Life Without God: Part Two

Whether or not you believe that these were two literal human beings in a Garden in the Middle East thousands of years ago, the story of Genesis 2-3 rings true. Because we make the same decision all the time. The history of humanity, and the story of our own lives, is one of choosing ourselves instead of God.

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s something wonderful about our ability to choose, something that I believe was given to us by God. God gave Adam and Eve plenty of ways to make choices—choices about how to tend the garden and interact with each other, freedom to learn and make mistakes, but initially, they were doing those things with God. Once they decide to do it entirely on their own, we see that there is also something incredibly destructive about human freedom, something alienating, something selfish and dark.

Later on in the Bible, people begin to name this broken condition that Adam and Eve first entered into. They call this condition “sin.” And they say that sin is a state of being into which all humans are born, and which all humans choose. Just as Eve and Adam each chose to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we each choose to know good and evil on our own, independent of God. We each choose to reject God as the giver of life, the protector and provider, and instead desire and attempt to be God ourselves. God created us for life with Him. We choose life without Him.

Yes, we have glimpses of life with God. We have moments where we experience intimacy, beauty, purpose, goodness. So did Adam and Eve, even after they left the garden. And yet that choice resulted in a broken relationship with God, with themselves, with each other, and with the creation around them. And that one choice for life without God ended in the ultimate “without.” It ended in death. And without God, in death, we find ourselves in the ultimate without, without self, without each other, without anything. And we can’t do anything about it.

So the question becomes: Does God care about this separation? Is God content to let us stay in a life without God? It’s not an obvious answer. It would be totally within God’s rights to let go of us altogether, to let our lives break apart and end in death. We have aligned ourselves with the antithesis of who God is. In deciding to live without God, we joined the other team.

There’s a place in the Psalms, a book of poetry in the Bible, where the Psalmist says, “Heal me, for I have sinned against you.” Which is kind of like punching a doctor in the face and then saying, “Hey, doctor, can you help me out? My hand is hurting.” “Heal me, for I have sinned against you.” We have sinned against God. We have chosen life without God. And we are broken because of that choice. Our only hope is that God will intervene. Our only hope is that somehow God can, and will, overcome, our life without God.

Happy and Special

Since "Life without God" isn't exactly good fodder for Thanksgiving Day, I'll come back to those thoughts over the weekend...

For now, a quick reminder of what this day is all about.

I was sitting with Penny this morning and told her, "Pen, today is a day when we get to think of all the people and things we feel thankful for. Do you know what it means to feel thankful? It's when we..."

"Feel happy and special."

"That's right. What makes you feel happy and special?"

"Pop Pop. Nana..." She went on to list a whole array of family members and people in her life. There was no mention of gratitude for things or weather or health, some of the items that often top my list.

Her answer made me think about the nature of God, as Triune, three persons in one being. She helped me remember that relationships are at the center of the universe, that before any of us were created, love, giving and receiving in community, already existed in the person of God.

So on this Thanksgiving Day, may we give and receive to and from each other. And be grateful for those who help us feel happy and special.

Life Without God: Part One

If God is good, and God's creation is good, then why is the world the way it is? In the talk series I presented last weekend, I argued that the world is the way it is because we humans--individually, collectively, now and throughout history--choose to live without God:

Let me explain what I mean when I say we live without God. First, we live life without a sense of God’s presence. We might feel some spiritual or divine connection when we’re on top of a mountain or on other rare or special occasions, but most of us, most of the time, don’t feel any connection to God. When we’re sitting in history class, or eating dinner in the dining hall, or playing soccer, or watching a movie with our friends, we don’t feel like God is around. It is this aspect of life without God that is God’s problem. If the only reason we live without God is because God hasn’t introduced himself, so to speak, oh well. There’s nothing to for us to do about it.

And yet there’s more to it than that. In addition to living without a sense of God’s presence, we live our lives as if God doesn’t exist. Even if we theoretically believe in God, we make decisions without reference to God. We’re like my daughter Penny. Much of her life right now is about “good choices” and “bad choices.” Good choices get a thumbs up. Bad choices, thumbs down. Good choice: gentle hands. Bad choice: pulling hair. Good choice: eating peas. Bad choice: spitting peas at her mother. You get the point. We’re a lot like Penny. Even if we are making good choices, morally upright choices, it often isn’t because we’re thinking about how God made the universe and how we want to live in accordance with those moral rules in order to please God. We’re just doing the thing that feels right to us, or the thing that will get us praise from other people, or the thing that will cause the least difficulty. Often, what feels right to us is perfectly fine and good. Other times, what feels right to us hurts other people and sometimes what feels right to us even ends up hurting ourselves.

When I was in high school, on the outside, I was a very good person. I was nice to people who didn’t have friends. I obeyed the rules of study hall and lights out. I obeyed my parents and teachers. Etcetera. But I can also remember getting to boarding school and having a lot of questions about God. I wondered about other religions. I wondered about whether the Bible was true. I wondered whether it was worth it to be religious when all my friends didn’t believe. And I remember one night sitting at my desk and pulling out my Bible because I wanted to try to figure it out. I heard footsteps in the hallway, and my heart started to pound. I threw my Bible in the bottom drawer of my desk and pretended to be doing homework. The person in the hallway walked right by, but I left the Bible in the drawer. I decided to navigate high school on my own. I let my questions sit in that drawer for a couple of years. I decided to live my nice, morally upright life, without God.

So we can live without the experience of God. We can live a morally upright life without reference to God, which is kind of a passive way of living without God. And we can also live in a more active way without God. We can live in rebellion against God. It is active rebellion against God whenever we disobey the moral law, whether that’s by talking about our friends behind their back or yelling at our parents or lying or abusing our bodies. We actively rebel and we also actively refuse to acknowledge God as God, as the one who created us, as the one who is in control. Life without God is not forced upon us. It is something we choose, even though it is harmful, to ourselves and to others around us.

Stay tuned for Part Two...

Knowing Good and Evil

New Post on the Park Forum: Back to the Garden of Eden.

"What matters is if God believes in us..." (Life With God, Part Two)

My theme for my talks last weekend was "Life with God." And yet before I could talk about life with God, I had to address the question of God's existence

So, some thoughts on that question, taken from the first talk I gave this past weekend:

I’m not planning to mount a defense of the existence of God. Honestly, if there is a God, it is up to God whether we know about Him. For all our arguments, at the end of the day, God’s existence and character need to be revealed to us, not discovered by us.

I go to seminary up the road at Princeton, which means I take a lot of classes that talk about God, and in seminary classes, my teachers talk about something called the “ontological divide.” Ontological. It’s a big word, but I like it, because it defines a big concept. “Ontological” comes from “ontology,” which means “the nature of being.” In other words, the question, “What makes us human?” is an ontological question. “What makes God God?” is an ontological question. And most people (though not all) would agree that there is a divide, ontologically, between human beings and God. God is God and I am not. What it means is that God is different, in His being, than we are. And if there is a God, then that God is not just ontologically different than us, but ontologically more than us—more powerful, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more everything.

It’s because of this divide that we don’t get to decide whether or not God exists. God exists, or He doesn’t. And if He does, it is up to Him to let us know. God’s existence doesn’t depend on us, so on that level, it doesn’t matter, really, whether we believe in God. If there is a God, then there is a God, no matter what we think. What does matter is whether God believes in us. So this weekend, my job is to explain how it is that God has let us know that He exists and how God has let us know that he believes in us.

Life with God

I'm speaking at a conference this weekend for a group of about 160 people, mostly high school students. And I'm supposed to explain the Christian faith to them over the course of four 20 minute talks. Whatever you believe, it's a good exercise: how would you explain the way you make sense of the world in terms that make sense to a 16-year old boy?

It's been a good challenge for me. I'm trying to explain what it means to live with God. The genesis of the idea came from a conversation I had with my mother-in-law, Penny, many years ago. Here's an excerpt from my book, Penelope Ayers, in which I relate that conversation:

Penny took me to Dante’s Kitchen for lunch. Palm trees shaded the entrance, and inside, the walls were painted in vibrant colors—sunburst yellow, teal blue, fire engine red. I’m sure we talked about trivial matters before we ordered our food, but what I remembered later was Penny’s question to me. “Amy Julia,” she said, “what do you think Christianity is really all about?"

She asked deliberately, as if she had been waiting all morning for just the right moment. I put my fork down and held my hands in my lap. I didn’t want to give a pat answer or talk about my beliefs as if I could hand them over in outline form.

“I used to think it was about forgiveness,” I said. “And I still think forgiveness is important, but I think forgiveness is just a means to an end.”

Penny looked eager, as if I were about to disclose the solution to a mystery. I was afraid I might disappoint her. I talked with people about God for a living, but that fall, I had begun to suspect that I was teaching answers to the wrong questions. Many of the students I worked with seemed to think about their faith mostly in terms of what would happen when they died, that is, who was “in” and who was “out” of heaven. I had started to think that living with God here and now mattered just as much as living with God after death.

I ran my fingers along the edge of the white tablecloth and looked up at her. “And the end, the point, I think, is a life lived with God.” For the first time, I put into words what I had been mulling over for months. I stated my new thoughts as simply as I could: “I think Christianity is about God inviting us to live life with Him starting now and continuing on for eternity.”

As the waiter began to clear our plates, Penny nodded.

“Life with God,” she said. “That’s what I want to figure out.”

This weekend, I hope that these students will join me in figuring out what it means to live with God, starting here and now, continuing on for eternity.

So, Really, Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

A quick response to the Atlantic's cover article on the Park Forum, here.