On being a Christian agnostic.
Faith and agnosticism are not mutually contradictory. There are millions of us.
Traditionalism conceptualizes the divine in all-or-nothing terms – either there exists an omniscient, omnipotent creator God or there is no higher power, scripture consisting entirely of fairy tales.
This reflects the All-or-Nothing fault common in much collective thinking. Climate change commentary is either doomsday or denial. Racism is said either ubiquitous or entirely eliminated. Politics is either far right or far left. There are numerous arenas in which we use an All-or-Nothing framework.
Which rules out the many possibilities in between.
In the All-or-Nothing view, either events happen because God wills them – God wills poverty, earthquakes, school shootings, massacres of innocents in Israel and Gaza – or there is no larger impulse, that religion nonsense made up by people who wanted money and social control.
Which rules out the many possibilities in between.
Maybe there is a preexistent creator God, maybe there is nothing beyond our fallen selves. I don’t pretend to know.
Maybe Christ was a supernatural child, maybe he was a regular guy born with talent. I don’t pretend to know.
I do know Jesus was a gentle man who taught us to love one another.
That’s why I am a Christian agnostic.
The geography of spirituality is not limited to believers and atheists. Somehow agnosticism gets overlooked.
It is common for agnostics to attend church, synagogue, mosque or other houses of worship in Western, Eastern and indigenous traditions.
I don’t mean this in the literalist sense that some people attend worship services despite not really believing what they hear. After all, some are present at worship services out of a sense of obligation, to please family members, in order to be seen by others (a frequent complaint of Jesus’s), or if they have a wedding coming up.
I mean this in the larger sense that to be an agnostic who belongs to a religion is not a contradiction in terms, is a real thing.
Agnosticism does not mean rejection of faith. It means considering aspects of faith neither proven nor disproven.
There are millions of Christian agnostics, Jewish agnostics, Islamic agnostics and agnostics active in other traditions: persons who follow the moral and spiritual teachings of a religion, and participate in the faith community, but doubt the mythology.
If the world becomes more rational (let’s hope!) religious agnosticism may increase in appeal, allowing us to advance the good aspects of faith communities without the ancient assumptions that lead to discord.
I belong to a joint Christian-Jewish congregation that is warm and welcoming. Christians should be more aware of how their faith descended from Judaism, just as Muslims should be more aware of how their faith descended from Christianity.
I attend Christian and ecumenical worship services, though not as often as I might, as my minister politely reminds. I pay an annual pledge to the congregation, donate to religious causes. I closely read the Bible and other sacred texts. And I’m an agnostic.
One of my favorite moments every year is the Christmas Eve late service. I love when the bells ring at midnight as Christmas begins, announcing the arrival of a Redeemer who forgives unconditionally.
The bells – and the concept of unconditional forgiveness – give hope regardless of whether God exists.
The moral teachings of the itinerant rabbi Jesus are valid and beautiful independent of Christian supernatural claims. If we all simply lived by the moral code of Jesus, everything else in the world would take care of itself, acceptance or rejection of any specific religion would not matter.
Being both religious and agnostic is more common than generally understood in our super-simplified All-or-Nothing culture.
Christian agnosticism appealed to the Framers, many of whom were deists, a branch of agnosticism. (Deists believe God created reality but offers no revelations, we must figure everything out for ourselves, including how to get along with each other.)
Martin Luther King Jr. said one of his favorite preachers was an English “nonconformist” theologian named Leslie Weatherhead, who called himself a Christian agnostic – accepting the moral teachings of Jesus while contending the existence of God has neither been proven nor disproved.
A few years ago, visiting Exeter, England, I was impressed to see my great-great grandfather listed in local records as “nonconformist,” which has both a general meaning and a specific definition in Anglican ecclesiology.
Outside places such as Exeter Cathedral is the digitized chaos of our moment. Inside, nothing has changed in 500 years. This is an aspect of wisdom from which even an agnostic can benefit.
Millions of people sense the need for the moral teachings and support systems religion can provide but are skeptical of mythology: or simply (this is my case) consider ancient claims of divine acts impossible either to prove or disprove.
As institutions deteriorate and families fracture, the support and sense of family offered by church, synagogue and mosque grows in importance.
Religions are to blame for many wars and persecutions. But if religion somehow vanished from human events, underlying hostilities between groups, regions and nations would remain. Moral codes taught by Jesus and other spiritual figures could be the solution.
Broader recognition of agnosticism would be healthy for our world, because agnostics don’t take personally the choices of others regarding belief or rejection of belief.
If you want to say the Bible or Quran recount actual history, or to reject them as fabrications, that’s your choice, since an agnostic thinks -- based on the evidence known today, at least -- it is impossible to determine whether any sacred writing from the far past is accurate.
Though, we can be sure the morality espoused by the Bible, Quran and similar books is true and good.
Religion is sometimes adverse to science and atheism sometimes adverse to religion. Agnosticism gets along with both, being open to science and to spirituality, not presuming one must defeat the other.
Standard All-or-Nothing thinking about God either has the divine as omnipotent and perfect (in which case human suffering is imposed by God!) or has the divine a fiction (in which case humanity is the best nature could do, which is really hard to believe!).
Agnosticism is open to the many intermediate possibilities: including a God that is more than man but less than nature, and a deity that is real but nothing like the kingly figure of the scripture.
Agnosticism further is open to many possibilities regarding the ancient sacred writings.
When I read the Tanakh, the Gospels and the letters, I accept them as a record of people who actually lived and events that really occurred.
They may not be, and it’s likely I will never know. But to assume the Bible recounts actual persons and real events is the way to see what’s being said in the founding document of Abrahamic belief.
Some of what’s being said is deeply disturbing, some has haunting beauty. That it all builds up to unconditional forgiveness fills me with hope.
The Biblical miracles don’t put me off in the slightest. Maybe they describe the use of knowledge we do not yet possess – after all, humanity knows perhaps one percent of what is possible to know.
Isaac Newton would have called the Boeing 787 a miracle. He didn’t know about laminar flow and building high-bypass jet engines. Thousands of people are walking around with someone else’s heart beating in their chests, which Spinoza would have called witchcraft. He lacked modern medical knowledge and surgical tools.
There’s already a functional prototype of a maglev train weighing 70 tons. Aristotle would have called that sorcery. If a 70-ton train can float on an intangible electromagnetic field, levitating one man in sandals as he walks across water seems possible on a physical-law basis. We just don’t know how to do it yet.
Miracle accounts may not be true; to me they are no obstacle to faith. It’s the anger of the divine that gives pause – and that makes the transition to forgiveness so important.
The Judeo-Christian Bible related the story of how God cast aside anger and became serene. That should inspire humanity to do the same.
Regardless of whether the accounts are factually true, they tell us that what the ancients wanted for us is to be forgiving and peaceful.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy,
for I am God and no mortal;
and I will not come in wrath.
This verse, compressed from Hosea 11:9, reports the spiritual journey of the divine. Whether an actual God really said this, or some forgotten poet made it up, the verse informs history our forebears hoped we would treat each other with kindness.
Everyone knows about divine anger at the Flood, followed many centuries later by the Gospel injunction to turn the other cheek. We don’t much seem aware that we are hearing the story of how God learned to be serene.
Early books of the Bible are about divine rage, God committing atrocities and destroying whole cities. The metaphors are of battle and vengeance.
By the middle Tanakh books of Hosea and Isaiah (describing events about 2,700 years ago) the metaphors have changed, are about romance, marriage, protecting, parenting, nurture: God become loving and wise.
It would be nice if these stories were true. What matters is the ancients telling us life does not have to be horrible.
“I will abolish the bow, the sword and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety,” God tells the prophet Hosea at Hosea 2:18. “I repent me of the evil I have done unto humanity,” the Maker tells the prophet Jeremiah at Jeremiah 42:10.
Rabbis and ministers quote the many verses about God thundering threats, rarely cite the scripture declarations that God has changed for the better.
As a Christian agnostic, such verses this speak to me.
There’s dispute among scholars regarding what the Jeremiah verse means. My next literary novel, Abide for Me, delves into that dispute.
Abide for Me takes its plot devices from Hosea. This little-studied book of scripture is the key that unlocks the transition of Western religion from retribution to mercy.
Don’t worry, when Abide for Me comes out, I won’t forget to mention it.
Supposing there are large numbers of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other religious agnostics, of the possible choices, why am I a Christian agnostic as opposed to some other kind?
One need not use the word “Christian.” Jesus certainly never did! According to scripture, Jesus never spoke nor heard the word Christian.
This is the case regarding scholarly translations; some evangelical translations sprinkle in the term. The authoritative New Revised Standard uses “Christian” just once, at Acts 19:26, to describe what people began to call the apostles after Christ’s ascension.
At his moment of ascension – bathed in the very glory of resurrection – Jesus charged the apostles to tell all the world what they had been taught of truth, morality and salvation. (Matthew 28:17-20.) He didn’t say a word regarding any specific faith or denomination.
Are we to believe Jesus was sent to instruct us to be Christian, and forgot?
There is a 2,000-year-long debate about whether Christ intended to start a new religion, reform an old one, or move the world beyond religion as such.
A fair reading of the sacred writing supports the third view: Jesus sought a social order based on kindness and righteousness, with specific denominations no longer needed. People misunderstood, and have been fighting over the misinterpretations ever since.
I am a Christian agnostic because Christ’s teaching are a guidebook on how to create the better world we dream of. I particularly take note of his editing the Ten Commandments to remove the ones about religiosity – clearly part of Christ’s message was that God was becoming less religious -- leaving only Commandments on morality and compassion.
Jesus’s Six Commandments are detailed here, along with his final teaching, the One Commandment: ”Love one another as I have loved you.”
Happy holiday season to the millions and millions of agnostics who adhere to a religion. Someday culture will realize how many of us there are.
And I hope everyone is in church for Christmas Eve midnight service. Atheists welcome! Bells will be ringing all across our troubled and promising world.
Bonus: On December 24th, All Predictions Wrong will offer an ode to Christmas Eve, both in written form and performed. Performed by professionals, definitely not by me!
It’s kind of the All Predictions Wrong Christmas Special, and will not be paywalled.
Book Bonus: I commend to readers the 2018 book Anger and Forgiveness by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who is among the great minds of our time.
She details the distinctions between transactional forgiveness (“If you do X, I will forgive Y”) and the more advanced unconditional forgiveness; shows how the ability to forgive is essential to friendship, romance, families and the smooth functioning of society.
At a time when recriminations are practically awarded prizes, we need to get better at forgiveness.
Book Bonus #2. Leslie Weatherhead’s 1963 book The Christian Agnostic, a volume praised by MLK Jr., discussed what it meant to be an agnostic standing at the pulpit giving sermons.
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Wow! Great column. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. So much to unpack. I think I may need to write multiple comments to express my ideas on this.
On forgiveness, I think forgiveness is the gift we give ourselves. It allows us to free ourselves from hate, regret, and self pity. It is a shared cleansing of pain between people. Without it, anger and fear fester and dominate our thoughts and actions. I believe that forgiveness is the core teaching of Jesus and it is the most overlooked and misunderstood.
If you have watched the show "Ted Lasso" you know what this is about. The show is not about soccer but about love, kindness, and forgiveness leading and triumphing. My favorite scene is at the end of season 1. During the first season, Rebecca, the owner of the team, has been scheming to destroy the team and Ted. She has been emotionally mortally wounded by her ex-husband and in an act desperation self-immolation she confesses all to Ted. I will let the scene speak for itself. It is a scene that would not have played this way on any other show. It broke me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhf5QSc0oZI
Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus!
Thank you for an excellent and thought-provoking column. Although I never articulated it before, I suppose I am a Catholic agnostic - I attend services and participate in the community, but am in perpetual doubt about Jesus' divinity. The thinking usually goes - was Jesus God's son in the divine sense, or in the sense that we are all God's children? And at the end of the day does it really matter? It doesn't change the worth of his teachings.
One other observation - I don't think you can viscerally understand the concept of unconditional forgiveness until you have children of your own. That's why I think the breakdown of the traditional family and the lessening of faith in America go hand in hand.
And I still wish Midnight Mass weren't at 10 p.m.
Merry Christmas.