Believing in a God that does not exist?
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 by Scholar in TrainingBelieving in a God that does not exist – FlyerTalk Forums.
Interesting idea:
[Pastor] Hendrikse gained attention with his book published in November 2007, in which he said that it was not necessary to believe in God’s existence in order to believe in “God”. The Dutch title of the book translates as, “Believing in a God who does not exist: manifesto of an atheist pastor”.
In his book, Hendrikse recounts how his conviction that God does not exist has become stronger over the years.
“The non-existence of God is for me not an obstacle but a precondition to believing in God. I am an atheist believer,” Hendrikse writes in the book. “God is for me not a being but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, ‘I will not abandon you’, and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.”
Hendrikse has been a minister for more than 20 years in the southwestern town of Middelburg and a nearby village. His two congregations have belonged to the Protestant Church in the Netherlands since it was formed in 2004 as a union of a Lutheran church and two Reformed denominations. Hendrikse’s congregations also belong to the Association of Liberal Protestants.
Powerful passage here:
God does not exist, God happens, in and through people.
God means “we made it, God got us through”.
The name in the letters JHWH in which God made himself known in the Exodus story mean: “go on, and where you go I will go with you.” We have to make the first step, because if we do nothing, God can do nothing through us, he is powerless. And we have seen much too much of that: a powerless God. We see that all over the world that people slaughter each other through war.
What of this notion of the idea of God without a real God? Is this something you can get behind?