Ancient Story, New Chapter – Comprehensive Study Notes

Earliest homo sapiens lived with a sense of surrounding numinous power shaping life’s pattern.
- Expressed through stories, symbols, rituals → later summarized by the word “religion.”
- Burial practices (ochre = blood, fetal positioning, grave goods) indicate belief that death could be a gateway to further life.
John Esposito’s synthesis: every society over the last $100,000$ years shows a parallel rise of tool-making, language, and unmistakable religious activity.
Key insight: Religion emerged together with tools and fire.

Transition around $3000\,\text{BCE}$ to settled villages / city-states produced:
- Structured liturgies: stories, songs, symbols, rituals.
- Sacred times & spaces, priestly hierarchies, charismatic seers.
Scholarly study now maps changes across: great / small, organized / indigenous, living / extinct religions.
Religion = dynamic phenomenon with emotional, intellectual, institutional strands.
Deity symbolises horizon of totality beyond mundane fragments; presence sensed in nature, art, love, loss, limits, the uncanny, etc.

Coined term mysterium tremendum et fascinans:
- Mysterium – hidden, inexhaustible plenitude.
- Tremendum – awesome, uncontrollable power; evokes reverence/fear.
- Fascinans – overwhelmingly gracious love, mercy, comfort; entices hearts.
Religion passes living tradition across generations: texts, rituals, practices carry ancestors’ encounters.

19th- & 20th-century atheism predicted religion would wither before technical progress → prophecy unfulfilled.
Ambiguous heritage:
- Positive vitality of faith & new spiritualities.
- Violence when a deity is reduced to tribal idol (Martin Buber: the word "God" has blood all over it).

Persistent biblical imperative to “seek God with all your heart.”
Textual motifs: thirst (Ps 63), divine invitation (Ps 27), promise of finding (Deut 4:29; Jer 29:12-13).
Mutual search: Wisdom (female) invites hearers; God shepherds lost sheep (Ezek 34).

Jesus’ teaching: “Seek first the kingdom” (Matt 6:33); promise: “ask… seek… knock” (Matt 7:7-8).
Divine initiative: parables of lost sheep & coin (Luke 15), mission of Son of Man “to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

Qur’anic focus on beholding the Face of Allah (Sūra $2{:}115$ ).
Allah rebukes elitism; honors poor who “desire His Face” (Sūra $18{:}28$ ).
Lifelong quest embodied in Sufism and Muhammad’s own striving (Sūra $92{:}20$ ).
Augustine’s maxim summarizes all three faiths: “God is sought in order to be found more sweetly, and found in order to be sought more eagerly.”

Factor 1 – Divine Incomprehensibility: God incomparable; any full concept becomes idolatry.
- Augustine’s riddle: “If you have understood, it is not God.”
Factor 2 – Insatiable Human Heart: universal longing propels continued hunger for deeper union.
Factor 3 – Historical Change: shifting cultures demand new mediations; old images may lose relevance.
Therefore: ongoing, historically new articulations are expected and healthy; eras without frontiers grow "dry, dusty, static."
Contemporary stimuli birthing new God-ideas: Holocaust aftermath, struggles for social justice, feminist dignity, inter-religious encounter, ecological crisis.

Inherited Enlightenment construct: God as remote monarch, “supersized chap” (critic Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins).
- Focused on single “first person” ruling from on high; reinforces social hierarchies; intervenes occasionally.
Genesis of the model: 17th–18th-century theologians adopted rationalist methods to defend faith → God reduced to highest piece in rational system.
- Attributes deduced by contrast: immutable, impassible, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.
Compromise produced:
- Diminished transcendence (God placed inside world’s coordinate grid).
- Diminished immanence (God too distant for indwelling presence).
Pop-culture fallout catalogued in J. B. Phillips’ Your God Is Too Small: grand-old-man, resident policeman, managing director, spoilsport, etc.

Reclaim radical transcendence & radical immanence together.
- God as Ground of existence, compassion, liberating love.
- Prefer liminal places & margins where God’s transformative action appears.
- Divine graciousness expanded: includes all peoples + entire natural world.
- Core metaphor: “God is Love” $(1\,\text{Jn}\,4{:}16)$ .

Ineffable Mystery
- God surpasses all wording; our vision is a dim mirror ( $1\,\text{Cor}\,13{:}12$ ).
- Augustine’s beach vision: trying to pour the sea into a sand hole.
No Expression Taken Literally
- Language = finger pointing at the moon.
- Three classic theories explain indirection:
  - Analogy: affirm → negate → negate the negation (e.g., “God is good” → “not creaturely good” → “supereminently Good”).
  - Likewise for “person”: God is super-personal.
  - Metaphor: holds tension of “is / is not” (e.g., “A mighty fortress is our God”).
  - Symbol: points & participates; can age and die (Tillich: “God” symbol of ultimate concern).
- Prayer / contemplation keeps metaphors alive; prevents idolatrous literalism.
Necessity of Many Names (Aquinas)
- Scripture overflows with images: father, mother, king, midwife, judge, potter, mother-bear, rock, light, cloud, fire, water…
- Central biblical name YHWH = “I will be there with you.”
- Poverty of vocabulary persists even with a thousand names.

Wolfhart Pannenberg: “Religions die when their lights fail”—teachings must illuminate contemporary life.
Vitality test → Christianity shows resilience via multiple local theologies & fresh practices.
Ongoing quest offers individuals & church new pathways for prayer and praxis; lights stay on where God is still encountered as living.

Archaeological origins: D. B. Dickson, T. Insoll, Esposito/Fasching/Lewis.
Experiential classics: Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, John Haught.
Enlightenment critique: Michael Buckley, William Placher.
Linguistic tools: Sallie McFague (metaphor), Battista Mondin (analogy), Paul Tillich (symbol).
Historical overviews: Gregory Baum (20th-century theology), Robert Schreiter (local theologies).