The Living God and the Secular Experience -- By: Clark H. Pinnock
Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 129:516 (Oct 1972)
Article: The Living God and the Secular Experience
Author: Clark H. Pinnock
BSac 129:516 (Oct 72) p. 316
The Living God and the Secular Experience
The doctrine of God is the central theological problem of our day. If one is unable to speak clearly and affirmatively about it, whatever else he may say as a Christian theologian does not amount to much. In spite of what the death-of-God thinkers maintained a few years ago, Christian faith without the reality of God is an absurd notion. If God is a problem, He is not one problem amongst others; He is properly speaking the only problem there is. All one’s efforts ought to be devoted to solving one’s difficulties in this matter. However absurd talking about God might seem to some contemporary men, it could never be as absurd as talking about the Christian faith without God.1
Nonetheless, believing in God is a problem for some modern men. The present ferment in theology, though it is due in large measure to factors immanent in liberal theology itself, has arisen in the context of a cultural situation in which speaking of God is a difficult thing to do. A way of looking at the world has developed in Western society, and increasingly throughout the globe, which leaves no room for the dimension of transcendence. What is real for a growing number of modern men is the profane, contingent causes that have produced the present generation, the relative moral and social institutions in which one lives and the mortality of all things temporal. In short, it is no accident that the phrase “death of God” has been taken to be a symbol for the current cultural mood.
BSac 129:516 (Oct 72) p. 317
How, indeed, is one to speak of God in such a climate of opinion?2
While a complete response to such a massive cultural Geist would have to be very far reaching indeed, we can at least seek to point out in this article one point of major significance. One of the reasons modern men regard belief in God irrelevant has to do with a rather serious misunderstanding on their part. This misunderstanding has to do with the “reference range” the concept of God occupies. The question of God is wrongly identified by secular men as a remote and largely speculative question, divorced from contemporary human concerns. Theists need to insist, loud and clear, that nothing could be further from the truth. The question of God affects more areas of human life than any other. This is well reflected in the fact that the topic has commanded more attention from thinkers of every period of history than any other. Whatever else belief in God may be said to be, it cannot possibly be said to lack existential implications.
But this misunderstanding is not entirely ...
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