The God Problem    by  Nigel Leaves 4^th R May/June 2005

In The Once and Future Faith, Robert Funk sets out the task that confronts those concerned in mapping the future Christian faith (p. 17):

The future of the Christian faith may turn out to be a minor aspect of the cultural shifts that are shaping our global future. The themes that have dominated the institutional churches may no longer be of central concern to us. But no matter. Yet at the heart of the old faith tradition there are topics and themes that are central to the human condition and the fate of the planet in the next millennium. Our task is to locate those themes and set them in a new and broader context.

In this article I will take up Funk's challenge and locate a theme that is central to the human condition: the "God problem." I will set this theme in a wider context than has been the norm for the Westar Institute which has traditionally been preoccupied with the historical Jesus.

Although "the God problem" has always been with us and has been expressed by biblical writers, most famously the author of the book of Job, "God" came to be seriously questioned by philosophers from David Hume onwards in the eighteenth century (see Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion). Perhaps the most strident of all attacks on "God" was that written by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the parable of the madman in his book, The Joyous Science (the traditional English translation of the title, Die frohliche Wissenschaft, as The Gay Science is now obviously obsolete). Following Nietzsche's pronouncement of the death of God there has been an almost incessant response that this cannot be so. The sheer existential terror that confronts those who have no supernatural prop on which to rely is too much to bear. The spectre of nihilism (there is No one out there) forces many to insist on the existence of something "more," something beyond, someone that sustains the Universe, because it is too painful to contemplate life without God. Nietzsche's famous parable of the madman is a landmark in modern intellectual history and deserves to be savored in full:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he excited much laughter. Why, did he get lost? Did he lose his way like a child? Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. "Whither is God" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from the sun? Whither it is moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives? Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed 06-rest for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us-for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto." Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. "I come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering-it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen or heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves." It has been related further that on this same day the madman entered diverse churches and there sang his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time," What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God? (TheJoyous Science, section 125)

Nietzsche scholars have long debated what exactly he meant by his announcement that "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Famously, the philosopher Martin Heidegger asked: "Which God is dead?" and then went on to say that Nietzsche's dead God was the "morality God" (the judge and Heavenly Paymaster) who was not worthy of belief in the first place. So, Nietzsche meant that we must kill a certain conception or interpretation of God. For Heidegger, Nietzsche was "that passionate seeker after God," a reference to the fact that the madman comes into the marketplace announcing "I seek God, I seek God." Indeed, the philosopher Julian Young in his book, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, has argued that "Nietzsche's intellectual quest can be characterised as `proving that God, after all, exists"' (quoted by Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche, p. 1).

Some have seized on the last phrase ("What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?") to argue that Nietzsche's attack was against false religion as practiced by many in the churches rather than against God per se. It is a familiar cry, even today: that the churches are not practicing what they preach.

Others have argued that there is a major inconsistency in the parable, for is it not absurd to think that humans can kill God? According to the classical/medieval scholastic definition of God, one of God's attributes is "aseity" (Latin a se esse "being from oneself") which is usually translated as self-existence. God is not dependent for her existence on any other reality apart from herself. God exists without reference to anyone/anything else which is expressed in abstract theological terminology as God has absolute ontological independence. God just is, without beginning or end. In order for God's existence to be terminated there would have to be some reality capable of destroying God. But there can be no such reality because God came into being by herself and is eternal. Humanity is not capable of murdering God because God is not a being (like ourselves). Rather, as Paul Tillich expressed it, "God is Being-itself." God cannot be said to exist in the same way that we humans exist.

These are ingenious ways of making Nietzsche a Christian believer, but the bulk of scholarship admits that Nietzsche had peered over the precipice into the abyss of nihilism and instead of shrinking back in terror plunged headlong into it. Once there, Nietzsche replaced belief in God with the myth of the eternal return/recurrence. But that is another story ...

This crisis in belief about God has been resolved by theologians associated with the Westar Institute in two ways. The first way is what has been described as "panentheism" and is illustrated most tellingly in the books of Bishop John Shelby Spong and Marcus Borg. It is what might also be described as "liberal Christianity." The second way is perhaps more controversial and, as Spong himself described it to me when he visited Perth a few years ago, it is a position to the left of where even he wishes to be. It is often labeled "non-realism" and is synonymous with the writings of Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering. It is "radical Christianity."

There is also a third way which is not addressed by the Jesus Seminar and which, following Robert Funk's advice in The Once and Future Faith that Westar should turn "rebellion into revolution" by expanding the contours of faith, I will include in this article. It is usually assumed that the Christian battle lines, especially in America, are drawn between liberalism and fundamentalism. However, there is a largely forgotten movement that has already rejected Christianity and has opted for what has been labeled by Robert Forman as "grassroots spirituality." If the research is correct, this movement is potentially far greater numerically than the organized religions. Today, there is "a spirituality revolution" taking place. It is being fuelled by those at the grassroots, by those ordinary folk who are moving away from the historic religions and forging a multitude of spiritual paths. There is a "smorgasbord of therapeutic spiritualities" from which people can pick and choose, and many people feel no need to cross the thresholds of the Church. This third way is a populist spirituality revolution of the new millennium that disturbs and challenges both liberalism and fundamentalism.

So, how would radical Christians, liberal Christians, and those in the grassroots spirituality movement each respond to the madman in Nietzsche's story?

Radical Christians

The radicals Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering would embrace the madman and'follow him, dancing around the town proclaiming "we have killed him, you and I." God is a human creation: the supernatural content of the God-idea no longer works and so it is time to reinvest it with new meaning for a new age. All religious doctrines must be understood ethically and existentially - they are guiding myths to live by in the creation of a new heaven here on earth. So there is no need to be afraid of the specter of nihilism. Cupitt and Geering would try to cheer up the madman and insist that he had not come "too early" for people. In fact, to use a popular saying, it is time to carpe diem - seize the day, seize the moment, because there is only this life and true religion is an affirmation of this life. We must say "Yes to life" in full acknowledgment of its contingency and transitoriness; and we must work towards establishing "tomorrow's god" - the creation of a just, peaceful and equitable world for all - both human and creatures alike.

The liberal Bishop Spong would look at the madman and reply, "I agree with your non-theism - the traditional God whom the Church has invested in so heavily to prop up an ailing institution is dead. But there is something more. There is something greater, beyond your wild imaginings, who calls me from the depths of my own being. There is a God-presence that invades me and whom I call Love. Come, let me take you to the psychiatrist, and after your treatment we shall discuss your delusion."

Those in the grassroots spirituality movement would be part of the crowd, but instead of laughing at the madman they would counsel him to "Get Real." They would hand him a brochure to join them at the local "Mind, Body, Spirit" Festival where he would have an abundance of opportunities to find the God for whom he was looking.

These then are the three responses to the "God problem." The question is: "Which way should we go?" In this article I will point out some of the problems associated with each of the responses. In particular, I will show that by taking any of these routes Christianity will change.

Non-realism's most vociferous opponent has been the atheist Michael Goulder whose own unease with believing in God led him to resign as an Episcopalian minister in 1981. Goulder neatly sets out the difficulties that face a non-realist Christian:

I certainly do not think such a position absurd or dishonest; but I think it paradoxical, and such paradoxes are only for the very clever. Religious stories are valued because they are thought to be in some sense true; liturgies are carried through because they are thought to put us in some relationship with a real world beyond; if religious language is used to back ethical prescriptions, it is because it is still felt to reflect metaphysical belief. The magic is gone from the Christmas stocking when the identity of Santa Claus is known; we may carry the ritual on for a few years for the nostalgia, but its days are numbered. Beliefs are not a dispensable superstructure, as a ship may sail on without its topmast .... Non-academic people - and that includes non-academic churchmen and saints - would feel that there is something bogus about saying prayers to a nonexistent God, thanking him for an atonement he has not made, by the death of one who is not his Son; and that if the metaphysics are false and the Christian story is a myth ... then no emotional response can spring naturally from it, and no ethic can be grounded in it ... If belief in God is not a valid option, then neither is Christianity a valid option. (Why believe in God?, p. 30)

Interestingly, Goulder's criticism of non-realism echoes Nietzsche's complaint in The Twilight of the Idols that Christianity is a complete system, and if you get rid of belief in God the whole edifice will collapse. In Nietzsche's view it is not only inconsistent but impossible to cling to any kind of Christian morality after having taken leave of God. For Goulder organized religion must be abandoned, since the churches are "locked for ever in the ice-floes of theological contradiction" and the only honest course of action is to leave (Why believe in God?, p. 28). For him, non-realism is atheism in disguise and no amount of academic double-talk can make it otherwise. Similarly, but on the other side of the theological divide, the feminist theologian Daphne Hampson represents those who are mystified why anyone would want to affirm both the continuity of Christianity and the discontinuity of its essential underpinning - a realist understanding of God. Hampson, labelling herself a "non-Christian realist," is convinced of the continuing validity of the term "God" in referring to an objective reality and "not an idealized notion of human beings." Yet, because of her feminist critique of Christianity, she must separate herself from the Christian tradition. Finding it irredeemably sexist, she leaves the Church, having found other strategies for survival. As in the case of Mary Daly's dramatic announcement to the congregation at the Harvard Memorial Chapel in 1971, the only possible route is "to affirm our faith in ourselves and our will to transcendence by rising and walking out together" (quoted by Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman, p. 302). Daly's argument is that the women's movement is an "exodus" community in which people can express their belief in transcendence without being constrained by the irredeemably patriarchal Christian tradition.

To paraphrase William Shakespeare: "to remain or not remain, that is the question? " Can the Christian story work and survive in the knowledge that, as academic theologians say, there is no ontological referent? In short, can one have Christianity without God? Would permitting Christians to accept non-realism mark the end of the faith and the churches?

It is obvious that for Don Cupitt and Lloyd Leering there is more to religion that a set of beliefs. There is religion's story or myth, enacted out daily and weekly in ritual, its ethical system, and its cultural dimension. The old supernatural story is no longer credible, but we can dispense with metaphysics and reinterpret the myth to fit in with our postmodern worldview. Religion is still needed - it has been made by us and can be-reinvented by us:

Religion is primarily not about supernatural belief, but about hope. It is our communal way of generating dreams of how we and our life and our world might be made better. We prepare ourselves for the dream, and we start to think about how we might actually start to make it all come true. My suggestion ... has been that the so-called "decline of religion" is people's abandonment en masse of the kind of ecclesiastical religion that promised comfort and reassurance in the face of death. Instead, we should see religious thought and practice as imaginative and utopian. Religion is a communal way of re-imagining and remaking the self and the world. It is what we are to live by and what we are to live for. At a time when political thought is very unadventurous, and when the world is becoming overwhelmingly dominated by technology, we need religion as much as ever. We need it as a human, value-creating activity. (Cupitt, "Christianity after the Church," p. 11)

Liberal Christians

The second option - of clinging to the objectivity of God - is insisted upon by Bishop Spong. The difference between Spong and Cupitt is that for Spong the word God is a human word that points to a reality that human words can never exhaust. The word God is a human construct. The reality the word points to is not.

Yet, does it still make sense to cling to that sliver of objectivity? What are the objections to belief in the objectivity of God? Is it all just a sort of rearguard action? Has not the scientific worldview dispensed with such a notion long ago? In religion, as in many other areas of life, we have a very ancient, long-established culture of dependency. People reckon that they must have something out-there to lean on, however minimally. Why must Spong fiercely guard that tiny speck of objectivity, that feeling that there is, there must be, something Real out there to which all the symbolism refers, even though ultimately he cannot say much about it? Moreover, there are two difficulties associated with Spong's reformation of Christianity.

First, and this criticism also applies to grassroots spirituality: Is every purported experience of God of the same value or true? Is the Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Hari Krishna follower's religious experience an incomplete apprehension of a greater reality called God in the tradition of the celebrated Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant? (In that parable, six blind men explore a large animal, each of them touching a different part of it; while each one correctly perceives what he touches, none of them can individually discern the whole elephant.)

Moreover, what does it mean to say that one has experienced the God-presence? Its very subjectivity calls into question the objectivity of which it claims to speak. How dependable is religious experience? I don't want to rehearse here all the arguments against religious experience, but to note that religious experience is not necessarily as trustworthy as its advocates suppose.

Second, Spong's assumption is that "religious experience is either a perception of a reality beyond the boundaries of our typical limits or a delusion created as a coping device by those who cannot tolerate, as that which is ultimate, a vision of meaninglessness" (Once and Future Faith, p. 69). What Spong has not accounted for is the nonrealist interpretation of religious experience. For Cupitt, there can be religious experience without any supernatural content. He is perhaps the last person one would expect to have had religious experiences, but he admits that they have occurred at regular intervals throughout his life. One special "revelatory" vision occurred in July 1997 and became the trigger to write The Revelation of Being. Religious bliss is attained not by contacting something or someone outside us, by acknowledging the cosmos as it is: outsideless. In contrast to ecstasy Cupitt coins the term "entostasy," which means to `jump back into ourselves" and accept the world as it is. This does not mean that we are fatalists, but we accept the fact that we are alone - the responsibility for all that happens is in our hands. As the non-realist prayer expresses it: "God has no hands but our hands, no feet, but our feet. .." We are accountable for the future of the Universe, our own lives and the lives of those around us. In short, it is "a purely immanent, for me, living, moving unity of everything."

We give up everything and suddenly find eternal happiness, on the surface only and just Now, where Be-ing pours quietly forth into the dance of meanings and the flickering play of the most transient phenomena. That's bliss; it is "the mysticism of secondariness," and it is what I am here calling the Revelation of Being joyous acceptance of the way everything turns out, or just happens to be. It is high-speed ravishment ... It is what Carlyle calls "natural supernaturalism." It is eternal happiness, briefly, in and with the here and now. (Revelation of Being, pp. 9-10)

According to Cupitt, religious experience is the rapturous attention to the passing moment when we realize and acknowledge that this life is all there is and we must love it now before it ceases to be. It is, as Richard Holloway explains, no different from what poets and artists have been advocating over the centuries: "All art is trying to get us to pay attention, to look at life and love it before we go from the fire-lit banqueting hall out into the winter's darkness" (Doubts and Loves, p. 245).

Grassroots Spirituality

The third option is grassroots spirituality. What should we make of this smorgasbord of therapeutic spiritualities? Cupitt himself says that he is unsure about the vast array of spiritualities that have entered the religious supermarket, for they have created formless anarchy and often commit the same error as traditional religions by producing dogmatic teachings dispensed by gurus and shamans.

The greatest and commonest mistake in religious thought is that made by millions of people who today embrace `spirituality' and New Age thinking without first clearing their heads. They rush uncritically into a tiny jumble of ideas: they have not sufficiently purged themselves of Platonism ... and instead of escaping from the horrors of the past, they merely repeat them. We need to train ourselves to be thoroughly sceptical and emptied out before we can think more clearly. (Emptiness &Brightness, p. 23)

On the surface, this seems to be a reasonable assessment. If the madman had followed the advice of the grassroots and gone along to "The Mind, Body, Spirit" Festival in any capital city in the Western world he might have experienced a whole host of bizarre and esoteric offerings that stretch the limits of credulity and rationality. And yet, are all spiritualities to be characterized as hogwash, full of "weirdos" and a resurgence of the 1960s hippy revolution? Indeed, many of these new spirituality tools and practitioners are becoming mainstream and are frequently used in the corporate and religious worlds, for example, neurolinguistic programming, walking the labyrinth (made popular by Lauren Artress at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco), the Enneagram, Thomas Moore and the care of the soul, holistic healing techniques, and ecological concerns.

Moreover, the existence of the grassroots spirituality movement poses questions for Christianity. First, if in postmodernity notions of the gods have become disseminated by language across and within cultures, then why should we limit ourselves to recreating the Christian myth? What is so special about the Jesus story that it warrants such attention? Second, what is it that the Jesus story alone can offer in response to people's search for meaning? Liberal Christianity can rescue the fundamentalist Christian, but what response does it have for those in the grassroots spirituality movement? Why should these people be interested in the Jesus story if, as it seems, they are already creative religious artists unearthing inspiration from a myriad of sources, both ancient and modern? Third, if Christianity opts for non-realism, will it strike a chord with many people's spiritual search? Instead of becoming gods and saints themselves, even in 2005, people venerate something beyond, "the More" as Marcus Borg describes it.

To sum up: I perceive "the God-problem to be the crucial area of discourse for the New Millennium." In short, it is the difference between non-realism and realism. I have used the writings of Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering as templates for non-realism, and Bishop Spong and grassroots spirituality as templates for realism. You will have noted that I have tended to side with non-realism as I find it the most intellectually compelling reading of Christianity. However, I concede that we whose cultural roots are in Western Christianity find it emotionally difficult to throw off the final vestige of belief in something or someone greater than ourselves. Perhaps the somewhat ambiguous position expressed by another Westar Fellow, Richard Holloway, is where most of us find ourselves:

as far as the status of God is concerned, I find that the needle on my own dial trembles midway between nonrealism (God is a human invention) and critical realism (there is a mystery out there, but we are inextricably involved in its interpretation ...). (Doubts and Loves, pp. 28-29)

However, he adds,

I am not quite prepared to reduce the whole of religious experience to human projection.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. The Gospel According to Woman. London: Harper Collins, 1986.

Cupitt, Don. "Christianity after the Church," paper presented at United Kingdom Sea of Faith Conference, 2000.

Emptiness and Brightness. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2001.

The Revelation of Being, London: SCM Press, 1998.
Funk, Robert. "A Faith for the Future," pp. 1-17 in The Once and

Future Faith. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2001.

Forman, Robert. Grassroots Spirituality. London: Imprint Academic,

2004.

Fraser, Giles. Redeeming Nietzsche: on the piety of unbelief. London: Routledge, 2002.

Goulder, Michael, and John Hick, Why believe in God? London: SCM Press, 1983.

Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyous Science. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965.

 . Twilight of the Idols. London, Penguin, 1990.

Spong, John Shelby. "A Christianity for tomorrow," pp. 65-80 in The Once and Future Faith. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2001.

Dr. Nigel Leaves is Director and Dean of Studies of Wollaston Theological College, Perth, Western Australia. He is a Fellow of Westar Institute and author of two books on Don Cupitt (Odyssey on the Sea of Faith and Surfing on the Sea of Faith) , from Polebridge Press. His third book will be on "the God problem."