by Harvey Cox
Once I realized that Christianity is not a creed and that faith is more a matter of embodiment than of axioms, things changed. I began to look at people I met in a new way. Some of the ones I admired most were “believers” in the conventional sense, but others were not. For example, the individuals with whom I marched and demonstrated and even went to jail, during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam protests, included both “believers” and “nonbelievers.” But we found ourselves looking out from behind the iron bars in the same jail cells. This suggested to me just how mistaken conventional belief-oriented Christianity is in the way it separates the sheep from the goats. But then according to the Gospel of Matthew (25:31–46) Jesus also rejects this predictable schema. What he said then no doubt shocked his listeners. He insisted that those who are welcomed into the Kingdom of God—those who were clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and visiting the prisoners—were not “believers” and were not even aware that they had been practicing the faith he was teaching and exemplifying.
As Christianity moves awkwardly but irreversibly into a new phase in its history, those who are pushing into this frontier often look to the earliest period, the Age of Faith, rather than the intervening one, the Age of Belief, for inspiration and guidance. This should not be surprising. There are striking similarities between the first and the emerging third age. Creeds did not exist then; they are fading in importance now. Hierarchies had not yet appeared then; they are wobbling today. Faith as a way of life or a guiding compass has once again begun, as it did then, to identify what it means to be Christian. The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it. No wonder the atmosphere in the burgeoning Christian congregations of Asia and Africa feels more like that of first-century Corinth or Ephesus than it does like that of the Rome or Paris of a thousand years later. Early Christianity and today’s emergent Christianity appear closely akin. We now turn to how and why this dramatic change is occurring and what it means for the contour of Christianity and the other religions in the twenty-first century.
CHAPTER 2
Einstein’s Snuffed-Out Candles
Awe, Wonder, and Faith
In 1930 Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, a prominent leader in the American Jewish community of New York, fired off a telegram to Albert Einstein. The rabbi did not waste words: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.”
The telegram was prompted by a public altercation that had arisen when Einstein published a statement that, to the consternation of some of his fellow scientists, he always referred to himself as “religious.” He had written:
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.1
As some recent writers busily exhume the worn-out “scientific” arguments against religion that were marshaled so energetically in the nineteenth century, it is useful to note that the greatest physicist of the twentieth century had quite different ideas on the subject. Einstein, it seems, considered himself to be a “devoutly religious man.” He recognized both the strengths and the limitations of science. And he also recognized the place of mystery in human life. Still, it is also important not to consign the discoverer of E = mc2 to the conventional religious camp either. I doubt that Einstein’s answer satisfied Rabbi Goldstein. Using even fewer than the fifty words allotted him, he told the rabbi that he leaned toward the kind of God Spinoza describes, “who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.” He did not, however, believe in a God “who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”2
Faith starts with awe. It begins with the mixture of wonder and fear all human beings feel toward the mystery that envelops us. But awe becomes faith only as it ascribes some meaning to that mystery. Since we are creatures who use language and symbols that vary from age to age and culture to culture, the meanings we ascribe inevitably differ. All religions and cultures are responses to the same fundamental mystery, but each perceives and responds in its own way.
Novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) once wrote that mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. It may well be, but it was an eminently “modern” man, a scientist and not a theologian, who brought the term “mystery” back into circulation. Today, Einstein might place himself among those people described in the previous chapter who say, “I am spiritual, but not religious.”
Einstein’s cryptic telegram is a harbinger of the rising Age of the Spirit for another reason. It reminds us of how much our feelings of awe before the beauty and complexity of nature have been eroded by both a cool, objective science and a religion too wedded to a human-centered view of the universe. One of the most fascinating features of the new spirituality, often introduced by women, is its retrieval of seasonal rituals and its recognition that human beings exist as an integral part of natural processes. Einstein’s perspective also helps sort out the complex interaction between awe, faith, and spirituality. Awe is a basic and nearly universal human emotion. Not to feel it was, for Einstein, to be less than human. Faith, on the other hand, is a particular human response to what awakens awe. It differs from person to person and culture to culture. Spirituality, as we have seen, is an ambiguous term, but often implies an element of dissent against belief-bound religion. The sage of Princeton’s refusal to bite on the rabbi’s bait (“Do you believe in God?”) recognizes once again the folly of reducing either awe or faith to “belief,” and it helps explain why “spirituality” has returned as a rejection of this distortion.
Einstein’s message also provides a promising link to a fruitful school of religious thought that has not received sufficient attention in recent years. In 1917 a German scholar named Rudolf Otto published a book entitled Das Heilige. It was a masterful examination of the mystery Einstein later described, the same experience that psychologist William James (1842–1910) had once called the “oceanic feeling.” Due to an obtuse mistranslation, Otto’s book appeared in English as The Idea of the Holy. It was not, however, about the “idea” of anything. It was about the primal experience of awe or wonder, not any ideas about them. Otto coined the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which incorporates both the object of awe (the mystery) and the responses it induces: a kind of terror (hence the trembling) and fascination. Admittedly there are people who claim never to have sensed anything like this. But Einstein describes such individuals as snuffed-out candles and as good as dead. Still, maybe his judgment is a bit too harsh. My own reaction to such people is similar to the one I might feel about someone who is color-blind or tone-deaf. It is even possible that one day brain researchers may uncover the portion of the brain that activates awe, and then find that there are certain people in whom it is underdeveloped. Might the capacity for awe be enhanced by a drug similar to the ones that enhance memory or alertness?
In the meantime, however, we need to find a way, however inadequate, to speak not just about awe, which is subjective, but about what calls forth awe. Many different words have been used to characterize this awe-evoking “other,” but they all turn out to be feeble and ineffectual. Still, since we are language-using creatures, we have to try, realizing that any word will fall short. This is why Einstein’s use of the word “mystery” is so helpful. A mystery is different from a problem. A problem is something that someone might eventually solve, but the mystery Einstein refers to is not the kind we find in the books of Agatha Christie or P. D. James, in which the perpetrator of the foul deed is always found out in the end. A mystery is not something anyone solves. It is something we live with, and people find that this mystery touches them in different ways. Albert Einstein’s primary exper
ience of mystery came from his encounter with the intricacy of the natural world. But people discover the mystery in other places as well. Many find it in more than one. Like Einstein, they marvel at the awesome scope and complexity of the universe. But they also find the mystery he spoke of in their encounters with other people and in reflecting on themselves.
The mystery of the universe often first confronts us when they feel overwhelmed by its utter vastness. Does it have an edge or stop anywhere? And what is beyond that? Many also feel baffled by the conundrum of time. When did it start, and what was there before? Will it ever end? Then what? Even when they learn about a space-time continuum that is “finite but unbounded,” this hardly answers the dilemma. Then there is the inevitable question our prehistoric ancestors began asking soon after they stood upright. Is the universe friendly, hostile, or just indifferent to human life?
At some point in evolution our forebears came to the realization that one day they would die, and this deepened the mystery. However advanced other animals might be—chimpanzees use tools, and dolphins exhibit the rudiments of speech and empathy—only humans marked the spots where they placed the remains of their dead, at first only with a small pile of stones. Already they were trying to wrench meaning from mystery, and this is what set them apart from the other creatures. The awareness of one’s own mortality raises the question of the meaning of life, and this eventually spawned philosophy, religion, and culture. But the enigma remains and eventually leads any thoughtful person to face the terrifying issues it inevitably poses: What am I? What are we in all this?
Einstein was right that the mystery of the universe begins with awe. But it hits home when I realize that I am an inextricable part of this whole big picture and then begin to ask what, if anything, that means. Such musings may begin in childhood, but they provide our first introduction to the unavoidable “mystery” of the universe and of the human place within it. Struggling with these questions has generated our greatest art, music, poetry, and literature from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Mozart’s Requiem. To repress such thoughts would not be to “grow up,” but to regress to a prehumanoid state. We would wilt into snuffed-out candles.
Again, there are thoughtful people who suggest that since these questions are essentially unanswerable, we should just stop asking them. But what does it mean that we never do stop asking? The sheer persistence of such questions tells us something about what it means to be Homo sapiens, and their intractability demonstrates what science can do, and also what scientists agree it cannot and should not be expected to do. They remind us, as Einstein put it, that “behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly.”
Despite the efforts of well-intentioned people who shrug them off as “meaningless,” we do go on wondering and asking, even though we recognize there will never be “answers” to these questions as there are answers, if always provisional, to scientific ones. That is why “mystery” and not “problem” is the appropriate designation. If in some distant future generation people do stop asking them, they will begin to look more like the humanoid robots of science-fiction novels. We are human not just because we sense that we are a part, albeit a minuscule one, of a space-time continuum and ask, “What does it mean?” but also because we puzzle about why we cannot stop asking. Human beings might be defined as Homo quaerens, the stubborn creatures who cannot stop asking why and then asking why they ask why.
Here religion emerges in the evolution of humanity. Creation myths such as the Gilgamesh epic, the Aztec creation stories, and the first chapters of Genesis were not primarily composed to answer the “how” or “when” questions. They are not scientific accounts, even though their poetical language, when read literally (which is always a mistake), may sound that way. Rather, they grapple, at one and the same time, with the linked mysteries of both why there is a universe and what our place in it is. Human beings have continued to fashion such narratives for thousands of years. They are not to be compared with evolution or string theory. They are more like lyrical cantatas, symphonies of symbols through which humans have tried to make sense of their place in the world. But what is to be done with these archaic narratives today?
This is where the distinction between faith and belief is vital. These stories are—literally—“not to be believed.” They are, rather, artifacts human beings have crafted to try to wring some meaning from the mystery. They are not themselves the mystery. They seek to find a place for humankind in the face of it. Faith does not mean “belief in” this or that myth of creation. These narratives are the vehicles through which human beings symbolize their orientation toward the mystery that evoked their search.
We are sometimes warned that we should simply rid ourselves of these gnarled old myths and that we would be better off without them. But I disagree. Instead, we should recognize and appreciate them for what they are, an invaluable reminder that, although we differ in many respects from the thousands of generations that have preceded us, we are really not all that unique. True, we benefit, as they did not, from the Hubble telescope, mood-altering drugs, CAT scans, laser surgery, and the Internet. But we still wrestle with the same fundamental ambiguity as did our fur-clad ancestors who scrawled those pictures on the cave walls and their successors who composed the Lotus Sutra and painted the Last Judgment. We are still trying to find our way through a terra that will always remain incognita.
But there is a dilemma. Today this luxuriant legacy of the myths through which we have striven for meaning and the rituals that dramatize them has become morally and intellectually confusing. Much of the misunderstanding is due to the way religious leaders, especially in Christianity, have cheapened them into doctrines, propositions, and pseudoscientific theories, which people are exhorted to “believe.” But the result of this “literalization of the symbolic” is that something essential has been lost in translation. The ill-advised transmuting of symbols into a curious kind of “facts” has created an immense obstacle to faith for many thoughtful people. Instead of helping them confront the great mystery, it has effectively prevented them from doing so. This was the case with Unamuno’s earnest young man from the city. But the priest knew the truth. The young man’s genuine doubts about religious doctrines, even about God, do not render him ineligible for prayer or incapable of faith. So what do we do with the plethora of beliefs and practices we have inherited from our various religious traditions?
Some well-meaning theologians think Christians are indeed asked to believe too many things. They suggest, therefore, that the best way to cope with this overload is to pare down the number of items, to discard some and keep others, though they often disagree on which ones to keep and which ones to consign to the wastebasket. This has been called the “modernist approach,” but it might better be called the “subtraction solution.” Popular among some liberal Christians, unfortunately it is exactly the wrong strategy. However well-intentioned and however trimmed the list of “must-believes” becomes, it simply reinforces the belief/nonbelief axis. It implies that there are still some things—albeit fewer—that we really “must believe.”
This is no solution. Rather, we should stop asking whether we “believe” them or not. Instead, we can appreciate this dazzling array of myths, rituals, and stories as an invaluable legacy of the human race. Like scientists, we can build on the past, not dispense with it. When we recognize that in many respects we denizens of the twenty-first century are really not all that exceptional, this appreciation of the past teaches us a little humility, an essential quality in good scientists, a vital attribute in religious people, and a desirable trait in mature human beings. Then we can learn from the partial successes and many failures of our meaning-making forebears. Like them, we find ourselves in a long human saga, reaching out for what is never fully attainable and trying to name what is essentially unnameable. It is that effort, with all its frustrations and rewards, that has made our ancestors an
d ourselves human, and if we ever give up on it, we could become sputtering wicks of once burning tapers.
The mystery of the universe is not only “out there” where Einstein found it. It is also unavoidably “in here.” We know that we are a part of it. But what kind of part are we? As Homo quaerens, we not only wonder about ourselves, but wonder why we are wondering. Just as part of the mystery of the universe is that we find it a mystery, so part of the mystery of the self is why we find it a mystery. Who am I to reflect on myself and on myself reflecting?
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) confronts this on the first page of his classic The Nature and Destiny of Man:
Man has always been his most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself?…If (he) insists that he is a child of nature and that he ought not to pretend to be more than the animal, which he obviously is, he tacitly admits that he is, at any rate, a curious kind of animal who has both the inclination and the capacity to make such pretensions. If on the other hand he insists on his unique and distinctive place in nature, and points to his rational faculties as proof of his special eminence, there is an anxious note in his avowals of uniqueness which betrays his unconscious sense of kinship with the brutes…. Furthermore the very effort to estimate the significance of his rational faculties implies a degree of transcendence over himself which is not fully defined or explained by what is usually connoted by “reason.”3