THE CONTEMPORARY WESTERN CHRISTIAN BACKGROUND

About ten years ago[*] the influential Christian philosopher and one regarded by Christians as among the foremost of this century, Jacques Maritain, described how Christianity and the Western world were going through a grave crisis brought about by contemporary events arising out of the experience and understanding and interpretation of life in the urban civilization as manifested in the trend of neo-modernist thought which emerged from among the Christians themselves and the intellectuals — philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists, writers, artists — who represent Western culture and civilization.¹ Since the European Enlightenment, stretching from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and with the concomitant rise of reason and empiricism and scientific and technological advances in the West, English, Dutch, French and German philosophers have indeed foreshadowed in their writings the crisis that Maritain described, though not quite in the same manner and dimension, for the latter was describing in conscious and penetrating perception the events of contemporary experience only known as an adumbrated prediction in the past. Some Christian theologians in the

[*]: This was written in 1976.

2 ‘God is dead’, which is still ringing in the Western world, is now mingled with the dirge that ‘Christianity is dead’; and some of the influential theologians among the Christians - particularly the Protestants, who seem to accept the fate of traditional Christianity as such, and are more readily inclined toward changing with the times - have even started to initiate preparations for the laying out of a new theological ground above the wreckage in which lay the dissolute body of traditional Christianity, out of which a new secularized Christianity might be resurrected. These theologians and theorists align themselves with the forces of neo-modernist thought. They went so far as to assert triumphantly, in their desire to keep in line with contemporary events in the West, that secularization has its roots in biblical faith and is the fruit of the Gospel and, therefore, rather than oppose the secularizing process, Christianity must realistically welcome it as a process congenial to its true nature and purpose. European and American theologians and theorists like Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten, Rudolph Bultmann, Gerhard von Rad, Arend van Leeuwen, Paul van Buren, Harvey Cox and Leslie Dewart - and many more in Europe, England and America, both Catholic and Protestant - have found cause to call for radical changes in the interpretation of the Gospel and in the nature and role of the Church that would merge them logically and naturally into the picture of contemporary Western man and his world as envisaged in the secular panorama of life. ⁵While some of the Christian theologians

earlier half of this century also foresaw the coming of such a crisis, which is called secularization. Already in the earlier half of the 19th century the French philosopher-sociologist, Auguste Comte, envisaged the rise of science and the overthrow of religion, and believed, according to the secular logic in the development of Western philosophy and science, that society was ‘evolving’ and ‘developing’ from the primitive to the modern stages, and observed that taken in its developmental aspect metaphysics is a transition from theology to science;² and later that century the German philosopher-poet and visionary, Friedrich Nietzsche, prophesied through the mouth of Zarathustra - at least for the Western world - that God is dead.³ Western philosophers, poets, novelists have anticipated its coming and hailed it as preparing for an ‘emancipated’ world with no ‘God’ and no ‘religion’ at all. The French Jesuit, paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, followed by other theologians like the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the American Paul Tillich, sensing the trend of contemporary events and the thoughts that recognized their significance to Christianity and the Western world, began to accept the inevitability of the impending religious and theological crisis that would emerge as a result of secularization, and being already influenced by it they counselled alignment and participation in the process of secularization, which is seen by many as irresistibly spreading rapidly throughout the world like a raging contagion.⁴ The Nietzschean cry

² See his General View of Positivism, trans. J.H. Bridges, London, 1880. Also H. Martineau’s Comte’s Positive Philosophy, London, 1853.

³ See H.L. Mencken’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche, Boston, 1913. For a brief but popular commentary on Nietzsche’s philosophy, see W. Durant, The Story of Philosophy, New York, 1926, chapter IX. The Modern Library, New York, has published some of his works in one volume (The Philosophy of Nietzsche) containing Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, and Birth of Tragedy.

⁴ For Teilhard de Chardin’s thoughts, see his The Future of Man, London, 1964; and The Appearance of Man, New York, 1966. For Bonhoeffer, see his Ethics, New York, 1955; and Prisoner for God, New York, 1959. For Tillich, see his Systematic Theology, Chicago, 1951 (vol. I); and The Courage to Be, New Haven, 1952.

⁵ For an expression of their ideas, see Barth, Church Dogmatics, Edinburgh, 1956-1963; The Humanity of God, Richmond, Va., 1960; Gogarten, Verhängnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit, Stuttgart, 1953; Der Mensch zwischen Gott und Welt, Stuttgart, 1956; 4 and intellectuals think that the religious and theological crisis felt by them has not yet taken hold of the Christian community, others feel that the generality among them and not only the intellectuals are already enmeshed in the crisis. Its grave implications for the future of traditional Christianity is widely admitted, and many are beginning to believe in the predictions of the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, whose The Future of an Illusion² is regarded as the greatest assault on theism in Western history.

Furthermore the Christians who on the whole are apparently opposed to secularization, are themselves unconsciously assiduous accomplices in that very process, to the extent that those aware of the dilemma confronting them have raised general alarm in that there has now emerged with increasing numbers and persistence what Maritain has called “immanent apostasy” within the Christian community.³ Indeed many Christian theologians and intellectuals forming the avant-garde of the Church are in fact deeply involved in ‘immanent apostasy’, for while firmly resolving to remain Christian at all costs they openly profess and advocate a secularized version of it, thus ushering into the Christian fold a new emergent Christianity alien to the traditional version to gradually change and supplant it from within. In such a state of affairs it is indeed not quite an exaggeration to say that we are perhaps spectators of events which may yet lead to another Reformation in Christian history.⁴ The theologians and intellectuals referred to above are not only preparing ground for a new secularized version of Christianity, but they also tragically know and accept as a matter of historical fact that the very ground itself will be ever-shifting, for they have come to realize, by the very relativistic nature of their new interpretation, that that new version itself — like all new versions to come — will ultimately again be replaced by another and another and so on, each giving way to the other as future social changes demand. They visualize the contemporary experience of secularization as part of the ‘evolutionary’ process of human history; as part of the irreversible process of ‘coming of age’, of ‘growing up’ to ‘maturity’ when they will have to ‘put away childish things’ and learn to have ‘the courage to be’; as part of the inevitable process of social and political change and the corresponding change in values almost in line with the Marxian vision of human history. And so in their belief in permanent ‘revolution’ and permanent ‘conversion’ they echo within their existential experience and consciousness the confession of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: “We are always becoming Christians”.⁵ Thus they naturally advocate in their attempt to align themselves with secularization a reconceptualization of the Christian Gospel; a redefinition of their concept of God; a dehellenization of Christian dogma. And Christianity, by virtue of its cultural nature and developmental experience, and based as it has always been upon a historically shifting foundation of hermeneutics, might lend itself easily to the possible realization of their vision of the future. This trend of events disconcerting to many traditional Christians, is causing much anxiety and foreboding and reflected plainly in Mascall’s book where he reiterates that instead of converting the world to Christianity they are converting Christianity to the world.⁶

While these portents of drastic change have aroused the 6 tide of the inexorable advance of Modernist thought in the European Enlightenment, and the logical development of the epistemological theory and method of the French philosopher, René Descartes, which greatly influenced the form in which European philosophy and science was to take - renewed interest in the study of Thomistic metaphysics have gained momentum this century among Catholic philosophers such as Maritain, Etienne Gilson and Joseph Maréchal, who each has his own school of interpretation cast within the infallible metaphysical mould fashioned by the Angelic Doctor. But some of the disciples of the former two, notably Dewart⁷ and his followers, while not going as far as Von Harnack in condemning hellenization as the perpetrator in the corruption of Christian dogma, nonetheless admit that hellenization has been responsible for retarding the development of Christian dogma, restricting its growth, as it were, to the playpen of philosophical enquiry and its development to the kindergarten of human thought. So in ‘a world come of age’, they argue controversially, Christian thought must no longer - cannot any longer - be confined to the crib of childish and infantile illusions if it were to be allowed to rise to the real challenge of maturity. And thus with new impetus derived from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the existentialism of Martin Heidegger, and further fortified by recent advances in linguistic analyses contributed by the philosophers of language, notably those belonging to the Vienna Circle,⁸ they press on vigorously for the

consternation of the traditional Catholic theologians, whose appeals of distress have caused Pope John XXIII to call for an aggiornamento to study ways and means to overcome, or at least to contain, the revolutionary crisis in the Christian religion and theology, and to resist secularization through the enunciation of the ecumenical movement, and the initiation of meaningful dialogues with Muslims and others, in the hope not only of uniting the Christian community but of enlisting our conscious or unconscious support as well in exorcising the immanent enemy, they nonetheless admit, albeit grudgingly, that their theology as understood and interpreted during these last seven centuries is now indeed completely out of touch with the ‘spirit of the times’ and is in need of serious scrutiny as a prelude towards revision. The Protestants, initiated by the 19th century German theologian and historian of the development of Christian dogma, Adolf von Harnack, have since been pressing for the dehellenization of Christianity;⁹ and today even Catholics are responding to this call, for now they all see that, according to them, it was the casting of Christianity in Hellenic forms in the early centuries of its development that is responsible, among other tenacious and perplexing problems, for the conceiving of God as a suprarational Person; for making possible the inextricably complicated doctrine of the Trinity; for creating the condition for the possibility of modern atheism in their midst - a possibility that has in fact been realized. This is a sore point for the Catholic theologians who cleave to the permanence of tradition, who realize that the discrediting of Hellenic epistemology - particularly with reference to the Parmenidean theory of truth, which formed the basis of Scholastic thought centered on the Thomistic metaphysics of Being - must necessarily involve Catholicism in a revolution of Christian theology. For this reason perhaps - that is, to meet the challenge of the Protestant onslaught which came with the 9 demythologization of Christian scripture and the dehellenization of its dogma.

Whatever the outcome may be Christians as a whole do not deny that their most serious problem is the ‘problem of God’. Already as alluded to briefly in connection with the Parmenidean correspondence theory of truth, the problem of God is outlined against the background of the problem of the existence of objects. Since according to Parmenides thought and being are identical, and being is that which fills space, it follows that in the correspondence theory of truth a proposition or an uttered thought or meaning is true only if there is a fact to which it corresponds. Being as such is necessary. The later Greek philosophers including Plato and Aristotle never doubted the necessity of being. Indeed, to regard being as necessary was the essential element of the Greek world view. However they distinguished between the necessity of being as such — that is, as concrete reality, existing as actuality as a whole — and individual beings, regarding individual beings as contingent. The being of the world as such is necessary and hence also eternal, but individual beings, including that of a man, are contingent as they have an origination in time and space and suffer change and dissolution and final end. The being of man as a species, however, like the being of the world as such, is necessary and indeed also eternal. It is quite obvious that when Christianity officially adopted Aristotelian philosophy into its theology,¹⁰ it had to deny necessary being to the creatures and affirm necessary being only to God Who alone is Eternal. Thus whereas Christian scholastic theology, like the Greeks, affirmed God as the Supreme Being Whose Being is Necessary, it did not regard the being of the world and nature as necessary, for as created being the world is by nature contingent. However, since it continued to adopt the Parmenidean epistemology, and while it denied necessary being to the creatures, it could not deny the necessity of the being of creatures as to their intelligibility; hence the creatures are contingent as to their being, but necessary as to their being in thought. In this way the identity of being — and also its necessity — and intelligibility is retained. Since a distinction was made between necessary being and contingent being, and with reference to the creatures their being necessary is in thought and not in actuality, a real distinction was thus made between essence and existence in creatures. The essence of the creature is its being in thought, and this is necessary; its existence is its actuality outside of thought, and this is contingent. As to God, it was affirmed that obviously His Essence should be identical with His Existence as Necessary Being. This distinction between essence and existence in creatures was apparently made on the basis of Thomas Aquinas’ observation, which in turn seems to have been based on a misunderstanding of Avicenna’s position, that every essence or quiddity can be understood without anything being known of its existing, and that, therefore, the act of existing is other than 11 essence or quiddity. The only Being whose quiddity is also its very act of existing must be God. It was this observation that made William of Ockham, less than a hundred years later, to draw the far-reaching conclusion that if every essence or quiddity can be understood without anything being known of its existing, then no amount of knowledge could possibly tell us whether it actually existed. The conclusion drawn from this was that one would never be able to know that anything actually exists. From the ensuing doubt that Ockham raised about the existence of objects, it follows that the existence of God is likewise cast in doubt. Our knowledge of things is based upon the existence of objects. Even if the external existence of objects remain problematic, at least their being in thought is known. But their being in thought, which constitutes ‘formal’ knowledge, can also possibly be caused, as such, by an efficient cause other than the actually existing objects - such as by God, or by the very nature of the mind itself - and hence, the problem as to the ‘objective’ reality of some ideas become more complicated for philosophy and cannot be established by it. Ultimately this trend of philosophy naturally led to consequences resulting in the casting of doubt also on knowledge of the essence of the creatures, and not merely its existence. The epistemological consequences of doubting the existence and essence of objects created the ‘problem of God’. After Ockham, Descartes, following the logical course of deduction from the observation of Aquinas, sought to establish the existence of the self by his famous cogito argument, from which he ultimately based his a priori certainty for the existence of God. But his failure to prove the existence of God led to the problem becoming more acute. Descartes established the existence of the self, the existence of the individual creature, man, to himself by means of empirical intuition; this does not necessarily establish the existence of objects outside of thought. In the case of the existence of God, the more impossibly complicated it became, seeing that unlike man He is not subject to empirical intuition. Now what is more problematic about the existence of God is that since His being in thought, His Essence, cannot be known, and since His Being is identical with His Existence, it follows that His Existence also cannot be known. His Existence - in the correspondence theory of truth - can be known only if the identity of His Being and His Existence can be demonstrated rationally, which is not possible to accomplish. At least up till the present time the idea that God’s Existence can rationally be demonstrated is only a matter of faith. Philosophically, and according to the development of thought flowing from Christian Aristotelianism, which some would prefer to refer to more properly as Aristotelian Christianity, the unknowability of God, of His Existence, and of other metaphysical notions about reality and truth was finally established in the West in the 18th century by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.¹¹

To augment this problem of self-evolved doubt about God, the God they have conceived since the earliest periods in the development of Christian dogma was formulated on the basis of a highly improbable conceptual amalgam consisting of the theos of Greek philosophy, the yahweh of the Hebrews, the deus of Western metaphysics, and a host of other traditional gods of the pre-Christian Germanic traditions.¹² 13 What is now happening is that these separate and indeed mutually conflicting concepts, artificially fused together into an ambiguous whole, are each coming apart, thus creating the heightening crisis in their belief in a God which has already been confused from the very beginning. ‘God’ itself is now becoming problematic for them, to an extent that they even contemplate discarding it altogether and leaving it to history to coin a new name for such traditions, connoting a more relevant and adequate concept to refer to the ultimate presence and reality in which they believe. Furthermore they understand Christianity as historical, and since the doctrine of the Trinity is an integral part of it, their difficulty is further augmented by the necessity that whatever be the formulation of any new Christian theism that might possibly emerge, it must be cast in the Trinitarian crucible. The notion of person in the Augustinian concept of the Trinity is left vague, and although Boethius and Aquinas and others through the centuries till the present time have attempted to define it, the problem, like the Gordian Knot, has naturally become more complicated and elusive. In spite of their concession that very real limitations inhere in Hellenism and that modern Western culture has transcended Scholasticism, they argue that, rather than succumb to the philosophical reduction of God to a mere concept, or to a vague and nebulous presence, the vagueness of their early predecessors must be interpreted as indicating the direction in which ‘development’ is to be pursued. In this way the Hellenic thought structure is conveniently made to appear as ‘open ended’ and not ‘closed’ or impeding ‘development’, so that it might readily be adapted to the equally ‘open ended’ Christian theism that may be envisaged from time to time as human ‘evolution’ in line with historical ‘development’ demands. Thus as long as God is conceived of as Three of Something it would always allow for future change with the changing world in a relativistic fashion; and this relativism allows the believer to be free to conceive whatever notion of God fancies him most, that is the scriptural, or the patristic (hellenic), or the mediaeval (scholastic), or the modern (existential?) in such wise that it also allows him or her to align with ‘contemporary experience’, which is historically minded. Aside from this and because of the problematic nature of their concept of God, the very name

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