I have noticed a shift over the last two decades of my life; both in the broader culture at large, and in the church—insofar as the church imbibes and reflects the broader culture. I’m an evangelist at heart, and would attempt to strike up evangelistic conversations anytime I could in the past. When I did this, I would expectedly receive a variety of responses. Some people were defensive and antagonistic; some were genuinely searching and interested; some simply liked to joust, so we would; and the smaller percentage of people I came across were indifferent. That has all changed. We might point to the flowering of a Post Modern (PoMo) normative relativism as that took root in the culture, say thirty to twenty years ago, as the culprit. Indeed, I’d say this sort of absolutization of the turn-to-the-subject, spawned a couple of centuries ago through rationalism, romanticism, and subjectivism, while only at its infantile stages back then, has come to fruition as modernity ran its course, and people began to take it to its logical conclusion. But you will note what I just did: I brought modernity and postmodernity together in a sort of mutually related and implicating combine; such that one lives off of the other at any given time. This means, that on a continuum, during any given time over the last couple of centuries, based on a variety of socio-cultural variables, the übermensch of modernity can and will show up; whether that be among the moderns or postmoderns.
I note all of the above as segue into a discussion about God’s Absence, with particular reference to an east German theologian named, Wolf Krötke. He did his work as a theology professor in the middle-late 20th century, up until his retirement from Humboldt University, Berlin in 2004 (as I recall off the top). As a college student he was imprisoned for two years because of some anti-socialist/Marxist drawings he did in class, and forgot to take with when class was out. Someone found the drawings, reported him, and he was arrested. This was the east German, ‘behind the wall,’ context Krötke worked in as a Christian theologian. I am currently reading Philip Ziegler’s published PhD dissertation, which he wrote on Krötke’s theology; it is entitled: Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke.
I am just starting; but something immediately stopped me, and required that I write this blog post. Ziegler, with heavy reference to a smattering of quotes from Krötke, offers a picture of the context Krötke was working in. What is striking to me, interestingly, is that the sort of atheism present in his German socialist context, has great parallel to my own context in North America; and I’d say the Western, even global world in general. We often hear of militant atheists these days, but they aren’t the majority; they just have the biggest mouths. What is more pertinent is the creep that practical atheism has made into almost all sectors of human life; even among professing evangelical Christians. This is what I was referring to earlier, the impact that an absolutized form of normative relativism can have on the psychology of a whole society, at a global level. Everything is formed by a ‘pure’ subjectivism. When this is the mood, people become highly indifferent about anything “religious.” For this mood of people, ‘hey, if it works for you: great!’ As long as what you believe doesn’t impinge on the other’s sense of self-worth, they really don’t get why the belief that ‘Jesus is the only Way’ is all that significant, or even threatening. For this mood such exclusivity is just another form of self-inclusivity and identification among the plurality of options available in the big world out there. Ultimately this represents a ‘practical’ or as Krötke also calls it a, “tired atheism,” that doesn’t much care if there is a God or not; for them it is so far off the radar that it has no teeth. This attitude towards God’s reality, and anyone who believes in it, might be summed up this way: “Good for you!” Ziegler brings us into this type of world through developing Krötke’s thought this way for us:
The question as to whether God exists or not has, thus, already been left far behind and need never return, since “God Is not necessary to shape everyday life or to resolve the problems of life. What faith once ascribed to God, the human person is now able to take into his or her own hands.” Here “God” has become a superfluous hypothesis, a “possibility from the past that has had its time,” but which has long since “simply ceased to apply.” In this situation, it is fair to say that “God’s absence is even more total and uncompromised than is the case in the most violently self-assertive atheism.” For Krötke, this God-forgoteness is the predominating climate in which Christian proclamation occurred and still occurs in eastern Germany. It is a climate that simply “balks at any talk of God whatsoever.”
In this situation, Christian discourse meets little or no active argument, little or no critique or debate, but merely a people characterized by their “utter disinterest in faith in God,” for whom “there is no need whatsoever to form an opinion in relation to God.” Here is found an indifference that is “neither articulate at the level of doctrinal formulation, nor aggressive at the level of practical action.” In a memorable passage, Krötke writes: “the fact that atheism is, in fact a movement for social freedom and emancipation was forgotten here long ago. Rather, godlessness put on carpet slippers and donned a nightcap. It wanted to be left in peace and not to get tangled up in difficulties of one kind or another. . . .” Gottesvergessenheit, for Krötke, is a tired atheism, an “atheistic sleep,” void of any sort of “deeply reflected theoretical basis,” and characterized by “an absolute indifference toward faith in God and toward the themes of the church.” Eberhard Jüngel has described this phenomenon as the “elementary absence of any need for religion” [elementare religiose Bedürfnislosigkeit] and has characterized it as “a frankly barbarous—though as such fascinating—religious cluelessness. . . . a religious ignorance of a hitherto unknown degree.”
Life lived in perfect indifference to both God and church, Krötke writes, “has become a self-evident habit in which not belonging to the church is not felt to be a deficiency, and in which the loss of faith in God is not felt to be a loss at all.” Belief in God is rarely contested in such a climate of “habitual atheism” because it is simply considered (when considered at all) to be “merely a garnish on the life of society,” something totally unimportant and insignificant, the sort of thing one might entertain in private life as a kind of antiquarian hobby, but only as such. Simply by virtue of its massive scale, this Gottesvergessenheit now finds constant de facto reinforcement in social and cultural life, with the result that increasingly—and characteristically—“the majority of people know absolutely nothing about that which they reject in practice.”[1]
In our Western culture this sort of attitude has passingly been identified as the Nones. Increasingly, this is becoming the normal mode you’ll come across in our secularized world. It is very hard for me to engage in evangelistic conversation anymore; people are almost totally indifferent. They just don’t care; to the point that even being antagonistic towards you as a Christian doesn’t even cross their mind. So, how does a Christian, a theologian, a church member, do theology in a context like this? We might just have to start writing for the ‘elect angels.’ Answering this question is what the rest of Ziegler’s book is about. I’ll be reporting back, I’m sure. I find this exceedingly interesting, and something I face on a daily basis; as I’m sure you do as well, as a Christian person.
[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007), 25-6.