Panel: TRANSFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN A POST-SECULAR AGE



69.1 - POST-THEISM AND REFORM OF CHRISTIANITY

AUTHORS:
Gamberini P. (Pontifical Theological Faculty of Southern Italy ~ Naples ~ Italy)
Text:
The faith consciousness of the new generations appears to be increasingly secularized, as if God no longer existed; it is an agnostic and indifferent generation. This raises the urgent question of how and what kind of God should be proclaimed in this post-secular time and society. Interestingly, in the meantime—in this post-secular society—mysticism and recent scientific discoveries in quantum physics and neuroscience, for example, are revealing a vision of reality that is understood at its deepest level as interconnected. This "interconnected" vision of reality is not only proposed by many quantum physics theorists but has also always been the mystical vision of the great religions. Unlike the atheism of the 19th and 20th centuries, post-theism does not reject all forms of transcendence, but only the kind of transcendence in which God is conceived as "separate from the world," "intervening" from time to time with some supernatural revelation or miraculous action. Post-theism fulfills what atheism, clearly indicated by the privative prefix (a-theism), had already attempted to do, namely, to deny the "God" of religion. However, atheism was—at least in my view—a partial attempt at denial, because it in fact denied a particular and specific image of God, namely the theistic one, but it did not seek to deny the reality of God as the foundational ground of reality. This issue has remained, so to speak, unresolved. One need only think of the concept of "transcendence without any heavenly transcendence" in Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope. It is a denial of the transcendence of the transcendent, not of transcendence as such. Post-theism adopts Bloch's "immanent" vision, as it denies the transcendent God of theism, understood as Someone who is outside and separate from the cosmos, with the cosmos itself viewed as something external, outside of transcendence.