Rock bottom

C S Lewis said of the Oxford philosopher Harry Walton that "He believes that he has seen through everything and lives at rock bottom." Living thus has now become almost mandatory. Indeed, to admit anything else is to come under a tirade of accusation from those who regard themselves as seeing though everything. Faith is accounted as immaturity. Welcome to a world of bottom dwellers.

Such destruction of belief systems is not new. Early Christianity did a hatchet job on Greek and Roman religion. The French Philosophes attempted a similar job on Christianity. English academics like David Hume and Bertrand Russell assured us that faith was now impossible.

Away from religion, evolutionary biologists showed us that the family was just a machine for the delivery of the next generation and that our affection for our children was part and parcel of that machine. We are programmed for sexual attraction that we mix up with the idea of love.

Sociologists have learnt that the nation is just a larger tribe that provides the necessary huddle for survival, so patriotism now seems silly.

All things have been corroded by our insistence that everything can be seen through. We need not go into postmodernism in which grand narratives are deconstructed and can no longer act as a repository of meaning and purpose. All relations are power struggles. In other words all is dissolved in the acids of modernity and we look in vain for some hint of what life is all about.

The seeing through of religion has been a profound movement that cannot be simply dismissed. The anti-theologians of the nineteenth century proposed serious objections to Christian faith and theologians of the present day cannot dismiss them. Some may think that the new atheists of our day pose a serious problem for the Faith but they are amateurs compared with the likes of Nietzsche and Feuerbach. Let us take the latter as an example.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) had a single thesis, that theology was really anthropology, that men projected their own goodness onto a non-existent deity while retaining for themselves the less attractive attributes of humanity. His program was to go through examples in which he exposed the attributes we give to God as human attributes. In his "The Essence of Christianity" he often used the words nothing but as in "Consequently, the belief in god is nothing but the belief in human dignity" or "The omnipotence to which man turns in prayer is nothing but the Omnipotence of Goodness" or "Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the awful, of that which ought not to be."

Karl Barth, in an introductory essay to the version originally translated by the English novelist George Eliot, writes that Feuerbach was on the money when it came to German theology of the nineteenth century. This suffered from the "turn to the self" that placed human subjectivity at the centre. Christianity was reduced to fine religious feeling, the feeling of absolute dependence. The objectivity of Christianity was lost in a romantic swell of emotion. Christ as the objective basis for Christian faith went missing. This truly was religion at the service of men in which human spiritual need was satisfied. We see the same thing today with religion understood on our own terms, rather than something that can stand over and against us.

The authenticity of Christianity stands or falls on whether it is a projection of our own hopes and fears or whether the transcendent exists, i.e. a reality that we have not chosen which has been revealed to us rather than discovered. This reality must at once be humane in that it addresses our situation and also be strange to us; something we could not know out of our own resources.

It has been held, perhaps by most Christians, that this transcendent, this "not us" exists as a divine and supernatural being who has created all things and holds all things in His hands, who has given us law and sent his Son to be our saviour. Alas, we must now admit that such a framework is no longer tenable. Indeed, Nietzsche has warned us that this god is dead and Kant has told us that there is no way we could know about such a being. The first led to the unappealing notion of the "overman", the superman whose only reason for being is the will to power and the second turned all theology into ethics.

We stand in a time in which supernaturalism; the belief in a transcendent being has become impossible, at least for serious thinkers. Many in our time have assumed that this is the end of all religious notions and that we had better put our head down and make the best of our bottom living situation. We turn to the comforts of family and friends and work.

There is another way of doing theology that is not supernaturalist and Karl Barth was at the forefront of such a movement. He did so by taking the theology of the Triune God seriously, not as an addendum to theology but as its starting point. We begin with acknowledging that we know God as Father Son and Holy Spirit and out of these three we begin with the Son who as the Word made flesh and who dwelt among us. Jesus is the objective realty from which faith springs, the one we have experienced, whom we know, have heard and seen. Such knowledge can be described as empirical: "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eye, what we have looked at and touched with our hands , concerning the word of life." (1John 1). Theology thus begins with Christology and the other two persons are known through this primary knowledge.

But how is this one a stranger to us? How is a man conceived of as transcendent? It is here that we must think in terms of paradox (not contradiction) and understand that while this one is a total stranger to us He is also closer to us than breathing. This is the tension of our relationship to Him.

We come to this conclusion by reading Scripture. It is only after this reading that dogma is formulated, not the other way around. Dogma is the development of our understanding of what we have seen when we have read Scripture. It is not the bogey in the woodpile that many make out it to be but the formulation of the identity of the transcendent. It is only within the framework of the dogmatic that we can understand who Jesus is and how he exists in communion with the Father and the Spirit.

Indeed, the trend towards immediately accessible and personal religious experience falls by Feuerbach's critique. Is not this private religion designed with ourselves in full view; made in our own image and thus the very opposite of transcendence? Can this not be thoroughly seen through?

So the transcendent is not longer "other" in terms of an immaterial being who can nevertheless interact with the material world, the transcendent is "other" in that Jesus comes into our world and destroys it, a reality that Christians discover particularly in the season of Advent. Jesus is the anticipation of the end of us and of our world. This is how He is a stranger in our midst. As the seventeenth century English divine, John Owen has written:

"He is light, and we darkness; and what communion has light with darkness? His is life, and we are dead, - he is love, and we are enmity: and what agreement can there be between us?"

The necessary property of transcendence in Christianity cannot be found in the order of the material and the immaterial or even in the dualism between body and soul but in the fact that when we read Scripture we recognise a One, who has come among us who is pure humanity and hence pure divinity. In Him the breach between heaven and earth has been overcome. This new Adam will restore us to the lost Garden of Eden in which the enmity between the truth and us is healed.

Hence transcendence is not to be found in the order of nature but in the order of culture. It also cannot dispense with the idea of truth, the truth about being human and subject to death

This is how Christianity escapes from its nineteenth century detractors. It is obviously not just a projection of human fear and desire but has its foundation in an actual historical figure that we could not expect and who turns all our "religion" on its head.

This is all to say that it is not so easy to see through Christianity. Rather it stands as a challenge to modern men and women who are not irrevocably destined to live at rock bottom.

The Church must take its detractors seriously. But those detractors must also do serious work. It is not good enough to take a one-sided view of history by which the dark times of the Church are used as proof of its transparency. We admit that the Church was often in the control of evil men and women who could not be called Christian. It is certainly not good enough to point to a supernaturalism that is no longer relevant to the Church, although, embarrassingly it continues to be the ground of faith for many.

It is significant that C.S. Lewis speaks about another academic, a philosopher indeed, who lives as though he has seen through everything and thus lives, as they say "with no visible means of support." He is not alone among the intelligentsia and the creative. They seem to be more than usually subject to such nihilism. It is not that they think too much or are too bright to be taken in by what has been called the mumbo jumbo of theology. Rather, they have inherited a tradition of scepticism that cuts away the possibilities of faith before any understanding may be built.

Christianity is so out of favour in academe, especially in Australia, that any prospect of something serious is to be found in it is suffocated before it gets off the ground. It is amazing to me that such a divide can exist in intellectual life. While scientists may be uninterested in say, French poetry, they will give it the benefit of the doubt that it is a respectable pursuit. The same may be said of the friction between other university departments, but none of this adds up to a full denial of the very basis of a discipline, as is often the case for the study of theology.

I can only conclude that the guise of intellectual openness and truth-seeking boasted of in academe is often a sham, overrun by shear prejudice and wilful blindness. What happens, of course, is that even more bottom dwellers are produced in the student body who must grope their way through the darkness hoping that something will turn up that will make some sense of their lives, something that will not be torn down before their eyes.