What ever happened to all those books attacking God, or at least the idea of God? They were quite fashionable not long ago. The bookstores were full of atheists on a roll – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris….

They were all here a minute ago. Where’d they go? They seem to have disappeared, or at least abated. Isn’t it time for some money-making, best-selling sequels?

Or is everybody just a little sick of all that? Or just plain bored. The whole, familiar genre could be called By God Possessed, for these evangelical atheists seemed gripped by an idea they could neither believe nor let go. He works in mysterious ways.

Just as depressing, a separate but equally polemical school arose in reaction, determined to prove the existence of God as you would a geometrical proposition. Like someone out to climb Mount Olympus with ropes and pulleys. There is no end to the making of books, as the Preacher warns in Ecclesiastes. And that was even before Kindle.

The thing all these books, pro and con God, may have in common is any felt experience with their Subject. They approached holiness as if it could be outlined on a blackboard. Setting out to create a logical structure, they ended up with competing Towers of Babel.

Talented, clever, and articulate as the disputants were, it’s hard to believe many folks have ever been talked into or out of belief the way you’re sold an insurance policy (“Why risk Hell?”) or tube of toothpaste (“It’ll make you look and feel so much better!”)

These super-salesmen on both sides of the aisle tended to approach God as a matter of fact, something to be proved or disproved. Faith isn’t like that. It’s something one has or one doesn’t, one has experienced or not. It’s something one acquires or loses, that waxes and wanes, not a problem in a logic course.

Resolved: that God doesn’t exist. Imagine a high school debate team tackling that proposition. And flee. For a time there we seemed surrounded by high school debaters of all ages eager to argue the question forever. Or for what seemed forever. A little theological disputation goes a long, tiresome way.

One might as well debate whether love exists. The doubters would set out to prove a negative – and succeed to their own immense self-satisfaction. The mirror-image believers would address the subject as if the existence of love – or truth or beauty or justice for that matter – could not only be proven to a mathematical certainty but chloroformed and pinned to a mat like a butterfly. Mainly for display purposes.

Embarrassing. Also boring. And generally distasteful. A sense of taste may not prove or disprove anything, but at least it can warn us away from silly futilities.

On the eve of this Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the sabbath of sabbaths, I found myself in a simple little synagogue repeating the old prayers, unable to bear looking at the state my sodden soul had reached since last Yom Kippur. I couldn’t even see it under all the stains, the resolutions unkept and even unmade, the pride and lust and 101 other of my favorite sins, the forgivenesses neither granted nor asked, and all I could do was repeat over and over, “Lord help me!” I was so far away.

And yet I came away at sundown the next day, when the gates are closed and court adjourned, with perfect confidence if not perfect faith. Because, don’t tell anybody, the fix was in. The trial was a set-up. (Just between us, the Judge loves us. You can feel it.)

I took comfort in thinking of a once obscure German Jewish theologian, or maybe anti-theologian, early in the last century: Franz Rosenzweig. He was existentialist before there was such a word to describe his thoughts. His problem with theology was that it was always setting down rules and regulations for the conduct of God.

As a promising young student in the golden year 1913, Herr Rosenzweig had before him a great career in history, or law, or medicine, or whatever he wished to pursue. As was the fashion with enlightened youth in any age, he decided to leave the faith. He chose to bid it adieu by going to one last Yom Kippur service at a simple little Orthodox synagogue he found in Berlin. How correct, how thorough, how German.

But something happened to Franz Rosenzweig that night. Something he had the wisdom even then not to analyze. As he wrote a friend after that Yom Kippur service, he found it neither necessary nor possible to stop being a Jew. And that was all he said about it. Faith is not something that can be proven, only experienced.

Years later, long after he’d decided to leave the academy and make his house a house of study for any and all who came by, Franz Rosenzweig would compare faith to marriage, which is not just “the empty announcement that two persons have married, or the showing of the marriage certificate. … The reality cannot be communicated to a third person; it is no one’s concern and yet it is the only thing that matters, and the objective statement of the fact of the marriage would be meaningless without this most private, incommunicable reality. It is exactly the same with what one experiences about God; it is incommunicable, and he who speaks of it makes himself ridiculous. Modesty must veil this aloneness-together. Yet everyone knows that though unutterable it is not a self-delusion (which a third person might well think it!). All that is needed to believe is – to undergo this experience.”

Here endeth the lesson.

© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.