What's Next for You?

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

What Kind of Believer Am I?

“Early in the morning I cry out to you, for in your word is my trust” (Psalm 119)

When I read the Scriptures in the morning I don’t usually talk to God in what we might call the traditional or regular prayer conversation practice or approach. I talk a lot with God, but rarely in the first-person. When I do actually talk in the first-person to God it is, I will say, a bit refreshing. There is a certain freedom that comes therein from not accumulating information or understanding or insight in those moments of sharing, but rather just relating who and what I am and what I already know and feel and think. The way I most do the first-person conversation is in reading and thus praying the Psalms in the first person, when, of course, the writing is actually such (make sure you know who in the Psalm is doing the talking. Things can shift from person talking to God talking in a heartbeat with nary a comma). 

One can read the first-person without being that first person. Instead, you read it as an observer of the person in conversation with God. When doing that, that listening in on the conversation, I am in the mode of gleaning insight, analyzing theology, growing in faith and life understanding. But when I am rather in the conversation, myself the speaker, I am loosed from the task of learning and thus active in experiencing the thought and emotion expressed, something that has redeeming value whether or not any insight is gained or solution to challenges, even those perhaps talked directly about, found. At the risk of characterizing the nature of the relationship we have with God as one of equal partners and thus cozying up to God as if in any given moment the conversation might turn and God would be the beneficiary of my attention and companionship, what happens in these first-person conversations with God is rather like a good conversation with a friend. Even if circumstances or conditions don’t change, even if direction or solution is not found, you feel better nevertheless.

Excursus: on God as a friend. I have never liked the old hymn “What a Friend We Have In Jesus.” Not only is the tune sappy but the text sentimentalizes the relationship we have with God and promotes the identification of God as The Great Explainer of all things perplexing and The Great Helper from all things debilitating. This is the God of Religion, the Divine One who bails us out and not, to corrupt the whole thing even more, simply unconditionally, but does the saving within the concocted (by us) covenant that demands our obedience to the law and if we disobey we get no saving after all, thank you very much. So, lose the hymn, please. And abandon the theology of glory. But, now, don’t lose sight of the fact that Jesus purportedly said a very interesting thing about friendship with us. He in fact calls us his friends and says this is because he has let us in on everything he knows of God (John 15:15). Interesting. He confides. It’s what good friends do. It seems to me only fair that we might be polite about it all and reciprocate. And so, friends. But please, realize what is going on here. Jesus made the first move and made himself vulnerable, and it killed him. This is a friendship of equals because he intentionally and deliberating made this so (see Philippians 2 for how Paul famously describes this changing of status, position and power). And so, we are equals, in awe.

So, back to the business at hand. 

I am not a Supernaturalist, one who sees God as intervening to change circumstances whether called for or not. But I am also not a Deist, one who sees God originating and setting the world in motion and then stepping away with hands off to see how it all evolves. I am a Christian, one who claims that Jesus of Nazareth is who God is (peace through distributive justice by non-violence) and that all the biblical accounts of God’s extra-natural, supernatural actions (hardening Pharaoh’s heart, parting the Red Sea, Elijah’s fire, you name it, including, mind you, the physical resurrection of Jesus) are mythologies to illuminate and declare (not just describe, but actually enact this truth by virtue of the declaration – in other words what we mean by Promise instead of Demand, Gospel, instead of Law) that unconditional love (“agape” type, the type Paul uses to describe love in I Corinthians 13, opposed to “phileo” or “eros”), short hand for “peace through distributive justice by non-violence,” is in the end (and from the beginning) the only thing standing, and left standing, forever.