Testing the Limits of A-theism

             Someone told me recently that if I start rejecting bits and pieces of God’s Word (the Bible), for whatever reason, the whole foundation for answering any of my questions crumbles. The sentiment totally makes sense to me because it is, after all, the reason why I never thought to give my questions a voice from the time I was a little kid. I’m sure most people know someone who’s been brought up in a devout Christian faith, but once that person grew matured and started doubting any one piece of the structure, the whole foundation for his or her faith crumbled to the ground.

The thought of my faith crumbling to the ground terrified me so much that whenever I had a fleeting doubt, I’d shove it away as if I were trying to keep a wild animal out of my cabin in the big bad woods. This reaction worked for a long time. It was my defense mechanism to keep my faith safe and alive. As long as I could control my environment and stop cold the velocity and ferocity at which my doubts came, I was safe within this structure of my beliefs. If my doubts started biting and scratching away the structure, I’d rebuild it stronger and more rigid than it was before. And so, in that way, my faith became a faith that needed to be defended rather than lived out. Because a faith like the one I had needed to be defended in order to be kept alive.

Much of Christianity today is like that, isn’t it? I hear day after day, on the news, on the Christian radio stations, and wherever else that Christianity is under attack from every which way. “In God We Trust” is being considered to be taken off our currency. “Under God” has been taken out of our nation’s Pledge of Allegiance. Christians cannot pray in school. Science is progressing in a way that rejects a 6-day created, 10,000-year-old earth. Do you hear what I’m saying? Christianity is under attack! And so I wonder, why is it that I feel like something as personal as my faith needs to be defended? Is it the bad guys out in the big bad woods who are forcing me to defend it, or is it the structure itself that begs to be defended? And if it’s the structure that begs to be defended, why then do I believe that God is in that structure and that it is therefore God who needs to be defended? And if God needs to be defended, why would I believe in a god so weak that I, a mere mortal, need to defend it?

I don’t think God needs to be defended.

I wonder if I do believe that God is supreme, can God can handle if I doubt God? Do my questions, my doubts, my wresting, compromise God? I’ve turned down what I had once believed is a dangerous path, because whenever I start rejecting bits and pieces of this structure, when I take out that piece and turn it over in my hand to examine and re-examine it, just the fact that I removed that piece to examine it made the whole foundation crumble to the ground. And so I wonder, is this structure really what Christianity is about? As I grow, do I sit in Sunday school, then in youth groups, then in church and learn exactly how each piece fits in this giant puzzle, this structure that I must defend?

Let’s call this structure “theology.”

So I’ve turned down this road of examining my theology. There’s no place I can find to turn around, nor do I want to, because this path is so alluring to me. Now that I am here, where do I stop? Is there a point at which I should again shove away my questions, because if I don’t, my theology will be destroyed? At this point I wonder how important my theology is for me. I think about how exhausting it has been to try to live within my theology, and how when something unexpected has happened to me, testing one piece of my theology, my faith has totally crumbled to the ground.

I’ve heard it said recently that Christians were the first anti-theists, meaning that the biggest thing that set Jesus apart from other leaders in his day was that he chipped away at the structure of theology. So, in a sense, Jesus could be said to be the first a-theist. Countless times in the NT writings, Jesus was asked pointed questions by the leaders of his day and he dodged the questions, often answering their questions with more questions, ultimately committing to no concrete answer at all. And so I wonder again, how important is theology to me? What’s interesting to me is that, biblically speaking, I should test God. I should wrestle. I think about the story of Jacob wresting with the angel. All night Jacob wrestled, and then at daybreak, what was important was not who won, but that Jacob wrested with God. How many times have I been given a structure, a theology, only to swallow it whole, not questioning it, not doubting it, not wresting with it.

I think about how many people’s faith would be destroyed if tomorrow scientist discovered definitive proof that the earth is 3.9 billion years old. I think about how many people’s faith would be totally destroyed if they started to question whether or not it was an actual, physical snake who spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Recently, Jeremy and I had dinner with some acquaintances of ours. We get together maybe once a year if we’re lucky. Now, this couple is Jewish and incredibly educated, so I often feel like a little black bird perched under an eagle with a fresh kill, hoping that the eagle will drop some of the morsels down to my level so that I may partake of the same meal. I’d already been questioning for quite some time what makes my theology so special by comparison to others. I’d already been questioning my elitism, and so when this Jewish man said that he didn’t believe that Jesus was the Christ, I became intrigued. He said that even Jews who believe that the messiah is still to come believe that the messiah will be fully human and not fully God, so the idea that Jesus (or Ben Joseph, meaning son of Joseph) was born of a virgin makes absolutely no sense. It sounds like some distorted combination of Greek Mythology and contemporary Jewish ethics and tradition.

 If I test this one piece of the structure, will the foundation for my beliefs crumble to the ground? Will I lose everything that I’ve worked so hard to establish? The answer to my question is overwhelmingly, “yes.”

So I wonder once again; how important is theology to me?