This last fall I went on a spiritual journey that I had not been on before. Accompanied by Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, I read and considered that the God, and I’m not sure if I should capitalize that usage or not, I had worshiped my whole life might not be real. Or might not be real in the way I imagined. I would have called it an exercise in atheism, but that seems to imply it was epistemic in nature which is inadequate. I was not merely in a cognitive place of experiment, my heart was demanding my worldview be given existential consideration. What was different about this bout with doubt from others is that I went more fully and open heartedly. Perhaps even curiously. And went, most importantly, not by choice, but out of necessity. It seemed to me not to be the next logical step, but a response of obedience. To live in congruence with myself and be whole I had to enter this place ambiguity.
Here I want to take some time to consider terms like doubt and atheism. As an intellectual endeavor, coming up with reasons that God does not exist never seemed difficult to me. As one who has held a posture of belief my whole life, the testimony of the antithetical always pressed in. And what are those? Legion really if you are paying attention at all. A two-year-old Syrian refugee boy washing up on the shores of Turkey. A ravaged cancerous corpse. Over 50,000 Gazans and 1,706 Israelis. But those are the arguments from evil.
There are other more philosophical considerations: chaos, entropy, evolution, psychological need. God starts to feel like patchwork if you linger there too long.
It could be that I’m inclined to a kind of intellectual dishonesty, but I don’t think any of those things are the best objections or really the ones most of us care about. I think that ultimately, we reject God because we don’t experience God, and at the end of the day, that observation is an emotional one.
My reckoning was about this latter observation. God had gone quiet when I finally listened to the silence with some honesty. I suppose that this is where my tradition would posit something like the dark night of the soul, but I didn’t ever get there. Or maybe I did, and I couldn’t recognize it, but I found that further I explored the possibility of God’s non-existence with my emotive self the more curious I became. Atheism gave me a new rubric to consider the world through. There was evolution and the big bang, but there was also a whole new way to watch sociological and anthropological history. An adventure that was made all the more fascinating for me by reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. All of the sudden the narratives of human development were reenergized by the possibility that, “holy shit, look at what humans did?” It felt like putting on glasses to colorize a world that had previously only been seen in black and white.
I’ve often identified that I have trouble knowing not just what I feel, but also what I believe. At any given point I could articulate to you what I thought I believed, but for me believing as merely ascent to proposition is abstract. Belief has no form if it is never invited to come out and play on the stage of life. Consequently, I find that belief must have the chance to be embodied to be real. Because of this I looked for trusted conversation partners as I was navigating my existential challenges. I turned, for example, to Sarah Bessey’s Field Notes For the Wilderness, which is a fine book in what it sets out to do, but for my cognitive needs it’s proved deficient. If I read Bessey’s book correctly, her aim is to meet fellow travelers somewhere in the place of Exvangelicalism and deconstruction–I like Jesus but am unsure about the church. In doing so Bessey employs beautiful images, quotes, and thought partners, but my objection is that those all only properly made sense if the supposition of God itself was true to begin with. I was questioning all of it, not just if the expression I grew up was not working
I should say that what was at stake for me in my atheism wasn’t really god or god’s existence, but that existence mediated specifically by Jesus. That a generic and or impersonal god might or might not exist is not hard to conceive of at all. That’s agnosticism, a position that, given the complexity of both beauty and evil, joy and sorrow, gift and task, life seems to leave you lingering in. My theological tent has been big for a long time. Having grown up with a robust pneumatology it wasn’t hard to agree with C.S. Lewis’s imaginative inclusion of Emeth the Tarkan as an example of those who come by the grace of God ontologically if not epistemically. That is to say, the notion that the Spirit was at work saving people through Jesus without explicit knowledge of Jesus was never a troublesome notion for me. If not a universalist, I was at least an inclusivist. But what happens if a confessing Christian were to relocate not just the epistemic nature of Jesus’ work, but also the ontological nature of Jesus in salvation? That would remove the atoning work of Jesus on the cross as the lynchpin of any kind of soteriological reality. What one is left with is a view of atonement not unlike early protestant liberals (Ritschl, Von Harnack, and Rauschenbusch). In this view Jesus’ death is a moral influence spurning believers onto love.
This raises another point worth discussing, that is the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Easter as they say. What is the difference between the 1st century Jew from Galilee who, based on the references in Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Lucian of Samosata, etc., who most certainly existed, likely garnered a notable following and was executed on the one hand, and the metaphysical figure, who receives worship and status as the Son of God and ruler of history as laid out in the gospels, Paul, Revelation, and elsewhere on the other? This delineation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Easter was most recently popularized by Richard Rohr in his book The Cosmic Christ. It takes a discerning reader to see it, but Rohr is probably scandalous by the measures of orthodoxy because in his book Jesus is not the expression of Christ in history, Jesus is one expression of Christ in history. The difference is subtle, but not insubstantial. Why? Because however licentious one wants to be with her Christian theology, to retain some kind of the proximity to orthodoxy one must, in my opinion, keep the Jesus of history connected to the Christ of Easter, because this is how God saves. It’s why two natures was the first good fight the church had, and why with Trinity, the doctrines church rests on. It also is necessary for theosis and other popular expressions that deify humanity through participatory measures. Splitting those identities doesn’t just undermine atonement, it undermines incarnation.
If I’ve gotten into the weeds I apologize, but this will help set up my existential reckoning. For the first time in my life I considered, “well what if Jesus was just one expression of the cosmic Christ and not the expression of Christ?” I realize that sounds robustly Christian, and not at all like the precipice of atheism, but it was, for me, the question hanging above the exit door of orthodoxy and consequently the entry door of religious imagination on other side, come what may. Remove the particularity of Jesus and the shape of the Christian worldview crumbles quickly.
Here’s what happened to me when I permitted my body, soul, and mind to move fully into the possibility of that kind of atheism, I sensed that God went with me. I know that sounds wildly inconsistent. Maybe even oxymoronic and I accept that so let me try again. In this moment of letting go I found, chiefly through my imagination, which is to say through my prayer life, that as I stared into abyss of not god, I couldn’t help but have a sense that, in the most unobtrusive manner possible, God gently walked up behind me to peer over my shoulder with as much curiosity as I had eager to know what I was experiencing. Here I was confronted with the inescapable reality that whatever I may or may not believe about god, God is the inevitable presupposition of my life.
A few weeks ago my friend Ericka Graham hosted Jared Byas on her podcast. When speaking about navigating what seemed like a similar moment in his own life, Jared quoted a line of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo that seems especially apropos:
Abbe Faria: Here is your final lesson – do not commit the crime for which you now serve the sentence. God said, Vengeance is mine.
Edmond Dantes: I don’t believe in God.
Abbe Faria: It doesn’t matter. He believes in you.
This has been my experience and made for a potent shift in my faith development, and it characterizes what I have emerged with on the other side. I no longer worry if I’m believing the right things. If I’m orthodox. Which is not to say I don’t actively think about theology and/or even desire to be a good practitioner of it. I just don’t worry about it anymore. I don’t worry about getting it right or wrong or even if getting it right or wrong is important. Because now I rest in the reality that God believes in me.
I suppose this reckoning could be interpreted one of two ways 1. One could emphasize the “God” portion of my statement and take it to mean a kind of monergism that emphasizes God’s sole agency in my relationship or 2. One could emphasize “believes in me” as a form of flimsy new-age belief that celebrates an anthropomorphic approach to religious selfishness–so as to suggest my religion celebrates God’s interest in me.
Neither of those capture my meaning. I mean to simply say that I’m liberated in the reality that God holds me.
But let me address one more objection. There’s a third person who might see the statement “God believes in me,” say an Evangelical, who would take delight in this and quip something like “you’ve finally understood grace.” And this is what I would say back, “maybe but I don’t believe you have.” And this is why. I grew up with the tired warning that unlike the Catholics we protestants didn’t believe we were saved by works. But what no one ever told me, nor do i think most Evangelicals are even perceptive of their own belief in, is the other side of that coin, which is neither are you saved by right belief, accepting Jesus into your heart, or praying a prayer. You aren’t even saved by your faith. The radical notion that God holds you is one accepted despite correct belief, not because of it. Said differently, protestants believe that the atoning work of Jesus can atone for any sin except for wrong belief about the atoning work of Jesus. Get that wrong and the protestants will give you a one-way ticket to hell.
It could be said that what is really at stake this whole time for me was the scandal of particularity. That may be true, but what I did not anticipate in confronting that question was the real sense of freedom that I’ve found on the other side of it. Freedom to love God and people more completely, and completely I think because it’s done more wholeheartedly. I’ve noticed a patience within myself. A patience that has vivified and revitalized the way I read scripture, but also all words for that matter. A sincerity with which I can now listen to other people’s religious experience without latent judgement, curious to hear what God has done in their life with their own imperfect postures of faith. And a joy, in the new places and teachers I have in discovering where God has been hiding in plain sight my whole life.
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