Christianity
God and Christ: Secular Christianity, Morals and the Kingdom Vision
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 11 January 2010
Relief of the human condition is what we must be doing. You cannot really define the meaning of human life other than to find some particular point at which the relief of the sorrows of the human condition is your business.W Hamilton
Secular
Through most of recorded history men have feared change and longed for permanence. However, change has begun to displace both stability and permanence as the higher good. It sets us off from men in most of recorded history. Our age differs from how men have seen themselves from the beginnings of time until recently. Never before have we been so sensitive to the ways we are shaped by the economic, social, psychological, and political environment. These new ways of thinking so intimately associated with the scientific, technological, and educational explosions of our time are the core of secularity.
Lloyd Geering (Christian Faith at the Crossroads, 2001) reviews the recent history of Christianity, saying “secularization” describes best what has been happening since the Enlightenment. It is taken to mean a turn away from religion—in the west, from Christianity:
By secularization we mean the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.Peter Berger
Religion involves the institutionalization of claims of the divine or supernatural, while the secular is everyday culture and the natural. This definition excludes expressions like “secular priests” and “secular Christianity” as self contradictory. Though it is a legitimate meaning of secularization, it has a more subtle and more original meaning. In the late medieval context secular did not mean “antireligion” but simply “not in a religious context”. At that time, “secularization” meant the process by which a “religious” was allowed by the Church to leave a monastic order to follow their Christian vocation among the “nonreligious”. Obviously, the parish priest was not a “nonreligious”, but he lived and worked in the community, not in a monastery, so he was a “secular” priest.
In medieval times, religious people tended to despise human affairs in favour of meditating on God and the afterlife. If Christ did not condemn meditation, he did not teach that other people and their troubles should be ignored in favour of it! From this, the meaning of “secular” is effectively “this worldly” and its opposite is “other worldly”. W B Hodgson in 1850 said:
Secular… should never have come to mean the opposite of religious. The fact that something may be described as secular does not preclude it from also being religious. Thus rightly considered the secular is religious in its tendency and issue, the religious is secular in its application and practical development.
Geering says the word “secularism” first appeared in The Reasoner, 25 June, 1851. Readers were told it had to do with things that “can be tested in this life”. So secularization is a change of emphasis from “other worldliness” towards “this worldliness”, a focusing of our attention on this world and away from an imagined other world. Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City wrote:
Secularization is man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time.
The British secularist, G J Holyoake (The Origin and Nature of Secularism, 1896) explained that the word “secularist” meant a way of thinking, and Ernest Rénan, author of the well known The Life of Jesus, said why secularization is not necessarily antireligious:
Whether one is pleased or not, the supernatural is disappearing from the world: only people not of this age have faith in it. Does this mean that religion must crash simultaneously? Indeed not. Religion is necessary. The day when it disappears the very heart of humanity will dry up. Religion is as eternal as poetry, as love. It will survive the demolition of all illusions… Under some form or other, faith will express the transcendent value of life.E Rénan, 1868
“Faith will express the transcendent value of life”—this life, because it must do, or it is worthless. René Girard (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, 1961) says denial of God does not eliminate transcendency but diverts it from the au-delá, that which is the supernatural, or in an imaginary spiritual life, to the en-decá, that which is natural, or in this material life.
The point for secular Christianity is that Christians are free to think about and address the effects of secularization on religion. Christians have to see that profound commitments can be undertaken without absolute claims being upheld. We have to learn to live with relativity because God cannot be proved and faith in an unknown quantity can only be valuable when it appears in reality as humanism.
It leaves the future of religion open. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, shows how conversion to Christianity has “frequently been assisted by the belief of converts that they are acquiring not just a means of other worldly salvation, but a new and more powerful magic”. Sole Fide is belief in religious faith as a magic charm. Not surprisingly, traditional Christianity has failed, but it is not what the man it is named after meant anyway, and what he taught remains sensible as practical social morality. Christians must face the fact that the whole purpose of the teaching of Christ was practical—secular. Absolutes are means to practical improvements or they are nothing. Paul changed the emphasis from practical care and help for others to self obsession about personal salvation through mystical concepts meant to be psychological ways of staying strong while enduring the hardship incumbent on Christians for love of others.
Thinking of and seeing our world secularly, we secularize it. The Enlightenment reacted against the medieval tendency to ignore Christ’s life and teaching for Paul’s mysticism, and secularization appeared as humanism. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us “the movement towards secularization has been in progress during the entire course of modern history”. Secularism is inseparably connected with how we experience, act in, and give shape to our world—secularization.
God is Dead
Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have him in the street.Herman Melville
Nietzsche pronounced that “God is dead!”. For believers in God, He cannot die. What can die is the utility of the notion of God. Few of our rulers believe in God, if they ever did, and fewer still intelligent people believe in Him anymore. God used to be a useful concept for rulers, but the utility of the concept is getting marginal. For an increasing number of people, it is no longer possible to think about, or believe in, a transcendent God who acts in human history. Christianity will have to survive, if it does, without him.
Nietzsche raised his cry on behalf of a new and emancipated man who had moved beyond the necessity for the cosmic crutches which measured the steps of ordinary men, while hobbling the feet of the bold and setting blinders on their vision. Nietzsche proclaimed the necessity for a new scale of values, a new measure of worth, to replace, rather than to fulfill, the goals and meaning of the now dead Christian tradition.Emerson W Shideler
Already in the 1960s, some prominent Christians thinkers were agreeing with Nietzsche. Among them were Thomas J J Altizer of Atlanta’s Methodist school at Emory University, Paul van Buren, a professor and Episcopal minister at Temple University, William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and Gabriel Vahanian of Syracuse University. In various ways, these theologians tried to define a Christianity without a God:
The death of God is a historical event. God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence.Thomas J J Altizer
I think I became one of the most hated men in America. Murder threats were almost commonplace, savage assaults upon me were widely published, and the churches were seemingly possessed by a fury against me.Thomas J J Altizer
Christian love, not Christ’s! Besides Nietzsche, among the sources of this enlightenment were:
- Sören Kierkegaard saw organized Christianity as a kind of idolatry that has obscured the real message of the Gospel behind irrelevant and outdated cultural forms.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a Nazi prison cell of the need for the church to develop “a nonreligious interpretation of Biblical concepts”, and of a secular world that no longer finds God necessary as a hypothesis to explain the sun and stars or as an answer to man’s anxiety. He mixed together Barth and Niebuhr. Barth was not interested in the historical Jesus, Niebuhr rejected social betterment as a substitute for the kingdom of heaven. Christologically, Bonhoeffer reversed both, citing Christ as the exemplar of how to deal with the social and political problems of humanity—the human condition.
What is meant by the death of God? One reply is Bonhoeffer’s in one of his prison letters. He said our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation vis à vis God. God is teaching us that we must live without him. He has forsaken us (Mark 15:34) because we are to stand on our own two feet without depending on him constantly. God used the cross to announce that he was leaving, having incarnated to show how He meant us to live. Yet human religiosity refused to accept the message, and indeed turned it back on itself via Paul, so we still look in distress to God to redeem us in the world, even though He has shown us how to redeem ourselves.
The views of the chief proponents of the death of God were summarised in the 60s in Time magazine:
- Altizer saw the death of God as an historical event, as if God really did die on the cross. Humanity had lost the sense of the sacred that was so vivid in the medieval world. Instead of trying to put God back into human life, the Christian should welcome the total secularization of the modern world, because it is only in the midst of the radically profane that man will again be able to recapture an understanding of the sacred. The collapse of Christendom and the onset of a secular world without God are necessary preludes to the rediscovery of the sacred. The death of God is essentially a redemptive act.
- Paul van Buren thought any talk of God, and therefore the prospect of his reappearance, was philosophically meaningless. Trained in the philosophical method of linguistic analysis, he denied the objective truth of statements about a God for whom no sensory verification is possible and so could not be verified empirically. With talk of the transcendent ruled out, all theology became Christology, so Van Buren sought a belief in ethical behavior as exemplified by Christ. He aimed to rephrase the Christian doctrine of man and to examine “the human imagination as a central theological category—to what extent religion was in someone’s imagination, and how important imagination is for all aspects of his life”.
- William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester argued that the theologian today has neither faith nor hope—only love is left. He concluded by affirming, not the historical Jesus, but the Christ “bringing the Kingdom, the new age, here and now into the midst of ordinary lives” who shows us a “way to be human”, who establishes a bond of comradeship, who draws us out of our private lives into the world, who provides us with a place to stand.
What he was is hidden, what he proclaimed, offered, defined, is not.
Awareness of God’s death summons Christians all the more to follow Jesus as the exemplar and paradigm of morals and conduct, and especially his commitment to the love and service of his fellow man, something that Christians have to do to be Christian—but mostly do not! Hamilton defined Christ as “a place to be”, meaning that the example of Christ required Christians to do what they imagined Christ would do. So, the place of Christ today is in the midst of struggles for justice and equality, standing up firmly against the constant use of warfare, opposing corruption at every level, but especially among those we have to trust.In the time of the death of God, we have a place to be. It is not before an altar, it is in the world, in the city, with both the needy neighbor and the enemy.
- Vahanian believed that God, if there is one, is known to humanity only in terms of human culture, and thus is basically an idol, the product of the encounter between primitive Christianity and Greek philosophy:
Theologically speaking, any concept of God can only be an approximation. Only God can have a concept about God.
The church’s idol is no longer relevant to secular culture and has been either neutralized by overexposure or rejected entirely. God is dead, and will remain so until the church becomes secular enough in structure and thought to proclaim him anew in ways that will fulfil the cultural needs of the times. Since the spirit of the times is irretrievably secular, with all notions of transcendence and otherworldliness rejected, Vahanian worked toward a historical explanation of how secularization came about.
Talk about “the heavenly Father” refers to another world, for which we have no empirical evidence it exists, and none that it ever did, and it all sounds empty. Scientists do not invoke God to explain any scientific observation. Scientific explanations are quantitative and impersonal, restricted to that which can be studied, tested, experimented with as elements of the empirical situation. As God is undetectable, being transcendental and beyond experience, though He is presumed to act somehow within or upon a situation, He is necessarily outside the scope of science. Nothing is seen or noticed that could be God, yet the believer insists God is acting. Science demurs. It deduces that God is imaginary.
If God has the features of something merely imaginary, statements of other presumed qualities, characteristics and acts of God are simply meaningless. All have to be assumed for no reason, and whatever they might be, they leave the situation just as it was before these features were imagined, and do not alter the empirical situation. In short, if the whole notion of God were abandoned, the situation would remain just as it was when God was presumed to act! Whatever caused the phenomenon being observed would remain unaltered, and so the observations would remain unaltered. What science hypothesizes must be necessary and sufficient to prescribe the phenomenon, or some such hypothesis is forthcoming as it has in every gap presumed for God in the past. Science has Nature, not God before it, and that is what it investigates. God is superfluous.
Even in ordinary everyday experience, God is now superfluous. If we are worried about our dependents when we die, we can rely on our relatives and friends, as people have always done, or we can today buy life insurance that will provide them with some income. Meanwhile, we rely on people trained in medicine to help to keep us alive when we get ill. Our lives are no longer in the hands of God. We can speak to our friends and relatives, though they be miles away, or even on the other side of the world, and in odd instances even outside the world! God had nothing to do with these miracles.
For Freud, “religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization”. Belief is inherently different from knowledge, because it does not rely on proof. Religious doctrines cannot be proved, so religion is illusion, indeed, some are so improbable and contrary to what we know about the world, they seem like delusions. The reality of them is eminently questionable—they can neither be proved, nor be refuted—so it is wrong to make anyone think them true, to believe in them. Belief is the source of society’s intellectual poverty.
In The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, Van Buren’s central topic is the empirical content of the gospel that remains when it is divorced from its irrelevant and objectionable supernaturalism. The meaning of the gospel must be stated without appealing to factors beyond the reach of empirical investigation—God. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism in his Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, is “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.
The kind of psychological help God used to give people, in their insecure lives, is provided in these technical ways today. God is unnecessary now, if He was ever necessary. What is necessary is that people behave properly towards their fellow humans in society. If they do not, society becomes intolerable, and cannot be sustained without force, and ultimately a revolution against the oppression. Morals not God give us the social security we need, and morals have been gradually eroded because our economic system teaches a different morality from that required in society. Christ’s teaching is primarily moral, God being a psychological crutch to help keep us moral. So Christ’s message is essentially humanistic.
God is a myth, so his death necessarily is, but myths express metaphorical truths. They express succinctly particular meanings, particular wisdom, to guide our lives. God is a metaphorical expression of the human community, originally a small one, the clan or tribe. God is superhuman because the tribe, with its own particular culture, is superhuman. People were born into a tribe, it taught them everything they knew, it offered them security, it provided them with companionship, and co-operation, eventually they died in the same tribe, so it lived on when the individual died. The person was dependent on the tribe, and they were therefore dependent on the tribe’s personification, God. They gathered with the tribe to worship its God, meeting together to reinforce their commitment to the tribe and its God. Yet there is no God. It is the tribe elevated in the imagination and thereafter notionally doing what the tribe did.
Sometimes myths die. The tribe dies by conquest or by voluntarily assimilating to a larger community for added security. The old myths are redundant, and new ones have to be adopted by a ritual rebirth into the new tribe. The old God is dead, or is made into a minor God in the new God’s court, and all his myths no longer stand for any community. Gods die.
If no God is to be found apart from Jesus, and if his Father can only be found in him, the New Testament gives its answer to the question about God by pointing to a man—Jesus, called Christ. The reason for confining our knowledge of God to Jesus is that in him we have data that are ostensibly empirical. Whatever men were looking for in looking for God is to be found by finding Christ. So, the empirical content of the gospel is the exemplary life and teaching of Christ. Questions about God are only usefully answered in the life of Christ. Not that the New Testament writers, or even Christ Himself knew this or were intentionally saying it.
The intention of Christ and the apostles was to instruct their followers in a practical ethic, and, in those days, they all saw the source of the ethic they were teaching as being God. They were faced by their own intellectual legacy, the general beliefs of their time and place—first century Judaea—where God was central to their world view, just as science, technology, freedom and democracy are to ours. God might have seemed strangely whimsical, but He was their source of motivation and righteousness.
Jesus was their righteous teacher, who taught them what was right and did what was right for them. By adding that Jesus was the archangel Michael, and the archangel Michael was an aspect of God, the first Christians aimed to teach their successors to live like God. Paul spoiled Christ as a good example by equating him with God. So the aim of showing Christians they should live lives of Christ ended up in the worshiping of Jesus as God, and not living lives of Christ because it was too hard to expect mortals to live the lives of Gods.
Christ, and Jews of the day, did not think it was impossible. He told them “You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48), and he and the Jews of the day knew God’s instructions to Moses to tell the Israelites “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord Thy God, am holy” (Lev 19:2). It was an aspiration to live by, not to be idly dismissed as Christians quickly did.
The Christian excuse for emphasizing faith, and not good works as they should, is that it does not require any effort—no attempt at perfection or holiness—to be saved, merely a profession of faith, and regular masses to prove it. The rest of the time do as you wish, but, if you are a Catholic, confess your sins occasionally to give the celibate priest a thrill. Hardly any Christians, even ministers, try to be perfect, so what sort of example are they to a generality taught to be greedy and selfish to get on in capitalist society. Capitalism and Christianity are incompatible. You cannot give all you have to the poor and get rich!
Even some traditional Protestant thinkers thought the new theology had merit. Gordon Kaufman of the Harvard Divinity School thought a re-examination of the doctrine of God was long overdue. Cosidering the prospect of nuclear holocaust, Kaufman had to dispense with divine Providence. God might not will nuclear destruction, yet can Christians rely on His not intervening in history to prevent it? If not, human beings will have to determine their own destiny. Christians who believe in Providence would be hard pressed to accept this idea of God without thinking that God, the God of Providence, had in some sense died.
Because of what is going on in Christianity and Islam, people with Gods are dangerous. And one of the things you can do to help your brothers and sisters is to take Gods away from people so their weapons won’t be quite so sharp as they are with monotheism.W Hamilton
Harvard’s Harvey Cox concluded his book The Secular City with the idea that Christianity may have to stop talking about God for a while—effectively what Christians wrote about God was meaningless:
Is it the loss of the experience of God, the loss of the existence of God in Christianity, or the lack of adequate language to express God today?
The critics complained that, if faith is stripped of all the mysticism surrounding the deity, little was left of religion. It rather proves that it was the mysticism that these believers wanted in religion, not the ethics. Accordingly, their main argument was that the death of God thinkers reduced Christianity to just another kind of humanism with a Jesus inspired morality. Don Cupitt justified Christianity becoming a form of humanism as implicit in the metaphor of God coming down to earth as Christ. Read traditionally, by this act God had directed His emphasis away from the mystical and placed it four square on to human shoulders. Sadly Christians since Paul have placed their emphasis back on to the mystical, quite contrary to the proper reading of the myth. Daniel Day Williams taunted the movement with the aphorism:
There is no God, and Jesus is his only begotten son.
It illustrates the inability of many Christians to produce cogent arguments, even when they are professors of religion. It is easier to make cheap jokes over serious matters for the benefit of their unwashed congregations. Secular Christianity sees Christ not as a son of a dead God but as a social moralist, the equivalent of a Confucius. The death of God ministers simply replied:
If Jesus can wonder about being forsaken by God, are we to be blamed if we wonder?William Hamilton
Secular Christianity
Secular Christianity is of deep concern for the future of humanity. The concern is for the survival of men and of our sick, secular world. Theologians and thinkers, both lay and professional, of almost every branch of the Christian tradition, have periodically explored secular Christianity. Paul van Buren (1970) said unless a secular christianity successfully emerges, Christianity is unlikely to be of any help in the secular world. We read on the internet:
Nietzsche was right that secular Christianity or Christianity without Christ is unsustainable…
Indeed, secular Christianity might be unsustainable as Nietzsche said, but secular Christianity cannot be Christianity without Christ, can it? If it is without Christ it cannot be Christianity. Secular Christianity is Christianity without God. Despite two millennia of traditional Christianity, humanity is in dire straits and desperately needs what secular Christianity has to offer—the practical application of care and compassion from each human to all others.
Where we are going and what is to become of us is not a matter of Providence, fate, or luck, but of what we do. We now see ourselves as active makers of our lives and world. It is up to us, we are responsible. If we pollute our world beyond the point of human survival, if we over populate the world beyond the point of sustaining life, if we blow it up into atomic dust, we will have done it, it will be our own fault. We could have done otherwise. When Christians come to think they are responsible for what they are and do, and do not blame their own faults and failings on to Providence, when they begin to act as Christs in this world, then we have secular Christianity.
Christianity, in common with some other mass religions, posits another world which God might allow Christians to enter after death subject to His judgement of how well they have done His will. The other religions have a somewhat different outlook, and conditions, and even Christians differ in some repects. All these differences have offered Christians endless chances to evade their duty to their God undertaken by their commitment to Christian belief. They end up quibbling about imponderables impossible to prove one way or the other instead of being Christians as Christ directed them.
Colin Williams sees the difference between traditional Christianity and secular Christianity as “thinking from below” rather than “thinking from above”—it amounts to accepting that God has given His revelation, and now it is up to Christians to act on it, instead of constantly making vain appeals to God to do it for them. He cites Luke 7:22, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear”, noting that these things have happened through human effort on behalf of the blind, lame, lepers and deaf and not through any additional interventions by God. We know what to do. The problem is doing it, and doing it for everyone, not just our best friends, relatives and compatriots.
Christians are lagging behind in the cultural shift. Traditional Christianity has always been associated with a conservative attitude, resistant to change. The shift necessary is not an easy one for Christians to make. Secular Christianity is a different Christianity from that which has gone before. Christians have been wrong—quite obviously wrong—in thinking that God needs to be worshipped. They have been wrong in ignoring Christ’s life and teaching in favour of his deification. They are wrong in relying on the magical effect of simple unquestioning belief instead of actually doing anything to fulfil Christ’s teachings. They are wrong in thinking that God will instruct them on how to be Christians, demonstrate it Himself by appearing on earth and showing people how to behave towards others, only to be constantly expected to do it all Himself. All of this is obvious in fact, but Christians have a vested interest in believing Paul—it is a lot easier just to believe you are saved for believing it!
Traditional Christians, observing the way Christianity has changed almost from the moment that Christ breathed his last, justify the changes from what they consider to be God’s own words, spoken from His own lips, the lips He assumed when He came to earth in human form, by saying Christianity is maturing! They treat the original words of God as the first words of a child, and since then the message has matured with age. The very words of their God are now dismissed by traditional Christians, Pauline Christians, as being an echo “of what loudly was proclaimed in the religious childhood of Christendom”. The fact is that in all logic, if Christ was God, then any changes to his words made since he died, are a corruption of what God came to earth to teach. Paul corrupted God’s own words, and so have most theologians since. We have to admit that the words of Christ reported in the gospels were written down half a century after Christ died, so they already have a gloss of the first changes to Christ’s teaching, and several of them are obvious. We now have a check on what Christ taught because his life was that of an Essene, and we know what Essenes taught from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Much of it confirms the gospel teachings.
Christianity, throughout almost its entire history and all the changes and transformations it has undergone, has accepted, and refined the priority of values established by Paul, not Christ, who emphasized secular works sustained, pricked and prodded along through faith. As Van Buren put it, Christianity valued the eternal over the temporal, permanence above change, unity over plurality, the universal above the particular, and the absolute above the relative. Christianity saw a believer’s role as passive, as accepting that which was decreed from eternity as unchanging and unchangeable. Can Christianity change to bring about that which Christ envisoned—the kingdom of heaven on earth? Or must it continue in the wrong direction it has been sent in since its simple practical tenets were hijacked by Paul into perpetuating the mysticism of the ancient religions of the dying and rising gods?
Secularity was basic to the origins of the Christianity. Harvey Cox, in The Secular City presented secularization as coming directly from the bible. Christianity has been changing through its history. When one thinks of the original revolution against Christianity of S Paul which horrified the Jerusalem Church which was the direct inheritance of Christ and was run by James, described as “the brother of the Lord”, or S Augustine’s subsequent changes, or later Aristotelian, Renaissance, Kantian, Hegelian, or Existentialist transformations of Christianity, the secular form of Christianity, though seeming outrageously novel, is actually more original. The shift is not an easy one to make because this accumulation of previous changes has altered Christianity so fundamentally from the original that it will be hard for traditional Christians to accept it.
Though some have considered the possiblity of a compromise Christianity, a hybrid of the original with its much altered descendent, it simply will not do. It posits a few token changes towards secularity so that Christians can continue much as they have been doing. Yet the two approaches are incompatible. Either God is making a difference in the world and rewarding Christians for doing nothing, or God has told Christians what they must do, and they now have to get on with doing it, or not, as they choose. Efforts to turn away the thrust of the argument only succeed to the extent that Christians are willing to turn their backs on the secular shift. As Paul van Buren put it, Christians just cannot stand still in a revolving door. They either must not enter it, or they must step in and pass through it.
Secular Christianity and Ethics
Christians in the US are fond of boasting the sociological finding that some 90 percent of Americans are Christians. At the same time they whine on about secularization, while repeatedly voting into power Christians who can hardly be distinguished from devils, their Christianity being so thin, incoherent, cruel and different from the teachings of Christ. Far from being secular, the US is and has been for some time, in the grip of its rabidly Pauline Christian minority, a block of 60 million, mainly protestant fundamentalists who control the electoral system. Obama, is barracked by Christians for not attending church on Christmas day. Despite its vaunted Christian majority, most Americans will not have done either, and a lot of evangelical pastors will have spent quality time over Christmas with their mistresses.
The US is not the Secular City, and each day, in its Byzantine corruption and injustice, it comes closer to total collapse. The religiosity of Americans brings no detectable wane of injustice, racism, imperialism, self-interest, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry. How can it be that a country devoted to the entirely admirable practical morality of loving each other can be so corrupt, and decadent? Could it be that their Christianity does not work, that their Christianity could hardly be worse if it had been devised by the devil—that proper Christianity has been bypassed, and actual Christianity is a secular morality that no Christians are in the least bothered about?
In certain countries in the world a good dose of secularism would break the repressive holds certain state ratified religions have over people’s lives.Graham Ward, True Religion, 2003
A secular world needs guides for conduct, and a social vision that can challenge the status quo and stir us to work for a world better than the one we have. Christianity, understood in terms of devotion to an unchanging, eternal, universal, and absolute unity, succeeded in calling man to a passive role of preserving a static, unchanging, eternal, and absolutely conservative world. Secular Christianity is a source of ethical insight and motivation in a secular age by calling men to follow the actual deeds that Christ recommended to bring about the kingdom of heaven—social righteousness, being caring to other people in their distress and suffering, because when you too are distressed someone will be at hand to be merciful and compassionate to you in return. The kingdom of heaven is what we get when everyone does the same, when it is expressed utterly instinctively.
Most ordinary people are inclined to act in that way naturally, but the mores of capitalist society are diametrically opposite, and those are the norms everyone is fed these days. Thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s frst woman Prime Minister declared society dead. Ever since then everyone has been intent on killing it off. Secular Christianity is to provide secular people with ethical insights in a secular age. Its only purpose is to preserve society, for society does indeed die when greed gets the better of lovingkindness. That was what Christ was teaching—it was his secular message.
Professor R B Braithwaite (the Eddington Memorial Lecture of 1955, An Empiricist’s View of Religious Belief) argued that Christianity may be understood by a contemporary empiricist as a way of life, wherein faith expresses the intention of living according to a morality of agapé—love. Most critics argue that Braithwaite reduced Christianity to morals, dispensing with any need to believe in the existence and activity of a personal creator God. Traditional Christians say their faith is a moral commitment—though many fail to show it, if it is so—but it is also an affirmation about what is so, about the nature and mechanics of the world—it is made and sustained in motion by God.
The trouble about committing the morality of Christ to his or any other view of what is so, is that it is subject to so many different opinions that it promotes division among people, and evasion of Christ’s morality by Christians who find discipleship too hard. It is the morality that is important, not any particular views of the world. And morality as well as religion commits us to beliefs about what is so. Anyone who takes a moral stand is committed by it to the belief that it makes sense to speak of morality. Moral action cannot be an utterly vain pursuit. Faith can.
Faith and Philosophy are air, but events are brass.Herman Melville, Pierre
Secular Christianity can only be of service to the world as a moral enterprise, a matter of how people shape their lives and their world. A moral system must help us to see such a matter more clearly and to help us to decide whether we ought to make such a judgment. The moral question is “what ought I to do?”. A moral principle is that I should do so and so. If we are all selfish and greedy, as we are taught by the necessity to support our economic system, then morals have no point at all.
A system in which we are all fighting for priority of wealth and power requires us to be brutal in asserting our own wants and desires, and utterly callous towards the needs of others, except in so far as we can profit from them. Medicine in the US has no moral imperative. It exists for profit, and only a relatively small part of it is based on Christian love. And who opposes any change to it? The horde of Republican voting fundamentalist Christians who have in actuality rejected Christ. The judgment that it is American society that is sick—that its priorities are wrong and antiChristian—is surely a moral judgment.
“God is love” summarizes Christ’s message, but it has to be clearly seen as meaningless outside of a social context, and acted upon within society. It cannot be fobbed off as most people, even professed Christians, and even many clerics do. The imagery of the kingdom is a social vision of what human life could be like and what the world could become. It is the social outcome of the personal duty to love other people.
The Kingdom of Heaven as a Social Vision
The central image for a secular Christianity is that of the kingdom, the image of human life to come—here, in this world! Secular Christianity offers to a secular society needing direction the social vision of a world of righteousness, justice, and love, which depends on our active and imaginative efforts for its creation—the vision of a world in which change and plurality are valued, and Christian life then is living so as to realize that social vision:
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Secular Christianity working for social change and seeking to transform the style of human life naturally depends on the life and teaching of Christ as the primary source of its social vision, but not the only one. The issues which confront us today are moral ones—the style of life, the shape and functioning of our institutions, the direction of foreign affairs, the priorities of our politics, the justification of war. A Christianity understanding itself primarily as a moral affair, as Christ saw it, might save us all in a sick world.
“Moral” is an adjective applied to questions, judgments and actions in human life, and “ethics” is the noun for study of these moral matters—for reflecting upon moral issues. As secular Christianity is concerned with morals and not with being or God, ethics replaces theology as secular Christianity’s philosophy. The ethical issue of the decision concerning a secular Christianity is the choice for Christians between their own past and a future for their children among everyone else in the world.
Social ethics is secular Christianity’s primary reflective activity, analyzing the state of society and the quality of human life against its vision, seeking strategies to bring the present world into closer conformity with the world of the vision, and doing it. Each advance towards the vision would itself become subject to new criticism in the light of that vision—a dialectic advance. So the revolution in which a secular Christianity would be engaged would be permanent, constant, or ever renewed.
Secular Christianity with the kingdom as its social vision is frankly a revolutionary movement, and nothing signifies it more than the death of Christ as a social revolutionary protesting against the oppressive imperialism of Rome over its subject people. The death on the cross is a condemnation of a hard and cruel society unresponsive to people’s needs, a political challenge, a revolt against every establishment, a call to political and social risk, and not just to our own immediate circumstances. After all, Christ was crucified according to Roman law, for the Romans were the policemen of the world at the time.
With its eye on the vision, the word of a secular Christianity about, for, and to the world would be “permanent revolution”. Christians must never be tempted to identify some modest accomplishment with the kingdom itself, nor turn to some other story to find an easier vision, nor one more agreeable to some particular conditions or culture, as it did with Paul the apostle and his offer of salvation by faith alone, as many modern Christians see it.
Secular Christianity will tell and retell Christ’s story whenever Christians meet together, but the emphasis must be on the morals and the life Christ led, an active life ultimately sacrificed in service to others. A gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is a reference to his manner towards others, not how he lived. Christ was far from passive, he was an active man. Luke was a follower of Paul, and Luke 17:20, placing the kingdom within us, cannot be read in a passive, do nothing, way. The kingdom exists as the earthly vision of those faithful to Christ’s commands to do something to achieve it.
The kingdom is a symbol or vision of a situation on earth, not a projection in the clouds. Secular Christianity can give up fighting for the existence of God—those who wish to believe in God can continue believing, but will have no interest in whether their belief is shared by others who share the hope of the kingdom, a constantly improving society for everyone. Secular Christians concentrate on morality as the route to the kingdom, and working like Christ to serve it, an ideal in which no one is not loved, no one is maltreated except by society itself justly for failing in their moral duty.
Traditional critics told their flocks secular Christianity was the easy way out—it was religion without sacrifice! The sacrifice they were concerned about was the sacrifice of the naïve lambs’ dollar bills on the platter in the church collection. One Christian blogger, defending traditional Christianity against the moral variety, writes:
When your religion says “whatever” on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it’s a short step to deciding that one of the things you don’t want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.
Obviously this man, a clergyman and Christian teacher, is more concerned with people being absent from church than the fulfilling of Christ’s real purpose. The secular approach to Christianity is far from the easy way out as traditionalists claim. The reverse is true. The easy way out is attending Church occasionally to worship God, without acting like Christ!
Secular Christianity only says “whatever” to the dud parts of Christianity, the parts that odious clergymen have persuaded people is the whole point of religion—God and His worship. That is only love of self, not love of God. Jesus was a wise teacher, but not just another one because he was the Christian wise teacher, and Christians use his name because they claim to follow his teaching. In fact they follow the teaching of another man, Paul, the apostle, who changed Christ’s teaching into belief in Christ himself as a redeeming dying and rising God, an ancient and popular idea.
Evangelizing in Secular Christianity is not recruiting them to your church to relieve you of a little of the burden of keeping the pulpit parasite. It is teaching people the importance of, and need for, moral behaviour. Traditional Christianity simply tells them they should be Christians to be “saved”, a purely selfish reason, when Christ taught the exact opposite—people were to be unselfish, and that is what saved them. Lovingkindness to others, like the Good Samaritan, is a Christian duty, not an option. Christ knew and said that his way was hard. Actually loving other people, even the lowest, and even your enemies is hard, but that is the way to the kingdom of heaven. If it is too hard for many Christians, they are deluded to think they are saved in any way by giving money to their church and pastor.
The King is Dead, Long Live the King
The Christian God is a metaphorical God—Christ—not the old supernatural being, Yehouah. Yehouah died at the crucifixion because His old ineffective myths had been replaced by new ones, a purer moral way of living taught by Christ. Jesus lives metaphorically, resurrected because he lives in the moral code he taught living on in those who follow it, putatively the people called Christians. Christ died cruelly at the hands of his fellow human beings precisely to show that it was inhuman and ungodly to kill people. Christ had said it—every person alive was him—a cruel deed to anyone was a cruel deed to him, and a good deed to anyone was a good deed to him. He stood for the totality of the human tribe, so he was its metaphorical God.
The king is dead, long live the king, is the meaning of the myth of the crucifixion and the resurrection. An old Jewish national God died and a universal God of love was resurrected. But Christ was only resurrected if Christians act like him as he told them. They failed. So Christ was never resurrected, or only briefly. Secular Christianity is the final attempt to resurrect Christ—the moral teacher showing and telling us how to behave to live in a kingdom of heaven. Christians preferred to live in a kingdom of hell. Can Christ be resurrected at last? Then Christians must be reborn as secular Christians and the old Christian replaced by the new.
Due to its loyalty to a supposed absolute, and understanding humans, though made in God’s image, as being passive and helpless, traditional Christianity is unable to throw itself unreservedly into the struggles against the selfishness and division which confront the human race, and so is unlikely to take the side of change, much less revolution. Pauline Christianity’s abhorrence of the fundamental changes in our political, economic, and social life needed to reverse the disastrous course of the arms race, racism, urban collapse, mass starvation, pollution and heat death of our environment, stands little chance in competition with its obsession with personal salvation and other worldly solutions.
This is a very dark period. I certainly believe that never in my lifetime has the church been so paradoxical. On the one hand, it is seemingly stronger than ever before. On the other, it is weaker and more mindless than ever before. In all major denominations, fights are going on because fundamentalism is so extraordinarily powerful today. Fundamentalism is in ultimate conflict with the modern world.Thomas J J Altizer
There is no guarantee that the fatal course we have plotted in our present society, under the influence of Pauline Christianity for so many centuries, can be reversed.
Secular Christianity might be rejected by secularists and traditional Christians alike. So far it has been! But its message is at least more comprehensible to the secular hearer wishing to understand what Christianity is really about once it is stripped of the gaudy mysticism Paul dressed it in. It ought also to be comprehensible to the traditional Christian too, because it does not stop their personal belief in God, but simply asks them to accept that the message of Christ did not demand it. His message was aimed at everyone as a practical ethic for a successful caring unoppressive society. Those who accepted it, and acted on it, living the life of Christ were Christians. They live their lives according to the teachings of Christ, whether they believe in God, or indeed Christ himself. Those who reject his message of social morality, or fail to see it, or are misled by vain mystification, or refuse to love their fellow human beings and even want to kill them, do not live lives of Christ, and are not Christians.
