Imagine if we treated gravity as a preference (follow this link even if you ignore the rest!). Personally, I'd rather know that gravity remains the same regardless of what I want it to be. Imagine cricket or football with no authoritative "how to play" - as each player goes about constructing their own situationally dependent rules of the game. Likewise, our western aspirations chase pleasures while avoiding responsibility, not surprisingly as that's a pleasant way to live ... temporarily. Also not surprisingly, we see echoes of this in the public face of Christian theology - new gnosticism, mysticism, and universalism. Inevitably the purpose is to put the safety catch on God and close the door to disturbing realities. Intellectual honesty in popular theology has, it seems, taken a back seat as we surround ourselves with the Bible in tweet form - selected snippets cast about to placate consciences while we un-follow the uncomfortable voices. It comes from blind acceptance of the Bible being selectively filtered for the message we desire. And when we're challenged, all we have to fall back on is a weak appeal to authority - "because the Bible said it." But why should I accept the Bible in the first place? Someone once asked me to prove there is a God without recourse to the Bible. This is where we should start ... first principle reasoning about God, of knowing the unknowable. Like Socrates (at least the one we know of) who reasoned One God. Like Anthony Flew. Then, through the account of God's interaction with a broken humanity we can find the authority of the Bible - the story of a logical yet unexpected fit with the nature of a true God. It's not at all comforting on first encounter. Throughout history people have tried to make God in their image - Gnosticism in all it's shades. Its no different today, and we see many on this crusade to reinterpret the Bible for their reassurance. Examples such as Rob Bell, Colby Martin, and William P. Young's "The Shack" are easy to come by. All filter our understanding of God into something that is safe, that plays the heart strings melodically, and leaves us emotionally comfortable while free to indulge in our preferential behavior - God on my terms. Even in mainstream theology we find threads of this desire to abdicate personal responsibility ... such as the Calvinist's retreat behind a paradoxical predestination of free will. However, if there is a God and God is absolute, and if the Bible reflects a history of God's interaction with broken people, then I need to face the reality of this God's nature and not remake my own god in my image. I don't want to have cancer and be told "its all going to be ok." Its not going to be ok, there's going to be misery, pain, and suffering, because cancer doesn't care about what I want, so I'd better do something about it. Probably the first thing I can do is recognize the decorative facade and strip it off to see what's behind. To most nominal or non-believers the popular stereotypes of God are hugely erroneous. We say "God is love, and a God of love would never harm me." But love could not ignore injustice, that would not be loving. So love must also be just. And thus perfect love must also be perfectly just. And so actions must have consequences. So my life has consequences, and what does God's love have to say about that? That's a reality that most don't want to see: the alternatives include falling into atheism (a deep faith position), agnosticism (retreat into denial), gnosticism or it's post-modern equivalent (a pink paradoxical haze of mysticism), pure modernism (the "I" is all powerful), even satanism. Or, they can grit their teeth and deal with reality where, like most seemingly unpleasant tasks, joy and satisfaction lie at the end. If I start from a position of imperfection to engage with a perfectly loving and perfectly just God (don't ever take one of these attributes alone), that's no recipe for success. In fact it sounds like a guarantee for failure. And here we see again the uniqueness of the Christian God compared to all others. Only the Christian God says "you can do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation." All others say "do this, do that, climb the mountain, empty your mind ... and maybe you can draw close to God, no guarantees though." The Christian God says: "Hmmm, logically you can do nothing, and logically because I am perfect you're a lost cause. But you are finite, and I am infinite, so hey, I know a way to satisfy perfect justice and perfect love. Of course in your tiny but lovable mind you can't fully understand how it works." You can understand enough of the amazing thing we call gravity to really appreciate it. So too you can understand enough of God to accept the solution to life's real flight, and if you do you'll know the joy of really flying - a joy that only exists because of God's gravity. Now that's reassurance.
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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