Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

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СКАЧАТЬ unfortunate. As my parents were setting out to come from Norfolk, on hearing the news, their next-door neighbor said to them, “You know, sometimes ‘God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.’” And writing to Margaret and myself one fellow minister said something very similar: “God does work in strange ways,” he wrote, but “next time you pray ‘thy will be done’ I will be there helping you. The Lord giveth and the lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” It is beyond my imagination how anyone can believe that God’s will was done when little Mark was born in the way he was. What do these people really believe? That God looks down and says I’ll strike down a few babies, that’ll shake their moral complacency! Let a drunken driver knock down a mother of four or someone die horribly of cancer, or a baby be born brain-damaged, and some idiot can be relied upon to say that God’s will is hard to understand, as if God was a cross between Adolf Hitler and one of the Moors murderers. One of the things which helped me cope with Mark’s death is that I never had believed in such a God. Thank you liberal Congregationalism!

      But the death of that kind of God is not the end of the matter. There is still the question that Tillich puts to himself as he compares Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Singing Angels to the carnage of the Western front. Which is the deepest truth about life? This is the conversation that goes on at some level in every human heart. Is there a meaning or purpose to my life? Is reality confined to what we can rationally analyze, weigh, and observe, or is there more to it than that? Is there a reality bigger than and not always accessible to human reason? Is there a deeper love which alone can make sense of it all, and us?

      In the Flanders trenches it looked as if there was no answer to the question. Nor is such an answer always obvious in our lives.

      And if the world were black or white entirely

      And all the charts were plain

      Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,

      A prism of delight and pain,

We might be surer where we wished to go.97

Nietzsche may be right in his assessment of human life. “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.”98 Significant voices in modern science, such as Francis Crick, are not very far away from this.

Looked at in this light our mind is simply a puppet on a string and so are we. You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve-cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice [in Wonderland] may have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’99

      All this fits in popular culture, with Bojack Horseman’s conviction that disillusionment inevitably comes when you look beneath the surface of life.

      Tillich in the Berlin art gallery gives another answer. Such a view is not adequate to what we experience of life. Tillich says,

The moment in which we reach the last depth of our lives is the moment in which we can experience the joy that has eternity within it, the hope that cannot be destroyed, and the truth on which life and death are built. For in the depth is truth; and in the depth is hope; and in the depth is joy.100

      What an answer to throw back, in the face of life’s blood, death, and pain! To be able to do that is what it means to believe in God. I think of Beethoven, by then deaf, but in his Ninth Symphony returning a triumphant “yes!” to life, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken.” Are we “nothing but a pack of neurons?” Hold a child in your arms, read poetry, listen to music, fall in love, does this really make sense? Or could the Psalmist be right? Are we “fearfully and wonderfully made?”

      This is very personal to me. Growing up in Norfolk I often went for walks in the school holidays looking at country churches and vast skies. When I go back now for me, as for John Betjeman, “these Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence.” But Norfolk is, as Noel Coward pointed out, rather flat. One of the wonders of my childhood was the holidays we had in the Western Isles of Scotland. When I looked out from Pulpit Hill at Oban to the Hebrides, across the Firth of Lorne to the Isle of Mull I realized that life had a wonder to it Norfolk had not prepared me for. Later that wonder came in other ways, listening to Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in Winchester Cathedral, in poetry, art, in worship and prayer, in architecture and the experience of loving relationships. As Archibald MacLeish sang it:

      Now at 60 what I see

      Although the world is worse by far

      Stops my heart in ecstasy,

God, the wonders that there are.101

Roger Scruton was an eminent philosopher. In the early part of his life he was influenced by Nietzsche—everything was fundamentally pointless, especially religion. Then during the Lebanese Civil War, he visited Beirut, to write about the conflict. For this it was necessary to cross into West Beirut. The only person who was prepared to take him was a nun of the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, who worked all over the Middle East trying to bring both relief and education to Christian and Muslim alike. He wrote, “At every point in this journey we found suffering, mute, helpless and often terminal. And everywhere around this suffering, were the arms of love.” They visited a convent founded by Mother Theresa of Calcutta. “The Mother Superior arrives—a small cheerful Bengali who speaks English. She shows us the children. Children with paralyzing deformities, children who cry and crawl like animals, and yet in each is a carefully nurtured person, gently tended by the good nuns into lank distorted but nevertheless eager life . . . If there is such a thing as God’s work this is it.” Scruton said he was “shocked out of the Nietzschean attitudes . . . and had been brought face to face with the mystery of charity . . . I had witnessed the descending love called agape by St Paul and it filled me with an uncomfortable wonder . . . I was being turned in a new direction.”102 This did not mean he had encountered a divine being, but love spoke of something greater. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says,

      But in the mud and scum of things

There always, always something sings.103

      The experience of love opens up the depths of life to us, and through it, the possibility of God remains open.

To explore what this meant Tillich turned to the classic liberal theology of Rudolf Otto who saw the core of religion not as a set of beliefs but as an experience met with in the depths and reality of life. How we speak of this inevitably changes as our insight and knowledge changes. All theologies are only partially true at best, all concepts of God are inadequate words. Augustine after all had said that “God transcends even the mind.”104 It is axiomatic therefore that the pictures we have of God are images that will often need smashing. This is the very essence of liberal theology, and, without it, Christian belief would be dead. As a young Congregationalist I grew up singing,

      We limit not the truth of God

      To our poor reach of mind,

      By notions of our day and sect,

Crude, partial and confined.105

      That still seems to me rather splendid.

For anyone who is serious about God it is a necessity. Stephen Greenblatt tells how when he was a child and went to services at the synagogue his parents would tell him to look down with bowed heads until the rabbi’s priestly benediction had finished because at that moment God passed overhead СКАЧАТЬ