An Age of Empty Symbols: Have the Secularists Ambushed God?

“Non-Christian,” not “Post-Christian,” is the best description of their Gospel

One of the noteworthy characteristics of contemporary theology is its inability to decide whether man is a religious being who needs a supernatural God or a child of nature whose coming of age includes, among other things, a need to be emancipated from such a dependence. In the past, the second option was not open to the theologian. But today the secular theologian takes the second option to be the only plausible one. To be truly Christian, we are told, is to pursue a certain quality of the secular life unencumbered by old, supernatural ways of thinking. In fact, these theologians add, the Christian faith may be preserved only as we attempt to understand that faith in a non-supernatural, secular way.

“Secular theologians share a common presupposition,” writes sociologist Peter L. Berger. It is this:

Secular theologians deny the objective validity of the supernatural affirmations of the Christian tradition, and have a greater propensity to proclaim themselves atheists than the average theologically untrained skeptic, writes this observer. They are like the drunkard who carefully walks in the center of the gutter so that he cannot possibly fall into it.

As a cultural phenomenon, secular theology can be accounted for either as the result of attempts by liberal theology since Schleiermacher to accommodate Christian beliefs to the modern, scientific world or as the result of the influence upon theology of the forces that account for the modern world itself. Berger writes:

Relativizing secular theologians are blind to the relativity of their own debunking apparatus, he continues:

Secular theologians try “to relativize the religious tradition by means of certain modern ideas,” but “these modern ideas … can themselves be relativized” (ibid.).

Begging the Question

Unfortunately, for the secular theologians, recent studies show that no safe generalizations can be made about what modern man can or cannot believe, to say nothing of what he ought to believe whether he is inside or outside the Church. According to one study, belief in God may run from a low of 40 per cent to a high of 99 per cent within Christian churches (Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension, 1965). And these variations are reflected even in church leadership. Outside the Church the pattern is equally random. The secular theologian cannot justify his program of desupernaturalization on the grounds that supernaturalism is no longer generally tenable, since his own program for translating supernatural beliefs into psychology or existential anthropology is no less implausible for many others. The fact is that in our pluralistic society, substantial numbers of persons still believe in some kind of a god, more often than not the supernatural God of the Bible. Indeed, the conventions of ordinary speech call for a supernatural theistic God, and while this may sometimes entail a crude anthropomorphism, for most believers it does not. To speak of a “modern world view” that is somehow supposed to be normative simply begs the question and ignores the fact that many world views compete for the allegiance of modern man.

Naturalists Always Stumble

Conservative believers rightly note that biblical supernaturalism has always been a stumbling block for certain men. It was a stumbling block for naturalists of the ancient world no less than it is for naturalists today. But today the proportion of those within the churches who reject the supernatural is considerably larger. And it is upon this foundation that the secular theologians build their popular support, if not the specifics of their systems.

Since the supernatural has now become a stumbling block for so many within the churches, the secular theologian feels he must desupernaturalize the Christian faith in order to preserve its plausibility. He tries to show, for example, that biblical supernaturalism is one of the vestigial remains of a never-say-die “folk religion” peculiar to the vanishing American frontier or to a recrudescent Bible belt. He discovers that “being Biblical” or “being Christian” is really being secular in a special sort of way. But being these things in the ordinary, supernatural New Testament sort of way means living and loving according to God’s will as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and believing that God is all of those things that ordinary New Testament believers take him to be: the Maker of heaven and earth, the One in whom we live and move and have our being, a loving heavenly Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the One to whom Jesus prayed and to whom he was obedient unto death, the One who was in Christ as the Saviour of us all. The God of ordinary belief is real, personal, sovereign, and supernatural—whatever else he may be. For he could hardly be less and still be the God of Jesus, or of the first or contemporary Christians.

Moreover, despite the contention of some secular theologians, one can believe all these things without at the same time committing oneself to a non-biblical, Greek metaphysical system, or, for that matter, being “infected” by any of these systems. On the contrary, the metaphysical infections that some secular theologians find in ordinary orthodox belief follow generally from certain gratuitous assumptions that arise from their own enslavement to the philosophies of Heidegger or Feuerbach.

It is in the nature of the case that the secular theologian can only offer his program of accommodation and translation to naturalism as an alternative to biblical supernaturalism. He cannot use it to prove biblical super-naturalism untenable, for he cannot by his own relativistic reasoning show that his program is intrinsically superior as a “reality presupposition.” For the secular theologian, “the entire transcendental frame of reference of the Christian tradition is demolished,” Berger notes. “It is ‘translated into existential anthropology’—a procedure … of the most radical detranscendentalization and subjectivization imaginable” (p. 6). Moreover, radical accommodation of this sort tends to “escalate to the point where the plausibility of the tradition collapses … from within” (p. 13).

The conservative rightly recognizes this. He opposes secular theology not because he is unable or unwilling to consider new ways of understanding his Christian faith but because he rightly sees that “ever-deepening concessions to the reality presuppositions of the people one wants to keep or win … infect the thinking of the tactitians themselves” (ibid.).

Perhaps the most remarkable claim of the secular theologian is his poignant “discovery” that man’s final goal is freedom from God himself. The new gospel is: God died for us so that we can become ourselves. We are now wholly responsible, and we must embrace this responsibility and all the anguish it incurs as the mark of our Christian maturity. We must, for example, achieve the self-understanding that is authentic existence. We must take assertions like “Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour” to mean something non-supernatural like, “I henceforth understand myself … solely in terms of … my encounter with the kerygma,” as Ogden puts it (Christ Without Myth, p. 114). Any assertion that Jesus Christ is the only door to salvation must become the claim, for Ogden at least, that the non-supernatural God made known in Jesus Christ is the God who is found everywhere as the universal possibility of authentic existence for all men. From this perspective, the kerygma becomes a kind of existential emancipation proclamation. What was possible for the man Jesus, we are told, is possible for any and all of us. Even if there had been no man Jesus, the experience that was possible for the early Christians continues to be possible today.

How Secularists Aim

Secular theologians believe that we are standing at the frontier of a new, post-Christian era and that, like Abraham, we must set our sights by a new faith. To look back to the Christian world of the past is to follow the example of Lot’s wife. Strategy dictates the abandonment of a thoroughly discredited Bible and of irrelevant supernatural beliefs. The man of faith today is not the man who cherishes the words of the Apostle Paul or those of the Fourth Gospel as the Word of God. On the contrary, he is the man who moves into the world in a forthright, secular way to reshape it with the courage and confidence of a man come of age.

The notion of a supernatural God who acts according to his will must be gotten rid of. The word “God” can no longer be allowed to function in a supernaturalistic way. Talk about God must be seen as talk about man; viable theology must rely on existentialism or some other form of humanism rather than biblical supernaturalism. It is held that the Bible can no longer provide “living metaphors,” because its witness is the witness of another age and its propositions the understanding of that age. Hence, not only biblical propositions are rejected but biblical metaphors also. Theology must give way to anthropology even as supernatural Christianity has given way to humanism.

If secular theology is confronted with the charge of atheism, its defense will usually be that of the mystic. God will be pictured as the inward abyss or the encounter. Nothing affirmative will literally be said about him. But one of the main characteristics of Christian belief is that it is grounded on some very definite things that can be said about God and what he is supposed to have done. It is what we do know and can say, not what we do not know or cannot say, that justifies our faith.

Fashionable Subjectivity

The desupernaturalizing of theology has been accompanied by a subjectivizing of truth. There is a positive correlation between a diminishing reference to a sovereign objective, personal God and reference to truth as objective or specifically cognitive. After Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher, it became increasingly fashionable to speak of “truth as subjectivity,” as Kierkegaard did, or to reduce God and revelation to categories of human experience.

When Schleiermacher published his work On Religion—Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers in 1799, he made it a point to separate what he took to be the religious from the factual. He asked whether the religious could be factual in any but a subjective sense, whether such things as the truth claims of the Christian faith were in any way objective in intention as were the truth claims of science, for example. To put it in the words of David Jenkins:

The secular theologian wields a philosophical razor that says: “Do not multiply entities beyond existential or empirical necessity.” Do not introduce or require a supernatural Being, a Trinity, or anything that is not observable or is not essential to the existential situation. God is a Thou, a Ground, or an Ultimate Concern. We can believe this much about God. But shaving off supernaturalism makes it possible to speak about things like Tillich’s “new being” or Bultmann’s “authentic existence” without reference to God or Christianity at all. We can speak of thous, grounds, concerns, and so on, as aspects of human existence, but we do not even need to refer to them as God.

Thus, the razor devised to save the living God of the encounter from literal supernaturalism actually shaves him off. In this system, the word “God” is made to function as an adverb or an adjective rather than as a noun. We are to speak meaningfully of godly deeds and godly persons, but we may safely reject the biblical “thus saith the Lord.” Thus, what started as a move to preserve the living experience of God finds itself trying to keep that experience alive after God has gone. Subjectivity replaces objective belief and faith.

Note how Buber, whose influence has been enormous, makes his point. To speak of “I” or of “Thou” alone is to speak abstractly, to reduce the I-Thou encounter to an impersonal I-it relationship. But the I-Thou encounter itself is real. God is the I-Thou relationship. Hence, whatever may be the transcendent character of the encounter, it is itself what is meant by “God.” God is not in the encounter. He is the encounter. Interpersonal relations give us what we can now refer to as “God” without having to invoke—that is, to abstract—God. So far as we must use the word “God,” we must use it in this way.

Doctrine, on its part, is pictured as the symbolic vehicle of the encounter. The Scriptures point to, or witness to, revelation. They are not themselves revelation, since propositions about God—who he is, what he is like, what he has done, or what he commands and promises—are not the Word of God. What God says isn’t the Word, we are told, because God communicates only himself. The Word is a new self-understanding or a new dimension of our own existence. There is no supernatural incursion into our lives. Indeed, supernaturalism encourages the mistaken picture of an objective Being who reveals information about himself, his will, his plans, and so on. It is what sterilizes and ossifies the truth to which we should be continuously open and which we experience in the encounters of everyday secular life. For the secular theologian, it is immaterial whether Christian, Buddhist, or any other religion’s propositions and symbols are involved, since what finally counts is human existence alone.

When Faith Departs

The secularist’s alternative to supernatural New Testament faith will survive only so long as vestigial elements of that faith remain intact. When these are gone, the symbols he uses will be emptied of their power, and God will truly be dead for him. New symbols may emerge, but they will not be the symbols of New Testament faith. Nor will they possess their power.

Evangelical belief makes its witness one and the same as the witness of those who first proclaimed the Gospel. “I beg you to stick to the original teaching,” a New Testament writer pleads. “If you do, you will be living in fellowship with both the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:24, Phillips).

The historic Christian Gospel needs no speculative reconstruction. It is the good news for all time. There is no substitute for it. Nor is there any improvement of it. And that is why it is too important to be left to the secular or any other theologians.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

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