Searching for God # 73

 I am beginning to wonder if, in my depiction of the Thanatos/Eros Freudian metaphor of forces in human lives and culture, I was not conflating the relationship articulated in Chinese thought, between Yin and Yang: as one increases, the other decreases and vice versa. Reading about the Freudian duality of Thanatos and Eros, indicates more of a conflict between the two forces, rather than a symbiotic inter-dependent relationship.

The Christian concepts of God and Satan, clearly working in direct and open conflict with each other, it seems on reflection, may be one of the ‘petards’ with which the Christian ‘ship’ has been, is, and continues to be hoisted. The divide between aspirational impulses to ‘do good’ and the self-sabotaging impulses to ‘do evil’ may not be so discreetly separated as was once envisioned. There is so much in human experience, history, philosophy and religion that embraces the notion, again borrowed from John Keats, of human life as a vale of tears. Keat’s insight that those tears are essential for one’s experience to deepen, enrich, and to evolve the ‘soul’ rendering the process of what he and Hillman call ‘making soul’.

Although it may be somewhat incomplete or somewhat cloudy, the ‘either-or’ of being a ‘saved’ person, in and through the grace of God, or being a ‘damned person’ who has not been ‘saved’ at the core of Christian fundamental theology, seems, to Keats and to this scribe, reductionistic of both God and human beings. The template does, however, correspond to the Pauline exhortation to ‘go and preach the gospel to all the nations.’ It offers a succinct, comprehensible, bumper-sticker aphorism as a compelling and somewhat threatening, fear-inspired, motivation for both the evangelist and the ‘unwashed’ who might be listening. For starters, that model shifts the meaning of the Greek word for ‘fear’ as in “fear the Lord.

From Biblehub.com, Fear is either expressive of reverence or terror. Fear as terror is generally expressed by the Hebrew words magor, and pacadh, and by the Greek word phobos. Fear as being reverences is dominated in Hebrew as yirah, and in Greek as elulabela.

Perhaps it is as a sign of the culture that we have lost reverence for almost everything and everyone, and that as part of a child-like religious and theological proposition, fear frequently, if not invariably, connotes ‘terror’ rather than awe and reverence. The juxtaposition of a threatened life in Hell, for those who are not saved, might have the synchronistic influence of terror in the phrase, “fear of the Lord’.  

Furthermore, there is the notion of the reductionism of both God and human beings that, given the level and degree of knowledge, research and the experiences of patterns in the human story, might seem tolerable and even commendable. In the 21^st century, however, where, as one scribe put it recently anonymously, ‘Perhaps the loneliest place in each and every community today is the church.’

Fear of the Lord may not be the most significant or relevant impetus for that loneliness; fear of the way the world is unravelling just might have something to do with the motivation to withdraw from everything and from everyone. We have now been living with the spectre of human, planetary, global annihilation given the existence of the atomic bombs (using nuclear fission, splitting atoms for energy) and  nuclear bombs (using both fission and fusion  fusing hydrogen isotopes) for three-quarters of a century.

The public images of those whose titles and roles put them with their ‘finger on the button’ to detonate one or more of such lethal weapons does not inspire confidence or assurance that they will desist from releasing such a weapon. And, as James Hillman points out, all of psychology has to be perceived through the lens of the cloud of extinction from the bomb that hangs over everyone. Indeed, it can be argued that theology, too, has to embrace the reality, not only of global warming and climate change, but also of the nuclear threat.

Individual personal ‘salvation’ as depicted by men like Franklin Graham and others, seems almost detached from the existential threats facing the human race. Saving the whole world, on the other hand, offers a starting place for theological reflection that opens more complexity and also offers more opportunity for challenging and expansive prophetic voices.

From religion-online.org, in a piece entitled Christian Conscience and Nuclear Escapism, by Robert Bachelder, after detailing the various arguments against the production of nuclear weapons and the proponents of deterrence as legitimate foil, writes:

It is correct to say, as Robert McAfee Brown does that the possession and   of nuclear weapons are immoral. But if the alternatives are also immoral, as the bishops suggest, it hardy follows that Christians should say an ‘unequivocal no’ to participation in nuclear weapons development. Brown believes that such an unequivocal stance is ‘risky.’ Granted it carries the risks of job loss and accusations of disloyalty. These risks are significant, but they pale before an ever greater risk which they reduce. This is the risk of unfettered thinking whereby the human mind, as Augustine said, is stretched and stretched until eventually it encounters something that transcends it, judges it, which is Truth. We try to avoid divine judgement and the anxiety it brings by refusing to think, by permitting our prepossessions to prevent the emergence of new insights, as the late Bernard Lonergan wrote. This is part of the appeal of unequivocal stances. Because they are unambiguous and devoid of any irony and paradox, they allow us to suppose that we are righteous. The result is that on the peace issue, we come to sound like those fundamentalist churches that call people out of a sinful world to a holy place of painless, personal salvation. If, however resist what Flaubert called ‘the mania to conclude,’ we are bound to fathom finally that for the moral problem of deterrence, there is no sanctified ground on which to stand. We learn instead, as London’s G.R. Dunstan writes, that there is only a choice between evils and ‘everlasting mercy for those who in good faith are driven to choose.’…..Today, living with nuclear deterrence is the greatest tragedy in the world, only excepting what might result from its alternatives. Since there is not handy exit from this tragedy, we may be forced to learn the wisdom of another generation—that Christian ethics is not a deus ex machina to extricate us from our predicaments. Instead, in the words of neo-orthodoxy’s most systematic thinker (Lonergan?) ethics exists ‘to remind us of our confrontation with God who is the light illuminating all actions.’ In a nuclear age, we confront a sorrowful God whose righteous anger boils over in the face of our folly. The miracle is that this weeping, angry God still graces us to hope and to labor for peace. But hoping and peacemaking, we must see, are very different things from indulging in one form or another of nuclear escapism.

Hoping and peacemaking may seem, to some, as merely ineffectual and insignificant in a world tipping over backwards towards anger, hate, lies and infamy with impunity and immunity. ICAN is the international campaign to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Their website indicates:

Canada has not yet signed or ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Canada has consistently votes against an annual General Assembly resolution since 2018 that welcomes the adoption of the TPNW and calls upon all states to sign, ratify, or acede to it ‘at the earliest possible date.’ It has described the treaty as ‘well intentioned’ but ‘premature.’ Canada supports the retention and potential use of nuclear weapons on its behalf, as indicated by its endorsement of various alliance statements of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of which it is a member. In 2023, in rresponse to a parliamentary petition urging Canada to ‘sign and commit to ratifying the TPNW,’ Canada’s then-minister of foreign affairs, Mélanie Joly said: ‘Canada recognizes that the entry into force of the TPNW reflects well-founded concerns about the slow pace of nuclear disarmament-concerns that Canada very much shares. While not a party to the TPNW, Canada has common ground with treaty states and shares the ultimate goal of a world free from nuclear weapons.

 Since the existence and threatened deployment of nuclear weapons poses a serious existential threat to the whole world, taken to its logical and reasonable extension, a mass suicide, one is prompted to ask, and not merely rhetorically, is our shared, religiously and theologically-supported declaration of suicide as ‘evil’ and thereby relegating it out of the conversation as a potential, legitimate and reasonable human decision (not as a political or threatening statement, or one by a psycho-or-sociopath) potentially leave us somewhat conventionally blind to the prospect of our own demise.

Is our black-and-white, either-or theology demonstrating itself as another of the blocks to ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking, thereby rendering a perpetuation and even a propagation of what is essentially a child-like theology? The ‘absolute’ perfection of a deity and the manifold human incompleteness and state of being an amalgam of both Thanatos and Eros, poses a series of penetrating questions for all those seeking God in these turbulent and challenging times. We cannot and must not give way to the simplistic ‘deus ex machina’ (God will rescue and fix this for us)….indeed such a perspective would demonstrate an insult to both God and man.

Christianity, too, cannot and must not presume that all ethnicities and religions will or should succumb to the theological dogma of its faith premises. Perhaps, faced with such a serious and inescapable and existential threat, it might be an appropriate time for all faith communities to begin to talk frankly, not about how to collaborate as theologies, but how to collaborate in pursuit of a universal curtailment of all catastrophic treats, including global warming and climate change and nuclear proliferation and deployment.

Fixated on the individual morality and ethics of individual men and women, with the presumption that ‘we’ (whoever is telling the story) is morally superior and therefore competent to judge and to sentence, and then projecting that conversation onto the countries they each represent, seems to this scribe as a ‘trap’ in an ever-revolving door of a kind of escapism to which Bachelder (and Lonergan) are referring. Such a process is also a denial of the very necessary and legitimate search for how we might, given a commitment to our theological roots, seek to find, not only new and different ways of  ‘doing’ but also different and new way of both ‘thinking and perceiving’ as an integral part of that theological endeavour.