Every morning I make my dog breakfast, the same breakfast, and as it is prepared, he jumps up and down in front of the kitchen counter—undistractedly fixated on the process–until the bowl is set in the accustomed place. The epistemologists of the eighteenth century, like the metaphysicians of the fourteenth, were likewise fixated with a process, the same old process, and were unable to break away from it. They were, forgive the change of metaphor, akin to being stuck in traffic, moving at best incrementally, fundamentally going nowhere. Evolution had not yet devised an off-ramp, some intellectual stimulus powerful enough to break the fixed-ness, the habitude, the fixation, of the situation. In 1781, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at Konigsberg, created, not simply an off-ramp, but a clover leaf. He published the first part of his trilogy on how and what we know, the Critique of Pure Reason, a critical examination of theoretical reasoning. Some may argue a clover-leaf opens the possibility of simply going in a circle and getting back on the same road. This is true–potentially. Some may argue a clover-leaf allows one to turn around and go backwards. This is true–potentially. All, however, must admit it allows traffic, and here the traffic is intellectual, to move. It did—vigourously.
Because rationalism was all about mind—ideas universal and necessary—it could proceed by logical deduction, but could not breach the caesura twixt the mind and the material world, not, at least, without some form of deus ex machina. Because empiricism was all about sense impressions as copies of material objects, it could not leap from the particular to the universal and necessary, not, at least, without some useful fiction resultant from associating particulars. Kant attempted to distil the best from both these schools. Subjective impressions from the external world are only half of the required equation. The second half is the mind, or more precisely, the innate or “a priori forms” the mind applies to these impressions. This still confines our knowledge to phenomena, to our ideas of the material world, to the material world as it is held or represented mentally, and does not give us access to the noumena, the “thing out there”, the material world as it is “in itself”, as it may appear apart from my perception of it. Aristotle’s epistemological system claimed we “assimilate” the object, the world, in the process of knowing it. Kant claims we “construct” it.[i]
According to the Kantian analysis, our initial response to sensation is something spontaneous, of our nature and structure; we automatically map the sensation according to time and space, or sequence and position. Aristotle and Newton both considered time and space realities. Kant claims they are mental a priori forms, the mind’s built–in sorting systems, the primal formats for organizing sensation, both external and internal. Once a sensation is thusly co-ordinated, the mind works to stabilize it by applying the concept of substance, the notion that this is something substantial, enduring, and then relates it to others according to such categories as cause and effect, quantity, quality, etc.
The process of categorization is overlaid by systems of unification: internal items under the idea of ego or soul, external items under the idea of world, and all items ultimately under the idea of God. Each of these unifiers is a type of bracketing, a code designating origin. They are subjective exigencies, requisite referencing systems, filing systems, necessary to the ultimate sorting and ordering of theoretical knowledge. We cannot know the ego, soul, or mind, only the act of knowing. We cannot know the world, only our knowing of it. Because time and space, cause and effect, etc. are merely forms we apply to sensations to make sense of them, they are not applicable to the world “as it is in itself”, to God, or to soul, rendering these three topics beyond either proof or disproof.
However, we are not limited to theoretical reason. We have another faculty that can and does penetrate toward the super-phenomenal, the noumenal, items of soul, world, and God. The second part of the Kantian trilogy is the Critique of Practical Reason, and its focus is the will. The essence, the a priori structure, of the will is the pure thrust of the will to act without regard to result, be it pleasure or pain, but to “that which ought to be”, to “duty”. (The French Enlightenment might have preferred “justice” to “duty”, and the Italian “the reasonable and civil”.) This thrust, this evocation to will rightly is the groundwork of the moral life, of the social life. It is exemplified in the command: so act that your act may be understood as a universal moral rule! Pure reason’s a priori forms exist to receive experiential data, to be given content. Practical reason’s, the will’s, a priori form is its own content. It is autonomous and beyond experience. Its function is to freely give to experience value and moral definition. Kant brings us here to the factuality that man in the world is not confined to pure or theoretical reason, that man in the world has the power, the duty to be of the world—social and moral, just and dutiful. The notions of justice and duty direct us to postulate freedom (the state of being beyond material conditioning), immortality (the frame within which alone virtue can be rewarded its deserved happiness), and God (the ultimate guarantor of both freedom and happiness). These three are beyond reasoned proof. They stand behind moral man as morality’s transcending and yet practical necessities.
The theoretical and practical aspects of our knowing through which reality is manifest for us are united through the judgement of sentiment. The final part of the trilogy, Critique of Judgement, continues the analysis of the will. It examines how the apprehended object is referred to the affective power of the will. The ego reflects upon an apprehended object and makes a judgement as to its emotive value. This is about sentient exigency, an embrace of the object as having a certain value regarding either purpose or pleasure. The sentient evaluation reveals those transcendents always in the eyes of philosophers: order and beauty. It also engenders in the ego a sense of satisfaction, a sense that one is a singular and free centre of creativity. The postulates of freedom, of immortality and of God made on the basis of the imperative thrust of will are herein given support in the power of will to evaluate the object according to orderliness and balance. This, again, does not constitute a “proof” of these merely postulated items, but it opens to man a vibrancy, a possibility of transcending the finite, the limitations of theoretical or “pure” knowledge. (This Kantian gazing toward an inherent inclination toward order, balance, and beauty will come to flourish in the Romantic Movement, while this possibility of transcendence will be converted into the incontrovertibility of the transcendent by Kant’s successors.)
It had been incrementally seeping into the occidental mind that the infinite and spiritual were ever and in every manner outside the grasp of reason. Hume had merely delivered the coup de grȃce. This understanding that we can speak of items spiritual only analogically had been anciently present, but before the Renaissance revelation was still considered either an acceptable supplement to metaphysics, or metaphysics a worthy handmaiden to revelation. For the new, the modern, the scientifically inspired man, a revealed religion is something questionable, and acceptable only if socially pragmatic. Furthermore, the idea of a natural religion which emerged out of this pragmatic focus was already beginning to prove itself as unstable an ideal as that of a natural society.
Kant took up this progress of thought regarding the impotence of reason before items spiritual and gave it a more refined groundwork within his exacting analysis of the structure of mind. In summation, he examined the process of theoretical (pure) knowing, and concluded its operation was founded upon mapping sensation according to an item’s place in time and space. Therefore, items not confinable to time-space, God and soul, could not be items of theoretical knowing. However, the mind has the faculty of not only processing sensations, but of willing. The will has to aspects: first, a primal thrust to act, and man being social by nature, to act rightly, and second, an ability to value an apprehended object as to its form and order, its capacity to please or be useful. These powers are beyond or more accurately, below the level of experience; they are the structure of the will. In willing to act and act rightly, the will reveals to man his inherent freedom, and if man is in this world free and free to act rightly, there must be, to compensate for this world’s inequities, some state wherein virtue can receive its merited bliss, immortality and a realm for the immortal. There must also be some guarantee for all this, some supreme and supremely just power, God. The second aspect of will, the power to give aesthetic value, supports these suppositions of free soul, immortality and God, for they engender the sense of freedom, of free man, as well as a sentience, a sapience, for proportionality and order, for purposeful man, artful man. Thus, Kant clinically removes God and soul from the realm of theoretical reason and gives them grounding in the powers of the will. Traditional philosophical speculation about God and soul, their nature and characteristics is impossible. The ideas of God and soul are not thereby eradicated. They have a root in the primitive powers of will, the will of moral man, social man, worldly man. Thus, theology and religion must arise out of social and moral man, not revelation, not mysticism, and certainly not a system of metaphysics.
The Kantian analysis does not, thus, place Christianity in extremis, rather it sets Christianity in a very Protestant position, a state wherein man cannot reach, cannot “really” reach out to God, where, therefore, God alone can reach out to man, where grace alone saves, or in more Kantian terms, wherein divinely set imperative moves man and divine presence guarantees. Teetering on that same fence as did Augustine, Kant made room in man for some receptivity for the transcending, and it is the will, the inner thrust for something unconditioned by the material world, an impulse to rise above man’s “radical” evil, his inclinations toward self-insularity, and to so act as if (and “as if” is almost a Kantian prefix in defining morality and reasonable religion) one’s act constituted the embodiment of a universal law. This evocation of goodness in the face of evil, of universality in act in the face of insularity of act, is triumphantly represented in Christ who constitutes the emergence of the Kingdom of God, the body of them that seek to emulate his victorious moral accomplishment. The inescapable tendency to institutionalize this ideal, this religion of autonomous reason and duty, unleashes a falsification, an idoliterization of the ideal replete with all manner of superstitions, elements that must ever be decried and rejected. There is here a very scriptural, a very Lutheran, immediacy of God and man, and it is moral, social, a matter of man-with-man, man-in-the-world. Heaven may still be there to secure the justice that this world cannot, but that is a reasonable assurance that good is never without due recompense. The world of moral man is the Kingdom of God. This world, not heaven, is the focus of man’s action. There is no room for miracle or mysticism; no place for ritual or prayer. With a force reminiscent of Plato, knowing rightly and being righteous are conjoined, and Kantian man’s bounden duty is understood to be so innately ensconced that man seemingly needs no discipline beyond sheer reason in which to be schooled, no artistry by which to be inspired. Resident in this religious inclination is the cogency lingering behind the minds of Lessing, Ritschl, and many of the twentieth century’s liberal theologians.[ii]
Kant surmounts many of the difficulties dredged up by the analytical approaches undertaken in rationalism and empiricism, and the vague notions of knowledge proffered in the Enlightenment. These all become compressed into a structural epistemological trinity of rational, evaluative, and aesthetic judgment wherein ideas of common sense and general will coagulate and manifest as the volitional imperative of duty. Kant’s work, however, embodies more than a functional synthesis of theories past; it is a fomenting of sundry intellectual forces preparing to erupt beyond the bounds of his synthesis, forces that will transform the imperative of the will into an all-embracing cosmic force, meld the noumenal and phenomenal worlds (mind, God, and world) into a singularity, and thrust up the pietist[iii] and deist religious movements of the times into new theological currents reshaping Christendom, currents of relentless critique, social gospel and liberalism, reactionary dogmatic and ethical conservatism, and scriptural literalism. Like Thomas in the thirteenth century, Kant is both end point of a progress, and beginning of a new event, an event still unfolding.
The twentieth century’s Henri Bergson considers Kant’s making of time and space a Newtonian grid-work on which to plot out experience deficient. Such a structuring allows only the examination of thing as a certain quantity, a frozen segmentation of reality. The Kantian analysis acknowledges this, claiming we have no certainty of the noumenal world, and it attempts to scale above this fragility of theoretical reason with recourse to the facilities dubbed the practicalities of reason, although they can claim to succeed only in positing certain exigencies, the unprovable, yet, seemingly requisite items. Bergson contends we do not know reality as a succession of things but as an endurance of things. A scientific mapping of sensation according to time-space does not present us the real world of constant change and motion. Below its abstracted, linear viewing of time, which is merely a mental symbol of worldly duration, the psyche reveals the true and heterogeneous nature of time–moments, events, experiences—ceaselessly becoming, blending together, permeating each other, melding past and future, memory and anticipation. Quantitative, numerical, mathematical, linear, graph-able time is a symbol, a code, consciously devised to break up reality into communicable pieces, into concepts, but inherent and at the base of this action is the loss of the self, a loss of the primal, principal perception of self as personal, spontaneous, free, enduring, vital, as an avatar of vitality itself, an élan vital. (Cf.: my On Time, March 2012)
If we merely look upon the self from the perspective of the impersonal, communicative, quantitative pieces delineated according to Kantian time-space, we find a conscious self determined by the chain of events, an automaton in an automated system. Here there is only to be found an action frozen in a time, a time artificially concretized, time abstracted from its vitality, its flow. But duration, the heterogeneous nature of experience, cannot be treated as extensity, as an object with extension, only and properly as quality. Intuitively putting aside the projected immobility of reality resultant of the Kantian time-space graphing, we are confronted with both the freedom of the self and the immediacy of the real, the noumenal world.
Kant, admittedly, is weaving primarily an epistemology and Bergson a metaphysics. Kant’s analysis, catoptric of the arguments that precede him, names the intellectual, logical deciphering of the world “pure reason”, theoretical reason, but realized its limitations, and thus proceeded to look to will, to the practicality of social man’s intellectual powers. Bergson, one might venture predisposed by the flow of time, by the thoughts of others (Condillac, Gerdil, Reid?), also marks the bounds of “pure” reason. Reason, intellect, is not the epitome of being human, it is rather a tool, an ability to pay attention to the world, a facility to make concepts, to mentally abstract from the flow of reality, and so to manipulate and make useful the world about us. Life is something more complex, more involved, more engaged than such making, such dealing with matter. There is a spontaneity to being, an incessant, enduring commixing of thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, actions which spins out novelties. They arise out of who we are, and they are who we are—free and alive. The mind has the power to step away from concepts, from freezing bits of time for dissection, and to bask in the endurance, the continuous-ness of becoming that is the reality of self and the world. This “intuition” is the living, moving, pulsing insertion of self into reality. It opens man, not to a logical exigency, but to the immediacy, the indisputable given-ness and presence of world and self. This alone reveals the reality of freedom, self, meaningfulness, joy.
The core of this zest of being, this élan for living, is God. This is God as creator and as He that is ever surpassing his creating. This is Creator magnified myriad times over in man, in world, in cosmos, ever evolving, and ever self-transcending.
An Excursus: I admit that when I was in university I found this vision of God, this evolving God, this God of “progress” theology, an untenable heresy. God had to be the timeless and unchanging, the forever the same, glorious frozen perfection. It took many years and trials to come to see God is something more than a celestial frappe. I am not about to deny the validity of attributing perfection to the divine, neither am I about to deny to the most Holy care, concern, compassion—all elements of being-with this temporal, ever changing, yet enduring cosmos, with me, with the reality of “man-in-the-world”. The relevance of God to any man establishes in the heart of man the relativity of God. The hopes and aspirations of every man establishes the transcendence of God. God—the perfect one (the Holy), the with-me, the for-me—name that, as does tradition, the divine trinity, the tri-parted unity of God, but it is still and ever shall be God seen with human heart, the beginning and end of all that which may not even have beginning and end, such terms being merely our grid to map an ungraspable cosmos. Just as Bergson notes I know the truth of myself and the world only with an inner eye, an intuition, so too can we know God only with an inner eye, an eye that has no forever fixed words, no incontrovertible images with which to tell its vision. The telling of that inner truth is found authentically only in the élan vital, the life well, graciously, joyously lived.
[i] Being of a certain age and of sufficient academic pedigree, I am going to be a wee adventurous and opine that if one consider closely the Aristotelean idea of assimilation and the Kantian idea of construction there is not a radical difference. The fulcrum is rather attitudinal. For Aristotle, and his disciples, Thomas Aquinas chief among them, there is a trust that the mind and the world are not opposed but apposed, that the systems of the mind that apprehend the world do so authentically within the unity of being, and so idea and world trustworthily correspond. In Kant we encounter the modern scientific caution, thus, the idea draws from the world, but it remains questionable as to the extent the mental picture and the world it is meant to represent are identical. The Renaissance and Reformation had definitely set in the occidental mind that man was capable of receiving the world, and indeed, the beyond of the world, in—at best– analogical, idiographic forms. Common sense may tell me the rectilinear lumps of wood and leather before me is my desk, but I also know they are, at a level beyond my normal perception, a swath of mostly empty space occupied by masses, whirls, strings, jumbles of infinitesimally tiny bits I have simply, by the mere construction of the system that is me, learned to identify as desk. I perceive my desk in “living colour”, but my dog sees it only in “black and white”, and the fly buzzing in the window sees it as I would if looking through a teleidoscope. Yet, my dog, the fly and I all manage to navigate the world “as if it were” as we perceive it. The human mind does not picture the world as does a dog’s, but there is a functional coordination for both of us. Aristotle and Kant both analyze the manner in which sensation of world becomes picture of world, Aristotle calls the end result a trustworthy assimilation, Kant dubs it a workable construct. Two millennia, two cultures, and not to disparage the progress of ideas, we are at potāto/potäto. I do not intend to discount that nuance upon changing nuance alters the psychic genetic code and moves the species on in paths hopefully suitable for spiritual, intellectual and physical survival and transcendence. However, we need ever be vigilant to discern that which we are trying to convey. Words, singular and multiple, can only effect so much. Too many arguments—academic, ecclesiastical, and political–have boiled over, sending tempers, peoples, and nations into states akin to the varied levels of Dante’s Inferno, and all for the sake of not being able to step back and discern the what, the functionality, of the said as opposed to the blunt and superficial how of what is said. The four gospels each repeat sayings reputed to have been on the lips of Jesus, but often we read the evangelists using them in differing ways, highlighting a particular theological vision, shifting their stress, if not their meaning. Words (spoken images), ideas (mental images)—these are malleable items, and mindful of Aristotle and Kant, we ought to receive them as reliable assimilations of the mind of the other, and real-ize that while we are fundament-ally not only identical to him who has spoken, we are also psycho-socially, historically, conditioned to receiving that assimilation according to a particular construct—the who, what, and wherefrom that constitutes the unique me. A word, be it the word of man or the Word of God, must always be received with humility, the vivifying awareness that reaching-out is to be taken as an indicative of authenticity, but that in the attempt to bridge the chasm of unique individualizations, it is also something open to misinterpretation. Hence, theologically, when Christianity turns to the idea of the tri-unity of the Godhead it invokes the ideograph that ultimately “God is Love”—a simplicity beyond resting/acting wherein the activating Word collapses into the swooning deliquescence of joyous Sigh, which Sigh defines its self and speaks of its eternal mind and extension, its “I am”/“Let be!”.
A goodly portion of twentieth century philosophy will be absorbed considering words, meaning, context, and a concomitant sector of theology will visit the ideas of analogy, metaphor, linguistics (Bultmann, Lindbeck, Hick, McFague, Ricoeur, Reuther, Tillich, Tracy).
An Excursus: Regarding nuance and evolution allow me to note nothing ever goes away, ceases to be (Bergson, Whitehead). It becomes infolded. Sin and hell never “go away”, they are infolded, transformed, redeemed, evolved into something new, something better. They are “saved”—preserved and reformed in their re-generation into something whole and wholesome, holy. This is basic psychology: we can grow, integrate, become integral. This is basic spirituality: we can grow in grace, by grace, to become the grace-full, the made holy.
Regarding words indulge me a brief reflection. Above I spoke of the potential of words to establish union betwixt minds, to create communion, to communicate. We value words. We give our averment with “you have my word”. We work with words, we play with words, we deeply know words are somehow at the source of us, our concepts, our thoughts, our reaching out to make community. They are profoundly creative sound-acts, and as thus, in a very real sense, sacred to us (as our philosophical heritage and Christian iconography of Logos reveal: “In the beginning was the Word and…the Word was God”!). We need always step back from the mere hearing of words, reading of words, and try worshipfully, obediently, respect-fully, receive that which they try of a heart, of a mind to convey. Faced with the world’s plurality of cults, cultures, and sub-cultures we must ever be mindful that while we are of one nature, we are many ways of seeing, hearing, appreciating, we are many voices. Can we find the song, the anthem, the hymn, that can worthily sound this polyphonic capacity—this rich harmonics that God, maker of all men, has scripted into our history? Are we ever to be, like my dog, fixated on some ritual, some particular recurrent process, some singular enunciation? Is Bergson right? Can we step back from our concepts, know ourselves free, and embrace not dissections of reality, but Reality? This is not a question of singing a “new song”. The question is more Pythagorean: can we step back and treasure that in the expanse of the cosmos we sing but one song, a harmony of richest textures, wherein the singers are the song, as is Dancer the dance?
[ii] A note on Reimarus, Lessing, Ritschl, Troeltsch, Niebuhr, Rauschenbusch, Segundo, Boff, and Song
While there was brewing inside Kant’s head the theories of his first Critique, there was published in Germany a work that quickly gained academic note. It was a critical examination of the Bible by Hermann Reimarus, professor of Hebrew and oriental languages. In his lifetime, adamant that God did not conjure up any religion other than Nature, Reimarus had defended the notion of natural religion. His arguments mirrored the work of Christian Wolff. (Wolff was a disciple of Leibnitz’s philosophy, and the fugleman of an army of eighteenth century German scholars, Kant included.) Reimarus’ views on natural religion were, thus, not revolutionary. However, in works withheld and only published posthumously, Reimarus reviewed the scriptures, and summoning countless contradictions, accused the biblical writers of fanatically, perversely, fraudulently inventing revelations and miracles, of manufacturing a supernatural religion. It proved to be the first volley in a war on holy writ and the dogmas it supported. Luther had wrestled the interpretation of scripture from the authority of the institution of church and handed it to everyman. Now, two centuries later, the academic fruits of that freedom were in flower. There followed critical examinations of the life of Jesus, the beginnings of a search for the historical person named Jesus (as distinct from the Jesus of Christian preaching, the Jesus proclaimed God’s Christ), historical examinations of the development of the early church and its teachings, critiques of the apostolic defalcation of the message of Jesus.
Reimarus was not alone in his opinions. In England, Samuel Clarke, a deist, had, like Locke, rendered Christian beliefs through the lens of reason. His contemporary, Anthony Collins, took a more pro-active tack, decimated the idea of revelation in a fierce attack on the Bible and its inconsistencies, and contumaciously dismissed all metaphysical speculations, contemporary and ancient, that doltishly attempted any reconciliation twixt the reality of evil and a belief in a benevolent God. Joseph Priestly would follow this with the reduction of all things spiritual to the realm of the ever evolving material. Paul-Henri Holbach, would also reduce reality to the material, and denounce all religions as purveyors of fear, ignorance, superstition, and enslavement—psychological and political. Christendom was at a stage wherein it could, and did, look to its roots with a fearsome and growingly critical eye. It was not always objective, nor comprehensive. It was a beginning, and it carried the flavour of a coming of age, an adolescent fledging, a making of that necessary leap from the parental nest and bond, a leap that always encloses some tincture of wanting to move-on and differentiate.
Gotthold Lessing, who had decided against a career in theology to become a playwright and critic, found himself one day editing Reimarus. Thereafter he became an advocate for natural and reasonable religion, claiming the value of any religion is founded in its fruits, in the good and godly men it produces. He had a sapience for the potential resident within a continuously developing cosmos, wherein God is ever revealing himself, and man ever progressing, ideas Christianity, he contented, had anciently encompassed within its visions of Trinity and eternal life. His conjoined interests in religion and language bore fruit in biblical studies, particularly in his mapping of the development of the synoptic gospels. He sets the critique of Christianity on a more positive basis.
While these scholars stand as backdrop to Kant, Kant also takes his place in the evolution of theological thought. Immediately in his wake stand Fitch, Shelling, Schleiermacher, and even a century after, Albert Ritschl can write of his indebtedness.
We sense the Kantian coulisse when Ritschl claims every religion is fundamentally social, and Christianity absolutely so, based upon Jesus Christ, founder of the Kingdom of God, which is humanity inspired by, motivated by, united by love. Speculative systems of support have no place in this Kingdom, neither has subjectivism. Religion is social, and only in and with society, in community, is love experienced (as divine grace), and effected (by human effort, or better said: embrace). Being social, Christianity is historical, and rooted in the historical concreteness of scripture. Being moral and non-speculative, its theology does not rest on either theoretical argumentation, or literalist interpretation, but upon evaluative judgments. Being social, moral, ethical, it has no need to scrutinize into spheres beyond this world. The paternal and loving nature of God is revealed in his Christ. This Christ and the God he reveals are not to be defined by metaphysis regarding notions of divine substance and nature. Christ is divine in, because of, his complete accord with the divine will—a will that men, weak and fallible, be in, grow in, fellowship and peace with one another and God, an estate characterized by the forgiveness, reconciliation, justification, affected by Christ’s work and suffering which awaken the consciousness of man, and arouse in him faith. In Ritschlian thought Luther’s theology and Kant’s epistemology meet–salvation by faith, the communal quest for the Kingdom in the ethical imperative to seek out the highest good, and theology, eschewing speculation, founded in, grounded in, history interpreted not by reason, but evaluative judgements.
Among Ritschl’s students was Ernst Troeltsch. In his considerations, the focus shifts from the “social” and “in-the world”-liness to history, specifically, the historical conditionality of church teaching, structure, action, and the relationship of church to the prevailing social order in which it exists.
Troeltsch insists the church must acknowledge its cultural biases, its immersion in Western culture and thought patterns. The traditional enunciations of the doctrines of incarnation and trinity arose out of ideas in ancient occidental philosophy. The relevance of these ideations has passed. Such manners of speech and definition are outdated. The scriptures must be understood within their historical context. Even the specific injunctions and actions of Jesus must be understood and appreciated within their socio-historical milieu. The importance of Jesus’ message resides in his character, his deep and abiding God-consciousness, his moral concern for others, his openness even to death upon the cross, and the dynamic response he, his words and actions, aroused in his followers. He remains central to Christianity as the focus for the transmittal of his teachings. The application of metaphysical notions to him and his work have lost all significance in the modern world. The same argument annihilates the doctrine of trinity. God is the Transcendent, the transcendent-ality of reality that encounters man at the core of man. This encounter is primarily personal, subjective; it becomes social only secondarily. Christianity in the West, replete with its doctrines, sacraments, and rituals, is a phenomena of the West. It is the superior form of religion of the West for the West, but because every civilization produces its own forms, this superiority is relative. There can be no argument for Christianity’s absolute status by appeal to revelation or miracle unless the church is willing to accede to the validity of such claims in other religions.
He saw the church of the day in crisis. Its intellectual foundations were crumbling and within them its power to move, and to lead. How could this entity of culture, this body of believers so influenced by the culture, inspire the culture? He contends true religion is an abiogenetic creature. It arises out of a transformative encounter within the individual. This individual foundation of religion is for Troeltsch absolute. Christianity is first and foremost about the relationship of God with a unique individual. It is realized in the formation of a social grouping. It is this social aspect of religion that influences its character and agenda, and this character and agenda are in continuous evolution with and within the greater social order. Thus, we find the early church, muchly missionary in character, enjoined an absolutist ethic. The stabilization of the institution gave rise to a more accommodating ethic. The mediaeval church simply was the abiding ethic, the institution that established the greater society, its morals and mores. The reformation returned the emphasis to individual responsibility and devotion. Luther’s vision was passive, calling for accommodation of the powers that be, while Calvin’s vision summoned the re-making of the world in the image of the elect. The Baptist movement opened the path back to a voluntary union of individuals, standing apart from the principal social order, but ever challenging it by a call to freedom of conscience. There has, thus, never been a singular, and therefore, absolute, Christian ethic. Church and the more encompassing social group, be it city-state or empire, have always interacted and influenced each other. The challenge for the church is to do so authentically and well.
Troeltsch had considerable cachet until Karl Barth countered with his commentary on Romans. Troeltsch came to be seen by many as the summation of all that was wrong with liberalism and relativism, everything that had colluded with the anility of the church and the collapse of society in World War I. Barth decreed Christianity is founded in faith in Jesus, the Christ of God, the sole revelation of God and his will for man. Nature and history are where sinful man stands. Opposed (we might say by grace “apposed”) and with arms open stands God in Christ.
Barth’s work still commands enormous intellectual prestige, but Troeltsch’s ideas and influence have not vanished form the face of the earth. An appreciation of the relativity of religious forms and formations, the recognition that church, its acts and words, arise within the confines of history—despite their inspiration in the eternal—persists.
Reinhold Niebuhr critiques Christianity in both its orthodox (traditional, conservative) and liberal forms. Orthodoxy has focused too much on the transcendence of God and on dogmas, ignoring the fact that the ultimate can only be spoken of symbolically, in myth, in poetry. Liberal Christianity has relativized, secularized, ethics and made man, pragmatic man, not God, the final judge. The ethic Jesus preached, however, was an exacting ethic, a love of God that cannot be enacted by man, cannot be fulfilled in history, a love that must ever abide in hope, in grace, ever await the final and definitive coming of God’s kingdom. This love is the “impossible possibility”; it ever transcends, and therein evokes. Humanity can only approximate it, and its approximation is justice.
The cross reveals that in God perfection and suffering are compatible. The triumph of God over the cross reveals perfection resides beyond history. The love of God revealed in the cross stands as a judgement on man’s sin, man’s self-interest, and the pervasive and debilitating corruption it spreads throughout society and all its institutions. The incomparable love of God stands as inspiration for justice, for a realistic ethic that approaches man in his varied circumstances, an ethic that is flexible and sensitive. The love of God not only inspires such, it stands its constant critique and negation.
A generation before Niebuhr, New York City pastor, Walter Rauschenbusch, confronted by the brutal social realities of his charges, turned to a reinterpretation of traditional doctrine and the idea of the Kingdom.
Rauschenbusch was convinced of the need for individual salvation, but realized sin and salvation were realities indivisibly individual and social. This is, he finds, inherent in Jesus’ preaching. In continuance of the tradition of the prophets, Jesus took their summons to fidelity from its ancient locus, the nation of Israel, and reiterated it to all the nations of the world. The embrace of Jesus’ message may begin with, have its primary place, in the heart of the individual, but man is not simply the individual, he is social. The greater the number of individuals that live Jesus’ message, the more society in general comes under its transformative power. In Jesus’ wording: the lone mustard seed grows into the great and self-perpetuating plant.
Christianity, however, rather than permeating society became infolded into the social milieu, and lost its vision for the reality of sin’s social dimensions. In concentrating on the reality of personal sin, on man’s corrosive self-absorption, on the personal relationship between sinner and redeemer, theology neglected the collective, super-personal force of evil. Salvation is not about turning away from selfishness to God, but turning at once toward God and to humanity. Jesus’ call for diaconia, for servant-hood, for care and co-operation, were lost in the personal focus of moral theology. The power of evil resident in all aspects of man’s world were ignored in the narrowly defined vision of personal salvation. The unchecked power of this socially embodied evil has in turn worked to continuously corrupt both man’s vision of God and his relationship with others.
Jesus, who is the initiator of the Kingdom, can no longer be defined in terms of traditional Christology based upon scriptural iconography and the ideas of occidental philosophy. He is to be understood as the one who has overcome the lure of mysticism, asceticism, pessimism, and defeatism by virtue of his God-consciousness. His death is the result of sin. It is the decisive revelation of love, of the solidarity of God with humanity. It is the paramount example of vicarious suffering. It inspires hope and courage, defies evil’s every vesture, and instills in the believer the strength to stand with Christ as a prophetic voice for the coming of God’s Kingdom. This Kingdom is “always coming”. It is the ideal that empowers the church, makes the church, reforms the church.
Juan Luis Segundo is perhaps the most articulate of the Latin American liberation theologians. He speaks of the relativity of religion in terms of a hermeneutic circle, a process that consists of a continuous reinterpretation of scripture. Scripture must be received and understood as speaking to the present, the ever changing socio-political, historical circumstances. It must be allowed to confront the present, challenge the present, guide the present into its transformative power, therein creating the new, the re-generate, which in its turn will need anew to be confronted of the power of holy writ. In brief, the church cannot present itself, its message, as an unalterable relic of times past. The church is in the world and must respond to, be comprehensible to the world. It must be effective within the present as the present. Indeed, the church’s theology has long been in an evolution, moving away from an antique dualism (which casts off the value of this world, this life, in favour of the hereafter) toward a holistic approach, a doctrine of the liberation of the whole man.
His contemporary, Leonardo Boff, analyzes the church’s historical prudence regarding an outright conjoining of socio-political liberation and salvation. The church can act to consecrate the world called to holiness in the incarnation of God, but must do so respectful of the fact that salvation always transcends the body, just as gospel always transcends individuated dogmas. Neither church nor state own history; they share history as the coparcenaries of creation and redemption. The church rightly approaches the situation of man from the vantage of gospel, not politics. It must offer guidance, critique, advice, admonishment in light of, in the grace of, God’s plan, God’s action, toward man in Christ. But the church cannot properly manufacture an all-embracing political system anymore than the state can manufacture a religion. Such theses are evident in papal teachings from Leo’s Rerum Novarum to John Paul’s Redemptor Hominis.
Making a slight turn in the tack of liberation theology is Choan Seng Song. Working not from an occidental, but an oriental perspective, he claims theology must be placed in cultural context. The insights, visions, and values of Christianity must be transposed, integrated, and contextualized into the given culture. They cannot be made to subvert or supress the culture. Their rightful function is to enrich the culture, to be, as it were, the added salt. To aver that God became man means God has entered humanity itself, not occidental man, not near-eastern man, not first century man. It means the acts of creation and redemption are intimately related, that all humanity—every time and culture—has been made and made free to imagine, to see, to act, to “theo-ologize” the world. According to Song, Christ is not necessarily the only, the unique, or the absolute revelation of God, but he is the decisive, he through whom every culture is opened to find its fullness. The God revealed in Christ is the God who is with the world, who suffers along with the world, who offers hope to the world. This revealed, divine, com-passionate, redemptive love is the basis of both justice and liberation—political and spiritual. The Christian mission is to embody this love and com-passion, to suffer with the peoples, to offer true incarnational hope, hope for body and soul, liberty from sin and from injustice.
In noting the work of the above scholars, it has not been my intention to claim they stand in direct dependence upon Kant or even one to the other. I have simply looked upon certain facets of their teachings and traced a mere thread that passes through Kant and on into our present, a sightline concerning the historicity of man’s religious ventures, their social nature, their social concern, the incapacity of pure reason to transcend the bounds of the quotidian world, or to establish that which must ever rest in praxis and the giving of value to that which demands value—freedom and duty before men to men, to which the religious soul rightly will add “by the grace of God”.
[iii] A note on Pietism
The making of the cosmos into a mechanically operational entity, an automaton, a machine, reduced the role of God in the cosmos, to the minds of many, to that of maker. Once the machine had been made, once it had been set in motion with its own inherent laws and functions, there was no need, no room, for interference. Alternately, the Maker of this magnificent machine must be of such immutable perfection, that to presume of him any interest or involvement with the item of his manufacture beyond its manufacture amounts to a derogation of his omniscient dignity. In the unfolding story of cosmos the role of God is properly confined to the frontispiece, subscribed under “published by”. Such is, at root, Deism.
The making of religion in the aftermath of the reformation into the wearisome and tedious retelling of dogmatic positions reduced spirituality to rote recitals of insipidities, to ventures beyond the bland and boring. The spirit needed to be freed, not tethered to the preacher’s box. One need not plummet the depths of Kantian notions of duty and aesthetic judgment to espy that in a world discovering its materiality, its sociality, its natural-ness, emotive man was rousing to the response. That response is dubbed Pietism.
Pietism, like deism, like most –isms, is not homogenous; it comes in many flavours, as many I conjecture as the number of its systematisers, and probably its adherents. Piety, an inner emotive experience with God or his Christ, a depth of religious feeling, expressing itself in the privacy of devotion or the sociality of action was not an unknown in either the ancient or mediaeval church. It was present within the reformed tradition from the beginnings (Arndt). But this sense of devotion, of emotion, this hemi-semi-demi-mysticism was not the principal tone of reformed theology and practice. It sapped too much of the trappings the reformation was wont to extirpate. However, as in any living system, there comes a tipping point, wherein the one-sided, the blind-sided, obsession with one end of the spectrum, causes a tilt toward the other.
In the dusk of the seventeenth century, Philipp Jakob Spener published his desiderations for the fostering of piety in the church. Salvation may be by faith alone, and man may be both sinner and saved, but Christian life is rooted in an intimate personal relationship with Christ, the redeemer. This is a vibrancy that informs all aspects of one’s being. Faith is not an intellectual assent to points of a creed. It is an unfolding journey, a venture of being gospel (evangel) people, and it ought to show forth both before God and men gratitude and joy. Spener was not about to eject church structure, but his emphasis on the individual and the scriptural “priesthood of all believers” excited official opposition. Neither was he about to call for justification through good works, but noted that our life in Christ is properly something about which to be glad, and thankful, and that such ought to be patent in the living of life, a life in a world too populated of the needy, the downtrodden, the heathen, the forgotten.
This attitude constitutes a continuance of the reformation, a focal thrust from reform of doctrine and authority to the reform of witness and service. It is a shift from belief in articles of faith to an active, a living, faith, a continuous unfolding of a relationship with God in Christ in the Spirit in the world. The Pietists perceived the church needed to move from being dogmatic to being pastoral, from being a church of words to being a church of spirit. This importance of pastoral concern, and the immediacy of a personal relationship with God in Christ through the power of the Spirit has always been present. It is there in Luther, it was augured in the twelfth century Joachim of Fiore (Cf.: Occidental Ideas, Part 13, April 2014), and it infuses the papacy of Francis. Our human power of focus is, however, feeble, and the trudge of time and circumstance often befuddle the best intentions. Herein resides a paradox of practice, for intentions need always be weighed, inspired, directed, and the forum for that makes institution, an entity that self-perpetuates by systems, by becoming functions of rules and words. Individuals, churches, societies must, thus, be in a state of continuous reformation, of realignment with ever flowing time.
Nikolaus Zinzendorf took Spener’s focus on the Lutheran church in Germany and gave it an ecumenical expanse. His efforts were not to establish an inter-communion among churches, but to instill into Christendom a charitable sensitivity for maintaining a permeating fraternity, a primacy of place for “heart”. His vision continues to invigorate evangelical and ecumenical efforts, and together with Spener he foreshadows much of modern religious thought and practice: the theologies of F. D. E. Schleiermacher, of Jonathan Edwards and the American revival movements, of John Wesley and Methodism, of the Moravian Brethren, and not least, the revivification of missionary undertakings by sundry denominations.
An Excursus: I will be cautionary and note that the effort to generate a religion of heart, of love for God and neighbour, does not always incarnate. It often dies in utero. It is the good seed that fails to root, falls to barren ground.
As I began this article with an observation of my dog, I shall end it with two other. My dog is assiduously well behaved. He is not a socio-path. He wants to be a viable member of our social grouping, our pack. On occasion he deviates from the accepted order, and urinates on the rug in front of the door. I can respond by pointing out the offensive spot and delivering a “therapeutic” slap on the bottom, by yelling, or some such action, or I can try to plummet the reason for such activity—a certain treat given too late in the evening, a visit form a friend who works with horses and who, detectably to my dog, tends to carry the smell of horses on her shoes, etc. If I can decipher the reason for the action, correct it, the offending act ought to cease. It does. Too often, people stirred by some experience of “being saved”, spiritually enlightened, call it what you will, become so ballooned with their own elevation of self they forget their humanity, their membership in frail humanity, and feel they are entitled to discipline [to enforce disciple-ship upon] them they find to be of offensive behaviour by yelling, scolding, or some other stern and harsh force. They are, in brief, so full of themselves, they have left no room for love—either of God or man. They have suppressed the ability to plummet the why and wherefrom of another, to stand in another’s shoes, another’s history, to appreciate the other, and the fact that the other is as beloved of God as are they. Compassion and understanding do not wear the spiritual equivalents of jackboots and brown shirt.
My dog can also become exceedingly excited when a visitor arrives. He will run in circles to find a favourite toy, then toss it about with over-wrought flourish, or make a point of stuffing it in some virtually irretrievable place thus allowing himself the excuse of show-stopping whimpering and tears. He will do whatever he must that all attention be set on him. It is an infantile behaviour, that overly energetic and boisterous bouncing off the walls that children are wont to use, the not so subtle form of “look at me”. There is occasionally in the rush and excitation of feeling stimulated by some “religious” stirring—although discernment will reveal it neither healthful nor holy—such infantile reaction. Last week there was on the subway with me a middle-aged woman who stood up in the middle of the car and began loudly reciting verses from scripture punctuated with “Alleluia God” and “Praise you Jesus”. Everyone was wise enough to avoid eye contact lest it cause the situation to escalate. I sat there and contemplated how many of my fellow passengers in this secular city were being “turned-off” to God, to church, to religion simply because they saw it here as the preserve of the “crazy”. Shortly before this bout of “evangelizing”, another woman entered the car. Around her neck hung a small cross. When the passenger opposite me moved some parcels that she might have a seat, the woman smiled warmly and said “thank you”. A silent token of faith, a smile, a quiet thanks—and I am of a mind that here was the greater act of evangelism. One cannot yell God, faith, hope, or love into another anymore than one can beat it into another.
The soul (religious term), the psyche (psychological term), moved by finding itself loved, accepted for itself as itself, and called to its holiness (religious term), its wholeness (psychological term), deeply knows the parameters of that call, its fragility and its pure potentiality. Love (and I do not mean fascination or titillation), whether one understand it psychologically as coming from the all-integrating Self or religiously as coming from God, is as humbling as it is joyous. It knows its shortfalls. It knows its treasuring. It knows the gifting, the graciousness, the surprise of love, the capacity of love to be novel, to create new vistas and insights. It has no need to beat-up on anyone—psychologically, spiritually, verbally or physically. It knows love abides, endures, stands by and with the beloved (be that self or other). It knows it transforms in being there (in theological terms: as the incarnate). It knows its presence, not words, opens heart and mind. Jesus did not berate them popularly held to be sinners, but he did, and rather sternly, accuse some among the popularly most respected of being “hypocrites”. To his mind they were so obsessed with showing forth their righteousness, their moral superiority, their graced enlightenment, so, in brief, full of themselves as to have no mind or heart left for others. Jesus calls them “white-washed sepulchres”, all polished and blazoned on the outside and internally a mass of spiritual rot and darkness where once there was a capacity for humanity.
There needs be added to the above several caveats.
First, too often has emotive man, the inwardly stirred man, not duly discerned the basis of the stirring, the parameters of the elation of self. Is it all emotion without substance, mere flash without enduring light? Is its fruit humility, joy, gratitude, graciousness toward others or brash moral coxcombry? Is it manifest in simplicity of act or some ostentatious self-aggrandizement? Is it of God or of a man in need of a sense of identity? Is it of God or is it a hiding from God under the cover of “Alleluia”? If it is truly of good, it will endure. It may waver, fail under trial, but it will survive. If it is merely a shadow cast to shield oneself from the whole, the Holy, it will either not last or it will destroy; it will prove either unsustainable or fatal, a seed cast into stones, or eaten my birds. (Cf.: on the Evagination of Values, and on the Evolution of Integration published within Occidental Ideas, Part 8, February 2014)
Second, Love does not come with strings attached. There are, however, some who use pastoral outreach—which is properly an act of love—not only as a string but as a brail to haul in a liege. This tends not to produce converts, but it does engender socio-political support. A goodly portion of fundamentalists, Christian and other, have of recent times used this to great advantage in securing both funding and influence.
Third, dogma, doctrine, is not the language in which one communicates faith. Faith is a personal coming together. Dogma is the internal language of the community of faith, the verbal imagery adopted by the community for the sake of the community’s shared meditation on the Holy, the agreed-to imagery of its spirituality, its ritual. It is a ritual language, a private language, a sacred set of symbols for that which is beyond human word. To use it as a medium of proselytization is, dependent upon the position from which one critiques, either meaningless or sacrilegious. Love’s private words are not to be profaned. They who think otherwise, who would utter words of a communion shared, of love’s whispers and wonderments, to them outside the sacred union are akin to the manque who feel that the baring of their flesh will garner them celebrity rather than notoriety. The church’s proper speech to the world is pastoral action, not dogmatic diatribe. (Cf.: System and the proper use of language, February 2012, on Language and the meaning of Christianity, May 2012, on Being Christian–3, Vitality vs. Dogmatics April 2013)
Last, they who are inclined to understand my Self/God connection as an equation ought to note that it may be so taken and/or Self may be taken as a reflection of God, as is the traditional stance of theology. The modern quizzing revolves about the issue: are we discussing the same power, two distinct powers, or one power in two manifestations, a transcendent and an immanent dynamic? The reply to that is a matter either of rational speculation or of faith. The response, the proper response, to the summons to Wholeness of Self/Holiness is invariable. The action called forth is one and the same whether one understand its origin from the depths within or the heights beyond. It is, as Kant would say, a matter of a categorical imperative to duty, to so act as if this act is the incarnation of an eternal rule, so act as if this act (dependent upon the system of choice: rightly, justly, reasonably, civilly, graciously) manifests the incessant flow of life toward being whole, being holy.