Bible Stories

For many centuries ‘theism’ as we have described it was a relatively stable element in the Christian heritage. But today many different conceptions of God are voiced, and many people are unsure what they should believe about their Maker. What has thrown Christian belief in God into such a state of confusion and uncertainty?

In the churches, Christians have neglected the study of God. Other beliefs have been carefully taught, but belief in God is seldom spelt out. So it is no wonder that eccentricities emerge. Failure to cultivate healthy ideas makes it easy for unhealthy ones to grow.

• Christian views of God have been challenged. God-shrinkers have long been at work scaling down the deity to fit him into frames provided by the secular thinking current in each age. The sixteenth-century Reformers proclaimed a Creator who is sovereign in history and who speaks through the Bible. But in the seventeenth century, influenced by a certain interpretation of Newton’s discoveries in physics, a way of understanding the universe developed which effectively banished the Creator from his world. The idea of God intervening in the physical order was rejected; he became the universe’s absentee landlord.

The greatest eighteenth-century philosopher, Immanuel Kant, believed in God but denied that he could communicate with humanity. God was silenced. The Bible could not be his word of instruction, nor Jesus Christ more than a unique man. On this basis nineteenth-century thinkers equated God with people’s best thoughts and feelings about him. But the atheist Feuerbach rightly claimed that in thus speaking of God these thinkers were really only talking about man, that is, themselves and their fancies.

As this process continued, leading scientists and historians were making it their principle to leave God out of account and interpret everything on the basis that ‘things happen as they always happen’.

Theologians went-with them, saying that God reveals himself only in theprivacy of a person’s inner life, not on the public stage of history, as was once thought. But this had a profound effect on their view of Jesus, whom they now saw not as God incarnate but as a man through whom inward illumination is somehow triggered off in some people’s hearts.

The God of the Bible has thus been reduced to a shrunken deity few can believe in. It is no wonder that those who still acknowledge the Creator are now utterly confused as to what they should believe about him.

• Christian belief in God has been undermined by those who deny God altogether. Marxism sees belief as a product of social conditioning in an economically unhealthy community. Freud saw it as a neurotic projection, an illusion best dispelled by counselling. From Darwin came the view that everything is relative, and since all thoughts of God (or anything else) are stages in an evolutionary process, they cannot be final or definitive for those who come later in the process. Another assault came from positivism: the attitude that only what we can verify by observation is real.

In science this rules out the unique (for example incarnation, miracle, resurrection) as unreal. In history it dismissestestimony to the supernatural as mistaken. And logical positivist philosophy treats all God-talk as meaningless, except as an expression of private feeling. These four world-views have each been highly influential in the development of modern ideas. The-intellectual atmosphere they create has led to great uncertainty about God.

• Some modern theologians have recast the mainstream view of God, with the aim of making Christian concepts more accessible to the twentieth- century framework of thought. Karl Barth, for instance, stressed God’s absolute transcendence and his hiddenness even in his revelation to such an extent that rational justification of faith was not merely impossible but unspiritual, and therefore should

Not be asked for. By contrast, the ‘process‘ school of theologians (followed to some extent by John Robinson) places such a stress on the immanence of God and his involvement in the cosmic process that he becomes finite and evolving. (Their name for this view is `panentheism’, meaning ‘God is in everything’.) These attempts seem to many to have created more problems than they have solved.

`But, bishop,’ a mid-twentiethcentury lady is said to have protested, ’surely we all believe in a sort of a something . ..’ That, sadly, is about as far as many people get today. The outlines of traditional theism have been chipped and eroded into shapeless vagueness in many minds. It is part of the spiritual tragedy of our time.

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