Abstract
This is an extremely rich book, rich in detail and in rigour of argumentation. And it has a fascinating story to tell, not all aspects of which can be mentioned in a short review. The author, who is professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, engages with a vast array of religious thinkers over the whole range of Christian history, and in general shows a lively and welcome awareness of the pitfalls attending Christian apologetics.
He begins by examining the disconnect between traditional Christian language and contemporary life. But behind the examination lies the conviction that Christianity can be shown to offer a credible, hopeful response to the fragmented, often frightening nature of modern existence. Much of the case for the Christian view of God rests for the author on the belief that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4: 16), a belief that also animates the writings of Walter Kasper, particularly his The God of Jesus Christ. ‘I endorse this understanding of God without reservation’ (p. 4), the author acknowledges, while noting that this obviously cannot be a starting point for theology, but only a conclusion (ibid.). Kasper is indeed a frequent presence in this volume. His assertion: ‘To call God a person is to say that God is the subsistent being which is freedom in love,’ occurs no less than five times throughout the book in one form or other (pp. 166, 173, 260, 308, and 311).
Godzieba argues that a new approach to the ‘God question’ is needed in today’s world where the very concept of ‘God’ has become problematic for many. And the crimes committed in God’s name have also considerably muddied the theological waters. Taking his cue from St Anselm, he accepts that no searching for God can begin unless there is at least some vague sense, or pre-understanding, of what the word ‘God’ refers to. His guiding principle throughout is that God’s transcendence or otherness must be respected, but God also must not be envisaged as so heavenly as to be of no earthly significance. Hence the mention of ‘presence’ in the book’s title. The incomprehensibility or transcendence of God precludes, of course, any final understanding of the divine nature. Hence the idea of ‘absence’ in the title, an absence that can never be entirely erased, no matter how strong a sense of the ‘presence’ of God can ever be mustered.
Yet the problem of demonstrating the credibility of ‘revelation’ in a sceptical world still remains acute. The ‘positivity’ or ‘phenomenality’ (if I have understood the author’s terminology correctly) of the Christian tradition, stressed by Godzieba, is beyond doubt. But does that make it ‘true’ in any transcendent or ultimate sense? Admittedly, ‘unprovable’ is not the same as ‘untrue.’ However, when the writer speaks, for example, about ‘the sheer fact of creation’ (p. 306, emphasis in the original), is such a statement not more in the nature of a belief (included, as Barth observed, in the Creed) than a fact? It was a belief the Christians took over from Judaism, but the philosophical Greeks didn’t hold it.
A significant element of Godzieba’s argument for a genuine interpretation of the Christian (trinitarian) view of God is his conviction that a false notion of God developed from the later Middle Ages (with nominalism the chief villain of the piece) and continued into modern times with the rise of ‘scientific’ thinking. The threat posed by the rise of scientific rationalism so cowed the theologians that they, perhaps unwittingly, ignored the true Christian idea of God and substituted for it a rationalist idol, and a concomitant obsession with ‘proofs for the existence of God.’ (Popular piety and religious art, as the author recognizes, took off in a different direction.) As a result, mainline theology drove the true God of Christianity to the margins of life, making faith in God a private affair. Even Schleiermacher, the ‘Father of Modern Theology,’ is guilty of participating in this increasing ‘privatization’ of religion (p. 77).
Whether this is entirely fair to Schleiermacher is perhaps open to debate. And, furthermore, superficially at least, Godzieba seems to follow fairly faithfully in Schleiermacher’s own footsteps with his insistence that there has to be some prior ‘sense of God,’ before the ‘God question’ can be meaningfully raised. In his own way, Schleiermacher too sought to stress the immanence of God—which seems to be just another way of talking of God’s presence (Godzieba’s favoured term)—as well as emphasizing God’s ultimate incomprehensibility and inaccessibility. Moreover, Godzieba’s frequent emphasis on the transformative effect of the human response to the revelation of God’s love does not seem a thousand miles away from the approach of another 19th-century German liberal Protestant, Albrecht Ritschl, himself an implacable foe of metaphysics in theology, who spoke resolutely about the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth by robust ethical action in response to the revelation of God’s love in Christ. These views then migrated to the United States where they helped to underpin the ‘Social Gospel’ movement.
Nevertheless, coming from a Catholic perspective Godzieba has much more sympathy than Ritschl for the long Christian tradition of thinking about God in metaphysical terms. He doesn’t cheaply dismiss the traditional ‘proofs’ for God’s existence, but sees them rather as explorations of aspects of human experience (‘access-points of faith,’ in his terminology) that point to, or are compatible with, a realm of transcendence controlled not by us but by God. More broadly, following Rahner (‘the supernatural existential’) and Kasper, he seeks to highlight aspects of human experience that point to the great mystery encompassing everything, including the self, which is thus not absolutely autonomous (pace the deists and all ‘extrinsicists’), but rather grounded in God (echoing the biblical claim about the ‘image of God’ in humanity).
In the final chapter of the book, drawing on a wide range of sources including painting, architecture, and music, the author delineates his own contribution to the God debate, arguing for a ‘performative’ (‘praxis’-oriented?) approach to Christianity’s truth claims. This is an old and venerable idea: ‘Whoever does what is true comes to the light’ (John 3: 21). Put in more homely terms, one might say that the proof of the (Christian) pudding is in the eating (‘praxis’) over a lifetime: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.’ Who could argue with that? The ‘answer’ to the God question can, in short, never be purely intellectual. It always has to be ‘enacted’ or ‘performed,’ to use the author’s language, in a way of life. To have reminded its readers of this ancient Christian truism is not the least of this book’s merits, even though the possible criticism that it represents a ‘retreat to commitment’ might also need to be met.
In the final chapter, the author has thought-provoking things to say about time, whose importance, he intimates, has been neglected by some recent manifestations of allegedly ‘timeless’ Catholic dogmatism, which are briskly rejected as being themselves symptoms of ‘postmodern inertia’ even though they ‘make a show of resisting a so-called “culture of relativism”’ (p. 290). This thinly veiled broadside is presumably aimed at Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger and his fellow travellers. Whether the author’s suggested remedy of ‘discipleship’ as a way of overcoming the malaise of the age will fare any better than that of the hapless, ‘intellectualist’ (p. 301) metaphysicians he has in his sights, time will no doubt tell. And time, the author assures us, borrowing a gnomic utterance from Pope Francis, ‘is greater than space’ (p. 314).
One major difficulty that could surely be raised in relation to Godzieba’s approach is whether his overarching notion that ‘God is love’ is perhaps being used in too undifferentiated, even naïve, a sense. The Jewish tradition, ominously for Christianity it might be argued, refused to move in this direction and to take the risk of defining God as ‘love,’ tout court. Perhaps now the very notion that ‘God is love’ should be handled as if it were a landmine or a time bomb, rather than a comfort blanket.
In this context, it may be interesting to note that Nietzsche, in his final clash with Christianity, opposed not, say, Plato, but Dionysos to Christ at the end of Ecce Homo, his brilliant final review of his life and writings (‘Dionysos against the Crucified’). Given that Nietzsche had already sarcastically dismissed Christianity as mere ‘Platonism for the people,’ this may not be too unexpected an opposition. But his pitting of Dionysos, the Greek god of ecstasy and destruction, against the crucified Christ, suggests he saw the real challenge to Christianity not in philosophy at all (thus making any philosophical interpretation of Christianity ultimately irrelevant), but in an altogether different, more visceral realm—in a conflict between the vision of reality to be found in the Greek tragedians and that of the early Christian saints, as Hans Urs von Balthasar (who, significantly, is absent from this tome) once hinted. The God question, in short, may be a debate about the essence of humanity, where we are at least as big a problem as God.