BLOG 10/14/15. “IT’S BEEN LONELY IN THE WORLD SINCE GOD DIED!”
I can’t even retrieve the source of this whimsical bit of poetry, but it helps to explain why there is the phenomenon of the huge number of people, who regularly attend church services, and even join and participate in church institutions, who have no serious engagement with the life and teachings of Jesus, or intend to engage in a life of obedience as his disciples. Yet there they are in vast numbers. I can testify because I have inherited so many of them in my decades of pastoral experience.
I well remember being guest preacher in a neighboring Episcopal congregation and being approached by an appreciative parishioner at a coffee hour afterwards. When I asked about her engagement with Jesus Christ, her effusive response was: “O, Pastor Henderson, I haven’t believed in God for years, but I love the Episcopal Church and its ethos!” It was her connection with transcendence. Also my years of conducting a membership class for new members in which the message of Jesus Christ, and his terms of discipleship were the core and focus of the ten-week class, only to have these same persons come to the final session in which they state their own personal faith, and come up with something bland like: “I’ve always loved the church and believe that God is always near when I need him”—nothing to do with Jesus or his calling to be formed by his New Creation teachings.
Somewhere along the way, from probably the 19th century and the modern era, a kind of endemic religious secularism has become the default position of our culture, and in too much of the church. There is a sense in which God and transcendence have become questionable. So, within the church are many folk who don’t operate from a presuppositional faith in Jesus. There has emerged what Dietrich Bonhoeffer termed: religious Christianity. Somehow the ghost of God lingers, and folk aren’t willing to outright deny his existence, but then they don’t want to forsake the church as somehow a lingering connection with transcendence.
There is the author who wrote: “I don’t even believe in God, … but I miss him.” There is a sense of emptiness that follows in the wake of the secularization of our culture. There is that lurking sense of something out there which haunts me, and us. So, just to cover one’s bases, and to make connection with some remnant of transcendence one adopts the excuse: “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” One participates in church institutional life, perhaps quotes his/her rosary, and finds these meaningful in some indescribably way, but are not living faith in Jesus Christ.
Exclusive humanism, secularism, agnosticism, atheism, and some version of ‘spirituality’ are all faith positions in themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously. Of course the life of discipleship by which one’s behavior, one’s thinking, one’s relationships, and one’s whole life are formed by Jesus Christ and empowered by the God’s Spirit are also a huge walk by faith, but are also based on a very clear sense that there is one God who has chosen to reveal himself powerfully in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is unequivocally a faith-position, and it is this which is the foundation of the authentic Christian community. But this does not mean that there are not many who long for some connection with transcendence who will join and participate who have no dynamic personal connection with that faith, and so are that omni-present phenomenon of religious Christianity, i.e., participation without true faith.
When “God dies” it leaves a haunting emptiness, a disenchantment that consistent secularism in which God is excluded from all consideration is also an act of faith … which does not resolve the sense of haunted-ness and disenchantment which that faith position does not resolve. When one reads the New Testament gospels, one finds that Jesus consistently spoke to this hungering. “Come unto me and I will give you rest.”
