God and religion

Miklós Vetö

pp. 13-23

in: Balázs M. Mezei, Matthew Z. Vale (eds), Philosophies of christianity, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

If God and religion are two notions that are often thought apart from one another (God without religion, or religion without God), the aim of this paper is to establish conceptually that the two necessarily belong together. God first appears to human consciousness as absolute "Other", and religion is that method by which humans articulate the presence of this absent one, this Other. Human beings have a constitutive need to transcend themselves, and this need finds its consummation in religion as a turning towards, and calling out to, the transcendent Other. Religion in its cultic, social, and doctrinal forms is not merely cultic, merely social, or merely doctrinal; it is a repository of reflections of the Other and its presence, as this presence is manifest in the natural calling out to God which we call "religion". Nonetheless, religion is founded upon transcendence: the validity of religion is a function of the presence and activity of the transcendent Other in its otherness. Religion's natural and exuberant unfolding—its cultic, social, and doctrinal expressions of "the sacred", or its fascination with the sublime or paranormal—do not satisfy the properly religious "moment": the mediation or manifestation of the Other as Other. In the Christian religion, God Himself has entered history in order to institute a new religious logic, a new sacred, in which the constitutive moments of religion are no longer the "hierophanies' emergent from natural sublimity or human consciousness, but the "Christophanies' which are the immediate and effective action of the Other within history.