Why do we believe…such wonky things about Satan? (Part 1)

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

During my exegesis of Job I studied in detail the nature, power and figure of Satan.  This led me to make the statement that, “Satan is a loyal servant, serving at the pleasure of God and doing his job by accusing Job.” This pissed some people off and I’m sure many found the concept abhorrent if not borderline heretical.  In this post I will present an excerpt from my paper on Job 1:6-12 and in my next post I post additional thoughts on the satan, the demonic, spiritual warfare and its place in contemporary Christianity. I will leave in my references and if anyone wants to read these sources themselves I will provide you with the full titles of the texts I used.

There is much confusion surrounding the Hebrew words הַשָּׂטָ֖ן  here in Job.  Literally translated this phrase means  “the satan” and it deserves more study.

It is incredibly tempting for modern readers to anachronistically read later theological developments regarding the Devil back into this passage.  Many texts regrettably capitalize the word here and drop out the definite article; we read “Satan” when what is really written is “the satan.”  This creates connections that the text itself never supports. (Balentine 53, Tur-Sinai 33 and 38, Gordis, 14)  The author(s) of Job could not have used this phrase to represent a concept that would only develop centuries later but this phrase originally must have meant something to them. What concept or idea is the text describing here by its use of the satan? What is a satan, what is the role of a satan, and what is a satan doing in Heaven talking to the LORD?

As a noun, a “satan” is, “a common noun that designates an adversary or opponent and is used both of an enemy in a military context and of a legal opponent in a judicial context.” A “satan” is a generic noun and not a personal name. (Page, 449)  Additionally, Dr. Habel points out that, “The verbal root  שָׂטָן  does not refer to an action which is necessarily evil but to the behavior of one who opposes or challenges another party.” This is an important nuance not to miss if we are to understand the satan here in context. (Habel, 89) While this word clearly has an adversarial sense one should not automatically assume an evil or malicious sense. Just as a District Attorney may be “against” the defendant and bring an accusation, this does not mean a District Attorney is evil, unethical, or unjust. In fact, a District Attorney may in fact be a very loyal, just and trustworthy public servant, and acting as an adversary against a person they are convinced is guilty might be an expression of these very qualities.

In terms of this word’s usage in the Bible, Balentine provides this exhaustive account of its uses in both noun and verb forms:

  • Within the Bible the verb “satan” occurs six times in the Hebrew Bible (Pss 38:20 [MT Ps 38:21]; 71:13; 109:4, 20, 29; Zech 3:1). Five of the six occurrences are in lament psalms, which refer to human opponents of the righteous, who “accuse” or act adversarially to defame character or bring duress. Only in Zech 3:1 is the verb used with reference to the activity of “the satan.” The noun “satan”, “accuser, adversary,” occurs twenty-six times in the Hebrew Bible. Of these, seven refer to earthly satans (1 Sam 29:4 (David); 2 Sam 19:22 [MT 19:23] (Abishai); 1 Kgs 5:4 [MT 5:18] (an anonymous military adversary of Solomon); 11:14 (Hadad); 11:23, 25 (Rezon); Ps 109:6 (an anonymous accuser of the psalmist). Nineteen of the twenty-six occurrences refer to celestial satans. Sixteen of the nineteen, including all of the references in Job 1–2, use the noun with the definite article, that is, “the satan.” The three exceptions are Num 22:22, 32 and 1 Chr 21:1. (Balentine, 53)

The word satan is used in the Bible to refer to both human and spiritual beings that act as an enemy or adversary. Here in Job it appears we are dealing with a spiritual or celestial satan so it is important to examine the other examples of celestial satans more in-depth. First, I will examine the verses where satan is used without the definite article before turning to the ones where satanis connected with a definite article.

In Numbers 22:22 we find the story of Balaam and his donkey.  En route to curse Israel Balaam is interrupted when God sends an angel, “and the angel of the LORD took his stand in the way as an adversary (לְשָׂטָ֣ן ) against him.” (Num 22:22 NAS)  This passage does not refer to the angel as the Devil or Satan, nor does it even suggest the angel is a satan, but describes an event where an angel was sent to fulfill the role of a satan.

In 1 Chronicles 21:1 we find a passage where the celestial satan appears to tempt or incite a human to evil.  “Then Satan (שָׂטָ֖ן ) stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel.” (1Ch 21:1 NAS) This numbering of Israel, a census of some sort, angers God, who subsequently allows David to pick the punishment Israel is about to receive for this sin.  Here what is literally described is “A satan stood up against Israel…” but many translations take this as a proper name.  From its immediate context, the nature of this satan is unclear.  It is not even clear this is a celestial satan at first glance.  Could this have been a human enemy or agent with nefarious motives who tempted David to do something the LORD would not like?  Only by examining its parallel passage can this be made clear.  In 2 Samuel 24:1 the same story is recounted but it is the LORD who incites David to take an action that would result in Israel’s punishment.  It appears that in this story something divine tempted or incited King David to an act that was deserving of punishment.  Most commentators assume this is referring to a celestial satan.

From these two examples not much can be said.  In the first example some divine figure is sent to act as a satan to Balaam and is invisible to this prophet-for-hire before the LORD opens his eyes.  In the second example a satan takes an action that is elsewhere ascribed to the LORD.  Who really incited David to take a census?  Was it God?  Was it God via an angel or emissary known as a satan?  Was it Satan, the eternal enemy of God, who tempted David without God’s permission or knowledge and God punishes David for falling into temptation?  Was the record in Samuel mistaken?

More is needed and I will now examine the instances where satan is connected with the definite article.

When this word appears with a definite article it appears that this phrase denotes a role or title, not the proper name of a celestial being. (Habel, 89, Tate, 462)  One would not say “the Jesus,” but one would say “the Messiah.” Most commentators, arguing from the verbal use of satan, understand this title to be given to one whose job description involved accusing or acting adversarially to someone else. Balentine  states that “the satan” is, “the heavenly being whose designated role in the divine council is to serve as a kind of prosecuting attorney who brings charges against another in the court,” and many commentators agree with this description. (Balentine 52, Habel 89) However, some have noted that depicting the satan in Job as a sort of divine district attorney or prosecutor breaks down in the narrative.  Prosecutors usually do not accuse people who appear innocent nor do prosecutors test such persons through heinous assaults on their person and property as the satan in Job does. (Page, 450)

To fully understand what concept is being called to mind by the writer(s) of Job, some begun to look to the Persian influence on the writer(s) of Job. Dr. N.H. Tur-Sinai suggests that the role of a satan found here in Job and elsewhere, notably in Zechariah, was modeled after an office within the Persian empire. (Tur-Sinai, 38-45) In the culture of the day the monarchs often employed agents who acted as secret police or special emissaries who would canvass their own nations to clandestinely observe and eventually report back to the monarch on the behaviors and loyalties of the nations own citizens. They were not external spies, used against other nations, but internal spies keeping an eye on their own subjects.

The Persians where apparently especially famous for this and were even to the point where their efficacy of their intelligence network was noted by Herodotus, a Greek historian. This is not surprising as the Persians had to be good at this. Many conquering nations had stretched themselves too thin in the Ancient Near East and after conquering many people groups did not have enough loyal troops to maintain and enforce their rule and ward off external attack and internal rebellion. The Persians allowed for some a level of local autonomy and self-governance almost like vassal states that were run under satraps or local governors.  In this situation, it was extremely important to make sure vassals were not secretly planning a rebellion and dissent was not fermenting unchecked. These secret emissaries, who were aptly referred to as the “eyes and ears of the king,” roamed the expansive Persian empire as a safeguard against inner turmoil.

Tur-Sinai suggests that the eyes in Zechariah 4 the satan here in Job, are modeled after this office. The Hebrew authors were connecting the eyes in Zechariah and the satan  with the “eyes and ears” of the Persian King by their shared behavior of roaming.  Where “the eyes and ears” of the King roamed the Persian empire for the Persian king,  the LORD’s eyes and the heavenly satan roam the world for the LORD. There are a number of reasons I am apt to agree with this suggestion.

First, Tur-Sinai furthermore argues from the fact that שׂ and שׁ  (two Hebrew letters) could and were used interchangeably in the Hebrew language. From this he suggests that what was originally intended here was not satan (lit: the one who accuses or the one who acts as an adversary) but actually shatan (lit: the one who roams).  The Hebrew authors did write that “the adversary” or “the accuser” was in heaven, but “the roamer.” It should be noted that while this might sound foreign to Western ears the Arabic word for Satan or spiritual evil is shaitan.

  • (Side note: Hebrew naming conventions should be explained a bit here. Titles or the names of roles were derived from the verbal action people in that role performed. For example, the Hebrew word for “a guard” is literally “the one who guards” and the Hebrew word for “king” is “the one who reigns.” If a spy roamed the realm to investigate the loyalties of the subjects of the king, such a spy could very well have been referred to as “the one who roams” or “the roamer.”)

Second, this entire scene uses the imagery and concept of a divine council.  Many Ancient Near Eastern cultures assumed that like earthly kings who held court, where they received reports from their servants, gave orders, and deliberated with their advisors, the divine beings must do something similar. The gods were often portrayed as convening in divine councils, especially on the New Years day, to set the agenda for the coming year.  Later Jewish tradition identifies the date of the conversation between God and the satan as happening on the Jewish New Year, apparently reinforcing the fact that this was how the passage was understood.. Such divine councils were to be found in other Ancient Near Eastern literature and appear elsewhere in the Bible, notably in the Zechariah passage we have already mentioned but also in the Psalms and other visions of God.  One major difference between the Jewish understanding of the divine council compared to other cultures is that  in the Bible the other members of the court are not other gods but angels, God’s servants.

Important to our understanding of the satan is the fact that the divine council is an anthropomorphic projection. Because of our limited knowledge about God we often have to use we use terminology and imagery from our human experience to describe God and the heavenly realm. A simple example of this is when we talk about God having an arm.  WE do not really think God has an anatomy similar to human beings and a physical arm in a literal sense, but we use this language to describe and talk about God because we have to. In this instance, the writer(s) of Job were describing the workings of heaven through imagery derived from institutions that existed, namely the earthly court of monarchs. It stands to reason that whatever the role of a satan was, it was not made up.  The heavenly satan most likely had an earthly counterpart and template that this role or office was based upon.  Just as an earthly council suggested a heavenly council, so it is presumed an earthly satan suggested that there might be a heavenly satan. If the post-exilic authors of Job would be familiar with the “eyes and ears of the King” used by the Persian empire to keep their leaders informed, (maybe because they had first hand experience with such “eyes”?) they may have assumed that God would “eyes and ears” as well.  In short, suggesting that God employed spies, “roamers” or shatans as well was a contextual way to describe how the LORD was kept informed of all things and managed the world.

Third, this understanding of satan brings clarity to a number of questions we modern readers, unfamiliar with the concept of these secret police, encounter when we read the text. Here are some of the questions raised from reading this passage:

  • Was satan an unwelcome guest?
  • Was the satan a son of God and/or part of the heavenly council?
  • If satan was unwelcome why didn’t God just boot him out of heaven?
  • How are we to understand God’s question to the satan about where he came from and satan’s reply that he had been walking and roaming about?
  • Why does God bring up Job?  If God had not, would Job’s children, wealth and health never been so thoroughly destroyed?
  • If satan is only an accuser, why does God give satan the power and authority to test Job?
  • Shouldn’t God just have looked inside Job’s heart and seen what was true or not?

If Tur-Sinai is correct, and the satan was a title given to member of the heavenly council whose role it was to roam the earth and report on any suspicious concerning the activities and loyalties of the LORD’s subjects, then many of these questions are answered.

  • The satan was not an unexpected or unwelcome guest because…
  • …the satan was a son of God and a member of the heavenly council.
  • God does not kick the satan out of heaven (as one would expect of an unwelcome guest) but instead engages in conversation with satan because it was time for the satan to bring his report, just as reports were being given by other sons of God who were standing themselves before the LORD.
  • The LORD’s first question to the satan is essentially asking the satan for a report. “Where have you come from” is in a sense asking “What have you been up to?”
  • Because the satan may very well have been originally “the one who roams” the satan’s response is essentially “From doing my job (of roaming the earth and investigating your subjects).”
  • In the LORD’s second question, the LORD brings up Job because while He (God) clearly believes Job is loyal, faithful and righteous He (God) has a spy for a reason.  The LORD wants the satan’s input and asks for a report concerning Job. In other words God is asking here, “Job seems to me to be completely righteous and loyal.  But you are my spy upon the earth who has just returned from investigating humans.  Have you investigated Job? What do you think of Job?  Do you have any suspicions to report?”
  • The satan here does have a report.  His suspicion is that Job is not truly loyal to God but loyal to what Job gets out of the retributive system.

All of this seems exegetically sound, reasonable and a number of other commentators support this position.  Habel even creatively call’s the satan, “Yahweh’s suspicious one, [God’s] spy.” This is an apt label that connotes two aspects of the satan in Job that stand in stark contrast to modern notions regarding the Devil, namely the satan’s role as an accuser and secret spy of sorts and the satan’s subservience to Yahweh. (Habel, 89)

Conclusion: In light of this research it appears the satan in the book of Job was a servant of the LORD whose specific role it was to survey the LORD’s domain and report any concerns about the loyalties of the LORD’s subjects.  The satan‘s behavior (of roaming and later questioning Job’s motivation for being righteousness) does not come from an opposition to God or even an opposition to humanity, but out of fulfilling his divinely given role at the express permission and empowerment of God. One should be very careful not to project later understandings of the Devil onto the satan in this pericope and the book as a whole.  From this word study, I have chosen to follow Balentine’s example of translating  הַשָּׂטָ֖ן as “the satan” to avoid confusion between the satan here in Job and the Devil, and also reinforce the fact that this word refers to role that is now defunct (just as “satraps,” “hoplite” or “ceasar” refer to historical positions, titles and roles that no longer exist).

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Speaking of Gender Constructs

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

In my University of Phoenix class on human sexuality I found the following table.  It is gender stereotypes that were found to be common among thirty countries.  I do not know how diverse the countries were, but it is interesting to note the differences.

Stereotypes of Males                                  Stereotypes of Females

Active* Opinionated*                                Affectionate* Nervous
Adventurous Pleasure-seeking              Appreciative Patient
Aggressive Precise*                                    Cautious* Pleasant*
Arrogant Quick                                             Changeable Prudish
Autocratic Rational                                    Charming Self-pitying
Capable* Realistic*                                     Complaining Sensitive*
Coarse Reckless                                            Complicated* Sentimental*
Conceited Resourceful*                            Confused Sexy
Confident* Rigid                                           Dependent Shy
Courageous Robust                                     Dreamy Softhearted*
Cruel Sharp-witted*                                    Emotional* Sophisticated*
Determined* Show-off                               Excitable Submissive
Disorderly Steady                                       Fault-finding Suggestible
Enterprising Stern                                      Fearful* Superstitious
Hardheaded* Stingy                                  Fickle Talkative*
Individualistic Stolid                                Foolish Timid*
Inventive Tough*                                       Forgiving Touchy
Loud* Unscrupulous                                 Frivolous Unambitious
Obnoxious                                                     Fussy Understanding*

(These are also feminine but the tables broke)

Gentle* Unstable*
Imaginative* Warm*
Kind* Weak
Mild Worrying*
Modest

First, I marked qualities that at first glance I thought described myself with an asterisk.  From the results one can clearly see why I am frustrated by gender stereotypes.  Apparently I am some kind of androgenous figure that doesn’t “fit” the patterns for acceptable male stereotypes or female stereotypes completely.  Usually I have pretended to be things that I am not, and denied parts of who I am, to try and fit into someone else’s idea of what “being” a man was like and avoid ridicule and accusations of being a homosexual.

Second, how many Churches passively and actively encourage these stereotypes and baptize them with scripture?  How many fruits of the spirit would be described as feminine?  Would Jesus be rated as more feminine than masculine?  Is this partly why men hate Church?  Is Christianity perceived as a “feminizing?”  Is this a problem with Christianity, or our stereotypes about gender?  When women say they want a “Man’s man” does that mean they want a man who is very non-Christian in his characteristics?

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Jazz Vespers, the Body of Christ and Improv (P.S. Thank you)

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

Last night I went to a Jazz Vespers event created by Gillian Grannum.  Jazz Vespers are a mix of jazz music, prayer, and performance.  These services can range from jazz concerts in a church to more formal and traditional Christian liturgies that feature jazz music. Like the reading of “For Coloured Girls…” this event was a surprisingly healing for me.

To provide some necessary backstory…

Most people don’t know that I was once a jazz musician.  I played guitar, alto and baritone sax in jazz bands in high school and appeared set in my Freshman year to be the lead alto for all the bands at Beyer High for the next three years.  Outwardly it appeared years of private lessons, hours of practice and my love for jazz were paying off.  However, my musical ability was inherently tied up with the chaos of my dysfunctional family. Music was one way I used to perform to earn affirmation from my family and attempt to drown out my self-hatred.  However, no matter how well I performed it was never enough. I have written more about this in my post “Command Performance.”

As I tried to reject the dysfunction of my family as a young man I threw out the baby with the bathwater. At the height of my ability I surprisingly quit all of my instruments, musical lessons and left the very reputable music program of my high school. I still remember the late Michael Dufour, my band director at the time, making a last minute appeal for me to stay in band. He was completely shocked and disappointed at my decision to leave.  I should have listened to him. Oddly enough, I could not really stay away from jazz and was still nominally involved in our jazz bands on baritone sax.

Fast forward to 2010 and this past year and a half has been a full fledged non-stop descent into my struggle with faith and theodicy and first real attempts to deal with what went on in my home.  This has led to two seasons of depression and a very real contemplation of suicide. More to the point, for months I have had absolutely no desire to go to Church, read my Bible, pray, listen to sermons, or do any other basic Christian activities.  I came to call this season “The Great Disconnect” because I felt so disconnected from God and other people.

This has led me to a place of asking a lot of questions: Why do we worship?  Do we worship to make ourselves feel God is worthy of praise, even in our darkest moments, or do we worship because we already know that God is worthy of praise, even in our darkest moments?  What does it mean to be the Body of Christ?  Do I have to attend a building on Sunday to be part of the Body of Christ?  Have I turned a lot of these Christian practices into works?

In the midst of all these questions still bouncing around in my head I went to Jazz Vespers last night thinking I was going to listen to some Jazz and support some of my friends who had planned the event and were performing.

For those of you who were not there it was an amazing experience.  Gillian explained the origins of Jazz vespers and how the event was structured.  The liturgy of the service was based on verses from Isaiah.  Unlike many victorious themes, verses and sermon series I’ve heard these verses affirmed that there will be dark times in our life where we don’t feel the love of God (you know…like the one I’ve gone through) but ultimately it affirms that God will come back and not abandon us.  The first several songs reflected this sorrow, culminating in a jazz improve piece called “Groans” that incorporated the audience.  Like a prayer service, everyone brought what they had to the table in a previously unplanned manner. For those of you who are not musical, improv itself takes talent and ability.  For this piece to be pulled off in the way that it was, this took incredible talent and creativity on the part of all the musicians involved.

Around the “low” point of the service Gillian provided what was the closest thing to a sermon that the night contained.  She talked about how sometimes our walk with God is in a nice 4:4 time signature; it is easy and knowable.  While normally we invite Jesus to walk with us in this comfortable pace of life, sometimes Jesus invites us to walk along with Him.  In these times, we feel out of sync, and tripped up as things do not go according to our plan. During these times Jesus writes the meters of our life 7:8, not 4:4. (You know, like the last several months or so…) However, Gillian reminded us, Jesus will always bring us back to that nice 4:4 rhythm when we need to, just as long as we need, before moving forward again.

After the low point of the service the next set of songs affirmed the love of God, and we ended with an improv piece that allowed for many in the audience to go forward sing.  I was surprised at how many people actually got up to join in one at a time and even toyed with the idea myself.

By the end of the night I realized this was the closest thing I had come to a worship service in months.  I thought I was going to listen to Jazz and I ended up going to Church. Who knew. Maybe this is as close as I can get to a traditional church service, and even if that’s the case that is okay.

Another important insight hit me later. As I thought about the night I went through the faces in the performers and the audience.  The room was filled with acquaintances, families members, professors, students, people from different races and backgrounds and dear friends. The room was filled with people I liked and people who liked me. I was reminded of how many who had walked with me in a very real way through the last several months, offered a kind word at a hard time, or were just influential in my life.  Carol, Carenda and Gary entered into my mess and were with me in dark times.  Candace I know is coming by the sound of her laughter.  Luke is a great depth hidden under British humor.  Andrea pushes lyrical expression on campus and in her life. Gillian (and all the other wonderful musicians) remind me of the power of music, and inspire me to create.  Cameron’s workout’s destroy my body but refill my soul.  I could go on but you get the point.

By the end of the night I realized that I am in deep community here at Fuller.  Far from being in “The Great Disconnect” I am actually deeply connected to Body of Christ, though this does not look like I thought it was.  Even in the midst of my exit from “church” I cannot escape the love of God’s community. Who knew.

This all coincides with the last several days, which have been an incredible and almost inexplicable return to joy for me.  God has brought me back to that 4:4 time signature.  All of my issues are not gone and I do not know how long this season will last but I am just going with it, which is a new thing for me.

As a result of my upbringing I have a strong tendency to make plans and attempt to control my environment.  I obey the rules, stay inside the box, and try to manage every detail. Heaven forbid I make a mistake. I always want to know what’s coming (so I can plan for what could go wrong) and what’s around me (so I can see any danger’s coming).  While foresight is admirable I take this way too far and worry about what might happen so much that it kills my present.  This even impacted me on an artistic level.  I painted a water color painting completely inside the lines and while I could practice and perform a piece that was written for me, improv was always very difficult.  Heaven forbid I hit a wrong note.

I think I am learning to let go.  I am learning that mistakes are part of life, even big ones.  Do I really think that I am going to bat 100% with all of my decisions in life?  I am learning to live in the moment.  I am learning to improv with my life.  And it’s fun.

P.S.  I just wanted to say thank you to everyone, especially at Fuller, who has been there for me or impacted me in some way.  I honestly do not know if I would have made it through this last year and a half without you.  I hope there are more years, “wide awake in our dreams!”

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Pornography, Social Justice and Gender Constructs

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

Recently I went to a talk on social justice and pornography.  Much was said about human sexuality, the Church and the impact of pornography.

One point that Dr. Erin Dufault-Hunter was keen to make was that in interacting with pornography, its users are interacting with fake examples.  This leaves the user ill-equipped to actually deal with and relate to members of the opposite sex.

Another point Dr. Dufault-Hunter was keen to make was the fact that women are not righteous or innocent in regards to pornography.  More women are accessing hardcore pornography but there are also female versions of pornography, such as romance novels, and I would also suggest bridal magazines.

The fake women men interact with in their pornography have idealized bodies, are aggressive and/or submissive in their sexuality and act essentially as sex objects.  The fake men women interact with in their pornography were variously described as empathetic, kind, cooperative, emotionally intelligent, loving, compassionate, metrosexual, and “gay enough.”

Dr. Dufault-Hunter reported that when she was discussing an example of female pornography with her husband, he commented, “So [female pornography] is women with penises?”  It struck me that in the pornography of both genders, what is idealized is actually what is closer to stereotypes about their own gender. Men want women who approach sex in a masculine fashion and women want men who approach relationships in a feminine fashion.

The encouragement was given for both sexes to let the other be themselves.  Both genders should learn to relate to and appreciate the opposite sex which is and forever will be “the other” and to not retreat, via pornography, into a fantasy that idealizes and simplifies the opposite sex into what is know.  Namely, your own gender.

As the debate continued something stood out to me that I want to make.  Pornography fairly actively reinforces gender constructs and gender stereotypes and it does so on two levels.  First, it sends a message about what the respective sexes want from the other.  This is the most plain and obvious one.  Clearly men want loose women with large breasts (or so pornography would suggest).  Second, it sends a message to the respective sexes about what they should want as a member of their sex.  Clearly men want loose women with large breasts (and if you don’t you may not be man/male/masculine enough).

Pornography exposes our stereotypes about what “real” men and “real” women are to be and what they should want.  If you are outside of this your gender is suspect and often this opens you up to passive and active ridicule and shame, all attempts to get you back into line with what you should be and want.  If you are a woman who wants sex, you are a slut.  If you are a man who is down for emotional intimacy you’re gay.

This all goes back to my frustration that there are traits, jobs, aspirations, qualities and values that we have made designated to one sex or the other for centuries.  Aggressive is a masculine trait.  If a man is aggressive he is a man’s man.  If a woman is aggressive she is a bitch.  Being nurturing and caring are female traits.  If a woman is nurturing or caring she is a real woman.  If a man is nurturing or caring he is gay.

Even in the language we used to talk about the men in female pornography was telling and part of the problem.  In describing emotionally intelligent, compassionate, loving men they were called metrosexual, “gay enough” and finally “women with penises.” The hard part for me was that, as a man, I strongly identified with a lot of these traits.

I rarely, if ever watch professional sports but cook and bake. Does that make me metrosexual? I am caring, loving and considerate to people. Does this make me “gay enough?” I am highly introspective, emotionally intelligence and self-aware and can describe what’s going on inside me beyond the monosyllabic expressions of, “good,” “bad,” and “ugh.” Does this make me a woman with a penis?

I am, in many ways, the man idealized in female pornography. (Before you get any ideas single ladies, know that I am more than a great set of listening ears.  Don’t objectify me. I exist for more than helping you process your hard day. I’m a real person with feelings.) These are not my only qualities, and I do truly enjoy certain activities that are traditionally identified as “masculine,” but collectively they are a large part of who I am and how I exist in this world. Yet I’ve felt the need to squash, deny, and hide from who I am because a thousand and one messages from my family, my Church, and the culture suggested this was not “manly” and as a man I should not be like this.

I think it is high time we need to drop these concepts of gender and just let people be themselves. If you are sensitive – be that.  If you are nurturing and caring – be that.  If you are aggressive and assertive – be that. If you are competitive – be that. Wearing masks and pretending you are something that you are not takes incredible energy.  It’s like writing forever with your non-dominant hand.  Take a burden off your shoulders and be yourself.  Some people will reject you for being yourself, but others will love you all the more.  At the end of the day, when you are perpetually pretending to be something that you are not, no one wins.

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This Liminal Space

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

[Suicide/Child abuse trigger warning: If child abuse and/or suicide are triggers for you, you may not want to read this post or at least prepare yourself.]

In Pastoral Counseling Dr. Hammer made the statement that our role as pastoral counselors is to help people come to a new understanding of themselves, in a way that they would not have without our presence. After many months of introspection and self-reflection, counseling, and recovery I feel I am for the first time coming to a new understanding of myself, that I probably would not have without putting in all this effort.  This post is an amalgamation of sorts and a record of how I have very recently connected the dots of insights and questions that I have been processing, at times in this blog, for months.

The source of most of my problems is my self-hatred. Almost nearly as far back as I can remember I have hated myself.  This was recently brought into high relief when I recalled a vivid memory from my childhood I had not thought about for years. In elementary school I ran away from home and in the “goodbye letter” I left my family on a whiteboard in my room with those colored plastic magnetic letters you see on fridges I apologized for being born. I remember taking several minutes trying to remember how to spell “born.”  Was it “b-o-r-n” or “b-r-o-n?” I can also remember sincerely meaning what I said – I was apologetic I existed because I had caused my family so many problems.  I was an unplanned and unexpected third child which I just knew and I felt that I was unwanted.  On top of this I had recently become diagnosed with arthritis and had “cost” my family a lot of time, attention and money in the course of it.

This self-hatred did not drop out of the sky.  My self-hatred was the result of the abuse that went on in my “Christian” home.  Even my parents reaction to my attempted escape from the family system was dysfunctional and terrifying.  When I came home my father, screaming at the top of his lungs, berated me for being stupid and attempting to run away.  He angrily scolded me, and assured me that kids who ran away in the Phillippines were kidnapped and beheaded.  I know, intellectually, that my father was talking about what happened in the Phillippines, but it really felt like he was threatening to kill me if I ever attempted to run away, and he had a means in mind: beheading.  My mother made some ineffective attempts to stop my father instead of truly defending me and later my sister mocked me for spelling born wrong.  I had gone with “b-r-o-n.”  Thank you Gonzaga household.

In this environment I came to believe that I was a burden to other people and that my very existence was offensive to others.  This feeling, mixed with other experiences growing up, led me to a fear of abandonment. Part of me feared and still fears people are perpetually making up their minds about me and always assessing and evaluating my performance and worth.  I believe that if they realize who I am, or I am not performing enough to their expectations, they will leave me.  Therefore, to continue and maintain friendships or relationships I feel that I have had to perform, excel and produce just to be accepted or my presence tolerated.

Not surprisingly I tend to hide when I am hurting or troubled. When I am dealing with “bad” emotions such as sadness, or anger or going through difficult times in my life my default reaction is to isolate, withdraw and become incredibly silent, even from people whom I know I am safe with.  “Nobody,” my past says to me, “wants to be around someone who is sad/angry/hurting, etc.  You are already normally a burden to other people, and if people are on-the-fence about staying with me, if I talk to people about what is really going on they will most certainly leave.”

My parents are human beings with their own character defects and they tried their best, but however gracious I am towards my parents, what happened happened and my childhood left me really wounded.  I was left in a horrible situation where I hated myself and isolated from other human beings, even those who truly would love and care for me.

Every person needs to have a positive view of themselves and needs to be deeply rooted in community to enjoy live and survive the trials that naturally come with it.  If you hate yourself, and you believe no one is on your side, or you keep everyone at arms length, there is simply no reason to live life and you will not be able to cope with life.  Yet this was the situation, so how did I survive and what did this “life” look like for me?

Through a combination of creativity and resiliency, not uncommon to children, I found ways to navigate life believing and thinking in the ways that I do.  To survive life I needed to find a way feel I was worthy enough to exist and provide meaning for my life. So I turned to and at times created what I will call “external structures” to provide validation and affirmation for myself and meaning for my life. I have historically given myself to a variety of external things (people, addiction, family, friendships, relationships, institutions, my Christian faith, etc.) wholeheartedly. Often this has been at great cost to myself. I will be whatever other people want me to be, like whatever other people want me to like, or do whatever an institution asks of me to be acceptable in their estimation. I will work long and hard for very little because in a very real way, my life depends on it.  Without self-acceptance and real community these external structures keep me putting one foot in front of the other, even during very dark times. Meanwhile the whole effort I am putting into this project distracts me from thinking about my life and my self-hatred. All that is necessary for me to sink back into depression is to just stop, put down my distractions, and think about my life. Working at these structures keeps me too busy to think. When a structure works for me, my life is stable, has meaning, I feel good about myself and the world, and am highly motivated to continue in life.

However, when these structures fail I am at a loss. I have never been healed of my self-hatred, only distracted from it, so I am dependent on these external structures.  And wouldn’t you know it, these structures have a habit of always breaking down.  Sometimes they break down through no fault of my own or (especially with human relationships) because of the unwarranted pressure I put on them.  When these structures break down I fight long and hard to make them work again, and if they do not I rage against them as if they are denying me something that I was owed. While a career, faith, ideology, family or relationship might be a good and helpful thing in this life, they were not meant to heal wounds left over from childhood and they can never do what I want them to do: fix me.  In this, I realize my anger at these things is completely irrational; I am mad at the fact that they cannot do what I want them to, even though they cannot and never agreed to this the first place. Sometimes even this anger becomes another distraction myself from my self-hatred.  I do not nurse resentments because I am by nature a hateful and vengeful person, but because this is yet another way to avoid my self-hatred. But eventually even this runs its course, though it may take months or years.

After the anger has calmed down I am left in the situation where I am left with my self-hatred and no distraction or structures to provide meaning for my life.  When faced with this situation I have historically done two things in sequence.

First, I struggle with depression that may or may not include a serious contemplation of suicide.  With no structure or means to earn validation or produce meaning for my life there is simply no reason to continue.  This is why I almost drove my car into oncoming traffic in high school and after college I performed a “temporary suicide” by isolating from everything, quitting everything, and binging on porn for almost a year and a half.

Second, I then set about the project of finding and/or building another external structure.  I cannot stand to stay in a depression for too long and have to have another structure, even if the last one failed. This is why after my plans for the military fell apart I devoted my life to God and ministry. After I experienced failure in and after college I devoted my life to recovery ministry and eventually my then-girlfriend, both extensions of my loyalty to God whom I thought had called me to both.  After these have fallen apart I have devoted myself to the PsyD and helping other addicts. When a structure falls apart, and my anger fades, I feel a vacuum and seek to fill this vacuum as soon as possible with another structure.

Recently, in the last year or so, all of my structures, even the two long-standing ones of my family and my faith have fallen apart.  I am currently estranged from my family. I have cut myself off from the insanity and unhealthy ways in which my family interacts, but this has also cut off whatever I was getting out of my relationship to them, no how meager that payoff was.  I am also currently estranged from God, who, if He exists, has broken my heart too many times for me to think of Him as loving and seems unable or unwilling to powerfully act on my behalf.  I have known for some time I do not need help, or improvement from transformation.  I have though, and been told, this needs to be a spiritual transformation from God but I am still the same and struggle in the same ways that I always had after years of spiritual practices and rituals.  Furthermore, the Bible, another pillar of my faith, which I have devoted my adult life to studying, is offensive to me when I read it devotionally.  It is filled with verses I have read, prayers I’ve prayed, wisdom I’ve tried to live out, and promises that have all fallen flat in my life. My academic study of the Bible is worse. It leads me to one of two conclusions: that Christianity is entirely fake or that the Church has used the Bible for centuries is incredibly wrong manner.  The most recent structures also fell away with my move to Pasadena last year. The woman I thought God was calling me to marry left me in one of the most vulnerable and broken times in my life, when I had *just* started dealing with the abuse from my past, and I was so dissatisfied with the M Div I actually left the program. The fresh hope I had for a marriage and family went with her.  The degree program I came down here to do, an M Div with a recovery emphasis, I now see as a complete waste of money and time. Both of these realities have eroded whatever trust I had in my ability to follow God’s will, if He exists and communicates such a will to us. In terms of recovery, I realized last fall I get stuck at Step 2 and 3 because I do not believe God cares about me, and have not believed so for some time.  As a result I am stalled out in my recovery and disconnected from both CR and SAA. My current hope of applying to the PsyD or being part of some kind of healing ministry I deeply suspect is just my most recent attempts at constructing a new structure to rely on.

With the dismantling of these structures and my suspicion and hesitance to give myself to anything new it is not surprising that I went through a season of anger and frustration at just about everything (my family, my ex, God, etc.) but then have followed the sequence into a deep depression. This depression started at the end of last summer that lasted through most of the Fall.  Sometimes I would wake up and immediately just start crying because I realized I still existed.  While it appeared that I had made some progress in the Winter Quarter this was quickly undone as this Spring quarter has seen the demise or continued dismantling of any remaining structures I have.

The last several weeks I have been trying to hold onto hope, and even began attempting inner healing prayer for the first time. This is a practice incredibly foreign to my experience of Christianity where you basically invite Jesus to heal old wounds, renounce vows and judgments, break curses, etc. While 99% of my prayers for help to God have gone unanswered, anything was worth a shot at that point and time. I cannot deny that Jesus Christ showed up in a powerful and healing way. (I am chronically my experience in my three sessions for a large mega post that will be available later.)

However, in a quiet time on Easter where I attempted to re-connect with God for the first time in months, I poured out my heart to God and was led to surrender certain things to Him and ask Him for help in other ways. This, in and of itself, was not distressing.  However, the immediate realization that I had prayed these exact prayers before was.  Last summer I prayed this same prayer almost verbatim.  God had not acted in that situation and what’s worse is that in following what I thought to be His will I was led into an absolute and complete disaster that marked my descent into depression last Summer.

The week that followed Easter I was plagued by very distressing questions. If God did not answer my prayers then what hope did I have that He would answer me now?  If following what I truly thought to be His will led me into dire straits (again), what hope do I have that things will be different now? This has left me questioning if Jesus’ most recent show of power and love just like previous ones.  God has a habit of showing up in my darkest times of need but then leaving me there. He will show up enough for me to not blaspheme His name or leave the Christian faith, but not enough for my Christian faith to count for anything.

As the week went on certain events, thoughts, and questions left me feeling that while I had put great effort into this year in counseling and recovery I was spinning my wheels and I was not changing.  I reflected on my life in general, and even read journal entries from years ago, and I came to see that I had struggled in exactly the same ways, pursued healing and answers, only to return to those same struggles.  Despite years of prayer, Christian practice and ritual, working the Twelve Steps of recovery, counseling and now inner healing prayer I was not changing the in ways I needed to – I was still this person that I hated.

In short I the feeling of “I have been here before,” and “I have tried this, and it didn’t work” robbed me of any hope that I could change and I became suicidal.  Since I averted killing myself in high school I have struggled with depression, but when suicidal thoughts came up it was no longer really an option but a sign of how bad things were.  The Friday after Easter I was back at a place of truly contemplating suicide.  For the first time in my life I began fantasizing about putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger, and this led me to considering going home to get my gun.  I have been around guns for some time, and even owned a gun and struggled with depression, but I have never thought about killing myself with my own rifle.  Thursday and Friday in particular I was fantasizing about putting the barrel of my rifle in my mouth, pulling the trigger, turning my head into pink mist and putting the gray matter of my brain on the ceiling of Apartment 3.  I knew from my Pastoral Counseling training that this was a highly lethal plan.  This wasn’t taking a bunch of pills when you know people will come home in time to find you, or driving your car into oncoming traffic…with your seatbelt still on.  This would not be a cry for help.  This would be the permanent suicide.

I knew I had people I could call, people I should call, but I didn’t.  Again, it goes back to the part of me that believes if I am a bother to people, say by needing help in a dark time, that they will abandon and reject me for being needy or a burden to them.  It is completely against the grain for me to reach out in a moment of distress.  To paraphrase the words of a friend who I talked to later about the situation, “It’s easier to report what happened, than to let people in on what is happening, because that requires vulnerability.”

There are basically only two reasons I didn’t go through with my highly lethal plan. First, oddly enough my absolute pessimism about life in an odd way saved me.  I honestly thought that I would somehow screw up my suicide.  That, in keeping with an overall pattern of my life, I wouldn’t even be able to kill myself correctly.  I feared that I might shoot myself in such a way that would leave me maimed and disfigured, but not dead.  “No,” I said to myself, “I would probably lose everything but my ability to be conscious and be aware of what I had done, but be left unable to kill myself for good.  I would be stuck on some hospitable bed on a respirator for forty years.  No way God would let me get off that easy.” Second, I did not bring down my gun to Pasadena.  It is five hours away in my parent’s home and my estrangement from my parents would make it hard, if not impossible, to just casually show up one day to get my rifle.

Eventually I emailed a professor who has been doing inner healing prayer with me and talked to my roommate about it on Saturday and my counselor on Tuesday.  And much of my reflection on why I wanted to die so badly and what has happened in my life since then led me to connect the insights that started this post.

I feel now that I can finally see the underlying reasons, forces, and choices I have made to perpetuate the vicious cycle that has repeated in my life and led to a lot of my cynicism. While, if there is a God, He has certainly not helped or bears at least some culpability, I must also own the fact that I have been my own worst enemy. From my woundedness I have only continued the abuse, continued to self-sabotage my own life, and hurt many people in the process of living life the best I know how.

Currently I am stuck in this liminal space, this space between depression and a normal life.  I smile at a friend’s party but then go home and sink into myself and my junk.  I am surrounded by wealth, abundance and friends, but manage to hate my past, find my present unfulfilling and am deeply pessimistic about the future.  The demands of my life keep me putting one foot in front of the other, even as I have no real motivation to keep going.

I am feeling the vacuum and I am very tempted to just find and build another structure. However, I am trying to choose another path.  A path that leads to a solution, not just back into this cycle.

The task before me is to deal with my self-hatred. I need to come to a place where I see myself not just as a sum total of the worst choices I made and my character defects, but see my mistakes and my character defects as parts of who I am but not the total and final estimation of my worth as a person. I have no idea how I am going to do this but I know it is the only way forward.

Posted in Faith, Personal Commentary, Recovery Journal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

A good word from Maxwell to all those in our often shamed extended adolescence.

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

Dr. Ryan, a professor here at Fuller, recently pointed out the fact that in the last hundred years the average lifespan has doubled.  That means that new life stages that previously never existed have been created and others have been stretched out.  One of these life stages that has been the subject of much debate, confusion, and discussion has been adolescence, a time including and after puberty where you are figuring yourself out as an adult.

I have heard it stated elsewhere that our grandparent’s generation went through puberty at 13, our parents generation went through it from the ages of 13-18, and now it can stretch anywhere form 13-the mid twenties.  My peers and I are taking longer to figure things out, but the expectations on us have not changed.  I personally have felt intense pressure to figure life out, to fully understand myself and be an established adult member of society (in other words to have a career and family) starting about five years ago.  Some of my peers seem to have achieved this, and done so years ago, yet at twenty six I feel I have failed and am failing to meet these expectations.  I am still coming to terms with myself, I do not have a career and I am not married. As a man in particular I am subject to challenges to “not waste my life” to “be a man” (i.e get a job, settle down, buy a house) and am portrayed as irresponsible, lazy, or immature for having not done what other generations did much earlier. The fact that youths graduating from college often end up back home are bemoaned and males, such as myself, who do not have everything settled are referred to as “man-children.”  Many of these shaming messages have come from Church pulpits.

The most encouraging word I have heard for myself, and I would hope others who are in the same situation as me, came from an unexpected source. Recently I stumbled across an interview with Maxwell, a popular singer who an unexpected seven year absence from the music industry after having a break-out Freshman album.  I have attached the video of the interview.

In explaining the reasons for his seven year hiatus he described how as a musician he needed to be inspired by life, and he simply needed to live more life.

Then he dropped this line:”In your 20’s your just like a sketch of what you think you’re trying to be.”

To me this was a profound statement and a encouragement that while others may have at least appeared to have life sorted out, it is okay for me to be healing from my past, figuring out who I am going to be, and growing in the life experience that will shape who I am and inspire me.

Posted in Personal Commentary | 2 Comments

Recovery Journal: Learned Helplessness and the Theology of the Abused (Part 2)

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

Recap: In my first post of this very very long blog I talked about learned helplessness.  To recap what I said…

Abused people often experience trauma they have absolutely no control over.  The pain, trauma and abuses they experience lead them to a fatalistic view of life and disempowers them; they think that life will always be bad, and that they can do nothing about it.  They believe this even when they can make changes to their life.  Even good times are robbed of their joy as these moments are interpreted as “the calm before the store,” a ephemereal happiness that will soon be a distant memory when the other shoe drops, which it always does.  This is a truly horrible situation and it is natural that people in this situation question God’s loving nature that scripture and other Christians declare.

From here I realized that my exploration of learned helplessness helps explains the fundamental disconnect I have experienced between myself and the vast majority of Christians I have encountered and how unhelpful the Church has been to me.  In this post I want to briefly explore why I feel so disconnected from most Christians and how the Church has been unhelpful to me and people like me.

To the first point, I believe there are Christians that did have “good enough” parents or are more naturally resilient persons. For the purposes of this post I will refer to such people as “Normies.”  Most Christians I have met are Normies or are pretending to be Normies. Generally speaking such people experienced stable upbringings and a benevolent God.  Their experience of tragedy and trauma was limited and/or they recovered from such things healthily and rapidly. For such persons the teachings of the Church and many scriptures simply ring true. As such, statements about God’s goodness, His protection on their lives or concern for their plight require no explanation, thought or faith to be accepted. “God is love,” the scriptures say, and such persons have no trouble believing this statement. Their experiences of God in this life have drawn them to the same conclusions declared in scripture.  Faith is easy for such persons and their childlike faith is even celebrated in scripture.

Let me be clear that I believe that having stable homes and avoiding major trauma and tragedy are good things.  It should be the aim of every parent to raise their children in a stable home. I am grateful for some reason God has protected some Christians from major tragedy (at least so far). It is not my wish that everyone was abused so that everyone would “get” me or struggle with faith like my peers and I do. If I am honest, I am even somewhat jealous of Normies. They seem to innately known how to navigate this world in successful ways.  Everything they touch appears to flourish and they relish in life.  Men and women my age are full-engaged in life-giving relationships and careers and I feel stuck in a perpetual ash-heap that is my life.  Do we even serve the same God?

However, I find it difficult if not impossible to connect with such people. Don’t get me wrong, we can share hobbies, play games together and even share a laugh or a friendship but I just cannot “go there” with Normies.  Normies tend to be at a loss for words and/or freak out when I talk about real stuff that has gone down in my life.  The either have no point of reference or, for those pretending to be Normies, it triggers their own junk they have not dealt with. My sharing has been in vain, goes without a response, or is actively shut down.  I inevitably feel I am not understood, have made myself vulnerable for no reason and probably should not have talked in the first place.

I believe that this lack of connection comes from an inability to connect on deep things, things deeper than theology, dating, food, gossip or the latest Hulu videos. There is an emotional and spiritual depth that comes with navigating real difficulties in this life.  People who have not gone through hard times (I mean really hard times) just don’t get me.  I tend to live in this deep space, even when I would rather not.  I do not think this depth makes me better or more profound, it just is. This does not make Normies “bad” or abused people “good” it just means that the two groups have a hard time understanding each other.

With the majority of Church people being Normies or pretending to be Normies this has meant that I feel like the odd one out nine times out of ten in any Christian setting (Church, worship service, seminary, etc.).

It is no surprise that I feel right at home, understood and cared for in support groups for addicts. I believe this is probably how I should feel in a Christian church but I have had to go to recovery groups to find it. All addicts tend to have gone through hard times.  Beyond the living hell that is addiction in and of itself, the vast majority of addicts are child abuse or trauma survivors. Where Normies will freak when I start talking about my life, my peers at SAA will literally finish my sentences and trains of thought.

Second, as to how the Church has been unhelpful to me over the years, I fear that major problems arise when Normies are put in charge of Christian theology and/or public teaching.  Normies rather naturally and innocently assume their experience is normative for other Christians. Consequently they teach from their positive and victorious experience of faith and life. This rings true and is affirmed by other Normies  in the Church, often verbally with “amens,” with comments after church or with smiles and facial expressions.  This all naturally creates an atmosphere where there is spoken and unspoken pressure to go along with the dominant narrative.  If the pastor, the representative of God himself, is saying something is true and people around you are affirming it, you are far less likely to speak up to question that truth.  You are far less likely to share what has gone on in your life to question the truths everyone around you is obviously on board with.

To explain what I’m talking about here I’ll just use a basic example.

Let us say a Normie pastor on a Father’s Day Sunday service expounds several scriptures.  The goal of the Normie pastor is to focus on how God the Father loves and protects us as a father loves and protects his children.  Verses about family, about how we are God’s children, and God’s love for us may be examined. A Normie pastor may even share a quaint anecdote about how their own father once protected them in a moment of distress and compare that to a time in Israel or the Church’s life where God the Father protected them.  Two hymns and several handshakes later and Church is over.

Normies in the congregation, those with positive experiences of God and of their earthly fathers, may very well be encouraged and reminded about God’s love and providential care.  Maybe even some fathers in the congregation feel appropriately celebrated as well.  But what of people like me?

What would such a rousing and uncritical celebration of God as loving and protective Father mean to a person who had no father, had an abusive father, or who had a father who molested or raped them?  How would one whose Heavenly Father failed to protect them in the time they needed Him the most hear this sermon?  What of those people who have no happy anecdotes about their earthly father being loving and caring?

Furthermore, in this environment, where the pastor teaches something many around me are affirming, am I likely to present a dissenting experience or view?  If, after the service where everyone is smiling, I am asked, “Well how did you like the sermon Kevin?” am I more likely to fake it and say “It was great” or try to get this person to understand my sordid history with both my earthly and heavenly fathers and how this has crippled how I interact with the world? Combine this with my inability to connect or explain my experience of life with Normies, and the answer is almost 100% of the time not surprisingly to fake it.

I hope everyone can see that when Normies assume their experience is normative, and preach from this standpoint, it creates a situation where a victorious experience of God and faith is the only legitimate response to God and faith.  This goes against a large number of texts and passage in scripture where humans question God and ask the same questions abused people often ask.  Just read Psalm 88.  However, by denying this as an at least occasionally appropriate response to God, those who are in fact struggling are made feel they are unique, “bad Christians” or are not praying/surrendering/fasting enough to experience God like apparently everyone else is.

Abused people, like myself, are incredibly marginalized by much of the teaching that goes on in the Church today.  Going to Church I have not found healing; I have been made to feel like a pariah. And I am not alone.  I have not found a Body but a Christian club for nice people. I am thoroughly convinced a lot more people in the Church are really hurting but are not talking about what is really going on because of the victorious ideal we have set up in the Church that everyone is, at all costs, trying to maintain.

Conclusion:I fear that too much Christian theology has been done in sterile vacuums like the seminary I attend or by people who have not experienced much tragedy. I think more theology should be done by people who had the shit beaten out of them by their parents, incest survivors, addicts, prostitutes and rape victims…who somehow came to faith or maintained in it despite what happened in their life. We would not let half of the things that have escaped from the mouths of pastors and Christian leaders slide. We would constantly remind the Church of the real world beyond our doors and the challenges faced by people who experience life that contradicts scripture. I think the Church, like the scriptures, needs to become a safe place to ask hard questions about God and the Bible.  When we lose this, we only allow for a victorious caricature of faith to flourish…and this caricature cannot handle the questions raised by tragedy that has a habit of finding us all eventually.

More than anything I think abused people need healing. While their contributions to the theology and practice of the Church could be profound I do not think abused people primarily need their own theology akin to feminist theology or liberation theology because  theology alone cannot provide healing. Healing, be it found in counseling, a recovery group, inner healing prayer, or whatever means is necessary is what is primarily needed by abused people.  The Church should be a safe place for abused people to to find this healing or at the very least be able to talk about their need for it without being made to feel like a leper our nuisance.

Posted in Letters between friends | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

I hope God can forgive people like Hitler because I hope God can forgive me (or What Step Four taught me about my sin.)

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

In my previous post on Rob Bell, where I unwittingly started a debate concerning atonement theories, one of my friends James left this as part of his comments and pushback on my words.

“Can you really love this kind of God? Can you love a God who is so angry that the only way he can keep from torturing people for all eternity is to vent all of his wrath on his own son? Can you love a God who can now look the other way when people do bad things because they’ve been ‘justified’ — i.e., when he looks at them as they do horrific things he sees them covered in the blood and entrails of the son he poured out his wrath on and is somehow appeased by this?”

First, I do not know if I love this God but for me it is clear that this is the God revealed by scripture.  This is the God who I must either accept or reject.  To tone Him down or believe something else would require me to dismiss large chunks of scripture and aspects of God’s character that He has seen fit to reveal throughout the Bible’s witness.

Second, your objection to a God who would look at someone who has done heinous evil things as justified, and “turn the other way” touches on something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.  I, and others, see that God forgives some and condemns others in a rather arbitrary fashion.  God himself says that He will compassion one whom He has compassion and mercy on whom He has mercy.  This statement in and of itself does not seem to be problematic, at least initially.  However, for you and many others, it is offensive when we start considering the heinous evils some humans do on this earth.

How could God forgive and bring into the kingdom a rapist, a murder or an evil dictator?  This goes against our hope and desire that justice will find everyone who has done evil, especially those who appear to escape punishment in this life. They do not get the punishment they deserve.  We often hear people talk about some evil people really “earning their place in Hell.” The idea that people who have earned their place in Hell could end up in Heaven is offensive to us. God doesn’t give people what they deserve and in this He appears unjust or unfair. If this was not enough, it seems this same God can and will look upon loving and helpful people and condemn them. Loving grandmothers, kid brothers, the Anne Frank’s and the Ghandi’s of this world will all be condemned them to Hell for failing to accept Jesus Christ as the one path to the Father. So God could forgive and bring to eternal life a murderer but someone who has been really good in this life may be condemned to eternal torment?

This seems offensive to many because a fundamental principle for justice and fairness is that bad people deserve punishment and good people deserve a reward. This is the retributive principle that is common to many world religions and I believe is an innate sense of basic justice across cultures throughout time. Therefore, evil people being rewarded and good people being punished is unjust or unfair. To put this whole complaint against God in the form of an analogy…

Say there are two buses, one filled with convicted inmates headed to death-row for their crimes, and another bus is filled with schoolchildren.  While the buses are traveling over a bridge it collapses into a frigid river.  Five inmates and five schoolchildren survive the crash and as luck would have it a fisherman was in the river with a boat that can seat five passengers.  The fisherman can clearly see the inmates were inmates by their uniforms and the decals on their bus and that the school-children were school-children.  I think we can all agree that if that fisherman came back to shore with three convicts and two school-children there would be an uproar, and it would be an absolute scandal if he saved the inmates and left all the children to die.  If he came back with five children, everyone would say that he made the right choice and was a hero, maybe even an angel sent by God.  Few, if any, would raise a cry over the inmates who died in the frigid river.  Society had already decided they deserved death anyway.

However, it appears from scripture that God’s forgiveness doesn’t not operate by our rules of justice and fairness.  God’s forgiveness seems to be arbitrary; it is totally divorced from human merit.  It is not just that we cannot earn our salvation salvation but in it appears that God decides who will come to grace and who will not.

Let me be clear on this point – I have come to believe in double-predestination because it is in scripture.  I also think double-predestination is completely irrelevant because no one has any clue who God has predestined to be saved and who God has predestined to be condemned. 

If God were the fisherman in the above analogy, it appears that He would come back with a mixed boat with some inmates and some school-children.  Many would take this as a sign of God being unfair or unjust.

I would suggest that the fact that God’s forgiveness is totally divorced from human merit is the only reason any of us have any hope of finding forgiveness. Furthermore, I think the fact that and that God can have forgiveness on despicable murderers, rapists and dictators is our only assurance that He can also extend forgiveness to people like us.  The fact that God’s forgiveness is totally divorced form human merit is good news, not a sign of any injustice on God’s part. I think more Christians would believe this if they stopped for a moment and really understood the gravity their own sin.

Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Most Christians wipe their ass with this verse.

Let me repeat that.  Most Christians wipe their ass with this verse and treat it with contempt, ride roughshod over it, or cut it from their Bibles and their memory.  While most Christians I have met, especially those raised in the Church, could repeat this verse from memory it stays on the tips of their tongue and by their actions, their complaints against God’s justice and their lives, deny that this is what they truly believe.

From my experience, what most Christians believe would read something like this:”For those people…have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. (But I’ve led a good enough life to not need God’s forgiveness like those people.)”  Likely candidates for those people include really evil people, people from another culture, people from another denomination, people from another race, people from another socio-economic class, people from another political party, people from another sexual orientation, etc.  Who those people are is ultimately irrelevant.  The point that is irrelevant is that many Christians believe sinful people are out there as opposed to the good people, like them, in here.

I fear that many Christians come to believe Jesus blood was only needed to cover up the sins of really evil people, or at least people who are worst than themselves.  Self-righteousness is pervasive in our culture and in our churches and I fear those raised in the faith are especially susceptible to this attitude. Many of my peers, who have done what is right and for the most part not turned from the ways of the Lord, fail to see their dire need for forgiveness and either fail to have gratitude for God for their own forgiveness or even complain about his justice. Scripture agrees with me on this point.

Jesus Anointed by a Sinful Woman (Luke 7:36-50)

36 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

40 Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”

“Tell me, teacher,” he said.

41 “Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii,[c] and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

43 Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”

“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.

 44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”49 The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” 50 Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

I fear that many Christians, like the disciples, are not really connected with their need for divine forgiveness and consequently fail to love God or extend grace and mercy to other human beings.  I do not mean to suggest that Christians should go out and sin more so that they would feel this need; I think Christians need to ponder the gravity and the weight of the sins they have already committed…the sins they think are “less sins” or “no big deal.”

I think everyone, Christian or non-Christian, places our sins or character defects or mistakes on a gradient scale that’s perpetually weighted so that we are better than others or at least not as bad as the really evil people. But, in the eyes of God is the regular and routine sexual sin committed by a pornstar somehow “more” sexual sin than a Christian wife who cheats on her husband?  Is a person who kills in a fit of anger somehow “more” sinful than someone who routinely and in a calculated manner slanders hundreds in Christian prayer circles?  If we break the law at one point are we not all law-breakers?

I think the truth of the matter is that we have all earned our place in Hell.  We are all the sinful woman, we just don’t own it yet.

Our complain against God’s apparent injustice in arbitrarily extending forgiveness, even towards really evil or bad people, falls apart when we stop thinking of ourselves as better than or distinct from other sinners, those people who really deserve to be punished.  To return to the analogy above, the reality of this world is that there is no busload of schoolchildren.  There is just us.  A bunch of inmates en route to our earned judgment. There are no innocents upon the face of this Earth.  If the fisherman returned with five out of ten inmates, his justice would not be questioned  no matter which five he returned with because there wasn’t someone “better” or “more innocent” to save.

To personalize this I want to share how I came this position myself.

I am completely guilty of self-righteousness and am or have been guilty of everything I am accusing Christians of in this post.  High school was probably the worst for a variety of reasons.  I was raised in the Church and for the most part avoided “heinous sins.” I was better than “those people” who slept with their girlfriends, or didn’t go to Church, or stole from stores, or whatever.  While I had memorized Romans 3:23 I, at the end of the day, did not act like I needed forgiveness.

However, for years I was secretly a sex addict.  I got into recovery in 2008 and as part of the process I did a Fourth Step.  Step Four reads: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”  This means we make a huge account for our lives.  It is literally a list of fears, resentments, disappointments, abuses and hurts we addict are infamous for having and causing.  We then take this list and work through a grid of sorts to move from blaming others to seeing our responsibility in the situation.  While sometimes, such as in the case of a rape or child abuse, we come to a place where we see that we had no guilt and absolve ourselves of self-hate or self-blame that often happens after these traumas.  However, many times we come to a place where for the first time we consider our responsibility in any given situation or broken relationship.

While my self-righteousness had slowly ebbed and faded I still would have felt that it was unfair for God to extend mercy and grace towards really bad people.  As I have heard, and continue to hear, many stories of trauma and abuse, I really did not want to see those people in heaven. Forever.  Not getting punished for what they did to my friends.  Then something happened as I was working the Fourth Step again this last Fall.

I have often pondered who I hurt in my addiction to pornography.  I used to think it was a “victimless crime” of sorts but I quickly had to be honest that I was hurting myself, but that didn’t matter because I really didn’t count.  The self-hate inherent in that statement aside I had never robbed anyone to pay for pornography, nor used the services of a sex worker of any kind, so did I really hurt anyone?  As I was working my Fourth Step a news story broke about two porn production companies who had to be shut down.  An outbreak of AIDs had swept through their actors and actresses and their business had been shut down by the government.  I had watched lots of porn from both of these companies and enjoyed it.  I realized that in the midst of my “victimless crime” I had contributed to a system that is filled with addiction and sexual slavery and objectified women and men.  Some of these male and female “objects” were now people, people who were going to die from an incurable disease.  Could I really pretend, after working the Fourth Step, that I did not have any blood on my hands?

I think this is when I really saw how desperately I need forgiveness.  This is when I got the fact that I need to believe in a God who will be satisfied by the death of His Son, even when the sins are very great. If this is not the case, I doubt anyone really has any hope of finding forgiveness for what we have done.

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Rob Bell, Universalism and all that Jazz.

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

I promised to respond to the many comments put up after I posted my thoughts on Rob Bell, Universalism, and seeing and understanding God as a threat.

First up, my brother.

“Interestingly enough, I’ve heard people use Luther’s major premises to argue for something that eludes to universalism. I’ve also noticed that people who strongly detract against universalism assume penal atonement as the *ONLY* possible theory of atonement. I don’t know if Rob Bell can be accused of believing in toy god, but I look forward to reading his book along with random stuff written by non-theists and other people who I might not agree with.”

Joel, I think people go to Penal Substitution to defend against universalism because it has a high view of God’s justice and holy nature and it is most applicable in our context. Most Westerners are unfamiliar with feudal notions of honor, debt and satisfaction that is necessary for the Satisfaction theory to make sense.  The problems with the Divine love/Moral influence theory make it actually appear to support universalism.  If the cross inspires a love to God that adheres us to him enough to avoid Hell than all we really need is love.  Love, not Christ, is what saves and I hope you can see how this would feed into an argument for universalism.

Also, your comment at the end was unnecessary. You know me well enough to know that I read a wide variety of literature, much of which is not in line with Christianity or my own beliefs.  I’ve read the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, Greek literature and mythology, a variety of Christian authors and the Bible.  I read all of these critically and none of these sources perfectly suit my personal beliefs and feelings about God.

I don’t think I wrote about it but I had voiced my belief, before the book hit shelves, that Rob Bell was actually going to be found orthodox. This has been confirmed by you, blogs you link, and even Dr. Mouw the President of our seminary. (And who wouldn’t defend our horse in the race as it were.)

So why did Rob Bell appear to open himself up to accusations of universalism in interviews and promotional materials?  Why does he not cite or reference major claims in his book? Some suggest that Rob Bell’s ambiguities are a result of his communicating style where he asks questions and gives no answers.  In this Rob Bell is creatively reaching a new generation, a generation that is comfortable with if not craves mystery. Rob Bell wants people to think for themselves and not struggle with the questions themselves.

While this might be the case I also think that these ambiguities are a very clever marketing bait.  How much press has Rob Bell and his book gotten from John Piper?  How many read Rob Bell because of Piper’s tweet and the blogs of others? How many bought his book and read it to confirm his alleged universalism? I am sure Rob Bell is not the first, not the last, to use such a tactic to move books and get an audience. But at whose cost?  Bell is supposed to be a teacher and pastor and such people should provide teaching and answers.  I get that Jesus taught in parables but he then explained these parables when the disciple didn’t get it.  To just leave people questioning is not really the role of a pastor, in my opinion, regardless of what generation you’re speaking to. Even if Bell does provide answers in his book, how much trouble has this uproar cost our witness in the world and how much of it could have been avoided with some more direct answers by Bell in a number of interviews and videos?

Second up, a blast from my TWU past, Mike Rauwolf.

“…I did want to share a couple of personal observations. As an associate minister in a church, I’ve been guilty of presenting a “toy God,” capitalizing on His love, his desire to rescue a fallen creation, renewed relationship, etc. but leaving out the fear and holiness aspect.

On the other hand, I’ve been guilty of the opposite: Showing God as angry, just and wrathful, but failing to leave people with the hope we now have in Christ…

I find that it’s very difficult to maintain a balanced perspective. How can God be both? You say that God hasn’t changed, and you’re right, but our relating to Him has. Hebrews describes this change in detail. Where once we could not approach the throne directly, now we do so boldly and with confidence. If I read you right, I see you posing the question, ‘has this confidence allowed us to remake God into the image of something else?'”

Dr. Thompson was far better at bringing this out in the lecture.  Thompson mentioned that some in the room had known only the terrors of God and not his mercy and more cautiously explored this topic.  Because the Bible contains violent images where God is the perpetrator and some people have suffered abuse, this can set up God as an abuser.  This too is only part of the picture of God.  Just as a loving God without a just God is incomplete, so a just God without a loving God is incomplete.

You are correct to point out the fact that while God has not changed how we relate to him has.  I did not bring this out in my post and I should have.  However, I think your words accurately describe my fear.  Do we just have confidence in loving God, so we forget that God is also just and we needed to be saved from something?

Third, Simeon Franklin

“The wrongness of the portrayal of Jesus saving us from God is exactly why I have never felt penal substitution is adequate to fully explain salvation.

http://metapundit.net/writing/atonement_theology”

Simeon, I read your blog and appreciated how you brought out the fact that there is a multitude of ways scripture talks about how atonement happens and that there is not one clear “biblical” model for atonement.  I agree with you that this situation helps us to relate the Gospel to other culture and other people and even remember our conversation months ago where you brought up Loki/trickster popularity in the hacker sub-culture and how Christus Victor could play well into that context.

Each model seems to break down at a specific point and it is clear that you, like others throughout history, believe that penal substitution breaks down because Jesus saves us from God. God saving us from God fails to make sense to you.  I do not share this belief.  If God is truly in charge of everything, if God is the one who decides what is sin, if God is the one who decides what the punishment for sin is, if God decides who to forgive and whom to damn, I do not see how we can be saved from anything but God.

Did Satan determine what was sin?  Did Satan decide what the punishment for sin was?  Did Satan decide whom would come to a saving faith in Christ and who would not?

I would ask you to explain two things so I can better understand your argument.  First, in your opinion why is it offensive/nonsensical that God saves us from God?  Second, why did many people in the Old Testament fear God, and why is “fear of the Lord” deemed an appropriate response to encountering God in a variety of passages?

Fourth, another blast from the TWU past James Hamrick,

“I think it’s amusing how much reaction there has been to previews of Rob Bell’s book.
Kevin, thanks for reminding us of some of the texts and traditions we like to overlook as we struggle to understand God. Some thoughts:
-universalism does not necessarily negate the justice of God, and should not be equated with some kind of ‘toy’ view of God. If you believe the cross satisfies the justice of God for some, why couldn’t the cross satisfy the justice of God for all?
-There is a very real sense in which the cross saves us from Satan and the principalities and powers. I think we can learn much from the Christus Victor ‘theory’ of the atonement in this regard.
-Can you really love this kind of God? Can you love a God who is so angry that the only way he can keep from torturing people for all eternity is to vent all of his wrath on his own son? Can you love a God who can now look the other way when people do bad things because they’ve been ‘justified’ — i.e., when he looks at them as they do horrific things he sees them covered in the blood and entrails of the son he poured out his wrath on and is somehow appeased by this?”

James, thanks for writing another thoughtful comment that pushes back on me.  I appreciate it.

To your first point I think you are correct, in a sense.  I think if God had decided that the cross would be sufficient to save everyone regardless of their faith in Jesus Christ then universalism would not violate God’s justice.  However, from the Bible it appears that God did not set the world up like this and not all roads lead to Him.  Some will be saved through the narrow road that leads to the Father through Jesus Christ but many will walk the wide road to destruction.

I connect universalism with a “toy God” view because I think universalism is the natural consequence of many who cannot believe God is who He says He is in the Bible.  Only comfortable with a “toy God,” (a partial representation of God from scriptures) their understanding of salvation reflects this.  The former often dictates the latter.  People with a more robust view of God can “get” why God would condemn some to Hell.  People with a “safe/toy/incomplete” God cannot understand why God would condemn some to hell so they change their understanding of salvation.  Does this make sense?

To your second point, I think I would argue with Abelard that if Satan and demonic powers have any dominion over us it is at the express permission and will of God.  God might have used Assyria or Babylon to judge the Israelites, but the ultimate cause of their punishment was God and His will.  In the same way because I believe Satan and demons are under the complete and absolute control of God.  Satan and demons serve at the pleasure of God and I do not believe have authority or power beyond what God permits.  Therefore to be saved from the Devil in the Christus Victor theory (even it is completely true) is still to ultimately to be saved from God.

To your third point I have a lengthy response in another post.

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Letters Between Friends: Rebekah Rossi, the Holy Spirit our Mother, gender constructs and the divine feminine.

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Speakfaithfully

Rossi recently posted: “How would you respond to someone referring to or praying to the Holy Spirit as “Mom”? I’m interested to hear your thoughts…”  She tracked me down and wanted my input and I jokingly put “heresy” but promised a more serious comment later.  It was too long so I just made it a post.

Simply put: I wouldn’t care. (By this I mean, I would not be concerned that the person was a heretic, or a feminist bent on changing Christianity)

There has always been a challenge to incorporate the “divine feminine” into Judaism and Christianity. YHWH is talked about in scripture from a highly patriarchal context. He is referred to as male and male pronouns are used to referr to Him almost without exception.  This alone does not cause problems. However, it seems many cultures have seen God exhibiting attributes and taking actions that are, according to gender stereotypes, more feminine in nature.  In polytheistic religions there are often male and female gods so this isn’t a problem.  The more feminine actions of the divine are attributed to female gods and the masculine actions are attributed to male gods.

The trouble is in the monotheism of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, a male God appears to take actions that are both masculine and feminine in nature. YHWH is an avenging God but also a mother hen who gathers her chicks, who inspires a prophet to write, “Comfort, comfort, my people.”

While many comments on Rossi’s blog suggested essentially that “this wasn’t a problem because God is neither male nor female and we all (both male and female) are created in his image…” some would disagree.

I recently read an argument against the modern notion that the Ancients believed God was sexless. There are ancient graffiti describe “YHWH AND HIS ASHERAH (wife).” These two gods are depicted as having the approrpiate male and female parts. Additionally there are allusions in scripture to God having a wife/wives (even if these are metaphorical in nature). Ezekiel 1:27 talks about God having fire coming up from and down below his loins (aka, male genitilia).  God is referred to as male consistently, was incarnated as a male, and to my knowledge God is not directly referred to as feminine in any verse. This sexless God does not look so sexless, at least not in the Biblical account.

Personally I would suggest that extra-biblical evidence and even the scriptural evidence in Ezekiel 1:27 represents the Israelites struggling with exactly what I am taking about here.  Where do you put stereotypically feminine characteristics in a religion dominated by a monotheistic male God?  For some it appears that the answer was to take the option presented by a variety of religions around them in the day and they gave God a wife, an Asherah.  This to me represents a creative, if syncretistic and ultimately unorthodox, option.

Throughout the history of Judaism and the Church a variety of things, people, and even nations have taken on the role of playing the divine feminine counterpart to the male God of the Bible. Wisdom is referred to as feminine. Hosea talks of Israel being God’s unfaithful female spouse.  Later both Mary, the mother of Jesus, is raised in Marian theology to represent and take a lot of female aspects apparently missing from the Bible.  The Church itself has often been referred to as “Mother Church” and seen, collectively, as providing a safe, nurturing, and distinctly feminine environment.

Even in patriarchal situations there have been some creative options.  Dr. Thompson recently highlighted a variety of comments from early Church fathers where Jesus is presented in a feminine and maternal role.  Many early church leaders, who would be deemed unbelievably sexist by todays standards, refer to young Christians being nursed at his bosom. Julian of Norwhich, a female mystic from the medieval ages, wrote that, “Christ, he is our Mother.” Dr. Thompson suggested Julian was breaking a stereotype (about the person and nature of Christ) with another stereotype (the role and attributes of women).

Talking about God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit as feminine or female is not an invention of third wave feminism or something that is new.  I think the contemporary assertion that God is sexless or that it would be wrong to refer to the Holy Spirit as feminine or as mother says a lot more about our individual and cultural understanding of what it means to be feminine and what it means to be masculine than anything else.

The Holy Spirit Herself is is a feminine noun in the Greek and Hebrew.  So if someone reacted strongly to someone calling the Holy Spirit “Mom,” I would ask why.  Likewise, I would want to know why someone felt the need to describe God in feminine terms.  Is masculinity equated to brutality in their mind?  Can only a feminine God be truly loving for them?  Why? Have we arbitrarily excluded fathers from being loving and nurturing to their kids?  Are women not allowed to be assertive and fight passionately for justice?  Is this an effort to tone down aggressive/abusive/masculine aspects of the Bible that seem too aggressive for a loving God and are offensive to us?

In short: I do not think such a statement represents heresy, or even a new or novel struggle in the modern age. But I do think it begs a lot of questions about what we think about God and gender.

Posted in Faith, Letters between friends, Personal Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments