Glossary: Gnosticism
Any hope for revelation outside sanctification.
Eugene Peterson: “…God is doing something before I know it.”
“The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.”
from Eugene Peterson in an interview by Ray Ortlund, here.
Apparently originally in Christianity Today, 3 April 1987, pages 25-26.
Pyramid Religion and Parenting
In Islam, God is the Ruler. He sits atop the pyramid of the cosmos and watches everything down below to keep them all in their right place. In this type of religion, the problem of our world is disorder and the solution is His will. Force. Dominion. Obediance or rebellion. All that matters is His will. You don’t matter a damn, except as an agent of compliance.
Oh, sure, in this cosmos, God is “merciful” — which means that occasionally He doesn’t kill you when you deserve it. But His mercy is a mystery in the bad sense of the term; it emerges from a black box, nobody can predict it or count on it. So we are like the man in the familiar parable who has inexplicably been saved from the firing squad by a last-minute message from the unseen emperor. Except…add to this parable the little detail that THE FIRING SQUAD RE-CONVENES EVERY MORNING.
In the Old Testament, God also sits at the top of the pyramid, but He at least tries to find ways to reach the bottom with His paternal love. In this cosmos, “love” or “mercy” are not emerging from an utter black box, because it is rooted in His personality. He is lonely in His core. Think of it: He says He needs us — or, Israel, at least. So His love is not an occasional add-on to the inner core of His personality. He made us, not as a hobby, but because He is Social.
But there is enough of God at the top of the pyramid in the Old Testament that the West imbibed it as a moral vision. After all, it is the order of the political world, so it is nice and neat that it should be the order of the spiritual world.
The New Testament is a radical document because the Incarnation turns the pyramid upside down. No other religious assertion sets out frankly to flip the cosmos over and over like a child turning handstands.
It’s amazing how many Christians think of their universe as a traditional religious pyramid…which means they parent this way. And then, consistent with that vision of the universe, their children rebel. We observe that the Western world has seen the emergence of a distinct stage of life marked by inexorable rebellion, because we parent like Islam but can’t quite stomach the necessary levle of enforcement to carry it off. What’s our solution? It’s a feature, not a bug; baptize it and call it normal.
Many Christian parents, along with all the rest of the non-Islamic world, have recognized that imperious parenting is not good, they themselves rebelled against it, and so they react by being permissive parents. And then their friends — or they themselves after they suffer that typical mid-life return to their childhood religion – they react to the Western secular permissiveness by re-ascending the old pyramid and imposing their will on their children. And evangelical pastors preach sermons on how children should obey their parents (instead of on how to love like God). And the cycle goes on forever.
No, the opposite of fundamentalist strictness is not worldly liberalism, but Christian agape. In the New Testament, God found a way to the bottom: become the bottom. Now, all fathers are givers, or they are not fathers. Father, now, is not that person who sits at the top but that person who comes to find the son in the garden every day.
Now, both permissive parents and strict parents are revealed to be: lazy. Truth is, it is actually easier to rule the pyramid than it is to enter the flesh of the beloved. Infinitely easier to rail and rant and throw lightening bolts from the depth of the storm than to be a baby in a manger. Nothing is harder, and more nourishing of the child, than love.
Oh, I hear the concern of those who think I’m destroying the authority of God. Relax: the pyramid is not gone. God still sits on the top, and is still to be feared. It’s just that He also plays at the bottom, and is available to be loved. So the bottom has become the top, and the top the bottom, in a ceaseless dance up and down the steps. And — the key point — His presence at the bottom makes His seat at the top an object of devotion, transforming an alienating fear into an integrating piety.
Don’t be a Christian who mouths Christian sentiments but teaches your child the universe is Islam.
The Protestant Neurosis
Today we heard in church that “our significance is based not on what do or are, but on the fact that God loves us.” That we have “a forgiveness-based relationship with God, not a performance based relationship”.
This is the decision that created Protestantism. And our churches spend enormous amounts of energy reminding ourselves of it, Sunday after Sunday, decade after decade. We must have a formidable impulse to forget it, which is ineradicable and nearly stronger than any other part of our psyche. Is this impulse to want to be something, do something, have God like us because we did something good — is this impulse the very definition of evil, from God’s point of view, or is this our humanity acting ineradicable like the God who put it in us?
It’s all got the smell of a neurosis about it. The empirical reality is that most evangelical souls find a significance based only on God’s love wholly inadequate, and don’t actually live that way, anyway. You don’t constantly re-affirm and remind yourself of something that you actually believe. And when the concept which you have tagged with the name of “grace” requires constant effort to not deny, you have a symptom of some deep-seated illusion. Basically sane people can’t choose to be neurotic without much effort. And Protestant piety is literally suffused with inner work, in the service of a neurosis whose purpose is, in turn, to avoid outer work.
Like in most systems created in reaction to something else, we threw out the baby of nature with the bathwater of works. The second adam, who kills the first and supplants him (thankfully), is not less substantive than the first, but more - does not do less than the first, but more.
What we construct in our religious imagination we reject in the daylight world. Do we really want God to relate to us like the drug addict wants all those around him to relate to him? Just forgive him over and over for decades, never expecting him to change, and just be there when he needs something. Do you really want someone you love to remain broken, but forgiven? In real life, this pattern gets old quick and is discarded in favor of intervention. You may never abandon your addict friend (in that sense, love is unconditional) but you will not find a healthy place for the two of you to stand until you start imposing conditions on your help. Health always follows conditions. The removal of all conditions is the very definition of pathology in every other known relation between persons (listen to it: “deconditioned”). You’d never want to practice this kind of hollow, docetic love in real life: in real life your love is indistinguishable from your passion for the object of your love to get better.
Now obviously this passion to see the beloved get better is fraught with the possibility of neuroses and abuses all its own. That literature fills libraries. “Better” is a loaded term, etc. But the abuse does not discredit the reality.
Love is unconditioned. But the more real it is, the more it demands, and so produces, better conditions.
Haiku 4
It is time,
time and deprivation
form the judge.
But alelluia is
the desert’s song,
Merton said.
Not sin,
but silence is
the noonday demon.
What ground I
have hated I
have hated, said God.
Glossary: church talk
The world : any setting where relationships are not based on the covenant to love.
The Kingdom of God: any setting where they are.
The church: the gathering of those who define love by Jesus.
Haiku 3: thaw
Drip, drip:
beneath the warming snow
the vole forgets the hawk.
