One of the most significant steps in our growth as human beings is the discovery that our earthly parents, contrary to our childish notions, are imperfect. A friend remembered well an incident in that process of discovery in his own life. He always thought his father was the perfect driver and that he was absolutely safe riding with him until one day he almost hit the side of a bridge. His father was a very good driver, but he was not, he was discovering, perfect.
Eventually, the discovery of the imperfections of our fathers goes much deeper than driving. We begin to see they lust after other women, are influenced by greed, are not always wise in their counsel, can make poor decisions, and can exhibit weakness both in body and character.
Freud, and other psychologists, suggest it is at this time we begin to project a heavenly Father, a perfect, divine Father, who will never exhibit weakness and who will never fail us. This heavenly Father, created out of our childish need and adolescent discovery of the imperfections of the adult world, becomes omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent; an infallible father-figure upon whom we can lean and from whom we can draw meaning and strength.
This projected father, created out of our emptiness and weakness and sense of dependency, is basically an illusion, say many psychologists. It is the Father-God of our wish-dreams similar to the ideal king or president of our wish-dreams who will solve all our problems. Thus, not only is our projected heavenly Father a self-created illusion; he is a symbol of our unwillingness to accept responsibility for ourselves and for the world.
Therefore, in this view, religion functions as a way of sustaining childishness and dependent adolescence in the human race rather than producing maturity and responsibility. Religion serves then as a prop, as a crutch, as a way of escaping from the harsh realities of life. In this view, religion becomes a way of evading the truth about ourselves and the world, and causes people to avoid responsibility for the world by saving souls out of the world and by hoping for the end of the world as soon as possible.
As people who are more or less religious, how shall we react to this critique of a fundamental religious concept?
I
One reaction is to agree with the critics that religion is basically illusion and that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is primarily a wish-dream, a Father-figure created out of the Jewish-Christian community to satisfy our needs and longings for a perfect father wherein meaning and strength and life and purpose ultimately can be found. As such we can claim it is as good an illusion as the world has going and that it produces some remarkable results.
Think alone of the music, art, and literature this illusion has produced for the world, not to mention the businesses, churches, scholars, publications, colleges, seminaries, hospitals, orphanages, and so on.
Another reaction to the charge that God is illusion, a creation of our needs, is to agree but also to point out to the critics that they themselves live by other illusions which function as God. For example, Marx and Lenin once provided the ultimate source of meaning for some people.
One time, a lady was standing outside a Christian meeting handing out tracts that said Lenin was the light of the world. Revolutionaries through the centuries have claimed an ultimacy for their special brand of political ideology. Do not these people and ideas serve as illusions, as crutches, as perfectionist patterns for a world without failure? Theologian Paul Tillich has suggested that each person has an ultimate concern and that that ultimate concern can function as a god, but that ultimate concern may be illusion.
Other people elevate psychologists and psychoanalysts to the position of perfect father, the one who explains all and provides the necessary and meaningful answers to reality. Freud held sway as an authoritarian figure for many years. Indeed, the Christian idea of God had to be subjected to Freudian psychoanalysis to see if it was acceptable. God, said some of the Freudians authoritatively, was illusion. God was out and Freud was in.
When the God of our Christian illusions is deposed, people do not then live in a vacuum without a source of meaning and sustenance. Instead, something else is drawn in as a source of meaning — family, sports, career, nation, pleasure seeking, and of course, the most persistent of all substitute gods — money.
Who is it that lives without a support system of some sort? Who is it that is truly independent, truly self-made, truly self-reliant? We all are dependent to some degree, but the religious question has to do with the nature of our dependency. What kinds of dependency and independency are there?
II
Consider, for example, abnormal dependency. As we have seen, discovery of the weakness and failure of the earthly father may lead us then to project an ideal heavenly Father who has no weakness, who never fails, and who takes care of everything for us so our lives will be problem-free. While this might be an apt description of God it may prove an infantile conception on our part, enabling us to continue to be spiritual thumbsuckers.
We have all known religious people who insist they turn everything over to God — all their decisions, all their thinking, all their responsibility for living. In other words, they want to remain spiritual infants, dependent, afraid, infantile, childish, and irresponsible. In their view whatever happens, therefore, is the will of God. And God gets all the praise or blame, and the individual thus absolves himself or herself of all guilt. What at first glance seems to be complete religious devotion turns out to be infantile, irresponsible dependency of a soul that refuses to grow up.
It was somewhat in that context that Dietrich Bonhoeffer liked to speak of man come of age and the God who abandons us so we can come of age. Just as a wise parent knows that the time must come for a child to sink or swim on his own, so, too, Bonhoeffer suggested, the time comes when God must withdraw himself to enable the spiritual self to grow up. Consequently, human beings often go through dry spells of faith when God seems distant and remote. People speak then of the silence of God or even of the death of God as we did a few years ago.
Bonhoeffer suggested that humankind, in our time, had come of age, and that it must be weaned from dependency upon the divine Father and take responsibility for itself. And, just as an infant feels rejected in being weaned, or just as an adolescent feels rejected in coming of age, so too humankind, in our time, has felt rejected by God. God is silent. God is indifferent. God is dead.
The other side of abnormal dependency is abnormal independency. This is the characteristic behavior of adolescent rebelliousness and self-assertiveness. The emerging adolescent must establish his or her identity and sense of independence over and against the father or mother.
Adolescents at this stage frequently avoid their parents, will not go to the cottage or boat with them. They often are ashamed of their parents and are reluctant to introduce them to friends, fearing their friends will see what they see — namely, old fogies from a lost generation of the distant past. Like the ancient priest Melchizadek, adolescents like to claim they are without father or mother and that they just appeared full blown into the world. If this attitude continues into adulthood, they maintain themselves as self-made men or women, refusing to acknowledge dependency upon the human community of teachers, ministers, doctors, business and government people, and so on.
Abnormal independency proceeds to distorted pride, to the classic hubris, to the elevation of the self, and the claim that we need no one at all. We can do everything by ourselves, thank you.
This attitude often leads, as it did in the 1960s, to the idea of the secular man, the man come of age, who needed neither earthly father nor heavenly Father. It was man's world, his age, his life, and he would handle it himself. In its best form, this led to secular humanism, so widely disdained by the religious right today. In its worst form, it led to Nazism and other totalitarian ideologies. It led to Nietzsche's "Superman" and the horrendous distortions of human nature that manifest themselves in hedonism, materialism, greed, narcissism, and eventually, in holocaust.
But there is a center position of normal dependency and independency. While it is important that we be weaned spiritually and that we grow out of spiritual adolescence, it is foolhardy to deny we have no spiritual ancestors or to claim we came into the spiritual or material world by ourselves. We are, in fact, dependent on countless people even though we may be mature and adult. As Plato observed, we often like city life because we can depend on so many other people to do things for us — provide food and transportation, make clothing and shelter. We depend on thousands for education, entertainment, business, and so on. There is nothing immature about that. It is a sign of maturity to recognize we cannot provide for our own needs.
But there is yet a deeper sense of dependency of which the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher spoke — a sense of absolute dependence upon the universe, upon God. It is the sense that we did not make ourselves, that we have come from higher life and intelligence. The awe and wonder evoked by the beauty and order of the universe, the remarkable symmetry and complexity of our bodies lead us to acknowledge a mysterious dependency upon the forces that have brought us into being, forces that have given us life and consciousness, forces that sustain us, powers from which we draw meaning and significance.
This sense of absolute dependence, this feeling of having come from someone greater than ourselves, forms the base of the religious attitude, says Schleiermacher. Just as it is a sign of adulthood and maturity to acknowledge dependence on others, so it is a sign of higher maturity to acknowledge ultimate dependence upon the universe, upon God. Therefore, thanksgiving for life and love and thought is a fundamental act of worship.
However, mature dependence does not mean, as we have seen, a retreat to infantilism, to childishness, to thumbsucking, and breastfeeding. As the writer of Hebrews says, there is a time when we must move on from spiritual milk to solid food. God did not intend to make the world a perpetual nursery. Instead, he made it a place for soul-making, where human beings, with their unique capacity of freedom, rise up to take responsibility for the world and for themselves. It is not responsibility over against God, but responsibility with God.
To take responsibility for the world with God is to accept some of the praise as well as some of the blame. You remember the old story of the minister who said to the gardener, that's a nice garden you and the Lord have there. Yes, said the gardener, but you should have seen it when the Lord had it all by himself! God provides the basic life forces and reproductive miracle, but man shapes, cultivates, and organizes the life. That is true in gardens, in literature, music, art, politics, and religion. The world is a cooperative effort between man and God. Man, in false pride, takes all the credit, or in false humility, takes none of the credit. Each is incorrect, but to take credit together for all the beauty and achievements of and in the world is an act of celebration. Worship includes that.
Likewise, man and God must share the blame for the world. God has to accept responsibility for the evil and suffering, the pain and heartache, the disease and death. After all, he created a world where such things are possible.
But responsible man, man beyond thumbsucking and adolescence, will also take some of the blame for the world. Just as an individual must someday stop blaming his parents for his behavior and thus excusing himself from self-responsibility, so humankind must stop blaming its behavior on heredity or environment, upon God or fate or determinism, and thus take responsibility for itself.
In his freedom, man has introduced war and slaughter, exploitation and oppression. By his own design he has maimed, killed, destroyed, and threatened his own kind with extinction. And for this, the proper religious attitude is contrition, confession, and change.
III
Therefore, in our worship, in our religious activity, it is our desire to be, as Paul says, led by God's Spirit to become his children, rather than children of the flesh.
This is to say we will stop blaming our parents for our failures, even though they may be worthy of blame. We come to worship to be released from the childishness of being forever locked into the regret and despair of hereditary and environmental deficiency. We come to worship, to be released from our fleshly habit of excusing ourselves for our behavior, always justifying our weaknesses and misdeeds by those of our parents and grandparents.
By the same token, we come to worship, to be released from the tendency to project nation or president or celebrity into God. The ancient Celts, for example, projected their king into divinity, and then when he failed to perform divinely, they ritually murdered him. Americans often project presidents into divine roles, but then either actually or psychologically assassinate them when they fail to be the perfect cult father, the perfect hero, and father substitute.
In a similar way, contemporaries of Jesus projected him as an ideal king or messiah who would solve all their problems. When he disappointed them and failed to bring in their ideal kingdom they crucified him and began to search for a new ideal king.
But God raised him from the dead, exalted him as Lord and King, and handed him back to us as Messiah, forcing us to accept responsibility for his murder. In so doing, we take our place before this exalted Lord who ironically helps us confess our escapism and vain, idealistic self-projections. Paradoxically, once we accept responsibility for ourselves and for the world, God, as divine Father, shares responsibility with us and cooperates with us for good.
Therefore, as children of God, we cease blaming our ancestors for our behavior and we refrain from projecting our ideal of God unto God. Instead, we commit ourselves to God, who by his grace accepts us into his family of love, ever beseeching us to become new persons.
As children of God, we come not to resign ourselves to the dreary repetition of past generations. As children of the Spirit, through confession and repentance, we resist the downward, earthward, deterministic pull of heredity and habit, to write new agendas for career and family life. We come to worship to be released from self-defeating self-images inherited from past family and sibling relationships.
As children of the Spirit, we accept into ourselves the failure of father and mother and thereby our failure, and by accepting failure into ourselves we accept death and confess our powerlessness before it. But through such radical humility and courage, we prepare ourselves for the Spirit of God which is life and life-giving.
Instead of projecting a divine Father that is an idealized, infallible version of the earthly, failing father, children of the Spirit receive instead the true image of the heavenly Father that calls them neither to infantile dependency nor to grotesque superman or superwoman self-images, but to healthy, mature, cooperative relationship with their spiritual Father.
We come, therefore, to take responsibility with God for the self and for the world, a responsibility that ultimately requires love and thus the willingness to suffer. In a world where God and man are free, anything can happen, evil or good. And, often the good requires the suffering of hard work, patience, determination, forbearance, forgiveness, and sometimes even pain and death.
Thus as Paul suggests, we suffer along with God for the wholeness of the world, being neither rebellious against father failure nor infantile in projection to divine Father, but cooperators for good with those who love God and are called according to his purpose. For we believe that by suffering with him we shall also be glorified with him.
