Sent this letter to a number of people today
Dear Teacher,
My purpose for writing to you today is to seek counsel. I find myself now at a crossroad. The path that I have trod to reach this point is paved with the influences of many Christian and secular personalities from the past and present. Since childhood, I’ve been instilled with a deep respect for knowledge and a strong, orthodox faith in God. At previous crossroads I’ve somehow been able to carry both of these qualities with me. The paths before me now appear to require my devaluation of one or the other. By seeking your help, my hope is that ultimately this will not be the case. In this letter I will describe how, with the expansion of knowledge, many of the traditional characteristics associated with God have begun to lose their validity, leaving me with a virtually content-less concept of God. These characteristics are almightiness, prayer, and relationship.
Almightiness
Almightiness is traditionally understood by the church in terms of omniscience and omnipotence. When we define God’s nature in terms of being omniscient, some difficult issues arise. The Bible portrays God as acting in ways that violate both our knowledge and our sensibilities today. If an all knowing God had really made many of the assumptions that the Bible makes, then this God would be revealed as hopelessly ignorant. For many biblical assumptions are today dismissed as quite simply wrong.
Sickness, for example, does not appear to result from sin being punished. Nor does a cure seem to result from our prayers for God’s intervention or from the sense that we have been sufficiently chastised so that the punishment of our sickness might cease. Today we deal with viruses, bacteria, leukemia, and tumors. God appears in our time to have little or nothing to do with either our sickness or our cures. In our generation we attack viruses, germs, leukemia, and tumors not with appeals to God, but with drugs, chemotherapy, and surgery. To appeal only to the power of God would be regarded as naïve in the world that we inhabit. This is just one of the changes in the perception of reality that separates our world from the world in which the Bible was written. Epilepsy and mental illness also are no longer understood to result from demon possession, even though Jesus was portrayed in the Bible as believing that they did. No doctor would treat an epileptic child today by ordering a demon out of him or her in the name of God. Religious people defend these beliefs by saying that God expects us today to use our brains and the new knowledge that is available to us. But it is the very newness of that knowledge that the church has resisted, fought against, and condemned through the centuries. Christian leaders have opposed almost every medical breakthrough as a diminishment of God’s power or as an attack on the divine capacity to control life by being able to punish sin with sickness.
Timothy Dwight, a Presbyterian divine and the president of Yale University from 1795 to 1817, was one of the acknowledged religious and intellectual leaders in the United States in his era. He preached passionately against the newly developing medical invention called vaccination. “If God had decreed from all eternity, that a certain person should die of smallpox, it would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul that decree by the trick of vaccination.”
What is true in the areas of human disease is equally true in our understanding of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and drought Today we predict and chart these occurrences with remarkable efficiency and with absolutely no reference to God whatsoever. God no longer seems to be responsible for these disasters, nor is His power invoked to bring them to an end. If God is not deemed capable of stopping these phenomena, then what does the word almighty mean when it is applied to God. Can a God who is no longer capable of acting in this world in either of these traditional ways be more than a shadow of what God is thought to be? Could anyone worship a God dismissed as impotent?
By attributing omnipotence to God, one also attributes to God the power to remedy any wrong or to prevent any disaster. Yet wrongs and disasters continue to be a part of life. To attribute to God omnipotent power in our world is thus logically to assert that the God who possesses this power must have chosen not to use it. The only real alternatives to this conclusion are found in asserting that God is limited, uncaring, malevolent, or nonexistent. None of these alternatives are very satisfactory. Archibald MacLeish said it best. “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God!”
To illustrate this point, the Bible suggests that God had the ability to rain bread from heaven upon the favored people to save them from starvation in the wilderness. But there appears to be no such divine rescue of starving people in our time; at least no heavenly bread falls upon them. In our generation starving people in Somalia, Rwanda, and in the sub-Sahara region of the world simply die, unless human relief operations are mounted.
God is also portrayed as having had the power to split the Red Sea to allow the chosen ones to walk through on dry land and as stopping the sun in the sky to allow the people of Israel more time to achieve a military victory over the Amorites. But then he also closed the Red Sea just in time to drown the hated Egyptians and that sun was finally allowed to set as soon as the slaughter of the wicked Amorites was complete. What kind of almighty power is this? Is it even ethical? Is one capable of worshiping a God who appears to embody the worst of our human political hatreds?
Prayer
“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams; with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
Micah. 6:6-7
“That night my husband and I did not sleep at all. We wept and wept. Privately we each pleaded with the universe to make the follow-up sonogram come out normal. We offered up our own body parts in exchange--eyes, arms, feet. The universe was deaf. The next day a doctor in a nearby university hospital concurred with the preliminary diagnosis of clubfoot, subtle though the evidence was.”
Natalie Angier, Ultrasound and Fury: One Mothers Ordeal New York Times, Tuesday, November 26th, 1996
These two episodes reveal what has happened to prayer as human beings have moved from a pre-modern world into a postmodern world. In Micah God was a being to whom sacrifices and prayers could be offered in the expectation that God would change the course of history. In the Times article God had become identified with the impersonal universe, which was deaf to the pleas and the offerings of the petitioner.
I have always wanted to be a person of prayer. I have yearned to have that sense of immediate contact with God. Yet for longer than I am willing to admit, even to myself, prayers addressed to God have had little or no meaning for me. My first presumption was that this represented the lack of some essential aspect in my own spiritual development and that all I needed to do was to work harder and harder to overcome this deficiency. So, like Jacob, I have wrestled with this angel, the meaning of prayer, for a long time, and I am not willing even yet to let it go until it has blessed me.
Not only have I created a prayer corner, as many books on prayer suggest, I’ve also gone so far as to paint a cross on my watch face so that every time I glanced to establish the time of day I would be reminded to send a prayer darting heavenward to keep me connected with God. My great ambition was to be one who lived in a significant awareness of the divine and could thus know the peace that comes from communing with God. I really did believe that discipline and perseverance would lead me to these goals. The Church encouraged that ambition with its talk about the centrality of prayer in the life of God’s people. Yet despite this persistent effort I have not been able to make prayer have meaning for me. Worse still, I now find myself calling into question the morality of prayer.
I once knew a woman who was diagnosed with cancer that was in all probability going to be fatal. Because she was well known in the community, the news became public almost immediately. The religious resources of her community and her friends were quickly mobilized. Prayer groups throughout the area added her to their special intentions. Her name was spoken regularly during the sharing of concerns during worship in multiple churches. Concern, caring, and love were communicated to both her and her family by those actions, and the family received that caring with deep appreciation. Remission did appear to have been achieved, and she lived for 6 and a half years from diagnosis to death. That was beyond anything that the doctors had believed was possible. As this realization of a prolonged remission began to dawn, the people who were most concerned and whose prayers were the most intense began to take credit for her longevity. “Our prayers are working,” they claimed. “God is using out prayers to keep this malevolent disease at bay.” Perhaps there was present still the assumption that this sickness was the work of the devil and that this evil work was being thwarted by he power of God loosed through the prayers of God’s people.
I cannot help but be troubled by this explanation. Suppose someone who isn’t well known in the community had received the same diagnosis. Because they are not a high-profile person, well connected to a large network of people, socially prominent, or covered by the press, the sickness of this person never comes to public attention. Suppose they are not a religiously oriented person and thus prayer groups and individual petitions in lots of churches are not offered on their behalf. Would that affect the course of their sickness? Would they live less time from diagnosis to death, endure more obvious pain, or face a more difficult dying? If so, would that not be to attribute to God a value system shaped by human importance and the worldly standards of social elitism?
Relationship
Lastly, and most importantly to me, is the idea of having a relationship with God. The crux of the Christian faith seems to rely on this concept. The entire redemption story came to pass because of God’s desire to have a relationship with His human creation. But what does it mean to have a relationship with God today? God has sometimes been described to me in such terms as “my best friend,“ and “my heavenly Father.“ But if I ask how to live out this relationship, the typical answer given usually includes the following: go to church, read the Bible, pray, and do good works. Certainly it can be said that each of these things can be a positive influence in a persons life. Yet, I find them to be remarkably different than a description of any other relationship with a best friend or a father.
When I consider what characterizes my closest friendships, I think about the experiences that I’ve shared with my closest friends. If these relationships were similar to ones relationship with God, I would expect that my experiences would include the following:
1) Visiting a house in which many objects are present that represent my friend in various ways and in which conversation generally revolves around my friend
2) Reading a collection of literature written by people who have been in some way inspired by this friend to write as if speaking for this friend
3) Speak directly to this friend without this friend ever speaking directly back
4) Do good things for people because this friend would approve of such actions.
In reality, these are not at all what my relationships with my close friends are like. Instead of visiting a house full of representations of my friends, I visit my friend’s house and spend time with them. They open the door and we greet each other with a smile and embrace. We sit down, drink tea, and discuss things relevant to our lives, be it politics, religion, family events, future plans, our hopes, or our fears. When we both feel so inclined, we might get together with other close friends and go out to dinner, play a game, or even take a vacation. We celebrate our triumphs and we suffer through our failures with each other. We laugh together, we cry together, and we love together. While I might read things about my close friend, I also find myself reading things from my friend to me, as well as things written by my friend’s own hand. If nothing to read is available, I can often simply talk to my friend and my friend will talk to me. This two-way, direct communication seems to be a much more fulfilling endeavor, than speaking to an invisible mute. Also, while doing nice things for people that my friend approves of probably has its merits, would it not be better still, if that goodness was the result of my own virtue, rather than merely an attempt to win favor from my friend?
So how then, can we believe that we have a personal relationship with God when our relationship doesn’t resemble that of any other personal relationship that we have? Relationship with God seems to be more like my relationship with the sun. If it weren’t for the sun, then life on earth would be virtually impossible. The climate would be cold, and lack the light and oxygen needed to sustain life. However, as important as the sun is, our relationship to it can only be described in impersonal terms. The case seems to be the same with a relationship with God who is the source of all life.
At this point, it seems that if I could just cease being a believer than all my problems with my faith would disappear. But I cannot cease believing. God is too real for me. But I also cannot resign from the modern world or close my mind to its insights. I cannot park my brain at the door of the church in order to accept as real the words that are used to interpret God in years past but seem no longer to be able to increase my understanding of God. I can only continue to be a believer if I am able to be an honest believer. I want to be a person of faith, not a person drugged on the narcotic of religion. I am not able to endure the mental lobotomy that one suspects is the fate of those who project themselves as the unquestioning religious citizen of our age. I do not want to be among those who fear that if we think about what we say about God, either our minds will close down or our faith will explode. I am not drawn to those increasingly defensive religious answers of our generation. Nor am I willing to pretend that ancient words still have power and meaning if they do not. So while claiming to be a believer, and still asserting my deeply held commitment to Jesus as Lord, I also recognize that I live in a state of exile from the presuppositions of my own religious past and am left with a nearly content-less conception of God.
If you have any thoughts or counsel that may be useful to me at this point in my journey, I’d be most appreciative of your response.
Sincerely,
Kyle Littlefield
My purpose for writing to you today is to seek counsel. I find myself now at a crossroad. The path that I have trod to reach this point is paved with the influences of many Christian and secular personalities from the past and present. Since childhood, I’ve been instilled with a deep respect for knowledge and a strong, orthodox faith in God. At previous crossroads I’ve somehow been able to carry both of these qualities with me. The paths before me now appear to require my devaluation of one or the other. By seeking your help, my hope is that ultimately this will not be the case. In this letter I will describe how, with the expansion of knowledge, many of the traditional characteristics associated with God have begun to lose their validity, leaving me with a virtually content-less concept of God. These characteristics are almightiness, prayer, and relationship.
Almightiness
Almightiness is traditionally understood by the church in terms of omniscience and omnipotence. When we define God’s nature in terms of being omniscient, some difficult issues arise. The Bible portrays God as acting in ways that violate both our knowledge and our sensibilities today. If an all knowing God had really made many of the assumptions that the Bible makes, then this God would be revealed as hopelessly ignorant. For many biblical assumptions are today dismissed as quite simply wrong.
Sickness, for example, does not appear to result from sin being punished. Nor does a cure seem to result from our prayers for God’s intervention or from the sense that we have been sufficiently chastised so that the punishment of our sickness might cease. Today we deal with viruses, bacteria, leukemia, and tumors. God appears in our time to have little or nothing to do with either our sickness or our cures. In our generation we attack viruses, germs, leukemia, and tumors not with appeals to God, but with drugs, chemotherapy, and surgery. To appeal only to the power of God would be regarded as naïve in the world that we inhabit. This is just one of the changes in the perception of reality that separates our world from the world in which the Bible was written. Epilepsy and mental illness also are no longer understood to result from demon possession, even though Jesus was portrayed in the Bible as believing that they did. No doctor would treat an epileptic child today by ordering a demon out of him or her in the name of God. Religious people defend these beliefs by saying that God expects us today to use our brains and the new knowledge that is available to us. But it is the very newness of that knowledge that the church has resisted, fought against, and condemned through the centuries. Christian leaders have opposed almost every medical breakthrough as a diminishment of God’s power or as an attack on the divine capacity to control life by being able to punish sin with sickness.
Timothy Dwight, a Presbyterian divine and the president of Yale University from 1795 to 1817, was one of the acknowledged religious and intellectual leaders in the United States in his era. He preached passionately against the newly developing medical invention called vaccination. “If God had decreed from all eternity, that a certain person should die of smallpox, it would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul that decree by the trick of vaccination.”
What is true in the areas of human disease is equally true in our understanding of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and drought Today we predict and chart these occurrences with remarkable efficiency and with absolutely no reference to God whatsoever. God no longer seems to be responsible for these disasters, nor is His power invoked to bring them to an end. If God is not deemed capable of stopping these phenomena, then what does the word almighty mean when it is applied to God. Can a God who is no longer capable of acting in this world in either of these traditional ways be more than a shadow of what God is thought to be? Could anyone worship a God dismissed as impotent?
By attributing omnipotence to God, one also attributes to God the power to remedy any wrong or to prevent any disaster. Yet wrongs and disasters continue to be a part of life. To attribute to God omnipotent power in our world is thus logically to assert that the God who possesses this power must have chosen not to use it. The only real alternatives to this conclusion are found in asserting that God is limited, uncaring, malevolent, or nonexistent. None of these alternatives are very satisfactory. Archibald MacLeish said it best. “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God!”
To illustrate this point, the Bible suggests that God had the ability to rain bread from heaven upon the favored people to save them from starvation in the wilderness. But there appears to be no such divine rescue of starving people in our time; at least no heavenly bread falls upon them. In our generation starving people in Somalia, Rwanda, and in the sub-Sahara region of the world simply die, unless human relief operations are mounted.
God is also portrayed as having had the power to split the Red Sea to allow the chosen ones to walk through on dry land and as stopping the sun in the sky to allow the people of Israel more time to achieve a military victory over the Amorites. But then he also closed the Red Sea just in time to drown the hated Egyptians and that sun was finally allowed to set as soon as the slaughter of the wicked Amorites was complete. What kind of almighty power is this? Is it even ethical? Is one capable of worshiping a God who appears to embody the worst of our human political hatreds?
Prayer
“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams; with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
Micah. 6:6-7
“That night my husband and I did not sleep at all. We wept and wept. Privately we each pleaded with the universe to make the follow-up sonogram come out normal. We offered up our own body parts in exchange--eyes, arms, feet. The universe was deaf. The next day a doctor in a nearby university hospital concurred with the preliminary diagnosis of clubfoot, subtle though the evidence was.”
Natalie Angier, Ultrasound and Fury: One Mothers Ordeal New York Times, Tuesday, November 26th, 1996
These two episodes reveal what has happened to prayer as human beings have moved from a pre-modern world into a postmodern world. In Micah God was a being to whom sacrifices and prayers could be offered in the expectation that God would change the course of history. In the Times article God had become identified with the impersonal universe, which was deaf to the pleas and the offerings of the petitioner.
I have always wanted to be a person of prayer. I have yearned to have that sense of immediate contact with God. Yet for longer than I am willing to admit, even to myself, prayers addressed to God have had little or no meaning for me. My first presumption was that this represented the lack of some essential aspect in my own spiritual development and that all I needed to do was to work harder and harder to overcome this deficiency. So, like Jacob, I have wrestled with this angel, the meaning of prayer, for a long time, and I am not willing even yet to let it go until it has blessed me.
Not only have I created a prayer corner, as many books on prayer suggest, I’ve also gone so far as to paint a cross on my watch face so that every time I glanced to establish the time of day I would be reminded to send a prayer darting heavenward to keep me connected with God. My great ambition was to be one who lived in a significant awareness of the divine and could thus know the peace that comes from communing with God. I really did believe that discipline and perseverance would lead me to these goals. The Church encouraged that ambition with its talk about the centrality of prayer in the life of God’s people. Yet despite this persistent effort I have not been able to make prayer have meaning for me. Worse still, I now find myself calling into question the morality of prayer.
I once knew a woman who was diagnosed with cancer that was in all probability going to be fatal. Because she was well known in the community, the news became public almost immediately. The religious resources of her community and her friends were quickly mobilized. Prayer groups throughout the area added her to their special intentions. Her name was spoken regularly during the sharing of concerns during worship in multiple churches. Concern, caring, and love were communicated to both her and her family by those actions, and the family received that caring with deep appreciation. Remission did appear to have been achieved, and she lived for 6 and a half years from diagnosis to death. That was beyond anything that the doctors had believed was possible. As this realization of a prolonged remission began to dawn, the people who were most concerned and whose prayers were the most intense began to take credit for her longevity. “Our prayers are working,” they claimed. “God is using out prayers to keep this malevolent disease at bay.” Perhaps there was present still the assumption that this sickness was the work of the devil and that this evil work was being thwarted by he power of God loosed through the prayers of God’s people.
I cannot help but be troubled by this explanation. Suppose someone who isn’t well known in the community had received the same diagnosis. Because they are not a high-profile person, well connected to a large network of people, socially prominent, or covered by the press, the sickness of this person never comes to public attention. Suppose they are not a religiously oriented person and thus prayer groups and individual petitions in lots of churches are not offered on their behalf. Would that affect the course of their sickness? Would they live less time from diagnosis to death, endure more obvious pain, or face a more difficult dying? If so, would that not be to attribute to God a value system shaped by human importance and the worldly standards of social elitism?
Relationship
Lastly, and most importantly to me, is the idea of having a relationship with God. The crux of the Christian faith seems to rely on this concept. The entire redemption story came to pass because of God’s desire to have a relationship with His human creation. But what does it mean to have a relationship with God today? God has sometimes been described to me in such terms as “my best friend,“ and “my heavenly Father.“ But if I ask how to live out this relationship, the typical answer given usually includes the following: go to church, read the Bible, pray, and do good works. Certainly it can be said that each of these things can be a positive influence in a persons life. Yet, I find them to be remarkably different than a description of any other relationship with a best friend or a father.
When I consider what characterizes my closest friendships, I think about the experiences that I’ve shared with my closest friends. If these relationships were similar to ones relationship with God, I would expect that my experiences would include the following:
1) Visiting a house in which many objects are present that represent my friend in various ways and in which conversation generally revolves around my friend
2) Reading a collection of literature written by people who have been in some way inspired by this friend to write as if speaking for this friend
3) Speak directly to this friend without this friend ever speaking directly back
4) Do good things for people because this friend would approve of such actions.
In reality, these are not at all what my relationships with my close friends are like. Instead of visiting a house full of representations of my friends, I visit my friend’s house and spend time with them. They open the door and we greet each other with a smile and embrace. We sit down, drink tea, and discuss things relevant to our lives, be it politics, religion, family events, future plans, our hopes, or our fears. When we both feel so inclined, we might get together with other close friends and go out to dinner, play a game, or even take a vacation. We celebrate our triumphs and we suffer through our failures with each other. We laugh together, we cry together, and we love together. While I might read things about my close friend, I also find myself reading things from my friend to me, as well as things written by my friend’s own hand. If nothing to read is available, I can often simply talk to my friend and my friend will talk to me. This two-way, direct communication seems to be a much more fulfilling endeavor, than speaking to an invisible mute. Also, while doing nice things for people that my friend approves of probably has its merits, would it not be better still, if that goodness was the result of my own virtue, rather than merely an attempt to win favor from my friend?
So how then, can we believe that we have a personal relationship with God when our relationship doesn’t resemble that of any other personal relationship that we have? Relationship with God seems to be more like my relationship with the sun. If it weren’t for the sun, then life on earth would be virtually impossible. The climate would be cold, and lack the light and oxygen needed to sustain life. However, as important as the sun is, our relationship to it can only be described in impersonal terms. The case seems to be the same with a relationship with God who is the source of all life.
At this point, it seems that if I could just cease being a believer than all my problems with my faith would disappear. But I cannot cease believing. God is too real for me. But I also cannot resign from the modern world or close my mind to its insights. I cannot park my brain at the door of the church in order to accept as real the words that are used to interpret God in years past but seem no longer to be able to increase my understanding of God. I can only continue to be a believer if I am able to be an honest believer. I want to be a person of faith, not a person drugged on the narcotic of religion. I am not able to endure the mental lobotomy that one suspects is the fate of those who project themselves as the unquestioning religious citizen of our age. I do not want to be among those who fear that if we think about what we say about God, either our minds will close down or our faith will explode. I am not drawn to those increasingly defensive religious answers of our generation. Nor am I willing to pretend that ancient words still have power and meaning if they do not. So while claiming to be a believer, and still asserting my deeply held commitment to Jesus as Lord, I also recognize that I live in a state of exile from the presuppositions of my own religious past and am left with a nearly content-less conception of God.
If you have any thoughts or counsel that may be useful to me at this point in my journey, I’d be most appreciative of your response.
Sincerely,
Kyle Littlefield