The Pietist Schoolman

Yesterday ended up being an unusually frenetic Sunday in our household. My brother and sister and their families came over to celebrate our twins’ birthday. Before that, we had to clean the house in a hurry — what our mom calls a “white tornado.” Before that, there was waiting at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Before that, a trip to pediatric urgent care to check on an ear infection that had flared up again.

But before that flurry… I completed two utterly ordinary, relatively leisurely Sunday morning rituals, though I suspect I’m one of a decreasing number of Americans who do both: reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and going to church. As it often works out, the two connected with each other in a surprising way.

First, the Times, whose Opinion page included a piece by author and journalist Eric Weiner, describing himself as one of the “Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all,” a growing group that is “running from organized religion, but by no means running from God.”

Weiner admits that

In my secular, urban and urbane world, God is rarely spoken of, except in mocking, derisive tones. It is acceptable to cite the latest academic study on, say, happiness or, even better, whip out a brain scan, but God? He is for suckers, and Republicans.

I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

But what God is he hunting for?

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.

Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.

My first response was that of a professor who comes across a heartfelt but half-formed essay. (It’s grading season here at Bethel.) I could see the comments in my mind’s eye: “Good first attempt; yours is an ambitious effort on a challenging topic. Before writing your final draft:

“1. Consider that G.K. Chesterton was completely ‘hung up’ on Christianity being true (cf. Orthodoxy). And before you toss in an aphorism that you found on Wikiquote, please re-read the piece in which Chesterton actually wrote the line about the ‘test of a good religion.’ There you’ll find that the very reason he could laugh about his own faith is that he took it utterly seriously:

So far as a thing is universal it is serious. And so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things.

…Unless a thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a man should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible or intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

“2. And while we’re correcting your use of great British writers of the 20th century… Please double-check your Huxley. When he introduced ‘human grace’ — ‘represented in the individual by inspiration from and self-sacrifice to strictly human “ideals,” “causes” and so forth’ — in a 1940 letter, notice that Huxley proceeded to call this nice-sounding phrase an ‘ersatz‘ that destroys the ‘spiritual grace’ for which it is designed to substitute and ‘results in wars, revolutions and other large-scale lunacies which end by destroying all the human values to which the individual originally devoted himself’ (quoted by James Hull, Aldous Huxley, Representative Man, p. 362).”

But that was my first reaction. Then I went and participated in an eminently “organized” religious activity (the Contemporary worship service at Salem Covenant Church in New Brighton, Minnesota) and found myself responding with perhaps a tad bit more compassion.

I fear that Weiner — like many secularists —has had some experience in which a religion has been “organized” so as to oppress. As a historian and a Christian, I fully understand how frightfully commonplace this is. When organized, the religious are capable of pettiness, discrimination, close-mindedness, and all sorts of violence. (Disorganized religion is equally capable of this, of course, but perhaps on a lesser scale.)

So I wish that we the religious would better organize our efforts to reach out to “Nones.” At several points in yesterday’s worship service, I found myself thinking, “Eric Weiner should be here for this.” Standing with dozens of others, pledging to share in the nurture of an infant being baptized into the same congregation to which his father, grandmother, and at least two more generations of ancestors belong(ed). Standing again, a few moments later, to remember a man who had been covered with love and prayer from his church family during the prolonged illness that finally took his life this past week. As we concluded worship and friend after friend came up to hug our kids and wish them a happy birthday.

I wish Weiner (and more, my friends who are Nones — to whom I do a lousy job of witnessing) had been there to hear our senior pastor ask us to rethink the nature of prayer. Mark reminded us that not only does prayer let us bring our requests before God, but other people’s prayers are answered with our actions. I don’t know why this had never occurred to me before, but what we do often serves as God’s response to the pleas of others. For example, I praise God that the people of our church could answer the prayers of thousands of thirsty people in South Sudan by paying for the construction of several wells, open to Christians and Muslims alike. Or that we could pack nearly a million meals now for starving people in Haiti, Burkina Faso, and dozens of other countries.

All of that, I think, would appeal to someone who enjoys thinking of God as a “semicolon, connecting people….” And truly, the Body of Christ is a blessing, one that I wouldn’t abandon for all the exclamation points that end the sentences of some of its members.

But that Body coheres because of something more than human connection. This might be a stumbling block for a “rationalist” like Weiner, but we believe that our earthly gathering is but a reflection of God’s own triune nature and an anticipation of our eternal community with Him and all the saints. If such notions sink in, Weiner might then realize that God is more than “fun”; He is Love.

But at some point, he’d also have to wrestle with the fact that this same God is capable of anger, since he might start reading his Bible and come across this passage:

So Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning, as the LORD had commanded him; and he carried the two stone tablets in his hands. Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:4-7)

Of course, it’s hard to accept truths as cosmic and comic (as Chesterton would say) as a humanity that’s fallen and a God who judges. But Weiner might start to recognize that it’s a peculiar feature of those few who live in what — compared to 90% of the world’s population — is unbelievable luxury and freedom to not want God to judge, or to not see in themselves the cause of injustice. The exiled people to whom yesterday’s sermon text was addressed would certainly get it:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called mighty oaks,
a planting of the LORD
for the display of his splendor.

They will rebuild the ancient ruins
and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities
that have been devastated for generations. (Isaiah 61:1-4)

A people who believes this to be an oracle of God would understand that, however slowly, He grows angry, and justly so.

But if Eric Weiner had been with us at Salem yesterday and heard Pastor Mark preach, he would also have heard that God sent a Savior whose coming to Earth fulfilled the promise above (Luke 4:14-30). He might have read on in the Bible and found that that Savior commanded us not just to “connect” with our neighbors but to love them as ourselves and to love God with all that we are. And while our sin sunders both relationships, this Savior offers a self-sacrificial grace far surpassing any human variety. A grace that both forgives and transforms — slowly changing us into the “better people” that we’ll never become on our own.

For Christ does not require our efforts. In the words of the Advent hymn we sang yesterday:

What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
if I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
yet what can I give him: give my heart.

So to Eric Weiner and all other “Nones”: you may not believe in God, but I hope you do one day as well. Just know that you won’t find him either the angry shouter (!) of the religious who have offended you or the genial connector (;) that you imagine. But as God-with-Us, whom heaven cannot hold nor earth sustain; a Lord Almighty who comes to us a child in a stable, died for us a king on a cross, and will come again as judge.