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Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Lukewarm atheists



There are probably a lot of people who don’t believe in God but are not quite sure about that. Now that I think about it, I do believe in God, but I am not quite sure about that. At least I have moments when I question the depth of my own faith.

When those moments come, I look around to see if there are other people walking with me. When I am taking the place of a pastor somewhere and preside at a Sunday Mass in his parish, I feel like I am being carried along on the backs of the people in the congregation. We’re all in this together.

Makes me think of a principle of military sociology: when soldiers are facing death in battle, they are not thinking about the flag or God or some other noble value. They are thinking about the soldier next to them. They go where their buddy goes, and they suffer what their buddy suffers, and maybe they die so that their buddy can live.

The people in the congregation are my buddies.

I have other buddies. They are people who pray psalms.

First of all they are people around the world today who are praying the same psalms today. We have this system called the “liturgy of the hours,” which lays out a plan for which psalms should be prayed on which days. There are men and women in Africa, and Oceania, and South Asia, and Europe, and South America, and even here in North America who are today using the words of the same psalms I am using, even though in different languages.

But then there are all the people who lived in earlier times. Monks and nuns who lived back in the middle ages and in the centuries before the middle ages. They were using the same words, though again in a different language from my English.

Aside: I grew up in an era when seminaries forced their students to learn Latin and Greek. In our case it was six years of Latin and four years of Greek. I can’t claim that I was comfortable in either language even after all that time, but the experience made me stubborn enough to keep my hand on that plough—I would touch base with those languages every so often. With Greek it was when I was preparing to preach on a New Testament passage, because the New Testament’s original language was Greek. With Latin, one time it was when a fellow Quincy University English professor talked me into taking over his introductory Latin course. He loves Latin, and has a much better grasp of the language than I have ever had.

Years ago I tried to photo-copy and paste together an English translation of the psalms with a Greek version of them. That didn’t work—too much Scotch tape. But now we have the Kindle, and Greek and Latin versions of the psalms available for download from websites, all for free. So my psalms are in triplicate: each verse in Greek, followed by Latin, followed by English.

When I pray a psalm in Latin, I think of all the people who used those exact same words down through the centuries. And the same for Greek—I think of the early Church “Fathers” like Athanasius and Basil who used the Greek words. Who knows? Maybe even Jesus knew Greek. Even if he didn’t, St. Paul certainly did.

I was told in a world religions course in grad school that Muslims are urged to read and speak the Q’uran in Arabic, that only by doing that can they appreciate what the Prophet wrote.

Conclusion to the aside: We could do worse than urge people of faith to learn Latin and Greek so that they will be able to have a richer understanding of the psalms.

But back to the lukewarm atheist.

The psalms are an education about God. Every verse tells me something about God. Maybe they could teach the lukewarm atheist too.

For example, over and over in the psalms two nouns occur: “ἔλεος (eleos)” and “ἀλήθεια (alethia)” in Greek, “misericordia” and “veritas” in Latin. But these are translations of the original Hebrew: “ḥesed” and “ˁĕmûnâ.” “ḥesed” can be translated “steadfast love.” “ˁĕmûnâ” means “faithfulness.” The two attributes of God that the psalms keep talking about are steadfast love and faithfulness.

Look, for example, at the Latin of the shortest psalm in the psalter, Psalm 117:

Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes;
laudate eum, omnes populi. 

Praise! Give glory to God!
Nations, peoples, give glory! 

Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus,
et veritas Domini manet in æternum. 

Strong the love embracing us.  -
Faithful the Lord forever.

Even after ten years of praying the psalms in Latin and many more years of praying them in English, I never noticed how often the two terms were paired. It was only after I kept seeing the pair popping up again and again in both Greek and Latin that I noticed the frequency.

That’s a nice way to describe God, don’t you think? God is steadfast love and faithfulness.

The psalms describe God with ears, and eyes, and hands, and an outstretched arm. God is jealous—but if you have a steadfast love for someone, and you see someone else horning in on that love, won’t you get angry? The jealousy grows out of love. Unfortunately, the jealousy led to an exaggerated focus on God’s punishing hand, an exaggeration nicely fitting into authority figures’ desire to make people behave. It took Jesus to strip away the focus on punishment and get back to the steadfast love character of God.

Yes, the psalms have a lot of problematic passages. The people who composed some of them didn’t know God very well, and the people who copied the originals sometimes botched the copying and nobody has ever been able to figure out what they were supposed to mean. But we are a human family, and we botch things and misunderstand God. The psalms teach us that too.

Conclusion.

The psalms are this lukewarm theist’s school of Godness. Every day I bathe in the centuries of words read, spoken, and chanted, about God. I still don’t know God very well. But it’s good to know that I can keep learning, with guidance from 150 sets of ancient words.

They used to say “In David, Christus.” In the songs supposedly composed by David, you can find Jesus Christ. In the words of those old poems, we can find the Word made flesh. What more do we need?