Mark Johnston’s book Saving God takes religion seriously from an anti-supernaturalist perspective. Indeed, he argues that the naturalist takes God more seriously than someone who believes in magical intervention.
This is a book about rescuing religion from a particular metaphysical perspective and offering a new one in its place. Another kind of argument in defense of religion is that it’s good for people or society. Johnston doesn’t care about that, he is interested in Saving God. There’s not much discussion of the institution of religion.
I’ve read this book several times. I first read it around 2013 or so. I leafed through it again 7 years later. I wrote this after consulting some of my notes.
Perhaps the central idea I took from Mark Johnston is one he takes from Martin Luther: that’s Luther’s view on sin:
Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin being so deeply curved in on itself (incurvatus in se) that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them, as is plain in the works-righteous and the hypocrites, or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.
Sin is the remarkable human ability to take whatever we’ve been given, done, or have and turn it towards ourselves. It’s a mix of selfishness, self-deception, and striving. One doesn’t need to believe in any kind of supernatural entity to recognize sin understood as incurvatus in se.
Johnston argues that spiritual materialism manifests sin. The spiritual materialist seeks advantage from religion, God, and the supernatural. There are obvious forms of this. The hip person who lavishly spends on their spiritual self-care in order to finesse their image or the pastor who uses their office and skill to gain power and prestige. It goes deeper. Ordinary prayer that seeks intervention on one’s behalf can be spiritually materialist. The idea of supernatural intervention itself is a distraction from God.
Which gets us to another one of Johnston’s core claims: the religions of today are idolatrous. There’s some philosophy of language here as Johnston argues the term God is like a term of office “President.” It’s a term of office. In order to be the president you need to meet the conditions for the president, someone who calls themselves a president but fails to do this isn’t a president at all. In the same way, “God” must meet the conditions of Godhood otherwise they are no God at all, merely an idol.
Do the Gods of our religions live up to the standards for The Highest One? Philosophers said that the Greek Gods couldn’t be Gods because they didn’t live up to the requirements – they were too volatile, selfish, and capricious. They didn’t live up to the office. As such, the philosophers proposed better Gods.
Johnston is making a similar move here.
In order to properly worship God, you must speak of The Highest One. But the Gods of the traditional religions are not up to his standards. Here he recites usual complaints against the God of the Old Testament. He cites Richard Dawkins approvingly.
In Saving God, we see a kind of whiggishness that I was attracted to earlier in my life:
Human beings render the old Gods irrelevant by coming to be better than they are; they shame the old Gods by being better to the Gods than the Gods have been to them.
This is fundamentally a progressive idea. It’s not just a judgment of past Gods but of past humans – our ancestors. We are better than the Israelites, Canaanites, Romans, Carthaginians etc because “we’ve” made moral progress. Hence, their Gods are not fit to worship.
I’m just not as attracted to this picture of moral progress as I once was. It seems clear to me that there has been both significant progress and regress. To the extent that there is positive improvement in our moral character (not just progress due to our improved environment) it is not the kind of thing that gives me confidence to say that this generation is mature enough to properly conceive of God.
That skepticism noted, what is Johnston’s God? Johnston is a panentheist. A pantheist thinks God is identical to everything that exists. A panentheist sees God in all things, but not limited by nature: “God in all, and all in God.”
Here are some somewhat clarifying quotes on it:
In thinking of the Highest One as Logos we would do better by conceiving of Logos as the principle of intelligibility of all that happens, a kind of preeminent rational intelligibility whose ends are served by the operations of the laws of nature.
The choice between classical theism and panentheism is, if you like, a choice between a first principle and the expressive activity of that first principle. The latter is the more inclusive object of worship, for it includes not only the serene perfections of Existence Itself, but the perfections inherent in its universal act of outpouring and self-disclosure.
“The Highest One is a certain kind of activity that could be analogically described as Loving, for it is the self-giving outpouring of Existence Itself by way of its exemplification in existents. On this second identification, the Highest One is not Being, and not any ordinary existent; it is Being’s Self-Giving. It is this Self-Giving in which we “live and move and have our being”.
It’s difficult. It’s not too different from the Stoic account of God. Think of God as the activity of everything Good – or the Good. God is existence itself and the perfect activity of existing that is exemplified by the stuff of nature.
Fundamentally, this being is what renders the world present to us. There’s a striking idea here. Many naturalists think of the world as dark, dead, and unconscious. A cold machine. Until the arrival of conscious beings that “light” up and experience the world. If there were no conscious beings then beauty, love, and the very presence of the world would not be. The universe would be cold and dark.
Johnston reverses this. He sees the world as already aflame. Instead of shining our light of consciousness on the world, we sample from what is already there.
The very idea of consciousness as a subjective mental phenomenon is a kind of blindness to the gift, a profoundly impious theft, an attempt to appropriate to oneself the source of intelligibility.
Here’s an explanation that is as lucid as you’re going to get:
The transformed picture of reality associated with this idea can be brought out very simply. When you close your eyes, the objects before you are still looking the way they just did; more generally, without you on the scene they would still present in the whole variety of ways in which they now present to you. They would just not be available to you. Furthermore, if that is not eerie enough, given that there are animals or conscious minds with sensibilities unlike ours, the objects before you now present in a host of ways that you could never access.
It’s a beautiful idea and makes sense of what this activity is. God is the outpouring of existence in the form of presence – presence that is made available to animals like us. In fact, this idea is so intriguing, it really deserves a post of its own. I’ll make use of it here, but it deserves a more serious philosophical treatment.
Moving along – what does this God ask from his people? An overcoming of sin through radical altruism:
Idolatry is, then, invariably the attempt to evade or ignore the demanding core of true religion: radical self-abandonment to the Divine as manifested in the turn toward others and toward objective reality.
Not that we live a “meaningful” life:
The demand that you live a meaningful life is an inflated form of acquisitive desire and an ultimate reservation about how far you would go in modeling yourself on the kenotic self-abandonment that is God. Look instead to the self-disclosure of the Highest One as outpouring Life, Intelligibility, and Love, and find your life-ordering demands there.
God is the outpouring of the good. He is the perfect cosmic life force. Wherever there is good, there God is. We ought to love in order to commune with The Highest One.
Something I want to ask – what does this God say about his people? If the God of the Israelites revealed them to be patriarchal primitives, what does this image of the Logos say about his potential followers?
It’s an abstract cosmopolitan God. It is part of a metaphysics that overlooks the individual in favor of the collective. Remember, Johnston removed human subjectivity and gave it to nature. He calls on us to focus outward – by serving others’ needs and rejecting our own acquisitive desires. But can one do this without properly following the delphic dictum to “know thyself” and face inward? Johnston’s theory of personal identity, given more details in his other book, Surviving Death is quite close to “no self” type views and it’s trite to say that those views end up communist, but accurate enough.
Indeed by Saving God Johnston erased God too! The outpouring of existence requires something doing the outpouring. To pour requires a pourer. Perhaps Johnston’s belief is that it is Existence as such that does this. This has familiar problems (is there such a thing as Existence itself?) and one must say is a rather confusing answer. “God is the flow that precedes the river.” It can be difficult to make sense of this.
Certainly, this God is no person.
Johnston himself powers skepticism about his metaphysics:
And this means that our actual life is parceled out between two bad masters: our own self-will and a compromised conception of the good. How is it compromised? It is averaged out because commonly available, it is held to with a sense of false necessity, and it needs to be defended beyond its merits because otherwise we sense that we would have no idea of how we are to live.
These two things cause us to have false pictures of the good – and even when we get it right we will distort it in time.
What we (and others) need is a better idea of the Good. That’s what Johnston aims to give us. And what he says the ancients got wrong. But if we carry this same skepticism about the nature of God that we apply to the old one, Johnston’s God may not measure up.
I think this very fact should make one more skeptical about the way we judge past humans or Gods. The current period is not in any way inherently better or special than all other periods.
There’s this idea that God is infinite in goodness and distance. He is full of familiar human goodness and with distant celestial wrath. This may render the God of the Old Testament more intelligible. He is a terrible God, but any God seen by humans would surely seem terrible. This is something that C. S. Lewis captures so well. Goodness hurts sinners. How could it not?
But this skepticism cuts both ways. It’s not an argument for prior pictures of God – so much as one that tempers arguments against him. But equally, it may also neuter arguments people give against Johnston’s God.
And so where are we left?
Johnston has a beautiful picture. As I said, I’ve read the book several times. It’s impeccably rich. The parts that stay with me are his picture of idolatry (even if I don’t fully subscribe to it), the devotion to God as an ingredient to religious life, and the picture of sin. Moreover, it’s a great example of the beauty of ideas. The aspects that castigate the God of the Old Testament, his whiggish theology do not strike me the same as when I read this book a decade ago.
I admired the seriousness and imaginativeness of this book and hope to read it again in a few years.
The spiritual materialist is inauthentic in his engagement with religion, and with his spiritual quest or search, precisely because he simply turns his ordinary unredeemed desires toward some supposedly spiritual realm. However intense his experiences, they do not deepen in him the theological virtues that constitute the change of orientation that makes for a new life.