Several months ago Time magazine reported Arthur Lovejoy’s death at the age of eighty-nine. He had served as professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Earlier in his career he had been asked to fill out a questionnaire on which one of the questions was: “Do you believe in God?” In reply to this question Lovejoy wrote thirty-three definitions with the implication: Which God? What meaning do you choose?
Those of us who study philosophy as well as theology know something about the quest that makes even questionnaires bristle with more questions. But those of us who also study the Word of God know as well that man can never be satisfied with speculative ideas of God. Pascal, the brilliant mathematician and thinker who came to feel the impact of divine revelation, cried out, “Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The believer who willingly humbles himself before the Word has come to know the personal God in Jesus Christ. This does not mean that he has sold his reason short as Pascal never did. But it does imply that he has found, or rather, has been found by him who is the way, the truth, and the life. He believes in order that he may understand.
Emily Dickinson, perhaps with tongue in cheek, wrote:
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
We who by God’s grace are believers do not minimize microscopes, nor telescopes, nor the searching mind of man. But we also refuse to accept the fallacy that faith is an invention. On the contrary, it is for us an experience and an understanding.
A Lost God
In the long history of man one can find at least three negative conceptions of God. They are: a lost God; a God who does not exist; a God who seems indifferent.
Among the children of men there is vast ignorance about God coupled with tragic indifference. He has become more or less a vague memory. Faded impressions of youth fade still more. There are silent reminders: the old family Bible, seldom if ever used; church buildings on many corners; an occasional baptism or wedding; ministers respected as pallbearers of a lost cause. But faith as an active force is rather dim.
How easily bright things can become tarnished, as every housewife knows! How readily near objects can be overlooked, their very proximity dulling the sense of wonder! Even when it comes to persons with whom we associate, we may be satisfied with appearance and never be concerned about the hidden reality. How carelessly precious articles can be broken! A teenager, dusting the parlor on a Saturday morning, shouts upstairs to her mother, “Mom, you remember that vase which has been in the family for generations? Well, this generation just dropped it.”
This generation may also have dropped that binding faith in God which meant so much decades ago. What is left might be a second-hand religion, a cheap imitation, an inherited “faith” with both the peace and the power drained from it. What is left might be even an institutionalized Christianity with little of personal effectiveness.
There comes to mind a sentence written in another connection: “The cutting edge of the pioneers is not always in their descendants.” There is a weakening of the strain, and that holds also in the field of religion. We have all seen Whistler’s painting of “Mother.” It is said of the artist that he was always kind to his mother, always courteous. He always drove her to church, and left her at the door. The meaning is as clear as the painting of the mother, clearer than the Mona Lisa’s smile.
A God Who Does Not Exist
For many God has been supplanted by man; revealed religion has given way to the religion of mankind, whatever that may be. Swinburne expressed it in the nineteenth century: “Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the Master of things.” In Anya Seton’s novel Dragonwyck, Nicholas is coaching Miranda from Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance.” He reads, “As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.” Miranda is shocked and says, “What a dreadful thing to say. Doesn’t the man believe in God?” And Nicholas replies, “My dear child, no intelligent person believes in God. Only the immature and ignorant need a prop from without. There is no god but oneself.”
That sounds very much like John Steinbeck’s words spoken when he accepted the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature:
“Fearful and unprepared we have assumed lordship over the life and death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfection is at hand. Having taken God-like powers, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.”
When confronted with divine revelation, a flippant atheist might say, “I don’t believe in all that rubbish, so help me God.” However, all atheists and agnostics are not necessarily flippant. Some of them have fallen heir to the lostness of God. Some, confronted by rampant evil in the world; by the inhumanity of man to man, have given up to despair. In “The Petrified Forest” a character symbolic of those who feel that the world has been shot from under them says he belongs among the dead, stony stumps. In “Nightmare With Angels” Stephen Vincent Benet puts it this way:
You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In fact, you will not be saved.
And Hemingway says, “There is no remedy for anything in life.” These strong despairers, clinging to the remnant of the will to live, echo and re-echo Bertrand Russell’s gloom.
The gloomy existentialists, enclosed in their own cellophane wrapper, cling to despair and to that self which must still live courageously though Death sits on the bedpost like the Raven and will not be blinked away. They continue to live and to write, finding in anxiety the spring to creativity. Others, still young and impressed by a certain kind of status-seeking, ally themselves with the cult of meaninglessness in the enchanting delirium of immaturity. For them painting, music, drama, poetry, fiction that present the maze with no Ariadne’s thread are The Thing. As the poet George Stefan has said, they want to be safe from “the indignity of being understood.”
It is no wonder that for many God has become a fashionable blur.
An Indifferent God
Isaiah, that impassioned evangelist of the Old Testament, speaks to those for whom God is lost or for whom He does not exist. His strong voice is directed especially at those who consider God as indifferent. In his book he says, “Surely thou art a God who hidest thyself.” However, the reference is not to the Almighty as an absentee landlord, but rather to the burden of the mystery that is in Him. That mystery He constantly reveals—though not all at once, lest our eyes be blinded and our minds give way. His self-disclosure is there in the prophecies and, more fully, in Jesus Christ.
There were those in Isaiah’s day who said (40:27), “My way is hid from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God.” The plaintive cry is heard again and again in Job. We hear it today. God has forgotten us. Why? He does not know, or he does not care about, our predicament. He seems to show no interest in justice and mercy. It is human for man to cry, “Why?” It may be enlightening to listen again to that greatest cry of anguish from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” But beyond that question lies the answer made concrete in him who gave that cry. If God were indifferent, there would have been no Cross. That God is not indifferent Isaiah reveals with strong conviction.
The God Who Reveals Himself
Our God has disclosed himself, and he keeps on doing just that. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable.”
God has never left himself without witnesses. His revelation has always been there. Daily he is appealing to us. “Have you not heard me? Have you not listened to my Word, my prophets, my Christ?” “Thus saith the Lord” has whispered and thundered through the centuries.
Must we have a Gallup Poll to remind us of Him? Is it necessary that God spell out his name in the stars or in neon lights to impress the unbelieving? Even then some would not accept him, some would turn from him as they do from Echo and the latest moon shot.
Who is this God who cries out to man?
He is the Everlasting, the Lord, Jehovah. He is the Creator of the universe who put all things there where man is still scratching the surfaces. His understanding is infinite. Before it our minds are like feeble candles. He knows all things and is present everywhere. And he is the strong God not tired from all his creating, never wearying of his kind providence, never exhausted from his redemptive efforts.
Man can not fathom him, comprehend him. He can not chop him out of a tree trunk nor capture him in marble. He can not catch him up in a neat definition, nor confine him merely in the realm of ideas. He is not “the Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness” of Matthew Arnold, nor the Santa Claus-symbol God of Edward Scribner Ames, nor the ambiguous God of Walter Kaufmann, nor the relativistic God of Hartshorne. He is more than the philosophic Being-itself of Tillich.
The God who reveals himself through Isaiah and in his Word, who has recorded for us his holy history, the greatest story that has ever been told, is an active God. The Bible tells us of the Acts of God. There are many verbs in the Book, as there are in the Apostles’ Creed. Words of Horace Mann come to mind: “I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the Apostles, but I have heard a great deal about the Acts of the Apostles.” One can say that about the Bible itself. In it God is evident in action. Jesus said, according to the Gospel of John, “My Father is working still, and I am working.”
If some people are impressed by ideas, there are perhaps more who are impressed by action.
Listen to what Isaiah says about God’s activity. He gives power to those who faint; he strengthens the weary. Even the young become exhausted. They are subject to old age and decay. But regardless of age those who wait upon the Lord will find their strength renewed. For God will increase our powers. It is communion with him that exercises us. Waiting upon the Lord we are even given wings like those of the eagle. With Sidney Lanier we can sing: “I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies.” That is finding our place in the sun, and it is far more rewarding than groping our way into the caves of the meaningless, or following paths that lead to the wastelands of nihilism.
Our God who alone can save us from the cult of meaninglessness and from the deserts of our own making will also cause us to run and not be weary, to walk, which may not be quite so glamorous, but which nevertheless gives us purpose, direction, the sense of destination and destiny, and the final triumph.
All this our God has done for us, is willing to do for uncounted millions. Ideas have moved the world, and ideas about God can give illumination. But personal encounter with Him who is, who reveals, and who acts will change our pilgrimage and see us through. It is the only way that despair and anxiety can give way to light and life.
For it is revealed that we have a great and good God. And it is faith, which is more than the soul’s invincible surmise, that reaches out to him. He is very much alive. And his Son, whose valley was deeper than man can ever measure, has said, “Lo, I am alive forevermore.”
A traveler in India passing a temple heard drums and asked what the meaning might be. A native answered, “O, they are waking up the god, for it’s almost time for worship.” We do not have a God who needs to be aroused. We worship him so that he can awaken us. We who are Christians or nominally so should expose ourselves to the daily and perennial awakening. May it never be said of us:
They do it every Sunday,
They’ll be all right on Monday;
It’s just a little habit they’ve acquired.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.”
His mercy and his faithfulness are great. He will not bruise the broken reed nor quench the smoking flax. But his judgment is also sure. It is because of him and his inescapable revelation that we are responsible creatures always living in decision.
