When Theology Becomes Idolatry

The theme of idolatry is explicit and relentless in the Old Testament. “There is only one God, worship Him alone” is the repeated refrain. Today, if idolatry is addressed at all in Christian circles, it is usually reduced to pagan or animistic worship or undue materialism, although there is little specificity as to how much materialism is undue!

Concurrently reading Isaiah and a novel recounting pagan beliefs a number of years back brought me to a deeper understanding of the insidious nature of our idolatry today. Although most of us would understand the idea of appeasing the gods and doing things like sacrificing something or someone to make them happy, it is the hidden agenda that is really the problem. Anything I do in order to get any “god/God” to do what I want is idolatry, and possibly it’s closely related neighbour, witchcraft. It is about control. And that is the root of our problem. Rather than allowing God (as the omnipotent, omniscient Creator) to have control over what goes on in and around our lives, we want to tell Him how to do it, and what we want. This is also the basis of the “works”, spoken of in the New Testament, by which we might try to make God love us more, or at least, not smite us.

So where do I get off suggesting that our theology could actually be idolatry?

As I read forums and hear people speak, I struggle at times with the surety of some that they have the “right theology” and further, that anyone who believes differently is condemned and maybe even of the devil. Quite possibly a few, if they have read this far, may already be condemning me in that same way. 

The problem I have, though, is not that I disagree with those beliefs necessarily. It is more that when we think we have arrived and know it all, we are in grave danger of making our personal understanding our god. We can wrap God/god up in a neat box and say “this is what He is like; this is what He likes/doesn’t like; this is how you have to behave/what you have to do to please Him”. And basically, we then condemn anyone who doesn’t agree with us one hundred percent, or has had a different experience of God. And I would suggest that this condemnation comes from ‘liberals’ as much as ‘fundamentalists’.

It is at this point that I am again and again reminded of the Jews in Jesus’ day and how sure they were of what Messiah would look like, what He would do, and how neatly they had packaged their faith. Jesus was not what they were expecting or looking for. In fact He offended many of them precisely because He refused to conform to their theology.

Again, we see this theme through both the Old and New Testaments; God never seems to do the same thing twice. In fact, it has been suggested that Moses lost his opportunity to get to the Promised Land because he second guessed God as doing that same thing again with getting water from the rock (Numbers 20:1-12). Jesus healed a number of blind people and crippled people, but we see Him spitting in mud, forgiving sins and simply touching people to bring that healing. There was no “one size fits all”. I like to think that this is because of our tendency to “formulise” everything: “This is how you do it”.

More than anything, God wants us to have a relationship with Him where we are dependent on Him, where we look to Him in confidence that He knows best, rather than growing in confidence of our own ability to follow a formula. We also tend to neglect the reality that each of us needs our healing and growth to come in a different way, as each of us is unique. Our experiences, good and bad, our personality, our family history, all these go together to bring us to the point we are today. This is so complex that only God could possibly know what is required to bring us to wholeness in Him.

Our desire for expediency, efficacy and orderliness steers us back toward programs and processes. Although these can be helpful and valuable, ultimately they can only be loose packing around our journey or we ascribe them more authority and power than God. It is only God working through these as He chooses that gives them any potential; we must submit them to Him consistently, or we elevate them higher than they deserve.

Doctrine, orthodoxy and dogma all come from the same root. It is about beliefs and about opinions, and as much as we would like to get it “right” in our theology, we are finite and God is not, so at best our theology is restricted or partial. And there is a very fine line between doctrine and dogma and it is often very blurry. In addition, in our desire to be precise and unambiguous, we can lose sight of the limits of our finiteness, and so we discredit that which others see from their different perspective.

This does not mean that we should accept every different understanding without question. We still need to be discerning. However, when we listen to others with one ear and God with the other, I think we might find that they are in tune more often than we realise. And in the end, no doctrine, creed or theology will give us complete understanding of God. This only grows and develops as our relationship with God deepens. The question is whether we will remain open and trusting enough to allow Him to reveal to us those things that challenge and confront us up to the next level of relinquishment or whether we are happy to set up camp where we are comfortable and can remain more or less in control.

“In that twilight zone of...double standard, orthodoxy is really just a word for my doxy. Heterodoxy means everyone else’s doxy.”

Hywel Williams; Let Us All Err and Stray; The Guardian (London, UK); Jul 8, 2003.

Up close and too personal

Thank you. 

How could two such innocuous, commonplace, ordinary words confront me so much? And yet, that is where I found myself yesterday. Why are you thanking me? I didn't. come.. for...   you...    

Or did I?

Yesterday I joined my first protest march. It was in support of refugees and asylum seekers. Listening to speeches and the stories personally shared by three asylum seekers, I found myself being stirred to a deeper level, both with compassion as well as a growing sense of outrage at the inhuman way these people are being treated. As impacting and confronting as this was, it was another incident that caught me by surprise and hit me at a totally new and different level.

As we walked through the city, I saw some friends who are asylum seekers. We exchanged greetings and happiness at seeing each other there, and their immediate and automatic response to me was "Thank you so much for coming", in the sense that I had come to support them personally. And that was when the real confrontation hit me. My instinctive feeling was wondering why they were thanking me, my coming was separate to them, it wasn't about them...ouch! 

As I reflected on why I was feeling all this, I realised how selfish some of my actions are. Going to the rally was about me, about my frustration and inability to affect change, and a desire to have an outlet for that. Now, don't get me wrong. I am happy to support asylum seekers in whatever way I can, but there is also a level of being comfortable in that. As long as I can keep it at arms length, that I can go home afterwards and put it back in the "manageable" place I am happy to help. 

My friends' thanks at such a personal level changed that. This is about real people who are not me. In turn, this confronts me about my own lack of real compassion. Will I allow myself to feel and share the very real pain of my friends, and that so many others are going through and what does that look like? It is one thing to try to fix the situation others are in, to try to support and care for them, but am I prepared to sit in and with their pain? Will I let it touch me to the point where I start to hurt as they hurt? Am I prepared to identify with them?

Two stories of Jesus weeping come to mind. The first is when He arrived at Bethany (John 11), and saw all the people mourning the loss of their brother and friend, Lazarus. Jesus was so moved with compassion for their grief that He also wept. The second is when He is approaching Jerusalem for the final time before His death, and He looks over that city and weeps for it as the seat of Jewish faith, representing His people (Luke 19:41). Jesus saw the reality of people's pain and loss at both a personal level as well as a societal level, and He allowed that grief to touch Him to the point of action that made a difference. For Lazarus and his friends and family, it meant another opportunity at life. And I guess within His own death, it means another opportunity at life for all of us.

I am aware of a tendency in myself to separate my emotions from others by rationalisation, not in a blaming or uncaring way, but one that says "that is their journey, their road to walk".  It is a way of coping, of not having compassion overload, but I wonder whether it also leads to a lack of action? This is one of the things that surprised me at the rally, also. The lack of passion. I was expecting chants and rally calls, but most people simply strolled down the road chatting. A number had their banners and placards, but even then probably half of those were advertising proclaiming who they were. Where was the passion? Where was the outrage? And at what point will we take our argument to the next level, where we actually start to force some change? Or don't we care that much?

Walter Brueggemann's observations in The Prophetic Imagination seem very pertinent to this. He talks of the problems of affluence and satiation. What it basically boils down to is that when a society is well fed and has their material needs met, there is a lack of ability to even recognise coming doom, much less to raise passion to help someone else living that doom. As long as my needs are met today and tomorrow, what do I really care? Apathy sets in, and this is pretty obvious in our society. Standing up for injustice in our communities and elsewhere is simply not a priority. 

For me, I am confronted with why I have not bothered to spend half an hour writing a letter to my local MP. I am wondering what else I can do to make myself more of a pest, to show our government that this issue is not going to lay down and die, we are not going to give up. But most of all, I want to spend some more time reflecting on how I can allow myself to connect with other people's pain, to make my compassion personal.

Finding Comfort in the Desert

There was a point in my healing journey where I likened it to being dropped in the middle of a field full of thorns. There was no avoiding it, whichever way I turned would be painful. Facing and dealing with those things in my past that were keeping me there (in my past) was not a comfortable place to be. But I wasn't comfortable where I was, either, hence the move.

Over a period of time I had developed strategies to manage and deal with my negative perceptions of myself, including a great big wall of self-protection, and while this was, at some level, effective at keeping the bad at bay, it was not living. More significantly, it kept everything and everyone out. It was a place of isolation and desolation. Like the proverbial child with my fingers in my ears, singing “lalalalala I can’t hear you”, with my eyes tightly shut, I could pretend that all was well. Except that it wasn't.

More recently, I saw another aspect of this game of pretence that again, is about self-protection, but this time against disappointment and disillusionment with what God is doing (or not).

We are in the midst of a series looking at wilderness experiences at church. The other week, our pastor finished with the idea that we can try to make our wilderness experience more comfortable. Being the bad girl that I am, I immediately got a picture of myself sitting in the desert in my comfy armchair with my feet up, a nice cool drink and the air conditioner going full bore. 

The problem was, though, that I could see some truth in it. Having been in the waiting room for quite some time, there is a little (ok, maybe a lot) of tendency to give up and stop expecting to ever get to the Promised Land. After all, every time it looks like we are about to move, I pack up and get ready to go, only to take one or two steps and stop again, unpack and settle in for some more waiting. And so, I may as well be comfortable while I wait.

At this point, I can hear all the answers starting to rev up. My husband’s favourite is the “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” I am also well aware of my proclivity to focus on the situation instead of God. I loved a comment in a discussion group the other day about Ezekiel’s dry bones. The point was that too often we focus on the dead, dry bones instead of what God is doing with them – breathing LIFE into them!

However, I leave these, and other thoughts about what we learn in the wilderness behind to focus back on the idea of our contentment here. As I reflected on my picture of myself and my creature comforts in the desert, I wondered if there might not be some truth in the idea that many of our “churches” may be living in this place too. What gets us into this position?

Imagine what it was like for the Israelites after 40 years. There was a whole generation that had never known anything but the wilderness. Relocating to the Promised Land was scary, confronting, moving into the great unknown. Coming back to my earlier point, we know how to operate in the wilderness, how to survive, how it works. As much as we dream of and talk about all the possibilities and excitement of the Promised Land, we are not sure that we want to let go of our security of the known, as ordinary and barren as it is.

To make the point blatant, I have heard people say (and read it elsewhere), that the church cannot expect to operate in the ways that it did back in the book of Acts, and even that God does not move in those ways any more. Some will go as far as to say that gifts such as prophecy, healing, tongues and their interpretation, miracles and so on were only for that time, and that now we have the Bible, we don’t need those things anymore. 

On the other hand, most people I know would disagree vehemently with these thoughts. But perhaps we dress up our wilderness a little differently. It might be rituals and traditions, or maybe it is up to the minute music and polished performances and the latest technology. Let's do what we can to hide from the idea that we not quite in the Promised Land yet. 

However, even when we do operate from a position where we like the idea of seeing God’s Kingdom and life breaking out in wonderful, obvious, abundant ways, I wonder whether, when it boils down to it, it can all be a bit confronting, a bit disconcerting. And because we cannot control it, much less understand it, we would rather step back into the wilderness, where, although it is pretty boring and nothing much spectacular happens, it is predictable and comfortable. Well, almost.

I thirst

Our region has been going through a particularly dry spell more recently. Adding some very high temperatures to this, even in my generally shady and moist part of the world plants have been shrivelling and dying, leaves are burnt brown on the bushes, and my soul feels the same, like it is so dry it is about to crack.

The other day as I read a friend's blog* about rain and listened to the beautiful song she has written, I had one of those flashes of insight, this time about the idea of desert experiences. In the past, I have usually linked desert experiences to being personally spiritually dry, to feeling disconnected from God. However, I saw then that it can just as easily be about experiencing the spiritual dryness of the world.

As I watch and listen to all that is going on in our world, I can easily fall into despair. "When, O Lord, when will You bring Your justice?" 

I read words in the Bible like "You heavens above, rain down righteousness [which can be interpreted justice]; let the clouds shower it down. Let the earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness grow with it..." (Is 45:8) and "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." (Matt 5:6), and my soul cries out "Yes, Lord, bring it on!"

From the issues of slavery and sexual slavery, to religious wars, hatred and violence, to the treatment of those seeking asylum in our own country, to youth suicide, cyber bullying, not to mention the inequality we see both at home, but more particularly across the nations, and the state of our environment, I find the sickness of our world soul destroying and depressing. And yes, I can make a difference where I am, but there are times it hardly seems enough, hardly seems worth it.

And so comes the dryness, the drought of justice, of God's righteousness reigning and ruling. The tug of war between the expansion of light and the overwhelming, suffocating darkness seems to inch then sway ever more strongly in the direction of darkness. And while, in the comfort of my western, civilised life, it is easy to say it is because we have rejected God in favour of our own strength and intelligence, that does not fix the problems of those who are increasingly closer to me as my circles of interaction continue to widen.

Today was the World Day of Prayer. Perhaps it is no accident that the theme this year is "Streams in the Desert". As we went through the liturgy, so much related back to the theme of a plentiful supply of water in places where there has been none, bringing an abundance of life, health, and prosperity. Verses were included such as Is 44:3 "For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground",  Is 35:6b "Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert" and Is 41:18 "I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs."

These verses bring both longing and hope to my soul. Longing for the day when God's justice will be poured out on the nations, bringing some sort of equality and hope for all people. And hope, because as I have seen Him fulfill His promises to me personally, I have hope that He will do what He has promised for the world. 

But I live in that place of tension between the now and the not yet, between the promise and its fulfillment, and it causes me tension between faith and doubt. What if it never changes, if it only ever gets worse? And I have to cling to the hope that, just as He has not let me down in so many ways, there is also the witness of so many others through the ages, that He hasn't let them down either, and that in His sovereign timing, He will fulfill all His promises and His justice and righteousness will reign on earth. 

And maybe, just maybe, part of the waiting is for His body here to rise up again to do their part.

"But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!"  Amos 5:24

*http://notesandodes.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/rain/ 

"I didn't hear you" ...or "Selective Deafness"

The classic excuse for kids not doing as they're asked would probably have to be the "I didn't hear you" excuse. I am pretty sure I have used it reasonably often myself. At a personal level, Mr Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest) has been challenging me on this over the last few days in my relationship with God. If I didn't hear You ask me to do this, then its not disobedience, is it?

It has got me thinking about the variety of subtle means I use to enhance my deafness. It can be a simple as decreasing the amount of alone time with God, to carefully sculpting that time to be filled with activities that minimise my ability to hear. I can fill the time with worship and prayer and reading from devotionals or even other people. Or I may just be too busy to spend quiet time with Him at all. Sometimes, it is just that I straight out don't like what I hear, so reject it out of hand. I am reminded of a friend who was struggling with not hearing from God on a certain topic. As we talked, I realised that the issue was not God's silence, but that He had already said something, and He hadn't changed His mind, much to the disappointment of my friend, who was looking for a different answer.

Another way I can dismiss what God is saying is to dismiss the messenger. This might be because I simply don't like them, they are not "spiritual" enough, or they have not always behaved in ways I deem appropriate in the past (or in the case of Oswald, they have been dead for nearly one hundred years - surely he is no longer relevant?). I know that God has challenged me by who He uses to bless me or speak into my life on multiple occasions. It is not always easy to respond in a positive manner to God, when my emotions are being prickled, but maybe that is also part of His point. I need to deal with my attitude to others as well.

As I reflect on this, I am aware of the fact that I also have some 'no go' zones in my time with God. My response may be as obvious as "I will think about that later" to simply not allowing certain topics to rise to full consciousness. If I don't ask the Holy Spirit to reveal these things to me, it can be quite easy (at times) to ignore anything God might have to say on the topic.

For me, the antidote to all this is accountability to another human. At the moment, I am finding a spiritual director a good start. In other scenarios it can be a spouse or close friend, or even a life group. I have to put myself in a place, though, where I can't wriggle away from what God is saying. And then, of course, there is the question of whether I will chose to obey Him when I do allow what He is saying to penetrate. But perhaps that is a question for another blog.

Is God Real?

Like many others, I am happy to have a good, robust discussion on what the Bible has to say about certain topics. Unlike some, I can’t use Hebrew and Greek to back up or oppose many points. However, as I have delved into the world of various online forums, I have to say I struggle with the definitive way in which some seem to put their point of view about what the Bible says. Not that I want this blog to be about what truth is and what is not and how we might read and interpret the Bible. Far from it. What I would like to propose, though, is that we can know a stack about God without being any different, fundamentally, to the person who knows nothing about Him.

I don’t think I am by any means the first to suggest this. Just the other day, I was reading Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost For His Highest, when I came across this: 

“When a man fails in personal Christian experience, it is nearly always because he has never received anything. The only sign that a man is saved is that he has received something from Jesus Christ. Our part as workers for God is to open men’s eyes that they may turn themselves from darkness to light; but that is not salvation, that is conversion – the effort of a roused human being. I do not think it is too sweeping to say that the majority of nominal Christians are of this order; their eyes are opened, but they have received nothing. Conversion is not regeneration...When a man is born again, he knows that it is because he has received something as a gift from Almighty God and not because of his own decision. People register their vows, and sign their pledges, and determine to go through, but none of this is salvation. Salvation means that we are brought to a place where we are able to receive something from God on the authority of Jesus Christ...” 

Another book I read some time back was Your Kingdom Come, by Daniel Kolenda, where he states,  

"A person who hears the gospel should have an experience that needs an explanation, not just an explanation of something that is in need of an experience...And the demonstration of God’s power should be the norm”.

And I guess from this you can see where I am heading.

A number of years back I came to the conclusion that if all I have to offer to others from my faith is a “nice life”, then I really don’t have much to offer. Many people already have that and don’t need faith in God to get there. I came to the conclusion that evidence of the power of God in my life had to be the difference. 

This topic also takes me back to conversations with my father in my mid-twenties. It came to a point where I felt as though every time we got together, he would be telling me about all these people who had shown that the Christian faith was a fraud or based on wrong beliefs and lies. One time, I was tired of it, so I (gently) told him that I felt as though he was constantly trying to persuade me not to believe what I believed, but the problem was that he would not be able to. I said that my relationship and experience of God was not something that I could be talked out of because it was simply that. My experience. I cannot “un-have” that experience. For some reason this put an end to those sorts of discussions. I would like to that it was because he realised my faith was not about following form and tradition but about a real relationship with God.

And so, I come back to where I started. I know that the history of the Church over the past few hundred years has included the battle to prove itself equal to “science”, and hence the desire for “proof”. However, I will come back again and again to the idea that experience will always trump a good argument – you cannot take my experience from me. You may choose not to believe I have had that experience (like a friend whose two broken wrists were miraculously healed just days after they were shown as broken on x-rays, and were confirmed healed by the second lot of x-rays – the doctor simply couldn't cope and told my friend to go away), or you may like to try to provide more “rational” reasoning of what happened, but I know differently, because it is my experience.

I also realise that experience is subjective and can be misinterpreted. However, without personal experience, faith is very dry. And besides, I further believe that God is faithful to His promise to send His Holy Spirit to teach and guide us in all things (John 14:16, 26 for example) and also that His sheep know His voice and follow Him (John 10:4). One of the biggest arguments for theology and doctrine is the fear of people being led astray, or leading others astray if they don’t have “good” theology and doctrine. However, I would argue that this is not particularly good theology. If God has promised His Holy Spirit, do we not trust Him to convict, teach and guide His people? Or does He only use (imperfect) human agents now?

I have titled this blog “Is God Real?”, because sometimes I wonder if for some, their theology is way more important than God to them. If we only ever talk about God in an abstract, theoretical way, have we actually been impacted and changed by Him? Tell me about the reality of God in your life and you give me something I cannot argue with.

Is God really faithful?

The other day a chance piece of information about the status of a marriage came across my path. Because infidelity had been an issue, it got me thinking about faithfulness. Having been through a similar circumstance myself, I wondered how you could ever completely trust the other again. From my own perspective, I think I would want to see a significant level of repentance and personal transformation to ensure it didn't occur again.

As my mind meandered through all this, I reflected on the nature of faithfulness. What does it mean to be faithful to someone? In marriage, we usually make this about sexual intimacy, but there are a myriad of small ways we can be unfaithful to the vows we have made. But even this became a side issue to the picture I was getting. In thinking about faithfulness, pretty quickly I was onto the topic of our relationship with God. After all, the Bible is filled with statements about God’s faithfulness to us, and (often) our unfaithfulness to Him.

What do we mean by God’s faithfulness?

Often we use it as an encouragement when someone is going through some sort of difficulty: “Don’t worry, it will work out ok. God is faithful.” Usually we use this to mean that He is faithful to His promises (Romans 8:28 is a good example), and that He will help us or fix the circumstances. Sometimes, though, we go as far as meaning that God will be faithful to us,  that He will do what we want (e.g. give us the ‘desires of our hearts’).

However, as I thought further, I realised that this kind of thinking causes big issues, particularly with those who question faith in God. Many ask questions along the lines of “if God is good, loving, kind, merciful, etc, etc, then why does bad stuff happen?’ We have lots of intricate arguments or platitudes to answer this, but generally I find them at best weak if not circular. At this point I had a sudden flash of insight. 

God’s faithfulness is not about us. He is not faithful to us, as such, but He is faithful to Himself.

God’s faithfulness is about His integrity. It is about Him being true to Himself, true to His character, true to His nature. 

Two things follow on from this. The first is a reminder of a story I read about a Christian student and an atheist professor. The professor was trying to use logic to discredit the student, but was beat at his own game. The important part of the story to this topic, however, was the student’s astute understanding of physics that made a lot of sense of the issue of God as Creator. 

Many people ask the question, “If God created everything, why did He create the bad stuff, too?” As this student pointed out however, much of what we term ‘bad stuff’ is not actually something created. Rather than existing, they are in fact an absence of something. In physics terminology there are a number of things we cannot measure. For example, there is no such thing as cold, it is simply an absence of heat; and darkness doesn’t really exist, it is simply an absence of light. Biologically speaking death is an absence of life. If we continue on this theme spiritually, we come to the idea that evil, then, is the absence of good. If we then see God’s nature and character as being the manifestation and expression of all that is good (the positive form), then hell, and the kingdom of darkness is simply a place or positioning where there is an absence or lack of all these things. On the other hand, where these things are breaking out, there you will find the Kingdom of God.

The second point is about integrity. Integrity has to do with wholeness. Again with the physics! If an object loses its integrity, it loses strength and often cannot be repaired to be used at full capacity again, if at all. As I have discussed a number of times with students, if we lose our integrity with others, it too is really difficult to get back. If we do something that damages our integrity, shows that we cannot be trusted, it is probably one of the most difficult things to repair. It is hard to forget when someone breaks our trust. Even though we might forgive, it damages the strength of the relationship. God’s integrity, however, cannot, by definition, be broken. If it were, He would cease to be perfect, He would cease to be God. It is that perfect integrity that makes Him who He is. And so, He must be faithful to His integrity.

If we call ourselves part of His Body, it leaves us with the question of the impact His integrity and faithfulness have on us and our relationship with both Him and others.