by E. Herbert Nygren
Emily Brunner, some years ago, in his book Revelation and Reason wrote: “The most characteristic element of the present age, and that which distinguishes it…is the almost complete disappearance of the sense of transcendence, and the consciousness of revelation.”[1]
The disappearance of transcendence—this can take us in either of two directions: the total abandonment of God in favor of a secular society or the total involvement of God within the secular society.
The former—the abandonment of God in favor of the secular conceded to the physical world the right to exert a controlling force over life. Several distinguishable corollaries are illustrative of this mood. There is a persistent appeal to physical accomplishments, minimizing or even neglecting human needs and values. Very often this implies the organization of personal and social life apart from any type of spiritual values. The thoroughgoing secularist operates as if there is no supernatural God whose existence would make any difference to life on this planet. It denies any validity to words and deeds not dealing with the objects which can be measured.
An illustration is the general attitude of twentieth-century man as he stands aghast at the towering buildings, the arching bridges, the stretching highways, declaring that here indeed is the strength of the nation. (Indeed, it might be said that such a secular emphasis can be found even within the church as it tends to glory in architecture and stone, in statistics and charts, while neglecting the weightier matters of human lives.)
Another general feature of Godless secularism is an emphasis upon the pleasures of life. Such a hedonistic trend makes possession of the “finer things of life” the major criterion for happiness. It implies a measurement by virtue of the significance to the self. This subtle suggestion often comes deluging its way into the homes of the modern world often by means of television and radio. Through the voices of the announcers come the claims that the “good life” requires a newer and better automobile, more and finer electric appliances, or more expensive decorative jewelry.
A further illustration of pervading secularism is an exceedingly high regard for the accomplishments of scientific inquiry. There is a tendency to believe that because the physicist has produced rockets capable of propelling capsules into space, and the medical technician has prepared antibiotics capable of speeding the cure of infections, science is potentially capable of producing all that human life needs for survival. This prevailing thought has been referred to as “scientism,” the near veneration given by modern man to the advancement of human knowledge. When the secularist looks at the accomplishments of science, he often believes that the advancing human knowledge has rendered the Christian religion untenable. Thus, he looks at the teachings of Jesus and the Church as anachronistic in the modern world of space and atomic fission. Accomplishments resulting from scientific inquiry cause the secularist to believe that it is indeed the panacea for all ills, and makes forms of inquiry obsolete and unnecessary as they no longer have any significant contribution to make.
The second aspect of the disappearance of the sense of the transcendent involves the total involvement of God in the secular world, the nearly exclusive emphasis upon immanentism. In many instances, the churches no longer make ontological or dogmatic statements about a transcendent Diety. God-talk has been dispensed with in favor of a theological language speaking about Jesus of Nazareth, about human self-understanding, about the “Death of God.” To make religion relevant to the secular society, the supernatural has to be excised, erased, forever.
But this cry for relevance so easily results in religion’s being swallowed up in the secular society. A Franz Kafka parable tells of people who were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The result was that everyone wanted to be couriers. Therefore, there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other messages that have become meaningless. Men have been offered the chance to lead —but they became couriers, and no one is left to make sense out of their message. Since there are no kings, there is no one to serve! This is living without asking what life is all about!
Just so, the Church has been offered the chance to lead, instead it has become a courier, and no one is left to make sense out of the message. Jesus never permitted himself to become relevant, but instead sought to redeem!
A recent issue of the New Yorker had in it a cartoon picturing a bearded beatnik wearing dark glasses, carrying a guitar strapped on his back. He was standing by the side of the road hitchhiking, holding in his hands a placard which bore the inscription, “Anyplace.”
How suggestive this is of modern man’s dilemma. It lies in his loss of direction; he is willing to go anyplace anyone will take him, and having arrived will do anything anyone asks him to do. It is possible that modern man’s frustrations and dissatisfactions lie in the fact that he has fallen in love with everything and anything rather than with something and someone. Hosea of old well described his contemporaries, they “became detestable like the thing they loved.”[2] This observation by the prophet comes from the context of Israel’s permitting the adulterations of Baalism, that vegetative cult of Canaan, to infiltrate the Holy worship of Yahweh who had called them out of Egypt. He had thundered from Sinai: “I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.”[3]
Is there an implied criticism of the cult of the relevant? Modern man has become so insatiated with making religion relevant to the current fashions—social and intellectual—that he may be in danger of loosing the God before whose throne nations must bow with sacred joy.
As Walter Eichrodt expressed it, Israel had lost a personal relationship with God by an impersonal entry into numinous forces of agricultural cults. In a desire to make religion relevant, they tried to imitate the mythology of the day, the mythology of the marriage of gods and goddesses with earth by having sexual relations with the cultic prostitutes at scattered shrines. Thus, in their religion, Israel had become as detestable as that which they loved.[4]
Kenneth Hamilton, in a literary study of the works of author John Updike, comments: “Updike links the boredom of much of our existence today with the poverty of the patterns we create.” “We are all pilgrims on the way to divorce, says the narrator of ‘The Music School,’ a story in which Updike brings together the modern scientific world view, current matrimonial unfaithfulness, and the theology of the mass. The divorce between man and nature, man and woman, man and divine forgiveness—this is the experience of our age.”[5]
Francois Fenelon, advisor to Louis XIV, penned some striking words centuries ago, words with a frightening sound even today: “We wish to love him on conditions that we give him words and ceremonies…on condition that we do not sacrifice to him our living passion…and of the conveniences of the soft life. We want to love him on condition that we love…all which he does not love at all… We want very much to love him on condition that we do not lessen in anything that blind love of ourselves, which goes as far as idolatry, and which causes us, instead of relating ourselves to God as to one for whom we were made, to want on the contrary to relate God to ourselves…”[6]
Are we able to catch what was in that ancient prophet’s observation—the peoples had thought that they could sanctify the corrupt simply by calling it good, by saying that it was for good ends. They were making out of fornication and adultery what they called religious experiences. Do you recall the words of a British cleric a few years ago concerning the prostitute who helped a man regain his self-confidence by sleeping with him? Said the cleric: “Our proper response should be ‘Glory to God in the highest.’”
Not so! cried the prophet of the Lord. Rather than prostitution being raised to a meaningful religious experience, the participator in this acthad been dragged to the level of the harlot. To call something good or holy does not purify that which is in itself evil. If this is what modern secular religion has done, then what has actually taken place is a sinful rebellion against God. Man has created, in his own image, the kind of god he wants. Pope’s essay on man has these words: “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated, needs to be seen: yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
Far back in a rather obscure passage in the Book of Judges we read of a man called Micah.[7] This Micah had apparently stolen some money from his mother, who upon discovering this heinous deed proceeded to pronounce a curse upon the thief. Either because he feared the curse or simply because of a troubled conscience, Micah was moved to confess his crime to his mother. This then caused his mother to reward his honesty with two hundred pieces of silver. Taking this silver, Micah proceeded to make an image and prepared a shrine in his home. Subsequently, a wandering Levite or member of Israel’s priestly family wandered by. He was convinced by Micah to stay with him as a personal priest. The young Levite agreed to serve for a guaranteed annual wage.
Shortly thereafter a group of men from the tribe of Dan passed through the area. They were impressed by the young priest and by the shrine. They offered him more money for his services; he accepted. Together they took the image and the special garb Micah had provided and fled. Micah came into his shrine. As he looked, he shrieked—if I may be granted the privilege of paraphrasing the Scriptural account—”My God! It’s gone!” He gathered some neighbors and gave chase. Seeing Micah and his friends hot on their heels, one of the Danites turned to Micah and asked him, “What ails you that you come with such a company,” Micah is said to have responded with the words: “You take my gods which I have made, and the priest, and go away, and what have I left? How then do you ask, ‘What ails you?’” A pathetic sentence from the Bible to portray the desperate condition of the twentieth century—the Christian Faith and secularism.
Look for a moment at the man Micah. Well back into the history of Israel specific pronouncements had been made regarding the prohibition of any form of image. The reason for this was obviously that these ancient people realized that any physical portrayal of God was by its very presence a limitation of God. In spite of the specific directions found in the Mosaic code, here was an Israelite whose understanding of God was so limited and so distorted that he apparently believed that apart from some physical manifestation of God in the form of a statue or shrine he could not sense the presence of the Almighty.
Note well: no hint is given by the Biblical writer of any cruel cult established by Micah. What he had done, however, was to degrade God to the mere representation by a figure. To this John Calvin commented: “It little matters what his intention was or what he told himself… Any opinion concerning the heavenly mysteries which has been formed by men themselves…is the mother of error.”[8]
Micah came into the room which had become the reposing room for his idol. How desperate he must have felt when only barren walls and a cleared floor met his terrified glance. How would anyone feel who suddenly thought that God had been taken away. Yet, if we look more closely at Micah, is it not true that his tragedy lay not in his having lost God, but in the fact that his understanding of God was so distorted that he believed he could lose him. He “lost” what he never had—a vital relation to the living God of his fathers.
Strange, is it not that Micah never seemed to comprehend that the God who could be stolen could hardly have been a God at all. It is like the story told of Heinrich Heine, that strange German romantic writer. It is said that on the last day he was to walk outdoors prior to the onset of a fatal spinal disease, he entered the Louvre, and stood before the statue of Venus de Milo. Later, as he reminisced, he wrote: “At her feet I lay a long time…and wept so as to move a stone to pity. And the…goddess … looked down at me…seeming to say: `Dost thou not see that I have no arms, and therefore canst not help thee?’”[9]
I see in Micah’s despair a strange similarity to that climax of the secularizing of religion, the cultic movement known as Christian Atheism. Their cry is that God is dead. No one seems to sense the utter absurdity of the very proclamation—that the god who could die and stay dead could not be God at all. The only god who has disappeared from the vision of these men (like Micah) is the little idols they have concocted in their own sinful images. God is not dead! It is what they never really knew that has “disappeared and died.”
Habbakkuk, Israel’s prophet, put it: (Habbakkuk 2:19–20.)
Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a dumb stone, Arise!
Can this give revelation?
Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath in it.
But the Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.
A further observation from the account of Micah suggests that in addition to his god having been taken, his priest had also left him. This was the adding of tragedy to catastrophe. That priest by virtue of the fact that he had wandered away from the nation’s central religious structure and had taken the position as “private chaplain” to Micah would suggest that he was one of those characters who thought that he could operate more freely away from the “organization.” It appears that Micah and the priest were not consciously trying to abolish the organized religion of Israel. But they failed to realize that formal ceremony carried on apart from the central core of the religious heritage of the people was wrong.
Why did Micah hire the priest in the first place? More than likely it was because of his concern for precision in ceremony apart from the true source of religion. Micah was seemingly convinced that only to the correct rites would God respond. Rites and ceremonies—how terribly important they must have been to Micah. Now that his priest is gone, he feels he cannot worship. Micah never realized that personal faith and holiness come not through ceremony, but through reverence for God.
A magnificent tree falls to the ground in the woods. From it can be made furniture, or even an altar. Yet, ultimately it will decay. Yonder one sees a similar piece of wood, but this one is still fastened to its roots drinking the water of life. It grows. Just so, ritual and religion apart from the very source of religion—God Himself—is dead. Is there a parallel here to the modern advocate who abandons the church to seek for his religion in the secular city? Such a one is so like the young priest who wandered far from the center of Israel’s religion, from the source of life.
What kind of character was that young priest? He was a man who turned his back on the religious heritage of his fathers and became a hired functionary, a man who left his first benefactor in order to keep pace with the allurements of the crowd which offered more glory and prestige. Was such a one really a loss to be mourned? Not even the priest’s multiplicity of forms, not his aesthetic arrangement of decor could redeem him from his own callous living. How then could he have offered balm to the sin-sick soul of Micah?
Finally, the Biblical narrative portrays the group of Danites, that group of wanderers, looking for a place to settle. We are told that some five spies went out. It was they who came upon Micah’s shrine and asked the Levite to pray for their success. When they returned with their comrades, they asked the priest to accompany them. He agreed; together they gathered up the images and the furniture and sped off. Thieves! Religious thieves! Thieves in the name of religion!
Rather than the moral demands upon the lives of these men, religion helped to make them violate whatever scruples they once may have had. In the name of God, in the name of religion, they did as they pleased. That clergyman who not long ago suggested that a homosexual relationship or an evening with a prostitute might well be a profoundly religious experience would have made a good member of the Danites whose only concern for religion was in its potential benefits to them.
Strange! Often many seem to be unable to comprehend that when religion is used as a guilt-woven drapery to cover one’s own immorality or expansion politics, it can hardly be called religion at all. These Danites looked upon religion, upon God, as devoid of moral claims upon their lives.
How like the words W. H. Auden puts into the mouth of a prayer:[10]
O God, put away justice and truth, for we cannot understand them, and we do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave Thy heavens and come down to our earth… Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.
What a strange distortion of the demands of God who spoke from Sinai: “Thou shalt not.” Religion must catch hold of man’s very being and make a difference in how he behaves or it is no religion at all. It is never the case of asking God to rubber-stamp his approval upon one’s own sinful ways, but rather his willingness to accept the judgement of God on his sinful ways that modern society needs. “My God! It’s gone!” Yes, to the man who has enshrined him in an image; yes, to the man who has relegated him to ceremony and ritual; yes, to the man who wants him for convenience. But not to the man who heard the words of the Nazarene who spoke: “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
Notes
- Brunner, Emil, Revelation and Reason. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1946, p. 4.
- Hosea 9:10
- Exodus 20:2–3
- Eichrodt, Walter, Man in the Old Testament. London: SCM Press, 1961. (See especially chapter one.)
- Hamilton, Kenneth, “John Updike,” Christian Century, June 7, 1967, pp. 745-8.
- Cited by Buck, Harry, (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1967, p. 208.)
- Judges, Chapters 17 and 18.
- Calvin, John, Commentary on Judges, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948.
- Brown, Lewis, That Man Heine.
- Auden, W. H., Collected Poems: New York, Random House, 1945, p. 457.
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