Why I Believe in God
“Jesus said... ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life....” “Paul said... ‘God...is not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being…’”
January 17, 1982
Today, I am struggling with the matter of why believe in God at all. For those of you who pay some attention to what I say and write, the following may sound fairly familiar. This is so because my faith-doubt journey to God and with God is behind all I say, write, and try to do, be it all ever so stumblingly. Now, however, I want to bring the backdrop of my belief in God intò center stage, to transform the field into the focus.
(1) Up front, it must be said: THE ROAD TO GOD IS PAVED WITH QUESTIONS AND DOUBTS. We are not the first nor are we likely to be the last to have wrenching questions about this God business. Job lifted his fists to the wind centuries ago asking why he, a man who tried to live rightly with God and people, suffered the loss of his family, property, and health. Just hours before he was nailed, Jesus cried out in the Garden of Gethsemane, "God, why does it have to be this way?" Where is God, is there a God, in a world that saw a nation that was the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation exterminate 12 million people in concentration camps, where a country with as many noble intentions as ours has been the only country to use nuclear weapons on another people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those of us who have watched a disease devastate someone we love know those questions and doubts about God. While watching the carnage among the wreckage of the plane crash in Washington, D.C. this past week on television, some of those questions cropped up again in me. Sometimes, it isn't anything big but just the being worn out and worn down by the daily one-thing-after-another-ness of life that raises the 'is there a God' questions and the 'if there is a God, so what?' questions.
The reason many of us are so intolerant of atheists, people who do not believe in God, is that we know they have a point. And they make it difficult for us to ignore the streak of atheism in you and me. Yet a faith in God that does justice to God, to life, and us who try to cope with it all must in some way confront these questions which ultimately boil down to the both intensely personal yet universal question: "How can there be a God who cares but allows us to hurt so bad?" I, then, think theologian Frederick Buechner is right when he says: Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith"; and theologian Gregory Baum is on target when says: "... to live with an unanswered question can be more in line with divine faith than to cling frantically to an answer which no longer satisfies..."
So, we ask Paul, who was no dummy, how do you get off saying: "The God who made the world and everything in it...gives to all...life and breath and everything"? I think Paul is talking about the bottom-line evidence that there may just be this mystery called God penetrating and coursing through all that is. And strangely enough, all the God-questioning situations only intensifies this battered conviction that there is a God in this reality which often appears so God-forsaken. It is the mind-blowing aha! that comes when it sinks in that in the vast nothingness of space there is something and not nothing, that we have life at all. Countless things could have been just a little different and there would not be life as we know it at all. If the earth were just a little further away from the sun or closer, there would not be liquid water which is crucial to our form of life; life can't make it on steam or ice. Things could have gone just a little differently and there would not have been a you or me in particular. Talk about the possibility of miracles pales before THE MIRACLE that we exist at all. We can call God into question because of the pain, nature, luck, and humans can dish out. But we have not quite done the God-question justice until we are filled with joy, wonder, and thanksgiving that we are at all, even for a painfully short time.
For many, questioning about God is bound up with questions, doubts, and fears about what happens after death. In his short story Pigeon Feathers, John Updike depicts an example of this questioning and doubting into faith I am talking about. One day, it hits 15-year-old David with a nauseating thud that he at some point will die. He asks his parents, his minister, anyone who will listen, what they think happens after death. Some say people live on the good deeds they do in the memories of people, like the memory of Abraham Lincoln. David responds that living on in other's memories isn't much good if Lincoln isn't conscious of it. Some shame him for worrying about it and not just appreciating the beauty of the now. To them, he retorts that the beauty of nature is just an "ocean of horror" if in the end it all comes to nothing.
David's answer comes one day as he looks at the bodies of some pigeons that have been shot as pests. The artistry of their feathers awes him: within each feather are delicately contoured filaments which precisely layer into one another; there is deftly engineered difference between feathers for flight and feathers for warmth; and each bird though similar to the others has its own special hues of color. David reflects: "Yet these birds bred in the millions are exterminated as pests. Updike has him conclude: “…that the God who lavished such craft upon worthless birds would not destroy His whole creation... (or)... David... forever.” David was in good company with those who have concluded that humans are precious based on provisions of nature for the birds of the air and the beauty of the flowers of the field.
Neither parents, preachers, nor super-pious Bible quoters can demand or command God-belief in anyone. No one can do it for you, no one may do it exactly like you, but dare to struggle with your questions and doubts about God. For if God is not to be found on the raw edges of life, he is not worth finding.
The next thing to be said is a mind-stretching attempt to say what is ultimately unwordifyable, but here goes the best way I know how to express it: I believe in God because I have come to understand that GOD MEANS NOT A BEING THAT EXISTS IN REALITY BUT THE REALITY IN WHICH ALL THAT EXISTS HAS ITS BEING. This is what Paul struggled to get over to those intellectual heavyweights that day in Athens. You must remember that Athens was the "think-tank" of the ancient world. The Greeks were trailblazers in science, philosophy, drama, mathematics, and religion. The aristocratic know-it-alls to whom Paul spoke probably thought he was some sort of country bumpkin. Paul observed the altars to various gods around the city and complimented the Athenians for being sensitive to the God-factor in life. Yet he pushed them to move beyond thinking of gods as just one or more beings in a Cosmos of beings: stars, doorknobs, cats, and people type beings. "The God who made the world and everything in it...does not live in shrines made by men...he himself gives to all ...life and breath and everything.... Yet he is not far from each one of us, for 'In him we live and move and have our being.’”
As we live in an ocean of air around us – unseen but absolutely essential for life from moment to moment – we live in the oceanic energy field of God's presence, power, and love. God is the primal and final, first and last, condition which makes the miraculous "something" as opposed to the unthinkable absolute "nothing" possible. One day, our 11-year-old said he was having trouble thinking about God. He said it was hard for him to think about something that wasn't somewhere but everywhere, something that always was and did not come from something else like everything else. Finally he said: "Daddy, it hurts my brain to think about it." And I agree.
In my opinion, the controversial "scientific creationism", with its shaky science and shallow Bible interpretation, is a consequence of the trouble people have getting from the crude understanding of God as a super-dooper being out there in space somewhere to God as the human word for the mysterious caring power that envelops, pulses through, and keeps going the brain-straining all there is. Some, mistakenly I think, feel that evolutionary views of the rise of life with macromolecules becoming microorganisms and developing finally into fantastically complex organisms like humans leave God out. They find talk about the struggle to survive and natural selection as an insult to a creator God. For me, the evolutionary rise of life when so many things could have kept life from happening at all does not leave God out but on the contrary causes a sense of awe and reverence that thrills me.
The evolutionary scientist, like any scientist, observes the way nature works. He or she may use a microscope, telescope, and/or bifocals. With the amazing human brain, scientists figure out much about HOW things came to be as they are. Yet another realm of truth is entered when humans question what's behind the natural processes that bring life and sustain it. From whence comes this life impulse to survive, this surge and urge to go on? From whence comes this tenacious passion that to be is better than not to be? These are not science issues and are not the business of the science classroom I might add but are faith-God issues. The mystery we have named God refers to the source, the Force for you Star Wars buffs, the ultimate energy and dynamism which permeates and penetrates the dark regions of the multiverse of galaxies, that whirls in the life-full currents of the oceans, that courses through the hulking masses of elephants and whales, that pulse in the minuscule recesses of subatomic particles. "In God we live and move and have our being." God is not one being among others but as the twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich put it, God is the power and ground of all being.
(3) I believe in God because JESUS GIVES US THE CLUES TO WHAT GOD IS LIKE, WHAT WE ARE TO BE LIKE, AND WHERE DESPITE CONFUSING APPEARANCES THE FLOW OF GOD'S BEING IS HEADED. A while back, I read a biography of the German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. Rommel almost defeated the Americans, and the British in the famous North Africa battles. The Allied victory ultimately was made possible because the English, unknown to the Germans, broke the German's communication code. So, whenever Berlin and Rommel communicated in their secret code, the Americans and British knew what to expect despite Rommel's super attempts to out- fox them.
When John has Jesus say, "I am the way and the truth and the life," I think that is what he is getting at. Jesus is our code-key to figuring out what's really going on in life and what really counts despite so many appearances to the contrary. Even Jesus seems to have made contact with God at some points by observing natural phenomena. He observed seeds when planted overcome tremendous obstacles to grow, and he concluded that God's love will grow and overcome the violence and evil that so often seem to be in control in the world. Like David in the Updike story, Jesus observed the beauty of common birds and wildflowers, and he got the message that humans are even more precious to God in a world that sometimes deals so cheaply with human life. So, we follow Jesus' lead when we observe the drive to adapt and the struggle to survive in natural processes, and we conclude that the flow of being is for life.
What is a little confusing in nature gains clarity in Jesus: to live is better than to die. And it is no big step with Jesus' help to decide that the flow of being, the energizing mystery called God, is for loving not hating, hugging not slugging, feeding not bombing, and healing not hurting.
Without our code-key Jesus, we can make mistakes about the nature of life. Some have short-sightedly concluded that nature is based on fang and claw kill-before-killed combat and competition. Natural scientists correct this partial view by showing the broad balance of nature in which living things and the environment are mutually dependent upon one another for each to have its span of life. A lot of shortsighted evidence seems to say look out for number one and get the other guy before he gets you is the way to live. Jesus the key, the lens to get life focused, shows us that go-getters usually wind up losers and that servant-givers wind up receivers of a life worth having. Even the strange things that happened after Jesus' crucifixion when good sense said Jesus was a dead and gone dreamer give us the crazy clue-key that in the end may just be God and not a cold nothing.
To believe in God means to believe in the "Godded-ness" of all reality. It means you believe that there is no place or no one where God's dynamic flow of being is not agitating for life, love, forgiveness, and healing despite appearances to the contrary. Joe Estes says that the most dangerous people in the world are the people he calls "practical atheists". These aren't the philosophical-theoretical atheists who write books and lectures that few pay much attention to. A practical atheist may be able to zip through the "I believe in God" of the creeds. The practical atheist is the person who, despite what he or she says, lives in complete contradiction to belief in the "goddedness" of everything and everybody. You and I are practical atheists when we write a person or a people off as being beyond hope or value. That denies the value and hope God pulses and pushes into everyone. I think we deny the reality of God's healing love when we say we cannot ever forgive someone who has hurt us. Whether we use Jesus our key to life or observe the struggle to survive in nature, we see that the flow of God's creation is for life. It then is practical atheism we go on building more mass cremating and annihilating nuclear bombs. Death is a security that our world can live without!
Let us arise to live, love, and work in God's flow of being."For in him we live and move and have our being. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow...."