they don’t make Oldsmobiles anymore.
They used to be popular, and your grandparents or roommate may still drive one, but the factories have shut down. Eventually the only ones left will be collector’s items, relics of an era that has passed.
Oldsmobile couldn’t keep up with the times, and so it gradually became part of the past, not the future.
For them, not us.
For then, not now.
I tell you about the Sled I used to drive because for many in our world today, God is like Oldsmobiles. To explain what I mean when I talk about God-like Oldsmobiles, a few stories: my friend Cathi recently told me about an event she attended where an influential Christian leader talked openly about how he didn’t think women should be allowed to teach and lead in the church. Cathi, who has two master’s degrees, sat there stunned.
I got an e-mail from my friend Gary last year, saying that he’d decided to visit a church with his family on Easter Sunday. They’d heard a sermon about how resurrection means everybody who is gay is going to hell.
And then my friend Michael recently told me about hearing the leader of a large Christian denomination say that if you deny that God made the world in a literal six days, you are denying the rest of the Bible as well, because it doesn’t matter what science says.
And then there are the two pastors I know who each told me, within days of the other, how their wives don’t want anything to do with God. Both wives were raised and educated in very religious environments that placed a great deal of importance on the belief that God is good and the point of life is to have a personal relationship with this good God. But both wives have suffered great pain in their young lives, and the clean and neat categories of faith they were handed in their youth haven’t been capable of helping them navigate the complexity of their experiences. And so, like jilted lovers, they have turned away. God, for them, is an awkward, alien, strange notion. Like someone they used to know.
And then there’s the party I attended in New York where I met a well-known journalist who, when he was told that I’m a pastor, wanted to know if all of you pastors use big charts with timelines and graphics to show people when the world is going to end and how Christians are going to escape while those who are left behind endure untold suffering.
I tell you about Cathi sitting there stunned and Gary hearing that sermon and me at that party because whether it’s science or art or education or medicine or personal rights or basic intellectual integrity or simply dealing with suffering in all of its complexity, for many in our world—and this includes Christians and a growing number of pastors—believing or trusting in that God, the one they’ve heard other Christians talk about, feels like a step backward, to an earlier, less informed and enlightened time, one that we’ve thankfully left behind. There’s a question that lurks in these stories, a question that an ever-increasing number of people across a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives are asking about God:
Can God keep up with the modern world?
Things have changed. We have more information and technology than ever. We’re interacting with a far more diverse range of people than we used to. And the tribal God,
the one that is the only one many have been exposed to—the one who’s always right (which means everybody else is wrong)—is increasingly perceived to be
small,
narrow,
irrelevant,
mean, and sometimes just not that intelligent.
Is God going to be left behind?
Like Oldsmobiles?
For others, it isn’t that God is behind or unable to deal with the complexity of life; for them God never existed in the first place. In recent years we’ve heard a number of very intelligent and articulate scientists, professors, and writers argue passionately and confidently that there is no God. This particular faith insists that human beings are nothing more than highly complex interactions of atoms and molecules and neurons, hardwired over time to respond to stimuli in particular ways, feverishly constructing meaning to protect us from the unwelcome truth that there is no ultimate meaning because in the end we are simply the sum of our parts—no more, no less.
That all there is
is, in the end,
all there is.
This denial isn’t anything new, but it’s gained a head of steam in recent years, this resurgence seemingly in reaction to the God-like Oldsmobile, the one more and more people are becoming convinced is not only behind, but downright destructive.
I was recently invited to participate in a debate at which the topic was “Is religion good or bad?” Here’s the kicker: the organizers wanted me to know I was free to choose which side I’d take!
How revealing is that?
All of which brings me to Jane Fonda. (You didn’t see that coming, did you?) Several years ago in an interview she gave to Rolling Stone magazine the interviewer said this:
Your most recent—and perhaps most dramatic—transformation is your becoming a Christian. Even with your flair for controversy, that’s pretty explosive.
It’s a telling statement, isn’t it? You can sense so much there, as if there’s a question behind the question that isn’t really a question—that hidden question being what the interviewer really wants to ask her: “Why would anybody become a Christian?”
That’s a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an “explosive,” not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.
In her response, Jane Fonda spoke of being drawn to faith because “I could feel reverence humming in me.”
Reverence humming in me. I love that phrase. It speaks to the experiences we’ve all had—moments and tastes and glimpses when we’ve found ourselves deeply aware of the something more of life, the something else, the sense that all of this might just mean something, that it may not be an accident, that it has profound resonance and that it matters in ways that are very real and very hard to explain.
For a massive number of people, to deny this reverence humming in us, to insist that we’re simply random collections of atoms and that all there is is all there is, leaves them cold, bored, and uninspired.
It doesn’t ring true to our very real experiences of life.
But when people turn to many of the conventional, traditional religious explanations for this reverence, they’re often led to the God who is like Oldsmobiles, the one who’s back there, behind, unable to keep up.
All of this raising the questions:
Are there other ways to talk about the reverence humming in us?
Are there other ways to talk about the sense we have that there’s way more going on here?
Are there other ways to talk about God?
My answer is yes. I believe there are. But before we get to those others ways, I need to first tell you why this book comes bursting out of my heart like it does.
One
