As the saying goes, "There are no atheists in foxholes."
In response to this, an atheist once said, "If I'm being bombarded in a foxhole, I'm going to do whatever I can to get out of there. I'm not going to sit around and wait for some God-guy to come and rescue me."
Exactly. This is what I call "foxhole faith". It's a faith that's just as valid a belief as any that I've ever heard. Perhaps even more so.
The late George Carlin once quipped, "Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible old man in the sky." And yes, that is the trajectory of most religious discourse. Unfortunately, it has led us to where we are today-- a world full of deists, atheists, and agnostics. This is why most churches are empty on Sunday mornings. An invisible old man who doesn't seem to know what he's doing is hardly worth getting up out of bed for.
To me it's quite simple: we're going to have to give up the interventionist and invisible God-guy if we're going to speak intelligently about our faith. We're going to have to stop speaking of God as an interplanetary cop watching and waiting to catch bad guys. In fact, we may even have to stop speaking of God in ways which imply that God is a sort of superhuman being who reminds us of how much we screw up. But what do we put in his place?
I propose we start speaking in terms of Ultimate Reality out of which all reality we experience with our senses arises, and that this God is constantly being revealed to us through ongoing discoveries in nature--medicine, physics, sociology, astronomy, archaeology, geology, anthropology-- as well as discoveries in Biblical and theological scholarship, linguistics, history, etc. Aren't discoveries made in these fields "revelations"? Aren't things being constantly revealed to us?
Of course, as Christians we believe that God was ultimately revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. That is something that cannot even be questioned. But I wonder if Jesus can be looked at from different angles. I believe that he can; it's why there are four Gospels and not just one. The first Christians saw in Jesus the fulfillment and the goal to which their collective stories pointed.
Today, our stories are huge by comparison and getting bigger by the day with the exponential explosion of our knowledge base. Wouldn't it be right to say that God is the Ultimate Reality out of which all of our discoveries and revelations, even our stories, emerge? We could even call this (to use a bit of Christianese) Divine Service. To use my own sophomoric term: Foxhole Faith.
Douglas Hoag
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About this blog
Pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, New Lenox, Illinois.
I'm married with two children.
My MBTI type is E/INFP, in case that means anything to you.
My prayer: Lord, help me finish everything I sta
Most importantly, I believe that the reality and personage of God was uniquely and fully realized in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. No one else comes close.
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for the seizures and/or convulsions you may experience while reading this blog.
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I'm married with two children.
My MBTI type is E/INFP, in case that means anything to you.
My prayer: Lord, help me finish everything I sta
Most importantly, I believe that the reality and personage of God was uniquely and fully realized in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. No one else comes close.
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for the seizures and/or convulsions you may experience while reading this blog.
Doug Hoag's Profile
Create Your Badge
7 comments:
That's also why there were 4 KISS solo albums. One person's gene Simmons is another man's Paul Stanley.
But, we all know that Ace's was the best.
And that is why we can't simply accept that one denomination has it over the rest. Christ is the perfect and ultimate revelation of God, but we humans experience this revelation in different ways.
Someone once told me...ok, a lot of people have said it...that bad theology is better than no theology. I tend to agree with them, so long as those who have different theology don't feel that have that market cornered. There is always room for more discussion.
And a nod to Christ....you're right, Ace's was the best!
actually...a nod to Christ is always a good thing, but I meant for Chris to get the nod concerning Ace Frehley
I am not sure I agree that our stories are that much bigger than those of the early Christians. They had Pharisees and Greeks and Romans using man's wisdom to lead the cultural beliefs of the day. We have political leaders, media, academics and all sorts of religious leader Pharisee types leading cultural beliefs in our day.
The average person today can hardly tell their own story let alone the huge story of some of the goings on of our day. And half of them are trying to alter their reality in some way so that they do not have to deal with the pain of their story in the first place.
Jesus came and once again reminded man that He and His Father are counter cultural. The only thing that puts people in the pews for the right reason is the Spirit of God changing the hearts and minds of people through the proclaiming of the Law and Gospel of Christ. His is the only story that really matters, because it is the only one that saves us from our sin and ongoing sad state of affairs.
If the man in the foxhole is too hardened to see his need for a Saviour as the bullets are coming his way, it seems there is little hope that any amount of logic is going to save him. He needs a miracle to save him, not and intelligent and convincing Christian.
I am not sure why some churches are empty and some aren't. Sometimes it seems that the churches that are more faithful to the proclamation of Jesus are more empty than those that use any kind of gimmick to bring people in. But for the most part I would guess that the gimmick churches aren't bringing in too many atheists either. I would guess that people without faith are brought to Jesus through His word and deeds given to them by a Christian they have some sort of on going relationship with.
Ace's was the best because he's LCMS!!!
I should clarify what I meant when I said that our stories are much bigger today than in ages past. We have probed the heights and depths of space and humanity and have discovered things that were not known even 20 years ago. For example-- it has recently been discovered that the human heart has neural tissue. No other organ, except the brain of course, has this tissue. The head/heart connection may be more profound than what we first thought. It could also give new meaning to the phrase, "Follow your heart."
Something we know today that the ancients didn't know is that stars are actually suns, not just little pinpricks in the sky. Also, the ancients thought the sun and the heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. Theirs was an earth-centered cosmology. We still use ancient language to describe this. We say, "The sun is setting." This is patently false. The sun isn't moving at all. The earth is rotating. This is not a belief. It's a fact! And here's another mind-blowing fact: There are literally billions of solar systems! This is public knowledge. I have trouble imagining that God had no idea that we would discover these things.
Simply put-- through the many branches of science we know more today than at any other time in human history. The breadth of this knowledge will be accelerating and expanding. Discoveries are being made just about every day. Science is not the enemy of religion. They can actually enrich each other.
From a different anon:
At what point did rightly dividing the Word, that is, the Law in all its sternness, followed by the Gospel in all its sweetness, become undesirable?
The grace of God means nothing without the awareness in one's own soul of one's own sin and its consequences through the preaching of the Law.
At what point did talk of sin and salvation change to ignorance and enlightenment?
At what point did rightly dividing the Word, that is, the Law in all its sternness, followed by the Gospel in all its sweetness, become undesirable?
The Law, as it is preached today (very generically), has lost its sternness to many people. They just don't believe it. This isn't ignorance, and the problem is not with the people themselves. The problem is our preaching. We must find creative ways to proclaim the Law in ways that actually pierce the hearts of people-- perhaps a new paradigm suggested by a St. Louis prof (I can't remember who)-- a righteousness not of ourselves and a righteousness from God. I think this is worth fleshing out.
Also, the way we present God in our preaching isn't very faith-sustaining. The God we present is basically deistic-- an absentee watchmaker who occasionally repairs the watch at whim and who isn't present until the pastor says so. This is why our prayers sound like requests to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Something else that I believe should be fleshed out more is St. Paul's encounter with the Athenians at the Areopagus, quoting the poet Epimenides, "In him we live, and move and have our being." Paul then used this to proclaim the full and deep presence of God in the resurrection of Christ, and not in idols of gold, silver, and stone. The question for us would then be, "What would be considered "poetry" to the average person today, and how can we use it to proclaim that God, in Christ, reconciled the world to Himself?" It depends who you're talking to.
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