Confessing Evangelical

John H Saturday 9th June, AD 2007

In my previous post, I described how David Jenkins (in his 1956 sermon, “There is no God”) proposes two questions that we can ask ourselves as those who worship God, rather than as outside observers of the phenomenon of worship, in response to the atheist’s cry that “There is no God!” (This is reminiscent of CS Lewis’ distinction between “looking at” and “looking along”.)

The first of these is this: “Can we really do without that to which such notions as perfection, transcendence and worshipfulness point?” Jenkins expands on this as follows:

Not merely, “Can we do without as pieces of mental furniture?” Very likely we can. Certainly we can for good stretches of time. But can we rigorously and absolutely exclude from every element of our being, activity and thought all suggestion that there is “more than” the sum total of other selves like us, the sum total of natural phenomena like those known to us, the sum total of the dialectic of history as it is described to us by the secular historian and so on? …

Or is there in worship an activity of response as well as, or even rather than, an activity of creation and self-projection? Can we believe that perfection, that the dimension of transcendence wherein lies the worshipful, is a mere notion?

Jenkins describes his second question as “perhaps the reverse of the first”:

Why does atheism have to be justified, and why does doubt about God’s existence have such penetrating and anguished quality? Is it because God is not a being like other beings, not in the sense that God does not exist, but rather in the sense that God is the one being whose existence cannot be a matter of indifference? That is, is it because God is the one being upon whom all beings depend?

It might, therefore, be one of the signs of God in human intellect is precisely the peculiarly intensive quality of the doubt that arises about God’s existence and the need to assert atheism rather than to treat the whole issue of God’s existence as “not a proper question”.

Not that Jenkins expects these to be knock-down arguments that atheists will find persuasive. As he concludes:

These signs, however, real as I believe them to be, are not proofs but pointers, not substantiations but signs whose true significance can be evoked only by the witness of the Christian church and the proclaiming of the word of God.

None the less, they remain as constantly fretting signs that we are made by the transcendent God for the transcendent God and that our folly is to say “There is no God”, while our joy and peace comes as in worship we confess God as “the one who is” and as “God of gods and Lord of lords”.

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