Wow what a beautiful day, blog readers! I’m at the window here, watching cats watching whishing
leaves, armed with my NJOY electric cigarette, an ingenious contraption that
allows you to inhale nicotine-infused water vapor. I’m going to go for two posts today, half-timed by a trip to
Trader Joes. Perhaps even
more. Work is going to swallow
both days of my weekend whole, and then I think I’m done for my week, which is
a shame, as it’s gone by all too quickly, the coins too quickly spent and on what,
ultimately, I’m not sure.
—
Continuing from yesterday, I must admit I’m a bit dumbfounded
by all the possible conversational directions we might go in. Doubt is really not some haze, but
the acute awareness of an equally viable option – in poem-making, it’s a word
or line or whole draft that could equally well be a different word or line or
whole draft. In life, it’s a torn
heart. In a matter like this, the
doubt pertains to the fact that there is so much that deserves to be brought immediately
to the fore. I don’t know if
anyone would disagree if someone were to say that every crisis is a crisis of
limits.
First, my impulse in bringing up Tillich and Einstein was apologetic….One
thing Tillich asks is that theology be shown the same respect as one shows
physics, medicine, or any other discipline. When criticizing it, one should criticize the most advanced
and not some obsolete forms of the practice….In one sense, he’s absolutely
right. We don’t debunk medicine as
a field because Benjamin Rush, the Doctor Os of the late 18th
century, once prescribed his diarrhea-inducing “Thunderbolts” for everything from malaria to
nosebleeds. Nor do we say astronomy
is doomed to truthlessness because
it once assumed the sun to be just the bolder and brighter of our two orbiters. However, we have no problem attacking obsolete
forms of religious thought, and feeling justified in our attacks. Of course, it is a different
situation in religion. If certain doctors
were trying to bleed sinus infections out of us in the present time, we would
have grounds for attacking medicine as a viable field. Such a parallel situation can no doubt
be found in contemporary religious practice.
Ultimately, in Tilich’s religious thought, contemporary Athiesm
is put into the surprising position of serving what it believes itself to be attacking. This is what I was hoping
to show. Attacks on a distorted concept
of God, a conflation of the symbol for the “unknowable ground and abyss of
Being itself” cannot be strong enough, and are ultimately in service of
religion. This is because they’re
in the service of Truth. As Augustine puts it, “where I have found the Truth,
there I have found my God, the Truth itself.” Truth, as we all know, can only replace itself with
itself. You cannot remove a truth
without establishing truth. Thus,
it can only become itself more fully as if moves through time. If God is “veritas,” what can be said then?
Says Tillich: “Ultimate Concern is manifest in the realm of
knowledge as the passionate longing for ultimate reality. Therefore, if anyone rejects religion
in the name of the cognitive function of the human spirit, he rejects religion
in the name of religion.” These
are some of the most challenging words Tillich speaks to the contemporary
religious.
On a side note, Tillich’s imploration that theology be
treated the same as other fields presupposes that the field of religion is
dynamic. This is troubling to many
inside of religion for all kinds of reasons. Unfortunately, as it has related to scientific
inquiry, religion’s movement has had the tendency of resembling a continuous
retreat, from one untenable position to the next untenable position. (One can trace this to the Thomistic Dissolution.) Tillich warns against theologians and
religious leaders building their doctrines in the dark spots of scientific
research, and how such is ultimately at odds with religion. At the time he wrote his History of Christian Thought, and to
this day, science has not been able to conclude how organic matter arises from
inorganic manner. The danger is
that religion places a “being among beings” in the universe at this point,
where he reaches down with His fingertip aflame and puts life into the world,
only to eventually withdraw, as one does from a grill gone blazing out of
control. While such a
concept of God is exciting to the mind, and pleasing to our poetic faculties, where can it go next once science is able to get its thumb on how life came to
be? Perhaps religion places this
transcendent being at the instant before the Big Bang. Anywhere it places it, however, is
ultimately a misplacement, a misunderstanding of God, and a misunderstanding of
religion.