Christopher Hitchins has been barnstorming the country of late promoting his most recent book, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, making an argument similar to Richard Dawkins in God is a Delusion.
Like the Philistine champion of old, Hitchins goes from city to city issuing his challenge: “Today I defy the ranks of Israel! Give me a man, that we may fight together” (1 Samuel 17:10). And in a series of debates, a local champion has emerged to defend the faith.
I'm sure this is all wonderful theater. Hitchins is nothing if not vivid in his manner of expression. But surely this act has already been exhausted by Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in days past.
The interesting question is not whether God exists, but whether we do. Let me explain.
Certainly our own existence seems more obvious than the existence of God. You and I occupy a physical space, for example, that no other object may occupy. Such a definition of existence, however, will prove deeply unsatisfying to believer and non-believer alike. A purely material account of existence fails to account for the profound mystery that is each of us as human.
It is no surprise, therefore, that the church fathers, Irenaeus or Athanasius or Augustine, defined “existence” as “to be who God intended us to be.” According to Irenaeus, “bereft of God, we cease to exist.” Evil and sin therefore lead to non-being, as these destroy and corrupt our being before God. The deeper question for these church fathers was not about the existence of God but about our own existence — an existence seen fully only in light of new creation in Christ.
In our scientific, rational world, such a turn easily seems unpersuasive. After all, we can prove our existence; no such proof is forthcoming for God.
Yet what exactly does it mean to prove our existence? Certainly most of us can produce birth certificates, credit cards, driver's licenses and so forth, but none of these identity papers prove who we are. Imagine not having the required documents, say, at an airport checkpoint, and suddenly being without legitimate existence. I recently wrote a check at a store, after which I realized that I had forgotten my driver's license. The clerk refused to accept my seminary ID, even though my picture was before her. I could have tried to explain to her who I was — how my ID at least partially represented this — but it would have been pointless.
Even more, the horror stories of identity theft reveal how easy it is to cease to exist in our bureaucratic society.
The philosopher Descartes tried to build a case that we can prove our existence through reason: “I think therefore I am.” But the sad legacy of this approach is to make those who don't think like us irrational. And it makes those who can't think like us, such as the mentally handicapped, subhuman.
Do we exist? We do not secure our existence through reason, the market economy, a bureaucratic state or even through our own memory, since one day our memory will weaken. All of these strategies easily turn our lives into delusions.
Only one thing secures our existence, and it requires a lifetime of practice: We exist to the extent we receive our lives as gifts from God.
Recently, my 7-year-old son and I were talking about Christmas and I was trying to remind him that Christmas was about Jesus, that we exchange gifts in celebration of God's gift to us, his Son. To which my son responded, “Yeah, but he got him back.” We might live under the delusion that gift giving and receiving is a zero-sum game — we give and the gift is gone, or what we receive belongs only to us. But God's economy is not like this. God's giving doesn't diminish God but is rather the overflow of his own Triune abundance. And God does not withhold his love from us.
Do we exist? Do we receive our identity from God's giving to us through creation, covenant, Christ and the church? Christopher Hitchins, no doubt, would find these questions nonsensical, if not repulsive. And yet, as Christians, we ought to know how easy it is to live a delusion, since we know that only God sets us free to live otherwise.
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— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]