Volume 7, Issue 5, March 1998

GOD IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Experience of living is experience of God

As we approach the end of the second millennium we find ourselves living in a new day and age, when many of the principles and categories of thinking with which we grew up simply do not apply. Traditionally we divide western civilization into three periods: ancient, medieval, and modern. But we are now living in a time that we have to call post-modern. The world we live in has little in common with the 16th or 17th century world, or even the 19th century world. For the older among us, the world we now live in has little in common with the world of our own childhood.

This is bound to affect the way we think about God. How will the idea of God survive in the years to come? For 4000 years it has constantly adapted to meet the needs of the present. Today there is less feeling for need of religious ideas and God is being relegated to the past.

In Aldous Huxley's notable, futuristic novel, "Brave New World," there is a scene in which the Savage and the World Controller are looking at a Bible and some books that deal with the subject of religion.

The Savage inquires whether the Controller believes in a God.

"No," he answers, "I think there quite probably is one....But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In pre-modern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books."

"How does he manifest himself now?" asks the Savage.

"Well," says the World Controller, "he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all."

Today only the naive believes in God the same way in which the most lukewarm and skeptical believed in him 200 years ago. One of the positive achievements of the "God-is-dead" movement in theology a couple of decades ago was to clear the air of some of the outworn ideas of God that were still cluttering up the backs of our minds: the watchmaker god who set the planets in their courses; the errand-boy god waiting to do our bidding if we said the right prayer; the benevolent old grandfather god in heaven, guaranteeing pie in the sky by-and-by to those whose wretched condition here on earth we could therefore ignore; the god of the gaps, invoked to account for anything the scientists hadn't figured out yet.

All these gods are dead. Thank God! They were really only idols, not truly God. And humans are idolatrous animals. Ancient, modern, or post-modern, we love to manufacture idols and then fall down and worship them. We have been at it a long time, molding golden caves and calling then gods. Unfortunately this is not a harmless pastime. We find ourselves becoming owned by them.

How should twenty-first century knowledge give content to faith in God?

Karen Armstrong in her book, "A History of God," states, (Ballantine Books, New York, 1993, page 378) that today "many are unmoved by the prospect of life without God. Others find his absence a positive relief. Those of us who have had a difficult time with religion in the past find it liberating to be rid of the God who terrorized our childhood. It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by the rules. We have a new intellectual freedom and can boldly follow up our own ideas without pussyfooting around difficult articles of faith, feeling all the while a sinking loss of integrity. We imagine that the hideous deity we have experienced is the authentic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims and do not always realize that it is merely an unfortunate aberration."

This is where God comes in - the God who is really God. The theologian, Nels Ferre, stated that humankind's history is a cosmic swoosh, a blitz-emergence within the mystery of creation. On a scale of three billion years to thirty days, humankind's history, roughly, is 10 seconds. But the next half-second may show more changes than the last 5 seconds. For the Christian, God as seen in Jesus Christ suggests God as the creative and reconciling love that makes up the transcendent element of the universe.

The knowledge that we have is but a swift, flaming arrow across a dark sky. God is the spirit of love and truth.

Ferre goes on to say that "If God is ultimate love, his true worshippers cannot become fanatical. The more that genuine love is practiced, the more is identification made with concrete need." ("Searchlights On Contemporary Theology," by Nels Ferre, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1961, page 182f).

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.