by Rev. Dr. Edward Frost, Summer Minister

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Sometimes, this is said in the context of a spiritual crisis, a time of transition in a life in which old assumptions seem no longer to hold and the foundations shake. Other times, “I don’t believe in God” is cast at my feet with a clank like an armored gauntlet. “Take that you fuzzy-minded mystic!” Some lie panting in the tall grass, hugging their skepticism like a Teddy Bear, hoping the Hound of Heaven will not smell them as it passes. Then there are those who declare their unbelief in a state of puzzlement—as if they had forgotten a once-vivid dream they were determined to remember or the name of an old lover once sworn for eternity.

I could respond with one of the old jokes with which Unitarians hide their unwarranted audacity or their outworn pride in theological poverty; or I could, for like reasons, just say “join the club”; or I could with some greater seriousness say—as a young professor said to me hearing my atheistic confession, “Great!  Now you can become a theologian.” But when we have had the time to sit back and follow the thread I have said to the confessing non-believer, “Tell me about the God you no longer believe in.”

The lost God, it often turns out, is the one we swore we glimpsed slipping past the open Sunday school door; or the one in the picture book, the unsheared, unshaven God lounging on a cloud on the Seventh Day or hard at work writing in a big book or tossing bolts of thunder at bad people. Perhaps the lost God is the one after that one—the one who ordered the slaughter of the Hittites and told Abraham to sacrifice his own son who, in later time, apparently floated aimlessly while psychopathic mass murderers slaughtered millions of innocent people. If this God noted the fall of the sparrow, He did nothing to catch it.

Speaking of offspring, this weight of incomplete unbelief was brilliantly depicted in the late Donald Barthelms’s novel The Dead Father. In the novel, the children of the dead father are burdened with the task of dragging about his gigantic carcass—literally larger than life—on a huge sled. I forget where they were taking him—perhaps that was the point—or part of it. I assumed at the time of reading the book twenty years ago that the figure was the symbol of all burdensome fathers; but, now, I think it is a metaphor for God. God.  Father.  Probably hard to tell the difference. The point is the father was dead. But…there is this necessity to continue dragging him around on the journey.

Keeping God—that “larger than life” figure—from slipping from our faith and reason has taken a while but here we are. “I don’t believe in God.” “That’s alright, God is dead,” said Friedrich Nietzsche, an announcement still being made a century later in the 1970s by such radical theologians as William Hamilton and Emory University religion professor Thomas Altizer in their book Radical Theology and the Death of God.

“There is no God but…”

“But,” in the first place, the memory lingers on—at the very least—and, to a greater extent, the body, the whole great, gigantic body of faith and thought, of “God bless mommy and daddy,” “It’s God’s will,” to say nothing of “Gott Mitt Uns”: all that goes on. The God that some with bravado, some with puzzlement, some as they nervously look over their shoulder say they no longer believe in—that God lingers as anyone can see who reads the news.

There is the account in the local section of the death of the child: the parent declaring in blind, naïve, or necessary faith that God had taken her to be one of his little angels. A baby killer, not to put too fine a point on it. There is the news of the hurricane, which, if God hears our prayers and wills it, will pass by and wipe out North Carolina instead of us. That God. Oh don’t neglect the God of his prophet, Jimmy Swaggart, the pornographic preacher who said that if “one of them” looked at him “that way” he would kill him and tell God he had killed him.

There is the God whose lovers and true believers in these days inflict his will in ripped apart bodies of children—that God of all the centuries exclusively  “ours”—Christian ours, Jewish ours, Muslim ours. “There is no God but…Allah.” Jehovah.  The One with the Sacred Unspeakable Name. Usually, when I have said, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” it is that God, those gods, those names about whom I hear.

There is no God…but there is that God who—his millions upon millions of followers notwithstanding—that God who is really quite dead. What is more than sad is that the carnage, the bigotry, the political appropriation of the dead will continue until the true believers catch up with the reality.

There is no God but…and on the other hand—

There is God.  God is. If you ask me if I believe in God I will say yes but not “believe in” as I believed in fairies and elves or as some “believe in” pundits and prognosticators. I believe in God as that which is. As the sun is. As the moon is. It is, for me, not so much a matter of belief as it is a matter of recognition.

The Greek Orthodox faithful believe that any statement about God must have two characteristics. First, it must be paradoxical, seemingly absurd—to remind us that God cannot be contained in any neat, coherent system of thought. As Joseph Campbell said, the God who exists beyond all god talk is the God who is beyond all categories of thought. Secondly, say the Orthodox, any statement about God must lead us to at least a moment of awe and wonder, because when we are speaking of The Living God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can express. So, I say again, I believe in God as that which is. As the sun is. As the moon is. It is, for me, not so much a matter of belief as it is a matter of recognition.

I have read and listened to a lot of theological thought in my days from Aquinas to Tillich, Bultmann, Brunner, Barth and yes, Altizer and Hamilton and a host of others. But I’ve been most moved recently by Karen Armstrong’s latest book, The Spiral Staircase.

Karen Armstrong is the author of several books on religion, including a masterwork on fundamentalism and a popular work called The History of God.

The Spiral Staircase is biographical, personal. It is the story of Armstrong’s spiritual movement from disbelief up the narrow, spiral staircase (an image from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday”) to a new understanding, a recognition of the God beneath or beyond all gods. The subtitle of her book is My Climb out of Darkness.

Armstrong’s work moves me because what she writes has me responding “Yes. Yes.  That’s what I mean.” Armstrong points out for example that it has only really been since the eighteen century that faith has come to be understood as believing in or giving assent to certain intellectual propositions about God. What that faith was originally all about—whether in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam or any other religion—was the conviction that life has meaning n spite of what might seem to be all the evidence to the contrary.

When I read the modern theologians, like Paul Tillich, who taught that God is the God beyond God, not the God we talk about,  that God is the Ground of Being, I used to say,  “Yes, maybe—but what does this impersonal God do? And if it doesn’t do anything, then what difference does it make whether or not it exists?”

What I’ve come to understand as the revelations of age overtake the murkiness of much knowledge is that God Is, not does. It is not that God may not exist because he didn’t do anything about the Holocaust but that God Is because God Is the hope emerged in spite of it—the hope that life, in spite of everything, has meaning and future. The Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams wrote: “While [liberal religion] recognizes the tragic nature of the human condition, it continues to live with dynamic hope…as one of its voices.”

As I was writing this there came back vividly to my mind Victor Frankl’s story of the death camp inmate who, dying, crawled to the fence that bordered the camp and there, through the wires, seeing a flower pushing up through the snow, shed a tear of hope. Whatever moved from that flower to bring hope, meaning, to the breast of the dying man is God.

What was also brought home to me in reading Karen Armstrong is that God is human to human action—compassion. In this, all the religious traditions were in agreement. Armstrong writes, “The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead to practical compassion.”

You may recall that, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote of religion as healthy or “morbid,” “morbid” meaning not just dark, but deadly. Whether a religion was morbid or healthy, James wrote, could be judged by the lives and behaviors of its adherents. Or, as the other James said—James, the brother of Jesus—in the Christian scriptures, “By their fruits you shall know them.” Perhaps we could say that God is a way of being revealed in a quality of relationship among human beings. The Unitarian theologian, Henry Nelson Wieman, called it “Creative Interchange” or “Divine Creativity.”

Karen Armstrong writes that Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul the Apostle and for Muhammed, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tzu, the Buddha and the sages of the Hindu Upanishads. She says, “If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of lovingkindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name it was bad theology.”

In Christianity, compassion is expressed in the “Golden Rule,” seemingly so simple, largely ignored, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But the act of compassion imbedded there is God visible transcending the ego—putting oneself in the place of the others, even of the enemy: “How would it be if what we say or do was done or said to us?” That is God speaking.

An early Buddhist poem puts it “May our loving thoughts fill the whole world; above, below, across—without limit; “a boundless goodwill toward the whole world, unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity.” And the Jewish scholar, Abraham Heschel, said that when we put ourselves at the very opposite of our own ego, we are in the place where God is.

This does not mean—as some have taken it to mean—that we must not resist evil, or thwart it, or destroy those whose evil would destroy us. It means that compassion dictates that evil can be resisted without self-righteousness, smugness, certainty. Joseph Campbell tells the story of the Samurai Warrior who was sent to kill another Samurai who had threatened his master. When the Samurai confronted his enemy, he drew his sword—but his enemy spat on him. At which the Samurai sheathed his sword and walked away. Why did he do that? Because the other was no longer simply a task to be done, like an invading army to be driven out. Being spat on by the other had made him angry, and, as a Samurai, he could not fight in anger.

It is as Campbell said, the old gods who are dead or dying: the old gods of human projection, of nationalism, of tribe, of human id and ego, of warriors and kings. Those were gods. They were never God. The history of God can be sifted out of the Scriptures and the teachings of the faiths of religions past and present. Wherever the words speak of hatred, anger, slaughter, power, privilege, certainty they are neither words about God or of God. Wherever the scriptures and the teachings speak of lovingkindness and compassion, they are indeed the Word of God.

And this is what is so remarkable in such an understanding of the divine—that when we experience ourselves being compassionate, when we receive the compassion of another, when we experience compassion in relation to all creatures and all nature, we  recognize—no need to “believe in”—we recognize that God is in us and in all being, neither out there nor dragged about in semi-conscious belief but alive and well in all being and experience.

A passage from The Spiral Staircase in closing:

One Kabalistic text tells us that when the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, the Holy King departed from the earth and no longer dwelt in our midst. Maybe God vanished also…after the destruction of the World Trade Center, an atrocity that was committed in God’s name. The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. We have seen too much religious certainty recently. Maybe this is a time for honest, search doubt, repentance, and a yearning for holiness in a world that has lost its bearings.

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Copyright 2006, Rev. Dr. Edward Frost.  All rights reserved.