Short Prayers? By Faith, not Sight.
My atheist social media partners snarl and demand of believers: prove that God exists! But, what I find more important than proving that some sort of deity exists is this question: what kind of God do we have? I only want a gracious God. and, I believe that is the kind of God we have.
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (John 20:29b)
I can’t see God!
Elizabeth was four years old. Each day I had to pick her up at the Bancroft Nursery School and drive her home. This particular day she looked pensive.
“Daddy,” she said, “I can’t see God.”
“What?” I asked. Oh, I had heard the question all right. I was asking her to repeat it just so I could buy some time to think up a response.
“I can’t see God,” she went on with increased frustration. “I look everywhere. I look at home. I look at church. I look at the nursery school. But nowhere do I see God. How come?”
Divine Ubiquity
On the one hand, the question worried me because I thought Elizabeth might be exhibiting the tendency of the modern post-Enlightenment mind to rely solely upon empirical knowledge, thereby leading to premature atheism because spiritual realities cannot be empirically verified. On the other hand, I felt confident because I, a fully trained systematic theologian with a doctorate in the field, should be well prepared to take on just such a query. So I launched into what I thought was a rather astute response.
“Well, Elizabeth, remember that God is omnipresent, ubiquitous. This means God is everywhere. Now if God is everywhere—strewn throughout the length and breadth of this gigantic universe—then there is nowhere where God is not present. Now to perceive anything we have to be able to distinguish what it is from what it is not. We need to see it in relief. But there is nowhere we can go to see where God is absent. We cannot physically contrast God with what is not God. We can contrast God only according to qualities such as righteousness versus unrighteousness, love versus non-love…..”
Does God love little children?
Elizabeth was growing perceptibly impatient with my dissertation, despite my erudition. So, she interrupted. “Daddy, does God love little children?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good,” she said with a smile returning to her face, and the conversation came to an end.
In the centuries of long battle between faith and reason, faith had a little victory that day. Elizabeth believes in what she cannot see, because what she cannot see is the source of divine love.
PRAYER
Unsearchable, invisible, God only wise, give us the faith of your children. Amen.
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Ted Peters is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus seminary professor. He is author of Short Prayers and The Cosmic Self. His one volume systematic theology is now in its 3rd edition, God—The World’s Future (Fortress 2015). He has undertaken a thorough examination of the sin-and-grace dialectic in two works, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans 1994) and Sin Boldly! (Fortress 2015). Watch for his forthcoming, The Voice of Public Christian Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.
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