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deconstructing-christian-girl · 2 years

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The Emptying God, Part 7: The Primacy of the Human

Part Six

We've reached the last paragraph of Abe's essay. In this end he returns full circle to the very beginning of his essay, which I skipped because it is primarily a standard summary of Christian views on atheism, humanism, secularism, sciencism, and Nietzschian nihilism and existentialism. He sets his entire essay "against these ... issues," and as a means by which "these issues" may be "overcome" (9).

At the end he returns to this point, but his very standard set up may lead us to be surprised at his conclusion here. The typical Western concept of God, god as subject, "is incompatible with autonomous reasoning" (26). Thus far, not surprising. This view of God is challenged by these secular fields in their autonomy; their assumption that humanity is the measure of all things is based in reaction against it by "Nietzschian nihilism and atheistic existentialism" (26). This is the view of God Abe has been deconstructing this whole time, God as substantia, essence, being. But God is Nichts, nothingness; this doctrine of God "is not only compatible with but also can embrace autonomous reason" due to the fact that "there is no conflict between the notion of God as Nichts (which is neither subject nor predicate) and autonomous reason" (26).

A self-emptying God has no need to "insist on their own way" (1 Cor. 13), including their own way in interpreting the world; other perspectives are perfectly compatible with it. A kenotic God is each and every thing, and therefore wants to know each and every thing authentically as they are in themselves, objectivity tempered with love. To do otherwise is to do violence to the Logos manifested in this particular form or embodiment. Love takes the subjectivity of the Other into account, and so does God, since God is love. To know God is to know the universe as it is, in its unity and diversity, just as it is. There is no logical system; neither God nor nature draws with straight lines. The Kingdom of God, like the branches of the universe's evolutionary web, is like a mustard seed that grows into a mustard plant, a tangled wild-grown weed, undirected chaos. Because the universe is "in Christ," in the Logos, the meaning of the universe is to be found within it and with reference to it. Our reason is autonomous, but guided by love that allows a thing, an organism, a person, to simply be as themselves. I suggest this is also reflected in the Incarnation: if the divine and human really meet in one body, and if this body, crucified and raised, ascends and is elevated to the right hand of the Father, then this human body is now the lynchpin of the cosmos, the kenotic (non) center of all things, the point of contact, and the measure of all things. The human, elevated by total Love through the Spirit via kenosis, is able to utilize autonomous reason.

He writes, "In the kenotic God who is Nichts, not only are modern human autonomous reason and rationalistic subjectivity overcome without being marred, but also the mystery of God is most profoundly percieved. God as love is fully and most radically grasped far beyond contemporary atheism and nihilism" (26).

Here objectivity and subjectivity are joined, reason tempered with love that genuinely wants to know the Other as Other and not as I percieve them or my ideological system demands them to be. We can actually have confidence in autonomous human reason when we allow reason to be guided by love for the beloved and has no need for Ego in the Self (bias). The rationalist is the coldest of persons without love; rational calculations are routinely involved in the justification of cruelty toward others. This very Western, Cartesian, and toxic male notion of "reason as objectivity only when not in reference to emotion" is in the end what gets us into the most trouble, because it always justifies the dehumanization of the other. I need no justification to extend compassion to another; human beings need reason to provide a justification for showing no mercy toward another. The burden of proof is always with the one who wants to deny love.

Yet Abe still wants to speak in the language of Western theology when he speaks of "overcoming" atheism. As I have suggested in previous parts in this series, for God to truly be Nothing as well as Something, God must be negation, or at least one side of God. There is a tendency for people to speak of Nothingness in a spiritual or metaphysical sense as really being Something after all, even in the Buddhist tradition; the human mind has serious limits on how it can understand pure void or absence of everything. But God's negation must be as exhaustive, as far reaching, as God's affirmation, and if affirmation means absolute existence, negation must correspondingly be absolute negation of absolute existence. Thus, the God that is Nothingness must be totally absent in the fullest sense of existential nihilism and atheism. Both states are ultimately and equally true.

Here I want to part ways with Abe for a moment, but on a trajectory he indicated. In the last post in this series, I hinted at a rapproachment with atheism. The first stage of that argument has been set in what I have written above. Autonomous reason is compatible with faithful Christian theology and praxis when guided by kenotic love. This suggests the possible development of a hermeneutics of kenotic love for Christian ethics and for biblical interpretation.

The second stage is what I will outline below, though in what barely constitutes a preliminary sketch. Abe found in the work of German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart his notion of God as Nichts, nothing, and I want to explore the "Christian atheism" of Eckhart by reading him through the lens of Jewish-German humanist philosopher Erich Fromm, who finds in Eckhart a humanism before humanism buried at the heart of God's inmost nature as nothing. Fromm is interesting because he also became one of the first Western intellectuals in psychology and ethics to incorporate Jewish, humanist, Marxist, Christian, and Buddhist insights into his philosophy and ethics (Fromm was profoundly influenced by the Buddhism of T.D. Suzuki, of whom Masao Abe is also a disciple), and so is a person in which many conceptual worlds and frameworks found rapproachment.

For our purposes here it will be enough to deal briefly with Eckhart's setting in Renaissance Germany and Fromm's reading of Eckhart in Fromm's posthumously edited collection of essays and speeches On Being Human (1994). First a comment on where Eckhart stands in Fromm's thought:

After publishing the still magisterial Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), Fromm became engrossed in the antithesis of "having and being." This idea would become central to the later Fromm, epitomized in his still profound book To Have or To Be (1976), a book which ties Judaism and Christianity's love of neighbor with the best insights of the humanist tradition (Spinoza especially), with Marx's view of alienation in the critique of social, religious, and political institutions, the Prophets' denunciation of idolatry (alienation in the spiritual dimension), and with Buddhism's liberation from the Ego in a compelling and radical critique of capitalism, authoritarianism, consumerism, and our profound sense of existential deadness in the developed world. In short, our culture is built on death, on mindless, passive consumption, on having much rather than being much. We become selfish and Egoist, grasping, clinging, obsessing over "having." Instead, Fromm says, to be free one must let go of having and embrace "being" instead. "Being" in this sense means a mindful, centered attitude that is capable of enjoying the present moment in all it offers us, and is therefore alive, connected to that which is life-bringing. We "have" many things, but things are dead. As books like Bowling Alone remind us, our social connections are collapsing while our floorspace expands and our possessions multiply like tribbles.

Fromm discovered in Eckhart another example of this distinction between having and being. In the course of writing To Have or To Be, Fromm wrote many more pages of manuscript, some collected in On Being Human, as well as in another sequel volume called The Art of Being (1992), and in The Pathology of Normalcy (1991, ch. 4), one of the first systematic challenges to the concept of innate laziness in human beings (Freud, Fromm's teacher, still accepted laziness as a category). His work on Eckhart, therefore, participates in this larger bulk of material in Fromm's thought.

Fromm begins his discussion by asking whether there is any similarity between Eckhart and Karl Marx. As far as labels are concerned, there is little to no connection. But Fromm detects in both of them a kindred spirit of sorts:

"Both were radically anti-authoritarian, spokesmen for the independence of man, for his active use of his essential powers, for life against death, for being against having. For both, reason was the supreme faculty of man. As far as their seemingly diametrically opposed religious views are concerned, Eckhart was an atheist (although thinly disguised); Marx's socialism was the secular expression of prophetic messianism" (On Being Human, pp. 114-115; Fromm's interpretation of Marx can be found in Marx's Concept of Man).

This seems odd for the atheist Marx, but Marx's communism came very clearly from the rich protest tradition of the Prophets that lived on in Rabbinic Judaism, and in one letter to a family member, he heard that she was reading the Bible, and he told her if she was going to read that book, she might as well read something solid like the Prophets. One Marxist, Ernst Bloch, was closer to a Hebrew prophet in thought; he wrote a book on how atheism is hidden in the Christian bible under the expression "love thy neighbor" (Atheism in Christianity) and his two-volume Principle of Hope is the finest contribution to the hope for Utopia that 20th century prophetic humanist socialism ever produced. As much as it might surprise people, Marxist theologian Roland Boar was able to write a five volume series on Christianity in Marxist thought. If Marxism was atheistic regarding the externals and dogmas, it preserved something of the essence of the Prophets, of Christ, and of the first Paul, liberation theologian that he was (the reactionary Paul appears in the inauthentic Deutero-Pauline works 1-2 Timothy, and Titus), and of the early Christian communism of Acts 2 and 4.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327/29 C.E.), says Fromm, was the "greatest representative of German mysticism" and its "deepest and most radical thinker" (116). An active leader in the Dominicans monastic order, a scholar, and a preacher, Eckhart became renown for his sermons most of all, both when he was alive and today. His "greatest influence" now is among those seeking "authentic guidance to a non-theistic, yet 'religious' philosophy of life" (116).

Eckhart lived, in his own context, at the transition point from the high point of medieval Christendom into the decline of the late middle ages. By 1300 the prevailing landed feudal culture that had stood since the fall of Rome (in the 5th century eight hundred years prior) had shifted into cities and towns. William of Ockham (1285-1347), a philosopher, scientist, and theologian, developed the famous Ockham's Razor postulate, and it was he who would provide the bridge from the dying medieval world into the birth of the Renaissance and the modern world. He did this virtually by accident: watching the Catholic church violently suppressing "heresy," aka dissenting viewpoints, in the name of a higher good, Ockham wrote a fierce denunciation of the Church's inherited concept of Neoplatonic universals.

"Ockham argued that nothing existed except individual beings, that only concrete experience could serve as a basis for knowledge, and and that universals existed not as entities external to the mind but only as mental concepts. ... Human concepts possessed no metaphysical foundation beyond concrete particulars, and there existed no necessary correspondence between words and things" (Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 202).

In short, Ockham said all language is a mental construct and the relationship between words and objects is arbitrary. Any word will do, provided it can be agreed upon to be used by others. Ockham had stumbled upon the idea that human ideologies had been masquerading as divine commandment all along. We all think our ideological system is objectively "there" in the world, but it exists only as a paradigm or conceptual framework in the mind. Ockham, in other words discovered the idea of the worldview.

This threw Medieval culture into a crisis of meaning. Ockham severed the organic link between all things, and so the Platonic unity that held the medieval hierarchy together began to collapse. A great burst of scientific study followed, and politically Nominalism meant the human person's meaning is found in themselves, not pre-defined and imposed by some static chain of being. Political and psychological individualism began to take hold.

This led to drastic changes in human experience, and of religious experience. Nominalism "weakened the kind of religious experience that was based on philosophical arguments. Thinking did not seem to be the way, anymore, to find God, after thinking itself became subject to critical analysis. ... faith in God as a vital experience began to vanish because critical thought began to undermine the rational basis for the faith" (117).

Eckhart spoke of God as that which provides the necessary link between individual and universal in the mystical encounter with God, the union with God, incorporation into Christ via the Spirit of liberation, and thus his views came to provide vital meaning when the hubris of scholastic philosophical speculation ended in a whimper rather than in glory. Eckhart: "Man should not be satisfied with a thought God; for if the thought disappears God disappears also" (117). Fromm notes that in these words, "here, for the first time, we hear faintly from Eckhart the motif of a godless, non-theistic religiosity. It was to become louder in Spinoza, and sounded in full strength in the radical humanism of Marx" (117).

Eckhart's mysticism, therefore, is a true mysticism, but it stands apart from the other mystics of the time, for there were many. Just like when the Church joined the Roman power and a mass exodus of protesting mystics departed for the deserts, in the crisis of the 13th century, a mass wave of new mystics rose to speak to it. Mysticism is not a sign of cultural decadence, against reactionary moralizing, but it does emerge in moments of crisis with a twin task of prophecy and hope, a rupture with the stasis of the eternal order that allows something new to be born. These other contemporaneous mystics of Eckhart are described as having a "kind of sentimental, sweet, erotic mood that is enjoyed and wallowed in" (117). Many of the other mystics of the time were women, like Teresa of Avila, which may be what Fromm, usually more conscientious than his contemporaries on matters of equality, is referring to obliquely.

But nonetheless, there is a theological difference in kind; Eckhart goes further than the others. Though he is interested in the unio mystica, the union of God and humanity, "in some of his boldest statements, there is a 'something' in man that is identical with God and hence does not need to be unified" (117). Here we start to see the connection with Abe's essay. On a deep level, we need union with God; but on a deeper level, we are already in union with God, since God is each and every thing that exists. On this deepest level, we ourselves are God, a particular embodiment of the kenotic Godhead poured out into and expressed in the Other. On the level of needing union, we are separated from God; but on that deeper plane, we find the separation is really in our head, our principle illusion. Union is experienced in fact by accepting the union with God that already exists. Peace exists where we thought there was enmity.

According to Fromm, Eckhart spoke on three distinct levels. On the first level, he spoke the traditional scholastic theology. On a second level, he disagreed with Aquinas in several important regards, but specifically over the negativa theologica, the negative theology of Philo (born 13 B.C.E.) and then of Mammonides (1135-1204 C.E.). Negative theology states that since God is incomprehensible, nothing can be known about God, and therefore God can only be defined by what God is not. God is not cruel, God is not hateful, etc. Aquinas rejected this; Eckhart accepted it.

On a third, and deepest level, Eckhart, "by implication, denies the being of the Christian God," only in "rare statements" where he minimizes the Trinity in favor of something he called the "Godhead" (119). Rather than pitting Trinity and Godhead against each other, I argue that, building on my comments in part six of this series, we see the Godhead as the incomprehensible Nothingness at the (non)center of the Trinity, the event horizon around which the three Persons rotate, where all separation is overcome and God is "all in all" (1 Cor. 15). Abe's Buddhist teacher, T.D. Suzuki believed Eckhart taught a "God is nothing" theology at this level.

Orthodox scholars have tended to deny Eckhart's most radical formulations, or to reletivize them by insisting they must be "interpreted in the light of his dominant orthodox theological views" (119). Because of course they do. Let us propose to take the more adventurous course and see for ourselves what Eckhart said.

"God is a true light that shines in the darkness, of three kinds of darkness ... The third darkness is the very best, and means that there is no light, it is neither cold nor warm in itself. ... What is the final goal? It is the hidden dark of the eternal Godhead and is unknown and was never known, and will never be known" (120-121).

Here we have God as Nichts again, and the God who is both dark/light meshes with my earlier suggestion that the formless void, the Nothing out of which God created the world, is the deepest Godself. Eckhart says in another place that what he is saying is difficult to understand: "If anyone does not understand this discourse, let him not worry about that, for if he does not find this truth in himself, he cannot understand what I have said--for it is a discovered truth that comes immediately from the heart of God" (122).

Here not only human reason, but human feeling, is radically trustworthy and has a conformational role to play when dealing with the Spirit. What is the discourse in question? He seems to speak in an ecstatic experience of inspiration that Fromm, ever the psychiatrist, interpreted as a "semi-trancelike state" and bears all the signs of mystical elation:

"My essential being is above [the concept] God. In that being of God [the Godhead], where God is above all Being and all distinctions, there I was myself, there I wanted myself and knew myself willing to create this man (myself). That is why I am the cause of myself in my Being ... And that is why I am unborn and according to my stubbornness I can never die ... In my eternal birth all things were born and I was the cause of myself and of all things; and if I had wanted, neither I nor things would exist; but if I did not exist, [the concept] 'God' would not exist either; I am the cause that [the concept] God is God; if I was not, God would not be 'God'. ... A great authority says: 'His bursting forth is nobler than his efflux.' When I flowed forth from God, creatures said, 'He is a god!' This, however, did not make me blessed, for it indicates that I, too, am a creature. In bursting forth, however, when I shall be free within God's will and free, therefore, of the will of God, and all his works, and even of God himself, then I shall rise above all creature kind, and I shall be what I was once, now, and forevermore. I thus shall recieve an impulse that shall raise me above the angels. With the impulse, I recieve wealth so great that I could never again be satisfied with [the concept] God or anything that is God's, nor with any divine activities, for in bursting forth I discover that God [the Godhead] and I are One" (121-122).

There is a lot to unpack there, so I can only glance at it superficially, but I want to say that the transformative mystical experience I experienced and continue to experience does find truth here. What's going on?

First, note the progression within the quote. Eckhart begins with total union with God, where he and God are somehow interchangeable, and what can be said of one can be said of the other. This is from the POV of God. Second, Eckhart "bursts forth" from God, seeing himself as a particular manifestation or incarnation of the deepest Godhead. Now he is on the realm of phenomena, creatures. This leads to a third, inward move, in the "impulse" that leads to such wealth that the entire scholastic, intellectual, philosophical structure is bit mere dross in comparison, because the leading of this impulse is the Spirit of the Godhead within, leading to the conclusion that God and the individual are One.

Notice first how this roots the inter-connectivity lost in the collapse of philosophical speculation in Medieval scholasticism into the indwelling of the Spirit, namely Love. Eckhart is overcoming Ockham's hermeneutic of suspicion with a hermeneutic of love. The world can re-intigrate only within the sphere of God's egalitarian, inter-trinitarian self-emptying "abyss of love" via the Spirit.

Notice too that this new integration included in bursting forth from God involves our being "free within God's will," which is also "free ... of the will of God," and free "even of God himself." At the start, he begins with the unity, but he ends with transcendence; to burst forth is to be distinct from God as well as to be identical with God.

"The Godhead," for Eckhart, is "absolute and 'mysterious' darkness ... resting in himself, the Nothing; he himself is identical with the "Seelengrund," the ground of Man's soul [and being], which is the absolute Nothing" (122). The infinite stillness of the divine desert. Fromm writes, "the last reality for Eckhart is death, the Nothing. Life is not given any meaning by an absolute--not even the Christian God. The answer to this objective meaninglessness of life is human activity, in caring for the wellbeing of our fellow creatures" (123).

This has profound implications. One of athiesm's recurrent complaints is that God, on the classical mode of essentia, substance, is that God is like a parent that never dies and thus humanity is never allowed to grow up and be a fully formed and independent adult. Institutionalized Christianity cannot give this, only union with the Godhead. Fromm quotes Shizuteru Ueda in summary of Eckhart:

"The radicalism and the peculiarity of Eckhart's view of the vita activa and cita contemplativa lies in the fact that for him both are not ways toward God, but ways away from God. The way to God is, for him, as we saw, not vita but only death, complete detachment. The vita activa for Eckhart means away from God to the reality of the world, together with breaking through God (the God of creation) to the Godhead. Activity in this sense occurs without God; a deed like bringing soup to a sick person us nothing but this work itself; it is without added religious meaning" (123).

Now this is fascinating. Eckhart seems to believe that the further we are from overtly thinking about God and are simply invested in the present moment in love, acting in compassionate care and solidarity with one another, the closer we are to God. The less we bother with the concept of God and simply get on with the business of loving our neighbors as ourselves, the more we will be filled with the presence of the Godhead in our deepest being. This accepts Ockham's disunification of transcendent meaning and accepts that meaning must be found in the act of living in love for others, that the sacred is found in letting the world be secular. Further, the idea of drawing near by moving away is paradoxical in just the kenotic kind of way we have been examining this in this whole series.

Let's look at this idea of meaning, and how we find ultimate meaning in the pure act of living in the present moment, because it offers us a holy secularism, a discovery of meaning in the death of meaning, and the finding of God in the death of God.

In one place, he says "people should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are ... take care that your emphasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of things to be done" (124). We could call this the difference between righteousness and justice. Righteousness is the "inward impulse" to do good and treat fairly and compassionately; the character structure that gives rise to the deed. If you have the inward impulse of the Spirit, you don't need to be told in commandments what the right thing to do is--it is to love, comprehensively. You don't have to consult any external authority, because it is written on the heart.

Eckhart's Godhead is the "silent desert," the "unmoved--and unmoving--the Nothing" (125). In his sermon Beati pauperes spiritu, Eckhart cries, "God, please rid me of God." That is, rid him of the concept of God that gets in the way of our experience of the Godhead. "You should rid yourself even of your 'thought' God, of all your inadequate thoughts and imaginations about him ... to call God a being is as senseless as it would be to call the sun pallid or black. If I had a God whom I could grasp, I would never recognize Him as my God. Hence, be silent and don't bark about him, don't hang on him the clothes of attributes and qualities, but take Him without quality, as he is 'a being above being' and 'a nothingness transcending being in the still desert of the nameless Godhead" (125-126).

This kenotic letting go of "the abandonment of having, clinging, craving, the giving up the mode of having ... meant creating the condition for the fullnest activity--not of trivial but of essential activity. Productive, "essential" activity, he believed, was possible only under the condition of freedom, and we were free only if we did not cling to what we had--including our Ego. ... Giving excludes holding on; loving requires one to drop one's ego. ... The problem ... is not that I have nothing, but that I am not egocentrically bound to what I have. ... The real opposition is between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity" (127).

In a sermon on spiritual poverty, Eckhart speaks on the nature of spiritual poverty in his typical inside out fashion, by naming three poverties: 1) the man who wants nothing; 2) the man who knows nothing; 3) the man who has nothing.

1) we think the one who wants nothing is ascetic, but Eckhart sees asceticism and luxury as both sharing in the egocentric mode of "having," the former by negation and the latter by affirmation. Those who want nothing, therefore are not homo consumens, not craving, not compelled by consumptive drive. "Eckhart goes as far as to postulate that one should not even want to do God's will, since this, too, is a form of striving. The person who wants nothing is the person who is not greedy for anything" (128).

2) deals with the one who knows nothing. And here again, Eckhart is not attacking knowledge so much as the ideological absolutism that often comes with knowledge. "We should not look at our knowledge as a possession, in which we find security and which gives us a sense of identity ... knowledge should not assume the quality of a dogma, which enslaves us" (129-130).

3) the one who has nothing, for Eckhart, means first "we should not be bound, tied, chained to what we own and what we have, not even to God" (130).

Independence within union is a "necessary condition of being" for Eckhart. "Whoever accepts something from another is a servant; and whoever rewards, a master. I was wondering the other day whether I should accept something from God, or wish something from him ... because if I would accept from God, I would be under God like a servant and He, by giving, like a master. But this should not be so in eternal life" (131).

Here, then, in Eckhart, we find in the death of God the concept the hope of the birth of God the presence. Only by and through the negation of God do we find the affirmation in the negation. Eternal life in the Godhead is a consensual union of equal independents, and Eckhart's ethical principle is that the holy, the ultimate, true meaning, can be found only in the present through care and solidarity with one another. The religious meaning of life is to love your neighbor, not because it is commanded, but because the act in itself fulfills the law and the Propjets. One need not be conscious of the law or the Prophets in order to behave with inward justice, the righteousness of love, and fulfill the command.

I will end now by springing from Eckhart and Fromm to another humanist and Marxist philosopher, Terry Eagleton, who finds very similar conclusions about the intrinsic meaning of life in his wonderful book The Meaning of Life. For Eagleton, the meaning of life is like jazz, it is both structured and improvisational, giving freedom in (limited) form, which reconciles meaningfulness and meaninglessness in the co-ultimacy of Self and Other. He writes,

"The meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living a certain way. ... In this sense, the meaning of life is life itself, seen a certain way. [People] feel let down by such a claim, since ... it seems both too banal and too exotic. It takes the meaning-of-life question out of the hands of a coterie of adepts of cognoscenti and returns it to the routine business of everyday existence. It is just this bathos that Matthew sets up in his gospel, where he presents the Son of Man returning in glory surrounded by angels for the Last Judgment. Despite this off-the-peg cosmic imagery, salvation turns out to be an embarrassingly prosaic affair--a matter of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the imprisoned. It has no 'religious' glamour or aura whatsoever. Anybody can do it. The key to the universe turns out to be not some shattering revelation, but something which a lot of decent people do anyway, with scarcely a thought. Eternity lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love that built the stars. To live in this way is not just to have life, but to have it in abundance. ... What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless ... Rather than serve some utilitarian end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond it's own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight, and that only by living this way can humans be said to share in his life. ... For classical theology, God transcends the world, but figures as a depth within it ... if there is such a thing as eternal life, it must be here and now. It is the present moment which is an image of eternity" (Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, ch. 6).

#masao abe #the emptying god #christianity #christian #christian deconstruction #christian ethics #erich fromm #deconstructing christianity #human reason #death of god #meister eckhart #terry eagleton #kenosis

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