God's Undectable Fingerprints

I am a Christian.  I believe, confess and teach Christianity.  Christianity is my inheritance, a safe and durable edifice.  Christianity is how we Roman successors understand and deal with Ultimate Meaning and Purpose.

I am Christian to my core.  I have faith.  I have both strong faith and no faith.  But averaged out, I have sufficient faith to face death without fear.  I have enough faith to banish guilt.  I behave like a Christian.  I am saved from the consequences of my sin.  Whatever you might mean by "salvation," I have it.  God loves me, so I can love others.  I am a lay theologian by personal preference and by education.

So that is the faith part.  I also strongly doubt the existence of a Supreme Being of any kind.  I do not believe in God as provable fact, certainly not as Christianity describes Him / Her.  That is the "no faith" part.  Well, not quite. My non-belief simply does not matter.  Yes, you can smell paradox in the air.  Paradox proves nothing.

I have read Christian history and doctrine.  I have studied as carefully and as thoroughly as I am able.  I can explain the how and why, the meaning of Christ's life, death and resurrection.  I know the story.  I also know what is not in the story, the elephant in the room if you like.  One thing is missing.  The Big thing.  The thing we never talk about.  I recognize what is conspicuous by it's absence.  No fingerprints, not anywhere. 

I cannot find God's fingerprints.  I cannot see evidence of God's action and intelligence.  I cannot hear His Voice.  I cannot distinguish any sign of God's influence in history.  Everything looks exactly like the horrible, illogical, profane mess people make in the normal course of life.  I see practically infinite complication, paradox and mystery.  I see humanity as I have come to understand it, humanity as Thucydides describes it.  The God of faith makes a difference in the way things happen.  God should have his thumb on the scale, favor His people, speak through the Prophets and Evangelists.  Scripture is the inspired, Holy word of God.

Except scripture does not read with any constancy.  God is everything but the same, omniscient, omnipotent, all-knowing, Alpha and Omega being we describe Him as.  The God of scripture gets really angry, God punishes entire peoples.  God's faithful are forever chasing harlots and setting up idols.  God sets up problems that only He can solve.  The entire concept of predestination and election is complete nonsense and contradiction, and conspicuously undetectable.  Predestination is the bastard child of the Greek concept of Omniscience.  And God so Loves our misbehaving, awful selves that he sacrifices himself for us.  And then un-sacrifices Himself.  Descends to Hell, visits for a few days then ascends into Heaven after materializing a while on Earth. Heaven and Hell are real places without locations. Or possibly just concepts.  This fellow who hung with harlots and tax collectors.  What was he doing for three days in Hell?  Hanging with old friends I suspect.

Polygamy, slavery, circumcision, patriarchy, punishment -- all there as much as you can handle.  Jews are God's chosen people forever and the People who rejected and killed God Himself in the Person of Christ.  The Bible cannot be understood without endless notes and commentary.  The Bible must be interpreted as prophecy, allegory, prefiguration, metaphor and simile.  Every literary device was employed to mash up the Hebrew scriptures with what became the New Testament's multiple narratives.  The Cannon?  What counts and what does not?  Only provisionally settled centuries later, apocrypha everywhere depending on location.

The meaning of Jesus' life and death are so unclear that it takes centuries to develop orthodoxy. Except there are multiple orthodoxies, great schisms, sects innumerable, reformations and counter-reformations.  Burnings and purges.  And the Pope?

There is, in theory, one constant and unchanging Apostolic message.  But countless flavors of heterodox Christians have existed from Apostolic times.  The Arians did not disappear, we just moved out of their neighborhood. Poor Marcian, whose mouth is overstuffed with other's words and carrying uncomfortably the condemnation of history.


I have read a bit of the history of Christianity and Christian doctrine.  I would have liked to find those fingerprints..  I would like to see God's handiwork in what we call religion.  I would like to find God's truth.  I would like to find something except battles to the death.  Just bitterly opposed people arguing and, often by default or accident, orthodox or apostasy. I see lots of misunderstood dead guys.  What should I expect?  It's people.  We are all just humans skittering across endless fields of ice.

I am too ignorant or too stupid or something.  All I see are people with axes to grind and opponents to conquer and personal vendettas to pursue.  I see lots of thinkers, lots of debate, lots of killing.  I see lots of polishing, lots of convenient or inconvenient changes.  I see Bishops arguing with Bishops, thinkers exploring every possible interpretation of what amount to ghost stories.

But I do not see inspiration.  I do not see God's authorship.  I see lots of knotty problems created by trying to fit strange thoughts into preconceived categories.  Lots of paradox and inconsistency created by language, logic and just craziness.  Lots of miracles.  Lots of Authority.  I do not see much originality.  There simply is no evidence of anything Divine.   It is all faith.  It is belief and faith.  It is the total absence of meaning and evidence all the way down.  There is no foundation whatever.

Reason and logic, that quintessential Greek skill set, serve well in ordinary circumstances.  We are enveloped, however, in things not amenable to logic and reason.  We live in an alien universe where reason, language, anything we have is insufficient to explain very much at all.

Christ lived in a time when education meant becoming conversant with the culture of the Greek Golden Age.  Paul pointed out very clearly that the mystery of Christ was not something which could be "explained" by Greek reason and logic.  Greek postulates are responsible for Christian paradox and almost infinitively complicated explanations.  Theologians haAnd then un-sacrifices Himself, rises from the dead, mmer contradictions into apparent consistency.  We do not need to know the answers.  But the obsessed, in particular, must know that answers exist.  Or simply believe they exist.

Christianity took shape in a Greek world.  The fundamental Greek postulate was that existence is reasonable, that God operates and can be understood logically.  Jesus was extraordinary by any standard.  Jesus was a Jew and he spoke from within Jewish tradition. He was regarded as a very learned Jewish scholar, certainly not a Greek cosmopolitan.  Christ happened, he left only the experience of contemporary Jewish witnesses.  What "really" happened? Does it matter?

Jesus left a lasting impression on his followers. That Jesus life and death IS significant beyond those first witnesses is that their transformation was transmissible.  What Jesus' followers understood and taught about Him readily transformed others.  That capacity for transformation and transmission continues to this day.  Sort of like a social virus.

But what did Jesus mean?  How are we to understand His significance?  We have a few fragments in the language Jesus spoke, Aramaic.  Most of what we know from that first generation, what we now call the New Testament, was written in Greek by observant, educated Jews.  They wrote what made sense to them as classically educated people, products of Greek culture.  Much about Jesus was difficult to describe in Greek.  We are left with what the writers could only describe as miracles, happenings which contravene logic, mysteries.

Those who started this "Christian" thing were people who considered themselves observant Jews.  They were educated in the Greek manner and the Jewish manner if they were educated at all.  What we recognize as Christianity today was sorted through their sensibility.  What an impossible situation. 

For the first 300 years Christianity was not the product of scholarship.  Rather it was a consensus of disciples, referring back ultimately to Jesus' first followers.  The first comprehensive analysis of Christianity comes from Augustine, 300 years after the fact.   Thanks O'Donnell for the idea.

What to make of this unusual character Jesus?  We have a polished, diverse collection of thoughts and practices 2000 years later.   You get to choose if the story bears any resemblance to "actual fact."  We know of early Christian belief from "apologies" written to distinguish "true Christianity" from "falsehoods."

Your opponent never understands your ideas.  That you disappear is sufficient.  Unless they dig you up and consider it worthwhile to burn your heretical bones posthumously.  So much thought spent answering your critics, who were mistaken anyway.  Who is driving the bus?  Is anyone driving anything?  Not apparently. 

Does it matter?  No.  Religion is for unity.  Religion is for fighting over, for uniting large groups of people in common practice, for control, for winning, for explaining the inexplicable.  For disposing of inconvenient, dangerous ideas.

Religion is for answering impossible questions.  Religion is for giving birth and death meaning.  Religion is for the sacred stuff, the mystery.  Religion is for fighting superstition and for reinforcing superstition.  Religion is a social tool.

Humans need answers.  Religion supplies answers.  Religion has tremendous social utility.  Priests and Rulers need tools to move people or to stop them. Organization trumps anarchy.  God's inscrutable ways are responsible for what happens.  God is the antidote to chaos.  If not God actually and precisely, then the concept of God, the threat of God, the fear of God.

God, who may actually exist, has been silent for a very long time, perhaps forever.  So far God is not detectable by any reproducible means.  What we now call physical laws have no practical exceptions.  The dead do not come back to life in our experience.  Time does not run backwards.  But we can live as though we matter, as though there is something beyond death.  That is sufficient.  The story is what matters.  The story, impenetrably complex and infinitely detailed.  The story fills an entire lifetime with plenty left over.

Christian practice and tradition have functioned effectively for two millennia based on faith and assertion.  Proof has never existed beyond the words of witnesses.  One must conclude that proof is not required.

What is required?  Nothing.  Has the secular enlightenment eliminated faith?  No, faith works very well, thank you.  Faith is miraculously effective.  That Christianity exists in so many mutually hostile forms speaks for faith.  Can another Great Awakening be very far off?

It is all a matter of faith.  We can deal with the black emptiness.  We can live.  We can function.  We can worship and praise.  We can manage the fact of our own existence.  We can give randomness a veneer of purpose.  We can be different from animals.  We can be civilized.  We can live together. It is all people have ever had.  Religion is our inheritance.  Religion works.  There is no other answer.  Go ahead, look, philosophy is no help.  Faith is the only game.  Faith will rise again. 

So this is where theologians come to rest, the muddy bottom which gently buried the fossilized past.  By the time one understands enough, one also understands how little it matters.  One must get on with life, happy or sad.  There is no starting over.

I am a Christian to my core.  I act like a Christian.  I believe, teach and confess the story according to Martin Luther, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America flavor.  I have faith.  My incredulity is irrelevant.