A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 3: Marilynne Robinson, the Truth and Tozer

My hero, the author Marilynne Robinson, wrote a great new book called Absence of Mind about a lot of this stuff. Christianity Today interviewed her last week and she said this in regards to the separations we make both as atheists and believers:

"[Atheists] have more or less accepted the notion that the more people know, the less inclined they will be toward belief - a central assumption of atheism. With this comes the idea that whatever is most toxic from religious point of view must therefore epitomize science. And all sorts of nonsense goes unchallenged. Christianity has abandoned its intellectual traditions, ceding that ground to anybody in a white coat. Where it has tried to muster courage, it has too often tended to become irrational and shrill. Meanwhile, a great age in true science, an absolute catalog of wonders, passes by unnoticed."

I’ll be the first to admit that Christians are horrific with their use of the word “true.” But it also must be noticed that the Atheists and physicists of our day make similar mistakes. When we categorize truth as only that which we may observe physically, we are in danger. Similarly, if we say that the Bible includes everything that is true and if it’s not in the Bible then it’s not true, we are in serious intellectual danger.

2 + 2 = 4 is not in the Bible and it is empirically true. Perhaps, then, there are things that are not physical that are only witnessed in the reality of our consciousness that are also deeply true.

Christians historically are people who desire truth. I am concerned with some of modern Evangelicalism because there is an irrational fear of science as if it might disprove God himself. What little faith we must have if we only see our God in the Scriptures and not in the entirety of his lovely creation. No, my God is living, active, speaking, moving.

If you are scared of science and physics and mathematics, then you have created for yourself a small god who isn’t even found in the Bible. My God made physics and lives and breathes in it, as he does in the very pages of his Holy Scriptures. When we discover a new scientific fact, we celebrate for now we know more about how God has invented his universe.

“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Romans 11:36).

A.W. Tozer’s theology was that “God’s Word” is not just the written word (the Bible), but “the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality.” In Tozer’s mind, the Word of God is bigger and more complex than a leather-bound Bible (although that is certainly a piece of it). To him, it is a universal and timeless Word of power and truth; so God has not only spoken, but he is currently speaking. Here’s a taste from The Pursuit of God:

“The Bible will never be a living book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in his universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page are actually for them. A man may say, 'These words are addressed to me,' and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.”

Marilynne, would you like a last word?

“Christians should care for what is true in every sense of the word true. This emphatically includes good science – understanding always its necessarily hypothetical workings.”

Walk boldly into what is true and even what could be.