God must be more than Credible

I was a young skeptic in 1978 when I took Charles Hartshorn’s Philosophical Theology course at UT. And he turned me into a believer. He demonstrated, at least to my satisfaction, that the concept of God was credible. One could believe in God and still fully embrace a then contemporary understanding of reality.

Given that assurance I was happy to go on theology school and join the ranks of the clergy. After all, the church had treated me well and respected my skepticism. The story of the Bible rang true in every important respect; not in the sense of historically verifiable (I was a history major and knew how difficult that was). True with respect to the fact that the claim that Jesus was the Christ now made sense as a claim about the trinitarian nature of a credible God intimately connected to the natural and human world: more sense than either polytheistic or strictly unitarian claims. Relieved of my nagging doubts about God’s existence I could fully embrace ministry. 

There was just one question, a question that Hartshorn left me with: What is designated by the word “God?” To which the answer came from philosophical theology: The One worthy of worship. 

As an educated skeptic who was at home in the church a God who could be believed to exist was a God worthy of worship. What more did you need?

More, actually. This became clear when I left the comfortable context of Texas suburbia and moved to Southeast Asia as a missionary. This carefully constructed, philosophically credible God wasn’t the God my fellow Christians worshipped. Indeed, on reflection my God wasn’t really worthy of worship. The philosophers’ God was far too abstracted from either the power and beauty of nature or the tragedy and joys of human life. Who could make an emotional investment in building a relationship through praise and thanksgiving, much less prayer and intercession, to such a God? 

And what about God the Father of Jesus Christ? Remember that I was framing the claim that Jesus was the Christ in terms of revealing and affirming the Trinitarian nature of God, not in terms of miracles and resurrection. 

Sure, God was our “great fellow sufferer” who somehow processed and redeemed in the divine life the suffering of the world. Yet in an environment infused with Buddhist concepts of karma and Hindu ideas about undifferentiated Brahman this cool, rational God didn’t seem so very worshipful. It looked more like another philosophical construct in which humans, and indeed all creatures were simply digestible morsels for the Divine gut. We might give God heartburn before becoming fond memories, but the price of human freedom was a God who had no power of any earthly use.

Years later, after a lecture by a prominent theologian of the school I was raised in, I asked him, “so God has less power than the least powerful of God’s creatures?” And his answer was “yes.”  

Culture and situation make a difference when it comes to who is worthy of worship. My American context was deeply empowered and valued that power and the personal autonomy it brings. It is a context in which miracles far beyond those performed by Jesus are accomplished by doctors, and farmers, and politicians, and businessmen every day. In that context a God worthy of worship keeps God’s distance and wraps things up in the end as a palliative for existential anxiousness; the end being the only place where humans can’t swing out their elbows and carve out a place for themselves. 

It wasn’t that way in Malaysia and Singapore, or among the Africans in my church in Vienna, or indeed for any of the deeply God-conscious and disempowered people I have met in the wide world. For them the God Christians worship has a nature derived not from the philosophical attempt to make God credible in a modern context. They learn about God by reading about God’s nightly acts in scripture. God isn't merely credible in the Bible. God is capable. God is immediately consequential,not just existentially consequential. 

In a previous post I offered a suggestion for how the Christian understanding of revelation might be brought into conversation with the experience of physicists and cosmologists whose work is firmly fixed in the realm of the immanent. I now want to suggest that for this same group, and their extended family of contemporary humans happy to live in that immanent frame, we Christians must find a way into a dialogue about a God whose existence isn’t merely credible, but whose person is worthy of worship. And that means showing that God is consequential in ways that they can relate to; capable in ways that demand the kind of human relationship to God called worship. And beyond that, why such worship properly belongs in a community of faith.  

One approach to this kind of apologetic has been to appeal to the kind of “second naiveté” that arises in descriptions of contemporary society as post-modern. But I think Taylor, whose Secular AgeI’ve mentioned, is correct in saying that fissures of emotion, or vague senses of something sacred, will scarcely move someone to worship as Christians understand worship. A sense, a gut feeling, a chill or moment of warmth, even a moment of awe is in a sense its own reward. It doesn’t reach out to the perceived source of the feeling, it simply validates that there is something transcendent relative to our daily lives of immanence. It is a basis for belief correlating with the work of the philosophers, but doesn’t necessarily move one to worship.

Nor, in the long run, does the creation of experiences that elicit those emotions. Gathering on a weekly basis for a rush of good feeling and a brief sense of the Transcendent isn’t the same as “bending the knee” (the literal meaning of worship) before God. 

So how do we engage the intelligent skeptic with the possibility of a worshipful God? Next post.