For a few months now, I’ve had huge doubts in my faith. If you’ve followed my blog at all during that time you’ll know all about it, I’ve been pretty open. Growing up in the Christian Faith, I’ve seen and encountered God in undeniable ways. I’ve felt the presence of God being with me, I’ve seen and experienced healing and miracles as a result of prayer, and I’ve seen people’s lives transformed when they’ve encountered God. However, I’ve also experienced times when it has seemed like God is absent, times when my prayers have not been answered. These last few months I’ve experienced the latter. My faith has crumbled piece by piece and the God I once knew feels more absent than ever.
Today is Good Friday, the day where we remember the death of Christ. The day when a Palestinian Jewish peasant was arrested, beaten and crucified for claiming that he was God.
On the Cross, Jesus painfully cried out the words ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ Which is Aramaic for, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’.
Peter Rollins describes the moment like this:
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“What we witness here is a form of atheism: not intellectual – Christ directly addresses God as he dies – but a felt loss of God. In the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark we read of Christ crying out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is a profoundly personal, painful, and existential atheism. Not an atheism that arises from some rational reflection upon an absence of divinity but rather one that wells up from the trauma of personally experiencing that absence. It is not some precursor to the atheism of people like Richard Dawkins. It is not a comfortable theoretical rejection of the divine. Christ expresses a deeply felt loss, one that has more in common with the atheism we find expressed in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose blood-curdling proclamation of God’s death in the nineteenth century was deeply felt. On the cross, Christ undergoes the deepest, most radical form of divine loss, one that is experienced.”
As I reflect on this, I can identify with Jesus in that moment. I can identify with the disciples, the followers and friends of Jesus in the hours and days after his crucifixion. The loss of God is extremely painful and real, Good Friday reminds us of this. Now you might remind me that the story doesn’t end there, that Jesus didn’t stay dead. You might remind me of the hope and joy that I can have because of that. That if I wait, sooner or later this pain will go away, things will make sense again, I will experience Jesus’ resurrection just as the disciples did on Easter Sunday.
Maybe that will happen. Somewhere inside me there’s a glimmer of hope that is helping me to hold on, hope that the Cross isn’t the end, that somewhere out there God is still there. But that doesn’t make my doubts disappear. That doesn’t make this absence suddenly go away and make everything OK again.
The beauty and true scandal of the Cross is that in my doubt, brokenness, and sense of divine forsakenness I am able to identify and participate in Jesus’ death. There’s a place for joy and rejoicing and resurrection. But there is also a place for doubt, questions, and cries of ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’. The Easter story tells us that we can identify with Jesus in both of these places. It tells us that both are valid, and both are necessary parts of faith.
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You are not alone in thinking this way Gordon. I am not even assured that " sooner or later this pain will go away, things will make sense again". I wonder if it is our compulsion to make sense of it that is part of the problem. Every time I hear some part of the Church, some theologian, someone who is certain tell me that they have an answer it only reflects my doubt not dispels it.
Only God can provide the answer not man. When Jesus cried out to God he didn’t doubt his existence. It wasn’t atheism; it was confusion. He wasn’t asking "are you there?" He was asking "What has gone wrong? This isn’t how it was supposed to be". This was the human in Jesus talking and it can encourage us because like him we don’t doubt God’s existence, only our part in his plan. Like Jesus we are still talking to God.
I’d argue it was atheism, but as was said in the quote from Rollins, it’s not an intellectual denial of God, but the felt experience of God’s absence. He describes it like this in more detail on his website.
‘In order to approach an answer I should begin by saying that the term “atheism” is not as monolithic and straightforward as the popular debate would portray it. This is not a subject that I want to delve into in this post, but it is worth mentioning that the atheism of Nietzsche is very different from, say, that found in Dawkins. Instead I want to outline my own position very briefly, which might be more accurately described as incarnational a/theism.
By “Incarnational a/theism” I am referring, not to an intellectual disavowal of God, but to the felt experience of God’s absence; an experience that must be distinguished from the idea of a mere absence of experience. To understand the difference take a moment to think about the difference between the absence that exists before you meet someone you later come to love and the absence you experience once they are gone. In both cases the person is absent, but the first is a mere absence of experience while the second is an experience of absence…
More than being the felt experience of Gods absence the phrase “incarnational a/theism” also refers to the idea that this traumatic experience brings us into the very heart of what it means to affirm God’s presence (hence the use of the dash). This is then the type of “atheism” I affirm as central to the Christian event.’
I find your feelings and commentary really helpful!! Thank you so much! I think if we are honest we all go through this. It’s a wrestle. I feel sometimes that I KNOW God is there – I have felt him so powerfully so many times and I have experienced answered prayer profoundly and witnessed healings. It makes sense intellectually to me too – I get it BUT when breakthrough just doesn’t come or a wound remains I find myself ever so slightly flirting with the idea that perhaps I’m wrong. However that makes sense to me too – there’s a battle going on. Another thing that testifies Jesus’ truth to me is there are times when I feel such an existence itch and the ONLY thing that satisfies it is Him. He will pursue you – doesn’t start something and not finish.
Thank you!
Danny I thought he cried that out because for the first time, with our sin on him, he was separated from God?
Sian, Yes I think so too and at that final moment he experiences something that we do. His cry of "Why?" resonates with me. He was fully God and fully man but at that moment of separation he knows exactly what it is like to be a man and has only faith and trust in the Father left. You are right. He doesn’t start something and not finish. That should inspire us.