Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God

The following are the words of Frank Schaefer as they were stated in an NPR interview on December 9th, 2008. "The Reason that I did not leave faith altogether is one that I will never know because I do not know where my conditioning as a person of faith ends and where my choices begin and where they end. All I can tell you is that if I wanted to become an atheist the first thing I would do is pray to God to help me......I'm stuck. I'm stuck because faith is just part of my life. I don't know whether if it is because faith is real or if its because that is the way I was brought up, but a day that doesn't begin with prayer for me feels empty. Even when I am questioning the existence of God."

Frank is wrestling with a huge question here. It is one that I have wrestled with myself and one that every person of faith must ask themselves. Essentially he is asking, "Is my faith socially constructed? Am I purely a product of my environment or do my beliefs run deeper than my arbitrary culture? How can anyone profess to worship a God who is merely a cultural decoration?" In order for a God to be worthy of our adoration this being must be transcendent, it must be bigger than me and you and our collective identity. Otherwise how can this being have the authority to do what God does? God is ultimately whatever grips you. He is whatever answers your questions. He is the being that assigns meaning to the happenings of our lives.

We are constantly striving to make meaning out of everything we experience in life. When we encounter something we asses its value and assign it a narrative using our faith in God. We explain why this or that happens. Many of us use purely scientific reasoning to make sense of the world around us. Other times we use coincidence and at other moments we use fate. But we all use something and whatever we use becomes a type of god. Many of us look to a god that might be connected to an organized religion to explain things and to tell us what value we should be assigning to all of the happenings around us. What is most frustrating is that we all have conflicting characteristics for our god and call him many different names, yet we cannot all be right. This doesn't bode well for a being that is supposed to omnipotent and transcendent. When all of our gods are compiled there are to many narratives flying around and, quite frankly, no one knows what to believe, but we all want to commit to one because we yearn to make sense of the world around us. So many of us do what every good American does and we go shopping. We choose a little from this god and little from that one and we end up with a hybrid god that does everything we want him to. However, if our god does exactly what we want it to then we have become our own god and we are not worthy of adoration, nor do we have any knowledge or authority to assign narratives that might make sense of this infinitely complex world. So what must we do when we are stuck in this quagmire?

I don't have a purely logical answer for this question because at its core this question is like every other- we use faith to answer it. Sometimes though I feel stuck, much like Frank Schaeffer feels stuck, but I know this as much as any human can know anything: ultimately we must give ourselves over to a god and there is a God, a true God who has absolute truth that governs our world. I know this with the aid of a lived experience and sometimes in spite of one. He is not relative to a geographical location or a socially constructed being because a god like that is worthless. He is mine and I am His, but this did not happen without "becoming critically aware of my own ability to compose my own reality, self-consciously participating in an ongoing dialogue toward truth, and cultivating an ability to respond in ways that are satisfying and just."