Reddit reviews The Courage to Be

I hold many of the same views of the radical Christians, but perhaps somewhat surprisingly given my label of choice, apparently differ in holding a more well-defined center.

To get the best view of it, you really need to read Paul Tillich's The Courage To Be. Beware: It's not exactly light reading, and some philosophical familiarity is useful. It's written at the popular level, but popular level for Tillich is still not exactly pulp fiction.

He identifies our existential quandary as the core of religion. Unlike everything else that has been thus far proposed, this has stood up to the onslaught of modernity. When you attempt to unmask our existential quandary, you find underneath it another existential quandary. You can dig down as many layers as you want, and it never converges towards anything we understand. It is in this realm that psychology and religion deeply inform each other. When Ernest Becker spoke of The Denial of Death and Paul Tillich spoke of The Courage to Be, science and religion finally stood united as one. These works have since informed our psychological research and stood up to many empirical tests, particularly in the field of terror management theory. What Tillich calls faith in our ultimate concern, TMT calls death-denying cultural belief systems. (It should be obvious one of these was named by a theologian and the other a psychologist. ;-)

The existential view of religion Tillich points towards is very different from the ones we have generated in the past. What it lacks in history I believe it more than makes up for in the advantages of both being empirically grounded and in postmodern terms, undeconstructable.

Once you understand the insights of TMT (well explained in this award winning documentary) and Tillich's use of Being, you see the world and its various competing meaning systems in a very different light.

As my friends have said, there is no grounding in a sort of certainty narrative like every major world group since the Stoics has chosen, and yet that lack of grounding itself becomes the grounding as we choose to continue Being.

I'll give you my answers, since they're definitely going to be considerably different, at the very least, from the ones you'll get from anyone else around here.

>Mainly, I'm interested in hearing the Protestant criticisms of Catholicism, and Catholic criticism of Protestantism.

I can't really speak to this one, as I'm not really either of those. There are Catholics that I would deem to be "true Christians" (e.g. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Óscar Romero, John Dominic Crossan) and there are Protestants that I'd refer to as the same (e.g. Jürgen Moltmann, Reinhold Neibhur, Martin Luther King, Jr.). Heck, I'd even call people who don't profess to follow Jesus yet act in a Christlike manner to be "true Christians" (e.g. Mohandas Gandhi, Ernst Bloch, Slavoj Žižek). I'm much less concerned about one's theology than I am about one's praxis.

>How do you view the "lukewarm" Christians mentioned in the Bible?

You're talking about the ekklesia in Laodicea in Revelation 3:15-16, right?:

>I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

These are Christians that refuse to take a side. James Cone has a good quote that I tend to go back to for those "Christians" that refuse to take a side:
>"Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism."

One could substitute any form of hierarchy for Cone's "racism" in that quote; race for him is an ontological symbol of oppression. For God to be a god of liberation (as Jesus' God was/ is) He/She must have an alignment with the oppressed. He cannot be neutral, for neutrality to injustices privileges the status quo. And just as God must take a side, so must Her/His followers. That's what the lukewarm Christians in Laodicea were doing - refusing to take a side. They were unwilling, perhaps afraid to be "hot," and thus were no better than the "cold" rest of the world. Revelation's God is saddened by Her/His followers refusing to take a stand - lukewarm is equivalent to cold, neutrality is equivalent to oppression, but it is much easier to judge active agents of oppression than its passive agents.

> How do you feel about the divide on social and scientific issues - where it seems Catholics are generally more progressive, and Protestants are generally more conservative?

I don't really have a great answer for the science one. If you believe in a Creator (I don't ), and you believe that that Creator is "good," then you should believe that everything that that Creator endowed you with, including the ability to reason, is likewise "good." Thus, denying scientific discoveries and theories because they go against a literal reading of a 2500+ year-old book is spitting on your Creator's gifts to you.

As far as "social issues" go, it should be noted that the metanarrative of the Bible is inherently a political story, one of liberation. Whether God is guaranteeing a "promised land" to slaves in Egypt or guaranteeing that He/She will bring Her/His people home from exile, the authors are making statements against empires. When Mark opens his Gospel with "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," he's making a direct statement against Caesar Augustus, who was said to be the bringer of evangelion ("good news") and whose full imperial name included the phrase Divi Filius ("Son of the Divine/ Son of God.") The anointed (Christos) son of god that brings the good news was not the Emperor of the known world, but a Jewish peasant bastard from rebellious Galilee. He went on a mission preaching a "Kingdom of God" (as opposed to an "Empire of Rome?") where "the last will be first and the first will be last." He attacked the center of social/political/religious/economic power of Judea, the Temple of Jerusalem, and was promptly executed by Rome with a method saved for political radicals. But then, the scandal! He was resurrected, denying the ultimacy of Rome's power and Rome's ideology, ensuring via promise that the "Kingdom of God" was something that can be achieved.

Liberation is the heart of Jesus' evangelion. Thus, as far as social (and economic. Especially economic!) issues are concerned, the God that Jesus professed will always be on the side of the oppressed, not that of the oppressors, for that would be the demesne of the God that named Caesar "Augustus." I hesitate to even affirm "progressivism" as the Christian God's ideology de jure; it's more radical than that. Jesus completely subverts what the Romans considered to be "reality" by presenting a Kingdom of God free of death (oppression). He revealed society's constructed nature, denied the invalid claims to ultimacy (because nothing man-made can truly be "ultimate"), and presented an alternative. Whereas Empire causes oh so many to fall into non-being, Jesus instilled his followers with the courage to be.
>And lastly, why do you think you've found the most correct version of Christianity?

Most correct? I hesitate to ever claim superlatives, but I am confident that my understanding of Christianity is much closer to Jesus' religious beliefs than the abomination of "mainstream" Christianity is. Why, though? Because I make every effort to read the Gospel with the eyes of a first-century Jewish peasant - Jesus' original followers and original audience. Or, failing that, I read it through the eyes of oppressed classes, after all, they certainly have a hermeneutical privilege. I read the Bible unpolluted by Plato's doctrine of the eternal soul or by the obscenity that is Constantine's in hoc signo vinces. I divorce myself from the assumptions of "nature" that our society makes, just as Jesus himself did. I reject the inherently flawed assumptions about a "just world" and those that affirm the powers-that-be as infallible.

What does that leave me with? Hope. Energization against an unjust world because Christ's gospel screams that there shall be a real, just world that we can bring about. Not just can, but must, for
>"Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.".

So, am I confident that I've "found the most correct version of Christianity?" No, and I don't think that that's possible. But I have been to the mountaintop, I have seen the Promised Land, and I know the Kingdom of God. Exegesis, coupled with the hermeneutic of the oppressed, offers no reasonable alternative "Christianity" to the gospel of liberation. Sadly, instead of this "bottom-up" model, Christianity has long been co-opted by "top-downers" more interested in either explicitly imposing their will further upon the downtrodden or simply pushing their legitimate grievances aside in favor of otherworldliness. But again, God cannot be neutral, and what use is a God on the side of the powerful? Why let them continue to stack the deck, to stack their team? The only God worth believing in is the God who evens the score, who stands on the side of true (distributive, not retributive) justice, the God who killed all oppression and bought us liberation at Calvary.

What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event by John Caputo.

Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel.

Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank

The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich

The Gay Science and The Antichrist by Nietzsche

God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse by Slavoj Zizek and Boris Gunjevic

The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism

After the Death of God by John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo

There is a large body of theology and philosophy from the enlightenment onwards that attempts to build a new understanding of faith, religion, God, and Christ without relying on the traditional supernatural theist beliefs. Traditionalists will tell you that this is not possible and such thought is not "real" Christianity. I urge you to explore and decide for yourself.

A very accessible introductory book would be John Shelby Spong's "Jesus for the Non-Religious." The title is a bit of a misnomer because it's not really for the non-religious per se, or at last not only for them, but it is also for people who are interested and perhaps deeply attached to Christ but who struggle with the traditional theist framework of God as a supernatural being who actively intervenes in our lives.

Another good introductory text is Paul Tillich's "The Courage to Be" which is about the search for meaning and affirmation even in the face of doubt and the failure of traditional philosophies and religion to address modern anxiety of non-existence and meaninglessness.

From there you might want to read other works of non-traditional and postmodern Christian thought.

There have also been some good discussions and AMAs in this subreddit that are relevant.

• This week's Death of God AMA. It's not exactly what I am talking about, but it had some ideas that might interest you.
  
  
• This week's Christian Existentialism AMA. My limited understanding is that existentialism is not necessarily theistic or non-theistic in and of itself, but there was still some discussion there that will interest you.
  
  
• A much older AMA by partofaplan2
  
  My personal experience is that the important thing is not to struggle to believe what others tell you is the truth, or to agonize over what you don't believe, but to take in all possibilities with an open mind and determine through thorough and lengthy investigation what you do believe, what it means to you, and how it can help you to grow and live as a better person.
  
  Good luck on your journey and feel free to PM me.
  
  EDIT--fixed bad link