Atheism For Easter
Have you ever had a boss you thought knew everything to do with the role and had a big grand plan of how things were going to go? See the pieces fall into place like tipping dominos and watch it all play out. A character somewhere between Oprah and Mr Burns, depending on the day. Maybe you have even been that person yourself. But as time goes on, you realise they are going home each night just thinking “I made it through another day somehow” and they do not really have a clue about a big plan or what is really going on at all. They are just as lost as you.
Yet you still see them in the role they perform. Maybe that context even gives a little more grace to their position, knowing you are both just as lost as each other. Almost like the end of each day is a little death, only to face resurrection in the morning with no clue how things might unfold.
This is how we can think about a clearer picture of God, through Christian atheism. Because today when we look around, the Christianity a lot of people espouse, the belief in a supreme leader floating on a cloud, is getting us into some really sticky situations.
It is easy to think that Christian atheism begins with the death of God. Instead it begins with the slow realisation that God never knew what he was doing in the first place.
Think about the book of Job. Job is a successful guy with a beautiful family only to have it all stripped away from him after God makes a bet with Satan on whether Job will renounce his faith. Job looks at the wreckage of his life and senses that the problem is not his lack of faith but God’s lack of competence. The wager with Satan feels less like a test of piety and more like an impulsive experiment conducted by a distracted researcher who has already forgotten what hypothesis he was testing.
Job demands reasons. He wants God to enter into something like a trial, to justify himself before the bar of human experience. But God does not say, I had a plan all along, let me reveal it. Instead of explanations, God unleashes a long poetic catalogue of creation, asking, Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, as if to say that the scale and strangeness of his reality outstrip any moral calculus Job could recognise.
What is scandalous in Job is not suffering as such, but the dawning insight that the so called omniscient God has written himself into a situation he does not understand. Job is the one who knows that God does not know. What is interesting to note is that, at the end of the book, God never corrects him.
Today we could think of our old pal Sheamus, whose story is like Job’s but for the age of casino capitalism. Sheamus is pious, obedient and structurally bankrupt. He prays for a promotion and God tells him to liquidate everything he has and put it all on games he neither understands nor controls. Poker, he wins big. God tells him to take it all to blackjack and he wins big yet again. Once again he hears the voice of God tell him to take everything to roulette. Every step deepens the risk while maintaining the illusion of providence. Probability masquerades as destiny. Sheamus acts as if God has a plan and God sounds like he does too.
Sheamus goes all in on roulette and to his surprise he wins, saying “My God, I cannot believe it.” At the very moment he expects divine confirmation God speaks. “I do not believe it either. You are the luckiest motherfucker I have ever seen.”
Salvation arrives as anticlimax, as the sudden recognition that there is no hidden wisdom behind the contingency, no secret script only God can read, no transcendent spreadsheet in which the odds were rigged in his favour all along. The miracle is not that God knew, but that God did not.
This is why the joke is more Christian than the solemn sermon. Sheamus discovers that his divided, anxious, contradictory subjectivity is not healed by appeal to an undivided Absolute. It is mirrored in it. The one who was supposed to know turns out to be guessing too. As Žižek puts it in The Fragile Absolute, Christianity “undermines the figure of the all knowing big Other, confronting us instead with a God who is himself caught in the deadlock of non knowledge.” In Job this appears as divine bluster, a storm of rhetorical questions that evade the question Job actually asked. In Sheamus it appears as a line from a drinking buddy at the end of a long night in Vegas. In both cases the structure is the same. The subject reaches out to the all knowing God and finds instead a stammering partner, another not quite knowing subject, caught in the same game.
Christian atheism is simply the decision to take this structure seriously. Not the denial of God as such, but the refusal to believe in a God who secretly knows what he is doing. God as a split subject rather than an all seeing administrator. The cross, in this light, is not the example of a man who failed to imitate an infallible deity. It is the moment in which God himself is exposed to God’s own non knowledge. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is not bad acting. It is the place where the divine voice cracks under the weight of its own inconsistency.
Job anticipates this crack. Sheamus hears it as a punchline from a God who sounds suspiciously like a mate at the bar. Both stage the same conversion. Faith is not the confidence that somewhere, beyond our limited perspective, there is a master plan. Faith is learning to live with the fact that there is not one, that the gap we experience in ourselves runs straight through the heart of the Absolute. Easter, then, is not the celebration of a God who finally gets his act together through resurrection. It is the liturgical memory of a God who loses the plot and, in losing it, hands it back to us.
So what if this Easter we let go of the fantasy of an all knowing God or all knowing plan of any kind. In that gap, what kind of practice, or community, or orientation towards life could we start to live with together?