Attempts to overcome the "death of God" by "irreligious Christianity": the idea of the worldliness of the Transcendent as the basis for creating a new anti-tradition.

Lepeshkin Dmitrii Germanovich Postgraduate student, the department of Culturology and Visual Art, Shuya Branch of Ivanovo State University; Senior Educator, the department of Theology, Svyato-Alekseevskaya Ivano-Voznezenskaya Orthodox Theological Seminary of Ivanovo-Voznezenskaya Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church 153012, Russia, Ivanovskaya oblast', g. Ivanovo, ul. Marii Ryabininoi, 29 uventus@internet.ru Other publications by this author

         Friedrich Nietzsche , through the mouth of one of his heroes , proclaimed the famous: "God is dead", meaning by this that everything erected by the human mind to the rank of the Absolute actually appeared to be quite relative, obviously not absolute, and therefore requiring further search for something truly fundamental. In this sense, "God" in its traditional sense is not such a foundation ^[1]. In parentheses, we add that Nietzsche himself understood by faith in God a certain moral system, denying the ontology of God as a Person. In another place, the philosopher aggravates his thesis by noting that we, that is, people, killed God. At the same time, the churches are the tombstone of the murdered ^[2].

         The Nietzschian challenge to God naturally generated a backlash from the bearers of religiosity, those for whom the existence of God is a reality. However, this answer was twofold. On the one hand, traditional apologetic polemics, especially since Nietzsche's thought is still close to theology ^[3]. But on the other hand, an attempt to rethink Christianity itself in the conditions of a "grown-up" world, which, in many ways, was initiated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But how justified is such an answer and will an attempt to "revise" Christian values lead to their reduction and then oblivion?

God without Religion

         Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer assumes that the world is moving towards a time without religion. This is an objective fact. Indeed, throughout its history, Christianity has proceeded from "a priori religiosity" in man, which the thinker questions, assuming that such a premise, quite possibly, was only a form of human self-expression in a certain chronotope.

         Without rejecting the almost prophetic thesis about irreligious times, we should focus on what Bonhoeffer himself offers in these conditions. The thinker puts forward a postulate about the coming of age of the world, the consequence of which is a great falling away from God. And the more Christian apologists strive to attract to Christ, the more the development of humanity realizes itself as anti-Christian.

         "Attempts are being made to prove to the adult world that he cannot live without a guardian – "God". Although capitulation was signed on all worldly problems, nevertheless there remain the so–called "last questions" – death, guilt - to which only "God" can give an answer and for which God, the church and priests are needed" ^{[4, pp. 238-239]}.

         Bonhoeffer criticizes Christian apologists for attacking the coming of age of the world: it is useless, dishonest and un-Christian. Modern researcher A. Denisenko sees this position of Bonhoeffer as one of his most important thoughts ^[5].

         Indeed, Bonhoeffer considers it unacceptable to replace Christ with a certain level of a person's religiosity, it is impossible for Him to indicate what His place in the world is and where it is. Christ overtakes man at the center of his life. Moreover, Jesus Christ claims the world as an adult.

Just as the Bible does not know the division into external and internal, so Christianity is deeply worldly. "Not homo religiosus, but a man, just a man – that's what a Christian is, like Jesus was a man." In this regard, the conclusion is: "God makes us understand that we must live coping with life without God. (...) before God and with God we live without God. (...) God is powerless and weak in the world, but it is in this and only through this that He is with us and helps us" ^{[4, p. 264, 270]}.

Bonhoeffer emphasizes that the God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with the God we imagine. In fact, he proclaims worldliness as the way to Christ: the attainment of the beyond through total immersion in the Hereafter, bearing in mind that our life on earth would be meaningless if Christ did not walk on it. The "worldly" life is man's complicity in God's sufferings. And the right to such a life saves a person "from false [emphasis mine – G.L.] religious ties and hindrances" ^{[4, pp. 266-267]}.

Thus, religious experience, religiosity itself is presented as something external, contradicting the integrity of the Bible and the very essence of Christianity. The worldly life is proclaimed as participation in life with Christ, which, however, opens up a fairly broad interpretation of what it means to live in this way.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his notes in Nazi dungeons, and therefore they are sometimes inconsistent and fragmentary. But the concept, in general, is built quite clearly. He refers a lot to Karl Barth, who carried out Christian criticism of the religiosity of man and religion as such ^[6]. Garrett Green very accurately expressed the essence of Barth's paradoxical reflections: the priority of Revelation over religion, without denying the religiosity of Revelation ^[7].

In addition to K. Barth, Bonhoeffer also appeals to Immanuel Kant, who in the very first lines of his essay "What is Enlightenment" defines it as "a person's exit from the state of his minority", which "in matters of religion is not only the most harmful, but also the most shameful" ^[8]. However, the philosopher calls for freedom in all cases to use your mind, and not to dismantle religion as such.

The irreligious Christianity proclaimed by Bonhoeffer was neither fully comprehended nor modeled by him: how it can actually be. But the very idea of an "adult humanity" that has outgrown religion has given impetus to the development of a whole trend in theology and, more broadly, modern cultural thought. After all, "liberation" from religion while maintaining a certain "faith" is quite correlated with the principles of post-secularism as a "new Enlightenment", to a certain extent, is "work on the mistakes" made by secularism.

It is impossible not to agree with David Hart: the ethos of modernity is nihilism, understood by the thinker as a refusal to believe in any source of truth that is beyond our "I". In this sense, freedom, revered as the highest good, is understood as the possibility of choice, regardless of what this choice is ^[9].

It would seem that Bonhoeffer calls for staying with Christ, but outside of religion, in total worldliness, the absolutization of subjective experience is carried out, which no longer correlates with tradition, and therefore is extremely profane, which is projected onto the sacred itself, which is thought and perceived as something non-objective, non-transcendent, non-universal, and extremely personal, and therefore quite relative.

In addition, such an understanding of faith fully explains the elimination of religion from the public sphere into the private: now it is perceived not as some kind of hostile act of militant secularism, for example, but as a natural process. Humanity is maturing and as this process ceases to need guardians. Religion, the Church is thought of, at the very least, as a complementary phenomenon, necessary to serve the changing needs of society, but not as a "pillar and affirmation of Truth" (1 Tim. 3:15).

Religion without God

A peculiar development of D. Bonhoeffer's ideas was the theology of the death of God, which is characterized by extreme heterogeneity and diversity of heterogeneity, which is quite natural from the point of view of the initially relativistic position of rejection of Truth. Perhaps they are united only by the very thesis of the death of God, which, however, is used in different contexts, but is a kind of calling card of radical theology, its criterion and the main subject of discussion, as the founders of this line of thought Thomas Altitzer and William Hamilton wrote about, who proposed ten readings of this thesis, starting from an atheistic understanding of that there is no God and never was, and ending with the fact that our language cannot adequately express the idea of God ^[10].

The very combination of the unconnected ("Christian atheism") is already, in our opinion, a distinctive feature of the post-secular. Altitzer explicitly points out that American atheism is just that (religious and Christian). The thinker also identifies a special type of modern nihilism, but unlike D. Hart, links it with apocalypticism, which completely destroys and transforms the entire non-apocalyptic world. Moreover, the author links the origin of this new modern nihilism with the Russian Revolution, noting that it could lead to the end of Western history in general ^[11].

Altitzer considers the Russian Revolution as a consequence of the death of God – His transformation from the transcendent into the purely immanent, from the Pantacrator Christ into the kenotic and self-emptying Christ, the apocalyptic Christ, that is, according to the author, the authentic Christ. This transformation is the essence of God's death. It is quite consonant with D. Bonhoeffer: once again, the ultimate worldliness. "In suffering and nothingness, the apocalyptic Christ (...) is revealed, whose body is suffering humanity." But such a Christ has been rejected by the Church throughout its history, because it is not the Church of the New Testament.

So, Christianity is irreligious, purely personally perceiving Christ in the world and not interested in Him outside the world and without the world. But, most importantly, outside the religious tradition, because religion acquires its most oppressive form precisely of the Christian tradition.

The anti-church pathos of Protestant theology is understandable, but there is a denial of Tradition, of the transcendence of God, of any universals. God, indeed, is dying not only in culture, but also in the religious tradition itself, because it is dying, eliminated by the new theology. It is replaced by a radically personal and subjective idea of God, which, of course, cannot remain within the framework of the traditional idea of God for a long time, since the very concept of "traditional" is denied and condemned.

As a result, there is an extremely relativistic understanding of God as a Higher Power, which, moreover, is quite adaptable to the needs of the moment: after all, God is seen as a Force on this side. What is the result? The inclusion of ideas about God in gender discussions. If in the American film "Dogma" (1999), for example, God is already represented partly dependent on this world, partly appearing to the world as a woman, but all this within the framework of a parody of modernity, then today we can talk about gender theology ^[12-13].

One consequence of it is the appearance of the female priesthood and the episcopate in a number of Christian denominations, which is not just a break with tradition, but its (tradition) denial. The Archbishop of Canterbury calls the appearance of women bishops "the new main thing in the life of the Anglican Church" ^[14], forgetting to note at the same time that the previous chapters were simply torn out by modernist decisions breaking with their own church tradition.

Another is a serious discussion about the "gender of God" with a revision of the traditional muscular paradigm of His perception: whether it is God the Trinity or Jesus Christ Himself ^[15]. One of the solutions to the "gender issue" was the idea of God as an impersonal force, a kind of gender-neutral energy, and not a person ^[16].

The consequence of such relativization of the sacred and the traditional is, according to Pierre Bourdieu's apt expression, "the decomposition of the religious", when what was previously considered the "field of religion" becomes the lot of many other social actors ^[17].

On the one hand, this is facilitated by the bearers of traditional religiosity themselves, who seek to "adapt" to the new demands of the world, using the tools of the world-wide world for this, which ultimately leads not to the expansion of preaching, but to the loss of their own identity.

For example, the modern Catholic Church, represented by its hierarchs, allows judgments that are quite comparable to what was broadcast in the aforementioned film "Dogma" at the end of the last century as hypertophan sarcasm. Thus, the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, calls Christ the world's first microblogger, since he began expressing his thoughts in tweets long before the advent of social networks ^[18]. And the Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli stated that those who believe will receive absolution if they subscribe to the Twitter of Pope Francis ^[19]. It is clear that the hierarchs deliberately allow frivolity in talking about serious things, but the very tendency to "understand" the world makes the sacred world.

On the other hand, the phenomenon of "parody religions" arises, which has not yet received proper scientific understanding. They are sometimes considered in the context of "game religiosity" ^[20], in general, but, in our opinion, this is a completely separate phenomenon, where the "game of religion" turns into religion itself, with its cult, sacred texts, adherents and even "martyrs": suffice it to recall how the followers of Pastafarianism fought for the right of a passport photo with a colander on the head.

At the same time, it should be noted that parody religions are not a phenomenon "in general", but have a clear anti-Christian orientation. They, as in the case of Pastafarianism, arise on the wave of protest against Christian dogmas (in this case, against creationism) and realize their "teaching" as a permanent "imitation" of Christian confessions: "Gospel", "icons", "hierarchy", etc. In the case of the Russian branch of the Pastafarians – even the abbreviation of their name: ROC MP (Russian Pastafarian Church of the Macaroni Pastriarchy): tracing paper of the naming of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). It is no coincidence that one of the modern representatives of atheism – Richard Dawkins – points out that such texts or even just literary works like the Da Vinci Code are quite comparable with traditional sacred texts, due to their "fiction" ^[21].

To a certain extent, it is possible to build a kind of "bridge", to trace a certain connection from non-religious Christianity to non-Christian Christianity, which can take various forms of distortion of tradition, its direct perversion, denial or ridicule, but, at the same time, having Christianity as the starting point.

And in this sense, one cannot agree with Nietzsche: God has died for those who regard the Hereafter as a kind of completeness that does not, in its essence, require either the sacred or the transcendent. Attempts at the worldliness of God, his forgiveness from absolute Simplicity to worldly simplicity, which means that it is obviously relative, which by definition cannot be applied to God. In this sense, it is quite possible to talk about the loss of any transcendent aspirations by modern humanity, in which F. Nietzsche's fear came true.

Conclusions

Protestant theological thought in the middle of the last century made a number of attempts to "adapt" Christianity to the realities of modernity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put forward the idea of an adult world that has outgrown religion, which no longer needs a guardian either in the person of the Church or, in fact, in the person of God.

Thomas Altitzer laid the foundation for the "theology of the death of God", which makes Christianity completely irreligious, a purely personal perception of Christ only in the world and not interested in Him outside the world and without the world. But, most importantly, outside the religious tradition, because religion acquires its most oppressive form precisely of the Christian tradition.

Such ideas turn out to be surprisingly consonant with representatives of more traditional religious denominations and theological interpretations, who, in an effort to "modernize" religion, actually abandon its traditional foundations and desacralize the very idea of the Transcendent, seriously arguing, for example, about the gender of God.

Finally, the appearance of openly parodic pseudo-religious constructs and their partial recognition by modern society finally opens up the prospect of the ultimate profanation of the Transcendent due to the loss of interest in Its (Transcendent) search, the reason for which, in many ways, was the attempts of confessional thought to solve the problem of the "death of God" through the secularization of faith, which, first of all, means the rejection of Traditions and God as an incomprehensible Absolute.

Such a denial of Tradition and with it the Transcendent, in fact, speaks not about overcoming the "barriers" of religiosity, but on the contrary, about building a new isolation. In the case when such a desire is born within a religious tradition, we can talk not only about the beginning of the "death" of this tradition, which is reborn into an anti-tradition, but also about the futility of "irreligious faith" and "atheistic Christianity" as a whole.