Tag Archives: negative theology

Breaking up with God: I didn’t lose my faith I left it.

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An interview with Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking up with God: A Love Story.

The title seems to be a takeoff from Lauren Winner’s Girl meets God, but given my recent posts here and here, it probably deserves a mention.

For me, this is the money quote from the interview with Sentilles:

People assume I’m an atheist, but I’m not. I don’t know what I am, but if I had to choose a label I’d choose agnostic. When I say that people usually ask me if I think God exists, and I usually give them the answer that my teacher, Gordon Kaufman, used to give me: The question of God’s existence isn’t the right question because it won’t get you very far. It’s a question human beings can’t answer. If we take God’s mystery seriously, then we can never know. I think there are better questions that we can be answering: What does a particular vision of God do to those who submit to it and to those who won’t submit to it? What difference is my version of God making? Who is it harming? In one of his books, Kaufman writes, “The central question for theology… is a practical question. How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what causes give ourselves?” He argues that theology that does not contribute significantly to struggles against inhumanity and injustice has lost sight of its point of being.

Full disclosure: Gordon Kaufman was one of my professors, too. He was also a member and sometime pastor of the Mennonite Congregation of Boston, to which I belonged during the 1980s.

That ultimately God is mystery is not a radical or heretical notion. Going back to the early church (at least to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus) the idea of negative theology, that the only true statements one could make about God were about what God is not, is a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat difficult to understand, methodology. Of course, Sentilles goes further in the interview, making clear that much of her problem is not about the notion of God, but about institutional religion. I am always saddened when people come to that point because for me the Incarnation is all about the messiness of the mystery of God being contained, experienced, and expressed in the ordinary, human, and accessible.

 

God does not (not) exist

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Paul Wallace’s essay on negative theology and atheism offers much to ponder. He takes apart the immature atheism of Richard Dawkins by making use of negative, or apophatic theology, which begins with the notion that the only true statements one can make about God, are negative, saying what God is not. Negative theology has a long history in the Christian tradition, going back to Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite.

Wallace’s starting point is a statement by Denys Turner: “Atheists reject too little,” Turner writes, “This is why their atheisms lack theological interest. The routine principled atheist has but tinkered with religion.”

His essay put me in mind of a job candidate for a position in a department of religion some years ago, who when asked about his own religious commitments, said boldly, “I’m an atheist.” I thought at the time, and still do, that it seemed strange and immature coming out of a scholar of religion–not that I expect scholars of religion to be believers by any means, but I expect them to have developed an understanding of the complexity of religious ideas and practices which would preclude such simple, black and white statements.