Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_5b24b7ef-e2b2-51fb-9a43-504b38a38366">64. Newport, “In U.S., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins.”

      65. Jonnyscaramanga, “How Many Christian Fundamentalists,” para. 5.

      66. Kumar, “Hindu Nationalists Claim that Ancient Indians Had Airplanes,” para. 9.

      67. Cupitt, “After Liberalism,” 252.

      68. Cupitt, “After Liberalism,” 255.

      69. Holloway, Leaving Alexandria, 335.

      70. Mountford, Christian Atheist, 11.

      71. Boulton, Trouble with God, 55.

      72. Geering, Christianity without God, 136.

      73. See https://www.sundayassembly.com/public-charter-for-sunday-assembly/.

      74. Alkar, Church, 148.

      75. Gardiner, Religious Verse, 179.

      3

      God Above God

Let me set out my case. I believe the numinous, the transcendent, is real and therefore the possibility of God is open. I believe that without it life’s meaning cannot be adequately located, and that its discovery can go along with honest questioning and search. In our society this is frequently written off as simply obviously untrue. If so, we are the losers. As Paul Gifford says, “Simply reading a newspaper shows that we have not succeeded in mastering the changes that modernity poses; but makes equally evident that the old answers are no longer viable or even particularly valued.”76 Today religious faith is something of a wild card. But despite everything it remains a real possibility. Maybe we need to see more clearly what is involved in the religious choice and what kind of hope it can give.

Let me illustrate the case by looking at one life, that of Paul Tillich. It may seem an odd choice. He was one of the most influential twentieth-century theologians. Yet today almost no one reads him. There are a variety of reasons for this. He was a very bad writer who never really mastered English. As a student in the 1960s I was probably not the only one who managed to read some of his sermons but gave up on his systematic theology! God, Tillich taught in a famous phrase, is “the ground of being.” Theology students used to have great fun and demonstrate their erudition by praying, “Dear Ground of Being.” Today he suffers from not fitting in with our more conservative time. His commitment to engaging with culture is out of fashion. Even among those of a radical cast of mind, who might otherwise be sympathetic, there is the suspicion fostered by his wife’s biography that he was a sexual predator.77 Not only feminist theologians regard him as morally toxic. Diarmaid MacCulloch asks, “One wonders how far any of Tillich’s theological work can be taken seriously.”78 I share a great deal of that concern and struggle with the implications of separating authors from their work. I remember first facing this dilemma when allegations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s serial adultery became public. I am still conflicted with the contrast between Philip Larkin’s sensitive verse and the misogyny, racism, and xenophobia suggested by Andrew Motion’s biography. For me the question, however, is whether a flawed human being can still have insights to share? And if not, what hope is there for any of us?

      When I started this book, I had not expected Tillich to prove in any way central to the argument. I had not read him for years. Then by chance I read Mel Thompson’s Through Mud and Barbed Wire which explores Tillich’s wartime experience in the charnel house of Verdun. The image of Tillich losing his conventional faith in the trenches, wrestling with Nietzsche’s vision of nihilism, and then through art and poetry finding a belief in a God above God, is one which has stayed with me. Reexamining them I have been realized how often his themes mirror my own personal and pastoral experience. To my own surprise I now think that, for all his faults, Tillich is an indispensable theologian for our time.

Paul Tillich was born in Germany in 1886, ordained a minister of the Lutheran Church in 1912, and served as a chaplain during the First World War. It was the war that shattered him and made him. In October 1915 he experienced heavy gunfire for the first time at the battle of Tahure as the Germans suffered heavy losses. Then the same year at the battle of Champagne his initial traditional religious faith collapsed in the face of carnage. Tillich spent the night with the wounded and the dying, “many of them my close friends. All that horrible long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down that night.” Reflecting on the experience in 1955 he said of the soldiers, “Most of them shared the popular belief in a nice God who would make everything work out for the best. Actually, everything worked out for the worst.”79 Instead there were young soldiers who if they did not take part in suicidal attacks would be shot by their own commanders. Tillich had a brigadier who was a dogmatic conservative Christian and believed that prayer could protect a soldier from enemy fire. Tillich challenged him to open his eyes.

Mel Thompson compares the experiences of Tillich in the trenches with those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who served as a stretcher bearer with French North African troops. Teilhard never felt the darkness of war in the way Tillich did. In a letter dated 13th November 1916, at a time when the battle of the Somme was being fought, he wrote, “Death surrenders us totally to God; it makes us enter into him; we must in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandon.”80 Words which seem difficult to correlate with the reality of bayonet charges, decapitated bodies, and maimed lives. And Teilhard could not face the honest truth that faith gives no exemption from the realities of life and death. Teilhard describes a situation in which a shell goes off near a shelter where he had just said mass with five men. All of them escaped unhurt. Teilhard said, “It was the will of Christ who is among us that none of us should be touched.”81 In other words God bent the trajectory of the shell so that it missed them and hit some other poor person. The idea is obscene, though not to the degree of the army chaplain in the Vietnam war quoted by Max Hastings who sought to show his brotherhood with the soldiers by delivering imprecations such as, “Please, God, let the bombs fall straight on the little yellow motherfuckers.”82 Tillich rejects totally any such view. The idea that in war God directly chooses one to live and another to die is morally and intellectually impossible. As Thompson says, “Tillich could not pretend to go along with conventional supernaturalism, not interpret every act of incoming shell as somehow directed by God. His integrity would not allow it.”

      In 1916 Tillich was at the battle of Verdun, one of the most terrible places in human history, with the fourth artillery regiment. Ironically Teilhard was a stretcher bearer on the other side of the trenches. The battle lasted ten months and saw something like 700,000 dead. There are still 138,000 unidentified bodies. I am reminded of Wilfred Owen:

      What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle.83

Tillich СКАЧАТЬ