Friday, March 6, 2015

How Relevant is the Christian Worldview Today?

This essay was published in The Fourth R 28.3 (2015): 17-18.

What is called nascent Christianity emerged in the early first century CE as a tiny Judean religious sect.  Its religious heritage was shaped by the Holy Scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and the temple at Jerusalem.  What little we know about the group derives from the writings of their later descendants, who represented at least a third generation of followers of the faith.
            When Christianity emerged, the city of Rome controlled the Mediterranean basin, and had divided its territories into a number of provinces.  Judea was an imperial province, governed by the emperor of Rome rather than the Roman Senate.  The religion of Rome in general was comprised of the worship of the traditional Greek Gods in Roman garb, plus new religions that the Romans had allowed into the city.
            As a Graeco-Roman religion of salvation, and with the patronage of the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire (Constantine, 325 CE), the new faith rapidly replaced the old religious traditions, which survived only in the countryside (paganus; hence called "pagan").  After 440 CE no pagan names are listed among the elite of the city of Rome.
            Since the fourth century CE, Christianity has been a formidable force in the Western world, but only recently with the rise of modern science and a growing reliance on reason rather than faith has it begun to show signs of irrelevance.  There had been warnings about the demise of the "pagan" worldview before the Christian hegemony.  For example, in the first century CE about the time nascent Christianity emerged, the priest of Apollo, Plutarch, recounted a strange story; he had heard reports of an anonymous voice announcing the death of the Great God Pan, some 300 years before the ancient pagan worldview was replaced by the Christian.
            Similar warnings have been sounded about the Christian worldview, which has now survived some 1700 years.  Toward the end of the 19th century a German philosopher (Friedrich Nietzsche) in The Joyous Science described a madman who ran into a market place seeking God.  "Where is God?" he cried.  "I will tell you," he says.  We have killed him.  He delivered a short speech about the loss of moorings in a world in which God is dead.  He looked around at his small audience, and throwing his lantern to the ground, he lamented, "I come too early; my time is not come yet. This tremendous event is still the way…it has not yet reached the ears of man."  On the same day he entered numerous churches and sang an "eternal requiem to God" saying, "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God" (96).
            In the 1960s there briefly emerged a group of scholars who wrote about the "death of God" as an event in our time.  One of these scholars (Thomas J. J. Altizer) took the incarnation quite seriously:  "God has negated and transcended himself in the Incarnation, and thereby he has fully and finally ceased to exist in his original or primordial form.  To know that God is Jesus, is to know that God himself has become flesh: no longer does God exist as transcendent Spirit or sovereign Lord, now God is love" (p. 67).  "Once God has ceased to exist in human experience as the omnipotent and numinous Lord, there perishes with him every moral imperative addressed to man from a beyond, and humanity ceases to be imprisoned by an obedience to an external will or authority" (127).
            Altizer's view clearly suggests there are more than a few cracks in the Christian Conglomerate; nevertheless it is evident that fissures, spearheaded by reason and science, have begun to appear in the seemingly impregnable Christian worldview.  The Christian Conglomerate holds that God controls the natural world, but Mr. Darwin's scientific view (evolution) on the origin of our species makes a more convincing case than does the theological answer.  The weather more often than not appears to work against the common good.  In the early 19th century the church was forced to admit in the face of compelling science that the earth was not the center of our solar system, which had been an item of faith for nearly 1700 years.
            The Christian Conglomerate holds that the Bible is a special religious text that puts human beings in touch with the divine will, but over 300 years of scientific study has shown it to be a human collection, and God has been reduced at best to the peripheral role of inspiring some of its ideas.  The idea that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19) is an item of faith that is not demonstrable except to those of like faith.  The Church is not as Paul believed a divinely gathered community of saints of the end-time, but has become a seriously flawed secular human institution.
            Could the church, like ancient paganism, simply fade into oblivion for lack of relevance?  Put differently: how is Christianity relevant in the 21st century?
 
Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
 
Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).
Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche. Selected and Translated, with an Introduction. Prefaces, and Notes (New York: the Viking Press, 1954).

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Charlie, there are two questions here which should generate very different responses: (1) How relevant is the Christian worldview, and (2) How relevant is Christianity? I'm eager to see what your readers have to say.

Marcia

Anonymous said...

Folks like Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, MLKJr., and Malayla Yousafzai are moral and social transformationalists of the highest order, and yet their religious talk, Sophia talk, Theos talk is not necessarily associated with scientifically based rationalism and often sounds more traditional, but perhaps not fundamentalist. Shouldn't we at least begin our thinking with what those with the proper cultural credentials have to say.

I had the opportunity to hear Altizer in seminary during 1967-1968. There is something profoundly truthful in his words. Yet if humanity no longer kneels in humility before God, doesn't he yet have to kneel before life. Humanity cannot handle the arrogance of standing. I stand by those who walk the second mile, see the log in their own eye, and settle with an accuser on the way to court.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, forgot to sign my name to the above post, and I mis-wrote the last sentence which should begin with, "I hope to kneel with those who....". Thanks.

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Anonymous said...

Malala’s God-worldview at age 11: “Dear God,” I wrote, “I know you see everything, but there are so many things that, maybe, sometimes, things get missed, particularly now with the bombing in Afghanistan. But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on my road living on a rubbish dump. God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect.” ..’.We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top, and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would fine it there.’

Malala’s God-worldview at age 16, after her speech at the United Nations: “Once I had asked God for one or two inches more in physical height, but instead he made me as tall as the sky…I love my God. I thank my Allah. I talk to him all day. He is the greatest. By giving me this height to reach people, he has also given me great responsibilities. Peace in every home, every street, every village, every country — this is my dream. Education for every boy and every girl in the world. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish. I am Malala. My world has changed but I have not.”

Charles Hedrick said...

Hi Gene,
I guess I would probably have said: One should stand in awe of life and not kneel--in the sense that one replaces one object of worship (God) with another (Life). I can only think of life as a precious gift of consciousness that is to be lived with joy as one chooses in spite of the difficulties of living.
Charlie

Anonymous said...

Charlie, I should have been clearer. Tried to speak of kneeling in the sense of humility, which I think can be distinguished from worship.

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Anonymous said...

Do we not need to talk about Christian worldviews in the plural?

In this post I refer to Walter Wink, a Jesus Seminar scholar, now deceased, whom I think deserves to be called Christian social transformationalist. He was active against apartheid in South Africa in the latter part of the 20th century. He provides what what seem to me to be some of the all time relevant ideas to thinking about the ties between religion-worldview and social application:

“Since we are co-extensive with the universe, and can say nothing about God or nature that is not at the same time a statement about ourselves, we must learn to think of ourselves as the universe reflecting upon itself.” (The Human Being, 47)

“The defeating element [of Jesus’ choice for the cross] is the choice of a non-violent response to the domination system, to the enemy, walking the walk of loving the enemy. His violent death exposes the domination system as oppressive and violent. Resurrection challenges the ultimate power of the system and invites us to be people of God here and now where oppressive systems remain powerful and must be challenged. Jesus teaches us how to live and shows us the risks of living God’s compassion in an unjust world.” (The Human Being, 110)

Wink’s religious/philosophy/theology talk was developed from the psychology of Carl Jung and theories of the collective unconscious and emerging archetypes among which the Christ/Human Being/Son of Man was prominent. Bob Funk refers to Wink in his Credible Jesus (2002) in the chapter on Subverting the System; referring to Jesus’ aphorisms on turning the cheek, giving shirt as well as coat, going the 2nd mile of conscription, he writes, “…Wink has taught and practiced these ethical guidelines for years around the globe.”

Wink’s books relevant to social transformation include: Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (1984), Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (1986), Violence and Non-violence in South Africa (1987), Engaging the Powers: Discenment and Resistance in the World of Domination (1992), The Powers That Be: A Theology for a New Millenium (1998), When the Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of Nations (1998), The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man (2002). I have read the last one.

Charles Hedrick said...

Dear Anonymous,
Thanks for this interesting comment by Malala. She seems to share the Christian perplexity about God's blind side. That is, she is confident that God "sees everything," but candidly admits God doesn't actually see everything. One of the things God missed was the children on her road living on a rubbish dump, and opines if God had seen that he would not be happy. So is the belief that God sees everything accurate or not? Or does the divine eye occasionally close in little cat naps?
Charlie

Anonymous said...

Charlie, as you may have guessed the Malala quotes were my post taken from her autobiography I Am Malala. The Wink info below is also my post. I just can't seem to remember to sign my name, and I'm as young as you.

Interestingly, Malala wants to help the girls on the rubbish dump whether God saw them or not.

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Anonymous said...

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of MLKJr. (1986), Ed. James Washington: Martin Luther King, Jr., Martyred Prophet for a Global Beloved Community of Justice, Faith, and Hope.

Christian worldview and social transformationalist:

"The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may...love, creative redemptive good will for all men, is the most durable power in the world." (UC at Berkley, June 4, 1957)

"...the method of nonviolence is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice." (Christian Century, 74, Feb '57 165-167)

"Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method." (Jubilee, sept-1958, 13-16).

"The common point in all existentialism, whether it is atheistic or theistic,
is that man's existential situation is a state of estrangement from his essential nature" (Christian Century, 13 April 1960, 439-441)

"I have been arrested five times...jailed in Alabama...my home has been bombed twice...my family and I are the recipients of death threats almost daily...I have been the victim of a near fatal stabbing...I have been tempted to remove the burden and retreat...like the Apostle Paul 'I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus...More than ever I am convinced of the reality of a personal God." (Christian Century, 77, 27 April 1960).

"Long ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that justice emerges from the strife of opposites, and Hegel, in modern philosophy, preached a doctrine of growth through struggle." (Phylon 28, April '57 24-34.)

"Now I am aware of the fact that there are devout believers in non-violence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God. But even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for togetherness, a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into an harmonious whole," (Advance 150, 28 Feb 1958, 14ff.)

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Anonymous said...

Dietrich Bonheoffer (1906 – 1945): Christian worldview and social transformationalist. Regrettably I have not read any of Bonhoeffer’s books.

A German Lutheran pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential, and his book The Cost of Discipleship became a modern classic. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel prison for one and a half years. Later he was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp. After being allegedly associated with the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, he was briefly tried, along with other accused plotters, and then executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime collapsed, just two weeks before Allied forces liberated the camp and three weeks before Hitler's suicide. (Go to Wikipedia)

“When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.” (The Cost of Discipleship)

“Grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.” (The Cost of Discipleship)”


"I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of the Christian life in Germany after the war if I did not share in the trials of this time with my people. Christians in Germany face the terrible alternative of willing the defeat of their nation in order that civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose. But I cannot make that choice in security."

http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1901-2000/bonhoeffer-transferred-to-buchenwald-concentration-camp-11630780.html

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa

Charles Hedrick said...

Hi Gene,
I am not sure how this information on Bonhoeffer (or for that matter King and Wink) relates to the question I raised in the blog entry (could Christianity simply fade into oblivion for lack of relevance?). Do you have an opinion on that question?
Cordially,
Charlie

Anonymous said...

Charlie, you ask, how relevant is the Christian worldview? I defined relevance as moral and social transformation. I've looked for folks who are leaders in moral and social transformation: Malala, Wink, King, and Bonhoeffer, and then tried to ascertain their worldview.

Wink, King, and Bonhoeffer all have worldviews honed in the Jesus Christ story of the 1st/2nd century tChristian testament. Wink combines the aphorisms with the crucifixion, and the resurrect ted/archetypal existence of Christ. King acts out nonviolence while firmly believing in a just universe, the example of Jesus, and a personal God. Bonhoeffer believed that God was willing to pay with his son as the required price redeeming our lives. Malala, although a Muslim, expresses traditional ways of thinking about Allah.

My point is that the greatest examples of those who work for moral and social transformation have fairly traditional Christian aspects in their world view, probably minus the fundamentalist cake layered universe of heaven above, earth in the middle, and hell below.

Based on the lives of these folks, its hard to see "Christianity (or Islam) simply fading into oblivion for lack of relevance," unless there's no connection, and only coincidence, between world view and living an incredibly good life.

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Charles Hedrick said...

Yes we should think in terms of plural Christian worldviews; that is what I tried to signal with my awkward word "conglomerate" (i.e., heterogenous mixture). Each faction has a separate take on the world--indeed each person claiming the name Christian has a unique take on the world. Hence the Christian world view does not only include the traditional items of faith but also the odd and the negative. For example, racial prejudice and hatred of those with a different sexual orientation become part of a Christian worldview if held by people who describe themselves as Christian. In the end "What's Christian?" depends on whoever is doing the interpreting.
Charlie
Charlie

Anonymous said...

A headline in today's New York Times reads, "Evangelicals Aim to Mobilize an Army for Republicans in 2016." On a local level, an out-speaking, self-proclaiming Christian running as a candidate for the school board of the largest public school system in Missouri speaks of the dangers facing our children and our nation because we have turned our backs on God. These viewpoints and actions may not be everyone's idea of the Christian worldview but they are certainly relevant. In the last few decades we have seen a world wide surge in fundamentalism among divergent cultures and religions. In the US mainline denominations may have lost numbers and influence, but many evangelical and fundamentalist churches are thriving.

I've enjoyed reading Gene's hopeful comments, but clearly, something else is going on.

Marcia

Anonymous said...

Everything has an expiration date, traditional religion not excepted.