Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Schlussbetrachtung

Kurzinhalt: What is it that alienates man from himself-the confession of God's presence in history and in man's consciousness or the suppression of him from history

Textausschnitt: 118c It is time for me to bring to a conclusion this lengthy, but still too brief, analysis of the problem of God, yesterday and today. At least one conclusion is warranted. It has two parts. (Fs)

119a First, it may be maintained with some justice that the modern problem of God, as raised by the godless man of the Academy, had a measure of diminishing continuity with the medieval problem as structured by Aquinas. Both problems were argued somehow in the same terms-existence and essence, knowledge and language. And for the disputants, the School and the Academy, the central question was the same-what God is. The issue was the intelligibility of God, as allied with the issue of the intelligibility of the world. In the post-modern age, however, this issue has become meaningless. If God is dead, as the post-modern postulate has it, why argue whether he be intelligible? Why argue whether the world be intelligible? Why, indeed, argue at all? The thing to do is one of two things-either change the world in the name of man's freedom to do so; or simply ex-sist the world in the name of man's freedom to do nothing else. (Fs)

119b Second, in the post-modern age the problem of God has come back in its biblical mode of position. I should not say that it has come back. I should say rather that it has come up from the depths where it always is-from the depths of history that lie far below the level of day-to-day events, and from the depths of man's heart that lie far below the level of his day-today thoughts. The problem of God today is not posited simply in the order of ideas and affirmation where the terms of argument are essence and existence. Its plane of position is the historical-existential order, where the terms of argument are presence or transparency and absence or opacity. This is the plane on which the problem was posited by the Lord God of Israel when he visited and redeemed his people. This, too, is the plane on which it has again been posited by the man of the Revolution and by the man of the Theater, who have come to visit, if not to redeem, us. (Fs)

120a We who say we believe in God have some reason to be grateful to these men, the heirs of modernity, who have managed to better modernity's instruction. They have done us the service of bringing to the surface, so that it is all but palpable, our own problem, the religious problem, the human problem. They have stated the issue with rather appalling clarity, in a phrase calculated to shock us into awareness of its urgency. They have said that God is dead. So the affirmations clash. For we say that God is living. (Fs) (notabene)
120b The issue is drawn. Which is the myth and which is the reality? Is the myth in Nietzsche or in the New Testament? Is it in Marx or in Moses? Is it in Sartre of Paris or in Paul of Tarsus? Is God dead, as the prophet of the post-modern age proclaimed, or is he still the living God of more ancient prophecy, immortal in his being as He Who Is, deathlessly faithful to his promise to be with us all the days, even to the end of the epoch within which both the modern and the post-modern ages represent only moments in a longer dialectic of history?

120c I might transpose the statement of the issue into an idiom that is at once contemporary and also reminiscently biblical. Is the presence of God constitutive of man's historical existence or destructive of it? In order that a man may exist, "stand forth" as a man in freedom and in human action, what is required-that he recognize and acknowledge the presence of God, as the Old and New Testaments say, or that he ignore and refuse God's presence, as the Revolution and the Theater say? In order that the people may exist, organized for action in history as a force to achieve an historical destiny, what is required-that they disown God or own themselves to be his people? What is it that alienates man from himself-the confession of God's presence in history and in man's consciousness or the suppression of him from history and the repression of him from consciousness? How is it that a man or a people comes to desist, to "stand down" from human and civilized rank, to fall away into absurdity and non-existence-through knowledge of God or through ignorance of him? (E07 (08.10.2007))