In Praise of Doubting Thomas

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong quotes a story from Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner. It’s a story I’ve heard in several other contexts, as it illustrates a beautiful approach to religious faith in the face of tragedy.

“Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity, but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer.” pp. 277-278

What I find heartbreakingly beautiful about this story is that sufferers had the audacity to throw their anger and suffering in God’s face, but also recognized that they couldn’t walk away from God that easily.

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the New Testament. It’s recorded in John 11:1-16. I will paraphrase.

Jesus’ friend, Lazarus, fell ill. When Jesus heard of it, he waited for a couple of days, and then announced his intention of returning to Judea, where Lazarus lay. The disciples pointed out that this might not be the best idea, as Jesus had narrowly escaped a stoning at the hands of the Judeans. Jesus and his disciples have a brief conversation, where Jesus cryptically speaks of death, resurrection, and faith. Then, Thomas gets the final word. Yes, that Thomas. The only disciple to have his own personalized adjective permanently affixed to him; “Doubting”. Here’s what good old Doubting Thomas says. “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

What I hear Thomas saying, and what I hear the victims of the Holocaust saying in Wiesel’s story, is “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand what God is doing. I think it’s a terrible idea, in fact, if this is truly God’s plan. I think it’s a terrible idea, and I’m not afraid to engage God in a conversation about what a terrible idea this is. However, when it all comes down to it, I’m going to continue to follow Him. I’m going to keep following because I know that, despite my questions and confusion, despite my disagreements and anger, this is the only path toward peace for me.”

To say, “Let’s follow him so we can die alongside him”, acknowledges confusion and questions, and also an incredible depth of faith. It’s hardly fair that Thomas has been so freely labeled as The Doubter.

I can’t follow like Peter or John. I can’t. I can’t be the disciple who enters an empty tomb to look for God, or who steps out of a boat to follow God across the water. I just hope I can follow like Thomas, who Jesus pitied. I hope I can follow like Thomas, who had the strength to admit his questions, and the faith that God would accept his questions and even his anger.

Michele Bachmann and the Fundamentalist Gigolo

I’m not going to pick on Michele Bachmann, though I am going to quote her. “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'” Apparently, when God speaks to Michele Bachmann, he does so through earthquakes and hurricanes. (OK, I guess I am going to pick on Michele Bachmann.)

There are so many ways I can go with this. I think it’s dangerous when we smugly claim that we know who God is, and what God wants. The danger is when God appears to want only our happiness and success. This kind of thinking reeks of wish-fulfillment. The danger is that we become complacent, or hateful, or even cruel, and we do this with the conviction that God approves of us and our goals. We feel that we are the chosen people, so we don’t need to question our motives or our actions. We feel that whatever we do is God’s will, so that excuses a host of horrors. This is dangerous politically and personally.

When I say that it’s dangerous politically, I don’t mean that Mrs. Bachmann is in danger of losing any elections because of this kind of language and thinking. What I mean is that if the electorate endorses this kind of language and thinking, we are in danger of losing our way as a country. We are in danger of setting up our self-interest as our god, and claiming that we have divine sanction whatever we feel driven to do.

When we, either as a people, or at the prompting of our leaders, think that our country has been given a God-given directive, we are engaging in idol-building. We are identifying God based solely on projections of our own hopes and fears.

This kind of thinking is also dangerous personally. I know a man who feels that God loves him, and wants him to be able to live a life of sexual promiscuity. (This man is married, by the way, and his wife does not feel that God’s message is quite the same.) Here’s his line of reasoning. “God loves me. God approves of me. I can do no wrong, as long as I continue to have God’s favor. Abraham had multiple wives. David had multiple wives. Hell, Solomon had 1,000 wives. God obviously condones promiscuity among his men of faith, as each of these men were patriarchs who lived in God’s favor.”

By the way, this man would identify himself as a fundamentalist. He claims that the only way to read the Bible correctly is to read it literally. His very biased study has made it clear to him that the Bible contains no contradictions or difficulties. It has also made it clear to him that he is one of God’s favored people, and God wants him to have sex with as many women as possible. Needless to say, this has created many problems for the rest of his family, who don’t read the Bible in quite the same way.

The temptation to reduce God to an idol who agrees with our politics, both in and out of the bedroom, is nothing new, as Karen Armstrong makes clear in The Case for God. She also makes it clear what a disservice we are doing to ourselves when we limit our concept of God in this way.

Is God Knowable?

Several years ago, I was asked to teach a large Sunday school class for a week while the regular teacher took a sabbatical. About thirty people attended the class, and I hoped to spark some discussion by dividing the class into smaller groups. I don’t remember exactly what we were discussing, but I do remember that I had a theory that the group would divide into two theological camps on a question about a certain passage from the Bible. I wanted to find a way to divide the class into those camps without their knowledge, so they could comfortably engage in discussion among themselves before turning to face the opposite group.

So I posed the question to them, “Is God knowable?” I thought that the group of people who felt that God was knowable would have one response to a further question about a passage from scripture, and the group who felt God was essentially unknowable would have a dramatically different response to the same scriptural passage. I also thought the group would divide fairly evenly over the question.

I was wrong. What I learned is that only two people felt that God is essentially unknowable. Those two people, by the way, are people I know well, people who participated in a small group with me. Nearly the entire group felt that God is basically knowable.

We didn’t explore the implications of the question. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on this question, but just hoped to use it as a way to divide the group into two different theological camps. What I learned is that this particular group, which I hoped would fall across the spectrum on the question of the human mind’s ability to know God, was amazingly uniform in its opinion. This surprised me.

Karen Armstrong’s treatment of this same question in The Case for God suggests that those two guys, who would agree with me that God is essentially unknowable, are anachronisms. That mindset was more prevalent among early Christians than it is today. And here I thought I was a modern Christian.

The following passage from The Case for God quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, who went to great lengths to demonstrate the otherness of God, and the inability of the human mind to grasp God.

"Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. ‘Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him’, Thomas explained. ‘For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God…by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think.’" p. 142.

Apparently, even among Christians who don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist, the initial assumption is that God is essentially knowable. It would be interesting to see how conversation would develop on this question if we decided to explore it further, rather than just using it as a litmus test for a different scriptural question.