A Lesson from the Pagans (3)

Who is like You among the gods, Lord? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders?Exodus 15:11 NASB

Among the gods – “If we were in a position to feel once more what it means for a god to be in our immediate presence, only an experience of this imminence could open our eyes.”[1]  That’s the real problem, isn’t it?  It’s not that we lack historical accounts.  It’s not an absence of customs and rituals.  It’s not want of theological explanation.  It’s the experience that’s missing.  The reality of the presence of the divine.  We are religious, but not spiritual.  We have all the right words but none of the deep encounter.  We have converted the ancients’ holy activity into script in a holy book.  We believe in the writing rather than the person.  Emotional ecstasy and grace have been divorced.  Why?  Because we are missing the one thing necessary for religious man to survive: the appearance of God.

Too much time has been spent on the senseless task of deriving the efficacious from the impotent.  There is nothing in the world which has shown such productivity as the image of deity.  Let us finally be convinced that it is foolish to trace what is most productive back to the unproductive: to wishes, to anxieties, to yearnings; that it is foolish to trace living ideas, which first make rational thought possible, back to rational processes; or the understanding of the essential, which first gives purposeful aspirations their scope and direction, to a concept of utility.[2]

The tragedy of this wasted time has been the rationalization of the sacred, the attempt to make what is holy wholly understandable.  But, as Otto, notes, “ . . . paradox belongs to the nature of everything creative.”[3]  After a long hiatus from experience of the divine, we have arrived at a time when we press “sacred rites into acts of good common sense.”[4]  We have not only demythologized the text, we’ve lobotomized the god-intoxication needed to endure divine encounter.  We’ve taken the witch out of bewitched and produced a rationally emulsified Santa Claus god sitting atop our mosaic images of heaven, placid, unmoving, controlled.  Our God, twenty centuries in the making, no longer needs a corrective course in anger management.  He is restrained by the human logic of religious scholars; no longer feared or unpredictable.  Whether rabbinic or ecclesiastical, the power of religion is now in the hands of the pious rather than the poet.  When Otto writes, “The primeval is that which is most alive—in fact, it alone is truly alive,” he challenges all moderns to rethink the assumption of a rational universe upon which all Western civilization is built.  We have resorted to “explaining” religious ecstasy as a defective function of the rational mind, in need of psychotherapy instead of societal declaration.  The prophets would be detained in asylums today.  God has been domesticated.

Why are we so anxious to repress the divine in our world?  Because “the more alive this life becomes, the nearer death draws, . . .”[5]  “Life which has become sterile totters to meet its end, but love and death have welcomed and clung to one another passionately from the beginning.”[6]  Perhaps we need to completely rethink (if thinking is even the appropriate medium) the connection between Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created . . .” and Genesis 1:2 “And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep . . .”  Then maybe we can experience Job.

Topical Index: life, paradox, death, theology, ecstasy, Exodus 15:11

[1] Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Spring Publications, 1965), p. 21.

[2] Ibid., pp. 29-30.

[3] Ibid., p. 31.

[4] Ibid., p. 41.

[5] Ibid., p. 137.

[6] Ibid.