So Near, Yet So Far
 |
| Google Image |
Images of Greek gods were on display there, and Acts
describes a speech Paul gave to “the men of Athens” who were presumably there
to discuss weighty matters of state or religion.
Paul tells them he noticed an altar with the inscription,
“To an unknown god” and says that’s the God he is proclaiming – the God of
Christians and Jews, who was unknown to the Greeks.
Impenetrable Mystery
That God is still unknown, theologians tell us, because
he/she is unknowable. As much as we may pray and talk about God, we really
don’t know who he/she is. We can theologize and philosophize all we want, but
God will always be an impenetrable mystery. And the mystery is why we need
faith to have a “relationship” with him/her.
But Paul goes on to quote Greek poets to say that in this
unknown God “we live and move and have our being.” Jeremiah, the Old Testament
prophet, places words in God’s mouth, writing that “Before I formed you in the
womb, I knew you.” And Jesus, in Mathew’s gospel, says that God has “numbered
the hairs of our head” (no great task in my case!)
So which is it? Is God a distant, unknowable mystery or
someone so close to us that we live and move in him/her?
 |
Tomas Halik
Google Image
|
“…The Bible, writes Czech philosopher and theologian Tomas
Halik, “is a book of paradoxes – almost every assertion is offset by some other
assertion that is, or seems to be, its opposite, so that we are prevented from
settling lazily on the surface of things or in the shallow slough of
over-facile certainties.”
Traditional theology has referred to the duality in our view
of God as “immanence” and “transcendence.” Whatever. We may be tempted to
complain that it simply complicates the difficulty in believing in the God of
the Bible and of Judeo-Christianity who, as much as we may want to believe, seems
to be missing in action.
That brings us back to the subject of faith, and doubt. I
know there’s a school of opinion that believes that doubt is bad, even sinful. I
disagree. Without doubt, there would be no need for faith. What’s more, God
gave us brains and expects us to use them and people who don’t doubt may not be
using them.
Humans endlessly try to make sense of things and are never
satisfied, even with the right answers. We’re questioning beings; skeptics by
nature. (Skepticism, of course, is distinct from cynicism, which implies a know-it-all mindset.)
This applies to believers as well as non-believers. In my
view, believers who don’t doubt may have become too comfortable in their
beliefs, taking them for granted and failing to understand their outlandishness.
If what we Christians believe is true, we should be in awe of it. But it often elicits
no more than a yawn.
Unlikely They Were Delusional
Nevertheless, belief in the God of Christians and Jews, I
believe, is rational. There are good reasons for it. Among them is the nearly
universal belief in a transcendent being and the almost universal longing for
him/her. Also, the witness of thousands of generations of humans, not the least
of which are the people of the Old and New Testaments. In my opinion, it’s
highly unlikely that they were all delusional. Something mysterious and
life-changing happened to them.
Personally, I believe God is also needed to explain
existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? My brain requires
meaning, and religion provides it.
Faith, of course, is not just about believing, and neither
is the search for God. The searcher must try to be “God-like,” trying to make
the world a better place, growing in love of self and others, and showing it.
In my opinion, that’s the way to grow faith in Paul’s
“unknown” God.
Comments
Post a Comment