Theology: God as Non-Being

For contemporary theologians, God is a dimming concept. Assorted Anglican bishops pull him back from “out there” in space and redefine God as ground of being. Some Protestant “Christian atheists” stand ready to write his obituary. Catholics and Protestants alike admit that the traditional proofs for God’s existence can be satisfactorily disproved, and earnestly strive for new ways to define and explain his presence.

To Leslie Dewart, a Roman Catholic philosopher who was born in Spain and now teaches at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, the trouble is not so much with God as with the language used to describe him. What Christianity needs, Dewart says in The Future of Belief (Herder & Herder; $4.95), is to “de-Hellenize” its thinking, abandoning concepts of God derived from Greek and Medieval philosophy that are out of accord with the contemporary experience of man.

No More Superjudge. Dewart thinks that atheists such as Freud have a point in viewing religion as something that in the past has hindered rather than helped man’s self-development. The church, he says, should concede that many of its teachings about God—the superjudge, for example, who mechanistically rewards good and punishes evil in the afterlife—are immature and unthinkable to the modern mind. One key concept that Dewart regards as disposable is the Christian conviction, derived from Hellenic philosophy, that God is to be understood in terms of being.

Medieval scholastics, following the sages of ancient Greece, defined God as “subsisting Being Itself”—a Supreme Creator whose essence is identical with his existence. Whatever value the formula once had, says Dewart, it no longer accords with contemporary philosophical conceptions of being, which limit the word to knowable, created things and to men. Moreover, Christian belief is not an intellectual acquiescence in the idea of God as Supreme Being, but involves “a leap of faith”—an act of total self-commitment to God as a transcendent reality who is at once absent and present to man. In the future, Dewart argues, Christianity might not conceive God as a being—which means, literally, that God does not exist, since existence is a property of beings only.

Nameless Presence. In Dewart’s brief sketch of a theology for the future, the church might no longer talk of God as a Trinity, since the terminology—three persons in one nature—is also applicable only to finite beings. Nor will God be considered omnipotent. Platonic thinking led the scholastics to envision a God who stood over and against nature. The idea of God as a transcendental presence implies to Dewart that God is to be envisioned as a reality found in and through nature, as the shaping force of history. And in so far as the word “God” has become a symbol of an outdated supernatural idol, Dewart proposes that the church might well resign itself to silence as to the name of the reality-beyond-being it serves and preaches.