MODERN REFORMULATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

The doctrine of God in Christian theology has been formulated and reformulated time and again.  The formulations tend to be a response to the Church's self-understanding and to its understanding of God in different times and in different social contexts.  

The question about how God is to be known-by rational inquiry of some sort, through religious experience, or through a revelation responded by faith-has been a traditional and recurrent question throughout Christian history.  In that history, there have been those who, while denying neither the efficacy, nor the significance of mystical experience or of revelation, have insisted that the existence of God can be established by philosophical argument and so the nature of God known and defined, at least in part, by reason alone, that is, by "natural theology." On the other side have been those who distrusted philosophical reason as "pagan" or at least as misguided; correspondingly they have argued that the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Jesus, and the Church, can only be known in revelation.  As a consequence for them a valid understanding of the nature and intentions of God must proceed from revelation and not also from philosophical reasoning. While the developments in modern culture have not effaced this traditional issue and its contesting parties, still these developments have to some extent effected changes in the way each side argues its case (Langdon Gilkey, p. 99). 

So,  the question remains "How do we know God?"  Is God known through self-disclosure?  Is God known through experience, both collective and individual?  Is God known through philosophical speculation?  Is God known through rational deduction?  Each of these perspectives have been submitted as the dominant or exclusive way of knowing and understanding the divine.

There are three points of difference submitted by Langdon Gilkey.  They are:

1.  The question of the possibility of a concept of God, the most radical question about God's reality has come to the fore.  Thus each side, the natural theologians and the revelationists, find themselves more concerned than their predecessors with the source or point of origin (in a "godless" natural and historical world) of this idea in philosophy or in the experience of revelation respectively, that is, with the question "How do we come to know God?' as well as with the question "What do we know about God in the way we do know it?" (Gilkey, op. cit., p.99).  

2.  Though the sharpness and difficulty of the question of the reality of God and of the intelligibility of that concept has made a natural theology eminently desirable if not necessary for modern believers, still the drift-not to say the flow tide-of modern rationality away from metaphysical speculation has raised increased difficulties for that enterprise in modern culture.  Whereas in many epochs only the use of philosophy in theology and especially at the idea of a natural theology, now is the philosophical community more than the theological community that raises questions about the possibility of metaphysics and of natural theology of any sort.  In modernity (as possibly the end of the Hellenic era) natural theologians have had to contend with philosophical resistance to their speculative, metaphysical labors as well as with religious-theological resistance, and they face the bizarre and arduous task, not forced upon their predecessors, of presenting a reasoned defense of metaphysical reason even before they begin their quest via such reason for God (Ibid., pp. 99-100).

3.  The modern critique of authority, the emphatic denial of absolute authority to any document or institution, has transformed the interpretation of revelation and its cognitive meaning.  Prior to this the "revealed faith" could refer to sets of prepositions in the scriptural corpus or the dogmatic tradition, and how one "knew God" via either one could be plainly and intelligibly stated.  With the modern critique of scriptural and dogmatic authority and of a "propositional view of revelation," at best revelation comes through the words of scripture and tradition and is received not in terms of objective propositions but on the "religious" level as an experience or "feeling," as an "encounter" resulting in a personal acknowledgment or a decision of faith, that is, as an existential reality and activity, so to speak, below the conceptual and ordinary cognitive level.  The obvious problem of a cognitive event taking place in a prelinguistic, preconceptual, and preexperiential "experience" thus plagues contemporary revelationists as it did their predecessors.  We should note that neither one of the traditional avenues to the knowledge of God, metaphysics or revelation, is in the least straight and smooth in our own day (Ibid. p. 100).

So, as in ancient times, and especially in as in the days of emerging Christianity, we are faced with the challenge and the task of postulating,  editing, redacting, and revisiting our formulations for understanding the divine.  We ask ourselves if our notion of God is culture-based, faith-based, or a combination of several approaches and foundations.  Is our approach to the "knowledge" of God a one-track approach or is it multi-pronged?  Our attempts to know and understand God constitute the journey of "theology in transit."

In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS ON GOD 

At the start of the post-Reformation period there were two dominant conceptions of God, one Catholic and the other Protestant.  They differed markedly in the categories with which God was described,  yet to our modern eyes they exhibited the same paradoxical character: the Catholic conception of an absolute, purely actual, changeless being "illegitimately" related and the Protestant conception of an eternal sovereign, divine will ordaining and effecting all temporal events from eternity, thus again "illegitimately" related and even responsive to historical crises and human needs.  Understandably, subsequent modern on the issue of God has, at least since the seventeenth century, been largely constituted by philosophical and theological criticism of these two inherited conceptions, and thence characterized either by humanist and naturalist rejection of the concept entirely or by a more or less radical reformulation of it.  Perhaps the best way to examine this extensive process is to remind ourselves first of the grounds in modern (Enlightenment and and post-Enlightenment) sensibility for this criticism,  and second to describe some of the characteristic forms of these reformulations as those forms appear in the present theological discussion (Langdon Gilkey in "God," p. 96).  

So in essence, what we find is a "clash" or competing conceptions of God during this period.  One conception (Catholic) was rooted in a synthesis of tradition, experience, Scripture, and philosophy, while the other (Protestant) was rooted in the primacy of Scripture, tradition, and experience, in that order, with a subsequent embracing of philosophy and other branches of human knowledge as ancillary.  Both sides attempted to be faithful to what they believed was the faith delivered once and for all by Jesus and HIs Apostles.   Both sides believed that indeed, their position was "Apostolic" in nature.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CRITIQUE 

The grounds for the modern critique of the idea of God have been essentially three:

1.  The new emphasis on experience as the sole relevant and dependable source for valued and meaningful concepts and the sole ground for the testing of those concepts. (Gilkey, op. cit. pp. 96-97).

2.  Corresponding shift to the subject as the sole seat of legitimate authority in all matters pertaining to truth and as the sole originating source of significant moral and/or personal action (Ibid., p. 97).  

Finally, since the principle of authority in matters of truth and morals has moved radically inward to the subject, all external forms of authority are radically questioned, especially those coming from Church traditions or Scripture (Ibid.).

In modern-day Protestantism, there is a question as to what really is the sole or primary authority.  Some Protestants believe in the "Sola Scriptura (the Scripture alone)" principle, while others believe in the "Prima Scriptura (the primacy of Scripture and secondary status of experience and tradition)" principle.  In Pentecostal theology, we have a what I would call a "theological conundrum."  While Pentecostals as a whole subscribe to the notion of the Scripture being "the only rule of faith and practice," there is a strong emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit being an authority in and of itself.  So far example, if someone calls out an aspect of Pentecostal theology to be at "variance" with scriptural revelation, the answer just might be "Well the Holy Spirit has revealed to me (or to us) otherwise."  It appears on the surface, at least, that in Pentecostal theology, there is room for a private experience with the Holy Spirit superseding the words of Scripture, though the claim is still made that the Bible is our only source of faith and practice.  

Thus, the question of the reality of God, even of the possibility of the concept in any of its forms, has been sharply raised in modern culture.  On the one hand, a powerful "naturalistic " viewpoint, which finds belief in God anachronistic and incredible and thus a relation to God either offensive or irrelevant, has arisen and spread pervasively throughout the Western and Communist worlds into almost every class.  From this viewpoint "nature," as understood by science, is the seat and source of all that is real; men and women are the source of values, and their needs and wishes are the sole criterion of values.  Thus this world and its history represent the sole locus of hope.  Whether in socialistic or capitalistic form, or as theorized by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus-or by most if not all the leaders of the scientific and and philosophical communities-this naturalistic humanism has dominated the cultural scene.  As a consequence its powerful presence has posed the central intellectual issues for theologians concerned with the defense and reformulation of the concept  of God (Gilkey, op. cit., p. 97).  

So here we are faced with the question of whether our theology is a revealed theology or a humanly constructed theology.  Personally, I find it difficult to submit to that dichotomy.  The reason for that is that even if we state that our theology is a "revealed" one, we cannot bypass the element of human filtering and mediation.  In other words, we cannot treat theology is if were written in Heaven and thrown down to Earth.  Whether we subscribe to the Catholic (and here I am including Eastern Orthodoxy) notion of God, or the Protestant notion of God, the agency of human mediation cannot be either bypassed or ignored.  While we might believe that divine revelation contains "absolutes," we cannot claim or pretend that our appropriation of divine revelation is either absolute, inerrant, or infallible.  In the final analysis, theology is a human construct, and subsequently is, as my theology mentor and professor at New Brunswick Theological Seminary said many times, "tentative."  

Whether or not "naturalistic humanism," a non-religious understanding of reality generally and of human existence, is a lasting possibility has also become problematic in the modern period.  This possibility of a totally "secular" world view was assumed in the French Enlightenment and taken for granted by most of the nineteenth-century critics of religion (e.g., Aguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, et. al).  However, recent history has seemed to show that as traditional religion wanes as the symbolic center of a community's life, "ideology' tends to take its place, and ideology with important religious aspects or dimensions.  Thus even if God has receded from the center of Western (or even Eastern) consciousness, "the religious" has apparently not-for the political and social worlds of Western culture are structured ideologically, and thus its major conflicts are still inspired by competing forms of religiosity (Gilkey, op. cit. pp 97-98).  

En fin, regardless of the root or source of our conception of God,  our conceptions result in enclosed and even entrenched ideologies.  Very few of us, if any, are open to the idea that there is truth in other conceptions of God, especially if those conceptions prevail and are rampant in faith communities other than the Christian Church.  We treat our conceptions of God as if we Christians have it "all sown up" in our pockets, and that any opposing concepts are demonic and heretical.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary