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Document Details : Title: Vertrouw op God, in wie geen geweld is Subtitle: Een analyse van de theologie van Anton Houtepen Author(s): VAN WILGENBURG, Arwin Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 51 Issue: 2 Date: 2011 Pages: 170-192 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.51.2.3203381 Abstract : This article presents the main ideas in Anton Houtepen’s theology. Houtepen understood theology as the humanity’s story about its craving for God. In the present agnostic age, he argued for a history-based biblical and ecumenical theology. Houtepen considers it very important that the customarily postulated gap between faith and science be bridged. Scientific thinking is built on instrumental rationality’s discourse, which proceeds from facts, causality and the desire to dominate reality. However, our understanding of life is usually rooted in hermeutical reality as interpreted in stories, play, art and emotions. Underlying this is an experience of gratuity, an experience that life is a gift. This hermeneutical rationality aims at the potentially good and is needed to complement and correct instrumental rationality which often has violent consequences. If anything, faith in God tends to seek expression in hermeneutical reason that does not seek to dominate or explain God, but that admits God into thought as an open question. Houtepen argues that God stimulates thought and that this thinking is far from irrational, that it is a sublime kind of rationality which can transport us beyond the perplexities of postmodernism. When thinking opens to the God hypothesis, a new metaphysics becomes possible; Houtepen draws on Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur and Marion to shape this metaphysics. God becomes the Giver of life, the Reference for human emotions and the craving for potential good. This requires a metamorphosis of the traditional views of God; Houtepen relies on the idea that there is no violence in God. Demilitarising the notion of God means that God’s name is removed from the sphere of power and violence. This makes it impossible to give any kind of divine legitimacy at all to violence. God is creator and father of all and cannot be claimed by any one religion, or be worshipped as an extension of our will to bring about change. However, all who do God’s will are drawn into the communion of saints. For Christians, Jesus is the parable of God’s humanity and the shining example. The Lord’s Prayer that he gave us forms the basic structure of Houtepen’s theology; it expresses the trust that our lives will not have been lived in vain, but are secure in God in whom there is no violence. |
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