At Dayton, the liberals had felt threatened when the rights of free speech and free inquiry were in jeopardy. These rights were sacred, not because they were “supernatural” but because they were now central to the modern identity, and as such inviolable and nonnegotiable. Take these rights away, and everything would be awry. For the fundamentalists, who feared modernity and knew that some of its most vocal exponents had vowed to destroy religion, the new doctrine of biblical inerrancy was sacred, not just because of its supernatural sanction but because it provided the sole guarantee of certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. There would in the future be similar clashes between people at different stages of the modernization process who had competing notions of the sacred. The religious had struck a blow for a value that they felt was imperiled, and the liberals had struck back, hard. And at first the liberal assault appeared to have paid off. After the Scopes trial, the fundamentalists went quiet and seemed suitably vanquished. But they had not gone away. They had simply withdrawn defensively, as fundamentalists of other traditions would do in the future, and created an enclave of Godliness in a world that seemed hostile to religion, forming their own churches, broadcasting stations, publishing houses, schools, universities, and Bible colleges. In the late 1970s, when this countercultural society had gained sufficient strength and confidence, the fundamentalists would return to public life, launching a counteroffensive to convert the nation to their principles.
During their time in the political wilderness, the fundamentalists became more radical, nursing a deep grievance against mainstream American culture.36 Subsequent history would show that when a fundamentalist movement is attacked, it almost invariably becomes more aggressive, bitter, and excessive. Rooted as fundamentalism is in a fear of annihilation, its adherents see any such offensive as proof that the secular or liberal world is indeed bent on the elimination of religion. Jewish and Muslim movements would also conform to this pattern. Before Scopes, Protestant fundamentalists tended to be on the left of the political spectrum, willing to work with socialists and liberals in the disadvantaged areas of the rapidly industrializing cities. After Scopes, they swung to the far right, where they have remained.
The ridicule of the press proved to be counterproductive, since it made the fundamentalists even more militant in their views. Before Scopes, evolution had not been an important issue; even such ardent literalists as Charles Hodge knew that the world had existed for a lot longer than the six thousand years mentioned in the Bible. Only a very few subscribed to so-called creation science, which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail. Most fundamentalists were Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science became the flagship of the movement. It would become impossible to discuss the issue rationally, because evolution was no longer merely a scientific hypothesis but a “symbol,” indelibly imbued with the misery of defeat and humiliation. The early history of the first fundamentalist movement in the modern era proved to be paradigmatic. When attacking religion that seems obscurantist, critics must be aware that this assault is likely to make it more extreme.
The Second World War (1939–45) revealed the terrifying efficiency of modern violence. The explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of Homo technologicus. Our ability to harm and mutilate one another had kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress, and we seemed to lack either the wisdom or the means to keep our aggression within safe and appropriate bounds. Indeed, the shocking discovery that six million Jews had been systematically slaughtered in the Nazi camps, an atrocity that had originated in Germany, a leading player in the Enlightenment, called the whole notion of human progress into question.
The Holocaust is sometimes depicted as an eruption of premodern barbarism; it is even seen as an expression of religious impulses that had been repressed in secular society. But historians and social critics have challenged this view.37 It is certainly true that Christian anti-Semitism had been a chronic disease in Europe since the time of the Crusades; and while individual Christians protested against the horror and tried to save their Jewish neighbors, many of the denominations were largely and shamefully silent. Hitler had never officially left the Catholic Church and should have been excommunicated; Pope Pius XII neither condemned nor distanced himself from the Nazi programs.
But to blame the entire catastrophe on religion is simply—and perhaps even dangerously—inaccurate. Far from being in conflict with the rational pursuit of well-organized, goal-oriented modernity, the hideous efficiency of the Nazis was a supreme example of it. Rulers had long initiated policies of ethnic cleansing when setting up their modern, centralized states. In order to use all the human resources at their disposal and to maintain productivity, governments had found it necessary to bring out-groups such as the Jews into the mainstream, but the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this tolerance was merely superficial and the old bigotry still lurked beneath. To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management. The camp replicated the factory, the hallmark of industrial society, but what it mass-produced was death. Science itself was implicated in the eugenic experiments carried out there. The modern idolatry of nationalism had so idealized the German volk that there was no place for the Jews: born of the new “scientific” racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the modern “garden culture,” which simply eliminated weeds—the supreme, perverted example of rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, clearly defined objective.38
Perhaps the Holocaust was not so much an expression as a perversion of Judeo-Christian values.39 As atheists had been eager to point out, the symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential. At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre-Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood, and a negation of the God who, as Nietzsche had suggested, put a brake on ambition and instinctual “pagan” freedom. The extermination of the people who had created the God of the Bible was a symbolic enactment of the death of God that Nietzsche had proclaimed.40 Or perhaps the real cause of the Holocaust was the ambiguous afterlife of religious feeling in Western culture and the malignant energies released by the decay of the religious forms that had channeled them into more benign, productive outlets.41 In Christian theology, hell had traditionally been defined as the absence of God, and the camps uncannily reproduced the traditional symbolism of the inferno: the flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking; the distorted bodies; the flames and stinking air all evoked the imagery of hell depicted by the artists, poets, and dramatists of Europe.42 Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being—whoever he or she may be—is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.
The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel believed that God died in Auschwitz. During his first night in the camp, he had watched the black smoke curling into the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were being consumed. “Never shall I forget those moments,” he wrote years later, “which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”43 He relates how one day the Gestapo hanged a child with the face of a “sad-eyed angel” who was silent and almost calm as he climbed the gallows. It took the child nearly an hour to die in front of the thousands of spectators who were forced to watch. Behind Wiesel, one of the prisoners muttered: “Where is God? Where is He?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him saying in response: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”44
This story can also be seen as an outward sign of the death of God announced
by Nietzsche. How do we account for the great evil we see in a world supposedly created and governed by a benevolent deity? For the Jewish writer Richard Rubenstein this conception of God is no longer viable. Because Jews so narrowly escaped extermination, Rubenstein does not believe that they should jettison their religion, as this would cut them off from their past. But the nice, moral God of liberal Jews seems too anodyne and antiseptic: it ignores life’s inherent tragedy in the hope that things will improve. Instead, Rubenstein is drawn to the self-emptying God of Isaac Luria, who had not been able to control the world he had brought into being. The mystics had seen God as Nothingness; Auschwitz had revealed the abysmal emptiness of life, and the contemplation of Luria’s En Sof was a way of entering into the primal Nothingness from which we came and to which we all return.45 The British theologian Louis Jacobs, however, believed that Luria’s impotent God could not give meaning to human existence. He preferred the classic solution that God is greater than human beings can conceive and that his ways are not our ways. God may be incomprehensible, but people have the option of putting their trust in this ineffable God and affirming a meaning, even in the midst of meaninglessness.
Another Auschwitz story shows people doing precisely that. Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.
The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God—conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable—is a recent phenomenon. It was born in a more optimistic era than our own and reflects the firm expectation that scientific rationality could bring the apparently inexplicable aspects of life under the control of reason. This God was indeed, as Feuerbach suggested, a projection of humanity at a time when human beings were achieving unprecedented control over their environment and thought they were about to solve the mysteries of the universe. But many feel that the hopes of the Enlightenment also died in Auschwitz. The people who devised the camps had imbibed the classical nineteenth-century atheistic ethos that commanded them to think of themselves as the only absolute; by making an idol of their nation, they felt compelled to destroy those they viewed as enemies. Today we have a more modest conception of the powers of human reason. We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge in a facile theology that says—as some have tried to say—that God knows what he is doing, that he has a secret plan that we cannot fathom, or that suffering gives men and women the opportunity to practice heroic virtue. A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing.
After the Second World War, philosophers and theologians all struggled with the idea of God, seeking to rescue it from the literalism that had made it incredible. In doing so, they often revived older, premodern ways of thinking and speaking about the divine. In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arriving at truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. Each one was meaningful—but only in its own context. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence,”46 because theological language worked “on an entirely different plane.”47 Positivists and atheists who applied the norms of scientific rationality and common sense to religion and those theologians who tried to prove God’s existence had all done “infinite harm,”48 because they implied that God was an external fact—an idea that was intolerable to Wittgenstein. “If I thought of God as another being outside myself, only infinitely more powerful,” he insisted, “then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”49 Religious language was essentially symbolic; it was “disgusting”50 if interpreted literally, but symbolically it had the power to manifest a transcendent reality in the same way as the short stories of Tolstoy. Such works of art did not argue their case or produce evidence but somehow called into being the ineffable reality they evoked. But because the transcendent reality was ineffable—”wonderful beyond words”51—we would never come to know God merely by talking about him. We had to change our behavior, “try to be helpful to other people,” and leave egotism behind.52 If, Wittgenstein believed, he would one day be capable of making his entire nature bow down “in humble resignation to the dust,” then, he thought, God would, as it were, come to him.53
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger had no time for the modern, personalized God but saw Sein (“Being”) as the supreme reality. It was not a being, so bore no relation to any reality that we knew; it was wholly other and should more accurately be called Nothing. And yet, paradoxically, Being was seiender (“being-er”), more complete than any particular being. Despite its utter transcendence, we can gain some understanding of it—but not through the aggressive thrust of scientific investigation. Instead, we had to cultivate what Heidegger called “primordial thinking,” a listening, receptive attitude characterized by silence. This was not a logical process, and it was not something that we did. Instead, it was something that happened within us, a lighting up—almost a revelation. Being was not a fact that we could grasp once and for all, but an apprehension that we built up over time, repetitively and incrementally. We had to immerse ourselves in this cast of mind again and again, in rather the same way as a historian projects himself repeatedly into a historical figure or era.
Theologians, Heidegger believed, had reduced God to a mere being. God had become Someone Else and theology a positive science. In his early work, therefore, Heidegger insisted that it was essential systematically to dismantle faith in this “God” so that we might recover a sense of Being. The God of the philosophers, a typically modern invention, was as good as dead: it was impossible to pray to such a god. This was a time of great depletion; the technological domination of the earth had brought about the nihilism foretold by Nietzsche, because it had made us forgetful of Being. But in his later work, Heidegger found it heartening that God had become incredible. People were becoming conscious of a void, an absence at the heart of their lives. By practicing meditative “thinking,” we could learn to experience what Heidegger called “the return of the holy.” No longer hopelessly mired in mere beings, we should cultivate that primordial waiting in which Being could, as it were, “speak” to us directly.54
Many were dismayed by Heidegger’s apparent refusal to condemn National Socialism after the war. But his ideas were extremely evocative and influenced a generation of Christian theologians. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) insisted that God must be de-objectified and that the scriptures did not convey factual information but could be understood only if Christians involved themselves existentially with their faith. “To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves … with an objective event,” he explained, “but rather to make the cross our own.”55 Europeans had lost the sense that their doctrines were mere gestures toward transcendence. Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is “not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. … Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically bu
t … existentially.”56 Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art. Religion was possible only when people were “stirred by the question of their own existence and can hear the claim that the text makes.”57 A careful examination of the Gospels showed that Jesus did not see God as “an object of thought or speculation” but as an existential demand, a “power that constrains man to decision, who confronts him in the demand for good.”58 Like Heidegger, Bultmann understood that the sense of the divine was not something to be comprehended once and for all; it came to us repetitively, by constant attention to the demands of the moment. He was not speaking of an exotic mystical experience. Having lived through the Nazi years, Bultmann knew how frequently, in such circumstances, men and women are confronted by an internal requirement that seems to come from outside themselves and which they cannot reject without denying what is most authentic to them. God was, therefore, an absolute claim that drew people beyond self-interest and egotism into transcendence.
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was born in Prussia and served as an army chaplain in the trenches during the First World War, after which he suffered two major breakdowns. Later he became a professor of theology at the University of Frankfurt but was expelled by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated to the United States. He saw the modern God as an idolatry that human beings must leave behind.
The concept of a “Personal God,” interfering with natural events, or being “an independent cause of natural events” makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless, a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.59
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