Vocal atheist returns less than 11,000 results, says Google, but I ran across it at least three times in items I read last week. In contrast, vocal Christian returns 127,000 Google results.
Funny thing is, atheism doesn’t start with what is voiced with the mouth. I guess Google, fount of all theological wisdom it might be, got this right.
Psalm 14:1 begins like a punch to the solar plexus:
The fool says in his heart, There is no God.
I did a bad thing there in that quote. I left out the ESV’s quotation marks around what the fool said. Instead, I went more for the formatting style of an internal thought. You see inner monologue formatted that way in novels. Sometimes, it’s even written like this:
The fool says in his heart, There is no God.
That second style seems even more ominous than the first. Almost like a shout. Or the whispered thoughts of the heroine in the horror flick who is walking the “empty” house, and we hear her inner trepidations–and all the while we know the deranged killer is right behind her.
Regardless, what is said in Psalm 14:1 is internal only. It reverberates inside the heart. Call it cardiovocal. A resonate dissonance that ends up shattering the whole man, like some cheap crystal facing Ella Fitzgerald on Memorex.
One gets the sense that it’s a ruminated internal saying, too, a cardiovocalization people repeat over and over as if looped, a repeating sample people dance to.
I think if you could hear the cardiovocalizations of the average person, you would hear There is no God loud and clear. A person doesn’t have to say it with his or her lips because it never stops echoing in the chambers of the heart.
Which is why I think that Alister McGrath, the noted theologian, is wrong in his The Twilight of Atheism. There is no God is the mantra of atheism, and it is being cardiovocalized by millions, if not billions. It is not a saying fading into twilight but a reality expressed nonstop in the world today. Even if we do not hear people saying it with their lips, we see it practiced ad nauseam. People living as if there were no God. Some mantra must be driving that reality.
While the silent cardiovocalizations of some people do come out in practice or in veiled writings, the nature of such inner monologue is to be hidden. You won’t get a judge who claims to be a moral person yet who makes immoral judgments admit that There is no God drives his decisions. Or the pastor who can’t stop checking out the ladies. Or the soccer mom who lives solely to buy more stuff.
Funny, though I’ve learned a lot in 50 years, one of the most important lessons goes back to my childhood and a children’s story. In that story, it says, What is essential is invisible to the eye.
Might I substitute ear for eye, in this case? Because that interior cry of atheism is rampant. It is essential to understand its prevalence, what it means, and what its ramifications are.
Christians are not immune to cardiovocalized atheism, which should sober us. Every day, I read material written by supposedly devout Christians who deny the gifts of the Spirit, mock the supernatural, make peace with the things Christ gave His very life to destroy, and craft endless mitigations of truth, which masquerade as “enlightened” spiritual treatises and “doctrinally pure” systematic theologies. In short, there is no difference between such people and atheists. The cardiovocalizations are the same. There is no God is at the core.
Sounds like a conflict, right? How can believers in Jesus have a heart that says There is no God?
Simple. They decide that they don’t like what the real God is saying and substitute a god of their own creation. If that’s not a denial of God, then what is? There might be a god, but there is no God.
No person is immune. What is your heart silently saying?
If Christians don’t understand this broken message of the heart, then we will not understand why people appear OK on the outside, yet the world keeps moving forward in the wrong direction. We will not understand motivations that seem to clash with spoken intentions. We will assume everything is fine with the people we encounter, yet inside they are screaming something that should appall us.