The God Who Is

The Christian God in a Pluralistic World

Hans Schwarz

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608994342
  9781498212663
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890928
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Who is the God in whom Christians believe? Is he just a figment of the human mind as critics of religion claimed in the nineteenth century and as crusading atheists assert again today? Since the beginnings of rational thought the brightest minds among humanity have attempted to assert that God does indeed exist. But even the so-called proofs for God's existence always started with the assumption that there is someone to prove. As soon as we move beyond that which is within space and time mere proofs or disproofs no longer suffice. Both believers and unbelievers live to a certain degree by faith. Yet religion is inextricably connected with human history. When we journey through the landscape of religion and witness its gradual unfolding we soon realize that not all religions are equal. Though they may be witnesses of the same God, the way they talk about God is so different that this not only leads to very different concepts of God but also to different approaches to life on this earth. At the end of this long journey we finally arrive at the Judeo-Christian tradition which witnesses to the God in whom Christians believe. This book seeks to show how this belief matured and what difference this belief still makes today.

Part I

Approaching the God Phenomenon

The belief in God has a checkered history. In the first centuries the Christian faith and with it the Christian belief in God were outlawed in the Roman Empire. At times Christians were actively persecuted and at other times merely tacitly tolerated. During the expansion of Islam, from the seventh century onward, Christian believers in God again faced hardships or were even forcibly converted to Islam. The Spanish conquistadores of the sixteenth century then in turn used force in Latin America to make the Indios believe in the Christian God. These atrocities, though regrettable, were always carried out in the name of one religion against another religion or other religions. Only in the twentieth century did an anti-religious ideology evolve that wanted to wipe out every religion. Especially in Russia, the Communists tried every means to exterminate religion altogether, since they considered it to be superstition.

There were certainly political reasons that motivated this persecution. The Russian Orthodox Church was so closely connected with the Tsarist rule that abolishing the Tsar also meant to reduce the power of the Orthodox Church. But the Communist contempt for religion and anything resembling faith in God is a thought pattern that has its roots in the nineteenth century. That religion belonged to a bygone era was evident for the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and the revolutionary Karl Marx (1818–1883), and also to some extent for the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and many proponents of the Darwinian notion of human evolution.

Both Feuerbach and Marx were students of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and his philosophical system. For Hegel the notion of God was a most natural presupposition. Due to the rapid industrial progress, Feuerbach and Marx were more materialistically inclined. For Feuerbach, God was not the foundation and opposition of the material as Hegel had thought, but at the most an epiphenomen of the material. Being involved with the workers’ movement, Marx noted the close association between the religious and the political establishment. Moreover, similar to Feuerbach, he was dissatisfied with the Hegelian system which saw a most natural logic in the antithesis of God and the world and their synthesis found in the incarnation. For Marx such a synthesis did not exist. God and the world were opposites.

Since Feuerbach had claimed that religion is a human product and “A god is man’s striving for happiness, fulfilled in his imagination” the idea evolved in Marx that this God notion had to be eliminated.1 The attempt was then made in Marxist Communism, the single most powerful political ideology of the twentieth century, to execute this idea. While religiosity took a heavy toll in Socialist countries, the God notion was not eliminated. In the West too skepticism has increased about anything religious. Especially “organized” religion has often been considered as a tool to keep people, especially children, under control. Religion is a means to pacify people and through religiously imposed rules to make them more docile. Yet such an understanding of religion as a political instrument already closes the door on the God phenomenon as a living reality which makes religion possible. Still religion in its various forms seems again on the upswing in Western countries.

One: A Figment of the Human Mind?

From the very beginning, the “New World,” established by the Pilgrims and other persecuted religious minorities coming from the Old World of Europe, had a religious focus. The European immigrants settled in this “New World” and they tenaciously defended their newly won religious freedom. To safeguard this freedom the notion of inalienable human rights was introduced and monarchy as a form of government was rejected. In Europe, however, monarchies were too well established for this kind of freedom to gain much of a hearing. Attempts toward democratization were quickly squelched. The only exception was France where in 1789 a violent revolution swept away the old monarchy. But soon the French re-established a new monarchy of sorts.

Since in Europe religion was considered part of the government establishment, the questioning of religion became more and more an issue in intellectual circles and also among political radicals. Here the deistic critiques of John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776) paved the way for the primacy of sense experience and reason while relegating religion and everything non-material to secondary status. The elevation of reason as a goddess in the wake of the French Revolution and with it the clear designation of religion as a private matter, had an impact beyond France. While Hegel could still wed revelation and reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) showed that they belong to different dimensions; reason to the realm of phenomena, as that what we can see and touch, and revelation to that of the noumena, meaning that which underlies the world of phenomena and which is not accessible by reason. It was the criticism of Hegel’s synthesis of reason and revelation that became the catalyst for Feuerbach’s criticism of God and the Christian religion in general.

The Anthropocentric Turn: Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach had been a student and follower of Hegel. But he could not accept his teacher’s organic and developmental thinking when Hegel, for instance, postulated: “The development of Mind [i.e., the Spirit] lies in the fact that its going forth and separation constitutes its coming to itself.”2 For Feuerbach there was no thesis and antithesis, with a subsequent synthesis on a higher plane. Thesis and antithesis became identical for him. Hegel distinguished the absolute Spirit, i.e., God, from the subjective spirit in individuals, and the objective spirit of the human community which shows itself in the legal system and in morality. But Feuerbach collapsed all three into one spirit. “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge,” wrote Feuerbach.3 God and humanity are the same, because “the secret of theology is anthropology.”4 “Man’s knowledge of God is man’s knowledge of himself, of his own nature.”5 Humanity becomes the starting-point and the focus of human reflection. Feuerbach confessed very pointedly: “God was my first thought, reason my second, humanity my third and last thought.”6

Theology, according to Feuerbach, must not (just) be seen as a derivative of, but must be dissolved into anthropology. The reason for this is that there is only one reality, the one given through our senses. There is no other reality, since “truth, reality, and the sensually given are identical.”7 Feuerbach objected here also to the idealistic notion of Hegel that reason would be the most truly real in humanity since human reason is in touch with God as the world reason or the absolute Spirit. For Feuerbach the “sensually given is the essence of humanity.”8 This materialistic vision of Feuerbach focuses exclusively on humanity, because “man, especially the religious man, is to himself the measure of all things, of all reality.”9 This anthropocentric materialistic vision is now employed to analyze religion, because as Feuerbach asserted, his writings have “strictly speaking only one purpose, one intention and idea, one theme. This theme, of course, is religion or theology and everything connected with it.”10

Since religion is a human phenomenon, Feuerbach sought to discover the origins of religion, primarily the God concept. He noticed that “the theist conceives God as an existing and personal being external to reason and in general apart from man.”11 The implications insist that neither God nor religion is primary, but humanity, since the concept of God is declared to be a projection of humanity. “The beginning, the middle and end of religion is MAN,” Feuerbach summarized his assessment of religion at the conclusion of the first part of his book The Essence of Christianity.12 God is perceived as a being outside and beyond humanity but “all the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.”13 Even the Trinity is brought into this anthropocentric focus. The Trinity is explained as the secret of the social life of the community, and the incarnation as the secret of God’s love to humanity is seen as the secret of humanity’s love to itself.14

However, Feuerbach sees that the problem with religion and the God concept is that it is not simply a projection of humanity’s own being. Such a direct projection would pose no problems. But in religion God—in actuality an imaginary being—becomes a being that is differentiated and even contrasted with humanity. This God who is thought to exist in and of itself exists only in one’s imagination, as an idea, but not in rea...

Table of contents

• The God Who Is
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Approaching the God Phenomenon
• Part 2: Discerning the God among the gods
• Part 3: The God Who Entrusts
• Index of Names
• Index of Scripture References