P
paxigoth7
Guest
Like many other people, in America, in today's world, the only image of Christianity that I grew up with (not due to the fault of any one person, but because of the situation as a whole) was a literal-factual view within a "conservative" mainstream. Thus, everything from a literal 6-day, young earth creationist view to a bloody futuristic "second coming" (and everything inbetween) was hammered into my head, and held up as the "faith once and for all entrusted to God's people" (never mind the fact that such an affirmation neuters the context of what Jude was saying). There could be no doubts, no questions, it was simply "God said it, I believe it, that settles it". Such approaches may seem pietistic, but they simply just drag one on the long road to disillusionment. The example is given in the history of executing people for not agreeing to "believe X". For example, the Church used to insist so heavily that the earth was flat (and that the sun rotated around the earth) that people really were killed for saying otherwise in the name of science. But then science won, the earth was not flat and the earth rotated around the sun. The list could go on and on, but this example suffices. It was just the long road to disillusionment, heightened and increased all the more by people refusing to accept science in the name of Christianity.
As a child growing up, I walked the long road to disillusionment by putting faith in fairytales, mythology, believing what I was told, only to have the "big questions" ultimately push, then crack and then collapse my idea of "Christianity". Again, I insist, the so-called notion of "just believe" is rendered venial. I can tell a child to "just believe" in Santa Claus, and then look the other way when they grow up and get beat up for such a belief. I can insist that there is a 'god' up in the clouds, only to have NASA prove otherwise. I could even go around claiming wildly that part of being Christian meant believing that there was a huge three-fingered green hand sticking up out of the quicksand and then cry "heretic" when any thinking person laughed me down as crazy. The point is obvious, when the truth of Christianity is contingent upon "facts" that can either be proven or disproven, it is simply a religion, and a weak one at that.
So, I began to live in a closet within Conservativism. I went from listening to contemporary gospel music to listening first to rock, then to metal and then (to my shock, Christian "rock" and "metal" tends to be fundamentalistic) to the aura of all disillusionment and disenchantment--gothic/industrial. But I remained within the conservative closet and listened to Christian "gothic/industrial" music. Within this framework, in college, I found a friend to suffer with me through the music of the band CIRCLE OF DUST. Sure, I listened to Klank, Aleixa, Argyle Park, Level and the sort, but CIRCLE OF DUST presented not only an emotional outlet but a confrontational philosophy. Afterall, it was through CIRCLE OF DUST that my image of 'god' was first questioned, then challenged, and then reformed. The cryptic chorus still haunts my thoughts: "there exists no dream worth chasing if it cannot satisfy, there exists no god worth serving if he cannot hear your cry". Was the anthropomorphic 'god' on the clouds in the sky, looking down at us and judging us, sending the good to heaven and the bad to hell anything more than mere human invention? More: is this the God revealed in Jesus?
Like many others, I became reactionary, I entered my academic life as a Church Alumni, as a "liberal", defined not so much as what I believe but as by what I didn't believe... Were more of this transition to have happened outside of my mind and my dorm room, I may have been forced into coming out of the closet sooner. Consider cross dressing. It would be one thing for a male to wear a bra and panty set in his dorm room alone with a skirt and halter top--it would be another to go like this out into public, or (gasp) into a church. But I really ended up, in a relatively short period of time, just switching closets.
Within liberalism, I found a variety of negations, of denials, that (more than just anything else) just simply did not line up with experience, with reality. The disillusionment repeated itself (only shorter, because liberalism's road to disillusionment is shorter). It is very hard to say what one affirms as truth within a framework consisting only of saying what truth is not. The existence of evil ended up challenging both 'conservative' and 'liberal' ideas. I simply cannot believe that when one plays a rock or metal cd, literal green demons with pitchforks come oozing out of the speakers and poke your sorry soul (can anyone say "cloud cuckoo land"?). Equally implausible is the idea that literal red devils personally make people do evil things, that "when things are going wrong, you know who to blame, he will always live up to his name (the devil)" as the band Stryper once assumed. If the world of conservatism offers an unbelievable world of literalized demonology, then the world of liberalism offers an unbelievable world of human goodness. They would have us believe that, for the most part, people are good. Never mind that Jesus is reported as having said, "No one is good but God alone". Never mind the horrors that humans have so obviously been the cause of.
It was this question of evil, addressed honestly within a psychological framework of the psychology classes I took, that the answer became flamingly obvious, and yet neither conservatives nor liberals seemed to "get it". We obviously have a huge case of double projection going on with ourselves and evil. Strikingly offensive to how we want to see ourselves, and yet so bluntly and brutally honest is the claim of Jesus, haunting our ghostly minds: "NO ONE IS GOOD BUT GOD ALONE". Embedded within his claim is his own application of this, even to himself. And yet the conservatives seem to say, "Sorry God, it is not me, it is the devil, he makes me do it" while the liberals seem to say, "Sorry God, it can't be me, I am basically good aren't I?" The truth we all find ways of ignoring is that sin describes our being, who we are by nature. For Jesus himself to be "not good" as a human must imply that being human is to be estranged, it is to be corrupted. Could it be that if I were to begin seeing the way as being the way of Jesus then that 'way' would cut through the beaten roads of conservatism and liberalism and forge "the way less traveled"?
So I returned, within a liberal framework, to the closet, holding the view that humans are not basically good and that, regardless of anything else that may be wrong about the conservative model, we do need rescue, we do need redemption, there is a problem and we need salvation.
For a short while, I bounced back and forth between the two puzzles of the two extremes, of saying "X" or of saying "not X" and neither gets anywhere. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. Both embody popular concepts, both can be popularised and enculterated--one can follow the cult of John Shelby Spong or the cult of Pat Robertson. Ironically enough, both can become fundamentalisms of their own. Here, I define "fundamentalism" as an overt insistence that the only way of seeing the absolute is actually the absolute itself. One can claim, insist upon, the notion that God is a "he" or one can react to the obvious sexism and claim that God is a "she". Both miss the point of what God is, both fail to see that God embodies male and female qualities and both can become fundamentalisms when taken to extremes. To claim that we should become vegetarians to save the animals while aborting the unborn is just as fundamentalistic, inhumane and repressive as is bombing abortion clinics while chanting "Thou Shalt not Kill" as our creed. We need to be consistent, either life is sacred or it isn't. Either "thou shalt not kill" and "turn the other cheek" teach subversive principles or they don't. Either Christianity is about a total transformation and resurrection of life into what life was always meant to be, or Christianity falls back on COD's crypticism: "there exists no dream worth chasing if it cannot satisfy, there exists no god worth serving if he cannot hear your cry". The stupidity of conservativism legitimates liberalism no more than the stupidity of liberalism legitimates conservatism.
Upon this realisation, I leave my closets, both conservative and liberal ones...and I enter into the whirlwind of the search for truth, whether the means of the search take the form of history, faith, science; in search of the authentic Christian faith that Rudolph Bultmann always yearned for.
What we have been witnessing is that both conservative and liberal mindsets in the 21st century have been erecting their own proud towers of babel, exalting themselves as if they could reach and/or contain the truth of God. What we fail to grasp is that whenever an image of God is put into human form and thoughts, it can only grasp a relative/subjective experience of God. If God is to be thought of as "absolute truth" then the boundaries are only kept when we realise that we can only "see through a mirror dimly".
Because of the proudness of the towers of babel in our day, we are crushed, thrown down. We are cast down, but not cast away. Yet our beliefs, our religions, our ideas are ultimately broken, made desolate, put to ruin. We echo both the death and the resurrection found in the VNV Nation song Genesis, "the abyss becomes me, i wear this chaos well, though none should save me, desperation keeps me here, my need for innocence, the place where i began... with you i stand in hope that God will save us from ourselves." Yes, the ultimate end of the road of disillusionment is the valley of the dry bones. In this wasteland, we come together, both liberals and conservatives, both heretics and orthodox as dead ones of a former age. And yet, to all of us lost children who knew not the way of peace, God promises us resurrection. We are not to be rescucitated into our earlier way of thinking--we are to be resurrected into an entirely new paradigm for the post-modern world.
With this mindset in mind, we can approach the infamous and often violent concept of "theology" through the eyes of losers, whores, sinners, goths, gays, and the marginalized people we all really are. We cannot be pharisees (whether of the conservative or the liberal variety) who think we really have such great prayers to offer God in the temple. Our cry is neither "the devil makes us sin" or "we aren't really sinning". Our worldly, secular, non-religious post-modern cry becomes "sin is a part of who we are--only You can clean us". We can only cry our eyes out, admitting who we really are, begging for the love and forgiveness only God gives. From this epistemology of love and forgiveness, we can give our own post-modern subjective experiences of the absolute truth. In this, we can live out symbolically the idea that "In Jesus there is neither conservative nor liberal, neither orthodox nor heretic." Christianity is not about believing, but it is about being. When we are truly joined in a mutual experience of grace and acceptance, we have felt the absolute gospel proclamation, it has touched us, transformed us and set us free to love and to be loved. We can echo the lyrics of an old Tourniquet song called "Your take"... "when we are not, just what you thought, do not blame, we're not the same--the colour grey is real, a shade that you can feel, your world of black and white is surreal... your take on life is who you are, unique unto the morning star".
Albert Schweitzer was right, Jesus comes to us as One unknown (Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus). But why is he unknown? Because we have, like Plato's simile of the Cave, hidden ourselves in our closets, wearing masks, playing games and erecting our own towers of nonsense. Bishop Wright is also right, we come to Jesus as ones unknown to be loved and known by him (Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God)... when we leave behind our closets as icons of a regressive past and allow ourselves to live symbolically of resurrection. This knowledge, this light of the world, this intimate sense of knowing and being known by Jesus is what we conserve, and by conserving it we find ourselves liberated in the highest sense of the word.
As a child growing up, I walked the long road to disillusionment by putting faith in fairytales, mythology, believing what I was told, only to have the "big questions" ultimately push, then crack and then collapse my idea of "Christianity". Again, I insist, the so-called notion of "just believe" is rendered venial. I can tell a child to "just believe" in Santa Claus, and then look the other way when they grow up and get beat up for such a belief. I can insist that there is a 'god' up in the clouds, only to have NASA prove otherwise. I could even go around claiming wildly that part of being Christian meant believing that there was a huge three-fingered green hand sticking up out of the quicksand and then cry "heretic" when any thinking person laughed me down as crazy. The point is obvious, when the truth of Christianity is contingent upon "facts" that can either be proven or disproven, it is simply a religion, and a weak one at that.
So, I began to live in a closet within Conservativism. I went from listening to contemporary gospel music to listening first to rock, then to metal and then (to my shock, Christian "rock" and "metal" tends to be fundamentalistic) to the aura of all disillusionment and disenchantment--gothic/industrial. But I remained within the conservative closet and listened to Christian "gothic/industrial" music. Within this framework, in college, I found a friend to suffer with me through the music of the band CIRCLE OF DUST. Sure, I listened to Klank, Aleixa, Argyle Park, Level and the sort, but CIRCLE OF DUST presented not only an emotional outlet but a confrontational philosophy. Afterall, it was through CIRCLE OF DUST that my image of 'god' was first questioned, then challenged, and then reformed. The cryptic chorus still haunts my thoughts: "there exists no dream worth chasing if it cannot satisfy, there exists no god worth serving if he cannot hear your cry". Was the anthropomorphic 'god' on the clouds in the sky, looking down at us and judging us, sending the good to heaven and the bad to hell anything more than mere human invention? More: is this the God revealed in Jesus?
Like many others, I became reactionary, I entered my academic life as a Church Alumni, as a "liberal", defined not so much as what I believe but as by what I didn't believe... Were more of this transition to have happened outside of my mind and my dorm room, I may have been forced into coming out of the closet sooner. Consider cross dressing. It would be one thing for a male to wear a bra and panty set in his dorm room alone with a skirt and halter top--it would be another to go like this out into public, or (gasp) into a church. But I really ended up, in a relatively short period of time, just switching closets.
Within liberalism, I found a variety of negations, of denials, that (more than just anything else) just simply did not line up with experience, with reality. The disillusionment repeated itself (only shorter, because liberalism's road to disillusionment is shorter). It is very hard to say what one affirms as truth within a framework consisting only of saying what truth is not. The existence of evil ended up challenging both 'conservative' and 'liberal' ideas. I simply cannot believe that when one plays a rock or metal cd, literal green demons with pitchforks come oozing out of the speakers and poke your sorry soul (can anyone say "cloud cuckoo land"?). Equally implausible is the idea that literal red devils personally make people do evil things, that "when things are going wrong, you know who to blame, he will always live up to his name (the devil)" as the band Stryper once assumed. If the world of conservatism offers an unbelievable world of literalized demonology, then the world of liberalism offers an unbelievable world of human goodness. They would have us believe that, for the most part, people are good. Never mind that Jesus is reported as having said, "No one is good but God alone". Never mind the horrors that humans have so obviously been the cause of.
It was this question of evil, addressed honestly within a psychological framework of the psychology classes I took, that the answer became flamingly obvious, and yet neither conservatives nor liberals seemed to "get it". We obviously have a huge case of double projection going on with ourselves and evil. Strikingly offensive to how we want to see ourselves, and yet so bluntly and brutally honest is the claim of Jesus, haunting our ghostly minds: "NO ONE IS GOOD BUT GOD ALONE". Embedded within his claim is his own application of this, even to himself. And yet the conservatives seem to say, "Sorry God, it is not me, it is the devil, he makes me do it" while the liberals seem to say, "Sorry God, it can't be me, I am basically good aren't I?" The truth we all find ways of ignoring is that sin describes our being, who we are by nature. For Jesus himself to be "not good" as a human must imply that being human is to be estranged, it is to be corrupted. Could it be that if I were to begin seeing the way as being the way of Jesus then that 'way' would cut through the beaten roads of conservatism and liberalism and forge "the way less traveled"?
So I returned, within a liberal framework, to the closet, holding the view that humans are not basically good and that, regardless of anything else that may be wrong about the conservative model, we do need rescue, we do need redemption, there is a problem and we need salvation.
For a short while, I bounced back and forth between the two puzzles of the two extremes, of saying "X" or of saying "not X" and neither gets anywhere. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. Both embody popular concepts, both can be popularised and enculterated--one can follow the cult of John Shelby Spong or the cult of Pat Robertson. Ironically enough, both can become fundamentalisms of their own. Here, I define "fundamentalism" as an overt insistence that the only way of seeing the absolute is actually the absolute itself. One can claim, insist upon, the notion that God is a "he" or one can react to the obvious sexism and claim that God is a "she". Both miss the point of what God is, both fail to see that God embodies male and female qualities and both can become fundamentalisms when taken to extremes. To claim that we should become vegetarians to save the animals while aborting the unborn is just as fundamentalistic, inhumane and repressive as is bombing abortion clinics while chanting "Thou Shalt not Kill" as our creed. We need to be consistent, either life is sacred or it isn't. Either "thou shalt not kill" and "turn the other cheek" teach subversive principles or they don't. Either Christianity is about a total transformation and resurrection of life into what life was always meant to be, or Christianity falls back on COD's crypticism: "there exists no dream worth chasing if it cannot satisfy, there exists no god worth serving if he cannot hear your cry". The stupidity of conservativism legitimates liberalism no more than the stupidity of liberalism legitimates conservatism.
Upon this realisation, I leave my closets, both conservative and liberal ones...and I enter into the whirlwind of the search for truth, whether the means of the search take the form of history, faith, science; in search of the authentic Christian faith that Rudolph Bultmann always yearned for.
What we have been witnessing is that both conservative and liberal mindsets in the 21st century have been erecting their own proud towers of babel, exalting themselves as if they could reach and/or contain the truth of God. What we fail to grasp is that whenever an image of God is put into human form and thoughts, it can only grasp a relative/subjective experience of God. If God is to be thought of as "absolute truth" then the boundaries are only kept when we realise that we can only "see through a mirror dimly".
Because of the proudness of the towers of babel in our day, we are crushed, thrown down. We are cast down, but not cast away. Yet our beliefs, our religions, our ideas are ultimately broken, made desolate, put to ruin. We echo both the death and the resurrection found in the VNV Nation song Genesis, "the abyss becomes me, i wear this chaos well, though none should save me, desperation keeps me here, my need for innocence, the place where i began... with you i stand in hope that God will save us from ourselves." Yes, the ultimate end of the road of disillusionment is the valley of the dry bones. In this wasteland, we come together, both liberals and conservatives, both heretics and orthodox as dead ones of a former age. And yet, to all of us lost children who knew not the way of peace, God promises us resurrection. We are not to be rescucitated into our earlier way of thinking--we are to be resurrected into an entirely new paradigm for the post-modern world.
With this mindset in mind, we can approach the infamous and often violent concept of "theology" through the eyes of losers, whores, sinners, goths, gays, and the marginalized people we all really are. We cannot be pharisees (whether of the conservative or the liberal variety) who think we really have such great prayers to offer God in the temple. Our cry is neither "the devil makes us sin" or "we aren't really sinning". Our worldly, secular, non-religious post-modern cry becomes "sin is a part of who we are--only You can clean us". We can only cry our eyes out, admitting who we really are, begging for the love and forgiveness only God gives. From this epistemology of love and forgiveness, we can give our own post-modern subjective experiences of the absolute truth. In this, we can live out symbolically the idea that "In Jesus there is neither conservative nor liberal, neither orthodox nor heretic." Christianity is not about believing, but it is about being. When we are truly joined in a mutual experience of grace and acceptance, we have felt the absolute gospel proclamation, it has touched us, transformed us and set us free to love and to be loved. We can echo the lyrics of an old Tourniquet song called "Your take"... "when we are not, just what you thought, do not blame, we're not the same--the colour grey is real, a shade that you can feel, your world of black and white is surreal... your take on life is who you are, unique unto the morning star".
Albert Schweitzer was right, Jesus comes to us as One unknown (Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus). But why is he unknown? Because we have, like Plato's simile of the Cave, hidden ourselves in our closets, wearing masks, playing games and erecting our own towers of nonsense. Bishop Wright is also right, we come to Jesus as ones unknown to be loved and known by him (Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God)... when we leave behind our closets as icons of a regressive past and allow ourselves to live symbolically of resurrection. This knowledge, this light of the world, this intimate sense of knowing and being known by Jesus is what we conserve, and by conserving it we find ourselves liberated in the highest sense of the word.
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