Slouching Towards Bethelehem 2.0
Thanks in part to Sandalstraps' positive comments regarding my first post in this series (way back when) I'm plodding ahead. Besides, the alternative is real work. I admit that this series feels a bit solipsistic, but then again, going back and writing about my past always changes my present.
***
It is unnverving when I think back to my college years how well I could parrot the gospel message yet still not know or experience the author of the gospel in any significant way. Along with Sandalstraps, I too remember "testimonies" and I admit mine may make a good story in its entirety, but for that very reason I try hard not to embellish or tint. When I was 20, my childhood perceptions of God were still dominant beneath my intellectual faith-veneer; as when I was a child, half-drawn and half running away like hell. If I knew Jesus, I surely didn't experience him or only did so rarely, like an unexpected faint breeze. I knew the evangelical distillation of the gospels, what I just called the gospel message, but not the demanding, self-aggrandizing yet sacrificially loving figure which inhabits all four canonical gospels and the theology of Paul.
I had a job with a small fabric company and on the long delivery truck rides with the owner's son, a Jewish man only a few years older than me, the two of us would discuss and debate religion, often at his request. I had a basic apologetics down, and I was arrogant, frankly, in my ability to 'defend' the faith. Probably also terrified that I couldn't. Still, I can't say some of this didn't sink into my friend's head. It's amazing it didn't sink into my own heart. Healing takes lots of time, and above all, awareness of the wound.
Not long before that I remember reading in my discipleship material at my first evangelical church (or maybe in Crusade) that Jesus witnessed to everyone he met. I don't actually know if that's true, but I tried to emulate it. I began talking about Christianity, generally from a persuasive dimension, with just about everybody, at work, in my apartment building, at school. I represented myself as 'well' or 'changed' through my faith in Christ. Perhaps I was taking something from my faith. I wonder if God didn't smile on some of that hectic evangelism, immediately trying to poor out my shallow and poorly understood belief. The sad fact is that I believe my trauma and ocd had so split my intellectual and emotional selves that the two had little commerce. I may have been a special case. But when I read now about individuals like Michael Shermer or Dan Baker going from evangelical witnessing Christian to famous agnostic non-theist I wonder. I feel like it would take a great deal to fully unhinge the faith I have now; something happened about six years ago which will not be easy to unhappen.
But I left off in part one as I began working at the reformed christian bookstore.
Because my anxiety had blown through whatever barrier I was using to keep it down, I had quit my fabric company job without much explanation, dropped out of school, left my fraternity, and was taking xanax and trying all the old anti-depressants, the tricyclics, meds which I was mostly able to tolerate but which unfortunately did nothing for my obsessions and anxiety. After a few months, maybe ten, where my only employment was mowing the lawn at my brother's church I got the job at the bookstore (I was attending my own church only rarely on Sunday nights, military pants, black trench coat with little handcuffs hanging from a button, lots of hurt).
The first thing the owner did was give me a copy of the 1689 Baptist Confession of faith and ask me to write a response paper. It know it's long and I'm not suggesting anyone read it all. It is essentially the baptize-confessing-Christians-only version of the Westminster Confession of 1646; the Westminster Confessions allowed for the continued baptism of the infants of believers.
I had never heard of 'Reformed Theology,' let alone neo-Calvinism. Try Section three for starters. Or ten. I had never heard anything like this in my life: we don't really have free will (not since Adam at least, depending on when one believes God authored his Decree...as if He is tied to space-time). Before our lives even began, God decided which of us would be damned and which would be saved without regard for our characters or actions. Predestination. Election. Effectual calling. Someone gave me a book by Arthur Pink, he was a modern-day hero at the bookstore, a man who sees election on nearly every page of scripture. Suddenly I was smack in a community that did nothing but argue, about predestinatino, election, the extent of the atonement, amillenialism, all that. And looking back, not one of them was a scholar or anything remotely close. Some of them read a fair amount, but they read authors, like Pink, who said the same things over and over. For them, predestination, God choosing the saved apart from their own will, was gospel-milk, first-things, foundational belief.
The bookstore I had stumbled into not only believed this virulently, they believed it in true 17th-century style. Essentially, these men were modern-day Puritans, only they hated Fundamentalism and Dispensationalism as much as they hated Catholicism. Almost everything I had ever heard before about Christianity was wrong. Oh, once one was saved that salvation couldn't be lost, but then, it's hard to know whether one is actually saved or not. Are there outward signs? If not, perhaps the inner sense of salvation is erroneous. Perhaps one has false assurance. (Ironically, that perhaps could have applied to me). The owner smoked a pipe and I was promptly given one of his old ones, introduced to cigars, and above all, debate. It was okay on this job to stop whatever I was doing and discuss theolgoy with a customer or another employee while on the clock. The sad thing is that the tolerance of ideas outside reformed theology was not high. I actually remember once Estella, my ex, probably 20 at the time, brought me lunch in the back room, and as I sat there and tried to eat my tuna sandwich one of the guys who worked there, the main theolog of them all, Larry (a man who, years ago at least, left the faith) got into an argument with me about the extent of the atonement. Did Jesus die for everyone or just the elect? At the time, I wasn't deeply committed to any idea about the atonement, and I said something Packer says, a quote I can't remember. This pissed off Larry so much he began quoting Owen, others, and I swear wanted to physically fight me. Physically. It got close. And poor Estella stood there and watched it all.
That may have been near the end though, when I was considering quitting. I was there less than a year.
Whew, I'm starting to sweat just remembering it. Suddenly I had found the greatest wealth of Christian intellectual material I had ever encountered, volume on volume, true systematic theologies, church histories, but most with the same bent. I started reading Spurgeon, Bunyan, Owen, Calvin (of course), Luther (but somehow missing his central focus/obsession, not the bondage of the will, but his radical understanding of grace). The store didn't carry any 'trinkets' like bumper stickers or posters unless they were theologically correct, but it had thousands of reformed seminary level books. Spirituality had become knowledge in explicit terms. All the clerks and managers were men; I think a woman kept the books.
The church these people all attended still exists (though like many, it has split, with my old boss leading the move away); some of my old fraternity brothers are still there with their families. That they uphold God's inerrant Word is without question. That they dislike dispensationalism, what they call fundmanentalism, really any theological developments since the Reformation, is acutely clear. Ideas from thinkers after the reformation? Watch out. They must agree with the great latin two word creeds (though Reformers don't like creeds) sola scriptura, sola fide, sola Christus, etc.. I began looking for a therapist at this time and several had issues with this. "God's Word is all Truth" I was told.. They believed only in Bible-based counseling and distrusted any modern psychology because Freud, you know, was an atheist.
Sadly, tragically, for me, Christianity had become an integrated, aggressive set of ideas. A systematized theology, fought over point by point. And it was based around great names, the giant minds, rock stars of the reformed faith, the new Patriarchs, and evaluated, above all, by doctrinal correctness.
I believe there are good Christians who believe in predestination (St. Paul may have been one of them, but I'm not sure he had the issue sorted out either). My own view is that there is no way humans can understand this from God's perspective. Still, I lean in the opposite direction: we really do have free will in some critical things, despite the pressure of culture, the unconscious, our own emotional wounds and addictions, even direction from God. But regardless, in my view, it is a ridiculous thing to make pre-destination, election and the rest of it, foremost in the gospel message, as these men did. Scripture, though they had answers for every verse which seemed to teach in the other direction (the dreaded Arminianism), teaches both halves of this question. Most importantly, the theory of election has enormous negative emotional impact on many human beings. It changes people and the way they view their world and God. I've seen it, felt it. There are lots of ways to present the gospel: Jesus loves you; you are going to hell without Jesus; or, you need to accept Jesus right away, but know that God decided before the earth was made whether you would or wouldn't...those not chosen, well, they'll burn in hell to show God's majesty, justice, and mercy.
For me, it was about the last freaking thing I needed.
Allow me to speak to those ghosts of twenty years ago which held such power over me then: give me a fucking break. The Bible is not a puzzle we crack. The Bible is not the perfect product of a single mind which we interpret without reader-agenda, which can be mashed into a mathematically precise theological system to fit any human situation or problem.
I remember in the beginning of Paradise Lost, when the demons are first waking up in Hell and looking for activities to amuse and distract, one group goes off to debate predistination/free will. Sometimes Milton says it better than anybody.
For a time, though, I had a new (and for me quite obsessive) religion neatly summarized by the famous five-point acrostic TULIP: Total depravity of man (we are utterly broken and fallen and unable to move towards God in any way); Unconditional election (God chose who will be saved); Limited atonement (Jesus only died for this elect); Irresistable grace (those called will choose God regardless of what they want); and Perserverance of the saints (those called and saved will never fall away).
When my anxiety began to creep up again (as my xanax dose crept down) I asked the owner if I could work less hours. He couldn't understand why a young guy like me wouldn't be thrilled about a career in retail for four bucks an hour and our conflict, which he later apologized for, led me out of the store and the world of book collecting as an end in itself and, eventually, back to my mainstream Baptist church. I don't know how any of the guys from the old store are doing. Well, one of them, Larry, fell away from his marriage and faith a few years later. I saw him seven or eight years ago drinking shots at a bar (where I was drinking myself).
There are answers in this life we will never have. Things we can't know. This must be accepted. Above all, Christianity is not an intolerant intellectual system which rejoices in its own correctness. And many reformed thinkers, still, strike me as rigid. I've seen N.T. Wright, for example, blasted (from a distance, of course) on reformed boards because he doesn't hold to innerrancy (apparently, I don't even know what he thinks about the Bible; he seems to base most of his theology on it). Or because of his new reading of Paul: "this violates sola fide", faith alone. As if the Reformers suddenly wrote God's Word, or were the only ones that could understand it. It seems foolish to me to rely on Reformation thinking alone, on their readings of Scripture solely. The Reformation accomplished many significant things, but it also led, all too often, to asceticism, intellectualism, sectarianism, and a rejection of much religious ritual and beauty (in reaction to excesses in Catholicism, I know).
I'm sick of such arid thinking. I appreciate symbols and mystery also.
It's true that I have presented a straw man of Reformed theology. The point of this post is to continue telling my own story, not critique Calvin or Luther. The guys I worked with at the bookstore (Little Geneva, I've sometimes thought of it) were just guys, many hadn't graduated; none had actual theology degrees. I was not well emotionally when I was there. And there are surely Reformed theologians today I would respect and read. But for me, in my own experience, predestination, neo-Calvinism, such aggressive intellectualism and arrogant epistimology...this was all one more false path I was led down in my personal search. For others, it may be the right path. For me, it was anything but.
***
It is unnverving when I think back to my college years how well I could parrot the gospel message yet still not know or experience the author of the gospel in any significant way. Along with Sandalstraps, I too remember "testimonies" and I admit mine may make a good story in its entirety, but for that very reason I try hard not to embellish or tint. When I was 20, my childhood perceptions of God were still dominant beneath my intellectual faith-veneer; as when I was a child, half-drawn and half running away like hell. If I knew Jesus, I surely didn't experience him or only did so rarely, like an unexpected faint breeze. I knew the evangelical distillation of the gospels, what I just called the gospel message, but not the demanding, self-aggrandizing yet sacrificially loving figure which inhabits all four canonical gospels and the theology of Paul.
I had a job with a small fabric company and on the long delivery truck rides with the owner's son, a Jewish man only a few years older than me, the two of us would discuss and debate religion, often at his request. I had a basic apologetics down, and I was arrogant, frankly, in my ability to 'defend' the faith. Probably also terrified that I couldn't. Still, I can't say some of this didn't sink into my friend's head. It's amazing it didn't sink into my own heart. Healing takes lots of time, and above all, awareness of the wound.
Not long before that I remember reading in my discipleship material at my first evangelical church (or maybe in Crusade) that Jesus witnessed to everyone he met. I don't actually know if that's true, but I tried to emulate it. I began talking about Christianity, generally from a persuasive dimension, with just about everybody, at work, in my apartment building, at school. I represented myself as 'well' or 'changed' through my faith in Christ. Perhaps I was taking something from my faith. I wonder if God didn't smile on some of that hectic evangelism, immediately trying to poor out my shallow and poorly understood belief. The sad fact is that I believe my trauma and ocd had so split my intellectual and emotional selves that the two had little commerce. I may have been a special case. But when I read now about individuals like Michael Shermer or Dan Baker going from evangelical witnessing Christian to famous agnostic non-theist I wonder. I feel like it would take a great deal to fully unhinge the faith I have now; something happened about six years ago which will not be easy to unhappen.
But I left off in part one as I began working at the reformed christian bookstore.
Because my anxiety had blown through whatever barrier I was using to keep it down, I had quit my fabric company job without much explanation, dropped out of school, left my fraternity, and was taking xanax and trying all the old anti-depressants, the tricyclics, meds which I was mostly able to tolerate but which unfortunately did nothing for my obsessions and anxiety. After a few months, maybe ten, where my only employment was mowing the lawn at my brother's church I got the job at the bookstore (I was attending my own church only rarely on Sunday nights, military pants, black trench coat with little handcuffs hanging from a button, lots of hurt).
The first thing the owner did was give me a copy of the 1689 Baptist Confession of faith and ask me to write a response paper. It know it's long and I'm not suggesting anyone read it all. It is essentially the baptize-confessing-Christians-only version of the Westminster Confession of 1646; the Westminster Confessions allowed for the continued baptism of the infants of believers.
I had never heard of 'Reformed Theology,' let alone neo-Calvinism. Try Section three for starters. Or ten. I had never heard anything like this in my life: we don't really have free will (not since Adam at least, depending on when one believes God authored his Decree...as if He is tied to space-time). Before our lives even began, God decided which of us would be damned and which would be saved without regard for our characters or actions. Predestination. Election. Effectual calling. Someone gave me a book by Arthur Pink, he was a modern-day hero at the bookstore, a man who sees election on nearly every page of scripture. Suddenly I was smack in a community that did nothing but argue, about predestinatino, election, the extent of the atonement, amillenialism, all that. And looking back, not one of them was a scholar or anything remotely close. Some of them read a fair amount, but they read authors, like Pink, who said the same things over and over. For them, predestination, God choosing the saved apart from their own will, was gospel-milk, first-things, foundational belief.
The bookstore I had stumbled into not only believed this virulently, they believed it in true 17th-century style. Essentially, these men were modern-day Puritans, only they hated Fundamentalism and Dispensationalism as much as they hated Catholicism. Almost everything I had ever heard before about Christianity was wrong. Oh, once one was saved that salvation couldn't be lost, but then, it's hard to know whether one is actually saved or not. Are there outward signs? If not, perhaps the inner sense of salvation is erroneous. Perhaps one has false assurance. (Ironically, that perhaps could have applied to me). The owner smoked a pipe and I was promptly given one of his old ones, introduced to cigars, and above all, debate. It was okay on this job to stop whatever I was doing and discuss theolgoy with a customer or another employee while on the clock. The sad thing is that the tolerance of ideas outside reformed theology was not high. I actually remember once Estella, my ex, probably 20 at the time, brought me lunch in the back room, and as I sat there and tried to eat my tuna sandwich one of the guys who worked there, the main theolog of them all, Larry (a man who, years ago at least, left the faith) got into an argument with me about the extent of the atonement. Did Jesus die for everyone or just the elect? At the time, I wasn't deeply committed to any idea about the atonement, and I said something Packer says, a quote I can't remember. This pissed off Larry so much he began quoting Owen, others, and I swear wanted to physically fight me. Physically. It got close. And poor Estella stood there and watched it all.
That may have been near the end though, when I was considering quitting. I was there less than a year.
Whew, I'm starting to sweat just remembering it. Suddenly I had found the greatest wealth of Christian intellectual material I had ever encountered, volume on volume, true systematic theologies, church histories, but most with the same bent. I started reading Spurgeon, Bunyan, Owen, Calvin (of course), Luther (but somehow missing his central focus/obsession, not the bondage of the will, but his radical understanding of grace). The store didn't carry any 'trinkets' like bumper stickers or posters unless they were theologically correct, but it had thousands of reformed seminary level books. Spirituality had become knowledge in explicit terms. All the clerks and managers were men; I think a woman kept the books.
The church these people all attended still exists (though like many, it has split, with my old boss leading the move away); some of my old fraternity brothers are still there with their families. That they uphold God's inerrant Word is without question. That they dislike dispensationalism, what they call fundmanentalism, really any theological developments since the Reformation, is acutely clear. Ideas from thinkers after the reformation? Watch out. They must agree with the great latin two word creeds (though Reformers don't like creeds) sola scriptura, sola fide, sola Christus, etc.. I began looking for a therapist at this time and several had issues with this. "God's Word is all Truth" I was told.. They believed only in Bible-based counseling and distrusted any modern psychology because Freud, you know, was an atheist.
Sadly, tragically, for me, Christianity had become an integrated, aggressive set of ideas. A systematized theology, fought over point by point. And it was based around great names, the giant minds, rock stars of the reformed faith, the new Patriarchs, and evaluated, above all, by doctrinal correctness.
I believe there are good Christians who believe in predestination (St. Paul may have been one of them, but I'm not sure he had the issue sorted out either). My own view is that there is no way humans can understand this from God's perspective. Still, I lean in the opposite direction: we really do have free will in some critical things, despite the pressure of culture, the unconscious, our own emotional wounds and addictions, even direction from God. But regardless, in my view, it is a ridiculous thing to make pre-destination, election and the rest of it, foremost in the gospel message, as these men did. Scripture, though they had answers for every verse which seemed to teach in the other direction (the dreaded Arminianism), teaches both halves of this question. Most importantly, the theory of election has enormous negative emotional impact on many human beings. It changes people and the way they view their world and God. I've seen it, felt it. There are lots of ways to present the gospel: Jesus loves you; you are going to hell without Jesus; or, you need to accept Jesus right away, but know that God decided before the earth was made whether you would or wouldn't...those not chosen, well, they'll burn in hell to show God's majesty, justice, and mercy.
For me, it was about the last freaking thing I needed.
Allow me to speak to those ghosts of twenty years ago which held such power over me then: give me a fucking break. The Bible is not a puzzle we crack. The Bible is not the perfect product of a single mind which we interpret without reader-agenda, which can be mashed into a mathematically precise theological system to fit any human situation or problem.
I remember in the beginning of Paradise Lost, when the demons are first waking up in Hell and looking for activities to amuse and distract, one group goes off to debate predistination/free will. Sometimes Milton says it better than anybody.
For a time, though, I had a new (and for me quite obsessive) religion neatly summarized by the famous five-point acrostic TULIP: Total depravity of man (we are utterly broken and fallen and unable to move towards God in any way); Unconditional election (God chose who will be saved); Limited atonement (Jesus only died for this elect); Irresistable grace (those called will choose God regardless of what they want); and Perserverance of the saints (those called and saved will never fall away).
When my anxiety began to creep up again (as my xanax dose crept down) I asked the owner if I could work less hours. He couldn't understand why a young guy like me wouldn't be thrilled about a career in retail for four bucks an hour and our conflict, which he later apologized for, led me out of the store and the world of book collecting as an end in itself and, eventually, back to my mainstream Baptist church. I don't know how any of the guys from the old store are doing. Well, one of them, Larry, fell away from his marriage and faith a few years later. I saw him seven or eight years ago drinking shots at a bar (where I was drinking myself).
There are answers in this life we will never have. Things we can't know. This must be accepted. Above all, Christianity is not an intolerant intellectual system which rejoices in its own correctness. And many reformed thinkers, still, strike me as rigid. I've seen N.T. Wright, for example, blasted (from a distance, of course) on reformed boards because he doesn't hold to innerrancy (apparently, I don't even know what he thinks about the Bible; he seems to base most of his theology on it). Or because of his new reading of Paul: "this violates sola fide", faith alone. As if the Reformers suddenly wrote God's Word, or were the only ones that could understand it. It seems foolish to me to rely on Reformation thinking alone, on their readings of Scripture solely. The Reformation accomplished many significant things, but it also led, all too often, to asceticism, intellectualism, sectarianism, and a rejection of much religious ritual and beauty (in reaction to excesses in Catholicism, I know).
I'm sick of such arid thinking. I appreciate symbols and mystery also.
It's true that I have presented a straw man of Reformed theology. The point of this post is to continue telling my own story, not critique Calvin or Luther. The guys I worked with at the bookstore (Little Geneva, I've sometimes thought of it) were just guys, many hadn't graduated; none had actual theology degrees. I was not well emotionally when I was there. And there are surely Reformed theologians today I would respect and read. But for me, in my own experience, predestination, neo-Calvinism, such aggressive intellectualism and arrogant epistimology...this was all one more false path I was led down in my personal search. For others, it may be the right path. For me, it was anything but.
Comments
I share your assesment of Reformed theology, both in terms of its rigidity (which at its worst removes all mystery from our experience of God, presenting us with a God who is little more than a set of propositions about God, limited to human ideas and systems) and in terms of its immoral callousness. Double predestination (and there is no way around double predestination - God predestining some to heaven and some to hell - if you're going to have any form of predestination, unless you're into universalism) presents us with a vision of God which John Wesley rightly considered unworthy or worship or service. Such a God may be all powerful, but is certainly not benevolent. I simply cannot serve a God who so callously throws away lives than even the most depraved of us might find of some value.
If God is to represent the highest good, why is my lowly good capable of an empathy that their God can't seem to muster?
There is some comfort in a degree of predestination: I can't screw things up so badly that God can't fix it. My salvation is secure. But that sense of security rightly goes away when I am reminded that my salvation is only secure if God wills it, and there is no way for me to know whether or not God willed/wills it.
I've always been Arminian, so I've never personally had to wrestle with predestination except as an opponent of it. I'm screwed up enough that I'm not sure what I'd be like if I had that doctrine swimming in the pool of my past along with all of the other issues.