According to this way of thinking, which is what we have all been brought up to, God is posited as ‘the highest Being’ – out there, above and beyond this world, existing in his own right alongside and over against his creation. As Tillich puts it elsewhere, he is
a being beside others and as such part of the whole of reality. He certainly is considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole . . . He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being, not being-itself.2
The caricature of this way of thinking is the Deist conception of God’s relation to the world. Here God is the supreme Being, the grand Architect, who exists somewhere out beyond the world – like a rich aunt in Australia – who started it all going, periodically intervenes in its running, and generally gives evidence of his benevolent interest in it.
It is a simple matter to shoot down this caricature and to say that what we believe in is not Deism but Theism, and that God’s relationship to the world is fully and intimately personal, not this remote watchmaker relationship described by the Deists. But it is easy to modify the quality of the relationship and to leave the basic structure of it unchanged, so that we continue to picture God as a Person, who looks down at this world which he has made and loves from ‘out there’. We know, of course, that he does not exist in space. But we think of him nevertheless as defined and marked off from other beings as if he did. And this is what is decisive. He is thought of as a Being whose separate existence over and above the sum of things has to be demonstrated and established.
It is difficult to criticize this way of thinking without appearing to threaten the entire fabric of Christianity – so interwoven is it in the warp and woof of our thinking. And, of course, it is criticized by those who reject this supra-naturalist position as a rejection of Christianity. Those who, in the famous words of Laplace to Napoleon, ‘find no need of this hypothesis’ attack it in the name of what they call the ‘naturalist’ position. The most influential exponent of this position in England today, Professor Julian Huxley, expressly contrasts ‘dualistic supernaturalism’ with ‘unitary naturalism’.3 The existence of God as a separate entity can, he says, be dismissed as superfluous; for the world may be explained just as adequately without positing such a Being.
The ‘naturalist’ view of the world identifies God, not indeed with the totality of things, the universe, per se, but with what gives meaning and direction to nature. In Tillich’s words,
The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Erigena and Spinoza, does not say that God is identical with nature but that he is identical with the natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects. In modern naturalism the religious quality of these affirmations has almost disappeared, especially among philosophising scientists who understand nature in terms of materialism and mechanism.4
Huxley himself has indeed argued movingly for religion5 as a necessity of the human spirit. But any notion that God really exists ‘out there’ must be dismissed: ‘gods are peripheral phenomena produced by evolution’.6 True religion (if that is not a contradiction in terms, as it would be for the Marxist) consists in harmonizing oneself with the evolutionary process as it develops ever higher forms of self-consciousness.
‘Naturalism’ as a philosophy of life is clearly and consciously an attack on Christianity. For it ‘the term “God” becomes interchangeable with the term “universe” and therefore is semantically superfluous’.7 But the God it is bowing out is the God of the ‘supranaturalist’ way of thinking. The real question is how far Christianity is identical with, or ultimately committed to, this way of thinking.
Must Christianity be ‘Mythological’?
Undoubtedly it has been identified with it, and somewhere deep down in ourselves it still is. The whole world-view of the Bible, to be sure, is unashamedly supranaturalistic. It thinks in terms of a three-storey universe with God up there, ‘above’ nature. But even when we have refined away what we should regard as the crudities and literalism of this construction, we are still left with what is essentially a mythological picture of God and his relation to the world. Behind such phrases as ‘God created the heavens and the earth’, or ‘God came down from heaven’, or ‘God sent his only-begotten Son’, lies a view of the world which portrays God as a person living in heaven, a God who is distinguished from the gods of the heathen by the fact that ‘there is no god beside me’.
In the last century a painful but decisive step forward was taken in the recognition that the Bible does contain ‘myth’, and that this is an important form of religious truth. It was gradually acknowledged, by all except extreme fundamentalists, that the Genesis stories of the Creation and Fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were none the less valid for that. Indeed, it was essential to the defence of Christian truth to recognize and assert that these stories were not history, and not therefore in competition with the alternative accounts of anthropology or cosmology. Those who did not make this distinction were, we can now see, playing straight into the hands of Thomas Huxley and his friends.
In this century the ground of the debate has shifted – though in particular areas of Christian doctrine (especially in that of the last things8) the dispute that raged a hundred years ago in relation to the first things has still to be fought through to its conclusion, and the proper distinction established between what statements are intended as history and what as myth. But the centre of today’s debate is concerned not with the relation of particular myths to history, but with how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all. Is it necessary for the Biblical faith to be expressed in terms of this world-view, which in its way is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically? May it not be that the truth of Christianity can be detached from the one as much as from the other – and may it not be equally important to do so if it is to be defended properly today? In other words, is the reaction to naturalism the rehabilitation of supranaturalism, or can one say that Julian Huxley is performing as valuable a service in detaching Christianity from the latter as we now see his grandfather was in shaking the Church out of its obscurantism in matters scientific?
This is the problem to which Bultmann has addressed himself. And he answers boldly, ‘There is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.’9 The New Testament, he says, presents redemption in Christ as a supranatural event – as the incarnation from ‘the other side’ of a celestial Being who enters this earthly scene through a miraculous birth, performs signs and wonders as an indication of his heavenly origin, and after an equally miraculous resurrection returns by ascent to the celestial sphere whence he came. In truth, Bultmann maintains, all this language is not, properly speaking, describing a supranatural transaction of any kind but is an attempt to express the real depth, dimension and significance of the historical event of Jesus Christ. In this person and event there was something of ultimate, unconditional significance for human life – and that, translated into the mythological view of the world, comes out as ‘God’ (a Being up there) ‘sending’ (to ‘this’ world) his only-begotten ‘Son’. The transcendental significance of the historical event is ‘objectivized’ as a supranatural transaction.
I do not wish here to be drawn into the controversy which Bultmann’s programme of demythologizing has provoked.10 Much of it has, I believe, been due to elements in his presentation which are to some extent personal and fortuitous. Thus,
(a) Bultmann is inclined to make statements about what ‘no modern man’ could accept (such as ‘It is impossible
