Awakening in the News:
The News-Leader writes about our Bible Belt alternative...
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by Phil Snider
 

Andrew Johnson’s insightful article (Feb. 23) raises some of the most critical questions theologians have wrestled with for centuries.  I know that if my faith demands paying allegiance to a deity who arbitrarily decides who lives and who dies in the wake of terrible tragedies like tornadoes and plane crashes, then I want nothing to do with such a God.

Following the 2004 tsunami that destroyed the lives and property of hundreds of thousands in south Asia, philosophy of religion professor John Caputo published a book titled The Weakness of God, which went on to win the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence.

In the preface, Caputo reflected on the theological response offered in the tsunami’s wake:  “Many religious leaders have been rushing to the nearest microphone or camera to explain that, while these are all innocent victims, we cannot hope to explain the mystery of God’s ways—implying that this natural disaster is something God foresaw but for deeper reasons known only in the divine mind chose not to forestall.  Tell that to the father who lost his grip on his three-year-old daughter and watched in horror as she was carried out to sea.” 

For Caputo, those are blasphemous images of God, “clear examples of the bankruptcy of thinking of God as a force (which intervenes upon natural processes) depending upon what suits the divine plan.”

While both the Bible and the Christian tradition offer several perspectives regarding the character, nature and power of God, it’s important to note that the idea of a remote God who pulls all of the strings—making us mere puppets—is just one of many conceptions that have developed over time. This is not the perspective shared by most seminary professors today, and it hasn’t been for several hundred years.  But because it’s the most popular conception in the public eye, it’s the easiest straw man to take down.  Contemporary authors known as the “new atheists” (Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc.) have made a nice living doing so.

But as the prominent 20^th century theologian Paul Tillich once said, “For many centuries the leading theologians and philosophers were almost equally divided between those who attacked and those who defended the arguments for the existence of God.  Neither group prevailed over the other in a final way.  This situation admits only one explanation:  the one group did not attack what the other group defended.  They were not divided by a conflict over the same matter.” 

I don’t know whether or not Andrew Johnson believes in God.  Personally, it is none of my business.  In his article, he didn’t disavow God entirely, but rather disavowed a certain conception of God.  And I’m more than happy to concede the point, for it’s a conception I hardly wish to defend.

But suppose it is possible to join with theologians and philosophers throughout the ages by re-imagining the way God uses power.  Suppose we were able to forget for a minute all of the things we think we’re supposed to believe about God, especially in the face of tragic situations, and reconsider the way God’s power was present in and through the tragic death of Jesus – a power revealed not in terms of force or coercion, but rather in compassion and love.

“When we think of God,” Douglas John Hall asks, “do we think the last word in sheer might, authority, supremacy, potency?  Or do we think compassion, mercy, grace—agape?” 

“Suppose the name of God,” Caputo asks, “is not identified with timeless infinite power, but with the powerless who suffer the ravages of time?  Suppose we think of God not so much in terms of everything that we desire, but in terms of everything that desires us, that summons what is best in us, to live by loving, unconditionally? Suppose, then, in short, and contrary to (most of our expectations), the name of God…is at best a ‘weak force’, and that the ‘weakness of God’ is, nonetheless, the only thing that is strong enough to save us, which is why we even want to save this name?”

St. Paul wrote that God’s “power is made perfect in weakness,” but this isn’t the kind of God we hear about in most Bible Belt pulpits and pews.  Yet it is the kind of God in which I place my faith, which is to say my trust.