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ears ago, when I encountered Don Miller and his early books, I ran
across the word “relational,” which sounded quite...made up. But if there’s anything that I now feel that
my church messed up, it was they were living just as if you could do ‘truth’
and ‘doctrine’ without doing love and relationship. Turns out you can’t. Like, at all.
Doesn’t
work. Living as if you can just know
facts and theories from the bible, calling it ‘doctrine’ or ‘teaching’ (or,
more arrogant, ‘scripture,’ though clearly you built it out of bible bits
yourself, for your own reasons) and that was it. The lesson that seemed to never be getting
learned was that we need to know how to
behave with one another. How to care for one another. How to treat one
another. How to connect. That stuff is
the essence of Christianity, it turns out.
But we really sucked at it.
Donald Miller, the author
of Blue Like Jazz, feels strongly
that, if you present any method (or system of steps or doctrine to believe in
order) to approach God, that you're missing something. He is strongly against
"bullet point" or "5 steps" methods to approach God or live
life with[1].
He feels there is mystery and organic process to it all. He feels that the
dynamic is relational, and that the very existence of the human romantic
relationship provides a real world metaphor to help us understand the
relationship God wants with Man.
He thinks "Why?" questions are too often
avoided in favour of "How?" and “What?” questions in our
process/method obsessed culture. He
thinks we talk as if decision-making and belief should only be the domain of
the right half of the brain and nothing else should enter into it. But actually, we live and decide and act as
whole beings, not as beings who use a tiny decision-making portion of ourselves
to decide with.
He thinks that we invent a "justification of
my decision" story afterward, and pretend that's how the decision actually
got made, when actually that's just something we made up to tell people and
seem reasonable. He thinks the process
by which we eventually decide things is a bit beyond our own conscious
thinking.
We are very comfortable with the "God as
Father" metaphor. We focus on
"angry Father with rules" pretty much exclusively, and we overlook the
"God/Christ as Lover" metaphor entirely. Or perhaps we set it in the future or
otherwise try to leave it out of the past and present.
For example, we seem comfortable talking about
"the marriage supper of the lamb" as a future celebration. We are,
however, uncomfortable with viewing Christ's giving up absolutely everything
and coming here where we are, in order to live as we live as romantic. His choice to live with the limits that we
struggle under, to not only know, but (more importantly and deeply) to
experience, participate in and respond to our situation. His managing to ace the whole "human life
on earth" thing without cheating, screwing up or wrecking anything for
anyone, including himself or God. His
then sacrificing the accolades, power, freedom and reward He had then earned
(in fact even the right to live out his full three-score and ten years). We somehow fail to view all this as the most
incredibly romantic thing anyone has ever done. Ever.
Watchman Nee, 19th century Asian
Plymouth Brethren evangelist and martyr, a very different man entirely from
Miller, in his book Normal Christianity
describes not a method, or steps for approaching God, but sees in Romans 6-8 a
description of the stages one can see in the process of drawing close to God
relationally. Unsurprisingly, these stages seem to be replicated in the
romantic relationships that mirror said approach. He identifies the stages as:
a) knowing,
b) reckoning,
c) presenting oneself
and
d) walking in the spirit.
So, with approaching God he
sees that first we come to know what's been done for us, and what that gives
us. We know it as a something only made possible because of what Christ did. Then
this knowledge just naturally changes our thinking to reflect this new reality,
so that we don't simply know it as a fact.
Our life choices reflect it, and the avenues and possibilities it opens
up. Then (and we'd expect this to need to happen first, wouldn't we?) we
respond to this and present ourselves to Christ just as he presented himself to
us.
("presenting" in the sense of "I'm
not just living for me anymore. I choose to, from now on, be with you and help
you get what you want and need. You're part of my priorities now.")
Christ
presented himself, submitting to torture, humiliation and the end of his days
on earth, in hopes of getting our
attention by giving us exactly the thing that we needed, and which we could
only hope to get from him, and of getting to have a continuing relationship
with us as a result of what this work started between us. Then, having made
this commitment to walk together, it is only natural to live out the rest of
our lives in this way, together, and in consideration of the concerns and
desires of the other.
I think most Christians that I meet are trying to
skip the b) stage, the accepting what has been done as something that has
indeed been done and which matters. They’re
missing the part where what they know
has some effect on how they think and
decide things and live. They know what happened, but they can't reckon it
(consider it) a done deal.
The fact that Christ's work was sufficient and
successful in completely getting us off the hook with God as Judge, and into His
good graces, is just a fact to us. We’re not quite grasping how much our fates,
reputations and worth are tied up in Christ's as far as God is concerned. This escapes many of us except as mere
conceptual knowledge, as doctrine we'd claim to agree with on some level, but
feel that it misrepresents or oversimplifies our situation and obligations. We
can't simply accept that it is so, and think and live that way.
Many of us can't do b). We can't live as if we are
actually OK as far as God is concerned. We haven't given up trying to tow our
car out of the muck, using only our own car. Because we’ve got to spin our wheels, right?
And so we continue to live in fear of letting Him
down, in angering Him, in disappointing Him.
This is how we insist upon living. We see nobility in it. We are trying
to better our position by making sure e believe the right doctrine, agree with
the right position and people, abstain from the appropriate things, and engage
in all the appropriate behaviours, all so that one day (after death, no doubt)
perhaps we can c) present ourselves to God without Him being too disappointed or
mad. All without having d) walked with Christ in the reality of what happened
when Christ came here.
Here’s what makes this problem obvious: The bible
talks “the old man.” The person that we
used to be before we had anything to do with Christ and his efforts. The agenda we would naturally follow, living
a solitary life completely untouched by Christ, with bad blood between us and
God and no way for either of us to fix that without Christ's intervention. This
old approach and attitude is so different from what is presented in the gospel,
that Paul the apostle sees it not only as an old life, but the life of a man we no longer are. The old man we
once were.
When I was being kicked out of my church, concern
was expressed at my (apparently heretical) doctrine that Paul says to
"reckon the old man dead" (and his works). Concern was expressed that I clearly felt that
Paul was saying to think of myself as a new person living a new life. As anyone does when a life-changing epiphany
of any kind takes hold. I thought I should get on with my life, free of the
shame, fear and dread.
They warned me with very serious faces and voices
that I must "reckon him dead, but never, ever forget how
very active the old man is in our lives, and how we must never cease to fight
him and keep him in the place of death." I was tempted to laugh at that
point.
So, my focus was on "Thanks to Christ I get
to live a new way, like a new person, and it's about damn time." But they insisted that my focus needed to
perpetually be on my past situation and self as some kind of zombie who would
haunt my every step and rear up continually, making my life nothing more than a
bad horror movie. I could never relax or be at peace or just live my life. That’s
how they claimed to live. That’s how
they wanted me to live. And they were
concerned that my troubling attitude might rub off on younger, more
impressionable people.
The work of Christ didn't work, they seemed
certain, until after I'd died. Well, what good is the work of Christ if it
doesn't help me or change anything now?
To their mind, the work of Christ moved us from the natural, unedified state of
the average person, into a hellish, divisive wrestling with "self"
for the rest of my days on earth. We had to wait for the work of Christ to
work.
They even invented a special term so they could
sub it in for the scriptural language. The
term they invented was "the old nature." They wanted to insist that,
rather than the work of Christ changing us right down to our very nature, our
very motivations and approaches and responses to everything, that we merely had
a second nature added on (a "new nature") and that the two co-existed
like an angel and a devil on each shoulder (how's that for "Theology The
Warner Brothers Cartoon Way"?)
Two core natures? No man can have two essential
natures. Your life changes and moves on, or it remains bemired in the same old
crap. There is really no middle ground on stuff like that.
With this handy term "the old nature,"
they could say "Never forget that the old nature is very much alive and
very active in us." Handy. If they
said things like "Never think of the old man as dead," they knew that
there was a bible verse that said the very opposite.
Well, using the romance
metaphor, I know that one approaches a woman thusly (this is a description of
what happens, and not a recipe or method):
a) one knows that there is something between
you that is worth pursuing,
b) one accepts this and begins to
think, plan and act according to this knowledge,
c) one eventually presents oneself
to the other person as being someone to
be with (that's where it always falls apart if you're me)
and
d) you live lives that are now
connected to one another.
Again, I think I was being encouraged that b)
was going too far. Was too much to hope
for, with God. Christianity was stuff we
knew. Facts. Doctrine. Not stuff we could actually go for a ride in.
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