Reflections 5

... continued from last Sunday
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I have often thought that I might not have struggled with my faith so much if I had grown up with a form of faith that was a little more informed and defensible. When I later studied the Bible and theology, I found myself torn, on the one hand, between loyalty to my childhood faith and those who preached it, and, on the other hand, to truths that became increasingly obvious beyond reasonable doubt.  I found myself in completely unnecessary faith crises for no reason whatsoever.

I think the categories of fundamentalism can remain comfortable for a lifetime if you are never exposed to the simple questions or situations that deconstruct it so easily.  Then again, there are others who have a strange ability to live with possible explanations rather than probable ones.  Perhaps I too might have remained quite satisfied with my childhood fundamentalism if I had become a doctor or a scientist of some sort.  There are some questions you just don't ask when you live in a particular paradigm.  But once those questions are honestly asked, it is only a matter of time before they unraveled.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I'll have recourse later to give my thoughts on raptures and a rigid sense of what experiences Christians are supposed to have. For now, I want to clarify what a bad concept of God I had in my bones as a child.  Mind you, it was not something you could have talked through with me, I don't think.  I was in the grip of an irrational fear.

I saw a video in seminary that summed it up well.  God was a cowboy to me, a policeman with an itchy trigger finger. He was a "one sin you're out" kind of God. If you died or the rapture happened in the ten seconds between a sin and your repentance, you were toast.

Suffice it to say, this is a horrible picture of God.  It pictures God as a legalist, not a truly loving God.  I am more loving than this god.  In fact almost any average person on the street gets higher grades than this god for love.  No doubt there are a lot of people in prison, maybe even some murderers, who come out more loving.

And it is an immature picture of God.  It is a god who loves rules for their own sake and gets really ticked off when people break them.  He's an insecure god, who cannot handle any infraction of his rules.

If the "eternal security" of some Baptists would allow a "Christian" to commit murder and still go to heaven, my childhood experience was one of continual insecurity. Yet if the word "love" is meaningful at all in relation to God, it surely means that he wants us to make it.  And I was raised to believe that he wanted everyone to make it, that the only reason anyone wouldn't make it would be their own doing.

I have also come to reject prevailing ideas about what it means to say that God is a God of justice. So many Christians seem to treat God's justice as something to which he himself is a slave.  "I'd really like to have mercy on you," God might say, "but I have to follow the rules."

But doesn't God make the rules?  I can believe that God exercises justice for our good. I can believe that God exercises justice for the collective good. I can believe that God exercises justice when a person is beyond redemption. I cannot believe he is just because he has to be or because he just can't hold his temper when people offend his honor.

To me, the most coherent view sees God in relational terms.  God knows us and wants to rescue us from our alienation.  He wants to be reconciled with us. He wants to be in relationship with us...