Honest to God: Abigail Maxwell on being an atheist Christian

‘Christianity is the tool I use to know the world, to know myself, and to live well.’

How can I claim to be Christian if I do not believe in God?

As an Anglican I said every week, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty’. Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians all regularly say the same. I do not believe in an all-powerful creator, eternal and so in some way outside the universe. ‘He’ did not make the tiny wings of butterflies – that was natural selection. Nor does he find me a parking space if I pray for one. Constantine, making Christianity the ideology of his empire, did immense damage to it.

If anyone talks of belief in God, they should make some attempt to define the term. I fear being inaccurate or misleading when using it. For me, ‘the inward source of our strength’ seems a better description than ‘that of God in every one’. Possibly, ‘psychological states’ is better than ‘spiritual experiences’. I believe my spiritual experiences are the manifestation of interactions between neurons and dendrites, and though these are complex they will eventually be explicable. My faith is in humanity.

Yet my spiritual life flows from Christianity. I was brought up in it, I have worshipped more than forty times in every year of my life, and my understanding of spirituality is suffused with Christianity. As a Quaker, with a faith rooted in Christianity, I consider belief in verbal formulae less important than acceptance of spiritual truths like the primacy of Love, and that Christianity is not a notion but a way.

Mary Magdalen went to the grave on the first day of the week, and had a great insight: ‘He is not here.’ Jesus is in our hearts, our memories, the way he has changed our lives. In that way he is with us now. She went off joyfully to tell his friends, and the gospel writers told stories of seeing him and speaking to him. Two thousand years later my culture is suffused with Jesus, and having repeatedly studied the gospels, I continue seeking to follow him.

I also continue to engage with the Bible. It is the record of a people’s wrestling with the idea of God, and with what it means to be human, over many years. It is a contradictory compendium which only makes sense as a conversation of different viewpoints. According to Psalm 37, the righteous always prosper. Job gives a different view, catharsis for anyone who has railed at the unfairness of suffering.

Sitting in silence as a way of worshipping, or as a spiritual practice, belongs to many religions and none, but my own practice of it has been distinctively Christian, mostly in Quaker worship but also in Catholic contemplative prayer.

I believe the pure in heart are blessed, because they shall see God within them: God in the form of the human Jesus, or in me. Christianity is the tool I use to know the world, to know myself, and to live well. Not believing in God the Father Almighty, I want to keep all I have gained from Christianity. I am an atheist Christian.

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Comments

and may the polished old handle of that tool continue to help us craft love in a world that badly needs it - whether we’re ‘believers’ or not.

By katon on 2nd September 2021 - 8:59

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