I recently attended the occasion of a professional associate being installed as the “minister” of a Unitarian Universalist “church.” The quotes refer to my observation that, in such a context, “minister” and “church” are culturally rather than biblically defined.
The occasion reminded me that the odds of my ever becoming a Unitarian are about as great as my being gay. Which is why I respect those whose sexual orientation may be different from mine, since I didn’t choose to be “straight” any more than some of my best friends have chosen to be “gay.”
Mine is a similar understanding as to why I am a trinitarian theist, in general, and an orthodox, evangelical Christian in particular. Not as something I “chose,” but as rather a “gift” bestowed upon me quite beyond any “doing,” much less “earning or deserving” on my part–indeed, a “gift” I have chosen to “embrace” and “accept”–the “gift” of my life.
Which reminds me of an article another friend sent me recently in which one Susan Jacoby pronounces her “atheism” in ways no different from how even more folk–at least as I observe it–pronounce their “belief in God,” however construed.
Not surprisingly, Ms. Jacoby begins her dissertation with a cliche, asserting that she stopped believing in God as a youngster when one of her peers contracted polio and eventually died, back in the days before the polio vaccine was developed, when that particular dreaded disease in fact afflicted and even killed people.
Which isn’t any different from how so many so-called Christians at least argue for their “belief in God”–because God did just the opposite–doing, instead, something “good,” at least according to their particular “wish list.” Their “prayer list”?
As if that is who God is supposed to be: the great “provider”–at least according to whomever is seeking the “provision.” Unless he, she or it fails to live up to such an expectation. Which, according to Susan Jacoby’s reasoning, thereby nullifies the credibility of God according to such a criterion.
If Ms. Jacoby’s “why I don’t believe in God” assertion at least doesn’t “beg the question”–“I don’t believe because I don’t believe”–her “theodicy” argument, as old as at least the Book of Job, nonetheless betrays a shallowness comparable to many whose “why I do believe in God” is offered ever as glibly. Such that I find the Susan Jacobys I encounter–if different in their conclusion–hardly different in substance from any number of Christian fundamentalists I notice trying too hard to impress whomever with, not a “faith” that holds them, but instead a “faith” they claim to hold.
“Shallowness”–concerning God–is indeed no respecter of persons, be they “believers” or otherwise. Such that it’s hard to imagine an “atheism” like that of Ms. Jacoby’s apart from her or whomever having reacted to a caricature of anyone’s religion, Christian or otherwise. And where religion is concerned, of course, there is hardly any shortage of caricatures.
If one can “see the forest for the trees” when reading the Bible–as well as likely the Qur’an, at least among monotheistic religions–there is hardly a more pervasive analogy for God in scripture (in which God is always understood and expressed figuratively) than that of the relationship of parents and children.
Which implies that, not unlike God, one is hardly disqualified as a parent because she or he fails to “provide” everything her/his child “wants.” Or for that matter, perhaps even everything a child may necessarily “need.”
Such that the healthiest people I have come to know across my lifetime have been those capable of accepting and embracing a parent’s “love,” however lacking in whatever ways such flawed or futile “love” may have been expressed. As in, for example, Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle.
Or to use a comparable analogy, if you want to keep your child “safe,” don’t ever let her or him out of your sight. Which would, of course–pardon the sarcasm–surely produce optimal health and growth in the child. This, so unlike how the Bible at least speaks of a “parental loving” who is God (Luke 15:11 ff.).
What I have observed as the “commonality” between so many “believers” and “un-believers” alike–at least concerning God–is the literal, concreteness and absolutism of their thinking. Which reduces God to being either “good” or not. And if seemingly not, then hardly worth believing in.
Except the Bible, at least, reveals such a different image of God. In the Hebrew Psalter, for example, there is as much “lamenting” as there is “praising” of who God is or isn’t. Just as Jesus, dying by the horror of crucifixion, expresses both his sense of being “abandoned” by God, while at the same time “embracing” such a gracious presence, even in the cruelest of circumstances.
Literal, concrete, absolutist thinkers–“believers in God” or not–reduce life to either/or, all or nothing alternatives. Which tragically diminishes a fuller, richer and deeper embracing of life at both its best and worst. Not unlike how the Bible speaks of all creation, however whole or fractured, in relation to God.
Princeton philosopher, the late Diogenes Allen, has observed that “a mystery is not as much to be solved as to be entered into.” That is at least the “mystery” as God is revealed in the Bible. Hence, such biblical images as “resting” (Psalm 37:7), “trusting” (Isaiah 26:4) and “relating” (Jeremiah 24:7, John 10:11-18)–“entering into” images where God and humankind are concerned.
In the Bible, at least, God is a verb, not a noun. Not “a being,” but “being itself” (Exodus 3:14). So then, at least in the Bible, God doesn’t “exist”–God “is.” Thus, we “are.” That is at least how the Bible says it.
Nor is the Bible a “science book.” Anymore than “science”–an empirical method of “knowing”–has anything to do with “morality.”
The “atheist” option may, however, be preferable–for some, perhaps many–since it is “logical.” Seeing is believing. Things either are or aren’t. Whereas Christian faith, at least, is as “paradoxical” as it is “ironic.” Believing is also seeing. Especially when there may be more to see than would appear. The former limits. The latter reveals. Christian faith as paradox–where losing is winning, getting is giving, the last are first and fighting is other than violent–it isn’t logical. Some would even call it “crazy.”
If “atheism” is confirming, Christian faith at least is confounding. The former assures one of what is true; the latter suggests otherwise. That “truth” is more gift than possession, meant to be embraced as lightly as humbly.
Who would want to be a Christian? Since the “gift” has more to do with who God is than who any of us are or aren’t. At least “atheism” is self-defined. Unless the smallest of packages is, after all, anyone “wrapped in her or himself.”
But back to the Unitarians. I’ve known some who claim to be “atheists.” But not most, who are either, like Thomas Jefferson, Deists, or who–from a humanistic perspective–claim to value the teachings of various moral and/or spiritual traditions, such as the Eastern religions, the ethics of Judaism, Christianity and/or Islam, New Age derivatives, ethnic (as in Native American), animistic or cosmological spiritualities, etc.
And, of course, since Unitarianism is at least as old as the Enlightenment–even as some would claim Michael Servetus as a 16th century progenitor–it has its own 300-year indigenous North American tradition extending from Emerson and Channing to John Dewey, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Carlos Williams, James Luther Adams and Forrest Church.
I even once had a colleague who called himself “a Christological Unitarian.” And when the Unitarian Universalist congregation he served summarily dismissed him as their “minister,” he explained that what they most dis-liked about him was not his “gay-ness,” but his Christianity.
Can “inclusiveness” be biased?
As for “logical” or more “paradoxical” ways of thinking: if one believes everything, does one believe anything? Or conversely, is “commitment” necessarily exclusive?
For example, as a Christian, for me to believe that the most and best I know of who God is, I see in the face of Jesus, that hardly means that I can’t or don’t or won’t also see expressions of such “truth, beauty and love”–not to mention, “justice, mercy and grace”–in other religious, spiritual or ethical traditions and expressions.
Meanwhile, one of my favorite stories concerns the Jewish kid who asks his uncle, “Uncle Abe, why do you go to synagogue–you don’t believe in God?
To which his Uncle Abe replies, “My friend, Saul–he believes in God, he goes to synagogue–I go to synagogue to be with Saul.”
