What use is God if he can’t actually do anything for us?
Part 6
How serious are these losses?
In practice, perhaps only reflective, philosophically-minded intellectuals could adopt this sort of religion. However, I think not. Given that the essence of religion is, I think, the personal relationship with God, I think we might be able to still promote a vibrant, attractive religion that everyone could adopt. A key point is that, in practice, the new way of understanding religion operates extremely similarly to the traditional way of understanding.
I also think that a creative response to the new demands of religion could produce wonderful things. And we acknowledge that the pain and puzzle created by traditional religion – eg why did God let that bad thing happen? – will be gone. So, for example, if final justice is not to be done by God in the afterlife, religious people might be more passionately committed to delivering as much justice as possible on earth. If there is no life after death, the life we have now becomes even more precious – but still enhanced by the spiritual life that our faith in God brings us now.
Let’s have a go at thinking through in more detail what these losses entail.
Some responses to the things we’ve lost:-
- There is no point praying for God to change the world to give us something we want.
However, there is still a great deal to pray for – we are simply shifting our focus from: “This is what I want, please will you get on and do that for me Lord”, to, “This is what I want, so I must commit myself to achieving it, using God’s inspiring power to help me”. All of the inner life of prayer is still effective in terms of sharing a personal relationship with God who guides, strengthens and inspires you.
For me, this would be very honest prayer, realistic and effective – and perhaps more motivating to effective action because I know that any relief is going to be provided through human agency – including me.
It also contains no problems of evil and suffering.
The loss for a believer like me would be minimal, and I think that, on balance, I would gain
Spiritual Devotion 