Believers who rethink their faith
We are living in a time of profound planetary civilizational transformation, the most profound and accelerated of the human species Sapiens since its origins 300,000 years ago. We have never been so powerful, yet we have never felt so insecure and vulnerable. It is a time of integral crisis which places us before the great alternative: either together we choose life or together we condemn ourselves to die.
So, for the women and men who write these pages to rethink their faith is not a mental exercise alien to the threats and possibilities of life at this planetary crossroads. It is a way to choose life for everyone. It is a way to dream and to open paths to life, to a life which will be more just and peaceful, more sober and happy for humanity and for all living beings. And it is a way to seek the wisdom, the inspiration, the vital impulse, the stimulating word necessary for it.
This book is a symphony of diverse voices, animated by the same great desire. And united by the same long, sometimes painfully forged conviction: that religions, with their millenary language, their old worldview, their old anthropology, their old creeds, codes and rituals, no longer inspire life or open paths to a common planetary future, and that they can only do so if they liberate from the letter the spirit that once inspired them, the universal spirit that animates the heart of all that is.
It is a book full of the light of vital testimonies, of searches and transits, of clues and intuitions for a transition time. Christian men and women of today, lucid and honest to themselves, rethink their faith, their vital confidence, their profound adhesion to Jesus the man, to the spirit that animated him que that opens us beyond all form and system, beyond all ecclesial institution. They rethink their faith with the freedom and wisdom of age. A god-metaphysical supreme being who created the world out of nothing and intervenes in it when he wants and is offended and forgives, the Bible as a supernatural revelation of God, the full incarnation of the Logos or the second person of the Trinity in the Jewish man Jesus, the atoning death, the physical resurrection… and so many more things that they can no longer believe –neither can I- in any of the two meanings of the word “believe”: “to accept something as true or likely to be true”, or “to give your heart”. We can only accept as true or likely to be true that which is reasonable for us, and we can only give our heart or our vital confidence to whomever or whatever inspires us and does us good. It is that simple.
This book is not closed. All beliefs are provisional, just like everything we know about the world and the words that say it. We keep opening our eyes to look and keep searching for words to explain the profound reality that makes us what we are, its silence illuminates us, and its absence calls us. We are in permanent transition, like Jacob at the passage of Jabbok, like Moses encountering the Burning Bush, like Eliah searching for silence and peace. We wish to live and explain the Mystery of the world in a manner coherent with the sciences and with the global challenges of the world today. I take the liberty to point out some tasks that I consider crucial in our reflective quest:
1.- Break the focus, still primarily anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, of Christian theology. Our human species, Sapiens, is neither the centre nor the summit of the evolution of the Cosmos, not even of the Earth. We are a contingent, unfinished, transitory form. Our intelligence, consciences, freedom … are emergent phenomena of matter, still incipient forms, and by no means are exclusively human faculties. Furthermore, we cannot but take very seriously the “transhumanist” horizon suggested by the infosciences, neurosciences and biosciences; it constitutes an enormous challenge to the Christian theology as a whole.
2.- Open ourselves to a deeper vision of the universe and of “matter”. We only know 4% of the matter-energy of this universe born of the Big Bang, which we do not know where it came from or why, but it was not out of nothing or by the intervention of an external god. It is a holistic universe; a whole made up of parts which, in turn, are also a whole made up of parts and so on indefinitely. It is a universe entirely interrelated and self-created. The original matter-energy is not “materialistic”, inert, as opposed to “spirit”; it is dynamism, relationship, information, potentiality, creativity, and it transcends our categories of space-time.
3.- Decidedly overcome the traditional imagery of life after death. Death is not an end but a transformation: it dissolves our “separated” individual I, but each atom and particle becomes part of other forms in the same universe. And we can ask ourselves: after death, will not the deep self survive in the universal interrelation, in the cosmic memory, in the “divine conscience”?
4.- Radically broaden the narrow anthropocentric framework of Christology, both dogmatic and historicist. We cannot think of Jesus as a “god” incarnated in the space and time, or as a finished and perfect man, or as the most finished and perfect of all humans. He was a Jewish prophet, whose good life as it emerges from the various Gospel accounts, beyond dogma and pure factual history, we can look at, recognize and confess as an inspiring icon of the vital Breath and of the fullness towards which we want to walk creating it.
5.- Deepen the experience and the language to express Bonhoffer’s motto: “to live before God without god”. The image of God as a supreme, omnipotent, extrinsic being, creator out of nothing who intervenes through miracles is left behind. It remains to live and to say the Presence, the Fund, the Breath, the Soul, the Creativity that is in everything that is… “God” is a metaphor for Mystery, created and creator Reality in which we are and is in everything.
And it does not matter to arrive but to keep on walking in a trusting dialogue.
José Arregi, Aizarna, January 20th, 2023
Epilogue to Des croyantes repensent leur foi. Ce qui les fait vivre. Ce qui n’est plus croyable, S. Couderc & G. Heichelbech (ed.), Karthala, Paris, 2023
Translated by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler