PSALM 14: 1-7
1 Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is no one who does good.
2 The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind
to see if there are any who are wise,
who seek after God.
3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;
there is no one who does good,
no, not one.
4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers
who eat up my people as they eat bread,
and do not call upon the Lord?
5 There they shall be in great terror,
for God is with the company of the righteous.
6 You would confound the plans of the poor,
but the Lord is their refuge.
7 O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!
When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,
Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad. †
Atheists Old & New
Atheists used to look like this:
These three guys have done more damage to the modern world than any three other nations combined. Typically, their names were mentioned only with dark expressions, for as thoroughgoing atheists, the American public always regarded them with great suspicion.
Today, atheism has grown respectable. The so-called New Atheists are best-selling authors on whirlwind speaking tours in universities, TED talks, and daytime talk shows. They are no longer overshadowed by the smoky cloud of incredulity for their spite of religious faith and all notions of the sacred. The tables have turned; atheists are now okay.
Good news about the New Atheists: they’re not saying anything new. They have no new arguments or new evidences to add to the atheisms of the past. There are no new revelations(if you will) that have sealed their position and no new scientific advances that have made their claims any more credible than the atheism of the iron age.
According to the Psalmist, all atheists are fools. To deny the reality of God is to be foolish. I still believe this, but foolish not in the sense of lacking intelligence or reason, but foolish for closing oneself off with the limitations of scientific knowledge alone. It seems atheists live in a closed system with known rules, and anything operating beyond these rules is to be discredited and/or disbelieved.
It may be helpful here to define our terms. Atheism is not a religion, though it may lead to certain ideologies. An atheist is simply a non-theist. They do not disbelieve in God; they simply do not—perhaps cannot—believe. Atheism, as popularly understood, includes agnosticism. Agnostics “do not know” about God, and may claim that God might be real, but cannot be known. The differences between atheist and agnostic are mostly hair-splitting. Most atheists don’t claim to disprove God’s existence—and that isn’t their job—but they say that based upon what they see, know, and understand, there is no God as others think.
“I don’t believe in God”
I suspect that most atheists were made, not born that way. My atheist friends, without exception, have stories of growing up in faith communities or religious families which so force-fed them Christian truths that they embraced atheism like prisoners liberated from cages. Like many other atheists in the western world, they felt they outgrew Christianity (or Judaism) and left it behind with Santa Claus and the awful and embarrassing things they wore in high school. Many—too many—carry this tone too far, speaking of their former faithfulness as an artifact of childhood or adolescence, and now that they have abandoned belief, they are “free,” “enlightened,” “woke,” or otherwise justified in acting smug toward people who love Jesus.
Even so, there is common ground to be found. All of us who believe have the same thoughts as atheists, by which I mean we all can think like atheists, if we try. We all have what can be call atheist thoughts. Acknowledging these raises our awareness of common ground with them and may help our dialogues.
Most atheists do not reject God (as I see it) because they have not seen God. They will admit as much. The “God” they reject is rarely, if ever, the same as our Lord God whom we love. They reject God’s representatives—the Church, evangelists, and well-meaning Christian friends or parents—moreso than God Himself.
They also quick to reject false versions of God—the “old man in the sky” with a long white beard, or the vindictive judge flinging thunderbolt—and they are right to do so! So are we—we, too, ought to be vigilant and quick in rejecting false versions of God.
Atheists reject all caricatures of God—strawman versions inflating negative characteristics and otherwise dumbing-down every theological definition in favor of and easy to criticize caricature. We too reject such caricatures.
Sometimes, atheists have no negative opinions about God, but they feel deep antipathy towards Christians and abhor the idea of conforming to the herd. They feel that saying no to the Christian throng makes them strong, or stout, or individualistic—all in a sense that increases their sense of esteem and/or personal empowerment.
All of these—by themselves or in combination—play a role in the atheist worldview. They may claim a lack of evidence for God’s existence, but seeing evidence is not the same as faith. And those who deny belief in God will certainly believe in something. There is no avoiding it; we are hardwired for belief of some kind. Without God, something else takes the place of God, be it the self, the natural world, the State, or some other preferred abstraction.
Much of our 21st century culture has abandoned traditional faith. things stand in the place of faith in America today? It’s not so much pagan gods as it is the artifacts of our progress: arts & entertainment, politics, a deep trust in the scientific method, technology, or following the Dodgers. Again, where faith is not real, a substitute must be found.
THREE CULTURES
Sociologist Philip Rieff has articulated three world cultures based upon society’s relationship with the sacred.
The First Culture is Paganism. In the history of humankind, there was a time when all was pagan. By pagan, we mean that humanity’s sense of the sacred was driven by the concern for one’s fate. Fate ruled, and the stories and myths developed as a way for people to come to terms with their fate. The gods were fungible; they could be invented and reinvented at will. The gods were invoked as a way to encounter and overcome fate. If one god didn’t work, you made another and tried again.
The pagan moral code was built upon taboos. A taboo was a property of the gods. You respect this or fear that because it belongs to one of the gods. Pagans (unlike modern neo-paganism) were very religious and the sense of the sacred overshadowed all of life. They lived and ordered their societies by a constant awareness of the sacred.
The Second Culture is Judeo-Christian. We know this culture very well, don’t we? Paganism came to its practical end with the Second Culture. The difference is that in the Second Culture, God self-reveals to humankind. God comes to Abram—not vice versa—and reveals Himself as the one, true God No more gods: no images, no names, and no attempts to control or remake God in one’s own image. We Christians believe that this process of God’s self-revelation culminated in the Incarnation of Christ. Jesus was and is the decisive and sufficient self-revelation of the one, true God.
The center of the Second Culture is faith. Faith is our response to God’s self-revelation. The Lord is God and we live under God, subject to His Word and will. The universe is His Creation and we live in response to His grace by serving His Lordship.
To come to faith means nothing more than acknowledging that Jesus is Lord, which is actually a lot. This remains the biblical worldview, and it is presently under attack by the Third Culture.
The Third Culture is based upon fiction. Rieff says the central motivation of the Third Culture is simply anti-Second Culture. There is no new truth or revelation to stand upon—just the rejection of the Second Culture truths and values.
There is no real truth, just the truths we choose for ourselves—the truths we make up—which is why fiction is the central motif.
Truth is an invention, reality is an invention, therefore you can’t say what is truth for me, and I get to determine what is truth for myself.
As such, humanity is divided up into a carnival of sub-communities, each committed to their own, self-made fictions and vying for empowerment and influence. This Third Culture spirit sees no difference between Christianity and paganism—they would say both are just made up as coping mechanisms—with neither having any legitimate truth claims. Third Culture superiority is based upon the debasement of the sacred. That’s right, the Third Culture has no sacred whatsoever, just competing, relative sacreds (fictions).
In the Third Culture, all faith and religion is like a great nerd battle between Star Wars fans and Trekkies.
For the Third Culture, God is dead. They disbelieve in God’s self-revelation and consider it the past, obsolete fiction of Jews and Christians. The only true god is Death, and death animates the arts, the sciences, and the popular consensus as the only absolute truth.
Without any notion of sacred (not even Death is sacred, though it comes close to functioning that way), there is no central morality. There is no absolute value or truth to stand at the core of society, which means the Third Culture—without God and without a unifying sense of the sacred—is based on chaos and will inevitably tend towards Chaos.
While atheism was condemned by pagans, Jews, and Christians alike, atheism fits very well into the Third Culture. Again, thank you so very much to Nietzche, Freud, and Marx.
The disturbing thing is that this Third Culture—gaining ground every year and ultimately intent upon eclipsing the culture of faith—offers no new foundations. Its foundation is an anti-foundation. It exists only by opposition to the past with nothing to offer in its place but atheism and chaos.
Our Christian witness IN AND TO the culture of death
Given that this is a growing worldview, we should ask how is it Christians are to behave and shape our witness in the decades ahead.
Now this entire Storming the Gates series has had a central theme—a punchline—that I have not explicitly named. The center addresses our witness to Christ in the midst of tension, turmoil, and division. We’ve seen how harmful it is to dumb-down issues to the merely-political level, and we have acknowledged again and again that is better to be useful than right. Our role in the world and God’s Kingdom is to endlessly display a reflection of the character of Christ and witness to His grace and goodness.
Our Christian response to the world, in all the cases we have explored, is the same. Behind every hot topic of this series, the core characteristic of our response is Kindness. It is kindness that ought to shape our attitude in the midst of every trial and tension. Kindness characterizes the best face for our witness, and we ought to take more care to be kind than to justify ourselves in being right.
Complete the following sentence:
I’d rather be right than __________.
We’d all rather be right than wrong, but put some other words in there and see if it still seems wise. Would you rather be right than faithful? Rather be right than loving? Would you rather be right than kind?
Maybe not on paper, but in the way we live do we put being right ahead of kindness, faithfulness, or love? Only at our own peril.
Come on—all of you in your marriages and families know that being right is not always the best course of action. It is often better to be wrong and have peace than to insist upon your own justifiable opinion. It works the same way in the world and for our Christian witness to the burgeoning Third Culture.
Christians: Be Kind.
Let us remember as we meet atheists and atheism that faith is a gift, not necessarily a choice of will or reason.
My heart breaks for my atheist friends. I see the Lord—I know the Lord!—and I see my atheist friends as people wearing blindfolds. I want so badly to yank that blindfold off, but I can’t; it doesn’t work that way. Neither can they remove the blindfold themselves. You and I can take no credit whatsoever for our faith—we did not choose to believe, but somehow, in the mystery of the Spirit’s work, we had our blindfolds removed by God. We didn’t get it, then we did. No credit to us.
Similarly, we can’t reason an atheist’s way out of their blindfolds. Faith is a gift, and we must say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I!” We can share Jesus with them as God wants us to do, and God may use us in their process toward faith, but we cannot talk them into faith. We can pray for them: “God, please give my friend the gift of faith!” and we should pray this, but we ought not to think of their un-blindfolding as a work we can achieve by either reason or good intentions.
We are utterly dependent upon God’s Holy Spirit in witnessing to the good news of Jesus. God does the un-blindfolding, God gives the gift of faith. And for that reason, we can’t be too hard on people who do not believe. They can’t help it. They don’t know they’re wearing a blindfold and do not know they are blind. They think we are crazy and will continue to think so until God should show them what Light is.
Love opens ears. May we be a help in having ears opened. In the meantime, let us pray, let us witness tactfully and do so with great kindness, great love, and great hope in the Spirit’s work and timing. †