UU Carnival - Is Atheism Non-Belief?

“A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgment upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.” –James Luther Adams

The latest installment of the UU Carnival asked bloggers to react to this statement from one of our preeminent Unitarian theologians. I’ve been thinking about this one, in the odd moments between meetings and classes, as I commute and listen to Sissy Spacek reading Harper Lee’s classic “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and sporadically as I read about Christian ethics for class, and work on a sermon for my next preaching gig.

It occurred to me that the last sentence pretty accurately characterizes Jesus – he certainly criticized spurious piety. He condemned those who performed religious rituals in public but were privately unmerciful and unjust. The Jesus I study and admire is a radical of the first degree, yet one could not accuse him of atheism – at least not in the modern sense of the word.

So, I have to wonder if Adams meant atheism as in “not believing in God,” or atheism in a less modern sense – that of “not believing in the God of the times.” The early Christians were sometimes accused of atheism on those grounds. They didn’t follow the spiritual practices accepted by their peers. They were weird, they were different, they chose a different way to worship God = they were atheists.

The Protestant reformers were also called atheists – because they chose a different way to worship and denied the efficacy of parts of the Christian tradition. The reformers who decried the sale of indulgences to buy one’s way into heaven weren’t much different from Jesus tossing the moneychangers out of the temple.

At the end of the 1800’s, the Unitarians of the Western Conference were doing things differently than their brethren back in Boston – putting women into pulpits, fraternizing with liberal Jews and humanists, working with the Free Religious Association. They were acknowledging that there are many ways to worship, many paths of spirituality. Once again, those who blazed their own trail were accused of atheism – and this time, some were truly nonbelievers.

So, I wonder. I don’t have any real answer here, but I wonder if each supposed religious “reform” eventually becomes mired in its own self-righteousness, unable to see its flaws for admiring its own perfection? Does each form of faith eventually require “atheists” to break away and shed the sham spirituality and spurious piety that has crept in? Do atheists really question creeds, or deeds? Perhaps these "atheists" have a good deal in common with Micah and Amos. Is that what Adams was hinting at?

It would certainly be irony of the finest kind if the holy really did work through history this way. I’m going to continue thinking on this. Perhaps it will help me locate a few flaws in my own theology…