Following Jesus without God?

As many who read this blog know, I am a Christian priest who serves as a school chaplain and head of religious studies at an Episcopal Middle and Upper School (grades 6-12). My position shares a great many commonalities with being a parish priest. For instance, I am the "village vicar" and pastoral presence for nearly 600 students and staff, and their families as well. But there are significant differences too. Chief among them is the fact that my parish not only includes Episcopal Christians, but also Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of every stripe, and every variety from Nominal to Committed to Conservative to Liberal. But not only does it include a broad spectrum of Christians, but my parish includes Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and many who Secular and even Atheist.


QUESTIONS RAISED BY CHAPLAINCY

John Wesley once said the world was his parish. Well, my small parish includes the world. And this can be incredibly challenging at times, especially when I wrestle with my vocation to serve Jesus Christ who is the Incarnation of God in history, who fully reveals the Triune God, and who calls me to proclaim the Good News that everyone in my parish is loved by God, and called to live in God's Love. In the process of doing this, I have found that almost everyone here is open to the call to love one another as Christ has loved us. Love, acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation, joy, and peace are Good News for them. Being called to use our gifts and talents and passions to serve others is Good News for them. But people are often considerably less open to accepting the classical Christian account of who God is and what Jesus is. They are largely open to learning how to Love. But they are largely closed to learning metaphysics.

This leaves me with these questions: If I have helped people find meaning and purpose in life, and empowered them to love themselves and love others with Christlike Love, have I proclaimed Good News to them? Or is it all for naught because they have no share in Christ if they do not believe the right things about him? Are they doomed to eternal death, and am I doomed to see all of the years of love and relationship I have shared with them perish when they do? If I don't get them to "sign on the dotted line" of faith, was it all worth it?

This is not just a problem for me. This is a problem for any committed Christian living in our world. Because I don't think anyone lives in a place where everyone in the community is assumed to be Christian anymore. We live in a pluralistic culture where we are surrounded by people of every faith and no faith at all. And the most effective predictor of a person's religion will always be the religion they were born into, and the culture they come from. Few people, demographically, will shift from that in any given generation. In other words, most people are not going to convert.

So, every committed Christian must ask the same question: If we take for granted that few people we know will come to explicit faith in Christ in this life, have we squandered our time and resources sharing life with them? Should we not instead badger them constantly until they either convert or sever relationship with us? And if we did that, are we even honoring Christ at all?

As I have wrestled with this, I have written quite a bit. I have written a Theology and Outline of School Chaplaincy. I have also investigated what it means in a pluralistic environment to affirm that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I have looked several times at our ultimate destiny and wondered if God just might reconcile all things to Godself through Christ, as we are told in places like Colossians 1. And I have written about Christ's relationship with the world religions, including what this does to our understanding of God as a Trinity, and our understanding of who we are in God.

But today, I would like to wrestle with the question of Christ and those who have no religion at all. What are we to do in the case of those who feel drawn to the teachings of Christ, but who cannot conceive of how God could exist?

WHY SOME FIND THE CONCEPT OF GOD PROBLEMATIC

The idea of God, and whether God can be experienced, is a stumbling block for many people I know and love. In general, I find that disbelief in God has three roots, which may or may not be linked depending on the person. 

First, some people dismiss the concept of God for moral reasons, to provide themselves license to act selfishly or abusively to others. If you read or listen to what some Christians teach about atheism, they make it sound like this is the ONLY reason anyone would ever be an atheist. These people do not usually have close relationships with any actual Atheists, because I've had relationships with a great many, and very few are the "Ayn Rand" style atheist running from God to justify their sin and predatory selfishness toward other humans. Spotting this kind of Atheist "in the wild" is a bit like spotting Bigfoot, if Bigfoot looked like Ayn Rand.

But some Christians will still say that Atheism is always a result of our rebellion against God, whether we know it or not. Outward Atheism is simply a projection of a heart that is so steeped in sin that they cannot experience God. Yet, that's true of all of us to greater and lesser extents. I'm steeped in sin, yet I can experience God. And most of the secular people I have in mind here are more than willing to admit their faults, and limitations, and instances of injustice and apathy and hatred and selfishness. And not only admit, but repent and make amends. So, it isn't personal sin that is the limiting factor here, or else it would be the limiting factor for all of us, since "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3.23).

A far more common root of Atheism is that some folks have been so ingrained with a certain idea of what God is-- an angry despot who either wants to condemn and destroy us, or just doesn't care about us at all-- that they cannot imagine experiencing God, or how God might even exist. Along with this is something I have written about frequently: The problem of evil and suffering. If God is so powerful and good, why doesn't God do something to end evil, suffering, and death? It seems that God is not good enough, or not strong enough, or more than likely, does not exist. Thus they cannot fathom how God and Jesus could be related, much less be somehow one. For them Jesus was a high minded prophet and a teacher of moral wisdom, but fundamentally in error about the Source of his inspiration, because "God" (as they conceive God) could not have inspired such beauty and goodness. 

This often goes along with a rejection of "organized religion" because of the craven hypocrisy found in so many religious people. Religious people often talk about a God of Love and forgiveness on Sunday, and then use that same God to justify prejudice against immigrants and Muslims and Atheists and LGBT persons on Monday. In the face of hypocrisy and unjust conceptions of God, it is easier for many to just ditch the God concept altogether, than to work through a belief system and a religious system that seems fatally flawed.

And it does not matter how thoroughly we deconstruct defective ideas of God. The baggage is there, the concept has been tainted. When you have been hit long enough and hard enough with a shoe, you will flinch when you see a shoe, even if you rationally know shoes were not meant as weapons. For many of my secular friends, "God" is not the kind of Reality that can be experienced because "God" either hates them, or is not concerned for them, or simply does not exist. 

One of the key conceptual issues this brings up is this: To experience God, a person has to conceive of God as Someone who can be experienced, who loves us despite sin, and who calls us to repent from sin and be healed. For many God is not, and cannot be that. God for them is a synonym for Hostility or Apathy toward the majority of humans, and thus is obviously not something that qualifies as the Source of all worlds, much less the Source of any feelings of Value or Love or Beauty they might experience. 

And to be clear: I do not think they are the source of this disconnect. Whoever deeply ingrained faulty conceptions of God created this rift, whether that was clergy, or religious people, or televangelists, or media, or parents, or someone else. Whoever used God as a blunt instrument to inflict damage over and over again is the one worthy of having "a millstone fastened to their neck and cast into the sea" [cf. Matthew 18.2-7].

A final root of Atheism is that for many, the concept of God is simply incoherent and nonsensical. It is a bit like telling someone to see infrared light: It simply does not show up in the conceptual apparatus that they have to make sense out of the world. For them God is, in the words of French Scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, not a hypothesis needed to explain or make sense out of the world. 

Believe it or not, it is really hard to come up with an example of this that does not make someone look bad. For instance, I could say that it is like color blindness: A person does not have the sensory apparatus to see the difference between green and red. But then this makes the Atheist sound "defective" for not being able to sense God. Or I could say it is like how I cannot grasp graduate level mathematics. I know all the words and numbers when you use them separately, but combined together I cannot fathom how they relate. But this makes it sound like believing (or disbelieving) in God is like a course of study, and if you worked harder you would come to the right conclusion. Or I could say that it is like the difference between people who look up at the clouds and see shapes and patterns, and those who look and just see clouds. But then this makes it sound like seeing God in the world is just faulty pattern recognition.

Perhaps a better way to get at this is just to talk about how hard it is to describe ANY human experience in such a way that another people can truly understand what we have experienced. It is exceedingly hard to describe why a cheeseburger is so tasty, or to tell someone else what your love for your spouse and children is like, or to explain what it feels like to lose a loved one. In describing these things, there are some people who will not "get" what is obvious to you, no matter how many words you throw at them. And this is usually because they do not have an analogous experience to compare to. I find that talking about why it is obvious to me that God is real, or why it is obvious to my friend that God is not real, is a similar experience.

Whatever example one uses, it is clear that it is not fully a "choice" of what we believe. Rather, when looking at the SAME evidence, some things are just apparent to some minds, and other things are apparent to other minds. For instance, to use another old example, if we see the letter-chain GODISNOWHERE, our minds go to work to interpret the meaning. Some of us will immediately "see" GOD IS NOW HERE, while others will immediately "see" GOD IS NOWHERE. We may come to see that there are other ways of interpreting the data, but what seems "obvious" to us is largely out of our conscious control. It is just how we are wired.

Now for most of the Secular people I know, it is obvious to me they have experienced God. They have rich inner lives full of meaning and purpose. They have a robust sense of beauty and appreciation for the inherent value of creation and humanity. They feel drawn to express themselves in art and in ethical action to help others. And yet, they cannot connect any of this with God, either because God is an immoral concept antithetical to meaning or beauty or compassion, or God is an incoherent concept that does not compute in their conceptual grid.

So the question for me becomes how to communicate what Jesus is, and perhaps even help people come to know and follow Jesus, when the concept of God is toxic or nonsensical for them. In pondering this problem, I've come to the following place:

FINDING GOD WITHOUT GOD

I believe that almost everyone has had an experience of God, because God is experienced not just in "supernatural" events (however one may define that). God is more often experienced through transcendence in everyday life, by encountering meaning in life, moral obligation, and aesthetic beauty. Almost everyone feels drawn by a Transcendent sense of Value and Worth which gives our lives depth and meaning, which is experienced when we get glimpses of awe inspiring beauty and unconditional love, and which inspires us to give ourselves in compassion and to stand for justice. Now let us imagine if that Transcendent Value became embodied in a human being, so we could know it personally. That incarnation would be remarkably Christlike. In fact, the Christian claim is that Incarnation is Jesus Christ. 

And this Jesus Christ tells us repeatedly that the central message of his forefathers, and the meaning of his Good News, is for us to "Love the Lord with all our heart, mind, and strength", and to "Love our neighbor as ourselves". For him, all of Religious Law, and all of God's Prophets, and all of his teaching "hang" or "depend" upon these values (cf. Matthew 5.38-48; 7.12; 22.36-40; Mark 12.28-34; Luke 6.27-38; 10.25-37; John 3.16-18; 13.34-35; 15.12). All of his other teachings on compassion, and healing, and forgiveness, and liberation from evil, and the Infinite value of all people flow from this dual command to Love God and Love God's children. But how might we translate this if God is absent from someone's conceptual apparatus?

Let's start with the object of the greatest commandment "to love the Lord our God". Rather than thinking of God in a metaphysical sense of "Supreme Being" or "Ultimate Reality" or "Huge Bearded Guy in the Sky", let's instead look at how "God" functions in an existential sense. One of theologian Paul Tillich's terms for God is our "Ultimate Concern": God is that Value or Obligation or Concern that we put above absolutely all other things. God is that Value which we serve, which we sacrifice for, which we give ourselves completely to, and which we seek to actualize in our best deeds and our hardest work.

When taken as a metaphysical reality, it is clear that not everyone accepts God exists. But taken in an existential sense, it is equally clear that everyone has a God. In the words of the prophet Bob Dylan, everyone is "gonna have to serve somebody sometime".  We all have an Ultimate Concern that animates our lives, Ultimate Questions that inspire our searching, and Ultimate Values that motivate our choices and decisions. So the question, in an existential sense, is not whether we will have a God, but what Value (or set of Values) we will worship and sacrifice for as our God.

Even if we ignore Jesus' teachings on God in a metaphysical sense, we find that in his life and teaching, he gives us a certain "palette" of values which make us fully human. These values include compassion and healing, forgiveness and freedom, joy and peace, outrage at evil which enslaves and abuses human beings, and a commitment to a vision of social justice in which everyone shares "daily bread" at a common table of hospitality and hope. 

This palette of values finds its Source and Completion in the "Ultimate Value" of unselfish, unconditional, self-sacrificial Love (as witnessed by the primacy of the Great Commandments themselves). This Love is ultimately embodied by Jesus' willing sacrifice of himself on the cross so that his friends were not rounded up and killed [John 15.12-13]. Thus, since there are so many versions of "Love" out there, from romantic love to friendship to love of craft beer, let us specify "Christlike Love" when we speak of the Ultimate Value found in Jesus' life and teaching.

So, on the basis of Jesus' own teaching, a "secular" read of "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength", would be something like this: You must love Christlike Love above all else. You must commit yourself completely to that Ultimate Value which empowers us to treat others like we would want to be treated, to see ourselves in others, and to have compassion on all persons, old and young, rich and poor, both our friends and our enemies. Give yourself totally to full human flourishing for every person you have any influence over, and care for others with the care you seek for yourself.

This Ultimate Value of Christlike Love by its very nature commits us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love every person following the pattern of love we see in Jesus. As Jesus said in Matthew 25: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.... Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me".

The Great Commandments, when examined existentially without reference to any metaphysical claims they may imply, lead us to a rigorous and challenging Christocentric Humanism. It is Christocentric because, out of all the values we could choose as our Ultimate Value-- egoism, rational self-interest, hedonism, detachment, progress, nihilism-- we choose the value of Christlike Love which Jesus himself taught and embodied. It is Humanism because in affirming the ultimate significance of one particular human and the Way he lived, we thus affirm the ultimate dignity and value of all human beings, and find our highest good in those activities that lead to full human flourishing for those we have contact with. For Jesus, this full human flourishing is not merely ideological, or some ethereal flight into spirituality, but it is gritty and concrete. Hungry people get fed. Hurting people are healed. Desperate people find hope. Hateful people get delivered. Selfish people learn love. Lonely people are gathered into community. 

TOWARDS A THEOLOGY OF INCLUSION

Although I do not here want to sketch a full Biblical Theology of how Christ includes people in his life, a couple of hints must be given about how God might include persons in Christ who do not believe God exists. First of all, Jesus famously says "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father if not through me" (John 14.6). Notice at least two of these terms are ACTIVE terms: The Way is a Path to travel on, and Life is something you live. They indicate a way of being, not just a content of believing. And for the Gospel writer John, even Truth is active and dynamic. As he says in another letter: "Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action" (1John 3.18). So what is distinctive about Jesus above all is that he embodies a certain Pattern of living-- a Logos of Love, to use the terms of John 1.1-18-- and he invites us to follow that Pattern as we love others as he has loved us (cf. John 13.34-35, 15.12-13). At a secondary level, we realize Jesus is able to be the fullest embodiment of the Pattern of Love because he is the incarnation of the God who is Love (cf. 1John 3-4). But what is primary is living in his Way, Truth, and Life. Jesus tells us that those who embody this Way of living are doing the will of God, and are thus his brothers and sisters (cf. Matthew 12.50).

Therefore Jesus tells us that we can tell if someone is following him by the outward evidence, or "fruit", found in their lives (cf. Matthew 7 and 12). Jesus in fact says that he participates in their deeds of Love because when they welcome others, they welcome Christ (cf. Matthew 10 and 18), and when they help the least and the last and the lost, they are helping Christ himself (cf. Matthew 25). Saint Paul elaborates on this by saying that when we manifest Christlike Love, we are manifesting the highest gift of the Spirit (cf. 1Corinthians 13), and the evidence of the Spirit's work in our life is the "fruit" of Love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control (cf. Galatians 5). Furthermore, Paul tells the Athenians that all peoples "live, move, and exist" in God, as "God's offspring", and that God intentionally spread out human diversity across the globe that we may "reach out for God and find him" (Acts 17). So we may conclude that anytime we meet someone striving for, and embodying, Christlike Love, they are doing so because at some level Christ's Spirit is at work within them, even if they are not aware of it. After all, we digest food without fully understanding nutrition. We make use of matter and energy without being fully aware of the Physical Laws that regulate them. It is not a huge conceptual leap to understand that, because God is Love, God is thus at work within his children to help them manifest the Christ life, even if they cannot (or will not) fully understand the ultimate Source of that Love. 

This is not to say all roads lead to God, but it is to say that God is drawing all of the world to Himself through Christ (cf. John 12.32). The primary way God is doing this is to inspire and guide people to live in Christlike Love. It is this Pattern of Life that is salvation, for there is salvation in no other way than through the Way of Love embodied in Christ (cf. Acts 4.12). And it is here at the level of experience that the Good News of Jesus is most universal. The highest values and ethical principles of world religions and secular humanism converge around issues of compassion, social justice, peacemaking, forgiveness, healing, and the principle of "reciprocal altruism" we find in the "Golden Rule". This is to say that beyond all the different metaphysical explanations for Ultimate Reality and God's relation to the world, there is a common existential and ethical commitment across human culture that is surprisingly Christlike. Now all cultures and individuals fall short of living this Christlike Love fully, but there seems to be a universal awareness of the ethical obligation to love even if we fall short in practice (cf. Romans 2). And as a Christ follower, I would say this universal ethical awareness comes because these are all culturally-adapted applications of the Pattern of the Christ life. And to participate in that Pattern is to participate in Christ regardless of what your cognitive beliefs are about God. 

We might add to this many of the surprisingly universal passages in the New Testament about the scope and breadth of salvation found in Christ. We are told that everyone "in heaven and on earth and under the earth" will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord because "as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ", and that Christ has "reconciled all things in heaven and on earth" to God through his death and resurrection [cf. Philippians 2; Colossians 1; 1Corinthians 15]. Christ dies for us even while we are enemies of God, so that all are reconciled and justified by his self-giving love [Romans 5]. We are assured that "God is Love", and that "Love never fails", and that no created thing, not even life or death, will ultimately be able to separate us from God's Love in Jesus Christ [cf. 1John 4; 1Corinthians 13; Romans 8]. This is NOT to say that there is not hell to pay-- so to speak-- for lives of selfishness and entitlement which use and abuse other persons. Yes, we are told countless times that God disciplines and punishes us until we repent and turn from evil, and choose justice and compassion [cf. Hebrews 12]. But, as I have written about before, this process of Divine discipline seems to occur in both this life and the next, and in both cases, is intended to eradicate evil within us, and bring about our ultimate healing, not our ultimate suffering and destruction. And this goes for the religious and non-religious, for those who follow Christ explicitly, and those who follow Christ implicitly.

RUNNING THE ODDS, MAKING DECISIONS

So can you follow Jesus without God? I definitely think so. But I don't think this is preferable, nor do I think this offers a sufficient explanation of who Jesus was and is. After all, I am a Christian priest, and I do believe that a robust metaphysical concept of an Ultimate Reality that is Infinite, Transcendent, Loving, Omniscient, and Omnipotent is the best explanation for a whole host of phenomena we find in the universe, from its inherent order and understandability, to its beauty and moral value, to our yearning to overcome suffering and death, to the reason why Jesus has such an enduring value for so many.

And yet, I do not think that buying into the entire metaphysical scaffolding of Trinitarian Christianity is necessary to follow Jesus. As Secular Humanism says, you can be "Good without God". I think that, for many people, they have to follow Jesus without God, if they are to follow Jesus at all. And I definitely think following Jesus without God is preferable to many Religious people who follow (g)od without Jesus: That is, they raise up a god who is hostile and tribal and exclusionary, and then use this god to justify all of their apathy and hatred and prejudice toward other humans.

To put this in terms of a decision tree, I would say this:

If I were to choose between being a self-centered Narcissist bent on hedonism, or being a Religious person who worships an exclusionary tribal god, I suppose I would have to choose being a Religious person. Having a moral and ethical commitment to some value outside of yourself, even if that harms some, is better for the soul than a predatory selfishness that harms all.

But if I were to choose between being a Religious person with that tribal and exclusionary god, and being an Atheist committed to full human flourishing for everyone, I would have to be an Atheist for the sake of Christ. The person who is committed to full human flourishing for all people is infinitely closer to the heart of Christ than the one who uses religious ideology to hate and demean others.

But finally, if I were to choose between being an Atheist committed to full human flourishing, and being a Christian who believes that Christ reveals a God who calls us all to full human flourishing, I would choose (and have chosen) being a Christian.

For my secular friends who read this, they are likely to reverse this argument on me. They are likely to say that I am in error in attributing this world to God, but they are happy for me to believe in God as long as that helps me love others in a Christlike way: In a way that follows Jesus in compassion and justice and altruism. God may not be real, after all, but if it is a helpful fiction to inspire me to care for my neighbors and help the needy, then it is better than nothing. How do I feel about the tables being turned on me? I feel fine, as long as it leads both of us to work for full human flourishing for every human we can influence. 

After all, if I am right, when we shuffle off this mortal coil, we will all be reunited with that Infinite Love that is the Source and Center of all being, and be raised into the fullness of Christ's eternal life. In fact, seeking to live in Love will be the primary way in which we are brought into harmony with Divine Love, and not the things which we cognitively believe or disbelieve. And if they are right, after we have led challenging and fulfilling lives pursuing compassion and justice and beauty, we will end our lives in peace knowing nothing, and we will leave behind a legacy of caring for others which hopefully inspires more of the same. And if neither of us are right, and God is a god of tribal hatred who delights in suffering and death for all who do not grovel, we will all perish together, for that god can never be worthy of worship no matter how powerful it is. 

If I were to run the odds, at the end of History, I think we will all gather around the One who is the Source and Goal of Reality, to find out just how wrong we all were metaphysically, and how right the Love of Christ was existentially. Regardless of our metaphysical scaffolding (or lack thereof), may we commit ourselves wholly to this Ultimate Value, and give ourselves fully to Christlike Love so that we may love our neighbors as ourselves.