So Near, Yet So Far
There’s a story in the Acts of the Apostles – in my view, the most interesting book in the Bible – about the Apostle Paul walking around the Areopagus in Athens, a sort of open-air courtroom/forum/temple.
Images of Greek gods were on display there, and Acts describes a speech Paul gave to “the men of Athens” who were presumably there to discuss weighty matters of state or religion.
Paul tells them he noticed an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god” and says that’s the God he is proclaiming – the God of Christians and Jews, who was unknown to the Greeks.
Impenetrable Mystery
That God is still unknown, theologians tell us, because he/she is unknowable. As much as we may pray and talk about God, we really don’t know who he/she is. We can theologize and philosophize all we want, but God will always be an impenetrable mystery. And the mystery is why we need faith to have a “relationship” with him/her.
But Paul goes on to quote Greek poets to say that in this unknown God “we live and move and have our being.” Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, places words in God’s mouth, writing that “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” And Jesus, in Mathew’s gospel, says that God has “numbered the hairs of our head” (no great task in my case!)
So which is it? Is God a distant, unknowable mystery or someone so close to us that we live and move in him/her?
A Book of Paradoxes
“…The Bible, writes Czech philosopher and theologian Tomas Halik, “is a book of paradoxes – almost every assertion is offset by some other assertion that is, or seems to be, its opposite, so that we are prevented from settling lazily on the surface of things or in the shallow slough of over-facile certainties.”
Traditional theology has referred to the duality in our view of God as “immanence” and “transcendence.” Whatever. We may be tempted to complain that it simply complicates the difficulty in believing in the God of the Bible and of Judeo-Christianity who, as much as we may want to believe, seems to be missing in action.
That brings us back to the subject of faith, and doubt. I know there’s a school of opinion that believes that doubt is bad, even sinful. I disagree. Without doubt, there would be no need for faith. What’s more, God gave us brains and expects us to use them and people who don’t doubt may not be using them.
Humans endlessly try to make sense of things and are never satisfied, even with the right answers. We’re questioning beings; skeptics by nature. (Skepticism, of course, is distinct from cynicism, which implies a know-it-all mindset.)
This applies to believers as well as non-believers. In my view, believers who don’t doubt may have become too comfortable in their beliefs, taking them for granted and failing to understand their outlandishness. If what we Christians believe is true, we should be in awe of it. But it often elicits no more than a yawn.
Unlikely They Were Delusional
Nevertheless, belief in the God of Christians and Jews, I believe, is rational. There are good reasons for it. Among them is the nearly universal belief in a transcendent being and the almost universal longing for him/her. Also, the witness of thousands of generations of humans, not the least of which are the people of the Old and New Testaments. In my opinion, it’s highly unlikely that they were all delusional. Something mysterious and life-changing happened to them.
Personally, I believe God is also needed to explain existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? My brain requires meaning, and religion provides it.
Faith, of course, is not just about believing, and neither is the search for God. The searcher must try to be “God-like,” trying to make the world a better place, growing in love of self and others, and showing it.
In my opinion, that’s the way to grow faith in Paul’s “unknown” God.
