A Violent God-Image Book

Beier's presentation of the work of Eugen Drewermann is a challenging and rewarding read.

He begins by saying that in the face of horrors, we like to escape into 'the incomprehensibility' of God, who appears passive in the face of horrors. But this constitutes a flight from the concern of Jesus in our time and from ourselves. The attitude of Jesus was to ask the human being what she had gotten herself into. It was not God who seemed doubtful to Jesus, but rather why we are still as we have always been: scared children of Adam and Eve, the heirs of Cain, and not the children of God.

Drewermann says that the task of theology today is foremost a psychological and anthropological one, to shed light on the reasons for human deformations, to overcome them as Jesus taught us, through an attitude of deeper trust.
Beier divides his presentation into four chapters:
---How a psychological interpretation of Genesis explains what went wrong with our under-
standing of who God is and who we are, and how a deeper understanding can create an attitude
change from fear to trust
---How a violent God image results in ecological exploitation, and the violence of war and terror
---How the idea of sacrifice, for instance, God approving of suffering (the Cross), is destructive of
human being
---How a misunderstanding of self-sacrifice has contributed to mistreatment of the RomanCatholic
clergy in the historical structuring of the church.

Drewermann challenges the tendency to see God's will and human will as naturally opposed to each other. Sin, he says, as understood in light of the human's absolute fear (ultimately of non-existence, death) is both universal and the result of free choice. It is not necessary.
The early Church, in its struggle for survival, departed more and more from Jesus' religion, shaped by parables, which integrated feeling and reason, body and spirit, and replaced it with an increasingly one-sided emphasis on rationality. The effect is war in the name of peace, exploitation of nature in the name of creating a better world, and a sacrificial attitude (exploitation of inner self).

Drewermann was a psychoanalyst as well as a scholar and a theologian. His insight is based in his experience as a priest in the 1960's in Germany, still dealing with the aftermath of the Third Reich.

I found this work to be insightful, and timely. It corrects a misunderstanding that the task of religion is to close the field of contingency that characterizes all human institutions. rather, it is to set up havens of the absolute, where it is possible to be led from acting to listening; from having to being; from planning to hoping; from judging to forgiving; from the finite to the infinite.
To do this, religion must be mindful of the power of symbol, which reaches beyond the simply rational to the emotional depths, beyond just words to psychic reality.

I'll quote one sentence which is a fair, if oversimplified, summary:
"Roses bloom only through the medium of light and warmth into their shape, and only within a space of love are humans capable of developing into the shape of their being."