Of A-Theism

When he was about sixteen, one of my sons told me he was an agnostic, that he doubted the rudiments of the faith that he had learned in Sunday School, that he had heard discussed among his friends. I told him that that’s a good thing…I having remembered reading Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith in Religion 111 as a freshman in college in which the great German theologian averred that doubt is a most necessary part of faith…that in fact without doubt there is no faith. I remember being so incredibly relieved that it was not only permissible to have doubts about faith, but even necessary… After two world wars and the exponential violence they wrought, it was no wonder people began doubting the existence of a loving God….that “doubt is a part of faith” at the time of Tillich’s writing, was possibly the greatest understatement a theologian ever made…. And the way many so-called churched people dealt with their doubts over the past half century was simply to leave.

Years later, just a few years ago one of my son’s friends around the age of thirty, who knew I was a priest, ventured to tell me that he was an atheist….Just months ago a woman perhaps around my age after we had been introduced at the Artwalk told me that she had heard so much about All Saints Church and the good that we do…that many of the people she knew who were actively engaged in socio-economic and justice issues around town were members of All Saints…I told her enthusiastically that she should come…but she demurred saying that she was an atheist…that she just couldn’t go with the “personal Jesus thing.” I told her still that there might just be a place for her here.

There are many in our culture like these two, people who have outgrown the dogmatic super-naturalism that Christianity has foisted upon its faithful over the ages, and particularly during the Enlightenment and the rise of American fundamentalism, when Christianity hid in its ivory towers from the renaissance of science, reason and empirical learning. It never crossed the church’s mind that religion and science might be intimately compatible….We are seeing such discourse today….science and religion in intimate conversation.

I told my son’s friend and the woman I met downtown that I too was an a-theist….that is, if theism is defined as a male God aloof in the heavens, an eccentric watchmaker, who has set the creation free to its own devices….a capricious deity who answers some peoples’ prayers, but not those of others….who punishes the wicked capriciously as well….and sadly, I think that notion of God is preeminent in what passes popularly as Christianity…. I don’t want any of that either….I want to be with the doubters….because doubt engenders conversation and imaginative discovery… After all the life of faith is not about dogma, but a life of discovery…..discovery and enlightenment amid a life of acting for the good of the whole…what Jesus preached and the prophets before him.

If we are to remain alive as the church, if we are to maintain any relevancy, then we must learn to speak of God with intellectual integrity…no more magic….but humanity living into its God-likeness…. intellectual integrity, and moreover to act as God acts….the people of faith committing themselves to compassion and mercy and justice….to mature into the love for the world we are meant to be….Scripture is our friend in this matter, because scripture compels us to enact the faith first….to enflesh the good, to enflesh the higher love that lives among us…and then belief comes in its own time…our doubts along the way notwithstanding…..Come all doubters, and see the good breaking into our world as we speak….you’ll see it if you are paying attention….see and join the love borne to the world by people who act as if it is the good that will in the end prevail…people acting as if, acting “as if”…. faith at its best….see and join the ones who change the world….Come and act and see…. that you might believe.