Sometimes, when I read the magazine I wonder whether I’m in the same world that spoke, in the early days of the Network, of religion as a human creation. I think of Karen Armstrong’s important book A History of God and I realize that the concept I had accepted as a child of a being so close and yet so far away, so immediate to me and yet everywhere, is one that has a history. This God was created by human beings on the basis of their experience, The history of that creation might have been different, in some ways ought to have been different. I recognize that when I use the word ‘‘God’’ I mean something different by it than many people mean who use itin a more realist way than I.
Yet for all that, I think of myself as a religious person, still able to make use of the word ‘‘God’’, and to conceptualize God in various ways that make it clear that God is a manner of speaking about human life, a way of adding an extra dimension, as it were, to human life. I recall Graham Shaw arguing, in his God in our Hanas, that the concept of God is a uniquely important one. He was responding to the criticism that he was an atheist and he argues, cogently in my view, that he is not, that for him the word ‘‘God’’ and the concept of God are uniquely precious and powerful, and can still do damage or good to people, and that we are responsible for what we do with this concept, how we use this word, and what we do with our religion and our religiousness too, Frank Walker quotes from Don Cupitt’s latest book After All, where Don says that ‘‘the historic task of religion, of embodying our values, witnessing to them, conserving them, setting them forth in symbols and securing their realization in human life, remains unchanged’’ (SoF 17, April 1994). I would argue that it cannot have this function unchanged if the religious language, which betokens transcendence, is emptied of significance. My understanding of non-realism is not that the word ‘‘God’’ (and other religious words) is meaningless, but that it means something different than we thought it meant. God is not a being ‘‘out there’, but a way of capturing a significant dimension of human being, a dimension that prompted the projection of something godlike.
If we become so careful that we have to empty religious services (worship) of religious terms, substituting bleeps for the religious words, then in what sense do we have a religion at all? The suggestion seems to be that, if religious language is non-realist, and if it is all ‘‘just’’ a human creation, then what we are left with is humanism.
I can see the attraction of this. However, humanism is usually understood as an alternative to religion, and this is in fact the way humanism tends to be understood in the recent pages of SoF magazine. The temptation seems to be to say that, since religion is a human creation, then there is no place for it at all. This is familiar teritory to the humanist. Humanists and Christians have been In some SoF articles I sense a growing insolence, a sense of ‘we know best’, of snooty rejection of the poor deluded bastards who still believe...
Surely there is room for someone who wants to be a Christian non-realist? arguing thus with each other for two centuries or so. But that was just shadow boxing. Once begin to see that realism in science is as much a myth as realism in religion, and the role of religious language takes on a different cast altogether.
Frank Walker calls Cupitt post-theological. And of course he is. But he is as much post-scientific as posttheological, and that is important for us to understand if we are going to understand what place religion and religious observance can appropriately play in the new non-realistic world in which we live. If language about God becomes ‘‘merely’’ mythical, in a sense in which our other linguistic efforts about life and the world are not mythical, then it seems to me that non-realism is about to take a wrong turn, firm in the conviction that something about the world is solid and comfortable and reliable even if our religious beliefs are not so.
That’s not critical non-realism at all, but a form of scientific hubris which Cupitt’s arguments go a long way towards demolishing, the hubris which once characterized theologians and the church, and later came to characterize scientists and their guilds. Time, says Cupitt, to do away with all these comforts and reassurances. The suggestion, in other words, seems to be that, since religion is a human creation, we can really do without religion. I’m not sure that was the original intent of the SoF Network. But by parity of reasoning, anyway, since science and art and - well, everything human - is a human creation, we should be able to do without it all and go back to being the noble savage. As I sce it, anyway, religion is both valuable and dangerous, and perhaps, as Aileen La Tourette suggests, valuable precisely because of the risk involved. It needs to be appropriated in a human way, a non-realist way.
When it is thought of as something that has come down from heaven, fully defined, it is narrow, intolerant, uncompromising and violent. That is worthwhile getting beyond. But when it is appropriated in a human and humanly accountable form, religion can be a foundation of freedom and dignity, a safeguard against the insolence of pretended knowledge.
In some of the articles and letters to SoF magazine I sense a growing insolence, a sense of ‘‘we know best’’, of snooty rejection of the poor deluded bastards who still believe such things - ‘‘can you believe it!’’. Non-realism was supposed, I thought, to be a way around this, a way to make it possible for people like me to take religion seriously. For if religious language (along with all other forms of language) is non-realist, then the religious project is, or should be, much enlarged.
I think that it is a much more complex task than seems to be acknowledged by a lot that I hear SoF Network members saying to each other in the pages of their magazine, and this saddens me. For if religion is a human creation, surely there is room within non-realist circles for someone who wants to be a Christian non-realist, and wants still to speak of God and Christ (both creations of the human imagination). Such a person would want to appropriate these concepts, of course, in a non-realist way, and this may go a long way to changing them in the way they are conventionally understood; but if the religious project can no longer be carried out after we acknowledge that it is a human creation, then that is something important that needs to be shown and said, and it will change the character of SoF too.
In a recent SoF article the suggestion is made that Bishop John Spong is as near as you get to non-realism this side of the Atlantic. Possibly. But the point that impresses me most about Spong’s contribution to the religious debate is the deep sense of spiritual reality that he discerns beneath the realism of most Christian religion. In other words, he wants to reconstruct the religion so that it can be a real gateway to transcendence for contemporary people. And surely that is at least one of the things religion is meant to be.
It seems to me, despite the claim that we may need a new story (sce Adam Thompson in SoF 17), that there is life in a number of the old stories that are still being told, and not only the Christian ones. What Spong does is to provide new ways of telling the Christian stories so that, at the same time that it is made very clear that they are human stories, they still have power to move us. And if religion as a human creation can no longer do this, then is it religion, after all?
Eric MacDonald is Rector of Holy Trinity Parish, Wilmot, P.O Box 245, Middleton, N.S. BOS 1PO, USA.