The Radical Christian Worldview

Radical Christianity is a form of radical humanism and it is focused on this world.

Since 1960 I have been a priest in the Church of England, and I remain a priest in good standing. But though I still communicate with the Church, I no longer officiate in the Church. Traditionally, a priest has been an institutionally accredited person who purveys a fixed body of knowledge, vocabulary, and set of rituals, and it is no longer in me to be such a person. I love freedom too much. I have spent almost all my career teaching the philosophy of religion and writing, and have come to think that none of our religious traditions can survive as it stands. All of them need reform, and the mainstream Christian tradition -- Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant -- in particular urgently needs revolutionary transformation. Since the Enlightenment and the rise of critical thinking it has become almost a cliche that the Church's worldview is long obsolete, that the doctrine-system is badly wrong, and that the Church's hierarchical pattern of government encourages vanity and inhibits change. In effect, each of the o ld men says to himself: "No, not in my time: the status quo will see me out" -- and he does nothing. So by small increments the situation has been allowed to grow steadily worse, to the point where it may already be too late to hope for reform and renewal.

From the Church's point of view I am only a marginal Christian now: I am someone who likes modern Western philosophy, who retains a strong devotion to Jesus Christ, who has an affinity with much in the Jewish and the Buddhist traditions, and who has been trying to build up a body of free and experimental religious writing which may or may not one day be of use to others. [1]

In light of this understanding of who I am, I have been asked a number of questions that I will address in this essay.

What is your conception of God or the Ultimate?

There is no Ultimate: everything is proximate. There is no Absolute: everything is relative. There is nothing primary and founding: everything is secondary. The human world around us is not beneath and subordinate to a Higher World above, because, on the contrary, "Nothing is hidden," and this is all there is. The human world -- that is, the world as it is for us -- is now effectively the only world, because we are, it seems, the only beings who have a complete world. There is no other world but ours. The human world is outsideless, and is coextensive with the range of our language -- which is finite but now very large. It includes the whole known universe and all that is known of human history.

Traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ideas of God have been heavily dependent upon Greek philosophy, which was strongly realistic. The world was seen as preceding us; it was a readymade cosmos, created by the imposition of form upon matter, law upon disorder, and intelligible meaning upon the sensuous flux. The Greeks saw these rational principles, by which the raw stuff of the world has been made a Cosmos, as really existing out there in an objective Order of Reason, and ultimately in the Divine Mind. The Greeks thus grounded everything normative, and the whole world order, in mind stuff out there. Their thinking was highly objectivist, and their philosophy gravitated steadily toward realistic metaphysical theism. Recent ideas about just when the books of the Hebrew Bible were written and compiled suggest that the most developed and universalistic ideas about God in the Old Testament (to be found in Isaiah, chapters 40-55) are already strongly influenced by Greek thought. [2] Thus religious belief in G od has since early times been locked into an important Greek philosophical doctrine -- metaphysical realism. This doctrine pictures our thinking and our rationality as derived from and dependent upon an objective Logos that pervades the cosmos. Before we were, it was already out there. When we think aright, our thinking participates in and tracks the cosmic Divine Mind. To think Newtonian physics, for example, was to think God's thoughts after him -- something that indeed we had been created by God to do, for it was believed that "Man" had been specially created by God to be his vicegerent upon earth.

Thus belief in God was tied to an unhistorical and supernaturalist view of reason, and to a very exalted view of "Man" as the crown of creation. It was sincerely believed that the human being (or, to be a little more explicit, the male human mind) was a finite copy of the infinite Divine Mind, and that the concepts through which we think are little copies of the unchanging Divine Ideas. God came first: God made the world to be a house for us to live in, and then made us with minds like God's, so that we would know how to live in it.

I don't want to retell here the story of how these ways of thinking died, and died finally in the nineteenth century. I need only say that fully orthodox realistic metaphysical belief in God has for a long time been quite impossible for an educated Westerner. We have come to see ourselves as products of an evolutionary process that has, and has to have, a lot of random in it and therefore cannot be God-directed. We have to come to see that we ourselves have evolved all our own languages, knowledge-systems, and visions of the world. Our religions too, exactly like all our other social institutions, are now seen as humanly evolved products of history. That is how they are treated in textbooks of "comparative religion," and that is how we know it is. We invented all the rational principles, all the worldviews, and all the religions.