Ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν. (God is love) Pt. 1

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8 NIV

                  My life has been, as are most, a voyage of discovery.  I promised a post quite a ways back with the intention of detailing some of this and it proved a bigger task than I at the time had the capacity for.  But times change and circumstances bring opportunity back around and sometimes make finishing a previous task all the more pressing. 

                  In my last post, I detailed some of the circumstances that helped begin to transform my ambition and the extent to which I sought to control my life.  In this post I want to look a little more closely at my spiritual walk and the realizations that at various stages helped to confirm my identity as a Christian. 

Part of my occasion for this is my children.  They have always asked heavy questions, well before they understood what they were asking, but in recent years the implications of some of those questions are becoming more apparent to them.  My kids are hitting a phase of life now where great potential exists for the joining of their spiritual and intellectual lives.  I recognize that their path will not be mine, but I hope that my experiences can help inform theirs.

                  This post will take place in two parts.  I can’t help but start a little ways back, and in order to tie it all up neatly, I must needs divide it. 

                  I was born in a Christian house to a Great Plains preacher who was himself the eldest son of a Great Plains preacher as well as the brother of two others, and brother-in-law of two more.  This informed my ambition, though not in the way you’d imagine as I had no intention of following suit.  If anyone thinks God does not have a sense of humor, just take a look at the ironies in my life (full disclosure, I am ordained, have been gainfully employed in pastoral ministry on at least three occasions, and am currently employed with a Christian organization operating international schools in China).    

                  But when it comes to spirituality, growing up in the kind of home I did can provide ample opportunity to investigate.  My parents did not push their faith on me or my siblings, demanding we “make a decision,” nor did they simply assume our faith would be a given; rather, their faith and that of our extended family permeated the world we lived in, and that coupled with an openness to curiosity meant that faith questions were inevitable. 

                  Thus, around the age of 8, perhaps more to push back bedtime than to actually dive into my sin nature, after watching what was probably Matlock on TV, something grabbed my heart.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember the details with any precision.  Whatever it was, the crimes of the villain of the week hit uncomfortably close to home, eliciting comparisons that were frightening to my 8-yr old self. 

                  I remember pondering this as the bedtime routine began, and mentioning it to my father which eventually worked around to the question, “If I do some of the same things, does that make me as bad as that guy?”  Long story short, 8-year-old Andy that night came face to face with his own sin and the free gift of grace seemed incredibly desirable. 

                  I have spent a fair amount of time reflecting on this event in my life, examining it from a variety of perspectives, and I have come to the conclusion that despite occasionally appearing otherwise, elementary kids are quite capable of making such life-altering decisions for themselves.  In his sermon in Acts 17, Paul tells us that God is around us in an incredibly immanent way, and this is not less true because someone cannot grow facial hair or perform algebraic functions.  My 8-year-old conversion was legitimate.  That night I did accept Christ as my savior. 

                  Yet, barring supernatural elements, an individual cannot grasp anything, spiritual, physical, or academic, at a developmental level beyond that which they have already reached.  The smartest infant cannot speak in complete sentences, the cleverest 5-year-old cannot follow the abstract musings of Descartes or Hume, and despite all my musings over the state of my mid 40’s body, I cannot truly understand aging until I am at least collecting Social Security.  

                  Yes, old age is a developmental stage.  Contrary to popular belief, human growth and development does not stop when we graduate from high school.  There are clearly physiological stages of development in adulthood and we have names for them, such as those around parenthood, mid-life crises, and old age, but there are also experiential stages of development that are not universal, points in which our minds or outlooks change due more to the circumstances of our life and our particular situation than to anything physical, and as such are contingent on those experiences.  These are points such as marriage, success or failure, trauma, being oppressed or assuming a position of power.    

Religious conversion would fit into this category. 

Whether experiential or physiological, these transitions constitute moments in our lives in which new aspects of our identity are revealed; the Inside Out films represented this well with emerging islands of personality.  Though I am not suggesting little personality people live in your mind, those films demonstrate the adaptation attendant to each development.   When we reach a new development milestone, it is like receiving an upgrade, and all of our constituent traits need to adjust to this new reality. 

For instance, at birth infants solipsistically think of the world as an extension of themselves.  This gradually morphs into an awareness that there is the child himself and mother, which gradually becomes a recognition of other people. 

                  This third phase is worth noting, because the child is first becoming aware that other people exist, and this is a frightening prospect.  We call this phase stranger danger because suddenly all that is unfamiliar is suspect, and the only way for this to pass is for a child to come to a fuller understanding of what exactly other people are, which in turn is rooted in a more complex understanding of the child’s own identity. 

In other words, to move past his fear in a healthy manner, an infant must grow past his own infancy – he must leave it behind, and in the process these concepts that were only vague shapes before; self, mom, world, others; pick up a fuller and more sophisticated definition. 

                  There is a similar process that I would posit takes place with our faith when it is transferred into other stages of development.  At 8, I would no more have understood atonement or most elements of what constituted sin than I might have needed a razor to shave, felt or understood the nuances of Romantic love, or been able to grasp the purpose of the conditional clause in language.  But I could see the similarity between what a criminal had done in a TV show and something I had probably been punished for earlier that same day.  This is a very concrete comparison. 

As children grow into adolescents, however, they all suddenly face the challenge of abstract thought.  This process of considering things separate from concrete examples, maybe even lacking any concrete form, starts slowly, with glimmers here and there even down to 7 or 8, but it is not really until 11 or 12 that the higher points of logic and metaphor, theme and aesthetic become apparent.  The 8-year-old knows love through hugs.  The 12-year-old is starting to understand that regular hot breakfasts and folded clothes might also represent this quality, (especially after they stay over at a friend’s house who commonly heats up Eggo Waffles for breakfast every day, which taste like cardboard and were previously only known through TV commercials). 

So adolescent Andy, apart from learning the sliding scale of breakfast value, the joy of good stories, and the wonder of Colorado mountain sunsets, was also starting to grasp questions that up to then had been quite disassociated from him, such as “What does it mean to be an American?” or “a Republican or Democrat?” or “a Christian?” 

Some people let these questions bounce in and fly away.  Some people freak out at them and lock them away.  They see them as doubts and doubts are bad, giving parents headaches and teachers concern. 

But even locked away, these questions will worry at people.  I am a little this way.  No one would call me anxious, but a question of this sort sits around in my subconscious and builds.  The longer it is there begging to be noticed, the more it grows and takes on shape and nuance.  There can be an urgency to such questions.    

14-year-old Andy felt this urgency and began to consider who might help me bear the weight of these questions, which were gradually growing more substantial.  For instance, “If Christianity is the only true faith (John 14:6) and God’s invisible qualities have been made plain from the creation of the world (Romans 1:20) but God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11, etc.), how does that work?  If He is fair and the only way to salvation is through Jesus, how have I not been shown favoritism by being born into a place and a family where I might know him?  If God is not playing favorites, and his invisible qualities are plain to everyone, does that mean that other people might also know him in their own way, i.e. their own faith?  Might the books of other faiths genuinely show other paths to God, as some people say?  If so, is John 14:6 wrong, and if such a very central part of scripture is wrong, is any of it right?  If it’s not, are the fools who say there is no God less foolish than the Bible says?”    

Thank God that He foresaw questions like these and gave us the book of Job.  This was the first step in my adolescent journey. 

There are those who read Job lightly and sort of see God as upset at Job when He answers him towards the end of the book.  This is a gross misreading of that book which leaves both God and Job looking petty.  Remember, at the end, Job is restored.  He has not besmirched God’s honor.    It’s true that God’s questions towards Job are not particularly soft and cuddly, but Job’s own questions had been getting progressively more pointed as well.  It’s only fair that if Job is going to ask questions like a man, he should be able to take them like a man. 

It is a good reading to see God’s questions as pointing out to Job his own insignificance and by extension the insignificance of his claims, but to stop there is to commit a hermeneutical injustice.  The fact that God was answering at all put those claims and questions on a pedestal; recognizing that man, no matter how mere, was permitted to bring his concerns, no matter how petty, into the presence of the Divine, who by the way made all of this and is continuously running it all.  Our concerns are simultaneously incredibly small and yet worthy of His attention – a lesson of profound significance to anyone who has ever uttered a prayer.  Jesus is our friend, but he is also our God. 

After this divine Socratic Seminar that left Job basically speechless, his life and livelihood were more or less restored.  And again note, instead of being condemned for his questions, Job is restored to honor.  Clearly, in questioning God, Job did not sin.  As with any of us, the scope of Job’s questions were limited by his circumstances, including his situation and the set of his experiences, but they were not sinful. 

Furthermore, one might add that God’s very powerful response to Job came right when Job was ready and neither a moment too late nor too soon.  We should not expect a pandering God who gives us a royal audience complete with gusting winds and hail whenever we have a question.

But the growing pointedness of Job’s questions throughout the book show us an increasing desperation on his part.  The man is clearly spiraling downward.  Were God to respond to this in Elijah’s whisper, it might not get through the growing volume of Job’s cries.  Then we might no longer be able to talk about the uprightness of Job. 

No God’s timing and approach are exquisite.  We’ll touch more on this idea in the second part. 

For now, the questions are what is important and reading the book of Job at 14 told me that such questions were ok. 

Knowing what I do now, I probably could have voiced these to family or youth ministers or others, and they would have been fine with them.  I was not nearly as confident about that at 14, though.   

So, in the absence of adult guides, I turned to books.  And in books I found an answer of sorts, at least one that satisfied at the time.  This answer came in two parts over two stages.  1.  I needed to justify the occasion for faith at all.  2.  Having satisfied that, I needed to examine why Christianity merited more credit than any other faith.   

So true to the epoch in which I was born, I looked into the new atheists, men like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, alongside others such as Karl Sagan, seeking truth in their arguments.  In turn, I also considered a few Christian apologists like Josh McDowell and Francis Schaeffer.  In the absence of the internet, I had slim pickings. 

Furthermore, to be fair, the argument between these groups always felt a little dishonest, like the atheists and apologists were both attacking strawmen renditions of each other to save themselves ever really having to communicate. 

Fortunately, I came across Blaise Pascal, ironically in a comment by either Dawkins or Hitchens.  This prompted me to find and read Pensées in which I encountered his famous wager and the debate was pretty much over for me.  I had never read any argument as sensible as Pascal’s and I find myself often recommending it to others to this day. 

 But Pascal’s argument only justifies belief in something over nothing.  It doesn’t really point to Jesus as that something.  Such extenuating signposting was unnecessary in Enlightenment Europe, but in the US at the end of the 20^th century, well, we were just a little bit too diverse.

Thus, the second phase was to read the holy books or at least portions of them from what my 14-year-old self had determined to be the most relevant other faiths, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, alongside the Bible. 

I did this systematically, beginning with a rereading of the Old Testament along with the Penguin selections from the Talmud; then the Quran and similar selections of Hadiths; the Lotus and Diamond Sutras and Hesse’s Siddhartha; and finally selections from the Baghavad Gita and Ramayana.  I felt like I had a pretty good take on Christianity.  This was before the days of easy internet access to anything, so I had to use what library sources I could find, and the fact that I could get my hands on each of the above-mentioned documents in rural Kentucky in the 90’s speaks to the incredible abilities of my high school librarian. 

I spent several months working through each of these, studying them in a similar fashion to how I might study the Bible.  That the first I read this way was the Old Testament gave me a good framework for the rest.  After reading them I would spend a little time reflecting, attempting to put together a synthesis of their meaning.  Occasionally I would consult other sources, hence looking for and finding Hesse’s book, or the Hadiths.    

And in the process a picture began to unfold of various groups of people all trying to answer the same basic questions in whatever situation they found themselves, the so-called big questions, and each group doing so from comparably limited understanding.  While it was true that I already resonated with Christianity and felt like it made sense, to be fair I had to come up with a method for giving each of these other faiths a fair hearing. 

I set out a set of questions that I have since often seen in worldview surveys and the like (Who or what is God? Who or what are we? What does God do?  What do we do? Etc.). And as I analyzed each of these, a realization began to form.  Each faith could be seen as responding to the situation of the world in a manner that could be summed up in more or less one concept, often one word. 

Admittedly, these don’t do any of these faiths, not even Christianity, justice, but as a thought exercise (“If you could describe your faith in one word, what would it be?”), this is useful, and for my 14-year-old self, it possessed a sort of symmetry I appreciated.  The 1 concept exercise I developed at 14 is as follows: Christianity in a word is Grace (God coming to us), where Judaism is Law; Islam, God’s Will; Hinduism, Fate (or Karma); and Buddhism, which I later found CS Lewis describes as a Hindu heresy, Escape (specifically from Karma and Dharma).

Each of these descriptors helped to paint a picture for my vexed mind of how these different groups approached the big questions, and in turn, why Christianity could be seen as both distinct and perhaps even superior to the others. 

Take for instance the problem of evil, Why do bad things happen to good people or any variation thereof; a question that I would pore over much more extensively later (said poring we will examine in the next post). 

Christianity would respond with Grace, “God deigned to enter our existence and experience this reality as well.”

Judaism would answer with Law, “Man has transgressed the known law of God, making the bed we lie in.”

Islam with In sha allah (if God wills), “Man may have made the bed, but only because God has willed it to be this way, Praise God.”

Hinduism with Karma (fate), “Suffering is Karma, there is no way to solve it.”

And Buddhism with the enlightenment of escape, “Life is suffering, but life is also an illusion, and to realize this is to no longer suffer.”

Now it should be noted that as simplistic as this approach is, it worked!  There is certainly substantially more nuance to each of these faiths, and a few others that might warrant placement here, but by and large this works.  Additionally, it makes it quite clear that any post-modern thought that all religions basically say the same thing is not merely poppycock, it is slander against these faiths.  This notion subjects all faiths to what many intellectuals felt had already defeated Christianity, treating its adherents as simpletons. 

I had done it. I’d answered the questions I had about faith to a point that I found sufficient and was ready to move on, comfortable in the answers I had found.

I would love to say that this exercise complete, I no longer had any doubts or questions, but that would be somewhat like saying that I decided to no longer see the color red, a futile endeavor alongside being a foolish thing to tell others.  What I did have was answers satisfactory for the moment.  I had, in a sense, baptized my newly found capacity for abstract thought, and it could stand assured of the faith and ready for subsequent battles.

But there were nuances to the questions that still lingered, that had not at that point even coalesced into questions, still seated in my subconscious waiting for the right moment.  We will hit on a few of those in the next post and discuss the next phase in this journey of intellectual development.