The New Look

I knew if I lazed around long enough, the good folks at blogspot would upgrade the templates, widen that reader's digest narrow column I've hated for so long. Voila. I didn't even have to write a tag. This design is called stretched denim, which kinda feels appropriate past 40.

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My wife is out of town all week, and when she leaves I have a hard time sleeping the first couple nights. Hard as in maybe four hours last night. I may complain (though less these days) about reading her to sleep each night (still on Watership Down) but I miss her presence, her voice and scent and body-warmth, even on the other side of our cal king futon. Even dropping off exhausted, we know the other is there. When I go away, say to sail, I sleep fine (besides snoring shipmates). But when I'm here and she's gone, even with my son still with me, I feel it.

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I was up late last night, or early depending on perspective, reading posts at Debunking Christianity, one of Sandalstraps' spots for discourse. There are other sites like this on the web, but there's something grass-roots, home-grown about DC. Many of the posters have sincere and moving falling away stories; many argue well. Certainly some have been disillusioned when reading the Bible. Sometimes I think a different perspective on an incident or passage might change their reactions, sometimes I completely agree with them on the human content in our book. When I was reading through the OT in my first year of EFM, though I'd been a non-innerrantist for a dozen years, the old paradigm still moved inside me. I had a very strong reaction to Joshua, for example, shoving my Bible across the table and saying, "it's out of the canon, like Luther with James, it's out."

That may not be exactly what Luther said about James, but the point is I felt Joshua could not be describing my God, the Christian God, accurately. Others in the group, lifetime Episcopalians, certainly Jesus-worshipping Christians, were a little surprised by my strong reactions. One woman, S, said, "I've thought differently about the Bible for so long...this doesn't bother me much." Much of the focus in our church is on the Eucharist, the worship, the community itself and outreach to those in need. The Bible isn't the center. The point is that even though I say I'm a non-inerrantist, it's a very enticing myth (true or not) and tough to move out of as I read. Plenty of bright Christians who have read the whole Bible still hold to it, even if in modified forms. Part of this, surely, is the pressure in American Christian Colleges to do so (a point Ehrman makes in a very interesting debate here). Part of it is the chaos which ensues when black and white thinking about the text is broken down: if this isn't God's word, how do I know what's true?

Good question. I'm still trying to find my own answer.

And that's really what I want to say here. Sandalstraps, arguing very well somewhere deep in DC, notes in a number of posts that intuition and human need, the experience of God, are evidentiary in their own right. Certainly that's how I came to Christ (again). I read the gospels, slowly, and heard the Voice calling to me, a personality unlike any other in literature. I responded without a developed apologetic. I figured half the gospels might be wrong, but some of it seemed deeply true. I'm getting ahead of myself (I'm still writing my online coming to faith story) but I was very impressed by a few passages in John. When Jesus says he's not going to the festival in John 7, then goes; when the water is being brought to the altar to symbolize the water from the rock in the wilderness (an eminently holy moment in the ritual) what does John say Jesus does?

On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."

I thought then and I still think now: there is no way someone made this completely up. It's too bizarre to be false. Where is the evangelical or apologetic value? Especially to gentiles outside Palestine? The man blasphemed YHWH in his own temple. He is claiming to be the rock from which water will flow, but an undying water, like the bread of life which never spoils. This Galilean stands up at the ultimate moment in the cultus, the holiest moment of the festival, and claims he is the center of the entire thing; this would be as insane as if I stood up on the 4th of July on Capitol Hill and screamed that I was the Declaration of Independence, I was Liberty, in the flesh.

I knew it, I heard it, I believed it was historical, and after reading a few other passages in John, I asked God to show me Jesus. I came to believe, for the first time in my life in any concrete way, in the Jesus of the gospels. I didn't even know if humans have souls (still don't). I didn't know if Hell is real (still don't; my own priest, without elaborating, once said, "we're in it"). I had no particular sins on my conscience at the time (though if I looked, they were there). I heard the Voice, over a long period slowly dropped my guard, and when called, I answered.

It was later, a few years later, that I started running into others online who had such different stories: they may have needed God at some point, but they don't seem to now! They read the Bible and decided God wasn't real, or Jesus wasn't his man, or some such thing. The reasons why are many, but the big few show up often: the nature of the Bible, the behavior of Christians, the reality of human suffering, and the multiplicity of human religions. Those are very poweful questions, I agree. Why haven't I thrown in the towel myself?

Something in John 6 comes to mind.

I want to write an actual blog-sermon (my first Hymn from the Wood) on the passage just before the one I'm going to quote, but until then: Jesus, in another of his magnificent I AM statements, says that he is the bread of life. That those who eat his flesh and drink his blood will be raised at the last day. This naturally disgusts many, and some of his followers leave. In briefest terms, I'd note that this is another invitation to communion beyond communion, to union; the speech is also placed in a geographic location, which opens some question as to whether later Christians merely redacted in a description of the Eucharist. Jesus invites people, in shocking and easy to remember terms, to unity with him in the most full way imaginable.

What happens?

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

"You do not want to leave too, do you?" Jesus asked the Twelve.

Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

Now if Peter put it just like that or not I don't know. But the statement is consistent with other things he says and does in all four gospels. At least for now, I hang on like Peter. Some questions I get answers to, many I don't have yet. I'm nervous, actually, to study the NT this year in EFM. I've read most of it, but not in big chunks in a long time. What will I find? The Voice, still, I pray. For what converted me to Christianity wasn't mostly argument or reason (though very important was C.S. Lewis' non-fundamental reading of Scripture in Reflections on the Psalsm, and I had been wrestling with various Jesus/gospel questions). What brought me in was a willingness just to listen to the Voice, to read the gospels with only half an ear open. Some things there I couldn't explain or understand, still can't. But overall, I was overwhelmed by the personality of Christ. I did not argue myself into the kingdom. I came, dragging my heels, in response to a historic personality.

It seems I have written some of my final posts on my spiritual journey. Oh well. With school on it will probably take me months to get back to that series anyway (though I hope not).

It wasn't long, of course, before I began running into gospel-criticism, the post Strauss post Bultmann world. I read Schweitzer thinking he'd strengthen my faith; I had no idea of his view on Jesus. Then I poked around online, continue poking. What I find there is often challenging.

Why am I hanging on, Peter-like (and my belief in the historic nature of the gospels, at the moment, is fairly strong) and not falling away like the others in the story? I don't know. Need, which may be a weakness or strength. Stubborness. The desire to never quit anything in my life without thoroughly good reason. Above all the moments, the rare moments, where I feel close to God. Those moments are not mystic visions in any way I understand them; they are not beta-wave stimulations (I've watched plenty of tv); they are something much deeper, richer, more broad. Love walks down out of the universe-sky and rests a strong and gentle hand on my arm.

Like good food, good water. A man knows when he is being fed.

That's the truest apologetic I have to offer. For some (say those in 12 step programs) it's enough. How far I'll get at the rational level I don't know, but I pray, more than anything, for deeper union, for communion beyond communion. May God give me answers; but mostly, may he show me Love.

I have more to say, but I'm getting that strange insomnia hyper I can get and I need to pull back from this bloody screen (teaching online today also). I need to go watch Prison Break with my son. Thanks to all who read. It's great to have time to post a bit more often than usual. I'd like to plan these posts better, but heck, it's just a weblog.