My father is an ordained minister in the Lutheran church, but I don't think you could call me a Christian by any but the broadest cultural definitions. I do not go to services regularly any more. I do not read the Bible at all. Some days I do not even believe that God exists.
And yet I have not totally given up on the idea of God. I know that there is something missing in my life. I know that there is a greater presence than myself alone. I feel the truth of the notion that I am not alone in the universe even if I cannot prove it with objective facts. But then again, I am fond of saying that something can be true without being factually correct.
I often feel like the narrator in that U2 song: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." I know there is something -- or someone -- to find. I also know that I have not found it yet. I guess that is why I picked up the latest book I am reading from the library shelves earlier this week.
U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher and Atomic Band is a collection of essays examining the connexion between the boys from Ireland and such philosophical heavyweights as Aristotle, Plato, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. I am only on the third essay --"If You Want to Kiss the Sky Better Learn How to Kneel": Existential Christianity in U2 by Mark A. Wrathall -- but I am already certain that it was a book worth checking out.
I thought I'd share a couple of passages that I found particularly relevant:
Despair, as we've seen, grows precisely out of "needing it now" but being unable to have it. The problem is that we long for something that, it seems, can't possibly be realized "in the flesh". For the Christian existentialist, the key is to discover a way to understand our longings so that they can be realized on earth. This will require a changed conception of both our spiritual side and our sensual nature. Faith in God, the Christian existentialist believes, shows us how to do this. In a faithful existence, the world is disclosed in such a way that we can achieve this resolution of the contradiction at the heart of our existence. What with the resolution be like? It will somehow show us both (a) how to pursue something eternal, infinite -- worthy of never ending longing; and (b) allow us to live on earth, in the kind of passionate relationships to others that don't end up driving us to despair by undermining our higher longings.
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Confidence in the truth of certain propositions grows out of the way that faith in Christ produces a changed experience of the world. "The Christian thesis," Kierkegaard wrote, "is not: intelligere ut credam (I understand in order that I might believe), nor is it credere, ut intelligam (I believe in order that I might understand). No, it is: Act according to the command and orders of Christ; do the will of the Father -- and you will become a believing person." Thus faith is to be understood, in the first instance, as the existential state of those who are able to act and live in a Christian way.
Without an ability to live a Christian life and inhabit a Christian world, mere belief in God or the truth of religious claims is not faith, it is superstition. Superstition is belief in the existence of entities and events which do not manifest themselves in the ordinary course of experience. If someone does believe "that rock 'n' roll can really change the world," it need not be a superstitious belief. This is because, while there might be an objectively low degree of probability that just listening to a song will really change all the greed and hatred and evil actions in the world, people might nevertheless, in the normal course of affairs in the world, change their behavior as a result of listening to a particularly inspiring song. By contrast if I believe that there is a God in spite of the fact that there's no place for God in my way of making sense of the world, then the belief is a superstition. It's not just that there is a low probability that God does exist, it is utterly incomprehensible how there could be a God. I am left merely "speaking of signs and wonders," while a true experience of God demands "something other" -- namely, loving action to relive the suffering of others (consider "Crumbs From Your Table").
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We would no say, in other words, that someone has Christian faith who is unable to live a Christian life. This is true, even if that person had a rationally grounded knowledge of God. So faith is located in the existential register, meaning the presence or absence of faith is a matter of the kind of stance one takes on life, the practices one engages in, the ways one feels about things. True faith is found in one's disposition (feelings of the heart) and the actions that arise from those dispositions (living a devout life). Bono echoes this view in his description of his own approach to religion: "God is love, and as much as I respond in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that's my religion" (Bono in Conversation, p. 200). True disbelief, by the same token, is found in a corrupt and licentious life (taking pleasure in what is not pleasing to God, doing actions that God condemns).
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Faith with then not be amenable to proof in the way one verifies a cognitive state or proposition (demonstrating that it is true). But it will have the kind of confirmation or success conditions that all other skills have. Music skills are confirmed or successful when they allow the musician to cope with the concert hall or the recording studio. Religious faith will be confirmed or successful when it gives me the practices and dispositions I need to cope with the world as a whole. As Father Zosima notes in The Brothers Kariamazov, "one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced." He goes on to explain that one is convinced "by the experience of active love .... The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul." The confirmation and conviction come, in other words, through one's success in living in the world in the way indicated by faith.
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U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band
Edited by Mark A. Wrathall
Carus Publishing Company, Peru Illinois, 2006
ISBN: 0-8126-9599-2
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