by Gilbert Markus

I imagine that most readers of Open House have experienced this kind of discussion with their friends and acquaintances: they discover that you are a Christian, a Catholic perhaps, and wonder why. And you are (as 1 Peter suggests you should be) ‘ready to answer anyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that is in you’.

So the conversation starts, but very quickly it becomes not so much about your vision, your hope, the life you hope to live or who you think Jesus is. It becomes about ‘the existence of God’. We slip so quickly into this abstract philosophical speculation about the existence (or non-existence) of this ‘Supreme Being’.

We might ask our friend who regards herself as an atheist: ‘What God is it that you don’t believe in?’ She gives an account of some being – a powerful and invisible individual who dwells ‘up there’ or ‘somewhere’, one who makes demands, who rewards and punishes, who sometimes intervenes in the world, and she will say, ‘That’s what I don’t believe in’.  And I will typically respond, ‘Well I don’t believe in any such being either.’

Gilbert Márkus was a Dominican friar for 21 years, and ordained a priest in 1987. He studied theology at Blackfriars Oxford and at Edinburgh University and taught and wrote on Liberation Theology for many years. On leaving the Dominicans in 2002, he taught and researched in medieval ‘Celtic’ history and theology at the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow. His many books include The Radical Tradition: Saints in the Struggle for Justice and Peace (DLT, 1992).