The Nature of God

Is modern theology atheistic? This is the title of an article in last week's Christian Century, written by a Christian philosopher who thinks that if Protestant theology is not out-and-out atheistic these days, it is the next thing to it. Then, contributing to the ages-old debate over the nature and meaning of God, he pleads for a deity susceptible to "man's tears."

Australian-born Congregationalist A. Campbell Garnett, philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin and past president of the American Philosophical Association, thinks that most theologians have taken to playing a kind of word game of their own that has no relevance to the needs of ordinary men. For example, Paul Tillich, America's most eminent theologian, talks of God as "Being Itself" or "Ultimate Reality"--a hard kind of God to worship, much less to love.

Philosopher Garnett blames the ancient Greeks for a large part of the trouble. The church fathers leaned heavily on Greek metaphysics and produced a natural theology that attempted to prove logically the existence of God and to define his nature. For Protestants at least, Garnett thinks, science has swept away such metaphysics; instead, they refer to God in the Biblical language of faith. But they recognize at the same time "that these Biblical concepts and statements cannot be taken literally as if they were pure history and science. They are symbols and their meaning lies deeper." The result is that "the plain man is bewildered and does not know what to believe, for the theologian has said nothing about God that he can claim, in plain, ordinary language, is true and that presents him as a Being worthy of worship."

Love for the "ultimate reality" is even harder to come by. Such abstractions, Garnett points out, are at best concerned only with what God means to humans--not what humans mean to God. And hu mans need the love that is agape, not eros--"concerned not merely with what the other means to us but with what we, in our lives, may mean to the other, whether he has joy in us, or sorrow, whether we serve him or disappoint him.

"If to say 'God is love' merely says what God means to us but says nothing of what we may mean to God, then it may arouse eros, the desire to possess, but not agape, the desire to serve. And a concept of God that does nothing to arouse the desire to serve him is irrelevant to man's deepest need. What man needs is not a God to serve him but a God to serve."

If theology is to be relevant to modern man's predicament, says Garnett, "it must reject the 'atheism' of a 'God' who is hidden beyond man's concrete thought in an immutable eternity impervious to man's tears . . . And it must proclaim by faith a personal God whose life and love and grief are not to be understood as mere symbols that describe nothing in the nature of the ultimate Being itself."

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