Table of Contents | 17. In a world wherein the conflict of religion is a major global concern, are there reasons that make belief in God significant?
My experience in relation to this question has run the gamut from an unquestioning assumption that would never even consider this a problem, through the period when my college philosophy and later theological studies considered the traditional arguments for the existence of God, through a time when my life as a parish pastor didn't have time for such an inquiry, through the much discussed period called "the death of God," continuing in the era when I was a Merrill Fellow at the Divinity School of Harvard University where the noted theologian Gordon Kaufman offered a course on The God Problem, the name of his course and the title of his book (and a more recent one by Nigel Leaves), to the present. With the advent of the "new cosmology" and the modern erosion if not total collapse of the metaphysical world view that requires a supernatural theism, the question of God has returned to the public consciousness with a vengeance. In fact it is the question put to me by a student at William Jewell College! He phrased his concern in a provocative inquiry. "Faith," he noted, "is something that drives me on but I can't turn off the voice within me that questions why I need to have faith in God. My atheist friends show love that seems to prove that faith in God isn't necessaary...." He is echoing the same perspective of Sam Harris that he expresses in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. These are his words: "Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith....Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people died talking to an imaginary friend....As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were tramped to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: their lives were organized around the the indisputable fact of his existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith...." The tsunami that devastated entire nations around the Indian Ocean can be included in his perspective. So, he asserts, "We can no longer understand God as the creator of the species. We can no longer understand God as an interventionist tyrant as he is depicted in the Old Testament." That is the dilemma modern people face. To believe or not to believe. It must be noted that God can't be described with a handful of words, however carefully chosen. There are many perspectives. The proposal that I find most attractive is that proposed by Marcus Borg in both The God We Never Knew and The Heart of Christianity, by Sally McFague in Models of God and by Bishop John Shelby Spong in A New Christianity for A New World. It is called panentheism. This view sees God as an encompassing spirit, a Holy Presence in us yet beyond us and embracing all that is. Spong is heavily influenced by the late German theologian Paul Tillich's perspective that saw God as "the Ground of Being" that is in all and thus sustains and transcends the universe. A book by Nigel Leaves called The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism seeks to delineate what God means in the twenty-first century. He does this by examining four ways of resolving the question. All of this is pretty cerebral for me because of my view of what it means to be human. If Nietzsche was right in proclaiming the death of God more than a century ago, it has been to no avail to many. That's true for me. I am utterly convinced that humans are always seeking meaning and belonging. We can't live alone so we create community and institutional structures for belonging. Martin E. Marty, emeritus church historian at the University of Chicago, goes so far as to insist that the Christian faith "isn't an individualistic faith for isolated persons." Room is allowed for "Robinson Crusoes who are temporarily and artificially separated from the community of faith. But Christianity doesn't allow for Tarzans who come to maturity by a self-civilizing process in the jungle." We need others for companionship, intimacy, etc. At the other side, we are "meaning makers" or "myth makers," as Joseph Campbell observes in his writings about heroes and myth such as The Hero With A Thousnd Faces, who yearn to get to the bottom of reality. The story of Jesus is the root of the "myth of Christianity." Myth is to be understood as a story much like a parable to give meaning to life, not in some true or false sense. I am utterly convinced that Augustine was on target when he claimed we are restless until we rest in God. In other words, as part of our human nature, we long for the transcendent or the holy. If someone kills off God, we will create God again. I have found that the God that the atheist doesn't believe in is the same God I don't believe in either! If you define God as that which gives order and purpose and, therefore, meaning to your life then everyone is a theist. There is an astounding and gifted scholar named Karen Armstrong. If you want to plunge into her writings then two are on this subject at hand, namely, The History of God and The Battle for God. I end this article in this fashion. With Richard Holloway in Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity I have concluded that the needle of my dial of belief trembles before the perspective that there is Mystery that transcends my human existence, that has compassion for me and all this entire cosmos and is grace. From my perspective, I don't care what name you give the Mystery. What do you think? You can reach me at BobSueSand@aol.com |