Deep Down Things

      This post is mostly a book/author recommendation along with an encouragement to continue asking the important questions, and even to live into religion deep down. Today, looking outside, we witness the change of seasons, possibly a reminder of shifting world views affecting even our reach toward God. Some leaves must fall, and their full lives, like ours, show forth the beauty and promise of transformation. 

      During the manifestations of late summer and early autumn, I’ve also been turning the pages of works by John A.T. Robinson [1919-1983] beginning with Honest to God (1963) and continuing into The Human Face of God (1973). His writings give me support in moving further with the themes that feel most significant. For example, the notion I call “resonance” connects with a primary focus he makes in Honest to God: “a number of things have unaccountably ’rung a bell’… if one is to retain one’s integrity one must come to terms with them.” To elaborate this resonance, he notes that “three [texts]…  have since proved seminal” (pp. 19, 21). These he names: Tillich’s Shaking of the Foundations called “The Depth of Existence”, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Bultmann’s New Testament and Mythology. Robinson explores the difficulties humans encounter in finding words to express the inarticulate; grasping at a shape-shifting reality proves so difficult:

Robinson asserts that to be honest to God is to persist through the fog, to refuse to surrender to a superficial view, and to plumb into the heart of matter because “God is by definition, ultimate reality” and “’the ground of our being’” (p. 29, referencing Tillich). Robinson further explores into the dominant but too-limiting view of God as a supernatural being in heaven. He shows that this perspective was considered “the great enemy of man’s coming of age.” This was the idea of God that they [Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and others] 

“must ‘kill’ if man was not to continue dispossessed and kept in strings. Few Christians have been able to understand the vehemence of their revolt because for them he has not been the tyrant they portrayed, who impoverishes, enslaves and annihilates man. Indeed, for most non-Christians also he has been more of a Grandfather in heaven, a kindly Old Man who could be pushed into one corner while they got on with the business of life. But the nature of his character is here secondary. What is important is whether such a Being represents even a distorted image of the Christian God. Can he be rehabilitated, or is the whole conception of that sort of a God, ‘up there’, ‘out there’, or however one likes to put it, a projection, an idol, that can and should be torn down?” (p. 41)

So, given the confrontation with the fallen leaves of the lost idea, what must we do? Robinson very helpfully names and elaborates the “task”

• “to validate the idea of transcendence for modern man” (p. 44)
• to affirm the existence of “a supreme Person, a self-existent subject of infinite goodness and power, who enters into a relationship with us comparable with that of one human personality with another… the existence of such a Being as the creator and most sufficient explanation of the world as we know it.”  (p. 48)
• to live forward “a view of the world that affirms this reality and significance in personal categories … that God, the final truth and reality ‘deep down things’, is love.”  (p. 49)