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CHAPTER IV
HOMO RELIGIOSUS
Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. - Joshua 24:15
The starting point for “biblical philosophy” is the recognition that judgments of good and evil are a constitutional necessity for every human being; that they are the inevitable concomitant of the exercise of free decision; and that the attempt either to avoid “value words” or to deny the fact of freedom must therefore ultimately be self-defeating. Though no affront to reason, this position does acknowledge the kind of question which, though unavoidable, might not be answerable either by the deductive method of philosophy or the inductive method of science. It has consequently given offense wherever men have pledged their total allegiance to either of these methods. Such a prior commitment obliges them to rule out in advance all questions which their respective methods are incapable of answering.
DEFINITION OF THE TERM “GOD”
The value judgments which free choice entails are “objective” in the sense that they refer to a standard of good and evil independent of oneself. They are distinguished from private inclinations and tastes by the fact that this external criterion can overrule personal preferences. If a man’s value judgments are consequent upon the particular standard which he adopts, and if he cannot make a responsible decision without reference to it, the conclusion is that the very exercise of freedom necessarily involves the agent in a relation to something beyond himself. Every man alive, by virtue of his freedom, must have some such focal point to which he stands in acknowledged or unacknowledged relation. Even such a cynic as Adolf Hitler, who claimed to be a law unto himself, superior to external constraint, could not avoid appealing to the standard of “blood and soil.” The conclusion reached in Chapter II, that “man is that creature who cannot avoid distinguishing good from evil,” thus leads to the explanatory formula: The exercise of freedom always involves the agent in a relation to some criterion of value beyond himself.
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The most important question that can be asked about a man therefore is, “What is the external criterion upon which his judgments of good and evil depend?” The answer to this question will shape all his decisions and thus the quality of his entire life. It would therefore never occur to the biblical writers to record the biography of a man (or a nation) apart from the point of reference toward which his freedom is oriented, or-to use their technical term-his “god.” Taken by itself, this word carries as little specific meaning as the word “good.” Both are empty receptacles whose content varies from man to man and from religion to religion. They are functional words, the linguistic reflection of the fact that man is that creature who, in the exercise of his freedom, necessarily appeals to some criterion of good and evil. To ask whether a man believes in “God” is consequently to misunderstand the issue. The proper question, as the biblical writers never forget, is rather: What (or who) is his god? As Martin Luther succinctly puts it, “Whatever, then, thy heart clings to and relies upon, that is properly thy god.”1
The issue can also be confused by the opposite misunderstanding: the notion that, since every man has a god, all men therefore acknowledge the same god under different names. To use a favorite metaphor of proponents of this view, everyone is climbing toward the summit of the same spiritual mountain, and it is therefore foolish to quarrel over whose route is the best. The most recent affirmation of this position is made by Arnold Toynbee, who believes that the four higher religions of today are “four variations on a single theme, and that, if the four components of this heavenly music of the spheres could be audible on earth simultaneously, and with equal clarity, to one pair of human ears, the happy hearer would find himself listening, not to a discord, but to a harmony.”2
The fallacy of this position consists in the assumption that, since the rival deities all wear the same functional label (“god”), they are at bottom identical. This is like saying that, because Henry VIII and Louis XIV were both kings, they are fundamentally the same. Part of the appeal of this position consists in the fact that it pretends to a universal tolerance. In fact, however, it is really an adroit piece
1Martin Luther, “Larger Catechism,” in Luther’s Primary Works (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896), p. 34.
2Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford University Press, 1954) Vol. 7, p. 428. The most recent in a perennial flood of books on this subject is Frith Jof Schuon’s Transcendent Unity of Religions, trans. by Peter Townsend (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953).
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of propaganda on the part of one particular god: the undifferentiated unity of mysticism in which all contraries merge.3 In spite of its manifest difficulties, this error, nurtured and cherished by idealistic philosophy, will always enjoy a wide popular appeal, since it offers the comforting assurance that life’s most urgent question can be safely ignored: namely, “Which is the true God?”
To him who will not hear this question the Bible remains a closed book. It proceeds from the recognition that life is indeed a “battle of the gods” or, to put it more exactly, a battle between the true God and a host of pretenders. Hence the famous words of Elijah, “If Yahweh be God, then follow him; but if Baal, then follow him” (I Kings 18:21); or of the Book of Deuteronomy: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live . . . to love the Lord thy God, to obey his voice, and to cleave unto him, for he is thy light, and the length of thy days” (Deuteronomy 30:19,20).
These passages express beautifully the biblical understanding that, simply by virtue of his native freedom, every human being is involved in a primordial commitment to one or another of these rival gods. It follows, moreover, that only one can be the true God. To suppose the contrary would be self-contradictory, since to the same question there cannot be two mutually exclusive answers. This means that the central problem of human life is precisely what the prophets said it was: the worship of false gods. The graven images against which the prophet inveighed are, from the twentieth-century perspective, absurd. It seldom occurs to modern men that idolatry is just as much alive today as it was twenty-five hundred years ago. If anything, it has become even more of a menace since it has learned to conceal itself. Unrecognized perils are always the most dangerous. The sophisticated “-isms” and “-ologies” in which modern man puts his trust simply function as graven images in modem dress.
By contrast to the favorite intellectual definition of man as homo sapiens, or rational animal, the prophets understand man as homo religiosus, religious animal. On this definition it is meaningless to distinguish between religious and nonreligious areas of life or between religious and irreligious men. He who rejects one religion (or god)
3This god has found a new and eloquent spokesman in W. T. Stace, whose Time and Eternity (Princeton University Press, 1952) is an excellent modern restatement of the attractive powers of this particular god.
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can only do so in the name of another. Whereas to the Bible (and, in fact, to common sense generally) these are self-evident truths, the intellectual often has to rediscover them by hacking his way through a tangle of sophisticated error. He frequently never does win his way back to the point where biblical thinking begins.
If he does grant the foregoing reasoning, however, he may be due for a surprise. It entails a corollary which may be more than he bar gained for: the biblical conception of sin! For sin is simply another word for allegiance to a false god. It is interchangeable with the word “idolatry.” Hence, Christian theology often equates it with unbelief, not in the sense of “incredulity,” but of trust in the wrong god.
The conception of sin as idolatry, though biblical in origin, is universal in application. As surely as he is free, every man will have a god. As surely as he has a god, he will have a conception of sin. He will be unable to deny any given version of it except in the name of another. He may disclaim the definition of sin as idolatry, but he can be overruled. Within the context of any given religious orientation, protests to the contrary notwithstanding, it can be shown that sin is really conceived in terms of defection to an alien “god,” in the functional sense already indicated.
GENERAL AND SPECIFIC USAGES OF THE TERM “SIN”
The words “sin” and “idolatry” entail no definite content. Both are purely formal, words for which no man can avoid using some covert equivalent, but whose specific meanings will be as numerous as the rival gods. They only become specifically Christian with the biblical answer to the question, “Which is the true version of sin or idolatry?” And this, in turn, depends upon the prior question, “Which (or who) is the true God?”
A great deal of confusion has been caused by the failure to distinguish between the general and specific senses of “sin,” “idolatry,” and other words associated with Christianity. For example, it is often maintained that a piece of literature is informed by one of the “great Christian motifs” if it deals with the conception of sin ( such as Robert Penn-Warren’s Brother to Dragons), or salvation (such as Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop), or atonement (such as William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun), or a savior (such as Faulkner’s A Fable). Nothing could be further from the truth. There is
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nothing specifically Christian about any of these themes. Christianity merely understands, as many of its rivals do not, that they all stand for questions which arise the moment one acknowledges the fact of freedom. They are its corollaries. Even if the biblical answers were all wrong, if the biblical God were just another idol, these would still be demonstrably the right questions. Their hidden presence can be detected even in systems which deny them. Whether they can properly be called Christian will depend in each instance upon how they are answered: What is the specific conception of sin? Of what does salvation consist? Who accomplishes it, and how?
An example of the confusion which results from the failure to make this distinction is provided by even so acute a theologian as P. T. Forsyth, in his observations on Richard Wagner’s opera, Parsifal. Because it does preach a doctrine of salvation from sin, and because it does have a savior, Forsyth supposes that it is to that extent a Christian drama.4 Actually Wagner’s avowed aim, expressly stated in many writings, was to replace Christianity by a substitute religion with himself as its prophet. He readily admitted that Parsifal’s version of sin is the Hindu conception that human existence is itself a curse and that salvation consists in extinguishing all desires.5 Nevertheless, when New York’s Metropolitan Opera makes its annual gesture toward “religion” with a Good Friday performance of Parsifal, thousands of listeners continue to imagine that they are participating in a “great Christian experience.” They thereby illustrate the contention of Denis deRougemont that Wagner’s audiences have “a wonderful ability not to hear what is being sung.”6
The word “sin,” then, a purely formal word referring to the misorientation of human freedom, is no monopoly of Christianity. Every philosophy has its own conception of what man’s external point of reference ought to be. Consequently, as the other side of the coin, it will also have its own conception of sin, though usually under a different name. The reason why it is mistakenly regarded as a “Christian motif” is simply that the Bible, adhering more rigorously
4See P. T. Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), the final two chapters, which deal with Wagner.
5See especially Wagner’s two treatises, “Religion and the State” and “Religion and Art,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, translated by W. A. Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 1897).
6Denis deRougemont, Passion and Society (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1939), p. 231. The book is published in the United States under the title Love in the Western World.
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than most other philosophies to the implications of human freedom, keeps the problem of sin in the foreground, instead of trying to circumvent it. Until one realizes that the issues with which it deals are the issues of human life, one will scarcely be interested in its specific answer to a question one has never faced. Conversely, when a man does awake to the fact that the discovery of the true God is a matter of life and death, he can hardly afford to ignore words like these:
For every one of the house of Israel, or of the stranger that sojourneth in Israel, which separateth himself from me, and setteth up his idols in his heart, and putteth the stumbling block of his iniquity before his face . . . I the Lord will . . . set my face against that man, and will make him a sign and a proverb, and I will cut him off from the midst of my people; and ye shall know that I am the Lord . . . That the house of Israel may go no more astray from me, neither be polluted any more with all their transgressions; but that they may be my people, and I may be their God, saith the Lord God (Ezekiel 14:7,8,11).
The distinctively biblical conception of sin thus depends upon the biblical conception of God and the effect which he exerts upon his worshipers. This will be examined in the following chapter.