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Atheism In Our Time
By Robert J. McCracken

"When I meet people who are contemptuous of the 'God is dead' theologians, and who are cocksure about their own belief in God, and who talk about him as if he were a man on the street and allow themselves unlimited license of dogmatic affirmation about the most profound questions of existence, I wonder whether they are alive to what is going on."

IT used to be said that atheism is a rare opinion very seldom met with. No one who knows what. He is talking about would say that today. Atheism is the official creed of communist countries containing something like one third of the population of the world. It is established in the west as well as in the east. The view, not confined to intellectuals, is Widespread that belief in God is a myth, an opiate, a primitive, credulous, childish phase that the human mind in its evolution has outgrown. When Nietzsche, the nineteenth century philosopher, proclaimed "God is dead," little attention was paid to him. He had had a mental breakdown, and it was easy to write him off as neurotic. The proclamation, however, has proved prophetic. There has probably never been a period in history when the conviction was as common as it is now that this is a godless world.

I

It happens to be a conviction held by some Christian thinkers. John A. T. Robinson, author of Honest to God, has written another book, The New Reformation? with a chapter titled, "Can A Truly Contemporary Person Not Be An Atheist?" In the judgment of

The Rev. Dr. Robert J. McCracken is the minister of The Riverside Church, New York, N.Y. This article was originally delivered as a sermon at The Riverside Church and also on the NBC National Radio Pulpit. We publish it here not only because of its intrinsic merit but as a creative, and empathetic, example of how the contemporary preacher can sense both judgment and mercy in a current discussion which for many seems utterly preposterous and unpromising.

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many he has stated a stronger case for atheism than for theism. The bishop's writings, though some call him "the atheist bishop," are conservative compared with those of three American Christian thinkers, Paul van Buren, William Hamilton, Thomas J. J. Altizer. I quote a statement made by Altizer which is typical of the new radical movement in theology. "We are not simply saying that modern man is incapable of believing in God, or that modern culture is an idolatrous flight from the presence of God, or even that we exist in a time in which God has chosen to be silent.... Insofar as the theologian speaks of the death of God-and actually means what he speaks-he is speaking of the death of God himself. He is saying that because God has disappeared from history he is no longer present for faith. But he is truly absent, he is not simply hidden from view, and therefore he is truly dead."

Statements of that sort have shocked and outraged many Christians. There have been floods of letters of protest and demands that men who believe God is dead should not be permitted to teach in universities and theological seminaries. For my own part, I recall what J. B. Priestley, not a Christian, said about two British atheists: "God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Margharita Laski that He doesn't exist." But I remind myself also that radical doubt is not a new phenomenon in Christian circles. From my Scottish background I cite two cases-Thomas Chalmers, leading churchman of his day, writing, "Without a hold on Christ there is no hold on God at all," and Marcus Dods, the theologian, exclaiming in a dark hour, "If only one could be sure of God!"

The Bible tells of men who grappled with the most devastating of doubts. Jeremiah wondered whether God had become to him "a stream that runs dry, a spring that fails." Job said about his search for God, "Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him; on the left hand I seek him, but I cannot behold him; I turn to the right hand, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way that I take." Nor can we leave out of reckoning the cry of dereliction on the lips of Jesus, in the Gospel according to Mark his last spoken cry, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" "If," asks William Hamilton, "Jesus can wonder about being forsaken by God, are we to be blamed if we wonder?"

Those who have heard me preach over a period of almost twenty years know how fundamental for me belief in the God and Father

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of our Lord Jesus Christ is. I hold no brief for the radical theologians, but I suggest that instead of castigating them or denying them a hearing, we try to understand them, what they are saying, why they are saying it, what faith they are substituting for the faith they have discarded. As Dean Cannon of the beleaguered Emory University put it (he was appealing to irate alumni): "What is seriously proposed should always be seriously considered.... Even in religion, we ought to be confronted with ideas with which we violently disagree. One learns far more from reading the works of thinkers who disturb and challenge him than from thinkers who confirm his own opinions."

II

We can learn from radical doubters. They have much that is important to say to us. Here again the past has lessons to teach us. Rufus Jones once wrote a book which he called The Church's Debt to Heretics. It is the heretics who have forced the church to clear its mind, opened up to it new insights, spurred it on to deeper thinking about God and Christ and man. So with the young radical theologians of today. Besides, when they say "God is dead," at once the question arises: "In what sense is he alive for us?" Their passionate unbelief is a rebuke to our conventional orthodoxy. Their concern is a challenge to our complacency. They deny the existence of God but nothing is plainer from their writings than that they are obsessed by him, as we are not. Luther once delivered himself of a strange and paradoxical judgment. "I will say one thing boldly and freely. Nobody in this life is nearer to God than those who deny him, and he has no more pleasing, no more dear children than these." What did Luther mean by that? Will Herberg, to whom I am indebted for the saying, offers this interpretation. "The passionate unbeliever who 'denies' God may be all wrong in his ideas, but at least he takes God seriously. This kind of unbeliever is no mere unbeliever; he is rather an anti-believer whose whole life is a wrestling with God, whose whole mind is preoccupied with the problem of faith. Whatever else he may do, he does not take God for granted; he does not commit the ultimate sin of indifference. For that reason, Luther insists, he is near to God and dear to him."

Some think it is a mistake to devote so much attention to a hand-

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ful of radical theologians, that they are in no sense representative of the mainstream of Christian thought, and that they should read Nietzsche and Camus and Bultmann and Bonhoeffer less and should study the Bible more. Some may want to remind me that fewer than one percent of the American people think of themselves formally as atheists. But are such critics giving weight to the solid evidence that increasing numbers of men of affairs, businessmen, scientists, writers, students are adopting a negative attitude toward traditional religious beliefs and are unable to profess faith in the God worshipped in the churches, a personal God, the God of the Bible?

There are two types of atheists, theoretical atheists and practical atheists. The number of the former is multiplying; in our secularist culture the latter constitute the majority of the population in our country and all over the world. By practical atheists I mean people who live from day to day as though there were no God, people for whom the word "God" no longer connects with anything real in their lives, except with whatever happens to be left over when all the vital connections have been made. The rituals of religion persist-children are baptized, couples are married in church-but they are frequently mere forms and observed from conformity to long-established custom. The same is true of a great deal of church attendance, though across the Atlantic the masses have left the churches, and Europe, the cradle of Christian culture, is its own major mission field. Religious conviction and experience are lacking. In their place often all that is left is an attitude as vague as, "It's not what you believe that is important, it's how you live that counts." Bishop Robinson maintains that most people today are practical atheists, and he spells out what that involves by stating that God has become for them "intellectually superfluous," "emotionally dispensable," and (in a world with too many tragedies, personal and social) "morally intolerable."

III

What about ourselves? Do we believe in God? It is not a question to answer on the spur of the moment. It should only be answered after we have searched our hearts and reviewed the way in which we live our lives and considered in what we actually put our final trust. The glib answer is the one to avoid. When I meet people

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who are contemptuous of the "God is dead" theologians, and who are cocksure about their own belief in God, and who talk about him as if he were a man on the street and allow themselves unlimited license of dogmatic affirmation about the most profound questions of existence, I wonder whether they are alive to what is going on, whether they have any grasp of the dimensions of the problem for Christianity, any comprehension of the issues at stake, any feeling for the people round about them for whom the word "God" has lost all meaning, for whom God is dead. Except for what William James called "sky-blue souls," and they are always humble souls, never cocksure, never glib, faith in God is difficult. If it isn't difficult for you, have a care. Don't be critical of those who only haltingly believe or can't believe at all. The day may come when something will happen--some loss, grief, sore trouble that will leave you full of doubts and questions and hard put to keep your faith. It won't necessarily have to happen to you or to somebody in your family circle. It may be that you will become aware, sharply, suddenly, as never before, as I was after a visit to Asia, of "the giant agony of the world" and will keep asking, "How with the world as it is can I believe in God?"

I ask that question myself. I can't understand how any thoughtful, sensitive person can avoid asking it. I have to do battle for my faith in God. But something said by one of my teachers, Professor H. H. Farmer of Cambridge, has stayed with me and helps me. He said that he had settled it with himself, that without running away from doubts and questionings (for often through doubts and questionings he had come to a deeper truth) he was always going to put the greater emphasis on faith. He was always going to put his doubts' in the dock first. He was going to doubt doubt before he doubted faith. When it came to an issue, he was going deliberately and consciously to trust his belief, his faith, that deep something within him which affirmed God, which said. "Yes" to the God revealed in the New Testament, and he was going to seek to direct his life accordingly. That strikes me as sincere, sound, intelligent.

In line with that I put my daily trust, my final trust, in Christ's interpretation of life. I say with George Matheson, "O Son of Man, whenever I doubt life, I think of Thee." Christ saw the reality of things, good and evil, right and wrong, belief and unbelief, more clearly than anybody I know of, and he lived from and died for that

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reality. It is incredible to me that he was deluded, that his prayers to God and his faith in God can be accounted for as mystical fantasy, wishful thinking, psychological self-projection. How could a faith founded on an illusion have produced such a character, such a life? When I ask myself: "Which is more likely to be right, my doubts or his certainties?", the answer is obvious. I put my trust in his certainties and in that something deep within me which rises to them and responds to them. And that is why Christ is the center for my faith and my life.

IV

Atheism in our time! An inappropriate subject, some may think with Christmas so near [Sunday, Dec. 12, 1965]. I thought so too, and had practically made up my mind to shelve the subject until the New Year. Then in restaurants and shops I heard the Christmas carols, and looked at the people round about me, and recalled Bishop Robinson's dictum, "Most of us today are practical atheists." The conviction took hold of me then that I must not shelve the subject of atheism, that I must deal with it in Advent, but go on from speaking about it to speak about him who came to reveal God, who was certain of God, who lived from that certainty and died for it and has inspired it right down the centuries. Think about him, his birth in Bethlehem, his boyhood in Nazareth, his preaching and teaching and mighty works, his death and resurrection, his influence in century after century. And quoting again my Cambridge teacher: "Doubt your doubts before you doubt that to which all that is best within you really points, that Christ is the way and the truth and the life, and to him and to his vision of God you can commit your whole being and your whole life."