3. Chapter

The God of faith and the God of philosophers

1. The decision of the early church for philosophy

Pages 100 - 101

The end of the myth and the victory of the gospel are, from a spiritual point of view, essentially to be explained from the opposite relationship that both times 

• between religion and philosophy, 
• between faith and reason 

has been built. ... Already in the wisdom book, chapters 13 to 15, there is the reference to this deadly fate of ancient religion and to the paradox that lies in the separation of truth and piety. Paul takes up what was said in detail there in a few verses, in which he describes the fate of ancient religion from this context of the separation of Logos and myth: 

"It is what is recognizable in God, among them is apparent; for God has made it apparent to them ... But, although they recognized God, they did not pay him honor and thanks as God ... They exchanged the glory of the everlasting God with the replica of a transient man ..." (Rom 1, 19-23).

• The [old] religion does not follow the path of the logo, 
• but persists with the myth seen through as unrealistic. 

Thus, their demise was inevitable; it followed from the separation from the truth, which led to it being regarded as a mere "institutio vitae", that is, as a mere institution of life and form of life design. Faced with this situation, Tertullian has emphatically described the Christian position in a magnificently bold word when he says: 

"Christ called himself the truth, not the habit." 

I believe that this is one of the really great sentences of fathers' theology. ... 

Christianity has thus resolutely sided with the truth and thus turned away from an idea of religion that is content with being a ceremonial figure, which can finally be made of some meaning on the path of interpretation.

Another hint may clarify what has been said. Antiquity had finally settled the dilemma of its religion, its seclusion from the truth of the philosophically recognized, in the idea of three theologies that exist: 

1. physical, 
2. political and 
3. mythical theology. 

She had justified the separation of myth and logos with the consideration for the feeling of the people and with the consideration for the benefits of the state, insofar as mythical theology at the same time made political theology possible. 

In other words: 

She had indeed put truth against habit, usefulness against truth. The representatives of Neoplatonic philosophy went a step further by interpreting the myth ontologically, interpreting it as a symbol theology and thus trying to convey it on the path of interpretation to truth. 

But what can only exist through interpretation has in reality ceased to exist. The human mind rightly turns to the truth itself and not to what can still be declared compatible with the truth with the method of interpretation by detours, but itself no longer has a truth.

Page 102

Both processes have something distressing present in themselves. In a situation in which the truth of the Christian seems to disappear, the two methods with which ancient polytheism once denied its agony and did not pass its agony are emerging again in the struggle for Christianity today. 

• On one side it says 
• the withdrawal from the truth of reason into an area 
• mere piety, 
• mere faith, 
• mere revelation; 
• a withdrawal that in reality, intentionally or unintentionally, admitted or not, is fatally like the withdrawal of ancient religion from the Logos, the escape from the truth into the beautiful habit, from the physique into politics. 

• On the other side is 
• a procedure that I would like to abbreviately refer to as interpretation Christianity. 
• Here, the method of interpretation dissolves the scandal of the Christian and, by making it so unpromsting, at the same time his cause itself. 
• made a dispensable phrase, 
• to a detour that is not necessary to say the simple, which is explained here by complicated interpretative skills to its meaning.

The originally Christian option, on the other hand, is quite different. The Christian faith has - we saw it - 

• against the gods of religions 
• for the God of philosophers, 

that means 

• against the myth of habit 
• for the truth of being itself 

opted for. 

This process stemmed from the accusation against the early church that its followers were atheists. He resulted from the fact that in fact the early church rejected the whole world of the ancient religio, that it did not declare any of it as acceptable, but pushed this aside as an empty habit that stands against the truth.

Page 103

Of course, the other side of the process must not be overlooked. 

• By choosing the Christian faith alone for the God of philosophers and logically declaring this God as the God to whom one can pray and who speaks to man, he has given this God of philosophers a completely new meaning, seized him from the mere academic and thus profoundly transformed him. 

• This God, 
• which previously stands as a neuter, 
• as the top, final term, 
• which is understood as pure being or 
• which is understood as pure thinking, 
• which circles eternally closed in itself and does not hand over to man and his small world; 

• this god of philosophers, 
• whose pure eternity and immutability excludes any relationship to the changeable and becoming, 
• now appears for faith as man God, 
• not only the thinking of thinking,
• eternal mathematics of space, 
• but Agape, power of creative love is.

Page 106

In the last one, it always seems self-evident to us that the infinitely greatness, the absolute spirit, cannot be feeling and passion, but only pure mathematics of space. 

• Unreflected, we assume,

• that mere thinking is greater than loving, 
• while the message of the Gospel and the Christian image of God in it corrects the philosophy and lets us know,
• that love is higher than mere thinking. 
• that absolute thinking is a love, not a senseless thought, but creative, because it is love.

Page 107

The highest way of being includes ... the element of relationship. One does not need to say specifically what revolution it must mean for the direction of man's existence, when absolute, self-contained self-sufficiency no longer appears as the highest, but when the highest is at the same time relation, creative power that creates and carries and loves other things. . .

The logos of the whole world, the creative original thought, is at the same time love. Furthermore, this thought is creative, because it is love as a thought and thought as love. It shows a primordial identity of truth and love, which where they are fully realized, are not two realities next to each other or even against each other, but one, the only absolute. At this point, the starting point of the confession to the trinity God, to whom we will later have to return, becomes visible.

4. Chapter

Confession to God today

Page 112

All our thinking is in fact only a reflection of the already pre-thought in the realm of reality. It can only try in a poor way to understand the thought that things are and find truth in it. The mathematical understanding of the world has found the "God of philosophers" here, as it were, through the mathematics of space, with all his problems, by the way, as can be seen when Einstein again and again rejects the personal concept of God as "anthropomorphic", assigns it to the "fear religion" and the "moral religion", to which he contrasts the "cosmic religiosity" as the only appropriate thing, which for him is expressed in "rapt amazement at the harmony of the laws of nature", in a "deep faith in the reason of the construction of the world" and in the "longing for the comprehension, even if only of a small reflection of the reason revealed in this world". 

Page 113

James Jeans once says: 

"We discover that space shows traces of a planning and controlling power that has something in common with our own, individual spirit, not, as far as we have discovered so far, feeling, morality or aesthetic ability, but the tendency to think in a way that we have called geometry in the absence of a better word." 

Again, we find the same thing: The mathematician discovers the mathematics of the cosmos, the thought of things. But not anymore. He only discovers the god of philosophers. 

If Jeans thinks that such a thing has not been discovered so far, one can confidently tell him: It will never be discovered by physics and cannot, because the question essentially abstracts from the aesthetic feeling and moral attitude, questions nature in a purely mathematical attitude and consequently can only see the mathematical side of nature. 

The answer depends on the question. 

But the person who is looking for a view of the whole will much rather have to say:

• In the world we find objectified mathematics, without a doubt; 
• In the world, however, we find no less the outrageous and unexplained miracle of the beautiful, or more correct:
• In it there are processes which appear to the receptive spirit of man in the form of the beautiful, so that he must say that the mathematician who has constructed these processes has unfolded an unheard-of measure of creative imagination.  

Page 116

Being is being thought. 

• Matter itself refers beyond itself to thinking as the prior and more original. 
• But contrary to idealism, which makes everything become moments of a comprehensive consciousness [mathematics is the basis, matter is derived from it], the Christian belief in God will say: 

Being is thought - but not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be a mere appearance to the closer observer. 

• Christian faith in God rather means, [this is where man comes into play]
• that things 
• are thought of a creative consciousness [among others of man],
• are from a creative freedom and 
• that that creative consciousness which carries all things, has released the thought-being into the freedom of its own, independent being. 

In it, Christian faith transcends any mere idealism. 

• While idealism, as we have just stated, explains everything real as the contents of a single consciousness, 
• for the Christian view, the fundamental is a creative freedom, which in turn puts the thought into the freedom of its own being, so that it is
• on the one hand, the thought of a consciousness and
• on the other hand, true being-itself. 

At the same time, this clarifies the core of the concept of creation: The model from which creation must be understood is 

• not the craftsman [natural scientist], 
• but the creative spirit, the creative thinking. 

At the same time, it becomes visible that the idea of freedom is the hallmark of Christian faith in God towards every kind of monism. 

• At the beginning of all being, Christian faith does not place any consciousness [e.g. mathematics] but a creative freedom, which in turn creates freedoms. 
• In this respect, one could highly describe Christian faith as a philosophy of freedom. 

[This expands the Stoa, as I have interpreted it, beyond the cosmic, scientific level towards archetypes. They sometimes show themselves to the gifted among us in meditation [Pauli, Jung and Kepler]. The space that meditation makes available opens up to creative freedom, so it appears infinite.]

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For the Christian faith, not an all-encompassing consciousness or a single materiality means the explanation of the real as a whole; Rather, at the top is a freedom that thinks and creates thinking freedoms and thus allows freedom to become the STRUCTURAL FORM of all being.

Page 117

If, accordingly, the Christian option for the logos means OPTION for a personal, creative sense, then it is also an option for the primacy of the special over the general. 

• The highest is not the most general, but just the special, and 
• Christian faith is above all an OPTION for man as the unreducible, infinity-related being. 
• And in this Christian faith is once again an option for the PRIMACY of FREEDOM compared to a primacy of cosmic-natural necessity.

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Page 118

Because if the supreme construction point of the world is a freedom that carries, wants, knows and loves the whole world as freedom, then this means that with freedom, the unpredictability inherent in it belongs essentially to the world. 

• Unpredictability is an implicit of freedom; 
• World can - if it stands like this - never be completely traced back to mathematical logic.
• With the boldness and great of a world marked by the structure of freedom, there is also the dark secret of the demonic that confronts us from it. 
• A world that is created and wanted under the risk of freedom and love is not just mathematics. It is as a space of love, scope of freedoms and takes the risk of evil. This world dares the secret of the dark for the sake of the greater light, which is freedom and love.

5. Chapter

Faith in the triune God

Page 123, 124

This is about whether

1. man in his relationship with God only has to do with the reflections of his own consciousness or 

2. he is given to really go beyond himself and to meet with God himself. 

The consequences are far-reaching in both cases: 

1. If the former is true, prayer,too, is only a preoccupation of man with himself, the root for actual worship is cut off as it is for supplication - 

2. If the other answer is the right one, worship and prayer of supplication are not only possible, but commended, that is, a postulate of the being of man who is open to God. 

[Here, man must try to establish connection to the primordial images [archetypes], i.e. to build up an extremely demanding meditation. This is more difficult, requires much more mental strength than rational, scientific thinking, which alone requires long, intensive study.]

Page 126

... Although it is true that we only recognize God in the reflection of human thought, Christian faith has maintained that we recognize him in this reflection. If we cannot break out of the narrowness of our consciousness, God can break into this consciousness and show himself in it.

... The expansion of the boundaries of human thought, which was necessary to process the Christian experience of God spiritually, did not come by itself. Expansion demanded a fight, for which error was also fruitful; in doing so, Christian faith followed the Basic Law, to which the human spirit is subject everywhere in its progress. 

Subordinatianism says: God himself is only one; Christ is not God, but only a being especially close to God. ... the consequence is - as we extensively demonstrated earlier - that man is cut off from God himself and locked into the provisional. God becomes, as it were, a constitutional monarch; faith has nothing to do with God, but only with God's ministers. Anyone who does not want this, who really believes in the rule of God, in the "greatest" in the smallest, will have to hold on to the fact that God is man, that the being of God and of man intertwine,

... Monarchism takes seriously the encountering God, who comes to us as Creator and Father first, as Son and Redeemer in Christ then and finally as the Holy Spirit. But these three figures are only regarded as masks of God, which say something about us, but nothing about God himself. As tempting as such a path seems, it leads again in the end to the fact that man only circles within himself and does not reach God's very own.

Page 128

We can only speak of God rightly if we renounce the desire to understand and leave him as the ununderstood. Trinity doctrine can therefore not want to be a concept of God. 

• It is a border statement, 
• a referring gesture that shows into the unmanageable; 
• not a definition that narrows a thing into the subjects of human knowledge;
• not a term that would give the thing into the grasp of the human mind. 

Pages 131, 132, 133

The law of complementarity is part of scientific thinking:

• Today, the physicist is increasingly aware that we cannot grasp the given realities, such as the structure of light or that of matter at all, in a form of experiment and thus not in a form of statement, that rather we each see an aspect from different sides that we cannot attribute to the other. Both together - such as the structure of corpuscle and wave - we must consider, without being able to find an overarching one, as an anticipation of the whole, which is not accessible to us as a whole in its unity because of the limitation of our point of view. 
• What is true here in the physical field as a result of the limitation of our vision applies to an even greater degree to the spiritual realities and to God. Here, too, we can only look from one side and thus grasp a certain aspect, which seems to contradict the other and which, however, is only held together with it, is a reference to the whole that we cannot say and grasp. Only in the vicinity, in seeing and saying from various, seemingly opposite aspects do we succeed in pointing to the truth, which is never visible to us in its entirety. ...
• Perhaps the approach of today's physics will offer us a better help here than the Aristotelian philosophy was able to. Physics today knows that the structure of matter can only be talked about in approximations from different approaches. Physics today knows that the structure of matter can only be talked about in approximations from different approaches. Physics knows that from the particular location of the observer depends the result of his inquiry of nature.  
• Why should we not be able to understand from here in a completely new way that in the matter of God we must not search in an Aristotelian way for a final concept that encompasses the whole, but must be understood in terms of a majority of aspects that depend on the viewpoint of the observer and that we can no longer ultimately perceive as one, but can only accept one with the other, without being able to express the whole. 
• Here we meet the hidden interaction of faith and modern thinking. The fact that today's physics thinks beyond the structure of the Aristotelian logic in this way is probably already an effect of the new dimension of its necessary thinking in complementarities, which Christian theology has opened.

We know today that in the physical experiment, the observer himself enters the experiment and only in this way can come to physical experience. [The experiment tries to capture reality with a template. What does not fit to the template is not recognized. The template is made by the observer, the experimenter and is based on his previous education, his concept of the model.] This means that pure objectivity does not exist even in physics, that here, too, the outcome of the experiment, the answer of nature, depends on the question that is addressed to it. In the answer there is always a piece of the question and the questioner himself, it not only reflects nature in its being in itself, in its pure objectivity, but also reflects something of man, of our own, a piece of human subject. 

• [Faith as an attempt to recognize God, i.e. as an experiment alias, in which a template for God is made]

[T]his applies -accordingly modified- to the question of God ... The mere observer does not exist. The pure objectivity does not exist. One will even be allowed to say: The higher an object stands humanly, the more it reaches into the center of the own and co-engages the own of the observer, the less the plain detachment of the pure objectivity is possible. 

• Wherever, therefore, an answer presents itself as dispassionately objective, as the statement that finally transcends the biases of the pious and enlightens merely objectively scientific, one must say that here the speaker has fallen victim to a self-deception.  
• This kind of objectivity has failed to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer. Anyone who tries to be a mere observer will not learn anything. 
• Even the reality "God" can only come into view for the one who enters into the experiment with God - into the experiment that we call faith. Only by entering, one learns; only by participating in the experiment, one asks at all, and only those who ask get an answer. 

 III. Jesus Christ

True God and True Man

3. The Law of the Christological Dogma

Pages 175 - 182

The king is son, not because he is begotten by God, but because he is chosen by God. It is not a physical process that is addressed, but the power of divine will that creates new being. In the idea of sonship understood in this way, the theology of the chosen people is now concentrated at the same time. ... in it the vocation of Israel is summed up: that he stands for Israel and unites the secret of the promise, the vocation, the love that lies above Israel.

The theology of the king, which in a first stage had been transformed from a theology of procreation to a theology of election, was transformed in a further step from a theology of election to a theology of hope of the coming king; the oracle of the throne became more and more a saying of promise.

This is the point at which the text was reused by the early Christian community. Probably in the context of the belief in the resurrection, this Psalm word was first applied to Jesus. The event of the raising of Jesus from the dead, in which this community believes, is understood by the first Christians as that moment in which the process of Psalm 2 actually became reality.

In the crucified one becomes visible for the believers what is the meaning of that oracle, what is the meaning of election: not privilege and power for oneself, but service for the others. In it becomes visible what is the meaning of the narrative of election, what is the true meaning of kingship, which has always wanted to be substitution, 'representation'. That 'representing ́ means: standing for the others, representing them - that now gains a transformed sense. To him, the completely failed one, who, hanging on the gallows, no longer has a piece of ground under his feet, for whose garments a lot is drawn and who himself seems to be abandoned by God, to him, precisely to him the oracle applies: 'My son are you, today - at this place - I have fathered you. Ask of me and I will give you nations for your heritage and the world for your possession ́.

The Son-God idea that entered the confession of Jesus of Nazareth in this way and in this form, in the interpretation of resurrection and cross by Psalm 2, truly has nothing to do with the Hellenistic idea of the divine man and cannot be explained from it in any way. It is rather the second demythologization stage of the oriental king idea, which was already demythologized in the Old Testament. It designates Jesus as the true heir of the universe, as the heir of the promise, in whom the meaning of the theology of David is fulfilled.

The Son-God idea that entered the confession of Jesus of Nazareth in this way and in this form, in the interpretation of resurrection and cross by Psalm 2, truly has nothing to do with the Hellenistic idea of the divine man and cannot be explained from it in any way. It is rather the second demythologization stage of the oriental king idea, which was already demythologized in the Old Testament. It designates Jesus [the human] as the true heir of the universe, as the heir of the promise, in whom the meaning of the theology of David is fulfilled.

What we already found in our reflections on the Trinity God, arises again from another starting point: the one who does not hold on to himself at all, but is pure relationship, coincides in it with the Absolute and thus becomes the Lord. The Lord, to whom the universe is bows down, [is a] provocation against the self-idolatry of political power.

We look into the prayer experience of Jesus, into that closeness to God which distinguishes his relationship to God from that of all other people, but which nevertheless does not want exclusivity, but is oriented toward including the others in their own relationship to God. It wants to take them, as it were, into their own way of standing to God, so that they can say 'Abba ́ to God with Jesus and in him just as he does: No border of distance shall separate them any more, but that intimacy shall embrace them, which is reality in Jesus..

Page 184

And just in the fact that this being as a whole is nothing but service, it is sonship. In this respect, the Christian reevaluation of values has only reached its goal here; only here does it become fully clear that the one who gives himself completely into service for others, into complete selflessness and self-emptying, literally becomes them-that this very one is the true man, the man of the future, the coincidence of man and God.

Page 185

Here, too, the encounter with God comes about only in the respective event flash, being is left out of it. In such theology there seems to me to be a kind of despair towards the being, which does not allow to hope that the being itself could ever become an actuality. 

IV. Paths of Christology

1. Incarnation theology and cross theology

Page 186

[There is] a man God ... and ... with it [is] at the same time God man; this monstrous becomes the all-decisive. In front of this event of the oneness of man and God, the becoming man of God, all single events, which still followed, pale. They can only be secondary; the meeting of God and man appears as the truly decisive, redeeming, as the real future of man, towards which all paths must finally go.

Page 187

Incarnation theology tends to a static and an optimistic view. The sin of man appears easily as a transit stage of quite minor importance. The decisive thing then is not that man is in sin and must be healed, it goes far beyond such a reparation of the past and lies in the approach of the intertwining of man and God.

This being is exodus, transformation. Thus, at this point, a Christology of being and incarnation that understands itself correctly must pass over into the theology of the cross, become one with it; conversely, a theology of the cross that measures out its entire dimensions must become a Christology of the Son and a Christology of being.

3rd. Main Part 

The Spirit and the Church

Two main questions of the article of the Spirit and the Church

Page 312

But then does the resurrection have no relation to matter at all? And does the "Last Day" thus become completely irrelevant with regard to the life that always comes from God's call? 

We have basically already given the answer to this last question with our reflections on the Second Coming of Christ. 

• If the cosmos is history and 
• if matter represents a moment in the history of spirit, 

then there is not an eternal neutral coexistence of matter and spirit, but a final "complexity" in which the world finds its omega and its unity. 

Then there is a ultimate connection between matter and spirit, in which the destiny of man and the world is completed, even if today we cannot possibly define the nature of this connection. 

Then there will be a "Last Day" in which the destiny of individuals will be fulfilled because the destiny of humankind will be fulfilled. 

The goal of the Christian is not a private bliss, but the whole. 

• He believes in Christ, and 
• He therefore believes in the future of the world, not just in his future. 
• He knows that this future is more than he can create himself. 
• He knows that there is a sense that he can't destroy at all. 

But should he put his hands in his lap? 

• On the contrary - because he knows that there is sense, therefore he can and must do the work of history joyfully and undauntedly, even if he will have the feeling from his small scope that it remains a Sisyphean work and the stone of the human fate is only rolled up again and again, generation after generation, to slip away again and again and to make all efforts of before come to nothing. 
• Anyone who believes knows that it is going "forward", not in a circle. 
• Anyone who believes knows that the story does not resemble the carpet of Penelope, who is always woven anew in order to be undone again and again. 
• Perhaps the nightmares of fear of futility, from which the pre-Christian world created such moving images of fear of the fruitlessness of human activity, will also assail the Christian.  
• But in his nightmare the voice of reality penetrates saving and transforming: 
• "Take courage, I have overcome the world" ( Jo 16:33). 
• The new world, with whose representation in the image of the final Jerusalem the Bible closes, is not utopia, but certainty, which we approach in faith. 
• There is a redemption of the world - this is the confidence that sustains the Christian and makes it worthwhile for him to be a Christian even today.

Version: 18.7.2023

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