Christ the Orphan
Mayer, Milton
Christ the Orphan by MILTON MAYER God is dead. The old kill-joy is out of the way, he despot done for, the father figure ;oppled (like Stalin, and how many Jthers!) from the pedestal on which le...
...Why Christ the Homespun Philosopher, rather than Will Rogers...
...no "Law," 10 sin...
...God cares...
...We have got all the knowledge there is of everything, or we're on the very verge of it...
...But man on his deathbed ;an now enjoy the short-lived satisfac-:ion of having achieved the Freudian xiumph of knocking off his father...
...This we ask of thee, this Christmas Day, in our name, and in his whose homilies have it all over Will Rogers, to take a powder, split the scene, and (just in case) leave behind thee thy only unbegotten unson, Jesus, called the Christ by the boobs, to plead with us to love without scaring the lights and livers out of us...
...But this is the packagers' gimmickry: It doesn't matter what it is, but only how you wrap it...
...Be dead, and, if not, remember that we mean no offense but that we used to dare thee to strike us dead, and thou didst, and now, with our armor clattering down upon us, we strike thee dead as we fall to show who's who around here, if anybody...
...The congregation will rise, and shine, and rock, and roll, and read responsively...
...And no boss-man to push him iround and spook him and immobil-ze him every time he wants to shake i leg, or wiggle a finger, or crook an :lbow...
...Posthumous Man has created the Posthumous God...
...The difficulty is, in a word, not the word but the Word, which, as was said long ago, is like a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I can not, for it is sealed...
...Man may not be an unqualified success quite yet...
...He is mobile, homeless, and his children, carried away from him on the cornucopic flood, or bucking it from their basement bastions in Berkeley, are as unintelligible to him in their adjustment as they are in their rebellion...
...Spare us thy Voice from the Whirlwind...
...Who isn't...
...Spare us the rod of thine anger, and thou canst keep thy staff to carry on the Thruway...
...Fat chance of getting us to mesmerize ourselves—while Jesus cheers us on...
...But if God is a mystery, there is no demystifying him by, say, translating Scripture into the vernacular of the Sixteenth Century German or the Mass into the jargon of Twentieth Century Jersey any more than there is by making Shakespeare sound like a high school dropout...
...All the better for Christ...
...Who cares about him rather than his Social Security number and his man-hour output and his purchasing power and consumer response...
...Spare us brotherhood, by being dead, that we need not be brothers, having no father of us all...
...The congregation will kneel, or lift its beer mugs, in mortal honor of the birthday of the mortal Alger hero who got it in the neck, and the side, and the hands, and the feet) Our father, who art wherever gods go when they die, updated be thy name...
...The difficulty is not the symbol, but the symbolized, and Christ must go the way of God in the end, package him how you will, for in the end men must pick up their cross or turn away from it—sorrowfully, like the young ruler, or with an a-go-go whoop and a holler when Christ says to them, "He that believeth on me, the things that I do, he will do likewise...
...it is the God of Job, of the mystery of the human situation, that the atheist theologians see rejected by knowledgeable man, and they insist only that the theory be brought into line with the practice...
...leave that to the dwindling body of hair-splitters whose audience is gone...
...Spare us thy "thees" and thy "thous," so that we can restate our faith in the Basic English of the Easy Gospel according to Man...
...And to be crucified...
...We are grown now, and we know...
...Neatest trick of any week since the first: Creation without the creator, progeny without the progenitor, the prince of peace without the king...
...Spare us, oh Wraith of Wrath, thy sourpuss judgment and thy sourpuss punishment and thy party-poop scowl when we pass by the man who has fallen among thieves and lies by the side of the road...
...So Jesus Christ, the pipeline to the outgrown God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, may still operate as the pipeline to an anomo-lous Dear Old Dad on a strictly contingent basis until we have grown (in the direction we are growing so fast) to the point where we can unravel the last of the mysteries...
...No Pedestrians...
...Spare us the burden of pain to overwhelm our simple delights as we set fire to crosses at home and crossroads abroad, and the fear of the dark to poison our excursions with napalm, and the loneliness with which we isolate ourselves, each from the other, around our shopping centers...
...One of the death-of-God men suggests that the only way to get rid of the old-man-with-a-beard-without-the-beard-and-without-the-old-man dilemma is to think of God "not as a being, but as a presence," something the mystics (including the Quakers) have always done, without, as an inexorable consequence, packing them into the Meeting House...
...And no sin, no guilt...
...Technology has made totalitarians of us all, in peace, as we and all our computerized dreams and diversions roll off the assembly line, and in total war, as civilians are massed to kill civilian masses and their cities...
...Or Rochefoucauld's...
...Christ Almighty is one thing...
...Who cares...
...In the Name of the Dead-and-Gone Father, the Emasculated Son, and the Exorcised Holy Ghost...
...Is this the God who cares...
...Like you and me, the God-is-dead men are all social liberals touting the "Christian ethic...
...Spare us by thy suicide, and leave us at large, and content, with our discontented lusts, so that we can fulfill ourselves...
...And if he has died, how could he ever have lived and been God at all...
...Spare us thy guilt which alloys our every innocent pleasure...
...Who will there be to pass the buck to...
...No law, no crime...
...You talk to man the way he talks or he walks out on you...
...Spare us, and we shall build us no more golden calves, but hide our ingots and worship them in secret (as we were told to worship in secret) when we rise up in the morning and when we lie down at night weekdays and gather on Sunday morning to meet the right people and deliver our children to Sunday School on the outside chance that something, maybe even Sunday School, can do something about them...
...Why should God up and die here and now...
...God s dead...
...Look who's talking...
...just see what we've done, and done by our own self-evidently unaided power...
...Give us this day our daily compounding of interest at the Savings & Loan Association...
...What if it is indeed the fool who saith in his heart, "There is no God...
...And lead us not into temptation while the flatfoot is looking, but deliver us from the next recession, migraine headaches, and the forty-hour week: For ours is the kingdom of the suburbs, the thermonuclear power, and the glory of a Jaguar with bucket seats...
...Man himself is the superman...
...Halle-ujah...
...The "God language" of the psalmist is no more peculiarly yesterday's than today's or tomorrow's...
...But why his, rather than Lincoln's...
...The God of the plague and the locust s dead (created by men with no plumbing or DDT...
...Or Goethe's...
...the end of the line...
...Why should an age which worships the work of its own hands not worship the hands themselves...
...the itinerant preacher (without invisible means of support) another...
...Who is there left who cares about him...
...Man is so nearly dead—600,000 in :he Civil War, 6,000,000 in the First World War, 60,000,000 in the Second World War, 600,000,000 in the Third World War—that it is only a matter )f time...
...No more "thou shalt" and "thou ihalt not...
...and the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned...
...Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, facing martyrdom by the Nazis, faced his own despair, too, and asked how religion would speak when the "few ultimate" questions that are left, questions like death and guilt, have been answered...
...We ask of thee...
...For some of the God-is-dead men the problem is simply linguistic: It is the "God language" that is rejected by modern man and is dead...
...The linguistic diagnosis suffers from cart-and-horse trouble...
...Why should he not, then, go where the omnipotence is and abandon its empty claim elsewhere...
...in the front pew on the Sabbath in Johnson City...
...The God of jflory dead, created by glorious men...
...Rather the rock than the rudder, better dead than reduced to size...
...Come, then, all ye faithless, to the birthday of the Orphan Boy and club around and recite his sayings and his stories...
...Behold Christ the orphan...
...The ritual of Christ—the functional Christ, streamlined and stripped of the dead weight of God—can be used to con the nonbelievers into doing what belief requires of them...
...you could re-christen him Dr...
...but at least, with God bashed in, there is only a single mystery left, and if DDT hasn't solved it maybe DNA soon will...
...And to speak (not as one having authority, but as the scribes and Pharisees) the words of the late Lord God Jehovah, coming now from the heart of Texas, saying, "Let us reason together," he with us and we with him, man to man (who else...
...Who has a better image, a hotter customer acceptance, a higher rating, than Christ, season after Christmas season...
...A real American Christ, a regular Abe Lincoln for world-wide export...
...When you've got a good thing, stay with it...
...Everything else in creation—except the unlikelihood of a creator outside it—is anthropomorphic...
...Or Calvin Coolidge...
...The anthropomorphic God, created jy man in his own image, is dead...
...don't heal it, just help it...
...Man is free...
...They want to know how "God is to be spoken about," or "named," in relevant, acceptable terms...
...The argument runs that the language blocks the ideas and leaves the reader cold, like the ads for the Edsel...
...from the pedestal on which le paraded the cult of personality...
...They see the church, and the religion it preaches, as an institution alien (with exceptions so rare as to be spectacular) to the peculiar needs of our time...
...Why club around Christ...
...Never mind...
...It is time to put away childish things...
...Make that read, Hooray...
...The peculiar condition of our time is the cornucopic outpouring of the knowledge of things and their use, which brought in its wake a consuming materialism with things, and more things, for everybody at once or in soonest prospect...
...Fat chance...
...Man the measure is not himself to be measured by the superman myth of perfection...
...The Episcopal Dean of the Washington National Cathedral says, "I'm confused as to what God is"—and hastens to add, "but so is the rest of America," thus demonstrating his thankfulness (to God...
...This massification has annihilated the individual's identity...
...We need to be kind to dumb animals, and to love, and forgive, and repent, and be decent, and support civil rights...
...What's so special about Christ, now that God is dead...
...Not even the Beatles...
...But where would we get the Christian ethic if we threw out the Infant with the bathos...
...Man the Maker has figured out how to make just about everything but himself (and fewer there are every day who believe that he won't do that...
...Not Will Rogers...
...Another says that this isn't really the problem...
...Because we need him so badly that he must be special...
...and why not Billy Graham?—into picking up our cross and defying the devil and all his works and pomps on the say-so of a man— even a good man, even the best...
...the problem is "to know the world's theological meaning when people sense not the presence but the absence of God...
...in the Beginning of the Great Consensus, all of us being seen of men (who else...
...that he is no worse off than other men, along with his unacquaintance with the Holy Doctor of the Thirteenth Century who could say that "we do not know what God is, but only what he is not" and never fail or falter in his faith...
...What\—The God who let it all happen, who let the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer and answered Job's just complaint by telling him to keep still...
...It is not the rejection of the name of God, but the rejection of God that is relevant...
...The peculiar condition of our time has uprooted him...
...The God of redemption, cre-ited by lost men, dead...
...The God of vengeance, created by vengeful men, is iead...
...What if the Homespun Philosopher was (as he actually said he was) going about his father's business, and you swallow God or spew out Christ...
...A coat of paint, a rebuilt transmission, and it's as good as new...
...The death-of-God men (they do not mind being called atheist theologians) are sharply and earnestly aware of the modern moral disorder, and they would like to do something about it...
...there are a few hitches here and there, as there are in every undertaking, even in a war to make the world safe for democracy...
...All the more American, the Horatio Alger Orphan Boy who makes it on his own without the Old Man's money to see him through or a letter on the Old Man's letterhead as Chairman of the Board, saying, "Will appreciate anything you can do for my son...
...The sanctuary has become—in our time, and not in Constantine's?— a sanctimony for the six per cent of the world's people who have fifty-one per cent of the world's income, a blatant reprobation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (and of Jesus, who promised the greater damnation to those who make long prayer for a pretense...
...Why shouldn't God be?—truly anthropomorphic, and not a father trying to tyrannize over his children and forever blaming them and never himself being blamed...
...This is the problem, all right, the problem that makes one of the atheistic anti-Communist and the atheistic Communist...
...Free to fulfill himself...
...And thy Voice in the Garden in the cool of the day calling, "Where is thy brother...
...And fill ourselves...
...Kildare without raising his rating by a cubit...
...Though one of the Nobel laureates who made the atomic bomb said, "If anyone should feel guilty, it is God, who put the facts there...
...Hasn't modern man demonstrated that knowledge (and not the knowledge of God, either) is power...
...Roger, and over...
...And make our religion relevant to our irreligion...
...Our kingdom come, our will be done, in Asia as it is in outer space...
...Help my unbelief...
...So o.k., God is dead...
...And forgive us our debts, or at least give us a thirty-day extension...
...and with its immediately consequent technology the massi-fication of man...
...Thus he is destroying himself...
...The reason we did not read the King James Bible was not that it was hard to understand, but that it was hard to face—¦ which is the reason we do not read the Revised Standard Version either...
...And now the rejected man—"I will lide mine eyes from you—yea, when /e make many prayers, I will not hear: four hands are full of blood,"—rejected nan has created the rejected God...
...The death-of-God men will not, I take it, quibble if the authoritarian mystery is supplanted by a finger-tip-control, push-button, dynaflow God hurling nuclear thunderbolts at Hiroshima and a burning of fire at Auschwitz...
...Be dead, so that our inward parts may be hidden, the hairs on our heads unnumbered, and nobody see the sparrow fall from the defoliated tree in the land where the tares take over from the poisoned wheat...
...Mystery is unendurable to knowledgeable man, and what he can not understand he must destroy as his enemy...
...But what are the peculiar needs of our time to which the God-is-dead men address themselves, and how did they get here...
...Modern man, knowledgeable man, is bugged by the hidden God, whose back alone was shown to Moses...
...For ever, or for as long as we can hold on to the fifty-one per cent of the world's income (by honoring our commitments in Latin America...
...But what if he isn't...
...Never mind where the line began...
Vol. 31 • January 1967 • No. 1
