Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: God Talking

                          In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

          Hello, again, I hope my blog finds you happy and healthy.  Thanks for visiting.

          Last night, I discussed primary objections to faith in God, and then I suggested an alternative way to view faith.  Below is a review of the three criticisms. 

God is an illusion. 

God is a coping mechanism. 

God is make believe. 

          I showed how all three are quite true, but they do not do justice to a grander understanding of God as Being-itself.  Let me share another criticism that was not intended to be an objection.

          Ludwig Feuerbach wrote a book The Essence of Christianity.  In dense, 19^th Century prose Feuerbach carefully built a persuasive argument that God is a projection of perfect humanity devoid of fault and sin.  I read that book and thought, “Well, there it is.  How can anyone refute that?”

          Refuting a theological argument is tough to do.  So is astrology.  I learned that from Ludwig.  One accepts a critical analysis of faith for what it is:  an iconoclasm.  

          Let us be honest, a lot of theological doctrine simply needs to go the way of runes and crystal balls.

          It cannot be otherwise.  Since we know so little about the power of being that prevents nonbeing from swallowing up all reality, we cannot help but create idols to fill the void.  

          There may exist in our minds a profound need to fashion a face when we gaze upon disparate and indifferent infinity.  In nature we observe patterns and processes and patterns within processes so we can make predictions that allow us to prepare for what can happen in a lifetime.  We call this science.  

          Our lives are experienced in decades yet burn as quickly as a moist match.  Compared to infinite space and time billions of lives pass through their finite spaces and times in total obscurity.  We leave only our genetic material, whatever art we created, and the affects our lives touched upon others.

          Concerning the latter: right now, I am at camp.  I have told stories to young people I hardly know.  They laughed and may recall what I said.  I have seeped into the pores of their lives ever so briefly.  Others they meet may very well be affected by the minutest residue of who I gave to them.

          I too am now here writing these words with infinite lives from my past and present reaching out through me into what I write.    I am not talking about reincarnation, but a connection we all live with everything that is second by second and we are unable to move it to the front of our consciousness.

          We are so alone in our bodies.  We sense an existential disconnection from everything that is while yearning to believe everything that is wants us here forever.  To express the tangled mess of self and being, we talk in the language of poetry with symbols and metaphors.

          A symbol points to something else as being what the symbol represents.  A symbol participates in the being of what it represents.  If I think of God as a symbol of the power of being then I am saying that the power of being in a symbolic way relates to me on a personal level.  

          The phrase “power of being” is symbolic.  It is an attempt to understand why a big bang happened instead of not happening at all, ever.  Incidentally, if the universe lives and moves in God, then it is not impossible to believe that big bangs happen more than once.  In God, the logic and energy required to expand a universe are gathered into a space no bigger than a period.  In a moment it expands into a universe replete with all the natural laws it needs to birth organic worlds and allow me to be here at this camp speaking God talk with a paint scraper.

           The trick is to realize that all talk about God is poetic.  Theology suffers from the same weakness that afflicts all nonscientific approaches to knowledge:  its language is imprecise and it must rely on analogy, not objective evidence, to make its case. 

           Recently, a good friend of mine said that the word “God” represents Being-itself as a “Who,” not a “What.”  Who’s to say which is real and which is not?  

          To make a statement like that the burden of proof is on me.  Any extraordinary statement requires proof.  I hope to offer different kinds of proof that makes God relevant for the next one thousand years.  I believe God does not need me to speak for God, but if we do not want our faith to go the way of Zeus someone has to attempt a theology that does not turn its back on modern knowledge.  

         God talk does not have to violate natural law.  Indeed, if theology violates natural law, it is not God talk.  Superstition believes things that never happen really do happen; poetry believes what never happens can be true.

         Jesus walked on water?  It never happened.  Is it true that Jesus walked on water?  You bet.  Have you ever felt beset by the storms of life and believed that Jesus passed through those storms just to pick you up and set you on safe ground?  Do you really think the experience of that kind of salvation depends on whether or not Jesus actually walked on water in history?  If you believe that, you allowed science to ruin you instead of illuminate you.

        Listen when you hear a scientist extol the wonders of nature.  That is God Talk without the word “God” as the subject. 

          Listen when you hear that war was averted after a peace settlement was negotiated.  That is God Talk without the word “God” as the subject.

          Listen when you hear the human genome has been decoded.  That is God Talk without the word “God” as the subject.

          Listen when you hear that a score of students scraped a hundred year old house so a grandmother, who is proud her grandson in Texas is graduating from college this year, does not have to worry about it being condemned.

          Listen when you hear that other missions throughout this little town in Virginia saw scores of other students create emergency buckets for tornado victims, paint a Salvation Army Center, play basketball with children who have no parents, and assist three people who feed 900 people at a community kitchen everyday.

          Listen when you hear of these things. That is God Talk with the word “God” as the subject and the action is “loving.”

          Theology is God Talk that relies on philosophy combined with poetry.  Feeding 900 hungry people a day is God Talk without the poetry.  In both, "God" is the subject and "loves" is the predicate.  

          I hope my blog today was meaningful.  Tomorrow, I would like to write about how God can be love in a way that does not sound silly or shallow.

I hope to see you here.  Blessings…