GOD
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
June 22, 2008
This morning I’m starting a four-part summer sermon series entitled “Christian
Fundamentals for Liberals.” This title purposely spans the theological distance from
fundamentalism to liberalism, so let me define my terms at the outset. First of all, I’m not
talking about political liberalism, so political conservatives among you need not leap up from
your pews and exit at this point. I’ll be explicating religious liberalism in a Christian context.
It’s my bet that most of you who show up at the Stanford Memorial Church on a Sunday
morning are religious liberals, or at least interested in learning what that means.
Yet, I’ve purposely used the word “fundamentals,” hearkening back to a series of twelve
paperback pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals published between 1910 and 1915. Through
the generosity of Lyman and Milton Stewart, brothers whose fortune was amassed in the
California oil industry, some three million copies of each volume were distributed free to every
member of the clergy, divinity school professor and theological student in America, as well as to
many Christian lay people across the country. These pamphlets became the germ of what came
to be called the fundamentalist movement in this country. In their pages, leading conservative
theologians built upon a list of five dogmas that they felt were essential to Christian faith which
had been formulated by professors at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1910. Those
fundamentals were: 1) the inerrancy of Scripture; 2) the Virgin Birth of Jesus; 3) Jesus’
atonement for all of our sins by his death on the cross; 4) Jesus’ bodily resurrection on Easter
day; and 5) the objective reality of his miracles.i
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It turns out that I don’t personally believe in a single one of those five fundamentals.
And again, I’ll bet most of you don’t believe in many of them either. I’m a Christian liberal –
one of those people whom The Fundamentals were published to challenge and refute. Here’s
some of what I mean by the term “liberal:” The Bible is meant to be read largely metaphorically
and allegorically, rather than literally. Science and religion are compatible; we liberals are
committed to the use of logic, reason, and the scientific method. Doubt is the handmaiden of
faith. Love is the primary Christian value, and it’s directly related to promotion of liberty and
justice in society at large. All people are inherently equal and worthy of dignity and respect.
There are many roads to the top of the spiritual mountain, of which Christianity is only one.
And Jesus is seen primarily as a spiritual and ethical teacher rather than as identical with God.
The press these days seems to speak endlessly of the Christian Right versus the Secular
Left. It’s as if Liberal Christianity, or the Christian Left, no longer exists. Yet, I like to think of
myself as a committed Christian who tries earnestly to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Where’s
the liberal voice today? What do liberal Christians believe and how do they act on it? That’s
why I’m doing this sermon series – to say at least a few things about what I as a liberal consider
to be fundamental elements of Christian theology. They concern God, Jesus, the Church and the
Bible. Today, I’ll be speaking about God. I’ll do so personally, rather than abstractly or
theoretically, hoping that might be the most useful from a pulpit, in comparison to what might be
taught in a theological school classroom.
In today’s reading,ii the Psalmist cries out to God, saying, “Incline your ear, O Lord, and
answer me, for I am poor and needy. Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you… You, O Lord
are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love… You are great and do marvelous deeds.” I
read and recited psalms like this regularly, growing up in the heartland of America as a
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Protestant Christian, duly baptized and confirmed. Yet, by the time I finished high school I’d
become a self-proclaimed atheist. Neither intellectually nor emotionally could I stomach the
notion that there could be a God. For how could an omniscient, omnipotent and loving creator
and sustainer of the universe allow all of the horrific and gratuitous suffering that occurs in this
world? Some of the worst instances, from torture of individuals to the genocide of entire races of
people could be explained, perhaps, by humans’ inhumanity to other humans. Yet, even there, I
thought God should miraculously intervene to save the oppressed from their oppressors, as the
psalmist asks. But how about the painful death of innocent babies and children, due to birth
defects, disease or so-called “acts of God” like hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis? How
about plagues and droughts and floods? For me it was simply obscene to imagine that all of the
agony and misery of blameless people and their loved ones might somehow be part of “God’s
plan.”
But my college education helped me rewrite a new faith in God on my atheist clean slate.
These four convictions emerged: Infinity is meaningful and real. There is order in the universe
as a whole. There is a spirit that infuses all of life in which we can mystically partake. And
there’s a law of love. Together these four statements are attributes of what traditionally has been
referred to as God.
When I arrived at college, I was immediately intellectually confronted by a new
perspective on the infinite – one that had nothing to do with a person-like God who intervened in
history. In my first semester I took a course on “Human Evolution” with a geneticist and
evolutionary biologist. He explained that we had evolved as a species to the point where ”There
is no more succinct, and at the same time accurate, statement of the distinctive quality of human
nature than that of Dostoevsky: ‘Man needs the unfathomable and the infinite just as much as he
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does the small planet which he inhabits.’”iii At the same time, in another course I was taking to
satisfy my math requirement I became fascinated by mathematical infinity. I realized that simply
in doing calculus – and using it to build bridges and skyscrapers and airplanes – we routinely
assume notions of the infinitely large and infinitely small.iv I also learned that mathematics
generally accepts ideas of transfinite numbers, and that they are enormously useful beyond pure
mathematical theory. The greatest modern mathematical theorist of infinity, Georg Cantor, then
spoke of an Absolute Infinite beyond transfinite numbers and called it God.v God is the highest
possible degree of totality or completeness. In terms of finite, rational thinking there is no way
fully to construct, reach or encompass God, just as finite standards do not apply to transfinite
numbers. But there may still some partially meaningful ways to talk about God, just as we can
talk about mathematical infinity.vi Of course, none of this proves that God, the Infinite in space
and time, actually exists, but I came to find the story of the infinite in mathematics highly
suggestive of something greater that’s going on in the cosmos.
Meanwhile, I was profoundly moved in my “Human Evolution” course when I read the
conclusion of Charles Darwin’s revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species. In the next to last
paragraph he declared: “Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view
that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we
know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that … [we] view all beings not as special
creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed
of the Silurian system was deposited…”vii How clearly this scientist expressed his understanding
that there are universal “laws impressed on matter by the Creator” – not only law of physics like
gravity, which hold throughout the universe, but also laws of biology like evolution by natural
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selection, which ties all of life on this planet earth together as a whole. The order of nature itself
is indeed staggering.
It was amazing to me, when I thought about it, that the universe coheres at all. Why are
there established laws that apply everywhere and always, rather than having one thing happen
here but then another there (gravity in America, but not in China), or something occur at this
time but something else occur at another (genetic transmission now, but not in the past)? The
universe turns out not to be awry or askew in this way, though, but instead ordered and
trustworthy in some basic manner. We humans can establish a scientific method by which we
can consistently test hypotheses against the evidence of the real world. Then, when we establish
scientific truths, the findings underlying them must be replicable again and again, no matter
who’s running the experiment. If there’s one convincing demonstration that the hypothesis
doesn’t hold, then this can’t be the truth; we have to throw out the hypothesis and start all over
again. So now I had two messages about what might be called God written on my atheist blank
slate: infinity has a reality, and there is an ultimate order in the universe.
I read that physicist Albert Einstein had explained in his “Credo” of 1932 that “To sense
that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and
whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is
religiousness. In this sense I am religious.” In a psychology class I studied religious mysticism,
which can be defined as the intuition that there’s a “Divine Ground in which all partial realities
have their being.”viii Religious mystics, like founders of most religions, speak of the ability to be
consciously reunited with the Divine ground of our being through spiritual exercises like
contemplation or meditation.ix It can also be experienced simply by being outside in nature
under the right circumstances, as romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote:
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…I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.x
So now I began to write a mystical notion of God onto my atheist blank slate.
Finally, through anti-war and civil rights activism in college, I began to experience what
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. called a universal law of love. It’s critical for
humans to be aligned with it in relations with each other. We deny or defy it at our peril. It’s
realized most concretely in nonviolent action. As Gandhi explained:
All well-ordered societies are based on the law of nonviolence…Whenever…you
are confronted by an opponent, conquer him with love…In India we have had an
ocular demonstration of the operation of this law on the widest scale possible.”xi
King added:
What is the summum bonum of life? I think I have discovered the highest good.
It is love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos. As [the New
Testament writer] John says, ‘God is love.’ He who loves is a participant in the
being of God. He who hates does not know God.xii
In speaking of a law of love along with the law of gravity, a relational and personal dimension of
God was added to my previously blank slate of atheism. God must include the personal and must
have a human dimension if God is the eternal totality of all that is, the order of the universe, and
the spirit that infuses all of life. Put a bit differently, when we people try to fathom infinite
reality with our finite, human brains, it makes sense for us (at least sometimes) to use
metaphorical language that is anthropomorphic – language that ascribes human characteristics to
God. So this sets me up for next week’s sermon on Jesus – God incarnated in human form.
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But there’s still a loose thread here. What had happened to my high school repulsion for
an omniscient, omnipotent and loving creator and sustainer of the universe who could allow such
horrific and gratuitous suffering as occurs in this world? What about all of those “acts of God”
which kill innocent babies and children?
Part of what had happened to me was simply a matter of personal spiritual development.
I no longer experienced God as an all-powerful supernatural being who miraculously intervenes
in history at certain times and doesn’t at others. I certainly didn’t take Bible stories literally
anymore. Anything I believed in had to be integrated with what I knew to be true scientifically,
logically, rationally and emotionally. As I came to see it, there isn’t “a plan” for anyone or
anything beyond the magnificent natural order of the universe, including all of its natural laws.
As we humans gain more scientific knowledge, we’re able better to understand our world -- from
the movement of tectonic plates that creates both majestic mountain ranges and tragic
earthquakes, to the evolution of humans that has led to both the nurturing institution of the
family and the history of warfare. There are no “acts of God” which are intentionally designed
by a divine agent to drown particular people, animals and plants in floodwaters while saving
others. As humans, it behooves us to align ourselves as much as possible with laws of nature (in
other cultures sometimes referred to by names like the Tao and Dharma) instead of ignoring or
violating them.
Jesus says in today’s gospel lesson that “Nothing is covered up that will not be
uncovered… What you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”xiii My proclamations
about God are fourfold: We need to recognize our own finitude as part, first, of an infinite
totality, and, second, of an ordered universe -- having the humility to realize that none of us can
conceive, articulate or encompass all of it (and listening carefully for the truth in others’
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perceptions and perspectives). Third, we need to be open, at least aesthetically if not mystically,
to that “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” And, fourth, our salvation as
human beings is dependent upon aligning ourselves with the law of love, which stretches from
parental love to a social manifestation in nonviolent action for justice. These are the
fundamentals of what this Christian liberal has come to call God. I hope that at least a couple of
them make sense to you.
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NOTES
i
Karen Armstong, The Battle for God (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), p. 171; E.R.
Sandeen, “Fundamentalist and Evangelical Churches,” Encyclopedia Britannica, (Chicago:
1978), Vol. 7, p. 778.
ii
Psalm 86: 1-10.
iii
Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: New American
Library, 1967), p. 63
iv
See, for example, Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the
Infinite (Boston: Birkhauser, 1982), pp. 6-9.
v
Georg Cantor, Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1932), p. 378, as cited in Rucker, Infinity and the
Mind, p. 9.
vi
See Rucker, Infinity and the Mind, pp. 44-51.
vii
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation
of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859).
viii
F.C. Happold, Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 20.
ix
Ibid.
x
William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the
Banks on the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798,” as collected in B.J. Whiting et al., The
College Survey of English Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942), Vol. 2, p.
53.
xi
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Collected Works as cited in Stephen Hay (ed.), Sources of Indian
Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), Vol. II, p. 252.
xii
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Most Durable Power,” in James Melvin Washington (ed.), A
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1986), p. 11.
xiii
Matthew 10: 26-27.
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