Yet, looking more closely at that more philosophical or generally religious orientation: if we are to speak in this way of God as the great Whence, the cause of all causes, and the great Whither, the end of all ends, how am I really to know what is concealed in the cause and what awaits us at the end? Might not the end perhaps be a dark abyss, and not a place of illumination? Might not the basic support be an enticing illusion, and not a sustaining foundation? Could not the ultimate end be a definitive breakdown, and not the ultimate fulfillment? How am I to know whether the central sense of things for myself and the world will not ultimately turn out to be nonsense, the central value ultimately non-value? Such doubts are truly justified and make the consideration of commitment to a system of essential Christian values difficult.
In reading this paragraph I thought of how of often, in how many ways in popular culture, in intellectual culture, the "dark abyss" "definitive breakdown" the presentation of life and the universe as meaningless ("nonsense") the value, purpose intention, meaning are presented as not only nonexistent but are rejected as a hated and derided and discredited illusion. You read that in a large number of writers you start to think that they want that to be true, their emotional attachment to these non-qualia of a dark abyss and their distaste and disdain for any proposal that the positive alternatives to them might be true.
Of course, the very same people will, in other ways, in other statements, often in the language of moral outrage or in sentimental assertions show that they don't really believe their own hard, cynical, would-be manly tough-mindedness. Their very anger and outrage in their expressions supporting the reality of their dark vision shows that they don't believe in it even in their expression of it.
It is clear to me that the reason they are so emotional about it is their angry rejection of the possibility of God the Creator who imbues the entire creation, including the physical universe with purpose and intent, with value and meaning. Most distasteful to many of those with manliness issues and an economic self-interest in an absence of moral obligation is that the universe includes such things as justice and, most disgusting to them of all, love.
What and who is the God who is to provide my essential values? What is he like? In the light of the Old and New Testament I know an answer to this question. The god of the Judeo-Christian faith does not remain abstract and undetermined like the God of the philosophers. He is concrete and determined; not hidden, but revealed in the history of the people of Israel and of Jesus Christ. And unlike the God of the philosophers and scholars to take up Pascal's contrast - this God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ, is not enigmatic, like the Egyptian sphinx, the strangler of passers-by. Nor is this God ambivalent, equivocal, two-faced like Tyche-Fortuna, who is the goddess of happiness and unhappiness guides the course of the world.
I would add here, that deistic God who contemporary atheists - and I will add, not a few Nazis - have, at times, for reasons I don't believe are sincere, propose as a possible God they can believe in, a god they believe could have, maybe, created the universe but who ignores it, having set off what is otherwise, in human and in animal experience, a torture machine, whose indifference to humanity and human suffering is either a matter of choice or impotence. I never, in reading these "deists" from the 18th century enlightenment nor in the years of the new atheism fad of the 00s believed for a second that any of them believed in such a God. I will note that most of those to whom such deism was attributed among the American "founding fathers" were invariably slave owners or those who didn't have much trouble with slavery. It was in the God of Abrahamic religion who those enslaved found their right to freedom, their right to the product of their own labor, their rights to equality. The Christian form of that God, through the person and teachings of Jesus is, in fact, the origin of the modern concept that slavery is an abhorent evil and its greatest force in the abolition of slavery and, lest it be forgotten, in fighting against wage slavery.*
No, the God of the Judeo-Christian faith unambiguously proves to be a God, not against humanity but for humanity. "Immanuel: God with us." A God who should mean for human beings not - as is so often represented by supposedly Christian teachers - fear but security, not unhappiness but happiness, not death but life. Even in the Old Testament (despite some still mythically pagan features) not a slave-owner but a God of the exodus from Egypt, a God of liberation, of mercy, of salvation, of grace. A God beside whom there are no other gods. This one and only God is that one very last, very first reality which, together with Christians and Jews, Moslems also worship in Allah - a fact which was not unimportant for the Camp David agreement and the recent strivings for peace in the Middle East. He is the reality which Hindus also seek in Brahma, and the Buddhists in the Absolute Dharma (Nirvana), as do the Chinese in heaven or in the Tao. For Jews and Christians this one true God is not the unknown God. He is the good God, the God who looks on human beings with kindness, the God in whom men and women can place an absolute and unreserved trust even in doubt, suffering, and sin, in all personal distress and all social affliction - the God in fact in whom we can place our faith.
I agree that in those other religious traditions the things that can produce egalitarian democratic governance with the aim of producing the most possibly decent life we can achieve are to be found, I have to ask why they have lain there undiscovered in most places where those other religions predominate as opposed to the places where they became active and were put, however imperfectly, into effect. I've mentioned before my debate about justice with some Buddhists as my engagement with the Jewish tradition was re-starting, when I noted the lack of a notion of justice in Buddhism. Instead of producing the Sutras that could point to that, they proclaimed that justice was an illusion, to which I told them if they were denied justice, they'd soon find out that their right to justice was not an illusion.
I don't know if Muslim countries will find the potential in potent enough quantities that Islamic egalitarian democracy will come into being, I don't know if Hindus will discover that potential in potent enough form to make India a real egalitarian democracy. I do know in the contexts in which egalitarian democracy arose in the United States, in Europe, it was through the morality taught by or taken up from the Gospel, the Law of Moses, the Prophets and that as those fade, egalitarian democracy has faded, too. The idea that a de-religionized Europe will retain what was gained in the moral revulsion to the world wars, to the Holocaust and other mass murders of the Nazis, is dissolving right before our eyes. I think the de-Christianized Christianity that wants to be nice more than it does in asserting the teachings of Jesus is not going to revive that. I think the central issue is the choice to really believe the most audacious claims in the Scriptures that support that moral force as the will of God. To really believe that you are commanded to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I think the "winter Christianity" that Karl Rahner predicted would be the Christianity of the future, in the modern, scientistic, secularized, de-religionized era certainly is centered around the form of the Jewish creed, The Shema, confirmed by Jesus, to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love others as you love yourself. From the second part of that wherever it is expressed all ideas of egalitarian democracy certainly come, they can't come from anything else. But I don't think it's possible to really believe it is possible for enough people to do that with enough force in reality TO MAKE IT REAL if you don't believe that it is a law, a requirement given by God. The secular notion that is something like that, the secularized notion of equality is not found by or in science and, so, remains as a habit of thought which doesn't stand up in use.
In view of the rise of neo-fascism, under that name or unadmitted, the decline of workers rights, of egalitarian democracy, it's worth considering that while Christianity might exist in a personal form, equality and democracy cannot exist except in a society, in a polity. There can be no "winter democracy".
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My increasing skepticism in the secular liberalism of my youth as a potent force as I saw its decline after the mid 1960s preceded my re-engagement with the Judeo-Christian tradition which, oddly enough, came from reading John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus. As much as I am skeptical, now, of the "Historical Jesus Seminar" that book came from, it was probably the decisive step in choosing to see, choosing to believe. I saw that the only really successful pursuit of justice in American history, in European history seemed to be powered by people who believed in their obligation, imposed by God to treat others as they wanted to be treated. As a secular notion or even a feeling of niceness - a vestige of post-Christianized societies - it just doesn't get the job done.
* The conditions of workers in no country that had an anti-religious Communist government rose as high as those so imperfectly did in the countires where Christianity once had influence. I have to wonder if the decline in real workers unions in the United States is a product of either the post-slavery suppression of the egalitarian core of Christian belief among those who profess what might be considered a semi-deistic "Christianity" whose god is indifferent to the economic justice that is central to the Mosaic Law and which found unbridled egalitarian generosity in Jesus's parable of the workers in the vineyard, or which is replaced by the gods of American style secularism, the market served by the kind of de-moralized law that Oliver Wendell Holmes wanted, the civil law stripped of all notions of morality, an automatic, scientifically precise and predictable administer of decisions that grant property to some and dispose of the lives of others devoid of morality. As this bizarrely ill considered hero of traditional American liberals put it in The Path of the Law,
For my own part, I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if
every word of moral significance could be banished from the law
altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas
uncolored by anything outside the law. We should lose the fossil records
of a good deal of history and the majesty got from ethical
associations, but by ridding ourselves of an unnecessary confusion we
should gain very much in the clearness of our thought.
I think that such a monstrosity of a "Justice" calling for such a parody of justice, a. points out the folly of not paying serious attention to the actual different denotation that words have because, b. the secular, 18th century "enlightenment" seflish meaning of "liberalism" is consistent with such a depraved view of secularized law. It would, in the experience of the victims of such "clearness of thought" be the very opposite of justice. The merely ethical replacement of actual, religious morality, of real justice, with that scientistic, enlightenment virtue of "clearness of thought" is quite compatible with that level of injustice and moral depravity and real suffering and death. The habits of mind it encourages are quite deistically indifferent to those. And, these days, in days gone by, many who wore the label "Christian" were capable of it, as well.
IF YOU WANT A GOOD EXAMPLE OF THAT LOOK AT WHAT THE GODDAMNED SUPREME COURT DID ABOUT THOSE SEEKING ASYLUM IN THE UNITED STATES YESTERDAY.
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