"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
The world without God, or a world without belief in God, actually has a place on the liturgical calendar: Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Jesus' words from the cross are the text for the day and the faithful thing to do is to take them straight. The absence of God is part of the palate of faith, whether it is the aching brief separation from one dearly known, the longing emptiness for one not yet fully met, or the angry denial of one who hasn't lived up to the billing.
The sign got a surprising amount of attention. Within 24 hours of going up it was a conversation topic on an atheist facebook page and soon after that on reddit. We might say it went mildly viral. After worship Sunday there were interesting conversations about the different things people saw in the sign. One said he saw the optical options ("God is nowhere" and "God is now here") as reflecting the way we look at the same data and come up with dramatically different results. Another said she thought it was classic Christian apophatic theology: God is nowhere means that God cannot be located, limited to any single place or conception. It is one in a series, whose next might be "Godisnothing." To say God is no thing is to say God is not one alongside a lot of others in our catalog of beings. The sign doesn't mean only one thing, not least because God doesn't.
A lot of the conversation on the atheist facebook page revolved around the assumption that the sign was a blooper, the mistake of religious illiterates who can't cope with punctuation or spacing ("Proofreading is your friend"). The condescension was mostly good-humored, and God knows Christians often enough fail to meet even that low bar in responding to critics. If we can puzzle together over the sign, that's a good thing. Here at the community of the sign, for these two days and beyond, the twist is that we will pray while we puzzle.
Mark Heim
The world without God, or a world without belief in God, actually has a place on the liturgical calendar: Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Jesus' words from the cross are the text for the day and the faithful thing to do is to take them straight. The absence of God is part of the palate of faith, whether it is the aching brief separation from one dearly known, the longing emptiness for one not yet fully met, or the angry denial of one who hasn't lived up to the billing.
The sign got a surprising amount of attention. Within 24 hours of going up it was a conversation topic on an atheist facebook page and soon after that on reddit. We might say it went mildly viral. After worship Sunday there were interesting conversations about the different things people saw in the sign. One said he saw the optical options ("God is nowhere" and "God is now here") as reflecting the way we look at the same data and come up with dramatically different results. Another said she thought it was classic Christian apophatic theology: God is nowhere means that God cannot be located, limited to any single place or conception. It is one in a series, whose next might be "Godisnothing." To say God is no thing is to say God is not one alongside a lot of others in our catalog of beings. The sign doesn't mean only one thing, not least because God doesn't.
A lot of the conversation on the atheist facebook page revolved around the assumption that the sign was a blooper, the mistake of religious illiterates who can't cope with punctuation or spacing ("Proofreading is your friend"). The condescension was mostly good-humored, and God knows Christians often enough fail to meet even that low bar in responding to critics. If we can puzzle together over the sign, that's a good thing. Here at the community of the sign, for these two days and beyond, the twist is that we will pray while we puzzle.
Mark Heim