BEFORE THE LEAP OF FAITH

The wall in front of me in the hospital disintegrated, leaving not a black space, which is how we conceive nothing, but actually nothing. (Here, my vocabulary fails because you can’t conceive nothing as if nothing were a thing. However, the reader can get the gist that it was frightening.) My next recollection is of the ambulance taking me to Kaiser Hospital on Sunset Boulevard, where they could deal with the septicemia that was consuming my body. During the ambulance ride, I had a near-death experience. Unlike some people with similar experiences, I did not see a white light, my dead relatives welcoming me, or the face of Jesus—no such luck. I saw the devil. He sat with me. He looked like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, but hard and colder and with sharper metallic edges. I am 98 percent convinced I was hallucinating, but that prompted the question during my recuperation: “Where was God?” If I had been blessed with a different experience and felt my soul streaming toward the beautiful infinity of the divine, I probably would not have asked the question and undertaken this journey.

As far as possible, we should find a common starting point. Atheists who say they don’t believe in God really mean to say they don’t believe in theism. Otherwise, I cannot take them seriously. Likely, it was one of our pre-Homo sapient ancestors who realized creative and destructive energies beyond his control animated the natural world. He gave them words—light, wind, rain, fertility—and often gave them personalities. On the way to becoming human, his next thought was to persuade these personalities to work on his behalf. The rites and rituals to get these energies or gods to do what he wanted were inevitable. Maybe the god was satisfied with a bucket of butter, or maybe it wanted blood—the fatted calf, an untouched fertile female, or your firstborn. Although we have largely renamed these energies, they have not gone away. The argument about God is over the nature of these energies—impersonal, uncaring, and totally explicable naturally or personal, directed, and essentially mysterious. Those who claim there is no God seem to deny such creative and destructive energies exist. Sorry, the fact that they themselves exist makes them a walking, talking, and thinking refutations of their point of view. It is that something beyond us exists where we find common ground.

I acknowledge an element of futility to these discussions. Nobody will be convinced by my or your brilliant reasoning. The debaters are engaged in a chess game where checkmate is impossible because each player values their pieces differently. Yet, the arguments are significant because they create a cultural mindset that allows or disallows such beliefs. They become part of the intellectual air we breathe.

Culture is one reason we resist each other’s arguments. The cultural atheists generally tolerate the quiet Christian, the “meek” who mistakenly believes he inherits the earth. That is not their cup of tea. They cringe at the idea of being obliged to inquire into the salvation of family and friends. They cannot imagine themselves shouting, “Praise be to God!” or “Hallelujah!” during a sermon. They are uncomfortable when an acquaintance says, “Have a blessed day.” All groups, including atheists, have their metaphorical handshakes. Certain phrases, certain references, certain looks, and even certain pauses in a conversation are used to suss out a fellow believer. The cultural atheists suspect that the evangelist naively wants him to act with the same extroverted bliss. In many cases, they are right. As I said, such behavior is not the cultural atheists’ cup of tea.

There is a similar disconnect for the believer. Much of his language belongs to another era, so words that once were visceral sound artificial. The hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” doesn’t resonate because we are not depending on a fortress to protect us. “The Lord is Our Shepherd?” We have seen pictures of shepherds but do not encounter them in our daily lives, much less have done any shepherding ourselves. “Put on the armor of God?” Aside from the recreators of Medieval battles, who wears armor these days?

Yet faith also provides words intimately related to our humanity. To go from belief to disbelief, one must empty these words of their meanings.

“Hallowed be thine name.” The concept of holiness not only encourages us to think beyond ourselves but suggests a new dimension of human experience. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Is blessedness an outdated concept, or is it a way to value a human being beyond the physical and material? “Love…always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres..” In a deterministic world, these attributes of love are irrelevant. “Prayer.” Does prayer, which at the very least is an expression of concern, make us better or worse? “Evil” is one concept many atheists hang onto without necessarily giving it lip service, maybe because they can use the term with justice against the extremity of some believers. Without God, sin is merely a violation of cultural norms. With God, we can use it to question cultural norms.

Many atheists attempt to articulate morality through a non-personified God. I find it encouraging that they do so even though they become tongue-tied when asked to identify the source of their morality. They can argue that their sourceless morality is superior to the God who killed innocent Canaanite children. I can’t disagree. I do not find the God of Old Testament massacres reconcilable with the God of Jesus or of the Ten Commandments. I imagine the writer of these parts of the Old Testament was warning outsiders with their own bellicose gods: “We got a bigger and ‘badder’ god than you, so don’t mess with us!” In a world where genocide was a common practice of invading armies, what sort of god would you want on your side?

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” 

John 3:16 brings us to the puzzling subject of sacrifice. Again, we have lost the ancient experience of this word. We sacrifice eating out to pay the rent. We no longer attend a public bloodletting to please a god. For a God to sacrifice his son—that is, depending on how you parse the trinity himself—must have been a shock. How can a god do that? This role reversal is a complete break from what had come before. It turns the world on its head. It makes no sense unless ‘sacrifice’ takes on a broader meaning. If a god can sacrifice itself for you, you must have value beyond your mere physical existence. Had the Romans only known what Jesus was about, they would have offered him a harem and an unlimited supply of fine wines. Christianity would then have had a short, merry existence.

According to Wittgenstein, who was not a Christian: “Only love can believe the Resurrection.” Many believers will happily tell you they have something special you do not have. I’m not going there because, aside from being obnoxious, it does not demonstrate love and is unprovable.

In the fewest possible words, the Christian message is: ‘Love defeated death through Christ’s sacrifice.’ God’s love is the love that defeats death. That people have difficulty accepting this radical assertion is understandable. Jesus, in dying for our sins on the cross, shared our pain and despair. He reached out to humanity in a world-encompassing act of empathy. That should have been the end of the story. Messiahs come and go. The disciples, like the majority of Jews in the first century, believed in resurrection at the end of time, so they had eternal life in their religion anyway. What did they gain by the absurd declaration they had seen the risen Christ? Why would they accept a painful death rather than deny him?

Perhaps Wittgenstein has half the answer: “Only love can believe the resurrection?” As Christ’s death met our humanity on the cross, God’s love met our love in the resurrection. How love defeats death for me is an open question.

Can anything be called love without the willingness to sacrifice for the beloved? From love comes hope and the joys of our lives. Without God, it is a fleeting human experience. For a believer, God’s love becomes the umbrella under which all our other loves shelter.

FOR EACH GRAIN OF SAND THERE ARE TEN THOUSAND STARS. THIS MAKES IT HARD TO CUT GOD DOWN TO SIZE TO FIT OUR INTELLECTS.