portland imc - 2008.05.04 - The Reality of God and the Worldliness of the World

portland imc - 2008.05.04 - The Reality of God and the Worldliness of the World

The Reality of God and the Worldliness of the World
author: Wolfgang Huber e-mail:e-mail: mbatko@lycos.com
Bonhoeffer's idea of reality is thoroughly relational. There is no world reality from the view of faith that does not stand in a relation to God's reality. The penultimate does not exist in itself. The ultimate conditions the penultimate.
THE REALITY OF GOD AND THE WORLDLINESS OF THE WORLD

By Wolfgang Huber

{This address at the colloquium "Possibilities for God and Possibilities for Humankind" honoring Wolf Krotke, 2/22/2004 at Humboldt University in Berlin is translated from the German on the World Wide Web http://www.ekd.de/vortraege/040222_huber_gott_und_weltlichkeit.html. Wolfgang Huber is an evangelical bishop in Berlin and chairperson of the Evangelical Church in Germany.]


I.

Our society is a knowledge society. The future belongs to knowledge. That knowledge becomes outdated in a few years marks the dynamic of this society. Science is its vital productive force. The life sciences are now leading to a change in our living conditions as a whole since physics has long defined the innovation speed of society and information technologies have revolutionized society. Where is speech for God?

In the heart of Europe, we are witnessing a rupture of tradition in which the Christian faith shares. The traditional forms in which faith and its life orientation were passed on to rising generations have lost their stability. The development of society is determined by economic and political imperatives. In the relation of the three great powers - economy, politics and religion -, a dramatic shift has occurred in favor of the economy and to the detriment of religion.

This process is commonly described as secularization. To me, this seems like a misleading trivialization. We face a far-reaching rupture of tradition, not only a secularization of originally religious themes. This breach of tradition impacts the two long dominant Christian churches, the protestant even more than the catholic. This breach puts in question the past order and organization of the churches: their universal presence with a functioning distribution system in every village, their public claim - for instance, with an extensive presence of religious instruction -, their interpretation monopoly in questions of life and death, meaning and the future of human existence. In all these regards, tradition-oriented explanations are no longer determinative. Regarding the present and future, why should there be religious instruction must be explained. What is theology's task at the university? What argues against a restriction of religion to the private sphere? How does the cross differ from the head-scarf? Making understandable what is no longer self-evident is a very exciting and strenuous challenge. Perhaps this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant when he said we are thrown back "to the beginnings of understanding."

Regrouping in outward existence is also undeniable. Different starting conditions in West and East Germany are manifest. The SED (Socialist Unity Party of Ulbrecht) in East Germany produced a situation where seventy percent of the population has no church bond. Of the remaining thirty percent, 25 percent are protestant and five percent catholic. The notion that the church would change quickly after Germany's reunification was mistaken. Lack of confession had already developed into a stable socialization factor. This lack of confession was passed on from one generation to another like catholic existence in some parts of Bavaria. For the foreseeable future, Wolf Krotke's insight that people have left the church in masses will be confirmed for East Germany and can only be reversed by individuals. Nevertheless the missionary awakening is vital. This awakening demands a long breath in our churches. Fast successes are not promised.

What is happening in West Germany? The number of persons without a confession amounted to less than ten percent before 1989. Still it was significant in certain sectors of the population at that time. The share of persons without confessions amounted to 21 percent among male university graduates between 10 and 64 years of age and 16 percent of female graduates in 12997. In 1990 the ideological materialism of the East and the practical materialism of the West united. This strengthened the trend to loosening or dissolving the church bonds in West Germany. The Catholic Church feels this - in a certain catch-up process. The erosion of Christian traditions has intensified...

The reasons for this erosion are not easy to identify. One thing is incontrovertible. Withdrawal from the church spread massively where church membership was long regulated by the state. The decline in church membership has been lasting where church membership ceased being a state norm relatively late as in Germany. Withdrawal from the church is still regulated by public law and can be carried out at the registry office or district court. Only in a few cases is there direct communication about the reasons for church withdrawal.

The conflict between faith and knowledge is obvious. Modern science - like the modern legal order - started from the courageous and successful premise of understanding the world "as though God did not exist" - "etsi dues non daretur." Faith in God was not abandoned but methodically suspended because God was not included in world explanation. Today the question is raised whether an affirmative sentence "because there is no God" can be derived from this methodical hypothesis first formulated by Hugo Grotius for the sake of peace "as if God did not exist." Kant's project of distinguishing between knowledge and faith to create space for faith was superseded by knowledge's claim to omnipotence and not being dependent on faith any more. The two centuries since the Enlightenment are marked by this conflict. This conflict is not at all decided.

Massive counter-developments trigger a development paraphrased with the slogans breach of tradition and abandonment of the church. Religion is a mega-theme of the 21st century. The turn to religion largely takes the form of a turning away from knowledge, an abandonment of the Enlightenment. Many Americans describe themselves as "born-again Christians" - some say forty percent. In some eastern European transformation countries, we witness an astonishing re-Christianization. In Islamic countries, a re-Islamization has occurred in the last decades whose extent and adjustment are increasingly felt to be threatening in the West. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" is still making the rounds. In Africa and Latin America, charismatic and evangelical communities grow at an astounding tempo. In view of the development dynamic of our world, a religious fundamentalism spreads that relies on simple answers, certain fundamentals, the rapid change of knowledge and a clear division of the world in good and evil, black and white and light and darkness.

The clearer such a religion is contoured, the more it is open to abuse. Our present time is full of such misuse. The assassins of September 11 appealed to the will of Allah and justified their murderous actions saying they followed a divine command. The suicidal assassins in Israel-Palestine are influenced and often supported by their elites. They are martyrs of faith when they tie bombs to their bodies and drag other persons to death.

Our time in no way leaves religion behind. Responding to the misuse of religion with the retreat into a religious illiteracy seems short-winded and short-sighted. In such a time, everyone is asked whether a religious identity is found. In such a time, the question must be asked how speech for God relates to the reality of the world which we interpret as "worldliness," reality without God.

II.

Thus we are challenged to reinterpret and theologically elaborate the specific world experience of the modern age. This specific experience of the modern age was characterized more than half a century ago by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. "The world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject. Nothing remains other than that eternally the same I thinking everyone must confirm my ideas. Subject and object become nothing. The relations of people, even the relations of every individual to him or herself, were bewitched with the objectivization and depersonalization of the spirit, not merely with the estrangement of persons from the dominated objects." [1]

Max Horkheimer and Thoedor W. Adorno described the world experience of the modern age as the "dialectic of enlightenment." This observation comes from their work of the same name.

Horkheimer and Adorno swathe wild goose chase of Odysseus as a paradigm of enlightenment. They saw Odysseus as the exemplary model of a "self that presses and misses life," the prototype "where survival is made dependent on the admitting one's failure and virtually on death." In the mirror of Odysseus, Horkheimer and Adorno describe the basic ambivalence of modern self-centering. Since they regard the opposition of subject and object and their underlying potential estrangement under the conditions of the modern age as unabandonable, the description of the dialectic of Enlightenment was a kind of secularized doctrine of original sin. They saw the enlightenment as an inescapable fate.

This fate assumed a dimension far surpassing everything that could be predicted. The estrangement of the modern subject in his urge to control the object world erupted according to Theodor W. Adorno in an unforeseeable and unpredictable way in the inhuman perversion of the Shoah, the genocide on European Judaism. In the Shoah, the most extreme expropriation occurred, the expropriation of death. As Theodor W. Adorno said, "death became something never feared in this way with the administered death of millions. There was no possibility of agreeing with its course. The individual was dispossessed of the last thing left to him. The dying also attached to those who escaped the measure." [2]

While this description is impressive and urgent, the perspective-less interpretation of the Enlightenment given by Horkheimer and Adorno cannot be the last word. Any ideological satisfaction that a new space is created for faith out of the supposed breakdown of the reason project of the Enlightenment is out of place. Such a theological triumphalismn leads astray like a resignation theology that only diagnoses God's death and with such hopelessness abandons the "processual form of hope" (J. Moltmann).

Theological triumphalism deduces from the alleged breakdown of the Enlightenment's project of reason to the truth of faith beyond all reason. It operates with a simple juxtaposition of faith and reason. Resignation theology concludes from the supposed success of the Enlightenment's project of reason to God's death and equates reason and faith. Both positions can be criticized since the correspondence of faith and reason cannot be dissolved either through a separation or an equation. This correspondence could be emphasized in view of the experience of violence of the last century. The hope for a responsible use of human reason can be deeply disappointed. The project of the Enlightenment - the exodus of the person from incapacity of his own making - is unfinished and has hardly reached its goal. But to infer from these events that the hope for a responsible use of reason is useless and the project of the Enlightenment obsolete means abandoning every notion of human self-determination and human freedom. Thinking faith can only be secured by rejecting the spirit of the Enlightenment is by no means a demonstration of a special strength of faith. Whoever opposes faith to human reason gambles them away like the one who equates the power of liberation implicit in faith and renewal. He renounces on the potential hope of faith in trusting a renewal of human reason in the spirit of love.

In a famous passage of the Letter to the Romans, Paul depicts the Christian life as the reasonable service of God on the foundation of divine mercy. In his description of faith, believers experience a change through "renewal of their minds" and can test what is God's will, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Rom 12,1-2). Paul proposes a relation of correspondence of faith and reason from the Protestant understanding of Christian faith. This correspondence is indispensable for all reflection about Christian faith's contribution to building civil society in which an event like the Shoah will never happen again.

Where a correspondence of faith and reason is assumed, the realms of faith and reason cannot be separated any more in a spatial division of holy and profane. For this reason, the metaphor of the "Christ space" cannot be understood in the sense of an area separated from world reality. Rather the idea of a correspondence of faith and reason presses to leave behind both a separation between a holy and a profane area of reality and their simple equation.

III.

The speech for God and the reality of the world should neither be unrelated nor coincident. But which understanding of reality should be the foundation? Isn't the understanding of reality involved in processes of social agreement completely different from faith's understanding of reality? Is there room for joining the speech for God with observation of the world generally in a time marked by the phenomena of forgetfulness of God and the silence of God as Wolf Krotke suggests [3]? Haven't we limited one area to immanence and the other to an understanding of reality open to transcendence? Can we go beyond the statement that both conceptions of reality are incompatible?

To answer this question, I will compare two theologians who both taught at this university and influence the atmosphere today in different ways in how theology is and should be pursued at this university: Romano Guardini and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both taught at Humboldt University. When Guardini born in 1885 started his professorship in Berlin, Bonhoeffer born in 1906 began studying protestant theology. First he studied in Tubingen and then in Berlin where his family lived. In 1927, the 21-year old was awarded a doctorate in Berlin where he returned in 1929 as an assistant for systematic theology. Post-doctorate work followed in 1930. While Bonhoeffer's teaching license was withdrawn on August 5, 1936, Romano Guardini's Berlin professorship was suspended in 1939.

Both belonged to this university. The differences of generations and confessions prevented their closer contact. One can easily imagine the distance between the respected professor who was a magnet for many students including protestant theologians and the young assistant professor. Bonhoeffer's first teaching experiences are described in Eberhard Bethge's Bonhoeffer biography: "A faithful minority coalesced who were impressed by the strength and peculiarity of the new." [4]

The young Bonhoeffer came in contact with Guardini's work indirectly through a dissertation. [5] He had read and utilized Guardini's study about "Religious Figures in Dostoevsky's Work" [6] in Letters and Papers from Prison and Fragments for Bonhoeffer's Ethic [7]. In his attempt to regain the term "natural" for protestant ethics [8], Bonhoeffer was guided by a critical appreciation of the catholic idea of nature. Romano Guardini's work was one of the bridges in the catholic world that Bonhoeffer came to know.

Relating Guardini's thinking with protestant theology brings to mind Paul Tillich. These theologians turned to the theme "border" in a special way. Hidden but possibly deeper affinities open up on second view. In describing this, I begin with an observation on Bonhoeffer.

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's understanding of reality, God's reality and the reality of the world were indissolubly connected. God's reality, Bonhoeffer proclaims, faces me completely in world reality. World reality is supported, accepted and reconciled in God's reality... What is central is participating in God's reality and the world in Jesus Christ. I never experience God's reality without the reality of the world or the reality of the world without God's reality." [9]

Bonhoeffer's perspective has a clear direction. It is christocentric and theocentric. God's reality is the starting point. God's reality is encountered in the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. God is engaged in the world. Therefore God's reality and the reality of the world cannot be separated from each other or played off against each other. Bonhoeffer strictly rejects thinking in two realms. The relation between God's reality and the reality of the world cannot be imagined in the form of a separation of realms. Rather God's reality must be viewed as constituting the reality of the world. Bonhoeffer expresses this in the terms ultimate and penultimate. "The penultimate does not exist in itself as though something could justify itself as penultimate. Rather something becomes penultimate through the ultimate, in other words in the moment when it is annulled. Thus the ultimate conditions the penultimate. The penultimate is not the condition of the ultimate."

Bonhoeffer's idea of reality is thoroughly relational. There is no world reality from the view of faith that does not stand in a relation to God's reality. For believers, existence in all its relations is grounded in Christ and defined by Christ. Leaving areas of life to its own laws as though they had their place and their reason outside God's reality is impossible for this way of looking at things.

The theological place of culture also results from this observation. Bonhoeffer describes culture as a divine mandate alongside the mandates of the church, state, marriage and family [10], that is as one of the basic fields on which people observe responsibility in forming reality entrusted and charged to them by God. In this function, the term culture replaces the term labor in an earlier version of Bonhoeffer's mandate theory. [11] One can only make conjectures about the reasons for this shift since Bonhoeffer does not develop the term culture. But culture - however broadly or narrowly the term is understood - for the believer always refers to Christ and thus to God's reality. There is no question about this for Bonhoeffer.

With Bonhoeffer, a concentration on the relation to God is joined with a critical focus on the reality of the world. This focus appears very clearly in the Letters and Papers from the Tegel Prison and was already set out in the Ethics manuscripts. When Bonhoeffer in his theological Letters from Prison urged a non-religious interpretation of religious terms and even spoke of a "religion-less age" [12], relation to God was not limited to the area called religion separated from world reality and delimited from human reality as a whole. The theological insights that faith is a life act and God's reality and world reality are a unity are the bold formulations of his late theological letters, not a diagnosis that religion as a lived relation to God disappears.

For Romano Guardini, a movement of thought is also characteristic that is similar to Bonhoeffer: the connection between Christological concentration and turning to the world.

The person Jesus Christ is unmistakably central for Guardini: "The Christian faith represents a spiritual movement through which the person comes to Christ. Faith means standing in a relation to the world as Christ stood..." [13]

The relation between God's reality opened up in Christ and the reality of the world is also clearly defined here. Turning to the world occurs out of recognition of the divine grounding of the world opened up in Christ. Therefore Christian faith realizes itself and proves its worth in the different areas of worldly existence.

Guardini does not understand divine and worldly reality in the distinction between ultimate and penultimate - a distinction that upgrades the penultimate in its provisionality through reference to the ultimate. Rather he uses an authenticity semantic borrowed from Heidegger. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic is emphasized again and again by Guardini. He says in his 1947 lecture on the nature of the work of art: "A genuine relation to a work of art flows into something religious. Enjoying a work of art does not do justice to a work of art. I must understand the creative person's encounter with the work. I enter a realm and live in a purer more sublime world. When I contemplate it, I am seized by it." [14]

Guardini's idea of faith includes the reality of the world grounded in God's reality and in sharp contrast to the modern picture of the world. He regards three factors as characteristic for the modern picture of the world: "nature resting in itself, the autonomous personality subject and the culture creating out of its own norms." [15] In diagnosing its end, he did not abandon "the genuine fruit of modern experience and work." [16] Rather he expected that an insight would blaze the trail that no longer refuses to see the destructive consequences of the modern project. He developed this expectation with view to human relations to nature: "The modern age loved to justify technology's measures with its benefits for human welfare and concealed the ravages inflicted by unscrupulousness. The coming time will speak a different language. Domination is uppermost in technology, not benefits or welfare. Domination involves vast possibilities of building and destroying... Thus the relation to nature has the character of the most extreme decision: either the human work of rule is done right even forcibly or everything will end." [17]

In an amazing way, Guardini's diagnoses in his 1956 treatise on "The End of the Modern Age" coincide with Bonhoeffer's reflections. This is very clear in the effects of the modern idea of autonomy on faith: "A purely religious religiosity is like a purely scientific science, a purely economic economy and a purely political politics. This religious religiosity closes the immediate relation to concrete life more and more, becomes ever-poorer in substance and limits itself to pure religious teaching and praxis. For many, religious religiosity only gives a religious consecration to certain culmination points of life like birth, marriage and death." [18] Guardini decries that segmentation of life in which religion becomes a separated area of life alongside others. Bonhoeffer said segmented religion was a religion that ended.

This end was not the end of faith. Unlike Bonhoeffer, Guardini also uses the term religion for what alone can save from the philosophical paradoxes of the modern age. He describes religious necessity in a drastic way: "Without the religious element, life becomes like a motor without oil. It runs down. All elements burn out somewhat. Parts that must interlock are blocked everywhere. The bond and the center are lost. Life becomes disorganized. A short-circuit or moment of madness occurs along with violence. Through this short-circuit, helplessness seeks a way out. When people no longer feel bond from within, they become outwardly organized. The state applies its pressure so the organization works. But can organization exist in the long run out of pressure?" [19]

Guardini's reflection ends in an abiding trust in a new resolution of Christian faith. The Christian faith itself must gain a new determination. It must come out of secularizations, half-truths, fish-stories and mixtures." [20] A half-century ago Guardini saw the self-secularization of the Christian faith in a conscious turn to the theme of faith. [21] The provisionality of the world is its essence or authenticity.

Bonhoeffer and Guardini raise the question about the future power and future form of the Christian faith from a critical diagnosis of the present. Faith sees God's reality and the reality of the world together. This is an experience with experience. [22] This experience with experience adjusts to the worldly experience of reality without separating from it. In this experience with experience, the provisionality and relativity of this experiential reality are not denied but brought in the light. The Christian faith lives the prohibition against images in this sense.

Faith is an experience of its own kind, not merely an interpreted perspective of worldly experiences. The Gospel of John describes this special character of the faith experience in the example of unbelieving Thomas. The encounter of Thomas with the Resurrected has its high point in Jesus' statement: "Because you have seen me, you believe. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." [23] Faith is its own experiential world. Some contemporary theologians speak of mythical experiences in supposedly correcting earlier demythologization claims. [24] Faith is open for a reality that is brought to people but cannot be derived from the categories of human world mastery in the understanding of the Christian faith. The work of the Holy Spirit is to mediate this reality. In its core, the arising faith is an unconditional trust in God's creative and liberating love and affection. A grateful response is due to God's helpful goodness and work, not to a human work.

Faith in this sense is an experience of its own kind and not merely an interpretation of experiences with the reality of this world. However this experience aims at and depends on a cultural form of expression. Religion is this cultural expression of faith. In this sense, concern about religion and spirituality in personal and communal forms is the most important way in which the culture of faith is shaped and developed.

From Schleiermacher's perspective, faith in its genesis and assurance depends on a representative action in which believers express their relation to God and their mutual relations in the community of believers. These representative forms of faith only arise when the churches reflect on their own message and bring it effectively among people, the unacceptable and vital message of God's grace and the protest against the self-infatuation of people that comes from the liberating reality of God's love and the renewal of relations to the world through the promise of God's future.

Because this faith depends on a theological teaching in this representative action, the time-orienting power marked by God-forgetfulness and God's silence can unfold. Wolf Krotke shows this in an exemplary way. He joins the honest concern for the reality of our world with the honest interest in God's reality. By emphasizing God's clarity, he gives clarity about the reality of the world. By stressing God's truth, God's love, God's power and God's eternity as the clarity making possible speech for God, Wolf Krotke shows what is lacking to our human existence when truth no longer concerns us, when love is absent, when the responsibility of power is unknown and eternity as fulfilled time is alien. Wolf Krotke shows what alone holds together speech for God and the reality of the world. Jesus' human existence is both a picture of the condition humana and a parable of God's clarity: God's truth, God's love, God's power and God's eternity. [25]

That Wolf Krotke may help us hold both together - speech for God and perception of our world - is my hearty desire today - for many years of theological existence.


FOOTNOTES
(1) Th.W. Adorno /M. Horkheimer, Dialrktik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/Main 1988, 32f.

(2) Th.W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 7. Aufl. Frankfurt/Main 1992, 355.

(3) Diese Einsicht verbindet zwei bedeutende Bücher von W. Krötke miteinander: W. Krötke, Die Kirche im Umbruch der Gesellschaft, Tübingen 1994; ders., Gottes Klarheiten. Eine Neuinterpretation der Lehre von Gottes "Eigenschaften", Tübingen 2001.

(4) E. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Eine Biographie, München 1967, 251.

(5) C. Cordes, Der Gemeinschaftsbegriff im deutschen Katholizismus und Protestantismus, Leipzig 1931; vgl. Bonhoeffers Rezension von 1932 in: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ökumene - Universität - Pfarramt 1931-1932 (DBW 11), Gütersloh 1994, 367-369.

(6) R. Guardini, Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk, 2. Aufl. Leipzig 1939. Die erste, 1933 erschienene Auflage trug den Titel: Der Mensch und der Glaube. Versuche über die religiöse Existenz in Dostojewskijs großen Romanen.
(7) D. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, 2. Aufl. Gütersloh 1998, 141, 147, 352. Die Guardini-Rezeption aufgedeckt zu haben, ist das Verdienst der Neuausgabe der Bonhoefferschen Ethik durch I. Tödt, H.E.Tödt, E.Feil und Cl. Green in DBW 6; vgl. dort auch das Nachwort S. 424.

(8) D. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, a.a.O., 163 ff.

(9) D. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, a.a.O., 40 f.

(10) D. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, a.a.O., 392 ff.
(11) D. Bonhoeffer, Ethik, a.a.O., 54 ff.
(12) D. Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Gütersloh 1998
(DBW 8), z.B. 404 f., 509, 529, 546, 652 ff.
(13) R. Guardini, Gedanken über das Verhältnis von Christentum und Kultur (1926), in: ders., Die Unterscheidung des Christlichen, Mainz 1935, 177-221 (188).

(14) R. Guardini, Über das Wesen des Kunstwerks, 3. Aufl. Tübingen / Stuttgart 1950, 52.
(15) So Guardinis eigene Zusammenfassung in: R. Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit. Die Macht, Mainz / Paderborn 1986, 47.

(16) Ebenda.

(17) R. Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, a.a.O., 51.
(18) R. Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, a.a.O., 81.

(19) R. Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, a.a.O., 85.

(20) R. Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, a.a.O., 90.
(21) Vgl. dazu W. Huber, Kirche in der Zeitenwende. Gesellschaftlicher Wandel und Erneuerung der Kirche, Gütersloh 1998.
(22) Vgl. E. Jüngel, Unterwegs zur Sache, München 1972, 8: "Denn der Glaube ist auf jeden Fall eine Erfahrung, die wir mit der Erfahrung machen und machen müssen." sowie W. Huber, Die Spannung zwischen Glauben und Lehre als Problem der Theologie, in: ders., Konflikt und Konsens. Studien zur Ethik der Verantwortung, München 1990, 15-43 (22): "Der Glaube also ist die durch Jesus eröffnete Erfahrung der Zeit, die wir mit allen Erfahrungen in der Zeit machen können."
(23) Johannes 20, 29.

(24) Vgl. J. Fischer, Glaube als Erkenntnis. Studien zum Erkenntnisproblem des christlichen Glaubens, München 1989.
(25) Vgl. W. Krötke, Gottes Klarheiten, Tübingen 2001, 290.

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