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389 - The Future Of Belief: Theism In a World Come Of Age |
The Future Of Belief: Theism In a World Come
Of Age
By Leslie Dewart
223 pp. New York, Herder and Herder, 1966. $4.95.
It is curious that among the world religions only in Christianity is the existence of God a problem. The chief question for those who attack the faith as well as for those who defend it has become the philosophical problem of the truth of the claims made for and about God, and the assumption seems to be that the religious issue of relationship to God is resolved by possessing the philosophical truth about him. Christianity now is in a cultural and philosophical crisis in which its truth claims cannot be demonstrated as required, for it is now a philosophic commonplace that God's existence cannot be proved, and that even to ask about God's existence is an improper question. Almost inevitably the next short step is taken to conclude that any statement about God is at best irrelevant to the problems of human existence, and at worst pernicious.
Christianity has brought this religious and philosophical disaster upon itself, Professor Dewart argues, because it is at least in its Roman Catholic form still wedded to a scholastic philosophical structure which is inappropriate for our understanding of man and the world in evolutionary and functional terms. Because of their emphasis upon static essences, Scholastic categories of being are no longer adequate as a vehicle for Christian theism; hence our present philosophical impasse, and the necessity to rethink the entire theistic topic in new terms. Christian dogma must be dehellenized, just as Scripture must be demythologized. The hellenistic form of Christian dogma means that Christianity appears as a finished and therefore unchanging system of doctrines about God the supreme being, and his incursion into our world of time and change from his own eternal and supernatural realm in the form of the Christ, who thus possesses two disparate natures or personalities joined in hypostatic union. Man's knowledge consists in the conformity of ideas in the mind to the objects in the external world, so that man as subject is clearly distinguished from the objects he knows, and truth means to possess the ultimate and absolute essence of reality. Religious truth consists in the same kind of propositional knowledge about God and his supernatural realm given in the form of cryptic messages which must be translated into common language. The result is a
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390 - The Future Of Belief: Theism In a World Come Of Age |
system of doctrines that communicates the character of the supernatural realm to the natural, with the magisterium as the translator of these cryptic messages from God to man. The aim of these doctrines is to procure man's salvation from this transistory world to an eternal and unchanging existence with God. But its actual result is that such a doctrine as the hypostatic union is now an empty formula concealing a cryptodocetism, when it is not frankly dismissed in favor of outright humanism, because in our conceptual world two persons means two beings which cannot be merged. Consequently in its popular form Christianity is now no more than a "spiritual hedonism" whose concern is wholly with ensuring to the believer the joys of the next life, and which fully deserves Freud's strictures upon it as an illusion.
The initial reaction of a non-scholastic Protestant to such a grim description of Christianity as the foregoing is to say that Dewart is not talking about the Christianity I know. But Dewart amply demonstrates that Scholastic categories dominate the thinking of such a prophet as Tillich, and it is obvious that although evangelical, not to mention fundamentalist, Protestantism bases its teaching upon Scripture rather than Scholastic philosophy, both its mood and its content exhibit the same propositional finality and other-worldly irrelevancy which Dewart identifies with Roman Catholicism. Protestants can take no smug comfort in his book.
To replace this irrelevant Christianity, Dewart argues for the recognition that doctrines are not final formulations of unchanging truths about an eternal essence, but are instead historical products reflecting the patterns of man's appropriation of his experience at a given time. In this sense, it was necessary for the concept of the Christ as Logos to replace the Messianic idea for only thus could Christianity expand beyond a Jewish cult to become ecumenical. In the same way it is now necessary to conceive of God in some manner other than being, for this category perpetuates both the search for some essence behind the processes of change, and the now inappropriate concern with demonstrable truths about God as being or a being. God is not being or a being but reality whose presence "'reveals me to myself . . . by making me more fully myself than I should be if I were not exposed to its impact,'" Dewart says, quoting Marcel (p. 177). ". . . God's real presence to us (and therefore, his reality 'in himself') does not depend upon his being a being or an object. In fact, our belief in the Christian God is post-primitive to the degree that we apprehend that although there is no super-being behind beings, no supreme being who stands at the summit of the hierarchy of being, nevertheless a reality beyond the totality of being reveals itself by its presence" (pp. 176-177).
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391 - The Future Of Belief: Theism In a World Come Of Age |
More is at stake than a shift in terminology from being to reality. Is man alone or does he exist in relationship to something not encompassable within the human and natural as ordinarily understood in non-transcendental terms? If the answer is "No," then clearly Christianity is a superstitious fraud. But if the answer is "Yes," the problem is how to say it. Dewart argues persuasively that the terminology must change because the human and religious problem is not resolved by pieces of knowledge about an object, but by a relationship with the other in which self-consciousness is enlarged and enhanced. Lest this be dismissed as Kierkegaard at his worst, Dewart holds that man is not an essence externally related to objects by pieces of knowledge about them; he is a self-conscious being created by his participation with and differentiation from whatever surrounds him. Knowledge is "a relational existing-with which results from the self-differentiation of consciousness" (p. 179). The key to knowledge and truth is then, not as Scholastic philosophy has it, the conformity of ideas with objects-which would rule out any knowledge of God for he is not an object-but fidelity, and this is a relation arising from one's own nature, in obedience to one's own nature, not from external compulsion. As one grows in awareness of one's own being, one's level of fidelity changes, and since truth is the fidelity of relationship, truth also changes as self-awareness enlarges. Human experience is that of an increasing self-awareness, of becoming more human, and when one speaks of God he refers to the reality in relation to which one becomes fully human.
About all this two questions are to be raised. One is whether the analysis of human experience is correct, and the other is whether the suggested result is Christian. As a phenomenological account of the process of becoming human, of knowledge as the structuring of relationships between self and whatever else there is, I find Dewart's analysis illuminating and exciting. We are social creatures and we develop languages and conceptual schemes as ways of communicating ourselves to ourselves and each other, not as the identification of ultimate essences. Truth and knowledge therefore arise from interaction because they represent creative exchange, and no formulation can be final because we are not finished beings. Moreover the test of the adequacy of any concept or doctrine must be the quality of participation in relationship which it engenders and sustains. This is the functional criterion of knowledge we use in the sciences, but we have not effectively employed it in any value experience or in our assessment of human nature-else the new morality would not have raised such an outcry-and we have excluded it in religion. Consequently Dewart's method and conclusions will be highly objectionable to both Roman Catholics and
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Protestants who identify the truth with a fixed content, whether given in Scripture or through a magisterium. And I think he is over-sanguine about the willingness generally to adopt such a functional method or its results in theology.
The issue, of course, is what is Christianity, and the full implication of Dewart's argument, as well as that of his radical Protestant colleagues, is that whatever is fully and appropriately human is Christian. But what is human? If man is as social a being as the phenomenological analysis indicates, then there are several, if not many, forms of humanness. Self-consciousness in relation to and in interaction with other humans does not describe a resulting form, but only identifies a process. And to identify a process does nothing toward choosing between alternative products of the process. Here a valuation enters which cannot be domesticated to the process, and something like this fact is implied by the Christian talk about God and the incarnation as his entry into our history. Hence it is not enough to identify as Christian that which is fully human, even in the name of an open rather than a closed future. Some further act of commitment is required, and this introduces a fideistic element which Dewart would seem to prefer to eliminate, although to talk about God at all is to assert that more is happening than a naturalistic account of the process of socialization and humanizing identifies.
It is necessary to find philosophically adequate ways of talking about God, because the traditional ways pose wrong problems. Here Protestantism has been derelict, as Dewart suggests, by taking refuge in a Scriptural literalism. The essential question is not whether God exists, but whether in relationship to him one discovers himself sustained and more fully revealed. To this end, Dewart's phenomenological analysis centering on the person may prove a more effective tool than process philosophy, and in this book he offers a challenging demonstration of the dialogue out of which theology comes.
Emerson W. Shideler
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa