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Preface

This book is about process theology and its relevance to the world of public affairs. It is written as a response to an important and impressive movement of theology into the public arena since the mid-sixties. This development has expressed itself in the theology of hope, the theology of liberation, and political theology. Each of these theologies deals with all three themes, but the choice of label usually correlates with the actual emphasis and focus.

Viewed in the light of these terms, developed chiefly in Germany and Latin America, with special contributions by Blacks and women in the United States, twentieth-century white male theology in the United States is not found entirely wanting. All three themes have been present in important ways. This has been true of the specific tradition of process theology as well. Yet in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, while continuing to contribute to discussions of hope and freedom, process theologians lagged far behind in the discussion of Christian responsibility for public affairs, especially as these are politically conceived. In relation to these topics most of our work remained abstract.1 The theology of hope, the theology of liberation, and political theology jointly constitute a challenge to which process theology has not yet adequately responded. The distinctive thrust of this challenge appears most clearly in political theology. This is one reason that political theology is taken as the conversation partner in this book.

A second reason for engaging political theology instead of liberation theology can also be briefly explained. Liberation theology in its actual form and practice attends to a concrete liberation. It may be liberation of Blacks from oppression by racist society in the United States or liberation of Latin American peasants and workers from the bondage of economic colonialism and class oppression. When white representatives of the politically and economically dominant nations find themselves drawn to join forces with Blacks or Latin Americans, we are usually told that our task is to deal with our own situation, sensitive to what it is doing to others. German political theology developed in the context of the globally dominant white society, and it is accordingly more directly transferable to the situation of whites in the United States, among whom process theology so far has its primary home.2

A third reason for selecting political theology rather than liberation theology for discussion in this book is that other process theologians have begun the dialogue with liberation theology, and I am confident that this will continue. Two books have recently been published which considerably advance this conversation and the movement toward appropriation by process theology of central themes of liberation theology.

Schubert Ogden has published Faith and Freedom, which he subtitles ‘Toward a theology of liberation’ .3 He describes the challenge of liberation theologies as the call ‘to join them in working toward a still more adequate understanding of faith and freedom’.4 To do so, he argues, we must distinguish without separating a double meaning in the idea of liberation. Liberation includes both redemption and emancipation.5 Ogden identifies God’s redemption as the boundless acceptance of all things, even sinners, into the divine life. Knowledge of our acceptance frees us to share in the work of emancipating people from the many bondages under which they labour. Ogden charges that most liberation theologies fail to keep this distinction clearly in mind. They tend also to focus on the meaning of God for us, without clarifying who and what God is as such. Each theology tends to treat only one form of bondage neglecting those treated by other liberation theologies and also narrowing the concern for liberation to human beings.

Ogden makes a clear distinction between witness and theology. Theology is critical reflection about the witness. As he sees it most of the liberation theologies are chiefly a matter of witness. This in no way depreciates their value,6 but it does mean that another task still remains largely to be done, that is, the critical reflection about the witness which is theology as such.

The second recent book to advance the response of process theology to liberation theology significantly is Delwin Brown’s To Set at Liberty.7 This is not so much a critical response to the challenge of the liberation theologies as a reflection on freedom stimulated by this literature. Brown surveys the history of Western thinking about freedom and develops a contemporary formulation. He then gives expression to a theological vision centering around freedom. He formulates a doctrine of God as ‘the lure toward freedom’, a doctrine of sin as ‘the denial of freedom’, a Christology as ‘the confirmation of freedom’, and a soteriology as ‘the future of freedom’. Throughout, he interacts appreciatively with the theologians of hope and liberation, especially Jurgen Moltmann and the Latin American liberation theologians. Although Brown does not uncritically agree with everything said by theologians of liberation, he presents his form of process theology more as a supplementation and conceptual grounding of their insights than as expressing a different understanding of the theological task.

Brown does not treat the theologians of hope and liberation as a breed apart but rather as a part of the mainstream of Christian theology in full continuity with the tradition. Similarly he does not present his own views as in contrast with theirs but rather as a contribution to working out and further developing the persuasive ideas he adopts from them. Whitehead’s philosophy, he shows, far from offering an antithetical direction for theology, can deepen and ground the central commitment to liberation.

The responses of Ogden and Brown to liberation theologies quite properly centre in fresh reflections about the perennial problem of freedom. That topic is one on which process theology has always had much to say. The weakness of recent process theology is that the discussion of freedom remains somewhat abstract in relation to actual practice in political life. In order to engage political issues more directly it seems well to supplement the discussion of freedom stimulated by liberation theology with a discussion of the relation to the political sphere stimulated by political theology. In doing so I find myself working alongside David Tracy, whose Blessed Rage for Order8 advocates a revisionist theology of a process mode and points forward, in a concluding chapter, to ‘The Praxis of a revisionist theory’.

This rather lengthy explanation of the choice of political theology as dialogue partner has juxtaposed it only to liberation theology, whereas theology of hope was listed as a third form of the same general movement. The choice of political theology rather than theology of hope can be explained much more briefly. The topic of hope has been a consistent theme of process theology.9 The weakness of process theology has been not neglect of the topic but neglect of its practical meaning for public problems. This neglect is overcome by Moltmann, whose thought thereby offers a sharp challenge to process theology. But precisely this aspect of Molt-mann’s work is also political theology and is recognised and named as such by him.

Whereas process theology has just begun to respond to Black and Latin American liberation theologies, the relation to the theology of women’s liberation is quite different. Among the theologies that were established before the rise of the current women’s movement, process theology has proved the most congenial to it. The criticisms of the classical doctrine of God by process theologians, for example, are parallel to those directed against the doctrine by women. Also the oppositions to a dualistic separation of mind and body or ‘mane and nature are comparable in the two movements.10 Process theology and feminist theology today overlap in a healthy way, and there is every indication that feminists will play leading roles in the further development of process theology.

This eminently desirable relation of process theology to this form of liberation theology, however, has not yet gone far to overcome the abstractness of process theology in relation to the political sphere. Feminists include this sphere in their concerns, and this provides further motivation for process theology to engage political theology. In dealing with political theology from the perspective of process theology it will be important to keep centrally in view what has already been learned through a partial assimilation of feminist insights.

My own journey to political theology has been through the impact of concern for the global environment. Since childhood I have been interested in politics and especially in international affairs. Later, Reinhold Niebuhr constituted my first taste of serious Christian theology, and he has been a hero for me ever since. Yet until 1969 my theology developed rather independently of my political concerns. Only my realisation in that year that the whole human race was on a collision course with disaster shook me out of this dualism and forced me to rethink my theology in light of this most inclusive question of human destiny. I found rich resources for this rethinking in the process tradition out of which I already worked, and especially in the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

Although the questions which I was driven to raise were political in the broad sense, they came only gradually to focus on politics in the narrower sense which seemed to dominate those who called themselves political theologians. As time passed I realised that their understanding of politics was broader than I had supposed, and I increasingly saw the importance of what they were saying. But my progress was slow. The introduction to process theology which David Griffin and I wrote together in 1975 as a summary of where we had come accurately reflects the interests and concerns that had dominated our reflection prior to that time.11 Political interests, in the narrower sense of political, were consciously omitted because we had not engaged them sufficiently to have anything distinctive to say. About that time I began working on a book with the Australian biologist Charles Birch.12 Our shared concern was to address some of the public issues of our day from the perspective of a different understanding of the nature of reality and especially of life. The manuscript, recently completed, concludes with wide-ranging proposals for implementing the World Council of Churches call for a just, participatory and sustainable society. My work on the present book overlaps with the writing of that one, and some of the content of Chapters Five and Six is similar to short segments of the other book. It is from the perspective of these commitments, which have become increasingly controlling of my work, that I am finally ready to approach the challenge of political theology with real readiness to learn. In my case it is taking a long time to become a political theologian, and I feel a deep respect for those who found their way to this destination ahead of me. Of course the path I have followed and the journey I am still on shape the questions that I ask and lead to dissatisfaction with some of the answers that I find. My aim is to become a political theologian in the tradition of process theology.

The theologian who initiated contemporary political theology and who has most consistently attended to its development is Johann Baptist Metz. The recent writings of Metz will play the largest role in defining the position of political theology in this book. However, the term political theology has been used by others who have come to their understanding in different ways. Jurgen Moltmann and Dorothee Sölle are two of these, and some attention will be given to their writings specifically on the subject of political theology.

The book is emphatically not a critical and comprehensive study of this important movement in recent German theology or of any of its leaders. Others have provided such studies,13 and I am dependent on their work. In the first chapter 1 locate this movement in relation to earlier forms of political theology and indicate its general form and emphases. I hope that enough is said for the claim that process theology, too, ought to become a political theology to be understood.

Chapter Two surveys the longer tradition at Chicago which in the past generation has been called process theology. The survey is guided by implicit attention to the challenge of political theology. The argument is that the Chicago school arose in the context of the social gospel, a movement that had much in common with contemporary political theology and that, under the stimulus of political theology, this school can recover something of what it had lost as well as move forward in new ways.

The third chapter begins the constructive task. This is the task of assimilating the rich insights already offered by political theology and relating them to the distinctive resources of process theology. This involves implicit and sometimes explicit criticism of existing formulations of political theology for what appear, from the perspective of process theology, to be lacunae or one-sided statements. The primary intention, however, is not so much to criticise this theology as to contribute to its further development. That means that the proposals inspired by the tradition of process theology are put forward in hopes of being found useful by those who have come to political theology in other ways. But whether useful to others or not, the proposals have their importance for process theology itself if it is to become a political theology. In the third chapter this constructive work centres on questions of theological method.

The fourth chapter carries on this constructive work but turns from questions of method to those of content. Process theologians are accustomed to seek conceptual clarity as grounds for existential significance. To us some of the doctrinal formulations of political theologians, while moving, do not answer questions which we cannot avoid asking. To us it seems that lack of clear answers to these questions cannot but adversely affect the movement of political theology itself in the long run. It also seems that the answers to these questions formulated by process thinkers are highly congenial to what the German political theologians are saying. In this chapter I offer process doctrines of God and eschatology in their supportive relationship to the important ideas that process theology can and should assimilate from political theologians.

Political theology has already done fine work in clarifying the relation of faith to the political sphere and in showing what the church must do in order that the appropriate relation be realised. But for a variety of reasons German theologians have been reluctant to enter the arena of political theory itself. Some of these reasons are valid, but from the point of view of a process theologian it is appropriate to go somewhat further in the direction of clarifying the principles that should guide Christians in their political aims. Chapter Five offers an expansion of principles already found in the writings of political theologians. This expansion draws on the resources of process thought.

Chapter Six discusses the scope of the political. From the perspective of process theology German political theology has dealt with reality in socio-historical terms, similar to those that dominated the first phase of the Chicago school. This is commendable. But in the past thirty or forty years, and especially during the seventies, process theology has widened its horizons so as to set human social history in the context of the entire history of life on this planet. The society of which we are a part includes the non-human world. Once this point of view has been assimilated, one cannot be satisfied with the anthropocentric perspective that underlies most of German political theology. This chapter proposes that the horizons of political theology should be so broadened that it can be formulated as an ecological theology rather than as a sociological theology.

Metz contrasts the proper work of a political theology, as a practical fundamental theology, with what he calls an evolutionary approach. What he rejects seems to include all forms of explanatory overviews of history. In Chapter Seven his position is presented and critically appraised. An alternative view of the value of a theology of history for Christian faith is offered.

An earlier version of much of the material in this book was presented in the Ferguson Lectures at the University of Manchester in March 1980. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my hosts there and especially Prof. and Mrs David Pailin. Some of the material, in revised form, was also presented as the Nuveen Lectures at the University of Chicago Divinity School and again in the Distinguished Visiting Lectureship Program of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. A portion of the material was given as a single lecture at several continental universities, and a French translation of this lecture may be published in the Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses. A slightly different English language version has been published in a Belgian journal.14 There is some overlap also with a lecture delivered at the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University and to be published by it.

The Ferguson lectures came at an earlier point in my research on the topics treated than I had intended. As a result I have been more than usually dependent on the critical assistance of persons who know the literature better than I. The assistance of Matthew Lamb was particularly important in guiding me away from serious distortions in my representation of Metz. Bernard Meland assisted me in coming to more accurate formulations of the development of the Chicago school. Others who have read the entire manuscript at some stage of its writing and given helpful responses are David Griffin, Franklin I. Gamwell, David Vergin and Ignacio Castuera. I am grateful for assistance to typists at both the School of Theology at Claremont and the University of Chicago Divinity School. My assistant Jan Ritzau gave a great deal of time to bringing my footnotes into some semblance of order.

 

Notes

1 Although this criticism must be accepted by process theologians, process theology has never been as lacking in relevance to public affairs as some critics have supposed. For books published in the sixties see Note 22 to Chapter Two. During the seventies process theologians have dealt more with environmental problems than social ones. See books and articles by Ian Barbour, Charles Birch, John Cobb, David Griffin, Charles Hartshorne, Schubert Ogden and others. But during this period Widick Schroeder has continued to give leadership in the discussion of social issues. See W. Widick Schroeder, Cognitive Structures and Religious Research: Essays in Sociology and Theology (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University, 1970).

See also the collection of essays by process theologians in John B.

Cobb, Jr. and W. Widick Schroeder, ed., Process Philosophy and

Social Thought (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion,

1981). More specific responses to the challenge of liberation theology are discussed below.

2 Moltmann, whom we will treat as a major example of ‘political theology’, understands his own response to the challenge of liberation theologies as also a liberation theology, this time for the oppressors. See Jiirgen Moltmann with M. Douglas Meeks, ‘The liberaction of oppressors’, Christianity and Crisis (25 Dec. 1978), pp. 310-17. Salle, another central figure in developing political theology, now describes political theology as hardly more than a step toward liberation theology. ‘The development of a political theology over against a personal existentialist one was a transition; we made a first cautious step, and we still used an almost neutralized language that included ambiguities.’ Dorothee Salle, ‘Resistance: toward a first World theology’, Christianity and Crisis (23 July 1979), p. 178.

3 Schubert Ogden, Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation (Nashville, Tenn: Abingdon Press, 1979).

4 Ibid ., p.43.

5 This distinction has, of course, been widely recognised. It is interesting to compare Ogden’s treatment with that of Metz in ‘Redemption and emancipation’, first published in English in Cross Currents and included, in an adapted version, as Chapter 7 in Faith in History and

Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David

Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980).

6 Despite Ogden’s intention, his formulations can appear to depreciate liberation theology. See James H. Cone, ‘A critical response to

Schubert Ogden’s Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liheration~ Perkins Journal (fall 1979), pp. 51-5.

7 Delwin Brown, To Set at Liberty (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books,

1980).

8 David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: the New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

9 See, e.g., Daniel Day Williams, God’s Grace and Man’s Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1949).

10 See Sheila Davaney, ed., Feminism and Process Thought (New York & Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1981).

11 John B. Cobb, Jr. and David R. Griffin, Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia, Pa: Westminster Press, 1977).

12 L. Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., The Liberation of Life (Cambridge: University Press, 1981).

13 On Moltmann see M. Douglas Meeks, Origins of the Theology of Hope (Philadelphia, Pa: Fortress Press, 1974). On Metz see Roger Dick Johns, Man in the World: the Political Theology of Johannes Baptist Metz (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976). 1 have not found a comparable study of Solle. For a critical study locating contemporary political theology in the German theological context see Siegfried Wiedenhaber, Politische Theologie (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1976). This includes a detailed bibliography.

14 John B. Cobb, Jr., ‘Process theology and the doctrine of God’, Bijdgragen, vol. 41, No. 4 (1980), pp. 350-67.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Suggestions for Further Reading



PART I

John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science, Collins

J. D. Smart, The Interpretation of Scripture, S.C.M. Press

Alan Richardson, The Bible in the Age of Science, S.C.M. Press

I.S. Habgood, Religion and Science, Mills & Boon

C.F. von Weizsäker, The Relevance of Science, Collins

Gustav Schenk, The History of Man, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Harvey Cox, The Secular City, S.C.M. Press

John A. T. Robinson, The New Reformation, S.C.M. Press



PART II

Henri Frankfort and others, Before Philosophy, Penguin

Claus Westermann, A Thousand Years and a Day, S.C.M. Press

T. J. Meek, Hebrew Origins, Harper

B. W. Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament, Longmans

Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, S.C.M. Press

Gerhard Gloege, The Day of His Coming, S.C.M. Press

Heinz Zahrnt, The Historical Jesus, Collins

Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, Hodder & Stoughton

James McLeman, Jesus in our Time, Hodder & Stoughton

H.H. Rex, Did Jesus rise from the Dead? Blackwood & Janet Paul Ltd.



PART III

John Knox, Myth and Truth, Carey Kingsgate Press Ltd.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Coffins

Leslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, S.C.M. Press

Alan Richardson, Religion in Contemporary Debate, S.C.M. Press

F. C. Happold, Religious Faith and Twentieth Century Man, Penguin

Nathaniel Micklem, A Religion for Agnostics, S.C.M. Press

Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, Penguin

R.Gregor Smith, Secular Christianity, Collins

Thomas W. Ogletree, The "Death of God" Controversy, S.C.M. Press

Alfred B. Starratt, The Real God, S.C.M. Press

Daniel Jenkins, Beyond Religion, S.C.M. Press

David Jenkins, Guide to the Debate About God, Lutterworth Press

W. Hordern, Speaking of God, Epworth Press

Peter L. Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, Doubleday

Chapter 21 The Faith which Outlives Death

We have made an attempt to show the meaning of Christian faith in the new world, by sketching it in terms of faith, hope and love. Because we are thinking creatures we naturally search for meaning and purpose in the life we find ourselves living in this world, and nothing can be meaningful unless we are able to understand it, at least to some degree. The discussion of the nature and relevance of the Christian faith therefore always plays some part in bringing us into encounter with that deepest reality in life we call God.

But writing and reading about the nature of the faith can never take the place of the life of faith itself. As we have said before, Christian faith is essentially to be lived and experienced. There will never be any complete or ultimate form of verbal expression into which it can be translated. Man will never reach the point where he has spoken the last word about it, and indeed no believer ever understands anything like the whole of it. Because man is a creature of history, his experience of faith will inevitably be expressed in words and terms which reflect the character of his time and cultural condition. Because each man is limited in his experience, his expression of his faith will also be limited and piecemeal.

Since faith is a personal experience, it means that it is only the man of faith who can talk about it at all in any real way. At first this may sound somewhat arrogant, but a moment’s reflection soon makes it clear that this is true of all kinds of personal experiences. Only a person who has experienced pain can begin to attempt to describe it, and it is impossible to communicate the experience adequately in words to a person who has never experienced any pain at all. Only a person who has had sight can talk about what it means to be able to see. So with faith, as with pain and sight, words alone are insufficient in themselves to convince the unbeliever about the reality of faith.

There will always be obstacles to faith, which no amount of discussion and explanation can surmount, and there always have been. They can all be described as the demand for more convincing proof, and strangely enough they come from two quite different directions, both of which were already known in the first century. Paul spoke of them when he said, "Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom." The Jew was a religionist who believed he already possessed a sure sign from God, and he was unwilling to move out in faith from this sign until he received another. He wanted to avoid the life of faith by moving from one sure sign to another, just as the learner-swimmer wants to move through the pool with his hand on one rail after another. There are religionists today who think they already possess a sure sign from God, in an authoritative church or an infallible Bible, and they are unwilling to surrender this security and venture out in faith. The appeal to a certain sign becomes a stumbling-block to faith today as it did for the ancient Jew.

But the Greek demanded a convincing argument, and until he received it, he too refused to make the venture of faith. There are men today who look at Christianity from the outside, read about it, turn it over in their minds, and still stand aloof, waiting for it to be presented as a logical and convincing piece of argument. To them it seems foolish to commit oneself to Christianity, when it is not capable of rational proof. But of course it is just because there is no rational answer to the meaning of life, that man is forced to live by faith. And in doing so, he finds in the end that faith is the very spice of human existence.

In all forms of faith there must be some acts of trust, great or small, but in the Christian faith it is an act of commitment followed by a continuing sense of commitment, which makes the difference between faith and unbelief. As the person who is unwilling to take the plunge into the water will never learn to swim, so the man who holds back from commitment to the Christian heritage cannot hope to learn what it means to live by Christian faith.

The life of faith makes itself manifest in the kind of decision and the quality of action, which the believer makes in all the events of life in which he is involved. Sometimes the first act of commitment is more dramatic than any others which follow, and the believer looks back to it in gratitude as a turning point in his life. But often the origins of the life of faith cannot be clearly discerned and remembered at all, for it has grown out of a long series of decisions and acts of trust. In any case, the life of faith is being daily challenged and tested afresh in the decisions and crises, both great and small, of which normal life consists.

We shall now attempt to describe the life of faith from the inside. It is important to remember that this is a description in the language of faith, and not an attempt to discuss its validity. Although there are certain basic forms which are common to nearly all Christians, such as, "I believe in God through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior", no two Christians would describe the experience of the life of faith in exactly the same terms. Not only must the uniqueness of each man be taken into account, but also the diversity of cultural background, personal experience, educational attainment and intellectual level of comprehension.

If God is the deepest reality for human existence, then He must speak to all men, in all their diversity, but the way in which the faith created by His word comes to be expressed by the believer, will vary considerably. Some take the step of faith using a mental conception of God which is more concrete in outline, and even more man-shaped, than some others would find meaningful. Some form a mental image of the Christ of faith which is more imaginative and picturesque than others would allow. One of the reasons why the community of faith has long been known as catholic or universal, is that it must hold together in love and mutual respect all the diversity that our individuality brings to the experience of faith.

The first thing to be said is this. Even though the believer has been consciously looking for something to satisfy his longings, and searching for some purpose in life, his embracing of the Christian faith does not mean that at last he has found what he is looking for, so much as the strange conviction that he has himself been found. Like the men of old to whom the Bible bears witness, such as Moses and Jeremiah, Peter and Andrew, who found themselves unexpectedly called, so the Christian is one who has found himself challenged by the community of faith and the Gospel it proclaims. The challenge has come to him as the very Word of God.

This Word may have come in any of many ways. There is usually nothing very dramatic about it. It is a Word which is heard in the inner ear, and at first the Christian may have tried to evade it. But the Word of God has an insistence about it that does not let men go readily. Yet on the other hand the Word does not trespass on a man’s own integrity. It does not take away from man the power of choice. God does not manifest Himself in all His strength, and, by showing up man in all his weakness, force him into submission. Rather it is a case of man, in spite of all his strength, being encountered by God in His weakness. The ancient prophet Elijah made a pilgrimage to the holy mountain of God and looked for God in the tornado, the earthquake and the fire. But the Word of God came to him in the weakness of a ‘still small voice’.

And the voice said "What are you doing here, Elijah ?" That illustrates the second point. The Word of God that comes to men through the Christian heritage calls them to decision. The particular act which may initiate the life of faith and obedience is only the first of a whole series, for the Christian life is one which is consciously lived in obedience. A Christian is one who is very much aware of the fact that he is not his own master, if indeed he ever has been. Now he knows himself as a servant. He is not here in this world to please himself, to achieve his own ambitions, or to plan his own way ahead. He is here to serve and it is in service that he finds his freedom.

It is the life of obedience which gives meaning and direction to his life. He is no longer meandering blindly along. And because he now has a purpose, he finds a new Zest in living and a new power to make progress on the way and to get things done. It is not the kind of obedience, however, which takes from him the need to think and make decisions, as it would be, perhaps, if he had become enslaved to a fellowman. Although he has given himself in obedience, there is the need to cultivate the attentive ear to hear the word of direction. In the Christian heritage, there are guidelines which help him in discerning the word of God, but there is no foolproof method of being absolutely sure. In faith, and in a certain amount of tension, he must learn steadily to grow more sensitive to the leading that he expects.

But what is the source of this Word? To whom has he committed himself in obedience? The Christian does not know. It is only in the language of faith that he can answer. The Christian believes that He who spoke to Moses and the prophets, and whose very Word became flesh in the man Jesus, is the One who addresses him and calls him to obedience. If the Christian is asked to prove or demonstrate the validity of his belief, he cannot do so. He recognizes that though there may have been a particular factor in the life of the church, or in the Bible, or in some rational argument which carried a lot of weight with him, none of these proves anything in the end. Nevertheless, the fact that the call to obedience rests upon faith alone, does not take away from the Christian the sense of reality he has found in the life of daily obedience.

The life of obedience is usually felt to be one involving a personal relationship. The Christian usually speaks in personal terms about God, the source of the Word by which he has been addressed and which he seeks to obey, but he freely confesses that the reality pointed to by this word is quite beyond his knowledge and comprehension. What gives him confidence in his conviction is not any esoteric knowledge of the mysterious God which has been revealed to him, but the testimony of the Bible and of the community of faith to the great company of people who in their own day believed they heard the Word of the same God and sought to obey.

But though God, as the deepest reality of the universe, remains beyond man’s grasp, the Christian has a tangible point of reference. The God whose Word he hears and seeks to obey, is the God who spoke through the human scene in a way which culminated in the advent of the man Jesus. The Christian sees in the man Jesus the clearest representation of God. Yet even the man Jesus is not tangible for the believer, and never has been, for it was only subsequent to the earthly life of Jesus, that Christian faith was focussed upon the risen Jesus as the Christ of faith.

In directing attention to the Christ of faith, the community of faith has traditionally spoken in terms of Incarnation, the Word of God become flesh. Paul described Christ as one who "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." We have already seen earlier how the advent of Jesus Christ became the culminating point of Israel’s concern with the historical human scene. The affirmation that the Word of God has finally become man calls upon man to accept his own humanity and to abandon all mythological pretensions to be an immortal god. For the God of Israel Himself has done just this. He has emptied Himself of all mythological divinity and become man. In this act, humanity is raised to a new dignity and honor, and its full potential comes to realization.

Thus in the life of obedient faith, the Christian fastens his attention upon the Christ of faith as the focal point of the whole Christian heritage. The man Jesus at one and the same time shows us the full potential in man, and brings us into encounter with God, the deepest reality for our existence. And at the center of the Christ faith is the basic symbol of Christianity, the cross. The community of faith has rightly never forgotten that Jesus was crucified, and has been convinced that this was no accident. The man Jesus would not have become the Christ of faith, if he had not been crucified, or at least taken death upon Himself in some similar way.

The Christian has found in the cross the key to the problem of the tragic element of evil which comes to light in man’s inhumanity to man, war, oppression, hatred, greed and famine. Man’s attempt to save himself from the tragedy of life only serves to accentuate the problem, for it largely arose in the first place from man’s self-concern, self-will and self-centeredness. In fact it is not in man to save himself. The cross shows, however, that by surrendering himself, he can be used to save others. "He saved others; he cannot save himself", was the Word of God which came from the very mouths of mockers.

The conviction that the key to the renewal of the human situation is to be found in the surrender of the self, the surrender of personal hopes and ambitions, and the obedient commitment of oneself to live in love for the needs of others, is not something which man has in fact found out by himself. Man has been led to it by the developing heritage. The way was already being prepared by God when He called to selfless obedience men of Israel such as Moses, Elijah, Hosea and Jeremiah. It became more clearly defined in the words of the unknown prophet of Israel, who outlined the role of the true servant of YHWH as one who took suffering upon himself voluntarily:

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

he was bruised for our iniquities . . .

he was oppressed, and he was afflicted,

yet he opened not his mouth . . .

he was cut off out of the land of the living,

stricken for the transgression of my people . . .

although he had done no violence,

and there was no deceit in his mouth . . .

he poured out his soul to death,

and was numbered with the transgressors.

The Christian sees this role of selfless suffering brought to a consummation in the crucifixion of Jesus. Because he finds there the key to the element of tragedy in human existence, the cross becomes the chief point of encounter with God, and from it he hears the challenge of Jesus as the very Word of God, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me". The symbol of the cross holds up before the Christian the choice before him in the decisions to be made in each new day of life. Is he to turn sorrowfully away because he has rich possessions, high hopes of his own and secret ambitions? Or is he to surrender all these pretensions and aspirations for himself either in this mortal life or beyond death?

To take up the cross means to prepare oneself to die, to die completely. This is the path which Jesus chose and which he trod voluntarily. His death on the cross has often been gravely transvestied by well-meaning Christians when they imagined that he faced the cross with the secret knowledge that less than thirty-six hours later he would be alive again and ready to ascend into heaven. This makes a mockery of the cross. Jesus was ready to die, really to die. This is the kind of cross to which he calls his followers.

He who is ready to surrender his hopes, ambitions, and life itself, for the love of God and his fellowmen, no longer fears death and the end of human existence, for that self-centered concern which wants to cling on to life beyond its appointed span, and seeks to bring it back again in some supernatural realm, has already died. The Christian is still keenly aware of the tragedy of human life, and the limitations in which his mortality involves him, but death no longer holds any fears for him. Christian faith takes the sting out of death, and makes even death subservient to the cause of life and the renewal of mankind.

There is one final point. It can be mentioned only at the end, and even then in some ways it should only be whispered, lest it be regarded as a kind of reward for those who shoulder the cross. When this happens, the real significance of the cross tends to be lost sight of. The Christian is called to the way of the cross not for any self-gain either in this life or beyond death, but simply and solely out of the love of God and one’s fellows.

But there is no keeping of this point secret, for though it is full of mystery it has been the chief source of joy and wonder in Christian experience. It took the first disciples, we are told, completely by surprise. Jesus was dead. Yet they found him more alive than ever. They spoke of it in terms of resurrection and they rejoiced. They were given the courage to shoulder their own crosses and become witnesses or martyrs, and new life rose within them. It was the life of Christ. Paul put it in a nutshell, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

The Christian who commits himself to Christ as Lord, and voluntarily takes upon himself the way of the cross, also knows something of the unexpected joy of the resurrection. He finds that though he has put an end (as he thought) to the personal ambitions which appeared to make life interesting, to his surprise there is welling up within him a new source of life. It brings to him a stronger faith, a clearer hope, a more vibrant love. Life takes on for him a new quality, a quality that justifies the name eternal. In submitting himself to the life of obedience, in seeking to be used as an instrument in the renewal of the world, in shouldering the cross of Christ his Lord, the Christian shares in the life of that faith which genuinely outlives death. There is much that he does not understand. He has no sure knowledge of the eternal verities, but he holds them by faith, and looks in faith to the God whose Word of life he has heard in the man Jesus and he says:

Good Lord, teach us to serve you as you deserve,

to give and not to count the cost,

to fight and not to heed the wounds,

to toil and not to seek for rest,

to labor and not to ask for any reward,

save that of knowing that we do your will,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Chapter 20: The Church as the Community of Faith

The Christian faith comes to visibility in the world, not primarily in creeds, doctrine, liturgical forms or ecclesiastical organization, but in the lives of those people who are experiencing the faith, hope and love, which have the Christian quality. Now one could imagine a person who had a particular kind of faith, which he preferred to keep to himself, or a particular hope which he saw no point in sharing with others, but when it comes to love, we see that by the very nature of this experience, more than one person is involved. The Christian faith, by virtue of the very life of love to which it leads, is essentially a community affair.

We have already referred to the family setting as the basic human community where each new individual is nurtured in faith, hope and love. Just as the family setting brings to every man the basic ingredients of human existence, so the church brings to the believer the distinctively Christian quality of faith, hope and love. The church is the community of Christian faith. All Christian believers have been nurtured by it, and it has sometimes been given the name of mother. Because every Christian in the past and in the present has been brought to faith in one way or another by this community of faith, it follows that the church is not something created or constructed by Christians themselves. The very existence of this community is a witness to the God, who, in fact, did call it into being.

According to the Bible, the Judeo-Christian faith has always been a community affair. At the Exodus from Egypt it was not an individual, nor a group of individuals, but a community, a people, which was delivered from slavery and led to the promised land. The Old Testament is not primarily concerned with the relationships between YHWH and individual Israelites, but with that between YHWH and Israel. The very work ekklesia which the New Testament uses for ‘church’ comes from the Greek Old Testament where it is used to describe the whole ‘assembly’ of Israel.

The faith of the people of Israel has often been referred to as a national religion, but this is quite misleading. It cannot be labeled national in the sense that it stems from one state or political institution, for only for the comparatively short period of the reigns of David and Solomon was the people of Israel contained within one kingdom. For a somewhat longer period there were two kingdoms. But for by far the longest period, Israel possessed no political institution which gave her an independent national existence. That which enabled Israel to survive as a community, A even though dispersed among the nations, was the common faith. As the community of faith, Israel pioneered the Christian Way.

Neither can Israel’s faith be called a national religion on the grounds that she was one pure ethnic group, for as we have already pointed out, the Israel of David’s kingdom was much more cosmopolitan than is usually realized. It is true that in the course of time it gave the appearance of being a national group, for many generations went by, in which little new blood, if any at all, was brought in to share the faith. But it is salutary for us to remember, that to the Indian and Chinese of the nineteenth century, Christianity had all the appearances of being the religion of the European race.

When the Jewish remnant of Israel became scattered through various nations and cultures which were alien to it, it led to two opposite kinds of reaction. The more dominant trend was to develop self-contained Jewish communities which existed like islands in a sea of alien culture. This concern for self-preservation fostered the inward look, leading to restrictions forbidding marriage outside the community, an emphasis on all customs unique to the Jewish faith, and strict laws of food and hygiene which prevented Jews from having table fellowship with Gentiles.

But there were some men in Judaism who protested against this. They looked outward, and believed that their faith led them to a sense of responsibility for the whole race of mankind. This concern found expression in the late Old Testament books of Ruth and Jonah, though there were seeds of it in Israel’s earliest traditions, such as the divine words spoken to Abraham, "By you all the families of the earth will bless themselves".

A contemporary of Jesus was the great Jewish philosopher Philo (c. 20 BC.- c. AD. 50), who attempted to interpret the Jewish faith to the Gentile world in such a way as to solicit the interest and appreciation of non-Jewish readers. The Pharisees definitely set out to make converts to Judaism. Indeed, not long before, the Idumeans (the descendants of ancient Edom), from whom the Herods came, were induced by force to embrace the Jewish faith and practice. Such examples show that Judaism was not simply an ethnic or national faith, but a community of faith which still occasionally looked outward.

This catholic or universal interest, which meant all the difference between a community of faith and a religion of race or state, was destined to break out in an astounding way as a result of the advent of Christ. But it did not happen straight away. It is widely accepted nowadays that Jesus had no thought of founding a church embodying all the ecclesiastical structure that we associate with the word. He probably never used the word ‘church’, for the only two references found on his lips in the Gospels almost certainly reflect later tradition. We have already noted the probability that Jesus expected the end of the age within a short time. Moreover, not even the Gospels set on the lips of the earthly Jesus any hint of a mission to men outside Jewry, but they record him as saying that he came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

It was largely due to Paul that the Christian movement began to move outside the boundaries of Jewry, and this partly derived from the discovery that, whereas there was considerable resistance among the Jews to the new form of the faith, some of the Gentile adherents of the various synagogue centers were quickly attracted to the Christian Gospel. When Jewish resistance turned to fierce opposition on the missionary journey to the synagogues of Asia Minor, Paul and Barnabas finally announced to their Jewish compatriots the following decision, which had such momentous results: "It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles".

The earliest Christians, being themselves Jews and centered in Jerusalem, were not a little alarmed when they found that the Gentile converts were not being made to conform to orthodox Jewish practice, and the Christian movement almost split in two over the issue. Eventually an agreement was reached that Paul and Barnabas should be free to take the Gospel to the Gentiles, and that the original apostles James, Peter and John should preach to the Jews. The famous missionary injunctions in the Gospels and Acts, such as, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . ." are all placed on the lips of the risen Jesus, the Christ of faith, and reflect what began to happen only ten to twenty years after the death of Jesus.

It was this dramatic move, initiated by Paul in obedience to what he believed to be divine direction, which was crucial for the future of Christianity, and without which the world may never have heard of the Christian faith. It was crucial because it allowed to come to the fore the heart and essence of the Judeo-Christian faith. For Christianity is essentially a faith to be lived. It expresses itself in the lives of those who embrace it and in the community of faith which together they constitute. From this point onwards Christianity left behind the security of the institutional structures of temple and synagogue. It went out into the world to sink or swim. It had so little framework or organization to hold it together that it could easily have faded out (and perhaps it did in some places), but on the whole it did just the opposite. It spread with the vitality of fire.

We have already noted earlier that when compared with the commonly accepted religious practices of the day, the Christian community of faith took on an everyday, almost secular appearance, not unlike such a contemporary movement as the Rotarians. There were no priests, no paid officials, no uniformity of practice and the bare minimum of organization. But the vital things were found there unencumbered -- a common faith, a living hope and a new level of love. Honesty, purity, gentleness, patience, love were fostered in the whole of life, not simply to make a good impression upon others, but because these were the only proper expression of the faith they had embraced. They were the fruits of what they found to be the power of God in the community of faith.

Jesus had founded no church of the kind that we know. But he had spoken consistently of the Kingdom of God, or the rule of God in the lives of men. Much of the original teaching of Jesus seems to have consisted of the parables of the Kingdom, which highlighted various aspects of the life of the community of faith. Let us take, for example, the parable in which Jesus likened the Kingdom of God to the leaven which a housewife puts into the flour to make bread. The leaven has to lose its independent identity in the flour, but by spreading throughout the whole, it slowly turns the flour into the living, fermenting dough ready to be baked into bread.

In the first place this describes how faith works in the life of the believer. When a man embraces the faith, there may be nothing at first that is very obvious to an outside observer, but Christian faith, like leaven, spreads through a man’s whole being, influencing in the end all his thinking and action. In the second place, the community of faith is not a separatist closed circle of self-satisfied members living to themselves, but a community which is again and again prepared to lose its own identity, that, like leaven, it may come to influence the whole of human society in which it lives.

Of course, we look back to the first Christian century through spectacles which have been ground and colored by some sixteen hundred years of the history of the church as an institution coextensive with the state. Until the beginning of the fourth century the Christian movement had been forced from time to time to live an underground existence, owing to the imperial persecutions, but Constantine the Great, partly in the belief that the Christian God had given him the victory over his rival contestants for the Empire, not only gave complete freedom to Christians for the practice of the faith, but he united the Christian church to the secular state by quite close ties.

In the course of time the church developed an ever stronger framework of organization, a more formal expression of doctrine, and an intricate liturgical cultus. This reached a climax in the Middle Ages, by which time the church had in her hands social power stronger than that of kings and emperors. On the one hand we can be strongly attracted by the magnificent features of the Middle Ages, as an inspiring expression of the Christian faith in a certain age and place. On the other hand, it is all too easy from our vantage point to behold those faults in the edifice of medieval Christendom which were destined in the long run to bring the whole intricate structure into increasing decay. There is no more telling commentary on this, than a visit to one of the medieval cathedrals, usually empty, with the all too obvious signs of decay, and the inevitable appeal for funds to help restore it.

But when Christianity takes to itself the forms and organization of the kingdoms of this world, it must expect that these structures will suffer the same fate as those of man-made empires, even if they are Christian in intention. The Reformation was the first great crack in the structure, though it had already been preceded by the break between East and West. In some respects at least, the Reformers were making a move in the right direction. They were challenging the rigid structure of the church, in which decay had already set in, in order to give breathing space to the essentially living thing that the Christian faith is. But it was no more than a temporary burst forward, for the Reformers only partially diagnosed what was happening. The various churches of Protestantism quickly set up their own rigid counterparts of the ecclesiastical structure centered on Rome, and were still intent, though sometimes unconsciously, on preserving as much of the institutional form of Christendom as they could.

But the door that the Reformers opened, let in more things than they bargained for. The new world began to emerge, though at first very few, if any at all, had any inkling of this. The leaven of the Christian heritage now began to penetrate further than either Protestant or Catholic realized , and in forms which could not readily be evaluated by the traditional canons of Christian orthodoxy. The emergence of the new world, which in fact owed so much to the Christian heritage, began to appear more and more in the eyes of the authorities of Christendom as an evil spirit from some Pandora’s box.

Steadily over the last two hundred years, and with increasing acceleration during this century, the remnants of eastern and western Christianity, of both Protestant and Catholic forms, have been forced back into themselves. Churchmen of various traditions are making strenuous efforts to prevent the once magnificent edifice of Christendom from falling into further ruin. The churches have become island organizations living within a sea of increasingly secular society. It is not the first time that the community of faith has become inward looking. Some, like the ancient Sadducees, are content to carry on with their priestly tasks regardless. Others, like the ancient Pharisees, prompted by equally noble motives, are making valiant efforts to keep the church structures buoyant and active by winning converts from the lost world as occasion offers.

Within the last hundred years the rise of the ecumenical movement has brought new hope to many, and much that it seeks to do deserves the fullest support. But what appears to be the ecumenical diagnosis, namely, that the trouble with the church lies in her divisions, does not go far enough. Lurking behind most ecumenical endeavors there seems to lie the vision of restoring the magnificence of European Christendom, though this time on a global scale. But the Middle Ages have gone for ever. There can be no restoring of the edifice by plastering over the cracks in the masonry. The medieval cathedrals are destined to become museum-pieces, just as much in Europe, as they are in Russia. The whole ecclesiastical structure is destined to undergo a much greater shaking yet.

In fact, the church as it has been known to us through European Christendom is destined to die, and we must let it die. For only then can there be a resurrection of the community of faith in a form relevant to the new world. It was the death of the Davidic kingdom which forced the Jewish community of faith out into the world. It was the death of Christ which led to the renewal of the community of faith. It was the dying to the old social structure of temple and synagogue which gave a freedom to the Christian community to spread out into the Roman world. The present decay of traditional Christendom is a challenge to our faith in death and resurrection.

We are unwilling and afraid to let the outworn organization, doctrine, and forms of the church die, lest we find in the end that we have nothing left. Herein we reveal our lack of faith. That which is permanent in the church is not its structure, its doctrinal confessions and its liturgies, but its faith, and the hope and love associated with it. The more faith becomes a present experience, the more we are willing to let the outward forms of past generations die, that the living church may show itself for what it is -- the community of faith.

Of course every human community must assume some kind of form, however loose and impermanent the framework may be. At the moment we cannot see clearly what form the community of faith will take in the new world, say by next century, any more than Paul could have foreseen the great church of Christendom which was destined to develop from the church of his time. But because the church must learn to be the community of faith, we must abandon the idea of the church as an institution of power. How often we are still tempted to bring influence to bear upon secular powers by calling on the church to speak with some kind of authority through its leaders and councils. The church is not called to be an institution within society, but to be the leaven of society. The real influence of the community of faith will not be through the power of the institution but through the lives of its members, and there will never be any easy way of evaluating this influence.

The recovery of the church as the community of faith will not come out of the blue, but out of the existing, fragmented and outwardly dying ecclesiastical institutions of Christendom. The denominational barriers are collapsing. Men of faith from all traditions are entering into honest dialogue not only with one another, but also with those who have abandoned traditional Christianity of any form. New life is breaking out from the churches in unexpected ways. These are the encouraging signs, that from the decaying structure of medieval Christendom there is beginning to emerge the new form of the church as the community of faith, whose role it is to serve all mankind by being the leaven of faith, hope and love in a distressed world.

Chapter 19: Love as the Life of Faith

One of the most inspired chapters in all of Paul’s letters is that in which, as if in a sudden mood of wild abandon, he sets aside all his theological argument and goes straight to the heart of the Christian life in what has been called a magnificent hymn of love. It is at the end of this that he links together the three basic realities of human experience, in which man senses that which is eternal. There are three things, he says, which abide, or last for ever. They are faith, hope and love, but the greatest of the three is love.

We have already seen that faith and hope are closely related. But even these, so far as their Christian expression is concerned, lose their intrinsic value unless they are directed by, and expressed in love. As in the case of both faith and hope, we must recognize that the Christian heritage has no monopoly of the practice of love, for it, too, is basic to the human condition. It is out of the love of a man and a woman that the human being receives his very existence. (The fact that sexual attraction may, in some cases, contain no element of love in it at all, but be only an act of lust, must not be allowed to blind us to the love that can be, and indeed ought to be, in the marriage relationship.) This is important because it makes it clear that the family, or basic human community, in which the newly born infant learns to take the first steps in faith and hope, is itself created by love and should continue to be a community visibly demonstrating love. The family setting shows us the human situation in miniature. From this setting each person receives his humanity, including the ingredients essential for human existence, namely, faith, hope and love.

Wherever humanity reaches some maturity of expression, a high value comes to be placed on love. And wherever love is to be found, and at whatever level it is expressed, it is to be recognized for what it is and valued. It is false, and indeed presumptuous, to suggest, as too frequently it has been done, that only Christians know anything about love. Jesus himself is reported to have acknowledged that even the despised tax-collectors of his day loved those who were close to them and who loved them in return. It is a matter for rejoicing that love is so basic to our humanity, that it has often come to light in unexpected places and caused faith and hope to be born again.

No one who knows anything at all about Christianity will want to deny that love holds the central place in it. It is the subject of the only two commandments recorded as coming from the lips of Jesus, and finally the New Testament makes the rather astounding affirmation that "God is love". But it is wrong to suppose that Christianity has created love where there was none at all before. What the Christian heritage has done is to focus attention upon it, and then declare that something happened in the advent of Christ which allows love to reach its highest level and full potential.

To see how the Judeo-Christian heritage has come to center man’s attention upon love, we must go a long way back. One of the earliest descriptions of it in Israelite tradition has now become quite proverbial. The quality of the relationship that developed between David and Jonathan was unusual, because, in their situation, ordinary family loyalty, coupled with Saul’s intense jealousy of David, should have spelled the end to their friendship. Instead, however, the love of these two for one another attained an eternal quality, and was cemented in a covenant. "And Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own soul."

When Jonathan was later tragically killed in battle, the love of David in mourning is expressed in one of the finest war laments ever written, "I am distressed for you my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women". Even in those early days of Israelite tradition, the level to which human love could ascend was being recognized, and already it was being linked with the love of God. This has not always come out as clearly as it should have done in English translations of the Old Testament, since there is no real equivalent in English for the key word used for it in the Hebrew. It is the word found in the mouth of Jonathan, and rendered in the R.S.V. as "Show me the loyal love of YHWH that I may not die."

The prophet Hosea stands out as a milestone in the growing concern for love found in Israelite tradition. Although we cannot be quite certain about the nature of Hosea’s relationship with his Wife Gomer, it was probably out of the pain of his own broken marriage, that he came to see that the love of a faithful partner could redeem a situation shattered by infidelity. From the quality of this kind of love in the human situation, Hosea came to discern the nature of the love of YHWH for his people, Israel. As well as using the analogy from marriage, Hosea applied to God the metaphor of fatherly concern, in a way which prefigured the father’s love in the parable of the prodigal son. "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son . . . it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms . . . I led them with cords of compassion, with the bands of love . . ."

A century later the Deuteronomic scholars, living under the impact of prophets like Hosea, set love at the center of all that should mark the life of obedience to which YHWH called Israel. The words of the Jewish Shema, quoted earlier, are immediately followed by the great commandment, "You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."

These are but a few of the stepping-stones to be found in the developing tradition of Israel which was destined to lead to the vibrant concern with love manifested in the New Testament. In both the teaching and the person of Jesus, love came out clearly into the center and at the same time rose to an unprecedented level. Out of the Old Testament Jesus took the two basic commandments about love: the one just quoted from Deuteronomy, and the other which lies hidden in Leviticus among a multitude of lesser injunctions both moral and ceremonial, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself". Jesus showed that these two commandments belong together. The love of God and the love of one’s fellowmen, which already possessed an incipient association in the Old Testament, were now explicitly linked together as one. One cannot love God unless one also loves one’s fellowmen, and one cannot love one’s fellowmen without loving God. A later New Testament writer put it quite strongly; "If anyone says, ‘I love God’, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen."

But Jesus further showed that love does not consist simply in loving those who respond in love, or in fulfilling certain clearly defined duties of a loving character. Love can be of such a quality that it knows no limits at all. Love reaches out beyond duty, and of its own freewill goes the second mile. It continues even when there is no response. It is prepared to forgive not just seven times, but seventy times seven. It transcends all human barriers and reaches out even to one’s fiercest enemies. The love of one’s enemies, perhaps more than anything else, vividly demonstrates the unique quality of love to which the Christian heritage points.

Paul’s hymn of love brings out this quality in the words which Moffatt rendered as: "Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no jealousy; love makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never selfish, never irritated, never resentful; love is never glad when others go wrong, love is gladdened by goodness, always slow to expose, always eager to believe the best, always hopeful, always patient. Love never disappears."

The parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan have long been treasured as the clearest examples used by Jesus to teach the love of God in the one, and the way in which a man should love his neighbor in the other. But Jesus did much more than bring new insights into the nature of love by means of teaching. He lived the love of which he spoke in such a way that the story of his ministry, passion and death has become the classic expression of what love means. That which first became manifest in the human situation, and which was reaching out to higher levels in the lives of David and Jonathan and of Hosea, came to breathtaking expression in Jesus.

So powerful was the impact made by the advent of Jesus that men came quickly to believe that in Jesus the love of God for man, and the love of man for God and his fellows, had become fused together in one and the same human life. The tendency there has been in Christian thought, from quite near the beginning, to depreciate the true humanity of Jesus and to turn him into a divine being, appearing temporarily in the form of man, fails to do justice to the magnificence, indeed the perfection, of that portrayal of love in the human scene. The New Testament holds together in a fine balance the love of God and the love of man. The same Gospel which says, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son", also puts into the mouth of Jesus, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." The Johannine writings of the New Testament bring love clearly to the forefront as the theme of the Gospel. The first letter of John speaks of love more than anything else, including this finely worded exhortation:

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Now while we have maintained that the love which is central to the Christian heritage must not be regarded as wholly different in kind from the love which is basic to the human situation, it must at the same time be said that the advent of Jesus Christ not only demonstrated the highest level to which the activity of love can rise, but actually introduced into the human scene an impetus in the direction of love which was not there before. It is the testimony of the New Testament and of the Christian community through the ages that the Christian Gospel delivers the man of faith from the inertia which so often prevents him from loving his fellows. Christians have always been ready to affirm that this in fact happens, more confidently than they have been able to give reasons to explain it.

Part of the reason is that the Christian faith takes seriously what has been traditionally called the fallen nature of man, namely, that man is a sinful creature, who does not find in himself the power to bring to fulfillment the ideals which attract him. When he repeatedly fails, he is often inclined to give up the struggle. It must be admitted that a certain amount of traditional Christian talk about man’s sinfulness has led to an unhealthy and morbid obsession with man’s weakness. But even when we allow for this, there still remains to be made an essential self-assessment of our human frailty, and we ignore or evade this at our peril. Whether we like it or not, we must in honesty confess that we fall short of what we see we ought to be; and if we are not too ready to confess this about ourselves, we are usually quick to see it in other people. There is no need to elaborate here the various features of the human scene, such as war, race-riots, family friction, crime, drugs and all the rest, which make it eminently clear that the world of men as a whole stands in need of renewal.

Because of this something in the heart of man, traditionally known as sin, it is unrealistic simply to exhort men to love one another, saying, "If only all men loved one another then all our problems would be solved". Any humanist remedy which relies upon calling man to reform himself, and to live up to the ideal of love, may not be wholly without success, but it still leaves man struggling in the chains of his own inadequacy and sheer willful cussedness. To set before him ideals which he cannot reach, virtually reduces his attempt to a failure before it has begun. The Johannine exhortation quoted above does not do this. It specifically points to something which happened. In the language of faith this is simply that "God sent his only Son in the world, so that we might live through him".

If children ever learn to love their parents, their love is not self-initiated. They love because their parents (or someone in loco parentis) first loved them, and, as it were, drew love out of them. What parents do in the family setting, God has done for the human race in the Christ-event which consummated the growing heritage of Israel. So the New Testament says, "We love, because he first loved us". Just how and why the advent of Christ is to be understood as the manifestation of the love of God, and just how it succeeds in drawing the response of love out of men, are questions which will continue to engage the minds of men until the end of time. The fact remains that it did, and still continues to do it. And nothing on earth, in the present or in the future, has the power to obliterate this thing that happened, for the Christ-event is embedded in history.

The whole complex of events to which the Bible bears witness is not something of man’s own engineering, but something in which man finds himself encountered by that deepest reality whom he calls God. In this encounter man finds himself, not condemned as he might have expected, but accepted, just as he is, sins and all. The love of God does not say to us, "Reform yourself and all will be forgiven." It simply says, "Son, your sins are forgiven." The advent of Christ, an historical event which is none of our doing, says to us that, even before we are reformed, even before we have faith, even before we show penitence, we are accepted. This is something of what it means to say that love is the deepest reality we encounter, and that this love that is God has searched us out.

But now we must face one last question. Some may want to say that the only test of the truth of the Christian proclamation that the advent of Jesus Christ is the manifestation of the love of God, is to be seen in the kind of response which it brings forth from men. Do those, who take to themselves the name of Christian, actually and always demonstrate in their own lives the response of love about which we have been speaking? Here Christians would like to answer with a resounding "Yes!" But most of us know that an unqualified answer would be a piece of hypocrisy. In the long story of the church there is much which seems to belie the claim that love is central to the Christian faith. The New Testament quite frankly recognizes this, but seems also quite clearly to imply, that wherever in the Christian scene we do not see love to be central, clear and unambiguous, then we are not really looking at Christianity. All the rest that goes by the name of Christianity is pseudo-Christianity, hiding the real Gospel from men, and the sooner it fades out of the human picture the better.

Yet perhaps out of Christian love itself, we must learn to refrain from setting ourselves up as judges, particularly on past generations, and look amid the tremendous conglomeration of things that have been said and done in the name of Christianity, for those places and those men and women, where the response of love has come forth and shone in an amazing way. That there have been and still are such, there is absolutely no doubt.

If the present challenge that the new world is bringing to the Christian movement is going to give it the greatest shaking it has had in its two thousand years of history, perhaps we can rejoice. There is much in popular Christianity today that needs to be shaken off, in the form of superstition, hypocrisy, pseudo-piety and spiritual self-centeredness. No Christian need fear for the ark of the Lord. In the day of reckoning only those things will remain which have in them the power to remain because they come of God, and those things are faith, hope and love, and the greatest of the three is love.

Chapter 18: Hope as the Goal of Faith

In addition to faith, hope is another basic ingredient essential for human existence, for man cannot live indefinitely without some form of hope. But faith and hope are quite closely linked, for, as the New Testament says, it is faith which gives substance to our hopes. Faith is born out of the heritage of past experience, and is created and fostered in us by the Word of God which is communicated to us through those who already possess faith. But insofar as faith, as the attitude of present trust, is necessarily involved also with the future, it gives rise to hope. Hope may be called the goal of faith, for it is that unseen destination in the future which gives direction to the present life of obedience of the man of faith.

Just as in the case of faith, the Christian can claim no monopoly of hope as a human experience. Hope begins to grow in us from early childhood, and is necessarily related to the confined and immature context of the child’s life. Hope assumes definite shape in the form of Christmas presents and birthday parties, prowess in a sport, and occasionally, even high academic attainment. The child becomes increasingly aware that he too will grow up to be a man, and, in the ever increasing horizon of his life, hope takes on maturer forms. In late adolescence, hope concerns itself frequently with the choice of a life career. Not all people experience hope with the same degree of clarity or intensity. Some may not think much about the future at all, but may be content to drift from day to day, and eventually from job to job. There is probably some incipient form of hope in all, but where it lacks intensity, life seems to be the poorer, for such a person is not reaching out to his full potential.

It is when we look at the meaning of life within its broadest possible context that we become concerned with hope at its deepest level. The simple and mundane objects which stimulate men to hope in their earlier years are concrete manifestations, within limited horizons, of that basic attitude which gives zest, interest and purpose to life. Just as the word ‘faith’ describes an attitude in man himself, as well as that which fosters the attitude, so ‘hope’ has been used to refer both to a human attitude, and to that which prompts the attitude, namely that to which his mind and spirit look forward.

The community of believers in whom the Judeo-Christian faith has manifested itself in successive generations, has been most full of vigor and vitality when it has been looking forward in hope. But though the basic attitude of hope may remain fundamentally the same, the form in which it is understood and verbally expressed may vary considerably from one generation to another. The hope which spurred on the Hebrew slaves from Egypt towards a land flowing with milk and honey could not also be the hope of the later Israelites who had entered into possession of Canaan, for hope always lies in the future. It concerns that which is unseen and unknown, that which is not yet. The hope of the community of faith has sometimes taken shape in worldly terms and sometimes it has been of an other-worldly form. It is a commentary on the other-worldly character of the orthodox form of Christianity we have inherited, that the very term ‘Christian hope’ has come to be used almost exclusively for what the Christian expects to enter into on the other side of death.

Modern study of the Bible has brought the discovery that the Christian hope is not at all exclusively tied to an other-worldly form; indeed, as we have seen, that is just what it had started to lead men away from. To see how the man of faith, living in the new world, is to express his hope, we can do no better than start with the biblical expressions of hope. The first such expression is quite near the beginning. By means of the story of the great flood, in which things were described as being so bad that the human race was all but annihilated, Israel was taught to see in the rainbow a sign that God would never again send such a catastrophe to blot out mankind. This is Israel’s way of saying that there are signs of hope set in the life of the tangible world itself, and they are there for all men to read, if they have eyes to see. Something similar is expressed in our proverbial saying, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." This is not the whole of the Christian hope, but it must not be scornfully dismissed as beneath the Christian’s notice. This hope belongs to man’s very nature. Man is a creature who has some hope already built into him, so that he often keeps on hoping in spite of himself, and for reasons he knows not why. It is this hope which is already set in man by his Creator, that is nurtured and cultivated by the Judeo-Christian heritage.

So while the Bible starts at this point, it goes on to show that hope takes on a new and unexpected quality as man finds himself addressed by the Word of God and called to the life of faith. We have already noted that running through the patriarchal sagas there is the thread of hope, expressed in the form of the double promise of land and progeny. What is easily overlooked is that the original promise to Abraham made no appeal to his personal self-interest. Abraham did not live to see either of his hopes come to fruition, and he was at no point led to expect that he would. Yet it was a hope that could claim his attention and interest to the point where he took the steps of faith and obedience so necessary for the fulfillment. In this story of Abraham, Israel expressed some of her understanding of the nature of hope.

Moses is another whose hope undoubtedly came to fruition, and yet not in any way which centered upon his own personal well-being. He was a man who spent his life in leading Israel to the land of promise. But he himself did not enter. As tradition has it, God led him to the top of Mount Nebo and showed him all the land from Dan in the north to Judah in the south, and then said, "I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there". Moses died and God buried him. Yet in the New Testament story of the Transfiguration of Jesus, it was the Moses who had died who was said to have appeared, along with the Elijah who had never died. Thus the biblical language of myth sets out the victory in altruistic hope.

It is not surprising that the intensity of hope waxes and wanes from one generation to another. For wandering homeless nomads, and for oppressed slaves in Egypt, hope was experienced with an intense urgency. But when life is marked by comfort, ease and present satisfaction, hope may be relegated to the periphery of man’s concerns. Through much of the period from David to the fall of Jerusalem, Israel’s life was not marked by the concern with hope, any more than is the life of the affluent society of the west today.

The Babylonian exile was destined to bring forth the re-birth of hope, In the early days Ezekiel reports that the exiles were saying, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off." But a generation later the unknown prophet was bringing comforting news which did much to rekindle their hope. In spite of varied fortunes and successive forms of imperialistic domination, that hope remained alive. It was experienced most vividly when the outlook was darkest. The two books of the Bible, which are the most vivid and triumphant expressions of hope, came out of periods of fierce persecution. They are Daniel and Revelation.

There is no need to sketch again what has already been said about the hope which formed the setting for the advent of Jesus, namely, the new age to be ushered in by God’s anointed king. The Death and Resurrection of Jesus became the focal point for the full consummation of that new age which they hoped very shortly to witness. But a hope involving an imminent event cannot retain its convincing power over a period which begins to stretch out indefinitely. It was inevitable that it should find another mode of expression, and this it did, as we have already seen.

Again in our day, the form of expression of the Christian hope is undergoing quite radical change, for, as we have seen, the orthodox picture of it we have inherited from the Middle Ages has been gradually losing its forcefulness with the advent of the new world. In addition to its mythological framework, there is a second and perhaps even more serious defect in it that is now beginning to make itself more evident. The promise of a life of eternal bliss in heaven above, and the threat of the torment of eternal punishment in the hell below, proclaimed as the two alternatives which faced man as his eternal destiny, frequently had the unfortunate effect of leading men in the direction of self-centeredness.

Man was quite rightly given little encouragement to think that his eternal salvation could be won by his own unaided efforts, for it was the gift of divine grace. But when the hearer of the Gospel came to the point of decision, that is, to accept or reject it, it was taken for granted that this should be made on the basis of spiritual self-interest. The form of the Christian hope encouraged a man to be concerned primarily about his own soul. It was put to him (and still often is) that to embrace the faith and give allegiance to Christ as Lord and Savior was in the long run in his own interests.

It cannot be denied that this form of hope often led men to great acts of self-denial; yet the very motives being fostered to promote it had in them a strong element of self-gain. If a man becomes a philanthropist with the deliberate intention of expecting to see his name in the New Year honors, we rightly feel that there is something hollow about his ostensible concern for others. If a man denies himself comforts and pleasures in this life in order to be assured of happiness in the eternal hereafter, he still does not avoid being self-centered. His self-centeredness has merely taken a subtle, spiritual form.

The first thing that needs to be said about the shape of Christian hope within the new world, is that it must recover and embody that selfless concern that marked the hope of ancient Israel. In the story of Abraham, Israel recognized that the fulfillment of hope lies far beyond the limits of any one man’s mortal life. Because Abraham represented the man who saw this, but who nevertheless obeyed, he was a man who embodied both faith and hope, and later generations gave him the unique title of ‘friend of God’.

In the new secular world, the only recovery of hope possible is that which is prepared to surrender all concern for the self, whether material or spiritual, out of love and concern for the common good. The hope that led Moses on was not for himself, but for his people. His hope was not shattered because he only got as far as seeing the promised land from afar, before he died and was buried in an unknown grave. His hope came to a glorious fulfillment, so that Israel, centuries later, recognized this man of vision by saying, "There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom YHWH knew face to face."

The later prophets were stirred by a vision of hope, in which they looked to YHWH to renew the world by the abolition of war, famine and plague, by reconciling not only bitter and hostile men, but even the very animals that lived by preying upon one another, and it did not even occur to those prophets to ask what would be their own personal place in that new world to which they looked in hope. Hosea suffered a domestic disaster. Jeremiah was persecuted by his own family, and trod an increasingly lonely path which ended in death in Egypt. Yet their hope in God did not vanish. Jeremiah’s own experience set the pattern for those psalmists whose words have kindled hope in the hearts of many generations since. The New Testament says of the prophets that even though ‘they did not receive what was promised’ they remained steadfast in faith and hope.

The most thorough-going expression of hope in a fully secular form is to be found today in Marxist Communism, and no Christian can afford to ignore it. It is being recognized a little more readily today by at least some Marxists and some Christians, that the Communist concern for the welfare of the whole human society, including in particular that of the worker, and the Communist hope for a renewed world with a classless society, find their roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage, and especially the new-world-hope of the prophets of Israel. Most of the deviations from the orthodox Christian stream have arisen because orthodoxy has neglected some essential. The rapid rise and spread of Communism must be accepted by Christians as the most seriously challenging deviant form of the Judeo-Christian heritage, just as, in the eighth century, the rise of Islam came about because of the tendency for Christian Trinitarian doctrine to revert to polytheism, adding weight to Mohammed’s call for a pure monotheism.

The hostility that broke out and still exists between Christian and Marxist is equally understandable from both sides. The Marxist felt little mercy for an ecclesiastical organization which had itself become an instrument of power, aiding and abetting those who had much, and showing scant concern for the present welfare of those who had little. The Christian became horrified by the political aspirations and methods of those who were fired with concern for the masses, but who had little concern for the individual. Yet, in this struggle, the faith and hope of some Marxists have put to shame the devotion of many a Christian.

Today’s Christian finds it a bitter pill to swallow to be told that he must learn a lesson from the Communist and his secular hope for society, but long ago a prophet of Israel ventured to speak of the arch-enemy, Assyria, as an instrument in the hand of God, and another dared to name a foreign emperor as the very Messiah sent by YHWH. Communism has challenged Christians to rediscover that element of their heritage which concerns itself with the renewal of human society in the here and now. Until this is done, there can be no reshaping and revitalizing of the Christian hope for men of the new world. Christians must rediscover the this-worldly hope which has always been there in their best-known prayer, "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven". The renewal of the world is the Christian hope, and even though, because of our mortal limited lives, like Moses we do not live to witness the consummation, but see it only in embryo, it is sufficient reward to have been used by God in this mighty process of the redemption of the world from the evil, suffering and misery to which man himself has contributed.

Only after we have recognized the Christian hope in this form, are we in a position to ask the humanist or the Marxist if his work for the renewal of society and for the future generations of mankind actually exhausts the meaning of hope for the man of the new world. What are we to say of the human spirit? And is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? If so, what are we to make of death? Is the embalming of the dead body of the pioneering hero of the new society the only answer that secular man can give to the quest of the human spirit?

Admittedly there is no returning to the picture of immortal life in a supernatural heaven. The man of the new world finds the prospect of an interminable life of heavenly bliss as horrifying to contemplate, as medieval man found the prospect of eternal torment in hell. If man seeks any continuation of life, it is a continuation of the life he knows here, accompanied by all the interests and vexations of movement and change. But he knows also that this life comes to an end.

At this point knowledge takes us no further in our pursuit of the meaning of life and death. The humanist stops, for he can go no further. The Christian proceeds, but he can do so only by faith, and he can speak about the eternal nature of hope only in the language of faith. In the life of faith the Christian has come to find in the human spirit qualities which have a deathlessness about them. He finds himself addressed by the Word of Him who is eternal, and he is led to an attitude of hope which is eternal. It is not primarily hope for himself, but hope for the human spirit, hope for the world, hope for all men, past, present and future. This hope has clothed itself in the past in the picture of the new age, and then in the picture of the blissful heaven. The truth existing in these pictures is not their now outworn form but the spirit of hope they have been used to express.

The man of faith finds himself to be a man of hope, for no adequate or demonstrable reasons at all. In the language of the world, Jesus is dead. But in the language of faith, Jesus is risen. And because He is risen, the world is a different place. Moses and the prophets are dead. But it is not the end. The saints and martyrs are dead. But it is not the end. We shall die -- really die. But it is not the end. All men and the whole world have only one end, and that end, so faith enables us to say, is in God, who has neither beginning nor end.

Chapter 17: God as the Ground of Faith

Whenever we talk about the relationship of God with the scene of human history, we move out of the field of history, as it is commonly understood, and enter the medium of myth. This has led us to justify the use of myth in the new world, partly on the very ground that without it we cannot express our faith in terms of God’s concern with the world. But on what grounds are we justified in speaking about God at all?

Throughout most of the Christian era the reality of either gods or God could be taken for granted not only among Christians, but also among the non-Christians to whom the Christian Gospel was proclaimed. Through the Middle Ages and down to quite recent times, theologians believed that, if pressed to do so, they could prove the existence of God on rational grounds. There was usually no need for this however, except as a theological exercise, since the presence of a powerful and authoritative church and the possession of an infallible Bible were usually sufficient to re-awaken faith, if ever believers were faced with doubts.

But today in the new world the most basic premise of the Christian faith has been widely challenged. In proclaiming the Gospel, the Christian can no longer assume that he has a common link with his hearers in some kind of God-belief which forms the basis for the communication of the Christian faith. The Christian is being challenged to show that when he uses religious language, and in particular, when he uses the word ‘God’, he is speaking in a meaningful way, and is not simply repeating an archaic form of words which belonged to the old world, and which is no more relevant to the new world than goblins and fairies.

It is not simply a matter of debating whether God exists or not, for this begs the basic question of what is meant by the word ‘God’. Even the Bible does not hesitate to declare that what some people mean by ‘God’ is no reality at all. As with all words of the language that man has slowly evolved, the meaning of ‘God’ is only grasped and appreciated when it is read or heard in the context of human discourse. The word ‘God’ means what the user of the word wants to make it mean. All of us use words in slightly different ways and impute to them slightly different meanings. Language is not nearly as exact and precise as we often imagine.

But we could not communicate with one another at all by means of language unless for most words there were some commonly accepted meaning, however general. For this reason, we never start a discussion of God with a tabula rasa. We ourselves are the products of a culture which has itself been largely shaped by the Christian faith. The language we have inherited from our fathers has already given some kind of content to our use of the word ‘God’, whether we regard ourselves as believers or non-believers. But within the limits set by the cultural background of the world, there are still considerable differences in the connotation the word has for each of us. If we are believers, we have emphasized those aspects which enable us to adopt a positive and accepting attitude to the word. If we are non-believers, we have fastened our attention upon those aspects which cause us to adopt a negative and rejecting attitude.

Our first task is to examine the way in which the Bible bears verbal witness to God. Here it is to be noted that the Bible does not confine itself to one word. As we have seen, there is the untranslatable proper name YHWH, which was Israel’s most treasured word to point to the reality, who, they believed, had delivered them from Egyptian bondage. But they did not hesitate to use other words, such as the untranslatable El Shaddai, and those translated as ,‘God’, ‘Lord’, the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, the ‘Holy One of Israel’. The Old Testament goes to some trouble to make it clear that all these words refer to the one reality. Another important aspect of the biblical talk of God is that He is not simply ‘God’, but so often ‘our God’, the ‘God of our fathers’, the ‘God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ’.

Next we must note that there is considerable diversity in the ways in which the Bible describes how God manifests Himself to man. We have already noted the growing reluctance to speak of God in anthropomorphic terms. Theophanies gave way to angel talk, and angel talk to visions, and visions to the hearing of the Word of God in the inner ear. The Bible reflects no embarrassment about this variety of usage. In the New Testament we find the apostolic church talking about God in some quite new ways. Yet even though the differences in usage between Old Testament and New Testament caused some second century Christians to conclude that two different realities were referred to, the apostolic church was adamant, that it was none other than the God of Israel who had spoken to men in Jesus.

Now this variety of usage in the biblical talk of God (and modern scholarship has shown that the biblical statements cannot all be neatly fitted together into a systematic whole, in the way some earlier Christian thinkers assumed that to be possible) makes it clear that the Bible is not wedded to any particular form of words concerning God. The words themselves do not contain the reality to which they refer; they are pointers. The biblical words are used to point to the deepest reality in the experience of man.

What is the relevance to us of the God-pointing language of the Bible? This is the same as asking, "What is the deepest reality for our experience as men of the new world, and is it the same reality as that to which the Bible points ?" We have seen that when the Bible is read against the background of the ancient mythological cultures, it is found to be pointing in a different direction. Whereas they pointed to the pantheon of gods in their unseen heavenly world, the Bible pointed to one who was in no way to be identified with the gods of ancient man, but who was known to them in the sphere of human history as the deepest reality confronting them there. This concern with the human scene finally led attention to be focussed on Jesus of Nazareth, a man of history, who lived and died as other men do, and yet one in whom the God of Israel confronted men in a unique way.

Even though the Bible was pointing away from the gods of ancient man, it was still forced to use the God-language of ancient man. For this reason conservative Christians maintain that if we dispense with the concept of God as a supernatural being dwelling in heaven, we are rejecting the biblical witness. But the biblical witness must be read in its own context, and when this is done, we must look for the direction in which the faith of Israel was moving, not for the mythological remnants still present in its expression.

Now just as Israel carried through the theological spring-cleaning proper to her time, so we, if we are to be faithful to her lead, must pursue the reformation of God-talk appropriate to our time. One aspect of God-talk, for example, which is overdue for elimination is that which tries to look for evidence of God in the areas of human ignorance, and which seeks to use him as the explanation of all we do not understand. There is no room for the ‘God of the gaps’ in the new world, nor is this the God of whom the Bible speaks. The God of Israel met men not on the borders of life, but at the center, at the point of deepest significance.

Another aspect of God-talk that must go is that which looks to God as a source of super-human power, who can be persuaded, and even cajoled, by the appeal of prayer, to perform those desires of man, which man cannot manage for himself. There is not all that much difference between the dancing of the prophets of Baal before their altar in the hope that their god would vindicate them, and the all-night prayer relay which seeks a glorious harvest of souls at the mass meeting of the visiting evangelist.

But when we have allowed for the various images of God which ought certainly to vanish, because they are the remnants of ancient mythology, we are still left with the question of God-talk itself. Must even the very word ‘God’ be now abandoned? This is a vital current issue. It may be that, more and more in the new world, men may find they can speak of the deepest reality of their experience without any need to use the God-talk inherited from our fathers. If so, we must listen appreciatively, remembering that, because all human language is relative and limited, we must not let any one word or group of words assume the qualities of an absolute, for that would be a return to the idolatry from which the faith of our fathers sought to deliver us. The Bible shows no concern when its writers were led to replace an earlier name or form of words by a new expression, and consequently it cannot be said that either the Bible or Christian tradition has made one particular doctrine of God or one form of words sacrosanct.

Some of the most fruitful thoughts about the role of God-belief in the new world have come from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45), a German theologian who was executed in a German prison a few days before VE Day, for having taken part in a plot against Hitler’s life. His most creative contributions are found, though only in seed-form, in his Letters and Papers from Prison. He spoke of our era as ‘man’s coming of age’, and said, "God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him". While we cannot say how Bonhoeffer himself would have developed the implications of these phrases, let us attempt to apply them to the question of God in the new world.

In the life of each man there is a long period of preparation and growth before maturity is reached, before he comes of age. In his pre-natal existence the embryonic person passes through various stages remarkably similar to those by which the whole race has developed by biological evolution. In infancy, childhood and adolescence, he passes through stages which find some striking parallels in the sociological evolution of mankind. A person owes his very existence to his parents, and inherits from them such traits as can be transmitted biologically. At birth he is still wholly dependent upon them. In the course of time he receives from them the language and the heritage of culture which enable him to develop his human potential. All that a person owes to his parents and to the cultural environment of his birth cannot be overemphasized, and yet it belongs to his very personhood that he becomes steadily independent.

Then he comes of age. The wise parent has been leading his child to the point where he can fend for himself. In coming of age the adolescent recognizes that he must stand on his own feet, and not be looking to his parents to extricate him from the problems and difficulties into which his ineptness and weakness lead him. Parenthood, insofar as it means the exercise of power and control, aims at making itself unnecessary. Yet at the very point where the young adult realizes that now he is free and no longer within the reins of parental control, he begins to find, though often slowly, that much of his parents is with him still. But now it is within him, prompting, guiding and stimulating him from within his own real self.

Now let us turn to the fatherhood of God. The Bible affirms with clarity that we are dependent for our very existence on the fatherhood of God. The traits of our humanity we have inherited from him, for we are made in his likeness. We may see the infancy of the human race, as the long period of man’s origins when he was completely at the mercy of his environment. In the mythological culture he recognized his helplessness and looked to the mysterious unseen forces for the things he could not achieve for himself.

The whole Judeo-Christian heritage, from whose roots the new world has sprung, may be regarded as the medium by which God the Father has been leading the human race to its coming of age. The New Testament proclaimed Jesus Christ to be the new man, in whom the nature of God was so fully to be seen that he could be called the ‘Son of God’. The very significance men saw in Jesus was that by his coming, men should be enabled to come into their own. "To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God." The letter to the Ephesians claims that the gift of Christ enables men to attain ‘to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’.

If it is of the very nature of the fatherhood of God that he should be leading his children to mature sonship, then we can see some point in saying that we must learn to live without God in the world. This is the maturity of sonship to which God the Father is calling us, and for which he has prepared us by means of the very heritage which has led to the advent of the new world. Yet just at the point where we find ourselves assuming full responsibility, free from the restraints of mythological powers, we become slowly aware that it is He, the God of our fathers, who is in fact prompting, guiding and influencing us from within. The man of faith lives in the new world without appealing to the ancient gods of heaven, for the very spirit of God is within him.

There is a final point from the analogy. The truly mature son does not abandon his father when he learns to stand on his own feet, but on the contrary, with his increasing maturity, he becomes more aware of all that he owes to his parentage, and is increasingly grateful. The test of whether man in the new world has come of age is seen first of all in his ability to shoulder full responsibility for his life, and secondly in the recognition of all that he owes to the fatherhood of God to whom is due praise and thanksgiving.

Some may have concluded, on hearing the phrases quoted from Bonhoeffer, that ‘living without God in the world’ quickly leads to the cessation of all God-talk. With Bonhoeffer himself it certainly was not so. On the contrary, his letters are full of it, and reflect the life of a man of deep faith, and full of gratitude to God. This may help us to see why the Bible, in spite of the fact that it was turning men away from the gods of mankind’s infancy, was quite vigorous in retaining God-talk to point to the deepest reality man encounters in his historical existence.

What men of faith may choose to do, even in the quite near future, concerning this dilemma of the language of faith, is yet not clear. The continued use of the word ‘God’ with all its associations and images from the old world always constitutes a temptation to turn back in the direction of mythology, and that leads to idolatry, which has always been the church’s greatest weakness. One can readily appreciate why some have been searching for new ways of expressing the attitude of faith towards the deepest reality man encounters, that reality to which the Bible points by means of God-language.

But in abandoning the biblical language of faith there lies another danger. It so easily leads to a humanism in which man becomes his own measure and consequently his own god. This is idolatry turned inside out. The more man sees himself as a self-made man, with no one to thank for it but himself, the more he turns into a demon, and of this the history of man has already seen many examples. The great deficiency in absolute humanism in the long run is that it is dehumanizing. The deepest reality we encounter in human existence is not our own image in the mirror, for that is no encounter at all. For this reason no better language has yet appeared in the new world to replace that which we have received from the heritage that has made us.

As we listen to the witness of the Bible, we may be inclined to think, at first, that this is no more than the voice of the human Israel which points us away from the gods of idolatry as the first step in man’s self-emancipation. But Israel shouts to us that this is none of their doing. The prophets affirm in no uncertain terms that Israel is a nation of stumblers and idolaters, but it is the Word of YHWH out of the burning bush, out of the mountain, out of the unknown, to which they bear witness.

The ‘this-worldliness’ and ‘down-to-earthness’ which made Israel’s faith so distinctive, came to a consummation in the man Jesus. In wildly ecstatic ways, and with all the impreciseness and lack of logical consistency which goes with that kind of unbelievably good news, the New Testament wants to say to us that here is man’s chance to become free and to achieve his full human potential. Yet even while it ventures to talk about this man in terms of the God-language of faith, the New Testament does not hesitate to describe this Jesus as a real man and one who points to Him who sent him.

To the extent that the new world may be described as man’s coming of age, we must be ready for all the refinements it necessitates for the way we talk about God. But if we dispense with God-talk altogether, we may find that we have not achieved the freedom of maturity at all, but rather lost it by confining our discourse to such limits as no longer allow room for the human spirit to breathe and move. Words like ‘God’, ‘divinity’, ‘holiness’ arose admittedly in the mythological context. But the human spirit needs these words, for true it is that in God ‘we live and move and have our being’.

It may well be objected that we still have not made clear what is meant by the word ‘God’. That is true. By God-talk we are pointing to the deepest reality we encounter, to that which concerns us ultimately. But we do not know what that is. The God that is known is an idol. The God who can be defined, is no God. It is of the essence of human existence that man lives not by knowledge, but by faith. It is by faith that man is led to fulfillment and ultimate destiny, and God is the ground of his faith.

Chapter 16: Myth as the Language of Faith

Faith is an experience into which a person is led by those for whom it is already a present reality. But for faith to be shared there must be communication, and this quickly entails verbal communication. Thus the experience of faith comes to be translated into a form of words. From now on we must discuss the verbal forms in which the faith of Christian believers has been most commonly expressed. As an example of the Christian understanding of faith in simple terms, we may take the words, "I believe in God through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior".

Now what sort of language is this affirmation of faith? Is it the same kind of language as that in which we say, "The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066" or "Water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen"? It is not! Actually it could be said that we have developed different languages for different purposes. For example, mathematics and biochemistry have developed languages of their own. So has human love. We have long realized that things can be communicated in poetry which cannot readily be expressed in prose. We should not be surprised if this most vital human experience called faith should have developed its own language.

Each language has its own rules and it leads only to confusion if we try to make one language conform to the rules of another. Human love has developed its own kind of verbal communication, but this language does not conform to the rules of logic. The language of faith does not become meaningless, as some critics of religious language are inclined to maintain, just because it does not conform to the canons proper to philosophy or history. But neither can the language of faith lead to conclusions which properly belong to the fields of history or philosophy.

Faith has developed its own language because it is attempting to express why man has been led to an attitude of trust, in the face of a human situation whose mystery is both impenetrable and tantalizing. Man finds himself with a stream of consciousness, which, in spite of all that psychology and neurology tell him, is a wonderful and inexplicable phenomenon. He has an imagination in which he may oscillate from seeing himself as but a speck in an unfathomable universe, to the other extreme of beholding the whole universe in his mind’s eye. Why does he find himself called to I respond to this human situation in faith? This question defies a conclusive answer in the language of logic. Not even good prose can adequately explain his reasons for faith. Like the poet and the artist, the man of faith reaches out for a medium of communication which transcends the languages which are adequate for discussing more limited areas of experience. The language of faith has more in common with poetry than with philosophy or a science. (Even for ancient man, poetry was regarded as the language of the gods, and all the early prophetic oracles of Israel were expressed in poetry.)

In the language of faith, as in the arts, the human imagination plays an important role. This does not imply, however, a flight into an unreal world of fantasy. Even the sciences, in spite of their apparent matter-of-factness, depend for their progress upon man’s imagination. Most of the great milestones in scientific advance have been achieved, not by rational calculations and deductions, but by brilliant leaps of the human imagination. The greatest scientists are those who have had the most fertile imaginations, combined with the integrity of scientific method. It may be said that the so-called laws of nature have come to expression through the success man has had to date in directing his imagination to particular fields of inquiry. These laws, like the human language in which they are expressed, are, in part, man’s own products, as their verbal expression has resulted from the application of his imagination to the world he seeks to know.

If imagination plays such a vital role even in such sciences as physics and astronomy, where man can so clearly be an objective spectator, how much more must man depend upon his imagination when seeking to understand the questions of human existence, in which he is at the same time an active participant. As the man of faith uses his imagination to develop a language adequate to express the experience of faith, he may use a variety of modes, such as ecstatic utterances, prayers and hymns. But perhaps the word which most adequately describes the nature of the language of faith is myth. In the ancient world it was in myth that the human imagination reached out in an attempt to understand the truth of human existence.

It is a great pity that the word ‘myth’ has for many people become synonymous with a story which is untrue. This has come about because the new world has so decisively abandoned the mythological elements of the old world. But in Chapter 8 it was suggested that the abandonment of the mythological elements did not necessarily mean the end of ‘myth’. We may freely admit that there is a danger that, if we continue to use the word ‘myth’, it may be mistakenly assumed that we are attempting to restore the mythological view of ancient man. Some Christians quite understandably want to avoid the term ‘myth’ on the grounds that the Christian heritage is grounded in history and not in mythology. But on the other hand there is one thing which the man of the new world still has in common with ancient man and that is his humanity. Scientific language has replaced myth for the understanding of physical phenomena, but it has not replaced poetry and art as the expression of the human spirit. Myth, properly understood, can serve contemporary man, as well as it served ancient man, for the verbal expression of the response of the human spirit to the environment of his existence.

The element which most clearly distinguishes myth from an historical narrative is the reference at some point to God. When we say that Jesus was crucified at Jerusalem we are making an historical statement. But when we say that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, we are speaking in terms of myth. Indeed if the life of Jesus is to be related to God in any way at all, then we are forced to move out of the language of history and enter the medium of myth. For the historian per se can say nothing about God. The historian may evaluate the evidence relating to the empty tomb, but Peter’s statement of faith, "This Jesus God raised up", is outside the scope of historical inquiry. Peter has drawn upon the medium of myth to affirm the faith into which he had been led, and he had little choice, if his faith was to find verbal expression.

The use of myth as the language of faith does not turn the myth into history. But neither can it be categorically stated that myth is untrue, unreal and meaningless, as long as it continues to be meaningful to, and to win the response of faith from, those to whom it is spoken. For this reason, however, myth in the new world will be markedly different in some respects from myth in the ancient world. Whereas the ancient myth bore all the marks of the mythological world to which it was orientated, the myth which the man of faith in the new world finds meaningful will be orientated to the human situation as contemporary man understands it, and it could even be called a ‘demythologized myth’ or ‘historically-grounded myth’.

The Bible itself helps to make the difference clear. As we noted earlier, the story of the Garden of Eden almost certainly had a prototype in ancient mythology, where its original theme seems likely to have been man’s search for immortality. But Israel turned the story around. It is no longer about the unseen world of the gods, but about men in the world of here and now. As Adam is simply the Hebrew word for ‘man’, the story is about man and his wife, and becomes one of the most penetrating narratives ever written about human self-understanding.

There is narrated here with vivid clarity the subtle steps by which man in his daily experience is led into temptation and error, for reasons which at the time appear quite convincing. Then in a flash the stark reality of what he has done comes home to him. His plausible reasoning is now shown up and leaves him defenseless. He is left naked before the truth. The guilty couple feel even the need to hide from each other by clothing themselves. But this is but the premonition of the ultimate confrontation with God, for He it is with whom all men have ultimately to reckon.

Yet the story does not tell us who God is, but only what He says. Man hears himself called to give account. He tries to make excuses for himself. The man blames his wife, and the wife blames the serpent, which here represents that mysterious factor in the human situation, which is felt to be essentially different from the true self. Israel then linked up the judgment consequent upon man’s guilt with the mysterious pains of childbirth and the frustrations which confront the honest toiler.

This is an imaginative story, about man rather than about the gods, and consequently it differs from the ancient myths. But it is a story which still refers to God, and consequently includes the element of true myth. Not only was this myth meaningful within Israel and the former generations of Christian believers, but also to us living in the new world, three thousand years later, it still speaks powerfully, as it lights up for us our human nature and our human predicament.

But Israel demythologized very few ancient myths in this way. She turned to a different source as the seedbed of the new form of myth, and that was the human historical scene. Let us take the sagas of Abraham and Jacob. We do not know for certain that these two men ever lived. What Old Testament scholarship has managed to show is the probability that Abraham and Jacob were two of the more important chieftains who led migrating tribes from upper Mesopotamia to Canaan, and that some of the stories now gathered in the sagas originated around these historical figures.

But about the original figures we really know practically nothing, for Israel kept reinterpreting the original stories, as well as adding new ones, in order to express in these sagas the hopes and convictions which Israel came to believe about herself as a people. Abraham was adopted as the father of Israel and came to portray the destiny to which Israel felt called. Abraham was seen as the very model of faith and obedience, and captured the imagination of Israel more and more as time went on, with the result that in the New Testament we find Paul using him as the example of the true believer.

In contrast with this the Jacob saga portrays the real and all too frail and human Israel. Much is made of Jacob’s craftiness and deceptive tricks, but he was a man who was being chastened and reformed by God, as the change of name from Jacob to Israel eventually makes clear. The story of how Jacob returns from a far country to face the brother he wronged, and how he wrestles all night with an unknown mysterious assailant, provides a penetrating picture of Israel’s own encounter with YHWH all through her history.

In contrast with the ancient myths these sagas are drawn from ancestral traditions. But though they are set in the tangible historical world, they describe men who encounter YHWH at all the strategic points in their lives. It is the reference to God in these narratives which leads them into the realm of myth. These sagas of Abraham and Jacob may be said to be myths which express the faith into which Israel found herself called by reason of her encounter with YHWH through the course of history.

Of course even the modern historian must use his imagination. He does not set out to give a full and cinematographic record of all things said and done in the period under review, for that would be neither possible nor valuable. He must select the words and events which, in his judgment, are crucial. He tries to discern the various trends and personal factors at work. Israel’s interpreters were doing this too, as they pioneered the concern with history, and that is the strength of the claim that the Christian heritage, in contrast with mythology, is grounded in history. But unlike the historian, the biblical writers moved into the realm of myth, even if sparingly, for only thus could their understanding of history become the expression of their faith.

The chief ‘historically-grounded myth’ of the Old Testament is the tradition of the Exodus from Egypt and the Covenant at Sinai. As we have already noted, historical research has so far failed to bring to light the historical events which gave rise to this tradition. But even if the historian were able to confirm that an unusual flow of water at the Sea of Reeds trapped Pharaoh’s army and enabled the Israelites to make good their escape, it is beyond the scope of the historian to deny or confirm that it was none other than YHWH who brought Israel out of Egypt. Even if the historian were able to confirm that at a certain mountain, called Sinai, the Israelites celebrated a ceremony which they believed to be a covenant with YHWH, it is beyond his scope to deny or confirm that YHWH was in fact a party to the covenant. So while the Exodus tradition may in a real sense be grounded in history, its essential importance for Israel is actually the mythical element in it. It is this which constitutes Israel’s own affirmation of faith.

Let us now turn to the ‘historically-grounded myth’ of the New Testament, the one that forms the focal point for the whole of the Christian Bible, and in which is expressed the heart of the Christian faith. We have already seen the difficulty of recovering reliable knowledge of the Jesus of history. But even if the historian were able to present to us with some confidence the historical data of the man Jesus, the real heart of the Christian Gospel would still be left untouched by historical inquiry. Not even historical confirmation of the Virgin Birth or the empty tomb, should either be achieved, would offer convincing proof of what the New Testament sets out to affirm. The focal point of attention is not the life and ministry of Jesus, but his death and resurrection. The New Testament claims, that Jesus died on the cross for men’s salvation, and that he rose in victory to ascend to the right hand of God, are outside the historian’s field of reference. They are affirmations of faith, in which the first-century Christians found it necessary to move into myth for the joyful proclamation of the Gospel. The New Testament story of Jesus becomes the center of the Christian faith only as it is transformed into an ‘historically-grounded myth’, for myth is the language of faith.

Historical inquiry can show with high probability that Jesus was a good man, who delivered some powerful preaching to his fellow-Jews, and who so roused the opposition of the authorities that they tried to silence him by putting him to death. But this is not what the New Testament is primarily concerned to profess. That is why the picture of Jesus as the great teacher of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man falls far short of the New Testament witness. The only way of expressing the faith of the apostles is to use myth, the language of faith. Because the disciplined study of history has helped us to distinguish between history and myth, and to come to the tentative conclusion that the stories of the Virgin Birth, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection and the Ascension are mythical in character, this does not mean that the faith which they have traditionally expressed and conveyed is thereby undermined.

The way to test the truth and validity of the myth is to ask whether it adequately performs its role as the language of faith. Does the historically-grounded myth of Jesus Christ communicate faith from the believer to the unbeliever? It can hardly be disputed that up until the present time it certainly has done this. But some may wish to argue that it was only because the mythical elements in the Gospel of Christ were assumed to be historical that it in fact did have the power to communicate faith. It is not quite as simple as that. For one thing it is anachronistic to press back into the past the present distinctions between history and myth which only the new world has helped us to clarify.

But the main answer to this objection is that faith is not the kind of response to which the believer is led by means of rational argument or the production of incontestable historical evidence. Faith is caught from those who already possess it. The evidence for faith is not in the Gospel story, whether it be called myth or not, but in the man of faith himself. The Gospel story is not a self-authenticating demonstration of its own validity. It is the verbal medium by which the man of faith attempts to communicate to the unbeliever his own understanding of faith.

There is a certain parallel between the sagas of Abraham and the Gospel story. Both are grounded in history, and yet in both the imagination of the believer has molded the original stories to communicate faith and hope. Abraham became the personal symbol of the promise of God concerning the destiny to which Israel was called. The mental picture of the risen and ascended Christ, which the imagination of the Christian believer developed from the memories of the crucified Jesus of history and from the initial apostolic experience, expressed the sense of faith, hope and victory to which the believer had been led.

In each generation each individual Christian moulds his own mental image of the Christ of faith in the light of his contemporary thought and experience. This is mostly done unconsciously, but even when a man becomes aware of what he is doing, it need not stop him, for man must use his imagination to reach self-understanding. But whereas the myth-making of ancient man had no boundaries set for it, the Christian believer is being continually recalled to the biblical witness to the Jesus of History and the apostolic testimony to the Christ of faith. That is the importance of calling the Christian Gospel an historically-grounded myth.

If man is to live, he must find faith. If man is to have faith, it will be caught from those who have faith, and communicated to him in myth, the language of faith. Within the human race the people of Israel pioneered the way of faith which is our heritage, and there is no more powerful myth than the story of the Christ of faith.

Chapter 15: Faith as an Essential for Human Existence

Much of what has been traditionally regarded as orthodox Christianity has been progressively dissolved by the advent of the new world. The liberal extreme has been led to abandon Christianity as no longer tenable. The conservative extreme attempts to defend as many of the bulwarks of orthodoxy as it can, and for as long as it can. Each extreme results from a superficial understanding of the origin of the new world and the nature of the Christian faith, and the weakness of each constitutes a reason for the other’s existence. By returning to the roots of the Judeo-Christian heritage, we have tried to show that the new world owes much of its strength to these roots. But if they are abandoned, the new world may cease to blossom and turn to decay, instead of bringing forth fruit.

To avert such a disaster, the Judeo-Christian heritage must be allowed to shed its outworn forms, and by finding that mode of expression most proper to the context of the new world, demonstrate to men that it possesses the same creative vitality that it has manifested in earlier periods. This is no time for clinging rigidly to the doctrinal formulae, the ecclesiastical systems and the liturgical forms of the past. We must learn to do without the security which such traditional institutions give us. Those committed to the Christian heritage are called quite simply to a venture of faith.

But what a paradoxical situation! Is not faith what Christianity is all about? While it has traditionally taken the form of a religion, and has appeared eternally committed to a large body of doctrine, Christianity has been most accurately described as ‘the faith’. Jesus has been called ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’. The first Christian martyr was ‘Stephen, a man full of faith’.

To learn how the God of the Christian heritage is addressing us in the new world, calling us, as he ever does, to venture into the unknown by faith alone, let us start at the very beginning and examine the nature of faith itself. First, we must look at faith in its most general form. One thing that should have come home to us from our study of biblical origins is that the Christian heritage is not a body of esoteric, supernatural knowledge which has been miraculously introduced into the human situation where it is somehow out of place. The Word which men heard from YHWH is that which came out of the historical scene. It addressed men through those elements which were already a part of the human situation, and faith is an essential for human existence.

What does it mean to have faith? Faith is an attitude of acceptance and trust. Christianity has no monopoly of it. Faith of some kind is as essential to the human spirit as blood is to the biochemistry of the body. Were there absolutely no faith present among men, there would be no community, and where a once strong community faith grows weak, civilization and culture give way to disorder and decay. The absence of faith in the individual is not so much doubt as distrust, isolation and utter loneliness. When a man has no faith at all, he is lost indeed, and it is from such that suicides result. It is far better to have an inadequate and superficial faith than no faith at all.

But there are different kinds and different levels of faith. A man may have faith in his car, in the Government, in his wife, in his pet theory and in God. In each case faith involves a relationship of trust which prompts the man to do certain things as a result. Indeed, it is only when faith does lead to decision and action that it manifests its reality, either to the man himself or to an observer. So the Bible says that faith without works is dead. The more faith one possesses, the more it leads to initiative, decision and action.

It is not just a part of a man, such as his intellect, which acts in faith, but the whole of man. Faith at its deepest and most all-embracing level is that attitude of acceptance, trust and initiative to which his total experience leads him. Faith is present in the human being from the point of birth, and it is in the infant that the intellectual content of faith is at its absolute minimum. Parentage and family setting provide the context which prompts and fosters faith from the human being’s earliest experience. In the years of infancy and childhood parents provide the ground for faith, and are as god to the growing child.

It is only when the child has already been involved in a good deal of basic faith experience that he steadily attains more self-awareness, and his developing mind recognizes that the context of his human existence is one in which the horizons are being pushed ever farther back. Intellectual knowledge and beliefs, such as he has already absorbed from his cultural environment, now begin to play a larger part in the total body of experience which continues to nurture his faith. But faith is an essential ingredient of human existence at all levels. It is neither more real nor less real in the infant than it is in the intellectual genius, but in the maturer person there is much greater awareness of the grounds for faith and the challenge to commitment. The practice of infant baptism is the visible acknowledgement that from birth the child is being shaped by his faith environment; and the practice of confirmation of baptism is the recognition that on reaching years of discretion a person must decide for himself between commitment and rejection.

In every human community there is some degree of common faith, or else the community will fall apart and perhaps disintegrate. The vitality of a community and the strength of the mutual relationships of its members reflect the faith common to them all and the degree to which its members are actively committed to it. If there is to be active commitment, then there must be some degree of intellectual understanding of what the faith involves, and this in turn means that the faith is expressed in certain practices and doctrines. These forms give practical and verbal expression to the common faith of any one generation and, when handed on, become the vehicle for transmitting and nurturing the faith of the next generation.

But this can readily lead to the fallacy of identifying faith with the practices and doctrines in which it has expressed itself. In the case of Christianity, the fallacy has led many to think that to embrace the Christian faith one must give intellectual assent to a body of standard unchangeable doctrines which have been handed down, supposedly, from the beginning of Christianity. Unless one can accept, say, the doctrines of the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection of Jesus, and the Trinity, then one cannot be a Christian believer.

But when we examine the history of any one of these doctrines we find that in their beginnings they were not the origin of faith at all, but the result or expression of it within a particular context. Let us take, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity. The word ‘Trinity’ did not even come into Christian use until about the beginning of the third century, and it was another two centuries before the orthodox form of it was hammered out in Christian thought. However much some may think the doctrine to be implicit in the New Testament, no one can maintain that it is explicitly stated there. To make Christian faith dependent upon accepting the doctrine of the Trinity leads to the absurdity that there were no fully Christian believers until the doctrine was clearly formulated.

Doctrines and formulated beliefs are neither to be identified with faith nor regarded as the origin of faith. Doctrines result from faith, and constitute the expression of faith for a limited historical period. Thus doctrines come and go. Sometimes what has been an orthodox doctrine for some long time has to be discarded. Sometimes a new doctrine comes to expression which has had no explicit forerunner at all. The history of the church illustrates this living, developing process over and over again. Too often Christians have clung to the doctrinal formulations of former generations long after they could be honestly held, and this has led to that all too popular idea of faith, so aptly defined by the schoolboy, as ‘believing what you know ain’t true’. Once a traditional doctrine ceases to be meaningful, it ceases to stimulate faith, and becomes a means of quelling faith. Many people in the new world have abandoned active commitment to the Christian heritage, not because they wanted to, but because the church led them to believe that the Christian faith was to be identified with certain dogmatic statements, which for them no longer had the ring of truth.

We must go behind doctrines and beliefs if we are to understand the origin and meaning of faith. Let us return to the family setting where the infant takes his first steps in faith. Leaving aside those infant actions which fall into the categories of reflex and instinct, we can discern the gradual appearance of responses which manifest the growing faith that the child is learning to have in his surroundings and particularly in his parents. These responses are not self-originated. Rather they are drawn out of the infant by aspects of the environment, particularly the care and interest shown by parents and the words they speak. Faith at its deepest level is personal, and is fostered in the newcomer to the faith-situation, by the faith that already exists in the community. It is widely recognized nowadays that the young child quickly learns to absorb the attitude of faith manifested by those around him, while, if such faith is deficient, the child too becomes diffident, perhaps distrustful, and builds up barriers in self-defense. Faith is an attitude to be experienced. It is not dependent upon prior knowledge, nor does it lead necessarily to knowledge of an objective kind. It is experienced most clearly in the human or personal situation, where there are so many unknown and unpredictable factors that the scientific method, which has been so fruitful in some fields, has shown itself to be quite limited in its application. It is not knowledge but faith which enables a person to blossom in maturity and wholeness. It is faith which creates the human community and makes it wholesome and stable.

If faith, simply as a human phenomenon, can do these things, then why is there any need to be concerned with some additional special kind of faith known as the Christian faith? First of all, it must be recognized that it is out of the heritage of Christian culture that we have been led to speak of faith in this general way, and to appreciate its role in the human situation. So widespread is the influence of the Christian faith in the culture that has nurtured us, that nothing we do or say is left uninfluenced by it. The second point is that it has been of the very essence of the Christian faith to have brought to light the role of faith in the human situation.

While this is by no means the sum-total of the Christian faith (as later chapters will make clear), it can certainly be said that the Christian heritage rests upon faith as the basic experience. The Christian heritage points to the way in which faith was drawn out of man by, what it calls, the word of God. The history of Israel as a people of faith begins with the story of Abraham, and of him the New Testament says, "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go." He received no map, no clear instructions, no guarantee of a safe return. He did not even have a signed affidavit which guaranteed that the voice he heard was the voice of God. But what he heard gave him faith; it gave him faith to hear it as the word of God, and he obeyed.

It is salutary for us to remember that Jesus is recorded as having recognized the presence of faith in the most unlikely places, even in those who had had no share in the inheritance of Israel. He did not ask men what doctrines they believed. He did not catechize them. It was sufficient to recognize in them the response of faith, and he said, "Your faith has made you whole." Just as the Word of God heard and proclaimed by the prophets of Israel engendered faith, so those who had known Jesus in the flesh had found him to be one whose very presence radiated faith and so brought forth from men the response appropriate to faith.

For faith, as we saw, cannot be separated from the action to which it leads. The man of faith is continually being prompted to actions and decisions, for faith which is engendered by the Word of God must lead to commitment to obey the Word of God. Yet it is not the clear and straightforward plan of action, that is most commonly associated with faith, but that which is begun with a certain amount of fear and trembling, and definitely with uncertainty. It is an act of faith just because it is not known for certain to be the right way. Abraham’s journey into the unknown describes this very aptly. The path of suffering which Jesus chose to tread, the agony in Gethsemane, and the cry of dereliction from the cross, all reveal the intensity of faith, just by virtue of the uncertainty that marked each act of obedience.

In every generation the Word of God calls men to faith and obedience. In spite of all the accumulated Christian witness of the past, it must still be for the believer a path of faith and obedience. Men are continually tempted to evade this path by resting on the laurels of past generations. Appeal is made to the examples of the saints and theologians of the past. Admittedly they have much to offer us, but what they give must never be allowed to take the place of the road of faith into the unknown. Each person, on reaching maturity, must learn the path of faith for himself. He who seeks refuge in an infallible church or in an infallible Bible is less acquainted with the way of faith, than the person who knows neither of these, but who nevertheless obeys the word of God in the midst of his own uncertainty.

In the new world, God challenges men of all religions and men of none to go forward into the unknown in faith. Christians are not excused this challenge to faith just because they can point to the ancestral line by which they have inherited the Christian heritage, for the Christian heritage, when examined, is found to start with an act of faith. The Christian finds himself in the paradoxical situation that the more he thinks he knows about God and his world, the less justification there is for him to be called a believer, while the less he knows with certainty of God and human destiny, the more he is challenged to that obedient faith which alone can lead to wholeness of life.

Chapter 14: The Concern with Freedom and the End of Bondage

The Christian heritage has been commonly known as the Gospel, or Good News. It announces to men who are suffering under some form of bondage that the door to freedom has been opened up to them. Central as this is to the Judeo-Christian heritage, the particular form in which the Good News has been understood and experienced has varied considerably from one age to another. It is too often overlooked that it was the joyful message of deliverance from bondage which originated the Old Testament as it did the New Testament.

There is a clear dominant note running through Israel’s written witness, whether in narrative, prophecy or psalms, and that is that Israel owed her very origin and her continued existence to a dramatic event in history, in which she was led out of slavery in Egypt to the freedom of a new land flowing with milk and honey. We have seen that YHWH, whom she called her God, was simply to be defined as the one who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.

Since our knowledge of this event is gained only from traditions which had been much embellished in the telling before being recorded in writing, we possess none of the historical details of the Hebrew slavery in Egypt. Its general historicity is confirmed mainly by the permanent mark it made on the national memory. Significant in the tradition are the simple words, "And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage and cried out for help". To whom did they cry? They did not know. When pressed to the limits of human endurance, one does not need to know before one cries out. Whether under the lash of an ancient Egyptian, or in the cotton fields of America, or in the concentration camps of Germany, it is often all one can do, simply to cry out, not knowing if the cry will ever be heard.

Their cry was heard. That is the triumphant and joyful proclamation of Israel. The Exodus saga tells how the angry young Moses made an unsuccessful attempt to help his fellow-Hebrews and then had to flee for his life. It was years later that he found himself confronted with an unexpected experience while pasturing his flock. From a desert bush, enveloped yet not consumed by fire, Moses heard a voice announcing that the cry of the Hebrews had been heard, and that he, Moses, was the one destined to lead them out of slavery to freedom. The voice was that of YHWH, and Israel’s concern with the Word of YHWH dates from that time.

As the tradition is now enveloped in legend, there is no way of discovering the historical circumstances of the call of Moses, but we can be reasonably confident that there was such a man, who led a band of Hebrews in a dramatic escape from Egyptian slavery, and one of the oldest elements in the tradition is a song which celebrates the defeat of the Pharaoh’s army in the waters of the Sea of Reeds.

I will sing to YHWH, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.

The deliverance from slavery not only gave the Hebrews freedom and a new lease of life. From this point onwards they became a new people, the people of Israel, whom the Exodus tradition actually refers to as the son of YHWH. There is good reason to believe that the Hebrews Moses led out of Egypt were only one portion of the people who later constituted the kingdom of Israel under David. But so full of vitality and promise was the faith engendered in them during the leadership of Moses that it soon penetrated the traditions and religion of all the people who lived in Canaan.

We have been accustomed to viewing Israel’s early traditions through the narrow spectacles of the post-exilic Jews for whom religion had become a nationally exclusive affair. But in the kingdom of David there was quite a mixture of races. First of all there were the descendants of the various incoming Hebrew tribes, only some of whom had been involved in the Exodus from Egypt. Then there were the descendants of the Canaanites, and finally there were sprinklings of Hittites, Arameans, Philistines and possibly Ethiopians. We are even learning today that the very term ‘hebrew’ did not originate as an ethnic term, but as a term of reproach, like ‘barbarian’, which was given to various adventurous groups that had no settled abode. The kingdom of David, then, had a certain cosmopolitan character, and perhaps the ethnic diversity of the United States of America is the nearest parallel in the contemporary world.

Within this cosmopolitan Israel the sense of freedom, sparked off by the deliverance from Egypt and consummated in the kingdom of David, gave rise to a new kind of faith, which as we have seen, was destined to diverge more and more from the mythological religion of ancient man. This faith, even then, had a certain universal or catholic interest, a characteristic which was to blossom much more fully after the advent of Jesus. The Yahwist expressed the conviction that all the families of the earth would eventually be blessed by the faith which was beginning to flower in Israel and which he symbolized in the person of Abraham. Another example of Israel’s wider interests was her concern for the resident alien within the community. "You shall not pervert the justice due to the resident alien . . . but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and YHWH your God redeemed you from there."

It cannot be over-emphasized that the faith of Israel originated from a concern for freedom which arose out of a particular historical situation. This helps us to understand, even though it does not by itself explain, why the faith of Israel became concerned with history, the word of YHWH, the earth and the human situation, and why it progressively abandoned mythology, the gods, the unseen world and religion. But this concern for freedom in the scene of history did not remain limited to one particular event, which receded even further into the past. Israel relived the Exodus experience in her annual festivals, which became slowly transformed from the celebration of the changing seasons to historical commemorations of the events of her origin.

In the light of the Exodus tradition and its annual commemoration, Israel’s thinkers were led to reinterpret the earlier tribal traditions and myths in such a way as to show how freedom from bondage is a basic human concern. The early Genesis stories clearly depict man as his own worst enemy because of the latent powers of self-destruction residing in him. The disobedience of Adam and Eve leads to Cain’s murder of Abel, and this in turn to Lamech’s vengeful inhumanity. The human race has within it the dreadful power to bring about its own self-destruction, and this is dramatically brought home by means of the legend of the great flood, where man was all but annihilated, because he had filled the earth with his violence and corruption.

The YHWH who led Israel from Egyptian slavery was identified with the one who had kept the door of hope open for humanity through Noah and his family. But no sooner had Noah become established again on dry land than he got himself drunk and the whole story of man’s inability to control his self-destructiveness began all over again. The legend of the tower of Babel is effectively used to show that whereas language may be man’s most distinctive characteristic, his own self-centered designs to make a god of himself result in a complete breakdown in that verbal communication upon which all human culture and healthy society depend. Words become a meaningless babble. Men become isolated from one another and are scattered in their loneliness.

In these few chapters which formed the preface for Israel’s testimony to what YHWH had done in her history, Israel strikingly portrayed the spiritual poverty and bankruptcy of the human race. Man is in bondage to himself. He feels he has the potential for something which turns out to be beyond his reach. He becomes enmeshed in the chains of his own making. This is Israel’s way of saying what Paul later so aptly expressed for every man. "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"

Consequently, though Israel had been led from bondage to freedom, she found that freedom is a goal, rather than a possession which is finally won and possessed thereafter. Each generation, in the circumstances of its own time, seeks a deliverance from bondage, and is led to freedom only by obedience to the Word of YHWH. Without that obedience even such freedom as may still be a present possession, is lost in a reversion to slavery and destruction.

In the seventh century BC., when first the Assyrian and then the Babylonian Empires threatened Israel’s possession of their land of freedom, some men of Israel, whom we call the Deuteronomists, because their work has survived in the book of that name, saw that the crisis could be met only by returning to the Mosaic foundations of the faith. As they saw it, Israel’s immediate destiny depended on a choice in which obedience would lead to freedom and disobedience to slavery, and this choice they set in the mouth of Moses. "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of YHWH your God . . , then you shall live and multiply. . . But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear . . . I declare to you this day, that you shall perish. . . I have set before your life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live . . . that you may dwell in the land which YHWH swore to your fathers . . . to give them". The freedom to which YHWH leads his people may also be lost. That is the Word of judgment that YHWH speaks in history.

So the Jews were transported into Babylonian exile, and never again since that time have all the Jewish people lived in the land of Canaan. Once again they cried out for help, but this time there was a difference. The unknown prophet we have already mentioned, saw much more deeply into the real meaning of salvation from bondage. This prophet looked for the release of his people from forced exile and he hailed the Persian conqueror Cyrus, who actually made this possible, as YHWH’s anointed king. But he also fastened on to the positive and redemptive meaning of suffering. In passages commonly known as the Servant Songs, he described the role of the true servant of YHWH. Whether as a people or as an individual he Is one who accepts and bears suffering. Freedom is something much deeper than the deliverance from outward oppression, for man must be freed from the chains forged by his self-centeredness and willful disobedience. Deliverance of this kind is achieved only through suffering, and it is not for his own deliverance but for that of others that the servant of YHWH is voluntarily prepared to suffer.

In Job, Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms, men of Israel wrestled with the problems of human existence. The traditional answers, as set forth for example by Job’s three comforters, no longer brought satisfaction. There did not seem to be any clear purpose in life, particularly when it was marked by apparently undeserved suffering. In the three or four centuries before Christ there gradually developed a cultural maelstrom, and the Jews found themselves caught up in a clash of cultures, religions and imperialistic ambitions. Men became subject to a new and even worse form of bondage. They were enslaved to a meaningless existence. Even Judaism, which had itself descended from the Israelite faith which originated in a sense of joyful freedom, had for many Jews crystallized into a legalistic religion which constituted a new form of bondage.

Into the cultural maelstrom there stepped that enigmatic man Jesus, and out of the complex of events surrounding his advent there burst into the world a fresh, vigorous and joyful proclamation of good news. The unknown prophet’s concern for vicarious suffering became a central historical event in the Crucifixion of Jesus. The cry for deliverance from a meaningless and doomed age had been answered by the very YHWH who had delivered Israel from slavery. The Gospel of Jesus Christ when proclaimed, brought to more and more men a sense of deliverance, a release from their burdens. It is by no means certain, and indeed not even likely, that all men who embraced the Christian faith were actually attracted to the Gospel for the same reason. Some Jews, for example, may have been attracted to Jesus in the first instance, because they saw in him the way in which the Davidic kingdom would be restored. There were others involved in particular personal problems for whom the preaching of the Gospel brought new vision and hope, and so it freed them from their burdens.

To the many who lived in dread of the imminent cosmic holocaust to which they saw the world heading, the Gospel brought the sense of being delivered to participate in the new age. For Paul certainly, and no doubt for other Jews, it brought deliverance from bondage to legalism, accompanied by a great sense of freedom. Such examples should be sufficient to show that the good news of deliverance from bondage, the theme which runs through the whole of the Bible, must not be interpreted in any one narrow sense. Whether the Christian Gospel was good news because it brought forgiveness of sins, deliverance from evil habits, or banishment of despair, depended on the particular circumstances in which it was being proclaimed. The Christian faith can be good news in all the variety of human situations, but to be so it will find many modes of expression. But fundamentally we may say that it is good news in all human situations because in one way or another it delivers man from some form of bondage and frees him for the fullest possible life.

Now it is one of the lessons of history that freedom is something each generation must seek afresh for itself. The freedom won by an earlier age so readily becomes transformed into a new form of bondage. The heritage of freedom handed down by ancient Israel became in Jewish legalism a new form of bondage. The glorious freedom in which the early church rejoiced had by the Middle Ages been transformed into a new form of bondage, actually the resurgence of an ancient form of bondage, that in which man was enslaved to his own mythological world. For medieval man the Christian Gospel meant the deliverance from the fires and pains of a future hell on the other side of death, and the assurance of a blissful eternity in heaven. (Those Christians who still hold such a view, have first to preach the fear of Hell into their hearers before they can then in turn preach the Gospel of salvation.)

The medieval Christian, in spite of his Gospel, found himself enslaved to an ecclesiastical system in which his future salvation depended on an intricate set of cultic practices. The very faith that promised deliverance had made him its prisoner. The Reformation was the first sign that this form of ecclesiastical bondage was destined to crack and give way to the emergence of a new world with a whole new concern for freedom. It is not surprising that it was through a study of Paul that Martin Luther, who had plagued his body in order to be sure of eternal salvation by the statutory methods of medieval religion, found a great burden fall from his shoulders, when he rediscovered the role of faith in bringing freedom to men.

But the Reformation of the church was only the beginning. In the last four centuries mans s cry for freedom has been raised with Increasing intensity and from diverse human situations. In successive political revolutions man has won civil freedom, throwing off the yoke of barons, kings, the gentry and now the wealthy. In the abolition of slavery man has sought freedom from the most ancient form of human bondage. In the emancipation of women, freedom is being won from subjection to the male. In the overthrow of imperialism each society seeks the freedom for independent self-rule. In the present racial clash man seeks to be free from the penalties imposed upon him because of the color of his skin. In the new world technology is bringing freedom from drudgery, education offers freedom from ignorance, medical science is freeing men from disease, malnutrition and untimely death.

The concern with freedom which has come to the fore in the new world is that which originally brought forth the Word of YHWH, to which the Bible witnesses. The concern for freedom is basic to the Christian heritage, and insofar as the new world has brought to man a greater measure of freedom, it is to be recognized as the answer of the God of the Christian faith to the perennial cry of man. Wherever the new world has brought to man freedom from human domination, freedom from famine, freedom from physical or mental handicap, freedom for the fullest possible human life, the Christian finds grounds for great rejoicing. Where the signs of bondage remain, the Christian sees a task which the Word of God is calling him to share. For the world is still waiting to be freed from the fear of war and of a suicidal nuclear holocaust.

There is one thing yet more basic. With all the freedoms that the new world has brought and is still bringing, there has been developing another form of bondage. It is the bondage of the human spirit. The old cultural frameworks which gave scope to the human spirit are gradually being destroyed by the new secular world itself. That which is beginning to worry our age more than anything else is the fear that human life after all is a meaningless affair. It is clearly reflected today in art, literature and music. There is the fear that there is no purpose in history after all, and that the world is an impersonal cosmic machine in which the individual lives and dies, and vanishes into oblivion, so that it makes no difference at all that he has ever lived. For this reason even the freedoms that have been won may turn stale and tasteless in the hands that have received them. Man cries out in deeper anguish than ever to be delivered from the crushing burden of the sheer meaningless of human existence. The answer to this cry comes from Him who brought the new world into being, the YHWH of Israel and the God and Father of Jesus Christ. In the Christian heritage He still sets before men the choice of life or death. From those who respond in faith and obedience to His Word of life there still comes forth the joyful shout, "Hallelujah! For YHWH our God the all-powerful has come to reign".