Now, as you know, this is the great discussion going on in what we call today the New Theology,
 the revolution within standard-brand Christianity.
 Because you see, for years and years, the clergy, the ministry of the various churches,
 such as Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Unitarian, even in some cases
 Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans, their theological seminaries have been discussing
 religion in terms utterly different than you will normally hear from the pulpit.
 And every graduate of an intelligent theological school has a sense of intense frustration
 as he has to get out to work in a community or parish church, because he does not believe
 what he is supposed to preach.
 And this has, in a way, been true for a long, long time.
 Clergy, except in the Roman Catholic Church, where the situation is somewhat different,
 are very heavily controlled by the laity, because he who pays the piper calls the tune.
 And therefore, they are in a state of constant frustration, because those who contribute
 most heavily, and therefore are most interested in the church, tend to be conservative-minded
 people and they want that old-time religion.
 Although as a matter of fact, what they call the old-time religion is really quite modern.
 But still, that's what they want.
 And they are people who, as I would say, would tend to be conservative in their whole attitude
 to life.
 Because you see, people of a more liberal disposition couldn't care less about going
 to church.
 In the British Army, they have a thing called "church parade."
 And there's a famous story about a drill sergeant who got all the troops up for church parade
 on a Sunday morning, and he used to call out, "Catholics to the right, Protestants to the
 left, fancy religions in the middle."
 And to the degree, you see, that intelligent people in our culture have any religion at
 all, it tends to be a fancy religion.
 Interesting in the new kinds of things that may be unity, Christian science, theosophy,
 Buddhism, Vedanta, or some kind of special Protestant offshoot, such as the Fellowship
 Church in San Francisco, or the Community Church in New York, and things of that kind.
 Very liberal, very left-wing theologically.
 So the new theology comes at this time to a very large extent because, A, the clergy
 are fed up; B, Christianity has its back to the wall, and the Pope knows this better than
 anybody.
 And so hand-in-hand with this ecumenical movement, there goes along a reconsideration of what
 on earth it's all about.
 Is there a God?
 Is there God?
 And a lot of people are boldly saying, "That is to be abandoned."
 As an English priest, Father Maskell, put it, "It is the basic assumption of the secularist
 movement in Christian theology that life is a journey between the maternity ward and the
 crematorium, and that is what there is."
 That's it.
 And that only is the life that the Christian religion has to do with, and to encounter.
 And therefore, more than ever, being a Christian, if it is an abandonment of God, or of the
 idea that the universe is supernaturally controlled, the Christian religion fastens itself, therefore,
 with peculiar and increased fervour to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
 As one wit put it, "There is no God, and Jesus Christ is his only Son."
 Because you see, what otherwise makes you a Christian?
 There's something strange about Christianity, in that it shares with Islam and Judaism what
 we might call theological imperialism.
 Christians of even the most liberal stripe fervently believe that their religion is the
 best religion, and they will state it by saying, "Either Jesus Christ is the only Son of God"
 - that's an Orthodox way, as a matter of fact, it isn't really an Orthodox way of saying
 it, but it's the way Orthodox people do say it - "or they will say, 'Jesus is the greatest
 man that ever lived.'"
 The point is that you make a commitment to the following of Jesus as an historical personage.
 And for some reason or other, people who commit themselves to this exclusive kind of following
 of Jesus become exceedingly obstreperous, because they will either damn other religions
 outright or far more insidiously, damn them with faint praise.
 Old Buddha taught some very good things, you know, and we all are indebted to his great
 moral principles, but... and then comes this pitch, you see, for the sole following of
 Jesus as the Lord and Master, head and shoulders above all.
 Well the trouble with that has always been that when you get into a theological argument
 with a person who is a Christian, you get into a situation where the advocate and the
 judge are the same person.
 That is to say, Jesus is judged the best man in the world by the standards of Christianity,
 because those are the standards with which this kind of person judges.
 And therefore, he... and you'll find that people who leap to these judgments usually
 don't know very much about any other kind of religion.
 The courses on comparative religion in theological schools are shockingly superficial and grossly
 inaccurate.
 And so this is coming to the front now, you see.
 In order to be the... to belong to the Church, really, is to be saved, and to be saved is
 to belong to the innest in-group.
 You have to have an in-group, you see.
 If you want to know who you are, you have to belong to something.
 Say, if you want to distinguish yourself, because you know who you are because of the
 people who aren't like you.
 There you get a contrast.
 Now this is... this is the basic arrangement for a Church.
 So you see, if you want to be in some kind of an in-group, you must put everybody else
 beyond the pale.
 St. Thomas Aquinas gave the show away, actually, because he said that the blessed in heaven
 will often walk to the battlements and look down and delight in the justice of God being
 properly carried out in hell.
 So... but you may not believe in hell, you may be very liberal, and after all it's not
 nice or sophisticated nowadays to believe in everlasting damnation.
 But we have new words for it, such as failing to be a real person, sinking below the human
 level, or entering into final and irremediable psychosis.
 All these are new words, either for damnation or heresy.
 And so you join, and you know you're saved, only if somebody else isn't.
 If somebody else is damned.
 It's very difficult to believe, or even to imagine a state of affairs where everyone
 and everything is saved.
 You have to be a mystic even to think about that, because it requires having a state of
 consciousness which transcends oppositions.
 And you can't do that along the line of ordinary logic.
 You have to have a new kind of logic, which takes over at a certain point.
 And this logic I'm using at the moment by pointing out that damned people and saved
 people need each other.
 They are in a symbiotic relationship with each other.
 They go together in the same way as the back and the front of something, because if something
 has a front it has to have a back too.
 And so the very fact that fronts and backs go together indicates that there is a unity
 between these two opposed sides.
 So also there is a unity between the damned and the saved.
 And it's only as you begin to realize that you need the damned people in order to be
 saved, and that the damned people need the saved people in order to be damned, that you
 start laughing about it.
 And that laughter is very subversive.
 And it's, you know how it is, you're not supposed to laugh in church, and not in courts of law
 either.
 There are places where laughter makes people nervous, because it's supposed to be a sign
 of disrespect.
 Now it may not be so at all.
 Dante said that the Song of the Angels in Paradise sounded like the laughter of the
 universe.
 But in church, especially any rather more serious kinds of church, laughing is very
 bad form.
 Why?
 Because if you look at the design of a Catholic church, you will notice that it is based upon
 the design of the courtroom of a king.
 And if you look at a Protestant church, you will see that it is based upon the design
 of a law court.
 Indeed, the Protestant minister wears exactly the same robes as an American judge.
 And all those pews and box-like stalls are the same as you will find in the old-fashioned
 court with a witness box, jury box, and all that kind of thing.
 But you see, the original idea of the Christian church, these ancient Roman churches, are
 called a basilica.
 That means the courtroom of a king, the throne room, the altar is the throne of God.
 Now in a courtroom, the king is very nervous, because anybody who takes it upon himself
 to govern other people and rule them had better watch out.
 And therefore he always has his back to the wall.
 And he is flanked by attending guards and high ministers of state.
 And just so that nobody will get up and make trouble, he has them either on their knees
 or flat on their faces when they come into his presence.
 And of course, no one must laugh, except the laughing Mr. Big.
 And so this was the pattern, this was the model upon which the Judeo-Christian idea
 of God was based.
 It is a political model, and the title of God is taken from the supreme emperors of
 Persia, the Dayan Khan, the king of kings, the lord of lords.
 And so in the English church at morning prayer, the clergyman gets up and says, "Almighty
 and everlasting God, the only ruler of princes, king of kings, lord of lords, who dost from
 thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth, most graciously deign to behold our gracious
 sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, and all the royal family."
 That's the picture.
 In the metaphor, you may not believe, literally, that God sits on a throne, or even has a body
 to put on one, or that he wears a crown, or that he has a beard.
 But the image colors your feeling about the character of God.
 And imagery is much more powerful than intellectual concepts.
 You may know, it says in the prayer book, that God is the Spirit, without body, parts,
 or passions, omnipresent to all places, eternal through all time.
 And therefore one thinks, as Haeckel does, of the gaseous vertebrate.
 Or else of an enormously diffused sea of luminous jello, filling all time and space.
 God uses images.
 But behind those images are the old images that influenced us in childhood.
 And if you still attend a church and you use that imagery, you still think emotionally,
 you feel towards God, as one would if you took it literally.
 So this political model of God has dominated the West.
 And the world is related to God as subjects to a king, or as artifacts to a maker.
 We have, of course, a ceramic model of the universe, because it's said in the book of
 Genesis that God made Adam out of the dust of the ground.
 In other words, he made a clay figurine and then blew the breath of life into the nostrils
 of the figurine so that it came to life.
 Now the Hindus don't have that model of the universe to cope with, because they don't
 look at the universe as God's creation, in the sense of being an artifact.
 They look at it as God's drama, because they see the world as acted, not created.
 God is that which is pretending to be all this.
 And everybody is really God, is a mask of God, who is playing that he's you.
 But he's doing it so well that he's taken himself in, because he's the audience as well
 as the actor.
 It's a really successful play, because the good actor, although you know a play is a
 just a play, a good actor is going to try and make you think it isn't.
 He wants to get you crying.
 He wants to get you sitting on the edge of your seat in anticipation.
 And God, as the best actor, has convinced himself completely that the act is real.
 The Chinese again have a different model.
 Their model of the universe is an organic one.
 It is a great organism.
 It is alive.
 It grows.
 It is an intelligent order.
 So those are the three great models of the world.
 When the West stopped believing seriously in God a long time ago, they however retained
 the idea of the world as an artifact.
 And so we graduated from the ceramic model of the universe to the fully automatic model,
 which is actual common sense for most people living today.
 I return to the point then that the clergy and the church people don't really believe
 in God in the old-fashioned sense of the word God at all.
 If they did believe the Christian religion in some of its orthodox forms seriously, they
 would be screaming in the streets.
 And even the most far-out lunatic fringe, Jehovah's Witnesses, are even more or less
 polite when they come and call at your house.
 Because if they really believed that you were going to hell, they would make more fuss about
 you than if you had the bubonic plague.
 But nobody really takes it that seriously any longer.
 That means they don't believe in it.
 They know they ought to believe in it.
 In fact many sermons are exhortations to have more faith, which means that we all recognize
 that we don't really believe in this, and we ought to.
 We feel very guilty about it.
 We don't have the moral strength to believe in this.
 But it isn't only a matter of moral strength.
 It's a matter of being asked to believe what most people feel is nonsense, that the world
 is run on the lines of a state.
 How, for example, can you be a citizen of the United States, having taken an oath that
 a republican form of government is the best form of government, and believe that the universe
 is a monarchy?
 So what has happened is, intelligent people have always realized that this political model
 for the cosmos won't do.
 Now actually, no serious theologian ever did believe that God was an old gentleman with
 whiskers on a golden throne.
 Never.
 What the Bishop of Woolwich says in his book Honest to God, you know, that there isn't
 some sort of a someone out there.
 He is very naive in a way, because he could have taken huge quotations out of St. Thomas
 Aquinas, out of the great fathers of the Church, from Oregon, from Clement of Alexandria, from
 St. Gregory Nazianzus, from St. John of Tabascus, from St. Basil the Great, from St. Augustine,
 from St. Ambrose, from Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Albert the Great.
 He could have quoted all those perfectly orthodox, very correct theologians, and shown that they
 never believed in a God like that with whiskers.
 And he could have come forward and said, you see, this is a perfectly orthodox book, and
 I'm not a revolutionary, I'm just going back to the real old-time religion.
 He didn't do that.
 And do you know why?
 He told me.
 He never read those writers in theological school.
 He was entirely confined to biblical studies, and never got as far as that.
 But it's just the same with ever so many people.
 One of the reasons why so many people turned to an Oriental religion was that the level,
 the intellectual level at which Oriental religions were first presented in the West, was so much
 higher than the intellectual level at which Christianity was presented at the local church.
 If you lived in India, or Ceylon, of course there would be the local Buddhist monastery,
 and it would be just as junky as the stuff was around the local church.
 They don't tell people all about the great void, and how to practice meditation, and those
 things.
 That's for specialists, a minority.
 All they care about is gaining merit, mostly by making contributions to the clergy, for
 better circumstances in your next life.
 Or getting out of evil karma.
 That's the real thing that popular Buddhism is about.
 But you see, the trouble in the West is that everybody's getting educated.
 There's a terrific literacy.
 And therefore, the public has to be treated as if it were intelligent.
 You can't say the public be damned anymore.
 There's too many intelligent people.
 Now, let's look at the line-up.
 What sort of a situation is this, really?
 For my part, I would say the god that is dead is this political model god.
 However conceived.
 The divine paternalistic authority who rules the universe.
 And to whom you as an ego are related as a subject to a king, by analogy.
 See?
 Now that one just isn't holding up.
 But what's the alternative?
 Especially think about what could be an alternative for Western people with a Christian background.
 What other kind of god could we have?
 Well, one possibility is none.
 And this is what people like Althaeuser are discussing.
 He's on the far left of this new theology.
 I would say a man like James Pike is on the right of the new theology.
 He very definitely believes in god.
 He's a theist.
 But he doesn't believe in anything with whiskers on it.
 Nor does he really believe in the political model.
 Are we going to settle, then, for the fact that the universe is just what it appears
 to be?
 Or are we going to have a very refined conception of god, which will be called it in the future?
 Instead of he.
 That makes a lot of difference.
 Very powerful what pronoun you use.
 Or even he/she.
 Now the Christian scientists talk about the father/mother.
 It's sort of complicated.
 People feel that's a little bit weird.
 It is rather simple.
 But then when you say it, does it mean that god is something like electricity?
 Which doesn't seem to have any independent intelligence of its own.
 You can use it intelligently.
 But it's just energy.
 It just suddenly goes zoom.
 Is that god?
 Is god it, like that?
 Or what?
 Well, it's a funny thing.
 But it's very difficult to be a complete atheist.
 A real atheist.
 Like in the House of Parliament in England, when in 1928 the Church of England wanted
 a new prayer book, a revised prayer book, because the Church and the state are inseparable
 in England, the Houses of Parliament had to vote on whether this prayer book might be
 used.
 And somebody got up and said, this is perfectly ridiculous.
 An assemblage which contains a number of atheists voting on the inner politics of the
 Church of England.
 And another member got up and he said, oh, I don't think there are any atheists here.
 Not really.
 We all believe in some sort of a something somewhere.
 Now, you see, in the theological world, it just doesn't do to believe in some sort of
 a something somewhere.
 Because one thing that theologians detest is vagueness.
 You should listen to them.
 Even no god at all, because that's clear and precise.
 No beating around the bush, old man.
 You know, it's just fuzzy thinking to have the great universal mind, the undifferentiated
 aesthetic continuum.
 That's all some sort of a something somewhere.
 Woolly thinking.
 Either no god, or a god with a definite character and a clear moral will and precise standards
 who will not be pushed around.
 The biblical god.
 Wowee.
 What do you do?
 You put your mind into two watertight compartments, one of which you're abreast of science and
 the modern world and all that kind of thing, and the other compartment, which simply had
 nothing to do with that, is a completely cut off thing called religion, where you believe
 in absolutely ludicrous propositions.
 A lot of people do that.
 But a lot of people want a religion which is difficult to believe in, because that's
 a kind of a test of faith, whether you can swallow it.


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