The End of God
June 17, 2007
Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3
I initially titled this, “The Death of God, Again,” but realized as I wrote that it is not so much the death of God that presses in upon us these days as it is the end of God.
The cover story on a recent issue of The Nation features a stained-glass window accompanying the bold type proclaiming “the new atheism.” Inside is a thoughtful and provocative essay reviewing a handful of recent books by prominent authors arguing not so much for the death of God as for the rebirth of strident humanism that not only rejects the idea of God but also all efforts to bring faith into the public square.
The proponents of this so-called new atheism are, with a few notable exceptions, steadfastly progressive. That almost goes without saying, considering that the article reviewing their thought was in The Nation. But it’s worth noting precisely because its presence in The Nation – still the nation’s finest weekly journal of progressive thought – underscores the long and continuing disconnect between progressive social and political thought and progressive religion.
That disconnect is nothing new under the sun. I vividly recall a conversation with a friend named Jame, a co-worker at SANE-Freeze – the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy – in 1985 while I was a student at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Jame was a self-described “red diaper baby” whose parents were somewhat dismayed that he had gone so mainstream as to work within the American political system for an organization such as SANE. Soon after we began working together, Jame asked me why a progressive would be a student at a divinity school. Why, he asked, would I have anything to do with religion?
As we talked, it was clear that he had never encountered progressive religious thought nor could he fathom the idea. When I told him that the life and work of Martin Luther King was my theological touchstone he admitted that he never considered King’s work as anything other than political action for a clearly progressive cause. He’d never considered that King’s work might be grounded in faith.
I’ve thought back to that conversation many times over the years, and it’s come back to mind even more of late when I read the “new atheists” or hear echoes of their thinking in public responses of many progressives to the work or words of folks like Jim Wallis at Sojourners or Michael Lerner at Tikkun.
A couple of weeks ago, Rabbi Lerner had a brief essay posted on the Common Dreams web site. If you don’t know of it, Common Dreams is one of the best on-line digests of current progressive political thought. Like many such sites, Common Dreams has a “comments” section, and reading the comments to Lerner’s essay was, in this instance, more instructive than reading the essay itself.
The number of fairly vitriolic comments suggesting that there is no place for faith in politics or that all belief is naïve if not down-right ignorant was a disheartening if not surprising reminder that in the minds of most Americans all religious thought is equated with the worst excesses of the religious loud at the most conservative end of the political spectrum.
Whether or not we like it or agree with it, the name “Christian” is clearly associated in the minds of most Americans with a certain strain of the faith given voice by some of the most divisive figures in the culture. From the late Jerry Falwell to Richard Dobson of Focus on the Family fame to Pat Robertson, the neo-fundamentalists of the conservative evangelical wing of Christianity have become the public face of the faith and their collective image has obliterated all alternative perspectives.
The God they imagine is the God in the cross-hairs of the new atheists. Thus, to a great degree, the new atheists herald the death of an old god.
To that old god I say, goodbye and good riddance.
That god, as Bishop John A.T. Robinson argued in his classic Honest to God, is a god of height, out there in the great beyond acting on history from a distance. That god is the deus ex machina – the god who appeared out of nowhere, often dropped onto the stage of classical theater from so sort of crane device, to save the day kind of like Mighty Mouse but usually older and with a long white beard. That god is Santa Clause without the reindeer; Spider Man without the webs; Super Man impervious to kryptonite. That god is the one we call on from the fox holes we find ourselves in from time to time when we’re waiting for a miracle.
If there is to be a God adequate to our time, Robinson suggested, it will not be this god of foxhole prayers but rather a God of depth more than height, measured within us rather than beyond us, and stirring our souls and thus our history.
The god dismissed by the new atheism should be given last rites by the church and quickly interred. As Robinson wrote some 40 years ago, “Yes, God is dead, genuinely – if we expect him in the old habitations, mental or material. Yet [God] is not dead – if we are open to the signs of [God’s] appearing.”[1]
What was it Waylon Jennings sang about “looking for love in all the wrong places”? Perhaps what we are most guilty of in our time is looking for God in all the wrong places.
If we expect God in all the old mental habitations – the habits of mind that lead us to imagine the God is the one we call on when we’re at the end of our human capacity – then we draw ever tighter, smaller rings around that which is God’s as our human technological capacities expand to ever wider spheres of knowledge, understanding and control over nature and ourselves.
If we expect God in all the old material habitations – those places of formal religious institutional formulations and orthodoxies that may look like medieval cathedrals or postmodern televangelical auditoriums – then we reduce God to that which is under the control of authorized traditions and institutions.
Perhaps it is that we are only now, some 500 years into it, coming to realize the full impact of Reformation thought.
It was Paul’s thought, freshly understood by Luther and his peers, that began that liberation of God and of humanity from the shackles to which we were jointly bound by a tradition that reduced God to dependence upon the crane operators lurking just off stage.
We catch a glimpse of that thought in Paul’s letter to the Galatians to whom he writes, “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”
As with so much of Paul’s writing, this is a mouthful in a few brief sentences, but it points toward something of ultimate concern. Indeed, it points toward another end of God – a telos or purpose of God as that which beckons us.
This God of beckoning, of calling, is the God we meet so many places in scripture: the God who calls forth light and life; the God who calls Abraham to go from his home to an unknown land; the God who calls Moses forth to lead the people from bondage to liberation; the God who goes forth before the people as a pillar of fire in the long night of the wilderness.
This God will not be bound back to any religious institution and delights in confounding human orthodoxies. This God will not be reduced to any human economy – especially not an economy of punishment, of unpardonable debt, of domination, division and control.
This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who sits at table with the Pharisees – and thus calls into question that very economy of division by which the world so easily divides itself into us and them, to good and bad, to straight and gay, to American and Iraqi, to atheist and believer. This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who offers shalom – wholeness, healing, community – to a woman of the city, a sinner. This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who calls us forth – not from some great beyond, but rather from the midst of our present lives – toward a future otherwise.
I would echo the words Bishop Robinson wrote in 1968, and update them only slightly to the present situation:
In our day, I believe, ‘the death of God’ as proclaimed [by the “new atheists”] has as its complement – and corrective – a fresh awareness of [God’s] presence as the One who comes to us ‘from the end,’ that is, from ahead of us in history, beckoning us onward at the moving edges of growth and commitment. ‘He is not here … he is going before you’ (Mark 16:6-7): the angel’s message at the empty tomb recurs as a refrain that runs through the pages of the Bible.[2]
This is the God we meet in scripture read well; moreover, this is the God we meet in our world if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts open to the beating of love that always marks the location of God. God is not dead, for love is alive and God is love. May we – again and again – meet this God of love who calls us forth toward a commonwealth of the beloved, and may we have the unbounded hope to welcome there with love even those who see it otherwise. Amen.
[1] John A.T. Robinson, The End of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) 5.
[2] Ibid.
Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3
I initially titled this, “The Death of God, Again,” but realized as I wrote that it is not so much the death of God that presses in upon us these days as it is the end of God.
The cover story on a recent issue of The Nation features a stained-glass window accompanying the bold type proclaiming “the new atheism.” Inside is a thoughtful and provocative essay reviewing a handful of recent books by prominent authors arguing not so much for the death of God as for the rebirth of strident humanism that not only rejects the idea of God but also all efforts to bring faith into the public square.
The proponents of this so-called new atheism are, with a few notable exceptions, steadfastly progressive. That almost goes without saying, considering that the article reviewing their thought was in The Nation. But it’s worth noting precisely because its presence in The Nation – still the nation’s finest weekly journal of progressive thought – underscores the long and continuing disconnect between progressive social and political thought and progressive religion.
That disconnect is nothing new under the sun. I vividly recall a conversation with a friend named Jame, a co-worker at SANE-Freeze – the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy – in 1985 while I was a student at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Jame was a self-described “red diaper baby” whose parents were somewhat dismayed that he had gone so mainstream as to work within the American political system for an organization such as SANE. Soon after we began working together, Jame asked me why a progressive would be a student at a divinity school. Why, he asked, would I have anything to do with religion?
As we talked, it was clear that he had never encountered progressive religious thought nor could he fathom the idea. When I told him that the life and work of Martin Luther King was my theological touchstone he admitted that he never considered King’s work as anything other than political action for a clearly progressive cause. He’d never considered that King’s work might be grounded in faith.
I’ve thought back to that conversation many times over the years, and it’s come back to mind even more of late when I read the “new atheists” or hear echoes of their thinking in public responses of many progressives to the work or words of folks like Jim Wallis at Sojourners or Michael Lerner at Tikkun.
A couple of weeks ago, Rabbi Lerner had a brief essay posted on the Common Dreams web site. If you don’t know of it, Common Dreams is one of the best on-line digests of current progressive political thought. Like many such sites, Common Dreams has a “comments” section, and reading the comments to Lerner’s essay was, in this instance, more instructive than reading the essay itself.
The number of fairly vitriolic comments suggesting that there is no place for faith in politics or that all belief is naïve if not down-right ignorant was a disheartening if not surprising reminder that in the minds of most Americans all religious thought is equated with the worst excesses of the religious loud at the most conservative end of the political spectrum.
Whether or not we like it or agree with it, the name “Christian” is clearly associated in the minds of most Americans with a certain strain of the faith given voice by some of the most divisive figures in the culture. From the late Jerry Falwell to Richard Dobson of Focus on the Family fame to Pat Robertson, the neo-fundamentalists of the conservative evangelical wing of Christianity have become the public face of the faith and their collective image has obliterated all alternative perspectives.
The God they imagine is the God in the cross-hairs of the new atheists. Thus, to a great degree, the new atheists herald the death of an old god.
To that old god I say, goodbye and good riddance.
That god, as Bishop John A.T. Robinson argued in his classic Honest to God, is a god of height, out there in the great beyond acting on history from a distance. That god is the deus ex machina – the god who appeared out of nowhere, often dropped onto the stage of classical theater from so sort of crane device, to save the day kind of like Mighty Mouse but usually older and with a long white beard. That god is Santa Clause without the reindeer; Spider Man without the webs; Super Man impervious to kryptonite. That god is the one we call on from the fox holes we find ourselves in from time to time when we’re waiting for a miracle.
If there is to be a God adequate to our time, Robinson suggested, it will not be this god of foxhole prayers but rather a God of depth more than height, measured within us rather than beyond us, and stirring our souls and thus our history.
The god dismissed by the new atheism should be given last rites by the church and quickly interred. As Robinson wrote some 40 years ago, “Yes, God is dead, genuinely – if we expect him in the old habitations, mental or material. Yet [God] is not dead – if we are open to the signs of [God’s] appearing.”[1]
What was it Waylon Jennings sang about “looking for love in all the wrong places”? Perhaps what we are most guilty of in our time is looking for God in all the wrong places.
If we expect God in all the old mental habitations – the habits of mind that lead us to imagine the God is the one we call on when we’re at the end of our human capacity – then we draw ever tighter, smaller rings around that which is God’s as our human technological capacities expand to ever wider spheres of knowledge, understanding and control over nature and ourselves.
If we expect God in all the old material habitations – those places of formal religious institutional formulations and orthodoxies that may look like medieval cathedrals or postmodern televangelical auditoriums – then we reduce God to that which is under the control of authorized traditions and institutions.
Perhaps it is that we are only now, some 500 years into it, coming to realize the full impact of Reformation thought.
It was Paul’s thought, freshly understood by Luther and his peers, that began that liberation of God and of humanity from the shackles to which we were jointly bound by a tradition that reduced God to dependence upon the crane operators lurking just off stage.
We catch a glimpse of that thought in Paul’s letter to the Galatians to whom he writes, “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”
As with so much of Paul’s writing, this is a mouthful in a few brief sentences, but it points toward something of ultimate concern. Indeed, it points toward another end of God – a telos or purpose of God as that which beckons us.
This God of beckoning, of calling, is the God we meet so many places in scripture: the God who calls forth light and life; the God who calls Abraham to go from his home to an unknown land; the God who calls Moses forth to lead the people from bondage to liberation; the God who goes forth before the people as a pillar of fire in the long night of the wilderness.
This God will not be bound back to any religious institution and delights in confounding human orthodoxies. This God will not be reduced to any human economy – especially not an economy of punishment, of unpardonable debt, of domination, division and control.
This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who sits at table with the Pharisees – and thus calls into question that very economy of division by which the world so easily divides itself into us and them, to good and bad, to straight and gay, to American and Iraqi, to atheist and believer. This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who offers shalom – wholeness, healing, community – to a woman of the city, a sinner. This is the God we meet in Jesus Christ, who calls us forth – not from some great beyond, but rather from the midst of our present lives – toward a future otherwise.
I would echo the words Bishop Robinson wrote in 1968, and update them only slightly to the present situation:
In our day, I believe, ‘the death of God’ as proclaimed [by the “new atheists”] has as its complement – and corrective – a fresh awareness of [God’s] presence as the One who comes to us ‘from the end,’ that is, from ahead of us in history, beckoning us onward at the moving edges of growth and commitment. ‘He is not here … he is going before you’ (Mark 16:6-7): the angel’s message at the empty tomb recurs as a refrain that runs through the pages of the Bible.[2]
This is the God we meet in scripture read well; moreover, this is the God we meet in our world if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts open to the beating of love that always marks the location of God. God is not dead, for love is alive and God is love. May we – again and again – meet this God of love who calls us forth toward a commonwealth of the beloved, and may we have the unbounded hope to welcome there with love even those who see it otherwise. Amen.
[1] John A.T. Robinson, The End of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) 5.
[2] Ibid.
posted by David Ensign at
6:22 AM
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