First published  as 'God the future' in Slant, July 1969.

There was a time when people were hostile to belief in God. They thought it did a lot of damage and needed to be eliminated by better education. Now, I think, people are not so hostile. The general feeling is that it really doesn't make much difference one way or the other. What happened was something like this. People who thought God mattered a lot became increasingly unpopular because their God frequently seemed to be opposed to what most decent people wanted - prison reform or free speech or parliamentary democracy. So without really noticing what they were doing, believers in God shifted his importance from this life to an extension of this life called the after-life. This was to be where God really made a difference.

Progress in technology and medicine had made it not so easy for God to get at you in this life, but once you were dead he had you on your own, so watch out. Of course these people still thought that technology hadn't and medicine hadn't taken care of all possibilities in this life so it was still advisable to pray as well, just to make sure. But the main importance of God was that you met him when you were dead. So true was this that belief in God and belief in the immortality of the soul were closely woven together, and it came as a surprise to people to find that there were quite respectable believers in God such as Moses who didn't believe in immortality at all. The next move came when people began to cast doubt on immortality. They said that all this heaven and hell stuff was in any case only a way of bribing or blackmailing people into following a certain code of conduct and not a very good one either. But even if it had been a good one, to train people to live in a certain way simply by promises and threats is to keep them at an infantile stage. Truly human morality consists in liberating people so that they are able to love, not in disciplining them according to a prearranged system. So Christians got more and more coy about heaven and positively embarrassed about hell; the after-life began to sound win on the pools something that we acknowledge as a reality, but not something that we allow really to affect our ordinary lives.

So as the after-life fell into irrelevance God went with it, and in consequence we have a situation in which an interest in God is somewhat like an interest in, say, the works of Ronald Firbank. There are people who like this kind of thing, but there is no reason why everybody should. There seem to be a fair number of believers in God who hold this view too. God, they feel, is an acquired taste: not everybody can be expected to get excited about it. We can get on perfectly well, or anyway reasonably well, in dealing with the real problems of life without making any reference to God. The day has happily gone by when people ask whether or not this or that statesman or soldier or scientist or psychologist believes in God or not. It is not expected to make a difference to practical affairs in the political, social, economic or technological field. Nor, curiously enough, is it always felt to be relevant to the teaching of religion. We are rapidly approaching the point in the west at any rate where God is as irrelevant to the teaching of religion as he is to the teaching of chemistry.

I want to make it clear that none of this is due to any hostility to God except amongst rather old-fashioned people. It is just that God is, if you like, a bonus. If you mentioned him during the course of a discussion of, say, literary criticism or automation or nuclear physics, the general feeling amongst educated people (I mean people educated in England) would be that it was rather bad taste to intrude your private concerns which other people cannot be expected to share. It would be like suddenly standing up and making a speech against the Vietnam war in the middle of a concert. Even people who sympathised with you would feel that there is a time and a place for these things. This is especially true in a really developed country like England. As it happens, I was at a poetry reading in Dublin some time ago in which a man interrupted to make a speech against the Criminal Justice Bill - a measure by which the Dublin Government is seeking to bring its powers of repression up to the standards enjoyed in the six more enlightened counties. He was, after a while, courteously persuaded to shut up so that Miss Siobhan McKenna could carry on her reading, but I noticed that even when irritated people didn't seem to feel it was an embarrassing episode. It was obvious that this crowd of Irish had a confused idea that there might be some connection between policemen and poetry. At any rate they didn't clearly see how utterly incongruous and ludicrous it was to bring politics and poetry together.

Now what I want to suggest is that bothering about God is incompatible with the civilised belief that the discussions of poetry, of chemistry, of politics and of farming are each of them absolutely autonomous, that each of them can go on, and should go on, without involving any overall view of man or society or the world. If a man is engaged in pure scientific research into, say, the biological effects of certain gases or whatever, it is irrelevant, tasteless and probably intolerant to enquire into who finances the research, what the man's views are on the relative importance of protecting human life and protecting capital investment and so on. The man who believes in God would, in his old-fashioned way, describe belief in the absolute autonomy of such studies as a form of idolatry. The man who believes in God is concerned about overall views.

What makes our western society the first wholly atheistic society is that it has succeeded to a remarkable extent in outlawing such overall interests. It is not just that philosophers are for- bidden to talk meaningfully about metaphysics and theologians forbidden to talk meaningfully at all, but that every discipline is kept within bounds, though given total freedom within those bounds. And all this is done not of course by actually for- bidding people, but by making it intellectually dis- reputable to put forward overall views. A man is allowed to harbour them in secret, but he is odd if he allows them to make a difference to his study and practice.

Overall views are like politics in one vital respect. If a man says he has no interest in archaeology and has never really thought about it you do not usually conclude that he holds firm and probably immovable convictions about the kitchen midden culture or bronze age trade routes. If, however,he says he has no interest in politics and hasn't thought about it much you can normally conclude that he is firmly and probably Immovably con- servative. There is no mystery about why this should be so: an interest in politics means a critical consideration of your society. Now I am not of course suggesting that all conservatives are uncritical, only that the uncritical are conservative. A man might take a critical look at his society and its institutions and values and decide that he liked it just the way it is, he may well be a critical conservative all I am saying is that if a man doesn't get round to taking the critical look it is precisely because he likes it the way it is. His conservatism will be all the more immovable because he never chose it, it seems to him just in the nature of things.

Now it is just this way with overall views. A man who has never got round to asking, or thinks it peculiar to ask, what is the proper relationship between policemen and poetry is a man who is quite satisfied with the existing relationship between policemen and poetry. The man who has never heard of the connection between coffee prices and the social structures of Brazil, or between electronics shares and events in the Far East, is a man who is untroubled by these connections.

Now, as I say, I think we have a society which discourages people from making these connections explicit and encourages the idea that we should each play our own language game without looking for the meta-game that might seek to include them all. It is just in the last two or three years that people, especially in universities, have begun to try to make connections: to ask what is the connection between Anglo-Saxon and coal-mining. And all this is to the great detriment of the civilised university which, of course, is meant to be a haven of autonomous learning where some people can pursue their language games in isolation and peace while others are trained to keep going the system in which it doesn't matter about people pursuing their language games in isolation and peace.

I have spoken about 'overall views' but the thing goes deeper than talk and the writing of books. What seems to me to be discouraged in our current society is what I might call overall living'. There is an unprecedented concern for skills in particular departments: a man who wants to be a doctor can be a doctor in our society with an intensity hardly conceivable in earlier days. People get to be astonishingly good at hydraulic engineering,market research, croquet or spot-welding; where we get all coy is when it comes to skill in just being or becoming human. We can give what look like plausible answers to questions about what engineers or doctors are for and what they do, and so we are fairly clear about how to do it well, but faced with the question about what people are for and what they do we appeal to the referee who says the question is against the rules of any of our games. It is equally illegal, of course, to pursue the question about what doctors or engineers are for beyond a certain point. You can always ask what the doctor is for within certain structures, what is his niche in the institutions that we take for granted, but if you go too far you start asking what the structures are for, or who grants the things we take for granted and all that would be subversive if it were not fortunately meaningless.

The real reason why it is inadvisable to try to take an overall view or to discover an overall way of living is that that way madness lies what you come up against, if you try, is not a fine, complex, interlocking pattern of relationships, but an absurdity. I mean if you try to see how the butcher, baker, armaments salesman, advertising agent, doctor and dramatist are all playing their separate, but mutually interdependent, roles in the overall society, you get nowhere. It is not just that certain ways of life, certain jobs are useless, don't fit into the pattern and might as well be scrapped like, say, being a belly-dancer or an archbishop; nor is it just that certain occupations are clearly destructive of the pattern and should be suppressed, like being a train-robber or a pyromaniac. If you look carefully enough you find that all jobs besides playing a part in the system are also destructive of it. I don't know how many pyromaniacs there are in the United States, but I'd guess they don't start as many fires in ten years as the army does in a day. The train robbers took two million pounds, which is about what the us Department of Defense takes every hour and a half.

In the case of the train-robbers we think we can say: These are anti-social men and we can deal with them by putting them into prison. Maybe we are partly right. Almost any weekend in Grosvenor Square you can find somebody who believes that the men in the Pentagon are anti-social men and the way to deal with them is to put them in prison or shoot them and this doesn't look anything like so plausible. Operations on this scale are not simply anti-social, they are social as well. They show human society destroying itself.

At this point I would like to start using the word 'world' for what I have been calling the overall picture. I have been suggesting that we live in an incoherent and absurd world. By world I mean the structures of living and of intelligibility within which signs or activities have significance. I mean that a sign has meaning by playing a part in some language game; similarly a job like being a doctor or a centre-half has meaning by playing a part in some more complex set of activities. Now the overall structures within which our various activities have their meaning I call the world. What I am suggesting is that when we seek for this total world we find it flawed, absurd, contradictory and therefore endowing our particular activities with contrary meanings. What sets out to be creative turns out to be destructive as well.

Now it seems to me that it is the absurdity of this world that forces us into otherworldliness - I am deliberately using the most disreputable language I can find. Otherworldliness can, however, take at least two forms, the vertical and the horizontal. Vertical otherworldliness is a method of eliminating the apparent absurdity of this world by postulating another world contemporary with this one, but vertically above it (or below it depending on whether you like things high or deep). With the aid of this other world it is possible to make sense of activities which, looked at from the point of view of this world alone, do not make sense. Thus the tenant farmer who is systematic- ally robbed by the landowner, but who does nothing about it because within the system there are no ways open of doing anything about it, can convert this absurdity into a meaningful act of Christian resignation and humility by reference to the world above. We are all familiar with this kind of example and with the sort of pain it gives to right- minded secularising Christians. But I think it necessary to pause a minute before dismissing it altogether. Instead of using such obscene words as 'Christian resignation and humility' let us instead consider the blues. Bessie Smith, let us say, succeeds in giving musical significance to the absurd condition of the black people of America in the twenties and thirties. Nowadays, instead of the blues, we have Black Power and thank God for that, but are we to regard the blues simply as the illusory substitute for the realistic response which has become possible in our time. Are the blues simply the heart of a heartless world, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the opium of the people? Are we to look and work for the abolition of the blues, or to announce that the call for the abolition of the blues is really the call for the abolition of the con- ditions that bring them about? Of course we want to say this in one sense; but of the work of Bessie Smith, for example, do we not want to say that it is more than a mere diversion from revolution (even if an inevitable diversion when historical conditions were not ripe for revolution)? I want to maintain that some of this music retains its power and meaning after the revolution, and does so because it is a discovery of an absurdity deeper even than the revolution has been able to heal.

But I am jumping the gun. I should have said that by horizontal otherworldliness I mean changing this world into another one in the future. I said that it is the absurdity of this world that forces us into otherworldliness. The horizontal inter- pretation of this is not that we are forced to think up another world above this one which consoles us mentally for the dreadfulness of this world, but that we are constrained to create another world. This is what the revolution is.

I would like to emphasise the point that traditional Christianity has it in common with other revolutionary movements that it is otherworldly. I think that traditional Christianity has frequently talked as though its otherworldliness were purely vertical, lacking the historical and materialistic dimension; similarly marxist revolutionaries used frequently to talk as though their otherworldliness were totally horizontal allowing no ultimate value to the blues, or if you prefer a more sonorous phrase, to the tragic interpretation of life. The point is, however, that neither of them can have any truck with a this-worldly theory, a view that is prepared to accept this world as some kind of ultimate; both of them will sympathise with Dr Mascall's description of secularising Christianity as a sanctification of the American way of life. It is never surprising to discover that secularising Christians are liberals.

Of course the idea that this world is ultimate arises from the idea that the world can be defined non-historically; the idea that there is some historically neutral object called the world, described timelessly by, perhaps, the physicist, who is supposed to speak and think in abstraction from the economic social and political milieu within which he works. On this view there is, so to speak, a permanent Newtonian stage, 'the world,' within which the human characters simply occasionally move the furniture around or within which the human furniture is moved around. I want on the other hand to suggest that, say, the feudal world is a different world from the capitalist world; it is not the same world with a bit of different decoration. What we mean by the world could ever mean by the world the only thing we arises out of the interaction between man and his environment. It is as true to say that a man's world depends on how he lives together with his fellowmen as to say that how he lives with them depends on his world.

The world, then, is not a great static box in which men live out their lives; the world is the set of relationships of dependency and communication in terms of which men are constituted as human and which they seek constantly to transcend. Man is always in a state of having belonged to this world which is perhaps another way of saying that this world is always disintegrating under the pressure of its absurdity. Man is, if you like, the growing point of the world: the creativity which makes possible another world. If I ask what am I, what is it to be me? I can answer that I am the point of intersection of perhaps an indefinite number of relationships; it is through the various relation- ships I have had with my parents, friends, employers, strangers, as well as through the impersonal relationships of my body with its environment, that I am what I am. To say that sounds as if it were to explain me away like saying Hyde Park Corner just is the point of inter- section of the Edgware Road, Park Lane and the Bayswater Road. There is nothing else there. Well, there is another element there and that is the creativity, the tendency to a reinterpretation of myself, to a redefinition in terms of new relation- ships. I am not simply a part of the social net- work because I am able to renew and hence transcend the network. This tendency to creativity is, if you like, the tendency to make sense of myself which encounters the reality that the social network that so far defines me does not do the job. If I try to make sense of myself as a citizen of the United Kingdom, or for that matter as a member of the Catholic Church, I simply don't succeed. And this is because the United Kingdom and the Catholic Church are in the end absurd, their formulae for sense lead to nonsense. The essential difference is that the United Kingdom as such is committed to pretending that this is not true for as long as possible, while the Catholic Church is ideally committed to proclaiming that it is true.

The pretence that it is not true is known as belief in the British way of life; the acknowledgment that it is true is known as belief in God. I hasten to add that the Christian churches are constantly falling for the temptation to think of themselves as simply structures of meaning, to forget that they are also structures of unmeaning and absurdity, to imagine that they provide terms in which we can finally make sense of ourselves 'Just come in with us and you will find that suddenly it all makes sense; our life may be difficult and austere, but it is clear and intelligible'. It is the temptation of ecclesiastical leaders to behave like the rulers of the United Kingdom who have to act as if the preservation of this particular historical order were an absolute, as if the whole meaning of being human depended for us on preserving the western way of life. So much so that these rulers are, or say they are, prepared to destroy the whole world rather than give up this particular version of being human. There is, as I say, a temptation for ecclesiastical people to adopt a similar tone, to treat the church as an absolute, to make the church an idol just as the politicians make the free world an idol. Fortunately the churches are equipped with a belief in God which won't let them carry this too far.

But I am cheating and going much too fast when I keep slipping in this word 'God'. All we have really tried to establish so far is the importance of otherworldliness, the fact that a this-worldly theory is an illusion. To put it simply: Is the absurdity to which we are subject in this world an absurdity simply in social organisation, so that the way people live with each other (their politics) is out of tune with the way they live with their world (their work)? If this is so, then a change in the structures of society will effect the change from absurdity to sense, man will be able to be consistently human at last. The change required would be a revolutionary one that is to say a change not merely within current fundamental structures, but a change in these structures themselves, a change, in fact, in the method of ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange of the society; a change which, needless to say, involves a change in the meaning of all those words: 'ownership', 'production', etc. Is our current absurdity such that it will be eliminated by the creation of a free society in this sense, a socialist society in which people are no longer at the mercy of others who control their work and hence their lives, but are able to make their own real decisions about themselves?

Let us at least willingly suspend any disbelief we may have that, roughly speaking, the marxists are right the question is, how roughly? Is it the case that our current absurdity is such as to be wholly eliminated in this way, or does it go deeper? Notice this word 'deeper': it is the thin end of the vertical wedge. Indeed, as Ulster Protestants say, it is the thin end of the Scarlet Woman. From what I was saying about the blues and about tragedy in general it will, I suppose, be clear that I think our problem is deeper; that is to say, I think it goes beyond contradictions in the structures of communication which are extensions of our bodies to contradictions in our bodies themselves. Briefly, man is the animal that lives out his life not simply in terms of built-in media of communication and exchange with his environment and with other individuals; he is able not only like the other animals to realise a world through such built-in media, through his senses and the rest of his bodily structure, he is also able to create his own media, to extend his body through machinery, to extend his modes of response out from the senses through home-made symbols, through art and language. Other animals have a form of life determined for them genetically, but man is able to some degree creatively to extend his forms of life, to make his own life. This capacity of the human body to recreate itself we call mind. The human body is a communications system within the communications system of society, and is moreover the originating system from which the other takes its source and meaning. Now if you take the view that the absurdity of this world which demands otherworldliness is simply a matter of contradictions in the communications system of society then what you will seek and expect is revolution in society. If, how- ever, you find that there are contradictions in the creative body itself, then what you will require and expect is revolution in the body itself. Now this is what Christians are talking about when they talk of resurrection.

The most important thing for me to do at this moment is to distinguish what I am saying from an idealist and individualist version at one time taken for granted by Christians and swallowed with equal facility by their marxist opponents. That kind of Christian said something like this: You political people, and especially you materialist marxists, are taking a very superficial view in supposing that man's ills can be cured by political changes. What is wrong with man is deep in man himself, in his soul it is not by changes in the public social world that he will be saved, but by changes in the private interior world of his soul. He needs a revolution, if you like, but it is a private and personal one, the one we call conversion. Confronted with this kind of argument it is only to be expected that the marxist should shy away murmuring words of abuse like 'idealist.' To him, such a Christian sounds as if he were escaping from the real task of changing the material world by going through the motions of an unreal change, a change of mind, an alteration in his soul. But what, I suggest, is in fact wrong with such a Christian is not really this: it is his assumption that the marxist deals with the public social world whereas he, in speaking for what is deeper, for man himself, is speaking for a private interior life. What is wrong is his assumption, which the marxist doesn't sufficiently question, that interior means private, that it is defined by contrast to the public world of communication.

I, on the other hand, have spoken of resurrection, which is not a change of mind, but an actual transformation or transfiguration of man. My proposal is that what is deeply wrong with man is deeply wrong because it is a wrong in his body: not in a soul which is more or less loosely attached to his body, but in his body itself, in this material body. Not in the body as object, however (this could no doubt be dealt with by surgery or genetic manipula- tion), but in the body as creative, as making itself. All revolution is a destruction of old structures to give place to new ones; the resurrection is the destruction of this mortal body to give place to a new kind of bodily life. The resurrection means that death itself can be a revolution and the new testament teaching is that it is through this revolution that the kingdom finally will come. It is important to see that for the New Testament salvation does not come through any mental change of attitude, but through a physical event in the future. Paul explicitly says that the Christian faith and all the rest that Christianity implies today would be quite illusory and useless without the future resurrection, the coming of the kingdom. For him conversion, the individual's laying hold upon faith, only makes sense by reference to the kingdom to come.

The Christian, then, does not offer to the marxist an alternative way of eliminating alienation today, an alternative to the social revolution: he offers a future ultimate revolution which is the final meaning and point of today's revolution. What happens in Cuba or Czechoslovakia or Vietnam points to-wards, and ultimately draws its meaning from, the transfiguration of man which is the resurrection. In so far as it is ordered to that final revolution it succeeds in doing more than it sets out to do, it succeeds in to some extent reaching down to that alienation of man which is deeper than his economic servitude; and in so far as it is not ordered to that final revolution it will fail to reach man in his depth and will ultimately betray itself. The Christian, then, maintains that the ultimate revolu- tion is not simply a matter of men transcending the structures within which they subsist, shaking themselves free of alienating structures and creating new forms of community; it is a matter of men shaking themselves free of themselves, of trans- cending not just these social structures, the exten- sions of their bodies, but transcending themselves. The power beyond man which summons man thus to transcend himself and makes it possible for him to do so we call divinity.

The process of transcendence at any level, whether it be a matter of passing from childhood to maturity or of loving someone or of passing to a new level of social freedom say from feudalism to capitalism is always a matter of man's being a person: I mean we say that a man is a person just because he can re-interpret himself in this way, can break forth into new dimensions of freedom. I am a person, not because of something I have, but because of my power to transcend what I have, my movement beyond where I am. So transcendence is always a matter of personality. It is for this reason that we cannot see divinity in less than personal terms. It is precisely the summons of man to creativity, to transcendence, which is what being a person is, and ultimately it is a summons to the transcendence which is what being divine is. The resurrection means that man is no longer summoned to transcendence as it were from without; it is, if I may adapt a phrase, the end of pre-divinity. It is also, of course, the end of religion and a number of other things.

That might seem a suitable point for coming to an end, but before stopping I must just say a word about the revolution ordered towards the ultimate revolution. I said that in so far as the social revolution, the radical change in social structures, is ordered towards the resurrection it reaches down to depths below social structures - to man's body itself, to that alienation of man which is deeper than economic servitude and its consequences. We may ask: how are we to do this ordering? How can our current revolution be an anticipation, a sacrament of the resurrection, how do we set about this? The answer the Christian gives is that we don't. We do not have to conform ourselves to an unimaginable future: the resurrection and our divinisation is something beyond our language and concepts in the way (but more so) that any post-revolutionary condition is beyond the language and concepts of the pre-revolutionary world. We can only speak of it in parables and images. We do not have to conform ourselves to this unimaginable future; the Christian gospel, the good news, is that the future has conformed itself to us, that in the passion and resurrection of Christ the ultimate revolution, the divinisation of humanity, has already begun. Christ was the first man who was able wholly to give himself up in love; in his body the transfiguration of man was able to occur so that the future towards which we strive is in some way with us. It is simply by our acceptance of him what Paul calls our faith that our own immediate revolution, our own task of transforming the world is related to the future, is a divine task. For this reason, for the Christian, God means not just the constant summons to transcendence, to freedom wherever and at whatever level such creativity may be found; nor is he just he who in the future finally makes sense of being human; God for the Christian primarily is he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and this is the whole of the Christian gospel.