The modern and primitive origins of the desire to rule over God

“When things look a little incredible, isn't that when faith is needed most? Is faith not faith only to the degree that believing in certain things is impossible? Do we not need faith precisely when the odds are against us, when everyone thinks it is madness to go on, when certain things begin to seem unbelievable?”

The words we have quoted from an article by John D. Caputo, the well-known radical hermeneutician who is also a Catholic theologian, titled “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible” (tezkire, issue 71, 2020), are a powerful example of the discourse of resistance that the Christian world has displayed against the modernist, positivist, Enlightenment threat.

Yet seen from here, a rote assumption of ours perhaps holds that the Christian and Jewish worlds adopted a far more submissive attitude toward the challenges of modernism, and surrendered everything about their books, their beliefs and their miracles to Enlightenment despotism. Indeed, there is a very abundant body of Western literature that prepares us for such a rote assumption. We think that Nietzsche's nihilistic philosophy, which proclaimed the death of God, really did erase God from life altogether in the West. But the situation is not so. In fact, even Nietzsche's proclamation was itself part of a revolt against the hypocrisy of Western humanism, which draws attention to a perverse relationship people have established with God, one that strips God of being God and turns Him into our servant.

Those forms of religiosity that make God their servant, a conception of theology that sets out by daring to ask “what kind of god do we need?”, had thereby fired the first arrow aimed at killing God. Western technology, with its approach of framing everything, objectifying everything, fitting everything into defined ranges and thereby appropriating it, made God too into an object. God is no longer a being who created us, who is almighty and all-knowing, who surpasses us with His vast mercy, His infinite knowledge and His deepest wisdom, and whose voice, word and revelation we would listen to with the ear of the soul. We now know better than He does what we need in the world. A somewhat more modest and in fact more cunning correction of this statement, on behalf of humanity, might go like this: “Of course it is not that He does not know better, but that He does not deign to meddle in the lowly affairs of people. He is far too exalted to stoop to the lowly affairs of mortals like us.”

The death of God is a process that begins with God's being likened to us, that is, with our deciding for ourselves what we should hear from Him instead of listening to Him.

Of course, Nietzsche was not the first in history to announce the death of God. From Aristotle to certain Jewish theologians, there have been many throughout history who announced God's death in this manner. And in all of them, as expressed in the Holy Qur'an, “They did not appreciate Allah as He should be appreciated, when they said: Allah has not sent down anything (a book that would bind us)” (An'am: 91).

The essence of the matter is to appreciate Allah as He should be appreciated. Appreciating Allah as He should be appreciated actually begins with declaring Him transcendent (tanzih). Tanzih is not putting Him into retirement, nor being content with attributing negations and dissimilarity to Him. It also means becoming ready to listen to Him with the ear of the soul. When we open theology to human intervention and decide for ourselves what function He should fulfill in our lives, we have not listened to God; we have commanded Him. The way we open our ears to God must also accord with the very nature of faith. As Caputo mentions, such an approach has nothing to do with faith. Nor can we say that an approach that is constantly guaranteed, calculating, having eliminated all risks and dispelled all probabilities with evidence, will appreciate God as He deserves.

We are not, of course, speaking of the effort to understand. We even need to take into account that our understanding is affected by our own conditions and our historicity. But we also need to know that the One we are addressing is Allah, that we cannot decide in advance what He will say to us, and that the command will come not according to our expectations or as we wish, but entirely from Him and as He wills it for us.

We have spoken of the cunning devout whom Spinoza described as eager to deceive God. This eagerness appears not only in peasant-Bedouin forms of religiosity; it can appear in a far more sophisticated way, within a rhetoric that is evidence-based, logical, argumentative and condescending, in very modern, educated, scientific circles.

In contemporary Christian theology, all of these debates have in fact been conducted quite thoroughly. Contrary to what is supposed, there is no surrender to historicism, and the historicity of human beings is clearly distinguished from the historicity of God or of the Holy Bible. To think that God, who created us afflicted by history, is Himself bound by a history, that is, afflicted by it, is itself the very essence of anthropomorphism, that is, of human-formism.

Historicism is an ideology, and even if its claim is true, then by its own claim it is itself afflicted by historicism. The claim to speak from a place above history is a sufficient indication of ideological blindness.

The interesting thing is that men like Gadamer and Haidegger, who today, with the worst connotations, are seen as responsible for historicism, in fact devoted all their efforts, on the contrary, to seeking ways of keeping historicism from contaminating the Holy Bible, that is, the truth. For Gadamer, truth is not something that can be reached by method, but truth exists, and there are ways of reaching it that are peculiar to it.