Ed Gungor: What I Hate Most About Christianity

This is Chapter One of Ed Gungor's newest book, Things I Hate About Christianity: Honest Reflections From a Christ Follower. I worked alongside Ed on this book, primarily as a researcher and sounding board for each of his chapters. I read through the chapters as he finished and commented on the ease of reading, areas I felt needed clarified, etc. I also contributed the name of this chapter.

CHAPTER ONE
WHEN GOD PLAYS HIDE AND SEEK

I believe in God most of the time. But I have my moments when I wonder if I’m wrong; times when I have a strong taste of doubt in my soul. Faith is a tricky business. Those of us who embrace it live our whole lives for someone we’ve never seen, and believe in things we are convinced of, but cannot prove (at least empirically).

This could easily be resolved if God were visible. It bothers me that he isn’t. I wish every person could access a peak at him even if it was just once in their lives before they died. I’d even vote ‘yes’ for people to see God while they are kids, and then, like an imaginary friend, when they come of age, they stopped seeing him. Then they could wrestle with whether or not he was real or imaginary—I think that would be better than him being invisible. But invisible he is. And as you study scripture, you discover he is invisible on purpose.

There is a rich tradition in Judeo-Christian thought concerning the “God who hides.” The biblical claim is that God loves to hide—he loves to tuck himself so completely into the backdrop of life and creation that many completely miss his presence. Isaiah comes right out and says it, “Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God and Savior of Israel.” After the resurrection of Jesus, the Bible records that he is with two of his disciples who knew him well, yet, “they were kept from recognizing him.” They had no clue they were walking along the road with the resurrected Christ. He was hiding. God was hiding another time from the biblical patriarch Jacob who exclaimed, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” God often told Israel, “I will hide my face.” The psalmists repeatedly lamented how God was “hiding” from them.

But God doesn’t just hide his presence. When it comes to his message, he tends to cloak it in obscurity, making it fairly inaccessible. In one of Jesus’ prayers he says, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned.” Often Jesus’ own disciples didn’t get what was going on: “The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.” When teaching the crowds Jesus would say, “If you, even you, had only known…but now it is hidden from your eyes.” Jesus claimed, “This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.” God often hid the true meaning of his message from people.

After Jesus departs and the apostles began to teach about faith, they too alluded to this conspiracy of hiddeness. Paul writes, “We speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden.” Paul repeatedly calls the gospel a “mystery” that “was kept hidden in God” only to be “revealed” at a special time to a special group of people.

WHAT’S THE POINT?

At the simplest level, the conspiracy of hiddenness is like the hide and seek game children play. God hides; those of us who are suspicious of that hiding, seek him. Scripture tells us well over a hundred times to “seek the Lord” or to “seek his face.” The very fact that he asks us to “seek” him implies he is hiding. But God has rigged the game so that the persistent, dedicated seeker always finds him. God promises to those who seek him, “I will be found by you.” Jesus adds, “Seek and you will find.”

Any thinking person has to ask, why would God do this? Why would God hide from people or make his message obscure? I think there are several plausible answers for this. One is simply that God hides because he has chosen to establish a relationship with humanity through the pathway of faith. And in order for faith to be faith, God must remain invisible and unprovable to the senses. If God were seen as plainly as the sun or experienced as unquestioningly as gravity, faith would not be required—God would just be an undisputed fact.

It is the pathway of faith that locates a relationship with God firmly in the domain of human free will and out of an orbit resembling anything forced or involuntary. Faith can only exist in freedom—where we can choose to believe or not to believe. By God using faith as the only modality for a connection between him and us forces any possible relational connection between us to be the result of choice or free will. The human race remains in control because as we observe phenomena around us we can either interpret it with God in the picture or not. It’s our choice.

Christian theology sees God as Almighty, all-knowing, and everywhere present, and, yet, as One who respects the right of those he created to completely ignore him. He respects our right to ignore him because he only wants authentic relationship with individuals. Authentic relationships require choice—forced friendships or shotgun weddings do not constitute real relationships. But the choice to ignore God would be impossible if God were visible. Why? Because God’s presence is ubiquitous—he is everywhere interacting with us in everything from holding creation in tact, to being the one who chose the time and place where we would live, to being the cause of all the good we know, to being the one who gives us “life and breath.” Only invisibility affords us the choice to ignore him. And only invisibility gives us the option to leap by way of the modality of faith past that invisibility into a relationship with him. The idea of God playing hide-and-seek is so scandalous, yet, so amazingly brilliant.

IN GOLDILOCKS FASHION

Though God is invisible, he is committed to leaving us “clues” that point to his existence. There are hints of his activity all around us. But they are only hints. As you study the biblical record, God’s loves to spill his life into the world through subtle, almost unperceivable ways. In other words, unless you are actively looking for him, you will most probably miss him.

As silly as it sounds, there is a Goldilocks way in which God sneaks around our world. Let me explain. In the children’s story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear come home one day only to discover that someone had been eating their porridge, sitting in their chairs, and lying on their beds. It wasn’t till the end of the story that they find out it was Goldilocks.

I think God, in Goldilocks fashion, gets involved with our lives before we notice him. As the creator and sustainer of all life, he metaphorically messes with our porridge, sits in our chairs, and lies on our beds. And though we can see and feel the results, we don’t get to actually see him till the end of the story. The essence of faith is the human commitment to "seek" the clues until they lead us to the hiding One—we may only get to “find” him metaphysically or spiritually, but it is finding him indeed. James writes, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”

But clues pointing to God’s existence are not proof of God’s existence. No one can argue from biology or philosophy in a way that successfully “proves” God exists. The ones who have tried have had their work mercilessly scrutinized. All attempts end up becoming surefire recipes for the triumph and expansion of agnosticism and atheism.

All the evidence can do is show that a belief in God is not inconsistent with what we see in the world. For example, the amazing order and symbiotic nature of the universe can be explained on the basis of the existence of God as its Creator—that belief is coherent with what we observe in the world. But it is at best a hypothesis, which means another person may hypothesize that the order seen in the world is here is by chance. And their hypothesis would not be any less valid than the one offered by the Christ-follower.

But suggesting that the Christ-follower’s hypothesis is in some way evidence that we are stupid, anti-intellectual, science-haters is not fair either. Often anti-faith attacks are based on the notion that faith is a childish or infantile notion, like believing in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. The inference is that people of faith are like unreasoned children who need to abandon their faith position just as childish beliefs are abandoned once reason-based thinking emerges in a child. However, beliefs in Santa or the Tooth Fairy are based on folklore, not evidence. There is evidence of God’s existence—there are clues. Though some see faith as intellectual nonsense, we can stand on the grounds that, though our beliefs are not provable, they are nonetheless perfectly reasonable to entertain—certainly as reasonable as the “belief” that all things are here by chance.

*The full chapter is available upon request.