Aristotle attempted the great synthesis of the Greek world, and there followed him lesser lights, each capturing the stage with some bit of theory or insight, and spreading it out as if a whole. The same lack of acuity plays itself out after Aquinas. After Kant, his system is shredded in search of the noumenal. This is not something completely in the hands of individuals. We are all, in one way or another, pawns of the great tides of thought and attitude that drift across the consciousness of the species, caught up in the endless seething to illuminate our boundaries, our whence, why and whereto, to assure ourselves their intellectual integrity, to continuously refine our understanding of our finitude within a cosmic infinitude. The Enlightenment had extinguished itself. While contributive to our journey, its discounting of the past, its celebrating of the “natural” and “common sense” proved failed experiments. Now all things past become the treasured, and individual creativity is elevated to divine status. Novalis writes: “the world is a dream and the dream becomes the world”. The new age, the age of Romanticism, weaves its dreams. It is no less impassioned or emotional than was the Enlightenment, but its reveries exude a mystical brume, a gouache of the aesthetic, erotic, and intuitive, the edges blurring as the infinite everywhere distils the finite. The dreamers are the likes of Goethe, Schlegel, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelly, Turner, Constable, Goya, Delacroix, Beethoven, Bellini, Weber von Weber, Donazetti, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and their oneirocritics are Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Herbert, Beneke, Weiss, Schleiermacher.
In Kant’s mind, God, world and soul are all non-conceptual items. We can “know” them only as subjective codes for organizing ideas, as postulates of will, as subjective exigencies of the valuations of purposefulness and beauty. But it may be argued that these items postulated and found exigent in the will are mere illusions, and this brings us back to Hume. It may also be argued that since will is the law-giver, the impresser of form on matter, this activity of will cannot be relegated solely to the sphere of morals and aesthetics. It impresses all; it is the creative mind. This brings us back to a type of Platonism, an Idealism. The mind, the ego, no longer organizes and values, no longer “constructs”, it creates. But, we can expand the critique of Kant. Kant claims we never know the world as it exists “in-itself”, we merely order our experience of it (as phenomena). But if the “as it is in-itself” world is unknowable, why posit it? This brings us back to Berkeley. But here, in the aftermath of Kant, not only does world vanish into the creativity of the ego, so too does God. There is one reality, The Ego. It is absolute, transcending. It is both subject and object, thought and being, God and world. This brings us back to Spinoza.
Kant had sought to deal with how we know, and within that investigation demonstrate how we arrive, legitimately arrive, at the ideas of world, self, free will, morality, immortality, and God. His successors in the texts of Western thought, beginning with Fichte, seemingly gloss over the foundations of his inquiry, and mine it instead not for some understanding of how we come to know the universe, but for a comprehension of the very soul of the universe “in-itself”, something Kant specifically claims is impossible, except as exigencies of valuation and aesthetics. But Romanticism wants to dream, and it behoves the dream to be beautiful. Therein is all the justification it needs, its valuations and aesthetics (Lessing).
Thomas Reid had noted every statement of “this is” implies another statement, “I am”. He deemed Kant was in error to claim “things-in-themselves” somehow exist independent of thought. Johann Gottlieb Fichte believed all philosophical investigations had been going in circles, constantly confused by ill-phrased questions and faulty hypotheses. He decided to discover the one fundamental principle that could explain everything, consciousness and thing, ego and world.
According to Fichte, I establish my consciousness of self by (unconsciously, spontaneously) projecting something beyond my self. This something is the contrast that allows the self to see itself. This contrast projected outside of self is the experiential gestalt, the world of things. In brief, ego implies non-ego; they come to light simultaneously. To explain the existence of the multitude of particulars he posits a transcending Ego, an Absolute Ego, which thinks itself in the particular egos and their external objects. With this we return to a rational first cause causing particular rational souls and the world, a semi-Neo-Platonic One renamed Absolute Ego, producing nature out of itself, and thereby limiting itself, objectifying itself, and then reflecting upon itself in an endless movement from that which it is to that which it should be–absolute self-consciousness achieved in the attainment of complete self-knowledge. The absolute Ego proceeds by thrusts, creating things other than itself until it creates a entity capable of reasoning and finding in itself the trace of the Absolute, giving the Absolute the platform for becoming self-aware, self-conscious, self-fulfilled.
This Absolute is neither a being nor a substance. It is a pulsing, a thrusting, a striving, a process. It proceeds by endlessly projecting from within itself obstacles to overcome, contrasts in which to find its reflection. This striving by differentiation implies a will, and thus, Absolute Ego is to be understood as Absolute Will, a Will with no other purpose than to be conscious of itself, a consciousness attained by freely, spontaneously acting to make that in which it can find and know the truth of itself, its “very self”. This Absolute Willing is God, an ideal eternally unrealized, eternally in process, in progression toward Self. (As such this reads as if coming from a text on depth psychology, but can it be accounted metaphysics, the statement of a cosmic first principle? Ludwig Feuerbach would contend it cannot, that the Absolute Ego/Self/Will is not the basis of reality, merely a wishful projection by an individual ego/self/will onto a cosmic screen, a making of a God in the image of a man.)
The truth of man, the ultimate well-being, the salva-tion, of man rests in consenting to this eternally evolving ideal toward which the Absolute is striving, and with discipline in the face of life’s pleasures and pains, freely become one in the struggle, freely will the ideal despite its eternal ideal-ity. The path of ascent is the familiar, but it is for Fichte reiterated in terms of his age, a romantic age wherein art and artist supersede the once sacred status of cult and saint. Man must look to those ancient transcending ideals of beauty, truth, good, and in their consideration find the freedom to rise upward beyond sensation, reason, and understanding, until the intellect comes to the pureness of light, the awareness of its one-ness with the divine. We have here the full flowering of our being, Plato’s “divine madness”, an ecstasy, the definitive enlightenment that my purpose, my mission, is to be the presence of the eternal within my time.
Friedrich von Schelling wrote to ensure this Absolute Ego renamed Absolute Spirit is not misunderstood as nullified in its self-objectification as nature, that the notions of spirit and absolute not be diluted by ideas of its unfolding as nature, and that nature not be misunderstood as something purely passive in the hands of Spirit. Both spirit and nature, ego and non-ego have inherent dynamics. However, as in Fichte, Spirit is the absolute; there is nothing outside of Spirit. Within this Absolute Spirit there are no distinctions. Within it is pure identity: conscious and unconscious, subject and object, spirit and matter, ego and non-ego, death and desire are all in a state of rest, an apathia (indifference). This Spirit freely, spontaneously, and eternally permeates all, manifesting itself in the finite, as the finite, in order that the distinctions of ego and non-ego, subject and object, etc. become expressed, developed, and overcome; it pulses forward until the identity of opposites resolves itself as the culminating unity, the one-ness of being.
The Spirit is God, an eternal process, something beyond reason or personhood, but reaching its manifest apex in rational man. In the human experience, the force of the creative movement from the divine back to the divine is experienced as the opposition twixt good and evil, a temporal tension requisite for the self-realization of the Absolute. Man is fully man in replicating within this self-determination, realizing, that like the artist, his work, here his self, is something of which he is, not by external necessities or laws, but by his very and own nature the free and spontaneous creator. Man can open himself to this power of being and its thrust, its free will toward unity, and incarnate that striving for unity within himself and his world. This is not a matter of wishful thinking or projection. It is very much a finding of God at once as beyond and within, the infinite in the finite, reality emerging from unconsciousness into self-consciousness, grace superseding moralism, freedom defining determinism, the religion of salvation become the art of living sanely.
(Schelling is the fulcrum twixt Fichte and Hegel. His process of the divine unfolding into nature and resolving back into itself is akin to that which we find in Erigena. It references the dynamic of traditional Trinitarian theology that speaks of the divine mission of creation, redemption, perfection and final return to the Godhead. It is reminiscent of Spinoza, and divers mystics, Christian and other. His cosmic ideas, his anthropology, and his ethics echo through much of late nineteenth and early twentieth century theology.)
G.W. F. Hegel continues the neo-Platonic idealist transcending (upending?) of Kant. He underscores the Absolute is the World-process, pure and simple. There is no transcending ego or absolute spirit engendering a process. The Absolute is the process. It is an evolution of idea in existence, culminating in total self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Being and thinking, or existence and idea, are two terms to denote one act, an organic unity, distinguishable only logically. The Absolute is idea manifesting and experiencing itself (existing) as nature, striving in nature, by nature, its creature within itself, to return to itself.
In man, the Absolute becomes conscious of itself, its freedom, and the eternality of this quest for self-realization. There is no goal other than itself. It is activity objectifying itself, living out every possibility. At every moment it is itself fully realized. There is no divinity toward which creation is moving. There is no end toward which everything is moving. The moving is everything. The divine, the end, the self-realization, the self-satisfaction is the movement, the process, the fullness of actualization that is the now.
The Absolute objectifies itself in order to gain knowledge of itself, consciousness of itself. Its actualizations in nature are unconscious. In man the actualizations culminate, and the Absolute becomes conscious of itself, knows itself. As theologians are fond of pointing out, by this logic, in man’s knowing and loving God, God knows and loves himself. In man the infinite becomes manifest as creative power, language, culture, art, religion, philosophy, the state. In man the infinite comes to know itself and can enunciate the dynamics of the eternal process: the continuous, hierarchical, all-embracing synthesizing of two forces toward their reconciliation in a transcendence, a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that can be variably expressed as being-nonbeing-becoming, Idea-Nature-Spirit, essence-existence-change, actuality-potentiality-fact, individual freedom-social compulsion-the state, art-religion-philosophy, freedom of the individual-societal obligations-the moral will.
The Absolute cannot reach full self-consciousness in the individual, and thus, it moves on toward super-individual forms. This is actualised within man’s nature, his constitutional sociality. Man’s fulfilment, his happiness, can be achieved only in society, in the proper performance of social duty, as member of a family, as citizen, as member of the state (which is not for Hegel a geo-political entity so much as an abiding synthesis of cult and culture).[i] The state constitutes the revelation of the Absolute in its freedom. There is, however, another dialectic, that of art-religion-philosophy, and it is in the last that occurs the supreme manifestation of the Absolute. Christianity may stand the all-reconciling religion, for in its doctrine of the Trinity is found the synthesis of the symbolic and moral, the eternal Father (pure identity), the Son (difference in identity), the Spirit (return to identity as unity).[ii] Nevertheless, since the essence religion revolves about mystery, imagination, faith, no religion can ultimately reconcile the subjective and objective aspects of the Absolute. That reconciliation must entail all religions, and can only be attained in philosophy, in the logical demonstration and understanding of the at once identity and unity of absolute objectivity and subjectivity.[iii]
Karl Marx rejected any evolution of an Absolute Mind. The world process does not suggest any moral plan or purpose. The essential characteristic of the cosmos is matter in continuous motion. The human mind is not a fallen bit of eternal spirit, not a manifestation of some infinite activating principle. It is simply matter having moved, evolved, and reached a new and causal level within nature. Mind is a manifest of matter’s mobility, a tool evolved for dealing with our world. Therefore, all knowledge is fundamentally utilitarian. The truth of anything is not an abstract, not an ideal, but a functional value, the usefulness of a thing. Man is, thus, not some pawn of nature’s unfolding, but a causal force within nature, a co-determinate of nature, a master in his own fate. That fate is not fulfilled in passivity, indifference to the world, escape form the world, some phantasy of contemplation, but in action, in history, in the materiality of man’s world. Marx’s materialism is about the orderly management, the eco-nomics, of the world: ownership, production, distribution, wealth, progress, the proper use of all things that stand to provide for and foster both the tangible and intangible necessities of human life.
Any sense of estrangement or alienation man may experience comes not from a tension twixt the infinite seeking to fulfil itself through becoming the finite (Hegel), not some falling from innocence into knowing (Kierkegaard), but the very structure of the capitalist state, any system that disorders and mismanages the world. Capitalism is a dehumanizing system wherein the cycle of production and consumption rules all, making all men cogs, perverted in consumerism, made resources[iv] of a system wherein thing becomes supreme. Man is not a means to making and consuming things. Man is the end. This entire thrust toward things has disoriented and debilitated humankind. As soon as one man said “this is mine” and convinced others to accede, once others scrambled to divvy up the world into countless bits called “mine”, the course was set toward a false vision of man, replete with all manner of inequalities, false divisions and distinctions, subjugations, and strife. Man is not inherently, authentically, primarily an individual that makes an assortment of concessions to be with others. Man is primarily, naturally, social. Humanity is an organic whole, and any dividing of it into cells, bits and pieces, can be no more than a logical, a logistical exercise. It follows that human thinking that is not collective, not about the common good, is suicidal.
Religion has always served as a tool in the hands of the privileged to sanction the status quo, to quell the masses with the promise of fulfilment in a world to come. It and all the other instruments that have been so long used to subjugate the masses that the few may flourish denigrate humanity. The making of man into a means must come to an end. It is a revolutionary idea.
Ludwig Feuerbach rejected all looking to an absolute mind or spirit as the first principle, prime cause, final cause, or creator-redeemer, as no more than wistful, wishful thinking. He plays the modern Xenophanes. Be it called Absolute Spirit, Absolute Will, Yahweh, The God and Father of Jesus Christ, or any other name, the divine is merely a projection of man’s ultimate hopes mapped onto the cosmos. The true object of religion is not a being analogical to man, not the bliss of a world yet to come, but man himself, man’s ideals, man’s world, man’s society, man’s happiness in the here and now. Any cult which is not the cult of man, which does not serve man and his well-being here and now, is as delusory as destructive.
Arthur Schopenhauer found the cosmic analyses of both Fitch and Hegel simply wishful projections of ideas about law and order, reason and moral purpose elevated to primal causal status. The sensible manifold is sorted out by reason, given its mapping in time-space, codified within notions of substantiality, cause-effect, etc. Ideas are sorted by reason, related, and inferred one from another. Experience is turned into something communicable and useful by reason. This means sensation is fundamental, and reason merely the means of making sensation useful. Reason provides no mechanism to go behind, beyond, or above our sense experience.
There exists, however, one object of knowledge that we know not only by perception of its external, sensible characteristics, not merely through an abstracted concept, but with an inner immediacy and connectivity. That object is the subject. This “I” can only be understood as will, my will. My will is exclusively mine. Every other body I experience is either without it, outside of it, or beyond it. My will defines me such that I am the objectification of my will. This is not to say will “causes” my body or my world, for will is neither spatial nor temporal, and causation is merely a rational correlation of the spatio-temporal. Here Schopenhauer leaps from psychology to metaphysics, from my will to Will itself. Will alone transcends world data. It is above all phenomena, the singular “thing-in-itself”. My will is a manifest of Will, the pure power-to-be. Will manifests itself to me internally as self and externally as all other. Will is the world-process.
Will must be understood as an irrational thrust to be. If we consider the world, we find not reason and moral purpose, not law and order. The world is a mass of conflicting, contradictory, more often chaotic movements. It is amoral, blind, a jumble of pure cravings to be, and to be triumphant. It is beyond bounds of right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain. Every manifestation of Will seeks to maintain itself against all others in a battle eternally waged. It is a tragic battle for it has no end.
Will, this blind pulse to be, to live, is experienced in man as an unfathomable stream of desiring. All attempts to satisfy this multiplex of wanting are futile. Thus, all life is mired in frustration, distress, pain, suffering. All attempts to hide this from ourselves with notions of pleasure, progress, and love are fleeting deceits. Man can rise above this tragedy of existence only by burking the will, by ceasing to desire, to strive, to struggle.
The route of escape begins with aesthetic contemplation. Schopenhauer looks to the Platonic ideas of the good, beauty, truth. Like the Will itself these are eternal and capable of being contemplated for themselves. In their contemplation, the ego becomes momentarily lost as the sublime is glimpsed. Desire is cloyed. This, however, is a passing shadow. It merely quiets the Will, suspends desire.
We can move beyond such contemplation. We can mortify the ego. We must come to appreciate Will as the groundwork of life’s chaos and ruthlessness. We must comprehend good and evil, pleasure and pain arise out of the belligerence of one ego against another, one thing against another, that every life causes the sin and suffering of every other, and every life carries within it the sin and suffering of every other. Awakened to this putridity of life, we can embrace an ethic of compassion and empathy for all men. Yet, this mortification, like the aesthetic contemplation, gives merely a moment of quiet. It cannot extinguish the Will. No mystical self-renunciation, not even death can silence Will, for individual manifestations of Will will endlessly come into being and pass away, but Will remains.
There is a final escape mechanism. It is the withdrawal into the disciplines of asceticism, the renunciation of the very will to desire, to will, to live. Is such nullification of the ego, the will to not will, a possibility? Will is free, and if it can will to objectify itself, it can will to not be. If an individual manifest of the Will can feely will to will no more, might this not say something deeper about Will itself? Can Will Itself will its emptiness, its Nirvana? Does the Will-to-Be end in purest pessimism, the thrust to nullify itself? Is thus how ends Romanticism’s creative ego? The very asking tells us the dream is ended.
An Excursus: Schopenhauer was well acquainted with Buddhist thought regarding desire, suffering, and detachment. His philosophical analyses echo the Buddhist journey to Nirvana. However, in reading Schopenhauer I do not sense a joy of transcending all bounds or realms of being. By the nineteenth century the ability of traditional Western thought and religion to inspire had grown insipid, and many great minds oriented themselves toward another light. In Schopenhauer, as indeed in many of his Eastward peering confreres, I do not detect elevation, enlightenment, or salvation so much as the surrendering slump of a body crucified, hung to self-extinguishing exhaustion upon the crossed bars of cultural and cultic demise. That which here resonates is resignation not transcendence, not the quiet exhilaration of sheer freedom. We still, as a culture, linger in this resignation and its encroaching and vapid anility, awaiting not a metamorphosis, a metempsychosis or a palingenesis, but merely the deliverer of the coup de grace. We stand before Grunewald’s Isenheim Crucifixion become Munch’s The Scream, framed in silence, not the silence of “the peace that surpasseth all understanding”, not the silence of Nirvana, but the silence of dispirited desolation, a lumen sine lumine, a light without light, knowledge without understanding, feelings without love, without passion, without compassion, an infantile paralysis of the soul.
There is a strong emotive element that underlies this age. It gives an optimism to Fitch and Schelling, it darkens in Feuerbach and Marx, it surrenders in Schopenhauer. Emotion cannot simply float a gossamer in the air. It must link to something, give colour to something, and as with all things human, it may do that positively or negatively. With positivity an emotive link may mature and eventually fledge toward a unitive action, a vivification in union, a growth of community. With negativity it eventually collapses into an endophagous, all-consuming ennui of self-loathing rooted in the quiet loss of self-value, devouring personhood to supply itself with power and domination, manifesting as entitled self-indulgence and a disregard of others. Both such fledging and collapse materialize in the nineteenth century— the paced evolution of humanistic values, human rights, genuine social concern, toddling, but none the less realistic, efforts toward a deeper comity of nations, churches, charitable and aid organizations countered by the meteoric assent of unscrupulous, unbridled capitalism coupled in consumeristic colonialism. This era began in so copiously seeing the transcending in nature, yet, as Feuerbach and Marx presage, its faltering to find in that a new world of man left man adrift to near destroy the totality of the old world.
I have noted that with the Renaissance and Reformation the unitary wave upon which occidental thought developed definitively gave way to a system of multiple waves. The two functions of the old wave, the ideologies of Plato and Aristotle, the ideal and the real, feather out into a series of diverging and converging systems. After Hegel, three major currents may be discerned in contemporary thought: one centres upon the materiality of being, another on the dialogical unfolding of reality, and the last, reacting to the apotheosis of ego in Hegel, finds the ego, and thereby the world, nestled in the particular and individual. Every possible variation is found within each of these main currents, and were we to make a chart of all this, it would indubitably look like a child’s engrossed scrawling. History has yet to edit and distil this jumble of opinion, and so we must try envision the truth as best we can, keeping in mind that, as in times past, each investigator merits to be accepted as sincere and earnest about his workings, but also that no one is capable of looking upon the field of inquiry from every possible position simultaneously. Every philosophical system is merely a facet, a window into a catoptric hyaline reality, providing a glimpse into reality but also casting a halation onto the viewer. Pilate, the pragmatic Roman adjudicator, sarcastically asks of Jesus “What is truth?” The gospel wherein this scene is played out upholds Jesus as the truth, the incarnate balance betwixt heaven and earth, the ideal and the real. Jesus’ inquisitor knows only a balance betwixt legalities and pragmatics. Theological visions and politics are rarely of one mind, at least one sane mind. Philosophy, true to its name, love of wisdom, attempts to mediate between them.
[i] A great deal of conflict in this world would never have found root had politicos of all stripes considered this living nexus of cult-culture as the defining reality of nation states, rather than flat geographical boundaries.
[ii] Trinitarian Theology, Sex, and Pictures
Hegel’s dialectic has held monumental power over contemporary theology, particularly in the reinterpretation of the traditional envisionment of the Trinity. Firmly rooted in Scripture, the ancient idea of the Trinity had the creation and redemption of the world move from Father to Son through Spirit and then returned to the Father by the Son in the Spirit. It is cyclical, or if you will, cubic. In no small part, thanks to the Hegelian umbra, this last aspect of the divine activity or missions is diminished in a goodly number of contemporary theologians. I admit, given the escalating pace with which pastoral concern has overtaken dogmatics, the theological importance of the handing of the redeemed cosmos back to the source of the Godhead is a doctrinal nuance most would not consider deserving of much debate or note. What can we say of it other than it shall so be.
Does it really matter that much of contemporary theology fails to give proper balance to the incarnation in contrast to the teleological return, the final rest, in the eternal? Yes. The last act of the mission is integral to the idea of Trinity, and although all we can say about it is that it shall so be, we need still to say that. There stands a distinction twixt the need for logical coherence and integrity within the parameters of orthodoxy and the reality that the bounds of our understanding and words must change, adapt, and be reformulated in order to be comprehensible to the present. It is too easy for theologians, clergy, and laity to focus too intensely on one aspect, one prospect, and ignore the fact that ultimately any vitality that might worthily, logically, usefully accrue to it resides only within the totality of the vision. Father without Son and Spirit is a Platonic pure transcendent. Son without Father and Spirit is utilitarianism waiting for a form, be it ruthless individualism or Stalinism. Spirit without Father and Son is anarchy by another name. The dynamic of our life is mirrored in the great idiom of Trinity: the transcendent seeks its enunciation as the immanent in the power of its own dynamic that that same dynamic, in the fulfilment of its work, move back to the singularity and rest of the transcendent, or otherwise said, that the Self endeavour to establish itself in its world and that thusly and healthily so established find its rest and transcendence as the fully integrated, redeemed, substantialized Self.
Jung spoke of the necessity of turning the triangle of the Trinity into a square by giving a place to a divinized feminine as represented by Mary. The history and the hideousness of this suggestion I hope to more fully address at a later date. However, in brief, Jung does not understand his vision is in orthodox theology a fait accompli. The return of perfected creation to the Godhead is the fourth act of the eternal missions. If, however, a feminine is the Jungian requirement, it is given not in Mary, but in the office of Christ “in whom there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female”. In Christ the distinctions of individuation are reconciled, perfected, and returned to the Godhead. The object of God’s love (the world) in the subject of God’s love (his Christ) is reintegrated into the whole, the Holy One. The divine missions are fully accomplished, realized only when creation is handed back to the Father by the Son in whom all things were made and called to their perfecting. This last act, the handing of all back to the Father seems to be a dynamic lost to Hegel’s understanding of Trinitarian theology. It is beyond “the rational and logical”, it is at once completed and unified, whole and one (theologically encoded: Holy One), a living synthesis and resolution of absolute subjectivity and objectivity—at least as I understand the Hegelian system, but I readily confess I am not a Hegelian scholar.
Christianity has too long been blind-sided by patriarchy, upholding Christ as “Son of the Father”, rather than understanding Christ is an office into which, following Jesus, all are called to partake, and in that partaking, that communion, a “communion of saints”, both men and women, masculinity and femininity, male idiom and female idiom, are reconciled, made equal, unified. Paul can claim there are no distinctions in Christ because the office of Christ is where humanity finds its true identity, its fulfilment, the sacred union of female and male, the Chosen and the pagan, etc. The masculine prejudices of the times rather easily allowed the voice of women in the early church to be swiftly subjugated and silenced, and the office of Christ, the be-ing Christ-ian, concretized into the historical person of Jesus. With that, Christianity became a religion of a Father and a Son, Yahweh and Jesus, not of a parent and adult child, not of a loving Creator and an anointed representative. Mary entered cultic history to compensate for the suppressed Mother Goddess of the ancient world. Yet, this Mary, being also made Eve’s antithesis, being presented as the obedient and submissive woman, remains a daughter of Eve. She is hailed Queen of Heaven and Earth, but her only power is to submissively intercede for her children, or to deviously, mindful of their rosaries and devotions to her, hide them under her cloak and scurry them through some back door into eternity. She is presented as the icon of humility and love, but look closely at the underlying dynamic, and you will find a patriarchy signalising her that ideal only because she is the subjugated, the ideal of how a woman should behave in a patriarchal household, and in that she is neither free nor equal, and carries merely a shadow of dignity, the shadow of another’s dignity, a man’s. Her cult is a patriarchal success in that it reinforces a distorted sense of humility and obedience, and the fallacious notion that such is the “proper” way of being woman.
We must save being Christ from the being of Jesus Christ. We must seriously acknowledge the office of Christ, the state of being a living presence of creative love (or if you will, He who is Creative Love) is open equally to every man and woman. We must stop making Mary something a little less than God to compensate for the fact we make woman a little less than man. If, as Schopenhauer imagined it, we are all immersed in a sea of sin and suffering, we may acknowledge anyone who has endured through the vicissitudes of this fragile life, rose above them to some degree, therein lessened their depth, and with compassion diluted their viciousness and viscosity. I sincerely avouch I have neither disregard nor disrespect for the devotion placed before Mary. However, this one woman may not be put upon a pedestal to distract us from the fact we deny proper dignity to one half the species, and therein deform every woman and man.
An Excursus: There is no patriarchy without misogyny. The fallacious elevation of one sex above the other necessitates a mendacious conception, an exaggerated xenophobia. The lie, a lie to the Self, must be covered-up, given reasons. Woman becomes the lesser because she is different, biologically distinguishable from the male. There is, however, no inherent, no real power, distraction, or temptation in any body part, be it breast, penis, hair, eyes, or neck. As Schopenhauer intuited, we cathect our body, give it emotive value, in whole and in part. The sundry valuations of varied bits and pieces of body in divers communities, societies, and civilizations from the dawn of time evidence this. One group may demand breasts be covered, another might find a bare breast as ordinary as an uncovered head. Our taboo bits and pieces are conditioned socially, not biologically, not psychologically. The same is to be said regarding our estimations of the male and female which we rigorously reinforce in social language—the subliminal and ritual language of costume, custom, manners, the panoply of ideas defining the deemed appropriate professions, positions and dispositions.
Any culture that elevates one sex over the other self-fulfils its own folie à deux. We have sexualized one another according to the prejudice of our culture. Man still plays the hunter, woman the hunted, the prey. Both sexes have quietly agreed to the deception and its mandatory sets of manipulations. Woman becomes the evasive, the devious, the one that must be pursued. Man must become the conqueror. Sex becomes about dominance and influence, about eros—eroticism and desire. But sex, the coming together of the species, if it is not pure animal rutting, ought to be about delight in each other, an interplay of persons, a communication of whole persons, a playing together in joy, in passion. There is a place for role-playing within sexuality, but it belongs as transient exploration not permanent definition. Despite incremental institutionalizations, our modern day sexual liberation is mostly facade, a mere recounting of the same old in new forms. Men still must hunt, and women lure and fall prey. Neither sex seems to understand how to stop the role-playing and to start simply being. Neither sex seems to know how to amend and evolve an entire culture of highly particularized sexual definition. Neither sex seems seriously interested in congeeing the cultural bias and coming together as equals.
Thus, yes, nuance in theology, as in psychology, as in philosophy, can matter, can be something more than simply splitting hairs. We may be dealing with intangibles of which we can only make images, but those images are the tools by which we internalize and progress. The more precisely the picture captures the essence, the more precisely the image functions to accomplish the immediate goal without distorting or defalcating the ultimate aim, the more true and worthy it is. It is not a matter of being wrong or right in our picturing, but of having a vision that propels adequately and in the proper direction.
Having for decades been immersed in prayers of another tongue, there resides within me, almost like a breath, an ancient prayer for the gift of the Spirit. There are variants occasioned by the ceremony or feast for which it is used, but the core of the Latin runs: Deus, qui corda fidelium Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti: da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere, et de eius semper consolatione gaudere. [God, who hath taught the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant us in that same Spirit to relish wisdom, and in his consolation ever to rejoice.] I enjoy words, their evolution of meaning, their malleability. Indulge me to look, somewhat playfully, at the Latin illustratione in the above prayer. It is usually translated as “light”, but were the word set before anyone as a word without context, and one asked to describe what is meant by the word, the more astute might target the “lustre” at the centre of the word, but most would speak of an illustration, a picture of some sort. Consider here the connections amongst lustre, reflected light, illumination, and the idea of illumination via illustration, the rendering of pictures. Could we translate illustratione as an illustration, a picture? Do we not claim to be taught by imaging Spirit that we may savour that which is proper and find our deepest comfort? We pray lustre and picture, reflected light and imaging as the means of spirituality. We make a mental image for the unimaginable to make it a reality—a tool for becoming wise [sapere], whole [recta], and at peace [consolation], and we count that mutual deliquescing of infinite and finite, as nineteenth century idealism would name it, a grace, a gift.
Recently a dear and muchly learned friend spoke to me about God and heaven, and I realized she was locked into a logical box from which there was no escape. She was treating the icons, the symbol-words, of our faith as realities in-themselves and not mere signs pointing toward the inexpressible and uncontainable, as masks set before the omnipotence of Being-itself or the Ground of all being. Too many reverent people in religion forget the vast distinction that exists, that must exist, between God and our images, our icons, our concepts, our notions, our ideas of God, of heaven, immortality, grace, salvation, and every aspect of our spiritual life we hang upon our images, icons, concepts, notions, and ideas of God and the holy. Spirituality is recognized as an evaluative system of self-growth or it is escapism. Theology is the realm of the “it is as if” or it is idolatry.
[iii] Theology in the wake of Hegel: a note on Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, J. Moltmann, Harnack, Loisy, Strauss, and Schweitzer
Kant epitomizes the thrust of modern man to find a new perspective for faith. His proposal is only partially new. God is found on the basis of man’s social nature, his duty toward other and his world, his delight in the order and purposefulness of the world. God, in this sense is discovered, realized, in this world in his kingdom, the world of duty-bound right-acting man. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all embrace that historical and social manifestation of the divine, sheering to the bone the anthropomorphic vision of the past. God is the pure thrust of life, whether envisioned as will, ego, or the process itself. God is the primal, the principle power. This is not the creator God of Judaism, not the Father of Jesus Christ. It is the idea of a first principle that reaches back to Aristotle, but the process of turning to or returning to that prime power is found in the ideas of duty, asceticism, and aesthetics, and that reaches back to Plato. Is this nineteenth century venture into Idealism a return to paganism or a search for a contemporary enunciation of orthodoxy, an attempt to speak Gospel in a new tongue?
Karl Barth rejects every philosophical effort to find God. He dismisses every attempt at a natural theology. These can, at best, find an assumed first principle of the cosmos, a logical construct made by a questionable use of analogy based on the human. They subordinate God to some other truth, some lesser truth, be it the nature of religion, the unfolding of the cosmos, or human history. They reduce God to an infinite being, an absolute spirit. They question God whose singular revelation is Christ. This is not to eloign all human knowledge. While a valid theology can proceed only from a faith in God’s singular revelation, it needs to be informed by exegesis, church history, the humanities, philosophy, and science. All such disciplines must, however, remain ancillary; they must bow before Him who is always “Other”, He no human word or concept can contain.
Barth’s vision of God proceeds totally from God. How can this be? To understand the ground upon which Barth stands, it may be helpful to consider a meditation he records on creation. Barth, as is his custom, begins with the beginning. God makes the world ex nihilo [out of nothingness], makes man ex nihilo through the Word, his Son, without whom “was made not anything that was made”. All power resides in the hands of God. Man is nothing unless God make him, define him. God is forever One, and man always the one being made. The church also bears this mark of temporality, this being ex nihilo. It is akin to that primordial void over which hovered the Spirit of God. Like that void, it can be known only as that which has been impacted by God. It can exist only as the community addressed by God. Barth speaks also of the church as reflective of the primordial Spirit hovering above the void. In this Spirit there occurs an overshadowing that gives light to the newness of life. The church always exists in that overshadowing, as that overshadowing. The church, like man, always exists in newness of life, in only one moment, the now, the concrete present, to witness in realistic act and word the gospel in the world for the world. This cannot be understood is a mechanistic way. God is not a machine that produces the cosmos. God is love, totally empowered in, by, with love, unconditional love, free self-giving. Love, thus, makes man, reconciles man, defines man as God’s man, empowers man to love, to freely be the earthly-historical form of the living Lord and Saviour. Ever made and empowered by God, neither man nor the church can set forth any principle of action as eternal. Man must continuously look to God for his “daily bread”, his sustenance, his proper word and act within the world, his response to “moral” questions as they arise. Only thus man becomes both free and obedient, for the command of God is not a demand, but an invitation to live by grace, to live in his con-descended presence, his defining light, or as existentialism will put it: to be continuously called out of nothingness into being.
God reveals himself in only one moment, one medium, the God-man Jesus Christ. This is God’s work and God’s alone. There is no encounter between God and man except by God’s grace in the God-man. If Hegel had proposed God is the process, Barth contends God is the revelation, his presence in Jesus Christ, who is man’s reconciliation, and ultimate perfection. There is no assent to God through aesthetics, ascetics, or mystical contemplation. The only “way” to God is to submit to his “Way”, his self-revelation, to stand in that moment, that presence of Lord and Saviour. Only here, not so much before God as opposite God, in the light of God, the power of God, is man truly man, knowing God as the unspeakably and totally Other, the Holy. Only here can man learn his relationship with God and receive his grace and blessings. In humble faith man is made man. In the person of the God-man man learns the meaning of personhood, finds his measure, and receives his value as the beloved. Only in Christ can man hear “know ye not that ye are God’s chosen, holy, and beloved?”
If God’s self-revelation is the God-man, the scriptures cannot be esteemed revelation. The scriptures are not a consecrated ground for finding God. To the contrary, they point to the fact that God’s presence is always something beyond human control. Their value resides not in words but in the Word to whom they attest. This Word is the Living One made manifest only by God’s good pleasure through his Holy Spirit in man’s true sociality, the fellowship that is church. The scriptures—which must always be taken as an organic whole–are the church’s sole basis for witness, but they are of this world, wholly human, and fallible. Man offers, can offer, nothing permanent, abiding, or definitive to the revelation of God. Likewise, whatsoever the church may say in her theologies, her dogmas and dogmatics is in human words, elements always under the spell of current ideas and philosophies. They remain the work of human hands, inherently fallible, and ephemeral.
Some opine it is in reflection of his day that Barth insists theology must start with the doctrine of the Trinity, with that which Hegel found as the high enunciation of the eternal dialectic, a transcendence-immanence-dynamic in resolution. However, this is not a bowing to Hegel for, as Barth rightly marks, theology can only begin with the beginning, at the fount of creation, election, perfection. Here stands whence the Son comes.
There is nothing we can know of God apart from the Son, and it is the Son who is the revelation that he comes as the Man Elected. Election is among the theological terms the Reformation seized upon to explain—often to death (Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 8, endnote iii). As in ordinary parlance it means chosen. Israel was God’s chosen. In Christian scripture it is used to reference God’s eternal plan for creation, and man in particular. Some opine it is divinely divisible such that God elects some to salvation, others to damnation. Barth claims, rightly, that God elects only once, only one, his son, the Christ—and in Christ all men, and as Paul would have added, the cosmos. The election of God, the choice of God is this: that he wills to be there with and for man, with and for his creation, to bring them to their perfection, a perfection designated from before the world began, for it is in the Son of God, the divine Word become for us the Christ, that all things that are made were made.
In uniting himself with the man Jesus, God decisively unites himself with humanity. This is man’s reconciliation, his salvation, his perfection. In the grace of God’s election of man in the God-man the sole purpose of creation is laid bare: “God exists for man”. God stands, therefore, above the nothingness of evil, the emptiness of sin, the fragilities and failures of man. This we believe and thus, we cannot judge God’s election, quiz his prerogative. Such force of statement left some to question if Barth envisioned an apocatastasis, a type of universalism in which hell dissolves and all is ultimately wrapped into the presence of the Godhead. Barth would not debate the question, he simply acknowledged man must bow to the absolute sovereignty of God, and leave to God those things solely in the hands of God. Nevertheless, once Barth placed all power on the side of God, once God freely elects humankind in the God-man, it is difficult to not infer a stare decisis that precludes the all-inclusive beatific finality of creation. In the effort to enunciate the fullness of power that is God’s, there resides always the danger that, by the thinnest of nuance, creation becomes not only the “out of nothing” but that it essentially remains so, that the final return of creation to the Godhead be conceived of as some type of automatic gnostic Pleroma.
Although it irritated Barth deeply to hear it said, Emil Brunner held natural religion had value. Indeed, the ancient fathers had spoken of nature, natural religion, paganism, all religion, as preparatory events for the revelation of God in Christ. They understood the need to value the world and its ways as ancillary events to the Christ-event as deeply as Barth understood the need of the day to aver faith is not speculation, analogy, science, philosophy, or anything other than being confronted and seized by God in his one and only revelation, his presence as God-man Jesus Christ. Barth knew the world had overvalued itself. He believed it had over-extended itself, heretically reduced God to the pulse of its history, its being. God is inutterably Other, not a principle. God is He before whom man is given himself, the truth of himself, in Christ. Barth speaks as one confirmed in faith. Brunner, however, realized that to speak of God in Christ to another not of that faith, the other needed to have some notion of “God”.
Brunner, like Barth, rejects any system that reduces the mystery of God to something reasonable or reasoned. Again, with Barth, he rejects any literalist, fundamentalist, or piece-meal understanding of scripture as idolatry. God’s revelation is Jesus Christ. It is supernatural and it is personal. In Jesus Christ man encounters God as a person within the parameters of a personal relationship. The undiluted objectivity of the God revelation we find in Barth is rejected, and so too is any notion that this is a purely human, private, or subjective experience. It is an encounter of persons. It is initiated by God such that man is not made a passive vessel of God’s love but called to action, to response, to faith.
Faith is a new relationship, and it encompasses a new awareness, a new insight into our capacities and limitations. It is a self-understanding that proceeds not from self but from outside of self, from God. The human thrust toward authenticity and wholeness is understood deeply, dramatically, as the call of God. The love of God for man revealed in Jesus Christ is not a quantitative force that engenders a quantitative reaction. The encounter is personal, qualitative, living. It is not a fiat that commands but an invitation to responsibility within a living relationship. Faith gives light to grace, to the abiding presence of God in Christ, God’s sovereign Word. This Word is not an unbearable Law summoning guilt into sin. This Word is ever creating; its fiat the incomprehensible command: “Love!”, its dynamic forging forgiveness into newness of life.
An Excursus: The fore-giving into newness of life encodes an ancient equilibristic nuance, and Paul himself teeters back and forth trying to balance the unconditional love of God (agape) and the imperfect and ever goal-oriented love of man (eros). This human love, this finite response of a finite being, is always conditioned, always moves toward some end, if even that be man’s ultimate good. How then can man adequately, rightly, properly, respond to God’s love, except by a nullity of self-power before God, a humility, a bowed and joyous acceptance of too rich a gift. The effort to enunciate and to live out that balance of ideal and real, to find wherein the bow or the joy resides the proper point of accent, constitutes the core question in Christian spirituality.
Brunner maintains the encounter with Jesus Christ is personal, although it is mediated by the witness of the scriptures and the church. There is no inherent infallibility in scripture or any other witness. There is an infallibility of encounter but it resides in its self-authentication, the replication of a response within the individual of that faith recorded in the ancient witnesses. (I find any blunt interpretation of a connection of self-authentication with a replication of response troublesome in that every response is culturally, temporally, and personally conditioned. Any self-authentication must, by definition, reside in how one lives one’s life.) Contrary to a number of theologians of the day that claimed the historical person of Jesus was forever lost behind the Jesus proclaimed by the church as God’s Christ, Brunner avers that despite the theologies that anciently accrued about the person of Jesus, the kernel of the historical person remains such that the Christ of faith is the Jesus of history.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in agreement with Barth and Brunner that theology must be solely determined by its object, God revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the encounter with the person of God in Jesus Christ that constitutes the ground of personhood. Bonhoeffer shifts the perspective slightly and stresses the individual authentically knows himself as a person only in encountering God as his ultimate boundary and absolute transcendence.
In all relationships the individual is confronted by another who represents a barrier beyond which the individual cannot proceed. This boundary, thus, presents itself also as a transcending of the individual. This double form of limitation constitutes the ground on which men establish ethics, and reflects the deeper encounter within man upon which men can speak of a relationship with the all-defining other, the divine “Thou”.
Barth had presented God’s revelation as something contingent upon God’s freedom, his election of the God-man. Despite the fact that Barth directly says “God exists for man”, God does so as the revealed God, and there lingers the question that there might be more to God than is revealed, be something of the godhead held in reserve. Bonhoeffer, with Luther and Paul, rejects this nuance. The object of consideration cannot be God’s freedom; it is God’s freely being present for man, his kenosis, his emptying of himself completely for man (Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton, April 2013). It is a spurious metaphysical exercise to ask how can this be, how can the infinite be present in the finite. The issue is not about how, but Who is this that so confronts man in being there for him. The ultimate limit boundary and the transcending of man become the One there for man, for me, for all. God in his Christ, therefore, stands the definiens of man and the world. Man is ever man, by nature a sinner, and by grace in Christ Jesus, the beloved of God. Man cannot be ambiguous about this definition. The relationship with God may be by grace, but there is no relationship if there is no reaction, no response, no act of responsibility, no acknowledgement of the gift, the “Thou”, the presence. There is no relationship without some governing discipline. That discipline is not set in the observance of abstracted rules and regulations, but in being-there, here and now, in living authenticity to that graced relationship.
Neither can there be any expression of that relationship to others, for others, before others that is not realistic, holistic, authoritative. In Christ the divide between the secular and the sacred is reconciled. Thus, the community of believers cannot hide from itself or the world behind eternal, sacred principles set against the quotidian and secular, but must continuously and concretely encounter the world as it is. It cannot command in principle; it can only act in the present. It cannot claim God is love unless it realistically manifest love to all, particularly to the despised, the deprived, and the dispossessed. The love of God has too long been cozened by the trappings of religion, by retreat into the interior life, into individualism, subjectivism. We cannot hide from life, evade the world, or reduce God into a deus ex machina for our un-resourcefulness, our unwillingness to be there with him realistically and reliably as his living embodiment in and for his creation.
Bonhoeffer endured the crisis of faith unleashed in the Nazi Reich, the church’s humbling of itself into an instrument of state, its abdication of its authority to speak against the sin of the state in the erroneous belief that it therein was upholding a separation of the powers of church and state. He was among the few that stood opposite. He acted—conscientiously and concretely–to end the madness, and the massacre of millions. His failed attempt to assassinate Hitler brought him to Buchenwald. In 1937 he had published Nachfolge, a work entitled in English, The Cost of Discipleship. In 1945 he paid that price in full; as the allies mounted the final assault, he was hanged.
Jürgen Moltmann was a prisoner of war when first he encountered the voice of scripture, and it spoke to him in his place and time, in his suffering and his hope. Tellingly, his theological considerations do not turn on the defence of traditional doctrine or their ancient metaphysical expressions. His focus is on the power of faith itself, a faith he understands as a hope for the future, a future unfolding from the primitive promise of a saviour, an exodus out of bondage, a resurrection heralding a new world. This faith bespeaks a hope grounded in history, working its way through history. Faith and its exposition in theology, thus, cannot insulate themselves from the world and history, but must bring to the world a new light, must act to transform the world in that light.
Christ crucified is the concretization of God’s solidarity with the world in its trials and suffering. Spirituality and the proclamation of the gospel cannot be divorced from humanitarian concerns and world events any more than the divine and the human can be separated in Jesus Christ. The church cannot conceive of itself as anything but as in-the-world, as the historical body of Christ, its Lord. It lives its life aware of God’s presence within and beyond every moment of time. It lives its life in the graced hope of fellowship and love. It lives its life “in the Spirit” acting in the world for the welfare of the world. It lives at one with the suffering of the world, with hope for the world.
Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, and Moltmann situate us in the twentieth century, and present us a reaction to Romanticism’s idealistic rendering of the divine. There is another focus in nineteenth century philosophy that vivifies modern theology: man’s historical nature. Kant had situated the root of morality and spirituality firmly in history, and his perspective is carried on in Ritschl and through him Troeltsch, and descends to Niebuhr and Rauschenbusch (Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 19, endnote ii). Adolf von Harnack was among the first to systematically explore the historical perspective enkindled in Hegel, and he proceeded with scholarly and critical eye. We cannot authentically receive the past without analysis of the zeitgeist, without acquiring an understanding of the cultural milieu. His concern was to extract and expose the essence, the “kernel”, of Christianity from the “husk” of a Greco-Roman ideology that had anciently been used to make it comprehensible and viable to the Hellenized world. He finds that essence is a confirmation of humankind’s hope in the face of the nature’s hostilities and the world’s inequities. It addresses humanity’s yearning for a constant within the flux of life, a presence of the eternal within time. The essence of Christianity is, thus, about the individual, the interior life, self-understanding, self-valuation, the finding of God within.
Jesus is he who unwaveringly found God within, and submitted wholly to his will. Jesus and this animating, evaluative, life-giving, life-defining God within are so volitionally integrated they are one. The God within transcends him and so Jesus knows him as Father. Gospel is, thus, not about Jesus but the Father within. Whensoever through him others come to find the Father within Jesus fulfils the role of Christ.
Christianity is not, therefore, a communal effort. It is not concerned with human history or progress. It is about the individual, his self-appraisal and ultimate aspiration. It is about the eternal, a connectedness to the eternal in the midst of time, about living with and in the power of God. There stand the value of each and every man, and the command of love. Their contingent ethic is as much about intention as execution, humility before God as forgiveness for self and other. It is an ethic embodied in him who preached it, whose life is its authentication, but it is also an ethic Jesus pointedly separated from communal ritual and control.
Alfred Loisy was critical of Harnack’s individualistic interpretation of Christianity. He attempted to move the Roman Church into a modern presentation of the faith, a theology in a new tongue. Theology must take past enunciations of faith and relate them to the present. Doctrines and dogmas may be rooted in the eternal truths, inalterable truths, but they remain compositions made of human words, mere interpretations of a faith. They can serve a living faith only by themselves being alive, being subject to history, adapting, and changing with the voice of the day. The Church exists as the medium for continuing Jesus’ work, the transformation of the world toward the coming kingdom of God. The function of the church is to make informed and discerning individuals toward that goal. It must evolve with the times, opening itself to ever richer understandings of Christ and his mission to herald healing, justice, and well-being for all. Loisy’s understanding of revelation may have wavered over the years, but his unrepentant “modernism” proved too much for an Eternal City. He was excommunicated, his work condemned.
Exhibiting an early interest in the issue of some type of resolution, restoration, or reconciliation of the finite within the infinite, David Friedrich Strauss found in Hegel’s ideas the au fait analysis. However, he soon turned his attention in another direction and went looking for the essence of Christianity. His conclusions were published as The Life of Jesus Christ Critically Examined. He was of a mind that it would be received with trumpet and joy. It destroyed his career.
Strauss rejected any supernatural or rational interpretation of scripture. Any claim of validity for a literal, historical, or natural approach cannot be supported. Instead he looked to something that was in the early nineteenth century accumulating academic cachet—myth (Heyne, Bauer, de Wette, et. al.). There were various understandings of myth, but at root it was regarded as a primitive form of expression devised to convey an insight into the profundities of life, the nature of the cosmos, or of the divine. Strauss used the term as denoting an animating intuition presented in historical, philosophical, or poetic form. The gospels are such myths. They draw upon the material of the Messianic prophecies and the memories of the impact Jesus had upon those about him to convey an insight. From their time and place, where mere literal transcriptions would have failed, they are tales told by the enlightened to shed, to share, a light. This mythic tool of analysis tossed away the historical Jesus in order to expose the meaning of Jesus. Strauss, a believer, asked what then were the gospels saying?
To re-proclaim the gospel Strauss turned to Hegel and to his early interest in the issue of the relation of finite and infinite. God is the infinite Spirit who manifests himself in the finite, in nature, in history, in man. The infinite has its reality, its truth, only in the finite, and the finite has its truth, its reality, only in the infinite. There must at some point, therefore, appear in history a man who can be recognized as God, a nexus of the infinite and finite. Faith in him, engendered in the passing on of his story, his discipline [disciple-ship], his religion, constitutes the medium wherein all men are called to become conscious of their truth, their intimate connectivity in the infinite. The God-man Jesus Christ is a statement about reality, both divine and human. Christianity is not about a God-man Jesus; it is about the God-man essence that belongs to everyman. Some may opine this does not take us far from Paul’s understanding of being Christian, of I-in-Christ and Christ-in-me. It is certainly not a summary spirituality Luther would reject. From Locke to Reimarus the nature of scripture had been scrutinized, and Strauss’ work—from our vantage point—seems merely a continuance of that critical examination. However, here in its Hegelian dress, in “meta-physicality”, in mid-nineteenth century Germany, in a time of social ebullience and rising socialist ideas, this was not received as spiritual insight and liberation but something teetering twixt heresy and anarchy, for if everyman be God-man in essence, to whom ought any man bow, to whom ought be reserved the thrones of Europe?
Albert Schweitzer accounted Strauss had gone too far in his dismissal of the historical material in the gospels. To understand Jesus one had to understand him a Jew of first century Palestine, in brief, in historical, in cultic and cultural, context. Schweitzer looked to the plain meaning of the texts. According to his analysis, Jesus preached an imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. He saw himself as the agent sent to inaugurate it, the “son of man”, the messianic auspex of the Book of Daniel. He called upon the people to repent and to prepare for the coming kingdom by embracing an absolutist ethic characterized by love. He met his passion and death as the event wherein his true identity, his divine mission, would be revealed, and God would spiritualize this world with a celestial rule. That such a series of events did not materialize, that the early church did not seek to expunge that fact, that the church later did spiritualize Jesus’ expectations and situate them in the indefinite future, all speak to the validity of this interpretation of Jesus and his message as historical. Paul turned the failure of the kingdom to appear into a mystical religion centred on Christ-Jesus who proclaimed the coming of God’s reign, suffered that all men might be brought into its healing light, and summoned all men to live in brotherhood, in servant-hood, in charity one to another.
[iv] Here be the reason I abhor the term “Human Resources”! Who makes another man a resource? It is a commodification of a person. Yet so many think the name so sophisticatedly au currant. What does that say about our society, about the many who want a capitalist system unimpeded by a demo-cratic oversight, some lever of social delimitation, an item too often demonized under the title of “big government”? What light does this shed upon why so many impoverished in so many ways look beyond the present inequalities of our socio-economic polity to socialist, to Marxist, ideals for some rectitude, some reconciliation? A name, a term, may be a nuance, but it portends much about the culture wherein it arises, and wither that culture is moving.