Talking about God is a Story

It’s too much to call it a conversion, but too little to call it a midlife crisis. Let’s just say that sometime in the last four years I lost confidence in classical theology; its proofs and analytic arguments; its longwinded consolations; its attempts to chart new courses or find new terrain.

It was always seeking to secure its new ideas, or defend its new territory. Even the descriptive language started to feel like it was lying- because there was nothing “new” that would be allowed within the constraints of orthodoxy. Everything had already been boxed up and was now being sold under a different name. Even the heresies of the tradition had gotten stale, as they were trotted out year after year under new names. So much of it- maybe all of it?- started to feel like salesmanship, attempting to coax the last drips out of a hose that had been long turned off. There was little left to be had. When even the heresies start to bore you, you know you are in need of new ground.

There were at least two generations before us when theological answers really came to bear on real questions- questions that were shared, to some degree, by most adult humans. These questions of meaning, of necessity, and of the “why” both of evil and of existence, held a certain kind of relevance to your everyday adult. People cared about them, deeply. They mattered.

But the questions have shifted, and quickly. Where once Christianity was thought to address a meaning question, increasingly I have seen it as required to address entire systems. My students wanted to be shown how Christianity was incompatible with racism, sexism, nationalism, and colonialism. They wanted this incompaitibility proven beyond doubt before they would pledge their belief. This made me into a salesman of a kind, trying to offer at a bargain-basement price an account of Christianity’s legitimacy that could never live up to this account. It is a faith, after all, of beggars and fools, of bleeding women and demoniacs and failed religious and deeply disappointed religious men. It is the faith that comes to the brokenhearted, after they’ve suffered the defeat of their expectations. God doesn’t come to them saying “do this, in exactly this way, for great results”. He says Fear Not.

The Christian faith, to be credible, would need to take stock of every awful thing that had happened on its watch. But this is not how its logic works.

Nearly every instance of suffering now took the form of a systemic inequality that might, with the right tightening of the gears, be addressed. Economic systems might be fixed so that they failed no one; political gears might be readjusted such that everyone’s good was addressed; even issues of human health, of sickness and dying, might be prevented or thwarted or mitigated against. Christianity might- perhaps should- have an answer to all of these problems, with a policy proposal to match.

In such a world view, theology’s job is not simply to speak about ultimate things. It has to somehow give an account of everything, and what’s wrong with everything, as well as offering a solution for how to fix it.

It has to make an argument for its own relevance.

I’m living in the land of this demise, and I don’t know quite how to proceed. It is not the case that theology doesn’t speak to the problems we experience and the social ills we wish to fix. It is more that theology it is the wrong tool for the job.

When asked to give an account (and a proposal) for all of the social sciences, theologians sometimes panic.

In an effort to show that God matters, they’ll take up all of the topics under the sun- perhaps how to fix racialized social systems, or housing inequality, or capitalism. So then we have some arguing that God is for gender equality, and others arguing that God is for patriarchy, and others arguing that what we really need is a better concept of gender. And so everyone is arguing about gender and no one is talking about God. Without making myself the argument police, what can quickly happen is that we develop reams and reams of material detailing our positions on everything other than God. It has gotten so boring, so dismal, so hopeless.

A reader asked the other day why I remain fond of Anselm’s Proslogion with its plodding, somewhat ridiculous hypotheticals. It is admittedly unlikely that two men would ever need to come up with an argument for the existence of God that needed only itself for proof (nowadays we’d need, minimally, some way to cash out politically). When I read the Proslogion for the first time, I found it surprisingly moving. It brought me to tears. Here’s why.

In Chapter 3, Anselm starts to generate some heat towards his proof. The perfect being, he argues,

assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist.

Anselm is thick in the middle of his logical proof at this point. Moving from one logical gotcha to the next, he is generating clear momentum toward his goal- a proof for the existence of God:

Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist;. and this being thou art, O Lord, our God.

It was that last line- “And this being thou art, O Lord, our God”; that brought the waterworks. Hidden at the end of line upon line of dull, exhausting argumentation, Anselm changes from the third to the second person. He moves from arguing for the possibility of the existence of a (hypothetical) God, to talking directly to God. “And this is you!”; his words rang out, in my version. I’ll never forget it. Under the heavy weight of analysis and argument, doxology broke through.

Without this second-personal mode, I’m afraid we’ve lost the plot. We’ve jumped the shark. We’ve attended our own funeral, giving long expanded speeches on why, perhaps, our discipline and its historic faith ought not to exist in the first place- due to its treatment of the poor and the orphan, of women and slaves, or the immigrant and and and.

Human sin comes to stand in for theology’s intellectual coherence, and this won’t do. It’ll break under its weight.

So about four years ago, I lost confidence in my training, in my ways of knowing, in my typical ways of engaging. The failure of my training to speak a truthful word about the God who was there, who existed at the other end of the logical proofs in the world of the second personal, it broke me open. We never got to “And this is you!” We rarely even used theological language to speak to God in the second person. It felt embarrassing, perhaps beneath us. It broke my heart.

It seemed to me that the only theological account worthy of the name would need to be a story. It would need to give an account of the time period that led Anselm to desire a proof, or of the man lost on a far away voyage, or of the migrant woman who knew to speak to God only in her own voice. Instead of arguments, it would need to use the second person. This is what it would sound like-My Lord and my God!