V. THE NATURE OF GOD: Part Three

So What? What Difference Does Acceptance or Rejection of These Beliefs Make?

And so we move on to the final point: So what? are there any practical, reproducible consequences to be drawn and, if so, what might they be? Here, again, I turn to what I know/don’t know and what I choose/wish to believe, and to my own experience over the years and now.

Despite the degree to which I have “tip-toed” through the ambivalence I feel and around my questioning mind—which, if I am to be honest, I must acknowledge—it should also be clear from what I have said here and in previous posts that there have been times in my life when I have felt a sense of “connection” to something larger than myself and have drawn from them strength, resolve, exhilaration, peace . . . depending upon the situation. While these have not been for me daily experiences—as many would devoutly acknowledge and describe—or even regular and predictable ones, all of them have been important. But let me speak briefly to one category among many.

There have always been in the world those disintegrating forces—personal, social, political, religious—that threaten to tear us apart, but it seems to me, as I reflect back over the eight-and-a-half decades of my life, that this is truer now than at any time in my memory. They are within me and beyond me and, while it doesn’t happen every day or even every year, I deeply need “on call” those interior resources that can help me gather the split and fragmented portions of my self—that can help me hang together when life threatens to go to pieces.

I have done that at points in my life.  I have been so close—most recently in confronting the deaths of both of my daughters in just over two months—that I don’t understand yet why I didn’t fall apart and, I suspect, many others have, too. Some would speak of memories, some about prayer, some about hope, some about the support of friends, some about divine intervention. I have not been able to say from where such reserves have come, other than from deep within myself. At my best moments, however, even though I cannot know, I have leaned evermore toward belief that at the inner precincts of my being there is a connection to a Ground of Being, to The Great Mystery. More to come about that before this post is concluded.

There is more that can and, perhaps, should be said about the “So what?” issue, especially from the point of view of devout believers who have either passed by  or found their own way through the moral and existential dilemmas I referenced earlier. But I will leave that for another day and begin the process of concluding these World View blogs pretty much where I began. My humanism springs from the fact that I am a human person and I have no place else to begin.  I stand by that, but I have also defined it as “reverent” and so it makes sense to me to begin with personhood at its best.  Whatever else Jesus was, he was a man—a person—and by beginning with him, I contend, one begins with humanity at its best and, as I have intimated, in Jesus we have surely touched “a near side” of the Great Mystery.

I am perfectly comfortable with the fact that there are many religions that offer acceptable “codes” to live by and have had admirable founders and practitioners, and I am equally accepting of those who choose to turn to Ramakrishna, Siddharta Gautama (or Buddha), Moses, or Muhammed. That said, my own background and experiences were immersed in Christianity and so it is in the life and basic teachings of Jesus that I find a frame of reference—a “model,” if you will—for building upon my own sense of a connection with a Divine Being and for confronting the world.

There is a good deal that could be said to “unpack” that phrase, “the life and basic teachings of Jesus.” The Synoptic Gospels, the first three—to say nothing about the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel According to John—do not always agree about what Jesus said and did, and there are some of his sayings and deeds that can be troublesome to me, as well as to others. So trying to find a legitimate and satisfying “core” of his life and teachings is a task to which a number of scholars have devoted their efforts. Perhaps the best known and most active group was known as The Jesus Seminar, which involved a foundational “membership” of some 50 to 75 scholars whose work spanned a period of 6 years, from 1985-2001, and also included a total of around 200 scholars and laypersons who participated “off and on.” It was an enterprise more complicated and lengthy than I will even attempt fully to address here. While I appreciate their qualifications and careful work, their conclusions about the legitimate sayings of Jesus were more sparse than were satisfying to me.

That said, I do want to acknowledge the reality and importance of such scholarly work and I credit the fact that most scholars agree that nothing was likely written about the deeds and saying of Jesus during his lifetime. Furthermore, much of what was eventually written passed through many years of oral tradition—a common and treasured process in a time when many, perhaps most, people did not read or write. The eventual progression of oral to written accounts produced some early documents which we do not have. While I do not claim the training and expertise of biblical scholars, I do—legitimately, I think—search for what I regard as the legitimate deeds and teaching of Jesus, and as I have said, human relationships are, in my judgment, central in that “core.” It is not, therefore, primarily theological arguments or doctrinal assertions that I find most meaningful in Jesus’ life and teachings, but those practical, reproducible behaviors that value human personality and human relationships above all else in this world.

Coming now, finally, closer to the end of this post, I would say that anyone who has read these World View posts—or most anything else I’ve written, for that matter—must be aware of my decades long struggle to come to some satisfying conclusion about the existence of a Divine Being, my own possible connection with such a Being, and how that fits with my more secure belief that in the life and teachings of Jesus we can touch a “near side” of this Being, if, indeed, one does exist. That internal battle has, of course, been at high tide as I’ve tried to compose honestly these final posts of my World View, which have focused directly on the Great Mystery.

As “fate” would have it, my wife and I were sitting on our deck a few evenings ago, enjoying the faint autumn breeze and the “green screen” that surrounds our back yard, having what we call an “Old Fort conversation,” which we do from time to time. The name, by the way, reflects an instance decades ago when, driving back from a visit with her parents in Elkin, NC, we were in the middle of a seriously heavy conversation as we were driving the steep highway up Old Fort mountain to Asheville. And the name stuck, appropriately, because this recent conversation was precisely about my struggles with the existence and my possible connection with this Divine Being which I’ve been writing about at irritating length, no doubt, and meticulous detail.

To the point, then, my wife observed that her own experience of a connection with God originates with her, not with God. For her it was a simple statement of her own encounter. The initiative is always hers—she “speaks” to God, she is aware of a presence, she finds comfort or challenge in the experience. She approaches God, not the other way around, and for her, all of the “sticky” issues surrounding the nature of God, which I have laid out ad nauseum, no doubt, belong in the category of “Mystery,” not to be known in this life. It’s not that I had never heard of such a resolution to the “sticky” issues, but her approach to a relationship with God suddenly resonated with me and, to be honest, it was like “a light went on in my head!”

To make that conversation even more timely and almost unbelievably fortuitous, the next morning I was continuing my daily reading of my doctoral dissertation, “The Christian Apologetic of Harry Emerson Fosdick”—which I had not read since I wrote and submitted it in 1967!—and this is what I said about Fosdick on pp. 184-85, picking up where I had left off the previous day:

“For him, the facts—the essentials of Christian faith—are enshrined in the basic spiritual experiences of man. . . . . He believes that the divine presence and power are apprehended intuitively within the self. He moved from there to say that one must affirm the objective reality of a creator . . . in order to explain the experience, but one begins with the inner reality and moves outward toward God, not vice versa.”

And as I read on, this quotation appeared from Fosdick himself, written in 1926:

“The place where man vitally finds God, deals with God, discovers the qualities of God, and learns to think religiously about God is not primarily among the stars but within his own experience of goodness, truth, and beauty, and the truest images of God are therefore to be found in man’s spiritual life.” (from Adventurous Religion and Other Essays, pp. 72-73, emphasis mine).

 And the light that went on the night before, simply grew brighter, and this, I believe, is where I now stand!

Finally, although I touched on this in the previous post, I want to reference a story and a particular verse—not from the gospels but, in of all places, Isaiah, in the Old Testament. It’s an account of Cyrus, who was the King of Persia, from 559-530 BC. Among his conquests was the capture of Babylon, which gave him not only Mesopotamia, but also Syria and Palestine. This gave him the opportunity to free the Jewish captives to return to their homeland, which he chose to do, although he knew little or nothing about Israel’s God, and to whom he acknowledged no relationship or obligation.  The KJV of Isaiah 45:5 pictures God as saying, “I girded thee, though thou hast not known me,” or in Moffatt’s translation, “You know me not, but I delight in you.” Cyrus is a symbol for me of some people with honorable, purposive lives who are deeply and faithfully committed to serving others, to elevating the character of the world around them, but who adhere to no religion and do not recognize a Supreme Being at all. They, too, can represent the best of persons and human relationships. Jesus might estimate some of them higher than some nominal believers who have never been disturbed enough about human misery to be troubled in their faith.

Now I need to ask whether we can make the huge assumption, upon which the Cyrus account depends, that a Divine Being exists that pays some attention to persons in this world—who we are, how we live, to what we are committed, etc.  If such an astounding  being exists, the God I would choose to believe in likes those people  described above, for whom Cyrus is a symbol, and is a good deal more tolerant of variant life styles, of “heresy,” and disbelief than are many believers. Which is consistent with the bottom line of the God I encounter in my own way and to whom I may try to speak from time to time: One who is known at the core of our own spiritual experience and is served in a broad spectrum of human relationships, as well as through our interactions with the natural world around us.

CONCLUSION

The effort to understand, to conceptualize, to make sense is not optional for me nor, I think, for humankind. While not everyone goes about it the same way nor—gratefully, I suspect—in as much detail as I have done, I believe it is that, above all, that makes persons what we are: human. I have spoken of my own world view in highly personal terms, with the recognition that some of what I have said, particularly in these last two posts, will probably be offensive to some, disturbing to others, and saddening, perhaps, to several. While I apologize for that, I have simply tried to be open and honest. I believe that we have world views—even when we have not carefully thought them through—not because they help us in specific, practical ways, although sometimes they do. Wehave them because we can’t help it, because the urge to understand, to make sense of our experience, is existentially who we are. And we will continue to do so as long as we can, because it isn’t over until it’s over!

As noted once before, but bears repeating, Loren Eiseley put it this way:

We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. . . . We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.” (from The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature, p. 53)

And so I conclude on the same note as I began: even world view is experientially translatable—in other words, to “live it” as well as write or talk about it!. Our world view is our “myth-system” and to fail to grasp that—at least in our guts and, preferably, in our heads as well—is to run past our perception of our self-identity: our awareness of who we are, how we know, and what we choose to believe and to behave in relation to persons, nature, and what I have chosen to call The Great Mystery.

Grace and peace to all who have taken the time to visit this site and read what I have written!