It is a truism that those who speak for God can and often do speak out of self interest, or in a tone that many people, like Ricky, find themselves repelled by. If so Gervais is in the company of a good many followers of Jesus, including me (and some of the people who have had to put up with me over the years). However, if, in the words of St. Anselm, God is "than which none greater can be conceived" then perhaps we should expect less from those who claim to speak about God, knowing that no one aside from Jesus (God’s only known offspring) is up to the task.

Such a failure to mediate God raises a point at which the Bible and Gervais agree: it is good that not many consider themselves to be teachers of divinity (James). The reason is not that God’s teachers cannot teach, nor that they are unable to give a cogent verbal depiction of the character or nature of God. Rather, it is that they will fail to teach about the character or nature of God by the way they live their lives. As such it is not a heresy of doctrine which is the problem, but a heresy of praxis: such teachers commit Christian malpractice, saying one thing and saying its opposite by their actions and self-aggrandizing attitudes. In Marshall McLuhan’s words, the medium is their message – a message mostly confused by what happens to be coming from their mouths. In Isaiah’s words, “They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

This final point, I submit, is where the doctrinal rubber his the practical road. In the case of Ricky Gervais, who claims to have departed from the simple faith of his youth because of the probing questions of his older and worldly-wiser brother, I wonder if his actual good life just crowded out his potential God life. His brother’s argument seems to have been highly abstract and conceptual with no practical probe, such as whether following the way of Jesus would result in more good in the world on balance than rejecting that way (a difficult question to quantify, I admit). I wonder what might have resulted if Gervais had ignored the problem of God’s existence raise by his cynical brother and simply continued to follow his early hero, Jesus?

I would like to venture a guess that speculative questions about God’s existence, and the concomitant problems of God's relationship to our world and us, become for many a convenient distraction from a very unspeculative sort of problem, namely, the challenge of following Jesus into a life of self-denial and love of enemies. Chesterton quipped long ago that "the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been found difficult and left untried.” In other words, denying the idea of God may cost you nothing; accepting the ideal of God may cost you everything.