Psalm 14
We live in a secular age.[1] What makes our age secular is not the diverse array beliefs that are available to us, nor is it whether one chooses to believe or not to believe in some or any or none of them. Rather, what makes our age secular is a broad cultural scepticism towards the possibility of any explanation of our experience that looks beyond the material world. In short, what makes our age secular is that the default cultural assumption is that there is no supernatural at all.
For most of history, the broad cultural assumption was the opposite—to conceive of a world devoid of the supernatural was almost incomprehensible, though scepticism regarding the supernatural in the ancient world did exist. There are many examples in history of individuals questioning the existence of deities prior to the Enlightenment.[2]
Admittedly, I have taken us down a bit of a rabbit trail—one that I hope you, preacher, will avoid. The intellectual atheism that might come to our minds is not the sort that the Psalmist is concerned with here and I would caution you to avoid making it the focus of your reading of Psalm 14. No insight for modern apologetical battles is to be found here. Rather, the Psalmist is concerned with those who confess with their hearts that there is no God.
With those few words, the Psalmist has dragged professing believers down from their defensive positions and thrown us all vulnerably into the open with those we had previously judged from on high.
The target of the Psalmist here is not the intellectual atheist. Many who deny the existence of God are sincere and honest people with legitimate concerns. Instead, the Psalmist is concerned with the practical atheist. The criteria for determining whether or not one confesses the existence and authority of God is not what a person says about God. A person’s belief in God is discerned by his or her actions.
If you want to know what people believe, do not listen to what they confess with their mouths. Look, instead, to what they confess with their lives, for it is in our everyday living that our deepest convictions are revealed. We may confess with our mouths to worship the LORD, but whenever we sacrifice another’s well-being to secure our own future or the future of our family or ‘clan’, are we not sacrificing our neighbours on the altars of the sort of fertility gods decried in our Scripture? If we heed the Psalmist’s warning in the way I think is warranted, I am afraid that we will find that our lives are more reflective of a faith in capitalism, consumerism, and progress than a faith in the good news of the Reign of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This is not to say that we should cease confessing with our mouths in our worship what we want to believe with our lives. Such confessions are not disingenuous, particularly when they are practiced as prayers of longing confession that lament the gap between our world and our place in it, and the kind of world we long for. Living as a citizen of the Reign of God in the midst of a ‘foolish’ world is no mean feat. Like trying to rise up and escape a glue trap, the residue of the world in which we were and continue to be reared is sticky and unrelenting. We are all habituated in it, even those of us raised among God’s people. It is the water in which we all swim. The role confessions of the faith (both in word and practice) have in the re-narration and re-orientation of our lives towards God’s Reign cannot be overstated. But simply reciting them is not the same thing as believing them. Learning to believe them comes by learning to live into the story of salvation that they recount for us and invite us to take part in by the power of the Spirit.
I am wont to think that there is another level to practical atheism. The kind mentioned above can be seen as sort of naïve—because belief operates on an un- or even subconscious level, that sort of practical atheism can be committed without a real awareness or intentionality. The second level is more conniving and would include a person committing the sorts of acts laid out in the Psalm (corruption, vile deeds, devouring people as though eating bread) in the name of God. I must admit, I was quick to think of politicians and businesspeople and televangelists, but it did not take me long to think of ways that God’s people, regardless of motive or verbal confession, would face indictment on these charges, as well.
I think we would do well as preachers not to worry ourselves with trying to argue with intellectual atheists to discredit them or convince them otherwise (or equipping our congregations to do so). Instead, I think we should do the hard work of leading our congregations in uncovering and repenting of the practical atheism present in our lives and life together. As we submit and allow our faith in capitalism and consumerism and progress to be pulled out by the roots and begin to have our lives and life together re-narrated and re-oriented by the Holy Spirit, we might find ourselves accused of atheism in the same way the earliest Christians were when their faith led them (as citizens of the Reign of God) to refuse to participate in the religious-economic systems of their world.
[1] Root, Andrew. “Faith Formation in a Secular Age” in Word and World 37, no. 2. (Spring 2017): 128-141.
[2] Whitmarsh, Tim. Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. United Kingdom: Faber & Faber, 2016.
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