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The past few days have been good, which is weird; I never seem to have more than about four hours in a row of awesome. Because of my AMAZING ACT SCORE, I get to go to the Bruce Springsteen concert AND Shogun!!! AND, I went to Beef O' Brady's with Anna Nyseth and her excited friend to watch the Germany vs. Turkey match (Germany won)! Good day Wednesday. I honsetly have no memory of Thursday whatsoever...I'm sure nothing traumatic happened.
Now to today. Today I finally met with Jeff Buchanan from Newsong Christian Fellowship Church about the whole ex-gay thing. It was cool; I related a lot. Still, I'm not entirely sure what there is that I, as a high school student, can really do about this. He suggested that we go to the Exodus International Freedom Conference (as in, Exodus is running it and it's an international event) on July 15-20. I really want to go, but seeing as it's several hundred dollars per person to go and and because I'm under 18 a parent has to go with me AND we would have just gotten back from the beach on the 13th AND that's the next summer band rehearsal (aka my next attempt at a sectional, though this last reason is FAR less important), my mom says we can't go. I'll pray about it; maybe God will let me go. Overall, though, the meeting felt good; I liked the fact that I could tell my whole story in front of my mom, all of it, and not have her explode or shake her head in disgust (even if she has every right to be upset about my past choices in life).
These have been excellent days. I haven't been overly upset, or even a little more than slightly pissed off; and what's more, I still feel like I have a soul, which is why I stopped taking them before. Hooray for God's gift of modern medicine!
~Michael
Both men, you’ll remember, offer sacrifices to God. Cain’s is an offering of crops, whereas Abel offers a blood sacrifice. God likes Abel’s offering but rejects Cain’s. Cain, angry, kills Abel. Taken as a simple historical narrative, the story yields little. We don’t learn why God prefers flesh to fauna. God comes across as both bloodthirsty and ungrateful. The standard moral of the story? Don't kill your brother just because God doesn't like your prize-winning marrows. It’s only when we begin to speculate about the wider significance of the story that things get interesting. The anthropologist Rene Girard, for example, thinks that the story is about the original meaning and function of sacrifice, namely the channeling (and therefore the containment) of violence in human societies. As modern ethology has shown, thwarted violence always seeks a surrogate victim, and so in societies that (unlike ours) don’t have centralised, powerful, theoretically impartial judiciaries and police forces, acts of violence can lead to orgies of recrimination, intractable blood feuds, geometric escalations of bloodshed. Violence is like a plague, and in order to contain it, societies have treated those things associated with violence as taboo. Girard’s overwhelmingly powerful argument is that blood sacrifice, in all tribal societies throughout history, has served as a means by which communities’ pent-up violence can be discharged in a ritually contained manner. The positing of ‘gods’ as beneficiaries of the blood sacrifice essentially conceals the mundane functions of sacrifice from the community, and legitimises the operation. For Girard, the Cain and Abel story – irrespective of whether it refers to an actual historical event – captures the whole meaning of the sacrificial system: Cain’s sacrifice does not involve violence, and so it does not absorb his animosity towards his brother. His murder of Abel somehow necessitates the formal institution of the violence-limiting sacrificial cult that becomes Hebrew religion, and which God ordains in order to create social order. (Note that God later claims to hate these sacrifices, which supports the view that sacrifices were a necessary evil.) It could be that stories like that of Cain and Abel encapsulate seismic cultural shifts in microcosmic stories involving a small number of characters who may or may not have also been real historical people. When we try to force them (for non-biblically warranted reasons) to conform to a straightforwardly ‘historical’ model of truth, we rob them of their vast scope, just as we would if we argued that Jesus’s parables are all literally true. The irony is that a reading like Girard’s reveals the full historical significance of the bible passage rather than diminishes it. The story of Cain and Abel is (among many other things) the story of how Judaism – as a matter of historical fact – became, by necessity, and as an act of divine wisdom and mercy, a sacrificial religion. Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac that Christopher Hitchens finds so morally revolting. God asks Abraham to kill his own child to prove his faithfulness. Isaac is then put through a hideous ordeal of thinking his own father is going to stab him to death. What's not to like about that? True, we can read this as an instructive example of someone putting God first and demonstrating faith. But look: how would we really feel if a faithful, sane Christian at our church turned up one Sunday and confided in a shaky voice that that God had asked him to stab his son to death? Would we urge him to be faithful? Would we even think it possible that the man was right in believing that God wanted him to do this? Heaven forbid! We would tie the guy to a pew and call the police. What if, like the story of Cain and Abel, the story of Abraham and Isaac captures in capsule-form the truth (historical and otherwise) of a seismic shift in culture, a new stage in God’s relationship with humans? We know that many civilisations exalted human sacrifice over non-human sacrifice (even those that didn’t exalt human sacrifice have tended to ‘anthropomorphise’ the animals they sacrificed – see Girard again). What if the story of Abraham and Isaac describes the momentous revelation that came to the Jewish people, perhaps originally through a real man named Abraham, that the worthiness of a sacrifice depends not on what is killed, but on the inward, personal sacrifice made by the sacrificer? The story shows, in capsule form, the historic shift from a focus on the external form of worship to a focus on the internal motive - a shift that has developed throughout the history of the Jews. This was the momentous shift that served to preclude human sacrifice from Jewish religion. We fundamentalists believe that all scriptural stories are rooted in real encounters between God and real humans: to affirm this is just to affirm the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the historic changes that occur on the basis of these cataclysmic encounters can be captured in capsule form without diminishing their historicity. It’s a matter of literary convention. We can argue for the truth – and yes, the infallibility or inerrancy – of the bible without acting as though it’s nothing but straight reportage.
All this online pugilism between Christians of different stripes! All these forum fencing-matches about free will and predestination and law and grace and evolution and intelligent design and miracles! All these arguments that might never have arisen if the Good Lord had produced for us a clearer bible, one that really spelled things out! A catechism, rather than a collection of stories, poems, genealogies, aphorisms...
Why are we so often angry at each other and so seldom irked at God?
Here's something to think about next time you see an online argument between a Christian who believes in miracles and one who believes that miracles belonged to the time of the apostles (ie a cessationist):
The cessationist has at some point prayed really, really hard for a miracle - and got diddly squat. The cessationist is some guy whose cancer didn't go away, or whose daughter died, or whose wife left, you name it. And instead of hating God, our cessationist friend has changed theological positions to make room for a God who didn't come through for him in any clear way.
Want to tell him to believe in miracles? Good luck! But don't rant hatefully at him - he may not be the dogmatist you think he is.
In every theological argument, you'll find at least two people who are trying so damned hard to be charitable towards God that they sometimes forget to be charitable towards each other. But God is sturdy enough to take human anger on the chin. Humans, on the other hand, break.
That person who believes in election? The person who believes in free will? Scrapping like hoods on some internet discussion board? God could have spoken decisively on this issue, and God didn't. Or maybe God did speak, through the Church of Rome - in which case, God should have done a whole lot more to preserve the unity of the church. And don't tell me that the bible is clear on these issues. There are very brainy and very holy people on both sides of every controversy.
By all means adopt the atheist solution to the problem and deny that God exists. But if you're averse to that move, let's not despise each other over issues on which God has not spoken loudly enough. We're in the same boat.
One thing binds us all together: we live in a more or less silent universe. Let's admit it! It's probably more silent than religious people say it is, and less silent than atheists say it is: but it is a universe in which someone can cry out to an invisible God and not receive any reply. It's a universe in which someone else always seems to be experiencing the miracles, and in which cries of 'It's a miracle!' sometimes seem obscene in the face of so many unanswered prayers. As Sheri put it recently on her blog, 'Do you really believe the Sudanese don't pray?'
In the face of this divine silence, we can never be anything more than co-seekers, and this should give us solidarity.
This seekers' solidarity should be the basis of every discussion about doctrine. Moreover, it should be the basis of our communion with each other. We should always be willing to at least imagine what might crouch behind the arras of a person's theological position, the stories behind the convictions. We should declare at the beginning of each exchange: We are on the same side. Let's end this exchange having gained an even greater sense of solidarity, irrespective of whether we move closer to an actual agreement. It's worth a try, isn't it?
Maybe if we achieved real solidarity in the face of God's silence, we'd discover that the possiblity of creating solidarity is why God opted to refuse to arbitrate on so many issues in the first place.
Maybe God's silence is a necessary condition of human solidarity. Maybe the compassion we might feel towards our fellow seekers is the thing that we, as seekers, are supposed to find.
Fellow Nick Drake fan Scott Small over on Not In Me has been so kind (or imprudent) as to let me post some reflections on heaven and suburbia on his upliftingly lovely blog There's Treasure Everywhere. If you're feeling whimsical please do pop over and give it a read, as well as the other posts there, and grace us with your thoughts!
Ta,
Nick.
I was mad about mythology as a teenager, and considered myself a sophisticated pagan after the model of Murry Hope, all of whose books I’d read and mildly understood. If Science had no way to talk about the cosmic intelligence I witnessed in the eternal struggle between birds and tortoises, then Murry’s mythology and magic did. Indeed, the fact that ancient cultures saw their gods as animating different aspects of nature seemed to me a validation of ancient thinking. To describe natural phenomena in anthropomorphic terms is to affirm something obviously true: that humans themselves belong to the realm of natural phenomena, and that every quality we think of as peculiarly human is also, in some way, writ large in nature as a whole.
Apparently, though, it was primitive to ascribe human qualities to nature, nature being, all said, a bunch of molecules moving around. On the other hand, it was perfectly scientific to describe every aspect of the human experience in terms of a bunch of molecules moving around. Perfectly acceptable, that is, to my second year English teacher, who first got me thinking about this odd way of thinking.
Our English teacher had once been a nun and now she was, like many teachers, a secular humanist. Unlike most secular humanist teachers, though, she was a proselytising humanist, the kind who would scrap a lesson on Wilfred Owen and instead give a slide show introducing us to humanist ethics. Her lecture on the finality of death made several pupils weep. We all suspected that we would have liked her more if we’d known her back when she was a nun. Partly this was because she wore a hairpiece, and we thought it funny to speculate that her autobiography could have been titled A Wig and a Prayer. But, also, there was only so much raw reductionist materialism a bunch of children like us could take. When you are a young person and the glorious adventure of your life is still spread before you, barely sniffed at, you don’t want someone in a wig telling you that it has absolutely no meaning save that which you pretend it has.
One Summer day when we all wanted to go home she looked at us, this zoo-enclosure of adolescent humans simmering with boredom and various lusts on our sweaty plastic chairs, and she told us that the only reason humans loved each other was chemicals. I even remember the name of one of the love-chemicals: vasopressin. Apparently it was vasopressin that stopped me from loving anyone else while I was fixated on Michelle Harkness. Another time she told us that, ‘from the point of view of nature’, there was no division or distinction between each of us and our school-books and the ceiling and the air: all was a continuum of molecules, and if you searched for anything else amidst the molecules, you were guaranteed to find nothing, not even your own self. The personality, free-will, God, all that stuff belonged to the realm of ideas. ‘Maturity,’ she said, ‘is learning to admit that ideas are not real things.’
Our English teacher would have seen in my dealings with ancient deities an attempt to personally drag the world back into the cruel and haunted darkness of superstition and witchery. She had nothing but scorn for primitive, pre-scientific notions of gods who caused hurricanes with their anger. But I thought that those primitives had a point. For a start, the gods never really represented to ancient people mere links in the material causal chain; they represented the imperceptible stuff going on behind events; they provided an interface between natural phenomena and human values. (That’s why sun gods Ra and Apollo didn’t look much like the sun.) A myth about moral order could also be a myth about cosmic order and political order and the lunar calendar, as well as containing some good corn recipes. But, more important, if human emotions are just physical and biological and chemical events, and elemental cataclysms are just physical and biological and chemical events, then what is wrong with describing one in terms of the other? My teacher thought that human subjective phenomena and natural objective phenomena were ultimately the same thing; but she laughed at the ancients, who said that human subjective phenomena and natural objective phenomena were ultimately the same thing.
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Kant and Schopenhauer will have heard of the distinction between phenomena – objects in the world of experience – and noumena – things as they are ‘in themselves,’ quite apart from how they look, smell, taste, sound and feel, and quite apart from the categories of understanding that the human mind imposes (including time, space and causality). For Kant, it is impossible to know what a thing is ‘like’ in itself. (Berkeley, of course, argued that it doesn’t exist ‘in itself,’ outside our experience – only experience exists; the content and substance of experience are the same thing.) For Schopenhauer, there is one crucial exception to the law of the unknowablility of noumena: each one of us is a ‘thing-in-itself’, and as we are self-conscious, we have some kind of experience of at least one thing-in-itself.
There’s a parallel here with what the ancients were doing when they saw intelligent agency lurking behind the observable universe. The ancients could observe the universe, as can we; and like us, they knew of one thing that does not belong purely to the realm of the observable: the experience of being a conscious, thinking agent. So when faced with the question of what exists behind, or guides, physical phenomena, their answer was, in effect: ‘The only other thing that we know for sure exists – subjective consciousness’. When the ancients described the inner nature of things in terms of intelligence, consciousness, thought, even emotion, they were building a picture of the universe with materials they had ‘to hand’, as it were. That’s not as naïve, or as unscientific, as my English teacher thought. If you disallow that move, then you’re left with the view that the inner nature of things is unknowable; you’re left explaining objective phenomena in terms of other objective phenomena, without ever getting behind the phenomena. If you’re going to leave a gap that big, someone's always going to try to fit some kind of deity back into it…
(click here for laws of nature pt 1)
When you are a teenager, your personality seems like something separate from you. You are aware that you are a person who experiences things, but you are also aware that the person you are is one of the things you experience - the most immediate thing, in fact, and among the most alien. Your image – the way you seem, especially to yourself – is at the same time something you are, something you experience, and something you have a particular relationship with. Some people hate the person they see themselves as being. Some people love that person. The kind of relationship you have with yourself determines what kind of person you are, and the kind of person you are determines what kind of person you are, and the kind of person you see yourself as being - or think others you think others see you as being - determines what kind of person you are. It is a complicated business, being a person. The complexities are highlighted in youth.
By age fourteen I neither hated nor liked my self-image; I had no fixed ideas about what kind of person I was. Consequently I never knew how to act in any situation. For many years this lack of persona was like a living death, only worse. At least real zombies are supposed to act like animate cadavers – it’s their job - but I assumed that everybody expected me to display the characteristics of the living. To meet their unspoken demands I felt pressured to invent characteristics from one moment to the next. It was exhausting. Sometimes I wished I could view myself from the outside, in action, during those rare times when I was not consciously trying to act like some character I’d seen in a film, so I could see if I had traits I didn’t know about. Once I considered asking someone close to me - my mother, for example, to describe me in, say, five words - so I could have some idea about who I was. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask. It did not seem preposterous to imagine that she would have had me committed.
Whenever I had the television to myself at home, I would watch videos of films my family had taped from the telly, and I’d wonder which of the characters I could profitably become. One of my favourite films was a comedy teen-movie called The Sure Thing, about a cheeky but loveable rogue who somehow wins the heart of a beautiful but stuck-up girl. I often felt I would make a great cheeky guy, and would write lists of the cheeky things that the cheeky guy did, so I could do them too. But then I’d watch The Breakfast Club, which featured a guy who was cool and moody and wore big boots and lots of layers of grungy clothing. After a few minutes of watching that, I wouldn’t be so sure about being cheeky. I’d consider being brash and smart-mouthed. But then I would watch my dad’s copy of First Blood, about a quiet but psychopathic soldier called John Rambo, and then it would be time to walk the dog and I still wouldn’t know who I was, and anyway, Rambo was not the best role model for a skinny boy who did not own a machine gun.
At school, I would ask myself from one moment to the next what such-and-such a character would do in my situation, a policy that usually resulted in paralysis.
My mother didn’t approve of me trying to model myself on characters from films. She always said to me: Just be yourself.
What on earth did that mean?
God, of course, did not have identity crises. Lucky God, I thought. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity came to represent, to me, the doctrine of an enviably healthy personality. Like me, God was conscious of himself; unlike me, he knew everything about himself, and did not have to wonder whether to emulate Rambo. Like me, God had a relationship with his self-image, but unlike me, his was positive, because he liked his self-image and didn’t have to change it every day.
The bible told me that Christ was ‘the image of the invisible God’, and though I didn’t understand this, I liked to think of God in the following, possibly blasphemous terms. God (I thought) looks at himself and sees somebody perfect; but in a sort of shy, bashful way, he refuses to take the credit for himself, and so honours his marvellous identity as though from a distance. I could relate to this idea because sometimes, at night, I would talk to myself as though ‘myself’ was a separate person who had deep wisdom and could offer me advice. The relationship between God and his image was like that, I assumed, only even better, because God’s image, about which God knows everything, actually possesses laudable traits. This relationship God has with himself is, therefore, not self-love, but other-love; and as God’s image is one with him and shares all his attributes, including intelligence and other things, his image can reciprocate that love. This relationship, as an elderly guest preacher at my church once said, is the original, primordial Father-Son relationship. (You could say that creation’s relationship with itself constitutes a cosmic Mother-Child relationship, but that would take us way off topic.)
Of course, we can conceive of a God who doesn’t have this ‘other’ focus and who therefore is a different kind of deity. The particular mode of the Christian God’s relationship with his image, with its other-focus, defines what sort of person the Christian God is – defines him, as the apostle John says, as love itself, purely giving. This distinctive relationship, itself a reality infused with all the attributes of God, constitutes the third ‘person’ of the Trinity (the third hypostasis, actually, to use the proper Patristic term, though I hadn’t read much Cappadocian theology by age fourteen): the Holy Spirit.
As a child I had often thought that God must get lonely. I felt sorry for him. But the more I learned about the idea of the Trinity, the more I realised, to my relief, that I had been wrong; God was not a solitary block but a family - a self-contained family that was so close-knit that it constituted one being. God was a person in and of himself because, like me, he was tripartite, a complex unity. Unless God contained relationships within his own being, as it were, then no personal characteristics, like love or mercy or wrath or whatever, could be said to absolutely belong to him; in which case, until he created beings who he could love, have mercy upon or get angry with, he would possess only a potential personality. To become personal, such a God would require us.
Ironically, the doctrine of the Trinity, which seems to some people like a pagan import (as though pagans didn’t at least subconsciously suspect that personalities are tripartite) or a baffling complication (see the Qur'an’s flustered objections), is the monotheistic doctrine par excellence; only Trinitarianism explains how a God could possibly be a fully-realised person without having to create other persons to be personal towards.
Incidentally, one of the questions on our R.E. exam the following year was ‘Explain the Trinity’. Explain the Trinity!
I wrote four pages, misspelt Saint Athanasius, and got a C-.
Question: Isn’t it always irrational to accept a claim ‘on faith,’ rather than on the basis of evidence?
Answer: Sometimes exercising provisional faith is the most rational way to test a claim.
(All faith is provisional at first, by the way).
Sub-question: ‘Provisional faith’? What the hell is that?
A: It’s the kind of faith you exercise when you approach the question of God’s existence by asking God whether he exists, rather than trying to prove his existence or non-existence with formal logic, mathematics, or half-remembered quotes from Nietzsche.
It’s also the kind of faith I exercise when I try to find out what my wife thinks by asking her, rather than utilising the more ‘rational’ method of putting Sodium Pentothal in her Ovaltine.
| "Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it?" |
| — Romans 6:1–2 |
Sadly, there are many believers today who live with the misconception that they must do something to earn God's approval.
When they have had a good week and have been reading their Bibles or doing certain good deeds for the Lord, they feel that God will be pleased. But when they have had a hard week, when they have fallen, when they have sinned, they think God is not pleased with them.
Sometimes they believe they shouldn't even go to church or read the Bible. "Why bother?" they think. "God is not pleased with me. I don't have His favor. It would be hypocritical for me to do that."
All the while, they don't realize they have God's unconditional favor and love regardless of what they do. But that is not a license to sin. It is an incentive to respond to Him in love.
If, as believers, we can truly get hold of what this means, if we can understand that it is not a license to live as we please, then it should be an incentive for us to serve the Lord, love Him, and show gratitude toward the One who loves us unconditionally, knowing us for what we are. An understanding of this truth can revolutionize our lives.
In some people's estimation, holy living—which is keeping rules and regulations—will bring salvation. But holy living—which we are not capable of, to start with—will not bring salvation. However, salvation will produce holy living. If you are truly saved, it will result in changes in your lifestyle.
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Copyright ©2008 by Harvest Ministries. All Rights Reserved.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
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