On Believing in God

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AT a conference of college students which I atV tended, two remarks were made which remain in my memory as surprising and interesting. We had some twelve hours in which to discuss the agenda, which included the whole universe under such headings as Theology, Social Problems, Personal Problems, Vocations, War, and Practical Religion. As the moderator, I raised the question at the start of the conference as to which of these subjects seemed most important and deserved the most attention. A young man, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, immediately spoke up and said: “Obviously theology is the most important, and I am in favor of giving plenty of time to it in our discussions. ” In this judgment the whole group concurred.

This was a considerable surprise to me. I had always assumed that of all subjects, theology was by far the deadest and dullest for most people. Yet here was a representative group of highly intelligent young people declaring that “dull theology” was the subject in which they were most interested.

The discussion on theology began with another penetrating remark, this time from a law student. “I think,” he said, “that there ought to be a system of strict rationing on the use of the word God. So much of the time you preachers use the word when your hearers do not know what you mean by it, and when, to be honest, they wonder if you yourselves know what you mean.”

Being a preacher myself, I know what he meant by this remark. It is a great temptation, and one often yielded to, to talk yourself into a thorny problem, and then extricate yourself by saying that the answer is “faith in God” or that “God’s wisdom is not to be questioned.” This student simply wants the people who talk about God to define their terms so that those who hear will know what they mean when they use the word. He is not the first to perceive the weakness of the clergy for solving all problems in theological terms which they leave undefined. He is raising a question which no self-respecting minister or layman can afford to leave unanswered.

What do we mean by God, then? At the very outset it must be admitted that for most of us it is hard to know God “other than by hearsay.” Some of us know a lot about what other people have said and written about God. Few of us know much of God, through firsthand experience. Ours is a secondhand acquaintance. Consequently, our use of the term is seldom as honest and convincing as it ought to be.

The idea of God in human experience has two marked characteristics. First, it is perhaps the most persistent idea in all human history. All the way from primitive man raising his arms in clumsy adoration to the sun or the moon, to the refinements and subtleties of Christian theology and liturgy, the idea of God has exerted a constant fascination on the human mind. Second, in spite of this constant fascination, this interest amounting almost to a hunger, the idea of God stubbornly refuses to lend itself to precise definition. (For many of us, the least satisfactory ideas of God come from those who are surest that they know exactly what God is and is not.)

Listen, for example, to the words of one of the greatest minds of the Christian Church, Augustine of Hippo. This man’s systematic theology is harsh, rigid, and precise. He propounds what is to many of us a perfectly atrocious doctrine of the absolute depravity of man, and of the completely illusory nature of free will and free choice in human experience. But his direct experience of God, expressed in his wonderfully penetrating Confessions, is human, warm, and very much alive: —

But what do I love when I love my God? Not the grace of bodies; nor the fair harmony of time; nor the brightness of the light so gladsome to our eyes; nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, of ointments and spices; not manna and honey. None of these I love when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, melody, fragrance, a food when I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, food of my inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there soundeth what time beareth not away. This is what I love when I love my God.

And this, you will agree, is real, yet not precise, not systematic. All attempts to express this accurately, to confine it within a definition, fall short, by far, of the felt reality. Yet probably no other idea had as real and visible an effect on the life of this man as the idea of God did.

By and large, nothing is more dull and unconvincing to the ordinary mortal than philosophical proofs of the existence of God, and theological descriptions of his power and love. Nothing, on the other hand, is more powerful than the sense of the reality of God as it takes hold of a man from within. In the language of a man’s own experience, his feelings, sacrifices, loyalties, and loves, the reality of God is made plain.

What do we mean by God? The best I can do is tell you what I mean, and in so doing make at least a provisional answer to the very proper condemnation implied in the law student’s searching statement. The point at which the idea of God takes on reality for me is suggested in St. Paul’s great chapter on love, in his first epistle to the Corinthians. It is in these words: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” The phrase “ Even as I am known ” is for me a kind of key to the idea of God. God is the one who knows. This is something I myself have felt.

Whatever we may be outwardly, whatever front we may put up, whatever opinion our friends have of us, inwardly, in some real sense, we are known and can know ourselves for exactly what we are. Just as a husband or wife or friend may know us so well that we do not have to say what we are thinking and feeling, so there is a Knowing One who understands us even better than our closest human companions do. Before this Knowing One we are exactly what we are, with all false fronts beaten down, with all disguises stripped away, with all possibility of pretense and deception removed. All the good in us is known. All the cheapness, selfishness, and malice in us is known too. Whatever we may be to all other people, we are what we are to God, just that, honestly that, and nothing more or less.

This realization is, at one and the same time, a terrible and a beautiful experience. It is terrible because before this experience our human pretenses and evasions seem shoddy and cheap. It is beautiful because in this experience we feel that our true account is honestly and lovingly added up. The final worth and meaning of a human life is judged, not by how it compares with other human lives, but by how it measures up to the perfect righteousness and love of this Knowing One.

This awareness of being known leaves me with a choice. Either this Knowing One is playing a game with human lives in which he regards, with amused and philosophic calm, our struggles to refuse the evil and choose the good, to control and direct our lives in the paths of righteousness and love, or he cares how the struggle comes out. It really matters to him that we shall be braver, cleaner, more loving people. I am free to choose between these two possibilities, neither of which can be proved by any airtight rational and scientific method known to man. Either this Knowing One cares or he does not care.

In the first case, if the Knowing One does not care, then this life we are living is a gigantic joke. Our struggles for better relationships, for peace and justice in society, are merely play-acting on a world stage. We put on a show because that is the thing to do, but the curtain comes down quickly and we are gone. There is no significance in our striving. In the second case, if it matters to the Knowing One what we are and how we play our tiny parts, then while we are still tiny and our time is still very short, the play is not a farce, but a grand and meaningful tragedy in which we are expected to do the best we can.

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IT would be more comfortable if we did not have to make this choice — if we could postpone it indefinitely or dodge it in some ingenious way. Many of us try to do this and succeed for a time. We have even come to the place where it is considered smart and sophisticated to evade this choice: to be what Thomas Wolfe calls “the apes of fashion, the eternal triflers,”to get the most out of every situation, and change the color and meaning of life with each passing phase of human affairs.

Yet I have a feeling that soon or late a clear-cut choice is demanded of us all. Are we going to live in this world as if what we are, what our beliefs are, what our lives are aimed at, matters eternally or not? At long last we have to say either yes or no to that question. And since that is the case, I prefer to live, even with the lack of conclusive evidence on either side, as if what a person is matters. Dr. W. L. Sullivan put the choice neatly in this epigram: “Religion may ask a hard thing: faith in the dark; but irreligion asks an impossible thing: faith in darkness.”

This choice being made, it occurs to me that the sense of meaning which I cannot escape in my own life comes not from me but from something considerably more important than my own personal whims and preferences. History, man’s struggles to widen his horizons, increase his knowledge, uplift and dignify his common life, — his apparently insatiable lust for a better world in spite of countless frustrations and failures, — means something. Through it there seem to run an enormous energy and an enormous purpose. It is a pilgrimage through the centuries, in which a man can have a part.

I am amused when I reflect on G. B. Shaw’s witty remark to the effect that the only thing we learn from history is that man never learns from history. But when I reflect that men, in spite of their evil and their failures, have never given up the quest for the good life, have always been made uncomfortable by it, and have again and again poured out their energy for the realization of a far-off dream, I am inclined to think that St. Paul is closer to the truth when he says, thinking of the hope and purpose which came into the world with Jesus: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” God, to me, means purpose: the strong, patient purpose for Good which inhabits the universe and molds the history of men and nations. It is a purpose not always clear, never easy, often stern and exacting beyond our powers, but I cannot get away from the feeling that it is there, and that a man can know enough of it to be either for it or against it.

So the ideas which point to God, for me, are these. First, I am known, honestly and completely, by someone or something in this universe. Second, it matters how my life is lived, matters to the Knowing One. Third, history is not a blind pattern of events. It is going somewhere. There is purpose for good or against it. But of course, behind all this, we still have the fundamental doubt: “How can you be sure? What if you are wrong?” The questions remind me of a statement made by one of the speakers at a recent conference on peace plans. “The problem is,” he said, “that nobody believes what governments say any more. If they want to convince anybody about their intentions for peace and justice, they will have to do something concrete.” We might transpose this statement into the present discussion, thus: “The problem is that nobody believes what the Churches say any more. If the people in the Churches want to convince anybody of the reality of God, they will have to do something concrete.”

A Christian has been defined as “one who makes it easier to believe in God.” I like that definition. It rings true. When I read the New Testament and ponder the life of Jesus, I do not find it hard to believe in God. I do not find it hard to believe in God when I read the life of St. Paul or of St. Francis of Assisi. I do not find it hard to believe in God when I read of the eleven hundred Norwegian clergymen who, almost to a man, resigned their pulpits, and therewith their material security, rather than permit themselves to be used by the Quisling-Nazi regime. These people make it easier for me to believe in God.

Nor do I find myself troubled by the thought that perhaps they are living and suffering and dying for nothing, as deluded puppets in what is actually a tragic farce. I think all these people lived and died for something real and true. I am deeply moved by the way in which their lives thunder across time and space, leap over the barriers of race and creed and nationality, and beat at the doors of my own complacency and comfort. Perhaps the only answer to the questions “How can you be sure? What if you are wrong?” is that we learn by doing, that our theology has to be set forth not in books and manifestoes, but in what we ourselves are and how we stand up to life.

Once this view becomes clear, the intellectual barriers to faith in God are not so formidable. The more a man does for God, the more he feels himself answerable to a holiness and a love which underlie his life, the more that same holiness and love hold him up and lead him on. It is like learning to swim. First you must cease to fear that you will sink. Then you must learn the movements which enable you to make progress. At last there comes a day when you do not have to think of all these things specifically. You do them more or less spontaneously. That is the day when you can say, “I know how to swim.”

So our entrance into the understanding of God requires that we overcome our fear that we may be mistaken, that we be willing to entrust ourselves to the buoyancy of the love and truth at the heart of things, and finally that we master the movements and disciplines which enable us to use that buoyancy and to be used by it, to work with it and to bring our little purposes in line with its great ongoing purposes.

There really seems to be, in the experience of many men and women, an answering power in the universe. So long as you do your part, it holds you up like the buoyant water. You can depend on it. It does not fail. But here is the curious thing: when we cannot swim we do not pretend that the water isn’t there; we know it is there and that it is buoyant, though deep and dangerous. We know the trouble is with us. We have not yet learned to live and move in this medium. But when we cannot understand God,— when we cannot explain him in a series of concise and apt definitions, — it seldom occurs to us that the trouble is with ourselves. Instead we say that God is not there.

But perhaps every quest which is to culminate in a real discovery must begin with the courage to entrust yourself to something, to depend on it, and slowly to learn how to work with it. Perhaps this is true whether the case is that of a child learning to swim or that of a mature adult seeking God. Perhaps you have to begin, and see what comes next, and go on and on until at last the day comes when you feel as much at home in all the world in the companionship of God as you used to feel only in your own home, with your dearest friends, in the familiar, well-loved customs and duties. And when that day comes, you don’t need theology. Argument and controversy cease to bother you. You know that the quest has been worth while, that it has led to something real. The days of secondhand acquaintance are over.