Saturday 26 April 2014

When Theology Becomes Idolatry

The theme of idolatry is explicit and relentless in the Old Testament. “There is only one God, worship Him alone” is the repeated refrain. Today, if idolatry is addressed at all in Christian circles, it is usually reduced to pagan or animistic worship or undue materialism, although there is little specificity as to how much materialism is undue!

Concurrently reading Isaiah and a novel recounting pagan beliefs a number of years back brought me to a deeper understanding of the insidious nature of our idolatry today. Although most of us would understand the idea of appeasing the gods and doing things like sacrificing something or someone to make them happy, it is the hidden agenda that is really the problem. Anything I do in order to get any “god/God” to do what I want is idolatry, and possibly it’s closely related neighbour, witchcraft. It is about control. And that is the root of our problem. Rather than allowing God (as the omnipotent, omniscient Creator) to have control over what goes on in and around our lives, we want to tell Him how to do it, and what we want. This is also the basis of the “works”, spoken of in the New Testament, by which we might try to make God love us more, or at least, not smite us.

So where do I get off suggesting that our theology could actually be idolatry?

As I read forums and hear people speak, I struggle at times with the surety of some that they have the “right theology” and further, that anyone who believes differently is condemned and maybe even of the devil. Quite possibly a few, if they have read this far, may already be condemning me in that same way. 

The problem I have, though, is not that I disagree with those beliefs necessarily. It is more that when we think we have arrived and know it all, we are in grave danger of making our personal understanding our god. We can wrap God/god up in a neat box and say “this is what He is like; this is what He likes/doesn’t like; this is how you have to behave/what you have to do to please Him”. And basically, we then condemn anyone who doesn’t agree with us one hundred percent, or has had a different experience of God. And I would suggest that this condemnation comes from ‘liberals’ as much as ‘fundamentalists’.

It is at this point that I am again and again reminded of the Jews in Jesus’ day and how sure they were of what Messiah would look like, what He would do, and how neatly they had packaged their faith. Jesus was not what they were expecting or looking for. In fact He offended many of them precisely because He refused to conform to their theology.

Again, we see this theme through both the Old and New Testaments; God never seems to do the same thing twice. In fact, it has been suggested that Moses lost his opportunity to get to the Promised Land because he second guessed God as doing that same thing again with getting water from the rock (Numbers 20:1-12). Jesus healed a number of blind people and crippled people, but we see Him spitting in mud, forgiving sins and simply touching people to bring that healing. There was no “one size fits all”. I like to think that this is because of our tendency to “formulise” everything: “This is how you do it”.

More than anything, God wants us to have a relationship with Him where we are dependent on Him, where we look to Him in confidence that He knows best, rather than growing in confidence of our own ability to follow a formula. We also tend to neglect the reality that each of us needs our healing and growth to come in a different way, as each of us is unique. Our experiences, good and bad, our personality, our family history, all these go together to bring us to the point we are today. This is so complex that only God could possibly know what is required to bring us to wholeness in Him.

Our desire for expediency, efficacy and orderliness steers us back toward programs and processes. Although these can be helpful and valuable, ultimately they can only be loose packing around our journey or we ascribe them more authority and power than God. It is only God working through these as He chooses that gives them any potential; we must submit them to Him consistently, or we elevate them higher than they deserve.

Doctrine, orthodoxy and dogma all come from the same root. It is about beliefs and about opinions, and as much as we would like to get it “right” in our theology, we are finite and God is not, so at best our theology is restricted or partial. And there is a very fine line between doctrine and dogma and it is often very blurry. In addition, in our desire to be precise and unambiguous, we can lose sight of the limits of our finiteness, and so we discredit that which others see from their different perspective.

This does not mean that we should accept every different understanding without question. We still need to be discerning. However, when we listen to others with one ear and God with the other, I think we might find that they are in tune more often than we realise. And in the end, no doctrine, creed or theology will give us complete understanding of God. This only grows and develops as our relationship with God deepens. The question is whether we will remain open and trusting enough to allow Him to reveal to us those things that challenge and confront us up to the next level of relinquishment or whether we are happy to set up camp where we are comfortable and can remain more or less in control.

“In that twilight zone of...double standard, orthodoxy is really just a word for my doxy. Heterodoxy means everyone else’s doxy.”

Hywel Williams; Let Us All Err and Stray; The Guardian (London, UK); Jul 8, 2003.

Monday 14 April 2014

Up close and too personal

Thank you. 

How could two such innocuous, commonplace, ordinary words confront me so much? And yet, that is where I found myself yesterday. Why are you thanking me? I didn't. come.. for...   you...    

Or did I?

Yesterday I joined my first protest march. It was in support of refugees and asylum seekers. Listening to speeches and the stories personally shared by three asylum seekers, I found myself being stirred to a deeper level, both with compassion as well as a growing sense of outrage at the inhuman way these people are being treated. As impacting and confronting as this was, it was another incident that caught me by surprise and hit me at a totally new and different level.

As we walked through the city, I saw some friends who are asylum seekers. We exchanged greetings and happiness at seeing each other there, and their immediate and automatic response to me was "Thank you so much for coming", in the sense that I had come to support them personally. And that was when the real confrontation hit me. My instinctive feeling was wondering why they were thanking me, my coming was separate to them, it wasn't about them...ouch! 

As I reflected on why I was feeling all this, I realised how selfish some of my actions are. Going to the rally was about me, about my frustration and inability to affect change, and a desire to have an outlet for that. Now, don't get me wrong. I am happy to support asylum seekers in whatever way I can, but there is also a level of being comfortable in that. As long as I can keep it at arms length, that I can go home afterwards and put it back in the "manageable" place I am happy to help. 

My friends' thanks at such a personal level changed that. This is about real people who are not me. In turn, this confronts me about my own lack of real compassion. Will I allow myself to feel and share the very real pain of my friends, and that so many others are going through and what does that look like? It is one thing to try to fix the situation others are in, to try to support and care for them, but am I prepared to sit in and with their pain? Will I let it touch me to the point where I start to hurt as they hurt? Am I prepared to identify with them?

Two stories of Jesus weeping come to mind. The first is when He arrived at Bethany (John 11), and saw all the people mourning the loss of their brother and friend, Lazarus. Jesus was so moved with compassion for their grief that He also wept. The second is when He is approaching Jerusalem for the final time before His death, and He looks over that city and weeps for it as the seat of Jewish faith, representing His people (Luke 19:41). Jesus saw the reality of people's pain and loss at both a personal level as well as a societal level, and He allowed that grief to touch Him to the point of action that made a difference. For Lazarus and his friends and family, it meant another opportunity at life. And I guess within His own death, it means another opportunity at life for all of us.

I am aware of a tendency in myself to separate my emotions from others by rationalisation, not in a blaming or uncaring way, but one that says "that is their journey, their road to walk".  It is a way of coping, of not having compassion overload, but I wonder whether it also leads to a lack of action? This is one of the things that surprised me at the rally, also. The lack of passion. I was expecting chants and rally calls, but most people simply strolled down the road chatting. A number had their banners and placards, but even then probably half of those were advertising proclaiming who they were. Where was the passion? Where was the outrage? And at what point will we take our argument to the next level, where we actually start to force some change? Or don't we care that much?

Walter Brueggemann's observations in The Prophetic Imagination seem very pertinent to this. He talks of the problems of affluence and satiation. What it basically boils down to is that when a society is well fed and has their material needs met, there is a lack of ability to even recognise coming doom, much less to raise passion to help someone else living that doom. As long as my needs are met today and tomorrow, what do I really care? Apathy sets in, and this is pretty obvious in our society. Standing up for injustice in our communities and elsewhere is simply not a priority. 

For me, I am confronted with why I have not bothered to spend half an hour writing a letter to my local MP. I am wondering what else I can do to make myself more of a pest, to show our government that this issue is not going to lay down and die, we are not going to give up. But most of all, I want to spend some more time reflecting on how I can allow myself to connect with other people's pain, to make my compassion personal.