Several years before some of my former classmates would be heading to Woodstock, I spent a memorable Holy Week with a bunch of fellow preachers on a Florida beach, striking up conversations with kids willing to pause long enough in their chugging to do a little praying. The evenings were spent under a big tent in the sand, engaging in coffee-house style give and take on, of all things, the question of what may have happened to God. That week, TIME magazine had put out its famous --- or infamous, depending upon your point of view --- feature, front page and all, of the really big God-is-dead kahuna of that generation, Thomas J.J. Altizer. And neither the magazine nor church folk in general were giving him an even break.
A year later, in connection with my work as a denominational chaplain on a state university campus, Tom and I got it on in front of the student body, and then of local clergy, and I revelled in the experience of listening to people who really understood what the "radical theology" agenda of that generation was all about. It was primarily about, well, theology. Not God, but human statements about God, especially the misstatements.
Altizer, along with Richard Rubenstein, and to a lesser extent Paul van Buren and Harvey Cox, were working overtime to help us understand how many things were wrong about the traditional idea of God that Christian theology had been transmitting for centuries, and to develop a sense of zeal about replacing it with a better one. As a group, what they were after was a new conceptualization that would respect the dynamic, changing essence of deity, that would close the gap between divinity and humanity in the direction of the former, that would substitute hard thinking for mushy doxology in the face of the problem of evil, and that would help people make peace with an increasingly secular society. Altizer and Rubenstein confused things a lot with their sloganesque, "God is dead" talk. But "classical theism" had been dead for a good while, and they knew it.
In the light of this brief bit of nostalgia, perhaps it will come as no surprise that I have been delighting in the break-outs of atheistic thinking in today's popular (actually, wildly popular) writing. For one thing, this generation's final four --- Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Bennett --- are every bit as captivating as the Altizer gang was, and behind their bombast, carefully calibrated of course to produce record royalties in durationless time, there is the same trenchant and important critique of traditional ideas about God that need just as much correcting as they did two generations ago. Further, what these guys have been writing is a whole lot better for our mental health than what we have been getting from most of their ranting and raving opponents.
As each of these writers in his own way points out, what the world needs now is anything but violence-inciting mythologies, crammed down peoples' intercessory prayers by authoritarian religious establishments hell-bent on doing in anyone and everyone with a different religious coding in their DNA. And what the church needs now is anything but the kind of anti-intellectualism, especially in the form of biology-bashing, that has been losing the more thoughtful of us friends in the secular marketplace for decades. Galileo, finally, is in, but Darwin is still taking his lumps, and that is just downright embarrassing. If you aren't cringing about creationism now decked out in the fancy language of intelligent design, read Natalie Angier's chapter on evolutionary biology in her delightful new book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.
On Easter Sunday those forty years ago, I got asked by a number of my fellow parishioners why, in their word, I chose to "dignify" all those Spring Break shenanigans by showing up on a littered beach with my religious t-shirt on. When I went on to tell about a Good Friday night marathon discussion under our packed tent on the beach, with the death not of Christ, but of God, as the theme, several of them freaked out. I began to see that their take on evangelism was a good bit different from mine. For them, good Christians simply do not give the time of day to God-deniers. For me, the only way to get a hearing for the truth about God at all is to be willing to take all the time in the world with them. Anybody for whom that truth is either not news at all, or not the kind of news that portends good for anybody, is missing a lot from life. And that is something every lover of God should be concerned about.
A year later, in connection with my work as a denominational chaplain on a state university campus, Tom and I got it on in front of the student body, and then of local clergy, and I revelled in the experience of listening to people who really understood what the "radical theology" agenda of that generation was all about. It was primarily about, well, theology. Not God, but human statements about God, especially the misstatements.
Altizer, along with Richard Rubenstein, and to a lesser extent Paul van Buren and Harvey Cox, were working overtime to help us understand how many things were wrong about the traditional idea of God that Christian theology had been transmitting for centuries, and to develop a sense of zeal about replacing it with a better one. As a group, what they were after was a new conceptualization that would respect the dynamic, changing essence of deity, that would close the gap between divinity and humanity in the direction of the former, that would substitute hard thinking for mushy doxology in the face of the problem of evil, and that would help people make peace with an increasingly secular society. Altizer and Rubenstein confused things a lot with their sloganesque, "God is dead" talk. But "classical theism" had been dead for a good while, and they knew it.
In the light of this brief bit of nostalgia, perhaps it will come as no surprise that I have been delighting in the break-outs of atheistic thinking in today's popular (actually, wildly popular) writing. For one thing, this generation's final four --- Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Bennett --- are every bit as captivating as the Altizer gang was, and behind their bombast, carefully calibrated of course to produce record royalties in durationless time, there is the same trenchant and important critique of traditional ideas about God that need just as much correcting as they did two generations ago. Further, what these guys have been writing is a whole lot better for our mental health than what we have been getting from most of their ranting and raving opponents.
As each of these writers in his own way points out, what the world needs now is anything but violence-inciting mythologies, crammed down peoples' intercessory prayers by authoritarian religious establishments hell-bent on doing in anyone and everyone with a different religious coding in their DNA. And what the church needs now is anything but the kind of anti-intellectualism, especially in the form of biology-bashing, that has been losing the more thoughtful of us friends in the secular marketplace for decades. Galileo, finally, is in, but Darwin is still taking his lumps, and that is just downright embarrassing. If you aren't cringing about creationism now decked out in the fancy language of intelligent design, read Natalie Angier's chapter on evolutionary biology in her delightful new book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.
On Easter Sunday those forty years ago, I got asked by a number of my fellow parishioners why, in their word, I chose to "dignify" all those Spring Break shenanigans by showing up on a littered beach with my religious t-shirt on. When I went on to tell about a Good Friday night marathon discussion under our packed tent on the beach, with the death not of Christ, but of God, as the theme, several of them freaked out. I began to see that their take on evangelism was a good bit different from mine. For them, good Christians simply do not give the time of day to God-deniers. For me, the only way to get a hearing for the truth about God at all is to be willing to take all the time in the world with them. Anybody for whom that truth is either not news at all, or not the kind of news that portends good for anybody, is missing a lot from life. And that is something every lover of God should be concerned about.
Finding Answers to Hard Questions About Faith is online