“Does God have a future?” This is the question asked by the celebrated British theologian Karen Armstrong. “In my country, God is in trouble,” she says, by way of answering her own question. In England, only a reported six percent of the population still goes to church regularly. Church buildings are being converted to other uses and there is a widespread malaise with institutional religion.
However, she hastens to modify the meaning of this situation. “I am not troubled by the atheism in my country,” she explains. It is not really directed against God, but rather against “a particular idea of God.” Remember, she observes, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all once regarded as atheists. The Europeans may need the moral equivalent of a “sorbet” to cleanse their palate of false theology before they can find the true God.
Karen Armstrong stopped in the Boston area recently on a nation-wide tour promoting her new book, The Battle for God. In a lecture to students and others at the Episcopal Divinity School, she laid out her views of the current struggle over religious issues. Author of several previous influential books, notably The History of God, Professor Arm-strong displays an amazingly wide knowledge of world religion and knows how to talk brilliantly about the subject.
In an interview with me, she described herself as a “freelance monotheist.” She now feels very critical of the Catholic Church which she formerly served as a nun. In fact, she confesses that she is currently “quite exhausted by religion” and feels the need of a break from it all. However, when asked about the need for a community of faith, she readily admits that the lack of such a community is “the weakness of my position.”
The crisis of modern belief, as Professor Armstrong sees it, arises from the conflict between mythos and logos, two Greek words that can be roughly translated as reli-gious imagination and hardheaded reason. The history of the West over the last 400 years should be seen as the triumph of logos. Science and technology have proven so spectacularly successful that thinkers anxious to preserve faith misguidedly let reason displace religious imagination altogether.
The result of this surrender to rationalism was that church doctrine came to be understood more as scientific statements rather than poetry. And what Gregory of Nyssa and other Fathers of the Church had taught was forgotten. They had insisted that doctrine can be understood only through prayer and contemplation.
Ultimately the first world war was to show the emptiness of the narrow scientific approach. Some thirty years after that catastrophic event, Auschwitz even more appall-ingly demonstrated what can happen when God is lost. In the face of such evil, human beings are defenceless against the threat of despair.
The answer to this situation, Professor Armstrong holds, is not to create a new definition of God but rather to cultivate spirituality. That is the way to get beyond the selfish, grasping self. This scholar quotes approvingly what she understands religion to be saying at its best: “We are most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away.”
Theology, being like poetry, is always an attempt to express the inexpressible. We must enter the darkness that covers God, the cloud of unknowing in which the divine dwells. For entering, two approaches are necessary: first, prayer because it teaches us to express ourselves in an unselfish way.
Secondly, we must undertake the discipline of compassion, something that enables us to rise above ourselves. That means living the Golden Rule of loving others as ourselves, as Rabbi Hillel taught. Jesus also urges love for people who do not love us. And the poet Auden says: “Where equal affection cannot be / Let the loving one be me.”
Our age has become weary of too many definitions and too much dogmatism. Prayer and contemplation can help us to overcome the limitations of our theology. We can become like the patriarch Abraham who entertained three strangers outside his tent at noontime in the desert, not knowing that one of them was his God.
In practicing compassion toward those they did not know Abraham and his wife Sarah encountered the holy. By receiving the unknown visitors and preparing a meal for them, they experienced something about the otherness of God and thus touched the great mystery.
Richard Griffin