Does a Minister Need to believe in God?
Apparently not … at least not in the Netherlands.
Pastor Klaas Hendrikse is a self-confessed atheist.
He has been a Protestant minister in the Netherlands for more than 20 years, serving churches of the combined Lutheran and Reformed denominations. Two issues of interest strike me: the response of church authorities to his declaration of atheism and the rationale for atheism by the minister himself.
The church authorities decided to opt out of any disciplinary action. They said that such proceedings would likely lead to “a protracted discussion about the meanings of words that in the end will produce little clarity.” Their statement also noted that people have debated the issue of ‘God’s existence’ throughout time.
The authorities’ unwillingness, or inability, to delve into this issue is understandable, for indeed, debating ‘God’s existence’ seems almost an exercise in futility. The authorities may have felt that their time, and the attention of their churches, needed to be focused on more pressing matters. I wonder, too, if church leaders may have considered that they would be seen, once more, discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. For whatever reason, church officials backed off.
Hendrikse’s atheism, though, is not as cleanly anti-God as the word atheist usually conveys. In his book, published in 2007, he wrote that it was not necessary to believe in God’s existence in order to believe in ‘God.’ “The non-existence of God is for me not an obstacle but a precondition to believing in God. I am an atheist believer … God is for me not a being but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, “I will not abandon you,” and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.”
Actually, such ‘clarification’ makes his atheism not that strange.
Theologian Paul Tillich wrote: ” The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word does not have much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.”
What initially may have appeared to be scandalous turns out to be a pretty straightforward contemporary theology, at least for the author of this commentary.
This story was found on the ENI Daily News Service Web site www.eni.ch.
I was surprised to see this news about an atheistic priest.
As I advanced through the article, I got even more surprised by the way how the community reacted (actually,did not). But, last surprise was far from being least- author of this article concluded the whole story proclaiming the case of atheistic priest “a pretty straightforward contemporary theology”!
If God is NOT a being per se, then to whom Christ spoke on the eve of his capturing? And moreover, if He is not A HE,(neither A SHE), then what is he (the above mentioned priest) doing, praying and worshiping with his community?
I do not mind experiments, but there is little point in calling yourself a doctor when what you actually do is being a pathologist! If there is no God (which is an atheistic axiom par excellence), then there cannot exist any theology within such framework.
So, sure it is allowed for someone to claim whatever he/she wants about the existence of God, but it is the duty of the Church to bear witness of the experience of Christ, Son of God, who took our human nature and united it with the nature of God, thus granting us the salvation.
If none of it happened, then the pries is just a category of social comfort and shallow applied psychology.
In response to Mr. Jovanovic’s surprised post:
1. The idea that God is a being – the supreme being, of course, but still a being – does not belong to the Jewish or Christian Biblical tradition but to the Greek philosophical tradition following Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Refusing to accept the existence of such a being need not interfere with one’s relationship to Jewish or Christian Biblical traditions, neither of which draw heavily on Aristotle.
2. For at least a century, theologians have been arguing that the radical monotheism of the Bible stands against the philosophical tradition of the supreme being. The supreme being is not absolute, whereas the God of the Bible is. Even a supreme being, it is argued, is subordinate to being itself. If so, then even though there may be no beings higher than the supreme being, the latter is not ultimate after all. A radical monotheist IS a kind of atheist, since the former cannot proclaim any image or description of God – any determinate ‘god’ – as truly God. The Romans knew this. That’s why they called the Christians ‘atheists’ and feared that the latter’s unbelief would anger the gods and endanger the city.
3. The claim that someone who rejects the supreme being hypothesis cannot legitimately call themselves a theologian has some merit on the surface. Although almost all Christian theology either rejects the supreme being hypothesis outright or subverts it, theology is not ultimately a Christian invention. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is first work to conceive of theology as we know it: a discipline, a way of thinking. I think it’s legitimate to insist that theology think about the divine in a certain way, rather than simply, for instance, writing fictions about the gods. But it does not follow that engaging in theology as a way of thinking need lead everyone to Aristotle’s Supreme Being. It led Anselm, among others, someone very different.
4. Depending on what one means by “God,” belief is intellectually irrelevant and hardly a moral virtue. When I’m in the midst of a hurricane, it matters little whether or not I believe in hurricanes, nor is it a moral virtue to believe in them. The stories and poetry of the Bible do not focus on an invisible and inactive supreme being that may or may not exist and belief in which is an option. These stories and poetry instead point to a certain kind of experience, or rather a certain dimension of all experience to which some experiences awaken us. To ask whether or not we “believe” in this is nonsensical; we experience it whether we like it or not. Thus it is said that even the demons in hell ‘believe.’
5. Therefore, before we castigate theologians who proclaim themselves atheists, we would do well to ponder what we mean by “God” and articulate it as clearly as possible. Once we have done that, it makes sense to ask whether theologians are grappling with that, and to ask whether those theologians who aren’t grappling with that are really writing theology. Of course, even beginning to think about what we mean by “God” might pull the rug out from under us, thus shocking us into an awareness of what theology is really all about.