God is good all the time, and all the time, God is good

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God. I know you are good all the time. This was drilled into me all my life. But what does that mean? What's the definition of good? We say this so flippantly, but I think this phrase might be more complicated than we initially thought. Please help me understand. Tom

Musings

God is good all the time and all the time God is good. We said this all the time when I was a kid growing up. I liked it then, but now I struggle with it. What!

My concern is with the definition of good. Good from God's perspective and good from a person's perspective  are not the same. Yet they get all mixed up in this phrase.

Let's review the phrase two ways.

Option 1:

God is good to me from my perspective all the time and all the time God is good to me from my perspective.

Option 2:

God is good from His perspective all the time and all the time God is good from His perspective.

If we believe option 1 it is invalidated by our experience. A lot of crappy stuff happens to us. So God is not always good to us from our perspective.

Therefore, we are left with option 2. But option 2 has its issues. For one, if those outside the church hear the phrase they might naturally assume we mean option 1 which fails the experience test which makes them less likely to pursue God because the claim seems false. If they do believe option 1 and join the church, it can feel like a bait and switch when they are discipled or something bad happens and they learn its really option 2.

So, I think we should get away from this saying, because it would be better to say, "When everything seems crappy, you can trust God to have a good plan." Its much clearer and doesn't have the potential for confusion.

A Missionary’s Story and a Moral Dilemma

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God. Let be honest. I find much of Exodus and Judges really disturbing, with all the genocide, and death, and punishments. I've been trying to understand all this. Can you help me understand this better? Thanks, Tom

Musings

“Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.” Psalms‬ ‭137‬:‭9‬ ‭NIV

Today, I listened to a missionary from Cambodia share his story at church. He told us about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, which I had only learned about from history class. But his personal testimony was more powerful and moving than any textbook or Wikipedia article.

He was only seven years old when his family was torn apart by the communist revolutionaries. He and other children were forced to work in the rice fields, where they witnessed unspeakable atrocities and genocide. His words made me feel sick to my stomach, and I could sense the same reaction from everyone else in the room. It was hard to imagine how anyone could do such evil things to fellow human beings.

But then, a disturbing thought crossed my mind. Why did we, as Christians, feel so appalled by this story, but not by the stories of God commanding the Israelites to wipe out entire nations in the Old Testament? How could we justify and celebrate the slaughter of the Canaanites, the Amalekites, the Midianites, and others, when we would condemn it in any other context, ancient or modern?

I know this is a controversial and complex issue, and there are different opinions and interpretations among scholars and believers. Some may argue that God had a good reason for ordering those genocides, or that they did not happen exactly as the Bible describes them. But regardless of the answer, I think we should at least acknowledge the moral tension and the ethical dilemma that these stories pose. In my fifty years of being in the church, I have never heard a teacher address this problem honestly and sensitively. Instead, they seem to accept these stories uncritically and even make them into children’s entertainment, like the Veggie Tales episode about the fall of Jericho.

I feel very confused and conflicted, because we often talk about God’s love and mercy, but we ignore or rationalize the violence and cruelty that He apparently sanctioned or inflicted in the past. How can we reconcile these two aspects of God’s character and nature?

The common answer that I hear is that God is both holy and loving, both just and gracious, both wrathful and compassionate. He has different sides or modes, depending on the situation and the people involved. But this answer does not satisfy me, because it makes God seem like a split personality, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. How can the same God who is so good and kind be also so harsh and cruel? How can He love us unconditionally, but also kill us mercilessly?

I do not want to impose my own perspective or expectations on God. He may be beyond my comprehension and logic, and that is His prerogative, and I accept Him as he is. But I also do not want to accept the easy or convenient explanations that the church often gives. I want to wrestle with the hard questions and the contradictions that I see in the Bible and in the world. I think this is the only way to grow in my faith and understanding of God. And I think this is what this generation of people needs and wants from us as well. We need to be honest and humble about the challenges and the mysteries that we face, and not pretend that there are no conflicts or doubts.

Belief, a More Nuanced Framework

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God. When I was younger, belief seemed like such a simple concept. But the more I think about belief, the more complicated it gets for me. I always thought I could decide to believe, but now it feels like my ability to believe or not believe is largely outside of my control. It seems like my genetics, personality, and upbringing are very important and I had no control over any of this. Can you help me understand? Thanks, Tom.

Musings

I read recently that evangelical Christianity is primarily defined by beliefs, which seemed obvious. Big Duh. What blew my mind was that not all religions are defined by beliefs. Some are more defined by actions and culture. Having lived in an evangelical bubble forever, I never even considered this distinction.  

This got me thinking more about beliefs. In evangelicalism we like to ask, “Are you a believer?” This is the question that bifurcates the world into the in crowd and out crowd. In evangelicalism people choose to believe and follow Christ. But can we really choose to believe?  

I believe things after evaluating the data I have against my experience, knowledge, and personality. I cannot change my belief after that evaluation any more than I can change the size of my ski jump nose. Until the facts or my knowledge or my experience or my personality change my belief cannot change.  

Furthermore, I do not think belief is a simple, yes or no. I think we can understand belief better representing it by a 2 by 2 matrix consisting of belief and non-belief against want to and do not want to.  

The person that believes and wants to believe is a happy person. I call this person the happy Christian. They feel good believing in Jesus and from their evaluation of the data they do believe Jesus. They are internally in harmony.  

The person that does not believe yet wants to believe is like many of those that are deconstructing their faith. I call this person a sad secularist. Many people grew up in the faith and want it all (or at least the “good” parts) to be true, but the worlds of science and academia make it difficult to believe in all the evangelical claims. But people cannot force themselves to believe any more than I can change Trump into a nice person. And so, they are internally conflicted. I think of a friend with a Christian family and friends. They all want her to believe, and she wants to believe but so far, she does not.  

The person that believes but does not want to has heard certain things so many times they cannot imagine them being false. However, for whatever reason, they do not feel comfortable with those beliefs. Perhaps they are offended by some of their beliefs. So, the people feel trapped in a religious prison. And so, they are internally conflicted as well. I call this person the sad Christian. 

The person that does not believe and does not want to is a happy person. I call this person a happy secularist. They are internally harmonious.  

Faith purports to move people from being a sad secularist to a happy Christian. In faith, the sad secularist tries to override their actual beliefs and change them to match what we want them to be. Since belief is what gets us into the in crowd and belief changes our eternal destiny, there is a lot riding on this faith. For some people, it is a fake it til you make it exercise. The actual belief is not there, but faith can be stirred up, so we believe that we believe, even if we truthfully struggle with the belief. (Sorry about that tongue twister.) Ideally, in that context there is a new experience to show that faith to be well founded, and the actual belief follows as experience has changed. 

Unfortunately, you can easily get into a situation like the emperor's new clothes where many people, somewhere between sad secularist and happy Christian, cannot admit that their faith has not changed their actual beliefs. No one admits this and you think you are the only one struggling. You are isolated because belief is the differentiator, and you do not want to be in the out crowd. 

This reminds me of one of my favorite Bible verses. “Lord I believe. Help me with my unbelief.”  This verse gives words to the struggle many people have, and it is the cry for those sad secularists trying to become happy Christians.  

I feel like I spent a lot of time in this gray middle between sad secularist and happy Christian. I kept pumping up the faith to keep in the happy Christian place pretending my beliefs had followed my faith when in fact some had not and could not. I segregated the mechanical engineer-like critically thinking part of me from the spiritual part of me because I wanted to believe fully and was afraid to let all of me comingle. This is a form of belief management. 

Belief management is used to keep ourselves or someone we care about in the happy Christian part of the matrix. Assuming I am correct that beliefs are only a function of the data in and the nature of the human, belief management is managing the data and the human. Many of us Christians live in a state of fear about this, and so we limit the data we receive, and our loved ones receive in order to help support their belief. Additionally, we home school (which we did), and attend Sunday school, and youth group, and go to Christian College to train ourselves so that our nature processes the data we receive in a way to supports belief. Is that right? Actually, it is not all right or all wrong.  

Since 2016, the bifurcating wall inside me crumbled and since then I’ve be deluged with data and it's confusing, messy, and it challenges my faith. But I think I am a stronger, better person and believer having opened my eyes to the entire world. While not every deconstruction leads to reconstruction, I appreciate that I am no longer living in fear that there is a fact around the corner that will surprise me and steal all my faith. It seems that living in fear, even fear of “losing one’s salvation,” is not a healthy or Christian way to live. Ironically, we speak a lot of trusting Jesus, but one of the things we struggle with is trusting Him with data and our own status as a Christian. 

I come away with these thoughts: 

• We should have a more nuanced understanding of belief so that we can be more authentic with each other and help each other so people do not struggle in isolation 
• Admit we do not have the power to arbitrarily change our beliefs and give the fear of wrong beliefs to God exemplifying the idea, “Lord I believe, help me with my unbelief.” 
• Move away from a life of fear trusting God to connect with us where we are, even if you are a skeptical engineer.