Another startling headline? It isn’t about Holy Friday. It was occasioned by a Special Edition (100 pages) of Time magazine totally dedicated to Pope Francis, on his death. Strangely, there was no mention of this in the Catholic media. A soft copy was sent to me by a young Methodist pastor, to whom I am eternally grateful.
I then started hunting for a hard copy and my daughter in law found it online and sent it to me. However, this was the Indian edition dated 12th May, that did have an image of Pope Francis in a sombre black outline. It wasn’t quite what I wanted so, again with great difficulty, I was able to download the special international edition. I shall share my findings on that later.
For now I restrict myself to another issue of Time magazine, probably America’s most famous, established about 200 years ago. On 8/4/1966 it had a cover story “Is God Dead?” As a departure from the norm, this issue did not have any graphic or picture accompanying the headline. I have always been intrigued, challenged and even inspired by that.
The irony was not lost on me that a magazine that questioned the very existence of God chose, 59 years later, to dedicate a special issue to commemorate the life, not death, of Pope Francis. What brought about this dramatic transformation? Again, with great difficulty, I was able to download the original story and take a print out of its 6000 words for study.
After doing so I couldn’t but laugh at its superficiality, because it was an assortment of opinions of vague contemporary theologians, loosely stitched together. However, it did quote some noted philosophers and theologians like Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, St Thomas Aquinas, Karl Rahner and Avery Dulles.
The biggest flaw in this article, considering the ramifications of the query, “Is God Dead?” was limiting itself to Christian orthodoxy or orthopraxis in the USA. It had not taken into consideration the perception or experience of God in other religions, notably Islam and Hinduism. American Christians may have had doubts about God’s existence; but ask the millions of Muslims that go to Mecca for the Haj pilgrimage, or the 640 million (as claimed by the government) pilgrims that flocked to the Mahakumbh at Prayagraj this year.
As an investigative journalist, writer and author on Christian issues I felt it necessary to study what occasioned that article 59 years ago. Time even reviewed it after 50 years in 2016, saying that the original “article was far more nuanced than the cover might suggest”.
The article is just a startling question, far from reality and finality. It begins by saying that “believers secretly fear that yes he is dead, and atheists suspect that the answer is no, he is not dead”! What a conundrum.
The article distances itself “from the age old assertion that God does not and never did exist”. Some thinkers felt that “God sitting in heaven is dead” seeking rather to “imagine and define a God who can touch men’s conditions and engage men’s minds”. Hence they are not questioning the existence of God, per se, but its common perception.
The cover story is titled “Toward a Hidden God” which echoes the Old Testament anguish that “You are a hidden God” (Is 45:15). It would take reams to counter that doubt with the revelation of God incarnate in Jesus.
The article also errs in equating the existence of God with the practice of Christianity. Kierkegaard had warned that “the day when Christianity and the world become friends, Christianity is done away with”. There is much truth in the statement that the “worldliness” of the Church has robbed it of its true message. The anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor Bonhoeffer wrote from his Berlin prison cell that “we are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all”.
What contributed largely to this decline in the belief in God, religion and Christianity was the “casting of a cold eye on the complacency of Christianity before such evils as slavery, poverty and the factory system”. This was further exacerbated by “Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant death, that there are all too many real possibilities of hell on earth”. This was the abject failure of Christianity to counter the mass annihilation in the Jewish concentration camps and the use of the atomic bomb. So who are we to blame if not ourselves for Time to ask the question “Is God Dead”?
Among other contributory factors was the rapid development of science that challenged established biblical beliefs, the most infamous of which was that of Copernicus and Galileo busting biblical narratives. There was also the Big Bang theory that countered the seven day creation narrative. It is another matter that it took centuries for the Catholic Church to apologize to Galileo. Fortunately, it was quicker to acknowledge the Big Bang theory of “how” creation took place, while scripture was primarily concerned with “why” creation occurred.
Together with science there was the evolution of the secular State, first during the French Revolution and the subsequent dwindling powers and influence of the church hierarchy. Congregations were also no longer afraid of sin and damnation that thundering preachers had belched out ad nauseum.
The reaction was that “some believers have desperately turned to psychiatry, Zen or drugs” in search for meaning in their lives. This was the time when the Beatles also became the disciples of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Cassius Clay converted to Islam as Muhammad Ali.
There were other secondary causes for the question to be asked. “The great American proposition is that religion is good for the kids though I’m not religious myself”. Other voices were “Churches on Sunday are preaching the existence of a God who is nowhere visible in their daily lives”; and again “I love God but I hate the church”, while “A girl said to me the other day – I don’t know whether I’ll ever believe in God, but Jesus is my kind of guy”. Echoes of Jesus Christ Superstar! I have written extensively against the pedestalization of Jesus, the awesome God up there without identifying with the frail human Son of Man down here.
The article suggests that the “church might need to take a position of reverent agnosticism regarding some doctrines that it had previously proclaimed with excessive conviction”. Noted Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles, an expert on Vatican II, also spoke of the need to promote ecumenism “including many of the old disputes that seem pointless or at least secondary”, that have since become redundant.
Did I mention Vatican II? So does the article. It says that “Along with the new atheism has come a new reformation. The open-window spirit of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II has revitalized the Catholic Church”. Sadly, the outside world has recognized the radically changed ecclesiology and missiology of Vatican II more than the insiders – our status quoist hierarchy and clergy.
The article ends on a positive note, “There may well be no true faith without a measure of doubt, and this contemporary worry about God could be a necessary and healthy antidote to centuries in which faith was too confident and sure”. It says that Christians could echo the prayer of that man whose son was possessed, pleading with Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24).
In the final analysis I would say that the question “Is God Dead?” poised by Time 59 years ago, should be seen as an opportunity for spiritual growth and not as a threat to a petrified or terrified faith.
It is possible that some lay readers may find this article hard to understand or digest. We could learn from the cow with four stomachs that regurgitates the food that it has hurriedly ingested. Lord I believe, strengthen my faith. Amen.
Leave a Reply