words that will shape how we talk about God in this book. The words are (I feel like there should be a drumroll or something . . .)
With,
For,
Ahead.
With, because I understand God to be the energy, the glue, the force, the life, the power, and the source of all we know to be the depth, fullness, and vitality of life from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and everything in between. I believe God is with us because I believe that all of us are already experiencing the presence of God in countless ways every single day. In talking about the God who is with us, I want you to see how this withness directly confronts popular notions of God that put God somewhere else, doing something else, coming here now and again to do God-type things. I want you to see both the irrelevance and the danger of that particular perspective of God as you more and more see God all around you all the time.
Then for, because I believe God is for every single one of us, regardless of our beliefs or perspectives or actions or failures or mistakes or sins or opinions about whether God exists or not. I believe that God wants us each to flourish and thrive in this world here and now as we become more and more everything we can possibly be. In talking about the forness of God, I want you to see how many of the dominant theological systems of thought that insist God is angry and hateful and just waiting to judge us unless we do or say or perform or believe the right things actually make people miserable and plague them with all kinds of new stresses and anxieties, never more so than when they actually start believing that God is really like that. I want you to see the radical, refreshing, revolutionary forness that is at the heart of Jesus’s message about God as it informs and transforms your entire life.
Then ahead, because when I talk about God, I’m not talking about a divine being who is behind, trying to drag us back to a primitive, barbaric, regressive, prescientific age when we believed Earth was flat and the center of the universe. I believe that God isn’t backward-focused—opposed to reason, liberation, and progress—but instead is pulling us and calling us and drawing all of humanity forward—as God always has—into greater and greater peace, love, justice, connection, honesty, compassion, and joy. I want you to see how the God we see at work in the Bible is actually ahead of people, tribes, and cultures as God always has been. Far too many people in our world have come to see God as back there, primitive, not-that-intelligent, dragging everything backward to where it used to be. I don’t understand God to be stuck back there, and I want you to experience this pull forward as a vital, active reality in your day-to-day life as you see just what God has been up to all along with every single one us.
All of which leads us to one more word to wrap it up: so. So what? So how do we live this? So is the question about what all this talking has to do with our everyday thinking and feeling and living.
To review, then:
Open,
Both,
With,
For,
Ahead,
and so.
One more note about notes: all of the places where I cite Scripture verses, as well as credits for other sources for information and suggestions for further reading, are included in the endnotes, organized there by theme or key phrases.
It’s a fair bit of ground to cover, and my hope is that by the end you will say,
“Now that’s what I’m talking about.”
One time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”
As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile, because not long before that evening I’d been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t you?”
It’s as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.
There’s a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:
Faith or intellect?
Belief or reason?
Miracles or logic?
God or science?
Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?
I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we’re living in.
When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don’t happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can’t prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we’re living in and how we know what we know.
Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they’re just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.
So before we talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us, we’ll talk about the kind of world we’re living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.
First, we’ll talk about the bigness of the universe,
then
the smallness of the universe,
then
we’ll talk about you and what it is that makes you you,
and then
we’ll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.
This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .
I. Welcome to the Red Shift
The universe,
it turns out,
is expanding.
Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but universes?
Or more precisely, the universe?
It’s expanding?
Now
