Humility and Love

I recently finished the book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) by Frank Schaeffer. While I felt like he was sometimes harsh and bitter- somewhat like the people he was writing against- I really enjoyed most of what he had to say, and the whole time I was reminded of the last thing that Brian McLaren said that I had wanted to talk about.

Brian said that, “Sometimes rejecting God is itself an act of spirituality because it says, ‘Whatever’s out there, it has to be better than that.’” If God is real, God has to be better than this small-minded, bigoted God that I’ve been peddled all these years.

Schaeffer takes on both the fundamentalist atheists—who militantly and arrogantly claim that God cannot exist because it goes against reason and that reason will eventually unravel all of the questions of the universe—and the fundamentalist Christians—who have put God in a box of their own beliefs and condensed salvation into a single prayer confirming “right” doctrine. Both reject mystery in favor of their own arrogance and certainty.

His response is that, “with all due respect to Dawkins, mystery trumps everything,” and that “according to traditional Christianity…the process of salvation was lived out in a community. Salvation was a path toward God, not a you’re-in-or-out event, as in ‘At two thirty last Wednesday I accepted Jesus.’”

God is so much bigger, so much better than that. So don’t mind me if I do reject your God. If your God demands that I hate or even kill my GLBTQ friends, if your God condones the pollution of the earth and the oppression of its peoples because they don’t look and sound and believe like me, if your God wants me to vote straight Republican because they’re God’s chosen people, then no, I don’t want your God. And if your not-God means that we’re all there is, that human reason is the best thing to come out of this galaxy, well, I don’t want that either.

“Some of the earliest Christians,” as Schaeffer notes, “wrote that God is not to be defined or hedged in by theology.”

I may know a person very well, but that person is still a distinct entity from me and therefore still foreign and, in a sense, incomprehensible. If I can’t even know another person entirely, how can I claim to know God entirely? How can I be so arrogant as to claim that I speak for God? For that matter, how can I claim to know the workings of the universe so entirely that I can say with confidence that there is no God at all?

What I can do is say that, “whatever is out there, it has to be better than that.” God has to be better than even my best, most hopeful imaginations. What I can do is share what I believe about God, what I believe about salvation, what I believe about my own responsibilities as a Christian. But I share with humility and love. Maybe God revealed something differently to you than to me. Maybe I’ve gotten something wrong. I’m human, so I probably have. But I can’t force anything on you. I can’t tell you with 100% certainty that you’re wrong.

So if you think that whatever’s out there is better than my God, go for it. Ask questions. Tell me about it. We can work toward God together. But if you share, share with humility and love. They’re the best we’ve got.