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Conceptual Limits | Forms of Expression

Preface: the context of these thoughts is "logic of language" or the distinction between language with meaning and language without meaning (nonsense). One way to make this distinction public, objective is by using the conceptual tool that in Wittgenstein's jargon is called 'grammar' or 'logic'.

Many of these ideas are first blush, many philosophically stupid, needing revising.

These thoughts were, at the time I wrote them, my most mature reflections. But they were, like everything else in philosophy, subject to revision. And they have been revised. Many times. Later thoughts are, for example, about "The way you use of the word 'God' says what, not whom you mean" (Wittgenstein), and about "goats, man, and God" (Schweitzer), where the teaching "God is the father" is looked at from a different point of view from this page's point of view. (There is no subject where someone's thinking may evolve more than in religion. And the thought may deepen, not merely go elsewhere. Of course in some ways it can't go any deeper than you are yourself.)

Our Father and the Kingdom of God

And so you kneel beside your child's grave shaking your fist at God. -- Why? Rather, here, take this handful of earth from the grave and throw it at Jesus there on the cross, because it was he who taught us to call God our father ("And which of you, if your child asks for bread, will give him a stone" (Luke 11.11, Matthew 7.9). It is hard to know what Jesus meant by those words, even more so if we divorce his words from his picture of the kingdom of God.

"It it not altogether easy to believe that God is a father to us," Albert Schweitzer said in Africa; and if Jesus had not said this, there would be no reason to believe it (and indeed there is no reason other than the ethical person of Jesus).

I am thinking of the Theocentric as distinct from the Christocentric ... Some people come to God through Christ ... But others come to Christ through God. Believe in the goodness and love and forgiveness of God first, then ... (M. O'C. Drury, "Letter to Rhees", 22 May 1958)

My own religion, if I am able to believe in God, is one hundred percent Christocentric: I only believe in God on the moral authority of Jesus. The "God of Nature" is not fatherly; if I believed in that God, I would see him as the enemy, a power to be fought against: capricious, cruel (sadistic). Drury's Theocentric faith couldn't be more foreign to me.

Jesus did not say God "who will be our father in the kingdom", but he called God our father now, even in "this world". That is indeed perplexing, for it was the same Jesus who called God the father who believed that the father required him to die on the cross.

There is a relation between language and truth. Confucius on the reform of language: "If a father who is not fatherly were not called father ..." But this applies only if God is conceived of -- i.e. pictured as -- the universe's puppet master (q.v.). Of course, there is nothing to stop anyone from regarding Jesus as a deluded fantasist, his ideology as the dangerous creation of a deluded fantasist.

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Outline of this page ...

• Our Father and the Kingdom of God
  • The Self-Limit of God
    • God does not do miracles (and we would not really wish Him to)
    • Propositions that are undefined language versus propositions that contradict experience
  • "Bound by the laws of nature"
  • Summary Conclusions
    • The merciful Samaritan (Luke 10.30-37) - "Who is my neighbor?"
    • "Controversies that no longer carry conviction" (Bonhoeffer)
• The Good, the Useful, Borderless Concepts
  • Forms of Expression, and Meaning
    • "The heart has its reasons"
    • The expression 'I feel that this is right'
    • Forms of Expression - Refuges of Ignorance (pretending you know what you don't know)
• The forms of life of birds and man
  • Thought-forms
    • "Sancte Socrates" (Erasmus)
    • "A Christian is anyone who lives according to the Word" (Justin Martyr)
    • Absurd Comparisons
• The displacement of "God as a working-hypothesis" to answer man's questions about the natural world (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
  • First impressions and expectations (quite often) are mistaken impressions and false expectations
  • Or maybe this would be a Summary of Bonhoeffer's thought
    • Grotius: Law that is valid "even if there were no God"
  • "God as a working-hypothesis"
    • An example of Bonhoeffer's project of reinterpretation

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The Self-Limit of God

The "God of the philosophers and schoolmen" (Pascal) is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good. That God does not do miracles -- but not because he is limited by the laws of physics (nature) -- but because the laws of physics are his self-made laws (Paley's Watchmaker). Thus God cannot lift Jesus from the cross, nor raise him from the dead, because God cannot do miracles, if by 'miracle' is meant 'an act that is contrary to the laws of physics', i.e. God cannot will against his own will, as it were. (The philosophers do not mean by 'God' the prodigy-working Olympian-type gods of the myths.) So much for the limits of deism's God, then.

But Catholic Christianity is theism: it believes both that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good -- and that God does miracles. And so there is the objection: But why would God do miracles in the case of Jesus but not in the case of a suffering child or animal? That is a religious (or theological) question, however, not a philosophical one. So much then for Catholic Christianity. And so much for an historical preface. (Language in religion, e.g. 'God is the Father', is discussed elsewhere.)

The God of the philosophers, Anselm's proof and Norman Malcolm

But if the God of the philosophers is a somewhat superfluous picture, because speculation isn't knowledge and what, after all, can be done with this picture? Anselm's proof: "God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and that which exists is greater than that which does not." Norman Malcolm argued that Anselm's argument is valid: the God of the philosophers exists; -- and now what? ["God is that than which nothing more perfect can be imagined". I don't see that it is more perfect to exist as a fact than to exist as an idea. On the other hand, perfect goodness would do good; this argues for theism (even as experience argues against it).]

And if the God of Catholic Christianity is shipwrecked by (what non-religious thinkers call) common-sense theodicy, and if we are neither metaphysicians nor Catholic Christians, then, if the word 'God' is to have some role in our lives, there will have to be conceptual revision: the two Gods -- i.e. two conceptions of God (or, more clearly: two definitions, two distinct usages of the word 'God') -- will have to be somehow reconciled. (The conceptual revision-reconciliation will not, of course, be acceptable either to the philosophers or to Catholic Christians, but the conceptual revision is not undertaken for their sakes, but for ours.)

And one revision may take this form: that God is "all-powerful, but within limits". Now, how can that statement not be nonsense? By adding to that formula: "although those limits are self-imposed". God does not do miracles because he is limited by the laws of physics (i.e. nature), but those laws are God's laws, not of necessity, but by choice. By God's own choice God does not play god. Nor would we really want him to. Because we would not want to live either in chaos [an unpredictable world] or in an eternal childhood in the protective hands of God.

[And now we may want to object: "... although those limits are self-imposed"? That is an example of the maddening-minded theology of anthropomorphism. What is correct to say is that God neither can nor cannot be all-powerful -- because the word 'God' is not the name of a human-like being.]

If there are laws of nature, it is God's will that there be, and there is no more reason to believe that man knows those laws any less "in part" than he knows God in part. And so God could work miracles without "violating the laws of physics". But then man would not be free; he would not have the gift of freedom God has given him through the regularity (predictability) of the natural world: "God doesn't play god" = God doesn't act arbitrarily. [The constancy (faithfulness) of nature]

God does not do miracles

The picture: "God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good." But God does not seem so very powerful -- if power is shown by deeds rather than by restraint ("Bear and forbear" is not only Epictetus's motto). Because above God stand God's laws of nature (not merely man's "laws of physics", and yes, "God's laws of nature" is a metaphysical picture; but then so is God). Or would you prefer to be a marionette, pulled this way and that by an inscrutable power? Would you prefer that events were unpredictable, that there were no regularity in nature, that when you threw a ball into the air it might fly up, down or turn into a bird and fly away, all at the hands of a God playing god? And if you would not prefer the life of a marionette, "then stop this foolish trifling and show by your own example what kind of men philosophy can make" (Epictetus, , Discourses iii, 13).

God does not do miracles. Nor would we really want him to.

We would not want God to play god, because, however distressed we may be by circumstances, we want to be free, not like small children or animals. (If God played god, we would exist in a state of chaos, helpless to orient ourselves: in a world of complete disorder, man cannot be free. [Arbitrariness is the tool of prison interrogators.] Above all -- God is not a human personality (The philosophically stupid -- is it philosophically stupid? -- anthropomorphism of the Olympian picture: the donkey's god would spend all his time eating hay and drinking water (Xenophanes), just as man's god is a marionetter [puppet master] man can make demands on, as on an all-powerful father). The Greek gods are human personalities.

Parenthetically: of course, 'God' is our concept, our "picture". The word 'God', like all words, is a tool we can use to do some work -- now, what work do we aim to do with it? There may be a conflict between our picture of God and our experience -- if we choose the wrong picture for our purposes.

Only, remember there is an important distinction between the logical possibility 'God is all-good and all-powerful' and the statement of fact 'God is all-good and all-powerful' (if the grammar of that statement allows it to be verified by experience): the first concerns whatever can be described, the second whatever is or is not actual. [Copleston about the Catholic theologians: "To treat a theological proposition, such as 'God loves all men' as though it were" an empirical proposition "would be absurd". But not to treat it that way is also absurd -- for what is it to mean if it is not treated that way?]

[Is the concept 'God' a theoretical construct, like the concept 'atom' in physics, an explanation of why there is something rather than nothing (if "something" is an observed phenomenon)? Bonhoeffer's "God as a working-hypothesis", in this case, however, an "hypothesis" that advances in physics can never displace (because it is a metaphysical rather than a physical hypothesis).]

["God as a working-hypothesis" in ethics, an explanation of good and evil? Again that would be a metaphysical rather than a physical hypothesis.]

Propositions that are undefined language versus propositions that contradict experience

Query: Wittgenstein, God, square circle.

Note: an important distinction. The proposition 'God is all good and all powerful' versus the proposition 'But all experience shows that God either isn't all good or isn't all-powerful'. Why is one ('square circle') nonsense, but the other ('God is all good and all powerful') not? Because one is a matter of experience, the other a matter of grammar! There is a difference between a contradiction in facts and a contradiction in grammatical rules. 'This simple figure is a square and not-a-square' is, if we talk the way we normally do, an undefined combination of words: 'There is an A such that A is round and A is not-round'. If 'A is round and A is not round, then there is no A' -- that is a statement of grammatical impossibility. But 'There is no all-good, all-powerful God' is not a grammatical impossibility; it is a false statement of fact -- if verification by experience belongs to its grammar -- i.e. if by 'God' we mean a picture that can be compared with the state of the world. (That is an elementary distinction, and yet it is very easy to be confused here.)

"Bound by the laws of nature"

God is bound, ethically bound by the laws of nature. He cannot raise Jesus from the dead without also curing [saving] the sick child. He cannot interfere in the course of nature to do one without also doing the other. God is ethically bound by the laws of nature.

The Source of Human Freedom

"... that a ball when you release it might fly up, down or turn into a bird and fly away (all at the caprice of one god or another). None of us would wish to live in a world like that." And this is related to the question of Can man be free if [he is] subjected to arbitrary rule?, whether the arbitrary rule of man or the unpredictable rule of God or gods. Man is free because he is able to predict the consequences of events and of his own actions -- this is what the laws (i.e. the observable regular relationship of cause to event) of nature effect, that man is free. (Of course human freedom requires some unpredictability as well, because otherwise man would be living in a calculus. [Ignorance of cause and effect (unpredictability) isn't lessened by invoking "God as a working-hypothesis": such superstition is ignorance that does not recognize itself, thinking you know what you don't know; placating and supplicating inscrutable deities is not being free: there is a relationship between rationality and freedom.])

"God is ethically bound by the laws of nature." We may say that if this is an area of our lives in which we use reason, because that would be a rational account. But religious belief is not about using reason or not always about that. For example, in the case of calling God our father solely because Jesus told us to, that would be a case where you really could say of the religious believer that "Here he does not use reason" (LC p. 59); in place of reason, there is trust (cf. CV p. 72 [MS 137 48b: 4.6.1948]).

It's not as if the laws of nature were contrary to God's will; quite the contrary, the laws of nature are God's will. Of course just what use that picture of God, i.e. that concept 'God', might have for the Christian religion, I can't imagine, because it could only be of the most tangential theism.

The rain God "sends to both the just and the unjust alike" (Matthew 5.45) -- that is the laws of nature.

Summary Conclusions

There cannot be a proof for the existence of the God of Christianity, and a proof of the existence of the God of Stoic pantheism would be superfluous; because the God of Christianity is transcendent (God somehow -- I don't know how -- stands apart from "the world") whereas the God of Stoicism, if I see this aright, is immanent (In other words, God is somehow -- I don't know how -- in all things and all things are in God; note that all things are not in Zeus and Zeus is not in all things; there is Zeus and there is the world, and the world is not Zeus, and the world is not in Zeus.). The God of Christianity is not a god, although that is his origin in Judaism, a god among gods.

The existence of pantheism's God is mere grammar, deriving one grammatical proposition from others, as in Aquinas's five ways; that is the sense in which it is "superfluous": it is a proof that proves nothing: it simply displays the inter-relationships of various rules. These "cannot" are, of course, logical impossibility -- i.e. a 'demonstration of the existence of gods' is undefined language (or what might it mean)? Obviously, if the gods are transcendent [supernatural] no empirical -- fact of experience -- test is possible ... or what would it look like?

Would it be like the test attributed to Diagoras: if a man who breaks an oath goes unpunished (oaths were sworn to God; cf. Jesus's "swear not" (Matthew 5.34)), then the gods must not exist? That would not be religion, but science.

By any empirical test, the gods do not exist: the spiritual cannot be put to a material test [cf. LC p. 60, 56] (If it could it would not be spiritual -- i.e. what we mean by 'spiritual'). Both the Gods of Christian dualism (God and the world) and of Stoic pantheism are pictures and nothing more: they are ways of looking at [organizing, "making sense of", making intelligible] the world and life (i.e. our experience).

[That is a summary of my reflections on Schweitzer's rejection of the historicity of Acts 17.22 ff., Paul's speech at Athens' Areopagus (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, tr. Montgomery (1931), p. 7-9).]

I think Schweitzer was right about this, to never use the word 'God' in the context of philosophy but only in the context of religion. Because -- but now this is my view, my way of thinking, not Schweitzer's -- in the context of philosophy the word 'God' can only be the title of "the God of the philosophers and intellectuals", and that God has very little to do with the God who Jesus calls "Father", which is the God -- i.e. the concept 'God' -- of religion.

The only connection of "the God of the philosophers" to religion is made by theology, e.g. by the theologians of Catholic Christianity (which is "faith seeking understanding"). That is, you cannot begin with that concept ("the God of the philosophers"), as if religion were founded on it, for it is not. Theology is based on religion, not religion on theology (not on "ways of knowing"; the ways of knowing only arise in Catholic Christianity as a theological response to The Book of Wisdom 13.5 and Paul's Letter to the Romans 1.19-20).

If there were gods on Olympus

Contrary to Wittgenstein, it is not true that we can describe what it would be like if there were gods on Mount Olympus -- because it would be exactly the same if there were no gods as if there were. That derives from the rules of grammar 'The gods are supernatural beings' and 'The supernatural is that which cannot be perceived'. There would be no empirical difference [no measurable difference]; just as there is no difference between the existence or non-existence of the God of Christianity: the universe would look exactly the same either way. [Invoking "God as a working-hypothesis" would be like describing a rain shower in a space of only two-dimensions and trying to account for the location of the water drops ("that the visible has its source in the invisible").]

Catholic Christianity, when it identified "the God of the philosophers" with the God of Judaism caused endless conceptual confusion, because the two conceptions are just that -- two distinct concepts, that is to say, two different grammars [one sign, two grammars; cf. 'cloud bank' and 'river bank', as different as that -- and yet there are similarities to confuse you: e.g. the common image of a wall].

There can be descriptions of what it would be like if there were gods on Olympus -- but not: "what it would be like if there were such a thing as God". And to say this is to determine the concept 'God' more precisely. (CV p. 82, a remark from 1949)

Is that a true account of the grammar of our word 'gods' [or is it a mistaken "more precise determination" -- i.e. definition -- of that concept]? The gods can make themselves manifest to you -- show themselves in some form or other (a cloud, a goose) -- but you cannot see them as they are in themselves for in themselves they are spirits [ghosts]. On the other hand, in the Bible, Adam sees the Lord God's back when He walks in His garden: God is a material superman, and we can say what it would be like if there were or were not such a god in Eden. (That is a more primitive conception (picture) than the Greek picture.)

[When the main character in Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul says about God the Father that "He's always seemed a bit of a swine to me", that character is talking about the God of the Old Testament, not the Father of Jesus. He is using the primitive picture of God, the picture of the God who plays god.]

[The torturer who boasts, "Inside these walls, I am God", has that primitive picture as his guide. In that picture God plays god [or, God plays the role of a god], something which God does not do (if one connects up the concept 'God' and 'laws of nature [physics]' as I have done above). The expression when speaking of a natural disaster such as a tidal wave or an earthquake -- if it is to reflect that primitive picture -- should be "the act of a god", not "an act of God".]

Query: God is all powerful within limits.

Isn't that another way of saying that God is not all powerful, for 'to be all powerful' is 'to have no limits to one's power'. What part of 'not' don't you understand?

"God is this. God is that", as if first there were God and then came questions about God's nature; but what if: first there is the word 'God' and then the question of what gives that word meaning. That is, discussions of God always begin at the wrong end -- i.e. with God, rather than with the word 'God'. I.e. they always assume the existence of some vague thing and then conjecture about what the nature of the vague something is. And that is self-mystification, but nothing more.

Query: what if the word is the thing?

I.e. what if the word itself [the sign: the physical aspect of the word only, e.g. spoken sounds or marks on paper, as distinct from the word's meaning or use in the language] is the only "thing" in this case, that the word is not the name of some object or phenomenon, as it is not in the case of the word 'God' where the word itself is the only "thing". But first that grammatical possibility must suggest itself to you. [This is not like 'There are no fairies in the forest', because the word 'fairy' is a name -- i.e. the name of a fairy tale object. But the grammar of 'God' is not like that (except in the most primitive pictures of God, where He walks in His garden, etc.)] It is, after all, the grammar of the word 'God' that we are inquiring about.

The merciful Samaritan (Luke 10.25-37) - Who is my neighbor?

If we want the kingdom of God to come, Schweitzer wrote, which is why we pray "Thy kingdom come", then we must work towards building it ourselves. The merciful Samaritan of the Gospel by his deeds creates around himself a small village of the kingdom of God [Schweitzer told his granddaughter: "You can have your Lambaréné anywhere"]. To deny this would be to rewrite the parable, because as it stands the Lord said, "Why do you call me your master and not do what I tell you? Go and do the same as the Samaritan of the story." Contrast the Samaritan with the rich man who walked past the poor man at his gate (Luke 16.19-25).

Is this correct, that in contrast to the religious thinker, the student of philosophy has no master, that his Amen can only come after Jesus speaks and what he says has stood the tests of reason and of experience? Not as Schweitzer saw religious thinking: everything must pass those tests. Nonetheless, Jesus is not thereby reduced to the status of a mere teacher (as Socrates, Schweitzer and Wittgenstein are). He remains a religious landmark: the force of his ethical personality demands that he be listened to: Schweitzer says that the title "teacher" does not go far enough -- but does the title "master" go too far?

Why not "teacher"? I wouldn't call Jesus that, certainly not in the sense that I call Plato and Socrates my teachers. Jesus is on an entirely different level. Maybe I could express it this way, that while Socrates, Wittgenstein, and Schweitzer are the principal teachers of the intellect, Jesus is teacher of the heart. And that is a very different sort of thing. (Cf. Schweitzer's belief that compassion is the foundation of all ethics (of which I would ask: how do you verify that?). But it's not that way: although Christian and Platonic ethics are consistent, philosophical ethics is founded in reason; its foundation is not irrational (Kant's ethics is religious, not philosophical). [More about this contrast in the discussion "Goats, man, and God" later.]

I don't know quite what the word 'redeemed' should mean for us, but I do think that the good life for man and for me as an individual can only lie in reverence for truth and devotion to what is higher, and that to live that way is to be "saved" or "redeemed" from evil.

Paul was the only great thinker in the early Church who saw clearly that redemption, like the Kingdom, was not something in the future, but a present reality ... ("The Conception of the Kingdom of God in the Transformation of Eschatology, an Epilogue by Albert Schweitzer", tr. Coates, in E.N. Mozley (1950), p. 97)

The meaning I would assign to that: not that the kingdom of God has come, but only that the path to the kingdom has been made clear: "The light shines in the darkness": it shone in Jesus and it shines still in our memory of him, and to live in accord with that light is to be "redeemed' or "saved" even now from this world's evil (ignorance). The light is shown by Jesus's life and ethics of unlimited love (as in Jesus's answer to the question "Who is my neighbor?" and as the Lord's Prayer: asking others for forgiveness for our wrong-doing while forgiving others their wrong-doing towards us), love which redeems or saves in the present, because it makes the kingdom of God live in us.

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Many years ago, maybe over fifty years now, the journalist David Frost interviewed the then archbishop of Canterbury, and asked him what anyone must believe if he is to be accounted a Christian, and finally Frost wore the archbishop down to this single criterion: a Christian is one who believes in the Resurrection (Jesus's rising from the dead). But I use a different criterion -- namely: Christian is as Christian does. What is important is not the word 'Christian' as a noun, but only as an adjective. Beyond that: a 'Christian' is a follower of Jesus, not in doctrine (world-picture), but in deeds (way of life); Schweitzer used the phrase "piety of deeds, rather than words" (Out of my Life and Thought).

What is the meaning of the combination of words 'belief in the Resurrection'? If this is a "religious picture", then how does it guide anyone's life? (Contrast or compare belief in a Last Judgment.) As well as that interview, Professor Trudinger gave us an essay to read which distinguished the question 'Are you a Muslim?' (If you go into any small village in the Middle East and you ask someone "Are you a Moslem?" he will answer "Yes. Everyone here is") from the question 'How Muslim are you?' So you can see that this idea was not original to me, but suggested by the author of that essay. And so e.g. 'Was Mr. N.N. a Christian?' is different from the question 'Was Mr. N.N. Christian?' (Unlike its mother Judaism, Christianity is not a tribal identity ideology, although in the past Christian churches have acted as if it were -- because Judaism or Semitism is an aggressive, destructive, genocidal nationalism. Its two principal objects of hatred are Christianity and Western, which is Christian, Civilization, both of which it seeks to undermine (by dilution (e.g. of Christmas) and misappropriation (e.g. removing Christianity from the Christian calendar) and satire (ridicule).)

Anyone can call himself a Christian, but God isn't deceived.

"Controversies that no longer carry conviction"

Now about this particular point, I agree with Bonhoeffer: these old controversies can be revived but they no longer carry conviction (I mean that queer notion "belief in": to believe to be true what one has no relevant reason to believe is true: we "believe in" things that are essentially unverifiable [The ethical personality of Jesus is not a relevant reason to believe that God is the father: a relevant reason DEF.= belongs to logical proof and verification]). In "Chapter 2. (e)" of his "Outline for a Book", Bonhoeffer writes:

The problem of the Apostles' Creed? "What must I believe?" is the wrong question; antiquated controversies, especially those between the different sects ... They may at any time be revived with passion, but they no longer carry conviction.... All that we can prove is that the faith of the Bible and Christianity does not stand or fall by these issues. (Letters and Papers (1971), p. 382)

My agreement is in the context of the development [evolution] of my own thinking about these topics. (I can't remember who said -- it may have been Norman Malcolm -- about Culture and Value that many of Wittgenstein's remarks there are "religious remarks" (i.e. remarks made by Wittgenstein about his own religious thoughts) rather than simply remarks about the Philosophy of Religion.)

There are, however, many people for whom in their own thinking and way of life "to be a Christian" means to hold dogmatic beliefs, a particular world-picture (in which mythography is actually historiography written, as it were, by God himself, giving the historical account not only of the past but of the future as well: "What is reality?" Well, God himself has revealed this to us). But there are countless variations of such beliefs-in.

The form of expression we use, 'Do you believe in God?' (1) The expression 'believe in' indicates that we are not asking for justification by relevant reasons or evidence. (2) It belongs to the grammar of this question that the same person may correctly answer both Yes and No to it -- i.e. 'believing in God' may mean so many things that, without clarification, it means nothing in particular (It is barely provides orientation as to what we are talking about). [Cf. defining the word 'God' and Russell's theory of descriptions. (PI § 79)]

"God is made in the image of man"

Query: God is the expression of our highest ideals.

Karol Wojtyla said that if we had made God in our own image we might have made Him many things, even a clown. There are many "images of man". But we did not.

But yet in Catholic Christianity God is depicted as a merciless judge, damning wrong-doers for all eternity [as in The Last Judgment fresco on the wall of the Sistine Chapel]. If God -- i.e. the concept 'God', which like all other concepts was made by man for man's use -- were an "expression of our highest ideals", God would have only two attributes: Truth and Goodness. (Note that the good man does good to others rather than harm (He makes them better rather than worse); but in the case of eternal damnation, God is made in the image of the bad man, the one who does others harm and makes them worse.)

And further God could not have the attribute of all-powerful ["almighty"] if God were "the expression of our highest ideal": He could not be the creator or sustainer of evil (Even if evil is classified as dysfunction, dysfunction belongs to the very nature of things; e.g. age and deterioration).

What can we do with a revised concept 'God'?

The question is: what can we do with the concept 'God' if God is stripped of His traditional attributes? Do we need a metaphor for Truth and Goodness? That is my question: what can I do with 'God' if God is to be "the expression of our highest ideals"?

Jesus is an expression of high ideals, of the ethical kingdom of God, of the ethics of love, and, as Bonhoeffer points out, he made himself helpless by putting himself on the cross (Isaiah's "suffering servant"). In contrast, the Second Person of the Trinity, God, is all-powerful.

There is not nor has there ever been a way to reconcile all-powerful and all-good; in our world those attributes are disconnected by experience [The difficulty is not that the concept 'God' is a grammatical (conceptual) muddle]. Some men can accept this contradiction of experience and call their acceptance by the title 'faith'. Others cannot. For me, I always return to my question (although I do, in some sense, believe in God; but "in some sense", anything you like, after all).

"The nature of God can be known by including every perfection or, conversely by excluding every imperfection" (According to Copleston, these are Proclus's affirmative and negative methods, I think). Is being all-powerful a perfection or an imperfection? "God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Is being all-powerful greater than not being all-powerful? Goodness and truth are perfections, but is power a perfection? Is it greater to exist than to be solely an idea? Would Plato be greater if he were alive? I don't see it. The discussion seems nebulous and arbitrary (and so I imagine I don't understand it).

It seems to me that whenever we say the words 'Thank God' we could with no loss of meaning say 'Thank goodness'. That is, the two forms of expression are equivalent in meaning. Thus "All good things come from God" = "All good things are God". But, if that is correct, what service would remain for the word 'God' to perform -- would that word not be superfluous? [The limit of concept revision]

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The Good, the Useful, Borderless Concepts

To be good is to be "good for something" -- i.e. useful. The good DEF.= the useful. For example, in order to be good, a friend must be useful to you in some way. That is, according to Xenophon's account of Socrates' thought (Memorabilia ii, 6, 14). But there are countless ways in which a thing may be useful; indeed, with some imagination, some use can be found for everything.

And not every use is what we would call a morally good use: e.g. a knife may be used for good or evil: a knife may be useful for killing [murder], but Xenophon's definition of 'good' is amoral (i.e. makes no use of the concept 'morally good and evil', although the proposition 'It is evil to harm one's enemies' is hardly equivalent in meaning to 'It is useless to harm one's enemies'; the latter proposition is an hypothesis; the former is a tautology). The good is many things, among them: whatever is in accord with the excellence proper to a thing.

The concept 'useful' is extremely broad [extensive] (cf. the concept 'thing'). So a selection of examples must make our meaning clear; cf. the word 'use' in Wittgenstein's "for a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language". Reading a child to sleep is not an example of that.

Xenophon: To be useful is to be good (but not: "to be good is to be useful", because that is a value judgment; the first statement is a definition).

"Isn't it enough for you that your daughter is good?" -- "Good? Good for what? If you're not clever, you're good for nothing!" What Albert Schweitzer says below is indeed applicable to Dr. Sloper's version of utilitarianism (James, Washington Square).

For the only profound ethic is one which is able, on the basis of one and the same conception, to give an ethical interpretation to all that a man experiences and suffers as well as to all that he does. The great weakness of the utilitarian ethic at all times is that it can relate itself only to man's action and not to that which he undergoes, although for his full development both must be taken into account. It is only in so far as a man is purified and liberated from the world by that which he experiences and endures, that he is capable of truly ethical action. (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, tr. Montgomery (1931), p. 302)

I don't think this is true, that a "utilitarian ethic" cannot "relate itself to that which a man undergoes ..." Because what is more useful to man than care of his soul, and how can that not be "related to that which he undergoes"? Is not detachment from this world, "living in the world without belonging to it" -- living in eternity by seeing the world sub specie aeterni -- the good for man? [Well, but isn't that more than simply rational moral virtue? Aren't I saying here that a particular attitude, namely philosophical, towards life also belongs to the excellence that is proper and unique to man?] And so concept fluidity ["useful"] makes this discussion ... although I do think that Schweitzer misrepresents Socrates and his Stoic descendants.

Forms of Expression, and Meaning

But if we undertake this task, as we needs must, we ought to make clear to ourselves what we are doing. We ought not to bemuse ourselves with the belief that we are simply taking over the whole of the dogmatic conceptions of Jesus and of Primitive Christianity, seeing that this is, in fact, impossible. (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, tr. Montgomery (1931), p. 291)

The word 'bemuse' here means 'self-mystify', 'to confuse oneself' or 'self-confuse' (reflexive). Our world-picture is not that the natural world is coming to an end even as Jesus speaks; Jesus died and the supernatural kingdom of God did not come. We cannot share his eschatology -- even if we wish to.

For the Baptist, for Jesus, and for the Primitive-Christian community the whole of Ethics falls under the concept of repentance (metánoia). By this they understand a change of mind, consisting in penitence for the past ["Forgive us our wrong-doing, as we forgive those who have wronged us" (Luke 11.4)] and the determination to live henceforward, liberated from everything earthly in expectation of the Messianic Kingdom. (ibid. p. 293)

And indeed why use the form of expression "change of heart" [as if man were not a reasonable being] rather than "change of mind"? What is meant by 'change of heart' -- a "change of feelings" or a change of attitude? But what should be the source of our attitudes -- irrational feelings? Or isn't reason the excellence that is proper to man? Well, but sometimes we must act without reasons -- aspects of our life just are nebulous -- guided by "our sense of right and wrong" only, and here we might speak of a change of state of mind = a change of heart ["I feel differently about it now"]. Is the meaning of the word 'feelings' the same in all contexts -- is there "an essence of feeling"?

"Why indeed?" All our lives we have heard the expression 'change of heart' thoughtlessly repeated; it is a concept that is common currency (CV p. 74). But that form of expression belongs to the Kantian picture, not to Socratic ethics; Kantian ethics consists of irrational convictions ("categorical imperatives"), or in other words "feelings". [Question: does ethics have to be exclusively one or the other, in all cases Socratic or in all cases Kantian?]

Do these propositions have a common nature: 'I feel sad / hopeful / cheerful / angry' and 'I feel that killing is wrong'? In Kantian ethics what does 'feeling' [cf. 'conviction'] mean?

The expression 'I feel that this is right'

"I feel that killing is wrong." If that conviction is not put to the test of reason (there is more than one way to discover contradiction), it belongs to an anti-Socratic (i.e. non-rational) view of ethics (right and wrong). (Many irrational beliefs are the result of mistakes in reasoning, or of ignoring the evidence of experience, but others are of not thinking at all.)

We often use the word 'feel' in the same contexts in which we say "What is your opinion of ...?" or "What do you think about ...?" And it is not true that we do not in some cases require -- or at least we expect the person to have (and we regard the person as irrational or unthinking if they haven't got) -- reasons for their feelings. What is the justification for your feeling, because the word 'because' here does not refer to a biological cause, but to a reason? So there is no essence of feeling. Nevertheless the word does suggest emotion rather than reason, and for that reason, I would use the expression 'change of mind' rather than the expression 'change of heart', and we ought to live in the way that makes that choice of expression appropriate.

Forms of Expression - Refuges of Ignorance (pretending you know what you don't know)

Words such as 'probable', 'reasonable', 'likely', 'doubtless', are not words that belong to scholarship. They tell us nothing about the facts (except of their absence) but only about someone's response to the facts -- and also about the quality of their thinking.

"Comparative Religion"-- pseudo-explanations of the origins of things based on resemblances, analogies, usually rather vague -- merely replaces one myth [mythology] with another, one which seems "reasonable", "probable", "likely" to so someone or other. But a myth is not a fact, and it is not scholarship. The words 'probable', 'likely', 'reasonable' do not have the same meaning as 'true', although that is often how the historian's readers treat them, especially if their readers are unaware of other possibilities: may be unjustifiably becomes is.

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Forms of life, bird's and man's

Note: this adds to the discussions "If a lion could talk ...", but Birds do talk and we do not understand them, and Patterns of behavior.

At school many, many years ago I read that crows have a vocabulary of twenty-four words, e.g. 'farmer' and 'farmer with a gun'. But words such as this is not what Wittgenstein has in mind when he says "If a crow could speak ...", but rather moods and dispositions. Or so I think, because if birds express emotions by their song -- what understanding could our life form have of theirs?

Thought-forms

The thought-forms which [Paul] had hitherto used proved incapable of dealing satisfactorily with the implications of his new faith. So the Apostle is driven to have recourse to another system of ideas. (Paul and His Interpreters, tr. Montgomery (1912), p. 67)

If the Christian faith of any particular period desired to free itself from Paul in order to adopt the Gospel of Jesus to its thoughts-forms ... (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, p. 395)

By 'thought-forms' Schweitzer does not mean the mere the "signs" (spoken sounds, marks on paper) of a vocabulary. For example, an English speaker may know how to use the word 'philosophy' and nonetheless ask which language that word comes from, because he need not know that word's history, i.e. that the letter combination 'ph' rather than 'f' may show that an English word's origin lies in the Greek language; that is not the case e.g. in Italian, where the Greek word philosophía becomes filosofia, as he also need not know the word's original meaning in that language of 'thirst for learning' (cf. Paul and His Interpreters (1912), p. 88).

By 'thought-form' Schweitzer means not merely a different [new] form of expression but a different [a new] way of looking at old things: received ideas and world-pictures.

The expression 'thought-forms' used by Schweitzer (or his translator) seems equivalent to 're-conceptualization' or 'concept revision'. But when Kierkegaard wrote that it was the task of the thinkers of every age to revise the concepts then common currency, he made a very general remark, the meaning of which needs to be explained with examples.

... which can in some way or other be expressed in Hegelian thought-forms ... (ibid. p. 15)

But is that always possible? Wittgenstein's "thought-form" [or conceptual tool] of grammar and sense and nonsense -- why suppose that every idea can be re-written in that thought-form, particularly as that thought-form is intended not to restate but to eliminate many [philosophical] problems. Can Hegel's philosophy be expressed in Wittgenstein's thought-forms? If a new way of thinking is radical, it may make the expression of old ways of thinking -- not different -- but, rather, impossible.

When I gave my account of the Lord's Prayer in the Gospel according to Luke, was I expressing Jesus's ideas in different thought-forms merely? Isn't my world-picture so radically different from his that his words are -- not re-phrased, not re-expressed -- but instead given a new meaning? And obviously this new meaning resembles the old -- or there would be no point to using Jesus's words at all -- but it does nonetheless consist of mere resemblances; many Christians would reject what I wrote as being a negation of what they believe.

There is no Christian religion, nor indeed five or seven Christian religions, but there are instead many, many Christian religions. Not everyone belongs to a Church (a community of believers in a doctrine, dogma or creed). A 'Christian' is a follower of Jesus, in some way or another (but there are many different ways). And he may belong simply to the "community" of good men and women ("known or as yet unknown, a good man is already a friend"). But that is only one possibility; there are countless others. That is the word 'Christian' as an adjective rather than a noun.

(But will the good man recognize me as a friend? That is the question.)

"Sancte Socrates" (Erasmus)

"And other sheep have I who are not of this flock"

A heathen wrote this to a heathen, yet it has justice, sanctity, truth. I can hardly refrain from saying "Saint Socrates, pray for me!"

Erasmus, quoted by J. Bronowski (in The Ascent of Man (1973), Chapter 13, p. 427); the source of at least part of this quotation may be Erasmus' Colloquies, in the section "The Religious Treat", which "teaches what ought to be the Table-Talk of Christians", tr. N. Bailey, these words spoken by the character Nephalius:

Indeed, it was a wonderful Elevation of Mind in a Man, that knew not Christ, nor the holy Scriptures: And therefore, I can scarce forbear, when I read such Things [as "what Socrates said to Crito, a little before he drank his Poison"] of such Men, but cry out, Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis; Saint Socrates, pray for us.

Again, there are many possible flocks. Erasmus was a Christian humanist, i.e. classicist, a scholar of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. (It's not clear to me whether he was also a Catholic in senso stretto.)

What is your aim in philosophy -- to dispel darkness? But much more: to revise and expand the list of categories.

Absurd Comparisons

Query: Jesus, Socrates compared.

The query is asking about two men whose world-pictures were so fundamentally and profoundly different as to make any comparison beyond that the life and death of each showed a complete unity of thought and deed, and that it is difficult to imagine what Western Civilization would have become without them. (Schweitzer wrote about Socrates: "What would that ancient world have become without him?") [Abraham and Socrates contrasted]

Justin Martyr's comparison of Socrates and Christ

When Socrates, in the power of the logos, or as its instrument, tried to lead men away from falsehood into truth, evil men put him to death as an impious atheist: so Christians, who follow and obey the incarnate Logos itself and who denounce the false gods, are termed atheists. In other word, just as the work of Socrates, which was a service of truth, was a preparation for the complete work of Christ, so the condemnation of Socrates was, as it were, a rehearsal or anticipation of the condemnation of Christ and His followers. (Copleston, A History of Philosophy II, 2, 2 (ii))

Justin (Flavius Justinus of Neapolis (Nablus) in Palestine) came to Christianity from Greek philosophy and held Plato and Socrates in the highest esteem. (I don't think any other Christian would have dared to make Justin's parallel.)

Query: who is more ethical Jesus or Socrates?

Absurdity of comparison: such different world-pictures. But their piety and asking their hearers to question is common to them, and although the context is so different: ethics is the purpose of the questioning. They were equally ethical -- i.e. fully occupied with how man should live his life, and with living that way themselves.

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The displacement of "God as a working-hypothesis" to answer man's questions about the natural world

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about something that seems similar to my subject, but note that he often places the word 'God' inside quotation marks; now why does he do this?

Note: There is also a brief summary of Bonhoeffer's views written much later than these first blush remarks.

First impressions and expectations (quite often) are mistaken impressions and false expectations

The movement that began about the thirteenth century ... towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learned to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called "God". In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which no one now hardly dares to tilt.

But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God" -- and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, "God" is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground. ([Tegel [Military Interrogation Prison, Berlin (p. 409)]] 8 June 1944, Letters and Papers from Prison: The enlarged edition (1971), ed. Bethge, tr. Reginald Fuller, Frank Clarke and others, p. 325-326)

He goes on to say, or I think he says, that only with respect to [the mystery of] death and guilt (Bonhoeffer does not include suffering along with death and guilt, although it seems to me that he should) has "God" any longer a (or maybe any) role [to play] in man's thinking. But that even with respect to death and guilt, secular solutions were in his day being offered by existentialism and psychotherapy; however unsuccessful those solutions may be, it does show man's quest to answer all questions without any need for "God" as the answer to them. (p. 326)

Bonhoeffer in the quotation above seems to ask (because I don't know if this is really his subject) the fundamental question: what is the place of God, I mean the concept 'God', now in the Western world-picture? If you know the rules for using the word 'God', then that should tell you what the place of God, i.e. of the concept 'God', is our life, if it has any place now. (I don't know whether or not this is a theological question -- "theology as grammar" (cf. PI § 373) -- for theologians now, i.e. whether or not they now "think it worthwhile to try to define God".)

On the next page (327) Bonhoeffer says that mankind has reached its adulthood now, and that it would be both pointless and wrong for the Church to try to force man back into his adolescence. But he doesn't (at least in this letter, I think) say what the adult concept 'God' is or should be. Bonhoeffer seems to be echoing, but also extending Comte's idea:

[Auguste Comte (1798-1857) says that what is] progressively shed by the wayside is recourse to God as an hypothesis to explain phenomena. That is to say, the more man comes to look for scientific "explanations" of events, the less does he seek a supernatural explanation. And when the mature mind [i.e. the mind intent on "positive" knowledge of the world] is ignorant of the scientific explanation of an event, it expects one and looks for it, instead of having recourse to God to fill a gap. (Copleston, History of Philosophy, Volume IX, V, 2)

When Bonhoeffer says that even "religious questions" now get along without "God", what does he mean by this, i.e. what examples does he have in mind? [The "eternal questions" are as much religious as philosophical.]

What role has God left to play in man's life?

Now I will try to go on with the theological reflections [Bonhoeffer says that his theme is a "secular" or "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts" (p. 359-360), and I think that means interpreting these concepts "as if God did not exist" or: with the presumption that God does not exist] ... I had been saying that God is being increasingly pushed out of a world that has come of age, out of the spheres of our knowledge and life, and that since Kant he has been relegated to a realm beyond the world of experience. Theology has on the one hand resisted the development ... On the other hand, it has accommodated itself to the development by restricting God to the so-called ultimate questions as a deus ex machina; that means that he becomes the answer to life's problems, and the solution of its needs and conflicts. So if anyone has no such difficulties, or if he refuses to go into these things ... then either he cannot be open to God; or else he must be shown that he is, in fact, deeply involved in such problems ... ([Tegel] 30 June 1944, p. 341)

Do I understand what Bonhoeffer is saying here? Is he objecting to stationing God on the outskirts of our life, such that a man might either not be aware of God at all or, despite being aware of God, simply choose to ignore that? But the "ultimate questions", which surely include how we should live our life, are not on the outskirts of our life: we all must live and we all must die (as must those we love), and so what does Bonhoeffer mean by 'ultimate questions'? In any case, the question remains: how is God the answer to those questions? If God has no roots in the world, no role to play in it, what is his connection either to it or to us?

"To live in a world in which God does not exist"

... we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in a world etsi deus non daretur [The sense of the Latin in Bonhoeffer's context is: which does not need God as the "working hypothesis" that explains its how-ness]. And this is just what we do recognize -- before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34 [(p. 366n81)]). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. ([Tegel] 16 July [1944], p. 360)

I think we are talking about, or I am talking about a revision of the concept 'God', or more clearly, forcefully and bluntly, a redefinition of the word 'God'. The present Christian concept is the God of Abraham: Creator, Law-giver (and Judge, rewarder (helper) and punisher), and ruler of the universe.

[An alternative account of the grammar of the word 'God' to the one given here.]

(Sometimes we revise a concept -- i.e. change the rules for using a word; but sometimes we only make clear to ourselves what the present concept is.)

Do we any longer have a use -- i.e. is the traditional concept (or, picture) 'God' in any way still serviceable (or even attractive to us in any way)? To me that seems to be the question to ask: Is there any longer any role for the concept 'God' to play in our thinking?

The expression "the death of God" sounds dramatic but it amounts to no more than the death of a particular concept -- i.e. that a word has lost its use in our life, its importance to us (e.g. if a community of thought gives only mouth-honor to God -- i.e. if mouth honor is people's only use for the word 'God'): words are tools and when we no longer have any use for them, then we discard them; or, alternatively, they may evolve to have a revised (or, changed) meaning, as e.g. the primitive god Yahweh became God (Maybe we could speak of the death of a particular picture of God in some epochs or among some communities of thinkers).

The question is: what can we do with the concept 'God' -- i.e. how can we define the word 'God' -- now? This seems to have been a question that concerned men in the time of Schweitzer (1875-1965) and in the time of Bonhoeffer (1906-1945); it seems to have been the question of post-Reformation (for in many ways the doctrines of the Reformation were simply variations on the doctrines of Catholic Christianity) Protestantism ... if I know what I'm talking about (and about history, I very often don't know what I'm talking about); and actually Bonhoeffer wanted to remain true to the doctrines of the Reformation; for him, 'Protestantism' still was, as it had been for Luther, 'a reformation of Catholic Christianity' (Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Eng. tr. 1970), p. 565).

But what do people normally mean by the word 'God'?

If you are not going to use the word 'God' the way we normally use that word, then why use the word 'God'? (cf. Wittgenstein: "My work is the heir to the title 'philosophy'." Well, that can certainly be disputed.)

Clearly for most people the traditional concept 'God' ["the highest, most powerful and best Being imaginable, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent"] is not no longer useful but remains a picture that has a role in their thinking -- regardless of whether they believe in God or are atheists.

The concept 'God' Pascal called "the God of the philosophers and wise ... [not the] God of Jesus Christ" (Memorial) is a metaphysical invention, sometimes but not necessarily the result of "faith seeking understanding". But that concept is now, I think Bonhoeffer would say, a way of thinking that belongs to the past, a picture with which we can now do nothing. All that remains now is the God of faith, the God of the cross: "pushed out of the world on to the cross". Is that what Bonhoeffer means -- it's not easy to see what he means, because doesn't Jesus on the cross need to be put in a cosmic context, and isn't that what is done with the concept 'God'?

We have then the Father who allows his child to become a man? That is not the God of Abraham, "our father in faith", who commands that mankind remain in an eternal childhood. But if the child no longer needs its Father (the concept 'Father' was invented for no other purpose than to serve a human need), if that particular picture has been put out to pasture [retired, withdrawn], then what becomes of Jesus, who taught us to call God our Father, the Father who will grant us the kingdom of God? What role remains for Jesus if he is no longer the Son of the Father?

In his "Editor's Forward" to the Third edition, revised and enlarged, of Letters and Papers from Prison, same translators as above (1967), Eberhard Bethge (1909-2000) writes:

Bonhoeffer's simplified description of Jesus as "the man for others" [Comment: if I recall aright, that was Nietzsche's expression, Nietzsche who said that there had only ever been one Christian, namely Jesus] ... means the realization of the fundamental difference between the religious God who is all-powerful, and the Christian God who suffers and is powerless ... (p. 18)

The question is, what is the Christian "God" [in contrast to "the religious God who is all-powerful"] -- i.e. what does Bonhoeffer mean by the word 'God' here? Was Bonhoeffer alluding e.g. to the doctrine of the Incarnation? For if you said that God became man and as a man let himself be put on a cross where he suffered and was powerless ... but the doctrine is not that God was crucified. How can you keep the "Son" if you discard the "Father"? I don't understand this. If the "Christian God" is not also the all-powerful God of religion, then why call the Christian God -- 'God'? And, further, why speak of the Christian God at all? Why not talk only about the man Jesus [as Schweitzer does in this letter from his youth].

Why not set aside the religious myth of the Incarnation as well as the myth (picture, concept) of the religious God? For as we normally use the word 'God', if the "Christian God" is powerless [not all-powerful], then the Christian God isn't what we normally mean by the word 'God'. Is not the all-powerful God the Creator (which is the traditional Christian concept 'God') the very picture that is required to give meaning to talk about God?

Albert Schweitzer also made a distinction between concepts in the case of 'God'. But when he contrasted the God of nature with the God who is an Ethical Personality, he did not do this in order to dismiss the God of nature (i.e. to discard the concept 'God of nature'), but only to say that nature is, from the ethical point of view, in every way mysterious to us, and that consequently Christianity must set the concept 'God of nature' to one side, accepting the mystery that is nature: we believe there is a relation between these two concepts, but we don't see what it is, how to reconcile them ["for we ourselves made them irreconcilable" (Z § 259)? Or did we? It is not the concepts 'all-powerful' and 'all-good' that are irreconcilable -- i.e. it is not rules of grammar that contradict one another -- but experience that contradicts preconception (i.e. our picture of how the world should be if God is all-good)]. [On the other hand, if we use the word 'God' the way we normally do -- and why use it any other way? -- then 'God' = 'nature's God'.]

But from what Bethge writes, maybe the answers to my questions may not be found in Bonhoeffer's letters, that we are instead left with a cryptograph, that is in this case a riddle to which there is no solution, possibly because Bonhoeffer died before he could finish his project. Goethe: fragments make you think, that is to say: to try to complete them. Maybe this is part of why Bonhoeffer is important in the history of Christianity, because his letters and papers from prison have led others to have thoughts of their own.

Many of my own thoughts, e.g. about Abraham as our father in an eternal nonage (although so far as I know Bonhoeffer does not refer to Abraham in this context), seem to resemble Bonhoeffer's thoughts. However, in my remarks I was talking about God the Lawgiver (ethics), not about the God of nature (physics) and any explanatory power that picture may have been thought to have. I was writing about freedom in ethics, not the freedom that comes from the belief that man can account for natural phenomena without needing to ever escape into the "asylum of ignorance" that is the concept 'God of nature'.

On the other hand, it may be that I simply don't understand Bonhoeffer's way of thinking, and that maybe I find his forms of expression, or his translators' versions of them -- I want to say that I cannot figure out what he is saying in prose so to speak. It is unclear to me whether he is writing theologically or philosophically -- or if he is, in some way that is unclear to me, doing both. And what are his assumptions -- the points of Christian thought [i.e. dogma: "Protestantism as a reformation of Catholic Christianity" (Bethge) might mean countless things] he accepts or takes for granted?

Or maybe this would be a Summary of Bonhoeffer's thought

Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" (or, "Christianity without religion") would not be atheism. But if it is not atheism -- for an atheist does not pray in the moments before his execution (Bethge, "The Last Days" (1967 ed.), p. 234), nor does he die with the expectation that "this day you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23.43), or in Bonhoeffer's own words "This is the end -- for me the beginning of life" ("The Last Days", p. 233; Bethge, "Editor's Preface", p. 24) -- then why does Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, call Bonhoeffer "The saint of the secular" (Sermon, 4 April 1965, used as a forward to the 1967 ed.), for is that not an abuse (misleading use) of the word 'secular'? And why talk of "the death of God" in this context, for although one picture of God was indeed "dead", it was not Bonhoeffer who killed that picture but, according to Bonhoeffer, historical developments, long before his birth, from Herbert of Cherbury to Hegel?

Bonhoeffer does not abandon (discard) the concept 'God' altogether, but only one picture of God [namely, "the God of religion" or "the religious God", by which Bonhoeffer seems to mean "the God of the philosophers", i.e. "the highest, most powerful and best Being imaginable", omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent], while at the same time emphasizing another picture of God -- namely, Jesus helpless on the cross, "the man [who gives his life] for others".

It is very easy to read one's own thoughts into Bonhoeffer's letters and papers from prison -- e.g. to falsely imagine that by "the God of religion" Bonhoeffer means what I wrote above about God and physics, that the only place we find God "in the world" is on the cross of Jesus, that the "religious God" (to use, what I think is, Bonhoeffer's jargon) is the God who does miracles in the world (as opposed to in men's hearts, as the picture of Jesus does), the God who takes part in the events of this world (hurling rocks at the heads of the Canaanites) -- and I don't know if that is what I have done in these paragraphs (I am seeking an historiographical hypothesis for the meaning of Bonhoeffer's statements).

Now for a few more thoughts on our theme. I am only gradually working my way to the non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts ...

Hugo Grotius: Law that is valid "even if there were no God"

On the historical side: There is one great development that leads to the world's autonomy. In theology one sees it first in Lord Herbert of Cherbury [1583-1648], who maintains that reason is sufficient for religious knowledge. In ethics it appears in Montaigne [1533-1592] and Bodin with their substitution of rules of life for the commandments. In politics Machiavelli detaches politics from morality in general and founds the doctrine of "reasons of State". Later, and very differently from Machiavelli, but tending like him towards the autonomy of human society, comes Grotius [1583-1645], setting up his natural law as international law, which is valid etsi deus non daretur, "even if there were no God". The philosophers provide the finishing touches: one the one hand we have the deism of Descartes [1596-1650], who holds that the world is a mechanism, running by itself with no interference from God; and on the other hand the pantheism of Spinoza, who says that God is nature. In the last resort, Kant is a deist, and Fichte and Hegel are pantheists. Everywhere the thinking is directed towards the autonomy of man and the world. ([Tegel] 16 July [1944], p. 195 (1967), p. 359 (1971))

And indeed in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) the word 'God' does not appear at all; and the God of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is the God of the Enlightenment's deism. So there cannot be any question that the "death of God" was first proclaimed by Nietzsche, much less by Bonhoeffer; it may be that, as in Bonhoeffer's historical account, it was first, as it were, pronounced by Descartes (as Pascal saw). (It could only be "the God of the philosophers and schoolmen" rather than of any particular religion that could be universally declared -- if it were the case that that concept 'God' were accepted even by all philosophers, which it is not. But "the God of the philosophers" does not need to appear in the U.N.'s Declaration in order to guarantee human rights, the justification for which lies in twenty-five centuries of human experience and reflection.)

"God as a working-hypothesis"

The following is from a document titled "Outline for a Book" [Tegel July/August 1944]:

[Chapter 1.] (b) The religionlessness of man who has come of age. "God" as a working hypothesis, as a stop-gap for our embarrassments [at being unable to explain the phenomena of experience without using the concept 'God'], has become superfluous ...

Bonhoeffer's "God as a working-hypothesis" is Spinoza's "God as a asylum of ignorance", because Bonhoeffer is speaking of when man does not have an explanation for a phenomenon -- i.e. he is ignorant -- he makes that phenomenon an act of God (an act caused or regulated or intended by God), whereas when man does have an explanation for that phenomenon he dismisses God.

["And so they will keep on asking the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God, that asylum of ignorance." (Spinoza, Ethics (Pt. I, Appendix), tr. Fullerton, quoted in Rogers, A Student's History of Philosophy rev. ed. (1913), 29, 2, p. 287)) This is apropos of both final causes [divine intentions], of which Spinoza says there are none, and efficient causes.)]

[A criterion for distinguishing superstition from religion based on Bonhoeffer's idea.]

God is still Bonhoeffer's answer to death (for what other answer can there be?), however; -- however, it is an answer that comes to him through faith in Christ's resurrection (I think). It is certainly not an hypothesis, working or otherwise, for him.

In the case of the eternal questions, God isn't a working hypothesis. God isn't an hypothesis at all. God is the only (logically) possible answer, but God cannot be a real possibility (God cannot be in competition with the laws of physics, as it were. To say that God is the cause of those laws is to say nothing about physics).

Chapter 2. (a) God and the secular. (b) Who is God? Not in the first place an abstract belief in God, in his omnipotence etc. That is not a genuine experience of God, but a partial extension of the world. Encounter with Jesus Christ. The experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that "Jesus is there only for others". His "being there for others" is the experience of transcendence. It is only this "being there for others", maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection).

The Religious God

Gero's Cross (c. 970),
Cologne Cathedral

Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest, most powerful and best Being imaginable -- that is not authentic transcendence -- but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others", through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation. God in human form -- not, as in oriental religions, in animal form, monstrous, chaotic, remote, and terrifying, nor in the conceptual forms of the absolute, metaphysical, infinite, etc. ... but "the man for others", and therefore the Crucified, the man who lives out of the transcendent. (p. 380-382 (1971 edition))

An important question: is Bonhoeffer using the word 'religion' in a peculiar-to-his-own-thinking way? The "God" Bonhoeffer is clearly laying to rest is "the God of the philosophers", but what the about one, I at least would call, "the God of Abraham"? Did either of those ever exist for us, except as idle pictures [Pascal said that Abraham's God was not idle, but belonged to a living and lived faith]? If it is a question of a non-theistic God, then Bonhoeffer could drop the concept 'God' altogether and just talk about the man Jesus -- but Bonhoeffer does not do that; he only discards some pictures of God [some concepts 'God'], not all.

Chapter 3 of Bonhoeffer's "Outline for a Book" (p. 282-283) discusses what the role of the clergy should be, and if there is no religion, no church -- in the sense of 'church' = 'community' (for Bonhoeffer's clergy would be without church buildings, having given all that away to the poor) -- no Christianity, but only "telling men of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others", then what need is there for clergy (i.e. what does Bonhoeffer mean by the word 'clergy')? But, then again, note that Bonhoeffer uses the words 'Christ' and 'Jesus Christ' rather than simply 'Jesus'. [In contrast, in Schweitzer's theology he only uses the name 'Jesus'; he never uses 'Christ'. 'Christ' is a religious title; it is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew word 'Messiah', so that 'Jesus Christ' is equivalent in meaning to 'Jesus the Messiah', the one who was to shepherd in the supernatural kingdom of God.] But Bonhoeffer does not discuss that topic in these letters and papers; what does he mean by 'Christ'?

Bonhoeffer ends a letter to his friend Bethge with the words: "God bless you and all of us each day and give us strong faith" ([Tegel] 10 August [1944], p. 384 (1971)). Whatever Bonhoeffer's ideas may be, they certainly should not be called 'secular', and I would add that they should not be called 'non-religious' either, not unless you deliberately want to mislead people. Bonhoeffer simply gets rid of idols, not God and not religion (as we normally use the word 'religion', although he does seem to revise the concept 'Christianity').

The time between Easter and Ascension has always been particularly important to me. Our gaze is already directed to the last thing of all [i.e. eternity (p. 247)], but we still have our tasks, our joys and our sorrows on this earth and the power of living is granted to us by Easter. ([Tegel] 10 April 1944, p. 246-247 (1971))

By which I think Bonhoeffer means something like this, which is in fact the orthodox theology of Catholic Christianity and the Reformation: Easter Sunday celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, prior to his "ascension into heaven" forty days later on Ascension Thursday, during which time ("the time between Easter and Ascension") he appeared to his disciples [Luke 24.15]. Those forty days symbolize our life on this earth during which, because of Jesus's redeeming death and resurrection, we belong to the body of Christ, living in Christian faith and in this way also, as it were, appearing to our fellow man, prior to our death when our life in this world ends and our life in the kingdom of heaven begins.

I can't imagine how that could be re-expressed [restated, re-interpreted] in this world's [secular, non-religious] terms, but Bonhoeffer maybe believed that it could be, for in "Notes" he writes: "But how, if Chr[istianity] were not a religion at all? | Worldly, non-religious interpretation of Christian concepts. | Christianity arises from the enco[unter] with a particular man: Jesus. Experience of transcendence" ([July/August 1944], p. 379). Or did he?

An example of Bonhoeffer's project of reinterpretation

The key to everything is the "in him". All that we might rightly expect from God, and ask him for, is to be found in Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with what God, as we imagine him, could do and ought to do. If we are to learn what God promises, and what he fulfills, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus.

... the truth is that if this earth was good enough for the man Jesus Christ, if such a man as Jesus lived, then, and only then, has life a meaning for us. If Jesus had not lived, then our life would be meaningless ... isn't this the simplest way of putting it? The unbiblical idea of "meaning" is indeed only a translation of what the Bible calls "promise". ([Tegel 21 August 1944], p. 391)

Is this an example of Bonhoeffer's restatement [reinterpretation] project in theology? In the "Outline for a Book" above, he says that in "Chapter 2. (c)" he plans to reinterpret in the light of "Chapter 2. (b)" -- i.e. to restate in such a way that acceptance of the idle picture of the "religious God" is not a precondition for understanding these ideas: "creation, fall, atonement, repentance, faith, the new life, and last things" (p. 382), and I think what he means is that all those ideas will be interpreted relative to the "in Christ" Bonhoeffer describes above. But further examples of how he will do this, if that is what his method will be, I think he does not give.

Very well, if that account is correct, then what does Bonhoeffer mean by 'worldly' or 'secular'? As is clear from his letters, he did not share the world-picture that sees this imperfect world and our life in our imperfect bodies as miserable and to-be-despised, but imagines that the transformed earth Jesus describes as the kingdom of God will have things in common with this world, for in this imperfect world and in our life in it there is much that is beautiful and good and there is love.

[This world is a place of exile -- but not from the bodiless existence Plato imagines -- but from the transformed earth that is the kingdom of God. In the Apostle Paul's account, at the resurrection the elect will not have a "body of death" -- i.e. one subject to disease and death -- but will nonetheless have a body. The resurrection is of the body, not of a disembodied soul. The kingdom of God is not in some place different from this earth, on "the other side of the sky" (Plato).]

But the world-picture of Jesus and his followers [disciples], with its expectation of the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God, was mistaken. The kingdom did not come as that picture expected that it would following the death and resurrection of Jesus. And to say otherwise is to give an ahistorical account (Bonhoeffer's aim is not the recovery of "primitive Christianity", because that world-picture is one we cannot share any more than we can find the picture of Bonhoeffer's "religious God" serviceable). But I don't know which type of account Bonhoeffer intended to use in his reinterpretations. I do not think that for Bonhoeffer Jesus was simply a man, simply a rival to the Stoic philosophers, say, or to any other teacher of a way of life, although Bonhoeffer recognized that is the way that many or most people now see Jesus.

[Bultman] goes off into the typical liberal process of reduction -- the "mythological" elements of Christianity are dropped, and Christianity is reduced to its "essence". -- My view is that the full content, including the "mythological" concepts, must be kept -- the New Testament is not a mythological clothing of a universal truth; this mythology (resurrection etc.) is the thing itself -- but the concepts must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith (cf. Paul and circumcision). ([Tegel] 8 June 1944, p. 329)

"... not to make religion a precondition of faith." Bonhoeffer introduces another element here: "faith" in contrast to "religion". Do I understand this? No. [A "religion" might be all the baggage (dogma) that supposedly is essential to a particular world-picture, but, according to Bonhoeffer, is not. I myself regard the last judgment (whether in Christianity or in Plato) and the kingdom of God as religious myths, but is it either necessary or possible to share the whole of Jesus's world-picture (Messianic eschatology)?]

By alluding to Paul, Bonhoeffer seems to mean by the word 'religion': creeds, dogmas, doctrines that even the already faithful do not really believe in; for "Chapter 2. (e)", he says: "I mean, believe in such a way that we stake our lives on it? The problem of the Apostles' Creed? "What must I believe?" is the wrong question; antiquated controversies ... no longer carry conviction" (p. 382). Thus, I think, man does not need to believe in dogmas before he can understand "the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus" [cf. what Schweitzer wrote: "There was a real danger of ... refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus"]. It is not the case that man must have "faith seeking understanding" [cf. "But if you do not [first] believe, you will not [i.e. cannot] understand", Augustine wrote as if that were God's law]. I think that is, or may be, what Bonhoeffer means.

"I seek to understand what I believe, not to understand in order that I may believe" (Anselm). That is the difference between divine theology (religion) and philosophy.

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