Category Archives: Ludwig Feuerbach

The Cipher-Jesus Predestined by the Fallen Heart

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German anthropologist and philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach stated: God is “the outward projection of a human’s inward nature.” A very telling observation with reference to a postEnlightenment turn-to-the-subject worldpicture. This remains a fitting observation even for our 21st century time; i.e., that people, by nature (according to Scripture, and empirical observation), in the inverse, have collapsed the classical attributes of God into the mirror of their own image. A postmodern, normative relativistic people simply wake up in the morning, look in the mirror in the bathroom, and say: “hello there God.” Even if not this overtly, it is the way us sinners operate enslaved, enbondaged to the incurvature of our in-turned hearts. We are, in the first Adam sense, slaves of our polluted, stained, dead souls; souls that by sinful being (ousia) naturally believe that our way is the way.

This is being played out every single day, not just out there, but in here; indeed, in our own daily lives. This is why the Apostle Paul by the Holy Spirit exhorts us to reckon ourselves dead to sin, and alive to Jesus Christ. Even so, the pagan, the heathen has no resurrection power to mortify these first Adam ways of life that dominate every shred and depth of the marrow of the bones; they are simply enslaved to love of themselves; and left to themselves have no capacity to not sin; to not worship the self as God. It is whilst inhabiting this type of beleaguered existence that in an attempt to worship, the person will name their own person as the Messiah. The urge to worship, of course, is because the human animal has been created by the living and alien God to worship; to worship Him in spirit and truth. But absent the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, the only reality the fallen person knows to worship, most immediately, is themselves. And yet, there seems to be some type of cultural pressure (maybe the Christian witness and the Holy Spirit’s conviction in the world) that leads said fallen people to worship something or someone outside of themselves; even though they haven’t the capacity to actually achieve a genuinely extra worship. And so, they might in parody, and for convenience’s sake, attribute their self-worship to the worship of Jesus. But their respective Jesus, as has already been alluded to, is really a Jesus who does what their deepest desires yearn for; the desires that are enchained to the kingdom of darkness; to their father of lies and death, the devil.

Barth helps us,

It is not, therefore, doing Him a mere courtesy when it names the name of Jesus Christ. It does not use this name as a symbol or sign which has a certain necessity on historical grounds, and a certain purpose on psychological and pedagogic grounds, to which that which it really means and has to say may be attached, which it is desirable to expound for the sake of clarity. For it, this name is not merely a cipher, under which that which it really means and has to say leads its own life and has its own truth and actuality and would be worth proclaiming for its own sake, a cipher which can at any time be omitted without affecting that which is really meant and said, or which in other ages or climes or circumstances can be replaced by some other cipher. When it speaks concretely, when it names the name of Jesus Christ, the Christian message is not referring simply to the specific form of something general, a form which as such is interchangeable in the phrase of Lessing, a “contingent fact of history” which is the “vehicle” of an “eternal truth of reason.” The peace between God and man and the salvation which comes to us men is not something general, but the specific thing itself: that concrete thing which is indicated by the name of Jesus Christ and not by any other name. For He who bears this name is Himself the peace and salvation. The peace and salvation can be known therefore, only in Him, and proclaimed only in His name.[1]

There are much too many cipher-Jesuses running around, reigning supreme in the world. There is only one Jesus Christ, and He alone puts His words in His own mouth in perichoretic conversation with the Father and Holy Spirit. The zeitgeist would make us think that Jesus is simply an imprimatur of our own waning and base desires; that Jesus is whomever our enchained souls would determine Him to be. Whether this be for interpersonal reasons, or collectivist political reasons. When Jesus simply becomes a cipher for me and my tribe, for our self-determined predestined agendas, He has simply been collapsed into us, as we have stolen His name and badged ourselves with it. God forbid it!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §57 [021] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 18.

The Character of Barth’s Kantian and Feuerbachian Critique of the Metaphysical gods

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Ludwig Feuerbach

Karl Barth is often identified as a neo-Kantian, or just straight up Kantian in his theological orientation (and methodology). It seems too facile to me to maintain that Barth was somehow a slavish servant of Kant, especially materially. Maybe formally, Barth could be understood to be a Kantian in certain qualified ways. But in the air he breathed to be “Kantian” or neo-Kantian would be like saying that John Calvin et al. was an Aristotelian, or Scotist for that matter. The point being, often, formalities are not the all-encompassing thing in the theological project. Ultimately, what is at stake is what gets produced materially. In other words, it is surely possible for the theologian to be influenced by some intellectual tradition, and at the same time, under the Christian revelational pressures of thought, indeed, trinitarian pressures, to retext the form (in this case, the Kantian one) in a way wherein the kerygmatic reality becomes the conditioning and driving factor even behind the form itself.

The above is rather abstract, indeed. In order, to incarnate my points with a little more flesh and blood, let’s now refer to Eberhard Busch’s discussion on these matters, as that pertains to Kant’s and Feuerbach’s deliverances of a Barthian theology and knowledge of God.

. . . In Barth’s view, what Feuerbach “rightfully objected to” was that in human religion the one who prays, the pious individual does not “get beyond what he himself has thought and experienced,” that all his “attempts to bridge the gap. . . take place within this world.” The interpretation that leads Barth to entertain Feuerbach’s critique of religion is clearly in line with Kant’s critique of the assertion that the knowledge of metaphysical truth is on the same level as experiential knowledge. Once again it is Kant in whose thought Barth finds the intellectual possibility of overcoming Feuerbach’s critique of religion. He does this by advancing the thesis that God is not a hypothesis (of man) only when he is conceived of per se as the “presupposition” (of man). Therefore “God” is not untouched by Feuerbach’s critique when he is generally understood as a metaphysical reality beyond all human hypotheses, but only when he is understood as “the origin of the crisis of all objectivity devoid of all objectivity.” After all this we may assume that Barth is especially influenced by Kant, deepened by Neo-Kantianism but also by Feuerbach’s critique, when he insists in his Epistle to the Romans that God cannot or only supposedly can be recognized as an object of experiential knowledge. And we may further assume that the same influence is in play when Barth now separates himself from Schleiermacher and his own earlier position with the thesis that God can only be “recognized” as the critical boundary of human experience.[1]

Busch, in context, is referring to the earlier younger Barth, and yet, he is also notating that the form of Kant remained continuous throughout Barth’s theological project; indeed, to the very end. So, Barth surely was a Modern theologian under these terms. But as Bruce McCormack has rightly pointed out elsewhere, Barth, just as Busch has inchoately pressed here, flipped the Kantian project on its head by thinking it through the noumenal and phenomenal being grounded in the enhypostasis of the anhypostatic Son becoming flesh in the singular person of Jesus Christ; as such, removing the odor the type of projectile dualism Kant’s theology suffered from.

Conversely, and for the purposes of this post, I think it is interesting to hear some of Busch’s commentary on Barth and his respective positioning within the modern German/Swiss theological and philosophical milieu of his day (at formative points in his own intellectual development). Further, I also think Busch’s clarification on how Barth deployed Feuerbach, even by creatively sponging the Feuerbachian critique of religion through the Kantian possibility for true transcendence, to be very helpful. I have often referred to Barth’s appeal to Feuerbach and Feuerbach’s critique of religion as self-immanent-projection; and as far as that goes (because it cannot go all the way), it is a helpful acid to place on the unhealthy aspects of a pietistic venture. But just as Barth understood—because he was a Christian of no small stature—Feuerbach and Kant were only useful propaedeutics, insofar that they could be deployed as foils against the manmade gods of the philosophers, and even the scholastics.

I’m afraid this whole post has been rather abstract. The necessary context for this offering is reliant on the reader’s own familiarity with these things. Even so, here’s the reduction: knowledge of the genuine Christian triune God is purely contingent on this God Self-disclosing Himself to and for us in the face of Jesus Christ. It is possible, as Barth illustrates, to even use pagans against the appropriation of pagan categories for thinking God. This is what Barth did by using a retexted Kantian form, and a Feuerbachian critique, against “Christian” appropriations of God, categorically, that are too contingent upon speculative discursive reasoning, and the “discoveries” of the various natural theologians throughout the millennia, respectively; going back as far as Genesis 3, into the Antique Greek philosophers, and the whole stream following. Let God be true and every man a liar.

[1] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth & the Pietists, trans. by Daniel W. Bloesch (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 119-20.

The Absence of God and the Rejection of the Self-Projected God: A Word to the Atheists and Theologians Alike

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I happen to believe this. So, what do I happen to believe, you ask? That atheists, when they say they reject God, aren’t rejecting the living God because they can’t without first knowing God; and they can’t first know the living and real God without the Spirit; and if they had the Spirit they would be a Christian; but since they don’t have the Spirit they aren’t Christians; and thus have no capacity to reject the real God. They instead only have the capacity to reject a god who is really just a projection of themselves; no matter how many Christians they are surrounded by. Even if they can intellectually “know” about the God Christians claim to know, they themselves cannot make this claim since the Spirit is required to know this God; to have eyes to see and ears to hear His voice. Since they are not this capacious, they may well be atheists; but they are atheists only insofar that they are rejecting the gods that the philosophers and they themselves have projected. If my premise seems tautologous, it is; but only insofar as God is the beginning and end of the circle. Barth agrees with me when he writes:

The God whose existence or manifestness they doubt or deny is not God at all. And so too His absence, as they think they should assert it, is not God’s absence at all. In order to be aware of God’s absence they would first of all have to know God and therefore God’s revelation. All general intellectual difficulties and impossibilities respecting knowledge of so-called supernatural things assert nothing at all in face of the negation of all other knowability of God which is achieved by God’s revelation itself. God does not belong to those supernatural things which may be believed and asserted to-day, doubted and denied to-morrow. And so, the difficulties and impossibilities respecting knowledge of these things, which the sceptic and atheist fancy they should take so very seriously, have nothing whatever to do with the hiddenness of God for man or man’s blindness for God. The seriousness of the fact that God is not free for us, not to be possessed, first begins with the revelation which delimits this fact, yet also illumines and confirms it in its factuality.[1]

This has tacit relationship to Anselm’s fides quarens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’), but is also a bit distinct. Barth’s point here is more publically critical than that. It is more in line with Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of cultural religionists who worship a god of their own self-projection; it is a constructively critical appropriation of that line of thought.

This has impact on a variety of things, one of which is the way we as Christians engage with non-Christians. As an evangelist it makes me think I shouldn’t be in the business of proving God’s existence to atheists or agnostics, but instead simply proclaiming the Gospel to them which is the power of God. Indeed, this sort of anti-natural-theological/law thinking kicks against the North American evangelical sub-culture in some stinging ways. But then, on the positive side, in the same sub-culture there is this sort of emphasis on simply proclaiming the Gospel to whoever will hear, and allow the seed to fall where it will.

Barth’s critique does indeed have implication towards the way the Christian theologian does their theologizing; no doubt. It is a matter of where the theologian starts their theologizing. Thomas Torrance and Barth were of a piece when it comes to this, even if the way they emphasized certain things made them sound a little different one from another when it comes to a natural theology. Nonetheless, they both are theologians of the analogia fidei or analogy of faith tradition; the tradition that grounds knowledge of God in God Revealed and then given to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Christ in and through the faith of Christ which is the basis for our knowledge of God. We can also pick up entailments of Calvin’s ‘faith as knowledge of God’ in both Barth and Torrance in this instance. These are important things that continue to run over the heads of many theologians in the current evangelical climate. They simply go on their merry-way, and act as if such things really don’t matter; they continue to engage in a textus receptus way of theology, wherein they simply see themselves as inheritors of a by-gone Protestant theology that represents, for them, the only genuine way to be an orthodox, conservative, evangelical theologian. But they are wrong. And more significantly, what is of ultimate import, beyond figuring out if we are in line with an ad hoc conception of who the orthodox are or aren’t, is to simply be focused on doing theology that is most proximate to the Gospel reality itself. In other words, who cares, ultimately, what the genetics are; the Gospel itself is the only genealogy that really matters.

Anyway, atheists, theologians, and all of us ought to be wary of thinking we can have a genuine knowledge of God apart from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. We ought to start everything from that point or not start at all.

 

[1] Barth, CD I/1 §13, 28.

Balaam’s Ass and Ludwig Feuerbach: Critiquing the Idol-God

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Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher (if his name didn’t give it away), offered a critique of religion, particularly the Christian religion, that ought to have weight as we self-criticize our own understanding of God. Karl Barth took Feuerbach’s critique to heart as he saw in it a critique of natural theology. Here is a key passage from Feuerbach that synopsizes his critique:

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e., his subjective nature); but a relation of it, viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.[1]

For Feuerbach God is simply a self-projection of the inner-man. Ironically, what people like Feuerbach et al. are doing is simply living out the metanarrative of Genesis 3, and the original serpentine lie. That we can be like, or construct God or gods.

But here’s where this becomes relevant, particularly for Christians in the main. Insofar that Christians attempt to imbibe the culture, even if in the name of Jesus, they end up, like the culture at large, under the influence of someone like Feuerbach; self-projecting a notion of God who confirms them in their inner-desires. In other words, they are living the life of an idolater, even in the name of Jesus Christ (which is the actual way the LORD’s name is taken in vain). Further, when people abandon the Christian faith it is because they recognize or ‘feel’ (subconsciously) that the God they have been worshipping is no longer needed, since He already affirms all of their wants or desires anyway; or, because the God they are presented with comes from the self-projections of the philosophers, and thus cannot actually live up to what the Gospel claims to be as the power of God.

Barth was right to appropriate Feuerbach, since all Feuerbach was doing, from his materialistic vantage point, was confronting the idolatry of the human heart. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, He can speak through Ludwig Feuerbach.

[1] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 14.

Self-worship as the Modern Form of Humanity: Both Cultural Christianity and Secular Paganism

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Self-made drama is corollary with worshipping a self-projected god; this is more antiquely known as idolatry. I just wrote that as a Tweet, yesterday. I had something like Romans 1:18ff in mind, but also Ludwig Feuerbach’s famous critique of religion in mind as well; which is the following in nuce: “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”1 Thomas F. Torrance describes the inner-mechanics of this, as he details ‘the problem with modern theology,’ thusly:

The problem with modern theology, however, is that the second feature has to out of hand, for when the element of personal relation to God is not controlled by critical testing on the analogy of faith it degenerates into a gross personalism in which we obtrude ourselves into the place of God, making our relations with God the sole content of theological knowledge. That is the problem that faces us everywhere today in the so-called ‘new theology’ in which statements about God are reduced to anthropological statements. Whenever we try to transcend a subject-object relation or replace it by a ‘pure’ subject-subject relation, we are unable to distinguish God from ourselves, and lapse into irrationality, and then into the bitter futility of God-is-deadness.2

You will have to infer what TFT is referring to as the ‘second feature’ (I don’t feel like treating that now). But what should, at least, be clear is when Torrance refers to ‘subject-subject relation,’ this is the modern mode of immanentizing all reality to the absolutism of ‘self’; ie “turn-to-the-subject.” Modernity likes to think it has ‘come of age,’ that it has finally transcended the magics and mythologies of the superstitious past; its proof-of-transcendence is ostensibly revealed in our “scientific advancements,” primarily experienced concretely in technologies. Its nostra theologia (‘our theology’) is then only capable of worshipping the self as that is individualistically and collectivistically projected into the various and empirically visible achievements of the indomitable human spirit. “Our feelings” give pathos to the life and verve of the verity of tech we interact with day in and out; it has become the ‘subject-subject relation,’ the sacramental balm that modern humanity immerses itself into in self-actualistic orgasm.

The genuinely Christian response to this is to repent! Bow the knee to the risen Christ, humble yourself, through the humility of God in Christ for you, and know that He is God, and that we are not! It is only in this repentant affection that a person can truly think reality as it is, and thus operate as the type of theological realist that Christ is for us. We will come to recognize that there is an object over against us who turns out to be the subject for us; the humanizing reality that allows us to stand before the living God in His iustitia aliena (‘alien righteousness’), and come to understand what it genuinely means to be human from the ec-static life of God for us—a life constantly given to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ as that is gifted to us by the Holy Spirit.

 

1 Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion. 

2 Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), x-xi.

 

 

Is God Really Love? How an Orthodox Understanding of God can Set Us Free From a God of Self-Projection

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John writes of God:

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.[1]

God is love. Growing up in, and still inhabiting, in many ways, the evangelical sub-culture in North America this pious idea of God is love is floated around almost ubiquitously. I remember years ago while attending a particularly large and popular evangelical church in Southern California, this well known pastor said “God will become whatever you need him to be.” I needed God to be all types of things for me back then; I needed emotional stability and spiritual foundation. But maybe you can already see where I am going with this, maybe you can see the theological problem associated with thinking of God under these constraints.

Is it really true that God is love? Yes. Is it true that God will become whatever we need him to be as the body of Christ? What happens if we couple the Johannine idea that God is love together with this idea that God will become whatever we need him to be? To help us answer these questions, and I want to keep this as un-technical as possible (so don’t be scared by this quote, keep moving on), I thought I would bring up 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. The following quote comes from a brief summary of Feuerbach’s critique of the Christian approach to God and this within the context of Karl Barth’s engagement with it. But the point I want to highlight by this quote is simply the critique that Feuerbach made of the Christian’s projection of a God-concept.

His primary avenue for accomplishing this goal lay in his assertion that “God” is nothing more than a projection of humanity’s essential ideals as distilled from embodied existence. God is, in Barth’s paraphrase, the “religious feeling’s mirrored self” (522). Feuerbach positions himself firmly against any thought system that introduces an unnecessary abstraction from the totality of sensory experience in which the only real distinction is the encounter between the objective I and the otherness of the Thou. “Truth, reality, the world of the senses, and humanity are identical concepts” (521) according to Feuerbach and, in the last analysis, “divinity” is just another item in the equivalency series. Thus, “the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion is Man” [#1] his own and his god’s alpha and omega.[2]

We don’t want to give Feuerbach too much shrift, but along with Barth I think we should actually appreciate Feuerbach’s critique of the pietistic conception of God; at least to an extent. I believe that his critique is apropos to what I was describing above; this concept of God that really is contingent upon what we need him to become for us. We end up constructing a God to meet our perceived needs, and thus projecting an uber-concept greater than ourselves who we believe is the living God who can meet all of my emotional and other needs in just the way I might think they need to be met; typically meaning that we will feel a certain way, or have an experience of God that we deem worthy of the God we worship.

What is prompting this post, really, was that I was listening to a local Christian music radio station, and they were interviewing the lead singer of one of the groups they play on their station. He was sharing some personal stuff he was dealing with in regard to doubt about God’s love and presence in his life. He said that he was in a dark place with that when he wrote his song, but that in the midst of that God’s light began to break through the darkness and he began to have an experience of God that began to assuage his feelings of darkness and angst. What I sensed though, as I listened to him, was this type of pietistic mood and conception of God, like the one I’ve been describing above. The idea that God becomes what we need him to be, and typically that is resident within a particular experience or feeling; of the kind that a song could capture.

I too, years ago, and for many years in my life, experienced deep angst, anxiety, and depression; I struggled deeply with doubt of God’s existence, and doubt of reality itself. The only way I could describe that season was that it was hell. The kind of God I was being pointed to in that season, and because of my evangelical context, was the kind that this singer above seems to be thinking from; this God who will become whoever I needed him to be. But this, in the end, never really helped me; in fact I would say it prolonged the dark season of my soul by placing all of the weight and onus on me to construct a God, to muster a feeling, wherein I finally felt like the ‘light was breaking through the darkness’ and I was having a real experience with the real God; the God who indeed is love.

The concept of God that Feuerbach was primarily critiquing in his historical period would be something like Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concept of God; a God known primarily by a ‘turn to the subject’. A God who was more contingent upon how I ‘felt’ about God, or we felt about God as the community of Christ, rather than believing that we could actually be confronted by God by way of direct encounter with him as revealed in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. While the relationship between the evangelical concept of God and Schleiermacher’s concept of God might only have tenuous linkage, I believe there is enough to make my particular point stick. In other words, whether Schleiermacher or a Western evangelical, we all have the propensity to construct gods of our own making by way of self-projection; in other words, in line with a Calvinian theme, we are all idol-manufacturing people who bend that way over and again, and constantly. If we find ourselves within a community of faith wherein we are fed theology that reinforces that bent, that’s the direction we will turn. And then we fall prey to Feuerbach’s critique; we are simply worshiping a God of our own making and projection.

Contrariwise, the reality is that the living God is, of course, not of our own making; he’s not a projection of us. Indeed, the living God has spoken in Christ; he has revealed himself over the long period of salvation-history as mediated through Jesus Christ. What finally “cured” me, and this was significant towards bringing me out of my long long season of doubt and anxiety, was to be confronted with the fact that God isn’t who we need him to become. All of that presupposes that we actually know who we need him to become for us; that we can search our own hearts and minds at the depths that only he can. When I realized that God is not who we need him to become it began to liberate me. I was able to come out of myself, and realize that the life I needed was found ecstatically; he was God in Jesus Christ. I didn’t need to engage in self-psychology anymore, I could simply begin the life giving process of doing doxological/worshipful theology and constant meditation upon who the actual living and true God is. I.e. The God who broke into my sinful human nature, and recreated it in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I could begin living out of the new creation and first fruits that Jesus was and is for me, as the new creation of God in his humanity for me.

The irony of the ‘God becomes who I need him to be’ approach is that it not only dehumanizes us (by putting us in the position of God), but it dedivinizes God (by reducing him to a human projection). Coming to know God more accurately, or rightly, more orthodoxly meant for me a way of escape; it indeed did bring God’s genuine light into the serious darkness of my soul. I was set free indeed. My hope is that I can help other people experience this same freedom by introducing them to God who is indeed love, but who defines what that means for himself.

[1] I John 4:7-10, NASB.

[2] Daryl, “And Was Made Man”: The Witness of Feuerbach’s Anti-Theology, Karl Barth Blog Conference (2007), accessed 05-29-2017.