Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

I have a new book coming out this fall.  It is titled Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age.  Out of gratitude for so splendid a set of colleagues, the book is dedicated to members of the Eric Voegelin Society.  Several of its chapters began as talks to this group.  Where else could one raise such questions?

The book begins with the fundamental insight that Reality discloses itself.  Yes, even divine or ultimate Reality.  In those moments of divine self-manifestation, the Hidden God, as Voegelin puts it, “acquires predicates.”   “In the Beginning, the word of the hidden god creates the cosmos; when the word moves from the Beyond into man’s consciousness, it reveals itself through language.  And in this revelatory language, the I-am becomes a subject that acquires predicates.”  God “is what he reveals himself to be in the event.” 

Without divine self-disclosure, we would be quite in the dark, drawing barren inferences in the stark terrain of Natural Theology.  Reality has disclosed itself at more than one time, in more than one place, within more than one culture.  I was speaking in this vein at a meeting of the American Academy of Religion, and had I stopped there, listeners would have been comfortable.  Well-educated and spiritually alert, they were quite aware of the sparks of the divine in multiple traditions.  But I did not stop there.  I drew the inference – staring them in the face, had they been willing to notice – that theology, if it is to be adequate to the array of divine disclosures, must take them all in.  And, in so far as possible, to take them in  in their own terms and on equal footing. It must be a Theology Without Walls, not bounded by a single religion.  Here my listeners were puzzled. For them, theology was defined as the articulation of the understandings of one’s own tradition.      

For Theology Without Walls, the first task is to specify the relevant sense of Reality. The Reality pertinent to our inquiry is that toward which we should orient our lives, that ultimate that sets the True North on our life compass. Locke’s “matter” is his metaphysical ultimate, the Boson particle is a kind of physics ultimate, but here we are discussing that ultimate that has, or ought to have, gravitational pull on our lives. Hence, Reality has soteriological implications, whether conceived in terms of salvation, enlightenment, liberation or in some other way. So the theological task is not merely to develop something like a theory of Reality but a living attunement with it, a life in concert with the divine. 

In our day, the theological task arises in the cultural context of a multi-religious world.  Let us begin with the telling experience of a missionary in West Africa.

Ardent for his faith, the young minister sent by the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in eastern Nigeria, determined to bring to the Igbo, he says, “the light of Christ to heathen darkness.” But, as he got to know them and their language, he made a shocking discovery. They already knew about God! They knew about God, he writes, “before ever a white missionary set foot in their territory.” “The Igbo knew of both the high God, the transcendent Being, who was called Chukwu, and the immanent form of deity, called Chi.” They knew about grace and the holy. They had, he says, “subtle and fascinating insights” into how God and human beings interact.

The young missionary was Kenneth Cracknell, who was to become a leader in interfaith discussions. Later, he recalled those days with regret. “I missed so many opportunities both to learn and to teach” because “I had not woken from a deep dogmatic slumber. Surrounded by manifestations of godliness and true faith, I could not see what lay under my nose. For I had arrived with a hopelessly inadequate theological framework ….”  (Cracknell, ix, x)  

THE INELUCTABLE SYLLOGISM

What would be an adequate theological approach for young Kenneth Cracknell, or any of us, once we confront divine truth where we did not expect to find it? That is the question that must be addressed. The project can be stated in what I call the Ineluctable Syllogism:  If the aim of theology is to understand the divine or ultimate Reality as fully as possible, and if insight into that Reality is not limited to a single tradition, then what is needed is a Theology Without Walls, without confessional boundaries.

In recent decades, recently we have deepened our understanding of the wide range of religions, great and small, ancient and modern, and the Reality they vouch for and provide access to. 

Yet this has never been a comfortable discovery.  Voegelin observes that, in confronting “a plurality of centers of meaning in the field of history,” we experience “a horror, not vacui, but pleni … a shudder at the richness of the spirit as it reveals itself all over the earth in a multitude of hierophanies ….” The observer is “loath to admit that the spirit listeth where it will ….”

REDEFINING THEOLOGY

In light of this realization, theology itself must take on a second meaning.  First, there is the articulation of the sacred doctrines and practices of a certain religion or denomination.  The tradition-specific understanding remains valid, but it will not be adequatio ad rem for a Reality that exceeds a single religion.  There must be a second, broader sense.   

A formulation by the great rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is helpful.  He writes, “Religion is an answer to man’s ultimate questions.”  When we become forgetful of the ultimate questions, he says, “religion becomes irrelevant and its crisis sets in.” We must “rediscover the questions to which religion is an answer.”  

“There are two types of thinking,” according to Heschel, “one that deals with concepts and one that deals with situations.”  “Conceptual thinking,” he explains, “is an act of reasoning; situational thinking involves an inner experience; in uttering judgment about an issue, the person [too] is under judgment.” Situational thinking is needed when we are “engaged in an effort to understand issues on which we stake our very existence.”  

The two types of thinking reflect different attitudes. “The beginning of situational thinking is not doubt, detachment, but amazement, awe, involvement.” The problem is “not how does man [humankind] arrive at an understanding of God, but rather how can we arrive at an understanding of God.” That is what, in my forthcoming book, is meant by theology. “We are never pure spectators,” says Heschel. “The challenge devolves onto each of us.” Onto each one of us.

EPISTEMIC STRATEGIES

Some would warn that this flirtation with the religions of the world is profoundly mistaken, risking truth itself. In the face of religious diversity, the brilliant Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga asks, “What should my attitude be?” The attitude he chooses is:  I believe what I believe and therefore any contradictory view is false.  “That,” he insists, “is simple logic.”  One might call this a closed epistemic strategy.

An open epistemic strategy responds, “Of course, I believe my current beliefs and disbelieve their contradictories, but I also know that I am fallible and limited.  Moreover, I understand that God is greater than my understanding.  Reality may have more dimensions than are reported in my own religious tradition.”

We cannot rule out the possibility that Reality is many-sided and that there is a multiplicity of different but true divine self-disclosures. I, like Plantinga, believe in a personal God, that is, a Reality that has a personal aspect.  However, that does not rule out the possibility that Reality has other, non-personal dimensions – or that Reality has disclosed these aspects primarily through non-theistic religions. Only a very strong claim that a particular religion is not only true, but is the only religious truth, would rule out this possibility. But would such a claim be compatible with the depth, power, and mystery of divine Reality?

 An open, non-exclusivist epistemic strategy – in religion and other fields – has a heuristic or truth-seeking advantage, since different theories cast different light on the phenomena they study. All belief systems foreground  some aspects of reality and, in the process, neglect or obscure others.  We can learn from the behaviorist and Freud, from Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes, from the Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita. The harvest of truth is richer if we take in what each has to offer. The question may not so much be “Which one is true?” as “What does each illuminate and what does it leave in the shadows?”

If God does disclose divine aspects through a diversity of religions, an exclusivist strategy will actually preclude knowledge of these other aspects. Hence an open epistemic strategy is ultimately more faithful and responsive to whatever God, in divine wisdom, chooses to disclose to different peoples or, in a less theistic formulation, whatever Reality discloses of itself to them. 

When someone presents an argument with odd consequences, one suspects something has gone wrong. I doubt that Plantinga tells his wife, “I believe I turned off the oven before we left, and anything that contradicts that is false.”  If he did, we – and she – would think he was picking a fight. And in a sense, he is. He is declaring where he stands, and defending his right to stand there, and not to hang suspended between different religions.

In this desire, Plantinga is right, not as a point of logic, but as the response to a divine summons. When Reality discloses itself, within Christianity or elsewhere, it is not an inert fact but an authoritative call, a call that demands a response. That response is transformative. You feel your whole life pointing True North and that nothing could be more certain than this thing that cannot quite be grasped. It seems to be the only truth, or the only truth worth having. Yet one’s hold on this truth may be fragile and at risk. The danger of being open to more than one truth is that you may well lose a grip on the truth you had at the outset – the truth that, quite possibly, is the very truth vouchsafed to you.

Still, you can believe and live out the truth given to you without having to deny the truth that may have been entrusted to others. We cannot assume that every human being receives the same divine call. We do not know how Reality discloses itself to them, or what God intends for them. There may be a kind of division of labor, as believers in each tradition live out their own divine callings.

We all have an urge to put God or Reality into our particular conceptual or theological or devotional box. But, if there is not just one truth but multiple truths, we can glimpse the plentitude of the divine Reality only by paying attention to multiple self-disclosures, not only those in our own tradition.

This openness requires humility, not only of soul, but of mind, and of belief. We want to worship the divine Reality, not our own beliefs, which would itself be a kind of idolatry.  Whatever and to whomever and in whatever language (or vision or practice) God has chosen to communicate, we should be willing to respond with humble hearts, “Thy will be done” or, simply, “so be it.”

REFERENCES

Kenneth Cracknell, Justice, Courtesy, and Love: Theologians and Missionaries Encountering World Religions, 1846-1914

Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume IV:  The Ecumenic Age

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