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The author begins with a most self-deprecatory omission. In the preface he remarks that a previous book entitled God in the New World (1968) attempted to outline

... how the essential features of the Christian tradition may be understood within the modern cultural setting.

He skips three years to 1971 and his appointment to the new Chair of Religious Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. What happened in the intervening three years bears telling.

In 1966, he published an article on The Resurrection of Jesus and, in 1967, another on The Immortality of the Soul which together sparked a two-year public, theological controversy. It culminated in charges by the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand - of which Geering is an ordained minister. He was accused of doctrinal error and disturbing the peace of the church. After a dramatic, two-day televised trial, the Presbyterian Assembly court judged that no doctrinal error had been proved. The charges were dismissed and the case declared closed. 

Shortly afterwards Geering moved into academia. This book developed out of a series of lectures entitled Religion in Change. They dealt with how religion is faring in the present context of rapid cultural change.

Seeing patterns
A provoking aspect of Christian living today is an apparently blind refusal of the faithful to appreciate the changes which are taking place. Even the clergy, it seems, resolutely  refuse to do more than shuffle the same old cards.

If Geering does nothing else with this book, he skillfully reveals why some find coping with change so difficult. A pivotal problem is that the tides of conceptual change are so slow. We are used to rapid and startling changes. In business change takes place in cycles measured in months. The average executive's horizons are bounded by the annual report and driven by the accountant's monthly figures. In politics, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once remarked, a week is a long time. Only a few years separated J F Kennedy's commitment to get a man to the moon and the actual event. Meanwhile technological advance shows no signs of slowing down.

In contrast, the cycles which Geering deals with are measured in centuries. For his purposes, the first comes before the dawn of recorded history and the second between roughly 800bce and the year 200. We are presently in the fourth stage, termed the third Axial Period. In the twentieth century we have witnessed the final departure from the house of authority to this-worldly religion.

Patterns which become plain only over such large spans of time are difficult to identify and even more difficult to analyse. To complicate matters, elements of older periods contaminate the new, operating at different levels and sometimes even in the same person. No wonder the establishment appears so defensive so much of the time. We are moving too fast to easily perceive some kinds of change.

No coincidence
Nevertheless, it can't be accidental that some 600 years before Jesus of Nazareth, Zarathustra (Persia), Gautama Buddha (India), Confucius (China), Numa (Rome), the prophets of Israel, and the Greek philosophers appeared more or less simultaneously. As Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History remarked, 

It is here that we meet with the most deep-cut dividing line in history. Man as we know him today came into being.

It was in the resulting fertile mix of ideas which gradually percolated from one culture into another that Christianity emerged and quickly flourished. It in turn gave rise to that remarkably homogeneous culture we today call medieval Europe. That derived its relative stability from realism - the idea that universal concepts are not subject to change and decay. The Church in turn taught that its teachings were likewise immutable.

In the fourteenth century a gradual upwelling began to subvert this point of view. William of Ockham (1300-1349) was perhaps the earliest prime mover of the conclusion that far from being eternal, universals are simply concepts or names (nomina, hence nominalism). We invent them on the basis of experience so that we can better understand our world. Nothing is absolute.

Between then and now have come the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, followed in short order by that revolution of perception we today call science.

Just as 2 000 years earlier a great tide in human thought had turned, so also by the seventeenth century another great change had come about. Like the one before it, its elements appear not to be coincidental. They somehow naturally flow together to create one great movement.

Geering skillfully prepares his readers to examine the lineaments of this second Axial Period by addressing its pioneers - such as Grotius, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Herbert, Locke and others. From them came the elements of change we can now perceive more clearly.

• The seat of human authority has changed for ever. The Church, the Bible and the classical writers all began to be bypassed.

• Instead of relying on others to interpret experience, men and women gradually began to rely on their own understanding.

• From submission to and dependence upon external authority, people moved to a sense of autonomy, of self-direction and self-determination.

• The few enlightened individuals who once determined right and truth were replaced by the many. They claimed a freedom to think for themselves and choose their own futures.

• Christian orthodoxy as understood since the fourth century was one immediate casualty.

Geering points out that even now the sea change is not complete:

Many have not yet realized that we have entered this new age. The rise of various reactionary movements shows that some prefer to surrender the newly found freedom in return for the security once enjoyed (as it was thought) by a heteronomous society. Whatever our judgement on the matter, humans have stepped over an irreversible threshold.

A change of focus
All this has had its effect on the Christian religion. I hesitate to say "on Christianity" because the latter is not essentially a religion - though it incorporates religious practices. Be that as it may, Christianity as a religion has been impacted by multiple changes. As Geering emphasises these are not cosmetic changes, but deep-seated shifts.

Revelation gives way to uncertainty  For a brief period after the Reformation, it seemed to many that humanity would soon solve all its problems by recourse to reason. This would completely subsume the certainties of revelation with a different kid of certainty. But that was not to be. Hume showed that reason could not establish even the basic beliefs of deists, never mind those of theism.

The Bible gives way to history and myth  Few realise that history as a discipline was invented only recently. Before that events were recorded. But the principle of scepticism which fuels the modern subject was largely missing, as were the many science-based techniques such as archeology which are so essential to history as we know it today. Assumptions of scriptural revelation began to collapse as soon as the canons of good history were applied to the Bible. The concept of myth was borrowed from anthropology (itself a new analytic discipline) to describe those parts of the Bible which, it can now be seen, serve a non-historical purpose. Geering summarises the stories of those who pioneered the Bible as history and the historical Jesus.

The human construction of God  With the life and work of Ludwig Feuerbach the struggle began between those who sought to preserve a personal God "out there" and those who could not construe the world in those terms. Feuerbach contended that God had originated as the projection of all that is best and truest of the human condition. Geering is correct in picking the following quotation from Feuerbach to represent the centre of the great struggle so many are presently embroiled in:

Henceforth man should seek the ground of his being, the goal of his thinking, the cure of his ills and suffering in himself, rather than outside himself like the pagan or above himself like the Christian. [1]

These primary early shifts, which so few Christians know about, led directly to the more familiar controversies such as the so-called conflict between science and religion, the place of man in the universe, and the possible relativity of morality and perception. All this is covered by the author with remarkable clarity and commendable brevity - a difficult combination at the best of times.

A secular God
Geering's main thesis, when not dealt with directly, hovers challengingly in the background. He thinks of himself as one

... who acknowledges that his basic values and the content of his ultimate concern have been moulded principally by the Christian faith. It is a viewpoint, however, which acknowledges that so much of what has emerged in the modern world ... is inconsistent with Christianity in its orthodox or classical forms.

His main purpose, given this milieu, is to examine the watershed between the modern world and all that preceded it so as to evaluate what is today broadly described as the secular or "this-worldly" religion into which Christianity seems to be transmuting.

The first casualty of secularisation (not the same as secularism) is what Ernst Troeltsch called absolutism - the claim by Christianity or any other religion to be the final answer to anything. The universe is all we can know, and anything ultimate will be found within it, than than outside it. One way of expressing this is the increasingly prevalent denial of the "existence" of an absolute called "God". Another is the increasing irrelevance to so many of traditional claims to a dualistic reality - this world and another "supernatural" world, where things are perfect.

Geering deals with all this masterfully. Provided the reader is willing to go a little more slowly than usual he or she cannot help but grasp what is in reality a highly complex and puzzling subject. I count it a tribute to Geering's obviously great depth of learning that I, who am normally easily befuddled by philosophical things, could feel both convinced and clear.

Towards the end of the book, the multiple themes of earlier are drawn together in a brief study of secularisation. The chapter entitled Why Did Secularization Come Out of the West? is interesting but less than convincing. Geering tracks back to the Old Testament for the roots of the secularising processes. But he fails, in my view, to explain why it is that this emphasis survived Christianity which may be seen as

... an arresting and retrogressive step in the unfolding of the drama of secularization ...

The survival of the ancient "God if this world" was, he proposes, due to a minor accident of history. If the Old Testament had not been included in the Christian Canon then other elements incorporated into Christian orthodoxy (Persian dualism, Greek Platonism, and Roman and Teutonic religion) might have taken the Church along an entirely different path. As it turned out, an insistence in the central doctrine of "God with us " in the incarnation, and of the essential humanity of Jesus saved the day.

Why then, asks Geering, does the Church think of the secular as something intrinsically evil and therefore to be held at bay almost at all costs? He reminds us that

... It was not the Jewish priests and scholars who initiated Christianity; they were strongly opposed to it ... Similarly it was not the Christian clergy who initiated the modern secular world but Christian thinkers who were on the margins or growing edges of Christian life and practice.

The book should end here, leaving us to explore further just how the secular manifests itself in our lives and what we must do to own our part in it. Geering tags onto it, however, an adulatory chapter on that "mad genius" Wilhelm Nietzsche. The author remarks that Nietzsche's writing may confuse and repel the reader. I would venture to add that anyone who tries to read Nietzsche must tread warily. Madness is intrinsically confusing and the risk is that we are tempted to project sanity onto it.
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[1] Lectures on the Essence of Religion

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