In this article, I walk a path that many no doubt have gone before me. It is a journey from a faith-based framework to one that is decidedly not; one that should rather be described as some form of atheism.
While I do not really self-describe as an atheist, I have to come clean with myself concerning some of the insights that have developed over the years. I believe some form of atheism is called for. An atheism that is methodological in its approach not in its claims. I seek a kind of atheism that could be described as religionless theology.
In my own work of theologizing and meaning-making I have tried to walk the fine line between theism and atheism, or better, go beyond the divide. This article is a further outworking of that effort. What is new is that for the first time I intentionally embrace the word “atheist” though with a twist.
What is Methodological Atheism?
What I understand by methodological atheism is an approach to interpreting the human experience that takes into account that human beings are thrown into the world. Because of their self-consciousness, they construct meaning for themselves as they go.
There is nothing we know of which the knowledge has not proceeded from our hands or our minds as we interact with the world and with each other searching for meaning. Particularly religions with their claims concerning higher realities and hereafters need to come to terms that they are elaborate communal meaning-making efforts that have forgotten this.
Methodological atheism is the effort to think about the world and construct meaning without recourse to a higher reality. Insofar metaphysical realities are invoked or made part of the discourse, they function as signifiers of humanity. Why? Because that is what they are at heart.
The Emptying Of Metaphysics
Metaphysical entities don’t carry any ontological weight. Not because the natural is privileged over the supernatural, but because all metaphysics is a human imaginative response to the physical. Though gods may exist (indeed, the physical is deeply spiritual), though a will may be driving all of reality to a certain goal, though something or someone may have created this world, though someone may have a reality beyond the material, it (or that) is not spoken of. That is to say, it cannot be the referent of any claim, demand, law, revelation or information, because whatever we say of, about, and on behalf of it, is ever the product of our imagination.
(As an aside, I just said that metaphysical entities don’t carry any ontological weight. It is important to note here that to an extent they do, of course. When and where they do, it is solely because we have surrendered our political and economic systems to their care. What we believe the gods to be, is how our world will be shaped. That holds for both religious deities and ideologies. The latter even more, because with ideologies we fool ourselves into thinking that we have overcome the gods and are now living according to certain principles of necessity.)
This method of the interpretation of reality entails that there is no knowledge from without. That is, there is no revelation. At least, there is no revelation as information. So, all the gods are products of our meaning-making endeavors. They are produced for various purposes. In a way, gods are machines, social machines, meaning-making machines, machines to acquire power or wealth, etc.
There is no absolute knowledge of god or gods. The very concept of the divine is a creation of humanity’s intuition. It can therefore never have any higher status than that of signifier of our fabric of meaning-making. It can not stand above us, it cannot control us with absolute power or claim our lives whether by natural law or by divine revelation. The gods are always, and I emphasize _always_, the product of the human response to being thrown into the world.
Pointing Humanity Back To Itself
Once we see this, we step back and prefer to refrain from using the word god too much. We're also hesitant to use it too little because doing that fools us into thinking that we can do without the gods (see my aside above). Capitalism shows what happens when we do that. It's even worse than religion.
Methodological atheism concerns itself with pointing humanity back to itself, shaping the words and oracles of its gods into laughing mirrors for humanity. It warns against the idols we fashion as they take ontological form in our political and economic systems and become the executioners of our judgments over our neighbor and the justification of our exploitation of powerless minorities. This is why I call this religionless theology.
In essence, Jesus made that very move in his time. Even though his teachings were religiously framed, they completely upended standard religious conventions concerning the god, perhaps nowhere more (perhaps paradoxically) than in his close identification with the God of Israel.
A Little Background to Methodological Atheism
The first time I coined or heard (I don’t remember) the term methodological atheism I was studying Heidegger whose “Being and Time” follows that trajectory of methodological atheism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who engages Heidegger in-depth in his second dissertation “Act and Being,” critiqued Heidegger for this methodology. Bonhoeffer thought it closed Dasein (i.e. humanity) off from an address from the outside in which the truth of its being was disclosed to itself.
I still think Bonhoeffer has a point. We need an openness to hear an address, a call, a trace of something that challenges us beyond our human limits and conventions; something that helps us see ourselves in a different light. Where I don’t agree with Bonhoeffer is that I think that this address doesn’t need to come from outside, from a divine entity, a divine source that is recognizable as such. It can simply come from a disturbance from within the fabric of meaning and the system we have devised. The way Bonhoeffer continues to talk about his ideal interpretation of the church constitutes, I believe, precisely such a disturbance.
A Disturbance At The Heart Of the System
The disturbance needed reveals how our meaning-making and our systems have covered up an abyss at the heart of our existence and put us in power of our destiny and others. Revealing this abyss can lead either to nihilism or to new meaning beyond conventional meaning. It is a risk worth taking. Disturbance means the potential for destruction as well as deconstruction.
The gospel, interpreted in a religionless manner, is such a disturbance. However, instead of revealing an abyss and insisting on utter meaningless, it invites us to lose our lives for the sake of the meaning beyond the meaning: in the obliteration (or at least the risking) of our lives on behalf of the other, we find new meaning to our lives again. It is a great risk because it forces us to face the abyss of meaninglessness and basically asks us to jump into it. Where systems are designed to help us forget the abyss, the gospel, interpreted in a religionless manner, invites us to jump for the sake of meaning beyond meaning.
Bonhoeffer’s Immanent Revelation
Of course, Bonhoeffer knew this very well. He did not present the address from outside as informational revelation like many theologians even today would prefer. Instead, he presented revelation as a form of being of which no metaphysical aspect can be intimated. It is entirely here in the flesh, so to speak, as a disturbance in the fabric of human existence. Bonhoeffer is actually very clear on how this works: you can’t understand revelation, or the gospel, or Christ unless you start participating in it. Only then you begin to understand, experientially, in your embodied existence, what the new being is all about.
This was Bonhoeffer’s articulation of his Hegelian interpretation of the church. The Church was for him Christ existing as community. Revelation is the embodied spirit of Christ in the earthly community. In many ways, following Luther (but also very sensitive to his times) Bonhoeffer turned revelation from an otherworldly address that comes from above into something entirely immanent. An emphasis on the incarnation provided him the tools to move away from a metaphysical conception of revelation. Whatever God is, God is not up there, but here in the flesh, in the community.
For me, it is only natural to take Bonhoeffer's understanding of revelation as immanent a small step further. I simply strike through the notion that the source of this subversive being is metaphysical, supernatural, or other-worldly. Sure, it may be God or something, but we do not know. There is no such thing as informational revelation only enfleshed revelation that simply manifests as something different in the force field of the human system. This is a religionless theology a.k.a. something very similar to the methodological atheism Heidegger embraced but with the incorporation of a religionless understanding of the gospel.
Why is Methodological Atheism needed?
This brings me to the question of why methodological atheism is needed in my opinion. There are two things that in my understanding necessitate a religionless theology that expresses itself as methodological atheism.
The Cognitive Orientation In Western Thought
For one, Western Christianity has since long sold itself out to a cognitive approach to the Christ-event. This has come in many different ways. Early on, the God of the Greek philosophers was integrated in the theories surrounding the carpenter from Nazareth. This gradually developed into the overly rational and comprehensive systems of medieval scholastic theology. After a brief interlude, Calvinism returned to this approach but now under the guise of being faithful to the Bible. Salvation eventually became to be understood as knowing and affirming the “right” things about Jesus.
We need to get rid of this approach to revelation as it leads to misunderstandings, distortions, bad theology, and abuse. Moreover, a reduction of revelation to the cognitive aspects of certain doctrinal axioms detracts us from an existential encounter with Christ. It reduces the leap of faith that risks one life to a carefully pre-meditated deal that exchanges a suffering mortal existence for eternal bliss in a heavenly abode. It removes the offensiveness and foolishness from the gospel.
The Divine Hierarchies Of The West
Secondly, the problem is not so much that Western Christianity was obsessed with knowing the right things about God. Rather, it was obsessed with power. The medieval system of the Neoplatonic divine emanation of being and the Aristotelian path of reason and ethical ascent back to the divine was tightly integrated with papal hierarchy. Calvinism’s later insistence on divine sovereignty, predestination, and providence are directly related to this heritage of wanting a top-down system through which absolute authority was carefully administered, controlled, and distributed.
Christianity’s quest for power was transferred to its secularized versions of domination and exploitation such as colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. In all of these ideologies, white Christian Europe is a privileged race under the aegis of either a divine monarch or his secularized successors: progress, free market, and white supremacy.
Atheism Needed To Free The Idea Of God
We need methodological atheism to counter and break down the cognitive orientation of Western Christianity paradoxically precisely if we want to retain an idea of god. We need it to subvert the hierarchical paradigms that treat as an absolute necessity, either the god or some secular ideology in which name authority is measured out for control and domination. We need this form of atheism precisely (once again) if we want to liberate the idea of god from the domestication of Western theologies and ideologies.
The kind of methodological atheism I propose needs therefore to be intimately conversant with theology so as to use it as a tool to expose the idols. This is why in my mind methodological atheism and religionless theology are one and the same.
Metaphysics Without The Meta
Methodological atheists are not absolute or ontological atheists, they don't claim this or that about the ultimate nature of reality; they simply concern themselves with the expression of human beingness in such a way that a greater good is achieved for all human beings.
Methodological atheism exposes the gods as fraudulent attempts to grab power and expose non-religious ideologies as seats of incognito divine powers.
I am interested in Jesus because, with Jesus, god is understood as antithetical to humanity and subversive with regard to human systems; whatever was present in Jesus expresses itself as a form of being that is willing to abandon itself on behalf of the other. Jesus is the location of continuous production of the new. This god, as the willingness to lose its being in self-abandonment, represents a permanent being-decentering approach that may point to a new location for revelation: a metaphysics without the meta.
This revelation does not concern itself with "info" about gods, angels, demons, heaven, and hell but represents a non-religious new way of being in the world that points us to a way beyond our own moral capacity. This revelation is therefore both antithetical to what we are and part of the unfolding of the world's being. It is generated from within us and stands over against us as that which we are not. In that sense, revelation is real. It just doesn’t come from above but from below.
Emptying the Inner Citadel of Christian Discourse
I return to Bonhoeffer. Where above I discussed his second dissertation “Act and Being” written in the late 20s, I now turn to his fragmentary prison letters. Just months before his execution, Bonhoeffer had something of a paradigm shift. He shared his new ideas in some of his letters in the second half of 1944.
As If God’s Is Not Given
Next to his phrase “religionless Christianity” which the title of this piece refers to, he insisted that Christians need to live in the world as if God is not given. The Latin phrase for this is “etsi deus non daretur est.” This is significant because, during his readings in prison, Bonhoeffer had it picked up from Hugo Grotius, the 17th-century Dutch jurist, who coined the term first. He believed that the laws of a nation should be written as if God is not given. He believed that the sovereignty of nations was not anchored in God but in the people. That was a revolutionary idea at the time.
This early step toward the secularization of society is picked up by Bonhoeffer, who insists that the Christian community needs to be present in a secular world as if God is not given. Without God we live in the world before God, he insisted. For Bonhoeffer, this had both a practical and a theological side. Practically, it meant that any pretense to speak and act on behalf of God is pointless in a society that no longer believes such a god exists or wields any power.
Religionless like God Wants It
But there’s also a theological side. In conformity with the theology of the cross, Bonhoeffer saw deep theological meaning in the process of secularization. Just as Christ was pushed out of the world on behalf of the world by the world, so secular society has dispensed with the idea of God. But in and through this, as the world comes to its own, comes of age, God withdraws not in spite of the world, but with and for the world. God is always crucified and pushed out of the world. The community of faith needs to follow suit. With Christ, it is kicked out of the world, i.e. its reference to Christ needs to be muted.
Where Hugo Grotius called for a society independent of God based on natural law and where Bonhoeffer calls the Christian community to become part of this world by means of a religionless Christianity that lives with and for the world as if God is not given, I believe we need to make the next move.
Making The Final Move
Bonhoeffer still wanted to retain an arcane discipline, a secret continuation of the Christian rites and the Christian community behind closed doors, so to speak. In a sense, for Bonhoeffer, theology continues on with its doctrines and its absolute claims concerning God and the community continues to keep the old Christianity alive in a form that goes back hundreds of years.
I propose, however, that the Christian community not only live in the world as if god is not given, but that it empties the inner citadel of Christian discourse of whatever concept of God resides there with all its attached notions of ontological reality and its discourse of descriptive attributes of what god is, what god thinks, what god says, where god resides, and what he is like.
We need to do theology as if God is not given. Why? Because God is not given. And insofar God is given to us with the incarnation of the Word, the recognizability, transparency, and objectifiability of Jesus as the incarnated Word of God is gone. All we have is a few metaphors to describe his appearance and 2000 years of unverifiable historical claims.
Religionless Theology as Methodological Atheism
What we are left with is methodological atheism that expresses itself in a certain kind of religionless theology. It has the following characteristics:
- It sees god as a possibility but never as actuality, except in the flesh
- It hears god as a call that can’t be identified but nonetheless heard. What it hears is merely a trace of something that is silent as we listen.
- It is thoroughly post-metaphysical in which its metaphysical work consists of ruling out any reification of a meta.
- It uses its theological prowess to expose the idols of ideology.
- It has an entirely horizontal orientation that, in following the example of Christ, is focused on embodied human existence and seeks to foster the wellbeing of all human communities.
- It neither denies nor affirms the existence of God acknowledging that revelation is never about info but always about being
- It uses the jargon of theology for a discourse that opens up on a plain beyond the antithesis between theism and atheism as it seeks to open up Europe’s cultural repository for new meaning-making.
- In short, it is agnostic, iconoclastic, ethical, and prophetic.
Once Christianity gets rid of the idol of its doctrines, the reified concept of heavenly dwellers, the notion of being guardians of secret other-worldly info, the holy objects paraded in their processions, the god in whose name it thinks to speak to the world– perhaps then, Christianity may become as salt and light for the world as Christ hoped.