Can a Christian be an atheist?

They that have been reading my publications[i] ought to be able to provide my answer to this question recently put to me. But, lest I have not been sufficiently explicit, allow me to review the issues anterior to the answer.

First, as noted in my article on Faith (11 Feb. 2012), I do not believe in atheists. Most atheists deny the existence of some sort of anthropological being who one day sets about to make the universe, sets it in motion, then either abandons it to its mechanical functioning, or keeps paternal watch over its unfolding and tinkers with it according to divine wit or whim. My incredulousness is, however, that anyone exists without some sort of adherence or subscription to an intellectual first principle or a volitional prime value, some sort of archetypal idea or value about the how of existence or the why of existence and our life together. It is my contention, one not out of congress and congruity with both learned and saintly souls, that one’s intellectual or volitional prime principle constitutes for one the basic most vision of that traditionally termed the “divine”. That prime principle may be the chaos of nature’s unfolding, it may be a type of “big bang” wherein an inherent pattern unfolds, it may be an attitude that existence is a wildness wherein it is properly “every man for himself” and “dog eats dog” except in so far as everyman and every dog needs a pack, or it may be an evaluative vision wherein, despite all the uncertainty of existence, one senses a deep and abiding surety and love of self which translates into the valuing the world in its very foundations or primal thrust as something positive and purposeful, even if mysteriously so.  One’s prime value or idea is one’s god, the vision, the projection, the transcending idiom, before which or under which one lives out one’s life, orders one’s thoughts and actions. One may not name such a “god”, but that is merely a matter of a rose by another name being still a rose.

That most of our ancestors made the primal value or idea communicable and communicative for both self and society by enwrapping its abstractness and absoluteness in anthropological, in mythical, in some sort of ceremonial robes is not the issue. No thinking person believes somewhere in the sky sits a hoary elder with compass and pen measuring and keeping scores. No thinking person transfixed by the painterly and narrative mastery of the Sistine ceiling believes the pictures are literal. Religion is in the business of making and preserving pictures, pictograms of non-material realities, of systems of societal values and visions, and their mission statements. One may disagree with the intent of a picture, one may dismiss the artistry behind a portrait, but one cannot escape the fact that we are a species that makes up pictures, that envisions the envisionable in the quest to make it visible and viable, tactile and practical, and that this is integral to our psychic structure, unless, of course, the history of the arts, the works of the like of Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Mircae Eliade, et al. are to be dismissed as iatrogenic bedlam and babble. Having defenestrated atheism, allow me to turn a deconstructive eye upon Christianity.

Is Christianity a system of teachings, sacraments, doctrines, dogmas, liturgies, rites, devotions and practices, or are such things posterior, aleatory, aliunde?  Is Christianity the worshipful adherence to one man as the chosen of God based upon his own self-identification with that role and his self-revelation in that role as encoded in his own Jewish cult and culture and transmitted through the wider social milieu of Greco-Roman civilization? Is Christianity the worship of the God the Hebrews through his Chose One, his Christ, as transmitted in the cultural lingua franca, the thought patterns and ritualizations of the Roman world?

Jesus understood himself to be the Christ, God’s chosen vessel for interfacing with the world, the divine ambassador to the world fully commissioned to deal with the world in whatsoever manner was required to move that same world to its full, its proper and healthful fulfilment (traditionally encoded as “salvation” and “Christ came to save the world”). His inner vision was one of deepest intimacy with the primal creativity and positivity of existence, and he spoke of it in the language of his cult and culture as a filial connection to a father, which father was our father, maker of all things, judge of all men. This vision was not a state unto itself in which to retreat, neither was it an honour in which to bask; it was purposeful, totally purposeful (dogmatically transmitted as: Christ is the embodiment of a mission of the creative and divine trinity to and for the sake of the world).[ii] The purpose was the continued animation of all that is toward its richest, deepest, most meaningful existence, not by miraculous leaps and bounds, but by application of something every loving parent, guardian and teacher knows well, by application of steady and unwavering faith and creative-love in each and every one in each and every moment and act. There is no magic wand to wave and make all things perfect. Creation continues to groan and creep toward its continuous unfolding, but in the breath and vision, the spirit,  given by this Jesus, it does so with and by the hand and heart of everyman who embraces the name and work of Christ-being, by and in the faith and hope of every soul that acknowledges, as first did this Jesus, that my reality, my identity, my true-most existence is to be the face, the heart and hand of creative love to my time and place that all times and places reach out to their fullness (in traditional form:  that “the glory of the Most High fill the heavens and the earth”).[iii]

Christianity is not first and foremost a religion; it is a state of mind, or more accurately, a state of being. To be a Christian is to embrace a valuation of self as positively and deeply valued, as primarily, as essentially, as foundationally so valued, and therein to radiate, to transmit self-affirming value and valuation to one’s environs, to have, in more pictogrammatic parlance, the heart and mind transfigurative of all creation. To be a Christian is to be—internally and externally–positive, accepting, understanding, caring, careful, and creative as possible in the living out of one’s life in and for one’s world. Christianity is not by necessity, not by essence, a religion. The Christian religion is a treasure house of instruments, of tools, of arts for the embrace and maintenance of that state of being, an inheritance from the generations gone before us. It merits to be respected and reverenced for that, but it cannot be worshipped and adored as if it, and not the living present of man and world, were the locus, the stadium of the wholesome and whole, the holy, quivering in its potential and gravidity.

Jesus formulated his self-understanding as the divine executor in the context of his spiritual heritage. His first followers formulated their understanding of his teachings in the context of their cult, its rituals, its holy books, and its spiritual and social expectations. The successive layers of adherents reinterpreted those formulations within their own cultural milieus. We are social beings, and social beings, by definition, have systems of communication and social adhesion—chief among these the plenum of language: spoken language, body language, symbolic and ritualistic language—tools to denote social vision, mission, order. Religion, utilizing the panoply of audible, visual, and tactile arts at its disposal, has traditionally stood as the prime methodology for disseminating the core values and visions of a society, the locus for both communal and individual reflection and re-affirmation. Values that are not intentionally reinforced wither; identity with an evaluative mission that is not internally and socially revisited, rehearsed, and reaffirmed evaporates. The unexamined life tends to unravel, individually and socially. Religion, as the cult and the hearth of culture, has traditionally functioned to provide the forum and language for this social and individual statement of identity and its affirmation.

We, however, live in an age wherein traditional cult and popular culture are no longer symbiotic, wherein, for many, the traditional cult no longer provides a viable, a comprehensible, or an acceptable forum and tongue for the transmittal and reaffirmation of the richest values and deepest visions. Where then does one, ought one, can one find a terrain wherein to find within the illumination of one’s deepest truth, to proclaim and practice, to celebrate and dance the joy of that light?  If the Christian religion, in any of its extant forms and formats, cannot provide a forum for the modern man, for any man, is it a necessity to the self-affirmation of one as Christ to my time and place, or more briefly said, as Christian?

Christianity is about “putting on the heart and mind of God’s Christ”, about the all-embracing self-identification with the role of being the temporal embodiment of the wholly creative power in one’s time and place. How one comes to that self-understanding, that self-affirmation, how one’s remains confirmed and rehearsed in that valuation and its inherent vitality of mission, is a matter one, being loving, careful and creative, must find for oneself. There are no rules, no regulations, no required readings or regimentations.  There are precedents, exceedingly valuable precedents, but precedents nonetheless. The scriptures, the compendium of the spiritual journeys of our ancestors in the faith, speak of living in the Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of God. Christian prayer always speaks of being given in and by the power of that same Spirit. Christian theology always speaks of the Spirit as addressing the world and summoning it to God. This Spirit, which is none other than an avatar of the whole-making (the holy), and of its agency in the world (the christ), is always free and potent. No law can hamper it. No horizon, not even death, can deter it. No threat, not even hell, can weaken it. It is called Holy Spirit precisely because it is free, creative, other-oriented, self-giving. To be a Christian is to not only be the face of such love in its creativity, it is to be so in unutterable freedom of movement and manoeuvre. This spirit, this state of being, this Christ-ianity, knows neither bounds nor binds. How can such a Spirit ever be burdened with “Thou shalt…” or “Thou shalt not…” when, as in Genesis, its primal utterance is now and always the vital “Let there be…”, its primal judgment the valuation “It is good”?

A Christian cannot be an atheist and that by very definition of the name Christian. A Christian lives his life, in the dark and in the light, in his solitude and in his public place, as the very hands and heart of the power he values as the base and basis of all that is—the creative, healing, healthful power of loving embrace, being at-one (atoned) with, in and for world. To be a Christian means to take on the sacred (the set apart from the ordinary) role of being a divine interface in and for one’s world. How does one deny that which one channels and ever rises to be?

But, and I have noted in my article on Sin theology always lugs about a “but”, there are other questions to which this gives rise. Can a Christian be churchless? Can a Christian be religion-less? Can a Christian be without anchor in scriptures, in the historical breath of the generations gone before? Can a Christian be without some type of allegiance to Jesus as the Christ, as Lord, as teacher of this way? I cannot provide definitive answers to these items, because I believe we are living the age wherein their embodiment will manifest itself only in practice; the creature will either evolve or not. Questions of such hypothetical nature are, however, dehiscent, and being not adverse to exploration, I shall venture onward.

Is Christianity essentially the embrace of an identity, delegate of the divine, and all else merely historical, traditional, and contingent systems devised to maintain and promote that relationship? I have above said it is. But how may one understand that “divine”? Does the divine principle that one embraces need to be imaged in the traditional garb of personhood? Can it be enrobed a pure power of being? Is Jesus’ founding vision of a parental relationship necessary for the Christian perspective? Can anyone argue that one cannot be animated to the depths of one’s being as a person by a non-personal idea when tradition has always spoken of the personhood of the divine as something analogous to human personhood? Are Christians bound to traditional imagery? Can new horizons of language, of psychic depictions carry weight and validity for them that cannot ascribe to traditional verbalizations and imagery? Is Christianity essentially a deeply personal relationship with the divine? Is Christianity essentially a deeply personal relationship with a personal God?

Is Christianity about going to church, to services, subscribing to ancient creeds, and adhering to the practices and prescriptions of some organization of believers toward the rightful, the proper format of worshipping God and meriting (or embracing) one’s true dignity as the creature-child of the Creator-parent? Is there a proper, a right, a literally “ortho-dox” way to approach the transcending wholeness, the Holy? The world of religions sets out varied paths to the Holy, and many basic items are found consistently. Christianity has celebrated a number of disciplines for spiritual in-form-ation, maintenance and growth. The first followers of Jesus’ Way were devout Jews, and they soon found it necessary to surrender to history many of their religious practices and cherished beliefs.[iv] As Christianity entered the main stream of Roman life, many felt the need to withdraw from “christened” society with its flourish of rites and to go off into the desert and the solitude of prayer. The reformers of the sixteenth century felt compelled to divest themselves of much in the religion they saw as mediaeval encrustation upon the purity of the primitive form. Their “protest-ant” principle still animates christendom, and new churches continue to cleave off the stone face of the established. Religion is a vestment of faith (worshipfully embraced vision). Vestments wear out, fray, require repair, re-styling, re-fitting, replacing. I do not deny that one must have a format, a set discipline, for spiritual growth, that life must be reflective and purposeful if it is going to be something more than existence, and I have argued at length the absolute need to absolutely commit to an absolute format, although there be no one absolute format.[v] Perhaps Christianity can be religion-less, but it cannot be undisciplined, unfocused, unreflective, ungrateful, ungracious, and in that sense, it can never be non-prayerful. Yet, if it can be unhinged from religion how does it continue to proselytize, to publicize, to embrace and enfold? In what language and in what forum does Christianity become visible, inviting, vivifying of modern society either uninterested in religion or untrusting of religion?

To what extent, if any, is discipleship, an adherence to Jesus, be it as Lord or as teacher, essential to being Christian? In what sense, if any, is some attachment to the ancient founding texts and their terminology essential to being Christian? I cannot see how the term Christian can be used without some anchor in the Christ-event spoken of in the Christian scriptures or of its expectation in the Jewish scriptures. Nevertheless, led on by the well-esteemed Roman theologian Karl Rahner, some have opined there are in fact “crypto-christians”[vi], men and women who live Christ-being lives but are not connected to or in some cases even conversant with Christian churches and teachings. Indeed, some of the early Fathers (founding theologians) of Christianity held that all them deprived by some circumstance of hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ, be they historically before Jesus or after Jesus, that, however, embraced, by the grace of God, the heart and soul of Jesus Christ’s vision, were in some “form” Christian, be that proto-christian or crypto-christian. But, when one speaks of having some “form” of primitive, anticipatory, or crypto- nature, at what point is that “form” properly and simply acknowledged as another, a different, a separate form? Can a faithful follower of the way set out by the Buddha whose life is compatible with the way set out by Jesus be called a crypto-christian, or is this theological hubris in search of numbers rather than converts? Can an avowed self-proclaimed atheist whose life is accordant with the way set out by Jesus be called a crypto-christian? Should anyone, other than one’s analyst, spiritual director, or criticaster label the heart and mind of another to the convenience of one’s own beliefs?  Or is such merely, as with my dismissal of atheism above, a matter of someone claiming that despite any names, a rose is a rose? Jesus reportedly did tell his disciples that they not against him were for him, but he did not tell his disciples to write them down in some census book as crypto-christians.

I noted earlier in this missive that no reasonable person thinks of the boundlessness-beyond-above-before-and-within-of-all-that-is is an ancient wizard sitting on cherub heads and keeping record and score of all that transpires. We all, however, need to keep such score of our own hearts and hands, minds and spirits, for in that scoring we plunge into our depths (in scriptural terms “baptize”), and we constantly reassess and realign our values and visions (in scriptural parlance “repent”), to make of ourselves positive forces for creativity and love within and in and for our world. We, embodied in time and space, will never be perfect in this endeavour, we will never be able to encompass, tackle or fix every problem, issue, or person, but we can move on as life that is faith-ful and hope-ful always does (in scriptural ideology “arise” as in “resurrection”). If that is Christian, and it is, than all the rest is merely vestment, and as with the Risen Christ and Adam before him, God minds it not if we praise him nude.[vii]

This last word is not intended to be provocative so much as perspicuous, for other than the cardinal who chastised Michelangelo, can anyone believe there are clothes in heaven, that any man can don any cover before the All-before? Can any Christian believe there are “in heaven” names or words other than that singular Word in which all others are subsumed, which Word rests in the endless silence of a moment of brilliant-most Love?[viii] There is a picture not easily portrayed. The transcending triangle set within a sunburst no longer inspires. Superimposing over that the images of a man firmly seated upon the earth and a dove with light-filled wings soaring off into the future no longer captures either our attention or our mind. With what colours and forms shall we portray our faith? With what thunder or what silence shall the Christian soul blazon the victory of the Christ? With what vesture or lack thereof shall we walk in our world? With what rite shall we be able to both speak and convey “Pax tibi”? In this groundless world, in this heavenless world, in this our so weary world what must a Christian do to be not pseudo-, not crypto-, but truly-Christian?

I have asked many questions, fewer, however, than our situation asks of us, and in the roar of this world and of our unknowing, in the absence of our own voice, I turn, where we most often turn when reason fails to answer, to art, here to narrative, sacred narrative, and I offer the following both as “unscientific postscript”, and portal to prayer.

A crowd of people brought to Jesus a deaf man who had also a serious speech impediment. They asked Jesus to lay his hands upon him. Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd. He put his fingers in the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spittle, and looking up to heaven, sighed saying “Ephphatha”, that is, “be opened”. The man’s ears were opened and his tongue loosened; he heard and spoke clearly. The people were astounded: “He makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak!” (Mark: 7 [translation, my own])

Pax tibi

[i] Cf. my works: on Sin (25 Mar. 2013), on Dogma and Science (10 May 2013), on Bowing Down (25 Mar. 2012), on Talking about God (26 Jan. 2012), on Believing in God (26 Jan 2012), and on Language and Meaning of Christianity (14 May 2012).