My Journey, Part 3: Questions multiply

This is part 3 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

By late 2011, my senior year of college, the misconceptions that had grown into my Christian faith had borne their fruit and undermined ways in which I was "walking with God" that, in retrospect, I can see that I was largely just doing to conform to peoples' Christian expectations of me. The passionate worship, fascination with the latest releases from "Christian" bands, casting around of "Christian" terms I only dimly understood like "eternal perspective" and "casting vision", and especially the ground-level evangelism I saw a lot of in Cru began to fall by the wayside. I had never managed to connect these things to my active faith, and I found that my heart wasn't in them. Rather than dismissing this uneasiness and saying that the Christian life doesn't depend on feelings, I decided to start paying attention to things I did as a Christian that felt forced or unnatural. A great deal of what I did and talked about in relation to my Christian faith was disconnected from what I actually believed, and consequently less real to me; this was the fundamental realization I'd had in my small group.

So I decided to get off the Christian bandwagon (wasn't Christianity all about getting off the bandwagon and being 'countercultural' anyway?) and see what was left. I considered this an undesirable and temporary compromise. I still wanted to conform to the expectations of my Christian circles; I simply refused to do so blindly. I remember having this anxious sense of expectation for the one realization or teaching that would make it all 'click' and help me to be a content, intellectually fulfilled, actively-walking evangelical like my friends. My own belief in the 'gospel' was not in question. I believed it was the ultimate truth by which I was supposed to live, and if it didn't seem to connect with the evangelical expressions of faith I saw as normative, that was because of a deficiency in my own understanding of it. Once I became aware of the chasm between my internal and external faith, I wanted to correct whatever problems in my internal faith were keeping it from making sense so that I could live it out properly.

There were deficiencies in my internal faith, beyond anything I had imagined. The process by which God pointed them out to me and brought me past them would be much, much longer and harder than I expected.

In early 2012, I started having big doubts about God's character based on parts of the Bible I was reading. (Actually, the first such doubt happened in the infancy of my blog over the bizarre, troubling incident recounted in 1 Kings 13, but I don't think it continued to bother me) Right before I started my big series on God's providence (and partly fueling my desire to know more about it), a study on John Calvin's Institutes I was partaking in gave me some pretty big questions. Specifically, as Calvin was defending his view of God's sovereignty even over evil, he brought up two passages which immediately began to trouble me and give me doubts about God's essential moral qualities.

God's goodness

First, 2 Samuel 16:5-13 and 19:16-23. These passages are set during and after King David's struggle for the kingdom against his insurrectionist son, Absalom. David is fleeing Jerusalem after Absalom has staged a bloodless coup, when suddenly a man from the house of Saul named Shimei comes out and begins cursing David, throwing stones at him, and claiming that the coup is God's revenge on David for usurping Saul's place on the throne. Abi'shai, one of David's guards, offers to take off his head. David's response to him is what helped ignite my next crisis of faith (emphasis added):

But the king said, "What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeru'iah? If he is cursing because the LORD has said to him, 'Curse David,' who then shall say, 'Why have you done so?'" And David said to Abi'shai and to all his servants, "Behold, my own son seeks my life; how much more now may this Benjaminite! Let him alone, and let him curse; for the LORD has bidden him.

David seems to think that the Lord has told Shimei to curse him. Perhaps he is feeling regretful for his role in the downfall of Saul and his house. The problem is that later, after David reclaims the throne, Shimei comes to David to apologize and, in 19:19-20, says that he sinned by cursing David. Once I had put these two together, I could not undraw the conclusion:

God had told Shimei to curse David.

Shimei's cursing of David was sin.

God told Shimei to sin.

The tapestry of my understanding of God's goodness began to unravel. If God tells anyone to sin, He puts them in an impossible situation. They must either obey Him by sinning, or sin by disobeying Him. God telling someone to sin is the same as Him causing that person to sin. And if God causes anyone to sin, then His "righteous" anger against sin and claims to moral perfection become absurd, meaningless, a transparent fiction. This was not strictly a logical contradiction in the Bible; it was a moral contradiction. The Bible's teaching didn't undermine itself, but the supposedly 'biblical' image I had of God as morally perfect and worthy of worship. A God who causes people to sin and then 'justly' has wrath on them for sinning is not worthy of worship.

God's truthfulness

The second passage is 1 Kings 22, especially verses 19-23. Ahab, the king of Israel, is trying to convince Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah (this is after the division of the kingdom) to go to war with him against Syria. Jehoshaphat, being considerably more morally upright than Ahab, asks him to "inquire first for the word of the Lord". (22:5) So Ahab gathers four hundred of his prophets together, who tell him to "Go up; for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king." (v. 6) Jehoshaphat is unsatisfied by these yes-men and asks if there is another prophet they can ask, so Ahab summons Micaiah, but reluctantly, "for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil." (v. 8) When summoned, Micaiah promises, "As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I will speak." Immediately after this, though, he seem to lie (or at least speak with deliberate sarcasm), pretending to agree with the other prophets, but Ahab realizes he isn't being serious and tells him to speak the truth. (Hadn't he just promised to do exactly that?) So Micaiah prophesies Ahab's downfall at the battle (v. 17), and supports this with a vision of heaven (v. 19-23, emphasis added):

I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, 'I will entice him.' And the LORD said to him, 'By what means?' And he said, 'I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' And he said, 'You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go forth and do so.' Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has spoken evil concerning you.

The excuse that God is not technically lying because He tells an agent to do so for Him wouldn't even hold up in a human courtroom. This passage completely flew in the face of verses that assert that God never lies (Num 23:19, Pro 30:5, Tts 1:2), and again it casts God's essential moral righteousness and trustworthiness in doubt. I blogged about my confusion in the interlude of my series on providence, concluding that God does not arbitrarily reject or lie to people but does so in response to our own rejection of Him, with the (seemingly contrary) intention to call us back to Him. In many ways it foresaw later conclusions I would come to, and it's one of my favorite posts I've written.

That troublesome Calvin...

Simply bringing these verses to my attention caused me considerable confusion and doubt, but Calvin made it even worse by "fearlessly" owning up to them, explaining that such is God's sovereignty that He actively uses evil to accomplish His purposes, which are beyond all human questioning or understanding.

The Christian, then, being most fully persuaded, that all things come to pass by the dispensation of God, and that nothing happens fortuitously, will always direct his eye to him as the principal cause of events, at the same time paying due regard to inferior causes in their own place. (Institutes 1.17.6)

So when David was assailed by Shimei with stones and curses, had he immediately fixed his eyes on the man, he would have urged his people to retaliate the injury; but perceiving that he acts not without an impulse from the Lord, he rather calms them. “So let him curse,” says he, “because the Lord has said unto him, Curse David.” (Institutes 1.17.8)

From other passages, in which God is said to draw or bend Satan himself, and all the reprobate, to his will, a more difficult question arises. For the carnal mind can scarcely comprehend how, when acting by their means, he contracts no taint from their impurity, nay, how, in a common operation, he is exempt from all guilt, and can justly condemn his own ministers. Hence a distinction has been invented between doing and permitting because to many it seemed altogether inexplicable how Satan and all the wicked are so under the hand and authority of God, that he directs their malice to whatever end he pleases, and employs their iniquities to execute his Judgments. The modesty of those who are thus alarmed at the appearance of absurdity might perhaps be excused, did they not endeavour to vindicate the justice of God from every semblance of stigma by defending an untruth. It seems absurd that man should be blinded by the will and command of God, and yet be forthwith punished for his blindness. Hence, recourse is had to the evasion that this is done only by the permission, and not also by the will of God. He himself, however, openly declaring that he does this, repudiates the evasion. That men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on any thing but what he has previously decreed with himself and brings to pass by his secret direction, is proved by numberless clear passages of Scripture. (Institutes 1.18.1)

Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of his Judgments. God wills that the perfidious Ahab should be deceived; the devil offers his agency for that purpose, and is sent with a definite command to be a lying spirit in the mouth of all the prophets (1 Kings 22:20). If the blinding and infatuation of Ahab is a Judgment from God, the fiction of bare permission is at an end; for it would be ridiculous for a judge only to permit, and not also to decree, what he wishes to be done at the very time that he commits the execution of it to his ministers. (Institutes 1.18.1)

Despite my doubts, I knew beyond all uncertainty that I could never believe in Calvin's God—yet He seemed to be inescapably depicted in 2 Samuel 16 and 1 Kings 22. Even as I found 'logical' explanations for God's behavior in these verses, they felt unsatisfactory, as if I was simply explaining the Bible's words away rather than taking them seriously. And more doubts were soon to follow, especially as I started a biblical theology course at my church that would take me through the entire Bible.

The meta-question

As I read Genesis more critically as part of the course, I kept asking things like: Where did the other people in Genesis 4 come from? What is with all the bizarre, morally troubling side stories? If God 'remembers' someone, does that mean He'd forgotten them before? How did people become nations? What is Genesis about? And the questions didn't stop with Genesis; I began writing them down as I read them, and soon I had almost 30 such questions about my Old Testament reading, all adding to the cloud of doubt surrounding me. Even as I was able to deal with some of these (like swatting a seemingly endless cloud of flies), a higher-order, "meta-question" began to loom huge on my horizon. My journal entries speak for themselves (the various versions of the meta-question have emphasis added):

One of my biggest doubts about my faith is how much twisting of words it is founded on. [James Davison] Hunter wrote [in To Change the World] that God embodies a perfect connection between word and world, so why the linguistic acrobatics necessary to interpret the Bible? Why must I struggle with the Bible to establish its own knowability and truthfulness? (2012-9-14)

If the Bible really is true and consistent, why do we have to spend so much time and effort showing it to be so? (2012-9-19)

Do we also have to believe in the basic attributes of God, besides His existence, by faith—over and against counter-evidence from the Bible? My doubts are generally about God's moral attributes—things that make Him a “nice person”. … Is there something wrong with wanting God to be always compassionate, truthful, and just to everyone? ... More concisely, my doubt comes down to this: why does the Bible so often not say what it means? I've lost sight of the 'big picture' of the Bible that we keep emphasizing. All I see are a collection of tangentially-related stories. I seem to have lost the ability to screen out the evidence I dislike. (2012-9-20)

A year previous, I'd realized the disconnect between my internal and external faith. Now I was realizing a deeper disconnect between what I'd been told the Bible said (and how it said it) and what it actually seemed to say. When my class did address these kinds of questions and doubts, I often found the proposed solutions unhelpful. The focus of the class was deliberately on the "big picture", the story the Bible told, and strange verses here and there weren't about to get in the way of that. But I couldn't just brush aside what I was reading if it seemed to go against this big picture. I wrote:

I refuse to accept that God is less morally perfect than I can imagine. … I think what I dislike is 'interpreting' a difficult verse merely by explaining the larger picture it's supposed to fit into, with minimal attention paid to what the verse itself actually means. (2012-9-21)

I began to be dissatisfied with what I saw as the overconnectedness of the class' hermeneutic. By viewing Scripture as a single story that was supposed to be connected to a single center (Jesus), I felt that it failed to do justice to many (especially Old Testament) passages, reducing them to be "pointers" to Jesus even if it didn't seem feasible that they could have originally meant this. I thought that they should say something of value in their own right, in the context in which they were originally written, and not make sense only in a context imposed on them by our hermeneutic. By reading the Old Testament through the "lens" of Christ, we seemed to lose sight of how the original audience would have read it.

For example, did ancient Hebrews really understand the "protoevangelium" in Genesis 3 as a promise to send Jesus to defeat sin and Satan and rescue the creation from a metaphysical curse? Or did the people of Judah, upon hearing Isaiah 53, immediately begin waiting patiently for a future Messiah to come and take away their sins via penal substitutionary atonement? I couldn't see the value of the whole idea of "typology"; it seemed like an idle game of word association and arbitrarily finding connections that weren't intrinsic to the text. Though I didn't know what dispensationalism was at the time, I was pretty strongly learning towards a dispensational hermeneutic (especially in the emphasized part), seeking to defend the meaning of the Old Testament in its own context against what I saw as unjustified impositions from the New Testament.

Even if the 'protoevangelium' could be construed to have parallels with Jesus for us now, the Hebrews would have had no inkling of it then. We should only focus on what it meant back then; any extra perspective we have now is just an 'easter egg'—as if God described the curse with a wink. Maybe it is a symbol, but that isn't the point—the text itself is, not its role as a symbol. … It's like two different ways of reading the Bible—top-down or bottom-up. (2012-10-16)

I sought a more unified way to read the Bible, one that would help me to tie together the biblical story instead of multiplying my questions. Fortunately, this was pretty much the point of the class I was taking at my church. It called us to read all of the Bible in light of the gospel; the saving work of Jesus was supposed  to be the unifying principle in which all of God's words found their purpose. I was convinced of the truth of this gospel, and I thought that a renewed and expanded understanding of it might be the key to resolving my profusion of doubts.

Unfortunately, it was around this time that the gospel I'd been hearing for years also stopped making sense to me.

My Journey, Part 2: Cracks Appear

This is part 2 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

Between my perceived dualism of my agency and God's, my laserlike focus on "relationship with God" or a "decision for Christ" as the be-all and end-all of Christian spirituality, and my rationalistic distortion of the faith, it was only a matter of time before something went wrong. You can't run the "Christian life" on such misconceptions any more than you can run a car on water. 2010 and 2011, for me, were marked by my first two major "crises" of doubt, which served to shatter these illusions, or at least begin their end.

Summer Project

The first signs of the aforementioned trouble started to appear when I was on Summer Project in Milwaukee, helpfully documented here about a month after it happened. Specifically, my conversionist take on my relationship with God and my dualistic view of how my agency and God's agency interact turned out not to work in actual ministry. I expected that if I believed the right things and took part in inner-city ministry, God would do amazing things through me, like I thought I'd been promised. But one evening, during the mens' Bible study as we were sharing ways we had seen God at work, I couldn't think of anything. The problem, I thought, lay with my faith—but how could that be? What was I doing or believing wrong? Wasn't it all about what God had done, not me? I journaled my confusion:

I want faith and I'm praying for faith but I'm not finding it and it can't be God's fault so it's my fault and I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Why am I the only one not seeing God at work? Why am I stagnating? Except I can't live for God inwardly or outwardly on my own. ... If I don't see Him at work in my life, am I being lazy or impatient? (2010-7-5)

I seemed to be interpreting John 15:5 to mean that I couldn't do anything of spiritual value on my own, which (in my flawed dualistic thinking) meant that I could expect it to happen completely apart from my own efforts. If things weren't working the way I'd hoped, there was nothing I could do (for "apart from me you can do nothing"); was my faith somehow wrong? Did I really have faith? Was Jesus really still the Lord of my life? Were His promises trustworthy?

Unfortunately, I didn't end up actually resolving that issue; I had to get back to my ministry, after all. I resolved to set aside my expectations of God and keep following Him even if He didn't seem to be doing anything through me, even if He seemed to make my life worse. I misinterpreted Job 13:15 ("Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him", actually part of Job's attempt to justify his case to God) and considered it my "life verse". At the time I considered this the big important faith decision I needed to set everything right (from my blog post: "I made an intentional decision to put my faith in Him"), the highlight of the whole project, but looking back I realize that I was simply denying my doubts, sweeping them under the rug and moving on. They wouldn't remain there forever. Nothing made any more sense to me then before; I just decided to keep going anyway, without really knowing why, thinking that this bold decision was an act of "faith".

2011 small group

But, of course, more episodes of doubt followed. The next came one night in 2011 during a meeting of my church small group. I have no idea what we were talking about; as was so often the case, my thoughts and questions led me on a trajectory that was far removed from the rest of the group. This doubt was overwhelming and confusing, as doubt so often is. As it began, I journaled (emphasis mine/original):

If we grow in relationship with Christ just to help other people know Him, that's circular and pointless. I want it to be more authentic, more real than that. What is the life of Christ? What is the death of Christ in us? ... So much of the time this seems like just idea manipulation, pointless exercises. How do I 'plug into' God and make sense of it? Works aren't the point. Emotions aren't the point. Knowing isn't the point. What is the point? Nothing matters. Except God. 

I'm struggling not to see [Christianity] as a different version of normal life with no substantive difference. ... I've suddenly realized how empty, meaningless most of my actions are day-to-day. I see it in others too. I'm just a shell of a life. Is anyone not a shell? People with Christ in their hearts. But what does that mean? I do have Christ, and I'm a shell. (2011-11-30)

The day after, I posted some brief thoughts on seeds and shells. The divide between my internal faith (the seed) and external faith (the shell) had become undeniable. Externally I did all these "Christian" things that didn't really make sense to me (like "know Christ" and evangelize people so they could "know Christ" and evangelize others), and then off in another part of myself I thought about my actual questions of faith and belief. But my belief and practice rarely conversed with each other; my thinking was disconnected from reality and my praxis was disconnected from any theoretical grounding. I had begun to feel this gap acutely.

In retrospect, this was inevitable and unsurprising. While I myself largely focused on thinking (and blogging) on matters of belief, in practice I largely just conformed to the expectations of what was "normal" for my Christian circles. As I realized this disconnect and tried to close it by connecting my thinking with my practice, I began to realize that many elements of how I lived as a "Christian" didn't make sense (like the seeming circular emphasis, especially of Cru, on the "point" of knowing Christ being to share Him with others, until I wasn't sure what else it actually meant). As I began to question more and more elements of my external faith by trying to connect them with my internal faith and being unable, I became less fervent and more ambivalent about living my faith out. I still inwardly believed "the gospel" as I'd been taught it, but I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with how I saw it lived out in American Christianity and how little this seemed to correlate with my own understanding. I wrote:

I want to get a good look at Christianity without the 'bandwagon-y” religion getting in the way. So often it's just about knowing the right answers and having the emotional experience—the head and the heart only. (2011-12-21) 

Christian theology is a beautiful study of the divine, but Christian praxis is riddled with contradictions. I desperately want to connect my everyday life to the eternal, to meaning outside of myself. I don't see how to do that in Christianity. (2011-12-22)

These critiques are not entirely fair; to an extent, I was projecting my own two-level conception of Christianity onto the church. I was simply unable to see things in a more integrated way, and I never got substantial help in doing this. It was also around this time that I dropped out of my personal involvement with Cru:

I dislike how normative Christian culture is. ...Is there pressure to 'add to' God's work? …You can't put Christianity into someone from outside. They can only accept Jesus into their heart—the center of their being. … I want to go deeper than [just acting like Cru people to fit in]—I really identified with and supported Cru's mission, but I think I did it all to please Cru, not God. I was a Christian as a lifestyle, as logic and a desire to be part of something, experience something [meaningful], but I only fleetingly connected my faith to my real needs that were instead met by shallow religious facsimiles. Is it wise to incentivize Christian events by what you will get out of them? There is such great pressure to accept the gospel now, I can see why it might not have time to 'drop down'. (2011-12-29)

There is a lot going on in this entry. My sense of Cru's ethos was something externally imposed stemmed, again, from the disconnect between how I internally processed and understood my faith and the ways that faith was 'supposed' to manifest, which I saw as normative. So I followed this ethos, but because of this disconnect it was "all to please Cru, not God". I also saw a conflict between perceived pressure to "accept the gospel" and allowing it to actually permeate you. I saw Cru as focusing much more on the former, for as many people as possible. All of these things were echoes of my desire to close the gaping chasm between my 'authentic' internal faith and 'inauthentic' external faith that had become evident in me.

As these doubts filled the gap between my internal and external faith, I increasingly withdrew from the manifestations of faith that I had previously participated in due to external pressure, but which no longer made sense to me. I expected to find a better way to live out my faith, a way which would be totally consistent with the glorious gospel I knew and "make sense" as I expected, and even to lead others to it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, looking where it has taken me), the doubt would go much deeper...

My Journey, Part 1: Back to the Beginning

This is part 1 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

When announcing my hiatus back in May, I mentioned (but deliberately did not elaborate on) a "new direction" to my journey of faith, which has put my beliefs in a "new and more promising state of flux". This is slightly inaccurate since in truth God didn't shift me into a new direction; I simply realized that the direction in which He has been leading me, besides leading me away from something, has also been leading me towards something. As I realized this, the previous direction I had been planning to take my series on the gospel became inadequate; some major rethinking was in order. Hence the hiatus.

To try and make sense of this development, to set it in its proper context (theologians are all about proper context), I did a fairly comprehensive survey of my journals, which span the last six years, in an attempt to trace and summarize the trajectory my faith has taken to where I am today. The result ended up being about 35,000 words, so I'm breaking it into about 13 posts which I hope to put out in relatively quick succession. So without further ado, back to what I believed in late high school/early college! (This is the continuation of my series on the gospel, I swear)

Looking back at my old journals, which begin shortly after I left high school, such is the difference that they could have been written by a different person. And I really was a different person back then, at least in how I thought about and lived my faith. I had some big, deep-seated misconceptions about what it meant, practically, to be a Christian that would set the direction for my journey in the years to come.

Dualism

As N.T. Wright explains in The New Testament and the People of God, "dualism" can mean a lot of different things, so I'll clarify my own usage of it here. By "dualism" I specifically mean a dualistic relationship between my agency and God's agency. That is, I believed that either I did something, or God did something for me, and that Christianity was, in some sense, 'about' ceasing to do things for ourselves and letting God do them for us, thereby 'trusting' Him rather than our own strength. One of my earliest journal entries shows this belief pretty clearly:

For a while I've been confused about the role of actions vs. faith in my spiritual life; if I'm to trust in God, does my current situation in life depend on my own actions or efforts? If it does things seem hopeless; if not, my free will seems useless. (2008-8-14)

I clearly saw a distinction between "trusting God", which was supposed to be at the heart of the gospel, and relying on my own actions or efforts, which was negatively associated with "religion". For example, one quote from a book about the beatitudes I've been going through says:

Christianity is about coming over and over again to rest in the life Jesus lived and the death that he died for you as a gift of sheer grace. Religion and morality turn Christianity into a system of achievement: "Do this, and you will live." But the beatitudes turn this on its head. In them we hear Jesus say, "I have done this, so you live."

It's not about what we're supposed to do, but what Jesus has done for us. The dichotomy between our agency (assumed to be fallen and impotent) and God's agency (assumed to be all-sufficient) is clear here. The gospel is about Jesus doing for and in us what we cannot (and should not try to) do for ourselves. He does the work, not us; He gets the glory, not us. So I don't think my dualistic thinking, however misguided it was, was or is entirely without support in the evangelical world.

The latter part of that journal entry also shows some of my early confusion about this kind of dualism: the dichotomy between our (useless, fallen) agency and God's (all-sufficient) agency also seems to necessitate a choice between despairing in our own strength or setting aside our free will to let God do everything. Or, trying to put them together, all we were supposed to do in our spiritual life was to somehow actively trust or rest in what He has done for you, as if the pure act of "trusting" apart from other action on our part made any sense. The Christian band Casting Crowns describes this paradox as "trying so hard to stop trying so hard". Seeing no alternative at the time, I assumed there was an answer to this question that I just didn't know yet.

A few other quotes to drive the point home:

Why should I serve God in something I enjoy and am good at? Aren't I supposed to rely on His strength, not mine? (2010-6-29)

Here I'm confused about another implication of my dualistic thinking: it seemed to turn the whole idea of "spiritual gifts" or God-given talents on its head. Doesn't relying on our own interest in or aptitude for something keep us from relying on God? Doesn't He get more glory for using someone totally unequal to the task, as He did with Moses, Gideon, David, and so many others? So shouldn't I seek to minister in ways I don't feel talented, gifted, or interested in, so He gets all the glory? (I'm not saying this is a well-developed evangelical teaching, this is just what I believed at the time, ostensibly as an implication of it)

Even during one of my major crises of doubt (more on that next time), I clung to this belief in dualism, in God working independently of me and my faith, for hope:

The strength of my faith is not what it once was. What we do is unimportant compared to what God has done for us. (2011-12-14)

I've heard that last sentence, or something basically equivalent to it, innumerable times in evangelical teaching.

Relationship with God

Related to dualism was a strong emphasis on my "relationship with God" (again, this was based on evangelical teaching I was hearing, or rather my interpretation and application of it). What I was hearing was that the point of "the gospel" was so that we could have a powerful, transformative, loving, personal relationship with God. This relationship was seen as equivalent to salvation itself (John 17:3). After all, "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion".

What I took from this kind of teaching was that everything in my spiritual life (and my life in general) depended on staying in right relationship with God. And I mean everything. In almost Buddhist fashion, I believed that this relationship was the solution to all of my problems; anything I was going through came down to some disruption in this relationship that needed to be repaired. The important thing wasn't directly confronting the problem, but fixing the relationship. I also thought of this relationship in dualistic terms: seek the face of God, reject the world and its temptations. Sin issues were solved by turning from whatever was tempting me back to God. I was constantly on guard against things "distracting" me from God. Some more journal quotes will illustrate (I probably considered all of these to be exemplary expressions of faith):

Instead of focusing so much on not sinning, maybe I should try to think of God more. (2008-8-11)

Seeking God is really all that matters—I don't have to worry about anything else. That's it. (2009-7-14)

Now, my faith means in any choice I have between my relationship with God and anything else, God wins, because I know He has my best in mind. (2011-11-22)

The first quote shows how I envisioned a very simple choice between either choosing God or choosing sin/the world. The solution to sin issues was simply turning my mind from sin to God—simple, right? The second quote states this more strongly, and shows how the evangelical tendency to highly value piously reductionist statements without nuance was rubbing off on me. The third one shows how this misconception was related to my view of dualism: the only thing I was supposed to 'do' was remain in relationship with God (apparently apart from anything concrete), and let Him take care of the rest. I'm not sure if I knew of the aphorism "let go and let God", but I probably would have endorsed it.

As I got involved with Campus Crusade (Cru) in college, this focus on relationship with God also took on conversionistic overtones: that is, I came to believe that this relationship was begun by our accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior and having your sins forgiven, which was supposed to instantly transform/regenerate you, bringing you from death to life. I saw a binary, black-and-white distinction between being "saved" and "unsaved", between "having Jesus" or not. This distinction was the most important thing about a person, and the "decision for Christ" was the most important decision of one's life. Consequently, when I eventually did run into serious doubt, it meant that I began questioning when and whether I had every really made that singular, all-important "decision for Christ" that was supposed to change everything, and if maybe I had better accept Him again just to be sure it really "took".

One more quote to tie this misconception in with the next:

Why am I trusting in my heart to let me know how it's doing? I can't just rely on some intuitive, mystical relationship with God. I need to actually get to know Him through His word and intentionally seek out His will for my life. (2008-9-2)

This relationship with God, though personal, was (I believed) mediated through Scripture. There was no place for wishy-washy emotionalism or mysticism here; our knowledge of God had to be based on His Word to us, and not on our own wishes or experiences.

Rationalism/Internal vs. External Faith

Last, and most seriously, were my own hyper-rationalistic tendencies, which created a gaping divide between my head and my heart, actions, and life. Unlike the previous misconceptions, which were at least nominally based on Christian teachings I was hearing, this one was (and still is) innate to my personality; it's a danger of being the deep thinker God has made me to be. It meant that my faith primarily played out in my intellect/conscious will (I saw no distinction between the two), my "beliefs" were often my mental assent to a propositional doctrine that was logically explained to me, and I thought I was supposed to "live out my faith" by rationally applying these beliefs in my everyday life through my conscious decisions. I expected to be able to somehow choose to "focus on my relationship with God" consistently and let Him take care of everything else, and considered this to be what the "Christian life" consists of. This colorful quote shows how I tried to do everything in the "Christian life" very intentionally, and was often frustrated:

If I consider following and knowing God to be a matter of the heart, I get into some kind of abstract, mystical, thought-policing state in which I try to turn my heart and mind to Him and am doomed to failure. If I consider it more a matter of the will, I risk getting into legalism. (2008-9-3)

In practice, in my actions (which, it turned out, were still up to me) I tended to "live out my faith" simply by going along with the expectations or application points given to me from my Christian circles. Thus, my rationalism gave rise to what I call (in retrospect) my two separate faiths: internal and external. My internal faith was dynamic and active in me, but largely consisted of merely thinking about Christian truth. My external faith was how I "lived it out" in accordance with what I was taught, but was impersonal and largely disconnected from how I actually processed faith. Obviously, this divide would lead to trouble.

Another result of my rationalistic tendencies was my expectation of my beliefs, doctrine I was taught, and the Bible to all make logical sense and to neatly cohere with each other. I believed that this was to be expected if they were true, because that's how truth works: by fitting into neat little compartments and formulas. (Obviously I no longer agree with this, at least consciously) My simplistic understanding of God's agency vs. my own was one example of this. I don't think I imagined that there might be truths that seemed counterintuitive or challenging, or that I might not understand; I believed that if it was true, it would readily appear to be so, and if no answer seemed like this, then I hadn't found it yet.

Dualism, a single-minded focus on "relationship with God", and a divide between rational "internal" and experienced "external" faith—with misconceptions like these, it was only a matter of time before something went wrong.