GOD-TALK AFTER THE END OF CHRISTENDOM
Ruether, Rosemary Radford
The problem of God in ew evil world GOD-TALK OF CHRISTENDOM ROSEMARY RADFORD RVETHER It lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn...
...For Eusebius, universal monotheism is the cosmic counterpart of universal monarchy in the political order...
...God" has taught all the servant classes of history to stifle their own nascent cries of protest and to bow down to their fate as divine commandment...
...This Unmoved Mover is the beginning and end of all things, but remains in itself perfect and unchanged by these processes of creation and redemption...
...For Feuerbach, all the doctrines about God can be seen as human self-projection and self-alienation...
...Buber concludes by saying that: We cannot cleanse the word God and we cannot make it whole, but denied and mutilated as it is we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care...
...For Marx, that social base was class division...
...In more recent times Whitehead, Hartshorne and other process theologians have proposed similar developmental concepts of God...
...Theses on Feuerbach, in Marx and Engels on Religion...
...These experiences generated new ways of looking at nature, history and transcendence...
...Any God whose providential activities to chastise evil could include Auschwitz must be declared a Devil and no God...
...Only through the processes of Becoming did God's Being reach its fullness...
...And even a, she is an p in humble irituality that secular, that ;ath that can zed by Latin ession of an >f oppression analysis and que does not rary, it clears use of the God of bibhets and the i the task of ideological critique of religion, as in the Prophet Amos who cried out: I hate, I despise your feasts, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies...
...For Bloch, the greatest blasphemy of the evil world-God is that He has appropriated the eschatological hope of the crucified and turned it into another tool of world domination...
...We must recognize God for what It is, namely, our own selfreflection...
...The Eclipse of God, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1952, p. 7-9...
...Where might I find a word like it to describe the Highest...
...But classical theology has assumed that, through equating God with the superlatives of our ideals, and, at the same time, denying that God literally was "like" these human images, one could get to some idea of what God is apart from humanity...
...But it is not at all sure that this God of redemption can be the same one through which so many messages of sexist oppression have been proclaimed in the Bible and the history of theology...
...Heaven, which heretofore had hovered as a transcendent Other far above the earth, had, so to speak, thrust itself into this mortal clay, transforming static being into dynamic process spinning forward toward unimaginable goals...
...This is the God of the prophets and the early Church...
...For history was : dichotomy . God, the history in through the ins through >us the full lg was only through the ach its fulltshorne and similar departicularly leta-physics, suppositions >t now look } God must ;ess through potentiality stence, only evements of eak, in the itinually ex;nts of historical existence...
...An alternative world can only appear as Utopian visions that radically contradict this dominant social experience...
...It is humanity, through its willful error, that has created the evil world, not God...
...Feuerbach reverses the Hegelian dialectic of humanity and God...
...They have not taken seriously enough the problem of evil and the disestablishment of those good consequences which their Consequent God is supposed to preserve...
...For example, in the writings of the fourth century Church Father, Eusebius, the relationship between monotheism and universal imCommonweal: 371 perial monarchy is explicit...
...Man on His Own...
...Then, far from being contrary to social faith, it can be discovered to be its true foundation...
...It is not enough to say that this God will intervene shortly to overthrow an evil world...
...The God who is manifest in the crucified Christ does not seem to be the God who is Lord of this world...
...Yet this safeguarding of the autonomous Being of God allows such theologians to admit that, concretelyj our images about this transcendent self are always rooted in human self-statement...
...Today various forms of liberation theology contain, as an essential element, an ideological critique of religion...
...But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream...
...It is the opium of the people...
...A combination of evil as punishment, evil as opportunity for redemptive suffering and final rightings of wrongs at the End are supposed to cover the gap...
...Sacramental theology has moved into a new, quite complex and more subtle mode of operation...
...The social principles of Christianity transfer the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class and all they have for the latter is the pious wish that the former will be charitable...
...It is not the divine Self that alienates and objectifies itself in the created world in order to reappropriate its own potential, now made fully conscious...
...The classical critique of anthropological language safeguarded a God beyond and independent of these human images...
...Bloch ends up with a new dualism between an evil and a good God...
...The separation of religious from social realities is part of the way in which the dominant theology makes God a sanction of the status quo and fails to connect the Christian message with social criticism...
...Certain models of God also become the way of sanctifying social and political systems...
...It is easy for well-fed Christians to believe that these thinkers have exaggerated the problem of evil in relation to the doctrines of divine sovereignty and providence...
...Jewish reflection on the Holocaust, Black theology and Marxist philosophy also have been ways in which the question of theodicy has been raised...
...Eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, opt...
...Language about a Black God, a Black Christ, a Black Theology, a Black Church as redemptive humanity, are intended to unmask the mystification of white power and locate the Christian message on the side of the oppressed race for the sake of the liberation of all humanity, Black and White, from the white Babylon...
...Latin American liberation theology confronts directly an expression of Christianity that has traditionally sanctified the power of the landed classes founded by the Spanish conquest...
...The God of apocalyptic redemption must be out of power in history if this God can appear only in the form of the Victim...
...Humans fall down and worship their own alienated self-projection, humbly confessing that they are a "worm and no man...
...that is, drawn from human experience...
...Feminists suggest that the whole history of God-talk, expressing the alienation of the divine from the human, of soul from body, of transcendence from immanence, with its denigration of earth, body, sexuality and femaleness, is a superstructure the social base of which is the subjugation of women by men...
...As Marx states this in his fourth thesis on Feuerbach: For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is only to be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis...
...Theology as Anthropology Another important critique of traditional Godlanguage came from the left-wing Hegelians of the nineteenth century, specifically Ludwig Feuerbach...
...The dilemma of all theologies of Liberation seems to be this: that the God who represents our liberation does not seem to be the God, who has been in power in history...
...In appropriating this development, it brings to full realization its own self-reflection...
...This sense of nature as processive had its effect upon the idea of God, suggesting that God too is a dynamic, historical being...
...Human images are both a reflecting glass and an impediment for viewing this transcendent being of God...
...The evil God is the Moloch of the historically established world order, the God whose reign has justified the holocaust of blood sacrifice of most human lives on the altar of power and privilege...
...The critique of religion as the alienated projection of human ideals is only the beginning...
...Prophetic faith itself began the task of 16 June 1978: 372 own nascent ate as divine ; face out of h its human >uage reveals critique of ed slavery ie Middle y, how to , although ansfer the class and wish that ansfer the ill the inther existThe Comer," ibid., ents, justifyation, would his criticism, this ideologied by Chrisof new types tion theology gical critique leology conuty that has inded classes inic Catholic the Indian ence to this >r...
...But a God whose ways are too far from our ways, in the sense of elementary principles of right and wrong, may just be more demon than God...
...This must be done, not only in order to appropriate our better self, but also in order to critique some of the worse aspects of ourselves which masquerade under the name of God...
...There are several dimensions of this new mode of operation, and their implications are worth exploring...
...New York: Herder and Herder, 1970, p. 144...
...Yet he posed an essential question which theology has been wrestling with ever since...
...It must become the critique of the socio-economic alienation of humanity...
...What Marx could not foresee was that this ideological critique of religion could be appropriated by Christians and become an essential component of new types of theology...
...This must take the form, not just of coups of consciousness, but revolutionary actions which grapple with the alienated system in order to overturn it and create a new social order where class division does not exist...
...Older images of the divine grow too crude to encompass higher human self-concepts...
...This God of Hope is the powerless but never extinguishable aspiration to a different heaven and earth...
...Other liberation theologies, specifically Black Theology in the United States, have been engaged in a similar ideological critique of theology...
...It too engages in the critique of patriarchal ideology in theology in order to clear the way for a vision of a new humanity and new earth when sexist alienation is overcome...
...But the Christ that overcomes sexist role oppression cannot be one that again alienates us from our real sexual natures, but allows us to appropriate them as ways of being human that do not cast one into a servant relation to the other...
...The ancient Greek dichotomies of Being and Becoming, which classical philosophy had separated into two mutually exclusive spheres, have interpenetrated and been mutually transformed into a new unity of Being as Becoming through which Being comes to be...
...They are rooted in that crisis of Western consciousness represented by the collapse of the ancien regime of Christendom and the discrediting of Us institutions, culture and, finally, its idea of God...
...The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces: they have killed for it and died for it...
...Christian hope, de-alienated, is recovered as God's mandate to struggle against an evil, oppressive world to create the new heaven and new earth...
...N.Y.: Schocken, 1964, p. 70...
...The solution to this cannot be simply more splitting of the natural from the spiritual self, but rather a return to the natural, the earthly, the bodily self as the only true concretization of our spiritual beings...
...Marx's terse language reveals the prophetic anger that lies behind his critique of religion: The social principles of Christianity justified slavery in Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, although they make a pitiful face over it...
...One must also explicate the social base for that self-alienation...
...The Kingdom of Heaven, which has been used to alienate and pacify the people, must be recovered in its de-alienated meaning...
...Rather it is the human self that alienates and objectifies itself in God...
...For Hegel the relationship between God and history was dialectical, modeled on the subject-object dichotomy of self-objectification and self-realization...
...The crumbling of the old order and its transcendent sanctions unleashed new forces within history itself...
...The God of Utopia has not been in power in history...
...Humanity, first of all alienates its own labor, its own creativity, by turning some into the laborers and others into the owners of the means of production and the recipients of the wealth of exploited labor...
...Hegel was the philosopher who painted this new vision of God in history on a large canvas to intoxicate the imagination of generations of thinkers...
...But the conflict was not resolved thereby and becomes acute all over again as the question of historical evil (rather than just individual sin) is raised in theology...
...These are, of course, perfectly sensible concerns, yet they somehow fail to meet the present situation...
...God's being continually expands as the repository of the achievements of hisof being its eing shaped md this besveloping of hotomies of osophy had es, have intned into a which Being d this new is to intoxilinkers...
...God becomes the objectified image of all the human longings and struggles to define the better human self...
...The idea of God evolves as human self-consciousness evolves...
...On the contrary, it clears out of the way the false or idolatrous use of the divine image in order to reveal the true God of biblical faith...
...Marxists claim to be atheists...
...The conflict between established evil and crucified good is both more acute and more tragic than the ideologies of providence have been able to allow...
...God's Being was only nascent or implicit at the beginning...
...Why was this God so helpless in the face of centuries and even millennia in which the systems of oppression were being built up, if all this was contrary to "His" will...
...Hispanic Catholic spirituality also was designed to teach the Indian laborer his duty of passivity and obedience to this class rule...
...We have no other language with which to talk about God except heightened language about ourselves and our experiences...
...It seems relatively easy to reconcile these through the concepts of human freedom and sinfulness...
...Our statements about God must be analyzed to find out what they are saying about ourselves...
...In Richard Rubenstein's book, After Auschwitz (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1966...
...A spirituality that divides soul from body, sacred from secular, that teaches a humble waiting for life after death that can only endure present evil, all this is analyzed by Latin American liberation theology as the expression of an ideology that supports an unjust system of oppression and subjugation...
...Gnostic theology carried this question to its logical conclusion by differentiating an evil God, who is the creator of this present world, from an eschatological God, who is not in power in this world and who represents the redemptive hope...
...This revolution in consciousness, which began among an intellectual elite, became visible in social processes through political and technological revolutions...
...The unrealized potential of the human self represents a transcendency of being that is both more than what the human is now and yet is related to human beings as its own higher fulfillment...
...From the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, ibid., p. 42...
...The latter must itself, therefore first be understood in its contradiction and then revolutionized in practice by the removal of this contradiction...
...the traditional God of Providence and punishment is declared to be dead...
...Humanity is the subject, not just the object, of this redemptive process...
...Perhaps the most challenging voices engaged in the critique of ideology, however, are coming from religious feminists...
...These process theories of God represent decisive challenges by the modern consciousness to the inherited model of the perfect and immutable God...
...It condemns desperate girls who abort a fetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions...
...But it does affirm that there must be an autonomous level of Being that explains this ongoing possibility and is the ground of actual and potential human existence...
...Ernest Bloch, a Marxist philosopher whose work lies behind much of Jiirgen Moltmann's and other theologies of hope, has stated the radical dichotomy between these two concepts of transcendence...
...This dilemma was suggested already within the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic traditions...
...This demands not only a profound critique of all the dualisms of patriarchal religion, but also all the social dualisms of male power and female marginalization sanctified by it...
...In Christ, God gets off the parental pedestal of enunciating of good, but unobeyed, commandments and appears as One who participates in this victimization by the powers of Evil...
...Their roots go back at least to the early 19th century...
...They touch finally upon the goodness of the God who is "in charge" or conversely, the "inchargeness" of the God who is good...
...The image of God serves as the ultimate ideological capstone of this system of class division, providing the owners and rulers with a spiritualized image and sanction for their own sovereignty over the world and teaching the workers to accept their own subjugated status as the divine Will...
...One might ask how many of our other assertions about God contain mystified social agendas...
...However, the more seriously one takes the history of evil as a long-term, chronic affair, the less this counter-image of a benign but ineffectual God, who will bring all things to rights in the end, satisfies the dilemma...
...One way to reconcile the split between the God of Creation and the God of Eschatology might be through process theology...
...This alienating aspect of the divine projection prevents humanity from appropriating its own higher capacities and making them effective in human life...
...For many, the feminist critique strikes much more directly at the Biblical foundations of God language...
...Feuerbach, however, proposed a reduction of divine being to human being without residue...
...God, the transcendent Subject, objectified Itself in history in order to bring Itself to self-realization through the dramas of history...
...If such a God exists that could use this history of racism for whatever purposes, He is a white racist God and not a liberator of Black people...
...Their God is an archive of what has been, not an alternative...
...The problem is that the process The year is 1978...
...God grows more universal and more moral, as humanity itself surpasses its earlier chauvinisms and gross sensibilities...
...As Marx himself put it: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress...
...But such a theology would have to come from those who, in Marx's words, are not concerned merely "to interpret the world in various ways," but who know that "the point is to change it...
...But why does God allow historical evil...
...Rather nature is an open-ended possibility of continual innovation...
...It is not enough to unpack the essence of the divine self as the projected human self and reappropriate that as an act of human consciousness...
...By reappropriating the wealth of our own powers, which we have built up over the centuries as the Divine Self, we bring all this work of human consciousness back to enrich the human self...
...God is still in charge, nevertheless, guiding all things for the good...
...The Scriptures themselves grapple with this problem and develop the idea of Last Judgment to cover the gap between divine justice and historical evil...
...Classical theology was well aware that all our images of God are anthropological...
...What we say about this higher Being represents particular moments of our own aspiring consciousness and must be reappropriated as our human potential in order to become, not merely contemplative statement, but moral, spiritual, praxis...
...That is, they disbelieve in the God who represents the transcendent halo over the world as it has been...
...I could not capture the Presence of the One whom the generations of men have honored and degraded with their awesome living and dying...
...Ideological Critique of God Language It was Karl Marx, building upon the Feuerbachian reversal of Hegel, who stated for the nineteenth century the critique of God-talk as mystified talk about the ruling class and its sanctifications of its own systems of domination...
...It represents a longing for a reconciled world that God and humanity have yet to create out of their sufferings and hopes...
...The achievements of this process are "stored up," so to speak, in the evolving Being of God...
...The Question of Theodicy Feminism shares common ground with other liberation theologies, and with Biblical faith, in that it too is a messianic faith...
...Ernest Bloch...
...The first is the foundation of the second and the second is the social reflection of the first...
...By reappropriating its own communal image, humanity realizes itself as a communal being...
...History was the means through which God manifests and makes conscious the full potential of its creative being...
...Latin American and Black theology can point to a judgment on class and national oppress-ion in the Scriptures...
...On this basis Christians and Marxists can cooperate in a common critique of religion (and of Marxist ideology in established Marxist states) and a common social revolutionary praxis to create a just and humanized world...
...Christian theology inherited from Greek philosophy the idea of God as infinite, eternal, immutable Being...
...James Cone of Union Theological Seminary has been the most eloquent spokesman for this type of critique of established theology as white racist ideology...
...Christian eschatology was brought down to earth and made the transcendent vista of new historic possibilities...
...This unrealized self must have a higher "base" of being than existing humanity...
...They profess instead to believe in a different kind of transcendence, historical rather than a vertical—a transcendence of future possibilities that can lead this present world to be transformed and changed...
...that all efforts to reconcile God's providence and sovereignty with the infamy of white racism must be placed under the same indictment...
...These contemporary challenges are not entirely new...
...In the name of this historical transcendence, they reject the God of vertical transcendence that represents, in their mind, the Platonic idealized reification of the present system of the world...
...Thus for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the Holy Family, the former must then itself be criticized in theory and revolutionized in practice...
...But their authentic message is the revolutionary aspiration for justice on earth...
...Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation...
...In this essay I wish to discuss particularly the kind of challenges which have come from those who are horrified by the historical evil done in God's name, but also from those who wish to rescue this word to set it anew over an hour of great care...
...Feminists are not the only ones who raise in a new way the contradictions between the God of their redemptive vision and the God of the historical tradition...
...83-4...
...The old heaven collapsed only to reappear as a future heaven on earth...
...But overcoming sex oppression, except for a few hints rapidly covered over within the New Testament, finds little scriptural basis...
...If there is an alternative, it doesn't seem to be available through a re-pristinization of Scripture, but by going outside and against Scripture, to suppressed alternatives such as the ancient Mother goddesses...
...This is the extent to which our ideas and doctrines about God are, in fact, human selfprojection...
...New York: Doubleday, 1973...
...Classical Christian theology rejected this gnostic dualism to assert the unity of the God of creation and redemption...
...Christian-Marxist Dialogue Some fruitful theological reflection has been stimulated by Christian-Marxist dialogue...
...If eschatology is the fulfillment, and not just the contradiction, of creation and its God, then in some sense creation as God intended it has been so...
...And even if the Virgin of Guadalupe is an Indian, she is an Indian whose whole being is summed up in humble obedience to her Lord and Master...
...For Marx, the image of God is not merely our own better selves to be delightfully recognized and recovered...
...If this isn't enough, one can shout loudly that "God's ways are not our ways...
...Take away from me the noise of your songs, to the melody of your harps I will not listen...
...God is not just a perfect, immutable entity "squatting outside the world," but is the transcendent foundation of this dynamic process...
...Feuerbach's thesis in the Essence of Christianity is simple, to the point of being simplistic...
...Reforms in religion, or new religions combating old ones, represent this developing human consciousness...
...A process theology that could incorporate this profound dialectic between creation, history and eschatology might be able to speak to the problem of God in an evil world...
...A reading of 19th century papal documents, justifying class rule as the ordained order of creation, would show us that Marx was not far wrong in this criticism...
...Feminists suspect that the JudaeoChristian God has been too much a part of the problem to be a part of the solution...
...As physics must now look at nature as dynamic and evolutionary, so God must be seen as the ultimate poles of the process through which the universe moves continually from potentiality to actualization in concrete modes of existence, only to pass into non-existence again...
...theologies that have been proposed, from Hegel to Whitehead and his followers, have been epiphenomenal rationalizations of the existing processes of nature and history...
...Calling this higher self "God" does not deny that it is indeed the ongoing and yet ever unrealized destiny of the human self...
...Latin Americans can appropriate this analysis and call it theology precisely because the critique does not exhaust the meaning of God...
...For Feuerbach, therefore, the time has come for humanity to de-alienate the divine image...
...namely, as the demand that "God's will be done on earth, as it is in heaven" of Jesus's prayer...
...The classical statement of the conundrum of theodicy is: "if God is all powerful, He must be Evil: If he Commonweal: 373 is not evil, he must not be all powerful...
...Christian theologians would stop short of Feuerbach's total reduction of theology to anthropology...
...Feminists can applaud the statement in Paul's epistle to the Galatians 3, 28 that "in Christ there is neither male nor female...
...If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought...
...The more humanity deposits its higher self in God, the more it denies these higher characteristics to itself...
...monika K. hellwig, a professor of theology at Georgetown, is the author of The Meaning of the Sacraments (Pflaum) and The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World (Paulist...
...Being unfolds and this becoming of Being must ultimately be a developing of the Being of God...
...The world upon which God could look and see that it is very good is not a statement about what was in the beginning...
...If God is an evolving self-projection of the human, God also is the way humans alienate themselves from their own higher capacities...
...Humanity projects its inner substance, its ideals and hopes, upon God...
...This means that God, too, comes into this process, is involved in it, not merely in the sense of being its engine driver, but in the sense also of being shaped and developed through it...
...The social principles of Christianity transfer the consistorial councillor's adjustment of all the infamies to heaven and thus justify the further existence of those infamies on earth...
...This is demonstrated in the sort of Christian consciousness which: Bristles at see-^through blouses, but not at slums in which half naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three-quarters of the world in misery...
...Marx wants to snatch God's face out of the heavens in order to unmask and smash its human counterpart, the oppressor...
...At the same time western humanity began to experience the world in a new way...
...Similarly William Jones declares, in his book Is God a White Racist...
...Since God represents not just the individual but the collective depository of the higher human self-consciousness, the reappropriation of the divine self as the essence of the human self becomes a way of human self-realization, not just individually, but socially...
...But what was this God doing before...
...Whitehead particularly developed his metaphysics literally as a meta-physics, as a philosophy that explicated the presuppositions of mathematical physics...
...Nature is not yet finished, but open to continual perfecting...
...Theological language, not only in its later development, but in its Biblical roots, seems pervasively patriarchal, justifying in religious law the social subjugation of women...
...The classical image of the all-powerful, sovereign Lord of history, who is, at the same time, all wise and good, does not pan out in the face of historical evil, especially when that evil becomes acute, massive and of great duration...
...From "The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter," ibid., pp...
...Classical Christian society had thought of nature as a static, finished, although finite world within which humanity "works out" its salvation in relation to a God and a transcendent destiny that is above this created framework...
...It searches for a God-talk that can be the authentic ground of this reconciled world...
...Humans see themselves as infinitely depraved and impoverished, completely dependent on divine grace and incapable of doing any good on their own...
...cit, p. 72...
...radically dethroned from history that it can appear only as eschatological hope...
...The Enlightenment reflected a growing challenge to this view of nature in western consciousness...
...God persuades humanity toward the good through freewill, not by force...
...On the contrary, it is a depository of infamy whereby the ruling classes have made God into the sanction of their own glorified class rule...
...The good God has appeared only as the crucified Victim, as the oppressed ones stretched on the cross of history...
...Christ is a Spanish conquistador...
...It has nationalized its God, nationalized Him into ecclesiastic organization and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified...
...5:21-24 Heaven and the Kingdom of God have been turned into "pie in the sky by and by" to justify evil on earth...
...They would assert that, even if we project our own idealized faces upon God, there is nevertheless a Something out there upon which our faces are mirrored...
...The task is the plotting of "Theological Frontiers" in sacramental theology: the main schools of thought, the issues most debated, the questions left unanswered for future years...
...Nature was not a static, closed system in which humanity must endure its inherited social or even biological fate...
Vol. 105 • June 1978 • No. 12
