What Christian Worship Can Learn From Atheists

While recent signs indicate that the tenor of conversation between Christians and atheists may be improving (evolving, even?) in public discourse, there is some irony in the fact that there is such considerable room to improve. Irony because, in the first centuries of the Church, Christians were regularly accused of - and killed for - being atheists, having adopted, said the ancient Greek historian Dio Cassius, "the practices of the Jews." Or as Phil Harkland put it in the article cited above: "the denial of other gods was perhaps the most important source of conflict and the strangest thing about devotees of the Judean God and of Christ."

While it is not uncommon for Christians to consider the distinctiveness of Christian claims relative to Judaism, it is instructive that the early Greeks saw Christians as adopting the practices of the Jews. This outside Greek perspective helpfully recalls the continuity of Israel's vocation - Israel's "set apart-ness" - and God's mission to those beyond Israel.  Dio Cassius is observing exactly the scandal by which the blessing of Israel's Kingdom is, in Christ, opened to Gentiles and that mixed kettle of fish called the Church. For Christians, Jesus is both "a Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel."

To begin with Israel is to begin with one God: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad; Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one (Deut. 6:4). 

Now, belief in one god is, in some sense, a question of movement from one's point of reference. That is, the one god of Israel's Shema could represent an increase, as in, "I did not believe in God before, but now I do." What the early opposition to the Church clearly saw, however, is that confession of "one true god" can just as easily - and far more probably - represent a decrease, as in, "I will not bow down to other gods."(1)  

Examples of the confession of one God as a decrease from the alternative in Scripture are many and too numerous to list. Consider a few representative instances: Israel and the golden calf (and God's response), Israel's request for a king (and God's reluctance), the refusal of the three men to serve the king's gods (and their subsequent deliverance from the fiery furnace), Jesus' crucifixion (and the people's haunting words, "We have no king but the emperor"), and the missionary encounters of the apostles recorded in Acts.

Similarly, the history of the Church's life and witness has consistently understood and engaged formation centered on one God as opposed to many. In his commentary on the Ten Commandments, Martin Luther writes:

Ask and examine your heart diligently, and you will find whether it cleaves to God alone or not. If you have a heart that can expect of Him nothing but what is good, especially in want and distress, and that, moreover, renounces and forsakes everything that is not God, then you will have the only true God. If, in the contrary, it cleaves to anything else, of which it expects more good and help than of God, and does not take refuge in Him, but it adversity flees from Him, then you have an idol, another god.

Thus, Christian formation consists, in part, of not believing; of saying "no" to the pantheon of the gods, where "gods" are understood to be anything from which we expect more good and help than God.

Of course, Christians are not atheists. Emphatically, believing in the one God who delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead changes everything. Indeed, to the extent Christians fail to worship the one true God - by expecting more good and help than of God from the countless myriads gods of our day - we live what Stanley Hauerwas calls lives of "practical atheism." 

But if confession of the Christian God requires of those who confess this God the refusal to worship another, perhaps we can acknowledge that atheists and Christians have a shared agenda: the naming and dissuasion of the worship of gods we don't believe exist. For this reason, it is curious that Christians have not valued inter-faith conversations with atheists on the same level as conversations with peoples of other faiths. Christians believe that it is enough to believe, and forget that not worshiping gods is as distinctive of our tradition as is worshiping the Triune God revealed in Jesus.(2) The challenge to an inter-faith conversation with atheists, I suppose, is that Christians and atheists can't agree on the gods we don't believe exist. 

Disagreements notwithstanding, I have hope that generous atheists can teach the Church a thing or two about not believing. I hope, too, that a generous Church can raise questions for atheists - about the gods, with God's help, we are learning not to worship.

JRM+

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(1) Significantly, throughout the Church's history, one of the chief expressions of the Christian's refusal to worship other gods has been the Christian's unwillingness to legitimate the empire's claims of divine status. Thus, the Church understands "Jesus is Lord" to be a theological and political statement.

 (2) Cf. Hauerwas: Americans do not have to believe in God, because they believe that it is a good thing simply to believe: all they need is a general belief in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in the US. The god most Americans say they believe in is not interesting enough to deny, because it is only the god that has given them a country that ensures that they have the right to choose to believe in the god of their choosing, Accordingly, the only kind of atheism that counts in the US is that which calls into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

"Hearing the Holiness" reflections on Annie, Joy, & Buechner

I grew up singing the Lord's Prayer.  One day I stopped singing it because the church at which I worshiped stopped singing it.  In place of the singing, the congregation simply said it together.  This was not a big deal to me.  The priest at the church was my dad, and he had a habit of letting me in on his liturgical thinking.  This one was convincing: "The Episcopal service is strange," he explained, "and the Lord's Prayer might be the only part of the service that the guest or newcomer feels comfortable joining."  In the overwhelming context of the Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer stares back at the stranger like a solitary familiar face in the midst of the unfamiliar throngs.  "Good enough for me," I thought to myself, and I never looked back.

I should probably pause long enough to say that I am not one who gets bent out of shape much over questions of liturgy.  I grew up in a Rite I Anglo-Catholic parish with a parochial school whose rhythm was daily prayer.  After high school, I went to Wheaton College (God's good sense of humor, and after a brief but formative time in a Canterbury Community engaging the Taize tradition in South Bend, Indiana), subsequently enrolled at Duke Divinity School (a Methodist school with an Anglican Studies program), and have happily lived out the first five-plus years of my ordained ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.  That is to say I've "gotten around" about as much as is possible for a life-long, cradle Episcopalian.  Rather than feel pulled in many directions by these experiences, I have grown to find my patch-work history shaped and centered by the gravity of St Paul's words when he writes:

There is one Body and one Spirit;
There is one hope in God’s call to us;
One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
One God and Father of all.

I remember these words and I particularly remember, too, the image of our div school chaplain, Sally Bates, breaking the bread time and again as light streamed in the chapel and speaking the reality that "we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf."

All of that is to say that I don't find myself interested much in the "freshman jostling" of inflexible liturgical decision making - life is too rich, and my economics background is always thinking "trade-offs" before absolutes anyway, and so my main point just now is not whether it is right or wrong to sing the Lord's Prayer in corporate worship.  But we did stop singing it, and I never looked back...until one day this past week.

Annie is two and a half, more or less.  She'll be three in August.  She "reads" books voraciously, memorizing the pages and speaking the words, often to other books.  Recently she's taken to singing.  She has always sung - a favorite past-time the two of us have shared together from her beginning - but she has recently taken to singing songs to tunes with the original words kept intact.  This is new.  This has mostly happened suddenly: one day she wasn't, the next day she was.  This past week she unexpectedly interrupted my knitting and sang the Lord's Prayer to the heavens.   As Bek and I listened in, my heart was swallowed by the prayer that I would never forget the awe and the magic and my jaw-dropped disbelief in that moment.

She was singing to God, but grace found our ears.  And every word was there: this ritual ending to our family's evening prayers, sung at Bek's whim one night, continued because Annie enjoyed her parents' singing, and two months later she's belting it out from the heart and from memory.  Maybe that's what I am striving to appreciate in this post: how music stains the memory; how prayers so sung make ready homes in us.

A few days later, this moment very much alive in my memory, I was listening to a speaker at our diocesan clergy day.  He was telling us about Frederick Buechner's encounter with mystery in the space of a "particular Episcopal church he attending while lecturing at Wheaton College."  My heart quickened as he spoke.  I also went to a particular Episcopal Church while at Wheaton...  "In Glen Ellyn," the speaker continued.  My eyes went wide - "Saint Barnabas!" we nearly said together.  And I wondered how many times I sat in Buechner's pew, two decades after his visit.  Anyway, I looked up the book, Telling Secrets, from which the speaker's story came, and found the following words that helped me make sense of the joy that flooded my being as Annie flooded our home with her song.  Before I share them, my point, the moral, my main advice to the patient reader who has nearly made it to the end of this long and winding post: sing as much as possible. 

Here's Buechner:

I also found myself going to an extraordinary church or, with my rather dim experience of churches back home, one that was extraordinary at least to me.  Its name was Saint Barnabas, and it was described to me as an evangelical high Episcopal church, and that seemed so wonderfully anomalous that what took me there first was pure curiosity.  What kept taking me back Sunday after Sunday, however, was something else again.  Part of the service was chanted at Saint Barnabas, and I discovered that when a prayer or a psalm or a passage from the Gospels is sung, you hear it in a whole new way.  Words wear thin after a while, especially religious words.  We have spoken them and listened to them so often that after a while we hardly even hear them any more.  As writer, preacher, teacher I have spent so much of my life dealing with words that I find I get fed up with them.  I get fed up especially with my own words and the sound of my own voice endlessly speaking them.  What the chanting did was to remind me that worship is more than words and then in a way to give words back to me again.  It reminded me that words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.  The chanting italicized them, made poetry of their prose.  It helped me hear the holiness in them and in all of us as we chanted them.