On coming to teach theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary I was assigned faculty mailbox number X. Appropriate enough, I thought, since so much of contemporary theology views God as unthinkable if not unknown or unknowable.
One of the ironies of Western Christendom is its conversion and deconversion of this twenty-fourth letter of the English alphabet. Ever since the Middle Ages, Christians have used the letter X to designate Jesus Christ, not because it symbolizes a cross but because it is the initial letter of the Greek χριστός. Mathematical science, of course, long used the same symbol to signify the unknown. Today we’ve moved from X for God to God-is-x. Our secular age has barnacled the term God with so many and such varied meanings that “whoever tries to speak of God today,” says Wolfhart Pannenberg, “can no longer count on being directly understood” (“The Question of God,” Interpretation, July, 1967, p. 289).
The problem of the anonymous God has become, in fact, the most vexing problem of our unsteady civilization. Some moderns are tempted to drop the term as one that is more troublesome to define than it is worth. The difficulty is that before long the frustrations of academia become the jargon of the man in the street.
In a letter to a Washington, D.C., newspaper, one reader pointed out that Neurotics Anonymous carried a sort of built-in divinity. Affiliation with that movement, the subscriber reported, requires no definite religious convictions: “Finding a Higher Power does not necessarily require that I call upon any particular religious teachings. I was told that, for a start, the Higher Power could consist of the NA group itself.
After all, the group presented a force greater than myself. That is what NA considers a Higher Power—something that is greater than oneself’ (Washington Evening Star, Aug. 9, 1967). Presumably, Great A & P or Burlington Northern would do just as well.
When the Living God was exiled, X was swiftly demoted to x. Even some who claim to be Christians now use the term God in so many ways that its very mention poses a serious semantic problem. So serious is this problem that some people wonder whether any genuine theological vocabulary remains in circulation.
The modern secular man no longer sees God as the medieval Christian X (the God incarnate in Christ), or even as a speculative philosophical entity located somewhere between Zero and Infinity, or as a possible x in the sequence from a to z. Expelled and banned not only as unreal but also as unimaginable, he is disdained as a zero, a nothing, a total blank. As a consequence, the gargantuan gods of paganism enjoy greater status than does the holy God of Christianity. Stripped of his New Testament glory as the self-revealed God, this zero-God of modern manufacture has less impact on human affairs than even the myths of ancient polytheism.
Yet however much secular theologians may insist on the death of God, God is no detached diminutive or wholly unknown x in the experience of modern man. The term God evokes something far more definite than a mathematical symbol of the obscure. Men may not be fully aware of what is involved, but they are confronted always by the Logos who lights every man. The Living God is always at least x-plus.
Out of reverence, lest they should profane the name of Jahweh, the self-revealed Creator and Redeemer of men, the Hebrews did not utter his name, written JHWH, but instead said “the Lord” when reading the Scriptures aloud. These four letters preserved “the Name” not merely as an impersonal symbol, but as a witness to the intelligible, personal, transcendent Lord. Christians, in turn, for better or worse, used X to represent the incarnate God, Jesus Christ.
The modern substitution of x for God, instead of JHWH or of X, reveals both the de-judaizing and the dechristianizing of theology. What’s more, it signals the repudiation of theology as a science; it surrenders the revelation-rights of theological science to the empirical relativism of physical science. The symbol x is now applied to God differently from the way that mathematicians like Spinoza or Sir James Jeans thought of him, namely, as the Divine Intelligence, the “A-to-Z” of all-inclusive absolute being. Rather, today’s x makes God the one about whom nothing is certain, the unknown quantity wholly beyond or outside cognition. Spinoza held that at least some of God’s infinity of attributes are knowable; the contemporary God = x marks a regression from God as intelligible to the pre-Christian unknown God of ancient Athens.
The letter x has no prototype in the Semitic alphabet. It first appears in the Western differentiation of the Greek alphabet. The medieval use of x derives from an abbreviation of the Arabic word shei, meaning a thing, a something; this word the Middle Ages transcribed as Xei to designate the unknown.
More and more, God as the modern unknown symbolizes a category of myth or a mystery fringe outside the realm of reality. The very term God occurs less and less in the alphabet of meaningful words and ideas. This loss of God as X by gradual whittling of his deity to x is not unrelated to the recent modern forfeiture of God as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End; all-embracing evolutionary science has simply lumped Him into its world-process.
To reduce God to simply one of many x’s, to just another question among others, perhaps even to a less important and subordinate question, shows how far much of the West has fallen. God must once again become the foremost concern and question of all questions, must once again be seen as the X over all x’s, the God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Unless he does, our world will blaze through another Christmas without the least glimmer of Bethlehem and Golgotha.
