The church in late modernity
In his 1973 classic, The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann described the dilemma of the contemporary church and of its theology as a twofold crisis: ‘the crisis of relevance and the crisis of identity’.Footnote 1 These crises, Moltmann asserted, were ‘complementary’:
The more theology and the church attempt to become relevant to the problems of the present day, the more deeply they are drawn into the crisis of their own Christian identity. The more they attempt to assert their identity in traditional dogmas, rights and moral notions, the more irrelevant and unbelievable they become.Footnote 2
Moltmann's reflections arose from the church's situation in post-war Germany. Here, he identified two approaches: an involvement in the liberating struggle of the oppressed that threatened to lose sight of its proper Christian motivations, on the one hand, and a retreat to the traditional tasks of the church that became irrelevant to many politically engaged young people, on the other. Moltmann warned that the legitimate concern for relevance must not ignore the question of Christian identity, and vice versa.
Moltmann's analysis emerged from his own cultural context. And yet, it applies to the church's situation in modernity and late modernity more widely. It certainly marks the dilemma of the church in many western countries. Increasingly today, institutional Christianity is losing its stronghold in large parts of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and even North America. Many people have lost the ability to represent the holy, no longer believe in a (personal) God and make sense of their experience of the world etsi Deus non daretur (as if God did not exist).
Liturgical theologian Graham Hughes has proposed that churches have generally taken one of three different approaches to respond to this situation.Footnote 3 They embrace modernity, oppose it or try to ignore it. Let us look at these options in turn. Some churches accommodate their message to their modern environment, by shaping the focus of their ministry and their liturgy accordingly. This often takes place in liberal or mainline Protestantism, where ministry focuses heavily on social engagement in the political issues of our time, worship often becomes near identical with fellowship and mission with social justice programs. Mainline Protestantism's unreserved espousal of modern culture expresses itself in attempts of assimilation, an emphasis on God's immanent working in creation and a progressivism, which sees the kingdom of God increasingly asserting itself in human history. Theologically, this approach to modernity can take different forms, from Bonhoeffer's ‘religionless Christianity’, to the death-of-God theology of the 1960s, all the way to contemporary contextual theologies of liberation. What marks all these different approaches is a focus on God's working in the secular, everyday world and an identification of God with God's immanence.Footnote 4
Mainline Protestantism's strength is also its weakness. Where mainline Protestant churches engage the sufferings of our contemporaries, they are relevant. But as they become engaged in the ‘struggle against human disorder’, to use a formulation of the late Karl Barth, they risk reducing their identity to a social programme.Footnote 5 The church's embrace of secular modernity without remainder can cause its own self-annihilation. When the church talks about God only in the context of social emancipation, and social emancipation no longer requires God, the church becomes superfluous.
Liberal and liberationist strands of theology face a similar problem. When theology reduces itself to an analysis of social oppressions, something other scholarly disciplines already do and do better, theology becomes superfluous. Sometimes, the contextual focus of theology leads to the morphing of theology into ethnography. Here, detailed descriptions of the faith of religious communities replace critical and constructive reflection upon such faith. When theologians substitute theological reflection with ethnographic description, however, they achieve relevance by giving up their own identity.
It was Karl Barth who reminded the church and its theologians already in 1922 not to misunderstand their job in this way. In his seminal lecture, ‘The Word of God as the Task of Theology’, he warned that ‘speaking of God means something other than speaking about the human in a somewhat higher pitch’.Footnote 6 Barth was acutely aware that what people do not need from the church is ‘to construct their lives and everything that belongs to life’, including ethics, culture, spirituality, religion, piety and metaphysics.Footnote 7 Barth remarked that ‘[t]hey can take care of that without our advice, better than we usually think’.Footnote 8 When we talk about the wrong issues, we are not doing people a favour. On the contrary, says Barth,
[i]t could be that we are being unmerciful when in the name of love we merely help people to exist, even if thousands were to thank us for our help. When they come to us, they are not asking about their existence but about the other side of their existence, God's existence. As village or city sages, we are unwanted, superfluous, and ridiculous.Footnote 9
We are, Barth contends, ‘supposed to speak of God and give answers to the ultimate question’.Footnote 10
Already since Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas God had been understood as the proper object of theological discourse.Footnote 11 While theology does of course need to speak about many other things, including the preservation of God's creation, sin and oppression, theology must address these other realities only as they relate to God. We must insist, therefore, that theology is first and foremost God-talk. It must relate all human experience to God, and it must do so in such a way that God is not simply an ultimately superfluous addendum to an otherwise already self-sufficient analysis. This alone makes theology distinctive from other disciplines and determines its contribution to human discourse.
Evangelical churches have traditionally taken the opposite approach. Where liberal Protestantism embraces modernity, evangelicals seek to offer an explicit alternative to their cultural environment.Footnote 12 Ironically, evangelical churches are at once most opposed to modernity and make most use of modern forms of communication, not least in their worship where they dismiss much of the liturgical tradition. In so doing, however, evangelicals risk bifurcation between their faith and the culture they live in. They live with a double consciousness, in which a pre-modern religious worldview exists side by side – though unmediated – with a secular one. Evangelicals oppose many modern philosophical assumptions, while embracing many of modernity's achievements. This makes clear that the evangelical rejection of modernity is never complete. Due to the high level of construction of meaning and its internal inconsistencies, such bifurcation is doomed to fail sooner rather than later.
If mainline Protestantism risks a loss of Christian identity, evangelicalism risks a loss of relevance. Related to this is the traditional evangelical temptation to focus almost exclusively on individual salvation from sin and to truncate the holistic biblical vision of the kingdom of God. God's reign relates to the flourishing of humanity and creation in all dimensions of life. Psalm 85 looks forward to a time when ‘righteousness and peace will kiss each other’ (Ps 85:10).Footnote 13 To put it pointedly with Black theologian and pastor Raphael G. Warnock, the Bible addresses not just ‘the slavery of sin’ but also ‘the sin of slavery’.Footnote 14 Evangelicalism tends to have little to say about the latter. We must insist, however, that theology must be God-talk in the context of the joys and sufferings of our world today. And it must be God-talk, which begins with Jesus’ proclamation that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:15).
There is a third option, which relates to modern and late modern culture simply by ignoring it. The church here seeks to offer its own ecclesial culture instead. Adherents of this approach sometimes like to think of the church as a counter-cultural colony. They trust the ability of congregants to learn the language and grammar of faith through the common celebration of worship and life in community. Faith resembles a language game the rules of which must be learned, not least through the assumed self-explanatory strength of the liturgy. Theologians of this stripe opt for a counter-cultural approach also to political engagement. They claim that the church impacts the world not by being engaged in worldly politics, but rather through a distinctive virtuous lifestyle that requires disassociation from the power structures of this world. Theology, on this model, becomes an exercise by the church and for the church. It is said to need no apologetics to the world.
The risks in this church approach to ecclesial and theological identity are more difficult to assess. Its representatives claim to have found a solution to the dual crisis of relevance and identity. And yet, their approach raises questions on several counts. To begin with, the notion that the church can offer its own counter-culture does not acknowledge sufficiently how interwoven all church communities are with their cultural surroundings.Footnote 15 If cultures have permeable boundaries and mutually influence each other, it is not possible, as Kathryn Tanner has shown, to speak meaningfully of a distinctly Christian counter-culture amid late modern culture.Footnote 16 Rather, Christians have many ongoing social interactions with people who do not belong to their community – interactions that ‘infiltrate’ the way people act within their churches. In addition, Christians share many of their communal practices with others. In fact, they borrow many of them from elsewhere in society, even while they oppose it.Footnote 17
If Christians interact with others, share many of their practices with them and even borrow from them, the way they relate to the surrounding culture is not that of an all-or-nothing confrontation, as the representatives of the church theology approach often imply. Rather, Christians approach culture in a differentiated manner. They adopt and transform practices of their host-culture in what Tanner calls ‘a piecemeal process’, adopting one practice, transforming another and rejecting a third.Footnote 18 Both the attempt to secure the church's identity over against the world in terms of its distinctive communal practices and the notion of the counter-cultural community are highly questionable.
A similar critique applies to the church theologians’ claim that the signs and symbols of the church's worship have self-explanatory power.Footnote 19 If the liturgy were to communicate meaning to the participants of worship simply by being celebrated together, an explicit mediation to the surrounding modern secular world is unnecessary. The problem is that for the participants in Christian worship, modernity is not just an external reality. Rather, it has long invaded the church from the inside in the individual consciousness of the believers. Liturgical rites do not simply speak for themselves. They need to be interpreted, and the act of interpretation must be done by the participants of worship themselves. These are active contributors or agents in liturgical meaning-making. If one acknowledges this active contribution of the participants in worship, one cannot so easily ignore the effects of secular modernity, however. The latter is not just a reality, which surrounds Christians externally. It deeply affects them, by shaping – consciously or unconsciously – their own view of God, world and humanity. Secular modernity has infiltrated late modern worshippers’ thinking and puts a question mark for them behind the claims of religion.Footnote 20 Christian existence does not take place in an isolated cultural ghetto. Christians are part of this world, and this world is part of them, even as they meet and worship in church.Footnote 21
The church in a consumer culture
None of the three theological approaches to modernity, then, successfully solves the dual crisis of identity and relevance. Let me add another point for consideration. It concerns the church's existence in a consumer culture, which, as Vincent Miller has shown, leads inevitably to the commodification of religion.Footnote 22 Consumer culture is a culture driven by the insatiable desire for consumption. It regards people primarily as consumers, which it entangles in a never-ending cycle of consumption. Consumer culture invites theological resistance on many levels. Its greatest challenge for the church, though, is that it introduces people to the habit of appropriating all things as disposable commodities. Consumer choices are never exclusive. I can eat at McDonald's today and at Wendy's tomorrow. More importantly, commodities are divorced from their larger context of production and use. I pick a product from the shelf, but I usually have no idea who made it and under what conditions.
The logic of commodification extends not only to material but also to cultural goods including religion. In a consumer culture, religion becomes itself a commodity, in the form of prayer beads, Guatemalan crucifixes, Buddha statues for the chimney mantle, Tibetan mandalas or best-selling Gregorian chant CDs. But just as other commodities are divorced in a consumer culture from their various contexts of production and use, so the commodification of religion leads to a similar abstraction. Religious goods and convictions become divorced from their original doctrinal and practical contexts. The rosary finds itself suddenly next to the Buddha statue. Never mind that the two may not quite fit together theologically. For the late modern consumer of religion, such ideological contradictions need not matter. The ever-increasing number of self-described ‘spiritual but not religious’ persons pick and choose objects for spiritual consumption by following personal taste, not theological consistency.
One may call this consumer approach to religion theological ‘bricolage’ or a lifestyle choice.Footnote 23 Either way, it has eminent consequences for the church's proclamation. On first sight, consumer society offers the church valuable opportunities to increase the reach of its proclamation. Here, traditional authorities may lose influence over their flock, but religious leaders can gain celebrity status in the world of modern media instead. The problem is that although they can reach more people more easily, people engage them in much the same way as they respond to other celebrities. In the consumer world of modern media people listen to Pope Francis no differently than to a television talkshow host. People's approach to religious beliefs, symbols, values and authorities is shallower, precisely because they treat celebrities as commodities, abstracted from their theological and communal contexts. Many people may be fascinated by Pope Francis, but most of them are not equally fascinated by his stance on abortion or on women's ordination. They simply fail to associate him with these positions.
It also isn't clear how celebrities impact people's lives beyond a momentary emotional response. The Dalai Lama may touch a chord with many religious consumers when he raises a moral appeal, but in a world where news lasts on average a day he most likely will fail to cause lasting change in them. For that to happen, one needs a long-lasting community of shared virtue, in which individual beliefs and values have their grounding. Without such a community, it is far more difficult for people to act consistently on their moral outrage.Footnote 24
Now, no church can escape the logic of a consumer culture altogether, because it absorbs even its critics by turning them into yet another commodity.Footnote 25 Ernesto Che Guevara may have hated capitalism, but capitalism made a lot of money selling t-shirts decorated with the iconic face of Che Guevara. And yet, the temptation for the church to adjust its proclamation and mission to the logic of consumer culture is risky, for Christian identity is easily lost here. For a while, the First Existentialist Church of Atlanta in my neighbourhood displayed a large poster outside of its sanctuary that read: ‘We don't want to tell you what to believe. We think you might have some good ideas of your own.’ This slogan captures well the promise and the risk of bricolage religion. Now, you might say that existentialist churches have little Christian identity to lose in the first place. True enough. But the problem also hits the mainline denominations.
In a study of an upstart United Methodist congregation in Chicago some sixteen years ago, liturgical theologian Ron Anderson described how Generation X pastors attempted to reach the unchurched among their peers.Footnote 26 The congregation deliberately met in a coffee shop where people congregated around various tables. One of them was set up with candles, bread, grape juice and baskets to function as a liturgical centre. The church did not identify itself denominationally nor did it use official liturgical materials by its denomination. Worship consisted of simple songs, words of welcome, a reading, a blessing and a dismissal. There were no acts of communal prayer, however. Instead of the pastor preaching, congregants were invited to talk about the texts around their various tables. A concluding conversation of the whole group transitioned to an invitation to all to come to the table. The pastor paraphrased the biblical institution narrative and invited those present to commune by self-service, buffet-style.
Worship at this congregation demonstrates well the risk of losing one's Christian identity when the church wholeheartedly embraces consumer culture in the hope of reaching the unchurched. Now, to be sure, I see no problem in creating alternative, non-traditional, more dialogical worship styles in uncommon venues. What I find problematic is the denial or relativising of Christian identity to meet the religious seeker. In the church that Ron Anderson studied, the fear that authority can become authoritarian led to a rejection of ‘both the authoritarian and the authoritative’.Footnote 27 Christian scriptures functioned no differently than texts from other religious communities. The biblical institution narrative, Anderson observed, was of no more importance than other ‘table stories’.Footnote 28 In fact, table fellowship in this congregation was less a eucharistic practice than a ritual of ‘breaking the loaf’.Footnote 29 Communion was neither administered by the pastor nor by the members of the congregation to one another. The pastor saw herself simply as a host who prepares the tables and issues an invitation to come and eat whenever one feels like it. The problem, Anderson concludes, is that to reach the unchurched churches ‘dispose of or hide their own, often unexplored, liturgical and sacramental traditions . . . only to offer patterns and practices that more readily express the unfaith of the seeker’.Footnote 30
Bricolage spirituality may insinuate relevance to people, but the hope people invest in it, I want to suggest, is bound to be disappointed. It easily becomes a narcissistic construction – a mirror-gazing endeavour, which is supposed to reaffirm a fragile ego, but fails to challenge it and probably even falls short of affirming it. To truly help me, affirmation must be spoken to me by another. A self-made gospel is no good news, because it is no news at all. It is simply a cry for redemption. Barth recognised this when he remarked that there is a reason why people come to pastors and theologians with their ultimate question. ‘Apparently’, he wrote, ‘by coming to us they are somehow expressing their realization that the human cannot answer this question alone.’Footnote 31 And he suspects why: ‘The human does not cry for solutions, but for salvation, not for something human again, but for God as the Savior of his humanity.’Footnote 32
Already Augustine made much the same point when he affirmed in his Confessions that ‘our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’. For while we can find some affirmation, forgiveness and meaning amongst ourselves, ultimate affirmation, forgiveness and meaning can be found only in the source of all being. The infinity of our desires can only be matched by the infinity of the One who created us. God, however, is not at our disposal. God cannot be found bricolage-style, even if the late modern, consuming, spiritual but not religious self hopes to do so. Redemption cannot be self-made. It can only be found. Or more accurately: redemption must find us. Churches would do well, then, not to give in to the temptation to offer a buffet-style, self-serve gospel. If they wish to meet the unchurched by denying themselves, they may gain members but lose their identity. More likely, they will lose both. The coffee shop congregation that Ron Anderson studied in 2001, and which did not want to be known by its Methodist name, no longer exists today.
The loss of alterity in the modern West
I want to suggest that behind the struggles of the contemporary churches to remain relevant without losing their identity lies a common problem, which we may describe with Emmanuel Levinas as the loss of alterity or otherness.Footnote 33 In our daily life, we are constantly surrounded by otherness. Just think of the otherness of those around us: people who look different, who love differently, who have different cultural habits and different religions. Because alterity is threatening to us, we constantly try to keep our distance from it or try to bring it under our control. Western political efforts to wall off the flood of refugees, for example, express such a strategy to keep otherness at a safe distance. Immersing ourselves into the ordinariness of life is another way to keep alterity at bay.Footnote 34
Fear of otherness is a universal human problem, but it is also a particularly modern one. It may not be by accident that the suburban single-family home represents the iconic dwelling place of modern western cultures. So are suburban subdivisions with their manicured front lawns and homeowners’ associations that vigilantly regulate a neighbourhood's uniform appearance.Footnote 35 Suburban single-family homes are best suited to keep alterity at bay. Sameness comforts. Otherness disturbs. Our suburbs and increasingly even many urban neighborhoods are ethnically and economically homogeneous. People want to live with those who look and earn like them. Immigrants live in neighbourhoods where no one else wants to live, be it in London, Paris, Berlin, New York or Sydney.
What haunts our neighbourhoods, namely the desire for sameness and the urge to keep alterity at bay, permeates the modern church as well.Footnote 36 Given mainline Protestantism's espousal of modern culture and evangelicalism's similarly enthusiastic embrace at least of many modern achievements, this should not surprise us. Modern Christians are deeply invested in keeping the alterity of their neighbors at a distance. Christian worship in the West is just as homogeneous as our suburbs are. This may not yet be as obvious in most European countries as in classical immigrant nations, such as Canada, Australia and the United States. The rapid emergence and growth of immigrant churches in western Europe and the failure to integrate them with existing church structures, however, indicates that the phenomenon is ubiquitous. People not only want to live, but they also want to worship with those who look and earn like them.Footnote 37 What Martin Luther King Jr. observed over half a century ago for American society still holds today, and not just in America: 11 am on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week. This is as true with respect to economic status as ethnicity. American church-growth manuals, such as Rick Warren's highly popular The Purpose-Driven Church, explicitly suggest that you grow your church by promoting economic homogeneity among its members.Footnote 38 Again, North America serves as a case study here, but as global migration increasingly marks the church in other Western societies the problem replicates itself elsewhere.Footnote 39 Otherness makes modern Christians nervous, even though they confess a common human origin and a common human destiny in God's kingdom.
Where the church celebrates alterity-free worship in economically, ethnically and ideologically homogeneous congregations, though, it runs the risk of becoming a social club of like-minded people for mutual self-affirmation. Indeed, Protestant churches often develop a culture of intimacy for its own sake. The community of the saints here translates into being close friends with one another.Footnote 40 Familiarity becomes an explicit goal in worship itself, so much so that twentieth-century church architecture developed its own distinctive style, the modern communal church – laid out to enable hospitality and a culture of intimacy.Footnote 41 But human intimacy cannot be the goal of worship. As Graham Hughes points out, it can be at best a ‘hoped-for byproduct of corporate worship, but when the priorities are reversed, the one becomes the other's sublimate’.Footnote 42
Christians do not only keep each other's alterity at bay. We also seek to suppress God's otherness. The bourgeois age of sensibility has created the notion of God as the ever-loving, ever-forgiving Father, well-known in German as der liebe Gott, and has contrasted him with the supposedly vengeful God of the Old Testament.Footnote 43 Concomitant with this conception of the ever-loving Father was the image of the ever-so-meek Jesus, which conveniently forgot about the righteous anger with which Jesus could meet his contemporaries, or the harsh warnings with which he confronted some of his listeners. White American Christianity, for its part, created the image of the white Jesus. And today, we turn God into our pal. In fashioning God in our image, we try to deny, control or ignore God's otherness. We lose sight of the fact that God is not just like us, but is wholly Other (totaliter aliter). In the Middle Ages, the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that ‘however great the likeness that can be noticed between Creator and creature, the unlikeness to be noticed is greater still’.Footnote 44 In all similarity between God and world, there is an always greater dissimilarity.Footnote 45 God's likeness to us needs to be balanced with God's otherness – and this otherness is in acute danger of being lost in the church today.
The loss of materiality in Protestant worship
This loss may be connected with the diminished semiotic forms that have marked much Protestant worship since the sixteenth-century Reformation.Footnote 46 Graham Hughes has shown that the loss of God's alterity in modern Protestantism can be traced back at least partly to this issue. Under the influence of western philosophy, from Plato to Descartes, Protestantism in the Calvinistic tradition has developed a dislike for material or physical mediations of the divine, which it identified prematurely with idolatry. Instead, it has developed the concept of a disseminated sacramentality – an affirmation of God's universal presence in the world and especially in human beings as images of God. Such disseminated sacramentality has become the hallmark of ‘low church’ traditions and is highly influential today across the spectrum of Protestant churches in the widespread desire for so-called contemporary worship.
Exclusive focus on disseminated sacramentality, however, comes at a high price, as it leaves mainline Protestantism dangerously exposed today to the inadvertent takeover by modernity's immanentism.Footnote 47 Because of the extreme reduction of material signs as carriers of divine meaning in Protestant non-sacramental worship, the resulting worship practice requires a high degree of interiority and imagination. Protestantism has reduced human communication with God mostly to the oral and aural senses, so that worship is almost exclusively focused on preaching and hearing. Other human senses, like sight, taste, touch and smell play little or no role in how most Protestants communicate with God. Without these other senses, however, meaning-making in worship relies to a high degree on our imagination, which involves great risks. Jean-Luc Marion argues that in the imagination the icon all too easily becomes an idol, which serves merely as the mirror of the self's gaze. Heavy reliance on one's imagination, then, makes worshippers especially prone to the modern danger of solipsism.Footnote 48 And celebrating worship bereft of iconic pointers to a God who is not just like us but also profoundly unlike us makes such worship more vulnerable to misinterpretation.
Rediscovering God's holiness
If contemporary church and theology are in danger of losing sight of alterity, I want to suggest that we can regain a sense of God's otherness by rediscovering God's holiness. ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts’, the heavenly seraphim assembled around the heavenly throne of God sing in Isaiah 6:3. And Jesus tells us accordingly that our first prayer shall be: ‘Father, sanctified be your name’ (Luke 11:2).Footnote 49 For the Bible, God is first and foremost the Holy One.
God's sanctity sets God apart from humankind and creation. It is dangerous. Even the seraphim need to cover their faces and feet with their wings. The prophet Isaiah is terrified. ‘Woe is me!’ he exclaims, ‘I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’ (Isa 6:5). Behind Isaiah's terror at the sight of God stands the awareness that for mortals, it is impossible to see God and live.Footnote 50
If God's inaccessible holiness encapsulates the distance between God and humankind, it is at the same time the very precondition for humans to be able to have communion with God.Footnote 51 Those who pray for God's name to be sanctified are also instructed to pray: ‘Thy kingdom come.’ And to their Trisagion, the heavenly seraphim immediately add that ‘the whole earth is full of his glory’ (Isa 6:3).Footnote 52 God shares God's holy presence through God's glory, which by inhabiting the world makes it God's property.Footnote 53 Only by participating in God's glory does the world have existence. God's glory constitutes it as God's creation.
The importance of proper respect for God's holiness dominates not only the Bible, but also the church's classic understanding of its own worship. In the Eastern Orthodox invitation to the communion table, the presiding priest sings over the prepared foods on the altar: ‘Holy things for the holy people’, to which the congregation responds: ‘One is holy, one is Lord: Jesus Christ, to the glory of God.’Footnote 54 This short liturgical exchange captures well what is at stake in worship: the priest's words are both invitation and warning: invitation to have communion with God through bread and wine, and a solemn warning that communion with God is nothing to be taken lightly. The holy things are only for the holy people. At the same time, the congregation's response makes clear that holiness is not a quality that Christians bring to the table. Rather, it is God's nature alone. Only one is holy means that neither the things nor the people are holy in and of themselves. They are holy, as Cyril of Jerusalem says, only by receiving the gift of God's holiness: ‘For truly one is holy, by nature holy’, Cyril writes, adding, ‘And we are also holy, not, however, by nature, but by participation and discipline and prayer.’Footnote 55 We are holy, because God makes us holy in the gift of holiness that comes in bread and wine.
If ‘One is holy’, Jesus Christ, his life and death must impact our understanding of holiness itself. Theologically, it surely matters that Jesus transgressed the Sabbath law of Moses (Mark 2:23–8; 3:1–6), that he did not protect his own ritual purity when he healed lepers (Mark 1:40–5; see also 14:3), and that he showed himself critical of ritual gifts to God (Mark 7:11). Most of all, it matters that Jesus’ own death did not take place on holy ground, but rather ‘outside the city gate’ (Heb 13:12). It marked him as cursed, for Deuteronomy 21:23 establishes that ‘anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse’.
There are two things here to be learned. First, in his ministry Jesus demonstrates that what is at stake in the law of Moses is both God's holiness and human flourishing. Both go hand in hand. Humans flourish if they give God the glory. When the disciples transgressed the Sabbath laws of Moses, Jesus claimed that ‘[t]he Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath’ (Mark 2:27). The point was not to abolish the holiness of the Sabbath, but rather to lift its deeper meaning, which is to honour both God and humans. God's holiness does not hinder human flourishing, but rather enables it. This is to say: God and humanity are not in a competitive relationship with each other.Footnote 56 It is not as if we thrive less if we give God more glory. On the contrary, we thrive more the more we accept our difference from God by giving God the glory. Human life does well precisely when it recognises its difference from the holiness of God.
The second point to be learned here comes from Christ's death. We saw that his cross outside the city gate marked him as rejected by God. From this circumstance, the letter to the Hebrews draws a paradoxical conclusion. It remarks that Jesus died in an unholy place precisely ‘to sanctify the people by his own blood’ (13:12). In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes similarly that Christ ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal 3:13; see also John 19:31). And in 1 Corinthians, the apostle suggests no less paradoxically that the cross allows us to participate in God's holiness.Footnote 57 It is worth quoting Paul here at some length:
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption . . . (1 Cor 1:27–31)
The Holy One dies an unholy death to make us holy. Holiness is not something God holds onto, but rather something that God gives freely away for our sake. ‘Though he was in the form of God’, Paul writes to the Philippians, he ‘humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:6–8). As Gordon Lathrop puts it, ‘[i]f only Jesus Christ is holy, then God's holiness is the very giving away of holiness to others, for others’.Footnote 58 Such giving away, however, does not diminish God's holiness. It rather confirms it.
And so, it should not surprise us that in Revelation, the seer describes four living creatures, one like a lion, one like an ox, one with a face like a human face and one like a flying eagle, who stand around the heavenly throne and sing ‘day and night, without ceasing . . . “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God, the Almighty, who was and is and is to come”’ (Rev 4:8). And immediately, the twenty-four elders whose thrones surround the throne of God
fall before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives for ever and ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing, ‘You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.’ (Rev 4:9–11)
Heavenly worship is marked here by the awesome and frightening holiness of God just as much as it was in the vision of the prophet Isaiah.
Conclusion
The church, I proposed, would do well to address the modern loss of alterity by rediscovering God's holiness. But how do we do this? Let me conclude with some modest suggestions first for contemporary theology and second for the contemporary church. I have already noted that theologians need to learn again to talk about both God and the human plight or, more precisely, to talk about human suffering and hope sub ratione Dei, that is, by relating it to God. Let me add just one additional consideration regarding Christian theology here.
Speaking sub ratione Dei does not mean simply talking about God as an interested participant-observer would do. This, in my view, is the fallacy of the ethnographic approach to theology, which contends itself with describing people's faith.Footnote 59 Theological speech about God, however, requires that we talk about faith based on God's revelation. And we cannot speak about God unless God first speaks to us. It was Barth who reminded modern theology of this truth that seems self-evident but that we so easily forget. ‘To speak of God in all seriousness’, Barth wrote in 1922, ‘would mean to speak on the grounds of revelation and faith.’Footnote 60 The challenge here is not simply to repeat what the Bible says, however, but rather to speak – as Barth puts it – ‘that Word which can only come from God himself: the Word, God becomes man’.Footnote 61 ‘We can say these three words,’ Barth warns us, ‘but it does not mean we have spoken the Word of God that contains the truth. Our theological task is to say that God becomes human and to say it as the Word of God, as God would say it.’Footnote 62 But this is exactly what we cannot do. ‘As theologians’, Barth insists, ‘we ought to speak of God. But we are humans and as such cannot speak of God.’Footnote 63 So what shall we do? ‘We ought to do both’, Barth proposes, ‘to know the “ought” and the “not able to”, and precisely in this way give God the glory.’Footnote 64 Let me suggest, therefore, that we theologians do both: start talking in a new way about God again and do so with an epistemic humility that leads to doxology: soli Deo gloria.
The church has its work cut out for itself. There is a tendency in liberal Protestantism to reduce love of God to love of neighbour and faith to social action.Footnote 65 But love of God and love of neighbour are no more identical than they are alternatives.Footnote 66 Those who look to God in prayer are sent to their neighbours in need. Those who meet their neighbours in need encounter God in them. In fact, the face of the suffering creature sends us right back to God in prayer. The same dialectic holds true for Christian worship: worship must give God the glory, and it must send the assembly out to feed the poor. Worship must not draw any attention to itself, but it also must not be reduced to a means for achieving something else, even if this were the most noble moral end. Giving God the glory is always an end in itself. Worship must not deteriorate into a feel-good session, an entertainment event or a social justice meeting.
It is instructive to attend to how we pray. Often our prayers are not prayers at all. Our gestures give it away. Leaders in worship pray to God but they look at the congregation. This is a mark of semiotic confusion. Gesture and liturgical action do not match. Prayers are addressed to God and not to the people. Perhaps, though, the semiotically confused gesture betrays what is truly going on, for prayers often turn out to be moral instructions directed at the congregation. God surely does not need to be instructed about the many social and moral evils that beset our broken world. This is not to say, of course, that our prayers should ignore the joys and sufferings of the people of God and stay docetically in the general and abstract. Prayer needs to bring the joys and hopes, the pains and sufferings of the people of God before God, but it needs to do so in praise, intercession and lament. Prayer and all of worship must be truly vocative: it must call on God to come to our help.
God's holy presence should inspire awe and perhaps at least every once and a while cause a little trembling. The Holy One is not to be toyed with. As Gordon Lathrop puts it, ‘God is strange and other, not our buddy, but indeed to be feared.’Footnote 67 The informality popular in much contemporary worship ends up dangerously diminishing this sense of God's holiness, as does the increasingly inescapable omnipresence of technology in worship. Today LED screens often present the strongest symbol in many worship spaces across the globe. They overwhelm and even substitute for all other iconic pointers to God's presence, be it the cross, the pulpit, the font, the altar, the cup and the bread, or the congregation itself that morphs into a mere audience. What does the screen symbolise? Hardly God's inaccessible holiness. More likely, it just symbolises an obsession with novelty, which but reflects modernity's immanentism.
Over against these tendencies, Protestantism may be greatly helped in rediscovering the alterity of God's holiness by recovering the true iconicity of Christian worship. As Jean-Luc Marion puts it, icons can serve as pointers to infinity. In contrast to the idol, which acts only as a mirror that reflects the gaze's image, the icon directs persons beyond themselves to the divine. Protestant churches, I suggest, need to invest less in the latest technological advances and more in a new appreciation of the sacraments, because sacraments rather than screens confront us with God's ultimate otherness and help us avoid endless self-referentiality.
Central to the recovery of God's holiness in church and theology is returning to the cross. The incomprehensibility of the cross – ‘a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor 1:23) – confronts us with God's alterity in an ultimate way. It constitutes a permanent crisis for all theology. They ‘deserve to be called theologians who understand the visible and back parts of God seen in suffering and the cross’, Luther claims in the Heidelberg Disputation, adding, ‘A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.’Footnote 68 Today, the cross has become a scandal for much of Christian theology and a folly to the modern consumer world around us. It can be reified and abstracted from the ugliness of torture and capital punishment, to be sure, and has often become a commodity for sale. Still, when church and theology recover the reality of the One ‘from whom others hide their faces’ (Isa 53:3), they can help free us from our self-made images of God that replicate only our own image. The face of the crucified One is for us the ultimate reminder of God's inaccessible holiness.
It is perhaps not by accident that the church sings the seraphic Trisagion, ‘Holy, holy, holy’, at the very moment in which the worshipping assembly not only commemorates but participates in the cross-event through its eucharistic celebration. The cross of Christ confronts us with God's holiness ever anew in ways that we must yet comprehend. The cross of Christ, then, as Moltmann reminds us, is the ultimate Christian answer to the church's dual crisis of identity and relevance. As he put it so memorably: ‘Christian theology must be theology of the cross, if it is to be identified as Christian theology through Christ.’Footnote 69
