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THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY
CHAPTER FIVE
MODERN SCIENCE AND THE GOD CONCEPT
INTRODUCTION
In this essay, I want to review understandings of the god concept emerging from modern scientific assumptions about the nature and sources of order in natural and social systems. These assumptions speak to the truth value of assertions about religion and the god concept in a way most inimical to the Drama of the Holy.
All this is in preparation of postmodern understandings about science and theology which return questions of religious constructs, including all sanctifications, profanations as all as all Dramas of the Holy, to human hands where they originate and human responsibility where they belong.
In the later sections of this essay, I will offer some of the elements of postmodern science, still highly speculative, with which to ground a postmodern theology most congenial to a knowledge process grounded in empiric research. In passing, I will draw out some of the implications of Chaos theory which resolves part of the animus between science and theology, especially, that part of Chaos theory which speaks to the geometry and facticity of the underlying ontology which is always the subject matter of empiric research. As we shall see, the ontology of natural and social systems is far different from that which is assumed in modern science. In that difference resides the possibility of an understanding of the god concept which need not meet modernist standards of objective existence and consistent behavior.
If one combines postmodern phenomenology together with some of the insights from postmodern natural science, one has the beginning of a social philosophy which speaks for the Drama of the Holy and against the nihilism and skepticism of those too much engaged in the modern scientific paradigm. It is the case made in this essay that theology and science are not separate knowledge processes but rather two quite different endeavors, the first oriented to exploration and reconstruction of the physical environment on terms congenial to a given social formation and the second, a discipline oriented to the development of a social world patterned on terms congenial to spiritual values in that social formation.
I want to emphasize that, apart from sociology and anthropology, there is no natural antagonism between religion and modern science. Physical science, in its modernistic form, simply cannot speak to the validity claims of religion: to questions of right and wrong; of good and evil. Physical science is, by modernistic definition, a reductionist endeavor and has no warrant to speak to social and cultural facts which take their meaning as a social fact from the larger context in which they appear. It is right and proper to use analysis in order to do physical science, however it is a scientific sin to try to understand social and cultural facts by solely by analysis since social facts are mediated by the whole of the social formation constructed, in a delicate, complex and varied process, by believing peoples.
Whatever animosity arises as between physical science and theology per se usually stems from the propensity of premodern theologians to offer unfounded comment on physical and natural law...comment which, in the depths of its ignorance, offends the sensibility of those who know of which they speak. When premodern theologians do speak cogently of the flawed theories and interpretations of modern science, they rush to the judgment that, since modern science is demonstrably wrong on some major point of empiric fact, that therefore their own interpretation must be valid.
This is a form of spurious reasoning to which Chaos theory speaks so vividly and forcefully. There are other interpretations of the failings of modernist science than that, given those failings, premodern understandings are valid. In particular, Chaos theory offers an understanding for nonlinear events which point toward quite natural, if surprising, processes rather than toward divine intervention into natural or social dynamics.
But if physical science, by virtue of its own writ, cannot speak to questions of theology, the social sciences claim to be able to do so. In so doing, in their modern science incarnation, they knell the death toll for premodern theology. Curiously enough, it is social science which provides part of the necessary corrections to modern science with which to ground some of the important assertions of premodern theology. I will pick up on this critique of modern science by the human sciences in the passages about postmodern phenomenology. But first, allow me to review the nature of the continuing dispute between premodern theology and all of modern science. That difference remains and, on those points of dispute, postmodern phenomenology is in agreement with modern science.
The God of Newton A major point of enmity between physical science and premodern theology hinges on the missions and method of the knowledge process. After Newton, the method of the knowledge process shifted from divine inspiration to empiric observation. The mission of the knowledge process shifted from sure and certain knowledge of the Will of God to sure and certain knowledge about natural laws...laws which tend to make God the creator redundant and God the avenger, impotent. The grounds for a long and often violent warfare between theology and science in Christendom and Islam lay in the assertion by premodern theology that introspection and inspiration is privileged over empiric research. Newton became the chief tactician on the side of empirical science.
With the publication of Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, Newton gave modern science a mission and a method which eliminated most of the ancient privileges of the god concept and redirected the pathways of knowledge from prayer and divine inspiration to measurement and direct observation. The mission of the knowledge process became the discovery of the eternal laws of nature and society. The method was that of successive approximations: his fourth rule of investigation was:
Propositions established by general induction are to be
regarded as true or very nearly so, until these propositions
are corrected by additional inductive evidence.
Induction is a process by which general statements are derived (induced) from direct observation. In this statement is a displacement of subjective inspiration and a preference for objective observation. Modern science displaced, in the same moment, theology as the arbiter of the true value of belief.
In establishing induction as the test for the validity of a statement, the very foundations of truth shifted like a great earthquake shifts mountains and rivers from petition to the god concept to careful observation and comparative study. The agent of knowledge became the field scientists rather than the holy man. The repository of knowledge came to be scholarly journals and texts rather than the Holy bibles, scriptures, canons and texts.
When Newton was asked how the laws of gravity and motion came to work as they did, he replied, 'Hypotheses non fingo," [I do not invent hypotheses, I only discover them]. For Newton, the role of science was completed with the discovery of natural law, explanation of them was outside the province of the scientist. This lead Newton to accept the views of Thomas More that God was the first cause while space was the sensorium of God. Premodern ideas that God was omniscient, omnipresence and omnipotent were transposed into the impersonal, blind, oblivious, nonjudgmental laws of nature and society. God lost the ability to act in the world, to see, to know, to remember, to judge, or to sanction.
In their own times, the role left to the God concept by Newton and the then modern science were reduced to three. God is necessary to explain
a) creation in the face of Universal Laws which, presumably never, never change b) why the stars do not come together in a single mass under the influence of gravity, and c) the stability of the solar system despite perturbations in the orbits of stars.
Today, only the creation is left for to comfort premodern theologians; the black holes in the cosmos are producedby stars falling into a huge mass, so big that the force of gravity prevents the escape of light. Those perturbations turn out to be the gravitational effects of other, unseen bodies.
Giant telescopes removed the finger of God and replaced it with moons, planets and whole galaxies. Astrophysicists such as Hawking and Penrose are searching for the one equation that explains the four forces; success in that quest would, for modern scientists, reduce the god concept to a complex equation.
Creation, the first and only task left to God by those working in the modern science tradition, was removed from the province of the gods by the work of the Nobel Laureate, Ilya Prigogine who offered natural explanations for the emergence of order in the universe when the second Law of Thermodynamics asserted that disorder was the natural fate of the universe.
The Second Law There is, thus, a curious contradiction together with a most curious congeniality between the advocates of God and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law states, without respect to God, that all systems tend to their most probable state, hence most homogeneous state. Systems tend to run down. That is true of the Sun, the stars, galaxies, dogs, cats, societies and religions. Nothing escapes the writ of this most secular law.
One could say that God did not exist since there is no escape from the operation of the Second Law: all systems tend toward entropy...God notwithstanding. Hence the antagonism between physics and theology. Yet there is order in the universe. If order exists in the face of the universality of the Second Law, from whence did order come? Premodern theorists answer, God; modern scientists keep their peace; postmodern philosphers of science note the empirical changes found in deep chaos...great leaps in both natural and biological systems which defy prediction--and control.
One could say that God is necessary since, without God, there would be no order, no pattern, no permanence in the world. The Second Law requires a God since, without God, the existence of stars, planets, molecules, and mountains could not be explained. Biological entities are even more improbable in statistical terms than are molecules and mountains. Both theologians and sociologists point to a tendency toward complexity and improbability not implied in the Second Law. Why should order emerge out of chaos in a world where the Second Law was paramount? If order is not to be found in the ordinary working of Nature and, if there is order (as indeed there is), from whence did it come that it might be lost?
Modern science; modern physics and chemistry, modern geometry and modern mathematics had no answer as to the source of order; they could only account for disorder. Then, into modern science came Chaos theory. Lars Onsager had previously won a Nobel prize for his 1928 work on irreversible thermodynamics. The point of that work was that, overall, there was disorder but there could be local and highly complex forms of order within that larger disorder and within the larger tendency to disorder. But it wasn't until the 1960s that Chaos Theory relocated the source of order in Nature itself (Prigogine and Stengers: 1984; Gleick: 1988).
Chaos Theory, then, makes God the Creator redundant for natural scientists.
Disorder is the most common state but there is a First Law of Chaos to modify and complement the Second Law of Thermodynamics: small scale perturbations accumulate in a deviation amplifying process and take on an ordered relationship to each other. This happens with sub-atomic particles, with photons, with the developing embryo of the drosophila, with molecules whose concentration does not exceed 10-10 cm (Prigogine & Stengers: 171). The process is entirely natural. Being natural, it has equal standing with the second Law. Being an opposition to the second Law on the level of theoretical physics, it is also in opposition to the necessity of God as Creator on the level of theology. That God is twice dead: once murdered by the Second Law and then again by the First Law of Chaos.
Three Hundred Year Reign After Newton came the Reformation and the Protestant renaissance in which God became the Great Scientist/clockmaker in the sky who designed the world and left it to dedicated believers to discover how it worked. And it is a most incredible world. For the past three hundred years, the discoveries of modern science of the laws of genetics; of organic chemistry; of subatomic physics and of astrophysics invited awe and reverence. Such a world we live in.
Such is the power of this paradigm that sociologists tried to superimpose it upon social life worlds. Comte, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and all who follow their ways rejected the concept of the supernatural in favor of the concept of the superorganic. For Durkheim, the superorganic was the source of order and solidarity; for Marx, the same superorganic could be oppressive and exploitative but for both, there were laws which lay outside of the human hand and which preshaped all thought, emotion and action. In modern sociology the mission is to search for the laws of social organization with which to displace the god concept as the architect and arbiter of 'modern' society.
Postmodern Social Science Social sciences, in their modernist form, are hostile to the god concept and to the sanctification process since they tend to re-interpret all such constructs into the language congenial to their own linear and desanctified analytic paradigm. Anthropology and sociology, in such a paradigm, accepted the standards of belief from premodern understandings of the god concept and, finding no evidence amenable to premodern understandings, dismiss such understandings as categorical errors--errors in which data which fit one category are falsely assigned (by wishful thinking) to other categories.
In particular, evidence supporting the God concept is falsely assigned, by such modernist reasoning, to categories of the supernatural when, in point of fact, such evidence should be assigned to categories oriented to the super-organic. The later category is, presumably, entirely a natural thus desanctified, category. Those who offer such evidence as proof demonstrative of the existence of god are degraded by such epithets as 'primitive,' 'preliterate,' 'aboriginal,' 'savage,' 'barbarian,' 'uncivilized,' or 'native' people. Being primitive, they are presumed to be unable to know the true nature of the social form they construct. Being modern scientists, sociologists and anthropologists are able to understand the 'real' nature of the social fact under construction.
As we shall see in the argument offered below, such re- interpretation privileges a profane reading of the drama of the Holy and thus violates a basic assumption of postmodern phenomenology. That basic assumption is that social research honors the conceptualization/interpretation process of a people on its own terms. In postmodern phenomenology, one cannot privilege the concepts of the observer over the concepts of adult members of a society since they are the architects of their own social life world. One can critique such categories on internal terms but, in the postmodern modality, one has no writ to re- translate the social construction process into a set of concepts equally constructed within other societies and call the second the more valid.
While modern phenomenology, after Husserl, posited natural and preexisting categories (eidos = essences), postmodern phenomenology accepts an infinite variety of categories all equally constructed and all equally crude in grasping the infinitely rich and varied social life world from which they come. Each people, in their active construction of social life worlds, use special concepts with which to construct that social life world and, to the degree, they succeed, are justified in using them to typify the nature of that world.
In both modern and postmodern phenomenology, interpretation is honored as a pathway to authentic understanding; however in postmodern phenomenology, the interpretations of 'primitive' peoples about their typifications of gender, of strata, of parenting, of art and of the drama of the Holy take precedence over the interpretations of outsiders including social scientists. The substitution of concepts from one social life realm for concepts from a different life world does much mischief to the knowledge process and, thus, to the reality creating process which goes hand in hand with it.
The Deadly Sciences Anthropology becomes a great threat to the notion of God by virtue of its research into times lost. By showing the variety, the similarities, the divergence and evolution of religions and the God concept, anthropology appears to spell the death of God. After tracing the many transformations of a sky god, one among many, into an universal, transcendent solitary God, few anthropologists or historians could believe the later concept to have priority. After noting the many gender changes of the god concept and the politics by which gods are made and unmade, there is little left to honor as the true god.
Judging the truth or falsity of the god concept upon terms set forth by premodern claims (of one and only one unchanging godhead) tend to lead one to reject the god concept since, as it is understood by many persons who think about the god concept in premodern terms, it involves pre‰xisting universal and eternal supernatural entity(s). For those who work entirely in modern paradigms of understanding, the existence of a second, entirely spiritual world peopled by autonomous entities which create, judge, punish, reward or intervene in the dynamics of natural systems is untenable.
By locating Divine power in the ordinary structures of social relations and social processes, sociology too, appears to be an enemy of God. Such an effort to identify the god concept with society in the abstract tends to desanctify and thus alter the god concept beyond all recognition by those who interpret the extraordinary feelings and influences as proof demonstrative of the existence of a supreme intelligence entirely separate from the humans beings who believe...or disbelieve.
Psychology offers another way to dismiss religion. By restricting their data to that of inner feelings and inner images; by looking at behavior of the single individual apart from the larger cultural context which gives meaning and sense to that individual behavior, the clinical psychologist manages to replace gods, demons, fiends and imps with psychopathological categories of analysis. If a person believes himself to be a reincarnation of Jesus or Mother Mary personified, given the presumptions of modern psychiatry, they are said to be mad.
Freud in particular thought, falsely, that religion arose out of the ambivalent wish of the sons to placate their father and, in the same instant, destroy and devour him that they inherit his strength on the one hand and assure themselves of his death on the other. One cannot be certain about Freud's attitude toward his own father and mother, but Parrinder assures us that such origins of religion have no scholarly basis (1971:15). Freud thought that the god concept became generalized in the form of a father figure internalized. As sons took on the attitudes and authority of the father in their own psyche, they carried these around and, unable to shake such attitudes, assigned them to nonexistent gods. One should take care to note that, even though Freud may have been wrong in the origins of religion, his larger point that god is the authority of society, personified, deserves more respect as, indeed, Durkheim gave it. I will pick up the content of a freudian critique of religion later in this essay, both to consider the role of psychology in contributing to death of god arguments and to extricate some of the more positive contributions of freudian psychology to postmodern theology.
Modernist psychologists today prefer to locate the god process in inherited genetic predispositions or in natural categories. Jung is well known for his archetypes which preshape all human products including art and marriage. In the workings of such archetypes, the Living God of Catholics and Anglicans are assimilated to generalized psychological predispositions. J.B. Watson offered a psychology, based upon the work of Pavlov in Russia, in which only behavior itself was of any interest. From that reductionist argument, B.F. Skinner developed an Stimulus- Response form of learning theory which left little room for either God or a psyche dominated by a father fantasy.
Modernist human sciences together, thus, are given much credit for the Death of God. There is some truth in such assertions but one should keep in mind that most people believe in their god regardless of what psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists say, teach and write. Indeed many of those in the human sciences are, themselves, believers, overriding the logic of that about which they write, believe and teach. Yet this encapsulation and disjuncture between science and theology need not be the case.
Modernist Interpretations of The God Concept A sociological understanding of God is summed up in the writings of Emile Durkheim (1961) who held that God is society itself reified and vivified, then deified:
'...[that] which is the universal and eternal objective
cause of these sensations sui generis out of which religious
experience is made, is society.'
God is thus a collective representation of the power of society together with the essences of a culture. The gods one finds in society mirrors the social organization and the cultural values of a society encapsulated into symbols which represent the collective. From these collective representations come a collective conscience which guides and engulfs the members of a society.
In Durkheim, God does not come directly from really existing society since, as he said: 'How could anything so crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their followers?' The god concept may mirror a society but it does not simply mirror whatever society produces it. Rather, the concept of God is '...an idea which comes to express our more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful and the ideal.' It is the idealization of society which gives it the grandeur and majesty so inspiring to a people and so redeeming of its more wretched members and practices.
Durkheim says that religion arises, sui generis, i.e., self developed, out of society but notes that there are real, empirical sources of religious sensibility both external and internal. External to every person is the acting society:
'...society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in
action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who
compose it are assembled together and act in common.
...before all else, [religion] is an active cooperation.'
Religious festivals and holidays are so important since they
provide an arena in which society is assembled and makes itself
felt as a distinct entity by each member of society. After
saying that all social institutions are born in religion;
especially law and morality, Durkheim takes us back to society by
saying:
'If religion has given birth to all that is essential
in society, it is because the idea of society is the
soul of religion.'
The primary empirical source of the holy is, according to Durkheim, in our own personal sensations:
'...we have seen if collective life awakens religious
thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is
because it brings about a state of effervescence which
changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies
are excited, passions more active, sensations stronger;
there are even some which are produced only at this moment.'
People who respond to the extraordinary sensations they experience do not think of themselves as ill and in need of some medication to bring them back to a more normal sensory state. Rather they reify those sensations as proof demonstrative of the presence of the Holy. Durkheim noted this transformation of ecstatic states into a sense of the holy:
'A man [sic] does not recognize himself; he feels himself
transformed and consequently he transforms the environment
which surrounds him. In order to account for the very
particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to
the things with which he is most in direct contact
properties which they have not; exceptional powers an
virtues which the objects of everyday experience to not
possess. In a word, above the real world in which his
profane life passes, he has placed...[the holy].'
Durkheim's analysis is the received one for most of those in the sociology and anthropology of religion. I agree with the thrust of his analyses and most of his conclusions except that I would not hold that the profane world is any more natural than the sacred realm created; nor are the gods any less real than are husbands, presidents or Popes. If the Catholic Church is a social fact, so is the God process of which it is part; the god concept does organize behavior and shape interpretations. The tests of facticity of such a god concept are, in postmodern phenomenology, to be found in the organized behavior of those who worship a god in their everyday life. And the death of god begins when the practices required by that god concept ends.
God According to Swanson Guy Swanson, a social psychologist
at the University of Michigan, has
set forth a series of propositions which show the connection
between God and society (1960). He fills in some of the blanks
left by Durkheim. The concept of the Supernatural is shaped by
social structures such as marriage; or business; or universities
for that matter. To paraphrase Swanson:
1. The way we experience God is connected to the way we
experience social relationships.
1a. As with social structures, Gods have purposes and
potentials which can be put to use by people.
1b. As with social structures, Gods pervade the inner
life and outer experience of people directing and
limiting behavior as invisible, immortal,
inescapable, and vaguely understood forces.
2. Gods tend to look like powerful groups since their
actions most visibly and clearly affect everyone.
3. Mana is the power of the primordial features of social
life.
4a. Magic is the use of mana...the forms of social
power...to change physical reality...as for example, in
healing.
4b. Religion is activities aimed at influencing or
implementing the Will of God.
If society is the primordial source of God, how is it that people experience society as God...how does Society/God pervade the inner and outer life of people. This experience of God/society begins with bonding, language, role relations and is deeply embedded in the everyday roles we take and make; it ends with reification and deification. I will explain reification and deification first.
God According to Freud Freud saw the origins of religion in the murder and cannibalism of the castrating father. In Freud's anthropology, the primordial father monopolized sexual access to the women of the tribe murdering, exiling or castrating his sons. The sons banded together to murder the father; having done so, felt guilt and denial. Guilt transformed the primordial father into the angry Father-God. Guilt transformed the fear and remorse the sons felt into worship and rigid compliance to the social norms which the father embodied.
The sons came to realize that all could not have unlimited access to every female; they instituted the rules of exogamy and incest in order to avoid doing to themselves what they had done to the father. All this is very fanciful...primordial poetry more than valid science but it does tell us that there is a relationship between sexual energy, forms of social control and social organization. God is the product of sexual energy redirected away from incestuous cravings toward social and cultural purpose.
For Freud as for others in psychology, religion is a neurosis which is subject to treatment and cure. Visions, voices, departures from this world or visits by supernatural entities are thought to be evidence of madness. There is another interpretation that postmodern psychology would consider. The vision sees and the voice that one hears may well be an ordinary psychological capacity for generalization of the collective conscience and the intuition of what collective wisdom might say on a topic. It is entirely possible that people who want, passionately, to solve a personal or social problem, are able to do so in their sleep or in a trance in ways that would not be possible given the distraction of everyday life.
This 'eureka' experience is not treated as madness when a mathematician hits upon a solution to a puzzle while asleep. It not recorded as madness when a computer scientist solves a problem in software design while day dreaming at the beach, on hold while fishing or pre-occupied with merely physical tasks while sailing a boat. If insight and discovery are treated as normal in secular affairs, why may they be interpreted as madness in dealing with spiritual questions?
Those who firmly believe that they are incarnations of Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha or a given saint in history are not far wrong in the terms of proof which postmodern science would honor. The genetic material of any two persons in the human genome is so similar that it meets even Penrose' standards for superb theory, that is to say, one part error in several millions of information bits. From the point of view of postmodern phenomenology, if a person defines herself of Joan of Arc or if a man defines himself as Jesus of Nazareth, and if that person embodies most of the characteristics of either, it is sufficient evidence to encode that person as a Joan or a Jesus. The poetics of vote counting or of criminal convictions are less precise.
Of course, one is not literally the same person who lived centuries ago any more than a virus which grew from a billion year old ancestor is the same virus. The point is that in postmodern phenomenology, things defined as such become such in the subsequent behavior. If a modern day Jesus does inspire and sanctify and is honored among men and women, then the postmodern phenomenologists honors that embodiment as interpreted by those who create it. If a modern day person speaks with mercy and wisdom in the language of old testament prophets, that mercy and wisdom is no less sanctified now than when Amos or Isaiah spoke. In Chaos theory, the boundaries between entities are far less precise and disconnected than newtonian understandings permit.
Freud and the Death of God Those who follow the ways of Freud must deal with his conclusion that rebellion against society is inspired more by hostility toward father-as-society-internalized than by the faults of society itself. When we rebel against society, we are, indeed, rebelling against our father. Our hatred of the repressive father we knew as child is channeled toward all authority figures. Yet it may be the case that the Father and the society He enforces is hostile to the human condition. In their theoretical support of oppression, freudian psychologist help dismantle the drama of the Holy.
In freudian theory, until we grow up, accept society and become fathers ourselves, we will challenge the power of police, priest, professor, and politician alike out of neuroses rather than out of cause. It is we who are sick when we rebel; not society. Yet sometimes, it is father who is wrong; sometimes society and authority figures are morally reprehensible and are to be rejected. If maturity consists in accepting the ancient wisdoms buried in society, maturity is, equally, an ability to know when to level hostility and when to reject authority. That is true of the mature son and it is true of the mature scientist. One cannot use freud to repress all dissent and be innocent of the death of God.
Maturity, in many societies, consists in redirecting the sexual impulse away from mother toward the female cousin, twice or thrice removed. There is good reason for incest prohibitions apart from arguments of genetic heritage. To use the child for one's own sexual gratification before the child has the social power for consenting to--or rejecting--the sexual act is to subvert all of the sexual norms regulating desire and intimacy. In all societies, the sexuality of men and women are colonized to reproduction of the social form. At the interpersonal level, incest rearranges social power arrangements in ways hostile to socialization, the child-sexual partner demands adult statuses in which sexuality is permitted. At a macro-societal level of analysis, incest forfeits all of the political, economic, and informational treasures that exogamy brings.
At a more social psychological level of analysis, the use of the child for sexual gratification interferes with the socialization process. If the socialization process is to be successful, the child must trust the adult. When a child realizes that the adult is using social power for personal gratification, the social contract that would emerge from socialization is betrayed. The child learns to use social power for highly privatized purpose. Whatever the level of the child's moral development, at some level of awareness, the child knows that this is wrong. The use of social power must end in mutuality and reciprocity else the grounds for compliance and cooperation are eroded. While the child cannot put this into succinct words, still the child feels and fears the wrongful use of social power.
At a still more personal level of analysis; a more psychiatric level of analysis, the ambivalence the child feels toward the adult; toward the pleasurable act; toward the false status that sexual activity bestows, that ambivalence returns to subvert all egalitarian social relations in the future of the child. It returns in the form of self anger and self disgust. It returns in a form that confuses power and pleasure; that separates pleasure and human intimacy. In locating the problems of incest in the origins of religion, freudians deflect attention from other problems of incest and thus give aid and comfort to those who would murder that which is holy in us.
Freudians hold, rightly, that the suppression and rechanneling of some part of sexual energy is necessary to the work of society. More generally, impulse control is essential to the peaceful cooperation of humans. Thus God, religion and emancipatory psychology are born out of the need for cooperative social relations. That is a valuable insight to keep...out of much in freudian theory that is not worthy of keeping. There are other elements of freudian psychology most congenial to the Drama of the Holy; the concern to help sort out the sources of damaged internal communications, the concern for a strong, socially constrained ego, a concern with the dramas of childhood trauma as well as a knowledge process which makes visible the things we just as soon forget--and in the forgetting, lose the possibility of better memories.
Postmodern Psychology. The more fanciful theoretical structures of Freud which located the source of god in the conflicts of the psyche gave way toward more practical endeavors in which radical psychologists and critical theorists give the market place dominion over the consumer. In these times, freudians of all persuasions help identify the neurotic needs of a society and use that information to colonize desire on behalf of profit and growth.
By means of an alienated Drama of Desire in millions of advertisements, desire is colonized to the purchase and ownership of material goods rather than adult relationships. In its more mercenary moments, freudian psychologists empower the factory and office administration. They use what they know of psychology to give management dominion over the worker; the state dominion over the poor and the oppressed. Freudian science came to serve both mammon and the state, and in doing so betrayed the freudian vision of a strong and healthy psyche able to get on with live in ways congenial to the human estate. In helping to transfer libido from the particular human other, the generalized human other and from the Universal We, freudian psychologists betray the Drama of the Holy. To their credit, many freudian psychologists, especially from the Frankfort School, have joined in a critique of the alienating uses of psychology. Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney and Walter Benjamin have contributed much toward emancipatory postmodern social psychology in their studies of the media and mass culture.
While there may be no precise accounting for the poetic genius, for the psychological grounding of the god concept nor of each cultural expression of the god concept in any given epoch, still there is a sensible story to be heard from the political economy of an epoch that reaches into every society and shapes the god concept. It is this political economy to which Marx and Weber contributed so much.
The depth to which the god concept is tied to and responsive to the political economy is recorded in the work of Karl Marx. The depth to which the political economy is tied to and responsive to religion and the god concept is recorded in the work of Max Weber. Together they provide us with insight and fuel for the construction of the realm of the Holy that permits us to concede authorship to the human hand for the kind of Holy space we chose to make in our lives.
The Marxian God For Marx, religion was an opiate of those who believed; mystifying and inuring them to the alienating relations in which they were immersed. In this reading of the god concept, God was a false reification of our own power to do good or evil in the world. However, for Marx, the sigh was real; the oppression which called it forth was real; only the answer was false. For Marx, the answer was not to walk humbly all the days of one's life; to prepare for paradise in the afterworld. For Marx, the answer was revolution today; paradise on earth tomorrow in a cooperative community of full citizens oriented to praxis and mutual affirmation.
Most people with a profound and sincere commitment to religion and to the god concept dismiss Marx when they read that first sentence, above, on the god concept. Yet Marx had great genius and can teach us much that is useful in a postmodern expression of the Holy. And the marxian view of religion was far more complex and far more subtle than conventional wisdom concedes. From Marx, we can learn much that helps us in the quest to center the postmodern.
God comes back in alien form, according to Marx, to oppress those who assigned their own power to non-existent gods. God is a human invention; a frankenstein created out of the mists of primitive superstition. God is a false and fraudulent tool of control. God is a ghost, haunting the human project, to be banished since the god concept takes its character from the ruling elites of the society. In a marxian rendition of the god process, not only is god made in the image of humans, it is made in the image of rich and powerful humans; a patriarchal society produces a patriarchal god while a slave society produces a slavemaster for a god. To the extent Marx was correct, in order to have a compassionate and merciful god, we need to build a compassionate and merciful society. Marx gives us insight in how political economy can help in that pursuit even if Marx would have held in scorn the task itself.
Though Marx held wide-reaching contempt for religion and for those premodern understandings which assigned misery, tragic and terrible events to gods or fate, Marx did not have a contempt for the people who reached for God when times were hard and life was threatened. In his Critique of Hegel, Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people but he said more than that in the same paragraph;
Religion is the general theory of that [premodern] world,
its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form,
its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its
moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground
for consolation and justification (in A Contribution to a
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right).
Religion was then, for Marx, the expression of real distress and a protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless condition in which human beings find themselves. Marx saw that good technology in the service of good theory along with good politics could end the era of prehistory and the idiotic explanations of human alienation they developed.
To its everlasting credit, capitalism did just that; it provided modern industrial technology with its creativity, flexibility and productivity. It also perfected the organizational and technical means by which extraction of surplus value through exploitation produced inequalities in wealth and power impossible in premodern times. Somewhere Marx said that the miracles of God were rendered superfluous by the miracles of modern industry. Marx, thus, saw many positive moments to capitalism, the chief of which was that it engineered the divorce between premodern understandings on the one hand and social philosophy on the other. In a moment, capitalism destroyed feudalism, slavery and primitive communism. Capitalism pushed religion and its muddled, mystic defeatism to the background of human affairs. Capitalism provided the means and the missions for a knowledge process that held the seeds of a good and just society.
The Life and Death of God in Marx and Weber Marx had held that capitalism created the bourgeois state and the bourgeois state separated itself from religion; in so doing, capitalism was emancipatory,
The division of man [sic] into Protestant and citizen..., is
not a lie...; it is political emancipation itself--the
political way of emancipation from religion. (On the Jewish
Question).
And again,
Man emancipates himself from religion politically by
relegation [of religious law] from public to private law.
(On the Jewish Question).
Once god is privatized, that is, confined to situated dramas of the Holy, the larger uses of politics and economics are unfettered. Freed from the constraints of Church and immune from the exhortations of prophets, capitalism could explore its many positive and negative potentials. Foundational concepts of grand religions are squeezed, by the privatization of canon law, into the smallest possible corners of social life. In Catholicism today, canon law applies only within the church. Only Protestantism managed to further privatize religion by confining it to the thoughts of single individuals in the privacy of their prayer.
In many ways, the sequestering of the god concept to private life or to a few voluntary organizations (including the church) operating on the periphery of society means the death of god. Note that it is capitalism, not Marx or Nietzsche, which confines and destroys the realm of the Holy and the reach of God; they are simply reporters who respond with great ambivalence to such sequestering.
God cannot exist in any political economy in which market relations (profit, impersonality, technical rationality, privatized demand and exchange value) pre-empts the realm of the Holy. Market values require that both nature and society be treated in practical, instrumental ways. Nature is not the province of the gods but rather the province of the developer. Society is not the flesh, bones, blood and spirit of the gods but rather the source of labor power and of consumer demand. Slavery, feudalism and low technology communalism require divine sanction for production and distribution; all prior political economies base production and distribution on status not profit. Capitalism finds such world-views to be romantic nonsense. Modern science is sufficient to the day for purely market relations.
It is a marxian analysis, if not Marx himself, which helps connect capitalism to the death of God. Once this connection is firmly understood, then the possibility of reinventing market systems which retain some of the many positivities of market capitalism while eliminating many of its negativities. In another essay, I will suggest that the market socialism of Roemer and Kenworthy offer interesting comment to the task.
Marx and the Premodern There are many compatibilities and congruences between marxist thought and premodern sensibilities. It would be misleading to pass by the many ways in which the premodern influenced Marx and the marxian camp. Many have noted the origins of Marx's optimism for traditional Jewish assumptions that one worked in this world to build the good society. In this respect, Marx carried on the long quest, still alive in Judaism, for the restoration of autonomy and respect for its people and its culture; yet one must note and keep in mind that Marx did not confine the quest for justice to members of the Jewish faith nor did he assume some primacy of place for Jewish cultural traditions. Still, it was in a letter to Arnold Ruge that Marx said, "To get its sins forgiven, humanity needs only to describe them as they are." (McLellan, 1977:38) In all his work, Marx worked to help humanity find and forgive and to make itself at home in a world it helped create...this is, truly, a religious liturgy in the technical sense of the word: good work.
More directly, the quest for peace and justice in this world informs the marxian quest for a knowledge process and a political process that resonates with ideas of salvation, redemption, fellowship and mutual sharing of the resources within a religious solidarity. It is fair, I should think, to hold that Marx retained the mission of the knowledge process inherited from Judeo-Christian prophets and intellectuals while he rejected premodern methods for acquisition of knowledge preferring, instead, the scientific method of Newton, Laplace, Sussmilch, Darwin and other empirical observers.
Marx had very little patience with those who claimed to be able to announce the Will of the God or to pronounce absolute truth through meditation, revelation or inspiration. Marx heaped scorn and calumny upon those who assigned immiserating human events to abstract forces, to non-existent gods; to those who lived and thought and fought for freedom only in the realm make- believe and just-pretend; after death. Marx shifted focus from alienation in the realm of the ideal to exploitation inside concretely existing social relations. For Marx, forces of production and relationships to the means of production ground the study of alienation and praxis.
It is not for nothing that Marx sat for long years in the British Museum studying the voluminous reports of social conditions in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. It is not for nothing that Marx conducted one of the first systematic studies of working class life and the work process. It was empirical data that were grist for the knowledge mill in Marxian thought; prayer, purification and renunciation of things of the flesh were not pathways to knowledge. Yet the mission of the knowledge process is the same for both Marx and the premodernists; an answer to the primal questions of moral and peaceful social life.
Marx and all the marxist camp were and are concerned with the possibility of escape from pain and suffering as well as the possibility of a praxis society in this life, a possibility which informs every chiliastic movement from separatist communities of early Christians to the Puritans, Mennonites, Hutterites, Quakers, and all the utopian communities founded in the past four hundred years. The Chiliastic vision presumes a time when Christ will return but that there is a possibility of a 'thousand year' epoch of social peace and justice prior to the coming of the end of days. That vision resonates with the social gospel that informs Protestantism, Catholicism and liberation theology today.
Marx, then, saw God and religion to be shaped by the mode of production found in a society. In this epoch, that of unfettered capitalism, religion was an ambush behind which lurked the interests of the ruling class. In feudality, religion took the shape of a powerful ruler in a hierarchal pyramid of power. In capitalism, religion becomes more a loose assembly of independent producers each reading and reflecting on the Bible and coming up with an interpretation which fits and celebrates his or her own interests in the marketplace but never intrudes in the 'invisible' hand of the capitalist class itself or the state which acts as its agent at home or abroad.
In the marxian world view, God did not exist either as an ontologically being or as an abstract embodiment of society. God was pure fiction kept alive by promises which never came while poor people play lottery in a labor market on the slim chance they will win. In a fraudulently religious world, some do win; those who spin the wheel and those who run and fetch for them in the world of ideas win and win hugely. But the winning is always less than the stake...in capitalism as elsewhere, there is no free lunch. Some win and many lose.
Marx is criticized by premodern theologians, properly so, for his failure to gauge fully the impact of things of the spirit upon economy. Such impact entails volumes but the short version is that, under some conditions, ideas can overthrow economics. Mormons founded whole new ways of life in their early days. Economics and politics worked to modify and edit those new practices until now Mormons are not very different from Protestants and Reformed Jews. But there was a time when dramatic transformations of social life were engineered by religious ideas rather than the reverse as a Marx would hold.
In more recent times, the overturning of the USSR bespeaks the power of ideas in a time of troubles. The effort of the KGB to suppress the liberalization of the Gorbachev era failed. A Marx might say that socialist economics paved the way for a more democratic socialism but that history is not yet writ. I rather expect a wide range of economic systems to emerge and most to fail. Out of such full blown chaos (technically understood), spiritual values of the sort found in the foundational concepts of grand narratives, including democratic socialism, will be important to death of god arguments.
Marx and the Postmodern There are many elements of Marxian theory which resonate with the postmodern spirit. Marx helped decenter grand unified theory and linear causality by holding that each mode of production had its own laws and that there were discontinuous transformations in the causes of poverty, crime, war and human knowledge. Marx helped decenter God, science and philosophy by locating them in the social formation they served, and in so doing, contributed to the postmodern impulse in science, religion, philosophy, economics and politics. With his vast genius and his compulsive drive for democratic humanism, Marx worked to build a knowledge process and a social process under the aegis of the people who must, perforce, live out their lives in the consequence of such processes. In his refusal to specify, for all time, the features of a communist society; holding instead that each society must work out its own individual problems--it was here that Marx best exemplified the postmodern spirit.
For many in the postmodern camp, the possibility of general theory and of structural analysis is remote. The identification of epochs, of modes of production, of tendential laws are, equally, fallible human artifacts and artifices; equally meta- narratives with special interests overlain upon the rich and irrational surface of human life. For many postmodern theorists, marxian theory itself is but one of any number of possible readings of capitalism. Indeed, much of the mutual contempt between marxist and postmodern scholars center around the possibility of general statements of truth and fact.
It is, arguably, in the concept of alienation that Marx most fully inherits and most closely follows the radical democratic strivings of postmodern poets, politicians, and ordinary people. In Marx as in postmodern morality, alienation was not separation from non-existent gods nor was it, equally, separation from Absolute Truth and Absolute Spirit; if nothing else, Marx' critique of Hegel made that point.
The agenda for human salvation was, for Marx, empowerment and enrichment of workers, minorities, women and third world peoples whose labor had been turned back against them in feudalism, capitalism, slavery and other forms of peonage to build the institutions of oppression that kept ordinary people from the centers of power and politics that create and recreate such social formations. For Marx, redemption required a special means of production informed by modern science but more than that, salvation required a special relationship to the means of production; one which provided decent housing, health care, education, nutrition as well as employment in prosocial labor. These are part of the human process and prelude to 'species being.'
Many have noted that marxian theory is more a religion than a science. In postmodernist terms, that is true. Marx' philosophy of knowledge erases the false boundaries between science, religion and philosophy and replaces them with a reading that reveals their connections. As much as Marx respected the work of Charles Darwin, still he could see the political philosophy and economic interests in Britain that preshaped Darwinian concepts and ideas about evolution. While Kropokin talked of mutual aid as the foundational concept of the species, Darwin used the imagery of industrial capitalism and its foundational concepts; competition, struggle for survival, survival of the fittest and thus, progress through conflict.
The obverse of alienation, in marxian social philosophy is praxis. It is here that Marx departs from the radical freedoms of some postmodern philosophies. A postmodern reading of marxian theory would both recognize and honor the human hand in writing codes and setting limits; of locating centers and defining boundaries. The only question for Marx would be the content of those codes; the geometry of those centers; the sociology of those boundaries.
In these times, Marx would examine the emancipatory moments of postmodern art, music, poetry, literature, drama, and, especially science. In such an enterprize, a postmodern Marx would work to retain the positivities and urge transformation of the negativities of the postmodern.
His view of God did not do justice to the genius of Marx nor to the facts of the case. An otherwise subtle and insightful intelligence failed greatly in the assessment of the nature of God. Much of what Marx said has validity: God is a false reification of social power...that is to say, the supernatural god is a false reification. Many Gods have been a mystification and an ambush for the oppressed who accept the god of the rich. In any stratified society in which religion gives preference to those at the top and offers theologic rationales for caste, class, gender and racial privilege, the God concept is alien to the human condition. The omnipotent God who has his own unchangeable plans for stratified society is an obstacle which must be destroyed if progressive social change is to take place. Marx set out to destroy such a god.
A more open intelligence has made better contribution to the economic and political sources of the God concept than has Marx. We can benefit from the work of Max Weber in the sociology of religion. Weber located the origins of god in the political economy of a society but he credited religion and God with more autonomy and more promise than did Marx. Of particular interest is the Weberian view on the reasons why god came to be a universal and rational gods; the reasons why the god of the powerful came to be the god of a society. For those who can read Weber and use him, he can contribute to a postmodern theology. He concern about the keepers of the god concept is fundamental to postmodern religion for reasons discussed below.
The Weberian God Max Weber (1920) saw the birth of God in the
political aftermath of warfare. He saw the
transformations of God as part of the process by which the gods
of the conquered peoples were assimilated into the pantheon of
the conquerors:
'Where a political god of a locality developed, it was
natural enough that he achieved priority...
'Whenever a plurality of settled communities with
established local gods expanded the area of their political
association through conquest, the usual result was that
various local gods of the newly amalgamated communities were
thereupon welded into a religious totality'.
Rationality and the God Concept The transformation of a pantheon into one god develops, according to Weber, out of the need for rationalization of community and economy.
'The process of rationalization favored the primacy of
universal gods; and every...[religion]...followed systematic
rational principles to some degree, since it [religion] was
always influenced by...the rational striving for order by
secular individuals.
'Upon these [universal] gods depend both rational economic
practice and the secure, regulated hegemony of sacred norms
in the social community.'
For Weber, as with Marx, God in his present form, grew out of the economic imperatives for a stable market and a peaceful work force held in check by sacred norms. Weber nominates the sky-gods for preeminence. The regularity of the stars, the seasons of the year, the tides and the daily journey of Sun and Moon fit the needs, in trade and commerce, for rationality; that is to say, of prediction and, hence, control. All corporate and state bureaucrats prefer the gods of rationality to the gods of creativity; the gods of routine to the gods of joy. Economic considerations gave preference to those gods which give the promise of control over nature more so than the various warrior gods who were whimsical, undependable and disruptive of trade.
Empire and the God Concept The universality of God grew out of expanding empire. Weber cites the growth of empire in China, the expansion of the authority of the Brahman caste in India as well as the bureaucratic totalitarianism of Egypt as the basis for the transformation of a pantheon of gods into one ruling God-head. Against the bureaucratic impetus toward one remote and abstract god, Weber stands the need of the individual family or group to have '...an accessible and tangible familiar religious object which could be brought into relationship with concrete life situations...to the exclusion of outsiders, an object that would above all...[provide them with access to magic].'
While Pharaohs and Kings might like predictable gods, ordinary people would like to have some access to magic to help them defeat inevitability or to deal with the unpredictable and unknowable events which beset them. That tension between the need for a rational God and a flexible, immediate responsive god is still a major problematic in Christendom; the various Saints and the Mother Mary tend to be used to resolve it in Catholicism. The Jesus figure is an important intermediary to the more remote Jehovah for many Protestant Christians; Jesus has a human face and spoke of his suffering and doubt in human tongue.
Hindus have no such problem; nor do the Buddhist or the Shinto. Presumably they will develop more remote and more universal gods as their societies enter the capitalist world system...or take Jehovah or Allah for their god.
Stratification and the God Process Perhaps the central contribution of Weber to postmodern expressions of the God concept was in his discussion of the attitude of God toward the poor and the rich. He says that, in those religions which have a God makes some to suffer while rewarding others with power and wealth, religion meets the ideological needs of the dominant stratum in a society:
If the general term 'fortune' covers all the 'good' of
honour, power, possession and pleasure, it is the most
general formula for the service of legitimation, which
religion has had to accomplish for the external and inner
interests of all ruling men [sic], the propertied, the
victorious and the healthy. In short, religion provides the
theodicy of good fortune for those who are fortunate.
It is very important to the changing concept of God just which stratum is given authority to interpret the Will of God; hence the nature of God. While Marx might see the priests and other clerics as 'running dogs of the bourgeoisie,' Weber sees religious intelligentsia as more responsive to the larger totality than to their masters, sponsors, oppressors or selectors in the upper reaches of wealth and power.
Keepers of the God Concept Weber (1920) said that while the six world religions are complex and every God a special formula, still God and religion are created primarily by the cultured literati--intellectuals--of each:
Religion Intelligentsia
Confucianism Prebendaries
Hinduism Brahmans
Islamism Sufis
Christianity Wandering Preachers
Buddhism Monks
Judaism Rabbis
For Weber, all institutions of society receive their 'stamp' of legitimacy primarily from religious sources...first of all from the promises of its God. Each generation of religious functionaries appropriates that promise and interprets it to the needs of their own stratum more so than to the needs of any other stratum including the rich and powerful. While Marx concedes the concept of God to the bourgeoisie, Weber reserves it, in the last instant, to those who embody the need for salvation in this world. But, until judgment day, religion works on behalf of the powerful.
It is not for the oppressed to take matters in their own hands since God may have sent tyrants, poverty, plagues, wars, genocide, or natural calamity to test one's faith or to work His own mysterious purpose. To take up arms against oppressors is, for many theologians, to challenge the Will and Purpose of God. Still there is a mighty impetus toward revolution in the stratum of the religious thinkers. Priests and preachers; rabbis and sufis; monks and ministers take suffering and resentment for suffering into their own province and link it to redemption....
Above all, the peculiarity of the intellectual strata in
this matter has been, in the past, of greatest importance
for religion...it was the work of the intellectuals to
sublimate the possession of sacred values into a belief in
'redemption.' The conception of redemption, as such, is
very old if one means by it a liberation from distress,
hunger, drought, sickness and ultimately from suffering and
death. (Weber, 1920)
Weber notes that whatever fanciful idea one may have about the form redemption might take, still it takes rationalization of this world to achieve it. In Weber, rationalization has a very technical meaning; it subsumes the probabilities that one can achieve the goals one sets with the means at hand. To improve rationality, one must improve the technology with which goals are pursued. He says, of this quest, '...the core of genuine religious rationalism, has been borne precisely by the strata of intellectuals.' The first task of the religious functionary is to solve the problem of redemption; the reproduction of power and privilege takes second place.
In these times, since the factors that shape social problems and thus, the possibilities of redemption (viewed as social justice), are global in nature, the technical means to achieve any substantive human goal: housing, health, hunger, child rearing, war, crime, dignity for minorities and for senior citizens must have local, national and international means.
In such a world, god concepts which are confined to household, tribe, or to ethnic categories are, in weberian terms, irrational. The organic intellectuals of such gods divide and miniaturize the problems which are central to social justice. They offer a god whose dimensions are smaller than the global structures to which the drama of the Holy must speak. They offer a god concept whose solutions are confined to some fraction of the world's population. They offer a redemption that transfers its costs to women, minorities or to neighboring people in the world.
The drama of the Holy is fragmented and miniaturized as well when the cultured literati come out of the ranks of an elite; the sons and daughters of the intelligentsia; viceroys to the wealthy and the powerful seldom if ever immerse themselves in the religious culture of the workers and peasants. Still less can they give those religious practices a theoretical voice that speaks to the general good, contaminated as they are by class, status and power loyalties. Elitist politics and elitist conceptions of the Holy have great trouble in speaking to the social justice needs of ordinary people yet ordinary people embody and give flesh and spirit to whatever degree of reality a god concept has.
Sanctification and Populist Religion Ordinary priests, wandering preachers, rabbis, monks as well as new made bishops and rectors of a church hierarchy often devote themselves to an exegesis of text and parable favorable the powers elite but just as often, they speak against privilege and preference as an abomination in the eye of their god. Islamic Imams and Buddhist monks, especially, are quick to condemn despots. Western theologians, immersed as they are in Protestant social philosophy and its near cousin, Roman Catholicism have, in the past, brought forward scripture and textual interpretation which favor slavery, feudalism or capitalism but most people in the world are not in elitist/Euro-centered political economies; they reside in more communal and more sacred spheres. Their organic intellectuals in religious garb or in mufti, speak out of the anguish and against injustice of the people with whom they daily live and among whom they work.
Liberation Theology One can see in Weber, sufficient independence from the political economy and from the powers elite to permit religious intellectuals to be part of the revolution toward the good society. While it is unlikely that a Marx would have conceded such a role to religion, yet in the many postmodern expressions of religion; Catholic nuns and Monks take sides with the poor and the oppressed in Central America. They form base communities which work for social justice in this world while the same work prepares communicants for salvation in the next. Protestant clerics and communicants in the USA today put together an underground railroad to give safe harbor to refugees from state oppression. They stand side by side with students, soldiers, and socialists in protesting the many wars of aggressive capitalism.
In other domains of life, liberation theologists support women in their quest for emancipation and empowerment (Weidman, 1984). They work assiduously to help produce theology and politics with which to emancipate and empower minorities (Wilmore and Cone, 1979). They act with compassion and sympathy toward postmodern expressions of sexuality and sensuality. They act with mercy and quote scripture to offer refuge and renewal to those in the third world who are hurt by others for their own private desire (Berryman, 1987). Thus is the postmodern joined by theology in the 21st century.
Repositories of Religion in Postmodern Theology While Marx and Weber presumed the continuing division of labor in which a relatively small priesthood retained hegemony over the god concept, postmodern theology requires that sanctification be polycentric. Each person, each role, each social institution, each social formation must incorporate the Drama of the Holy into embodied activity for a postmodern theology to come into existence.
Neither Weber nor Marx are now alive to help us formulate a religious sensibility that answers to the questions they raised; to the economics they faulted; to the politics they criticized; to the vision of full humanity that served as centerpoint to their critique. But others remain and more join every day to push the knowledge process and the political process toward social justice, and thus the Drama of the Holy toward praxis and a praxis society. The voice of the religious intellectual is again heard in the land.
For both Marx and Weber, the political economy of a society shaped and reshaped the god concept. If we project a future for the world based upon present trends in the emerging world economy, we will find bifurcations in wealth, status and power which will do damage to the Drama of the Holy in all religious traditions. If, however, the same parameters, class, status and power are mediated by postmodern theology which honors various images and embodiments of the god concept, a polycentric Drama of the Holy is possible. An emancipatory postmodern theology would value the face of god in any incarnation and work to make real, the face of god that best serves peace unmediated by power and justice mediated by mercy and compassion in a pluralistic world system.
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