I like to think I'm allowed one heavily emo post every couple of months, so here's mine for the spring semester.
going home to houston, I had a wonderful talk with an close old friend, during which he made the comment that I haven't been the same person he knew in college ever since the end of my first relationship, that all the joy that defined my first 3 years at Rice had somehow vanished, replaced by an unacknowledged cynicism and skepticism masked as "careful reasoning".
After that one relationship, from February to March, two years ago now. How does one month change someone so much? I'll try to answer that...by starting with a seemingly tangential non-sequitur.
After reading the most recent post on Matt Dunn's blog about "initiative evangelism" and a non-Christian's view of Christians, I have to admit that over these last two years, I think I've been looking at my own faith through that sort of perspective.
And I think that all started with the line "I think God is leading me to break up with you".
The way it had happened was that she had a few doubts about the relationship, so we took 3 days apart to pray and ask for guidance to see if we should continue. I thought yes; apparently God told her differently. For the first week, I took it seriously. A week later, not so much. After talking to several sympathetic Christians, I started to think there might have been more hidden in that line than just the prophetic hand of God intervening in a relationship. Eventually, I think I started to wonder if God was even present in that line at all.
Maybe this is what started the downward spiral. For the first time, I could look at the Christian life and see contradictions and issues, fallacies, things that didn't make sense. Talking with non-Christian friends about the breakup made me feel better, since they all basically shared the exact same reaction - shock and incredulity at the way she ended the relationship. It felt so good to be able to feel like I'd been wronged somehow, that somehow she had taken God's name in vain. Eventually, this evolved into the thought that she had just done something irrational and dishonest, using God as a cover.
And so it started. I began to remove the hand of God from my interpretation of events. The breakup was because she didn't feel confident, and therefore invoking God was an excuse to cover up her real reasons. Someone's "led by the Spirit"? Just a combination of their emotions and their own thoughts. Even better, this easily explained stupid, hurtful, or violent actions done by the leading of (and in the name of) the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without having to directly attribute them to God. And so I started to distrust the way Christians take things as the action of God, without mystery or uncertainty, applied to their personal lives.
Admittedly, the breakup hurt like nothing had ever hurt before, so negative feelings associated with that probably exacerbated my growing skepticism. Don't get me wrong, though - my battle with doubt is something completely different. Doubting God, creation, Jesus, etc originated elsewhere and was resolved apart from this issue (though the condition of my heart probably had something to do with both).
I do believe Jesus was the Son of God, physically resurrected from the dead to redeem us from our sins. I believe that God has called us to live morally upright lives, serving each other in love, being his hands and feet into the world, sharing our faith with others, and being salt and light to a veiled and decomposing world. I have more trouble believing God continues to work in blatantly supernatural ways: not that he can't; but that he chooses instead involved in the natural processes that guide our paths, our actions, our thoughts - that he (usually) interacts with us in a quiet, nuanced, mysterious way, and not just crudely, directly breaks into our lives and picks us up, forcefully turning us to go a certain direction.
Therefore, I still believe God is at work in the world. I just don't know if he works in the way I naively imagined him to do early in my Christian life. A good artist doesn't just force the theme of his art upon you brusquely; they guide you in a nuanced way to a given interpretation. Most of the time, good art may look like nothing at first glance, but upon a closer inspection, the genius behind the piece comes out. In terms of engineering and mathematics, I wonder if God's taking action in the world is a little like creating a function (the action) that satisfies certain conditions (purposes). There is often an easy, straightforward way to construct a valid function, but that function usually ends up being either trivial or useless for any application purposes without continual tinkering with the function and its processes. The construction of a useful function (action) is usually much less straightforward, and may seem to take several paths that seem completely unrelated to the problem, but ends up giving you a function that has a distinct purpose, yet isn't something that's completely alien to (and thus useless in) the natural settings.
(Theologically, if God works in this way, I believe it has very interesting applications to the way we as Christians should interact/approach the world, consider science, etc...but that's another blog post)
...
(Here, I realize that I've started to ramble and need to connect it back to what I started the blog post about)
I'd be willing to bet that these ideas about God's action in the world aren't impossible to swallow for most Christians - I've heard these metaphors and ideas before, and I don't think that they're out of line with the Bible (at least, I think if there are verses against it, there are also verses supporting it). However, it looks like somehow these ideas got twisted by my feelings about the breakup. Pride in me makes it easy enough to see someone who doesn't hold this similar (intellectual) view as being overly conservative, sheltered, and slightly backwards. However, throw a breakup and one misspoken line about God's guidance into the picture, and pride combines with fear into distrust, and I think that if I've changed for the worse these past two years, it's because of this.
Truth be told, two years later, I'm still reliving parts of the breakup, and unfortunately, I'm also still having trouble trusting other Christians "led by the Spirit". I think I'm slowly coming to the point where I can say things like "God taught me" or "God worked in my life" again, but after experiencing the consequences of taking God's name in vain, I find that I still hesitate in taking God's name at all anymore.
6 comments:
Thank you very much for this, man. This is what so many people need to hear; I'm sorry you had to go through it. But your story ("testimony", even??) is powerful.
Still got your email in the inbox; i'll be sitting down later this week to get to a bunch of thoughtful emails that deserve thoughtful responses.
Cool. I agree with what you've said. I don't think God tends to be as direct - "break up with him now," etc. - as people would have it. People who are just going on raw feeling and aren't taking time to process everything usually say something like that. (Or it may be a coverup for what they don't want to say, but that's the more cynical view.) For me, I've always found practical, thoughtful reasons to take a particular direction (at least barring some crazy direct message from God).
On the other hand, God is still working, always working. Usually it just takes us sitting down and reflecting to see what He's done.
I don't necessarily sense intellectualism in the way you write - you're just a nerd, man - but I do sense a lot of maturity that you've gained and it reflects in the way that you write. Good stuff.
sigh. like always, i always just see the bad things and fail to point out the good. so let me just say that the vast, vast majority of your post demonstrates that you have acquired a large amount of self-awareness and good reasoning abilities =). that said...just a couple things that raise alarms in my head =p.
after experiencing the consequences of taking God's name in vain, I find that I still hesitate in taking God's name at all anymore.
i'm not sure that there is justification for saying that she took the Lord's name in vain. although you know the situation better than I, I would expect that she probably had several reasons, whether they be the advice of friends, thoughts about the future, or the influence of Scripture reading...I think that very reasonable people can group those together under "the Lord's leading." just a thought.
I started to distrust the way Christians take things as the action of God, without mystery or uncertainty, applied to their personal lives.
jesse, i've always distrusted that. but I think that if we believe that there really is a spiritual reality, then we have to accept that they are possibly led by God. always? probably not. even most of the time? maybe not. but sometimes, at least.
I have more trouble believing God continues to work in blatantly supernatural ways
just like you said: "not that he can't." although i don't see it that often, i see no logical or scriptural reasoning to limit God. especially when i hear about spiritual warfare in places where there is "pagan" worship...again, one of those things where although some people only see God work supernaturally (and are probably wrong), just because he doesn't always doesn't mean he doesn't ever (did that make sense?).
again, i'm not trying to argue against the importance of careful reasoning. i just think that if we claim to believe in God, in Heaven and in Hell, in angels and demons, in the resurrection of the dead...we have to hold our reasoning and our carefully constructed arguments with open hands (like anything else). when dealing with God, we are dealing with a force beyond our understanding and reckoning...and at any moment He might come in and blast it all to pieces.
on a side note, glad i'm still your friend after that, haha. hope i still am after this =)
It's interesting because we want to discount believers who invoke the name of God casually: small group leaders who automatically give instructions to pray as you're "led by the Spirit," and so forth. Where do our own impulses end and the work of the Spirit begin?
I was going to post on this subject pretty soon, actually, but you've done a good job explicating the difficulties of discerning how much is really "God's doing" in light of how often we put God's name on occurrences.
One story that might prove relevant (you get to decide how) is from the end of Acts 5 where a Pharisee named Gamaliel says of the apostles, "Keep away from these men and let them alone: for if this plan or this work is of men, it will come to nothing; but if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it -- lest you even be found to fight against God."
Great thoughts man,
It's also very hard for me to know how to think about the words "God is showing me", "God told me" etc. It's just wrong sometimes. And it's put a lot of pressure on me to always be trying to figure out in what ways the statement might be valid for whoever is saying it.
Reading your blog reminded me of that time we talked about biochemistry and stuff. My views on that have been changing some recently. Did you hear about Francis Collins coming to Rice? It's interesting how he believes in evolution and also is a believer. If you haven't seen the video of when he was at Rice i'd recommend it. It should be on the Rice videos site or veritas.org.
Let me know if you come up with a good balanced perspective on how to view frustrating Christian cliches.
matt - good call on Acts 5. I see it applied often, and I feel like it's a good, sound piece of advice. I wonder though; we have kind of let them go (in the sense of letting churches split, letting groups do what they want), and they've kind of just stuck around and added to the pool of diverse (and sometimes polarizing) Christian perspectives. what does Acts 5 help us to conclude then?
david - thanks =) I appreciate the empathy. I think it may just be a matter of maturity in this - Henry made a great point that people saying "God led me" can mean just that God used people, circumstances, introspection, etc to guide them to a decision. This isn't always the case, but hopefully maturity teaches us to differentiate b/w the two.
and neat! I did listen to the entire Collins talk on podcast, and it was good (even if it was much like his previous Veritas forum as well). It seems like a lot of my Christian friends at Rice have changed their views somewhat since that talk. I'm glad it got good discussion in there, though I think Collins (and Lewis, McGrath, etc) would all agree that this isn't such an important issue compared to issues involving Christ.
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