The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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HRN speaks, significantly, of the kind of "ecclesiasticism" in which "echoes of monotheism continue to be heard," in that "[t]he God to whom reference is made in every act of worship and in every proclamation of the church's message is still to some extent acknowledged as the principle of being." "Yet," he adds, "the confusion is there between that objective principle and its image in the church. The God of the Christian church has become confused with a Christian God, the One beyond all the many with the collective representation of a church that is one community among many" (RMWC: 59). A few pages later, he speaks of "the people of faith" being "tempted to substitute that which makes them one and makes them different—their faith or their culture—for the objective One with whom the faith began" (61).

Unless I'm mistaken, HRN's underlying point is the same as Bultmann's in his interpretation of the Fourth Gospel's criticism of religion. To be human is to be aware of one's creatureliness, and thus to have a question. But religion is a matter of having, or giving, an answer to one's question, wherewith the at most provisional is treated as final, the inauthentic, as authentic, death, as life, and so on. True, one's religion shows that one has a knowledge of that which is beyond human beings and the world. But in that one imagines oneself to be secure in one's religion, one perverts this knowledge. The different religions dispute one another and deny the rightness of one another's worship of God. But God is not legitimately worshipped either in Jerusalem or on the Gerazim. The "true worshippers" worship "in spirit and in truth." In other words, the right worship of God is an eschatological occurrence that God enacts through God's own Spirit and that becomes actual through the coming of the revealer.

3 December 2006

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