Tim Keller writes a striking statement in his book The Reason for God (p.152), “If there is no God, argues Nietzsche, Sarte, and others, there can be no good reason to be kind, to be loving, or to work for peace” (emphasis mine). This is an all-or-nothing statement, that if proven true, radically changes the landscape of atheistic perspective. Every time someone, Christian or not, performs an unloving, unkind, or un-peaceable act we promote an atheistic perspective to the world. Simply put, this is how you can be an evangelist for atheism.
The flip side to this statement pre-supposes that love, peace and kindness are the sole-possession of theism, particularly a Christ-centered Theism as in Keller’s case. That last statement alone makes this idea hard to swallow if you focus on the outward fruit of many who call themselves Christian in our global village.
This makes me wonder, has the church really become a place of “Evangelical Atheists”? Obviously that’s a strong statement, and immediately I’m forced to backtrack and say that there are many congregations and many Christ-followers throughout the United States and around the world who would not fit into this category, however I think it’s safe to assume the majority of our society believes the stereotype of Christianity as judgmental, fear-mongering, war-mongering, right-wing extremists. How did we get to this point? Certainly it didn’t happen overnight?
Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote this back in 1919 in his essay The Sense of God’s Reality, “Atheism is not our greatest danger, but a shadowy sense of God’s reality. We do not disbelieve that God exists, but we often lack a penetrating and convincing consciousness that we are dealing with him and he with us.” Is the problem outlined by Fosdick after the turn of the 20th century the same at the turn of the 21st century, or perhaps magnified to a greater extent?
What I find interesting about Fosdick’s statement is how it presents itself in the prayers of the Christian. It seems without fail, whether in distress or painful circumstances at dinner or in small group we throw in the line “God be with us” or at the beginning of our worship services the prayer is heard “We welcome you here Lord.” I wonder how ridiculous those statements seem to an omni-present God who is already there, already comforting, already working and moving. I believe what this shows us more than anything is how right Fosdick was, that we live in the greatest danger of all: a shadowy sense of God’s reality… we don’t experience a perpetual presence of God’s reality.
Has the church lost its voice, its power because of our own atheism, our own practice of the absence of God? Have we, as Jesus stated of the Ephesians, “Forsaken our first love”?
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This very theory is what I based my final paper on (for English 101, no less). I had a lot of fun with it.