How does God exist?

Theology finds itself in a peculiar predicament in that it must talk about the Word of God but cannot speak about the speaker of that Word. We are privy to God’s address to us but not to God Himself. This is the one who is protected from human speculation by the first commandment that we must have no images of Him and by numerous texts that warn that to see God is to die.

This understanding comes into practice when the preacher is a disciplined exegete. Sermons are born out of meditation on biblical texts and it is undisciplined to evoke God apart from these texts. Thus God is to be found in the text and in the sermon and in the sacrament as a real presence that informs, comforts and confronts.

The reason that Evangelicals have such a low view of the Eucharist is that they do not understand that God is in the bread and the wine when it is distributed among the believing community and in the sermon when it is faithful to the biblical text. This has a long history in Protestantism which distanced itself from what it saw as superstitious, if not magical in medieval sacramental theology.

The reason that Evangelicals do not take the Eucharist seriously is that God is elsewhere. He may be the conversational partner in private prayer but he is not “enthroned on the praises of Israel” or present in the worship of the church.

When the Old Testament prophet stands in the midst of the community and brackets his speech with “Thus says the Lord” it is counted that the Lord has spoken even though that word comes from the mouth of a human being. The prophetic word is not a case of God being channelled through the prophet but of the prophet speaking a truthful and confronting word to the people. As the Word of God it creates life for the people.

This Word is pure event and cannot be tied to any species of being. Biblical language about God does not always reflect this because our relationship with God is set within the context of our relationship with other persons. God is not a cache of knowledge or a theory or a force or a sentiment, He is a conversational partner. Thus we find in the Bible language which portrays God as having a “strong right arm”. But this does not mean that God is an actual person as we know other persons.

It is apparent that belief in God has a multitude of meanings. The first Christians in the Roman Empire were accused of being atheists because they refused allegiance to the gods of the empire. It seems to me that contemporary Christians can also call themselves atheists in a sense in that they do not believe in God as supernatural agent but in the God we see nailed to the cross. Again, God is pure event.

The silence that follows the cry from the cross; “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ convicts God as a personal being as absent. Similar cries of those in the open and floundering boat, that remain unanswered, bear witness that there is no one out their, no one knows we are here.

In this sense naturalistic scientists are correct, the physical universe is cold and uncaring. “We cannot view life as a saga with a meaning intended for us, because to do so would be to “assume that the universe is governed by forces which are essentially of the same order as the promptings of the human heart”. To do so is to be narcissistic and self indulgent and to be out of touch with what is.

The argument of protest atheism is that believers are deluded because they do not see the world as it is. They are weak because they attempt to cushion the human reality of death and tragedy. This is cogent criticism.

But this does not empty faith in God, it is just a different God to that constructed in the modern age. Far from being a means by which obstacles to faith may be removed, Christian atheism consists in a retrieval of the God of the Bible who is identified in the events of the particular nation Israel and in the life and death of a particular man Jesus. This is no apologetic but a rediscovery of the radical nature of biblical theology.

It has been the error of the modern age, and some of the Medieval, that the otherness of God consists in Him being immaterial, ghostly, supernatural. However, the Bible describes the otherness of God not in terms of the material or immaterial but in terms of consciousness.