WHAT I GOT AWAY WITH ON MY WAY TO ATHEISM
By David Madison
PhD Biblical Studies, Boston University
It was about 1970, when I was studying for the ministry at Boston University School of Theology, that I wrote an essay entitled On the Improbability of God. Many years later I found out that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing his essay, The Necessity of Atheism. Well, 1970 wasn’t 1811, and I survived my blatant cheekiness. 
Since I never went to chapel while I attended seminary, I was considered the class eccentric, the contrarian seminarian.
I wasn’t kicked out, and I finally managed to write a statement of personal theology that was given the imprimatur by that liberal Methodist institution. I leaned heavily on the obtuse theology of Paul Tillich, who called God the Ground of All Being—and said that God didn’t exist because existence would be a limiting concept.
So I survived to (more…)