I am presently
following a blog entitled Year Without God: A Former Pastor's Journey into Atheism. Ryan Bell, a forty-two year
old ordained minister, recent church pastor, Christian university adjunct professor
and church consultant, is practicing atheism for a year.
He is not just studying it, but living it – no praying, no
devotional Bible reading, no worship, no God. He is seriously considering
becoming an atheist.
His unusual New Year’s resolution is interesting to me
because I also seriously reexamined atheism not long ago. As a young man in my
teens and early twenties I was an atheist. Then I became a Christian and later a
pastor. I have been a fulltime pastor for over 35 years.
A few years ago I reexamined my Christian faith and revisited
my former atheism in the process. I reread books by the old atheists and every
book I could find by the New Atheists. I watched atheists debate with theists on
YouTube. I studied their arguments against theism and the Christian apologetic
responses. I took the arguments to heart, looking for the weaknesses and errors
in my religious faith.
I came through my year-long reevaluation of religion spiritually
stronger. In fact I found that atheism was very helpful to my faith. It helped
rid my life of idols. Now I often say, “I don’t believe in the God that atheists
don’t believe in.”
In other words a serious study of atheism made me a better
Christian. It acted as a refiner’s fire, burning away the chaff from the unexamined
areas of my faith. Looking back on it, I realize it didn’t have to turn out
that way. If my religious faith had been nothing but chaff, I would have ended
up as an atheist. As it is, my faith was purified in the furnace of unbelief.
So I thank God for atheism and atheists. They have been my dialogue
partners and companions in my spiritual journey. Atheists ruthlessly expose the
sins of Christianity and the weaknesses of religion. Atheism reveals the faulty
logic at the heart of much of the evidence for, and “proofs” for, God’s
existence.
Because of atheism, the God I know is not the God I used to
believe in. The God I know is not the rigid God of old-time religion or popular
Evangelicalism. Not the adaptable Deity
of mainline Protestantism and theological liberalism. Neither the mega-church
Culture Clone, nor the Culture Warrior of the Religious Right and Progressive Left.
Beneath the layers of religious tradition, biblical misinterpretation
and theological misinformation, I came face to face with the One whom 14th
century theologian Meister Eckhart calls “God beyond God.” I discovered that
God was not who I thought God was, and I was not who I thought I was.
I have atheists, in part, to thank for my religious renaissance.
I hope that Ryan Bell, the trial atheist, has a similar journey. I will be
following his experiment in Godlessness with interest.
