I used to be. God-the-father-almighty-maker-of-heaven-and-earth and all the rest.
I wasn't casual about it either. I don't mean to imply that I was particularly moral or good. I wasn't. But I thought a lot about the things I believed. I read the Bible — several times. I went to church two or three times a week. I studied Christian writings, everything from the church fathers to the Puritans to contemporary authors.
I think I have a pretty decent grasp of Christian theology, too, especially the branch I most recently belonged to. (Reformed Baptist, if you are curious.) I can recite a bunch of scripture or the catechism to you, or distinguish for you the major differences between the 1644 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the 1689 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith. I can even tell you why it's called the 1689 Confession when it was written in 1677. I can talk to you about the distinguishing characteristics of the first and second "great awakenings" and why the second is not highly regarded among some.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. It's not much use to me now.
If people ask me "what I believe" now, my answer usually depends on who I am talking to. Sometimes I say, "I'm not a religious person." If I want to be cheeky, I tell them I believe in John Coltrane. I like the word "agnostic," I suppose, although that has to do with what you know rather than what you believe. The word atheist might fit, but it has so much baggage, I don't know if it's worth it.
Besides, it doesn't capture the way I process my life or the narrative I impose on it.
I am a rationalist and a skeptic when it comes to the natural world. I believe that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that we evolved from lower life forms. I believe in the scientific method, in secular government, and in a "wall of separation" between church and state.
Yet I have these words and stories bouncing around in my brain. And I don't mind them. Staves turning to snakes. Widows mites. Buried talents.
At some point I was introduced to Joseph Campbell. If you haven't been, I cannot recommend highly enough his Hero with a Thousand Faces. I don't agree with him categorically, but I do find that he understood our need for myth, much similar to (and related to) our need for art. Campbell sent me to Jung, and while I haven't figured anything out just yet, I'm more comfortable than I used to be with all that stuff I used to take literally.
It's a common thing among evangelicals of a certain stripe to say that "Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship." I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm in need of a religion, but no thanks on the relationship. I need psalm and prayer and communion and celebration and the word (lower case "w" will do just fine). I need a pause at the end-beginning of my week to say, "Life is not merely matter, energy, and time." I need sacred moments and sacred spaces, made sacred not by the presence of the spirit of God, but the presence of my own spirit — me, fearfully and wonderfully made, the product of untold eons and made from the dust of stars. I need the mythology of the Bible without the disproven cosmology and barbaric ethics.
I don't exactly think that there is anything special about Christian mythology, it's just that it happens to be the one I grew up with. As Campbell wrote, it is one of many examples of the monomyth found throughout mythology and art. But there are some things in the Christian story that seem unique, or at least emphasized more strongly that seem special to me.
These are the things I think about, the things that still color the way I see the world. I am deeply grateful (in whatever sense you can understand that in a non-theistic way) for that.
So, I thought I'd do a series of posts about this topic, namely, what about my religion is still meaningful and relevant to me in a post-supernaturalist context.
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All of that was by way of preface, but I thought I'd go ahead and talk about the thing that still means the most to me in the Christian religion. And in a weird way, it's the thing that's central to what I do and don't believe any more.
I'll start with a story. It's one of my favorites and I've mentioned it in a prior post. Perhaps you already know it.
The king of Aram was at war with Israel. And God had given the prophet Elisha knowledge about the king's comings and going so that whenever he would encamp, Elisha would send message to the king of Israel and say, "Don't go to such-and-such a place. The king of Aram waits to attack you there."
So the king of Aram asked his courtiers, "How is it that the king of Israel always knows where I am about to attack?"
And they answered him, "The prophet Elisha knows and tells him."
So the king of Aram sent his army to Dothan, where the prophet Elisha had pitched his tent. And Elisha stayed there with only his servant.
So the servant rose up early in the morning and left the tent, and he saw hundreds and thousands of horses and chariots and soldiers of Aram. So he went to the prophet and said, "Alas! What shall we do, master?"
Elisha answered, "Do not be afraid, for we are greater than they are." Then he knelt and prayed, "Lord, open the eyes of my servant."
Then the servant looked again and saw the army of Aram, and encircled around them were the hosts of heaven riding horses and mounted on chariots of fire.
The story goes on from there. God makes the army blind and Elisha leads them to Samaria, where their sight is restored and they realize they are in an enemy city. Then the Israelites give them bread and send them back to Syria.
I love, love, love, love, love this story.
It comes to me when I am at my lowest. It renews my spirit. There is real power in this story.
If someone asked me what I take from the story, I would say it is this: things are not as they seem.
There is more than meets the eye. Like Harry Potter in a world full of muggles, we are surrounded by wonder and what passes as magic.
In many ways, it is one of the central themes of Judeo-Christian scripture. As I've written before, the Bible is filled with these unexpected twists. Boys slay giants with slingshots. A man kills a crowd with the jawbone of a donkey. And right there at the climax of the whole story, we see the most divine, powerful thing in the universe made weak. But the secret is this: we are made strong in weakness. The first will be last and the last will be first. And that man who is now naked and despised and bleeding on a cross before a pitiless crowd is winning the battle over death.
How can this possibly appeal to the rational mind?
Because it's true, in a sense.
We've learned that the smallest things in the universe — particles so small that we cannot see them — have unimaginable power, power to level cities and nations.
We look at a diamond and at plant life and imagine they are different, but they are not. Time does its thing and one transforms into the other.
All matter that ever was or will be in this universe began as a small ball — about the size of a softball, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson is to be believed — and has grown to an expanse past human calculation.
Each of us — kings and queens as well as washerwomen and chimney sweeps — are made of the same matter that makes up the furthest star.
We look up at the night sky and see ghosts — stars that have passed out of our universe ages ago, whose light is just now reaching us.
Each of us is covered by billions of micro-organisms who depend on us for survival and who, if scaled to our size, would seem like the stuff of nightmares.
And we can look at a single-cell organism and see something like our most distant ancestor.
Things are not as they seem.
It could pass for magic. But it is real.
How marvelous. What a wondrous world we live in.
A number of very virulent atheists like to refer to the Bible as a book of fairy tales. I would agree with that assessment, but I celebrate it. It is a book that has prepared me to look at the world in wonder and expect the unexpected.
If someone asked me what I take from the story, I would say it is this: things are not as they seem.
There is more than meets the eye. Like Harry Potter in a world full of muggles, we are surrounded by wonder and what passes as magic.
In many ways, it is one of the central themes of Judeo-Christian scripture. As I've written before, the Bible is filled with these unexpected twists. Boys slay giants with slingshots. A man kills a crowd with the jawbone of a donkey. And right there at the climax of the whole story, we see the most divine, powerful thing in the universe made weak. But the secret is this: we are made strong in weakness. The first will be last and the last will be first. And that man who is now naked and despised and bleeding on a cross before a pitiless crowd is winning the battle over death.
How can this possibly appeal to the rational mind?
Because it's true, in a sense.
We've learned that the smallest things in the universe — particles so small that we cannot see them — have unimaginable power, power to level cities and nations.
We look at a diamond and at plant life and imagine they are different, but they are not. Time does its thing and one transforms into the other.
All matter that ever was or will be in this universe began as a small ball — about the size of a softball, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson is to be believed — and has grown to an expanse past human calculation.
Each of us — kings and queens as well as washerwomen and chimney sweeps — are made of the same matter that makes up the furthest star.
We look up at the night sky and see ghosts — stars that have passed out of our universe ages ago, whose light is just now reaching us.
Each of us is covered by billions of micro-organisms who depend on us for survival and who, if scaled to our size, would seem like the stuff of nightmares.
And we can look at a single-cell organism and see something like our most distant ancestor.
Things are not as they seem.
It could pass for magic. But it is real.
How marvelous. What a wondrous world we live in.
A number of very virulent atheists like to refer to the Bible as a book of fairy tales. I would agree with that assessment, but I celebrate it. It is a book that has prepared me to look at the world in wonder and expect the unexpected.
