Stories about God

 

We live in a world where millions of people tell stories about God. There are collections of stories shared by millions, and collections shared by much smaller groups of people.

I “belong” to a group that shares stories that come from the Jewish people, followed by stories about the person named Jesus Christ, and all the stories that have resulted from his presence in human history.

From a strictly scientific standpoint, no one can “prove” the truth any of these stories. By “proof” I mean a story grounded in empirical observation and shared by a community of scholars who evaluate the quality of the observation and the quality of the theory that scientists tell as a result of their observations. (A theory is a story, a fiction, about what someone has observed.) That does not mean that all of the stories are  “false” or “myth.” Some of them are surely as true as any other story we tell in life—we just can’t prove the truth of our religious stories by empirical observation. We religious people “believe” the story we take as normative for ourselves. By belief we mean that we know the story is true even if we can’t prove it.

Religious stories tend to have characteristics that are different from other kinds of stories. They are different from scientific stories (theories), but they are also different from the stories grounded in everyday experience. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, sixty years ago, proposed that people tend to approach the world with four different frames of mind.

The first kind is the common sense frame of mind, in which I implicitly develop a story about things I do from moment to moment as I go about my daily business. I don’t question anything, I just focus on the activity at hand. The second kind is the scientific frame of mind. Geertz says that the scientific frame of mind is characterized by an attitude of explicitly questioning everything. To a scientist, there is nothing that can be proven for sure. Every scientific theory can be overturned by observations that call it into question. Think of what Einstein did to Newton. But we cannot live in a scientific world view. We could never eat breakfast if we had to be sure that the milk we drink is not poisoned, and we can never be sure it isn‘t.

The third world view is the aesthetic world view. This world view revels in experience. We experience delight from seeing or hearing something produced on canvas or performed by a musical group, or something in nature like a sunset. That emotional delight is what we seek when we are looking at something aesthetically. We verbalize artistic experiences by expressions of delight and that verbalization is an artistic kind of story.

The fourth and final world view is the religious. Geertz says that this is similar to the first, common-sense, world view in that it is just taken for granted, like everyday life, but it deals with the most important issues in life, what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate reality.” We do not try to prove the truth of stories in this world view. We take them as true and they ground our approach to the rest of our experiences.

In earlier ages, people developed the idea that anyone who did not share their religious story was bad, and had to be persuaded or compelled to change the story they were telling about “God.” This may have been the result of religious leadership becoming fused with political leadership—the king was both political leader and religious high priest. When you are living in a community of people who share the same stories about God, the intrusion of someone who doesn’t share those stories in uncomfortable and disorienting.

We are learning that it is possible for people to live together in peace even when they do not share the same stories about God. Possibly that advance in human culture occurred as a result of the experience of the founders of the United States. Those men had experienced the tragic effect of religious persecution in Europe, and they wanted to set up a society where no one would persecute someone else because of their religious beliefs.

My Roman Catholic community came to accept this approach when our church leadership, in the 1960s series of meetings of church leaders called the Second Vatican Council, said that every person’s conscience should be respected—if in conscience you accept a certain story of God, we should respect your belief and allow you to go about your business undisturbed.

To see religions as stories about God, and to accept that none of us can be absolutely sure about the truth of the story we accept, and to agree not to persecute people who share a different story, opens us to new experiences.

First of all, I may learn something about God from the stories other people tell about God. The stories in my tradition, both Jewish and Christian, have changed over the centuries. There are stories about God in Jewish tradition that I believe were changed by the experience of living with Jesus Christ. There are stories that the Roman Catholic community used to accept as true (for example, that charging interest on a loan will lead to bad outcomes) that Catholics later rejected. Moral beliefs are based on stories that describe bad outcomes when you do something.

There is no way for any group to prove the truth of its story. There is no “natural law.” What Catholics have called natural law is the set of stories about bad outcomes accepted in our community across centuries. Secular social science has come to reject the term “natural” in describing events that human beings experience. There are indeed features of our experience that seem to be biologically programmed, but it is very difficult to separate those from features that we have accepted because our societies have accepted them as true. Some people used to accept as true the story that the human race is divided into “races” that are innately superior or inferior to one another. Most people now reject that story. Ultimately all moral rules are the result of human agreement and learning.

To put it another way, the idea of natural law is a denominational belief accepted by some denomimnations. We and everyone else should be free to accept it or to reject it, following our consciences.

Much of the bitterness surrounding the issue of abortion in our country could have been avoided if we Catholics had quit treating our beliefs about human life as “natural law issues” and accepted the possibility that other people’s approaches to the legality of abortion can be based on their beliefs in conscience about what God wants them to do.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus gives to his disciples what Christians have come to call the “Great Commission.” “Go and make disciples of all nations.” (New American Bible translation of Matthew 28:19) The term "disciple" comes from the Latin word that means “to learn.” A disciple is a learner. To learn is to change your mind. We Christians are called to help all nations, including ourselves, to be open to changing our mind about what God is like and what God wants. We are all learners. As Jesus once said, “You have but one teacher.” (Matthew 23:8)

(Aside: The Greek of Matthew 28:19 does not use the term “disciple.” The Greek can be translated literally as “preach the gospel to all nations,” which is not the same as making disciples. Preaching does not presume that the preacher controls anything the hearer does about the message.)

There is a God. It’s just that none of us has a corner on what God is like, and we can learn from each other about what God is like. That kind of learning can be very enlivening and exciting.