ahead of the horse.
The metaphysics, myths, hyperbolic traditions, stories, and theologies do not themselves build self-integrity, but often contest a person’s self-integrity, as they did for Reverend Wilmot. Hence, the “burden” is not self-integrity per se, but how religion’s Absolute makes it difficult for one to maintain self-integrity in espousing the religion’s unquestionable doctrines.
If a religion is about “character” as Whitehead suggested in the introduction to this study, this means that it is about ethical relationships. The sad thing was that Reverend Wilmot failed to see that he had made the priorities out of the secondary aspects of the religion, thereby missing its real focus. He judged his theoretical insights, his mental consistency, his faithfulness to an institution’s presumed position as the most important element in his self-integrity instead of seeing how his self-integrity was derived from his relationship with his wife and family and parishioners in their daily struggles for meaning. It was giving priority to ideas over real persons and actual relationships. This mistake of his was learned in seminary because it has always had to be taught since it was so unnatural otherwise. The misunderstanding of what a religion is about is traceable back to “authorities” who define it with their vested heteronomous positions, including its incredible metaphysics.
I neither do believe nor am I even suggesting that faith’s (or trust’s) rewards or one’s self-integrity come only through the assurance that one never contradicts oneself, changes one’s mind, reasons inconsistently, or acts hypocritically. In such case, trust as well as self-integrity would ultimately be nonexistent. The self is always in process as are its relations and understandings, and they need to be seen as such for self-integrity to be even conceivable.7 Humans as primarily social animals, creatures that have a quite conscious awareness of their own selves, needs, and relationships—and creatures are unfulfilled as persons to the degree that they are not social or relating meaningfully with others. This brings me to the next point.
Regarding the fourth possible reading, although self-integrity of each individual is crucial, because humans are basically social creatures, I find it impossible to think that religious faith is only between an individual and his or her God, as subject and object, despite Kierkegaard‘s magnificent attempt to make this attractive. Even within Kierkegaard’s reconstruction of Father Abraham’s great faith, Kierkegaard’s answer offers absolutely no guidance on how one should relate to other persons as Hegel pointed out long ago about Abraham, even preempting Kierkegaard’s reaction against his position.8 But how could Reverend Wilmot’s sermons have been only about his own salvation and his own self-integrity? That was not why he was commissioned or ordained. To the contrary, that individualistic picture with the Absolute ends up painting God as well as Abraham as deplorable and despotic loners, amoral if not totally degenerate by their evident narcissistic focus only on themselves.
The actual data pertaining to various religion’s founders as well as great thinkers in various religions reveal that they were primarily concerned with how people relate to each other rather than prescribing a utopian isolationist beatitude. This is as true in Muhammed’s case as in Gautama’s, as well as Jesus, Moses, and others, who in many cases showed very little awareness or interest in being a “founder” of a new religion.9 Ironically, this is true even of Kierkegaard since his main concern overall seemed to be to restore to Christian faith the necessity of renunciation and sacrifice, and, at that point, he simply reverted to an uncritical biblical authoritarianism, which stood in unresolved tension with his understanding of faith and one’s Absolute relation to the Absolute.10 The focus on how people relate to each other seems to be the primary purpose of nearly all religions in their formative stages, prior to their accumulation of hyperbole, myth, mystification, and apotheosis—and this is true of Christianity and Islam as it is of Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism, notwithstanding the later official dogmatic positions of each.
Self-integrity, Heteronomy, and Autonomy
Updike’s message is the burden of an inflexible faith, which is so rigid that it destroys either one’s self-integrity or one’s relations with other humans, or both. If “faith” were not defined in such an inflexible form, that is, if not absolutized, one could find other alternative meanings or dimensions for faith or trust that would be more humanizing. If “trust” is the equivalent of “faith,” and trust is our willing, calculated decision we make about something in our future, which a person or event in our present can affect or promises us, then it differs from religious faith in (1) the fact that the person we are asked to trust is in our present, is human rather than supranatural, whereas in religion, he is usually in the distant past, (2) the sense that trust in real relations concerns relative entities and events, nothing that is thought of as Absolute or beyond question, and (3) the effect we are being promised or are anticipating in religion seems to be usually in the continually receding future, and/or quite extravagant rather than realistic. Otherwise, they involve the same basic desire to trust the other if there is some reason we think the person is trustworthy. But some definitions of faith, such as Kierkegaard’s went so far as to emphasize that one could not think of any reason for having faith since it was simply beyond reason completely. So, faith in that sense, returns to the Absolute, and has nothing in common with our understanding of trust. It is totally done by God and is heteronomous, whereas we recognize humans’ reasoning that usually precedes their decisions to trust someone. Trust might be the same as the confidence in the other, which is the very means or power by which people come to identify mutually with each other, which always has a certain empirical data supporting it. Only through certain actions do people prove themselves trustworthy, and only through genuine trust are they able to construct meaningful relations with each other.
Now in days in which Christian theologians are describing “God” as “being-itself” or “source of being” or the “abyss” beyond being and nonbeing, one might also posit that “God” is simply the “power of relating.” That is, if one has to find “God” somewhere in the scheme of life and “God” cannot be a mere object or some entity that can be fully comprehended by humans (because it would then not be ultimate), the personal aspect of that which one trusts is already thereby dissolved. So whether “God” is even a symbol for “being-itself” or the “power of being” or the “power of relating,” in any case, it would not be some personal god that people think inspired the Bible or Qur’an or any other sacred scriptures, or that people thought intervened within human history, defying all scientific understandings of the real world to rescue them, or that will someday judge all humanity at some great Final Judgment, or that hears and responds to their prayers.
Yet religious institutions continue to propagate the ancient idea of some personal divine being somewhere (often “beyond time and space,” the latter of which now extends more than 4 billion miles) despite the fact that the personal idea has been deserted by most of the deeper Christian theological thought for the past two centuries (though they still confusingly speak of “God” in traditional anthropological terms) at least from Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith on, published in 1832. As Robert P. Scharlemann’s work shows, going into the twenty-first century, many theologians are still attempting to believe in and speak of “God” although disagreeing over whether “God” is distinct from the whole structure of being.11 Much of this is rigidity of religious tradition, and equivocal theology, and it was not simply the fault of Reverend Wilmot. He was trained in the church’s seminary for ordination to propagate the church’s traditional, metaphysical position, which identifies itself with worldviews, details, and claims two thousand years old.
The idea of “relation” or “trust” is something that is relevant and not antiquated. It suggests meaning to life, which people are able to explore, whereas an idea of having “faith” in “God” meaning faith in only a symbol for “being-itself” or something similar, carries neither meaning nor any ethic whatever, just as much of the old metaphysics carried little ethic but rather focused on the supranatural and invisible world beyond. Religions are surely saying more
