Existence and Significance: History and Discontinuity

Existence and Significance:

History and Discontinuity^[1]

 

1. Prescott Johnson

 

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

Monmouth (IL) College

 

* * * *

 

And he said unto me, It is

done.  I am the Alpha and Omega,

the beginning and the end.  I

will give unto him that is

athirst of the fountain of the

water of life freely.

Rev. 21:6

 

Dust to the dust: but the pure spirit shall flow

                                                                 Back to the burning fountain whence it came,

                                                                    A portion of the Eternal, which must glow

                                                         Through time and change, unquenchably the same . . .

Shelly. Adonais

 

* * * *

 

Abstract

 

The article addresses the subject of the nature of Christian redemption, with special reference to the contrast to redemption as conceived in terms of myth.

 

The contrast is developed, first, with respect to the contrast between existence and significance.  Some attention is given to certain mythic formulations and rituals developed, in the ancient world, which were constitutive of pagan redemption.  The argument is that these proposals always and invariably keep the content of their systems anchored in the existing world of the sensuous given.  The intuitive content of the sensuous given is thought to be itself endowed with redemptive efficacy.  It is for this reason that myth must be distinguished from religion.  It lacks the spiritual significance that is the defining essence of religion.  Attention is then given to certain of the significant symbols of the Christian faith, showing that, while these symbols take the intuitive given as their point of departure, they then proceed farther and denote that which is spiritual.  That is, they take on the significance that is of the nature of religion.

 

The second main aspect of the argument of the article concerns the allied contrast of history and the meta-historical, or that which, while anchored in history, transcends history and is discontinuous with it.  Attention is called to the fact that the mythic formulations of redemption lack both the historical situs and the element of discontinuity that redemption, in order to be effective, must possess.  In contrast to myth, Christianity is anchored in history, in the actual existence of Jesus.  Yet, the argument proceeds, there is here more involved than history by itself can provide.  That is, the Jesus of history is also the Christ who, albeit in history, transcends history.  There is rather detailed discussion of this duality, with reference to certain modern thinkers.

 

The article concludes with the observation that the Christian experience of redemption and the Christian symbols that the Scriptures develop may be, and are, positively qualified by considerations of the reason.  While those considerations are significant, they are not, however, to be regarded as a substitute for, or replacement of, Christian experience and Christian symbolism.     There are elements of nature that are employed in Scripture to signify the spiritual.  Perhaps the most significant of these are light, water, and blood.  Thus, for example, in the passage from Revelation the Eternal One announces that He is the dispenser of the water of life.

 

* * * *

 

We are aware of the fact that, when Christianity was introduced into the ancient world, it found itself confronted with pagan rites that promised their devotees redemption.  These rites, also, made reference to the elements of nature.  By means of physical appropriation of them, the people enjoyed ecstatic experiences that they took as enabling their redemption, in this life and the after-life.

 

During the first century of our era, the conditions of the Roman empire were deplorable.  The middle classes, the backbone of society, had all but been eliminated.  There was a bad social cleavage between the wealthy and aristocratic classes and the masses, including the slaves.  Even the wealthy classes became disgusted with life, a result of their self-indulgence and satiety.^[2]

 

Into this milieu came a plethora of eastern mystery religions that promised the emotional satisfaction that the age demanded.  These religions told of savior-gods who came to earth to work for and suffer for the people.  The savior-gods knew the agony of parting from loved ones, of persecution, of mutilation, and, finally, of death itself.  They had won salvation for humanity and now stood ready to help all who were in need.  The rites of the mystery religions re-enacted the suffering and triumph of the savior-gods.  The initiate felt himself participating in the archetypal experiences of his lord, felt himself lifted beyond his wretchedness and suffering and enjoying repose in an exalted sense of security.  In the following days and years, the memory of his experiences, most importantly his initiation, provided continuing emotional stimulation through the experience of contact with a sympathetic savior.

 

One such cult, with its rites, was the Eleusinian mysteries.  They are based on the Eleusinian myth.  The myth is stated in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.  Its opening lines are:

 

I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess–-of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus the loud-thunderer.^[3]

 

 

After long and arduous suffering, Demeter recovered her daughter and, in honor of the event, instituted the Eleusinian mysteries, which gave to mortals the assurance of a happy future life.

 

The myth became the pattern for the Eleusinian ritual.  There were four stages of the ritual.  The first were public, while the last two were strictly private.  Early in the preliminary rites, the candidates for initiation marched to the sea, there to cleanse themselves in its salt waves.  Each participant carried a suckling pig, which was purified by being placed in the sea.  Later the pig was sacrificed and the blood was sprinkled on the candidate for initiation.  The mystae believed that this Eleusinian baptism had regenerative powers, constituting them new beings.  Thus Tertullian writes, quoting Celsus:

 

. . . at the . . . Eleusinian games they are baptized; and they presume that the effect of their doing that is their regeneration and the remission of the penalties due to their perjuries.^[4]

 

The climax of the secret phase of the ritual was a religious drama, the subject matter of which being essentially the same as the Homeric myth.  There may have been another aspect of the drama.  One feature of this was a dramatic representation of a sacred marriage.  Asterius, a fourth century Christian bishop, writes of:

 

the underground chamber and the solemn meeting of the hierophant and the priestess, each with the other alone, when the torches are extinguished, and the vast crowd believes that its salvation depends on what goes on there.^[5]

 

There is no reason to assume that the rite was illicit.  It was probably but a liturgical fiction.  The ritual assured the initiates of a direct and intimate communion with their goddess.

 

A second feature of the drama was the birth of a holy child.  In his Saassenic sermon Hippolytus states:

 

(Now) by night in Eleusis, beneath a huge fire, (the Celebrant,) enacting the great and secret mysteries, vociferates and cries aloud, saying “August Brimo has brought forth a consecrated son, Brimus;” that is, a potent (mother has been delivered of a potent) child.  But revered, he says, is the generation that is spiritual, heavenly, from above, and potent is he that is so born.^[6]

 

The Dionysian ritual placed a major emphasis on the drinking of wine.  The devotees became physically intoxicated.  But they believed that there was more to the rite than the physical: it was spiritual ecstasy.  The wine was potent with spiritual power, and this because the god and the quintessence of divine life was in the wine.  Thus Euripides says:

 

Oh, blessed he in all wise,

Who hath drunk the Living Fountain.,

Whose life no folly staineth,

 

And his soul is near to God.

Whose sins are lifted, pall-wise,

As he worships on the Mountain . . . .^[7]

 

In addition to drinking of wine, the devotees of Dionysus observed a sacrament of eating.  This rite was the “feast of raw flesh.”   The initiate into the mysteries of Dionysus was obliged to avow

 

I have . . .

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.^[8]

 

The feast of raw flesh was an orgiastic rite.  The devotees tore the slain animal asunder and devoured the dripping flesh to assimilate the life of the god resident within it.  Raw flesh was living flesh and had to be eaten quickly lest the divine life within it should escape.  So the feast was a wild, frenzied, and barbaric event.  In the Baachae Euripides describes the affair:

 

They swept toward our herds that browsed the green

Hill grass.  Great uddered kine then hadst thou seen

Bellowing in sword-like hands that cleave and tear,

a live steer riven asunder, and the air

Tossed with rent ribs or limbs of cloven tread.

And flesh upon the branches, and a red

Rain from the deep green pines.  Yea, bulls of pride,

Horns swift to rage, were fronted and aside

Flung stumbling, by those multitudinous hands

Dragged pitilessly.  And swifter were the bands

of garbled flesh and bone unbounded withal

Than on thy royal eyes the lids may fall.^[9]

 

The cult of the Great Mother, which came to the West from Asia Minor, also observed the rite of drinking blood.  The rite is the taurobolium, the sacrifice of a bull.  A priest with a golden crown on his head and adorned with fillets descends into a trench that was covered over with planks.  A bull, gleaming with gold and covered with a garland of flowers, is led on to the platform and stabbed to death by a consecrated spear.  The blood flows out over the planks and down on the devotee in the trench.

 

Then through the many ways afforded by the thousand chinks it passes in a shower, dripping a foul rain, and the priest in the pit below catches it, holding his filthy head to meet every drop and getting his robe and his whole body covered with corruption.  Laying his head back he even puts his cheeks in the way, placing his ears under it, exposing lips and nostrils, bathing his very eyes in the stream, not even keeping his mouth from it but wetting his tongue, until the whole of him drinks in the dark gore.^[10]

 

 

The initiate then emerges from the trench, drenched and dripping with blood.  He presents himself to the assembled crowd, who honors him as a god, as one who has been born again to a divine life.

 

The rite was regarded as a rebirth to a new kind of existence.  The bath of blood was believed to purify the neophyte and, in effect, make him a divinized human.  The effect of the rite was thought to be everlasting and that the devotee was in aeternum renatus.    The consumption of animal blood as a means of restoration to the divine life was also practiced among a much-earlier people, the Semites.  The ancient Semites were a tribal people, organized as families and clans.  The dominant social conception was that of the kin.  According to this conception, the group was of one blood, participating in one blood that passes from generation to generation and circulates in the veins of every member of the group.  The unity of the group was viewed as a physical unity, for the blood is the life‑-which is an idea found in the Old Testament‑-and it is the same blood that is shared by every descendent of a common ancestor.

 

Further, not only do the members of the kin share in a common blood, but the god also shares with the people in one life of life-blood.  The place of the god in the community is conceived on the analogy of human relationships; thus the relationship is itself physical.

 

The animal that was offered in the semitic ritual of sacrifice was, not a gift to the god, but a means of establishing a communion “in which the god and his worshippers unite by partaking together of the flesh and blood of a sacred victim.”^[11]

 

Originally, the sacrificial meal was a feast of kinship, an act in which the common life is sealed and nourished.  To refer again to Smith:

 

The sacrificial meal was an appropriate expression of the antique ideal of religious life, not merely because it was a social act and an act in which the god and his worshippers were conceived as partaking together, but because . . . the very act of eating and drinking with a man was a symbol and a confirmation of fellowship and mutual social obligation.  The one thing directly expressed in the sacrificial meal is that the god and his worshippers are commensals, but every other point in their mutual relations is included in what this involves.

 

Very little is known of the secret rites of the Attis cult.  The only extant source is Clement of Alexandria.  According to him the confessional of the initiate was:

 

I have eaten out of the drum,

I have drunk out of the cymbal,

I have carried the Cernos,

I have slipped into the bedroom.^[12]

 

 

The formula expresses two experiential elements.  One is union with divinity by a mystic marriage.  “I have entered the bedchamber.”  The votary entered the shrine of the goddess as a bridegroom.  In that secret chamber humanity and deity were united in marriage and hence the devotee attained communion with his goddess.  The second element indicates communion with the deity by the act of eating and drinking:

 

I have eaten out of the drum,

I have drunk out of the cymbal.

 

The drum and cymbal were the favorite instruments of the Great Mother.  For this reason they were used as cup and plate in the ceremony.

 

The common meal was more than a communion with others.  It was a communion with divinity.  It was believed that this rite communicated divine life to the devotee and assured him of salvation.

 

Now, these factors in pagan myth, the mystic marriage, the birth of the holy child, the baptismal cleansing, the sacrament of the wine, and the regenerative potency of the blood, bear some resemblance to the elements found in Christianity.  For this reason, many contemporary scholars propose one of two theories as to the import of Christianity.

 

One theory is a purely reductionist one, that is, that the Christian themes are reformulation of the mythic material of paganism.  This reformulation but changes the color of the older myths.  Although the terms are modified, this modification still leaves them as myth.  Thus, in writing about the ritual love-death of primitive mythology, in which the myth of the Eleusinian Mysteries is located, Joseph Campbell says:

 

Something of the sort can be felt in the Christian myth of the killed, buried, resurrected, and eaten Jesus, whose mystery is the ritual of the altar and communion rail.  But here the ultimate monstrosity of the divine drama is not stressed so much as the guilt of man in having brought it about; and we are asked to look forward to a last day, when the run of this cosmic tragedy of crime and punishment will be terminated and the kingdom of God realized on earth, as it is now in heaven.  The Greek rendition of the mythology, on the other hand, remains closer to the primitive view, according to which there is to be no end, or even essential improvement, for this tragedy (as it will seem to some) or play (as it appears to the gods).^[13]

 

The other theory is one that regards the Christian themes, not as myths, but as symbols.  While the material of the symbols is mythical, even in their reformulation, that material takes on a symbolic significance.  The meaning of the symbol, then, is detached from its material base and referred to spiritual realities that transcend the existence-level of its material foundation.  What the Christian religion says explicitly, then, must not be taken as literally true.  Rather, what is true is what that religion says implicitly——what it says implicitly about the great themes of human existence and salvation.  And this meaning must be formulated and explicated in rational terms.  In sum, this view is an attempt to retain the primitive value of myth and yet go beyond that value to a level of greater significance.

 

Now, both views are inimical to the integrity of the Christian faith.  The one view reduces Christianity to myth; the other, to a conceptual, rationalist system.  The questions are thus posed: what is the nature of Christianity?  In what does its truth consist?  These are questions that Christians today face and for which some resolution must be forthcoming.

 

There is, it must be observed, a measure of truth in the second of the views just considered.  It is that there is an element of symbolism that is found in the formulations of Christianity.  But that element must be properly interpreted, which is to say that it does not reformulate Christianity into purely conceptual and rational terms.

 

The distinctive and defining characteristic of myth is its bondage to existence.  It is locked into the sensuous given.  The material of existence is regarded as endowed with divine life and regenerative potency.  It never passes beyond existence to significance.

 

The symbol begins at the existence-level to which, however, myth remains bound.  The symbol has an intuitive character.  It is bound up with the intuitive and cannot be separated from it.  But, unlike myth, the symbol employs the intuitive so as to mean more than the intuitive, i.e., it signifies the non-intuitible and the spiritual.  In this regard, Harald Höffding writes:

 

In all symbolization, ideas taken from narrow although more intuitible relations are used as expressions for relations which, on account of their exaltedness and ideality, cannot be directly expressed.^[14]

 

Thus symbols of religion share in this general characteristic of symbols.  But religious symbols have additional features that other types of symbols do not possess.  First, they are drawn from fundamental and pervasive regions of intuition.  They are rooted in a deeper layer of human experience than the images employed in the formation of the symbols of science and art.  Höffding describes those regions as “. . . the great fundamental relations of nature and of human life——light and darkness, power and weakness, life and death, spirit and matter, good and evil . . . .^[15]  Second, the more important feature of religious symbols consists in their unique reference.  The reference is to the infinite.  The religious symbol, therefore, shines with a distinctive luminous quality.  It is extremely rich in color and extremely toned with emotion.

 

In the Dionysian rite, we have previously observed, it was believed that the quintessence of divine life was actually in the wine.  When the devotee drank the wine and became physically intoxicated, he believed that he experienced a spiritual ecstasy.  He felt a strange, new life within himself.  He was filled and possessed by the god.  During the epopteia, the highest grade of Eleusinian initiation, the initiate drank a barley drink, by means of which the devotee participated in the experience of the goddess Demeter and realized saving fellowship with her.  Taking the sacred food, a cereal, from a chest, and eating it brought union with the Demeter, the goddess of grain.  In consequence of this union, the divine substance was incorporated in the individual.  “Already emotionally united with Demeter through participation in her passion, the initiates now became realistically one with her by the assimilation of food and drink.”^[16]

 

There is a marked contrast between pagan and Christian sacraments.  Whereas pagan sacrament is bonded to the physical, Christian sacrament breaks loose from that alliance and achieves a true symbolism that touches upon spiritual reality.

Matt. 26:26-28 records the institution of The Lord’s Supper:

And as they were eating,

Jesus took bread, and blessed

it, and brake it, and gave it to the

disciples, and said, Take, eat;

this is my body.

And he took the cup, and

gave thanks, and gave it to

them, saying, Drink ye all of it;

For this is my blood of the

new testament, which is shed

for many for the remission of

sins.

 

The language in which Jesus spoke was probably Aramaic.  This language, like the Hebrew, has no term to express mean, signify, denote.  When the Hebrews used a figure, they wrote it is for it signifies.  Writing his Gospel in the Koine Greek, Matthew followed the Aramaic and Hebraic usage and retained it is as it signifies.  Thus the statements, this is my body and this is my blood, mean that the bread and wine signify, or represent, Jesus’s body and blood.  There is here, then, a breaking away from bondage to the existent and the development of a true symbolism.

 

The Christian sacrament is thus set in sharp contrast to the pagan sacrament.  The Dionysian devotee drank the wine to excess, became intoxicated, and attributed to the wine the power of the divine life.  In the Lord’s Supper there is nothing of this: the wine points beyond itself, to Jesus’ death for the redemption of humankind.  The ancient Semites drank the blood.  In the Hebrew rites, the blood was sprinkled upon the people.  Now Jesus and His disciples drink, but they drink of the fruit of the vine.  The wine is now the blood of a different, vegetable, kind.  It is now the blood-bond of a new and higher order.  It does, indeed, signify the near-coming of the shed blood and the death that is to bring remission of sins.  But here the wine also indicates something else, namely, that the age of blood-shedding is soon to come to a close.  No longer is Abel’s sacrifice to prevail.  The sacrifice that will prevail is now Cain’s sacrifice of the garden, transformed  into the spiritual and made acceptable.  This death, the death of the Savior, brings the end of the shedding of blood.  And this because in that out-pouring of blood, in that death, the covenant of saving fellowship has been finally and forever ratified.  It need not, and cannot, be repeated.  The writer of Hebrews says of Jesus:

 

Nor yet that he should offer

himself often, as the high priest

entereth into the holy place

every year with blood of others;

For then must he often have

suffered since the foundation of

the world: but now once in the

end of the world hath he ap-

peared to put away sin by the

sacrifice of himself.^[17]

 

 

Substantially the same type of consideration holds for the symbol of blood.  In the pagan rites, the observants slew the animal, drank of the blood, even stood in the pit while the blood of the animal placed above them flowed over them.  The cultic practice is wedded to the existent object.  It is in and through the very blood itself that sharing in the life of the divinity is achieved.

 

Among the ancient Hebrews there is a “softening” of the idea of blood sacrifice.  As it was for the pagan Semites, the blood is the bearer of life.  It is therefore sacred.  For this reason the eating of raw flesh and the drinking of blood was prohibited:

 

For the life of the flesh is in

the blood: and I have given it to

you upon the altar to make an

atonement for your souls; for it is

the blood that maketh an atonement

for the soul.

 

Therefore I said unto the child-

ren of Israel, No soul of you

shall eat blood, neither shall any

stranger that sojourneth among you

eat blood.^[18]

 

The text indicates that there is a further reason for the proscription against the drinking of blood.  Blood is the agency of atonement.  Exodus 24 records the establishment of the Mosaic covenant.  The Hebrew term covenant is  ____ (ber-eeth), which means cutting.  The term is used because the covenant, or compact, between the parties was made between cuttings of sacrificial animal flesh.  And this involves the shedding of blood.  The blood is sacred, and therefore cannot be drunk.  On that great day of covenant-making, Moses served as the priest.  He took half of the blood and threw it against the altar, which represented the active presence of God in the covenantal relationship.  He then sprinkled the same blood on the people, thus uniting them and God in sacred fellowship.  Here was enacted the sacred meal of fellowship, which, in distinction from earlier pagan Semitic times, did not involve the actual consumption of blood.  There are here the beginnings of the symbolizing process that molds the physical in clearer service of the spiritual.

 

In the New Testament the concept of blood assumes its greatest significance in relation to the death of Christ.  In that context, the blood of Christ is the means of justification through atonement and sanctification through grace:

 

Regarding the former, the passages in the fifth chapter of Romans are extremely instructive:

 

Much more then, being now

justified by his blood, we shall

be saved from wrath through him.

 

For if, when we were enemies,

we were reconciled to God

by the death of his son,

much more, being reconciled,

we shall be saved by his life.

 

And not only so, but we also

joy in God through our Lord

Jesus Christ, by whom we have

now received the atonement.^[19]

 

Here it is explicitly stated that justification is accomplished by the blood of Christ.  The text also asserts that reconciliation to God is accomplished by the death of Christ.^[20]

 

These verses also refer to sanctification through grace.  There is not only justification, but final salvation:

 

No clearer passage can be quoted for distinguishing the spheres of justification and sanctification than this verse and the next——the one an objective fact accomplished without us, the other a change generated within us.  Both, though in different ways, proceed from Christ.^[21]

 

By reference to blood, sanctification through grace is expressed:

 

Wherefore Jesus, also, that

he might sanctify the people

with his own blood, suffered

without the gate.^[22]

 

Again,

 

But if we walk in the light,

as he is in the light, we have

fellowship one with another, and

the blood of Jesus Christ his

Son cleanseth us from all sin.^[23]

 

We now come to the question of the meaning of the phrase, “the blood of Christ.”  In Hebrews we read:

 

How much more shall the

blood of Christ, who through the

eternal Spirit offered himself

without spot to God, purge your

conscience from dead works to

serve the living God?^[24]

 

 

Here the writer means that the phrase, “the blood of Christ,” is to be understood in a literal, although not mechanical or magical, sense.  He affirms that “The offering Christ made was in the realm of reality, as tangible and real as blood, as central and decisive as life (blood).”^[25]  In keeping with the view that life resides in the blood, the New Testament finds the significance of the blood of Christ in relation to His death.  The interest is not in His material blood, but in His shed blood as the life offered for the redemption of humanity and world.  The blood is a graphic term for the death of Christ.  This means that the phrase, “the shedding of blood,” requires us to come to an understanding of the salvific significance of the death of Christ.  That is the important issue.

 

The second significant phrase of the text is “through the eternal Spirit.”  This phrase, too, is to be understood literally.  It signifies a transmutation of Christ’s offering on the plane of animal existence into an eternal redemption.  While the shed blood, the loss of life, did in fact occur as historical event, these in themselves are not the finally sufficient condition of redemption.  With these alone, what Christ did and underwent would have, as many believe, only an ethical significance.  They thus must be brought within a new scope, the scope of “the eternal Spirit.”  We have here a form of the distinction between existence and significance that is essential to religion, and in particular to the Christian religion.  But in this form of the distinction, existence is not abrogated; rather, it is preserved and yet elevated into an eternal significance.

 

The expression, Πvεύματoς α_ωvίoυ (Pneumatos ai_niou), is, literally, Spirit eternal.  It is in the genitive case.  Some biblical scholars interpret the phrase as “the Holy Spirit.”  But this is not the usual designation of the Holy Spirit.  Were the Holy Spirit meant, the term _γιoυ (hagiou), holy, would in all probability have been used by the writer.  In addition, the definite article, which ordinarily is present in designating the Holy Spirit, is lacking.  The eternal Spirit is the divine element in Christ.  The emphasis is thus placed on the spiritual aspect of the atonement.  Its especial virtue is not the mere suffering or the shedding of blood or the death upon the cross, but the perfect obedience of Him who stood for humanity and in whom “the eternal Spirit” triumphed over the weakness of humanity.  The language answers to earlier designations: that He is a High Priest forever, made so according to the power of an indissoluble life, and that He lives forever to make intercession for His people.^[26]  The expression, “who by an eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God,” when added to the expression, “the blood of Christ,” expands the effect of that blood, representing it as an ever-living and valid effect.  And this expansion is necessary, if the physical fact is to be lifted up into a spiritual and eternal sphere of redemptive significance.  The atonement is valid only on the basis of the Incarnation.

 

 

In the book of Revelation, Christ is portrayed as the final Redeemer under the symbol of the lamb.  John the Baptist had, in the days of the Savior’s flesh, referred to Jesus as “. . . the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.^[27]  Here the term is άμvός (amnos), used but three other times in the New Testament.  The word lamb as it appears in Revelation is _ρvίov (arnion).  It originally signified a little lamb, but did not retain that significance in New Testament times.  In Revelation the lamb (_ρvίov, arnion) is also depicted as “slain.”  Thus the statements of Revelation cannot be separated from what the New Testament says about Jesus as the sacrificial lamb (_μvός amnos).  Those statements depict Him as Redeemer and Ruler and in so doing bring out all the most significant elements in his title as Deliverer.

 

The Lamb bears on His neck the mark of his slaughtering:

 

And I beheld, and, lo, in the

midst of the throne and of the

four beasts, and in the midst of

the elders, stood a Lamb as it

had been slain . . . .^[28]

 

His blood flowed in atonement for sin:

 

And they sang a new song,

saying, Thou art worthy to take

the book, and to open the seals

thereof: for thou wast slain, and

hast redeemed us to God by

thy blood out of every kindred,

and tongue, and people, and nation.^[29]

 

Notwithstanding this, the Lamb overcame death and is omnipotent:

 

And one of the elders saith

unto me, Weep not: behold, the

Lion of the tribe of Judah, the

Root of David, hath prevailed

to open the book, and to loose

the seven seals thereof.^[30]

 

The Lamb is also omniscient:

 

. . . and in the midst of

of the elders, stood a Lamb as it

had been slain, having seven

horns and seven eyes, which are

the seven Spirits of God sent

forth into all the earth.^[31]

 

He assumes the government of the world as He opens the book of destiny in the heavenly council (Rev. 4:2 ff.), receiving divine adoration (Rev. 5:8 ff.), establishing the rule of peace on the heavenly mountain (Rev. 7:9; 14:1), subduing all alien powers (Rev. 17:14), exercising judgment (Rev. 6:16 f.; 14:10), and making distinctions on the basis of the book of life (Rev. 13:8; 21:27).

 

The Lamb is victor as the Lord of Lords and King of Kings:

 

These shall make war with

the Lamb, and the Lamb shall

 

overcome them: for he is Lord

of lords and King of kings: and

they that are with him are

called, and chosen, and faithful.^[32]

 

And he hath on his vesture

and on his thigh a name written,

KING OF KINGS, AND LORD

OF LORDS.^[33]

 

The Lamb celebrates His marriage festival with the community of the redeemed:

 

And he saith unto me, Write,

Blessed are they which are

called unto the marriage supper

of the Lamb.^[34]

 

Finally, the Lamb governs His own as partner of the throne of God:

 

And he shewed me a pure

river of water of life, clear

as crystal, proceeding out of the

throne of God and of the Lamb.

 

And there shall be no more

curse: but the throne of God

and of the Lamb shall be in it;

and his servants shall serve him.^[35]

 

Now, it is here, in the symbolism of Revelation, that the irreplaceable power of symbolism is disclosed.  The figure of the Lamb embraces nuances of meaning that cannot be expressed in the abstractions of logical conceptions.  The power of conceptual thought lies in its insistence upon the self-identity and self-consistency of meaning.  A conceptual element must be held before the mind as a self-identical object.  But no such ideal is required for symbolic expression.  Here meanings which, at the abstract level, appear contrary and even contradictory of each other, can be brought together in one context.  And that is what happens with respect to the symbol of the Lamb.  For now the values of meekness, patience, weakness, suffering, sacrifice, and isolation and defeat and death, are combined with those of victory and triumph, power and authority, governance and fellowship.  While the Lamb as sacrificial is central, He is also called the Bride who brings His Church into living fellowship with Him, and, finally, the Lion who rules from the divine throne with authority and power.  No such constellation of significance can be combined by the purely logical intellect.  The complex symbolism can be expanded by the use of concepts, but when this is done, it is finally necessary to return to the symbolism.  For the depth and richness of the meaning-complex can be decisively grasped only when the mind attends upon the primary intuitive meaning of the elements that constitute the symbolism.

 

 

The pagan beliefs and practices, some of which have been discussed in the above, were supported by the various aetiological myths.  The term aetiological derives from the Greek α_τία (aitia), which means cause or reason.  Thus an aetiological myth is the conceptual element that provides the base upon which rites and practices are founded.

 

These myths constitute the material for the redemptive themes that appear in pagan culture: the sorrow and sin of human existence, the dying and risen savior, the birth of a holy child, redemption and purification through the shedding and appropriation of blood, cleansing and newness through baptism, rites of communion with the deity by means of sacrament of wine and food and marriage, and, ultimately, resurrection as victory over death.

 

In fairness it should be said that the rites of pagan redemption were not all or always lacking in moral and ethical idealism, notwithstanding the strident animadversions of the Fathers.  There were injunctions requiring of the devotees purity of life and action and the observance of justice.  Further, the devotees did, without question, experience a sense of redemption and fulfilment.  In especially their initiatory rites, they felt an achieved communion and unity with their deity.  They enjoyed an assurance of a blessed and happy immortality, of the victory of life over death.

 

The value of the myth, then, consists in informing experience.  That is its significance, and it makes no difference whether it is true or false, valid or invalid.  Its value is wholly intra-experiential.

 

But what about Christian symbolism and Christian experience?  Are these symbols significant only in an intra-experiential respect?  The passage in Deut. 8:7 is God’s promise to His chosen people that “. . . the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of the valleys and hills.”  Here the water is physical water.  But even in the Old Testament, the context begins to change from the literal to the symbolic.  Ezekiel’s vision of the holy waters is a vision of the temple river of the eschaton, of the final, golden day of eternity in which redemption is secured forever.  The water is the water of prophetic symbolism: “And it shall come to pass, that everything that liveth, which moveth, withersoever the rivers shall come, shall live” (Ezek. 47:9).

 

The ability of water to quench thirst and nourish life is now a metaphor.  It is no longer physical water that is in itself the subject.  The qualities of physical water are now transferred, as a symbol, to God Himself.  Through that transferred usage, God now becomes the source of living water.  The symbol has taken on the property of signifying the Infinite.

 

To woman of Samaria Jesus declared:

 

But whosoever drinketh of

the water that I shall give him

shall never thirst; but the water

that I shall give him shall be in

him a well of water springing up

into everlasting life.^[36]

 

 

The Old Testament person no longer thirsted because he could come again and again to drink of the fountain.  But the New Testament person no longer thirsts because he has the well of life within himself.  It is the gift of Jesus.  His gift, the living water, becomes a well of water in himself.  The true water brings to the person a total renewal from within.

 

Is Christian experience of redemption significant only in a “pragmatic” respect?  The Christian does indeed find a sense of meaning in this life and a confidence for the future.  He or she finds at the center of one’s being a renewal of life and an assurance of an immortality beyond death.  Is this, the subjective value of inner assurance, the final word?  Is, in fact and reality, salvation indeed realized?  Does the Christian, along with the devotee of myth, stand in an unresolvable problematic?

 

We have on several occasions stressed the significant difference between myth and symbol.  Myth is bound to the existent, to the sensuous given.  Symbol, on the other hand, while it begins with the sensuous given, employs its initial intuitive content to signify that which transcends the content, i.e., the spiritual.  Thus the symbolism found in religion, particularly the Christian religion, cannot be interpreted as myth.

 

But this observation does not answer the problematic of the Christian faith.  The question still remains as to whether or not the symbolism of that faith, which purports to disclose the spiritual, really and veridically does so.

 

Now, there are two lines of argument that promise resolution of this question.  The first line involves an appeal to the element of historicity that is lacking in myth.  The second line of argument concerns what is unique of the Christian symbol, namely, its reference to the Infinite.

 

But before we explore these matters more fully, some attention must be given to the question of verification or authentication.

 

The fundamental principle of all verification procedure is that the procedure is always from within the universe of discourse in which the proposition or theory subsists.  No universe of discourse that is alien to the proposition or theory that is being evaluated can become the context for that evaluation.  It is for this reason that procedures that concern scientific statements or theories cannot be employed in evaluating the concerns of Christian experience and Christian symbolism.

 

This point must be made absolutely clear.  Someone might object to what is here inferred, namely, that the Christian faith must be evaluated only from within the context of that faith.  But this objection cannot stand.  For the principle that verification is from within its appropriate context holds with equal force in science.

 

Science itself is a symbolic form.  Its activity, which consists of its use and reliance upon sense observation, theory construction, and verification in terms of sense observation (howsoever indirect via instrumentation) is always from within the context of its own symbolic form.  If this circumstance does not denigrate science, why should the same situation not denigrate religion?

 

 

Science does, indeed, presume the reality of the external world.  But, in contrast to the past, no reflective scientist believes that his constructions of symbolism reveal the nature of that world as it is in itself.  The world that the scientist apprehends is, as regards its knowable content, the world of his symbols, the world of his own construction.

 

The English philosopher-scientist Arthur Eddington expresses the symbolic nature of physical science in the following manner:

 

The physical universe is the world which physical knowledge is formulated to describe, and there is no difference between the physical universe and the universe of physics.^[37]

 

Again:

 

The few who have attempted to give it [“really exists”] a definite meaning do not always agree on the meaning.  By defining the physical universe and the physical objects that constitute it as the theme of a specified body of knowledge, and not of things possessing a property of existence elusive of definition, we free the foundations of physics from suspicion of metaphysical contamination.^[38]

 

In this or another of his books, Eddington constructs what may be termed a “Robinson Crusoe” illustration.  A man is cast on an island that he initially takes to be uninhabited by other human beings.  He wanders along the shore and sees no other human individual.  Soon he comes on human footprints in the sand.  He is elated, believing that he has found evidence of the existence of another person.  Some time later, after recognizing the reappearance of familiar surroundings, he realizes that he is walking in his own footprints.  “. . . there is no difference between the physical universe and the universe of physics.”

 

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce argues as forcefully as anyone that verification in science is wholly an intra-experiential process, confined to its particular subjective form of experience.  To quote:

 

. . . all the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to every question to which they can be applied. . . .  This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. . . .  This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality.  The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.  That is the way I would explain reality.^[39]

 

To return to our first line of argument: the appeal to the element of historicity that is lacking in myth.  Notwithstanding this, however, historicity must at the same time become self-transcending, if it is to sustain a significance that history by itself cannot provide.  Still, even here, the value of significance over existence must be preserved.

 

 

The redemptive rites of the myth are lacking in historicity.  And this very lack disqualifies them as procurers of an authentic redemption, both within and beyond history.

 

We have previously called attention to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.  The myth tells of Demeter’s search for her daughter, Persephone, and the final, triumphant recovery of the daughter-goddess from death in the underworld.  The myth became the basis of the festival at Eleusis.  In the passion drama, the climax of the festival, the initiates enacted the events of the myth.  They accompanied the priestess, who represented the grieving mother, in the search for the lost child-goddess.  The mimesis closed with the reunion of the two goddesses.  Sharing in that reunion, the initiates shared in the triumph over death.

 

In the Egyptian cult, Isis, the wife of Osiris, searches for her murdered husband.  After a long wandering, she finds his corpse and performs certain rites, which revived him.  Osiris is thus a dying and reviving deity, providing assurance that life continues beyond the ravage of death.

 

The Eleusinian drama portrayed dramatically a sacred marriage and the birth of a holy child.  The drama represented the birth of a progenitor of a new race of those who are now translated from the earthly sphere to the heavenly.

 

While all this mimetic enactment, on the part of the devotee, of the mythic content may have provided a measure of assurance and fulfillment, it cannot procure actual redemption.  Of this the modern mind is well aware.  In no sense can the mimetic enactment of recovery from death bring redemption.  In no sense can a mythic “holy child” bring a new age, a new humanity, into being.  And this because it lacks historical actuality.  Whatever redemption involves, it must be more than mimesis.  And, for Christianity, that further element is the historical factor.  Christianity is an historial, not a mimetic religion.

 

Here Christianity transcends myth.  It is the existence-quotient that makes effective, for history and eternity, a new, redeemed, humanity.  This the Christian account provides.  There was, indeed, one born who was destined to be the “prince of life,” the pioneer of a new race, an heavenly.  “And she shall bring forth a son,” it was announced, “and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.”^[40]  Of this Isaiah had earlier spoken:

 

For unto us a child is born, unto

us a son is given: and the govern-

ment shall be upon his shoulder:

and his name shall be called Won-

derful, Counsellor, The mighty

God, the everlasting Father, the

Prince of Peace.^[41]

 

 

To the historicity of Jesus, no serious objection can be made.  The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, refers to this: “Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate . . . .”^[42]  The Jewish historian Josephus writes:

 

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.  He drew over to him both many Jews and many of the Gentiles.  He was [the] Christ.  And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day . . . .^[43]

 

Yet, notwithstanding the historicity of Jesus, there must be, and there is, that about Him that goes beyond history.  There must be, and there is, the quality of meta-historical significance, without which His redeeming efficacy collapses into the matrix of myth.  In short, the two, the historical and historical discontinuity must, and indeed do, coalesce in the man Jesus who is also the divine Christ.

 

He was in the world . . . .

And the Word was made

flesh, and dwelt among us, (and

we beheld his glory, the glory

as of the only begotten of the

Father,) full of grace and truth.^[44]

 

In our time, no one more seriously addressed this question than does the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard.  In the title page of his book Philosophical Fragments, he writes:

 

Is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure have any other than a merely historical interest; is it possible to base an eternal happiness upon historical knowledge?^[45]

 

In the closing pages of the work, he states the matter even more forcefully:

 

 

It is well known that Christianity is the only historical phenomenon which in spite of the historical, nay precisely by means of the historical, has intended itself to be for the single individual the point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has intended to interest him otherwise than merely historical, has intended to base his eternal happiness on something historical.  No system of philosophy, addressing itself only to thought, no mythology, addressing itself solely to the imagination, no historical knowledge, addressing itself to the memory, has ever had this idea: of which it may be said with all possible ambiguity in this connection, that it did not arise in the heart of any man.^[46]

 

Kierkegaard’s most “systematic” work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, addresses the problem raised by the Fragments.  The argument of the postscript is that Christian truth cannot be certified either by means of historical investigation or by means of philosophical speculation.  Christian truth is not an objective truth.  Its truth—that eternal happiness depends upon an event in time—is the paradox that is appropriated through the inwardness of faith.  The Christological event is appropriated only by the passion of faith, a passion that is the anxiety of “fear and trembling.”

 

In the chapter, “Truth as Subjectivity,” Kierkegaard posits two alternatives as regards the question of truth:

 

For an objective reflection the truth becomes an object, something objective, and thought must be pointed away from the subject.  For a subjective reflection the truth becomes a matter of appropriation, of inwardness, of subjectivity, and thought must probe more and more deeply into the subject and his subjectivity.^[47]

 

Thus the truth that eternal happiness is effected via the event in time, which to objective thought is unresolvable paradox, consists in the inward appropriation of that paradox by the believing subject.  What is involved in this distinction is, perhaps, no better stated than in the following passage:

 

When the question of truth is raised in an objective manner, reflection is directed objectively to the truth, as an object to which the knower is related.  Reflection is not focused on the relationship, however, but upon the question of whether it is the truth to which the knower is related.  If only the object to which he is related is the truth, the subject is accounted to be in the truth.  When the question of truth is raised subjectively, reflection is directed subjectively to the nature of the individual’s relationship; if only the mode of this relationship is in the truth, the individual is in the truth even if he should happen to be thus related to what is not true.^[48]

 

Immediately following this passage, Kierkegaard provides an example of his meaning.  It concerns the question of the nature of the “God-relationship”:

 

Let us take as an example the knowledge of God.  Objectively, reflection is directed to the problem of whether this object is the true God; subjectively, reflection is directed to the question whether the individual is related to a something in such a manner that his relationship is in truth a God-relationship. . . .

 

 

The existing individual who chooses to pursue the objective way enters upon the entire approximation-process by which it is proposed to bring God to light objectively.  But this is in all eternity impossible, because God is a subject, and therefore exists only for subjectivity in inwardness.  The existing individual who chooses the subjective way apprehends instantly the entire dialectical difficulty involved in having to use some time, perhaps a long time, in finding God objectively; and he feels this dialectical difficulty in all its painfulness, because every moment is wasted in which he does not have God.  That very instant he has God, not by virtue of any objective deliberation, but by virtue of the infinite passion of inwardness.^[49]

 

Referring Kierkegaard’s analysis to the problem of this work, he would agree that mythic representations, based solely upon imagination, cannot suffice to effect eternal happiness.  For they have no reference to any event in time.  That is, he is saying, the event in time, the Christological event, is the necessary condition of eternal happiness.  This event becomes effective, however, only in the inward appropriation of faith.  This means, in short, that the question of one’s salvation remains, for thought, but problematical.  The felt assurance that Christianity affords, like the assurance of the rites of pagan redemption, cannot yield any objective certification.  But there is in Kierkegaard a significant advance, for salvation does require an enactment in time.  But, as we have seen, the availability of that enactment for redemption is forthcoming only in the inwardness of faith.  It remains, finally, but an objective probability.

 

Kierkegaard (1813-55) lived and wrote during a time in the nineteenth century in which western thought was in bondage to two influences.  The first was empirical science.  Science, it was believed, secured literal truth and was the exclusive instrument of knowledge.  The second was Hegelian philosophy.  According to this form of idealist philosophy, it was possible to know truly the systematic nature of ultimate reality.  Kierkegaard’s animadversions rebutted both of those claims.  He was correct in dethroning both empirical science and systematic philosophy.  He showed that they cannot be the avenues to the God-relationship, that they cannot disclose the way of eternal happiness.

 

But since his time, there have been developments in the culture of thought of which he was not, and could not be, aware.  It is now held by reflective scientists that science does not disclose the inner nature of reality.  Rather, it is a paradigm of symbolism.  As a general rule, the idealistic system of philosophy that identifies the Real with thought and its regulative forms is subject to serious criticism or even disavowed.  In consequence of these changes in intellectual culture, Kierkegaard’s rejection of science and philosophy as avenues to salvation, although regarded as extremely significant for his time and still of some considerable significance, loses something of its former cutting edge.  Nevertheless, his concept of inward appropriation of truth as subjective continues to appeal to many who struggle to find meaning in Christianity.

 

To return to the question of the historical factor in Christianity.  In contrast to the imaginations of myth, Christianity asserts that redemption, eternal happiness, is grounded in an event in time.  That is our argument thus far.

 

 

Now, there is no question but that the man Jesus did live and was crucified by the Romans.  Both scriptural and secular sources testify to this.  While Jesus’ death is an indispensable factor in the drama of redemption, redemption is finally secured and guaranteed by the Resurrection.  The New Testament is clear as to this.  Thus Paul writes: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.”^[50]  Elsewhere Paul removes the problematic and writes categorically:

 

Concerning his Son Jesus

Christ our Lord, which was made

of the Seed of David according

to the flesh;

And declared to be the Son of

God with power, according to

the spirit of holiness, by the

resurrection from the dead:

By whom we have received

grace and apostleship, for obedi-

ence to the faith among all

nations, for his name.

 

Thus the Resurrection is part of the history of Jesus, is part of the situation in time that procures, in Kierkegaard’s language, eternal happiness.  But now the question occurs as to just how, in what respect, Resurrection is continuous with existence.  That Jesus did exist, we have said, is beyond cavil.  His existence provides the element that imaginative resurrections of mythic figures do not have.  At least, that is the Christian claim.  But is Jesus’s resurrection a real factor in His existence?  Do we not have, instead, but another myth, namely, a “Christian myth”?

 

The Resurrection is real only on the condition that there is a quality of the existing individual, Jesus, that is capable of supporting it.  That quality is a special relation to God.  Further, it must be something that Jesus Himself sensed and one that others also detected.

 

Jesus’ earthly life brought the full meaning of the divine fatherhood to view.  His “Abba experience” was the experience of His unique relation to the Father.  It was His sense of oneness with the Father.  His saying “I and my Father are one” affirms that special relation of deep intimacy with God.

 

How are we to view this fact of Jesus’ sense of oneness with the Father?  We could, of course, say that here we have someone who is afflicted with megalomania.  But that is hardly credible.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile that theory with the whole of Jesus’ life and activity.  Schillebeeckx has stated the case for the veracity of Jesus’ consciousness of sonship:

 

. . . we have been examining the fundamental and constitutive elements of Jesus’ message and praxis.  He proclaimed, ‘for God’, the approach of salvation for man, he appeared and acted as the eschatological prophet bringing God’s ‘glad tidings for the poor’, news of salvation . . . .

The source of this message and praxis, demolishing an oppressive notion of God, was his Abba experience, without which the picture of the historical Jesus is drastically marred, his message emasculated and his concrete praxis (though still meaningful and inspiring) is robbed of the meaning he himself gave to it.

 

Over against all this one could say: this very Abba experience was the grand illusion of Jesus’ life.  Such a reaction is certainly possible on our side.  But then one is bound to draw from that the inevitable conclusion, namely, that the hope of which Jesus spoke is likewise an illusion.

. . . On purely historical grounds this cannot be verified, since such an Abba experience may be disqualified as an illusion.  On the other hand for someone who acknowledges and in faith confesses this trustworthiness of Jesus as grounded in truth and reality, the trustworthiness acquires visible contours in the actual life of Jesus of Nazareth; his faith then perceives Jesus’ trustworthiness in the material, the biographical data, which the historian can put before him regarding Jesus of Nazareth.^[51]

 

That is the crucial distinction between myth and Christianity.  There are “visible contours in the actual life of Jesus.”  That is lacking in the mythic figures who promise redemption.

 

Others, too, witnessed something unique about Jesus of Nazareth.  Of Him who had dwelt among them, John wrote in his Gospel: “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”^[52]   And the centurion, hearing Jesus’ pathetic death-cry, was constrained, perhaps against all of his Roman prejudices, to say: “Truly this man was the Son of God.”^[53]

 

There is, then, a marked discontinuity of Jesus’s history with that about Him which was meta-historical.  This His Abba experience discloses.  Yet the meta-historical cannot be absolutely disassociated from His history.  Some such association is a necessary condition of the reality of the redemption that Christianity offers.  This association is, perhaps, most crucial with respect to the Resurrection.  That is, the Resurrection must in some sense be continuous with existence, must itself be part of Jesus’s history, of the event that He constitutes, if the redemption He offers is to be truly significant and valid.  If Resurrection is an illusion, along with the Abba consciousness, Christian redemption stands along side pagan redemption: a myth.

 

The Gospel narratives agree that no one actually witnessed the resurrection of Jesus.  The biblical accounts of the Resurrection are of resurrection appearances.  It might be thought that, therefore, the appearances are but private hallucinations.  Against this supposition is the circumstance that these appearances, with some exception, were to groups of people rather than to individuals confined in isolation.  In the mimetic rituals of pagan myths, there are no such experiences as those of the early Christians.  There are but mimetic actions imitating the mythic material.  These can in nowise bring personal salvation.  Against this, stands uniquely distinctive and supreme Christian redemption, which finds in the resurrection appearances the raison for its claim of truth and validity.

 

 

Here, too, “visible contours” are acquired.  They are acquired in a new dimension of history.  The early belief in the Resurrection was such that it transformed the human reality of those long-ago individuals and, through them, the reality of human history.  The only explanation that explains this is their assurance that He is risen.  It was this belief in a new reality, an abiding Presence, that became the power in their venture of faith and deed.  These are the incontrovertible facts, in consequence of which the resurrection experience can never be consigned to the dust-bin of illusion.  The resurrection appearances were veridical perceptions‑-not self-induced hallucinations‑-and the resurrection effects were actual and real.  Of this it is certain: Christianity did not originate and grow in nonsense.  In these respects, at least, there is reality in the Resurrection.  And in these respects, Christian redemption is on a uniquely higher level than was ever attained by pagan redemption.

 

We have employed the terms “history” and “meta-history.”  That Jesus was crucified and buried is a matter of history.  But His death assumes a dimension that in nowise merely emerges out of its historicity.  In this regard, Paul writes, not that “Christ died,” but that “Christ died for our sins.”^[54]  The phrase, “for our sins,” states the significance of that death.  And this significance is meta-historical.  It is discontinuous with history but yet bound up with history.  There is here both continuity and discontinuity with existence.  This is the paradox of which Kierkegaard writes, that our eternal happiness depends upon an event in time.  Eternal happiness is conditioned by Resurrection, which stands both beyond and yet within history.

 

The second line of argument in defense of the truth and validity of the Christian claim has to with what is unique of the Christian symbol, namely that, unlike all other forms of symbol, its reference is to the Infinite.

 

In his book, The Idea of the Holy, the German philosopher Rudolf Otto devised a term to denote the unique character of the religious consciousness.  He pointed out that the word “ominous” is taken from the Latin omen.  There is no reason, he argued, why a new word “numinous” should not be formed from the Latin numen.  “I shall speak, then,” he wrote,

 

of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely ‘numinous’ state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied.  This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined. . . .  it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.^[55]

 

In the earlier chapters of the work, he develops the elements of the numinous.  The experience of the numinous is a feeling of creature-hood.  It is also a feeling of the divine majesty, which Otto calls mysterium tremendum.  The tremendum involves the element of awefulness, of overpoweringness, of energy or urgency.  And the mysterium involves the element of The Wholly Other, the unapproachable distance of God from humanity.  All this Otto terms The Holy.

 

 

The Holy is an a-rational category.  It cannot be equated with the moral category of the good.  It is not a metaphysical category to be explicated through rational analysis.  It is strictly a category of feeling, of intuition.  It is, Otto says, “the feeling which remains where the concept fails.”  The terminology that is available for use here “is not any the more  loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of symbols.”  What is important for us here is the observation that the symbols will carry the burden of the numinous.  It is precisely this burden that makes the symbols, drawn as they are from the intuitions of humanity, the symbols of religion.  It should be noted here that this circumstance in nowise contravenes the concept of divine revelation.  The meaning of revelation is that God speaks, but speaks in the terms of humanity, the only terms that we are able to comprehend.  For in themselves “. . . how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”^[56]

 

Of this supreme experience of the numinous, Otto writes:

 

. . . the mysterium is experienced in its essential, positive, and specific character, as something that bestows upon man a beatitude beyond compare, but one whose real nature he can neither proclaim in speech nor conceive in thought, but may know only by a direct and living experience.  It is a bliss which embraces all those blessings that are indicated or suggested in positive fashion by any ‘doctrine of salvation’, and it quickens all of them through and through, but these do not exhaust it.  Rather by its all-pervading, penetrating glow it makes of these very blessings more than the intellect can conceive in them or affirm of them.  It gives the peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly.  Only from afar, by metaphor and analogies, do we come to apprehend what it is in itself, and even so our notion is but inadequate and confused.^[57]

 

Now, the experience of the numinous may be, and is, given a measure of determination by the reason.  That is, the numinous of experience is determined in idea as the Absolute, the Infinite.  There is no doubt but that the numinous of experience has for its referend the “Wholly Other,” the Infinite, or God.  Yet from within the circle of numinous experience, no evidence is forthcoming that the referend of that experience is extra-mentally real.  The Christian symbols are, indeed, bathed with numinous quality.  They yield insight into the God who is beyond conceptual determination.  Is the insight a true insight?  Are they, after all, illusory, albeit with some intra-experiential import.  Can these questions be answered in terms of the ideational equivalent of the numinous experience?  For, if they can be answered, they are answered only at the level of reflective thought.

 

 

In our modern era, we have somehow been led to the conclusion that the objects of scientific formulation exist, and exist beyond a reasonable doubt.  In contrast, it is a prevailing view that the idea of God is problematic, that is, that it carries no evidential weight as to the real existence of its presumed referent.  However, there are grounds that justify the conclusion that the presumed realities of scientific symbol-formation are never certifiable as to an existence beyond the reach of the symbolic formations.  They exist within the construct of symbolization.  We do not know the physical world in its inner nature.  We do, indeed, presume that there is an inner nature to the physical world.  But that nature, that world, is beyond our reach, beyond the reach even of our scientific symbols.

 

In 1913 the German philosopher Edmund Husserl published his most significant work, Ideen zu einer Phänomenologie und phäomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas of a pure Phenomenology and phenomenological Philosophy).  The work was later translated in English by W. R. Boyce Gibson, under the title Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.

 

An important thesis of the work is set forth under the rubric phenomenological reduction.  Briefly stated, the term means that the objects given as data of experience are such that it is necessary to suspend the question of the actual existence of those phenomena.  The reduction does not signify that they do not exist; it signifies that we do not      know that they exist, or, that the givenness of the data is incapable of showing forth extra-mental existence.  Husserl states this thesis in the following language:

 

Thus in its immanence it must admit no positing of such essences in the form of Being, no statements touching their validity or non-validity, or concerning the ideal possibility of objectivities that shall correspond to them nor may it establish any laws bearing on their essential nature.^[58]

 

Husserl extends the phenomenological reduction to the idea of God.  That the idea of God is entertained in the mind is no evidence that God exists.  Husserl’s argument here is based on the assumption that the idea of God is of the same logical character as all other ideas, including ideas of physical objects.  However, if it should turn out that the idea of God is unique and therefore different in logical character from other ideas, Husserl’s contention would not hold.

 

Now, we are led to the subject of what is known as the ontological argument.  It is the significant argument for the existence of God.  A recent proponent of the argument makes this point:

 

The reasons men have given for believing in God have been formulated in what are called the ‘proofs’ for the existence of God, or, briefly, the theistic argument.  Of these proofs the Platonic or ontological argument is in a sense the most significant, for it constitutes what, in a dialectical or logical age, men believed to be the ‘logical witness for God.’^[59]

 

The historically classic formulation of the ontological argument is found in Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogium.  He “defines” God as “being than which nothing greater can be conceived.”  The conception of God in those terms, he claims, requires and shows forth the objective reality of God.  He writes:

 

And, indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.  Or is there no such nature, since the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalms xiv. 1).

 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived.  For, when he hears of this, he understands it.  And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding.  “And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone.  For, suppose it exists in the understanding: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.

 

Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone. the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived.  But obviously this is impossible.  Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.^[60]

 

Anselm’s argument was immediately challenged.  Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier, replied, in effect, that the idea of God as perfection no more entails His existence than does the idea of a perfect island entail its existence.  He gave the example of a “lost island,” which comprises the sum of all excellencies.  This does not mean, he argues, that because the perfect island is an idea in the mind that, therefore, the island exists.  Therefore, mutatis mutandis, the idea of God does not entail the existence of God.

 

Anslem replied, in effect, that if Guanilo can find the perfect island, he will give it to him:

 

Now I promise confidently that if any man shall devise anything existing either in reality or in concept alone (except that than which a greater cannot be conceived) to which he can adapt the sequence of my reasoning, I will discover that thing, and will give him his lost island, not to be lost again.^[61]

 

The point that Anselm makes here is that only the idea of God implies the necessary existence of the referent of the idea.  All other concepts do not.  “The sequence of my reasoning,” he correctly says, cannot be adapted to them.  Further, he is certain that, if Gaunilo can find the lost island, it will be readily given to him.  Why is this?  The answer is that the concept of a perfect island is a dependent, conditioned, meaning.  It depends on other conceptual elements: the concepts of water, land, and the relationship between the former two concepts.  It is, therefore, a contradiction to attach perfection to the concept of island.  That which depends on something other than itself cannot be perfect.  There is no such self-consistent meaning, perfect island.  It is not even a possible object of thought.  Since it is conceptually impossible, it is therefore actually impossible.  Its existence is really impossible.  In nowise, then, can its existence be implied by its presumed, but illusory, conceptual status.

 

There is, however, a factor that vitiates Anselm’s formulation of the ontological argument.  He assumes that existence is part of the meaning of the idea of God.  That is, existence, along with other attributes, is an intensional property of the idea of God.  When we think God as perfection, we must assert His existence, as we must assert the other attributes that constitute His nature.

 

Indeed, it is true that in thinking God as perfection, we must think of Him as existing.  But not for the reason that Anselm proposes.  For existence is not part of the intensional meaning of the idea of God.  In technical language, existence is not a predicate.

 

The German philosopher Kant make this point.

 

‘Being’ is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. . . .  By whatever and by however many predicates we may think a thing——even if we completely determine it——we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is.^[62]

 

Kant is correct here.  Existence is not a predicate and therefore cannot be included in the idea of God, so as to evince His existence.  But this does not mean that the ontological argument, if properly construed, lacks formal validity and real significance.

 

There is a difference between an idea and a concept.  As the term from which concept derives, concipere, take together, hold together, indicates, a concept is a collection of meanings.  With respect to our knowledge of the space-time world, concepts are generalizations from particular instances.

 

Now it is clear that we do not have a concept of God.  We do not hold in our minds the qualities of the Divine being.  We do not know God as He is in Himself.  And we certainly do not form a concept of God as a generalization from many instances of God.

 

But we do, without question, possess an idea of God.  The idea connotes, not a plurality of meanings, but a unique singularity of meaning.  And it contains no reference to a plurality of instances, but only to a single Individual, or Being.  The idea of God is the idea of the transcendent Individual.

 

The ontological argument is really not an argument at all.  It is not a deduction from premises.  It is an insight.  When that insight is properly explicated reflectively, it becomes evident that in order to think God consistently it is necessary to think God as necessarily existing.

 

We have pointed out that the ontological argument is a Platonic argument.  That is, indeed, the case.  The merit of the Platonic argument is that it formulates the argument in exceedingly abstract terms, i.e, it takes the idea of God as a purely formal idea.  Some attention must be given to the Platonic formulation, in order to bring the question of God’s existence to a profitable conclusion.

 

 

Plato’s analysis is found in the sixth and seventh books of the Republic.  The argument is developed in the context of the theory of Ideas.  The Ideas are the intellectual instruments employed in the organization of experience.  In the Phaedo he listed the various Ideas: equality, beauty, good (moral), justice, and holiness.^[63]  In the Republic he considers them in the context of the analogy of the divided line.  It is there that he formulates the ontological argument.

 

In one passage he writes:

 

. . . that which reason itself lays hold of by the power of dialectics, treating its assumptions not as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, footings, and springboards so to speak, to enable it to rise to that which requires no assumption and is the starting point of all. . . .^[64]

 

The other passage is this:

 

Is not dialectics the only process of inquiry that advances in this manner, doing away with hypotheses, up to the first principle itself in order to find confirmation there?^[65]

 

The various individual ideas are the hypotheses.  Their extra-mental status is problematic.  But they are show a dependency upon the ultimate value principle and serve, accordingly, as “springboards so to speak” for the disclosure of “the first principle.”  The first principle is viewed in the manner of “doing away with hypotheses.”  It is “that which requires no assumption.”  Its reality, then, is certain, beyond all assumption.

 

But how do we know that our awareness of this first principle is an awareness of its reality?  That is the crucial question.  The question is answered in terms of the meaning, in the Greek, of the English phrase, “that which requires no assumption.”  For that phrase the Greek has a single word, with the definite article.  The Greek expression is τo_ _vυπoθέτoυ, the genitive of τ_ _vυπόθετov (to anhypotheton, the unhypothesized).  The noun is used but three times in the Greek language, and exclusively by Plato in the Republic.  Its meaning is essentially negative, since it is a compound of the privative particle α (not) and the noun _π_θεσις (a placing under).  It means “independence of conditions.”

 

Since it means, in a formal respect, independence of conditions, the anhypotheton must be thought of as independent of the conditions of thought.  To entertain it in the mind as but a mental construct, as dependent upon the conditions of thought, is a self-contradiction.  To think it, then, is to think it as self-existent.  That, precisely, is the germ of the so-called ontological argument.  It is the reflective insight that, as entertained in the mind, the anhypotheton must be entertained as existing extra-mentally.

 

 

Plato does not explicitly identify the anhypotheton with the Good.  However, his discussion of the Good, the ultimate reality, makes it clear that he regarded the two as identical.  The anhypotheton, the Good, is the Father of all else, streaming into the world but yet remaining in its inviolable reality beyond all worlds.^[66]

 

If we transpose the Platonic reasoning over into the Christian idea of God, the result is precisely the same.  We do, without question, entertain the idea of God as “the unconditioned transcendent.”  While not directly given, it is nevertheless given as a co-implicate of the awareness of our finitude.  This idea connotes the “formal principle of Deity.”  It yields minimal knowledge of God, the only form of literal knowledge of God that we possess.

To think God, then, it is necessary to think God as independent of the conditions of thought, as self-existent.

 

The distinction between concept and idea is an important and decisive one.  Husserl has shown that all finite concepts can be bracketed with respect to the existence of their referents.  He is correct here.  But he is incorrect in supposing that the idea of Deity also requires, even permits, bracketing.  For here we do not have the concept, but rather the idea.  The idea of God is unique, formally signifying the unconditioned Absolute, and therefore cannot consistently undergo bracketing.  In short, insofar, and as long as, we think God, we must think Him as real.  Of this we are assured beyond all cavil.  If we wish to remove from ourselves the idea of God——if that were indeed possible——,we face the consequence of depriving ourselves of the potential of our humanity.  And this means that we have to deny our own selfhood and reality.  And that is too great a price to pay!  If we excise God from our intellectual experience, we renounce our humanity!

 

Now, what bearing does this have on the question of the truth and validity of our experience of God, both via the numinous awareness and the numinous symbols?

 

Are we as Christians, like those of the pagan myths, left without any anchor.  Are we but on a tempest sea, agitated with the waves of insecurity, tempest-tossed without a light-house to illume our sea-borne quest?

 

Our argument is that beside the experience of the numinous, beside the numinous coloring of the symbol, we do entertain the idea of God as self-existent.  This idea, and this idea alone, carries with it certification to the reason of extra-mental reality.

 

Reason, then does this.  It brings an appreciable measure of assurance that our experience of God treads upon the shores of eternity, that, perhaps like Moses, we do see the divine silhouette.  We can also say this: from the other side, were we not to know that the God whom we entertain in thought exists, or that even His but possible existence is an impossibility, we could not rest in the felt radiance of numinous experience.  We may rest assured, too, that the numinous symbols of grace do disclose, for us, His matchless name.

 

 

But this value of the reflective consciousness is not to be taken as a substitute for, a replacement of, the felt value of numinous experience or the numinous symbol.  Its service, rather, is to temper, even remove, the dark, shadowy and foreboding background, which for many today is said to constitute an ineradicable “problematic of faith,” from which there is no release.  Yet, finally and decisively, the “joys of the Lord” reside in that distinctly ineffable experience of redemptive grace.  And, finally and decisively, we see the Lovely One,^[67] albeit from afar, in those magnificent symbols of redemptive grace.  They are the “The light that never was, on sea or land.”^[68]  They are the beacon-light streaming from the eternal world.

 

All this is our redemptive heritage—an heritage that forever eludes any and all mythic formulations of redemption.

^[1]Forthcoming in The Wesleyan Theological Journal.

^[2]See Petronius’ account of a dinner given by the wealthy Trimalchio.  Gaius Petronius, The Satyricon, tr. Alfred R. Allison (New York: The Panurge Press, 1930), chap. v.

^[3]Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, tr. Hugh G. Evyln-White, Loeb Classical Library , No. 57 (London: Heinemann, 1929) 1.1-2, p. 289.

^[4]Tertullian De Baptismo 5, tr. S. Thewall, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson (10 vols., New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1890), III, 671.

^[5]Asterius Encomium in sanctos martures 113B.  Quoted in Willoughby, op. cit., p. 53.

^[6]Hippolytus Philosophoumena v, III, tr. J. H. MacMahon, Ibid.

^[7]Ibid. 72-77, pp. 10-11.

^[8]Euripides Fragmenta 475, in Porphyry De Abstinentia iv. 19.

^[9]Euripides Baachae 736-47, pp. 42-43.

^[10]Prudentius Peristephanon x. 1035-40, tr. H. J. Thompson, Loeb Classical Library No. 398 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 297.

^[11]Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 3rd ed. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1927), p. 227.

^[12]Clement of Alexandria op. cit. ii, II, 175.  The cernos was probably a vessel containing poppy carried in sacrificial procession.  For “bedroom” one can read “bridal chamber.”

^[13]Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), pp. 182-83.

^[14]Harald Höffding, The Philosophy of Religion, tr. B. E. Meyer (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1914), p. 201.

^[15]Ibid.

^[16]Harold R. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1929), p. 60.

^[17]Heb. 9:25-26.

^[18]Lev. 17:11-12.

^[19]Rom. 5:9-11.

^[20]The term atonement in vs. 11 is in the original reconciliation.

^[21]Sandy, William & Arthur C. Headlam, The Epistle to the Romans, 11^th ed.  (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906).  In The International Critical Commentary.

^[22]Heb. 13:12.

^[23]1 John 1:7.

^[24]Heb. 9:17.

^[25]The Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, c1955), XI, 692.

^[26]Heb. 7:16, 17, 25.

^[27]John 1:29.

^[28]Rev. 5:6.

^[29]Rev. 5:9.

^[30]Rev. 5:5.

^[31]Rev. 5:6.

^[32]Rev. 17:14.

^[33]Rev. 19:16.

^[34]Rev. 19:9.

^[35]Rev. 22:1, 3.

^[36]John 4:14.

^[37]Arthur Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1939), p. 159.

^[38]Ibid., p. 3.

^[39]Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (January, 1878), pp. 286-302.  In Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss, eds., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-66), 5:268.

^[40]Matt. 1:21.

^[41]Isa. 9:6.

^[42]Tacitus Annals tr. John Jackson, Loeb Classical Library, No. 322 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 15:44, p. 283.

^[43]Flavius Josephus The Antiquities of the Jews, in William Whiston, tr., The Life and Works of Flavius Josephus (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co., n.d.), p. 535.

^[44]John 1:10, 14.

^[45]Sören Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, tr. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c1936, 1962).

^[46]Ibid., pp. 137-38

^[47]Sören Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 171.

^[48]Ibid., p. 178.

^[49]Ibid., pp. 178-79.

^[50]1 Cor. 15:17.

^[51]Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, tr. Hubert Hoskins (New York: The Seabury Press), pp. 269-70.

^[52]John 1:14.

^[53]Mark 15:39.

^[54]1 Cor. 15:3.  Italics mine.

^[55]Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2^nd ed., tr. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 7.

^[56]Rom. 11:33.

^[57]Ibid., Foreword.

^[58]Edmund Husserl, Ideas, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1931), p. 178.

^[59]W. M. Urban, Humanity and Deity (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., p. 165.

^[60]St. Anselm, Proslogium, chap. ii, in St. Anselm, tr. Sidney Norton Deane (La Salle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1951), pp. 7-8.

^[61]Anselm’s Apologetic, in Ibid., p. 158.

^[62]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1950), pp. 505-05.

^[63]Plato Phaedo 75d, tr. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 263.

^[64]Plato Republic vi. 511b, pp. 113-15.

^[65]Ibid., vii.533c, p. 203,

^[66]See my article “The Ontological Argument in Plato,” The Personalist, 44:1 (Winter, 1963), pp. 24-34.  See also Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, c1965), pp. 139-41, which is a discussion of the article.

^[67]“One thing have I desired of the Lord, that I will seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple” (Ps. 27:4).

^[68]Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanza, VI.