Pastor Jonathan Threlfall starts a new series today, Behold Your God: Discovering Who God Is And What He Is Like, with "God is Knowable" from Matthew 11:25-30.
In 2008, a book in my local library grabbed my attention. In large letters against an ominous black and red background—the red part exploding like a dying star—the title read, The God Delusion. Just having gotten married a few months prior and starting out as a youth pastor at a Baptist church, I read aloud to my new bride a line from that book: “If this book works as I intend,” wagers its author Richard Dawkins, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”
My wife assured me of her prayers—and worries.
But something more than my wife’s prayers and my strong Christian upbringing frustrated Dawkins’ aim for me. I was struck by a curious feature of Dawkins’ approach. He opens his second chapter with a lengthy description of the God of the Old Testament, ending with “capriciously malevolent bully.” This seething characterization of God—conspicuously absent of any mention of his love, kindness, and patience—made me wonder why Dawkins so raged against a God he did not believe in. This did little, in my mind at least, to assure me that my faith was about to be dismantled.
But something else was at work to blunt the effect of Dawkins’ militant atheism, not only in my mind, but also in Western culture at large. We are living in what some sociologists call “late modernity”—an environment in which the exuberance of the Enlightenment has waned into the malaise of uncertainty. It’s not that we don’t believe one way or the other; rather, it’s that we are less sure of what we believe. As James K. A. Smith has put it succinctly (summarizing Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor), “Believers are beset by doubt and doubters, every once in a while, find themselves tempted by belief.”
In this epistemically hazy atmosphere, Dawkins’ confident denial of God’s existence hasn’t really caught on. Instead, people are willing to be “spiritual, but not religious.”
If this is not the case in the southern United States, it certainly is in my region of the country, New England. If you asked people to express exactly what they believe about God, many would say something like this: “If God or gods exist, we can’t know for sure who or what he, she, or it is, or what they are.” Perhaps, after careful reflection, they would say that a person’s idea of God really depends on what they find personally or socially useful. If it is useful to think of God as Mother Earth, because this settles the mind and promotes peaceful coexistence between humans and nature, so be it. If it is useful to think of God as Jesus, who loved and sacrificed himself for others, so be it. The important thing, they would say, is not to impose one’s conception of God on others, not to let one’s conception of God tear the fragile fabric of society.
