If religion can be de-mythologized and de-literalized and thereby reduced more to morality, there are many stories, doctrines, creeds, and rituals in the tradition that cannot any longer be used. They will have no more credibility because of their lack of real relevant morality than did the myths of ancient Greece when Plato objected to them for their lack of morality. The idea of “sin” might be retained as a violation of the mutual trust between myself and the other, or any detrimental affect I initiate on that potential mutual self-realization, although for many religious people it still carries too much of a heteronomous law, the metaphysical idea of violating God’s personal will. The real negatives of “sin,” the socially negative consequences, would no longer be thought to be remedied by some sacrifice to God, or even more easily by a mere reference to a sacrifice to God, or even more easily by a simple prayer to God for forgiveness or a group absolution during worship by a single prayer of a priest or pastor—but would rather have to be actually rectified by an actual restoration of the abused or ruptured human relations. Hegel may have been too much of an idealist for many people, but on the idea of reconciliation, he was quite realistic: human relations continue to need real reconciliation, as Prof. Mollie Farnell has pointed out.33 This real reconciliation should begin to change most religions fairly quickly, just by the taming of the incredible metaphysical and mythological claims and improvement of human relations.
To reconsider the wildly transcendent and personal claims made for God that are destructive of human relations would mean re-examining all talk of “incarnations” or God intervening in history on someone’s side against others. It would mean being able to abandon the idea that “God” as infinite became finite or incarnate in only one specific human being, whether occurring only once for all time as in Christianity, or multiple times in history as in the Boddhisattva’s thousands of incarnations in Buddhism, or in a particular location of this world, or that “God” becomes incarnate only when the world gets run down or overcome with evil (Vishnu’s role in Hinduism).34 The same would be true of the Islamic claims made that “God” transported a favored person from Arabia to Jerusalem and back, or into some particular level of paradise or heaven and back. These ramifications will become more evident in each future chapter.
It would include finally eliminating claims that “God” will not allow one to be hurt by handling any poisonous serpent or even in drinking strychnine. And what about the belief that this god would impart all the contents of a sacred book into a person’s mind when one simply asked for that help through ritual and then leafed quickly through the book? Or what about the apparently easy talk about God as one who commanded the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his son? Or God as intervening continually in nature, even keeping the planets and asteroids in their places? Or raising people from death? Or stilling a storm or causing a she-ass to speak as a human? Or returning bodily from some outer-spatial sphere in the form of a Jesus to reward a few select individuals with eternal life while punishing eternally everyone else?
Inasmuch as these old images, framed in very ancient terms, now used literally, paint God as capricious, childish, playing favorites, less compassionate, less noble, less ethical, less humane than many humans we know—they cannot be taken seriously, and many of them can hold no useful purposes even if not taken literally. Many of them serve only to reinforce a picture of a wholly transcendent deity (a “Wholly Other” as Rudolf Otto defined, Who as Otto painted, is fairly terrifying), which means a super-strong heteronomy or authoritarianism or the Absolute which, in turn, serves to create a fear and then unreasonable guilt. At best, they are only stories or images of ancient imagination to fascinate and entertain—like the ancient tale of the small child Jesus who kicked a playmate off the roof so he could go down to him and raise him from death, or, on another occasion made mud birdies like his playmates, but his were different because they took off in flight—but which have at best no positive power, little real entertaining power, and at worst possess considerable negative power in distracting one from her search for mutual discovery of her self in the self of another, even threatening to disrupt if not prevent any meaningful mutual human relating. This means we must find and observe the limits of claims, especially those about a transcendent, personal god who controls what He wants only when and how He wants, and at other times ignores the terrible tragedies, no matter the havoc it reeks on humanity and the cosmos. This is serious because of what an acceptance of an Absolute can do to a person when the person begins to realize it belonged only to a distant age and mentality. Hopefully, one can see the other options of finding one’s self in others, in mutual autonomous relations of trust, of mutual encouragements to “take the next step,” to find a larger “we,” to be less judgmental of those who differ, and to feel relief in being able to take responsibility for one’s own life and decisions with true innocence and openness to others, rather than tortured by an ideology that seems divisive at best, lethal at worst.
As Reverend Wilmot’s life revealed, certain types of “faith” probably need to be “lost” or terminated—before they destroy the most obvious and precious relations we have on earth. His “faith” in the invisible seemed to leave little room for faith as “trust” in the visible others who needed him. It was too rigid for him to redefine in any significant way, even if it killed him and devastated his family. Once he “lost his faith” in its incredible style, he found no replacement and no meaning for his life.
But the real, deep meanings of Reverend Wilmot’s life were his relationships with those who lived right under his roof as his own family, as well as the people in his parish. But ideas were more significant than people for him, and people, even his wife, could not deter his being self-destroyed by his ideas which he, for some reason, could not synthesize. Yet faith as mutual trust between humans is essential to life, to self-integrity, and to responsibility in community. Religions at their best, speak in the latter terms. But must they speak heteronomously in rigid absolutes, and take no blame for the casualties?
Ah, but this is only an Updike novel. Indeed, but the parallels to it have been experienced time and again in real human history. If one sees no burden in one’s religion, certainly I would not want to create some fear of what is not real. Yet, perhaps, just perhaps, one could be warned against the hetereonomous rigidity religion can take in one’s life. If most religion is actually inherited, it likely is mixed in with a culture in which some of the present cultural values compete with the religion’s values or unconsciously replace them. If the religion promises “more” life, but the person does not experience any more, then all the “goods” of this world end up being discounted in favor of some imagined life after death, or else one has to find “more” life presently in a different way. In such cases, it may be that only the shock of death of some family member or close friend reverses one’s priorities to see human relationships as most important. Does this mean abandoning religion’s rigidity or redefining or limiting its Absolute before it destroys our most important relationships?
NOTES
1. Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016), pp. xxiv–xxv.
2. John Updike, The Beauty of the Lilies (New York: Random House, 2013). Specific citations are given page numbers in parentheses in the text hereafter.
3. This is the primary problem with the “historical” method of the great nineteenth-century Christian theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, due to his Romanticist leanings and imagination. I analyze his approach in more detail in my upcoming Ethics and the Future of Religion: Redefining the Absolute.
4. This is what Susan Sontag warned against in her analysis of “interpretation.” Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), pp. 543–50.
5. See Laurence H. Tribe, Constitutional Choices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. vii–8, which gives a more meaningful brief hermeneutic for legal theory than mere “original” intent. He proposes a position in which one always realizes one’s present subjectivity, presuppositions, contingency, tentativeness of different possible choices, as well as their substantive effects of the possible choices one