As I have mentioned in previous posts, my life began in the strangely quiet synagogues of a reformed Jewish life. I say that for two reasons. Firstly, reformed Judaism is mostly a product of ethnic and secular thought. While there may indeed be a great love for Israel and love of Jewish culture, there is often not much religious enthusiasm, zeal, or knowledge. At least, that was the case in the life of my family. Jewish secularism grew out of fear of being labeled and treated differently. The century before with its Eastern European pogroms, along with the holocaust of the mid 20th century, helped to secure these beliefs and practices. The reason I could flourish in my secularism and atheism was a lack of religious instruction or reinforcement at home, and the strong promotion of strictly secular thought by my father. Secondly, reformed thought (unlike reformed Christian thought) was very liberal in its thinking. This meant not only were its politics to the left of center but its claim to religious exclusivity was non-existent. There was no religious figure (besides the casual mention of Abraham or Moses) and no belief in a revelation, oral or written, from God. This was a collection of culture, an assembly of ethnicity, a construction of non-religious Jewish consciousness.
And so went the life of my family. Our discussion of religion went as far as the yearly meaningless recitation of the Passover Haggadah (though it was a fond memory), and then a few years of Hebrew school before my Bar-Mitzvah (which I despised). I was, as my father raised me, an atheist, secularist and had what I considered were high ethics (not sure what criteria I would use to evaluate them outside of sentimental Western enlightenment thought). I found great meaning in the belief that man was growing and learning and would someday be able to conquer his shortcomings, whether medical, scientific, sociological, or moral. I most definitely had a great faith in man, his evolving brain, and the evolutionary progress. My father was a university professor at UCR for twenty years. He introduced me to Louis Leakey (not in person but in study) in my high school years. I loved him and his discovery of Zinjanthropus man in Kenya in the 70’s. I had already developed a love for the African country, Mt. Kilimanjaro and the cheetah through the monthly publications of National Geographic; so gravitating towards Leakey’s work in Kenya was a no-brainer.
As I began to enter college, I saw that the world was much larger than I had been taught or realized, by either family, school or synagogue. I encountered different cultures and genres of thought, both Western and Eastern. I learned of Confucius and read through his Analects, of Buddhism (and some splinter groups). But what most profoundly impressed me was Christianity. I cannot explain why, other than to say, I had an encounter with Christ. I had spent the fall of my junior year in college arguing with a creationist over dinosaurs. For someone who relished the Scientific American publication, this was child’s play, and yet there was something unexplainable and intangible from a relationship perspective that tugged at my heart. Though I love rational thought and logic, analysis and inquiry, we would be fools to think that “thinking” is the consummation of life. Heart issues like compassion, empathy, and suffering with a loved one would become concepts I would learn to deal with as I grew as a person. In my senior year of college, I arrived at a place of “accepting Christ into my life”, whatever that meant. You must remember that I had no Christian roots or even real religious background to help me arrive at such a belief. It was not a scientific method of evaluating reality, nor a system of thought that was being presented that needed consideration but a Person that I was encountering, Indeed, much of rational inquiry and evaluation seemed elusive. One who was completely alien to me was being revealed. This was done in the quietness of my heart, not at the pressured invitation of others. Though I had a very limited understanding of Scripture (based almost entirely on the retellings of Purim, Hanukah, and Passover-told only as childhood fairytale like stories-in addition to the passages I had to learn for my bar-mitzvah portion, regarding “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”), I was not prepared to deal with deception, Jewish or otherwise. I had no background in a belief in Jesus, and was in no position to make rational arguments one way or another. I had no idea if there was one God or three hundred million and no historical idea of this Fellow, Jesus, whether or not He had really lived. I had no concept of redemption or heaven, whatsoever, nor the need for either of them. I was definitely not “a sinner”. What caught my heart was this Alien who cared for me in an unimaginable way, as I would discover. But for the moment, I was captured by this experience.
You can also imagine that having no underlying foundation or familiarity with this religion (other than performing violin solos in church services with my French teacher, who moonlighted as a church organist and who himself held no strong religious convictions), “believing” would leave me open to all sorts of corrupting influences (no matter what the intentions of those who first introduced me to Christ were). I mainly listened to the conversation of friends and the teachers they espoused, mostly outside of traditional or mainline Christian camps, referred to positively as the Word of Faith movement, and pejoratively as the “Name it and claim it” or “Blab it and grab it” group. Within this cultic group, I began to study the Bible through a predetermined and very shallow grid. Now, I don’t call them an outright cult (though my family certainly thought they were) because they still promoted the traditional “born-again” message of Christianity and did ultimately honor the God of the Bible and the Bible of God. What they failed to do, however, was to ground me in anything other than a few of their trite sayings. Inquisitive as I am, after a while, I began asking questions. They didn’t like my inquiries, dismissed my questionings and refused to take me seriously. At that point, I left the church. If a system of thought is true, it has to be willing to stand up against scrutiny, especially if it is a religious, moral or philosophical one. At that point, I started questioning what I had believed. I wasn’t sure what I could believe of what I had been told nor what I felt I had discovered on my own. Was the Bible to be trusted? Was what I had experienced been real? What was reality? Was life “but a dream”, a speck of dust in a greater civilization like Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, or an illusion like the perceived bend in the underwater stick? Was Christianity just another system of thought that was only speculative as was atheism? Though I had loved atheism when I believed it, at heart it was a system that looked forward in faith to certain hopes of discovery and promises of better ways of treating people. Atheism along with Christianity held out many hopes. Both also involved many well meaning and virtuous souls. But what I was faced with was whether or not Christianity’s promises were any more certain? Were we really any better off today than the Aztecs of a couple thousand years ago? I guess it depends what station in life you held. If we would say yes, what criteria would we use in evaluating our decision and what right would we have in coming to such a criteria. Isn’t belief, ethics, or morality relative? Who has a right to impose their culture on another? I had spent my senior year at conservatory and two years at Yale graduate school believing what was turning out to be “a lie”.
Ironically enough, the centerpiece of disbelief and questioning arose around the issue of the sinfulness of man. The Word of Faith people did not believe in the depravity of man after Christ had imputed His righteousness to the believing heart (as Christians have traditionally believed). A friend of mine questioned me about these beliefs, my understanding, and my hermeneutical methods of interpretation (how I decided how to interpret the Bible). In reality, she confronted me. In fact, she also accused me of Bibliolatry, worshipping the Bible as God, instead of the Person, Who authored the book. When I seriously considered what she was saying, I realized she was right. It was a hard place to arrive at. Now that I had come to my first crisis of faith, where did I stand? What did I think? What was reliable and what wasn’t? I questioned just about all of my core beliefs in those rocky and turbulent years. But, I found out that doubt could also be a good thing to drive one to greater self-examination, inquiry and a trust in a true source of strength, to the True and Authentic One, who is our Strong Tower. (More recently, I went through a similar period in regard to my son’s dealings with autism and the resulting behavioral problems. In his early days, we had to deal with his frustrations with communication and the many times he would either throw his cochlear implant processor [a $6,000 piece of outerwear] across the room, car, against the wall, or rip it apart. More recently, we have had to deal with aggression. That can be a scary thing if you know that he is almost the same size as me at twelve years old and almost as strong.) In addition, to years of torment due to my beloved’s chronic illness, I was again brought to a point of great despair. But I thank God for the Psalms, which encouraged me tremendously with the knowledge that others have preceded me in my struggles of faith and that Christ went through the greatest of afflictions and tasted the collective and eternal suffering of His people to give us aid. He of all Men knows what we experience and then holds our hands as He goes through the hardships with us. He does not stand off afar in voyeuristic sadism or sympathy, but embraces us in our suffering, as if He were going through it with us. Isaiah says, “In our affliction, He was afflicted”. Paul says, “For we would not have you ignorant, (what delight for us reasoning and rational creatures) brethren, concerning our affliction which befell us in Asia, that we were weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of life: 9 yea, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead: 10 who delivered us out of so great a death, and will deliver: on whom we have set our hope that he will also still deliver us;”
What I lastly desire to add to the communication of this post is the failings of the church in regard to teaching true and sound doctrine. The word “doctrine” scares people because they somehow think it means irrelevant academic thought. This is not true in the least. True doctrine means true teaching. Is this not what many so earnestly seek on Sunday mornings that call themselves Christians? What I experienced in the early years of my Christian experience was what I refer to as Smorgasbord or Cotton Candy Christianity; a religion based on the sweet stuff but lacking in any spiritual nutritional substance, what I consider fundamentalism to be. What this teaching fails to do is to prepare us to face anything difficult in life. Whether our religion’s claim encourages an almost childish and mindless theistic belief or encourages what might be aptly titled “plastic-smile Christianity” pretending that all is well even though our hearts are broken and still darkened by a sinful nature, we must not utopianize the Gospel, this side of heaven. This is just plain naïve and foolish thinking at best, and mean-spirited and sadistic at worst. No matter what we experience, Christ who experienced much worse than the worst Auschwitz (seeing He drank to the dregs the cup of eternal judgment), can comfort us. Right teaching, true perspective and theology give us life in the darkest moments and trivialize the shallowness of modern Christian thought (which almost exclusively exists in a bubble, away from societies and cultures which deny basic human rights: to think, speak and worship according to conscience, where people suffer unspeakable attrocities).
I would also argue that we have an obligation, not just to find succor and strength in our severe afflictions, but also to bring help to others. He prepares us to be able to empathize, not just sympathize, with others that we might stand with them in their tragedies as Christ stood with us. The church must go beyond the comfortable boundaries falsely created by Christians whose diets have consisted of spiritual potato chips and French fries. We need to adopt Paul’s attitude in Colossians 1:26, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister”. Our sufferings are not redemptive in that they acquire forgiveness for another, but that they are meant to be used in a redemptive way and can be instrumental to the healings of those who are currently grappling. We are to mediate the sufferings of Christ by experiencing their pain with them. Paul again writes in II Corinthians, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort; 4 who comforteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 5 For as the sufferings of Christ abound unto us, even so our comfort also aboundeth through Christ. 6 But whether we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; or whether we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which worketh in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer”.
As Christians, we must recognize that we not only have an imputed righteousness as a gift, that we have not only been given a new nature by His Spirit, that we have not only been granted Sonship through the Beloved’s standing with His Father on our behalf that enables us to call Him Father, too, but that the sinfulness of the human heart is still present with us in our doubts, our fears, and our anxieties, and that it raises its head in great ugliness and terror at times. We must not hide from this or pretend it doesn’t exist. We must acknowledge it, seek it out, and find true solace in Christ, and then look for opportunities to support others in their struggles.
The consumerism culture in the Church has endeavored to make us more relevant, palatable and attractive to the world, but has succeeded only in making us more titillatingly trite. We see this everyday in our society at the check out counters of our grocery stores. Stories of celebrities, the lives of the rich and famous, might more aptly be re-titled lives of the shallow and meaningless. Unfortunately, the church has for decades adopted this attitude, aiming to maintain purpose and meaning through “keeping it together with a smile” while slowly marginalizing itself and the Christ who it seeks to exalt. Despite the compromise of doctrinal integrity and the adoption of ecclesiastic dishonesty in regard to the character of God, we have done a tremendous disservice to God and His people by misrepresenting who He is, what He has done for us, the Christian life in both suffering and victory, and the need for pathos among the people of God. It is only as we see who God is as the supreme King, Judge and Lawgiver, how we have offended Him and His ways, the tremendous identification He made in becoming like us in our suffering humanity (laying aside His intimacy with the Father in eternity and living amongst us in a sin cursed world in the struggle of darkness of soul) and then eternal agony and penalty of judgment He paid in our stead through His propitiation for us, drinking to the dregs the cup of just perpetual punishment of His people, that we will begin to appreciate the imputation of His righteousness and the adoption of us as His. It is then that we can face the joy of victory and the suffering and agony of defeat. This, my friends, is what the gospel is all about. Let us live as Christ has called us, as His.
