Atheism for Lent Pt. 1 The Atheism of the Christian Mystics Chris Hutton The First Mennonite Church April 2, 2017 Here is Winnie the-pooh coming down the stairs, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is as far as he knows the only way of coming down stairs, but sometimes he wonders if perhaps there is a better way, if only he could stop bumping his head long enough to find it. This is how Peter Rollins opens his course and collection of spiritual practices that he calls Atheism for Lent. Peter is an Irish philosopher/theologian who is becoming increasingly well-known as a leader of what is being the called the Radical Christian movement; a movement of young leaders who are re-thinking what Christianity and belief mean in an increasingly secular and post-christian world. And Peter is particularly well-known for a practice he does called Pyrotheology; where Peter attempts to re-examine and re-think belief in such a way that we now begin to remove and burn away the assumptions and prejudices that often form our beliefs. Is there a different way to believe what we believe, if we could only just stop banging our heads long enough to find it? We are in the season of Lent, 40 days of renewal before Easter morning where Christians will often fast from something in order to re-examine and re-think their attachment to this thing. We fast in order to re-new ourselves, our understanding of something, and how God might possibly fit into the picture. And about 20 years ago, Peter began to think, What would it look like to fast from belief? What if we fasted from belief in God in order to re-examine, re-think, and renew our belief in God? What if we practiced Atheism for Lent? Peter often confesses that he actually stole the idea from a very conservative Christian scholar in the United States named Merold Westphal, who regularly took his students through the Lenten season as a time to listen to critiques of religion and faith and find out how do we respond to those critiques? How do we feel about them? What do they evoke in us? Can we stop believing in something long enough that we might actually be able to find a way to belief that doesn t bump our heads so much? A way to believe that is much more painless? Can we let go of our beliefs for a season that we might actually grow closer to God through the process? And so Atheism for Lent is not necessarily about atheism vs Christianity, but it s actually more about belief vs. disbelief? How do we believe in some things and how do we dis-believe about other things?
And, Peter actually argues that this is not a practice that exists outside of the Christian faith, but that the interplay of atheism and theism actually resides within the practice of Christianity itself. He argues that the Christian spiritual journey itself is a practice of theisms or beliefs and atheisms or dis-beliefs and that to experience both atheism and theism is to experience the heart of Christianity itself. For example, in the story of the Golden Calf that we read earlier, the Israelites construct their own god out of the gold they possess, and Moses comes down from the mountain to see what they ve done and in his anger and his frustration, he smashes the tablets bearing God s laws that he first brought down with him. The Israelites have become atheistic towards the God of Mount Sinai and now they must become atheistic of the Golden Calf, that they might re-understand and re-new their faith in the God of Mount Sinai. Christianity is a process of naming and de-naming. Nomination and de-nomination. Whenever we name something about God, we are simultaneously denying something about God. And whenever we deny something about God, we are simultaneously saying something about God. All this is to say that belief is more complicated than we know, and Atheism for Lent is a season to examine why we believe something and how we believe something. So just to try and lay it out clearly, let me quickly illustrate 4 reasons why we re exploring Atheism for Lent for the next two Sundays: 1) de-center our ideas about God 2) break down our idols that we make of God, re-examine our beliefs 3) create space for the My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? moment 4) to identify with people who do experience the My God, My God moment De-centring can actually be a good thing. When Copernicus de-centred the understanding that the sun revolved around the earth, it gave us incredible new insights into understanding our universe. When Darwin de-centred our understandings about our biological history, it unlocked incredible new ways to understand our physiology and our DNA. We ourselves, as Anabaptists are products of a de-centring of authority within the church. Our ancestors de-centred the idea that one individual or one small group of people could exercise complete and total control over the church, and it gave us new understandings of faith and community. Often in church, we focus upon the moment of belief and the affirmation of belief. But there are many people who come to church on Sunday mornings, and they are struggling to believe. They feel as if God is absent and God has forsaken them. Atheism for Lent is about taking a season to create space for that; to acknowledge
that this happens probably far more than we know, and to identify with our brothers and sisters who are in that season of life. And so over the next two weeks, we will de-stabilize the way we think about things in order to try and find new ways to think about things. Just to be clear, this is going to be a season where I present a lot of ideas without suggesting answers. So if you re expecting me to land the plane on something or respond with an answer to something, that s not the purpose of this season. Atheism for Lent is about spending time swimming amongst our questions and our doubts, that we might see them more clearly and understand them more clearly; that we might live for a time in the midst of our doubts. And perhaps along the way, we might just expose our idolatries, our dogmatisms, and our fundamentalisms. We might just stop bumping our heads long enough to see what we ve been doing all of this time. So when Peter Rollins starts his Atheism for Lent course, he begins with an image from a comic book. In the comic Knight and Squire, there is a pub called Time in a Bottle, and every Thursday night, all of the super-heroes and all of the super-villains come to Time in a Bottle and within this pub, they can do no harm to one another. Instead, they spend time together socializing. And once Thursday night is over, they re all magically teleported back to their homes or to mysterious places, so they have no chance of being able to follow one another afterwards and do each other harm. Peter uses this image to illustrate the concept that in a healthy belief system, faith and doubt, good and bad, theism and atheism all come together to socialize and actually inform and form one another. Peter argues that conflict can actually be a good thing. It can actually be good and formative for us to hear alternative ideas and hear from people who disagree with us because we might then grow the process. In fact, Peter suggests that war is the absence of conflict. War is when you refuse to hear the other person s viewpoint and you simply want to destroy them. But conflict, sitting down to hear from the other, is actually a healthy and important part of humanity and spirituality. Peter then goes on to suggest that atheism is an integral component of faith for the movement of people that we call Christian mystics. Christian mysticism is a movement that has existed throughout the history of Christianity and it includes figures like the Desert Fathers, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Avila. For the mystics, every time you talk about God, you talk about less than God. Every time you try to categorize or describe God, that category or description slips through your fingers. The mystery of God is too great to understand God. God is beyond description. God is beyond categorization. God is beyond the faculties of the human mind and any attempt to know or understand God will always come short.
For example, Pseudo-Dionysius was a 6 th century Christian mystic who talked about the divine ascent of meaning. He suggested that every time you describe God and you attempt to unpack what that description means, you move through various levels of meaning. And the higher and higher you move in these levels of meaning, the less you can begin to say. For example. you might start out by saying that God is good. But what does it mean that God is good? And as you try to unpack what good means, you discover that there is less and less that you can say with certainty. Next you ask yourself, what does it mean to say that God is something? And the more and more you try to unpack that, the less and less you can say with certainty about how you might be able to say that God is something. And finally you ascend to an even higher level of meaning which is the idea of God himself, and you realize that there are fewer and fewer words you can say. And so to ascend in understanding the meaning of God is to know less and less about God and to understand more and more that God is a mystery. For the Christian mystics, idolatry was the attempt to capture God within an idea, a concept, or an object, when God is beyond ideas, concepts, or objects. And so for the mystics, atheism or denying something about God was the way to understand God. In order to truly understand God, you must truly understand that you cannot truly understand God. Anytime we try to ascribe meaning to God, we are actually attaching a falsity. Simone Weil was a French mystic and philosopher who then suggested that atheism is about purification. It s about burning away our falsities, our idols, and our projections of God. The theologian Karl Barth once said, When we talk about God, we talk about ourselves in a loud voice. Our ideas of who God is are often idolatrous projections of what we want God to be. Often when we look at God, we re actually looking at the narcissistic mirror image of ourselves, rather than the God who challenges our understandings of meaning. I ve heard it said, What s the best way to find out if you re worshipping an idol? If God looks exactly like you, you are most likely worshipping an idol. We re worshipping something that comfortably affirms the choices of my life and doesn t challenge me to grow. Now, the Golden Calf in Exodus becomes a projection of the Israelites desire for wealth and importance. The image of a bull calf was also actually a symbol of military strength in Near Eastern culture, and so the Golden Calf also becomes a projection of their desire for power and might. And the ancient Israelites had to
become atheistic of this God. They had to tear down this idol and this projection of God in order to truly find God. In the words that we read from Paul this morning, he uses the metaphor of a builder s work being put through the fire. Everyone s work will be put through the fire to see whether or not it keeps its value. If the work survives the fire, that builder will receive a reward. But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. But notice what Paul says next, The builders themselves will be saved, but like someone escaping through a wall of flames. (1 Cor. 3: 13-15, NLT). Here Paul is talking about an afterlife concept. This is where many theologians get the suggestion that when we die, something about our souls is purified from everything that is not of God. Everything that is not of God becomes burned away as we enter Heaven. Here, flames are a good image for personal purification, and for Simone Weil, she too saw the need to put our beliefs through the flames of purification, that we might re-new and re-understand why we believe what we believe. Take some time this week, and consider your beliefs about God, whether you believe or you don t believe in God, and ask yourself, How did I come to this belief? What do I actually believe about God? Is this a genuine belief, or is this belief actually a projection of what I want God to be? And that goes for atheistic beliefs as well? Is my denial of God actually a projection of what I want to be true about God rather than something I have discovered about God? Have I made an idol of God? Have I made an idol of my belief? What are God s qualities and how did I arrive at my understanding of them? Take a walk, go grab a coffee somewhere, maybe take your lunch break or a work break this week to ask yourself these questions, and don t worry about answering them right away. Just sit in these questions. Contemplate these questions. What sort of emotional responses do these questions raise within you? Where is that response coming from? Let me close by saying this: The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstien once said, What we cannot speak of, we must observe in silence. But the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart also once said, The unspeakable is that which we must never stop speaking of.
The Christian mystics often said that we cannot understand and encapsulate God, but that still leaves us with a world that bleeds. That still leaves us with a world with real material needs, and so how do theism and atheism play into that material world? And so to look into that question, next week, we are going to look at some critics of religion. Philosophers and theologians who belong to a group that we call materialists. People like Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietszche who questioned religion as a way to address the real needs of the material world. We re going to spend some time listening to their critiques of religion, not to argue with them and respond to them, but to listen to them, and to understand them. We re going to allow ourselves some time to swim in their critiques to possibly see how their own words might change us and help us grow. And that s really what Atheism for Lent is really all about. This is a season where we lay down our arms; where we enter Time in a Bottle for a season to engage with critique; to listen to our super-heroes and our super-villains; to hear from our doubts and our questions; and to possibly be transformed through the process. This is obviously a really short 15-20 minute attempt at addressing a huge topic that we will continue next week, but if you have questions coming out of this morning, you can talk to me after the service, and you can also join us tonight here at the church for a discussion group that we ll be running. It gets underway at 6:30pm, and we re going to spend some time reading some more materials from Peter s Atheism for Lent course and just discussing, debating, and hashing out the questions that all of this material raises for us. You are more than welcome to join us for that tonight. I m actually in the midst of this year s session of the Atheism for Lent course with Peter, and one of my fellow students made an interesting observation that Peter reflected on. He said that often when we give up chocolate for Lent, all we can think about is chocolate. Is it possible that as we give up God for Lent, all we will be able to think about is God? Is it possible that it is actually between theism and atheism that we just might find God?