Thinking of God
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from the dream of religion is to “cease to be the victim, the plaything, of all those hostile powers which from time immemorial have employed and are still employing the darkness of religion for the oppression of mankind.”Freud’s critique focused on the harshness of human life, given the “majestic, 17
cruel and inexorable” forces of nature, which rise up against us and expose our weakness and helplessness.civilization, such as art, cultural ideals, and economic wealth, offer some meager but real psychological satisfactions to compensate for instinctual (^18) According to Freud, the mental assets of
renunciations. By contrast, the idea/image of God and the practice of offer nothing that is psychologically beneficial. Freud purported to unmask biblical personalism as the result of a cunning psychological strategy designed to gain consolation and protection in face of the hostile powers of nature. religion
On the basis of an infantile prototype, we humanize the forces of nature into a father-image, in hopes that we can appease the deity as we appeased our own fathers when we were children. Theism constitutes an that it expresses a neurotic wish-fulfillment as one of “the oldest, strongest illusion, in
and most urgent wishes of mankind.”wantand weakness.In the upsurge of critique in such figures as Semler, Feuerbach, and it to be true in order to make life tolerable for them in their suffering^19 People believe in God because they
Freud, theism turns into humanism. The destructive work of critique, in negating theism, human life that forms its own goals in not yet spoken, however. Biblical personalism does not simply vanish under serves the positive purpose of setting free an authentic self-determination. The last word was
the withering eye of criticism. It finds new ways of asserting its fundamental religious vision.example of a post-critical form of biblical personalism. The metaphor of In the twentieth century, Karl Barth’s theology is the most spectacular
God as heavenly deity is denied in the form of a divine person, yet nonethe-less affirmed in the form of the “wholly other” deity. He was a leading figure in the post-World War I critique of the “liberal theology” of the nineteenth century, which intended to accommodate critique by reinterpreting Christian
beliefs in culturally acceptable idioms. For Barth’s generation, a historical epoch had ended: “a bourgeois age, which had united faith in technical progress with the confident expectation of a secured freedom and a civiliz-ing perfectionism.” (^20) Barth saw liberal theology as an idolatry of the human
writ very large.answered the question with his dialectical theology.the historical criticism of the Bible, he could not turn to the Bible as proof Can a non-idolatrous theology survive the full force of critique? Barth (^21) Having appropriated