There are some that
call themselves believers, L**, but they look at the f@ith as a religion, a set
of rules and beliefs, instead of a relationship, I said earnestly, eyes
half on L**, half intently searching for pieces of duck in the swirling,
fragrant broth. I was tired, and this
conversation had already been going on for a long time. I think
knowing G*d is about having a relationship with Him; religion is about
accepting societal customs. Despite
being nearly vacant, the hot pot restaurant was curiously loud—a noise that
emerged from the pervasive bustle that characterized Chongqing. Carrying platters of raw meat, potatoes,
mushrooms, and vegetables of a kind that only grow in China, the waitresses
hurried between the backs of mostly empty seats. Two men in table next to us
were talking to each other—but looking, decidedly, elsewhere; bifurcated (or
fractured) attention becomes habitual in a city of so many millions.
I rarely seem be able to keep my eyes fixed and steady
anymore.
In the chair next to me, L**’s constant readjusting betrayed
the discomfort his placid face attempted to belie. Slipping into autopilot, L** responded, Religion can help people get a better life,
live with purpose, and feel better about themselves. I think religion is good…
There’s a dull, resonant flavor to the bitter pepper used in
nearly every Chongqing dish. There was a lot of that pepper in the duck
tonight. Kicking my way back home along
in the diffused bloom of a streetlight battling gloom, I mulled over L**’s
backpedaling. Nearly a month ago L**
had sent me texts that had me thinking he was on the verge of a
breakthrough. Really, it was the logical
thing to think. But now, in the space of
a few minutes, those hopes seemed dash. S@lv@tion isn’t supposed to work this
way.
G*d, according to some Atheist thinkers, is product of the
evolutionarily advantageous human inclination of pattern recognition. Imagine you’re part of a tribe of hunters
several thousand years ago. Stalking through
the bush, you think you see a pair of eyes and the shape of a big cat in the
tall grass. You think you see something
that matches, enough, the pattern of a big cat to act accordingly. Operating under this assumption, you
flee. Now, no matter if, in this
particular instance, there was a big cat in the bush, it is beneficial to your
survival to act as if there was. If
every time you think you see a shape that signals danger you act assuming the
danger is real, then you will avoid the possible danger in every instance;
however, if you ignore those signals, you might be right, but it only takes one
wrong decision to make the strategy less worthwhile than a strategy that always
guarantees your safety. Pattern recognition,
according to this theory, was beneficial to human survival and cognitive
development, but, not just any pattern, it was advantageous for humans to
interpret an intelligence behind what could be, and probably often was, just
some odd arrangement of plants. Thus,
such pattern recognition is fundamental to human thought, and it is this
behavior, on a larger conceptual scale, that created concepts like G*d.
Christ@ins like to think in patterns. All people do. But Christ@ins look for the patterns of
G*d. They look for situations to match
up to their concept of G*d and his plan so that life makes sense. We (unconsciously) build and create patterns
through the stories we tell and through the ways we interpret past events. In this situation, G*d was doing blank;
“Yesterday, G*d taught me the importance of patience.” Patterns are a means to meaning and
therefore, bring us comfort. We all feel
very nervous in situations we cannot understand or predict. But if we run across a situation that is
analogous to another we have seen, we instantly feel more at ease, because
we’ve seen it before. Christians, in
particular, generate and store such patterns to help them understand and predict the will of G*d. In relationships or evangelism, especially,
believers try to divine the will of G*d, looking for signs and signals that
might reveal His plan; we use situations we’ve read about, heard of, and/or
lived through—event patterns—to give us insight about the future; habitual
pattern recognition naturally builds these expectations. But, often enough, we find that reality is an
ill-fitting garment. Our expectations
never materialize, and we are left perplexed—doubting G*d’s plan, significance,
or even His very existence—all because what we thought should happen,
didn’t.
//
Hunched over—practically on—a city trashcan, a man, little
more than a tuft of hair on pile filthy cotton, pressed a tongue toward the hay
colored refuse, grasped in his small-knuckled fist, that looked the consistency
and texture of pudding. His hands, invisible but for the battered, thin fingers
emerging from his olive coat, slipped quickly back into the bin after he had
finished the handful. His bowed back was cradled by a desultory stack of
packages tethered to a length of bamboo, withered legs bent into submission by
the desire to stave off starvation.
//
But this mindset is hardly rational and, even, strikingly
inconsistent with our ostensible assumptions about the nature of G*d. In terms of the nature of His being, Jehov@h
is defined by three characteristics: omnipotence, omnipresence, and
omniscience. These characteristics are
all unmatched by anything that we are aware of within reality and are,
therefore, incomprehensible. G*d is, by
necessity of his divine nature, impossible to understand. Why is it, then, that we are surprised when
the events that He oversees defy our concepts of what should and shouldn’t
happen? If we really believed that G*d’s
nature is so difficult and impossible, we should really be more surprised whenever
we find his will intelligible than when we don’t. It stands to reason that the failure of many
of our expectations should come expected—not unanticipated. J3sus explains this in when he’s talking to
Nicodemus: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do
not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is
born of the Spirit.” But instead,
believers seem to base their belief on the premise that it will provide an
explanation for all things, past, present, future, and, when a ready explanation
isn’t so ready, our contingent faiths find themselves in deep trouble.
I think we’ve forgotten what faith really means. Paul, in the very beginning of Romans,
outlines the importance of faith: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it
is the power of G*d for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first
and also to the Greek. For in it the
righteousness of G*d is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The
righteous shall live by faith.’” Faith
is our S@lvations foundation. But it
seems like most of us are bent on obtaining a faithless belief—that the
strength of our belief is contingent on its ability to produce all answers and
predict all events, at least personal ones.
Christi@n apologists, in particular, like to implicate, or explicitly
state, that our faith isn’t really a faith, that it is the inevitable logical
outcome of a rational and open mind.
But I think that such an attitude stands defiance of the eminently
apparent incomprehensibility of the world that we live in and the G*d who wants
to know us. Not much of what we “know”
is the product of pure rationality; most of it is based on articles of faith
tacitly accepted. The reality of reality,
for instance, is such a faith-based assumption°. When questions and unmet expectations are
looked on as problems, the necessity of faith that is so essential to salvation
is obscured and a perverted manner of viewing Christi@n beliefs is
promoted. Questions and unmet
expectations are not just causes for doubt, but instead opportunities to
display the vigor of a salvation whose efficacy overwhelms these.
Faith is the essence that drives our relationship with G*d;
it is the basis of salvation and the force behind it. When we encounter problems, when events just
don’t turn out, when questions persist, let’s not act shocked or be
shaken. Don’t work to strip the faith
from your beliefs. When we feel the
necessity of satisfaction at every turn, we suffocate the faith that is the
genesis of our relationship with G*d. A
faith contingent on the regular meeting of expectations has little right to
call itself faith and is most likely a “belief in self” more than a faith
G*d. If reality fails to live up to our
hopes, are we upset because G*d wasn’t glorified or because we weren’t? Perhaps instead of losing faith in G*d’s
ability to carry our His will we should lessen our confidence in our ability to
foresee it—like the wind in J3sus’s example.
It is the worst possible mistake in a Christi@n’s life to doubt G*d when
we should only doubt ourselves.
But sometimes circumstances seem contrary to not only our
own reasonable expectations, but the overall will of G*d—sometimes they
actually seem to contradict His seemingly apparent, scripturally revealed
plan. We’ve all experienced moments in
our life where the results of following what is quite obviously G*d’s will quite obviously fail. Perhaps for the believer, these situations are
the hardest to deal with. Paul didn’t
seem to have the same reaction; in second Timothy, he expresses earnest
feelings of abandonment:
Be diligent to come to me quickly; for Demas has forsaken
me, having loved this present world, and has departed for Thessalonica—Crescens
for Galatia, Titus for Dalmatia. Only
Luke is with me….Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. May the Lord repay him according to his
works. You also must beware of him, for
he has greatly resisted our words.
At my first defence no one stood with me, but all forsook
me. May it not be charged against them.
Paul’s account is troubling, but the letter doesn’t end
there; “But,” Paul continues, “the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, so
that the message might be preached fully through me.”
The consequences of Paul’s obedience seem counterintuitive:
those that were supposed believers left him; the army of G*d was represented by
one. He followed G*d’s will intently,
but his harvest was bitter. When we
think about biblic@l figures, the stories that come to mind are of faith
rewarded in deliverance—rarely do we conjure images of belief met with
abandonment and failure. But Paul
defined failure a different way; his concerns didn’t rest on difficult
outcomes, but on his relationship with and obedience to G*d through them. The only consequences that should concern us
are internal. If our posture is one of
worshipful faithfulness, G*d’s will is
done and His Glory made manifest. Faith is the beginning and end of G*d’s will
for our lives. It is through our faith
that G*d is glorified, so, as long as we have faith, why do we worry?
The long-expected messiah was never visualized as a homeless
carpenter, criminal sympathizer, and itinerant teacher; he was supposed to be
the physical savior of a physical national; but instead he was the internal
redeemer of individual spirits. J3sus
consistently emphasized the internal in his ministry; isn’t it about time that
such a realm became focal point of our life, that our internal response to
events, instead of the events themselves, became the pith and marrow of godly
pursuit?
L** (or anyone) and the look of G*d’s plan for him (or
anyone) cannot be the crux, or a crux, for my faith. If it is, what sort of faith do I have?
People, as I’ve said, deal in patterns, and we can only
recognize patterns we’ve seen before.
Why should we be surprised that atheists cannot interpret a G*d whose
language they’ve never learned? Why
should I be surprised that L** cannot recognize a pattern he’s never seen? Why should I be surprised that he cannot see
the same G*d I can? It’s like expecting
him to understand Melville if he didn’t know English: it’s lost on him. And, even though I know the language, much of
it, like Melville, is lost on me too. I can only hope for the faith to thrive in
the midst of it, the gift to see others come to Him, and, perhaps, the blessing
to get better at the lingo.
°(for
an example of this basic principle, see The Matrix).
