"It has not yet been disclosed what we are to be" (1 John 3,2)
Feature article
Thinking God at the Beginning of the 21th Century
What does it mean to believe in God?
If I understand our Western history rightly to answer this question would have been simple for every inhabitant of the Western world a thousand years ago: To believe in God then meant to conceive the world as a well organized totality which had been created and cared for by a transcendent male person: an almighty invisible man. Although Jews and Muslims never believed that God the father had sent his son Jesus Christ into the world to rescue us humans from sin and eternal death, they would have agreed with Christians believing that God existed as a person to whom you can tell all your thoughts and feelings - complaints, thankfulness, despair – and who, above all, deserves gratitude and praise because He is the origin and end of all that exists.
I am not sure if most people would have answered the question in the same way two thousand years ago. And it is likely that three thousand years ago most of them would not have understood the question at all. For then one used to believe that the world was reigned by several gods – or spirits, or forces – that were not strong enough to influence the whole but only their own spheres and, consequently, were in permanent conflict with each other.
And today?
Of course, there are still many women and men who believe in God in the medieval way. Yet, it makes a difference that, since the European Enlightenment, the framework of political and mental structures which held those people’s belief in a state of stability has been lost, at least in the Western hemisphere. Whereas believing in God seems to have been self-evident a thousand years ago, it has nowadays become a personal decision. Today it is possible to believe that one God or several gods or no god or whatever is hiding behind the visible world. Unless you try to spread your belief in an aggressive way or infringe a state-law, nobody will trouble you because of your faith. Religious belief has become a private affair in Western democracies. You do not even have to believe that democracy is the best possible polity or that its rules are rational as long as you follow them.
Yet, obviously, the question of what it means to believe in God has not disappeared. Having been shifted from the so-called public to the so-called private sphere it has only left its previous context. People are still asking where they come from, where they go to and what their being-here-in-the-world means. At least parents whose duty it is to accompany human newcomers into adult life cannot avoid these questions. For, to ponder on one’s origin and future seems to be a normal and necessary element of the process of becoming (and remaining) a person. Yet, as history teaches us, it is possible that existential questions can assume new forms. It is true that the very word “God” has become weightier in the past few years because of the acute conflicts between oriental and occidental worldviews. Nevertheless it is possible that in a hundred or two hundred years children will not any more ask their parents about “God” but simply: What is the meaning of my life? Where do I come from? How can I lead a good life on this planet that is inhabited by billions of ever-newborn human beings?
Literally, the word “theology” means “speaking of God”. In fact, as we have seen, the word “God” (in Ancient Greek: theos) for many centuries has been a sort of a container in which humans in the West put their existential questions. Yet, whereas these questions remain and will probably be asked in some way or other by every new generation, the container-words can alter. At the beginning of the 21th century it seems that more and more people do not any more ask questions about “God”, at least not in the sense that they imagine a transcendent person holding the world’s fate safely in his fatherly hands. Realizing that the word “God” can be conceived as a garment in which existential questions dress, theology could also mean to observe how the mode of asking existential questions is changing in a given present. As we can learn from the jewish-christian-muslim tradition, we should not make images of “God”. So, to allow the imaginery of the transcendent male person to fade and be open for new qualities of conceiving what we can’t see, but seem to need, means to creatively refer to this tradition.
Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political theorist, writes in her book “Vita Activa” that every human is born into a fabric that she or he has not made herself and that has been there long time before he or she has entered it. To live means to weave one’s own life into this fabric, like a thread of a unique color and quality, not knowing what will happen to me and to my actions. As the natural cosmos, the world and the fabric of human affairs woven into it is such a complicated network the origins and future of which nobody will ever be able to understand wholly, humans tend to think that there must be an “author” behind the intricate story: God. Yet, perhaps there is no author who knows the end? Do we have to give up all our hopes if there is none? Hannah Arendt says that letting go the idea of a God who holds all the threads together is no reason to despair, because nevertheless we can say where we come from and where we go to: we are born by a certain mother into a certain nourishing, loving texture: the texture of generations and the world which we can love and nourish ourselves. We cannot see what is “behind” the world, but every human being has the possibility to trust and give love. Perhaps we create “God” who calls herself LOVE (1 Joh 4, 8) and BEING-THERE (Ex 3, 14) in the bible by loving, trusting, being there for our fellow-creatures? What we should praise is, perhaps, not a distant person “behind” the world, but the INTER-EST, the LIVING-IN-BETWEEN all the billions of beings inhabiting the world?
It is possible that parents will respond to their childrens’ existential questions with sentences like these. Doing so, they will not have left the jewish-christian-muslim tradition, but they will have transformed it into an existential language that postpatriarchal people are able to understand.
Already appeared in this section:
- The Art of Creating Postpatriarchal Meaning (WINCONFERENCE Prague, oct. 2009). This text has moved to the Pelican Web.
- Thinking Dependency. This text has moved to the Pelican Web.
What does it mean to believe in God?
If I understand our Western history rightly to answer this question would have been simple for every inhabitant of the Western world a thousand years ago: To believe in God then meant to conceive the world as a well organized totality which had been created and cared for by a transcendent male person: an almighty invisible man. Although Jews and Muslims never believed that God the father had sent his son Jesus Christ into the world to rescue us humans from sin and eternal death, they would have agreed with Christians believing that God existed as a person to whom you can tell all your thoughts and feelings - complaints, thankfulness, despair – and who, above all, deserves gratitude and praise because He is the origin and end of all that exists.
I am not sure if most people would have answered the question in the same way two thousand years ago. And it is likely that three thousand years ago most of them would not have understood the question at all. For then one used to believe that the world was reigned by several gods – or spirits, or forces – that were not strong enough to influence the whole but only their own spheres and, consequently, were in permanent conflict with each other.
And today?
Of course, there are still many women and men who believe in God in the medieval way. Yet, it makes a difference that, since the European Enlightenment, the framework of political and mental structures which held those people’s belief in a state of stability has been lost, at least in the Western hemisphere. Whereas believing in God seems to have been self-evident a thousand years ago, it has nowadays become a personal decision. Today it is possible to believe that one God or several gods or no god or whatever is hiding behind the visible world. Unless you try to spread your belief in an aggressive way or infringe a state-law, nobody will trouble you because of your faith. Religious belief has become a private affair in Western democracies. You do not even have to believe that democracy is the best possible polity or that its rules are rational as long as you follow them.
Yet, obviously, the question of what it means to believe in God has not disappeared. Having been shifted from the so-called public to the so-called private sphere it has only left its previous context. People are still asking where they come from, where they go to and what their being-here-in-the-world means. At least parents whose duty it is to accompany human newcomers into adult life cannot avoid these questions. For, to ponder on one’s origin and future seems to be a normal and necessary element of the process of becoming (and remaining) a person. Yet, as history teaches us, it is possible that existential questions can assume new forms. It is true that the very word “God” has become weightier in the past few years because of the acute conflicts between oriental and occidental worldviews. Nevertheless it is possible that in a hundred or two hundred years children will not any more ask their parents about “God” but simply: What is the meaning of my life? Where do I come from? How can I lead a good life on this planet that is inhabited by billions of ever-newborn human beings?
Literally, the word “theology” means “speaking of God”. In fact, as we have seen, the word “God” (in Ancient Greek: theos) for many centuries has been a sort of a container in which humans in the West put their existential questions. Yet, whereas these questions remain and will probably be asked in some way or other by every new generation, the container-words can alter. At the beginning of the 21th century it seems that more and more people do not any more ask questions about “God”, at least not in the sense that they imagine a transcendent person holding the world’s fate safely in his fatherly hands. Realizing that the word “God” can be conceived as a garment in which existential questions dress, theology could also mean to observe how the mode of asking existential questions is changing in a given present. As we can learn from the jewish-christian-muslim tradition, we should not make images of “God”. So, to allow the imaginery of the transcendent male person to fade and be open for new qualities of conceiving what we can’t see, but seem to need, means to creatively refer to this tradition.
Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political theorist, writes in her book “Vita Activa” that every human is born into a fabric that she or he has not made herself and that has been there long time before he or she has entered it. To live means to weave one’s own life into this fabric, like a thread of a unique color and quality, not knowing what will happen to me and to my actions. As the natural cosmos, the world and the fabric of human affairs woven into it is such a complicated network the origins and future of which nobody will ever be able to understand wholly, humans tend to think that there must be an “author” behind the intricate story: God. Yet, perhaps there is no author who knows the end? Do we have to give up all our hopes if there is none? Hannah Arendt says that letting go the idea of a God who holds all the threads together is no reason to despair, because nevertheless we can say where we come from and where we go to: we are born by a certain mother into a certain nourishing, loving texture: the texture of generations and the world which we can love and nourish ourselves. We cannot see what is “behind” the world, but every human being has the possibility to trust and give love. Perhaps we create “God” who calls herself LOVE (1 Joh 4, 8) and BEING-THERE (Ex 3, 14) in the bible by loving, trusting, being there for our fellow-creatures? What we should praise is, perhaps, not a distant person “behind” the world, but the INTER-EST, the LIVING-IN-BETWEEN all the billions of beings inhabiting the world?
It is possible that parents will respond to their childrens’ existential questions with sentences like these. Doing so, they will not have left the jewish-christian-muslim tradition, but they will have transformed it into an existential language that postpatriarchal people are able to understand.
Already appeared in this section:
- The Art of Creating Postpatriarchal Meaning (WINCONFERENCE Prague, oct. 2009). This text has moved to the Pelican Web.
- Thinking Dependency. This text has moved to the Pelican Web.
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