God in the 21st Century – Angela Shanahan

Angela Shanahan, a columnist with The Australian, addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 23 August 2011 as part of a discussion on God in the twenty-first century. She was joined by Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins from the Emanuel Synagogue in Sydney, Robyn Williams, the ABC Radio National presenter of The Science Show & Ockham’s Razor and Dr Shakira Hussein from the National Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Angela Shanahan addressed the Sydney Institute on 23 August 2011.

GOD IN THE 21ST CENTURY

ANGELA SHANAHAN

When I was asked to speak this evening, I must admit that I was puzzled. For those of us for whom God is a real personal God there is no difference between God now and God in the first century or no century. But, of course, the Western notion of God has changed, up to a point. However, if you at look God through solely Western eyes, you are looking through a pretty narrow little prism.

I can only talk about my own tradition, as neither a philosopher nor theologian, but as an ordinary lay person. In the Christian Catholic tradition, we see God as a personal God of three:  the Father, in whom we believers believe , the Son and redeemer as the person of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit , much neglected by my Catholic education, but who has recently made something of a comeback. More of that later. We are taught that the spirit continues to mysteriously influence the church. So, to really understand the concept of God as  a personal God in the lives of so many in the world, we must talk about the church, a church which as a twentieth century Catholic thinker – Waugh I think – once remarked, must be divine since it is so full of idiots and of course sinners, like me.

Those who say that Christianity and God are dead or dying, might on the face of it have a point. There is widespread disillusionment with the established church. During the last century the idea of God has become vaguer. He is relegated in many people’s lives to a mere “life force”.  Secularism encourages a view of religion which would exculpate even its long philosophical tradition from the public domain.

To make matters worse, there is a shrinking demographic in Christianity’s traditional European strongholds. In Spain and in Italy, Total fertility rates of 1.2 and 1.4 respectively mean the lowest birthrates in Western Europe. Aggravating the apparent numerical decline of the church, a new liberalism has taken hold in Europe and North America which wants to diminish the authority of the hierarchy, and erode traditional doctrine on issues such as family, life and sexuality. Even in some Christian churches this trend denies the incarnation and resurrection

But while this is going on in the old Christian world, think about this. In the Philippines, the annual rate of baptisms is higher than the total for Italy, France, Spain and Poland combined. Of the 18 million Catholic baptisms recorded on 1998, 8 million took place in Central and South America, 3 million in Africa and almost 3 million in Asia. These three regions account for almost three quarters of all Catholic baptisms.

The coming dominance of Christianity is the theme of a ground breaking work by American historian of religion Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Jenkins argues that:

The 21st century will almost certainly be regarded by future historians as the century in which religion replaced ideology as the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood and of course conflicts and wars.

His argument is not theological. He analyses overlooked sociological trends. Within 25 years, the global Christian population will be 2.6 billion, making it the world’s largest religion. Most of these will be in the developing world, 50 per cent in Africa and Latin America. The growing numbers of Christians in Africa, projected at 228 million by 2025, has probably the deepest political significance because it is there that the dividing lines are drawn between Islam and Christianity, both of which seem to be polarising towards fundamentalism.

Where Christianity is flourishing, it is not of the new, touchy feely character that wants to marginalise religion to the outskirts of discussion about society, tolerates a watering down of doctrine and sees God as “the life force”. Oh no. Conservativism flourishes in the Christianity of the developing world and reformers, obviously, do not like this fact.

The liberal Catholic writer James Carroll has complained that “world Christianity [is falling] increasingly under the sway of what he deems ‘fundamentalism.’” There is also grave concern among  the hierarchy, almost 50 per cent of whom come from the “new” Christian strongholds, about tribalism and above all superstition.

However, Jenkins compares the new Christianity to the zealous Christianity of the early church – mystical, puritanical and prophetic and with its own martyrs, most recently in Africa. He also compares it to the great post reformation movement in Catholicism – the Counter Reformation –  which produced great missionary saints like Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier and, indeed, much like our own age several great popes.

The idea of God in the new orthodoxy of Christianity is pretty much same as He is in the old orthodoxy. There is no waffling on about the life force. Authority is very important and so is the idea of God’s mystery and power. Hence, in the developing world, the anti-authoritarian excesses in the West which followed  Vatican II have been corrected. The ancient elements of Catholic tradition and practice, like the  Marian emphasis, have been revived. There is also a frank horror of Western notions of “private” sexual morality, which in the developing world that is riddled by AIDS are seen for what they are. Already we have seen the fallout from this divide in the Anglican Church over the vexed question of the ordination of practising homosexuals. The Anglican Church in Nigeria – the single largest Anglican church – has now come to schism with Canterbury.

But whether one would use the dreaded F word or the term new orthodoxy, analogous to a counter reformation, in reference to new world Christianity which is really world Christianity, depends upon which side of the global fence trains your view.

The perception that religion and Christianity in particular is dead is a peculiarly Western dominated line of thought. It not only ignores the major demographic trends in Africa and Latin America, but it forgets the historical view of the church itself, which has always operated as a world entity, not a European one, with no boundaries of place or time. Its horizon, like God, is eternal. Closer to home, the God is dead view also ignores a growing Christian movement in the West among young people who, having been brought up with no faith, are finding it.

Christian Pentecostal churches are full of young people – as are Catholic churches which have decided embrace this form of worship.  At World Youth Day in Sydney, I saw what sheer joy can be had in the notion of Christian camaraderie – now being enjoyed in Madrid by two million young Catholics.

But is this just a variation on the idea of Christianity as teaching What of the substance of the teacher? What of the person of Jesus himself. Is he still, to most, just a teacher – or has the idea started to come full circle, that he is also our Divine savior?

Even people who believe in God – because there must be “something” there, as they put it, find the concept of Jesus as more than a teacher very difficult to cope with. From the 1960s, even Catholics had become rather used to seeing that imagery of Jesus – the great teacher – rather than the savior around whose death and resurrection the whole edifice of Christianity revolves. Indeed, some churches seem to have almost given up the idea of the resurrection.

When the film The Passion of the Christ was released in 2004, there was a general perception that a religious film produced by an eccentric reactionary Catholic like Mel Gibson was in some ways an exotic curiosity. Many critics, particularly reform minded Catholics, regarded it as a throw back to a different pre Vatican II version of religion – orthodox and with its Marian overtones very catholic.

But, contrary to expectations, the film was hugely popular – particularly among the young. The Jesus of this film is not the fashionable Jesus of my youth, the wild counter culturalist as portrayed in Passolini’s famous film The Gospel According to Mathew. No, it is the suffering Jesus who overcame evil in the personified in the devil. That film is as an annunciation, in no uncertain terms, of the central doctrine of orthodox Christianity: Jesus is the Divine redeemer whose suffering and death was the point of the Gospels. And the young loved it – because the young want certainty.

In the twenty-first century we must realise that whatever “image” of God we have in Australia,  indeed in the West, is probably rather beside the point. God and religion are part of our demographic destiny. We can’t ignore either.

Religion not going to go away, nor can the very loud protests of atheists drown out the prayers of the faithful. God is not a  narrow cultural phenomenon, The God of Abraham is my God as it is Shakira’s and Rabi Kamins. He is also the God of unborn generations in some of the world’s poorest  and most tumultuous areas and, as in China, the potentially richest. So, when we talk about God in the twenty-first century, we might drop our Western rationalist spectacles and remember that.