Searching for God #9

 From Patheos.com:

If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude. (Carl Jung)

Yesterday three different perspectives, Roman Catholic, Reform Judaism, and  Gandhi’s personal reflection appeared here…The tension between various faith communities oscillates depending on a number of factors:

a)    the above-noted question of ‘salvation’ versus ‘wonder’

b)    the degree of relevance of dogma, church tradition and personal experience

c)    the period of history in which religion is examined

d)    the culture of the region, tribe, nation in which the religion is manifest

e)    the exegetical reading of whatever holy text is prevalent..(literal, historical, metaphorical, prophetic, mythical)

f)     the relation of the ‘state’ to the religion(s) dominant in that state

It is not that each of these, and other, factors provide a continuum for ‘liberal and conservative’ perspectives within each community; however, those political terms do have a religious relevance.

Similarly, apophatic, and cataphatic ideas about God, have a somewhat obscure application, given that few lay people have heard of the difference.

From Britannica.com, under apophatic theology, we read:

Christian Mysticism, the negative approach to God…describing what God is ‘not’

In Christian: Eastern Christianity: Through a gradual process of ascension from material things to spiritual realities and an eventual stripping away of all created beings in’ unknowing,’ the soul arrives at ‘union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge.’

Cataphatic theology speaks about God using positive, affirmative and descriptive language, affirming God’s attributes and actions, emphasizes what God has revealed about Himself in scripture, nature, and through religious experience.

Many religions seek some form of balance between these approaches to God, another of the many ‘seemingly unreachable, unattainable and unknowable’ aspects of the process of searching for God. If and when the approaches have to compete with each other, in a zero-sum dialectic, however, the dialogue reaches a dead-end. And, for each of us, the significance of ‘positivism’ itself, has a direct application to our search for God. Just as Karl Marx argued that a society in which the people were no longer subject to a ‘debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence,’ the idea of God would simply wither away. (Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Jarolsav Pelikan, ed. Modern Religious Thought, p. 80, from Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p.242)

Armstrong continues: (p.242)

Others were beginning to argue that it was science, which for so long had been its willing handmaid, that would eliminate religion. In his six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42), the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) presented the history of humanity in three stages. In its primitive theological phase, people had seen gods as the ultimate causes of events; then these supernatural beings had been transformed into metaphysical abstractions; and in the final and most advanced ‘positivist’ or scientific phase, the mind no longer dwelled on the inner essences of things, which could not be tested empirically, but focused only on facts. Western culture was about to enter this third, positivist phase. There was no way back.

A culture deeply steeped in, if not drowning in, positivism, is almost without doubt, very uncomfortable speaking about God in anything other than ‘positive’ terms…..And the elision from that perspective to an almost didactic approach whereby these people wish to introduce their God to others, in their ‘sharing’ and evangelizing, is both short and swift. In America, especially, where everything is viewed from a positivist perspective, and where little if anything is even recognized as unconscious, or beyond comprehension, or escaping cognition, God has become another ‘commodity’ to be both ‘consumed’ (by worship, ritual and prosletyzing). I was once accosted by a devout Episcopalian in America who told me, “Jesus was the world’s best salesman!” to which my jaw dropped in shock. “Really?” I muttered, confused, and almost appalled at her conviction.

Perhaps it was my then unconscious preference for the apophatic approach, depicting what God is not, in deference to the incomprehensibility and the ‘unknowing’ of God, at least from my little world.

This ‘positivism’ has other implications. Interventions, in imitation of the Good Samaritan, in a culture overflowing with people in various stages of significant personal need, offers both opportunities and for philanthropic and other social and health care services, as well as considerable hope for recipients. What is less evident in America is a more modest, less self-assured, and far less domineering approach to many of both society’s wounds. ON the surface, that last sentence reads as if it comes from a ‘right-wing’ users manual, among those who firmly believe in less government, less of what they call the ‘nanny state’….so that people will be obliged, from their perspective, to ‘pick themselves up by the boot-straps’ in  order to escape their desperate situation….whether it is poverty, hunger, ill health, lack of education or hopelessness in all of its many forms, (addictions, gangs, domestic violence, crime, terrorism). And those conditions are so interwoven as to be almost unable to be separated.

However, this is not a screed for right-wing either small ‘c’ or Capital “C” conservatism! It is rather a different look at the separation of church and state. Rather than engage on a battlefield of issues like prayer in the schools, or the Decalogue on school bulletin boards, or programs like abstinence versus condoms in high school health and sex educations classes, this space is dedicated to a different way of both thinking and perceiving and relating to God….

Borrowing, as is the habit and preference here, from others, whose thoughts and words and examples have found their way into the lives of many others, and seem to have been excluded or lost from many others, I intuit an intersection of some social and political and cultural issues with a reductionism of religion, faith and God, irrespective of how that deity is depicted in each faith community. The cultural ethos of positivism, empiricism, and a reduction of most observations to the literal, extends to how we each define both ourselves and others. And in that light, the issue lies at the heart of relationships, relationality, and the intersection of relationships and meaning and purpose.

In another life, I found that public schools and religious schools, (in Ontario that means Roman Catholic separate schools) offered different messages to their prospective parents and students. And the public relations initiatives came first from the separate school boards. ‘We teach the whole child’ was their ‘sell line in their advertising, implying and inferring that public schools taught only ‘subject matter’ rather than focusing on the development of the individual student. A similar public discourse occurred around the difference between elementary and secondary schools, as iterated especially among elementary school teachers and the federations. On the separate v public school debate, the inclusion of religion, teaching the church teachings, festivals, rituals, including prayer, and Mass, a segment of the curriculum missing from the public schools, by studious avoidance offered a kind of ‘moral safety net’ from the perspective of parents who were concerned about their child’s moral influences. The perception that without specific moral education, under the guidance of the church, the student would be more vulnerable to negative social influences of both individuals and specific activities. Needless to say, morals, without a specific religious flavour or influence were regarded as significant among both public elementary and secondary schools. For a while, there was some evidence that parents even of non-Roman Catholic persuasion were enrolling their children in the separate schools, in order to take advantage of what they saw as a moral/spiritual/religious curriculum.

Make no mistake, the question of the morals and ethics of a society are among the highest aspirations of many parents enrolling their children in elementary and secondary schools. A prescribed curriculum, whether ordained and sanctioned by a religious institution, is one path, like a kind of insurance policy, for some parents, Intervention, with specific curricular segments, based on the teachings of a church, have the aura and the public image of a higher moral expectation than that offered by a public institution where neither religion nor morality are located on the formal syllabus.

Undoubtedly, too, those in the separate school system, most of them loyal and sincere members of the Roman Catholic church, believe that they are acting in the best interests of both their church and their students and parents. The intersection of religious instruction and the issue of the relationship between humans and God lies at the heart of both the education systems, in the West, as well as the perception and definition of the role of faith in the community.

The tradition of reciting and memorizing the Ten Commandments, for example, as is being reconsidered in some southern states, primarily as a way to wrap board and officials in the ‘alb of self-righteousness’ and sanctimony, imitative of the current occupant of the Oval Office, is reprehensible both for the ecclesial institution as well as for the parents and the students who are being subjected to this form of ‘oppression’ in the name of God.

And here is the CAPITAL RUB!

Whenever public institutions attempt to wrap themselves in the faux-religiosity of carrying Bibles for photo-ops, or of hanging the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms for young children, or making complete and accessible health care for women in all the various stages of birthing out of reach and out of bounds, and even illegal and resulting in their own death, for lack of medical care, it is not rocket science to discern and determine that they are a long way from God. So too are they a long way from God when they propose that they are ‘bringing the Kingdom of God to America now’!

The arrogance, presumption, hubris, and ignorance (in the not-knowing sense of that word), consume both their efforts and their self-imposed delusions. And there are religious institutions fully in league with these despicable aspirations and visions. And, for readers who consider the last sentence as indisputable evidence of he arrogange, presumption hubris and ignorance of this escribe, let me try to relieve your conviction.

Partly in congruence with the Jung quote that opened this piece, partly in congruence with the apophatic (describing what God is not) and partly from an affinity with those faith communities which disavow evangelism and prosletyzing in all of its many forms, (God is not for sale! Religion is not for sale! And faith convictions and beliefs are not amenable to imposition, propaganda and forceful ingestion or adoption.

If we start with the last line in Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, from Luke 17: 20,21:

The kingdom of God cometh not with outward show; neither shall they say, Lo, her! Or, Lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (p.368)

And from the Forward to that work by Martin Green:

Dogmata, such as that God is both three and one, meant nothing to Tolstoy. He dismissed the sacraments as ‘savage customs,’ suited to an earlier phase of civilization….(p.ix)

In 1884, he finished My Religion, in which he described himself as having behind him five mature years of faith in Christ and thirty-five years of nihilism, or faith in nothing. He presented himself to the reader as one of the robbers at Christ’s crucifixion, come down form the cross to preach. His conversion had occurred when he realized that ‘Resist no evil!’ (Matthew 5: 39) meant what it said. This was a revelation to one who had always been taught that Christ’s laws sere not practical, and so must be interpreted—in effect, circumvented…..I was taught to judge and punish. Then I was taught to make war; that is to resist evil men with murder, and the military caste, of which I was a member, was called the Christ-loving military, and their activity was sanctified by a Christian blessing. (p.ix-x)

To be continued………