas
We are talking about God; what wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God. Augustine of Hippo
Making the Case—God's transcendence would seem to be among George Fox's "airy notions," when we try to speak of it. Transcendence exceeds normal human experiences & categories of thought & language. Meister Eckhart says: "So be silent & do not flap your gums about God, for the extent to which you flap your gums about God, you lie." To speak of God's transcendence is to risk falsehood & invite failure ... & yet, not to speak is also a kind of falsehood. Beldan Lane says: "We must speak, we can't speak without stammering ... [Language about God uses] speech to confound speech, speaking in riddles, calling us to humble silence in the mystery's presence." If we too easily give up the struggle to express the ineffable, we may finally have nothing to say.
As Quakers we have inherited a healthy skepticism about "notions." Paradoxically, early Friends never seemed to be at a loss for words; they made use of a rich & evocative vocabulary to describe their experience of the Divine. They understood that in speaking about the Divine, metaphors are all we have. At the beginning of my college years, during the Vietnam war's waning years, I turned to my ancestors' Quakerism to help articulate a claim as a conscientious objector to military service. I began to discover what I believed & where I could stand. The weaving together of [Friends spirituality], academic study of religion, and a scientific worldview came to be a life project.
I have been left with the need to find coherent ways to think about God. If we have only nonsensical or outmoded images and ways of thinking about God, then faith in God will sooner or later come to be seen as nonsensical. I am deeply concerned that in the 21st century, our theology may no longer be adequate to sustain our practice of waiting worship. There is an implicit theology: God is present & available to us all, without mediation; God has something to say to us, if we but listen. God can & will speak to the gathered community through one another's words. God's ways can be discerned by the body; God will give the community the gifts necessary to accomplish God's tasks. If we no longer believe in this implicit theology, then at some point our practices of silent worship and group discernment will become "empty forms."
My goal in this essay is to examine the idea of God's transcendence and how process theology can help us to reclaim a living sense of Transcendent of our time. I want to show that one can think coherently about God in a way that does justice to the scientific worldview and to our deepest spiritual intuitions. In this vision, God is an energy field, an inner yearning, a decentralized network of cooperation and connection, a verb, and is embedded in the very process by which the universe comes into existence. My purpose is to use words, as Isaac Penington would say "to bring us to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter."
The Paradox of Transcendence—Spiritual truths are often expressed in terms of paradox, something contradictory, which when seen from a larger frame turns out to be true. [Besides spiritual paradoxes], there are scientific paradoxes, such as light understood as having a dual wave/particle nature. Christian tradition speaks of God's transcendence beyond our normal experience, & God's immanence, nearness, presence, or indwelling. Tradition has always asserted that both are fully & paradoxically true—a kind of "spiritual complementing."
By the the 17th century, God's transcendence was uppermost in the popular imagination; for most, God seemed remote and distant, even unapproachable. George Fox and the early Quakers redressed this imbalance in dramatic fashion: with experience of the Inward Light immediately available to all and the belief that "Christ is come to teach his people himself." Their subjective experience of the Light was one of overwhelming holiness and otherness, of God breaking into their lives from beyond their normal experience, [i.e. transcendence]. For modern Friends the task is more likely to involve "reclaiming the transcendent," of finding new ways to think about God's "moreness" and "beyondness." Process theology can be one vehicle for this rebalancing.
Changing Views of Transcendence—The interplay between God's immanence and transcendence is apparent from the very beginning of the Bible. From cosmic creator to walking in the garden; from looking down from heaven to "for in him we live and move and have our being." Sometimes the Bible combines images of transcendence and immanence: "I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit (Isaiah 57). It seems that people in the ancient world may have been better than we are at holding together this paradoxical, simultaneous sense of God's transcendence and immanence. With God as an active participant in terrestrial life, the ancient world was an "enchanted universe".
The ancient worldview eventually broke down. [At the same time that science expanded the universe's distances to vast proportions], God's role in explaining the natural world around us became smaller & smaller. The ancient world's "both/ &" understanding of transcendence/ immanence was lost. In the 17th century understanding, God is outside of the world. God can influence & affect the world, but the world has no effect on God. This God is spatially and spiritually distant. Deism was the belief that God created the world, set it in motion, imparted the scientific laws, and then withdrew to a distant place beyond the universe. God's immanence was reduced to the scientific laws. The highest human calling was scientific reasoning used to discover nature's law.
[Supernatural Theism]/ An Alternative Model of God—Theism, the belief that there is a God who created & continues to sustains the universe through active involvement, is as old the Bible; theists of the Enlightenment period basically adopted the understanding of God outside of & unaffected by the world. They held that God continues to be active in the world, albeit from God's distant perspective above, beyond, & apart from the world. Since Enlightenment theists saw God's ongoing relationship to the world as being through selective divine interventions, this position has been characterized as supernatural theism. This is an anomaly that arose out of the Enlightenment's peculiar dynamics. A remote & distant God arbitrarily suspending the laws of nature, is decidedly not biblical. [And what is now a suspension of natural laws may some day be explained by a new scientific understanding]. For millions, it has become increasingly unbelievable & discomforting; it doesn't explain how God acts in the world, [or God's relationship to evil]. Institutional religion has largely abandoned these people to skepticism & eventual disbelief. They are unaware that there is an option other than supernatural theism.
Might there be a more adequate way of thinking about God [than supernatural theism]? In panentheism, the world is in God, & God is in the world & is more than the world. God is both immanent & transcendent. Certainly Eckhart & many other Christians mystics through the ages have (without using the word) been describing panentheism. Marcus Borg describes panentheism as "a root concept for thinking about God." If God is in the world & the world is in God, then intimation of the Divine would seem to be a natural, expected occurrence.
One helpful metaphor is: God is to universe as soul is to body. God [soul] pervades the world [body] and is present everywhere, but at the same time is more than the world [body]. God [soul] acts upon the world [body] from the inside. Panentheism permits us to reclaim the transcendent but in a way that avoids the distortions of supernatural theism. We can say for our time, the transcendent is that which is supremely immanent.
Process Theology—Alfred North Whitehead, [a mathematician & physicist turned philosopher] originally sought to address the most basic metaphysical questions: Why something rather than nothing? Why order instead of chaos? Why novelty instead of repetition? Whitehead's basic insight was to see that what is most real isn't matter or substance, not objects or "things" of ordinary life. These are made up of more fundamental building blocks, Whitehead's events: momentary units of experience, actual occasions, with an internal process of becoming & change. Whitehead's metaphysics is one of process, rather than substance. Ultimate reality consists of events rather than things. In the moment of its becoming, the actual occasion selectively and creatively incorporates those aspects of the past which are most relevant to its own becoming. The actual occasion thus represents a creative synthesis, a unity (however fleeting) which arises out of the multiplicity of past actualities and future possibilities. An actual occasion is like a person who brings an inheritance of past experiences as well as a number of future possibilities into a critical moment of decision.
In making a decision, one takes from what has gone before, never as a mindless repetition of the past in its entirety, but as creative process of selection and synthesis, forging a unique identity from the raw material of the past. One is also very much influenced by future possibilities, as a source of goals, motivation, and vision. My interests ranged from geology (now faded), to chemistry, to religion, to teaching, to medical school. One's situation here is analogous to an actual occasion in the moment of its becoming. Parts of the past that mattered most, along with the future possibilities that most beckoned were chosen, and a new reality was forged.
The influence of past actualities is real & tangible, the realm of physical casualty. The future's influence is very different, for the future doesn't actually exist. Future possibilities must be conveyed by to actual occasions by some actual or real entity. Here, Whitehead invokes God as that actual entity which mediates to every actual occasion, in the process of its becoming, the relevant possibilities for its future. God is both the ground for order, limiting the possibilities, & the ground of novelty. God is an intrinsic part of the process of becoming, part of the very fabric of existence. Among the limited possibilities offered, there is one that is most valued, as the one most likely to advance God's vision; this preferred possibility is called the initial aim. God acts in the world by per-suasion and invitation, never by coercion, inviting each actual occasion to align itself with God's wider purpose.
My decision to attend medical school and become a rural doctor allowed me to unify many disparate strands of my life. I was clear that I was being drawn into something larger, that what I chose to do with my life mattered beyond my own needs and desires, mattered even to God. Choosing one possibility necessarily closes others, but it also opens up new possibilities. I never had a sense that there was a single "God's plan for my life." No matter what I chose, God would continue to work with me, continue to offer new possibilities, continue to nudge me toward a more worthy life. What process theologians are saying is that there is always creative incorporation of the past, always the need to make choices. This same dynamic is present throughout the universe, at all levels of reality. It is a never-ending process that creates present reality.
For the inanimate universe, the future possibilities are largely just a continuation if the past. In higher life forms the range of possibilities is much greater. On the largest scale, the picture that emerges is of slow, gradual, evolutionary change, with the possibility that God's values can to be progressively realized in world. What is valued by God is beauty or increasing harmony at ever-increasing levels of complexity. The history of the universe seems to bear this out. Increasing complexity and organization suggests that there is an emergent "moral nature" built into the fabric of the universe. In humans, this impetus towards increasing harmony at every increasing complexity is manifested most notably as love.
Process theology envisions an interdependent, relational view of reality. All things are related to all other things; God is the supremely related one. God gives creative & suggestive energy to the world, & the world gives the results of what it has done with this energy back to God. Whatever we have done with possibilities from God, God experiences us again in our new moment of being. God then "fashions for us another possibility that we once again may transform to whatever degree. Einstein said: "there are only 2 ways we can live our life; we can live as if nothing is a miracle, or we can live as if everything is a miracle," touched & guided & intimately known by God in every moment of existence. God's transcendence consists in being supremely immanent.
Religious implications—Process theology emphasizes God's omnipresence, but also clarifies how God is present as the initial aim for every actual occasion. Because God is present and working in the world only through the initial aim, God's power is the power of persuasion and invitation. In process theology, God influences everything, but determines nothing. God knows everything there is to know, which does not include the future. Classical theism sees God as unchanging, unmoved, unaffected. Process theology envisions God as the One who is always supremely related and influenced by the world; what God is related to changes as the world changes. God is all-knowing but what God knows changes as the world changes. In process theology, God's overriding aim is that the world come to experience well-being and beauty. God's aim is to increase the creatures' capacity to experience goodness and beauty, but this necessarily involves an increased capacity to experience suffering and to choose either good or evil actions. God suffers our suffering, is truly affected by it and responds to it by offering new possibilities to redeem and transform the suffering.
Spiritual Implications—Process theology gives a positive account of the reality of spiritual experience. In human beings, initial aims largely remain far below the surface of our awareness. From time to we can become intuitively aware of God's initial aim for us in our particular circumstance. [It will seem to come as] an in-breaking from another, transcendent realm. God is constantly offering "little leadings" in the form of the initial aim, a constant invitation to align ourselves more with God's way. God "speaks to our condition," offers new possibilities, & to the extent that we respond to these new possibilities, more possibilities will be offered. [It is interaction carried out with a high degree of intimate understanding between the participants]. Our relationship with the Divine has a personal quality to it, even though God isn't a person in the usual sense of the word.
Christ as Logos is present in each of us & throughout all creation, as [initial aims made flesh]. [Jesus' complete, perfect, growing responsiveness to God's initial aims] is implicit & imperfectly present in us. Jesus has given us all "power to become children of God." Process theology allows us to reclaim a sense of the Transcendent in our spiritual lives, & is one door through which we might reclaim a robust sense of the reality of God.
In the End ... God—I was exposed to the ideas of process theology through [extensive reading] of seminal works in process theology and a course in process theology at Earlham School of Religion. Process theology allows me to think about God in a way that is compatible with a scientific worldview. Leading-edge theologians and scientists are finding common ground. In my day-to-day spiritual life, I rarely spend time in the rarefied and abstract world of process theology. [I tend to use Quaker metaphors and practices there, because] there is a practical aspect to Quaker spirituality that I find lacking in the abstractions of process theology. The new ideas [of process theology] have reinvigorated my appreciation for the tried-and-true of our tradition.
It is a lot like the big bang theory. I know that everything we see in the physical universe owes its existence to the big bang. You and I are some part of this incredible story: born in the big bang, forged in the interior of ancient stars, part of the universe now coming to understand itself. I can no more comprehend the God of pro- cess theology than I can comprehend the big bang. Nothing of the creative and sustaining properties of God depends on my understanding them. Catherine LaCugna said: "One finds God because one is already found by God. Anything we find on our own would not be god." Thomas Aquinas said: "This is the ultimate knowledge of God: to know that we do not know." Augustine of Hippo said: " "We are talking about God; what wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God." Some of us are content to bow before the divine Mystery in awe and gratitude. I feel drawn to try to comprehend something of the nature of this Mystery. I have come to see that the value of that effort is simply to bring us back to the mystery, awe, and gratitude.
Queries: Why is it important to have coherent ways to think and speak about God? How is God immanent (near to, dwelling in) you? How is God transcendent (beyond) you? How do you respond to panentheism, God being in and acting from inside you? How do you react to the statement "there was a sense that no matter what I chose, God would work with me, offer new possibilities, and nudge me towards a more worthy life?" How would you describe God you do or could believe in?
About the Author—Thomas Gates is a member of Lancaster (PA) MM; he has served the Committee for Worship and Ministry locally, and the Working Group on Deepening and Strengthening Our Meeting from Philadelphia YM. He spent the 1st 8 years of his medical career as a family doctor in rural NH. He and his family lived and worked at Friends Lugulu Hospital in Kenya (Stories from Kenya; PHP #319). Since 1995, he has been a member of the faculty of the Family Medicine Residency at Lancaster General Hospital.
This is the ultimate knowledge of God: to know that we do not know. Thomas Aquinas
We are talking about God; what wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God. Augustine of Hippo
Making the Case—God's transcendence would seem to be among George Fox's "airy notions," when we try to speak of it. Transcendence exceeds normal human experiences & categories of thought & language. Meister Eckhart says: "So be silent & do not flap your gums about God, for the extent to which you flap your gums about God, you lie." To speak of God's transcendence is to risk falsehood & invite failure ... & yet, not to speak is also a kind of falsehood. Beldan Lane says: "We must speak, we can't speak without stammering ... [Language about God uses] speech to confound speech, speaking in riddles, calling us to humble silence in the mystery's presence." If we too easily give up the struggle to express the ineffable, we may finally have nothing to say.
As Quakers we have inherited a healthy skepticism about "notions." Paradoxically, early Friends never seemed to be at a loss for words; they made use of a rich & evocative vocabulary to describe their experience of the Divine. They understood that in speaking about the Divine, metaphors are all we have. At the beginning of my college years, during the Vietnam war's waning years, I turned to my ancestors' Quakerism to help articulate a claim as a conscientious objector to military service. I began to discover what I believed & where I could stand. The weaving together of [Friends spirituality], academic study of religion, and a scientific worldview came to be a life project.
I have been left with the need to find coherent ways to think about God. If we have only nonsensical or outmoded images and ways of thinking about God, then faith in God will sooner or later come to be seen as nonsensical. I am deeply concerned that in the 21st century, our theology may no longer be adequate to sustain our practice of waiting worship. There is an implicit theology: God is present & available to us all, without mediation; God has something to say to us, if we but listen. God can & will speak to the gathered community through one another's words. God's ways can be discerned by the body; God will give the community the gifts necessary to accomplish God's tasks. If we no longer believe in this implicit theology, then at some point our practices of silent worship and group discernment will become "empty forms."
My goal in this essay is to examine the idea of God's transcendence and how process theology can help us to reclaim a living sense of Transcendent of our time. I want to show that one can think coherently about God in a way that does justice to the scientific worldview and to our deepest spiritual intuitions. In this vision, God is an energy field, an inner yearning, a decentralized network of cooperation and connection, a verb, and is embedded in the very process by which the universe comes into existence. My purpose is to use words, as Isaac Penington would say "to bring us to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter."
The Paradox of Transcendence—Spiritual truths are often expressed in terms of paradox, something contradictory, which when seen from a larger frame turns out to be true. [Besides spiritual paradoxes], there are scientific paradoxes, such as light understood as having a dual wave/particle nature. Christian tradition speaks of God's transcendence beyond our normal experience, & God's immanence, nearness, presence, or indwelling. Tradition has always asserted that both are fully & paradoxically true—a kind of "spiritual complementing."
By the the 17th century, God's transcendence was uppermost in the popular imagination; for most, God seemed remote and distant, even unapproachable. George Fox and the early Quakers redressed this imbalance in dramatic fashion: with experience of the Inward Light immediately available to all and the belief that "Christ is come to teach his people himself." Their subjective experience of the Light was one of overwhelming holiness and otherness, of God breaking into their lives from beyond their normal experience, [i.e. transcendence]. For modern Friends the task is more likely to involve "reclaiming the transcendent," of finding new ways to think about God's "moreness" and "beyondness." Process theology can be one vehicle for this rebalancing.
Changing Views of Transcendence—The interplay between God's immanence and transcendence is apparent from the very beginning of the Bible. From cosmic creator to walking in the garden; from looking down from heaven to "for in him we live and move and have our being." Sometimes the Bible combines images of transcendence and immanence: "I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit (Isaiah 57). It seems that people in the ancient world may have been better than we are at holding together this paradoxical, simultaneous sense of God's transcendence and immanence. With God as an active participant in terrestrial life, the ancient world was an "enchanted universe".
The ancient worldview eventually broke down. [At the same time that science expanded the universe's distances to vast proportions], God's role in explaining the natural world around us became smaller & smaller. The ancient world's "both/ &" understanding of transcendence/ immanence was lost. In the 17th century understanding, God is outside of the world. God can influence & affect the world, but the world has no effect on God. This God is spatially and spiritually distant. Deism was the belief that God created the world, set it in motion, imparted the scientific laws, and then withdrew to a distant place beyond the universe. God's immanence was reduced to the scientific laws. The highest human calling was scientific reasoning used to discover nature's law.
[Supernatural Theism]/ An Alternative Model of God—Theism, the belief that there is a God who created & continues to sustains the universe through active involvement, is as old the Bible; theists of the Enlightenment period basically adopted the understanding of God outside of & unaffected by the world. They held that God continues to be active in the world, albeit from God's distant perspective above, beyond, & apart from the world. Since Enlightenment theists saw God's ongoing relationship to the world as being through selective divine interventions, this position has been characterized as supernatural theism. This is an anomaly that arose out of the Enlightenment's peculiar dynamics. A remote & distant God arbitrarily suspending the laws of nature, is decidedly not biblical. [And what is now a suspension of natural laws may some day be explained by a new scientific understanding]. For millions, it has become increasingly unbelievable & discomforting; it doesn't explain how God acts in the world, [or God's relationship to evil]. Institutional religion has largely abandoned these people to skepticism & eventual disbelief. They are unaware that there is an option other than supernatural theism.
Might there be a more adequate way of thinking about God [than supernatural theism]? In panentheism, the world is in God, & God is in the world & is more than the world. God is both immanent & transcendent. Certainly Eckhart & many other Christians mystics through the ages have (without using the word) been describing panentheism. Marcus Borg describes panentheism as "a root concept for thinking about God." If God is in the world & the world is in God, then intimation of the Divine would seem to be a natural, expected occurrence.
One helpful metaphor is: God is to universe as soul is to body. God [soul] pervades the world [body] and is present everywhere, but at the same time is more than the world [body]. God [soul] acts upon the world [body] from the inside. Panentheism permits us to reclaim the transcendent but in a way that avoids the distortions of supernatural theism. We can say for our time, the transcendent is that which is supremely immanent.
Process Theology—Alfred North Whitehead, [a mathematician & physicist turned philosopher] originally sought to address the most basic metaphysical questions: Why something rather than nothing? Why order instead of chaos? Why novelty instead of repetition? Whitehead's basic insight was to see that what is most real isn't matter or substance, not objects or "things" of ordinary life. These are made up of more fundamental building blocks, Whitehead's events: momentary units of experience, actual occasions, with an internal process of becoming & change. Whitehead's metaphysics is one of process, rather than substance. Ultimate reality consists of events rather than things. In the moment of its becoming, the actual occasion selectively and creatively incorporates those aspects of the past which are most relevant to its own becoming. The actual occasion thus represents a creative synthesis, a unity (however fleeting) which arises out of the multiplicity of past actualities and future possibilities. An actual occasion is like a person who brings an inheritance of past experiences as well as a number of future possibilities into a critical moment of decision.
In making a decision, one takes from what has gone before, never as a mindless repetition of the past in its entirety, but as creative process of selection and synthesis, forging a unique identity from the raw material of the past. One is also very much influenced by future possibilities, as a source of goals, motivation, and vision. My interests ranged from geology (now faded), to chemistry, to religion, to teaching, to medical school. One's situation here is analogous to an actual occasion in the moment of its becoming. Parts of the past that mattered most, along with the future possibilities that most beckoned were chosen, and a new reality was forged.
The influence of past actualities is real & tangible, the realm of physical casualty. The future's influence is very different, for the future doesn't actually exist. Future possibilities must be conveyed by to actual occasions by some actual or real entity. Here, Whitehead invokes God as that actual entity which mediates to every actual occasion, in the process of its becoming, the relevant possibilities for its future. God is both the ground for order, limiting the possibilities, & the ground of novelty. God is an intrinsic part of the process of becoming, part of the very fabric of existence. Among the limited possibilities offered, there is one that is most valued, as the one most likely to advance God's vision; this preferred possibility is called the initial aim. God acts in the world by per-suasion and invitation, never by coercion, inviting each actual occasion to align itself with God's wider purpose.
My decision to attend medical school and become a rural doctor allowed me to unify many disparate strands of my life. I was clear that I was being drawn into something larger, that what I chose to do with my life mattered beyond my own needs and desires, mattered even to God. Choosing one possibility necessarily closes others, but it also opens up new possibilities. I never had a sense that there was a single "God's plan for my life." No matter what I chose, God would continue to work with me, continue to offer new possibilities, continue to nudge me toward a more worthy life. What process theologians are saying is that there is always creative incorporation of the past, always the need to make choices. This same dynamic is present throughout the universe, at all levels of reality. It is a never-ending process that creates present reality.
For the inanimate universe, the future possibilities are largely just a continuation if the past. In higher life forms the range of possibilities is much greater. On the largest scale, the picture that emerges is of slow, gradual, evolutionary change, with the possibility that God's values can to be progressively realized in world. What is valued by God is beauty or increasing harmony at ever-increasing levels of complexity. The history of the universe seems to bear this out. Increasing complexity and organization suggests that there is an emergent "moral nature" built into the fabric of the universe. In humans, this impetus towards increasing harmony at every increasing complexity is manifested most notably as love.
Process theology envisions an interdependent, relational view of reality. All things are related to all other things; God is the supremely related one. God gives creative & suggestive energy to the world, & the world gives the results of what it has done with this energy back to God. Whatever we have done with possibilities from God, God experiences us again in our new moment of being. God then "fashions for us another possibility that we once again may transform to whatever degree. Einstein said: "there are only 2 ways we can live our life; we can live as if nothing is a miracle, or we can live as if everything is a miracle," touched & guided & intimately known by God in every moment of existence. God's transcendence consists in being supremely immanent.
Religious implications—Process theology emphasizes God's omnipresence, but also clarifies how God is present as the initial aim for every actual occasion. Because God is present and working in the world only through the initial aim, God's power is the power of persuasion and invitation. In process theology, God influences everything, but determines nothing. God knows everything there is to know, which does not include the future. Classical theism sees God as unchanging, unmoved, unaffected. Process theology envisions God as the One who is always supremely related and influenced by the world; what God is related to changes as the world changes. God is all-knowing but what God knows changes as the world changes. In process theology, God's overriding aim is that the world come to experience well-being and beauty. God's aim is to increase the creatures' capacity to experience goodness and beauty, but this necessarily involves an increased capacity to experience suffering and to choose either good or evil actions. God suffers our suffering, is truly affected by it and responds to it by offering new possibilities to redeem and transform the suffering.
Spiritual Implications—Process theology gives a positive account of the reality of spiritual experience. In human beings, initial aims largely remain far below the surface of our awareness. From time to we can become intuitively aware of God's initial aim for us in our particular circumstance. [It will seem to come as] an in-breaking from another, transcendent realm. God is constantly offering "little leadings" in the form of the initial aim, a constant invitation to align ourselves more with God's way. God "speaks to our condition," offers new possibilities, & to the extent that we respond to these new possibilities, more possibilities will be offered. [It is interaction carried out with a high degree of intimate understanding between the participants]. Our relationship with the Divine has a personal quality to it, even though God isn't a person in the usual sense of the word.
Christ as Logos is present in each of us & throughout all creation, as [initial aims made flesh]. [Jesus' complete, perfect, growing responsiveness to God's initial aims] is implicit & imperfectly present in us. Jesus has given us all "power to become children of God." Process theology allows us to reclaim a sense of the Transcendent in our spiritual lives, & is one door through which we might reclaim a robust sense of the reality of God.
In the End ... God—I was exposed to the ideas of process theology through [extensive reading] of seminal works in process theology and a course in process theology at Earlham School of Religion. Process theology allows me to think about God in a way that is compatible with a scientific worldview. Leading-edge theologians and scientists are finding common ground. In my day-to-day spiritual life, I rarely spend time in the rarefied and abstract world of process theology. [I tend to use Quaker metaphors and practices there, because] there is a practical aspect to Quaker spirituality that I find lacking in the abstractions of process theology. The new ideas [of process theology] have reinvigorated my appreciation for the tried-and-true of our tradition.
It is a lot like the big bang theory. I know that everything we see in the physical universe owes its existence to the big bang. You and I are some part of this incredible story: born in the big bang, forged in the interior of ancient stars, part of the universe now coming to understand itself. I can no more comprehend the God of pro- cess theology than I can comprehend the big bang. Nothing of the creative and sustaining properties of God depends on my understanding them. Catherine LaCugna said: "One finds God because one is already found by God. Anything we find on our own would not be god." Thomas Aquinas said: "This is the ultimate knowledge of God: to know that we do not know." Augustine of Hippo said: " "We are talking about God; what wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God." Some of us are content to bow before the divine Mystery in awe and gratitude. I feel drawn to try to comprehend something of the nature of this Mystery. I have come to see that the value of that effort is simply to bring us back to the mystery, awe, and gratitude.
Queries: Why is it important to have coherent ways to think and speak about God? How is God immanent (near to, dwelling in) you? How is God transcendent (beyond) you? How do you respond to panentheism, God being in and acting from inside you? How do you react to the statement "there was a sense that no matter what I chose, God would work with me, offer new possibilities, and nudge me towards a more worthy life?" How would you describe God you do or could believe in?
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60. Promise of Deliverance (by Dan Wilson; 1951)
[About the Author & Pamphlet]—Dan Wilson was executive director of Pendle Hill from 1952-70. This pamphlet proposes that A person must be regenerated by the power of God to overcome the human condition.
The promise of Deliverance is the assurance that there is a power, available to humanity, by which high disaster can be abolished forever. But there is no promise that we shall not be in great danger, nor that we shall be delivered from war, institutional evil, or calamities. There is no promise that western civilization can be delivered from the fate of prior civilizations. The message of deliverance drives away fear; it is that God is real and that God acts for humankind’s deliverance.
Deliver us from the present—Time is running out. We no longer feel an easy confidence that we can leave deliverance to technological progress or to chance. We yearn for deliverance from meaninglessness. But God takes too long; we dare not experiment with eternity. War must be avoided, yet we find ourselves dependent upon [evil] tradition & habits that make war. “Deliver us from the present” is our prayer. The Promise is that we can be delivered from anxiety about our past failures, & from fear of future disillusionment. The present could hold all we could ever wish for, & more. God is completely present. Eternity is now. We can experience it now.
Deliver us from Christianity—Christianity’s doctrines and divisions, remnants of once vital religion, leave modern man cold. Christianity institutionalized has spoiled the world for the gospel. The materialistic element of western culture marks the failure of Christianity. The limitation of the message of deliverance to fixed creeds and formal procedures diminishes its power to persuade men who are endowed with spiritual freedom. Deliver us from a Christianity that does not feel the living and Inward Christ at its center.
Deliver us from evil—The sufferings of life attest the reality of evil. Can the overfed and privileged overcome starvation’s evils? We have underestimated the power for evil—the assertion of self-interest without regard to the whole—in ourselves as well as in others. Replacing God with ourselves at the center of the universe separates us from God, and [creates the most basic] evil. The good, [when put in static categories] hinders deliverance as surely as does the evil. Such legalism misinterprets the human’s free spirit. It overlooks the necessity for moral action in each particular instance to originate from within. If one is condemned if one chooses not to follow the law, this destroys the meaning of freedom. The habit of thinking about man’s imperfection in legalistic terms is so fixed that our morality has become negative and uncreative. How quickly we legalize God, so set are we upon capturing and imprisoning life as we know it, or as we wish it to be. The only life truly guided and truly free is the life of constant prayer, the life continuously seeking for God’s guidance.
God has performed miracles through humanity, when devotion has been centered on the source from which activity springs & not on the ends toward which it is directed. Even Quakers aren't available to be used freely to transform evil because so much effort is directed toward preconceived solutions. Anxiety about our kingdom of plenty stands in the way of deliverance. We are filled with fear because we are afraid of losing something we cannot live without. We have looked hopefully to the United Nations for the power to preserve things as they are. We look everywhere but to God, because we do not want to pay the price God asks for deliverance. The Promise of Deliverance is not for us unless we deeply and urgently feel the need of deliverance. Yet there are many hidden falsehoods which arise to justify privilege and elude detection. Some are even considered virtues.
Deliver us from man—If we are aware of the brutality and degradation of life that exists in the world and in ourselves, we shall not pass lightly over the judgment of [theologians] who want to return to a doctrine of man’s depravity. In a time of imminent crisis [and failure, the pessimist feels guilt, and even the optimist feels hopeless]. “Deliver us from evil, ego-centered, meaningless man” is our cry. [The theologian Karl Barth says of humankind:] “Humans have stood, are standing and will stand in infinite opposition to what God is.”
In contrast to Barth, Nicolas Berdyaev’s interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Fall is: “Awareness of original sin both humbles & exalts. Man fell from a height & he can rise to it again.” He longs for a return to the blissful state of the unconsciousness of pre-birth. He longs for power to overcome evil. He longs for a transcendent and external God to come near, to fill man with God’s presence, to reassure man that he belongs to God.
The promise is a new man—There is no promise that man will be delivered from human status, because to be human is his high & creative destiny. [He can't] return to a state of primitive bliss, he would then be meaningless. There is the Promise that man can be delivered just as he is, frailties, suffering and all, into a certainty now of oneness with God. The new man’s creation is the painful, joyful task of us all; it is not delegated to those known as saints or towering prophets and apostles. The new humanity is made up of all the faithful—the faithful found within and without all forms [of religion, government, political systems, or professional disciplines]. What the saintly, mystical, prophetic types discovered for themselves they believed to be true and available to all who love truth. The truth is as near to you and me as to any others. The Promise is a new humanity made up of you and me and others who will believe (in terms of our own individual experiences of truth) and follow.
We can listen to others’ doctrines and experiences, but we can learn little from them about God’s Promise held in our own nature. It is conformity of mind and practice to the will of God, in all holiness of conversation, according to the dictates of divine light and life in the soul, which denotes a person as truly a child of God.
Spiritual and Material—There is an invisible spiritual aspect and a visible material aspect of the same life; the spiritual and the material are inextricably one. Each is to be known in and through the other. Mysticism is the key to the whole, the recognition that there is a point of convergence of the material and spiritual qualities of man and the world. [Prayer where I feel in control of the input and the outcome] will not bring God nearer. Prayer as a cry when my [carefully] constructed world falls apart opens the way to God. Prayer without form and with openness to receive contains the meaning and mystery of waiting upon God.
The Presence of God rarely brings specific guidance for behavior, but rather a quality of being, an exultation of belonging, a renewal of strength, and a power and justification for action. We see that of God and the new man already in every man. The discovery that the Light within, the inward intuition of God, and the spirit of Jesus the Christ, are one, is the most momentous of life’s experiences.
The Christ has existed from the beginning, in man’s center as the seed, the germ, the life. Once Jesus the Christ has won a deep intuitive response within us, it is inevitable that we project our apprehension of God into Jesus’ form. The Church’s central challenge today is the reunion with the living experience of the historic and the inward Christ. In a Friends meeting, a powerful and creative ministry is the product of a meeting that expects God to speak to it as God spoke to Jesus, and that expects to receive strength and guidance from God’s Presence.
The promise is a new loyalty—There is no higher loyalty than this: to be faithful to that of God unfolding in every man. God is acting in each to perfect an original masterpiece. Rabindrananath Tagore wrote: “The universal is ever seeking its consummation in the unique. It is our joy of the infinite in us that gives us our joy in ourselves.” Loyalty [to God] is the secret to open the way to joy in all experience of pain and heartbreak, success or failure, of doubt or assurance. Each of us feels the pressure of [divided loyalties]. Until we have found a new unity within and without, our lives will be disorganized, and our hearts torn with conflict. We look everywhere for a loyalty that will again claim our full and joyful obedience; everywhere except within ourselves.
The secret is available—In the quiet depths of our innermost nature, if we know how to find it, is the dwelling place of a loyalty for which we would joyfully die. [The Quaker Job Scott said]: “God has made humankind universally sensible in degree sufficient for their various circumstances and allotments in life.” As children [we sensed our connection] with all life. [As adults] we lose this sense of the whole of things, and shape [the world] to fit [what] we know of fragments of it.
Many of us live as if we had no expectation of finding God. Because we do not find God [only in a certain place] where others seem to find God we strive to content ourselves with lives of patient resignation. [We should rather have] the immediate and constant Presence of God as our certain expectation. Our apprehension of God’s presence is often unexpected; it breaks through when we are open to it. Jesus was one of God’s masterpieces. God’s expectation is that we should be like Him. We look for “God in man” in every man. But always, we recognize the Christ that we find outwardly because we first recognize the Christ within ourselves.
The promise is a new community—In the Old Testament, through the power of a liberated spirit, a new community arises out of the deadness and fears of the old. Yet side by side with these positive elements there is also the record of the accumulation and hardening of the law. The Promise of the power of God, available to man is contained within each of us. This seed of the Kingdom of God is a gift from God to persons.
[Although Jesus seemed lost forever to the disciples,] they discovered that He was still with them in their hearts. [They found themselves] in a unity beyond what they had while He was alive. Now he was truly and indestructibly alive among them. They had known and loved the outward Christ. Now they knew also that Christ was living with them. This group experience [of Christ amongst them] was no mere pooling of separate experience of the Christ within. Something more than the highest insight of any of them, or all of them, was available.
Membership in this community of the Living Christ was essential for the individual. Our lack of experience of community prevents our acceptance of the Kingdom of God as a present fact. [A close-knit community is essential] as a tangible experience of the love and care of God through one another. Salvation for an individual or for the whole appears possible in proportion to the fullness of this experience of community.
Germ cell of the new society—Do there exist now, visible nuclear communities, held together by an experience of unity so fundamental that the new society is emerging through them? Could a community of individuals become so filled with the sense of belonging now to the Kingdom of God that they would suffer even beloved community to be sacrificed in order to spread the Kingdom's promise for everyone?
The Promise is the assurance that there is a way to change suffering into joy; all men who respond affirmatively to the light as they receive it, shall know what God is like. Early Christians were drawn together by the creative experience of the Kingdom present among them. Without the aid of specialists, men can come together with all their blindness & limitation & suffering into a consciousness of the Presence of God. Salvation, healing & wholeness, is the seed which God has planted in each person. Salvation is never complete or final. It brings with it no guarantee of infallibility, but it does bring the glorious freedom to experiment radically and creatively.
The promise of deliverance—This, then is the Promise of Deliverance. We can begin at once to help create the Kingdom—to translate love into political and social relations. We do not have to commence retraining, or to expect new talents, or to go to a new place to begin, or to wait for a more opportune time. Always God is giving God’s self without stint to help us accept our weakness, to overcome our doubts, to start over again and again. Wherever we are, power equal to the measure of our need is available to enable us to follow as we are led. Now all our gifts, including the gift of life itself can be given fearlessly, joyously and confidently. The Promise of Deliverance is the promise in Christ, of God in man, loving, living, suffering and giving Himself to win each person and humankind from disaster forever.
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409. Who Do You Say I Am? (by Lloyd Wilson; 2010)
About the Author [and Pamphlet]—Lloyd Lee Wilson is a recorded gospel minister in Rich Square MM, NC YM (Conservative). He has written Essays on Quaker Vision of Gospel Order and Wrestling with Our Faith Tradition, and has made numerous contributions to Quaker publications. His message is that "Christ has come to teach Christ's people." This essay is part of a lecture series entitled, Who Do You Say that I Am? The text has been lightly edited with attention to an audience of readers father than of listeners.
[Introduction]—All who make a home in the Friends' faith tradition must sooner or later come to terms with Jesus of Nazareth, [& his discerning question]: Who do you say I am? There is no single fits-everyone, -every-Christian, -every-Friend right answer. Christianity has always been a big tent; it has room for innumerable variations on its theme, many understandings of Jesus. The Religious Society of Friends [has also been a large tent], from its beginnings, and continues to be diverse today. What is essential is that I face Jesus' question squarely, answer it honestly & personally, & that I be willing to incorporate my answer into my faith & practice.
The personal answer [found] is not [and need not be] final or complete. In the synoptic gospels, this question is preceded by the question: "Who do others say that I am? [Our question is the 2nd question, seeking our answer]. Jesus is still posing that question to you and to me, every day. The words used in our answer all carry 100's or 1000's of years of accumulated meaning and connotation. I want us, writer and reader, to be very aware of the connotation, denotations, and accretions of meaning that are present, and for you to understand what accretions I am including in my use of a word and what accretions I am stripping away.
"You are the Messiah"/ Anointed to do What?—Some translations use Christ in this passage, some use Messiah. "Christ" is English for Christos, which is Greek for the Hebrew messiah. "Christ" is so charged with emotion and connotations that it is better to start with another word. Peter would have used "Messiah," which is my personal choice. Messiahs, anointed Ones, are found throughout the Old Testament (OT). One of the best known messiahs named by Scripture was Cyrus the Great. He was not divine, not a Jew. His personal understanding was that he was carrying out the mandate of the Babylonian God Marduk. I understand Jesus to be the Messiah in the OT sense, the anointed One who brings all of God's plans to fruition.
Another term is "Son of the Living God." What it means to most people now is quite different from what it meant to Peter's audience. Christians today and in the past 17 or 18 centuries have considered this a literal, genealogical statement. The Jews of Jesus' time were strongly monotheistic and would have rejected the genealogical interpretation. Son of God to them would have meant someone who has received God's special favor or regard, a very holy, saintly, godly person. Jesus' practice is so impeccable that he embodies what God yearns for humans to be; he is like an adopted son of God. [To the assumption that] "Son of God" indicates a divine being, [there is] the counter argument that Jesus cannot or doesn't do things a divine being would do: get the disciples to understand him; overcome those arresting and convicting him, etc.
As I use it here, "Son of Man" means Jesus embodies what it means to be fully, perfectly human, a model for each of us. My answer to the beginning question is "You are the Messiah; the Son of God; the Son of Man." Jesus' [mandate] is larger, richer, and more universal than the understanding of "Messiah" among Jesus' contemporaries, more than restoring David's throne to the Promised Land or the High Priesthood for believers.
What work does Jesus do here in Creation that uniquely advances God's plans & yearnings? Humans aren't doing God's work in the world. As humans become more numerous & powerful, the suffering of Creation increases geometrically. [This suffering won't go on forever]. God's love will lead to God's divine intervention. God's love led to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus' life teaches, by precept & example, the reality of the Kingdom of God & how to participate in it. Evil forces opposed Jesus' challenge to their domination & eventually managed to kill Jesus. God's resurrection of Jesus established God's victory over evil forces & death. What George Fox called Christ, has now come to teach Christ's people of the Kingdom of God's perceptibility & accessibility.
The invitation is to all of Creation to come to the table, learn of the Kingdom, & live fully into the reality of God's Kingdom. We enter into the Kingdom of God by accepting God's invitation extended through Jesus. [Learning of the Kingdom] in early Quaker understanding involved conviction, convincement, & conversion of manners as stages in one's spiritual journey. Conviction of past wrong life commitments is repentance. Convincement is realizing we need to rid ourselves of the benefits of these wrong commitments; conversion of manners is the ongoing work to engage and participate ever more fully in God's kingdom through the Holy Spirit.
Understanding Atonement—How can reconciliation of Creation to Creator be accomplished through Jesus? This is called atonement theory. Understanding divine-human reconciliation is accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The need for atonement and its being attained through Jesus the Messiah has been a shared Christian belief since the church's beginning. How atonement happened has been a matter of discussion and preference, not settled doctrine. The most widely embraced understandings of atonement are based on humans and God being profoundly estranged.
[An extraordinary act is required to reconcile humans and God. Jesus' death is understood as various instruments which brought about] God's victory in the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. In one understanding, it was a ransom paid to Satan to redeem humanity from captivity. In another understanding, it was a trap, [a kind of Trojan Horse], with Satan not realizing the human Jesus contained a Divine Person, [released into Satan's stronghold with Jesus' death]; Jesus then defeated Satan and freed humans. In substitutionary atonement Jesus' death substituted for the deserved death for sins against God; penal atonement made Jesus' death the legal punishment humans deserve for behavior contrary to God's law.
Moral influence atonement proposed that Jesus' death was intended to demonstrate the depth of God's love, and influence humans toward repentance, faithfulness, & holy love. God still arranges for Jesus' death and atonement is still based on an intended violent death sanctioned by God. Deanna A. Thompson writes: "Amidst the numerous theories over the meaning of Jesus' death, the cross remains a 'stumbling block,' most pointedly for women, children, and men whose lives bear the marks of crucifixion." In the 19th century, most Christian denominations adopted penal or substitutionary atonement as church doctrine. Many see these as the only Christian understanding of atonement. Because of the divine violence [central to these understandings], this conception of atonement is a stumbling block preventing many persons from embracing Christianity.
[Atonement & Peace Churches]—The idea of divinely sanctioned & divinely initiated violence being involved in God's will, greatly undermines the pacifist position of Friends, Mennonites, & Brethren, among others. How do we refrain from violence if God cannot? Why should we restrain ourselves from violent acts, & believe them against God's will, when God finds violent acts necessary? Other criticisms of the classic atonement theories include: it is ahistoric; it endorses family violence; suffering of innocent humans is the divine will.
Atonement is ahistoric, because it is already accomplished, so my only requirement is to accept salvation, which is separate from my present behavior in history. The model of a divine father sending his innocent son to torture and death is abhorrent to many, especially those with understanding [and/ or] direct experience with domestic violence. Father God's violent punishment of God's own innocent Son in the name of justice offers no help in the effort to put an end to the violence in human families. Divinely willed suffering of the innocent Jesus has been used over the centuries to keep believers, especially women, in oppressive and abusive relationships, that their suffering may reconcile many to God. God is portrayed as insisting that the oppressed remained oppressed, for the benefit of their oppressors.
[Atonement & Early Friends]—Early Friends paid less attention to atonement than other points of faith. When they did, they generally followed classic atonement theories. Robert Barclay used the word atonement in his writing. Once he appears to adhere to ransom theory, and once to substitutionary penal atonement. Barclay writes: "As to our being justified, it is by Christ & his Spirit, as he comes in our hearts truly & really to make us righteous ... We don't hereby intend any ways to lessen or deviate from the atonement & sacrifice of Jesus Christ ... we believe it was necessary that Christ should come ... & offer a sacrifice to God for our sins, who his own self bare our sins in his own body ... remission of sins comes only ... by virtue of that ... sacrifice.
Fox writes: If when we were enemies we were reconciled to God, through the death of God's son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by his life ... we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, thru whom we have received the atonement ... Christ with his own blood, which is his life ... sprinkles the hearts & consciences of his people with his own blood ... & with it makes atonement to God for the world's sins."
Early Friends, by not thoroughly addressing the Jesus' work in the atonement, have left a set of vexing problems for pacifist churches. A better understanding of atonement can strengthen our commitment to the Prince of Peace, & remove an important obstacle to many thoughtful would-be Christians. The Mennonites have been giving attention to what an adequate understanding of atonement might be for pacifist Christians. I believe Jesus' atonement offers us full inclusion in the Kingdom of God, not escape from unbearable punishment for our sins.
[Better Metaphors, Roles for the Messiah, and Adjectives for Atonement]—Better metaphors than the traditional one are: watchful father in the prodigal son parable; messianic banquet's host, making everyone welcome at the feast. God didn't plot or intend Jesus' death. God's Kingdom is opened to us not by a death that removes God's own barriers preventing reconciliation with Creation, but by Jesus' life of precept & example of how to live in God's Kingdom offered to us, & by the resurrection's promise. Jesus wasn't a passive sufferer of God's anger or demand for satisfaction, but an active resister of evil & oppression, the model for all men & women. The Messiah was committed activist, not willing sacrifice, obedient to the end.
Our atonement with God is intrinsically ethical and dependent on our commitment to resist evil and oppression wherever we encounter them. In understanding atonement as narrative, the "work" is the life and teachings of Jesus about the Kingdom, culminating in the resurrection as God's victory against all opposed to the Kingdom. We Friends recognize that the Kingdom is among us at this moment but is not yet established in all parts of Creation. Atonement is directly linked to our commitment to living into the Kingdom here and now. Our atonement, our salvation, is ethical; it depends on our ethical behavior in the present moment.
[Faith and Works]—We are not justified by our good works alone, but faith alone is not enough. "Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed for their doing" (James 1:25). Faith counts only when faith is lived out in deeds that reflect and embody the Kingdom of God. It misses the mark for me to believe that "because I believe, I can get away with stuff I do that is ethically wrong"; our lives preach what we really believe. The Messiah brings atonement between humans and God, but the nature of that atonement is radically different from doctrines embraced by much of Christianity. I understand atonement as placing the greater emphasis on Jesus' life and teachings and on his resurrection, and less emphasis on his suffering and death on the cross.
Divinity & Trinity—In turning from Jesus' work, to the question of Jesus' person, we come to the question of Christ's divinity & the Trinity. Questions about Jesus' divinity are really trying to get at 2 other crucial questions: What authority should the Christian give to Jesus' teaching & example during his earthly ministry? If Jesus was only human, how can Jesus' suffering & death be the key to atonement & reconciliation with God? How or when did divinity settle in or upon Jesus? If Jesus' teaching was human teachings, they would have less authority, while remaining inspiring. If they were divine, they might be beyond human imitation. If Jesus was divine, we have to look at the Trinity.
I believe that Jesus was divine, that God was manifest in his teaching & in all of his life on earth in an unprecedented way. He taught us to make God's Kingdom a reality, & to live in that Kingdom. Only Possibilities are available from the text as when divinity came. Matthew and Luke point to the moment of conception. Mark implies that it occurred at Jesus' baptism. John's Jesus is so otherworldly that his being fully human is at issue.
I don't deny the truth of miracles surrounding Jesus' birth; their literal truth isn't central to my faith in God or in Jesus as Messiah. I believe Adam & Eve's pattern is common to human beings, not a mold by which all human souls are deformed. We have free will to sin, & sin we do frequently & with gusto; sin isn't divinely mandated. Divine birth narratives aren't needed to save Jesus from original sin, which I don't believe in. Reconciliation with God is God's loving outreach to us, embodied in the teachings & incarnation, & sealed in the resurrection.
With Jesus' divinity, I am forced to think about the Trinity after all. How can God have been in Jesus uniquely, differently from how God is present in all of Creation? I recognize God's awesomeness, the Jesus' divinity, the reality of the Holy Spirit. I make use of each of the aspects included in the Trinity, but I am unable to explain how they are related to one another. Jesus' teachings and the examples of his life show us the fullness of God's desire for all of Creation, and how we can individually and corporately live into that desire. The truth is not that we could all be like Jesus with enough hard work, but that God can lift up any of us at any time.
Jesus is the One through whom God works our atonement, the reconciliation between God and Creation. Jesus is precept and example for the life lived in God—the life that is the true goal of every Christian. Jesus makes plain the Kingdom of God and extends God's invitation to enter into the Kingdom by committing ourselves daily to living by Kingdom values and ethics. It is the inward experience of the Living Christ, the Holy Spirit bringing grace, mercy, illumination, healing, teaching, and guidance that makes a difference in my life.
Precepts & Examples/ Who am I, as a Disciple of Jesus?—The Kingdom of God is God's Gospel Order made manifest. Justice prevails for all through the restoration of all to the Gospel. Justice is achieved by embodying a life of love to God & neighbor. An example of justice as restoration is the prodigal son parable; ingratitude & insult toward the father are met with restoration to the family. The gospel accounts describe Jesus' radical obedience to God's will, concern for the poor, powerless, & marginal, & the inevitably of suffering for those who follow the Messiah's path. The resurrection demonstrates that evil can't prevail against God's intentions for Creation. The resurrected Jesus shows that God is victorious over evil. The Holy Spirit has returned to continue the work Jesus engaged in earlier, of teaching all who accept the invitation to live in God's Kingdom how to do it.
What does it mean to be Jesus' disciple? What sort of human being should I therefore strive to be? Having accepted the invitation, my faith commitment is to God on the path illuminated for me by Jesus the Messiah. The watchful father accepts the prodigal back into the family because that is where I have always belonged, in spite of rude behavior and wandering ways. My destiny is the Kingdom of God, as Jesus revealed in his life and God confirmed in his resurrection. I commit my life, with divine assistance, to bringing that destiny more fully into reality in this world. I must be an active imitator of Jesus, announcing and advancing the Kingdom by my own words and deeds. Otherwise, the Kingdom is inaccessible to me.
Restoration of the Gospel Order will not come about by improving governments or power structures—only God's Kingdom will do. It is not a commonwealth or a democracy, but a theocracy of God over Creation. God's Kingdom is subversive of any national government, secular organization, or religious institution humans can construct. Worldly governments have good reason to consider Christians to be the most harmless, beneficial, and most dangerous of the nation's inhabitants. After all, they pray daily for the government's overthrow with "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
What have I done today to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit sick and imprisoned? God's Kingdom isn't advanced by punishment; it is advanced by working with all persons affected to bring about a restoration of right order. I must live into the reality that God will give me what it takes to do my job: no shortcut; no excuse; no cheap grace. If I fall short, God didn't leave me ill-equipped. It is my lack of single-pointed attention & dedication to task. If I am faithful, the same forces that killed Jesus may make me suffer or kill me. That won't be God's will; it will be evil at work to stop me. Evil will not have the last word in our lives. Our deeds, however long they are allowed to continue, will have their effect on the Kingdom's coming. Though we die, we will have life in God beyond reach of evil. I have discovered a wonderful treasure. I want to share beyond the Scriptural precept to be always ready to give an account for the hope and joy I have. Oh my Jesus! You are the Messiah!
[About the Author & Pamphlet]—Dan Wilson was executive director of Pendle Hill from 1952-70. This pamphlet proposes that A person must be regenerated by the power of God to overcome the human condition.
The promise of Deliverance is the assurance that there is a power, available to humanity, by which high disaster can be abolished forever. But there is no promise that we shall not be in great danger, nor that we shall be delivered from war, institutional evil, or calamities. There is no promise that western civilization can be delivered from the fate of prior civilizations. The message of deliverance drives away fear; it is that God is real and that God acts for humankind’s deliverance.
Deliver us from the present—Time is running out. We no longer feel an easy confidence that we can leave deliverance to technological progress or to chance. We yearn for deliverance from meaninglessness. But God takes too long; we dare not experiment with eternity. War must be avoided, yet we find ourselves dependent upon [evil] tradition & habits that make war. “Deliver us from the present” is our prayer. The Promise is that we can be delivered from anxiety about our past failures, & from fear of future disillusionment. The present could hold all we could ever wish for, & more. God is completely present. Eternity is now. We can experience it now.
Deliver us from Christianity—Christianity’s doctrines and divisions, remnants of once vital religion, leave modern man cold. Christianity institutionalized has spoiled the world for the gospel. The materialistic element of western culture marks the failure of Christianity. The limitation of the message of deliverance to fixed creeds and formal procedures diminishes its power to persuade men who are endowed with spiritual freedom. Deliver us from a Christianity that does not feel the living and Inward Christ at its center.
Deliver us from evil—The sufferings of life attest the reality of evil. Can the overfed and privileged overcome starvation’s evils? We have underestimated the power for evil—the assertion of self-interest without regard to the whole—in ourselves as well as in others. Replacing God with ourselves at the center of the universe separates us from God, and [creates the most basic] evil. The good, [when put in static categories] hinders deliverance as surely as does the evil. Such legalism misinterprets the human’s free spirit. It overlooks the necessity for moral action in each particular instance to originate from within. If one is condemned if one chooses not to follow the law, this destroys the meaning of freedom. The habit of thinking about man’s imperfection in legalistic terms is so fixed that our morality has become negative and uncreative. How quickly we legalize God, so set are we upon capturing and imprisoning life as we know it, or as we wish it to be. The only life truly guided and truly free is the life of constant prayer, the life continuously seeking for God’s guidance.
God has performed miracles through humanity, when devotion has been centered on the source from which activity springs & not on the ends toward which it is directed. Even Quakers aren't available to be used freely to transform evil because so much effort is directed toward preconceived solutions. Anxiety about our kingdom of plenty stands in the way of deliverance. We are filled with fear because we are afraid of losing something we cannot live without. We have looked hopefully to the United Nations for the power to preserve things as they are. We look everywhere but to God, because we do not want to pay the price God asks for deliverance. The Promise of Deliverance is not for us unless we deeply and urgently feel the need of deliverance. Yet there are many hidden falsehoods which arise to justify privilege and elude detection. Some are even considered virtues.
Deliver us from man—If we are aware of the brutality and degradation of life that exists in the world and in ourselves, we shall not pass lightly over the judgment of [theologians] who want to return to a doctrine of man’s depravity. In a time of imminent crisis [and failure, the pessimist feels guilt, and even the optimist feels hopeless]. “Deliver us from evil, ego-centered, meaningless man” is our cry. [The theologian Karl Barth says of humankind:] “Humans have stood, are standing and will stand in infinite opposition to what God is.”
In contrast to Barth, Nicolas Berdyaev’s interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Fall is: “Awareness of original sin both humbles & exalts. Man fell from a height & he can rise to it again.” He longs for a return to the blissful state of the unconsciousness of pre-birth. He longs for power to overcome evil. He longs for a transcendent and external God to come near, to fill man with God’s presence, to reassure man that he belongs to God.
The promise is a new man—There is no promise that man will be delivered from human status, because to be human is his high & creative destiny. [He can't] return to a state of primitive bliss, he would then be meaningless. There is the Promise that man can be delivered just as he is, frailties, suffering and all, into a certainty now of oneness with God. The new man’s creation is the painful, joyful task of us all; it is not delegated to those known as saints or towering prophets and apostles. The new humanity is made up of all the faithful—the faithful found within and without all forms [of religion, government, political systems, or professional disciplines]. What the saintly, mystical, prophetic types discovered for themselves they believed to be true and available to all who love truth. The truth is as near to you and me as to any others. The Promise is a new humanity made up of you and me and others who will believe (in terms of our own individual experiences of truth) and follow.
We can listen to others’ doctrines and experiences, but we can learn little from them about God’s Promise held in our own nature. It is conformity of mind and practice to the will of God, in all holiness of conversation, according to the dictates of divine light and life in the soul, which denotes a person as truly a child of God.
Spiritual and Material—There is an invisible spiritual aspect and a visible material aspect of the same life; the spiritual and the material are inextricably one. Each is to be known in and through the other. Mysticism is the key to the whole, the recognition that there is a point of convergence of the material and spiritual qualities of man and the world. [Prayer where I feel in control of the input and the outcome] will not bring God nearer. Prayer as a cry when my [carefully] constructed world falls apart opens the way to God. Prayer without form and with openness to receive contains the meaning and mystery of waiting upon God.
The Presence of God rarely brings specific guidance for behavior, but rather a quality of being, an exultation of belonging, a renewal of strength, and a power and justification for action. We see that of God and the new man already in every man. The discovery that the Light within, the inward intuition of God, and the spirit of Jesus the Christ, are one, is the most momentous of life’s experiences.
The Christ has existed from the beginning, in man’s center as the seed, the germ, the life. Once Jesus the Christ has won a deep intuitive response within us, it is inevitable that we project our apprehension of God into Jesus’ form. The Church’s central challenge today is the reunion with the living experience of the historic and the inward Christ. In a Friends meeting, a powerful and creative ministry is the product of a meeting that expects God to speak to it as God spoke to Jesus, and that expects to receive strength and guidance from God’s Presence.
The promise is a new loyalty—There is no higher loyalty than this: to be faithful to that of God unfolding in every man. God is acting in each to perfect an original masterpiece. Rabindrananath Tagore wrote: “The universal is ever seeking its consummation in the unique. It is our joy of the infinite in us that gives us our joy in ourselves.” Loyalty [to God] is the secret to open the way to joy in all experience of pain and heartbreak, success or failure, of doubt or assurance. Each of us feels the pressure of [divided loyalties]. Until we have found a new unity within and without, our lives will be disorganized, and our hearts torn with conflict. We look everywhere for a loyalty that will again claim our full and joyful obedience; everywhere except within ourselves.
The secret is available—In the quiet depths of our innermost nature, if we know how to find it, is the dwelling place of a loyalty for which we would joyfully die. [The Quaker Job Scott said]: “God has made humankind universally sensible in degree sufficient for their various circumstances and allotments in life.” As children [we sensed our connection] with all life. [As adults] we lose this sense of the whole of things, and shape [the world] to fit [what] we know of fragments of it.
Many of us live as if we had no expectation of finding God. Because we do not find God [only in a certain place] where others seem to find God we strive to content ourselves with lives of patient resignation. [We should rather have] the immediate and constant Presence of God as our certain expectation. Our apprehension of God’s presence is often unexpected; it breaks through when we are open to it. Jesus was one of God’s masterpieces. God’s expectation is that we should be like Him. We look for “God in man” in every man. But always, we recognize the Christ that we find outwardly because we first recognize the Christ within ourselves.
The promise is a new community—In the Old Testament, through the power of a liberated spirit, a new community arises out of the deadness and fears of the old. Yet side by side with these positive elements there is also the record of the accumulation and hardening of the law. The Promise of the power of God, available to man is contained within each of us. This seed of the Kingdom of God is a gift from God to persons.
[Although Jesus seemed lost forever to the disciples,] they discovered that He was still with them in their hearts. [They found themselves] in a unity beyond what they had while He was alive. Now he was truly and indestructibly alive among them. They had known and loved the outward Christ. Now they knew also that Christ was living with them. This group experience [of Christ amongst them] was no mere pooling of separate experience of the Christ within. Something more than the highest insight of any of them, or all of them, was available.
Membership in this community of the Living Christ was essential for the individual. Our lack of experience of community prevents our acceptance of the Kingdom of God as a present fact. [A close-knit community is essential] as a tangible experience of the love and care of God through one another. Salvation for an individual or for the whole appears possible in proportion to the fullness of this experience of community.
Germ cell of the new society—Do there exist now, visible nuclear communities, held together by an experience of unity so fundamental that the new society is emerging through them? Could a community of individuals become so filled with the sense of belonging now to the Kingdom of God that they would suffer even beloved community to be sacrificed in order to spread the Kingdom's promise for everyone?
The Promise is the assurance that there is a way to change suffering into joy; all men who respond affirmatively to the light as they receive it, shall know what God is like. Early Christians were drawn together by the creative experience of the Kingdom present among them. Without the aid of specialists, men can come together with all their blindness & limitation & suffering into a consciousness of the Presence of God. Salvation, healing & wholeness, is the seed which God has planted in each person. Salvation is never complete or final. It brings with it no guarantee of infallibility, but it does bring the glorious freedom to experiment radically and creatively.
The promise of deliverance—This, then is the Promise of Deliverance. We can begin at once to help create the Kingdom—to translate love into political and social relations. We do not have to commence retraining, or to expect new talents, or to go to a new place to begin, or to wait for a more opportune time. Always God is giving God’s self without stint to help us accept our weakness, to overcome our doubts, to start over again and again. Wherever we are, power equal to the measure of our need is available to enable us to follow as we are led. Now all our gifts, including the gift of life itself can be given fearlessly, joyously and confidently. The Promise of Deliverance is the promise in Christ, of God in man, loving, living, suffering and giving Himself to win each person and humankind from disaster forever.
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About the Author—John Lampen is a Quaker, a member of Ireland YM. He was headmaster of a therapeutic community school for 10 years. He now works for peace & reconciliation projects in Northern Ireland. He & his wife were Friends-in-Residence at Pendle Hill in the fall of 1992; he worked on this essay then. Poets offer confirmation to religious seekers that their glimpses of divine presence & intention are valid. Poets give them a language in which to describe glimpses without demanding adherence to a belief system they cannot accept.
Growing Doubts—[The dying] went to God's Right Hand/ That Hand is amputated now/ And God cannot be found./ The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small [Excerpt from Emily Dickinson's Poem 1551]. It is surprising that this "contemporary" sentiment was written in the 1860s. Many religious people believe human existence can only be explained by the drama of sin, atonement, repentance and salvation. We know the quagmires of bigotry and violence into which constructed religions, dogmatic political ideologies, and private obsession can lead us. John Hewitt confesses [his childhood religious bigotry in the poem "The Green Shoot"].
Judaism & Christianity were always rich in resources to reconcile believers in a loving, omnipotent God to the unfairness & cruelty of life. In an "age of faith" these resources helped many people to surmount suffering & retain trust in the love & power of God. As the works of Darwin, Marx, Freud, & modern bible criticism was developing, the intellectual climate changed. I found relief as a teenager in Edmund Blunden's "Report on Experience," with its denial of falsehoods & platitudes we were taught in church. It was modern warfare, blessed by the clergy on both sides, which seemed to show the hollowness of orthodox belief. War poets identified battlefield sufferings with the suffering of Christ. [There is hopeless, ghastliness, and even Christ's powerlessness over] the dark kingdoms at his feet. The only comfort in our darkest moments is the belief that Jesus suffered the same depths as ourselves. We are no longer offered a way out.
The Crisis of Faith—[In the dark times written of above, there] is a gospel of suffering but not of hope; it had no saving power. Some writers attack the church for losing the original message and substituting an opiate or an instrument of repression, such as King Calvin with his iron pen,/ And God 3 angry letters in a book/ And ... the Mystery is impaled and bent/ Into an ideological instrument. [Excerpt from Edwin Muir, "The Incarnate One"]. The doctrine is now seen to be false and irrelevant, because in the [general] chaos the whole rickety structure has collapsed and crushed it. [There is angry bitterness in] rejecting the promises which offer an answer to the problem of pain. Some of us find that the hymns, scripture, and rituals in which we once found strength are gradually or suddenly drained of meaning. [We feel guilty because we are "losing our faith," even though] we were taught that merit comes from holding to our faith when the devil attacks it.
Those who prize a strong faith and demand certainty of Christian belief must be appalled at an age which can offer no better news than that Christ suffers with us. They reject despair as unworthy of a Christian, and claim everyone could and should accept the traditional doctrines. But pretending to believe, forcing ourselves to believe, is only a disguised form of despair. Stevie Smith writes: I think it will be too much for us, the dishonesty,/ And, armed as we are now, we shall kill everybody,/ It will be too much for us, we shall kill everybody. [Excerpt from "How do you see?"] [Those 3 lines] no longer seem [like much of] an exaggeration.
The Empty Silence—The alternative to forced "belief" may be an emptiness in which prayer isn't merely unanswered, it becomes impossible. [T.S. Eliot in "The Waste Land" part I, & Arthur Rimbaud in "Alchimie du Verbe" [Alchemy of the Word] reflect this experience]. St. John of the Cross (1542-91) saw them as an essential part of our progression towards God, [even when] "they experience no pleasure & consolation in spiritual things & good exercises where they were wont to find their ... pleasure ... Instead they find insipidity & bitterness in the said things." He knew that God was still there, & that there remained support & prayer of a believing community around one. Now when we have this experience of emptiness & loss of meaning, there is no sense of support.
There is only 1 religious experience which still appears possible, & that is to ask questions. To doubt, to question & challenge God, is to believe against whatever odds in an answer. Quakers now seldom speak of the emptiness & loneliness of silence. Isaac Penington wrote: "I met with the very strength of Hell. The cruel op-pressor [Satan] roared upon me, & made me feel the bitterness of his captivity ... yea, the Lord was far from my help." Job Scott wrote: "My way is hedged up—I see no way to go forward ... The light of God's countenance ... seems to be quite withholden from me, & nothing else in heaven nor in all the earth can satisfy my longing soul."
George Fox's experiences taught him that this dark wood isn't a conclusion but a starting point. He wrote: "Wait upon God in all that is pure. Though you see ... your emptiness ... nakedness ... barrenness & unfruitful-ness, and see the hardness of your heart and your own unworthiness; it is the Light that discovers all this, and the love of God to you; it is that which is immediate." T.S. Eliot wrote: "I said to my soul be still, and wait without hope/ For hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love/ For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith/ But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting./ Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;/ So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. ["East Coker" part III].
George Fox recorded: "When all my hopes ... in all men were gone, that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell me what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice." For some seekers, it was not even a voice, but simply a presence that could not be denied. Was the loss of familiar reassurances a necessary step toward new awareness? Anne Ridler concludes "Deus Absconditus" [Hidden God]: Here he is endured, here he is adored,/ And anywhere. Yet it is a long pursuit,/ Carrying the junk and treasure of an ancient creed,/ To a love who keeps his faith by seeming mute/ And deaf, and dead indeed.
The Poet & the Theologian—Theologians might class such experiences as "epiphanies," daily revelations of God's presence & glory, [& insist on attaching theological language to them]. As soon as revelations are put into service of a belief system, some at least will feel alienated from them. Edith Scovell pleads with believers to: Believe I also with my dumb/ Stranger have made a marriage bond/ As strong & deep and torturing & fond. These people are making a journey without a trustworthy map; [they use momentary glimpses of their path for guidance]. They have allies in those poets who have made the same journey & recorded their moments of true direction. Poets, like theologians, believe that the experiences of life have secret connections, hidden depths and meanings that have to be sought. Poetry does not have to explain and systematize its questions and findings.
In the Middle Ages theology was the "queen of the sciences," engaging some of the best minds in Europe. Economic, political, military, cultural & scientific changes led to an era which elevated rationality, at first in harmony with religious faith, but soon attacking it. [With all the failures of technical progress, communist vision, & social reform], there is no refuge for many thinking people except cynicism & despair. Throughout this process Christianity has continued to support and inspire millions of people. Perhaps a false Christianity was sometimes preached; that doesn't mean that its followers had no genuine knowledge of Christ, no Christian heroism and no true faith. With those who stayed in touch with truths the intellectuals had lost, new awareness grows out of the old stem. New theologies are created, of which Freud writes: "Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor ... calling 'God' some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves ... they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is but a shadow."
For myself, I have come into a phase where I find it very hard to read religious books; after many years I am now able to read poetry again. Carol Murphy suggests that "The deepest truths can be conveyed only in poetry, and Christian theology is not a set of dusty propositions, nor a dreamy fairy-tale, but the highest poetry, full of illuminating images and brilliant paradoxes." [Robinson Jeffers writes of transcendent feeling in The Excesses of God: Rainbows over the rain/ And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows/ On the domes of deep sea-shells,/ And make the necessary embrace of breeding/ Beautiful also as fire ... There is great humaneness at the heart of things,/ Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise, If power and desire were perch-mates. For poets as for scripture, there is "a certain truth that none can understand their writings aright without the same Spirit by which they were written." Spirit descends and a spark [of truth] flashes from writer to reader.
"I brought them to their own Teacher"—Friends, like artists & writers, witness to the significance of experience, & sit light to the doctrines which try to explain it. Fox [could] argue Christian doctrine & still acknowledge that Teacher in the native Americans, in the Koran's pages, & the divine in the natural world. Friends have long-standing testimony against over-analysing. Scott Crom writes: "This experience's sheer power had been so compelling, the visual sequence so crystal clear, & my helplessness & passivity so overwhelming, that I didn't wish to examine it, although I 'looked' at it again." James Naylor advised intellectuals to "no more consult with your own wisdom, nor follow your own understanding, but let that in you that's pure & simple lead you."
We have in meeting for worship a wonderful resource for contemplating experiences. Ministry which comes from a deep place inside is very much like poetry. Travelers can be helped by testimony that doctrines are like clothes which may need changing, clothes which partly conceal, partly reveal the lovely body beneath; such doctrinal clothes tend to become old-fashioned. Our meetings often give the impression that "it does not matter what you think" is the purpose of the Society of Friends, as long as you want to share in fellowship.
Travelers are not looking for this. They want a community which witnesses to a meaning at the heart of things, and doctrinal clothes which fit comfortably, without distortion. They see most Christians fighting against the old clothes being taken off—as if they feared there might not be an emperor inside the robes. Does the Society of Friends provide a home for someone who wants to believe, but finds the traditional language of religion too devalued by formality, dogmatism, familiarity, and even dishonesty?
"Christ the Tiger"—Many travelers remain fascinated with Jesus, even after discarding Christian beliefs. Like Jesus' first followers, they knew him first as a man, and it was his blazing humanity which attracted them long before they had religious beliefs about him. Dogmatic and sentimental traditions of the Church have concealed many qualities which inspired the disciples to say "This was indeed the Son of God." Other "[Jesus travelers] feel that his concerns were very different from those of most Christian churches. Walt Whitman writes of Jesus: I do not sound your name, but I understand you .../ We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers, nor anything that is asserted,/ ... We walk upheld, free, the whole world over, journeying up and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,/ till we saturate [them], that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brothers and lovers as we are.
What kind of Jesus is presented when travelers come to a Christ-centered Quaker meeting? Do they encounter a personality relevant & poetically complex, [or someone] as dry & precise as a "How-to" manual? As Stevie Smith writes of The Airy Christ: He doesn't wish that men should love him more than anything/ Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing. Poets show us how some people come to knowing Jesus by throwing away the garment in which conventional followers clothe him. In I come like a beggar & The Danger, Sydney Carter challenges complacent assumptions that Christians understand & possess their Master.
The experience to which many poets testify offer help & support; it is mysterious, unpredictable, demanding—very different from conventional piety's comfort. Jesus of Nazareth's impact on his friends & enemies was disturbing & reassuring, powerful & tender. Early Friends insisted that historical Jesus & Inward Christ are the same; they challenge us in an identical way. Elizabeth Jennings writes in Answers: I kept my answers small & kept them near./ Big questions bruised my mind but still I let/ Small answers be a bulwark to my fear ... The big answers clamored to be moved/ into my life. Their great audacity/ Shouted to be acknowledged & believed.
"Small answers" are the slogans, platitudes, & conventional replies which aren't based on a deep wrestling with the difficulties of life & belief. If those wrestling within their souls seem to reject Jesus, they may be rejecting one of the false Christs which have been preached to the world. They are still given those holy experiences which they are unwilling to name as God's. Understanding such travelers & their needs is part of loving them.
The Emmaus Road—These travelers may come to a personal faith in Jesus Christ [on their own "road to Emmaus"]. Cleopas and his wife Mary learnt God's truth on this dusty road, and their hearts burned within them. They were unable to name Jesus until he broke bread with them in the cool of the day. Then they moved from bereavement and meaninglessness to acceptance and understanding. T.S. Eliot uses that road in The Waste Land, Part V, as an image for his way out of "the waste land," towards hope.
In Ash Wednesday, he describes letting go, leaving behind his original [hope and] belief-system, and the despair of the desert. Later in the same poem, the faith of his youth has to be given a "new verse," and some part of what he once had or was is not to be restored, but taken away for burial. It is an experience which included tears and resignation, but also recovery—in its double sense of healing and finding what was lost. [Again in Ash Wednesday, he asks]: Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood/ Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still/ Even among these rocks,/ Our peace in his will ... At this point, Eliot rejoined the church. His religious life as described in Dry Salvage is in part: Hints followed by guesses; and the rest/ Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
The Christian Mysteries in Direct Experience—When belief seems impossible, it is the poets who help us be aware of experiences of healing & forgiveness which seem to come from outside or from places deep within, [like D.H. Lawrence's description of]: ... snatches of lovely oblivion, & snatches of renewal/ odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers/ such as my life hasn't brought forth before, new blossoms of me—/ then I must know that still/ I am in the hands of the unknown God,/ ... breaking me down to his own oblivion/ to send me forth on a new morning, a new man. Or Walt Whitman's wish: ... to disengage from ... corpses of me, which I turn & look where I cast them,/ To pass on, (O living! always living!) & leave corpses behind. These are religious experiences which witness powerfully to the resurrection's reality [& doctrine]. We can have no understanding of resurrection doctrine except through the wisdom which such experiences give. Sydney Carter wrote: Your holy hearsay isn't evidence;/ Give me the Good News in the present tense. ["The Present Tense"].
Friends used to believe in a relationship between scripture events and their own experience. Job Scott believed "they are mainly meant of internal operations, discoveries and over-turnings which God, in his dealings with the soul, leads it through." Friends today find this difficult to accept intellectually, but it can still resonate as poetry. Arthur Rimbaud, a non-Christian, celebrates his release from his inner prison and the dawning awareness of a new task [using biblical images of hell, the son of man, the silver star, and the 3 magi] "to salute the birth of the new work and the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, and be the first to worship Christmas on earth." [translated from the French].
Edith Sitwell uses the cross, the nails, Dives & Lazarus, Christ's blood in "Still Falls the Rain", & T.S. Eliot uses Pentecostal images in "Little Gidding" part IV, to describe God's power & love & the evil & suffering of the London bombing raids. Quaker tradition sees judgment not as an event at the end of time, but something that occurs within the individual, who participates in it, and in doing so gives her or his life its meaning. James Naylor wrote: "And if there be a dwelling in the Light, this judgment ceases not, till the throne of Christ be established in the heart in peace; for this is his judgment, and is upon all that stands up against his kingdom." Kathleen Raine in "The 8th Sphere": Why then on earth, all who have been here ask,/ Why in the body's narrow prison?/ But why this here and now only when I loved I knew/ And lifted with joy the burden of this sorrow.
New Wine and Old Wineskins—Some people find the hints and guesses founded on undeniable experience intensely exciting, as opposed to a taught or caught religion. Jesus was ambiguous about the relationship of traditional understanding to new revelation, [hence the analogies] of new cloth on old garments and new wine in old wineskins. In "2 Trees," David Sutton uses the image of a crab-apple tree growing out of the trunk of a rotting willow, with their branches intertwined. He closes with: The willow played its part by standing there.
These experiences offer only a starting point. For those who learn to trust the vision they are given, struggles of faith against doubt give way to new priorities. T.S. Eliot implies that there are only isolated moments of understanding. He says [in "The Waste Land" and "Burnt Norton"]: Sudden in a shaft of sunlight/ Even while the dust moves/ There rises the hidden laughter/ Of children in the foliage/ Quick now, here, always—/ Ridiculous the waste sad time/ Stretching before and after. Wordsworth is well-pleased to recognize/ In nature and the language of the sense ... The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being.
Richard Eberhart, [in "The Incomparable Light"], writes of: The light beyond compare is the light I saw. I saw it on the mountain tops, the light/ Beyond compare. I saw it in childhood too./ ... I saw it in political action, & I saw/ The light beyond compare in sundry deaths. Edwin Muir asks in The Transfiguration: Was it a vision?/ did we see that day the unseeable/ One glory of the everlasting world/ Perpetually at work, though never seen/ Since Eden locked the gate that's everywhere/ & nowhere? Was the change in us alone,/ the enormous earth still left forlorn,/ exile or a prisoner? Yet the world/ We saw that day made this unreal, for all/ Was in its place. Muir's vision of "that radiant kingdom" is so intense that it convinces him of the possibility of universal healing and forgiveness. He ends his poem with the image of Judas, the betrayal ... quite undone & never more be done.
We can dismiss it; or if it resonates with our own deepest intimations, we can embrace it. Any doctrine, any church, any poem can be a container for the truth; but if we come to value it for itself and not the reality it contains, the life drains out of it, the angel departs, and the form becomes empty. In Kathleen Raine's imagination the divine revelations are a succession of huge angels coming to earth throughout history: ... In vain we look for them where others found them,/ For by the vanishing stair of time the immortals are always departing;/ But while we gaze after the receding vision/ Others are already descending through gates of ivory and horn.
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317. The Kingdom and the Way: Meditations on the Kingdom (by Carol R. Urner; 1994)
About the Author—Carol R. Urner has spent most of the past 30 years traveling the world with her husband, Jack, a development consultant in Libya, Philippines, Egypt, Bangladesh, Bhutan, & Lesotho; [she served the underprivileged in those places], in particular as a school teacher in Bhutan & currently in Lesotho. They participated in worship groups in Rome, Manila, Cairo, Bhutan, & now in Lesotho Allowed Meeting in Maseru.
INTRODUCTION—These are meditations I wrote for myself during 1986-87 in Bhutan, where I taught in a primitive, impoverished elementary school. I worshiped with evangelical Christians, but I couldn't accept that gentle Buddhists around me were condemned to eternal torture by not affirming "Jesus Christ as their personal savior." I turned to Jesus' words, & they became a bridge between the fundamental truths in their Buddhist experience & in my own. I sojourned briefly in the US in 1991, & found evangelical Friends in agonizing tension with those mistrusting evangelical theology. Why must there be so much division of belief among Friends? How are more liberal, intellectual, and "modern" Friends in danger of losing touch with the holy ground on which early Friends once stood? How is there a Christ Jesus that's a window to God, and a tie that binds us, and draws us into the eternal Spirit of truth?
PART 1: THE KINGDOM. What is this Kingdom which we Seek?—[King James Version (KJV), New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), and Jerusalem Bible (JB) of Matthew 6:33 cited] How did you first find the kingdom? I found it as a child, a precious special place at my being's center where I was loved, led, held, chastised, and taught by an active something other than myself. Eventually I prayed and was prayed through with a powerful love that held and searched me. My mother brought me into the presence of God and left me there.
[JB, Matthew 13:45-6 cited] In the terrible time of my adolescence and young adulthood, I lived with postwar literature of emptiness and despair, and being told God is a fabrication. My church's beliefs were battered into [ruins]. Nothing else had meaning or value if I didn't answer to that something still there at the center.
[NRSV of Matthew 12:31 cited] Jesus used seed, bread, well of living waters, treasure, light, salt, yeast, pearl as images for the kingdom of heaven. I discovered that early and present Quakers are my people. Isaac Penington wrote: "Sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart and let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee."
Where is this kingdom that we seek?—[NRSV and KJV of Matthew 4:17 cited] I have little experience of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven that people go to when they die. But the kingdom of which Jesus speaks is more than real to me. It is immediate, ever-present, an eternal now.
[NRSV and KJV of Luke 17:21 cited] The kingdom doesn't come by examination & analysis. It isn't some-thing that can be understood or known without entering into. The kingdom of heaven is within, deep within where we meet God, and know we are held and loved, we are seared and hammered into a good and useful shape for service. [I have sensed that kingdom in the dark, forgotten places] in Manila, Cairo, Dhaka, and Rome.
What is this God, whose Kingdom we Seek?—[JB version of John 4:24 cited] Temples, steeple houses, sacrifices, liturgies—these aren't what's wanted from us. We may use them to protect ourselves from God.
[JB version of Mark 10:18 & Matthew 5:48 cited] God is good and perfect. Yet God yearns after, and we yearn after all that is fallen, imperfect, scattered; even Jesus does not claim to be perfect.
[JB version of John 12:44 cited] Jesus never says directly: "God is love, God is light, God is truth." These definitions are implied in his life. Jesus gives God his own life with which to make a definition, and calls us into an experience, a relationship, a way.
[JB version of John 14:6 cited] It was many years before I could see God clearly through Jesus. [I had to learn to see past the Northern European miracle-worker in white robes from Sunday School]. I sought for lives to grow on, & people who weren't hollow or shadows. I found: Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Tagore, George Fox, John Woolman, Penington, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day & others. I found in slums around the world living souls who let God shine through. [In & through them] I could see another Christ Jesus, [one I could relate to].
[JB version of John 7:16 cited] Jesus preached & lived the truth, life & love we call God. For me, worshiping Jesus Christ would be to make an idol before God of what is meant to be a clear window. How can Christ Jesus become a bridge between us, in spite of our difference experiences of [Jesus Christ or] Christ Jesus?
What is God's Righteousness?—[JB version of Matthew 25: 35-36 cited] What counts [toward us expressing] God's righteousness [in our lives]? What counts is how much I myself have done to bring food, clothes, healing, and love to those in need.
[JB version of Matthew 6:10 cited] Jesus' prayer is that we do God's will, help bring the kingdom of righteousness to this world, and dwell in the eternal now.
Who will Enter this Kingdom we Seek?—[JB version of Matthew 7:21 cited] When, inside ourselves, we stay still and close to the center, we find both direction and an opening way, [i.e. God's will]. When we "mind the Light," and act on it, we find our strength, empowerment, [God's love], joy, even ecstasy, [i.e. the kingdom].
[NRSV of Matthew 7:24 cited] Through the years of adolescence I struggled with the Sermon on the Mount; it was threatening & demanded everything. Shortly after I gave up on the Sermon, I was led to Sabatier's Life of Francis of Assisi. For 17 years Francis lived the Sermon, and became like a Christ in his own time. His life shook the foundations of the church and the world around it. I found a whole progression of people who lived the Sermon. The more I test those lives, some of which were Christ-like but not Christian, the more I find its teachings; there is a rock on which we can build. Jesus the teacher shows us clearly the kingdom and the way.
Who can Help Bring this Kingdom to Birth Among Us?—[KJV of Matthew 13:38 cited] My experience of focusing on personal rewards, like "the kingdom of heaven after death," is that we cut ourselves off from the kingdom at our being's center. What the Beatitudes ask of us is asked so that we may be clear instruments and a healing presence, that we may experience joy from God's Love and being truly blessed, and that we may dwell in God's kingdom and bring it to birth in the world.
PART 2: THE WAY. What are the Requirements of the Way?—[NRSV of Mark 12:30 cited] I have encountered deep God-hunger in Muslims, beggarwomen, scavengers, black Christians, Filipino Catholics, Buddhists, Hindu student friends. Rabindranath Tagor wrote love poems to God in Gitanjali. For me, at least, this inward hunger is the starting point.
[NRSV of Mark 12:31 cited] We can't love God without loving our neighbor with that same love pouring into and loving us. The love we feel loving us is as much for those who wound and betray us, for enemies, as it is for ourselves. We must love them [all], for the hidden Seed that would live and grow in them. How are love of God and love of neighbor opening ways to one another?
What is the Way to the Kingdom?—[NRSV of Matthew 7:14 cited] We can't fully love God or neighbor, or [have anything to do with the kingdom] unless we walk in the way of God's righteousness. It took lives like Francis of Assisi, George Fox, Gandhi, Theresa of Calcutta to make the life & teachings of Jesus "the Jew from Nazareth" real to me. Only when I concentrate on his own sayings, & not on the many teachings about him am I able to discern the way of God's righteousness [by living in: love; truth; purity; service to the [lowliest]; chosen poverty; powerlessness and humility; nonviolence. His sayings are not easy sayings, poking, pricking, cutting, and the way he shows is indeed a narrow one, and difficult. This is the only way worth traveling.
The Way is Love—[NRSV of Matthew 5:45 cited] Friends convinced as adults were convinced because since childhood we've experienced the reality & the universality of God's love that was irreconcilable with the traditional church's doctrines. I knew as a child that all were loved as I was loved, & to be loved by me. Because I grew up surrounded by love and loving others, it was impossible for me to identify that Love [with the God of others who loved selectively only those who professed certain narrow beliefs and not "his" errant creatures].
[NRSV of Luke 6:32; Matthew 5:44; 7:3; 5:39-40; John 15:12 citied]—Jesus is clearly speaking of a love that isn't rooted in self. It's not a love that requires return. We can't even love those closest to us unless our love has a deeper root. George Fox says, The love of God is love past knowledge ... & is the ground of all true love in your hearts." // How do we love those who are actively doing evil? Even Jesus seems to have trouble loving priests & Pharisees in [all] their self-righteousness, coming between their people & God. We are to seek the holy seed in those who see us as enemies, answer to it, & love it into life. // [Jesus calls for a radical recognition and correction of our errors, much like John Woolman's ruthless seeking and radical integrity, which helped and still helps] other Friends see and remove the evil hidden in their lives. // We're to find the holy seed, somewhere buried in even the worst, the most abusive and brutal of humans. [as did Francis, Gandhi, Elizabeth Frye, John Woolman]. // You will find [the way of love] through others, but you will also discover it deep within yourself.
The Way is Truth—[KJV of John 3:21; JB version of John 18:37; Matthew 5:37; Luke 8:17; NRSV of John 17:17; 3:21; 8:31-2; 16:13 cited] Some priests and theologians see The Way's Truth as separate from every day truth, or scientific truth, or our personally experienced truth. How are those who seek [the various kinds of] truth also seeking what we call God? How does every day truth, scientific truth, our personally experienced truth, or sacred truth lead step upon step to the truth which God? // Truth is not something we write, read, think or meditate about. We test it out in our lives. Only when we do truth can we come to the light. [The more we do with our light, the] more light is given; Jesus did the truth which he found. //
Jesus tried to make his people see the truth beneath all their falsities. He cut through to the root truth beneath the doctrines and teachings of his time to the foundation stone; he witnessed to it with his own life. Jesus wanted his people to recognize the lies in their own lives, and the hypocrites that stood between themselves and pursuit of truth. // All truth is inter-related. To lie, or to manipulate truth, in even [non-religious, "unimportant"] matters is to deny God, and to cut ourselves off from the light that would guide us. // If we seek to protect our actions by lying or hiding them, we're departing from God's way. Only those sturdy in the truth can stand in God's power and walk in God 's way. // God's word and law was made manifest in Jesus' life. When we look at him we see the kingdom and way of God. We look through his life as through a clear window to God. It is the Spirit of Truth, the holy Spirit, the Seed, the Light, the inner Christ, which holds us, guides us, shapes us, loves us, commands us, owns us as we witness and grow from truth to ever greater truth.
The Way is Purity—[JB version of Luke 11:35-6; NRSV of Matthew 19:4-6 cited]. The strong yearning to live in God's heart, to be open channels for God's love & to stay in the light, leads to the purity quest. [How do I live in purity in the midst of all of life's distractions & temptations?] // How do Friends listen to, & answer each other across the widening gulf [formed by differing views on sexual love & faithfulness] that divides us? In my experience, husbands & wives can go into the world as a compassionate team, doing in pairs the work to which God calls both & each; committed pairs like Quakers have historically had have been our strength.
[NRSV Matthew 19:11-12 cited] Jesus seems to ask for chaste celibacy of those who would be most fully his followers. Perhaps marriage for Jesus was the true disciple's complete marriage to God, God's way and will. Married Friends have endured long periods of celibacy when separated from their mates by imprisonment or travels in ministry. How do we give enough support now for those couples who find themselves separated by imprisonment, ministry, or illness? Lifetime celibacy is not easy. It might bring liberation for loving service; it might bring lovelessness and self-righteousness, failure and being trapped in a life of hypocrisy and lies. How can Friends require celibacy of all those who, for one reason or another are not led into heterosexual marriage? What about those who physically and psychologically can't share sexual love with someone of the opposite sex? We must each be true to what we have found thus far on our own inner journeys.
The Way is Love for the Poor/ ... Voluntary Poverty/ ... Powerlessness and Humility—[NRSV of Luke 4:18; 16: 19-20; 14:13/ 18:25; 9:3/ 14:11; 17:33 cited] A love that does not go first to one of the least of these, helpless victims of injustice, is not a healing love that can serve God's righteousness. Living in Manila, in a guarded, American-style, middle-class community, surrounded by thousands of shanty-dwellers, I was forced to see the seeds of the injustice in my life style. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, 40 poor women sewed, cooked, and educated their children at our home. To share in this way was not pain but sheer joy; those were kingdom days.
After spending a day among the [dispossessed], I come home to every comfort. How am I called to live as a bridge between rich & poor? Or am I a failed disciple? // Among the "valiant 60" there were many poor & near-poor who published truth with little to sustain them. Imprisoned, they became poorer still. I suppose we are still "good people"; most of us no longer stand in that power which shakes the countryside 10 miles around.
It is my experience that those in power can be opened to love & truth's way; their very position will be a hindrance. Their web of power prevents them from acting as they should. It is the same with people who aren't powerful, but who live comfortably & well fed. We may help others do the work, or do some ourselves; [those without wealth & power are the leaven of change. // We Friends are called to be God-centered, rather than self-centered, knowing that whatever good is done through us is done by the power of God, not by our own.
Friends have recognized from their beginning nonviolence as a basic requirement of the way. // I now read Jesus' "It is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword" differently. This is the sword that makes clear our error, and would separate us from it; the sword cuts away our hatreds and falsities. // Jesus asks us to be as he was; barefoot as the poorest, at the mercy of all, offering obeisance to none, beholden to none but God. Friends suffered much to "Publish the truth," to strip away all the "notions," rituals, outward show, and priestly intercessors standing between Christians then and the inward, teaching Christ. This inward Christ "enables them to live better in the world, and excites their endeavors to mend it" [Wm. Penn]. The weapons of the lamb are love, truth, purity, poverty, humility and a life lived in God's power, light and way.
In our time, I think Gandhi and his satyagrahi, devotees of Truth have shown us the fearfulness in the face of death required to serve God's righteousness and way. // I am easily intimidated by those in authority. When concerns lead me before someone in high authority, not knowing what to say, I think always the right words have come, and a strength and Spirit have been in me that were not my own. Our battle is one for souls and spirits, for inward change, love, truth, righteousness, justice [for poor and oppressed], for God's kingdom on earth.
The Way Leads to the Salvation of All—[JB versions of John 3:17; Mark 2:17; Matthew 20:28] I think the barbaric vision of hell lurking for centuries at the heart of Christian teaching would have cut me off from Jesus if I hadn't found [in John's gospel that God's Son was sent not to condemn, but to save the world]. In many ways the world is already in hell. Jesus longed to draw this world into the Light. This Jesus I can know, listen to, love & seek to follow. // Jesus labors hard with the self righteous. For him, they too, are lost. To those who have suffered much at the hands of others & been crippled in their suffering, he brings comfort & healing, hope and direction for their lives. [To those causing harm to others and themselves], he brings the call to repentance.
I don't know if Jesus is God, God's divine son, the only mediator, or a saint among other saints. I don't claim to understand those things only God can know; I sense this Christian mystery's reality that makes God's promise & requirements more than words. We, in error & hard-heartedness, selfishness & self-willing, have put [all those we have failed, broken, beaten, & wounded] on the cross; God is there with them. Only we can let them down off it. Each must respond in our way to the vision we are given. We must strive for everyone's salvation.
EPILOGUE—For those like myself, Christ Jesus is a window to God, who owns our lives. For others, wounded by encounters with traditional churches & theologies, he has actually become a stumbling block. How do we bring Jesus to others as a bridge of love, an opening door? I think Friends of different traditions need each other, to hold each other to the way. I think we need to test ourselves against the life & teachings of Jesus, & experiences of early Friends, like Isaac Penington, who wrote: " “Our life is love, peace, tenderness, & bearing one with another, forgiving one another—& helping one another up with a tender hand, if there has been a slip or fall; & waiting, till the Lord gives sense & repentance, if sense & repentance in any be wanting."
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191. Feminine aspects of divinity (by Erminie Huntress Lantero; 1973)
“In Divine Science we have not as much authority for considering God masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the clearest idea of Deity” (Mary Baker Eddy)
“I am thy bride [Wisdom tells him] & thy longing after my power is my drawing to myself. I sit on my throne, but thou knowest me not. I am in thee, but thy body is not in me . . . I am the light of the mind” (Jacob Boehme).
For she is a reflection of eternal light/, a spotless mirror God's working/, an image of his goodness./ Though she is but one, she can do all things/ & while remaining in herself, she renews all things/ In every generation she passes into holy souls/ and makes them friends of God and prophets… (Wisdom of Solomon).
About the Author—Ermine Huntress Lantero spent 4 years at Pendle Hill (1938-1942) as librarian & 1st editor of Inward Light. She taught Bible & religion at Wellesley & Sweet Briar. She is preparing books: Space, Time, and Deity: A Pilgrimage through Science Fiction and … Fantasy; and The Feminine Aspects of Divinity.
The Divine Image—In recent years there has been growing recognition that religious language of the Judeo-Christian tradition is over-weighted with masculine symbolism, a [result of] patriarchal domination. “He” is at least better than “it.” Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784) and Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) were early signs of feminine rebellion. Mary Baker Eddy said: “In Divine Science we have not as much authority for considering God masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the clearest idea of Deity.” We find her balanced view of a Father-Mother God right and valuable.
Masculine symbols are dominant and male theologians have frozen them into patterns of abstraction; but the feminine images are also there, awaiting fuller appreciation which we were not ready for till now. In the Genesis 1:27 verse about creating “man” in God’s image, “male and female” is parallelism, not a change of subject. While individuals belong to one sex or the other, we are androgynous in the sense of having both male and female hormones, as well as potential character traits traditionally associated with both sexes. That a solitary male God should claim to be a Father who begot a Son, strikes the primitives and Far-Eastern cultures as nonsense.
Quakers were in a position to know that God was Spirit. In the Friends lifestyle, a rare degree of equality between men & women was insured by their realistic acknowledgment of “that of God” in every human. The Inward Light, a reality present to their individual & collective experience, was no more masculine than feminine.
The Contra-sexual Balance—Archaeology shows that from the Mediterranean lands to the Indus Valley, the ultimate source of life was felt to be maternal. The maternal principle was personified as a single Great Mother or several goddesses with specialized roles. The male spouse was usually subordinate to the Queen of Heaven. There were triune goddesses representing stages of feminine life as the Maiden, the Mother, and the aging Hag-Witch. In the Greco-Roman period, mystery religions were part of the syncretism of the goddesses.
Moses and the Hebrews carried on a heroic struggle to depose the god Baal and the goddess Astarte in all forms. But they acknowledged a polarity of gender or “contra-sexuality” on the transcendental level in other ways. In the Genesis creation story, sexuality and fertility are not His attributes but his inventions. Nature is separated off from God and made available for man’s use according to Divine command, even for man’s dominion. Some Old Testament (OT) scholars see this story as a radical secularization of the earth; reduced to a mere creature, deprived of holiness. [It has been misinterpreted this way, ignoring] passages that instill reverence and a sense of stewardship; the earth is holy, though in a way that is entirely new.
Sometimes God commands; at other times God’s creation by word and earth’s bringing forth seem to constitute a joint creative act. In the tragedy of Adam and Eve, is the serpent really the devil, or something less sinister? [Does God] feel Himself threatened by their curiosity and lèse-majesté (violating royal rights)? The prophets speak of Israel as a son of Yahweh, but at more length as His unfaithful bride. The God of the Creation story (written in the post-exilic period), this god of incomparable power, beauty and grace, is out to redeem not only Israel but all the world through Israel. Isaiah speaks of Israel the masculine servant, and of Mother Jerusalem. [On the return from exile, suddenly] it is God who plays the mother role. “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 66:12f).
Sophia, the friend of Man—Wisdom books, [both biblical and apocryphal], are as a rule ascribed to Solomon, but they are collections from many sources over many centuries. Job and Ecclesiastes are also wisdom literature, protests against the complacent optimism of more orthodox teachers. “Wisdom” in Proverbs covers: folk wisdom; skill or cunning; prudent maxims; moral maxims; wise rule; of insight and understanding. According to Proverbs 8:22, Wisdom is a created entity, first of God’s creatures, who assisted in the rest of creation. [Was Wisdom a master workman, advising God, and delighting in the results of Creation? Or was she a daughter, laughing and playing before God like a child? Proverb 8:30 can be read either way.
She is a teacher and counselor, with affectionate concern for humankind, the tireless instructor who teaches man how to live. “The fear [reverent awe] of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). In Greek, Wisdom becomes Sophia. The Torah was personified by later writers as God’s feminine consultant at the Creation. In the New Testament (NT), she is equated with the Logos, which is Christ and loses her feminine identity.
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) was both mystic and philosopher. In his reconstruction of the inner evolution of God-universe-man, the heavenly Virgin Sophia plays many different roles: empty mirror of the abyss; Mother of God; Divine Imagination; model of the universe; Eternal Nature; man’s heavenly genius, bride of the soul, mother of the reborn. She knocks inwardly at the door of man’s soul, or “hovers outwardly before him” in the beautiful or awe-inspiring aspects of the natural world, awaiting his acceptance of her as both Bride and Mother.
[The Shaker Mother Ann Lee was seen as manifesting God] “as the Eternal Mother & Wisdom.” Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) was perhaps Russia’s most outstanding philosopher. His metaphysics and his religious endeavors were rooted in 3 Sophia visions. Thereafter Soloviev devoted his life to restoration of this fallen world to the transcendent state of unity that God intended, starting with Eastern Orthodoxy & Roman Catholicism.
“At last I realized that the Holy Spirit is the Mother Heart of the Holy Trinity. . . For every yearning, God has made provision for its satisfaction. . . Every Christian should have the mother love of the Holy Comforter” (Genevieve Parkhurst).
The Holy Spirit as Mother—The OT Spirit of God is grammatically but not noticeably feminine. It has been Wisdom that unifies the world. [Using Spirit of God in the creation story] is justifiable whatever the original writer meant, since it was understood throughout our era as meaning that Spirit which was involved in the creation and could be taken poetically as feminine. The Hebrew verb translated as “was moving” [could be translated “hovered” or “brooded” [like a] mother bird over her cosmic egg. In the NT, the Spirit uses the form of a dove, which had long been the bird of the Mother-Goddess.
[Over the years] the Spirit is transmuted by the alchemy of a unique series of historic experiences from a broad cosmic principle to a specific dynamic associated with Christ. Christ promised to send a Counselor or Spirit of Truth. In the NT the Spirit is masculine where it is personal at all. Only in fringe sects whose writings are mostly lost was the Spirit still thought of as feminine. In any case the all-masculine Trinity became dogma. Genevieve Parkhurst said: “At last I realized that the Holy Spirit is the Mother Heart of the Holy Trinity. . . Every Christian should have the mother love of the Holy Comforter.”
Mary as Mediator—The most obvious & effective way in which Christendom reinstated the Divine Mother was in the veneration of the Virgin Mary. The exaltation of Mary didn't get under way immediately. Both Mary & the Church were seen as the 2nd Eve, who by their obedience undid the disobedience of the 1st Eve. The belief in her perpetual virginity, her bodily Assumption into heaven, & her exaltation all began in the 5th century. When theologians removed Christ from the sphere of human feeling, whatever understanding, compassion, maternal tenderness, etc. the common folk once found in Jesus of Nazareth, they had to find in Mary. She was seen as [devoted to those devoted to her]. Around the 15th century, Mary’s Immaculate Conception was introduced; i.e. she was miraculously freed from the otherwise universal taint of original sin by the retroactive grace of her Son. [New doctrines like this] were gradually made explicit as the Spirit led the Church into all truth.
In the last 150 years there have been a number of “apparitions” of Mary, leading to forms of devotion that Rome after initial resistance & careful investigation found it wise to approve. [Not only] children, but highly educated Catholics had profound experiences with Mary. Theologians & common folk agree that she plays a needed mediatorial role between alienated souls & the God they find so hard to approach directly; rather than a goddess, she is a divinized human, the first who totally received him in faith & was transformed by him. Mary can lead us to God because she isn't God. [However much closer she is to God], she is still on our side of the fence.
The Shekinah as Presence in Exile—In the first few centuries A.D., Aramaic versions of the OT introduced the word “Shekinah” (literally “indwelling), as the feminine mediating principle between God and man. The Jerusalem temple was built to be her permanent home. After the 2nd temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., she appeared in Babylonian temples, and made herself heard as a bell. She rested on [all worthy souls] and worthy married couples. She came to be identified with the ideal Israel, the faithful Community which awaited redemption, as “a wifely and motherly, passionate and compassionate female divinity.”
Shekinah is the tenth attribute of God in Kabbalism’s Zohar: the Kingdom, the mystical Community, the Bride. Due to a primordial Fall long before Adam, the Shekinah is in exile while the world lasts. The exile of the Shekinah is a genuine symbol of the “broken” state of things in the realm of divine potentialities.” Any true marriage, according to the Kabbalah, becomes a symbolic realization of the love between the King and His Shekinah; it helps to heal the wounded heart of God.
Comfort, Life, And Fire of Love—Sophia, Spirit and Shekinah may be seen as somewhat different but overlapping bands of the total spectrum of Divinity as immanent in the universe and in man; all three are closely related to the Quaker Inward Light. [As one opens one’s self to a dialogue with one’s dream symbols, what were once highly personal figures may allow universal symbols to break through with a sensing of divinity; fantasy may be intensified into genuine vision.
Athena is the Greek equivalent of Sophia; being better known to our culture and portrayed in art, she is more available to pictorial imagination. “Comforter,” in the Latin is literally Strengthener; it can suggest anything from a soft maternal bed quilt to Luther’s ruggedly masculine “mighty fortress.” God is One in all the aspects [I have used here]. God has been and is as much a matter of vivid first-hand experience as any encounter with a specific aspect. The Inward Lights leading into unity would make no sense whatever unless God were a unity. God graciously expresses Himself in whatever aspects are necessary to enable us to apprehend Him, through all our ages of cultural change. There is an element of paradox here, but no contradiction.
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359. The Existential Theology of Nikos Kazantzakis (by Howard F. Dossor 2001)
About the Author—Howard F. Dossor, after ordination and service in the Congregational churches, re-signed from the ministry to enter the educational sector, working in university administration for 20 years. He is a regular lecturer for Melbourne's Existentialist Society. He is the author of Colin Wilson: The Man and His Mind." The lecture set in these pages was delivered to the Existential Society in 2000. It reflects a re-evaluation of his theological position in light of examination of Nikos Kazantzakis' life and works.
[A Dream; Questions; the Abyss]—[I begin with a dream that was central to J. B. Priestley's life]. He says: "I dreamt I was standing on top of a very high tower, looking down on millions of birds all flying in one direction ... a vast aerial river of birds of all kinds ... [Then], the gear was sped up; [birth, mating, weakening dying took place in seemingly seconds] ... What was the use of all this gigantic meaningless biological effort? ... The gear was changed again & went faster still ... the birds were like an enormous plain ... Along this plain, flickering through the bodies passed a sort of white flame ... life itself ... All creatures were of no account except as this flame of life traveled through them ... All real feeling ... danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life.
359. The Existential Theology of Nikos Kazantzakis (by Howard F. Dossor 2001)
About the Author—Howard F. Dossor, after ordination and service in the Congregational churches, re-signed from the ministry to enter the educational sector, working in university administration for 20 years. He is a regular lecturer for Melbourne's Existentialist Society. He is the author of Colin Wilson: The Man and His Mind." The lecture set in these pages was delivered to the Existential Society in 2000. It reflects a re-evaluation of his theological position in light of examination of Nikos Kazantzakis' life and works.
[A Dream; Questions; the Abyss]—[I begin with a dream that was central to J. B. Priestley's life]. He says: "I dreamt I was standing on top of a very high tower, looking down on millions of birds all flying in one direction ... a vast aerial river of birds of all kinds ... [Then], the gear was sped up; [birth, mating, weakening dying took place in seemingly seconds] ... What was the use of all this gigantic meaningless biological effort? ... The gear was changed again & went faster still ... the birds were like an enormous plain ... Along this plain, flickering through the bodies passed a sort of white flame ... life itself ... All creatures were of no account except as this flame of life traveled through them ... All real feeling ... danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life.
I offer you this dream as a powerful and profound symbol of Nikos Kazantzakis' existential theology.
Kazantzakis has given expression to an understanding of God without losing sight of the reality of the human condition. Soren Kierkegaard asks: How did I come to be here? What is the world? Who lured me here & left me there? Why was I not consulted, & made acquainted with its manners & customs? Why was I brought as though by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the Director? I would like to see him. These questions had found a quiet resolution in Kazantzakis' mind and his work The Saviours of God. At its heart lies the understanding of the Abyss.
He wrote: " We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, & we call the luminous interval in between life ... In the temporary living organism 2 streams collide: the ascent towards composition, toward life, toward immortality; & the descent towards decomposition, towards matter, toward death ... We are born in every moment; we die in every moment ..." Kazantzakis' understanding of the abyss is a legitimate alternative to a theology which enshrines a loving, benevolent God & an eternal, heavenly realm of bliss. This notion [of God & heaven has no place in a theology that dares to be legitimately existential & embraces the concept of the abyss.
Kazantzakis' abyss is nothingness, void, chaos. It is perpetual night, without beginning or end. What Kazantzakis celebrates is not the abyss but the luminous interval that is called life, which] is like a crimson-tailed comet, flashing in the everlasting night, rising in the east, arching the heavens in a brilliant flash of passage before fading from sight; it triumphs over the darkest night, if only for a second. Kazantzakis' existential theology comes from within the very nature of our existence. It is not merely preparation for something else. Bertrand Russel writes: "A complete life can only be lived when the fact of the death is kept steadily in mind." An afterlife offers support to some, but what is available to those who hold no such conviction. Kazantzakis would have us resolve the problem of death by focusing firmly on the present reality of our living.
[God, Freedom, Living Life]—Kazantzakis' theology needs a God. He applies the name God to that inexplicable force that drives the comet of life across the arch of night of nothingness. Kazantzakis says: "We have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly." His God is not Almighty. He stumbles, is defeated incessantly, rises again. Kazantzakis says: "His brain is a tangled skein of light and darkness which he strives to unravel in the labyrinth of flesh ... Crawling, straining, groping for unnumbered centuries, he feels the muddy coils of his brain being suffused with light."
Kimon Friar wrote: "God, for Kazantzakis, was not a predetermined goal towards which one proceeds, but a spirituality ceaselessly and progressively created by nature as it evolves toward greater and higher refinement." It is an internal God with whom we deal. Personifying this universal force was not as foolish as it sounds, for humans are the highest thing we know; what can be greater than the highest virtues in man infinitely expanded?
God's essence is struggle & the objective of struggle is freedom. In co-operating with energy that seeks to power us across the night sky, we not only set free God within but we move toward attainment of freedom for ourselves. Heinrich Mann writes: "Freedom ... is sum of all the spirit's aims ... Freedom is equality ... will to truth ... absolute human being." It is the inescapable obligation of persons to choose to participate in their own becoming, to [work with God] in realizing their potential. Freedom is something you do." When Kazantzakis 1st wrote "I am free" in 1923, he was 38 years old. To grasp Kazantzakis' understanding of life as a luminous interval within the abyss is to comprehend ultimate truth about life—that it is the highest concept of which we are capable. When we are engaged in life most enthusiastically, we are truly alive & most effectively setting free that Godhead that seeks to gush forth. Life contains at its center its own justification, which when fully realized transforms our experience & nature of interactions. The answer theology provides to the question: What am I supposed to be doing now that I find myself in the world? may well constitute the real value of any theology.
[Spiritual Exercises]—In 1922, Kazantzakis wrote: "I am writing Spiritual Exercises, a mystical book where I trace a method by which the spirit may rise from cycle to cycle until it reaches the supreme contact. I describe how we ascend all these steps, & how, when we reach the highest, we live simultaneously all the previous cycles. In the opening section he sets out 3 duties as preparation before doing the exercises he formulates. El Greco spelled out the 1st 2: "Reach what you can." [i.e. Live within your mind's limitations, accept the boundaries], & "Reach what you cannot," [i.e. Renew yourself. Extend yourself. Transcend yourself]. The 3rd duty is to understand that all hope has already been realized in the fact of life.
Kazantzakis sets out 4 steps in what he calls the March of Ascent. In the 1st step of the ascent, Kazantzakis would have us embrace ourselves, the ego. We have an essential value. We are a "flaming, courageous, relentless heart" and must "struggle to subdue the commotions and contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life ... to the ascending rhythm of the universe." [God is freed by passing through us, and God is freed of us].
The 2nd step of our ascent is an embrace of our ancestors, the recognition that we carry within ourselves the seed of all of them as well as the seed of our progeny. [Past generations nourish us, shelter us, inspire us]. "Future generations don't move far from us in an uncertain time. They live, desire & act in our loins & our heart." "Both of my parents circulate in my blood ... The presence of my 2 parents is clearly manifest in my hands, my right hand strong, insensitive, absolutely masculine, my left sensitive ... The twin currents of blood, Greek from my mother & Arab from my father ... has been positive & fruitful, giving me strength, joy, & wealth.
The island of Crete was in his very being; it always meant a resisting, struggling Crete, an island seeking to assert itself in a sea of opposition. He sought freedom from the outer, flesh and blood, Turk oppressors, and "freedom from the inner Turk—from ignorance, malice and envy, fear and laziness." It taught him the value of the Cretan Glance. "I feel something else, a synthesis, a being that is filled with coherence, pride and manliness by such a vision of the abyss ... This glance ... I call the Cretan Glance."
"Train your heart to govern as spacious an arena as it can. Encompass ... through as many centuries as you can bear, the onward march of humankind. Thus the 3rd step in the ascent is an embrace of humankind. Whoever does not feel the pulse of humankind in one's own beating heart is not yet human. God is to be found in the collectivity that we know as humankind. The 4th step involves a confrontation with the earth. Trees, waters, animals, birds and reptiles find their voice in us. "They toiled, loved and died to open a road for our coming."
[Ascent to the Heart of God]—God says: "I am He who eternally ascends ... I fight and ascend that I might not drown ... I am afraid! This dark ascent has no ending. My head is a flame that tries eternally to detach itself, but the breath of night blows eternally to put me out ... I walk and stumble in the flesh like a traveller overtaken by night and I call out, "Help me!" This call from within is a sign that the ascent has begun. It is as if all we have ever known, ever done, ever thought or dreamed has been transmuted into a form of spirit. What spirit? The spirit of ascent! Every victory, every momentary balance on the ascent fills with joy every living thing that breathes grows, loves and gives birth... And again the ascent begins.
The call of ascent may be regarded as the pulsing life-blood of Kazantzakis' existential theology. It adds an abundance of richness to everyday life. The common will blossom in a plenitude of beauty. The idea of ascent can renew our relationship with the Earth on which we live. It is more than a room in which we live; it is part of who we are. Kazantzakis says: "The universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body." There is no end to the ascent, although its end perpetually promises itself. The reward comes to us in the Silence. "Every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, and ripens fully in silence, indestructibly, eternally, with the entire universe. There, he merges with the Abyss and nestles within it like the seed of man in the womb of woman."
Kazantzakis' existential theology has a liturgy. He gave it expression in his epic 33,333 line poem The Odyssey. All of his writing, all his characters, are aspects of Kazantzakis himself engaging in spiritual exercises of the ascent. "Odysseus keeps the thought of death before him as a stimulant ... to whet his appetites in life, to make them more capable of embracing & exhausting" everything in him, so that death would find an entirely squandered Odysseus." The liturgy most akin to Kazantzakian theology is expressed through human beings as artists, incurable mythmakers. We base our everyday behavior on a myriad of myths that both comfort and stimulate us.
We are today in desperate need of new mythmakers, new fashioners of imaginations & dreams which will lead us through the impasse of a despair that threatens to overwhelm us. We must acknowledge myths to be symbols of the unsayable, & not invest them with reality & become entrapped in them. We may have enshrined Christianity like a dead icon in our belief's heart so that it diverts our attention from our human responsibility & our opportunity for self-renewal. The myth of the scientific method's infallibility may have interfered with our willingness to look in unaccustomed placed where God is waiting to burst forth in a renewed assault upon complacency. The ongoing replacement of one myth by another is akin to the placement of stepping stones in the building of a pathway across stony ground. Kazantzakis' The Saviours of God was the formulation of a mythology. Kimon Friar writes: "It would be the deepest happiness of Nikos Kazantzakis to know that those [helped by his work], have smashed his Law Tablets ... & struggle to surpass him, to mount higher on their own ... wings."
Time will no doubt produce a fuller, richer theology than that of Kazantzakis. [Let us look one last time at his writing, this time] his credo: "From early youth, my fundamental struggle ... and joy has been the ... battle within me between flesh and spirit. My spirit is the arena where 2 armies have met and fought. If only one of these 2 conquered, I would be lost ... [I did not want to lose my body or soul]. I struggled to unite these 2 antithetical and universal powers as co-workers ... so that I might rejoice with them in their harmony. This struggle las-ted for many years ... When I saw that all [the ways I tried] led to the Abyss, I would turn back ... I felt deeply and I was freed ... I changed the vision with which I looked out upon the world ... I struggled not to do anything ... in disharmony with the rhythm of the Great Combatant ... I also have a great responsibility in the progress of the world ... my contribution ... will not get lost ...An unceasing and renewing reconciliation and co-operation with antithetical powers, has remained for me my freedom and my redemption." [If we listen carefully, we may hear] the incessant beating of Priestley's birdwings as they dance on ecstatically with the white flame of life.
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Kazantzakis has given expression to an understanding of God without losing sight of the reality of the human condition. Soren Kierkegaard asks: How did I come to be here? What is the world? Who lured me here & left me there? Why was I not consulted, & made acquainted with its manners & customs? Why was I brought as though by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the Director? I would like to see him. These questions had found a quiet resolution in Kazantzakis' mind and his work The Saviours of God. At its heart lies the understanding of the Abyss.
He wrote: " We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, & we call the luminous interval in between life ... In the temporary living organism 2 streams collide: the ascent towards composition, toward life, toward immortality; & the descent towards decomposition, towards matter, toward death ... We are born in every moment; we die in every moment ..." Kazantzakis' understanding of the abyss is a legitimate alternative to a theology which enshrines a loving, benevolent God & an eternal, heavenly realm of bliss. This notion [of God & heaven has no place in a theology that dares to be legitimately existential & embraces the concept of the abyss.
Kazantzakis' abyss is nothingness, void, chaos. It is perpetual night, without beginning or end. What Kazantzakis celebrates is not the abyss but the luminous interval that is called life, which] is like a crimson-tailed comet, flashing in the everlasting night, rising in the east, arching the heavens in a brilliant flash of passage before fading from sight; it triumphs over the darkest night, if only for a second. Kazantzakis' existential theology comes from within the very nature of our existence. It is not merely preparation for something else. Bertrand Russel writes: "A complete life can only be lived when the fact of the death is kept steadily in mind." An afterlife offers support to some, but what is available to those who hold no such conviction. Kazantzakis would have us resolve the problem of death by focusing firmly on the present reality of our living.
[God, Freedom, Living Life]—Kazantzakis' theology needs a God. He applies the name God to that inexplicable force that drives the comet of life across the arch of night of nothingness. Kazantzakis says: "We have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly." His God is not Almighty. He stumbles, is defeated incessantly, rises again. Kazantzakis says: "His brain is a tangled skein of light and darkness which he strives to unravel in the labyrinth of flesh ... Crawling, straining, groping for unnumbered centuries, he feels the muddy coils of his brain being suffused with light."
Kimon Friar wrote: "God, for Kazantzakis, was not a predetermined goal towards which one proceeds, but a spirituality ceaselessly and progressively created by nature as it evolves toward greater and higher refinement." It is an internal God with whom we deal. Personifying this universal force was not as foolish as it sounds, for humans are the highest thing we know; what can be greater than the highest virtues in man infinitely expanded?
God's essence is struggle & the objective of struggle is freedom. In co-operating with energy that seeks to power us across the night sky, we not only set free God within but we move toward attainment of freedom for ourselves. Heinrich Mann writes: "Freedom ... is sum of all the spirit's aims ... Freedom is equality ... will to truth ... absolute human being." It is the inescapable obligation of persons to choose to participate in their own becoming, to [work with God] in realizing their potential. Freedom is something you do." When Kazantzakis 1st wrote "I am free" in 1923, he was 38 years old. To grasp Kazantzakis' understanding of life as a luminous interval within the abyss is to comprehend ultimate truth about life—that it is the highest concept of which we are capable. When we are engaged in life most enthusiastically, we are truly alive & most effectively setting free that Godhead that seeks to gush forth. Life contains at its center its own justification, which when fully realized transforms our experience & nature of interactions. The answer theology provides to the question: What am I supposed to be doing now that I find myself in the world? may well constitute the real value of any theology.
[Spiritual Exercises]—In 1922, Kazantzakis wrote: "I am writing Spiritual Exercises, a mystical book where I trace a method by which the spirit may rise from cycle to cycle until it reaches the supreme contact. I describe how we ascend all these steps, & how, when we reach the highest, we live simultaneously all the previous cycles. In the opening section he sets out 3 duties as preparation before doing the exercises he formulates. El Greco spelled out the 1st 2: "Reach what you can." [i.e. Live within your mind's limitations, accept the boundaries], & "Reach what you cannot," [i.e. Renew yourself. Extend yourself. Transcend yourself]. The 3rd duty is to understand that all hope has already been realized in the fact of life.
Kazantzakis sets out 4 steps in what he calls the March of Ascent. In the 1st step of the ascent, Kazantzakis would have us embrace ourselves, the ego. We have an essential value. We are a "flaming, courageous, relentless heart" and must "struggle to subdue the commotions and contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life ... to the ascending rhythm of the universe." [God is freed by passing through us, and God is freed of us].
The 2nd step of our ascent is an embrace of our ancestors, the recognition that we carry within ourselves the seed of all of them as well as the seed of our progeny. [Past generations nourish us, shelter us, inspire us]. "Future generations don't move far from us in an uncertain time. They live, desire & act in our loins & our heart." "Both of my parents circulate in my blood ... The presence of my 2 parents is clearly manifest in my hands, my right hand strong, insensitive, absolutely masculine, my left sensitive ... The twin currents of blood, Greek from my mother & Arab from my father ... has been positive & fruitful, giving me strength, joy, & wealth.
The island of Crete was in his very being; it always meant a resisting, struggling Crete, an island seeking to assert itself in a sea of opposition. He sought freedom from the outer, flesh and blood, Turk oppressors, and "freedom from the inner Turk—from ignorance, malice and envy, fear and laziness." It taught him the value of the Cretan Glance. "I feel something else, a synthesis, a being that is filled with coherence, pride and manliness by such a vision of the abyss ... This glance ... I call the Cretan Glance."
"Train your heart to govern as spacious an arena as it can. Encompass ... through as many centuries as you can bear, the onward march of humankind. Thus the 3rd step in the ascent is an embrace of humankind. Whoever does not feel the pulse of humankind in one's own beating heart is not yet human. God is to be found in the collectivity that we know as humankind. The 4th step involves a confrontation with the earth. Trees, waters, animals, birds and reptiles find their voice in us. "They toiled, loved and died to open a road for our coming."
[Ascent to the Heart of God]—God says: "I am He who eternally ascends ... I fight and ascend that I might not drown ... I am afraid! This dark ascent has no ending. My head is a flame that tries eternally to detach itself, but the breath of night blows eternally to put me out ... I walk and stumble in the flesh like a traveller overtaken by night and I call out, "Help me!" This call from within is a sign that the ascent has begun. It is as if all we have ever known, ever done, ever thought or dreamed has been transmuted into a form of spirit. What spirit? The spirit of ascent! Every victory, every momentary balance on the ascent fills with joy every living thing that breathes grows, loves and gives birth... And again the ascent begins.
The call of ascent may be regarded as the pulsing life-blood of Kazantzakis' existential theology. It adds an abundance of richness to everyday life. The common will blossom in a plenitude of beauty. The idea of ascent can renew our relationship with the Earth on which we live. It is more than a room in which we live; it is part of who we are. Kazantzakis says: "The universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body." There is no end to the ascent, although its end perpetually promises itself. The reward comes to us in the Silence. "Every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, and ripens fully in silence, indestructibly, eternally, with the entire universe. There, he merges with the Abyss and nestles within it like the seed of man in the womb of woman."
Kazantzakis' existential theology has a liturgy. He gave it expression in his epic 33,333 line poem The Odyssey. All of his writing, all his characters, are aspects of Kazantzakis himself engaging in spiritual exercises of the ascent. "Odysseus keeps the thought of death before him as a stimulant ... to whet his appetites in life, to make them more capable of embracing & exhausting" everything in him, so that death would find an entirely squandered Odysseus." The liturgy most akin to Kazantzakian theology is expressed through human beings as artists, incurable mythmakers. We base our everyday behavior on a myriad of myths that both comfort and stimulate us.
We are today in desperate need of new mythmakers, new fashioners of imaginations & dreams which will lead us through the impasse of a despair that threatens to overwhelm us. We must acknowledge myths to be symbols of the unsayable, & not invest them with reality & become entrapped in them. We may have enshrined Christianity like a dead icon in our belief's heart so that it diverts our attention from our human responsibility & our opportunity for self-renewal. The myth of the scientific method's infallibility may have interfered with our willingness to look in unaccustomed placed where God is waiting to burst forth in a renewed assault upon complacency. The ongoing replacement of one myth by another is akin to the placement of stepping stones in the building of a pathway across stony ground. Kazantzakis' The Saviours of God was the formulation of a mythology. Kimon Friar writes: "It would be the deepest happiness of Nikos Kazantzakis to know that those [helped by his work], have smashed his Law Tablets ... & struggle to surpass him, to mount higher on their own ... wings."
Time will no doubt produce a fuller, richer theology than that of Kazantzakis. [Let us look one last time at his writing, this time] his credo: "From early youth, my fundamental struggle ... and joy has been the ... battle within me between flesh and spirit. My spirit is the arena where 2 armies have met and fought. If only one of these 2 conquered, I would be lost ... [I did not want to lose my body or soul]. I struggled to unite these 2 antithetical and universal powers as co-workers ... so that I might rejoice with them in their harmony. This struggle las-ted for many years ... When I saw that all [the ways I tried] led to the Abyss, I would turn back ... I felt deeply and I was freed ... I changed the vision with which I looked out upon the world ... I struggled not to do anything ... in disharmony with the rhythm of the Great Combatant ... I also have a great responsibility in the progress of the world ... my contribution ... will not get lost ...An unceasing and renewing reconciliation and co-operation with antithetical powers, has remained for me my freedom and my redemption." [If we listen carefully, we may hear] the incessant beating of Priestley's birdwings as they dance on ecstatically with the white flame of life.
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