"Cool" Christianity and Form/Content Dualism

I'd like to give a quick shout-out to a recent article written by a blogger I follow, Brett McCracken, as a follow-up to his book Hipster Christianity.

McCracken's book wasn't specifically about the trend of "hipster" Christianity that we seem to hear so much about today (which my church simultaneously participates in and pokes fun at), but about the notion of "cool" Christianity in general. He examines the ways we try to make our timeless faith more "accessible", "seeker-oriented", "user-friendly", or "contemporary" by "repackaging" it in a different, culturally-appropriate style, ostensibly without changing the underlying gospel message. A sample summary of this approach that he gives goes, "What we’re doing is simply putting the gospel in different packaging and updating the style of its delivery [so] as to be relevant to a particular audience. The medium may be different and new, but the message remains the same."

McCracken doesn't think this approach to church is worse, just different, but tries to call attention to "the way form matters in the Christian life", the connection between style matter and manner that is forgotten all too often by "cool" Christians. It's something I'm concerned about and periodically bring up on my blog, but McCracken explains it much better.

Are the medium and the message really so detached that, no matter how an idea is packaged or presented, its meaning remains the same? With Hipster I wanted to challenge this notion and show how form matters: that perhaps the way Christianity is understood and appropriated is different when packaged in Helvetica, skinny jeans, and small batch whisky than when it’s packaged in robes, pews, and pleated khakis. Not that one is necessarily preferable to the other, mind you; just that they are different.

He makes a very insightful connection with the Incarnation that I hadn't thought of:

Christians of all people should grasp the inextricability of form and content. The Incarnation itself demonstrates it. The Word made flesh is content meeting form (John 1:1-18). The gospel is not some ethereal, conceptual “message” as much as it is an enfleshed reality and storied form. The gospel message is embedded within and derived from a medium: the medium of a man named Jesus, out of a nation named Israel, crucified in a place named Calvary.

He also alludes to some of the Christian artists of yesteryear to show what we stand to lose along with the connection between form and content. I agree with his comments on "Christian" media: when we turn the medium into nothing more than a container for the message, we lose sight of makes great art, art.

I think it’s naive for Christians to suggest that medium is something separate from message; they are intertwined. The architects of the great cathedrals in Christian history understood it; composers of sacred music like Handel and Berlioz and Tavener understood it. And yet contemporary evangelical Christians seem to have lost the inextricable connection between form and content. It’s one of the reasons, I think, why evangelical movies, music and artistic output have such a reputation for mediocrity. In privileging content over form, and caring about medium only insofar as it efficiently conveys a message, we’ve tiptoed down a Gnostic path of dualism that doesn’t really resonate with how embodied people live in this world.

Going into specifics, he identifies three values where the ideal of "cool" clashes with the Christian gospel: trendiness, exclusivity, and individualism. I really appreciated this part, as he shows how particular media and style are not content-free but carry their own values and assumptions which may or may not be conducive to the gospel.

My Journey, Part 5: The Big Question

This is part 5 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

As much as I had begun questioning the gospel I'd been taught, all of these questions were still at least somewhat external. Though I was growing tired of hearing them, I didn't believe these teachings were actually true, and I was fine with simply not believing them, or at least seeking to modify them into a better form. At least at first, I expected to still remain an evangelical after doing so. What I was struggling against were caricatures and 'bad habits' of the evangelicalism I saw around me—something that I have more recently been tempted to forget. I 'knew' they weren't true and sought better alternatives; they didn't have to characterize the Church.

But there was one doubt that plagued me singularly, wreaking havoc on my ability to see any kind of coherent biblical narrative or make sense of large swaths of Scripture. It wasn't a disagreement with something I was being taught; in fact, it was an issue I almost never even heard mentioned. It was an apparently inescapable contradiction in what the Bible itself said. And not just something surface-level that could be explained away by an appeal to genre or ancient literary conventions, like the disparate genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, but a fundamental discontinuity in the theology and overarching narrative of the Bible. It could be stated succinctly:

Is the gospel a God-given solution to a God-given problem?

My starting point

It began as an offshoot of my quasi-dispensationalist dissatisfaction with biblical interpretation that seemed to disregard the original context and meaning of a passage in favor of its retrospective, 'Christological' meaning. Applying this, evangelical theology viewed the law in light of Christ: it was given to point out our sin by contrasting it with God's standard of perfection, both to mitigate sin and to convict us of it to point us toward Jesus. (Rom 3:20, Gal 3:19) The law was like a stern babysitter or tutor (Gal 3:24) that imprisoned us in our sins, condemning them but not healing them, until Christ should come and set us free. Everyone's default state is to be sinful, under the law's curse (Gal 3:13). 'Sin' is, in some form, trying to add some kind of law to the all-sufficient salvific work of Christ, trying to be justified apart from Him, which is impossible (Rom 3:20). By faith in Christ, we are justified apart from the law (Rom 3:28) as Christ takes the curse and penalty of the law on Himself and gives us life. (Rom 3:24-25) 

This is, roughly, the view of the law I was given: we start out under law, which screams to us, "Sinner!", and by nature objects of God's righteous wrath (Eph 2:3), but thanks to Christ we are no longer under law but under grace (Rom 6:14), able to either live free from the law's demands or finally fulfill them by His grace, not our own moral effort. My church kind of waffles between the Lutheran and Reformed extremes on the law, but from either perspective it's clear that salvation has always been by grace through faith; we were never expected to save ourselves by obeying the law.

Cracks appear

In the biblical theology class of 2012-2013 I took at my church, I started thinking and wondering more critically about how the Old and New Testaments, or the covenants of law and grace, fit together. Part of this was simply the practical question: how do the precepts of the Mosaic law relate to us as Christians today? We talk about how the purpose of the law is to convict us of sin—so why aren't we letting us convict it of breaking the Sabbath (Exo 20:8-11), not circumcising our children (Gen 17:9-14), eating pork (Lev 11:7-8), or wearing different kinds of fibers (Lev 19:19)? Reflecting on these differences between the Mosaic law and how Christians seem called to live, I (reluctantly) gravitated towards a view that, again, seems shockingly dispensational to me today.

I think each covenant is a way God chooses to relate with His people and how He chooses His people. There is nothing intrinsic or necessary to His nature about either covenant. They are totally arbitrary—there is no ethical concept of 'good' apart from God's commands, and right is right only because He says so. What troubles me isn't that there is no external definition of good apart from God, but that His decrees are not intrinsically based on His nature—either in the old covenant, or presumably the new. Each covenant has its own system of ethics. (2012-9-23) 

But continuing that journal entry, I glimpsed (maybe for the first time) the troubling implications of this view of the covenants. I couldn't see how God could make such a covenant with the Israelites, but so radically change it at the advent of Christ and, in doing so, reveal that the original covenant was deeply inadequate.

The bad news is not the good news. Showing the hopelessness of Israel's condition under the law does not equate to promising Jesus. … So the question becomes, why did God make a doomed, futile covenant with His 'chosen' people? (2012-9-23)

I was beginning to think about this law-grace dynamic historically. The view of the law as existing to show us our hopeless sinful condition and drive us to Jesus as our savior worked on an individual level for modern people—but I was getting tired of thinking of salvation in individual terms. On a national, historical level, it made no sense. The law was given to Israel specifically as a nation, not to all of humanity as individuals. And it was given over a thousand years before Christ came. So what are we to make of the plight of God's 'chosen' people the Israelites, who spent all that time with a flawed, imperfect (Hbr 7:18) covenant that could only point out their sin but offer no solution, with only a distant, poorly-seen hope of the future Messiah (to say nothing of the other nations)? What kind of a gift is this for a good God to give His children? Why did He leave them for so long with only half the gospel—the bad half? I kept thinking about the implications:

The law doesn't 'point to Jesus' because the provision for what to do if/when you break the law is contained in it. If it was put in place to show us our transgressions, then why aren't we repenting of our failure to make the sacrifices, or wear the right clothing—if it is by our failure to uphold the law that we are condemned? (2012-9-24) 

Again: if the Mosaic law really was given to point out our sin, why do we refuse to let so much of it do its convicting work? I began to suspect that we had lost the ability to think about the 'law' in its original context, and could only see it Christocentrically.

I looked for a better way to think about the law and how it related to salvation, later writing:

God didn't give the Israelites, His people, a faulty system to keep them from being saved. The thing that saved them, then like now, was faith. The punishment associated with breaking the law was temporal, not eternal—they broke the covenant, so He punished them as He'd warned from the beginning. They had to earn God's blessings, but not salvation. But at any rate, works were never the basis for man's relationship with God, but faith—faith inextricably tied to obedience. We do not obey God to be 'saved', we obey because he is Lord and we love Him. The gospel does not free us from having to obey God, it frees us to obey Him as He intended. (2012-12-11)

I was beginning to see beyond the simplistic 'faith vs. works' dichotomy, that the law was not simply about "works" that could never save, but that justification was always from faith. Giving the law was not equivalent to commanding them to seek salvation by works. I hinted at a concept I would expand on later, that obeying the law might not be for the sake of earning your salvation by "works" but about enjoying the blessings of pre-existing salvation. My view was kind of similar to the Reformed one (especially that last sentence), still well within the bounds of evangelical orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with this perception of law and grace was the Bible.

Why does God seem to command people to seek life through [the law] if it was never intended? ... God never wanted Pharisees—He never intended for anyone to actually try to be justified by obeying the law. So how do you explain His commanding them to obey it all so they would live? I picture Him saying it with a wink—'By the way, this is all impossible, but just play along.' If God never intended anyone to be saved by the law, why was He so emphatic about obeying it so you might live? Lev 18:5, Deu 6:25... And this after the establishment in Abraham of justification by faith—what were they supposed to think? 'Wait, so if we disobey the law, does that nullify our righteousness by faith?' (2012-12-13) 

It almost seems like God did expect the Israelites to be justified by law. Was the whole system of law a big joke, delivered with a wink, with Christ the punchline that God expected the Israelites to 'get'? 'You will be declared righteous by obeying the whole law (only you can't, this way doesn't work, you just have to believe like Abraham)' (2013-1-12)

If God never intended for people to seek salvation through the law, why did He tell them to and say they could do it? [Deu 30:11-14] If Abraham had already established the precedent of salvation by faith, why was the law then given at all? (2013-1-20)

This view of faith and obedience made much better sense of the Old Testament than saying that God gave the Israelites the law simply so they would fail at it, realize their hopeless sinfulness, and turn to Jesus. I wanted to believe that God had never sent the Jews from Mount Sinai on a hopeless quest for self-justification by works. But standing firmly in opposition to this more optimistic view of the law was the apostle Paul.

The problem of Paul

I was back to my meta-question of "why does the Bible not say what it means?" But it got worse as I realized the tension was not just between the Bible and evangelical teaching, but (as far as I could tell) within the Bible itself. God told the Israelites to seek life and righteousness by keeping His commands.

You shall therefore keep my statutes and my ordinances, by doing which a man shall live: I am the LORD. (Lev 18:5 RSV)

And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.' (Deu 6:25 RSV)

And further, in Moses' final, summary address to the Israelites at the end of Deuteronomy, he tells them that they are able to obey the law today, not after Christ rescues them. There is no hint of the law being impossible; the message simply seems to be that you are able to obey this law, so you should.

"For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (Deu 30:11-14 RSV)

So then how can Paul say that no one will be justified (or, equivalently, declared righteous) through the law, that no one could ever follow it, and that it simply brings knowledge of sin?

For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Rom 3:20 RSV)

We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified. (Gal 2:15-16 RSV)

Paul's answer to the question "why the law?" seemed to fit the evangelical teaching: it was added "because of transgressions", to consign all things to sin, to confine us, to be our "custodian" (Greek: paidagogos, as in "pedagogy"), to lead us to justification through faith in Christ.

This is what I mean: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance is by the law, it is no longer by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained by angels through an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one; but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the scripture consigned all things to sin, that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; (Gal 3:17-25 RSV)

In Romans 10, Paul mourns his fellow Jews who have not found their righteousness in Jesus, but sought to establish their own righteousness by law—yet he describes this righteousness by citing Leviticus 18:5! In other words, he seems to be saying that God commanded the Jews to seek the righteousness through the law that led them to reject the righteousness of Jesus, for which they are now condemned!

Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified. Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. [Lev 18:25] (Rom 10:1-5 RSV)

Hebrews' treatment of the law was, if possible, even worse. The law that was supposed to have been given by a perfect God to His chosen people as a treasured gift was called "weak" and "useless", merely a shadow of the grace to come, whose sacrificial system was secretly defective.

On the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God. (Heb 7:18-19 RSV)

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices which are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered? If the worshipers had once been cleansed, they would no longer have any consciousness of sin. But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. (Heb 10:1-4 RSV)

This was my biggest doubt yet. I tried reading those verses every way I could think of, looking for some way to avoid the seemingly inescapable contradiction between them. Paul's view of the law not only seemed incommensurably different from the view depicted in Deuteronomy, it turned salvation history into a farce. At worst, the law seemed to be something that Jesus saves us from; at best, it was a stopgap measure, a deliberately ineffectual solution to the problem of sin which Jesus would later solve in earnest. Neither view made any sense in light of the fact that the law was itself given by God, supposedly for a redemptive purpose. I kept looking for ways to make sense of this tension, to coherently tie together the old and new covenants, but each time I came up with an idea, another unaccountably strange verse from Paul would jump out at me and shoot it down. That darned Paul!

Accepting doubt

By early 2013, my faith was in shambles as as result of all of these doubts about both what the Bible said and the questions my biblical theology class was raising. What really didn't help matters was that, at first, I was reluctant to address my growing doubts. I saw it as allowing my intellect to control and lead my relationship with God, which I knew was bad. Early in the fall semester, still wrestling with my doubts about God's goodness, I journaled:

I thought the answer was just to trust God more, in spite of my doubt, to not let it come between us. But that doesn't mean I set it aside and let it grow. It means I deal with it to know God better. But what else was I supposed to conclude from all the times I heard Christianity contrasted with an 'intellectual assent'? It led me to deny a (big) part of who I am. I didn't rigorously answer these doubts before because I thought having complete answers was unimportant. (2012-9-26)

What Don Miller's railing against Christianity as 'lists and formulas' seems to say, my questions don't matter, I just have to 'know God relationally'. But suspecting someone to be a liar puts a damper on a relationship. (2012-10-2)

I realized that I couldn't simply marginalize my intellect and "trust Jesus" instead, or put my relationship with Him ahead of "having all the answers", as I viewed my questioning quest. These things couldn't be set in opposition to each other without denying a vital part of who and why God had made me to be. My doubts weren't being actively suppressed, but it did feel like they were being swept aside or relativized.

In the tradition I'm from, questions aren't so much fearfully suppressed as they are buried under 'the gospel' or a wash of platitudes. (2013-1-2)

Not long after this I published my post on the denial of doubt, which expanded on an idea I had had on the value of doubt a few months ago:

This is why skepticism is needed—it is so easy to believe that my ineptitude in missions in a serious problem that must be repented of, that I am not properly applying the great commission to my life, to get swept up in the evangelical tide and accept it 'on faith' as a given, labeling your doubts as sin. Because God calls us to put on faith—in what?—and cast off doubt. If the church stops questioning and doubting itself, it veers off into catastrophe. (2012-11-2)

So I held onto my doubt, rather than simply 'laying it down' for the sake of a shallow 'faith' that shied from tough questions. My 'faith' (actually my ability to make rational sense of Christian theology) reached its nadir in late January 2013. As I described in my post on sola scriptura, I finally admitted to God what I had been fervently denying for so long: "Your Word has contradictions in it. What do I do now?" It was then that I think I realized what faith truly was.

I am unwilling to reject God even as my mind is telling me to do so and doubting. So my intellect and will are distinct after all. If God really is faithful, it doesn't matter whether I believe that He is. The 'strength' of my belief is secondary—that is, my certainty/level of understanding. (2013-1-27)

For the first time, I actually saw that my faith was different from my intellectual conception of Christianity. The latter was utterly defeated, yet somehow I still had faith. I still wanted to trust and believe in God. Even when He made absolutely no sense to me and I could see no reason to trust Him, I continued to trust Him to bring me light and restore order in my troubled soul. The day after, I reflected:

I think God is separating my faith/will and intellect from each other. I now have to learn how to have faith that isn't coterminous with rational thought. (2013-1-28) 

In a post on my big doubt last February, I came to some preliminary conclusions about the relationship between the covenants. I tried to free the Mosaic law from the straitjacket our exclusive focus on its Christocentric meaning had become and situate it in its ancient Near Eastern context. I tentatively concluded that the context in which the law was viewed and the way it was treated had changed from when it was initially given to the first century AD. I was still a long way from figuring out the questions raised by Paul, but my admission about the Bible and discovery of a faith that wasn't in thrall to reason had freed me to begin to seek a new, better way to approach Scripture.

My Journey, Part 4: Questioning "the Gospel"

This is part 4 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

Once my doubts about the gospel story started, they never stopped. Rather than simply following a single line of thought, they quickly branched out to many different facets of the gospel, which I have attempted to break into some themes. Reflecting the period I was going through in late 2012 and 2013, this post is rather more negative than I would like. (It gets better!)

The Fall

The Fall: the moment when it all went wrong. The origin of the big problem to which Jesus is the solution. According to the evangelical narrative, sin came into the world through Adam (Rom 5:12); consequently, we are all born with a sinful nature that makes us slaves to iniquity from the womb, subject to the just punishment of death for our acts of treason against a holy God. We are born into slavery to sin, unable to produce any good in ourselves, yet somehow this inability makes us more culpable rather than less. Adam's act of disobedience was the "original sin" that is responsible for our present predicament from which Jesus saves us.

As I felt increasingly disconnected from the way my biblical theology class interpreted biblical passages (especially OT passages) "in light of Christ" in a way that seemed to disregard their original context and meaning to fit them into our prepared "gospel" narrative, I saw little of the gospel Fall narrative in what Genesis 2-3 actually said. The garden of Eden was supposed to be a perfect, deathless paradise before the Fall, yet factors in the text itself challenge both of these assertions (man's immortality seems dependent on ongoing access to the tree of life in 3:22; the words for "till" and "keep" in 2:15 have militaristic connotations suggesting that the rest of the world might not have been like the garden; there is a lying, talking snake in the garden before the Fall). The snake itself is always identified with Satan, but this is dependent on a connection with Revelation 20:2, not anywhere in Genesis itself.

The most likely explanation of Gen 3:14-15 is that God is actually speaking to the serpent as an animal, which begs the question: why would God curse a snake for being acted through by Satan? … Sin entered the world through the man and woman, but before that the snake. (2012-9-13)

Genesis 2:24 was supposed to be the record of God "creating the institution" of marriage, yet to all appearances it seemed more like a post facto explanation to the already-existing tradition (note how Adam's poetry in 2:23—not a decree of God—is taken as the direct reason for marriage in the time of writing). Likewise the attempt to glimpse a complete account of "how it was supposed to be" from 2:25 seems sketchy. I already mentioned my difficulty seeing the "protoevangelium" in 3:14-15. These two chapters in Genesis seemed to me a textbook example of clobbering a text's original meaning in the practice of "Scripture interprets Scripture". And wasn't the author's original meaning supposed to be the true meaning? (This was my dispensationalist phase talking)

I also wrestled with the theological implications of God allowing the Fall to happen if it was really so completely awful that it somehow "broke" the entire creation:

It's very hard to see 'the Fall' from a state of sinless perfection as anything other than a great derailment of God's plans. ... We justify it by saying God used it to bring 'more glory' to Himself—treating glory as a quantity. (Which, for God, is supposed to be infinite anyway) What keeps people holding to the Fall is the false belief that the alternative is a denial of sin and the gospel. (2013-5-1)

It didn't make sense: if God was really as sovereign as I was taught (from a Reformed perspective) He was, why on earth would He allow His creatures to so ruin His perfect world? In fact, how could they even do this? I pretty clearly gave my objections to the "cosmic Fall" theory for explaining natural evil (that God cursed the creation as a punishment for Adam's sin) in May. When this question wasn't simply answered with an appeal to mystery, it was with an appeal to God's "glory"—a fallen and restored creation would be better and bring more glory to God than one that had never fallen in the first place. But, being omnipotent, why couldn't God have made the world this way to begin with? Was Eden perfect or not? Why was the finite Adam able to do instantly something that's taking God thousands of years to undo? And extending how the Fall was supposed to happen, how do we know there will be no second Fall after God makes everything perfect again, if what made the first one possible was human free will? If we will somehow be totally free but without the possibility of sinning, then why didn't God just create us like this in the first place? The implied questions were limitless.

The last part of this entry also protests how we have made this interpretation of Genesis 2-3 absolutely critical for the rest of the gospel story, the part without which nothing would make sense. We think of evil, sin, and death not so much in terms of their present reality as in terms of their beginning (the Fall) and ending (the Atonement). The Fall narrative was presented as the only theodicy needed: sin, death, and suffering are not God's will but exist because of Adam's sin, and God is working to redeem the effects of this sin. So my questions about it cast the rest of the gospel into doubt as well.

And, of course, there was the fact that this Fall narrative made the evangelical gospel story dependent on the claim that sin and death came into the world through Adam's sin and denying the (incompatible) scientific facts that there was no first pair of humans and that animals were living, dying, and evolving millions of years before humans existed.

Theistic evolution implies death before the Fall—uh-oh... (2012-9-16)

I eventually settled for simply not knowing how they fit together and "trusting God" with the answer.

Sin/The Human Condition

I was also becoming dissatisfied with how evangelical theology described the basic human condition. In the narrative of the 'gospel', humanity's 'big problem' is sin: it entered the world through Adam (Rom 5:12 again), brought death and condemnation to all men (see also 5:17-19), was dealt a deathblow by Jesus's atoning death on the cross, and will be fully done away with at His return. But I realized I couldn't follow the evangelical arithmetic of sin, as high treason against an infinitely holy God that instantly brought eternal condemnation and death, no matter what the actual offense. It made God's justice seem like a parody of our human legal systems, rather than the other way around. I had trouble believing God made no distinction between swearing and genocide. I wrote,

How is all sin like crossing the moral event horizon for God? ...With God, He is perfect and we should have the highest regard for Him and therefore not want to disobey. If we do it is because we don't hold Him in the highest regard or see Him as perfect—we believe a lie. Except coasting through a stop sign is not treason. The use of the word 'treason' to refer to sin is not biblical. ... every sin reflects this loss of viewing God as perfect and all-sufficient. (2012-10-16)

I think with the stop sign example I was comparing sinning against God to breaking the laws of the land; obviously, not everything that is a crime according to the American legal system is treason. As well, I was trying to get at the relational (rather than the legal) dimension of sin, which I saw as being neglected by this judicially-minded talk of sin as "treason against a holy God", as the ultimate cosmic crime that had to be punished. I began to see sin as leading to death because it cuts us off from the author of life, not because it incurs a death penalty. This view seemed superior because it showed how some sins could be worse than others as well as why all sin is a problem (beyond just "because God must punish it"; see below).

I was also dissatisfied with the emphasis on sin being used to denigrate human dignity or agency (often in support of the kind of dualism between us and God I used to hold to). Humans, it was supposed, were so flawed and sinful that even our best attempts at righteousness are "filthy rags" (Isa 64:6) before the all-holy God, which we are to count as loss (Phil 3:8) as we trust entirely in Christ's sufficiency rather than our inability. But did this kind of focus on the "sinful nature" lead us to see ourselves more negatively than God sees us (and to believe that the worse assessment of our nature is always necessarily the more accurate)? In the thinking that led up to my post on how God will praise us, I wrote:

In reformed teaching we are just (presumably interchangeable) passive, imperfect straws through which the spirit blows. But this view misses much. We will get praise from God—for what we have done with what we have been given, for how well we've obeyed. (2013-3-16)

Using "sin" as a blanket explanation for why we couldn't expect anything more from ourselves than continual disobedience was starting to seem like a cop-out. Even in the Reformed teaching I was misunderstanding, we're supposed to be saved not from God's moral standards, but in order to obey them better. This would seem to undercut the dichotomies between God's agency and ours I was hearing, which contrasted Jesus' perfect righteousness with our sin-addled attempts to secure righteousness for ourselves. But I didn't hear this nuance as often as I heard simple dichotomies between our righteousness and Christ's.

God's "Justice"/PSA

As I said above, I also stopped being able to make sense of the evangelical account of God's response to our sin. Because the penalty for our sin is death, God, being perfectly just, would be right to destroy us at any time for our sin, so even our continued existence is a testament to His mercy—so the thinking goes. I tried and failed to convince myself of this. God's "justice" was conceptualized as the necessity to punish sin (in the sense of giving a courtroom verdict and "executing justice"), for "the wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23). If God simply let our sin slide or let up in His condemnation in the slightest, then He would not be perfectly just; it has to be punished—right? I was starting to doubt that.

Why are the wages of sin death? Why is God considered just to kill people for any sin? Is this just an arbitrary feature of His justice? (2013-1-12)

I asked a pointed question in an attempt to draw out what I saw as the questionable part of this view of our sin and God's justice:

If, somehow, a person could be instantaneously rendered morally perfect and without a sinful nature, would that person still have need of further justification from God? (2013-2-6)

I still think this is a great question. If (as evangelicals will sometimes say) sin is not primarily what we do but who we are, then is the point of "dealing with sin" to provide a legal mechanism to forgive acts of wrongdoing, or actually healing the presence of sin (as an infection) in our souls? Is our "justification" before God forensic (legal acquittal of past wrongdoing) or moral (restoration of our present moral righteousness)? The idea that "salvation" is something that we can attain fully and instantaneously by divine decree (i.e. without actually becoming morally perfect) would seem to indicate the former options. By implication, God holds our past transgressions against us regardless of our current state, this remembrance seems to be a corollary of His justice, and it is from this impure record and the just condemnation that it brings that we are saved in the moment of justification. This is what I call a juridical view of sin, and I was having trouble believing it anymore.

A few weeks later I wrote of how I was shifting to seeing God's justice as something that we desperately seek to see restored to the world instead of something we graciously are spared from, something that was "satisfied" by restoration and flourishing rather than by punishment. This was a more relational, less juridical view of God's justice. I clarified the tension between these conceptions further in March:

One gets this image of this invisible, spiritual mass of sin of which we are insensible but which God sees all too clearly and will judge us by—no. Our sin is not 'out there', it is all 'in us'. (2013-3-29)

I saw evangelical theology as conceptualizing sin as this "spiritual object" somewhere out there, not intrinsic to our selves, that we add to with our transgressions and that God (being just) cannot ignore and has to get past (by punishing/condemning it) before He can have a relationship with us. In the evangelical gospel, our sin keeps God away from us because God, being "just", cannot tolerate sin in His presence. (Well, except that whole time in Job 1-2 when He has a face-to-face meeting with the devil. And maybe when He comes to earth and spends a good deal of time with the outcasts of society.) I expected such a fundamental problem as sin to be more intrinsic to us, too much so to be defeated by a mere legal decree.

I also questioned the dominant theory of atonement in evangelicalism, penal substitution, which seemed dependent on this external view of sin as something that can be decisively "dealt with" by a courtroom maneuver and of God's justice as the necessity to legally retaliate against sin which can be "satisfied" by Jesus' sacrifice and thus bypassed in order to have a relationship with Him.

The difficulty with the penal substitution view is that God's wrath seems needlessly cruel, disconnected from the actual offense. (2013-3-29)

It seemed to me that in penal substitution (and this juridical view of sin in general), we weren't saved from our sin so much as from what God was going to do to us for our sin. The problem of sin that was so often emphasized was not that sin relationally separated us from God because of our ungodliness, but that it legally separated God from us because of His justice. If it did relationally separate us, it was because it legally separated us first and foremost. And I could not accept this. I saw it as misapplying language of God as 'judge' so that our whole relationship with God was understood through a courtroom metaphor, mediated by it, rather than simply allowing it to speak to a dimension of the relationship. God wants to love us, it seems, but He is first and foremost the great cosmic judge and He has to fully discharge His legal duties (namely, hearing the case against us) before He can get off the stand and come near us.

Cruci-/Christocentrism

Another flaw of PSA that I saw was how it concentrated the whole work of redemption, the sine qua non of the gospel, into the crucifixion, effectively making it central to the gospel and implicitly demoting the rest of Jesus' time on earth. Even the resurrection seemed secondary, since it wasn't what "dealt with" our sin in this crucial legal sense. It mostly served to rectify the problem of God being dead after the crucifixion and to exemplify the fullness of life beyond death that Jesus bought for us on the cross, and the rest of the teachings of Jesus...well, the gospel isn't about what we do to make ourselves righteous but what what Jesus has completely done to make us righteous, but if our saving faith in Him starts to spill over into our lives, great! His commands and teachings are not laws that we have to follow to make ourselves acceptable to God but a way to check yourself to see if you are bearing fruit in keeping with repentance; we can't make ourselves any more obedient to them. (there's that "justification by faith alone" dualism again)

Once again, I found this borderline-exclusionary focus on the cross over every other dimension of Jesus' life and ministry unsatisfying, reductionistic, and opaque. There had to be a reason for all the things Jesus said and did (occupying most of the gospel accounts about Him) before and after His passion. At the very least, I thought the "gospel" should place at least as much emphasis on the resurrection as on the crucifixon.

Arguably the biggest flaw with penal substitution is that it marginalizes the resurrection, makes it unnecessary for our atonement. (2013-3-28)

Luther's emphasis on the cross of Christ risks making one part of the gospel message into the whole thing, our only light for seeing God. This can be confining, even damaging. (2013-4-24)

Luther was not alone; I have often heard "the cross of Christ" used synecdochically to refer to the whole gospel. But without a counterintuitive legal mechanism by which it can completely secure our "salvation", the cross cannot stand alone. I wanted an understanding of the gospel that would be summed up as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, by mentioning Christ's death and resurrection in the same breath. Having been told the crucicentric rendition of the gospel for years, I wasn't sure what this might look like.

As well, in all the talk of sharing "the gospel of Jesus Christ", "trusting Jesus", "Jesus as Lord and Savior", Jesus as the one who decisively defeats sin, I saw another potential imbalance.

I think evangelicalism does overfocus on Jesus over the rest of the Trinity. (2012-10-8)

In the gospel of PSA, the Father supposedly loves us and is coequal to the Son, but is also apparently the wrathful, "just" judge of sin that Jesus saves us from. Within this tension between justice and love, and considering Jesus' place in it, it's easy to see how we can focus our thanks and adoration on Jesus, our "savior". Again, the Holy Spirit is our comforter and advocate, sent by Jesus to live in us, transform us, and pray for us, but I sensed in all the sola fide-istic denials that we can or should actively participate in our salvation or sanctification an implicit denial of His ministry.

Focus on salvation

I also questioned the enormous weight and importance put on "getting saved", "putting your trust in Jesus", "starting a relationship with Jesus", "being justified by faith", etc. that I saw in evangelicalism. In October 2012 I made a bridge analogy that I found helpful:

I get this image of a celestial bridge across a great divide. The bridge is the gospel, and it spans from Death to Life. Other bridges go from nearer outcroppings to Death, and people think the outcroppings are life. The point of crossing the gospel bridge is to get to the other side and lie there, never forgetting where you came from and how you got there. (2012-10-13) 

The whole focus of evangelicalism is the bridge—how wonderful it is that it's there, and getting other people to cross it. (2012-10-14)

I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I was recalling an image that was commonplace among evangelicals.

Does he have to climb over the top part of the cross, or work his way around it somehow? I've always wondered.

This diagram is similar to one that I saw used (explicitly or implicitly) in thinking about 'the gospel'. The focus is entirely on how to get across the chasm separating us from God. Once you cross the chasm, everything after is simply depicted as "GOD". "Getting across the chasm to God" seems to be thought of similarly to "living happily ever after", as if the rest of your life will just work itself out after you 'get saved'. No one would explicitly say this, of course, but it was the message I was getting from so emphasizing the single-moment-of-salvation aspect of the evangelical gospel over everything else.

Especially in Cru, but also in general, the strong focus on evangelism, on helping other people to hear and respond to this gospel made it hard for me to see how I 'fit in' to the body of Christ, the church. My introverted nature made it hard enough for me to go up to strangers and engage them in what might be the most important conversation of their lives; my doubts about the gospel I was supposed to be sharing made it nigh impossible. How could I share something that didn't make sense to me?

If we reduce the gospel from a new reality to a message to be proclaimed, the range of acceptable parts of the body of Christ shrinks distinctly. (2013-4-7)

I also became aware of the pastoral quandaries brought about by this binary view of salvation. It's understandable how such a binary view could shift peoples' focus from living as saved to simply being sure they 'have' salvation.

If the only two categories we have are 'saved' and 'unsaved', the only alternative to everything being great between you and God is admitting that you're unsaved. (2013-5-8)

Of course evangelicals view their faith with more nuance than this—but is this because of a binary view of salvation, or in spite of it?

We place such a high importance on knowing you have obtained salvation, we deflect any verses that might challenge that assurance—because I'm so sinful, I'll throw salvation away the first chance I get. Are we supposed to be so worried about whether we're 'saved'? (2013-5-16)

Insidiously, this conceptualization of salvation as something you "receive" from God and then "have" (i.e. a "spiritual object") threatens to shift our focus from trusting in God to seeking certainty that we have received something from Him. This attitude is unacceptable with physical possessions or any other created things, yet it's allowed for salvation? (I had heard plenty of explanations that salvation was essentially receiving the gift of God Himself, but then why did we keep talking about this thing called "salvation"?)

And, embarrassingly, the question of children (or infant) salvation was a grey area of this paradigm. How can we know when children are old enough to have 'saving faith'? What is the difference between a child who is old enough and one who is not?

Our model of sin and salvation doesn't apply to children—so you get wonky debates on paedobaptism and infant salvation. (2013-6-17)

These were all clues to me that the way I'd been conceptualizing salvation was in need of improvement. 

Individualism

I grew tired of the term 'relationship with God', often preceded by the word 'personal'. In an attempt to help the gospel land with people and not just be something to believe intellectually, it was stated in very personal terms: 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life', 'When Jesus died on the cross He was thinking of you', 'Jesus died for my sin', etc. (Often this came at the expense of the intellectual side of faith, as I would see) I realized the potential problems of focusing on this personal dimension:

How is the gospel usually stated in evangelicalism? 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, so He sent Jesus so that your sin could be forgiven and you can have a personal relationship with Him.' With such a personal understanding of the gospel—as being all about you and God—is it any wonder that so many American Christians have a self-centered faith? (2013-1-10)

A few days later I wrote of the 'impersonal gospel' I thought we were missing. I sought a bigger, more cosmic and universal view of God's redemption, of which the personal dimension of the gospel is simply one part.

A self-focused faith also blinds me to the glory of God throughout the universe by making faith too 'personal'. (2013-2-6)

As much as I need to feel loved, I also wanted a gospel that truly made me feel small and left me in awe of the plans and glory of God. The highly personal gospel of evangelicalism was not doing this for me.

Descriptive or normative?

With all of these doubts, it's no surprise that I had trouble accepting the overall gospel 'storyline' that I was hearing. I couldn't look back to a decisive, dramatic moment when I let Jesus come into my heart and transform my life. I couldn't see my life as a constant struggle against trying to prove myself 'good enough' to God (what Jesus was supposed to have saved us from), at least without a lot of unintuitive mental maneuvering. On a meta level, I couldn't see how my present struggle with doubt and questions fit into this narrative at all.

It's not helpful when my twisted, specific situation is answered with vague, 'gospel' generalities. (2013-1-13)

By mid-2013, I was apparently distancing myself from evangelicalism, partly because of how its redemption narrative just didn't seem to fit me, as I noticed every time I tried to write my "testimony".

I kept waiting for God to write me a story that fit into the evangelical four-point narrative. I stopped being one when I realized God had no intention of doing this. (2013-6-14)

The gospel narrative of salvation seemed disconnected from my experience, like something I was supposed to intentionally fit my life into, a square peg into a round hole. But this made it impossible for it to illuminate or explain what I was going through. I realized the importance of connecting my received faith with the rest of my life, but for the reasons listed above I couldn't seem to do this. I couldn't see how a message with so many holes in it could possibly explain my relationship with the divine or the purpose of my life.

Holistic deconstruction

An important qualification: my questions about the vision of the gospel that was being presented to me weren't so much over statements I thought were false outright (though those did occasionally happen, especially with very strong/exclusionary statements), but over misplaced emphasis: parts of the gospel were shifted around, distorted, overemphasized or marginalized. This telling of the gospel had plenty of truth to it, but that truth did not seem to be in the proper balance. Regardless of how its individual pieces were justified from Scripture, the way they were put together into the big picture just wasn't believable to me. I kept wanting to respond: "Yes, but..." Some examples:

• The 'Pauline' reading of Genesis 2-3 was given center stage until it became the only reading.
• The legal dimension of sin was overemphasized in the message of salvation; I wasn't sure that it was even worth focusing on.
• Within this legal framework, sin was closely associated with "works-righteousness": human attempts to establish legal merit before God, as if this was all there is to sin. In denial of these, our agency/righteousness was dualistically opposed to God's; the former is bad, the latter good.
• God's justice was viewed primarily as the necessity to judicially punish sin, instead of the broader sense of something positive that God is restoring whose consequence is the punishment of those who oppose it.
• This distorted picture of redemption was accomplished primarily on the cross (so that "the cross" becomes virtually synonymous with salvation), only secondarily in the empty tomb.
• Jesus was the one we wanted to tell everyone about, never just "God", the Father, or the Holy Spirit.
• The initial moment of salvation was prized above all else; salvation was an all-or-nothing deal, a crucial, life-altering turning point; the rest of life afterward was out of focus.
• Partly in reaction to the perceived intellectual dryness of a doctrine-centric faith, the personal dimension of salvation was turned way up: "when he was dangling on that cross, he was thinking of you".

I'm also aware that there are answers to most of these things within evangelical theology—but seemingly nowhere in evangelical worship and practice, as far as I could see. They were often posed as question or brief sketches by theologians exploring the possibilities of their tradition, almost as far from soaking down to the ground level of the church as you can get. Attempting to blaze my own path through the gap between church and academy would entail an incredibly individualistic picture of faith with which I may have once been comfortable, but no longer was. I tried to see past these problems to the theoretical solutions I was only reading about, and to help others to do the same, but the constant waves of doubt and disagreement made it very hard to be constructive. I couldn't do this project of reinvention on my own; I was never meant to. And my doubts continued to deepen...

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.