HELLO BEST AMERICAN BLOG READER(S). Good to be back for my third installment; today begins the draft, some of the most exciting few days of the year for NFL fans. Even during the Bengals’ despairing 1990s, in which the Bungles dug out lows nearly unimaginable in a league with such an even financial playing field, draft day was a day of wild optimism. As a young fan you hope for stars; as an adult, you feel yourself hoping for fixtures. You like the idea of your squad using a top pick on some blunt mauler of a guard with the staying power of a canned good. Someone re-signable, who’ll be in the lineup for a decade. I’m hoping that a fellow named Mike Iupati, from Idaho, falls to us this year. He’s just such a blunt mauler. Well worth a 21st overall pick. In the cold-weather divisions particularly, few things are more invaluable than depth on the line. Ah, football….In the name of these blog-posts maintaining at least a modicum of topical unity, I won’t dwell.
I would like to begin by picking up discussion of a document briefly touched on yesterday. This was at some point before I began un-systematically meandering through the Ontological argument for the existence of God. Thinking about those sentences, I can only smack myself on the forehead. I was like someone running all the way the around the base-paths without actually getting his foot on a single bag. If you would like to take in a piece de resistance (sp?) on the subject, read Tillich’s “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” which appears in Theology of Culture. Read especially the sections on the Augustinian Solution and the Thomistic Dissolution. All the ideas are laid out there and shine, simply.
The document that I mean to talk about is Tillich’s 1940 rejoinder (reprinted in the same book) to some religious statements made by Albert Einstein. Einstein’s comments, in which he rejects the idea and existence of a Personal God, roused a considerable amount of excitement at the time. One can discern that Tilllich was a bit miffed by it. His first point in the paper, after all, is that Einstein’s arguments would have failed to matter out of a different mouth, as they were “neither powerful nor new.” One can also discern that he was disheartened. The outbreaks of fear and anger, the schizophrenic God-affirming and God-denying that afterwards ran rampant, could only indicate a spiritual sickness in the religious communities. It could only indicate superstition, recidivism, suppression. If you read Tillich’s A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, you’ll find in the chapters on religion and science that he was much more optimistic than he should have been about the relationship between the two realms moving forward. And really, there should by now have been a healing together, or at least a movement in that direction.
As for the Personal God, Tillich explains that “it is the common opinion of classical theology, practically in all periods of Church history, that the predicate "personal" can be said of the Divine only symbolically or by analogy or if affirmed and negated at the same time.”
What does this mean? That if you are a member of any Judeo-Christian religion you have no point of disagreement (or shouldn’t) with Einstein or anyone else as to whether a perfected and all-powerful being exists or does not exist. The answer is that such a being does not exist. There is no such being that has power as you have power, only to an infinite degree. There is no such being that has knowledge in his head as you have knowledge in your head, save to an infinite degree; such a being does not make choices as you make choices; he does not have, in each massive transcendent cell of his being, a Y-chromosome like a gigantic glowing tuning fork rendering his every cell transcendently male. Nor does he literally “send his son” in the way you might send someone to go do something you aren’t capable of doing yourself. Such a being could not do this because such a being doesn’t exist; the Personal God symbolizes; it inflects; it allows access to the dimension of depth in all that is, but it does not exist.
Says PT: “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 amongst objects, a being amongst beings, maybe the highest, but anyhow a being. This, indeed, is the destruction, not only of the physical system, but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God. It is the impure mixture of mythological elements (which are justified in their place, namely in the concrete religious life) and of rational elements (which are justified in their place, namely, in the theological interpretation of religious experience). No criticism of this distorted idea of God can be sharp enough.”
He says more: “It is obvious that in the daily life of religion that the symbolic character of the idea of the Personal God is not always realized. This is dangerous only if distorting theoretical or practical consequences are derived from the failure to realize it. Then attacks from outside and criticism from inside follow and must follow. They are demanded by religion itself. Without an element of ”atheism” no “theism” can be maintained.”
(To Be Continued.)
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