Divine Necessity and Contingency: A Note on R. W. Hepburn

DIVINE NECESSITY AND CONTINGENCY: A NOTE ON R. W. HEPBURN DEATH-OF-GOD theology has probably run its course as a phenomenon capable of generating popular interest .1 The questions it raised, however, may be another matter. A theology that seeks to be pastoral will neglect this to its own detriment. One of the most challenging studies of the God-question that has appeared on the American scene in a good while is a set of eleven essays written by Ronald W. Hepburn and entitled Chri8tianity and Paradox.2 He proceeds under the assumption that theological discourse involves a critical exchange of views. An agnostic rather than an atheist, he has striven to make himself acquainted with the various types of justification that Christians offer for their theistic convictions. His own position of hesitancy is expressed as a reasoned alternative. Fruitful dialogue will not be initiated if silence is the sole reaction of believers to such a work. Neither God nor man is served that way. Furthermore, one is dealing with a serious and respectable treatment of the mystery that is at the heart of Christianity, that of the God whose good tidings the latter seeks to proclaim. First Hepburn treats a number of approaches that lay claim to direct and immediate experience of God.3 Then he turns his 1 This is at least the way Paul Van Buren sizes it up; cf. Theological Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 6. 2 Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox (New York: Pegasus, 1968). This book appeared originally in 1958 but is published for the first time in the United States with this edition. Its author contends, and rightly, that the interest in the God-question and religious language has surely not diminished in the meanwhile . 3 Ibid., ~4-59. He remains unconvinced when he studies the conviction of those who maintain that God can only be addressed and in no wise expressed. Of a theological audience that has grown accustomed to the Barthian distinction between knowing God and kn01ving about God, he asks incisively whether the two are not more complementary than antithetical. 150 DIVINE NECESSITY AND CONTINGENCY 151 attention to theistic evidences that take the form of demonstration or argument. To the latter a great deal of attention will have to be devoted by convinced theists, if they intend to enter into mutually profitable discussion with men of his calibre.4 God and Morality It is his contention that secular ethics does not by any means exclude moral seriousness. In other words, a life of dedication to noble ideals does not depend on a morality that is theistic in its roots. A way of 1iving worthy of man does not, he argues, demand as its sole possible foundation the existence of God. In working out this conclusion, he introduces a number of ideas that could well serve as the basis for a further attempt to clarify the issue at stake. He notes that few theologians today see moral principles as commands of God pure and simple. This means in practice that motivation seeks another source besides a divine imperative for a particular course of action. Goodness is the rational justification for obeying God; one obeys, even as a theist, because of a recognition that it is good to obey God's commands. Any other view, the reader is told, involves the worship of power as such.5 Obedience and its Motive Here not a few believers would have to disagree or at least express reservations. For they find themselves faced ultimately not with the question whether one obeys God because it is good to do so but rather whether goodness does not consist precisely in obeying God. This may be misconstrued, of course. But there is no need denying that a good deal of Christian tradition, Protestant no less than Catholic, has seen goodness the result of divine commands. Does God will any created good • There is no reason to think that the sole possible attitude the religious man can consistently take before the mystery of God is silence pure and simple. Even the assertion of His ineffability should bring this home, if the speaker will simply advert to...