Why I Believe in God…and….War and Peace and the Problem of God

Prelude to “Why I Believe in God.”

This past week I was drawn by some circumstances to write out some things on “why I believe in God.” Then last night Donald Trump closed his remarks regarding the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities with a “particular” thanks to God. Trump said, “And I just want to thank everybody, and in particular, God.” And then he said, “I want to just say we love you, God” before he added that we love our U.S. “great military.”

I’m thinking that God really appreciates being drawn into this battle. This is not new. God has been listening to this spiritual rhetoric for a long time. A long time (e.g. see I Samuel 15 of the Hebrew Scriptures and the order to destroy the Amalekites).

I would like to ask Trump to leave God out of it. But I know that he won’t.  None of us will. Not even those who don’t believe in God. And those who do believe in God will keep on saying that they have heard from God and that God told them to kill somebody (that I Samuel 15 thing, and other Scripture and then this: I’m reading Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith right now with my Book Club and can hardly contain my fury at the religious fundamentalism that bludgeons people to death).

You would think that with all the practicalities of concern about war and peace and bombings and retaliations we might not want to hear any thinking about “why I believe in God.” It’s so distant and unrelated to the real things in life to which we need to attend. But, I would differ. As I have said elsewhere: this “business of God is the fuel that fires the engine that Drives the Bus.” It is more than “practical.” It is foundational. It is what makes war and peace.

Why I Believe in God

A couple of “bullet points” that come to mind, and then a last one that turned into what for me is the heart of the matter: what to do with the Problem of God.

 -Faith is not appropriation of conviction but rather demolition of the same

-Not because of what I see, but because of what I hear (cf. Romans 10: “faith comes by hearing”)

-The overall biblical account telling us the Modus Operandi of the universe is Grace and not Law is too iconoclastic to neglect, let alone ignore or abandon

 -World War I and World War II and the Atomic Bomb and Auschwitz and Carbon Emissions and Urban Sprawl and two elections of Donald Trump have destroyed any possibility of faith in humanity to right itself. Humanity’s calamities, temporal and eternal, can be righted, but from the outside in, not the inside out. And the “outside in” is not a magic or supernatural intervention, but rather an external word heard, heeded and acted upon.

-God is not the Law who brings Order within the parameters and infrastructure of the Law.   God is the Outlaw outside of any parameters and infrastructure of Law, who brings Mercy. God gives laws. God is not the Law.

-Somebody, for God’s sake, literally, even though I know God can take care of Godself, has to speak out against Fascism and Authoritarianism that masks as Good Government and speak out against Religious Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism that masks as Good Religion (and more specifically as Good Church)

-God is not the Great Explainer or Great Helper who acts at the margins and gets called in when we can’t figure things out or when we can’t get things done and who waits for us to make a correct choice. God is rather the Great Presence (or even the Great Reality) who is at the center who gives us no choice in whether or how to relate to God (since the relationship is ubiquitous and a gift) but every choice as to what to have for lunch, what career path to take and whether or not to pull the trigger.

-Not because I want to believe in God (like I need relief from life’s burdens) or think that I should love God or want to get to love God (like I am trying to do what most, if not all, religious instruction today urges me to do), or that I need to believe (like I need hope to surpass what I see and know). But, this: because I cannot avoid believing in God as the only one who can engage the problem and pain that God actually is to me (God is not my Solution to life and death. God is rather my Problem and no one, not religion or philosophy, can solve the problem of God except God).

Here’s what one of my mentors writes:

 “I heard a rabbi in one of the memorial ceremonies for the destruction of the two World Trade Towers declaim that nothing or no one could convince us that God somehow willed the terrible tragedy with all its attendant suffering and loss of life. But the problem is that such declamations, alas, do not hold. When all is said and done, the pain and sorrow and mourning continue. The cry goes up, nevertheless, Why? As [Martin] Luther put it, ‘the arrow of conviction remains stuck fast in the human heart’ (Bondage of the Will). All such declamations accomplish is to throttle the preaching of the gospel. They substitute lame explanations and shallow comfort where there should be proclamation. The only solution to this kind of necessity is the proclamation. That is, if God rules all things by absolute necessity, then our only recourse is to attend to what he [sic] does do. The solution to the problem of the absolute is absolution! There the immutable God does ‘what is necessary’! God is ‘determined’ to have us back! But we can see that only in Christ Jesus.

Apart from Jesus we are on our own. Luther could even say that apart from Jesus God is indistinguishable from the devil. And apart from Jesus we have to attempt to redo God more to our liking or do what most moderns do, dispense of him altogether. But the gouty foot laughs as such doctoring.” (The Captivation of the Will: Luther vs. Erasmus on Freedom and Bondage, Gerhard Forde, 2005)

More on how God is our Problem and that reference just here about a “gouty foot laughing”:

The Problem of God is Only Solved by God. Being Spiritual is still being Religious. Religion is a Construct of Humanity, not of God.

“….Leonard Cohen. His dense, unsparing songs refuse to believe that the world is soluble or any transport permanent; they push unflinchingly into bafflement and betrayal, even sin, the order of punishment he never shies away from. Here, I think is Buddhist practice: simply systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.” (Aflame: Learning From Silence, Pico Iyer, 2025)

It is the “on anything other than” that is the problem. There is no “other than.” There is nothing in our relationship with God, with Destiny if we want to call God that, with Reality if we want to call God that, that we can control. And this is not controlled, this uncontrollability, with a control that is “an acceptance of uncontrollability”! Not even a “calm mind.” Martin Luther had a metaphor that describes this attempt to work on this unworkable dilemma: “the gouty foot laughs at your doctoring” (The Bondage of the Will, 1525). Gout, of course, is no joke even today. An Inflammatory Arthritis. But imagine it in 16th century Germany when Luther writes. Try as one may to fix it, to doctor it, there was no changing it.

There is no getting rid of the accusations of God. There is no getting rid of the Accusation that is God. Really? Ok, just try it. Try this “calming of the mind.”

It can be therapy to be sure. It can be a consolation. I do not deny or decry it’s redeeming and helpful application. I do “mind calming” things all the time. I’m guessing you do too. Entire industries are built around this today. But a calm is no declaration of peace. It is no salvation. The moment one serenity is known, another agitation arises.

“…he too is beginning to look shaky. He’s been diagnosed with something for which there is no cure. Of course, he offers with unsleeping irony, we’re all suffering from something for which there is no cure. But this is specific and depleting.” (Aflame, Pico Iyer, 2025). Iyer visited Cohen at Cohen’s home in Los Angeles and made this observation about Cohen. The thing, of course, from which there is no cure, is not only death, but the thing also which kills us daily quite before any permanent demise: predestination sickness. It’s our spiritual gout and, again, as per Luther, “the gouty foot laughs at our doctoring.” This sickness, this condition of having no control over our destiny, is not curable.

But we try. Religion passes as devotion to God when it is actually spiritual calisthenics, what Luther called speculation, to improve or impact positively in any way whatsoever this sickness, this disease.  Many do not want to participate in these religious notions (for numerous reasons, not the least of which is because in its fundamentalist forms they jettison science and worse, bludgeon and kill people who step out of line, or even in its mainline forms too often give emotionally and intellectually deaf answers to questions of disparities and injustice like “why do the wicked prosper?” and “why do bad things happen to good people?”). But while rejecting spiritual religions many turn to philosophical religions like Skepticism with its answers masking as questions or Stoicism with its firm upper lip or Epicureanism with its carefree and careless living or Atheism with its self-importance and back-turning denial of the Problem or Nihilism with its despair masking as hope.

So, religion doesn’t cure the disease. Neither does philosophy. The problem of God can only be solved at its origin. The problem of God can only be solved by God.

What this means, it seems, is that in order to do something about the Problem of God I must turn to “believing in God,” by which I mean recognize the reality of God which, such recognition, is something I cannot not do because the Problem of God (the Threat, the Accusation) is something I know without trying to know it.  There doesn’t seem to be any other route to take.

But, now, we have to be very careful. Right? My believing gets me nowhere, right? Right.

Enter here the story of Jesus, the story mostly misconstrued and told wrongly by most of the Church today as Us taking care of the Problem of God instead of God taking care of the Problem of God. It’s an easy mistake to make, and one that is done because it’s too painful to tell the truth: Jesus is no Help at all [In fact, Jesus, instead of getting us out of a jam, puts us readily right in a jam when we pay attention to the kinds of things he actually taught. Things like love your enemies, turn the other cheek, the first will be last, give up all your possessions, divorce = adultery = sin. Or, the most offensive and biggest jam of all: forgiving all the infractions of this stuff without even the slightest requirement of contrition or confession or penance, things that we love to require but Jesus does not. We especially love to require it of others! Think of that John 8 account of Jesus and the adulterous woman, or the story Jesus tells of the father with his two wayward sons (Luke 15)].

Jesus is no help at all. Truth be told, the death of Jesus at the hands of Pilate and Herod’s minions was tragic and unjust. End of story. It did not get us anywhere.

But, watch this now: that is the story! The good does no good (metaphysically, spiritually, “relationship to the divinely”) but is only good (that blind man who was given sight by Jesus and that woman whose hemorrhaging was stopped by Jesus certainly would attest to this “good”). Really? That’s the deal? My good gets me nowhere but….dead? Yes. The reason the story of Jesus is so compelling is not because it’s a superhero story where the good man wins the prize but because it’s a story where the good man gets nothing. All he can do is be dead and wait until Somebody might decide to do the good thing and raise him from that dead! Jesus is totally dependent on God.

 Jesus’ story, if you are with me on this, is our story. Our good gets us nothing but dead. And all we can do is wait until Somebody raises us from that dead.

And that is what it is be a Christian: being totally liberated from any need to be good for the sake of any truck with God (the New Testament, and writer Paul in it, calls this being freed from “the curse of the law”) and being totally dependent on God to give us anything and everything, including wherever and whatever we might think an “eternal salvation” might be.

So, where are we? Jesus is not helpful in our relationship with God. He is our relationship with God! This, too, by the way, is what I believe John is trying to tell us when he writes that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father but by me” (John 14). This is not meaning what the church mostly has said it means: Jesus is the only correct path, among many wrong ones we might choose, to get to God. This means, instead, that Jesus (alone among “spiritual leaders”) gets us nowhere with God because there is no path to God. There is only God getting to us. And that, uncomfortably for us, too, in God’s good time.

But, watch this now: That “time” is now! Not some time and place somewhere over the rainbow or in the bye and bye. Be baptized and come as often as you can to the Eucharistic (“give thanks!”) Table where God gives you your relationship with God! Jesus is no helper there. He is Lord and Savior (I know those are weird terms to use for a person, but use them they did in the first century for Jesus, and that because they were contrasting Jesus to Caesar Augustus who had already claimed those very titles!).  And then, after, always, that feast at the Table, get on out there and do the good the world needs so badly but that you don’t need (for that “relationship to God” thing) at all.