“What matters is if God believes in us…” (Life With God, Part Two)

Last updated on: November 23, 2009 at 1:07 pm by Amy Julia Becker

“What matters is if God believes in us…” (Life With God, Part Two) 2009-11-23T13:07:00-05:00 Amy Julia Becker

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My theme for my talks last weekend was “Life with God.” And yet before I could talk about life with God, I had to address the question of God’s existence

So, some thoughts on that question, taken from the first talk I gave this past weekend:

I’m not planning to mount a defense of the existence of God. Honestly, if there is a God, it is up to God whether we know about Him. For all our arguments, at the end of the day, God’s existence and character need to be revealed to us, not discovered by us.

I go to seminary up the road at Princeton, which means I take a lot of classes that talk about God, and in seminary classes, my teachers talk about something called the “ontological divide.” Ontological. It’s a big word, but I like it, because it defines a big concept. “Ontological” comes from “ontology,” which means “the nature of being.” In other words, the question, “What makes us human?” is an ontological question. “What makes God God?” is an ontological question. And most people (though not all) would agree that there is a divide, ontologically, between human beings and God. God is God and I am not. What it means is that God is different, in His being, than we are. And if there is a God, then that God is not just ontologically different than us, but ontologically more than us—more powerful, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more everything.

It’s because of this divide that we don’t get to decide whether or not God exists. God exists, or He doesn’t. And if He does, it is up to Him to let us know. God’s existence doesn’t depend on us, so on that level, it doesn’t matter, really, whether we believe in God. If there is a God, then there is a God, no matter what we think. What does matter is whether God believes in us. So this weekend, my job is to explain how it is that God has let us know that He exists and how God has let us know that he believes in us.

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