Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

God Loves You (Better Be Afraid)

This is my (belated) response to Monte Asbury's post that I stumbled on a few weeks back about 'What I Learned From Church That Didn't Ring True'. Since he was kind enough to comment, I figured I better actually write one.

There are many things I have learned from my various church experience that didn't ring true (and are only just starting to kind of gel together into some kind of coherency). The one I've chosen to pick is:

God Loves You (Better Be Afraid)

We don't outright say this, usually. But in a lot of (particularly evangelical and Pentecostal) church preaching and particularly evangelism, we convey this message: God is great and wonderful, he rules the universe, he loves you unconditionally, he has given you everything up to and including eternal life - but actually it's not unconditional, all of God's love is only available to people who reject every good thought about themselves and consider themselves utterly unworthy, broken, miserable failures. It's an Escher-like picture: you're rich, but only if you believe you're poor. You're guaranteed salvation, but only as long as you remain good and scared of Hell. You're a good person just as long as you see yourself as a bad person.

How can anyone reason coherently about a self-contradictory belief statement like this? As soon as you start to get happy, you check yourself and think that you're feeling good about yourself, which is pride, and that means you must be wrong; you start feeling bad about yourself, and then you remind yourself that your humility means that you're in a good place to receive God's uplifting power...

If we start thinking too seriously along these lines, we find ourselves starting to treat God a bit like an abusive parent: he beats us up, but it's for our own good, so we must have deserved it. He smashes the furniture in a drunken rage, so we try harder to paper over the cracks. We smile, we put on our best face, we praise His Name and insist on His justice even as inside we're dying.

Okay to be honest, a paradox like this - 'the last shall be first, those who lose their life shall gain it' - does exist in the Gospels and in a lot of the deepest Christian mystical material. But I think it's a lot simpler than 'God likes playing opposites, so whatever you think of yourself, He thinks the opposite; whatever you want, he wants you to have the opposite'. God loves us, period. And that means God thinks we're good.

I have never had an idea of God as 'a white-bearded old man in the sky'. I don't know who actually has that image; for me, it's so utterly silly that it doesn't even rate a thought. Of course God - the real God, the only kind of God worth thinking about - isn't a human, or any kind of human construct. Existing outside the universe and time, outside thought; how could any old man rise to that?

No, for me the lurking fear of God is that He is an all-powerful cosmic force; something deeper, wider, more fundamental than life. An energy that could completely erase me in the blink of an atom, and wouldn't even notice. Something utterly alien to me, my petty thoughts, my emotions, my physical body; alien to all biological life; a cold, empty eternity indistinguishable from death or a destruction more permanent than death, but with the added twist that He has moral authority on His side; that His judgement is final; that there is no arguing with Him, because even my own innermost heart would condemn me if I tried; a blackness utter and absolutely dark and cold and unforgiving as the vacuum of space. The Thing That Is There, the Cosmic Authority, aloof in mathematical purity, regardless of anything we might think or feel or care about. Sharing nothing whatever in common with us except for the fact of existence, and not even that.

The kind of God that creates Hell not out of any desire to punish, but just merely because The Equations Demand It; The Greatest Good Must Be Served; The Divine Plan Is All-Wise; There Is No Alternative; What Must Be Must Be. Those who do not love Him are erased from existence, quietly and without remorse.

Could I love a God like that? Not really, no; the human instinct is to hide and flee; love is too small a thing to figure in His nature. Could I believe in His existence, believe Him to be Truth Absolute and Eternal, and fear and respect Him (from a safe distance and with proper precautions) like I would geometry, physics, gamma rays? Hell yes.

But that God is not the Christian God.

When I sit down to pray, or contemplate, or meditate, whatever I choose to call it, somewhere in my gut still lives the shadow of that God; the Cosmic Force, abstract and unmoved, stern and terrible, inhuman in resoluteness, the Devouring Fire, the Purifier, the Refiner, the Mind who is Exalted Above All, who uses the word 'love' like a scalpel, calm and dispassionate like a Terminator, who cannot be fought, evaded, bargained with, and whose goal is the destruction of all my small, damp, fragile, messy humanity. The God of Plato, perhaps, or Pythagoras, or of Kabala.

But not the God of Jesus.

Coming to terms with the irreducible love of God - the All-Powerful as smallness, softness, gentleness, quietness - is something altogether different, and emotionally quite hard to process. There is a sense that this God is not fragile - quite the opposite - but something like it, that is hard to describe; smallness is about the only English word to hand. Humility, perhaps? A God who could perhaps easily be overlooked, moved with a breath. But slow and persistent like an ache, returning if we miss Him.

One day I want to get hold of the now out-of-print Exegesis of Philip K Dick, that sprawling pile of random notes from a mad prophet, broken and desolate God-lover, who in the midst of sex and drugs and psychosis and science fiction it seems somehow caught (or was caught by) a glimpse of the same God I know. So far all I've seen are quotes, but ones like this stick in the mind and cause my spirit to say 'Yes!':

One can see from this that that which we kick off to one side of the road, out of the way, which feels the toe of our boot - that may well be our God, albeit unprotesting, only showing pain in his eyes, that old, old pain that he knows so well. I notice, though, that although we kick him off to one side in pain, we do let him toil for us; we accept that. We accept his work, his offerings, his help; but him we kick away. He could reveal himself, but he would then spoil our illusion of a beautiful god. But he doesn't look evil, like Satan; just homely. Unworthy. Also, although he has vast creative and building power, and judgment, he is not clever. He is not a bright god. Often, he is too dumb to know when he's being teased or insulted; it takes physical pain, rather than mere scorn, to register.

Do I fear this God? No. Do I love Him? How could I not? Except... perhaps not so much. It's so easy to pass Him by, flinch and be a little ashamed, ignore Him for that glorious, merciless Machine-God of crystalline perfection, the Almighty Ruler and Judger, Who Lives In Unapproachable Light.

It's hard to let myself admit that the God who I like, not the one that demands worship, is in fact the most real.