Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable—that is not authentic transcendence—but our relation to God is a new life in ‘existence for others’, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
Norwich, Vermont – June 6, 2007 – I’ve opened with that epigraph from Bonhoeffer since his Letters and Papers from Prison will hover over everything I want to say. The martyred German pastor wrote that today’s world has “come of age.” Therefore, the time has come to articulate a “religionless Christianity” and learn to speak of God “in a secular way.” God is not like the Supreme Being of traditional theism, one who is separate from us, one in whom we must try to believe; instead he is one in whose life we participate. While Bonhoeffer has been welcomed as an innovative thinker, that epigraph echoes St. Paul, who wrote that God is he in whom “we live, and move, and have our being.”
Bonhoeffer clearly anticipated the battle which is going on in Christianity today. As New Testament scholar Marcus Borg puts it, “Christians in North America today are deeply divided about the heart of Christianity. We live in a time of major conflict in the church.” Describing that conflict in terms of a “paradigm change,” he says that the earlier paradigm interprets the Bible literally and conceives of God in terms of “supernatural theism.” He contrasts this with what he calls an “emerging paradigm,” one that “sees the Bible metaphorically”—and imagines God in “panentheistic” rather than theistic terms.
I should note that panentheism has no connection with pantheism. By adding the little preposition en, Greek for in, it refers to God as being in us. Pantheism, by contrast, imagines God as being the same as everything which exists.
I might also clarify what Borg and I mean by a paradigm. In this context, it means the framework within which we view some large aspect of reality. As an example, Borg cites our 16th century move from the Ptolemaic earth-centered paradigm to the Copernican sun-centered view.
The earlier Christian paradigm thought of faith as belief; that is, believing in such things as the miracle stories of the Bible, an afterlife, and an all-powerful Supreme Being. By contrast, Christianity’s new paradigm sees faith as the way we commit ourselves to the Christian life, the way we seek to transform ourselves and the world.
The new paradigm, Borg writes, “has been visible for well over a hundred years” and “in the last twenty to thirty years, it has become a major grassroots movement among both laity and clergy in ‘mainline’…Protestant denominations.” That’s certainly true of many laypersons and clergy in my own denomination, the United Church of Christ (UCC). Since I was raised as a Presbyterian, and have also spent ten years as a confirmed Episcopalian, I’ve seen this new paradigm emerging in a variety of settings. In fact, I’ve been actively promoting it since the 1940s.
In this book, I’ll be seeking to add what I think of as “additional scaffolding” to the new paradigm. As indicated by my opening epigraphs, I’ll be drawing especially on the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Vladimir Solovyov. Rosenstock-Huessy, who was my professor at Dartmouth, was hailed by Bonhoeffer’s twin sister Sabine as a forerunner of her brother.
As I’ve noted in the preceding acknowledgements, these pages owe a great deal to discussions that began at the Norwich Congregational Church in 1963. I can still remember, quite vividly, the topic we discussed that year. We read Anglican Bishop John Robinson’s little book Honest to God. In that ground-breaking work of forty-four years ago, the good bishop said that we’d reached the time when “our image of God must go.” We should give up thinking of a God who is spiritually or metaphysically above or beyond us. He turned to Bonhoeffer and the theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) to find ways of thinking which would overcome the common tendency to imagine God as a supernatural being. It appears that Bishop Robinson’s book, selling over a million copies, was the first widely-read manifesto for Christianity’s new paradigm. Robinson and Tillich will play significant roles as I develop my argument here.
When friends ask me who I imagine as readers of this book, I say they would be the kind of people who would read books by a Bishop Robinson today, the kind that go to discussion groups, be they church-sponsored or college-sponsored. Beyond that core, I also imagine readers who are simply interested in religion; for example, readers of Sam Harris, who’d like a reply to his The End of Faith.
Christianity’s new paradigm, as I discuss it in this book, is suggested by the secular image of Christ that appears on the cover. Here the famed Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco depicts a clenched-fist Christ, a man who has just cut down his own cross. This contemporary Christ is challenging us to throw the idols of all religion, including even the idol of his own cross, onto the dark and looming scrapheap of history. There they’d be piled with the equally-passé idols of nationalism: the guns and tanks of war.
This secular Christ calls us to a mature and fully-engaged Christianity, one that’s not superstitious, sentimental, or pietistic. He’s as far from fundamentalism as you can get. It’s significant that St. Augustine was the first to suggest a Christ who might cut down his own cross.
It should be noted that speaking of God in a secular way and celebrating the secular Christ have nothing to do with secularism. The latter affirms that one can dispense with all forms of religion. What Bonhoeffer and my other mentors were doing was translating the outdated language of 18th and 19th century Christianity into contemporary terms—so that it could speak to people who had outgrown the childish language that was still prevalent at the turn of the century. Of course, it is that language, in the mouths of a Falwell or a Robertson, that has come back to haunt us in more recent years.
After World War II, those of us who thought of Christianity in contemporary terms were often subscribers to Christianity and Crisis, a little magazine founded by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1941. When you stood before Orozoco’s fresco at Dartmouth, you’d see the kind of Christianity espoused by Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer, a Christianity that is fully committed: politically, socially, economically, and internationally.
Borg and retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong have become two of today’s better-known spokesmen for that kind of Christianity. Borg has proposed that we call it “transformational Christianity,” rather than liberal or progressive, and that suggested the title of my Chapter 12. Spong has written a book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, in which he describes Bishop Robinson as a key mentor and presents panentheism as today’s appropriate successor to theism.
As I read both Borg and Spong, I see them taking up Bonhoeffer’s banner—and I’m reminded of how I first heard similar ideas in Rosenstock-Huessy’s lectures. Eugen was a social philosopher, a philosopher of language, and historian, whose interpretation of Christianity was central to all his teaching. He certainly enabled me, and many of my Dartmouth classmates, to discover Christianity in a contemporary mode. I first listened to his lectures in the fall of 1940—and I’ve pursued his work, quite steadily, ever since. Eugen and his allies became my real career, though I’ve had to supplement that with a few income-producing ventures.
When Borg and Spong hail Tillich as one of their champions, I’m reminded of what Tillich said of his friend Rosenstock-Huessy: “when Eugen speaks, it’s like lightning.” In this book I’ll share that lightning with the reader—and suggest that Eugen’s work may be as important a weapon as Tillich’s or Bonhoeffer’s in making the needed counter-attack against the childish forms of Christianity which threaten the church and secular society today.
While this book will introduce you to Eugen’s work, it does not seek to be a study of his thought. I draw not only on Eugen but also on many others to present what is essentially my own contribution to Christianity’s new paradigm. I’ve written three other books which develop similar themes. The most recent, published in 2004, was entitled D-Day and Beyond: A Memoir of War, Russia, and Discovery. While this book draws some sections from that memoir, most of the present text is entirely new.
I was reminded of my relationship with Eugen when I read Mitch Albom’s 1997 best-seller, Tuesdays with Morrie. Albom’s book and mine are quite different, but still the coincidences between the two are simply astonishing. Mitch spent weeks with a dying professor of social philosophy, one Morrie Schwartz, thus giving wider life to his mentor’s thought. I’ve spent decades with a professor of social philosophy, Eugen, also giving wider life to his thought. Morrie’s favorite poet was W. H. Auden, while Auden’s favorite thinker, apparently, was Eugen. Morrie died of ALS, the rare Lou Gehrig’s disease that killed Eugen’s best friend, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929). Eugen and Franz were both friends of Martin Buber (1878-1965), whose little book I and Thou was on Morrie’s reading list for Mitch. And that famous book on dialogue plays a surprising role in this book’s plot.
Ted Koppel’s Nightline first called attention to Morrie—and reunited Mitch with his dying professor. Koppel’s show was also the first to publicize US-USSR Bridges for Peace, as described in Chapter 9. Morrie’s mantra, life’s greatest lesson, was his version of a famed line from Auden: “Love each other or die.” Eugen once put it this way: “The history of the human race is written on a single theme: How does Love become stronger than Death?”
I’ve divided this book into three parts because I take three different approaches to engaging with Christianity’s new paradigm.
Part I describes how I see Eugen and his fellow “dialogical” thinkers, Rosenzweig and Buber, as introducing a unifying way of thinking about all our knowledge, both secular and religious. In the closing chapters of this part, my Russian Orthodox mentors take the stage: Berdyaev and Solovyov, who were key figures in moving us toward panentheism. In Chapter 7, they’re joined by two contemporary Catholic theologians, Gregory Baum and Leslie Dewart, who similarly suggest how we can get beyond theism.
Finally, Part I closes with Chapter 8 on the history of dialogical thinking, where I’ll show how my Western mentors, as well as my Eastern, all had certain important 18th and early 19th century forerunners.
Part II will show how all the ideas presented in Part I were tested in Russia—between 1983 and 2000. US-USSR Bridges for Peace is described as a project exemplifying one of Eugen’s key propositions: that speech serves much more important purposes than the expression of ideas; its ultimate purpose is to establish peace.
Then Part III will take up the current development of the new Christian paradigm, particularly as it is presented by Borg and Spong. We’ll consider how the new paradigm challenges both the religious right, with its fundamentalism and literalism, and the atheist left, currently in full voice through the efforts of today’s “Unholy Trinity”: Sam Harris of The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion, and Daniel Dennett of Breaking the Spell. Since they’ve now been joined by Christopher Hitchens in his God is not Great, I’m calling the four of them “a querulous quartet.”
As I say in Chapter 12, Christianity is now becoming engaged in a war with two fronts: on one the mainline churches confront the rapidly-growing forces of fundamentalism, which the press often treats as “the” spokesmen for Christianity today; on the second front, all persons who treasure their religious heritage, be they theists or panentheists, are confronted with the atheism espoused by Harris and Company—to say nothing of the secularism which pervades large parts of American and European life. We who sit in the pews of mainline churches need to start finding our roles in this two-front war. I’ve written this book to help us find the appropriate weapons.
Bonhoeffer and Buchenwald
Returning now to Bonhoeffer, just as we’ll meet him in the pages which follow, so I almost met him in real life.
As World War II was coming to an end, I found myself given an unlikely assignment: I was put in command of the just-liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp! Our troops arrived there on April 13; if we’d arrived just ten days earlier, I’d almost certainly have met Bonhoeffer. As a prisoner at the camp during February and March of 1945, he became a sort of pastor to some of the prisoners. Unfortunately, on April 3, he was taken from Buchenwald to the Flossenbürg Camp, where he was executed on April 9.
My two months at Buchenwald were certainly the most formative experience of my life. One little episode, on our first day there, dramatizes what I mean. Shortly after our arrival I took my belongings to the elegant little chalet where the Nazi camp commander, SS Obersturmbannführer Herman Pister, had lived. On entering his living room, the first thing I saw, sitting prominently on a side table, was his large leather-bound family Bible! Leafing through it, I came to the pages at the back where he’d faithfully-recorded all his family’s births, marriages, and deaths. Just as faithfully as he’d recorded, in the camp’s records, the names of the endless thousands of Jews and other “sub-humans” he’d dispatched by rail for extermination at Auschwitz or had shot at Buchenwald.
As I thought about the Buchenwald commander’s Bible, it seemed to me that a 1,700-year era was coming to an end. Christianity might have a future, but no longer as the state-sponsored, all-powerful Christendom, the reign begun by the emperor Constantine.
Although I’d been severely wounded on D-Day, June 6, 1944, then wounded again in the Battle of the Bulge, my physical wounds seemed nothing compared to the psychic wounds of Buchenwald.
Four thousand Russian prisoners of war made up the largest group of inmates at the camp. Talking to them, I learned that Stalin had a gulag of similar camps—and right then I decided to make Russia’s problems my own. Returning to Dartmouth after the war, I started a college Russian club and chose courses that would prepare me for a State Department career. While I got deflected from that goal, I remained an ongoing student of Russia’s history—and especially of her religious tradition.
That explains why I became so deeply involved with Berdyaev and Solovyov—and why Russia became this book’s Part II proving ground for all the ideas offered in Part I.
After Buchenwald and Auschwitz (and after the millions lost in two World Wars), it seemed clear to me and many others, both within and beyond the church, that we can no longer speak of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God. The idea of a Supreme Being up there, or out there, one who can intervene in history or in our personal lives, made no sense to me, just as it made no sense to Bonhoeffer.
If you read Elie Wiesel’s Night, a classic recollection of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, you’ll have some idea of the scene that greeted us in April 1945. Wiesel was soon put in our hospital, along with some 3,000 others, who were dying at the rate of over fifty a day. It’s likely that we saw each other then—when I made my daily visits to the hospital.
In any event, Wiesel and I finally met in November of 2002, when I gave him a copy of the camp’s map, one I found in Pister’s office. A picture of us together with that map is Picture 1 at my web site: http://clintgardnervt.googlepages.com (where you’ll also find this book’s complete text). A list of the other pictures at that site is provided at the beginning of this book’s Notes section.
Of course, I told Wiesel about my plans for this book—and also about a memoir I’d just finished concerning my Buchenwald experience. Soon I’ll post that memoir at my web site too, since Buchenwald lies behind everything I say here. In fact, I see this book as an attempt to answer a difficult question: How can we speak of God after the Holocaust, after Buchenwald and Auschwitz?
To continue, click Chapter 1 Discovering the Cross of Reality