Open Theism Discussion Board

Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Questions about Christianity > (No Subject)

Forum Quick Jump

[ << Previous Thread | Next Thread >> | Show Newest Post First ]

Seymour
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 105

Posted 5/5/2002 10:43 PM (GMT -6)

I don’t really care for Philip Yancy’s writings, but back when I was a better fundagelical I read two of his books since he seemed to create such a stir among my fundagelical friends. (I did, however, enjoy the opening of What’s So Amazing About Grace for what it’s worth, about the prostitute and why churches make her feel lousy. He really played that one up well because at first you really really hate her, then you really really hate yourself, and then you just plain hate everything)

But in his book Disappointment With God he tells the story of a Wheaton student who is almost terrorized by his faith. He tries relentlessly to be the kind of person God wants him to be, has a regular struggle of it, even writes a promising book himself about Job. But still this guy is in perpetual spiritual angst and he’s losing it quickly. Phil plays good ol’ fundagelical mentor to him from time to time, yet this kid always seems to have real problems that are immune to the fundagelical ointment that folks like Phil can’t help themselves from offering to the struggling soul.

One day Phil sees the guy and there is a radical change. He seems free, happy, healthy. “What happened?” Phil wonders. Well as it turned out this Wheaton kid simply stopped believing in Christ, and as soon as he did this his life turned around, all of his problems vanished, he was a new creation. It was like a conversion, one that saved his life, gave him meaning and washed away his, er…problems.

In Nikos Kazantzakis The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus is similarly haunted by God. He feels God’s favor, his ‘choseness’ and it plagues him. God’s presence within him is a constant source of pain, it feels like an eagle is digging its talons into his eyeballs. At first Christ does everything he can think of to drive God away, to make himself so disgusting that God simply can’t put up with Jesus anymore and will remove his presence from him. Jesus goes so far as to go into business with the Romans (BJS will like this) building crosses to crucify Jewish dissidents. But unlike this Wheaton kid, Kazantzakis Christ cannot find the freedom of being free from God.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage Philip Carry, an orphan, is raised by his uncle a local Vicar. Philip was born with a club foot (a clever disguise for Maugham’s homosexuality in this highly auto-biographical novel) which is a constant source of shame. One day, when the Vicar was forcing Philip to read the Bible, he came across the passage that says that if we knock the door will be opened, if we seek we shall find, if we ask we shall receive. He also highlighted in his mind other verses that say that if one only has the faith of a mustard seed one can move mountains. Philip asks his uncle if these verses are true. The Vicar’s response was that of course they were true, the whole Bible was true. So poor Philip, with the simple faith of a child, prayed endlessly and piously with purity that God would remove his clubbed foot and give him a normal foot, to make him like other boys. He prayed and prayed and prayed, and nothing happened. He concluded that he had given all the faith he had, and that it must simply be impossible for him to create the faith of a mustard seed, or that the Bible was lying. At a young age he concluded it was all false. He tried and it didn’t do what it promised it would do. Later in life, when Carry was an adult and had suffered a long love affair with the cruel but alluring Mildred, abandoned a hopeless career in art for medicine, and then abandoned medicine because he was brook and forced to be homeless, and then in order to survive took a trivial job which insulted life itself he came to the conclusion that life was meaningless. And once he finally said it out loud it freed him, it was his second conversion—the first being when ‘the weight of a belief God was lifted from his shoulders.’

quote:

There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief n God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. (chapter CVI)

I feel myself on the verge of a similar freedom, like the freedom that Wheaton kid received, like the freedom Kazantzakis’ Christ sought but never found. Christianity is a weight, one that will undoubtedly crush me if I continue on with it. The truth about that verse which says the burden is light and the yoke easy is the same as the truth about the verses which say that we will receive what we ask for in faith: when actually tried it is oppressive and ineffective. I never had the benefit of a conversion experience, a marker to mark a radical change. When I was ‘born again’ nothing happened, nothing changed (although of course I’ve been taught to recite that some spiritual and theological event actually took place that day, an event which was completely removed from anything to do with a real life). I was born buried in fundagelicalism, like an inoculation I was immunized by it from any possible conversion, I was overchurched.

Without a conversion away from Christ I’ll be driven mad, not unlike Kazantzakis’ Christ, and just like Kazantzakis’ Christ if I stick with God he will end up killing me. I could leave Christianity behind like a terminal disease and enter life. I could abandon Christ like a scapegoat or an escape pod in which I jettison into it all of the psychological baggage that Christianity has tied to it. I could follow that Wheaton kid on his way to freedom from people like Yancy. I could be free.

So what’s stopping me? Why can’t I seem to do it? And what will become of me if I can’t?

Some folks dance cool, all angels and swaying hips, Sensual as all get out and in. Me, I'm a hick, and I dance like one, I just kinda jump around and grin.
--Greg Brown

Edited by - Seymour on 05/06/2002 03:46:33 AM

Semeia
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2001
Total Posts : 522

Posted 5/6/2002 6:17 AM (GMT -6)

Seymour,

You are free.

You haven't really asked for advice, so at the risk of offense I offer some rather unconventional thoughts.

Abandon religion, and keep Christ. Jettison the whole bloody placenta, and keep the baby. The placenta is meant to keep the baby alive during gestation. But once the baby is born, the placenta can be discarded.

Love the baby, and let the baby love you. Care for him, feed him, rock him, love him. Let his eyes be your mirror – his eyes so different from that narcissistic companion in hell we meet in Sartre’s No Exit. Keep Christ, who with the greatest strength offers himself on the cross as our vulnerable baby, to keep and to love. He offers what every baby offers: “Love me, and I will bring forth life – love me and let me live and grow so I may love you.”

God came into the world as the Son of Man – not the father. He gives us the choice to love him. He is not the critical parent, no matter what religion through the ages tries to say. Christ comes as an infant, asking for love. Christ dies broken on the cross, asking for love. We are to love him as a child – he lives in us only when we give him life in us. And we are to be like him, like an infant, vulnerable in God’s arms, trusting and allowing him to love us.

Religion needs to deny this truth, because this truth sheds light on its own irrelevance. Religion is the umbilical cord wrapped around Christ’s neck, ever tightening, again and again leaving him stillborn around the world. True Christianity is the death of all religion, and the birth of eternal life.

If you are experiencing a lack of joy in your life, do not confuse this as coming from Christ. The Christ who turned the water into wine, the Christ who healed on the Sabbath, the Christ who spoke with the woman at the well, the Christ who died for us on the cross with his side pierced, head bowed under a crown of thorns, did so so that our joy might be complete. Christ desires life in us, us in him.

If religion is choking off your oxygen, cut the cord. The only purpose for the religion of Christianity is to bring us into a relationship with Jesus Christ. If it is failing that in your life, cut the cord and discard the placenta, but keep the baby. Let those eyes reflect the life and joy that is meant for you.

Seymour, I came to Christianity from such a different direction. I always believed in God, but I always saw religion as a sham. I grew up Catholic, and it seemed apparent from an early age that it was an appalling sham, and a lie upon a lie. The God of the church was never like the God I knew in my heart, and I learned from an early age to trust God in my heart. But the hurt I saw in the world caused me to throw out the baby, or at least to ignore the baby, and pretend he wasn’t there. I don’t know if you ever read my testimony over on the Women, Homosexuality and Slavery thread:Testimony link You might find it meaningful; I’m not sure. I don’t really know what it feels like to grow up believing in TULIP, or legalism, or any of that. I guess I’m just a rule-breaker, and if someone in authority told me something that didn’t line up with what I knew in my heart I simply didn’t listen. (Of course, I’ve gotten into a lot of unnecessary trouble in my life with that attitude.) But I did get cynical at the gap I saw between what my own eyes observed of people and what the church said was true. And I pushed Christ away. But what my conversion experience revealed to me was God’s deep love for the freaks of the world, every last one of us.

I remember many years ago when we were first married Iconoclast said to me, in the context of some difficult conversation, “God loves you, Semeia. He loves you.” And I started crying and I couldn’t stop. For hours. And I’m a terrible crier – if I so much as cry for a few minutes my eyelids swell up like cloves of garlic. I cried for three or four or five hours, until my head was swollen up like a pumpkin. I cried because it hurt, the love of God touching me. I cried for a life spent lonely and not believing in that love. I cried for myself, for my inner resistance to receiving that love, for my disbelief that it could be true. I cried for my unlovability. I cried for grief of a life lost, of life in a family that forgot love, that could not find what was right in front of us, in every corner of every angry room, loud with failure and fear, yet love waited for us, wondering when, when would we receive? I cried for the lost days, weeks and years. I cried because as much as I pushed against the possibility of God pursuing me with his love, I knew it was true, and it hurt.

And that day that I cried and cried was a funeral and a passage and a birth. It was the day I started giving up the memory of empty life, and exchanging it for the truth. Maybe “giving up” is the wrong phrase. It was more like I let God embrace my own emptiness; I let God acknowledge every moment of my life, touch it, and absorb it. I cried because I didn’t want to let it go, the pain. In my confusion I thought that the pain was necessary to signify that I was alive. I felt that if I gave that up I would betray the reality of my past, and be some co-dependent religious type, floating in fake joy. I felt that if I gave up that pain that I would die. And, in fact, in a manner of speaking, I did.

I wish I could say that the transformation was permanent and complete, but for me it’s more of a process. What I have found is that it is only when I allow myself to be loved that I become capable of loving and bringing forth love around me. The pain doesn’t completely go away, but it simply is no longer the core of my identity. I don’t allow it to define me.

If you find you need religion, let the wild woods be your cathedral, the rushing stream a symbol of the source, the mushroom a pulpit stage for katydid and beetle – espousing God’s love in the particular extravagant diversity of creation. Let the ocean deep submit a sermon to the stars; let the sun burn its candle on the altar of this one galaxy, this one little world. Let God find you where you are.

Love,
Semeia

"The opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith."--Soren Kierkegaard

GregBoyd
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 1818

Posted 5/8/2002 5:08 PM (GMT -6)

Beautiful words Semeia. Lord, use them.

"Three is the magic number, oh yes it is, it's the Magic Number" - De La Soul

Seymour
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 105

Posted 5/8/2002 9:27 PM (GMT -6)

No it's not religion that's oppressing me. if it was religion it would be the simplist thing to write off. No it is Christ who is oppressing me. He's more difficult to deal with than religion. People expect it of religion, that's what its made for.

quote:
God came into the world as the Son of Man – not the father. He gives us the choice to love him. He is not the critical parent, no matter what religion through the ages tries to say. Christ comes as an infant, asking for love. Christ dies broken on the cross, asking for love. We are to love him as a child – he lives in us only when we give him life in us. And we are to be like him, like an infant, vulnerable in God’s arms, trusting and allowing him to love us.

No that's precisely the problem. If Christ was a critical parent it would be easy to dismiss him, he would be a burden that wouldn't have the power to really follow you. But it is because he came as an infant that makes him so heavy. It's funny you used this imagery because i just finneshed a casting of a baby in a uterus. the baby is made of cast lead, it weighs a ton. the uterus is light in comparision, even though its bigger.

You've read The Unbearable Lightness of Being right? it's sort of like that. Children are more unberablely heavy than parents. that's partly why i'll never have any of them.

quote:
If you are experiencing a lack of joy in your life, do not confuse this as coming from Christ. The Christ who turned the water into wine, the Christ who healed on the Sabbath, the Christ who spoke with the woman at the well, the Christ who died for us on the cross with his side pierced, head bowed under a crown of thorns, did so so that our joy might be complete.

He's just rubbing it in my face at these points.

quote:
Seymour, I came to Christianity from such a different direction. I always believed in God, but I always saw religion as a sham. I grew up Catholic, and it seemed apparent from an early age that it was an appalling sham, and a lie upon a lie.

Indeed we are coming at this from different directions seeing that i'm on the verge of converting to Catholicism myself. I'm glad to know you think it's such a sham! Ouch

Some folks dance cool, all angels and swaying hips, Sensual as all get out and in. Me, I'm a hick, and I dance like one, I just kinda jump around and grin.
--Greg Brown

Edited by - Seymour on 05/09/2002 02:28:33 AM

Forum Information

Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 4:22 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads

Need Support? | Forum Help Manual