theology – and the lack thereof

fury and terror

It’s been a long time since I’ve dwelt on my loneliness.

Of all the fears I have in this mortal world, to be alone is the most fierce of them all. It’s a feeling that’s been present for as long as I’ve known time, stretching back into my earliest of days. I never got on the bandwagon of cooties as a child; girls never intimidated me like they did my friends, and as I grew older it was a feature I prided myself on for no particular reason. Of course, I found myself out of my element as soon as puberty hit, and I realized that I lacked every possible quality I might need to fulfill my heart’s desire of romantic companionship. I can’t exaggerate how intensely I felt that desire, even in middle school – I cried out to God on more than a few nights asking for one, and one thing only: a true love, a woman that I could love, and that would love me. It was a longing I oft confessed to my mentors, and I wonder how they managed to take a preteen so seriously on the issue, but I’m grateful that they did. My Christian companions tended to lob the canned answer that I should want what God wants – and that may or may not include a lover. I certainly attempted to do just that, but part of my slow distrust of God’s ability to hear or answer grew straight from the fact that no answer came, and year after year, I found myself alone.

As time marched on, I eventually realized what many self-proclaimed “nice guys” tend to ignore: that there are basic rules of the game that must be played, and that being virtuous doesn’t enable one to abandon the subtleties of romance and attraction. My first and most important conclusion was that before I could share my life with another person, I must have a life I feel is worth sharing. How can you love another if you do not even love yourself? How can you honestly believe that another loves you, when you cannot do so yourself? So I went about the business of learning to love myself, as well as making myself into the person I wanted to be, a self that I could love. It’s where my writing started, my running, my tattoo, my clothes. Much of that came simply with maturity and time, but I believe strongly that who I am is quite purposeful. Perhaps that’s just arrogance – and I would certainly be a fool to claim I am anywhere near self-made – but I do know that I set out to better myself, that I had a desire, and that desire was met.

So now as I look upon the death of my first, true relationship, I find myself asking myriad questions, while the chilling tendrils of that old loneliness takes its grip upon me once more. I’ve thought back to my childhood, and I wonder if God gave me what I asked for, and simply took it away, or if this were his way of reigning me in, as if to tell me “You can have a taste of what you seek, but you won’t have it until you kneel!”, or as a third possibility, “I will not grant you what you seek and you will live your life unfulfilled, but for your impatience your punishment will be to know how unfulfilled you truly are”.

It is ironic, to me, that I would consider God in any part of this equation, after I claim such control of myself. But the end of all this has brought me to the simple realization that I truly have no control over anything. I could try to claim that I brought her into my life, that it was my confidence and strength that brought it all to pass – and I think, for a time, I believed that – but correlation is not causation. When all is said and done, I did not decide her choices. I can only be grateful for what came to pass, and do my best to be deserving of what I receive. I celebrate the fact that I am not haunted by regret and that I can walk away with a handful of wisdom – but I find the path before me to be more daunting than I’d ever imagined. My fortune feels very far removed from my control, and waiting to see what these next months will hold for me is not an exciting prospect. I’m in a lonely place, with little to do but work and study, and not enough money to pursue the many hobbies I once had.

God continues to shower me in silence despite my simultaneous fury and terror, but as hard as I try, I cannot evict my pondering over his intentions and desires. Though I no longer believe Yahweh is this same as this silent God that seems to taunt me, my desire to do his will truly has not lessened, and I’m curious to see what opportunities he presents to me in the dull days ahead.

chronovore

I have, of late, felt driven to make some sort of decision about Christianity. I dislike standing on middle ground when people try to place where I am. When someone pegs me as a Christian, I feel cornered by stereotypes and misunderstandings, trapped with a group that I find less and less in common with. When another pegs me as an unbeliever, I feel undefined and vague, lacking in virtue and values, like a philosophizing windbag that thinks about deep things without coming to conclusions that positively change his life.

I know that whatever my choice is, I’ll never be rid of it all (and not just because I have a phoenix plastered to my chest). My parents, and my parents’ parents have forever been steeped in very core of America’s Christian culture. My whole way of thinking, my worldview, and my language have risen straight from that – a fact which I do not resent or regret, but that I cannot avoid due to its prominence, even if it sits only in the background of my life. I don’t mind this, because I can see that it gives me a set of experiences and a perspective that if I did not have, I would not understand a thing about, an ability which few looking from the outside in are very good at. It’s given me a drive to ask hard questions and seek hard answers – but it’s precisely there that I think the faith of my fathers does not satisfy.

I’m tired of trying to fit Christianity’s answers to the problems that the world presents. While an impressive many of those answers work and are fruitful, too many, for my tastes, do not. If I am to be expected to disbelieve my senses and to trust in an ancient dogma, I would demand answers that do not falter in the face of scrutiny. Primarily, the problem of God’s character is what troubles me.

I have rather high expectations of God – and while God is in no way bound by those expectations, if he expects me to recognize him for who he is and to honor him for that, then his character should be far more evident than I have yet found it to be, as the Bible presents it.

I see little consistency between the Old Testament and the New. I have heard dozens of scholars attempt to explain how the God of Abraham saw fit to enact genocide plural times or of his complete lack of forgiveness for deviance within his people, when the God of Paul claims to be so overwhelmingly full of love for his creations. I simply cannot reconcile the two: one is entirely similar to the gods of ancient Greece, or China, or Arabia: wholly vain, perhaps even whimsical and capricious in his judgment upon the world, while the other is suddenly willing to engage in a living relationship with people beyond an arbitrarily selected group of nomads. Yet, even this God is not willing to forget Hell, a place of judgment for those not lucky enough to be born of God-fearing parents, or (and this doctrine truly riles me) those pre-destined to know their Creator.

There is no justice or mercy in either God of the Bible. I am willing to admit that humanity is plagued by sin, and that we are in need of salvation from that sin – no one need look far to confirm that. Yet the fact remains that God is responsible, yes, responsible for his creation. I do not deny responsibility for my own actions, yet I cannot, in good conscience, worship a God that claims to be just and merciful, yet would knowingly craft billions (billions!) of people only to condemn them to Hell. It is folly to say that every person has had their chance at redemption – ill cultures raise ill families, and ill families raise ill children; sociology has taught us that much, at least, and it would be ignorant to claim that every person has had proper exposure. One lecturer at L’Abri put it roughly like this:

The Bible is not in every language. Even for those, not every person can read. Even for those, not all of them have access. Even for those, not all of them have a church to go to. Even for those, not all of them have a good church to go to. The simple reality is that most people will never hear the message of salvation.

For the longest time, I have refused to separate the many great Christians I’ve met from Christianity. Yet perhaps, like others that I have met, they were simply great people, that just so happened to be Christians. They would most certainly deny this notion, but I have yet to see anything truly miraculous in another person’s life, or my own. The change (so often attributed to God) I see looks quite human. Perhaps faith was the key to unlocking that change, but to claim that true change can only come through Jesus is to ignore the many examples that speak to the contrary throughout the world.

Even still, however, I recognize many of the truths that Christianity speaks towards. The men that wrote the Bible were geniuses – the wisdom therein is timeless and wonderful, but this does not mean it is ultimate truth, the final truth, the only truth. The Bible carries a powerful story, and is itself an astounding piece of literature – but for now, I do not believe it is more than that.

If God wishes me to be a Christian, then he’d best speak up. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong: to have some form of definite answer about the nature of the world around me would be a wonderful gift. To have a Creator I could recognize and share with and to love, would be even greater. Yet God has made no such attempt. If my experience is all I have to go on, I could conclude just as easily that he hates me rather than loves me, but of course this conclusion would merely change based on how well my day was going.

Until then, I’ve stopped wearing that good old coconut bead necklace. I’m not sure what to replace it with, though.

supernature

These are two forum posts I made recently as an attempt to answer the question “Is God good?”.

March 23:

Before we can answer the question at hand, there must be some definition of terms, as it were. Particularly, God, and goodness.

Who is God?

These might seem obvious or repulsive, but these are the assumptions that allow us to begin to answer this question:

– God exists. If God does not exist, then he is nothing but a psycho-social phenomonon. A figment of history’s imagination cannot be good.
– God is the creator of the universe. What point would there be in investigating, questioning, or worshipping a god that was not responsible for the world he presides over? Within this assumption, there are hidden two more points – particularly, God’s omniscience and omnipotence. If God is the sole creator, then he knows his creation perfectly, and has perfect control over it. I should insert a note that I see absolutely no reason why God couldn’t have crafted the world within its own mechanisms – those being the Big Bang and Evolution.
– God is knowable. This is what Agnosticism and Deism deny, as well as to a lesser extent, Islam – that God avails himself in certain ways to enable his creation to have relationship with him. He must be knowable, if there is to be an answer to who he is. Otherwise, we’re just making guesses and assumptions.

The catch is that God’s existence and his knowability, in and of themselves, say absolutely nothing about his character. But before we talk about God’s goodness, we have to define goodness, as well.

What is goodness?

The trouble with defining a term like goodness is the presence of its polarity, evil. Humanity has the consistent problem of mixing the two up, whether purposefully for personal gain, or accidentally via the human tendency towards imperfection and mistakes. If we say a human is good, we do not mean that he/she is incapable of evil, but that on the whole, they seem to prefer goodness. If God is good, it has to be in a higher sense, because of God’s aforementioned nature.

In order for goodness to have any meaning, it must be more than a cultural/sociological concept. That is to say, goodness must be absolute, regardless of race, gender, socio-economic status, culture, and so on. I should backdrop this by noting that this is not an attempt to give meaning to morality – I believe that meaning is self-evident and intrinsic for all human beings. How that is expressed and altered varies between people-groups, but the absolutes never change.

I can’t really imagine defining goodness without invoking the other two transcendentals – truth and beauty. The three are inexorably linked to each other – where one appears, the other two are also present, whether apparent or not. That which is true and beautiful, is most definitively good. Now, the whole of human history has been spent waxing and waning over trying to pin down what truth, beauty, and goodness really are, and dare I say that nobody’s made a whole lot of definitive progress. That doesn’t mean that it’s useless to try to find out, but I think that the problem lies in separating them out. They belong together, they thrive together, they enhance one another, they define one another.

What, then, is God’s relationship to goodness?

Christianity’s answer to this question is that he is perfectly good – incapable of evil, and therefore the penultimate embodiment of goodness. The same can be said of beauty and truth, I believe. But there’s problems that immediately come to mind, just by looking out the window and seeing the world that God has created. This world is not perfectly good, and a perfectly good creator would not make an imperfect creation. This, quite distinctly, is the problem of evil, or of suffering (since that is evil’s most direct result).

Yet still, alongside Christianity’s answer is the claim of exclusivity. That is, that our souls are immortal (persisting beyond death), and that we will be judged for our choices and actions (or lack thereof) upon earth by God. The most universally popular conception of the consequences therein is heaven and hell. Heaven being the reward, hell being the punishment. But therein lies many problems:

– Why would a good god demand the loyalty of his creations, under threat of eternal damnation?
– Why would a good god demand loyalty but never reveal himself to so many of his creations?
– Why would a good god create people just to damn a shitload of them to hell?

And all the while, God has created a world chock full of suffering and pain, an imperfect world, created by a supposedly perfect creator.

Even if you acknowledge the existence of God, why would you want to worship a god like this?

I have my answer, but I’d like to hear other thoughts first.

Today:

“Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.” – John Calvin

God’s goodness demands that he be knowable – if his goodness cannot be seen, then what use is it? Morality is a concept of movement, of action. That which does not move cannot be moral. That which has no will, cannot be moral. Indeed, morality can be applied only to creatures of choice. If God is good, that means he is choosing, he is acting, and he is acting out that goodness in an active way. If he is good, then that goodness can be known.

Where is that goodness?

My greatest vexation at this juncture is that the objectivity of goodness versus the subjectivity of experience. No person experiences everything in the same way, nor are the experiences we face exactly similar. This is, in essence, the problem of epistemology. Knowledge is not equal, nor is our understanding of that knowledge. Many philosophers have spent their whole lives seeking to find the solution to what knowledge really is, and Plato probably got about as far as anyone else might have hoped. His theory of “Justified True Beliefs” is what tends to dominate current thought, most visible in the realm of hard sciences.

Modern society has more or less reduced knowledge to facts – only that which can be proven and observed. Yet that does not match our reality. Very little of what we do in our daily life has much of anything to do with this kind of knowledge. We do not love our parents (insert loving relationship of your choice here) because of any knowledge we have gathered, and we do not know they love us. These are not objectively provable aspects of our reality, but that does not make them any less real. That knowledge is, in the end, is up to us.

The verb I’m hinting at here is faith. No, I am not saying that the answer to the question of “Is God good” is “If you have faith in him”. That’s a foolish and self-righteous answer with no reasonable justification. One rather famous Christian paraplegic, Joni Eareckson Tada, has shared letters from other Christians telling her that “If her faith was strong enough, she could walk again”. Please do not interpret me in that way. What I mean here is more in line with something St. Augustine once wrote: Crede, ut intelligas – I believe, in order that I may understand.

Hebrews 11:1 – 1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
James 2:14-19 – 14What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? 15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

18But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

19You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.

Faith is not a rebellion against rationality. It is not the enemy of thought, nor the denial of experience. It’s not sticking my fingers in my ears and humming a mantra. It’s an action. It’s a response. It is, I believe, the supreme way of understanding our world. When faced with the goodness of the world, I can only understand that goodness through faith. Goodness, Beauty and Truth lose all meaning without faith. They become nothing but shells of a concept, a mystical feeling that comes and goes. The more faith I hold, the more I experience these things within my life. No, it is not because God is rewarding me for being a good little boy – it’s because they were already there. It doesn’t make the presence of evil, corruption and falseness disappear, either – those are forces greater than myself, and to think I could stop them is foolish.

Goodness is not something we can find from an armchair. It will not jump out at us from the television, nor will it consume is as we play video games. If you wish to see the goodness of the world, then you must first believe it is there to be experienced.

As for heaven and hell?

If there is Goodness, there is Justice. In a world where evil exists, that evil must be brought to justice, if goodness is real. Unfortunately, I believe there to be a large amount of misinterpretation as to how this justice will be played out. I do not believe in a heaven of such mystical proportions, of streets made of gold. I do not believe in a hell of fire and flames; in fact, with the exception of Revelation (a book rife with bizarre metaphor and symbolism, fitting given the similar nature of Genesis), the Bible makes very little allusion to such a place. Jesus does indeed say the life comes only through him – and I cannot disagree. The only afterlife that makes sense to me is an afterlife with God. If, indeed, the problem with our reality is separation from God and disobedience towards him, the solution is union and obedience. If that is the reward, then the punishment could only be complete separation from God. Annihilation, oblivion, nothingness. If God is good, and he is just, then the punishment for failing to follow him will be just.

I cannot know the answers for what life lies beyond this one, or who will be where. Simply put, that doesn’t matter. If God is good, and he does indeed love us, then I need not worry about the eternal fate of those who might never have heard of Jesus. Any implication otherwise – that God is most certainly damning billions to hell – is nothing but a self-righteous and pompous claim made to spawn guilt and fear. Yet, I do believe that our actions have eternal meaning, that what we do matters both in this life, and the next. Evil cannot happily coincide with good.

Faith in God’s goodness resolves the anxiety of, well, his goodness. If he is good, then he will be good, and that is the truth of the matter. I can only understand myself. My fate is my responsibility, not anyone else’s.

And the problem of pain?

I will be blunt and honest: I don’t know. I don’t understand how a good God could allow a father to rape his daughter in a cellar for 24 years. I don’t understand how a good God could allow 15,000 people to die at the hands of a cyclone. I really do not understand why God would allow his creation to cause such incredible levels of malevolence against one another. I cannot see the reasoning behind it, I cannot understand it. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

However, I am faced with terrific accuracy with which the Bible explains the problems of this world, and where they started. I cannot escape the truth of Jesus’ message, nor can I ignore the power of that truth in my life and the lives of others. Faith does not make pain go away, and I despair over those that seem to believe it could. Faith is a response to truth. It is not a means by which we improve our lives, but a reaction to both the good and the bad of life.

Is God good?

I believe he is. I don’t believe it every day – my faith is as imperfect as I am, and it truly is a constant struggle. Fortunately, God’s goodness does not depend upon my faith. Rediscovering my faith is something I do quite often, and it usually does not take long before I’m faced with something awesome and terrible to behold, a truth which demands my response.