Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 78 of 529 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to propitiate an “agency” they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster. Aristotle had been wrong: philosophy was not the result of a noble desire for knowledge but of the craven longing to avoid pain. The cradle of religion, therefore, was ignorance and fear, and a mature, enlightened man must climb out of it. Holbach attempted his own history of God. First men had worshipped the forces of nature. This primitive animism had been acceptable because it had not tried to get beyond this world. The rot had set in when people had started to personify the sun, wind and sea to create gods in their own image and likeness. Finally they had merged all these godlings into one big Deity, which was nothing but a projection and a mass of contradictions. Poets and theologians had done nothing over the centuries but make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom they will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities. Human beings will never see in God, but a being of the human species, in whom they will strive to aggrandize the proportions, until they have formed a being totally inconceivable. History shows that it is impossible to reconcile the so-called goodness of God with his omnipotence. Because it lacks coherence, the idea of God is bound to disintegrate. The philosophers and scientists have done their best to save it but they have fared no better than the poets and theologians. The “hautes perfections” that Descartes claimed to have proved were simply the product of his imagination. Even the great Newton was “ a slave to the prejudices of his infancy.” He had discovered absolute space and created a God out of the void who was simply “un homme puissant,” a divine despot terrorizing his human creators and reducing them to the condition of slaves. 69 Fortunately the Enlightenment would enable humanity to rid itself of this infantilism. Science would replace religion. “If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.” 70 There are no higher truths or underlying patterns, no grand design. There is only nature itself; Nature is not a work; she has always been self-existent; it is in her bosom that everything is operated; she is an immense laboratory, provided with the materials, and who makes the instruments of which she avails herself to act. All her works are the effects of her own energy, and of those agents or causes which she makes, which she contains, which she puts in action. 71 God was not merely unnecessary but positively harmful. By the end of the century, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827) had ejected God from physics. The planetary system had become a luminosity extending from the sun, which was gradually cooling.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yahweh had marked his people out from all the other nations, not because of any merit of their own but because of his great love. In return, he demanded complete loyalty and a fierce rejection of all other gods. The core of Deuteronomy includes the declaration which would later become the Jewish profession of faith: Listen ( shema ), Israel! Yahweh is our Elohim, Yahweh alone ( ehad )! You shall love Yahweh with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I urge upon you today be written on your hearts. 32 The election of God had set Israel apart from the goyim , so, the author makes Moses say, when they arrived in the Promised Land they were to have no dealings whatever with the native inhabitants. They “must make no covenant with them or show them any pity.” 33 There must be no intermarriage and no social mixing. Above all, they were to wipe out the Canaanite religion: “Tear down their altars, smash their standing stones, cut down their sacred poles and set fire to their idols,” Moses commands the Israelites, “For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh your Elohim; it is you that Yahweh our Elohim has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples in the earth.” 34 When they recite the Shema today, Jews give it a monotheistic interpretation: Yahweh our God is One and unique. The Deuteronomist had not yet reached this perspective. “Yahweh ehad” did not mean God is One, but that Yahweh was the only deity whom it was permitted to worship. Other gods were still a threat: their cults were attractive and could lure Israelites from Yahweh, who was a jealous God. If they obeyed Yahweh’s laws, he would bless them and bring them prosperity, but if they deserted him the consequences would be devastating: You will be torn from the land which you are entering to make your own. Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other; there you will serve other gods of wood and of stone that neither you nor your fathers have known … Your life from the outset will be a burden to you … In the morning you will say, “how I wish it were evening!” and in the evening, “how I wish it were morning!” such terror will grip your heart, such sights your eyes will see. 35 When King Josiah and his subjects heard these words at the end of the seventh century, they were about to be confronted by a new political threat.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  I was disturbed that the gospel was brought into disrepute at Wittenberg. If I were not sure that the gospel is on our side, I would have given up. All the sorrow I have had is nothing compared to this. I would gladly have paid for this with my life, for we can answer neither to God nor to the world for what has happened. The Devil is at work in this. As for myself, my gospel is not from men. Concessions bring only contempt. I cannot yield an inch to the Devil. I have done enough for Your Grace by staying in hiding for a year. I did not do it through cowardice. The Devil knows I would have gone into Worms though there were as many devils as tiles on the roof, and I would ride into Leipzig now, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days. The image of a steady rain of scowling Duke Georges is entertaining enough, but Luther’s faith and fearlessness are on dramatic display here. It is clear that when he knows he is in God’s will, he not only has no fear but has a tremendous boldness. In fact, he is now so clear that he is walking with God for God’s purposes—and therefore cannot go wrong, come what may—he speaks to Frederick in a way that sounds at least somewhat arrogant: I would have you know that I come to Wittenberg with a higher protection than that of Your Grace. I do not ask you to protect me. I will protect you more than you will protect me. If I thought you would protect me, I would not come. This is not a case for the sword but for God, and since you are weak in the faith you cannot protect me. . . . [Y]ou should do nothing but leave it to God. You are excused if I am captured or killed. As a prince you should obey the emperor and offer no resistance. No one should use force except the one who is ordained to use it. Otherwise there is rebellion against God. But I hope you will not act as my accuser. If you leave the door open, that is enough. If they try to make you do more than that, I will then tell you what to do. If Your Grace had eyes, you would see the glory of God.2 These are powerful words. He has no doubt that the Lord of hosts is real and will protect him, so much so that he dares to tell the man who has long protected him that Luther’s faith—which is to say God—will now protect Frederick. And then he speaks not simply of God’s protection but of his glory.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  He’s not alone. Four times as many millennials as Gen Xers list “fear of losing job” as one of their top concerns at work, according to Forbes. Uncertainty is intensified when managers at all levels don’t communicate clearly, precisely, and consistently about challenges facing their organizations— and how those issues may affect their people. We’d all have to admit that the pace of change in business has accelerated considerably, and organizations get disrupted faster than ever. For workers there is also so much information available online about how the firm is doing, and most of it is usually not positive. And yet most leaders haven’t adapted their communication approach or frequency to help control the resulting anxiety overload or temper negative outside voices. While there may be little that an individual manager can do to address the root causes of big-picture uncertainty, what they can do is communicate about what they know of challenges and what the organization is doing to address them, and especially how those challenges may impact their team and their priorities. Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers and a former Oracle global leader, told us, “Whether we are facing a pandemic, social injustice, or just because there’s too much to know today, the job of the leader is to say to their people, ‘Come with me into the dark. Together, we are going to navigate our way through complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility to a better place.’ A leader harnesses the collective intelligence of the team to find answers along the way.” The challenge most leaders have, however, is a reluctance to admit they don’t have it all figured out. What Wiseman describes is a very different way of thinking about leadership. The Power of Directness In the midst of the pandemic of 2020, FYidoctors president Darcy Verhun committed to what he called “constant communication transparency.” FYidoctors operates more than 250 optometry clinics in Canada from coast to coast and was just entering the United States when, due to COVID-19, the company was forced to temporarily close all its clinics—except to provide emergency eye care—in order to follow public health guidelines. “To keep everyone informed during this stressful period we held daily updates, via Zoom, with our entire team, which is close to three thousand colleagues,” Verhun told us. “Ahead of the calls the executive team would spend time thinking through our team members’ uncertainty and what they might be feeling. We led these calls from our home office boardroom. We wanted to signal to our emergency care givers that we were prepared to do what we were asking them to do by being in the office throughout the pandemic while following medical authority guidelines. “At the start of every call we would reconfirm our plan, what key issues we were working on for that day along with what had changed since the previous day’s call.

• From A History of God (1993)

  After his death, however, when “Calviniste” needed to distinguish themselves from Lutherans on the one hand and Roman Catholics on the other, Theodoras Beza (1519–1605), who had been Calvin’s right-hand man in Geneva and took on the leadership after his death, made predestination the distinguishing mark of Calvinism. He ironed out the paradox with relentless logic. Since God was all-powerful, it followed that man could contribute nothing toward his own salvation. God was changeless and his decrees were just and eternal: thus he had decided from all eternity to save some but had predestined the rest to eternal damnation. Some Calvinists recoiled in horror from this obnoxious doctrine. In the Low Countries, Jakob Arminius argued that this was an example of bad theology, since it spoke of God as though he were a mere human being. But Calvinists believed that God could be discussed as objectively as any other phenomenon. Like other Protestants and Catholics, they were developing a new Aristotelianism, which stressed the importance of logic and metaphysics. This was different from the Aristotelianism of St. Thomas Aquinas, since the new theologians were not as interested in the content of Aristotle’s thought as in his rational method. They wanted to present Christianity as a coherent and rational system that could be derived from syllogistic deductions based on known axioms. This was deeply ironic, of course, since the Reformers had all rejected this type of rationalistic discussion of God. The latter-day Calvinist theology of predestination showed what could happen when the paradox and mystery of God were no longer regarded as poetry but were interpreted with a coherent but terrifying logic. Once the Bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible. To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions. The “God” of the Bible ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel and despotic tyrant. The doctrine of predestination shows the limitations of such a personalized God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thus Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) still seemed preoccupied with the metaphysical anti-Semitism of Kant and Hegel. Concerned above all with the accusation that Judaism was a servile faith, Cohen denied that God was an external reality that imposes obedience from on high. God was simply an idea formed by the human mind, a symbol of the ethical ideal. Discussing the biblical story of the Burning Bush, when God had defined himself to Moses as “I am what I am,” Cohen argued that this was a primitive expression of the fact that what we call “God” is simply being itself. It is quite distinct from the mere beings that we experience, which can only participate in this essential existence. In The Religion of Reason Drawn from the Sources of Judaism (published posthumously in 1919), Cohen still insisted that God was simply a human idea. Yet he had also come to appreciate the emotional role of religion in human life. A mere ethical idea—such as “God”—cannot console us. Religion teaches us to love our neighbor, so it is possible to say that the God of religion—as opposed to the God of ethics and philosophy— was that affective love. These ideas were developed out of all recognition by Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), who evolved an entirely different conception of Judaism which set him apart from his contemporaries. Not only was he one of the first existentialists, but he also formulated ideas that were close to the oriental religions. His independence can perhaps be explained by the fact that he had left Judaism as a young man, become an agnostic and then considered converting to Christianity before finally returning to Orthodox Judaism. Rosenzweig passionately denied that the observance of the Torah encouraged a slavish, abject dependence upon a tyrannical God. Religion was not simply about morality but was essentially a meeting with the divine. How was it possible for mere human beings to encounter the transcendent God? Rosenzweig never tells us what this meeting was like—this is a weakness in his philosophy. He distrusted Hegel’s attempt to merge the Spirit with man and nature: if we simply see our human consciousness as an aspect of the World Soul, we are no longer truly individuals. A true existentialist, Rosenzweig emphasized the absolute isolation of every single human being. Each one of us is alone, lost and terrified in the vast crowd of humanity. It is only when God turns to us that we are redeemed from this anonymity and fear. God does not reduce our individuality, therefore, but enables us to attain full self-consciousness. It is impossible for us to meet God in any anthropomorphic way. God is the Ground of being, so bound up with our own existence that we cannot possibly talk to him, as though he were simply another person like ourselves. There are no words or ideas that describe God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther sent his academic gown and ring home to Mansfeld, telling his parents that he had drawn a line under this part of his life. He sold some of the fine legal textbooks his father had bought him and donated others to the monastery. 49 Then he invited all his student comrades to a lavish meal, with music and entertainment. At the height of the party, he told his shocked companions of his decision to become a monk, announcing melodramatically, “Today you see me and never again!” 50 He then left for the monastery, accompanied by his sobbing companions. Luther had staged his departure in the form of a Last Supper, a dramatic enactment of his separation from the world of the flesh. 51 Luther’s entry into the monastery was a major act of disobedience, a repudiation both of his father’s plans and of the values of Mansfeld society. Once inside, he remained in seclusion for the first month, which made it impossible for his irate father to intervene, or for his friends to try to change his mind. Moreover, he did not return home to explain his decision in person, but rather told his family of the decision by letter. Enraged, his father wrote back bitterly, returning to the informal du address. He at first withheld permission for his son to enter the monastery and, as Luther noted, eventually only gave way “unwillingly.” One version of the story has it that he gave way only after he lost two of his children to the plague in 1506. What the rebellion must have cost Luther is evident in a story about his first Mass as a priest in 1507, at which his father was present. When he arrived at the moment of consecration, where the wafer becomes the body of Christ, he experienced such panic that he would have fled had the prior not prevented him from doing so. 52 As Luther told the story in 1537, it was the words tibi aeterno Deo et vero (to you, eternal and true God) that plunged him into terror. The incident concerned the miracle of the Mass, where the bread, now the body of Christ, is displayed or is administered by the priest to the believer. At the ensuing feast to celebrate his first Mass, for which Luther’s father, always the man for the grand gesture, had given the sum of twenty guilders, the breach was still evident. Luther asked whether his father now accepted his decision, and in front of everyone at table, Hans Luder replied: “Remember the fourth commandment, to obey father and mother.” “What if it was an evil spirit” behind the events in the storm? he asked. It was a very serious charge, made at the point where Luther had just acted as Christ’s representative on earth for the first time. As everyone at the table knew, Satan could easily trick the believer into thinking an apparition was divine when it was in reality demonic.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  At times during this period, he feared for his life. His theologically correct message of moderation and restraint could not compete with the wild tauntings of Müntzer, who appealed to their deep sense of outrage at many decades of injustice. When Luther preached, many of them not only heckled and jeered but also rang bells as a symbol of their protest. Luther finally saw that they were not to be spoken to. They had become rabid and bloodthirsty, so now there was but one thing to be done: he must rally the nobles to crush them. Already on May 4, Luther wrote to his friend Johannes Rühel, urging him not to advise Count Albrecht to “be soft.” Whatever you do, Luther counseled, do not give in to the peasants’ demands. Rühel later said that Luther’s letter had indeed buoyed him up at a crucial time. As Luther traveled toward home, the ugliness of warfare was everywhere around him. It was a vast landscape of death, and now “the arch-devil” Müntzer appeared, inflaming it at every opportunity. After his time in Mühlhausen, Müntzer had again fled, this time to Nuremberg, and then he fled Nuremberg to return to Mühlhausen. But his lifetime of serial fleeing would soon be at an end, for here and now his great hour of action had come, and Müntzer could at last mount the world stage to play the part of his waking dreams. In Mühlhausen, he amassed and led an armed militia that he humbly dubbed the “Eternal League of God.” It rallied under a rainbow banner daubed with the painfully ironic maxim “The Word of God Endures Forever.” Everywhere now, and in Thuringia and Saxony especially, thousands of peasants were looting and destroying cloisters. In Thuringia alone, more than seventy cloisters were sacked, and the monks treated despicably. The fanatic peasant mobs swarmed in every direction, burning castles and barns as they went. There was no justice being sought, nor even the pretense of such. It was nothing but vengeful murder and mayhem on a terrible scale. But Luther knew that Müntzer had been called by Satan to stir up these blind butchers, all of whom ardently believed they were doing God’s work as they reveled in slaying and burning and gloried in blood and ashes.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He remarked that this was again the work of the Devil, who always attacked him “whenever I have something important that I have to do.” His body was rubbed with hot cloths and he revived. In Eisleben, Luther stayed in the house of Dr. Drachstedt, a major figure in the mining business with long-standing links to Luther’s family. 12 Meetings had to be organized around the old man’s illness, but even his precarious physical state was not enough to get the counts to agree. Negotiations dragged on for three weeks, with Luther desperate to get home. Meanwhile, he devised a daily routine. Just as mealtimes with the whole household were central to his life in Wittenberg, so in Eisleben he kept a common table, with guests. Mealtimes were devotional occasions, as they had been in the monastery. Then, every evening around eight o’clock, he rose from the table and left the big parlor to go to his room, where he would stand by the window, praying—“so earnestly and intently that we…keeping silent, often heard some words and were amazed,” according to his companions. Afterward, he would turn from the window, happy, “as if he had put down a burden,” and talk to his associates for another quarter hour before going to bed. Luther knew that he was facing death, and he talked about how “we old ones have to live so long that we see into the backside of the Devil, and experience so much evil, faithlessness and misery.” There was also talk at dinner about whether the dead would recognize one another, one of the very few occasions on which Luther speculated about the afterlife. He was sure that they would—just as, when Adam first met Eve, he knew at once that she was flesh of his flesh. 13 On the evening of February 17, when he went to his room with his two younger sons to pray, he was suddenly taken ill once more, with chest pains and coldness. Jonas and the Mansfeld preacher Michael Coelius immediately rushed to his room, and he was again rubbed with hot cloths. Countess Anna of Mansfeld was summoned to provide unicorn horn—actually the tusk of a narwhal—believed to be a powerful restorative, and Count Albrecht himself grated some of it into a glass of wine. Conrad von Wolfframsdorf, one of Albrecht’s councilors, took a spoonful of it first—perhaps because Luther feared that he would be poisoned, perhaps because he mistrusted such medicine. 14 At about 9 P.M., Luther lay down to nap, and slept peacefully for an hour. When he awoke, he asked those who had kept watch, “Are you still sitting up?”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Trans. Clarence H. Miller and Peter Macardle, with an Introduction by James D. Tracy. Indianapolis, 2012. Möllenberg, Walter, ed. Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte des Mansfeldischen Saigerhandels im 16. Jahrhundert. Halle, 1915. Mundt, Lothar. Lemnius und Luther. 2 vols. Bern and Frankfurt am Main, 1983. Müntzer, Thomas. Außgetrückte emplössung des falschen Glaubens der vngetrewen welt. Nuremberg, 1524 [VD 16 M 6745]. ———. Auszlegung des andern vnterschyds Danielis. Allstedt, 1524 [VD 16 M 6746]. ———. Briefwechsel. Ed. Siegfried Bräuer, Helmar Junghans, and Manfred Kobuch. Leipzig, 2010. ———. Hoch verursachte Schutzrede und antwort wider das Gaistloße Sanfft lebende fleysch zu Wittenberg. [Nuremberg], 1524 [VD 16 M 6747]. ———. Prager Manifest. Ed. Friedrich de Boor with introduction by Hans-Joachim Rockar. Leipzig, 1975. ———. Quellen zu Thomas Müntzer. Ed. Wieland Held and Siegfried Hoyer. Leipzig, 2004. Myconius, Friedrich. Geschichte der Reformation. Ed. Otto Clemen. Leipzig, 1914 (repr. Gotha, 1990). ———. EPISTOLA SCRIPTA AD D. Vitum Theodorum…DE CONCORDIA inita VVitebergae inter D. D. Martinum Lutherum, & Bucerum anno 36. Leipzig, 1581 [VD 16 M 7350]. Nas, Johannes. Quinta Centvria, Das ist Das fuenfft Hundert der Euangelischen warheit. Ingolstadt, 1570 [VD 16 N 105]. Neudecker, Christian Gotthold, ed. Die handschriftliche Geschichte Ratzeberger’s über Luther und seine Zeit. Jena, 1850. Neudecker, Christian Gotthold, and Ludwig Preller, eds. Georg Spalatin’s historischer Nachlass und Briefe. Jena, 1851. Newe ordnung der Stat Wittenberg, MDXXII. jar. Bamberg, 1522 [VD 16 W 3698]. Newe zeytung von den Wydertaufferen zu Münster. Nuremberg, 1535 [VD 16 N 876]. Nickel, Heinrich L., ed. Das Hallesche Heiltumbuch von 1520. Halle, 2001. Osiander, Andreas. Ob es war vn[d] glaublich sey, daß die Juden der Christen kinder heymlich erwürgen, vnd jr blut gebrauchen: ein treffenliche schrifft, auff eines yeden vrteyl gestelt. Nuremberg, 1530 [VD 16 O 1079]. Paullini, Christian Franz. Historia Isenacensis. Frankfurt, 1698 [VD 17 3:300044V]. Posset, Franz, ed. The Front-Runner of the Catholic Reformation: The Life and Works of Johann von Staupitz. Aldershot, 2003. Reindell, Wilhelm, ed. Doktor Wenzeslaus Linck aus Colditz. Vol. 1, Marburg, 1892. ———, ed. Wenzel Lincks Wercke. Vol. 1, Marburg, 1894. Richter, David. Genealogia Lutherorum; oder historische Erzehlung von D. Mart. Lutheri…heutigen Anverwandten;…Hochzeits-Tag, und seines…Gemahls Famille;…jetziger Posterität…also verfertiget, dass die teutschen Opera Lutheri…ergäntzet und…continuiret, auch mit…Kupfern gezieret worden. Berlin and Leipzig, 1733. Rubius, Johannes. Eyn neu buchlein von d’loblichen disputation offentlich gehalten vor fursten vnd vor hern vor hochgelarten vnd vngelarten yn der warden hochgepreusten stat Leyptzick inn reymen weisz. Leipzig, 1519 [VD 16 R 3409]. Schirrmacher, Friedrich Wilhelm, ed. Briefe und Akten zum Marburger Religionsgespräch (1529) und zum Augsburger Reichstag (1530). Gotha, 1876 (repr. Bonn, 2003). Schneide-Lastin, Wolfram, ed. Johann von Staupitz. Salzburger Predigten 1512. Eine textkritische Edition. Tübingen, 1990. Scriptorum publice propositorum a gvbernatoribus studiorum in Academia Wittenbergensi. Vol. 3, Wittenberg, 1559 [VD 16 W 3761]. Seitz, Otto, ed. Der authentische Text der Leipziger Disputation (1519) aus bisher unbenutzten Quellen. Berlin, 1903. Sider, Ronald J., ed. and trans. Karlstadt’s Battle with Luther: Documents in a Liberal-Radical Debate. Eugene, OR, 2001.

• From A History of God (1993)

  A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind. Science, the new logos, could take God’s place. It could provide a new basis for morality and help us to face our fears. Freud was emphatic about his faith in science, which seemed almost religious in its intensity: “No, our science is not an illusion! An illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give we can get elsewhere.” 19 Not all psychoanalysts agreed with Freud’s view of God. Alfred Adler (1870–1937) allowed that God was a projection but believed that it had been helpful to humanity; it had been a brilliant and effective symbol of excellence. C. G. Jung’s (1875–1961) God was similar to the God of the mystics, a psychological truth, subjectively experienced by each individual. When asked by John Freeman in the famous Face to Face interview whether he believed in God, Jung replied emphatically: “I do not have to believe. I know!” Jung’s continued faith suggests that a subjective God, mysteriously identified with the ground of being in the depths of the self, can survive psychoanalytic science in a way that a more personal, anthropomorphic deity who can indeed encourage perpetual immaturity may not. Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalized, subjective God. Nevertheless he made a valid and perceptive point when he insisted that it would be dangerous to attempt to abolish religion. People must outgrow God in their own good time: to force them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression. We have seen that iconoclasm can spring from a buried anxiety and projection of our own fears onto the “other.” Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish God certainly showed signs of strain. Thus, despite his advocacy of a compassionate ethic, Schopenhauer could not cope with human beings and became a recluse who communicated only with his poodle, Atman. Nietzsche was a tenderhearted, lonely man, plagued by ill health, who was very different from his Superman. Eventually he went mad. He did not abandon God joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine. In a poem delivered “after much trembling, quivering and self-contortion,” he makes Zarathustra plead with God to return: No! come back, With all your torments! Oh come back To the last of all solitaries!

• From A History of God (1993)

  In our own day, we have witnessed the permissive society of the 1960s giving way to the more puritan ethic of the 1980s, which has also coincided with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the West. This is a complex phenomenon, which doubtless has no single cause. It is, however, tempting to connect this with the idea of God, which Westerners have found problematic. The theologians and mystics of the Middle Ages may have preached a God of love, but the fearful Dooms over the cathedral doors depicting the tortures of the damned told another story. The sense of God has often been characterized by darkness and struggle in the West, as we have seen. Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe were flouting Christian taboos and proclaiming the holiness of sin at the same time as the witchcraft craze was raging in various countries of Europe. The radical Christians of Cromwell’s England were also rebelling against a God and a religion which was too demanding and frightening. The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was frequently unhealthy and characterized by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals. We can see this in the wave of religious fervor known as the Great Awakening that swept New England during the 1730s. It had been inspired by the evangelical preaching of George Whitfield, a disciple and colleague of the Wesleys, and the hellfire sermons of the Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Edwards describes this Awakening in his essay “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Northampton, Connecticut.” He describes his parishioners there as nothing out of the ordinary: they were sober, orderly and good but lacking in religious fervor. They were no better or worse than men and women in any of the other colonies. But in 1734 two young people died shockingly sudden deaths, and this (backed up, it would appear, by some fearful words by Edwards himself) plunged the town into a frenzy of religious fervor. People could talk of nothing but religion; they stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all classes of society: sometimes there would be as many as five a week. Edwards saw this craze as the direct work of God himself: he meant this quite literally, it was not a mere pious façon de parler . As he repeatedly said, “God seemed to have gone out of his usual way” of behaving in New England and was moving the people in a marvelous and miraculous manner. It must be said, however, that the Holy Spirit sometimes manifested himself in some rather hysterical symptoms. Sometimes, Edwards tells us, they were quite “broken” by the fear of God and “sunk into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  We had to think fast to respond openly and transparently. In being willing to do this we built trust, confidence, and deep engagement with the team.” Said Verhun, a few weeks in, the executives found that they no longer were the only ones responding to queries. “Our doctors and team began to mentor each other and answer each other’s questions faster than we could read them in the chat. That told us that everybody was helping build solutions and helping to lead collectively to the goals the leadership team had identified for the organization. This was only possible because of the clarity provided up front and the unwavering guiding principles and values our entire team understood that we used to make decisions.” By midyear, FYidoctors clinics were opening back up and the company was reporting its best monthly results and growth in its twelve-year history. One need look no further than the decline of Yahoo for an example of how detrimental a lack of transparency can be to morale during uncertain times. Despite an optimistic outward appearance to investors, employees had begun doubting the company’s viability by the mid-2010s. According to New York Times interviews with Yahoo employees, leaders had embarked on a series of “stealth layoffs.” They called in a handful of people each week and fired them quietly. No one knew who would be safe or who would be gone next, and fear paralyzed many workers. The entire process was confusing and demoralizing to loyal employees who loved the company and believed in its platforms. “We all want to make as much impact as we can and leverage Yahoo’s existing strengths,” employee Austin Shoemaker said at the time, summing up the feelings of many loyal Yahoos. Finally, in March 2015, CEO Marissa Mayer told the staff at an all-hands event that the bloodletting was over. She even darkly joked that no one would be laid off that week. Yet shortly thereafter, more cuts began. Employees were well aware of how fierce Yahoo’s competition was. The company was also struggling with an industrywide drop in display advertising, not to mention a challenge in trying to excel at so many things—from news and sports to web searches and email. But employees interviewed said they wanted to face the hurdles as a cohesive team, even if that meant that some might have to depart the company for it to survive. While Mayer tried to hide layoffs behind the euphemism “remixes,” one employee told the New York Post : “I don’t think people want to be mollified. They want to be respected and trusted with facts so they can plan their lives, and also help.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among world religions for its violent alternations of periods of repression and permissiveness. They have also noted that the repressive phases usually coincide with a religious revival. The more relaxed moral climate of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity. In our own day, we have witnessed the permissive society of the 1960s giving way to the more puritan ethic of the 1980s, which has also coincided with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the West. This is a complex phenomenon, which doubtless has no single cause. It is, however, tempting to connect this with the idea of God, which Westerners have found problematic. The theologians and mystics of the Middle Ages may have preached a God of love, but the fearful Dooms over the cathedral doors depicting the tortures of the damned told another story. The sense of God has often been characterized by darkness and struggle in the West, as we have seen. Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe were flouting Christian taboos and proclaiming the holiness of sin at the same time as the witchcraft craze was raging in various countries of Europe. The radical Christians of Cromwell’s England were also rebelling against a God and a religion which was too demanding and frightening.

• From A History of God (1993)

  31 In 1553 Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity. Servetus had fled Catholic Spain and had taken refuge in Calvin’s Geneva, claiming that he was returning to the faith of the apostles and the earliest Fathers of the Church, who had never heard of this extraordinary doctrine. With some justice, Servetus argued that there was nothing in the New Testament to contradict the strict monotheism of the Jewish scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity was a human fabrication which had “alienated the minds of men from the knowledge of the true Christ and presented us with a tripartite God.” 32 His beliefs were shared by two Italian reformers—Giorgio Blandrata (ca. 1515–1588) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)—who had both fled to Geneva but discovered that their theology was too radical for the Swiss Reformation; they did not even adhere to the traditional Western view of the atonement. They did not believe that men and women were justified by Christ’s death but simply by their “faith” or trust in God. In his book Christ the Savior , Socinus repudiated the so-called orthodoxy of Nicaea: the term “Son of God” was not a statement about Jesus’ divine nature but simply meant that he was specially loved by God. He had not died to atone for our sins but was simply a teacher who “showed and taught the way of salvation.” As for the doctrine of the Trinity, that was simply a “monstrosity,” an imaginary fiction that was “repugnant to reason” and actually encouraged the faithful to believe in three separate gods. 33 After the execution of Servetus, Blandrata and Socinus both fled to Poland and Transylvania, taking their “Unitarian” religion with them. Zwingli and Calvin relied on more conventional ideas of God and, like Luther, they emphasized his absolute sovereignty. This was not simply an intellectual conviction but the result of an intensely personal experience. In August 1519, shortly after he had begun his ministry in Zurich, Zwingli contracted the plague that eventually wiped out twenty-five percent of the population of the city. He felt completely helpless, realizing that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. It did not occur to him to pray to the saints for help or ask the Church to intercede for him. Instead he threw himself on God’s mercy. He composed this short prayer: Do as you will for I lack nothing. I am your vessel to be restored or destroyed. 34 His surrender was similar to the ideal of isl a m: like Jews and Muslims at a comparable stage of their development, Western Christians were no longer willing to accept mediators but were evolving a sense of their inalienable responsibility before God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like the earlier Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), Calvin was not particularly interested in dogma: his concern was centered on the social, political and economic aspects of religion. He wanted to return to a simpler, scriptural piety but adhered to the doctrine of the Trinity, despite the unbiblical provenance of its terminology. As he wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, God had declared that he was One but “clearly sets this before us as existing in three persons.”31 In 1553 Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity. Servetus had fled Catholic Spain and had taken refuge in Calvin’s Geneva, claiming that he was returning to the faith of the apostles and the earliest Fathers of the Church, who had never heard of this extraordinary doctrine. With some justice, Servetus argued that there was nothing in the New Testament to contradict the strict monotheism of the Jewish scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity was a human fabrication which had “alienated the minds of men from the knowledge of the true Christ and presented us with a tripartite God.”32 His beliefs were shared by two Italian reformers—Giorgio Blandrata (ca. 1515–1588) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)—who had both fled to Geneva but discovered that their theology was too radical for the Swiss Reformation; they did not even adhere to the traditional Western view of the atonement. They did not believe that men and women were justified by Christ’s death but simply by their “faith” or trust in God. In his book Christ the Savior, Socinus repudiated the so-called orthodoxy of Nicaea: the term “Son of God” was not a statement about Jesus’ divine nature but simply meant that he was specially loved by God. He had not died to atone for our sins but was simply a teacher who “showed and taught the way of salvation.” As for the doctrine of the Trinity, that was simply a “monstrosity,” an imaginary fiction that was “repugnant to reason” and actually encouraged the faithful to believe in three separate gods.33 After the execution of Servetus, Blandrata and Socinus both fled to Poland and Transylvania, taking their “Unitarian” religion with them. Zwingli and Calvin relied on more conventional ideas of God and, like Luther, they emphasized his absolute sovereignty. This was not simply an intellectual conviction but the result of an intensely personal experience. In August 1519, shortly after he had begun his ministry in Zurich, Zwingli contracted the plague that eventually wiped out twenty-five percent of the population of the city. He felt completely helpless, realizing that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. It did not occur to him to pray to the saints for help or ask the Church to intercede for him. Instead he threw himself on God’s mercy. He composed this short prayer: Do as you will for I lack nothing. I am your vessel to be restored or destroyed.34

• From A History of God (1993)

  Highly recommended. O’Donovan, Leo (ed.), A World of Grace, An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner’s Theology (New York, 1978). Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (New York, 1958). The Christian Faith (trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Steward, Edinburgh, 1928). Riches, John (ed.), The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh, 1986). Robinson, J. A. T., Honest to God (London, 1963). Exploration into God (London, 1967). Rosenzweig, Franz, The Star of Redemption , 3 vols. (New York, 1970). Rubenstein, Richard L., After Auschwitz, Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, 1966). Schweid, Eliezer, The Land of Israel: National Home or Land of Destiny (trans. Deborah Greniman, New York, 1985). Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, Islam in Modern History (Princeton and London, 1957). A brilliant and prescient study. Steiner, George, Real Presences, Is there anything in what we say ? (London, 1989). Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be (London, 1962). Tracy, David, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York, 1971). Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality (Cambridge, 1929). Religion in the Making (Cambridge, 1926). 11 Does God Have a Future ? A S WE APPROACH the end of the second millennium, it seems likely that the world we know is passing away. For decades we have lived with the knowledge that we have created weapons that could wipe out human life on the planet. The Cold War may have ended, but the new world order seems no less frightening than the old. We are facing the possibility of ecological disaster. The AIDS virus threatens to bring a plague of unmanageable proportions. Within two or three generations, the population will become too great for the planet to support. Thousands are dying of famine and drought. Generations before our own have felt that the end of the world is nigh, yet it does seem that we are facing a future that is unimaginable. How will the idea of God survive in the years to come? For 4000 years it has constantly adapted to meet the demands of the present, but in our own century, more and more people have found that it no longer works for them, and when religious ideas cease to be effective they fade away. Maybe God really is an idea of the past. The American scholar Peter Berger notes that we often have a double standard when we compare the past with our own time. Where the past is analyzed and made relative, the present is rendered immune to this process and our current position becomes an absolute: thus “the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.” 1 Secularists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw atheism as the irreversible condition of humanity in the scientific age. There is much to support this view.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Songs were sung mocking him, letters of feud were sent threatening his life and goods, and a gang of fifty students arrived from Wittenberg who began to hound him.” On 3 January 1521, Luther was finally excommunicated by the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem. Luther noted what was happening with fascin- ation, following the progress of the original bull and gathering the accounts through the spring of 1521 of its fate.* In Leipzig, to his surprise, the bull was ripped and dung was thrown at it; in Doblin the crowds did the same, erecting a notice saying “The nest is here, the birds have flown!’ In Magdeburg, Emser’s book was put up on the pillory.® It seemed that Germany was thumbing its nose at the power of the Pope. Book burnings were also in the air. In 1518 it had been the students at Wittenberg who had burnt the work of the indulgence-seller Tetzel. In Louvain in 1520, Aleander managed to have over eighty Lutheran books publicly burnt by the executioner in the market square, partly by getting the councillors to seize the books from the booksellers. In Mainz late that year, however, the ritual went badly wrong. The hangman asked the assembled crowd whether the author had been legitimately condemned; they roared back that he had not been — and so he refused to light the fire, much to the audience's delight.” Luther mocked Aleander for having spent hundreds of ducats buying his books to burn. But burning heretical texts prefigured burning the heretic himself: Luther knew what fate awaited him if he were to be seized by the Pope’s forces. ——-~ « = pee = oe a wiete! wate ee a) < actor yes } 2 so vtrten Lew nano nds iatecias sip’ pobets h-nechil vee ‘am eee ne ahd wht ig en* ae 4 gee shea] a ‘Uniti 8 =4ngei ak on tet ie; es oh ees oe ‘tase ad ae = ; pied qaar 4 are | . Sea war ce taper eae nie shirs ew tet marta stim Siird <A - ate weet. as ieee oY ip i dohieq.ge é bev. - Tretrud to wag, cams enetgdy “Shay SF eta Gal YRS : ‘ ‘ ‘S ws e. i we : Riyt ae mie 8 na =~ mt - , ie o> Sin Ji. i |X 7 — @ 9 4° - “a a fo 7 =i DG Jae ~ Pa be La - re Am Je! ie . ; ie q f — — Se < 2 we on =e) o> <2: ws ae 1. ; Se wt. } ee Vee Ape “eit eam eres wees “J : peney in omeit, yee hel ane rch set la ana aellie a ot = wee? : a : - : aan. a il t y42 Seay CAE ee 4 Pat) Os aii Ae!

• From A History of God (1993)

  Abraham had proved himself worthy of becoming the father of a mighty nation, which would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. Yet to modern ears, this is a horrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this tale as children reject such a deity. The myth of the Exodus from Egypt, when God led Moses and the children of Israel to freedom, is equally offensive to modern sensibilities. The story is well known. Pharaoh was reluctant to let the people of Israel go, so to force his hand, God sent ten fearful plagues upon the people of Egypt. The Nile was turned to blood; the land ravaged with locusts and frogs; the whole country plunged into impenetrable darkness. Finally God unleashed the most terrible plague of all: he sent the Angel of Death to kill the firstborn sons of all the Egyptians, while sparing the sons of the Hebrew slaves. Not surprisingly, Pharaoh decided to let the Israelites leave but later changed his mind and pursued them with his army. He caught up with them at the Sea of Reeds, but God saved the Israelites by opening the sea and letting them cross dry-shod. When the Egyptians followed in their wake, he closed the waters and drowned the Pharaoh and his army. This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies. He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his own favorites and is simply a tribal deity. If Yahweh had remained such a savage god, the sooner he vanished, the better it would have been for everybody. The final myth of the Exodus, as it has come down to us in the Bible, is clearly not meant to be a literal version of events. It would, however, have had a clear message for the people of the ancient Middle East, who were used to gods splitting the seas in half. Yet unlike Marduk and Baal, Yahweh was said to have divided a physical sea in the profane world of historical time. There is little attempt at realism. When the Israelites recounted the story of the Exodus, they were not as interested in historical accuracy as we would be today. Instead, they wanted to bring out the significance of the original event, whatever that may have been. Some modern scholars suggest that the Exodus story is a mythical rendering of a successful peasants’ revolt against the suzerainty of Egypt and its allies in Canaan.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Zayd’s longing for a divine revelation was fulfilled on Mount Hira in 610 on the seventeenth night of Ramadan, when Muhammad was torn from sleep and felt himself enveloped by a devastating divine presence. Later he explained this ineffable experience in distinctively Arabian terms. He said that an angel had appeared to him and given him a curt command: “Recite!” (iqra!) Like the Hebrew prophets who were often reluctant to utter the Word of God, Muhammad refused, protesting, “I am not a reciter!” He was no kahin, one of the ecstatic soothsayers of Arabia who claimed to recite inspired oracles. But, Muhammad said, the angel simply enveloped him in an overpowering embrace, so that he felt as if all the breath was being squeezed from his body. Just as he felt he could bear it no longer, the angel released him and again commanded him to “Recite!” (iqra!). Again Muhammad refused and again the angel embraced him until he felt he had reached the limits of his endurance. Finally, at the end of a third terrifying embrace, Muhammad found the first words of a new scripture pouring from his mouth: Recite in the name of thy Sustainer, who has created—created man out of a germ-cell! Recite—for thy Sustainer is the Most Bountiful, One who has taught [man] the use of the pen—taught him what he did not know!2 The word of God had been spoken for the first time in the Arabic language, and this scripture would ultimately be called the qur’an: the Recitation. Muhammad came to himself in terror and revulsion, horrified to think that he might have become a mere disreputable kahin whom people’ consulted if one of their camels went missing. A kahin was supposedly possessed by a jinni, one of the sprites who were thought to haunt the landscape and who could be capricious and lead people into error. Poets also believed that they were possessed by their personal jinni. Thus Hassan ibn Thabit, a poet of Yathrib who later became a Muslim, says that when he received his poetic vocation his jinni had appeared to him, thrown him to the ground and forced the inspired words from his mouth. This was the only form of inspiration that was familiar to Muhammad, and the thought that he might have become majnun, jinni-possessed, filled him with such despair that he no longer wished to live. He thoroughly despised the kahins, whose oracles were usually unintelligible mumbo jumbo, and was always very careful to distinguish the Koran from conventional Arabic poetry. Now, rushing from the cave, he resolved to fling himself from the summit to his death. But on the mountainside he had another vision of a being which, later, he identified with the angel Gabriel: