I Used to Be Smart.

What does it mean for God to be relational?

I’ve been re-reading Don Miller’s Searching for God Knows What this week. I’m not really sure why that’s what I pulled off the shelf. Perhaps I saw Don’s twitter feed right before my selection, perhaps it was happenstance. I don’t really know.

One of the things that Don continually drives home (and it’s probably even his thesis for the book) is that God is primarily relational, and our primary understanding of God should come in the form of a relationship.

So that made me wonder. What does it mean to relate to God? That question may not strike anyone as particularly important at first. If you’re like me, you’re used to hearing about relationships with God. In the evangelical experiences, this language is fairly common. However, I think that if we stop to unpack what we’re actually saying, that question becomes almost silly. To ask what it means to relate to God is to ask what it means for fallible, finite humans to relate to God, the force that created the universe, that exists outside of space and time, that is completely other and completely above humanity. It seems (and I think I’m stealing this analogy, but I don’t know where it’s from) that it’s like asking what sort of relationship an ant has with a human. Perhaps we could be more generous, and compare ourselves to dogs and God to a human. Either way, the implication seems pretty solid to me: how in the world can utterly disparate entities have a relationship? What does it mean for humans to relate to God?

I think that I’ve seen extremes of this. For example, I’ve known the extreme growing up that essentially makes God a really nice guy who lives in the sky. Talking to him is like talking to anyone. It’s friendly. We “love” God. We talk about God like God is a next door neighbor. People of this persuasion frequently say that they hear God speaking, frequently. God gives them messages about what color car they should buy, where they should live, who they should speak to, things like that.

I’ll be honest and say that I’m not real convinced by these folks. If God is well…God, then I don’t think we can really relate to God as another human, albeit a more powerful human, that lives way off in the sky somewhere and has access to our thoughts. This, to me, seems like an incredibly under-developed kind of relationship with God. It’s a relationship that doesn’t understand the gravity of what it might mean to commune with the ultimate deity responsible for the creation and order of the universe.

On the other end, I guess, would be the folks for whom God would be utterly untouchable. I’ll be honest, and say that I’m not sure I know anyone who is actually like this, so I’m not sure I can say much, but I will say that if there are folks like this out there, then I think they have a point. What I mean is this: actually realizing the gravity and enormity of who God is might just convince that there’s no way we can possibly relate to God. How in the world can finite, fallible human relate to infinite, infallible God? It just doesn’t make sense, so it must not be possible. There must be no relationship. I see their point.

However, I just don’t feel they’re right. I agree with Don Miller. God is primarily a relational God. I think that human experience shows us that relationships are life’s greatest good, even if those relationships activate our base fears of intimacy. What I mean is this: relationships may be unbelievably hard, and scary, and gut-wrenching, but relationships also have the potential to be unbelievably good. Because of the potential of relationships, I believe that any force that is the embodiment (and creator) of good in the universe would pursue relationships with its creations.

This isn’t going to be one of those blogs where I ask a question, and then answer by the end of the post. Sorry. I really have no idea what a relationship with God looks like. I believe that we are made to relate to God, but I genuine do not know what that means. I used to think that relationship was as simple as the prayers I said while I was falling asleep at night, and perhaps some occasional thoughts directed God-ward through the course of a day.

Now, I wonder about all of that. I used to think direct address was necessary for something to be a part of my relationship with God. I though I had to start with an introduction, like I was talking to God. Now, that seems silly to me. It seems like, when I’m in my car, listening to a Wilco record, and my whole self is filled up with a sort of ecstasy that I really can’t explain, that I’m relating to God. Maybe Jeff Tweedy really knows how to manipulate the chemicals in my brain to make me feel a certain way, or maybe there’s this perfect combination of the speed of my car, and rhythm of the bass line and the crescendo of a guitar solo that point inexplicably to something that is above and beyond what I can see and feel now. Do I have to distill that into some specific notion of what it means to interact with God? I’m reminded of folks like Thomas Merton, who think about contemplation as a place beyond words, and a relationship with God as something that is too much to be distilled into mere language.

And what about those rare mornings, when I wake up early, and there’s nobody else up? I make coffee, and breakfast. I might listen to some music, or read the news, or a book. I take my time as I get prepared for my day, checking to do lists and future events and generally preparing for the potential of a new day. Do I have to be able to say how I see God in my second cup of coffee, or is it just enough that I know that life is something that is good, and that even in all of the complications and misfires, that we all have the potential to be something bigger than we actually are? Do I have to wring the joy out of the moment so thoroughly that what drips out is some theological nugget that, no matter how well articulated, does no justice to the calm of those mornings? I feel like I don’t. I feel like, if relationships with God exist, that they are something so far beyond words that using words to describe them is usually futile.

I feel like those moments are so fragile, and amazing, that our desires to reach out and grab them always destroys them. It seems they are intensely, and that anyone who tries to dictate what those relationships should look like, or anyone who forces us to talk about those relationships deserves none of our time, as those people seek to destroy our experience in order that it might fit their agenda. Relationships with God, it seems to me, don’t fit anyone’s agenda.

I think Jeff Tweedy was right. Theologians? They don’t know nothing about my soul.

First, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who has commented so far, both here and on other media. The comments have been extremely helpful, even if I haven’t taken the time to give a long reply, and this entry stems from one of those comments.

It was suggested to me that my thinking about the Bible and Jesus as history was missing something: I was thinking about the Bible and Jesus as story, and that it is on the level of story where we can really see that the Bible “works” and is an authentic narrative for the world. I would think that, as someone with a degree in English Lit, that turning to the narrative would my first impulse. However, it seems that it hasn’t been at all.

I know that I used to read quite a lot about the concept of narrative. I was pretty sure of what it meant to live in a narrative, to use a story to give order and meaning to our lives. I haven’t done much thinking about that lately, so this represents an effort to think about that once again. It’s both an effort for me to recapitulate the story of the Bible as I can see it, and to think about what it means to live in light of a story.

I think about the story of the Bible, and I always wonder where to start. Starting at the beginning, at Genesis, seems like a very logical place to start, but I’m not sure that it’s the best place to start. I don’t think it’s the actual beginning of the world, nor do I think it’s the actual beginning of the narrative that’s told in the Bible. It’s first chronologically, but I think that its written later, to explain things that had already happened in the story. The beginning is myth, a way for a people group to explain their presence.

I don’t know what the right name for those people are: Jewish, Hebrew, Israelites, something like that. I like Hebrew. The Hebrew people, so I’m going to use that. Even if it’s not right.

In college I had to read a very good book. I can’t remember that book’s name, but I can remember what it argued. It argued that the story of the Hebrew people was the story of the promise that God makes to Abraham in Genesis 12:2-3, “And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you, I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” I think that whoever wrote whatever book that was is exactly right. That, summarily, is the story of the Bible. God builds a nation through much of the Old Testament. Then, those people are forced to grapple with God, both in their infidelity to the covenant they have made, and with the consequences of the infidelity. At some point, that continuing cycle of ruin and redemption breeds a new thinking among the Hebrew people: that there is coming a time when they will be fully redeeming. There is coming a time when God will renew his relationship with his people, and those people will live with God as they were always intended to live.

That was the rise of apocalyptic though. Not so much the apocalypse of the movies, where there is fire and demons and possibly flu from some yet undetermined animal. No, apocalyptic though points out that the world is not as it should be, and that there will come a time when God sets the world right.

That, in very broad strokes, takes the narrative through the Old Testament. It leads us to this time when all is quiet. Palestine has been conquered by the Romans. God’s chosen people again live as captives in their own land, outside of their right relationship, looking for the time when God will somehow redeem the world. They lay in wait, having not yet become a blessing to all the nations of the world.

And then the strangest thing happens. A Galilean peasant starts preaching about the kingdom of God. He starts telling everyone what the kingdom of God is like, and he starts telling them that it is right here, right now. That the new reality that they have been promised has come to earth. He heals sick people, casts out demons, raises the dead to demonstrate the kingdom, and the present-ness of his presence. He develops a following in Galilee before traveling south to Jerusalem, running afoul of Roman authorities, and being executed.

Then something even wilder happens, the message of Jesus doesn’t die with him. There is some sort of resurrection. Whether corporeal, or spiritual, or just in the minds of those who followed him, Jesus doesn’t remain dead. He has proven that death will not be victorious. He has shown how the kingdom of God looks when it is right here right now.

I hate to do this, but you remember in Star Wars, when Darth Vader kills Obi-Wan? Of course you do. You’ve seen it as many times as I have, and you don’t even need me to quote it. “If you strike me down now, I shall become more powerful than you cold possibly imagine.”

Now, maybe that’s just a cornball way to think about this, but I think that’s exactly what happened. And in that event, whatever it was, the promise to Abraham was fulfilled. It grew legs. The legacy of the Hebrew people could now become a blessing to all people in the world.

Every sad thing could become untrue.

And that, I think, is the story. All of that leads us to the point where we can see that God is at work redeeming the world, the whole world, and every sad thing is in the process of becoming untrue. Our job, then, is to aid in the process of redemption. Our job is to participate in that redemption, to find out how we can find the redemptive work that is happening in the world, and how we can join God in that work. Then, we can participate in the work of becoming a blessing to all of the people of the world. Then we can live in the kingdom of God—not in some yet to be determined future, but in the here and now.

So, the question is to ask ourselves how we can participate in that narrative. How can we align the story of our lives with the story of what God is doing in the world? How can we make our lives the story of redemption? How can we make sure that our story is a story of doing out best to make the sad things in the world untrue?

In that way, the Bible absolutely works. Perhaps it is lacking as history, but as story, there is something there that is undeniably good, and something that undeniably resonates. There’s no objective, scientific way to prove that it’s true, but there’s something in that story that absolutely resonates in a way that I find it hard to deny.

They only problem I’ve found is that I haven’t told myself that story nearly enough, and I haven’t done nearly enough to make sure that my life looks like that story.

First things first.

I was thinking about yesterday’s post, and I think that I might have been fundamentally misguided. I made an assumption that there was some way that the resurrection might be proven to have never happened. I think, in retrospect, I was barking up the wrong tree. In thinking and reading, I’ve come to the conclusion that an event like the resurrection is fundamentally unable to be either proved or disproved. It’s outside the bounds f what historians are able to do. So I think, instead, that the focus should be on the impact of the resurrection. Rather than thinking about what happened or did not happen, I think that our thinking about the resurrection should be in looking at how it impacted the early Christians and how the writers of the Bible thought about the resurrection. That definitely changes my last post a great deal.

That, then, bring me to an interesting divide. In the comments of the last post, Chris challenged me to enumerate what a faith without a corporeal resurrection might include as its central tenets. In light of this post, I’m not sure that’s something I’m willing to tackle now. However, it has made me think about something I don’t think I’ve ever really considered. The idea is still fairly nascent in my head, so the writing it out in this post is going to be my first articulation. So bear with me.

I’m wondering if there is a divide between historical Christianity and devotional Christianity. In some ways, I’m wondering if there’s a difference between what Christianity was and what Christianity is, but I think it might be a different question than that.

Devotional Christianity is Christianity as a religion. It’s concerned with beliefs. It can be thought of as the kind of Christianity whose goal is to answer the question, “How do I get to heaven after I die?” Devotional Christianity is orthodoxy.

Historical Christianity is something more specific. Historical Christianity is the specific phenomenon of the religion that arose out of a specific historical figure of Jesus that lived and died in Palestine in the first century of the Common Era.

I know that some folks will fail to see how the two differ, so I’ll try to do more to delineate.

Devotional Christianity, as far as I see it, represents a synthesis. Its goal is to take the texts that make up the Bible, synthesize those texts, and then use them to answer fundamental questions, questions like “How do I go to heaven when I die?” It is the insider’s perspective. I don’t wish to make overly broad generalizations, but it is the kind of Christianity that treats every verse in the Bible as roughly equal, and applies every verse roughly equally, often disregarding things like context and genre. (It also, I think, views the faith subjectively, but I’m still thinking that one out.)

Historical Christianity has a different set of concerns. It recognizes that the Bible is a fundamentally divergent book. It was written by lots of different people in several languages, and those people who wrote it often have divergent viewpoints and theologies. Historical Christianity would rather take each book of the Bible on its own terms, and place it in a specific historical context. It asks how that context is present in the work. Its reading is not so much concerned with gleaning devotional nuggets as it is with discovering the truth about the books. Take, for example, the gospels. Rather than reading the gospels to “deepen” a “relationship with Christ,” a historical approach reads the gospels to find out who Jesus really was. It compares the gospels, noticing differences and similarities. It applies certain historical criteria and attempts to figure who the real Jesus might of been, and then thinks about why individual authors may have been attempting to say about Jesus.

At this point, I’m trying to figure out if I have a point, and I’m not sure that I do. I think what I want to say is that defining Christianity is hard. I’m not sure what we’re really doing. Are we trying to establish a devotional Christianity? Are we trying to establish a devotional Christianity that, essentially, gets us into heaven after we die? Each project is significantly different, though they perhaps reach a point of convergence.

What do you think?

So far, I haven’t managed to be very controversial. I may change that here.

I have, for years, been familiar with the tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. I have studied various groups’ definition of each category, and seen what is viewed to be genuinely Christian. I’ve even read a few books dedicated to the subject, but I still wonder about the whole thing. There have been a lot of people who have attempted to tell me what is genuinely and essentially Christian, and what is not. Some have lovingly pointed that my explorations have the potential of leading me into perdition. Some of have not so lovingly told me that my inquiries mean I’m destined for eternal torture. However, I still wonder.

What has always intrigued me about Christianity is that its truth depends upon the reality of certain historical events. Most versions of orthodoxy, especially, are significantly invested in historical events and their claims of the truth of those events. Christianity is a religion that is undeniably rooted in history. It’s rooted in the history of Jesus—who he was, what he did.

What I wonder is this: can faith (and should faith) stand up to the toughest historical scrutiny?

What if unbelievably solid proof were discovered that the resurrection had never occurred? I’m not going to speculate on what the nature of such proof might be, for I know the difficulties of “proving” any event that happened in antiquity. However, in any genuine exploration of the Christian faith, I think we have to wonder whether Christianity could survive such a thing.

Perhaps we should be asking if Christianity should have to survive such a thing. I think, fundamentally, it must be able to. For any faith that is rooted in history, especially history that is, well, dubious, the followers of that faith have to wonder if their faith is something bigger than the specific historical events, or whether their system of belief could be toppled by some yet undiscovered piece of history.

If Christianity is fundamentallytrue, that is, if it is an accurate representation of what is actually true in the universe, then I believe we have to construct our faith in a way that it could survive such a blow. Perhaps there is some piece of logic that I am missing, but it seems fundamental to a religion based on dubious history that there has to be a contingency for if that history is proven to be false.

Furthermore, if that contingency exists, then it can’t exist simply as a safety net. It is not simply a backup plan to salvage a system of belief when our initial assumptions are proven wrong. Rather, it seems that the contingency, the thing that lies beyond the potential claims of history is what is most genuine about the faith.

I recognize that might be fairly obtuse. So let me say it more plainly:

Christianity is built upon the existence of a historical person, Jesus. The crux of the Christian faith is belief in a specific historical event: that Jesus was executed on a cross in the typical Roman style, and then buried. Jesus then rose bodily from death and eventually ascended into Heaven.

If scholars are able to prove that Jesus was never raised from the dead, then Christianity is, for all intents and purposes, proven worthless. (For what it’s worth, I find this to be an utterly unprovable proposition.)

What then, I’m saying, is that Christianity must exist in a form that allows for events such as the resurrection to be questioned, re-imagined, and re-thought.

Here is the sort of thing I mean:

Whether Jesus actually rose, bodily, from the grave or not, something remarkable happened after that crucifixion event in Palestine. There began to spread this new religion, slowly at first, then more quickly. At the center of it was this man, Jesus, preaching a message that is still unprecedented. It was, it seems, a message that utterly resonated in the hearts and the minds of the first century world. Coming from the mouth of an irrelevant, itinerant peasant, the message should have died as quickly as he did. But it didn’t. The men and women who were around Jesus were utterly transformed, and spread the message of the kingdom of God and its potential to change lives all over the world. Even if the resurrection never happened, and even if it can be proven that it never happened, there is still no doubt that the message of Jesus transformed lives in the first century, and it continues to transform people in the twenty-first century.

If all of that is true (and we can, with much more certainty, say it is), then does the exact nature of the resurrection matter nearly as much? In that light, can’t Christianity survive any of the assaults of history? And, for its own sake, shouldn’t Christianity be thinking about those possibilities? Even if the writers of the Bible, no matter well-intentioned, but ultimately wrong, should not faith be able to survive those possibilities?

As I start this off, I want to start by thinking about some of the fundamental assumptions that I’ll be operating under as I write and think about these issues. I think that will be a helpful starting point, and will be a nice way for me to be clear about my intentions and presuppositions.

I thought about trying to find a “beginning,” and start there. However, I can really think of no beginning in a conversation about truth and faith. The conversation just is what it is. So, I’m going to arbitrarily begin where I feel like beginning—heaven and hell.

Here is what I believe: any journey to discover truth in (and even beyond) the world must operate beyond the well-known concepts of heaven and hell. That search for truth does not have to deny their existence. Rather, if heaven and hell exist, their existence, and their nature should not relevant to our conversation.

Heaven and hell operate on the oldest parts of human psychology: risk aversion and reward affection. Appealing to concepts of heaven triggers the instinctual parts of our brain that seek pleasure, and enumerating visions of hell triggers the instinctual parts of our brain that fear pain. In short, I see them as awful motivators.

I believe that any search for truth should be guided by something better than a sheer risk/reward calculation. I believe that, if God exists, that such simple arithmetic is below what that God would be, especially if that God is principally defined by love (as in the Christian tradition). Thus, any questions that I might ask, any conclusions that I might draw, must be drawn outside of this traditional risk/reward framework. Rather, they must be developed with an eye toward something different. They must be developed with an eye toward seeking to be as truthful as possible, even if I think heaven and hell are very real, I cannot allow them to be my motivation.

Perhaps an example with help with clarity. Various religious traditions have conceived of the afterlife in various ways. I’m most familiar with the Christian tradition, so I’ll use an example from there. For the sake of our example, let us pretend that there is a particular kind of Christianity that believes that an absolute belief in the virginity of Mary at the birth of Jesus is a prerequisite for entering heaven.

If I am an intellectually curious member of this brand of Christianity, I may question the so-called Virgin Birth. However, there is a limit to my intellectual endeavor if I’m operating withing the confines of a heaven and hell mentality. I may discover loads of good evidence that suggest that Jesus was fathered by a real man by means of sexual intercourse. However, if my tradition believes that such a conclusion would sent me to eternal perdition, then fear of that outcome does not allow me to be faithful to the conclusions of my mind.

Whether the Virgin Birth is true or not is not the relevant issues for this example. What is relevant is this: the heaven and hell model of motivation utterly destroys the quest for truth. It both limits intellectual curiosity, and does not allow individuals to follow through with their conclusions because of a fear of eternal damnation. For that reason, I feel this journey must move beyond promises of heaven and fears of hell.

It seems to me that such a primordial punishment/reward scenario is fundamentally below God. What I mean is this: it seems to me that any good God’s desire for God’s creation is for that creation to discover what is ultimately true. If what is ultimately true is the creation of a good God, then what is ultimately true is ultimately good. Those things, then, that would serve as impediments to our search for truth are not things that would be favored by God. Because of the way that traditional notions of heaven and hell shackle our intellectual pursuits by their appeal to base psychological notions of pain and pleasure, those notions are impediments to our search for truth, and therefore they are not at all helpful to us. They do not help us to know what is real about the world, or how we should live in the world. They are methods of control and manipulation more than they methods of truth and discovery.

If, then, we are genuine about our desire to discover truth in and about the world, we must first start the work of moving past that base psychology and be willing to pursue what is ultimately true regardless of the promised consequences.

I feel like that’s a great place to begin. Only when we have freed ourselves from the fear of our explorations can we begin to explore with the intensity and candor necessary to discover truth.

I’ve decided to do something different, and to start over with this blog. I’ve taken all of the old stuff down, because I don’t want to burdened with what it used to be. I would much rather move forward into what I want this to be in the future.

This mostly used to be a blog about faith. Sometimes that meant being about political or social issues, sometimes it was even about culture and media. I want this to continue to be a blog about faith. However, things have changed. In the future, this blog will become more about a search for faith. My hope is that it will be a conversation about faith and what it means for our world and a search for truth as much as we can know it.

I don’t want the project to be about being a Christian, or to be about not being a Christian, or even to be saddled with such baggage (though I fear it inevitably will be). Rather, I’d prefer this blog to be a conversation about truth, and all of the pitfalls and impossibilities that we ignorant souls encounter when looking for it.

This will, I’m sure, be about things we are all familiar with, God and Jesus, heaven and hell, the Bible, etc. However, what I’m hoping is that the tone and the nature of the conversation are different than what I have come to expect from these sorts of conversations. Perhaps that is naive of me, as I know what sorts of passions that these sorts of discussions inevitably arouse.

I wish I could lay out a set of guideline for what this is and is not. For it will be and will not be, but I cannot. Instead, I will simply view it as an opportunity—an opportunity to step away from certain baggage and commitments and to think a while about things that might or might not be true.