Secularism Envy?

Have you ever envied your totally secular friends?  The ones who don’t think or worry about God?  Who aren’t troubled by God?  Who are comfortable living in the world they can see and hear and touch and explain (if not now, someday)?  Those for whom “God” is a sociopolitical problem, cultural artifact, or distant memory from their childhood, nothing more?

I have.  In college, I studied philosophy and literature, not theology, because I wanted to be the kind of person who had nothing to do with God—an intellectual!  How could you be and intellectual and believe in God,  a holdover from a more primitive, less enlightened time?  When I went to the University of Chicago Divinity School to study history of religions with Mircea Eliade, I wanted to be like many of my classmates—interested in God only from the distancing vantage point of academia, not from within the standpoint of a faith community.  To be a person of faith meant you were not capable of true objectivity about your own religion or that of others.

Many times in my life I have wished I could just forget about God.  It’s nothing but trouble and embarrassment, being a person of faith  who is also a 21st century post-Enlightenment, post-Darwin, post-modern, post-post citizen. How can one defend oneself? There are no airtight proofs of God’s existence.  The reality and experience of God exceed the limits of reason.  The concepts we’ve inherited for talking about God, self, and world are woefully outmoded or just out of touch with the assumptions or worldviews of most people.  We often look like fools or are taken for fools. 

Here’s the burden or responsibility some of these fools bear:  finding ways to mediate between the wisdom of our faith and the best of contemporary culture’s rational understanding of the universe.  It’s a classic move among people of faith, faith seeking understanding. Origen, Philo, Augustine, Anselm,  Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn-Sina, Ibn-Rushd, Maimonides, Ibn-Ezra, Erasmus, Schleiermacher, Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan, and H. Richard Niebuhr practiced it.

It would be easier to ditch God and run with whatever current or perennial philosophy is hot.  I’ve tried.  I can’t do it.  I have to accept that I was born tuned to spirit.  Not everyone is.  That’s good, too.  And sometimes I wish I were like them.   But whether i like it or not, I’m one of those fools who dance to music some people can’t hear.  And that means I have to shoulder my part of the burden of finding new ways of practicing faith seeking understanding today. I’m often not sure how best to do that. Counter the fundamentalist attack on reason and science? Create new concepts and images for God that incorporate recent scientific understandings of matter and the universe?  Sidestep science with poetry?  Bracket God and focus on morality?  I’m still finding my way. What’s yours?