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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
This article raises the question whether Christianity might itself, at least in part, be responsible for the modern waning of belief in God because of its New Testament teaching, unlike that of the Old Testament, that God is ‘love.’ After examining whether the Bible does in fact present two incompatible views of God, the article looks at some signs of how the traditional Western view of God might be changing, in response to modern sensibilities. It concludes by considering how it might still be possible to speak about the God of Christianity despite the new cultural conditions of today.
This article incorporates some ideas from my book, On not understanding God (Dublin: Columba, 1997), chap. 11.
2 Related, for example, by Peter Seewald in Ratzinger, Joseph, Gott und die Welt. Glauben und Leben in unserer Zeit. Ein Gespräch mit Peter Seewald (Munich: DVA, 2000), 90Google Scholar.
3 Quoted in Konner, Joan (ed.), The Atheist's Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 21Google Scholar.
4 Quoted by Hick, John, Evil and the God of Love (London: Collins, 1970), ixGoogle Scholar.
5 Elias Canetti, quoted in Konner (ed.), The Atheist's Bible, 51.
6 Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Rosenthal, R. (London: Abacus, 1989), 117Google Scholar. [Jean Améry, the name taken in the 1930s by the Austrian Jewish intellectual Hans Mayer, also survived the Nazi death camps and also, like Primo Levi, eventually took his own life, although apparently in Levi's case the evidence for this is not entirely clear.]
7 Ibid., 117–18.
8 ‘Le mot Amour ne s'est trouvé associé au nom de Dieu que depuis le Christ,’ quoted by Agathe Valéry in the ‘Introduction biographique’ of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ed. of P. Valéry's works (vol. I, 72), as mentioned in the notes to Julien Green, ‘Journal’ in Œuvres Complètes vol. IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) 1680, n. 3 to p. 859. Although Valéry did not know Overbeck's writings, as far as I am aware, his judgments on theology are also quite similar to Overbeck's: see Henry, M., ‘Franz Overbeck: A Review of Recent Literature (Part 1)’ Irish Theological Quarterly 72 (2007): 391–404, at 402–03CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See Overbeck, F., Christentum und Kultur, ed. Bernoulli, Carl Albrecht (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963;Google Scholar orig. ed. 1919), 30–31; see also the relevant passage in the new critical edition of this work, Franz Overbeck, Werke und Nachlass. Band 6/1: Kirchenlexicon. Materialien. »Christentum und Kultur«, ed. Barbara von Reibnitz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996), 63–64.
10 W. Ward Gasque, art. MARCION, in Douglas, J. D. et al. (eds.), The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1974), 629–30, at 629Google Scholar.
11 Perhaps this reserve with regard to God's identity is what Elias Canetti wished to draw attention to by asking: ‘Isn't it the refusal of the name that constitutes the Bible's most important teaching, the teaching that endures?’ (Canetti, Elias, Aufzeichnungen 1992–1993 [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999], 49Google Scholar; in the original: ‘Ist es nicht das Wichtigste, das Bleibende, was einer aus der Bibel lernt: die Verweigerung des Namens?’)
12 Tarnas, Richard, The Passion of the Western Mind (London: Pimlico, 1996), 470Google Scholar.
13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Clark, Maudemarie and Leiter, Brian, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 175Google Scholar.
14 Quoted in Konner (ed.), The Atheist's Bible, 110 (Attributed also to Voltaire).
15 Quoted in Konner (ed.), The Atheist's Bible, 113.
16 ‘Les religions, comme les idéologies qui en ont hérité les vices, se réduisent à des croisades contre l'humour,’ Aveux et anathèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 22Google Scholar.
17 In More Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Hart-Davis, Rupert, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 167Google Scholar.
18 Quoted in Löwith, Karl, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1978), 37Google Scholar [‘die göttliche Tiefe des Leidens’].
19 From Poems the Size of Photographs (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002), 67Google Scholar.
20 ‘After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?’ (The Reflections of Lichtenberg, trans. Norman Alliston, 87, quoted in A Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations, ed. Ayer, A. J. and O'Grady, Jane [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], 256Google Scholar).
21 Quoted in Konner (ed.), The Atheist's Bible, 57.
22 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Volume I, ed. Tanner, Norman P. S.J., (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 231–32Google Scholar.
23 Read, Piers Paul, Hell and Other Destinations (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 60Google Scholar.
24 See Is 29: 16, and 45: 9; and Rom 9: 20–21.
25 Hell and Other Destinations, 238.
26 T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding IV’ (the fourth of The Four Quartets).
27 In a letter to Lady Robert Cecil, dated 12 November 1922, Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘I read the Book of Job last night – I don't think God comes well out of it’ (source: http://www.hielema.ca/essays/job.html).
28 Kolakowski, Leszek, Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 49Google Scholar.
29 I owe this stimulating phrase, as also the reference to Phèdre, to my friend, John Campbell.
