How to have faith when you don't 'believe' in God

Thanksgiving morning, as we get ready in our small church to serve Thanksgiving dinner to over 200 people in Bisbee, I think it might be a good time to reflect on why I spend so much time in church when in fact my thoughts about faith and God are so, well, unusual.  Besides, politics and health care reform are beginning to drive me totally crazy. So here goes.

I am a Christian.  I have faith but I don't 'believe' in God.

There, I've said it and I'm glad.

But hold on a minute:  the statement "How to have faith when you don't believe in God," does not quite mean what it might seem, at least for me anyway.

That's why I put the word 'believe' in quotations: I want to concentrate on how that word truly is the wrong word to use about faith and about God. 

When we challenge the word 'belief' we challenge the other two words, God and faith.  We also challenge the meaning of the statement, "I am a Christian."

To begin, there is a very old tradition in Christianity and indeed all religion that is very suspicious of using the term "belief" when describing our faith or religion. To believe is to actually to employ a rather controversial test for religion; to believe in God is to accept certain  creedal statements, like the Nicene Creed or the Apostle's Creed as empirical statements definitive of our ideas about God, and to accept, against all the evidence, the Biblical record a factual, as empirically true despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary.

These two meaning of belief run together of course.  "On the third day he arose from the dead," from the Nicene Creed.

Actually, there is a very old tradition within Christianity and Judaism (and most other religions) that is very suspicious of joining the terms "belief" and "God."  This is because belief implies certainty and the banishing of doubt. But for many people of faith doubt and uncertainty are the cornerstones of a true faith, primarily because certainty so often is another word for idolatry.

What is more religion generally is much more than a set of beliefs. Religion is first and foremost a practice, a way of living, a way of struggling to become awake in the world, awake to the suffering of others and to our membership in all that is, awake to how much we don't know and how much of life itself is a profound mystery, a mystery that fills one with wonder and gratitude.

When the Buddha was asked, "Who are you?"  he is said to have replied, "That is the wrong question. The question is 'What am I?' and the answer is 'I am awake.' "  Buddha was focusing on enlightenment as the religion or practice of striving to stay awake in the world and to avoid succumbing to the kingdom of the familiar and the accepted, which is the kingdom of the lost.

The parables of Jesus make a very big deal about staying awake, and indeed his whole life and gospel of good news was the gospel of waking up to the kingdom that is already there, spread out among us.

Belief is simply the wrong word to apply to this view of religion; practice is the better word, and it is the practice of unknowing or of a learned ignorance as well as the practice of awakening to compassion that are central to faith.

Belief, in our time and for some time now, has come to mean "belief against the evidence."  Belief is a kind of cultural revolt against modernity, too often the wrong cultural revolt.

My thinking about these matters have recently been reinforced by Karen Armstrong in her new book, The Case for God. This is really a very good book and it helps me bring together much that I have read for the last 20 years or so.  I am profoundly grateful, especially as I have known of her writing and yet I had not read any other thing by her. Even people who really are little interested in church or faith will have their eyes opened by Armstrong's book.

I am also deeply in debt to James Carse's book, The Religious Case Against Belief, which offers a very different, yet compelling understanding of "religion" as opposed to the certainties of "belief."  And of course there is Don Cupitt's many books attacking the "realism" that underlies so much of Christianity (and other religions):  A good place to start with Cupitt is with his book Above Us Only Sky.

Armstrong puts my own questioning in the larger context of Christian history, as well as also Judaism and Islam, but Christianity is the main focus.  I may form a discussion group around this wonderful book.

As a matter of fact, many, perhaps most, theologians that I have read take largely the same position.  Theologians like Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, or Schubert Ogden (The Reality of God), the process theologians like John Cobb, Charles Hartshorne, and A.N. Whitehead as well as many other contemporary philosophers and writers like James Carse's classic, The Silence of God, (as well as his The Religious Case Against Belief mentioned above), or Mark Johnston (Saving God: Religion after Idolatry).  

All of these authors, in different ways, try to shift the focus on God-talk away from belief and toward awareness of one's existential condition and decision.  

Decades ago,  in 1963 the Anglican Bishop of Woolrich, John A. T. Robinson, in his book Honest to God, wrote as a Christian who doesn't 'believe in God,' as God is typically described as a very large being among other beinga.  Like Tillich, for Robinson God is our ultimate concern, the ground of all being, or Being Itself. 

I owe a special debt to Don Cupitt, the Anglican priest who has abandoned most God talk because he thinks that "Being talk" or our ideas about "life" and life itself are where we are most clear about the meaning of religious experience.  I think Cupitt is right and while I don't go all the way with him in accepting that our language and the world we create together with our language is all that we "know," he still has had a profound influence in shaping my ideas about "life itself" that I have long struggled with here and here and here and here.

That's the position that I more or less embrace, and like others I remain inside the church, actually inside a specific gathering of Christians, with many who do "believe" in God in the usual ways as well as with those who may not "believe" in God in the more traditional sense.

And by the way, the title for this essay was mentioned in passing by an Episcopal priest and friend.  As I can't say he would subscribe to what I have written here, I'll leave his name out of it but I think it is interesting that a minister of the church is thinking somewhat along the same lines.

I started out by mentioning our St. John's traditional community meal at Thanksgiving. When we come together in the community and share a common meal we are celebrating life itself and life together and that is the very heart of faith. Surely that is a faith that reaches far outside the precincts of organized religion.

Amen.

Comments

[Ben Somerville]

What you have said is both provocative and falls within the continuing ancient discourse of faith, religion, belief, spirituality. It seems to me that we will never be able to verbalize the reality or the non reality of God. We can have a deeply emotional experience and not be able to fully explain it to others. Our view, experience, and relationship with faith, god, and religion will continue to ellude us. Some find the discourse exciting, others find it tiring, and yet others find it blasphemous. The discourse will remain with us forever and will regularly change in tempo and temper. There is a tradition that reaches into lots of areas of life which says that silence is the ultimate of what we can say about God. One tradition within Christianity is that when we have any kind of religious experience, we are not to talk about it for 3 years while it is digested and absorbed within our souls. The verbal discourse is important and helps the one expressing their views and those hearing them confront and clarify what they may be feeling, thinking, or something I cannot put into words.