{"id":2635,"date":"2014-01-20T21:10:06","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T21:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/?p=2635"},"modified":"2014-01-20T21:10:06","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T21:10:06","slug":"what-difference-does-god-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2014\/01\/20\/what-difference-does-god-make\/","title":{"rendered":"What Difference Does God Make?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Ryan Bell, as part of his “Year Without God<\/a>” project, recently wrote about the question “What Difference Does God Make?<\/a>”\u00a0 His answer was that God makes no difference to his daily life.<\/p>\n

There may have been some confusion in how Ryan framed the question.\u00a0 If<\/em> there is a God, then God makes all the difference in the universe, because there would be no universe without God.\u00a0 This is simply a function of the definitions of what theologians mean by the terms “God” and “universe” (or, more accurately, “creation”).\u00a0 If<\/em> there is no God, then of course “God” makes no difference at all, and indeed the question of what “difference God makes” is nonsensical, a non-question.\u00a0 In other words, the question “what difference does God make” begs the question whether there is<\/em> a God.<\/p>\n

I think what Ryan meant is “what difference does believing<\/em> in God make?”\u00a0 Even this is a question fraught with definitional problems.\u00a0 For example, what does “difference” mean?\u00a0 Given that most human beings through most of history have had some sort of belief in God or the gods, and given that even evolutionary sociobiologists seek to explain such belief\u00a0 with the language of adaptation, it seems beyond dispute that belief in God \/ the gods makes a substantial “difference.”\u00a0 Certainly folks like Richard Dawkins like to argue that belief in God makes a pernicious difference by increasing divisions and violence among humans.<\/p>\n

Here I think Ryan meant what positive<\/em> difference does believing in God make?\u00a0 This seems evident in his focus on “hope.”\u00a0 At least some people report that their belief in God gives them “hope.”\u00a0 Ryan feels he can experience hope without belief in God.\u00a0 In fact, Ryan feels that at least some of the sorts of beliefs about God he received from his church experience were less hope-filled than how he feels “without” God.<\/p>\n

I can’t blame him for that conclusion.\u00a0 The vision of the “Left Behind<\/a>” theology so popular in American church culture is hopeless and nihilistic.\u00a0 The spirituality of pop materialism is far more attractive:\u00a0 we are on this Earth for a blip in evolutionary time, but we have the capacity to feel and experience life at least for a moment, and so we can find that moment let go of worries about the future.\u00a0 Don’t think so much; feel<\/em>, and let go<\/em>. \u00a0That is the message of almost every contemporary pop song, romantic comedy, family-oriented animated film, home furnishing commercial, and so-on. \u00a0 It is a compelling message, because entails substantial truth, even though it is incomplete (see, e.g., the Book of Ecclesiastes<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/a>
The Decapitator<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But this raises another set of questions:\u00a0 Who said belief in God is supposed to make an emotionally positive<\/em> difference to the believer?\u00a0 Why should a value judgment like positive<\/em> matter to us?\u00a0 And what, exactly, do we mean by “belief” in God?\u00a0 There have been cultures in which belief in the gods produced fear rather than hope.\u00a0 I can’t imagine that the Moche people<\/a>, for example, thought of the Decapitator<\/a> primarily in terms of the category of “hope.”<\/p>\n

At this point I think Ryan’s Christian background is already in play.\u00a0 Christians take “belief” in God to mean “trust.”\u00a0 Christians want to “trust” God because we believe He is perfectly good and loves us absolutely, demonstrated in the fact that He created us, gave us life, and gave Himself for us on the cross.\u00a0 We expect that this kind of “belief” will, at least over the long haul, at least in the hard fissures of life, and at least at the end, make all the difference to how we feel and how we live.<\/p>\n

Even given these Christian presuppositions, why don’t most non-Christians feel hopeless most of the time?\u00a0 I think there are at least two\u00a0 Christian theological notions at play:\u00a0 the doctrines of creation and grace.<\/p>\n

Christians believe every human being is created in God’s image.\u00a0 We differ among ourselves to varying degrees about the extent to which sin affects our ability to function properly as God’s image-bearers without a specific connection to Christ, but we generally agree that simply being human is a precious gift that entails some basic blessings. Christians further agree that all human beings who enjoy the basic goods of life are given at least some measure of grace.\u00a0 In fact, this common humanity and common grace is a cornerstone of Jesus’ ethical teaching:<\/p>\n

You have heard that it was said, \u2018Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.\u2019 \u00a0But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, \u00a0that you may be children of your Father in heaven.\u00a0 He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.\u00a0 (Matt. 5:43-45.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is no surprise that, on any given day, both people who trust in God and people who do not trust in God (and people who struggle to trust in God) wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to work, engage in relationships, and participate in the general goods of life.\u00a0 This is part of the theology of creation as well as the theology of grace.\u00a0 The more penetrating question, then, might be whether we can recognize grace and respond in some way to it.<\/p>\n

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My friend Ryan Bell, as part of his “Year Without God” project, recently wrote about the question “What Difference Does God Make?”\u00a0 His answer was that God makes no difference to his daily life. There may have been some confusion in how Ryan framed the question.\u00a0 If there is a God, then God makes all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[71,74,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cosmos","category-spirit","category-thought"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-Gv","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}