The blog I posted on Sunday 6 April began with a quote from A Rumour of Angels (1969) by Peter Berger.
Thinking Anglicans listed my blog on the Opinions thread on Wednesday 9 April together with four other blogs and articles: one by Andrew Brown, another by Martyn Percy about the effects of Long-Covid on the CofE and two from Via.Media News. Charlie Bell wrote about Consensus, Compassion, Truth, and Grace and Michael Hampson about Common Worship and our Gender-neutral God .
One hundred and fifty-four comments (and counting) have been posted. The first comment wondered about “the time devoted to matters of little consequence like what to do about God’s preferred He/Him pronouns, the theme of Michael Hampson’s blog. The following 153 plus comments all in one way or another pursue ideas about the use of gendered language in relation to God. The other four listed blogs were ignored.
I wonder why it’s so important to some people that God should be referred to as male. It has long been important to me, forty-five years, that we should use gender neutral language in worship. Is God’s gender only important for those who imagine God to be a supernatural being? What happens to gendered liturgical and Biblical language if God is imagined as a metaphysical essence? God is not a male entity ‘existing’ somewhere in a space/time location according to my Christian faith. I am disappointed that Thinking Anglican comment-posters expend so much time and energy discussing in detail the gender of God.
Definitions
I decided I needed to check the definitions of two words that I’ve just used and that occur much in of the material I read.
Supernatural
“Of a manifestation or event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature - "a supernatural being". Manifestations or events considered to be of supernatural origin, such as ghosts.”
Metaphysical
This is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space. abstract theory with no basis in reality.
Progressive Christianity
The Progressive Christianity Network and Sea of Faith Movement and other contemporary Christians follow a spiritual path that does not believe in God as a gendered being or entity existing in a time/space location somewhere beyond our present knowledge of the universe or cosmos.
I am still being drawn to think every day about whether I “believe” in the supernatural, in manifestations, events and forces beyond the laws of nature, beyond “science”. I think about the gendered language we use and the unexamined assumptions we make about God.
My previous blog referred to Peter Berger’s 1968 book A Rumour of Angels. His opening chapter, The Alleged Demise of the Supernatural, surveys the history of religion and modernity from the 1920s to 1968. Berger refers to Rudolf Otto:
“Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy 1917, attempted what may still be regarded as the definitive description of this ‘other-ness’ of religious experience. Otto emphasised that the sacred (that is, the reality humans believe they encounter in religious experience) is ‘totally other’ than ordinary, human phenomena, and in this ‘otherness’ the sacred impresses humankind as an overwhelming, awesome, and strangely fascinating power.”
Rumour of Angels p.14, edited
Reality and another reality
Reality is the ordinary world, the ‘life-world’ within which the wide-awake, grown-up person carries on ‘normal’ activities in collaboration with other human beings. The term ‘supernatural’ denotes a fundamental category of religion, the assertion of belief that there is an other reality, one of ultimate significance for humankind, which transcends the reality within which our everyday experience unfolds. Berger notes that “commentators on the contemporary situation of religion agree that the supernatural has departed from the modern world.” This fundamental assumption about reality that is allegedly defunct or in the process of becoming defunct in Berger’s contemporary 1968 world is described in formulations such as ‘God is dead’ or ‘the post-Christian era’ (Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God 1968).
Is supernatural religion in decline?
Berger wonders whether his experience and interpretation of the modern world as described by Altizer and Hamilton, the idea of the demise of the supernatural, is correct. Has the secularisation of modern culture, applied to the processes inside the human mind, secularised consciousness? He has mapped the decline of religious belief and practice within the traditions of the principle Christian churches in modern society. In European society there had been a progressive decline in institutional participation. In the USA, on the contrary, there had been an increase in participation. In both Europe and the USA there was strong evidence that traditional religious beliefs have become empty of meaning not only in large sections of the general population but even among many people who continued to belong to a church. He questioned whether there may not be genuinely religious forces outside the traditional Christian or churchly frame of reference while recognising that today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers and probably from the majority of people in modern societies.
Knowledge and deviant knowledge
Berger says a minority of people hold a view of the world differing significantly from the one generally until now taken for granted in society, people for whom the supernatural is still a meaningful reality. A ‘cognitive minority’ has formed around a body of ‘deviant knowledge’. I experience myself as being a member of that deviant minority in the 1960s. The idea of the supernatural is not a meaningful reality for me, at least in the terms in which it is generally understood by the majority of Christians.
I think what Berger describes is not only accurate to the 1960s but even more so to the 2020s with the difference that the divisions and disagreements within the Church of England are even more complex. Now there are sub-groups of those adhering to deviant knowledge, groups and individuals pursuing, like me, a belief or experience of ‘otherness’ through modes such as intuition, emotion, experience and bodies. These are not supernatural experiences to me because they are felt, known in my body, detectable through brain scans and Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
Supernaturalists continue to adhere to traditional, orthodox Christian beliefs in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit as a real presence, active in the events of people’s lives and in our ‘world’, hearing and responsive to prayer, known by experience. Berger thought that supernaturalists as may be around will find their beliefs buffeted by very strong social and psychological pressures. Fifty-seven years later the crisis of faith is even more severe.
Origins of today’s crisis
Berger identifies the origins of the crisis beginning as far back as 1799 when Schleiermacher’s Addresses on Religion to Its Cultural Despisers were first published, Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century up to the First World War there was a gradual rise to dominance of a theological liberalism whose crucial concern was a cognitive adjustment of Christianity to the (actual or alleged) world view of modernity. One of the major results was the progressive dismantling of the supernatural scaffolding of the Christian tradition (Rumours p.23). The overall result has been a profound erosion of the traditional religious contents, in extreme cases to the point where nothing is left but hollow rhetoric. Of late it seems more and more as if extremes have become the norm.
1918 to 1948
For a short time, roughly from the end of the First World War until shortly after the Second World War it appeared as if the trend might be reversed. The period of neo-Protestant orthodoxy and dialectical theology was ushered in by Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in 1919. Barth called for a return to the classical faith of the Reformation, a faith unconditionally based on God’s revelation and not on any human reason or experience. This turned out to be only an interruption of the secularising trend, not a reversal.
1948 - 1968
The ‘normalisation’ of society after the Second World War led to a rapid decline of neo-orthodoxy and to the resurgence of various strands of neo-liberalism. Protestant conservatism still existed, located on the fringes of urban, middle class society but by 1968 the neo-orthodox found themselves dwindling in both numbers and influence. The theological novelties of Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, as Berger rather dismissively categorises them, dominated the Protestant scene in the nineteen fifties and sixties, taking up where the old liberalism left off. Tillich understood the task as the intellectual adjustment of the Christian tradition with philosophical truth. Bultmann proposed a programme of ‘demythologisation’, a restatement of the biblical message in language free from supernaturalist notions. Both drawing heavily on existentialism.as developed in particular by Martin Heidegger.
“The various recent movements of ‘radical’ or ‘secular’ theology have returned even more unambiguously to the older liberalism whether the ‘cultured despisers’ being cognitively embraced are psychoanalysts, sociologists, existentialists, or language analysts. The self-liquidation of the theological enterprise is undertaken with an enthusiasm that verges on the bizarre, culmination in the reduction to absurdity of the ‘God-is-dead theology’ and ‘Christian atheism’.”
(Rumours p.25)
The trend towards secularisation was likely to continue unabated. In 1968 Berger envisaged a number of possible ‘surprises’ such as a thermonuclear war devastating much of the world, a complete collapse of the capitalist economic system and permanent racial war in America. There would be strong social and social-psychological pressures against supernaturalism. At one extreme there might be an option to maintain a supernaturalist position in the teeth of a cognitively antagonistic world.
For Berger, the basic task might be one of translation, translating traditional religious affirmations into terms appropriate to the new frame of reference, one that conforms to the modern world view and philosophy. Supernatural elements of the religious traditions might be completely liquidated and traditional language transferred from other worldly to this worldly referents. The recipients of these blessings will be either happier people or more effective citizens, or perhaps both, these benefits also being available under strictly secular labels.
The larger religious groups are rather inclined towards various forms and degrees of limited, or controlled accommodation. This stance could involve a bargaining process with modern thought, a surrender of some traditional (supernatural) items while others are kept. Tactical modifications entailing a process of rethinking would tend to escalate toward genuinely cognitive modifications. At this point the outside challenge would become a challenge from within. In the modern world the supernatural had become irrelevant. Berger thought American cities seemed fated to go up in flames in an annual ritual of mad destructiveness and futility. The civil rights movement (which gave Harvey Cox confidence in the libertarian future of urban secularity) seems dead as a political force to Berger.
Berger expressed anxiety and uncertainty about the success of the burgeoning movements towards equality and justice, relating to the decline of the supernatural model. He was born in 1929 and had grown up through this era of dramatic transformation, his thinking and emotions were inevitably influenced by his experience. I think he was understandably attached to the somewhat conservative period ending in 1947 and was somewhat tentative in welcoming the transformation he was witnessing. In the final paragraph, he recovers a more optimistic, progressive tone:
“Genuine timeliness means sensitivity to one’s socio-historical starting point, not fatalism about one’s possible destination. What follows, then, is based on the belief that it is possible to liberate oneself to a considerable degree from the taken-for-granted assumptions of one’s time. This belief has as its correlate an ultimate indifference to the majority or minority status of one’s view of the world.”
I am deeply conscious that my beliefs are thought to be dangerously out of tune with the Biblical, orthodox, traditional Christian matrix that many still observe. I am also out of tune with some members of my own ‘tribe’, the progressive reformers and transformers. And I am most deeply conscious of the world of 2025 in which the American President is wreaking havoc on global political, financial, trading and relational networks and institutions that have formed the bedrock of my life as a white, Western European 1945-born boy. I am also living in a Christian era riven by disagreements about gender and sexuality, traumatised by the unearthing of abuse, sexual and emotional, and that has yet to confront what Berger was struggling with in 1968 – what kind of God do we believe in?