Promised Land

                             Musing paths taken… Ones left behind … Wondering beyond… 
 

Sometimes alone, surveying the woods, a sense of things distills, and a hard chill penetrates—the social/political world appears to have gone so cold. Are people much less caring now? Is this freezing coming off a world of fear? Or of an icy emptiness that’s warning an avalanche of hate? Perhaps in the pain of life’s losses, folks who might once have been more tolerant of differences now lash out like an ice storm or like a sudden crevice made when hearts break. And eyes lose sight when hit by bitter sleeting wind—when dreams are disappearing and hope dimming.

Once, in a time remembered, the look-ahead viewed down into a promised land that glowed golden with scientific progress, with warm expectations of happy grandchildren, sure of sufficient material wealth to make it to the end. But now, it’s more a mirage that evaporates to nothing. Over the edge, prospects shimmer as a barren desert that’s threatened by financial insecurity, shattered homes, selfish lies, and environmental disasters. 
Such conditions are sometimes related to “postmodernism.” But attempting to make sense of that term often feels yet more mind-numbing, like wandering further in a fog. Rather surprisingly, I’ve found this postmodern heaviness to be eased by reading works that talk about “the death of God.” Hold on. Take a breath.

The phrase does not have to mean that there is no God. 
Instead, it may offer the shock that’s needed to break a frozen conception. Maybe our view of “God” got stuck, leaving behind a faith that’s no longer of the living God. A living God gives vibrancy and renewal. A living God nourishes capacities required in order to pass through the traumatic experiences of life. Stories of God’s people remind us again and again of individuals and groups who lost faith when their religion turned into idols, particularly when caught in the love of status, materialism, and/or power. 
Mark C. Taylor gives a condensation of the complex called “death of God.” His summary packs in too much to take in at once; but when read without expecting to “get it,” the overview may be helpful. Taylor writes regarding “Death of God theology,” God

“does not simply disappear; rather, a particular notion of God—more specifically, neo-orthodoxy’s wholly other God—dies in an act of self-emptying that issues in a realized eschatology that totally transforms the present. Borrowing Nietzsche’s description of the ‘moral God,’ who is the negation of the religious vision of Jesus, Altizer argues that the distant God of neo-orthodoxy is the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!’. . . The death of the transcendent neoorthodox God is, therefore, the negation of the negation of life, which allows the true God of Jesus (rather than Christ) to be born anew.” 

[pp. 200-201 in Mark C. Taylor’s After God; Taylor quotes Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ,’ from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kauffman, p. 585. He references Thomas Altizer’s Gospel of Christian Atheism as well as his History as Apocalypse and others. For elaboration on “realized eschatology,” see Altizer’s Contemporary Jesus, p. 61 particularly.]

Postmodernism can also be better comprehended when considered in the flow from classical (pre-modern) into modern and on to postmodern and by making comparisons and contrasts among them. Don Cupitt’s Creation Out of Nothing (1990) has helpful material.

We have three visions of the world to compare, classical, modern and postmodern. They are related as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In the classical vision the world was God’s work of art, produced by God’s almighty Word. In the modern vision the world was constructed as a machine operating in accordance with general mathematical rules, a machine of whose workings we might gain complete understanding and control. In the postmodern vision the world is represented as our expression, our fiction, our communally-produced and ever-changing work of art. We need a new kind of religion for this new world, an objectless, abstract practice of life as expressive religious art (p. 195).

The contrast involves leaving the distant All-Powerful God Who gives laws that humans follow as prescriptions for getting to Heaven, shifting to a God (of the modern time) who guides His people to making a better world, and adjusting further on to the postmodern loss of control with its overwhelming ambiguity, paradox, multiplicity, and uncertainty. Cupitt elaborates on these world changes concerning religion and related across fundamentalism and mysticism. 

“Unable now to look either to the past for legitimation or to the future for justification, we are forced to find and affirm the meaning of our life in the here and now. 
… it must be insisted at once that this does not imply any mystical regaining of Presence in the present moment. On the contrary, there is no mastery of the presence of the present moment. We always arrive a little too late, just as self-consciousness always gets there too late. And there can be no going back on the realization that self-expression is death to the speaker, whether the speaker be the Self or God. I am my life, I am my communicative expression; but as I go out into language I lose my self-identity and become nothing but the many different things that people make of me. Like God, we are nothing unless we give ourselves. Our destiny is to give ourselves by going out into communication, but in so giving ourselves we lose control of ourselves. That self-giving is religion, is love, is God and is death.“ (Creation Out of Nothing, pp 147-8)

In his book written a few years later, Cupitt develops further the possibilities of religion moving into and beyond postmodernism:

“Will the religion of Being be a religion of personal salvation? The old religions promised to the individual person an eternal life and a perfected selfhood. The religion of Being cannot promise that much. It promises only two things—aesthetic joy and happiness in death. (p. 140, The Religion of Being, 1998.)

“Under the new order, things are rather different. Our lives are not pre-planned, and there is no hidden puppeteer pulling wires and managing the plot. Faith in Being feels subjectively very like an artistic vocation, or an addiction to writing. Creativity has become an habitual way of life. All day, every day, a bit of you is listening, waiting for it to come. But how does . . . ‘it’ … ‘come’? It comes when the words that have been whirring in our heads all day, and the various forces struggling for expression within us, suddenly click together. Just for a moment, it all ‘comes right’, Being comes forth and there is a moment of creativity. That’s it. That’s what we live for—the moment when Meaning and Being meet, and something new is born. Our own personal struggle for wholeness in expression has met with Being’s own forthcoming into expression. We are briefly one with Being, and we know what it is to be a son of God and an agent of Creation.” (p. 151, The Religion of Being, 1998.)

As we participate in creativity, Cupitt describes our expression as “fictionalism,” as the making and joining in the play of good stories.

“Now, in religion, I have no new dogma. I am teaching play, I am teaching fictionalism and holy-common religious humanism, and I am saying that the move to these ideas is therapeutic. We come at them on the rebound from the failure of the old quest for transcendence, for reality and for dogmatic truth. The quest, its failure, the rebound and the return into immanence and play have all to be constantly renewed: that is fictionalism. And the return from them into hold-common religious humanism—that is Incarnation.
(p. 141, What Is a Story?)

 

oh shall we believe in life beyond…

Recent readings press into the elusive space/time of faith: beginning-less, end-less…whence?

Gregory of Nyssa summarizes the life of Moses, ascending into his vision of the promised land, as if the release from entering with the troublesome crowd was relief, not loss; as if, already there, beyond.

[Moses] still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.

   Such an experience seems to me to belong to the soul which loves what is beautiful. Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. . .

   [God] would not have shown himself to his servant if the sight were such as to bring the desire of the beholder to an end, since the true sight of God consists in this, that the one who looks up to God never ceases in that desire. For he says: You cannot see my face, for man cannot see me and live. 

   Scripture does not indicate that this causes the death of those who look, for how would the face of life ever be the cause of death to those who approach it? On the contrary, the Divine is by its nature life-giving… (pp. 114-115, Gregory of Nyssa : The Life of Moses. Trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson)

Included in Morton Kelsey’s Afterlife: The Other Side of Dying is considerable attention to contemporary loss of faith and to the New Testament’s affirmations. He includes a chart showing over 600 “References to Eternal Life, Resurrection, and the Kingdom of God or of Heaven in the New Testament” (p. 160). He quotes John Stanford: “All of this describes the kingdom as a present spiritual reality, but the kingdom as a spiritual reality also has an eschatological character” (p. 162; 274-289).

Finding solace, or even capacity to cope with advancing age and its partner the increasing awareness of death, tends to run into “negative theology” or whatever other language tries not to slide too precipitously off the slippery slope of God—or into.  Perhaps helpful is Don Cupitt’s Mysticism after Modernity:

Negative theology denies that God exists in the everyday sense, but only in order to prepare the way for an affirmation that God nevertheless does exist in some ineffable, inconceivable, higher, and purer sense. God’s Being is so pure that he cannot be thought of as a being, among others. (p. 97)

Particularly relevant to the beyond, David Jasper (noted in the previous blog) quotes Thomas Altizer’s Total Presence: The Language of Jesus :

Genuine solitude is a voyage into the interior, but it is a voyage which culminates in a loss of our interior, a loss reversing every manifest or established center of our interior so as to make possible the advent of a wholly new but totally immediate world…But the real end or reversal of an individual interior makes possible the actual advent of a universal presence, a presence transcending all interior and individual identity, and presenting itself beyond our interior, and beyond every possible interior, as a total and immediate presence. [quoted in The Sacred Desert, p. 182]