Thinking of God
41
or “second” naïveté that is reflective as well as responsive.has always felt the twofold claim of way of reconciling, balancing, or even uniting them. Theology arises and undergoes changes in history precisely because of the dynamic interaction religion and critique and has sought some^6 Genuine theology
between religious consciousness and critical consciousness in human life.characteristic of religious consciousness is the human capacity for immediate openness and receptivity to the real presence of sacred powers. Through a Consider two poles of interaction. On some accounts, the fundamental
hierophany, as Mircea Eliade called it, the god or gods reveal how, poreforming rituals re-creates the original time when the god or gods created the world and fixed proper human purposes like stars in the sky. Conversely, , they brought forth a world. Reciting the stories of the gods and per-in illo tem-
the basic trait of critical consciousness is the power of the human mind to suspend or interrupt the immediate receptivity to whatever appears as given and self-evident – including the sacred. Whereas religion takes its place within a given symbolic world, critique has the capacity to break direct,
immediate participation in the given world.truly is the divine?” Critique severs the connection between appearance and reality, the meaning expressed and the signified referent. Critique need not The critical attitude asks, “How do I know that what appears to be divine
destroy religious consciousness. It can be held in check and assigned a sub-ordinate role of organizing, prioritizing, and interpreting the meanings of religion without calling the sacred into question. However, when critique does unfold its full powers, as it does with the rise of modernity in the West,
it challenges the idea of a supernatural agent (God) and ultimately makes it vanish. The price of critical reflection, when taken to its extreme forms, is the desacralization of the world. The sacred cosmos as a human dwelling place is lost; one is left with the “desert of criticism.”
toward the appearing, sacred power. If I believe in the appearing god or sacred power, then I am religious, not critical, in my fundamental relation to reality. If, by contrast, I question whether the sacred power of religious belief Religion and critique, taken in full, are incompatible when directed
is in fact what it purports to be and I answer “no,” then I am being critical, not religious, in my stance toward existence. The conflict between religion and critique seems to force a choice between them, just as we see it in the opposition between churchly theology and post-theistic a/theology. Each is
a form of theology. That is, each is a form of belief and practice. However, the key word is “reflection.” If “reflection” means “faithful mirroring” of divine appearances, then theology sides with religion and becomes its advocate, as in churchly theologysecond-order reflection. If, however, “reflect on religious ion”