THE DENIAL OF WHAT EXISTS ONLY IN THEIR OWN IDEOLOGY:

The impossibility of atheism (Peter Sellick, 29 January 2009, Online Opinion)

[J]ust as the early Christians were accused of atheism because they refused to give homage to the gods of the Greeks or the Romans, modern day Christians can similarly be accused of atheism because they do not believe in the God delivered to us by 17th and 18th century scientists/theologians.

My argument is that the God that the atheists do not believe in is not the God that Christians worship, but rather an idol of our own making or unmaking.

Jesus says in the gospel of John, “Who has seen me has seen the Father”. During Christmas we are reminded that God has been born a vulnerable child for whom no room was found in society, whose life was threatened by the vicissitudes of history and who died the death of an outsider. This produced a profound crisis in the theism of the ancient world. God could no longer be likened to the playful and envious gods of the Greeks or the civil gods of Rome. The God that Christians worshipped was all powerful but his power was shown in weakness. In the dereliction of the cross God transformed the world.

The failure of atheism to appreciate this is a failure to distance ourselves from the paganising of Christianity; the continuing tendency to see God in Greek or Roman terms. God transforms the world not by controlling the orbits of the planets or even holding each electron in place, but by exposing human beings for what they are, well intentioned, maybe, but essentially driven by desire and fear. For it was desire and fear that placed the man Jesus on the cross. In judging him, we judged ourselves and the scales fell from our eyes.

All of the old attributes of God, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence must now be interpreted not from the a priori of philosophy but from the biblical witness of how God acts. The first thing to be said here is that God acts in the bible in the form of the Trinitarian persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Pauline blessing: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” reveals how the three persons act in the world. These acts are interdependent. Jesus displays the love of God in his graciousness in the power of the Spirit. The Son and the Spirit have been called the two hands of God by which he acts in the world. Christian speech about God is essentially Trinitarian and is quite different from pagan speech about God.

My point is that modern expressions of atheism are an objection not to the Christian God, who escapes their criticism, but an objection to paganism. All we Christians can say is “welcome”, we have been doing that for 2,000 years!

The atheist objection must now be that the three persons of the Trinity are just three gods whose existence is brought into question. However, the persons of the Trinity are not beings in the ordinary sense of being or persons in the ordinary sense of persons. As I have often reiterated in these pages, God is known in his act, God is pure Act. Thus the first epistle of John names God as love. It is not so much that the persons of the Trinity are beings that have attributes, but that they are attributes. The Father is not a being who loves but is love.

This is different for the Son because Jesus was a man, a being, a person like us. However, we may say that he was pure grace, that his life was defined by grace and it was his grace - in obedience to the love of the Father - that is with us in the past the present and the future in his Spirit. The Spirit is the one who reveals the truth of the Son; he is the one who takes the scales from our eyes and unstops our ears so that we see the truth of the Father through the Son. The attribute that the Spirit is, is community. His action is not under our control, some see and hear, others do not. Thus the understanding of the Spirit puts paid to all individualistic Christianity; Christians can only exist in community, in the Church.

My point is, as regards atheism, is that a fully worked out theology of God that uses the language of the Trinity does not resort to a supernaturalism that relies on immaterial as opposed to material beings. God is not a spook, neither are the persons of the Trinity.

A further objection must come that Christian language posits God as a conscious immaterial being. Part of the explanation for this is that language has to be found to talk about God that uses the usual grammar of subject, object and predicate. Such objectifying language about God is inescapable. Second, many if not most Christians do think about God in an objectifying way. This is an example of the continuation of pagan thought forms about God. After all, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a natural idea as arguments from evolutionary psychology point out. Thinking of God as Triune requires some education and sophistication. That is why in the absence of this education belief will ready revert to the pagan forms.

A still further objection is that by forsaking God as a being in the sense of conscious immaterial monad we remove all foundations for Christianity. We are left instead with attributes; love, grace, community. We are back with the Beatles singing idealistically “All you need is love”. There is the real danger that faith is reduced to unsupported ideology. However, faith does have an object and that is Jesus Christ, a material being whose life and manner of death incarnates the attributes. Saying that we believe in God is saying that when we look to Jesus we see the essence of humanity whose fulfilment in us will change the social world. This is the one who will bring peace to the world.