Chapter One
"I believe ."

This is a book on questions of religious faith. If one has no faith, is there any reason why one should be interested?

Leave aside for the moment the question of why one may have faith: There are good reasons why many people go through life, often very successfully, without faith. It is more difficult to see how one could fail to be interested in the matter. Religious faith, in whatever form, always involves one fundamental assumption - namely, that there is a reality beyond the reality of ordinary, everyday life, and that this deeper reality is benign. Put differently, religious faith implies that there is a destiny beyond the death and destruction which, as we know, awaits not only ourselves but everyone and everything we care about in this world, the human race and the planet on which its history is played out, and (if modern physics is correct) the entire universe. One can reasonably say that one does not believe in such a transcendent destiny; it is less reasonable to say that one is not interested in it. Religion implies that reality ultimately makes sense in human terms. It is the most audacious thought that human beings have ever had. It may be an illusion; even so, it is a very interesting one.

Most of the time, in the course of ordinary living, we assume that reality is what it appears to be - the physical, psychological, and social structures that provide the parameters of our actions. The philosopher Alfred Schutz called this "the world-taken-for-granted." There are exceptional individuals who question this taken-for-grantedness by way of intellectual reflection, individuals like Socrates or Einstein; they are quite rare. For most people ordinary reality is put in question by something that happens to interrupt the flow of ordinary living. Often what happens is something bad - illness, bereavement, loss of social status, or some other individual or collective calamity. But the taken-for-grantedness of everyday reality can also be put in question by some very good things: an intense aesthetic experience, or falling in love, or being awed by the birth of one's first child. Either way, suddenly, it becomes clear that there is more to reality than one had previously assumed. Minimally, this is what is meant by experiences of transcendence. Such experiences are not yet religious - atheists and agnostics too become ill, get to be parents, become intoxicated by music or by love. But one could call these experiences "pre-religious": By relativizing ordinary reality they open up the possibility of a reality - or, perhaps, of many realities - that are usually hidden. One takes the step from a pre-religious to a religious perception of transcendence when one believes that the reality that lies beyond ordinary experience means well by us. Again, one need not believe this. But it is certainly interesting to consider the possibility.

I used to know a psychoanalyst who was a very orthodox Freudian. We had a number of conversations about religion. He found it hard to understand that an intelligent person (he generously allowed that I was such a person) could be religious. He, so he said, had been a convinced atheist as far back as he could remember, and he was sure that religion was nothing but a comforting illusion. I asked him once whether he ever had any doubts about this conviction of his. He said no, he never had any doubts. Then he hesitated and said, actually yes: He had moments of doubt about his atheism every time he listened to the choral portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the chorale based on Schiller's "Ode to Joy." Thornton Wilder, in his novel The Ides of March, puts a similar thought into the mouth of Julius Caesar. Wilder's Caesar says that he never believed in the gods (he only performed the religious rituals demanded of a public official in Rome because he thought them to be politically useful). But Caesar too admitted to occasional doubts about his atheism. This happened in some moments in the midst of battle or of some important political actions when he had the feeling that a greater power was guiding him. It also happened during the so-called epileptic aura, the acute sense of ecstasy which typically occurs just before a grandmal attack.

On the other hand, if one has faith, why should one ask questions about it?

There are people who have faith without feeling the need to reflect about it. Sometimes one refers to this kind of faith as "child-like," but it is not necessarily something that one should look down upon. These are often people who have grown up in a social environment in which their particular faith is taken for granted, or they have had a powerful experience which confirmed their faith and which retains its power in their memory. Or perhaps the capacity for unquestioning faith is simply a part of a certain personality type; in religious terms one could then say that such faith is a gift. The value one ascribes to reflection will determine whether one envies such people or thinks that they are missing something important. Be this as it may, most human beings (and by no means only intellectuals) feel constrained to reflect about their experiences and beliefs, if only to relate different experiences and beliefs to each other in such a way that they make overall sense. If reflection becomes systematic, one can describe this activity as theorizing. Obviously any aspect of human experience and belief can become an object of reflection. Religion is no exception. The simplest definition of theology is to say that it is systematic reflection about faith.

The word "theology" comes out of Christian usage and people in other traditions (such as Judaism or the religions of India) do not like to use it (often because they associate it with an overly cerebral approach to religion or because they want to distance themselves from the repressive dogmatism which, unfortunately, has been a recurring habit among Christians). However, in the simple sense in which theology has just been defined it will necessarily occur in every religious tradition, from the most sophisticated to the most primitive. A Jew might not want to attach the label "theology" to the highly sophisticated theorizing permeating the Talmudic literature, but in the aforementioned sense it is a specific sort of theologizing that goes on there (even though, with its rootage in practical considerations of religious law, it is different in character from the evolution of Christian doctrine). The same goes for the monumental theoretical edifices constructed in the course of Hindu and Buddhist history. But even in so-called primal religions - that is, traditions without sacred texts or bodies of learned religious functionaries - some sort of theorizing goes on. Thus mythology - the stories about gods and other supernatural beings - is also a very distinctive type of theoretical reflection. In other words, theology occurs whenever there is a systematic attempt to reflect about faith. For anyone who identifies with a particular tradition this reflection will be some sort of dialogue between this tradition and the individual's experience of faith. Needless to say, the present book is just such an exercise.

Scholars will differ as to the date at which full-blown theological systems first appeared in the development of Christianity - certainly no later than the time when the early Church Fathers felt it necessary to spell out their beliefs in the confrontation with Hellenistic philosophy. But there is theology - or, more precisely, a number of theologies - already in the New Testament, and not only in the letters of the Apostle Paul and the Johannine texts. Even in the Synoptic Gospels, which tell the story of the life of Jesus, there are theological considerations that shape the telling of the story (for example, in relating events to prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures). Thus theology has been a very important feature of Christian history from the beginning. Over the centuries this process of reflection had to take account of different theoretical interlocutors: rabbinical authorities, Greek philosophers, teachers of Gnosticism and other esoteric doctrines, the powerful rival of Islamic thought, more recently the manifold theoretical expressions of modernity.

In a general way, therefore, doing theology today is not fundamentally different from what it was at any time since the early Christians had to make sense of the events around the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, there is something distinctive about the modern situation, and it is useful to recognize this: Modernity progressively undermines the social environments which support taken-for-grantedness, in religion as in everything else that people believe. This is not the place to elaborate on this important phenomenon, but the basic reason for it can be stated quite simply: People take their beliefs for granted to the extent that everyone around them does the same. Put differently, beliefs appear to be self-evident if there is a more or less unified social consensus about them. Modernity, through some of its most basic processes (such as mass migration, mass communication, urbanization), undermines this sort of consensus. The individual is increasingly confronted with many different beliefs, values, and lifestyles, and is therefore forced to choose between them. Choice requires at least rudimentary reflection. Religious choice, then, requires at least rudimentary theologizing.

To use a philosophical term, modernity problematizes....