God Hides: A Critique of Religion and a Primer for Faith

God Hides

A Critique of Religion and a Primer for Faith

Ned Wisnefske

GOD HIDES

A Critique of Religion and a Primer for Faith

Copyright © 2010 Ned Wisnefske. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Pickwick Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-868-5

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-652-4

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Wisnefske, Ned.

God hides : a critique of religion and a primer for faith / Ned Wisnefske.

viii + 122 p. ; 23 cm. — Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-868-5

1. Religion. 2. Theology. I. Title.

bl48 w60

2010

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

The chapter entitled The End of Religion and the Beginning of Faith appeared in an earlier form as The End of Religion: The Beginning of Faith in Word & World 23/2 (2003) 197–205. Used here with permission.

To all those at Roanoke College who have made it a good place to learn

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Schumann and Jordan-Trexler endowments at Roanoke College and the Lutheran Academy of Scholars for providing time and resources.

Introduction

Salvation Nobody Needs

For by grace you have been saved through faith.

—Ephesians 2:8

That is the gospel, the good news Christianity proclaims to the world. How do we hear that claim? What does this word of salvation mean to us today?

Let’s start with the idea that we are saved. It may seem ignorant or ungrateful to ask this question, but what is it that God saves us from? For almost 2,000 years Christians said, God saves us from hell and damnation, and everyone understood what that meant. That is no longer true. Few today give any thought to hell, let alone worry that they will wind up there. Fear of damnation afflicts next to no one. When salvation from hell is no longer a live question, the Christian answer—that we are saved by God’s grace through faith—becomes superfluous. The context the gospel addresses no longer exists. There is no threat to us from which we must be saved. Take that away, and the gospel is spoken in a vacuum. It cannot be heard at all, let alone as good news. As a result, proclaiming salvation to Americans today is like offering free health insurance to a rich man. He doesn’t understand why he needs it, though he’s not going to turn it down. Salvation sounds like a good thing to have, so he’ll take the offer. It can’t hurt.

Suppose we replace hell and damnation with the modern concern for a meaningful life. Is the gospel heard as good news if we replace the threat of eternal perdition with something more understandable to our ears such as the threat of meaninglessness? Is that what we need to be saved from, a life without meaning? If so, then is the good news that the Son of God suffered and died so that I might have meaning in my life? Jesus had to be tortured and crucified so that I might have a fulfilling worldview? Put that way it is evident that the cost of the remedy far exceeds the seriousness of the problem. Furthermore, if human existence itself, with the social relationships, natural orders, and intellectual activities that sustain it, holds little meaning for us, it sounds as though we creatures are dissatisfied with the creator’s creation. Are we complaining that the creator placed us in a creation that is not good but deficient? Do we think we deserve a better world? However we assess this modern complaint, the testimony of believers through the centuries is that God does not save us from life’s needs and troubles, and the unfairness and suffering they cause us, even when they seem meaningless.

Or is the fact that life ends the issue? Is it that we need to be saved from death? The good news Christianity has to offer, by that account, is immortality. Believe that Jesus died for your sins and you will have eternal life. Christianity appeals to our self-interest, and faith sounds like a good deal. This is a problem, of course, because then Christian faith becomes a self-serving enterprise. Rather than fix the problem presented by self-centered creatures, Christianity makes it worse. Self-absorption becomes the mark of the Christian life rather than self-forgetfulness. Pointedly stated, we use God as a means to obtain our own ends, and even reverse the roles of creature and creator. In the gospels when Jesus is asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? (Luke 10:25). He answers by giving an impossible demand, or by pointing out that salvation is the creator’s business, and that creatures have their own business—principally the welfare of their neighbor—to be concerned about. In other words, he shows his questioners that it is the wrong question. Christianity weans us from the compulsion to ask, what’s in it for me? Besides this, the creation narrative in Genesis indicates that death was the natural end for humans. We were formed from dust and return to dust. That is the fate of Adam and Eve even before they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After they ate the Lord drives them from the garden proclaiming, and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever (Gen 3:22), which indicates that Adam and Eve naturally would have died even if they had not eaten from the tree. God created humans to die. We should note, finally, that for thousands of years the finality of death has been part of the faith of Israel. Many Jews believed, obeyed, and went to their deaths without expecting God to reward them with another life.

Even more problematic for the Christian message, religious egoism today may be so advanced that we think we already are immortal and do not need God to save us from the grave. Many Christians evidently do not think they will actually die, but that on their last day on earth they will be transferred immediately to heaven. Someone should remind them that the last article of the Apostle’s Creed affirms the resurrection of the body—not escape from the body by an immortal soul—and that even Jesus was really dead and lay in the grave for three days.

If people think their souls are immortal, the only significant religious question is what their destiny will be. Maybe that’s what salvation is all about today. Spiritual seekers are in the religious market place to compare the various hereafters available. Americans especially are attracted to such spirituality, in that the pursuit of happiness—that most sacred of American beliefs—easily extends into religion. In this life I pursue my American dream; when that pursuit of happiness ends my immortal soul continues its pursuit in the next life. If our dreams can come true in this life, why not in the next? Why can’t we each reach the heaven of our dreams? Our egoism does not consider how it is possible for individual dreams all to come true, and in a fantasy world of multiple universes all our dreams could come true. In the real world, however, we all exist in the same universe, so why wouldn’t that be the case in the end? Contradictory visions cannot all come to pass. Jason may dream of spending eternity with Jessica, but so does Jeremy. Both dreams cannot come true. When we awaken from our religious dream world, we realize that we all live in the same world and will face its end and aftermath together. But in a day when spirituality is a purely private matter such details do not concern us. Religious egoism so strong ferments into spiritual solipsism. Where traditional faith offered hope after death of salvation from hell, by contrast, religion today ignores death and guarantees heaven.

Religious wars?

The history of modern theology is a continuous stream of proposals translating Christian claims into terms understandable to modern ears. In the last few decades prominent voices contend that the United States is in the midst of a culture war; and, since religion is one of the fronts in that war, these translations have polarized into competing camps. The war is between the left and the right, liberals and conservatives. Theologically, it is between progressives and orthodox, morally between relativists and absolutists.

One problem with characterizing current religious conflict as part of a war is that far less than half of all Americans identify themselves as combatants in it. The often cited book Culture Wars estimates that perhaps twenty percent are on either pole.¹ More recently, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, claims the figure is less than ten percent.² Most people therefore are not part of the debate, and are open to some other way of identifying themselves. So we must ask, is this really a full-scale war? Loud voices have declared that there is a culture war in America, yet less than a quarter of all Americans show up for it. The camps on either pole set the terms and tone of the debate—sometimes by their dislike for the other side and an inability to think that they could be wrong—but they do not speak for the majority. It is also likely that popular media, preferring to see such issues in the black and white terms of winners and losers, overlook the multitude in the middle. Many uninspired and disillusioned are caught in the crossfire, or are unwilling conscripts in a conflict where they hold allegiance to neither side. We should beware of those who cry war! war! when there is no war.

Rather than be pulled apart in this tug-of-war, allowing those on the poles to define the theological terms, we might redraw the frontline, consider what is missing in the current conflict, and propose a new position to take up and defend. Does either side, to begin with, start with a conception of God at all like the one which intoxicated their forbears in the faith, for whom God was the Alpha and Omega, the beginner and finisher of all things, before whose mystery and glory humans were reduced to silence and awe? When we listen to the breezy, cozy way we talk about God one has to wonder whether we really know what we are talking about. Are we referring to the creator of the universe or to our guardian angels? A true sense for divine reality, for that which is prior to and beyond us and our capacities, would make us cautious in our claims to know it, experience it, and have a relationship with it. Yet we see little such reticence today. It seems, rather, to be our habit of mind to create everything in our own image, reduce everything to the familiar and bring everything down to our size, so that God becomes the Big Guy Upstairs, or the Author of my values.

This shortcoming common to both camps needs to be addressed. But also, are we not overlooking common moral ground in the middle? Is there not, e.g., agreement on freedom of religion, freedom from hunger, oppression, and ignorance, and freedom for moral responsibility? These are common, vital concerns for left, right, and everybody in the middle. The tactics for addressing these issues will vary, but there can be fundamental agreement over their moral priority.

Criticizing religion to prepare for faith

This book attempts to recast this religious conflict in order to gain a clearer view of Christian faith. To do that we should challenge the idea of religion commonly held today. Religion, understood as a longing for the divine, pursued through good works, spiritual contemplation, metaphysical speculation, and ritual practices is not part of every person’s make-up. Not everyone by nature is religious. In the spirit of Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity, we might reflect upon our contemporary religious context without assuming that everyone is seeking God. Both camps assume this in spite of the fact that many people are unaware of it, would be surprised to be told that they are, and even outright deny it.

Second, we should take the position, denied or given little attention by both camps, that there are common moral truths, and that these can be known apart from religion. Call it the natural law, the Tao, or the moral order, it is an objective set of values that format human life. Conservatives avoid this position because they are reluctant to concede that anyone can know ultimate moral truths apart from God revealing them. Liberals do not want to take this position and affirm common moral ground because they have been won over by the apparent relativity of morals. Traditional Christian thought, though, held that position.

Third, this common moral ground provides the foothold for advancing theological claims. Morality raises questions, we come to see, that it cannot answer. Questions such as: why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? will our moral ideals be realized? how will they be? will the righteous be vindicated? An important role religions have played is to give answers to these pressing moral concerns. Christian theology, e.g., replies that there is evil, the righteous will be vindicated, and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is the basis for the hope that the creator is