fallible language III: experience of God?

Let’s go back now to a series that I’ve begun last winter but left unfinished, about fallibility of language (find part I and part II here, as well as the apophatic interlude featuring our Friend Rollins) in which we were looking at the way in which language fails us sometimes. This was not (as you would expect from a postmodern like me) from a postmodern viewpoint, but I started from the thought of G.K. Chesterton and mostly from the classical Orthodox tradition, on which I was reading a quite good book, and the church fathers.

I have been writing about the fallibility of language, and about how difficult it is to speak about God, as a created being. One of the most important things here is that we as Christians are in the first place not just expected to know about God (which requires human language) but after all and more important, we are to know God Himself. Christianity is not a gnostic sect in which we are saved by mere knowledge, but a restored relationship with the Source of all Creation (‘God’) through Christ… And relationality entails a completely different sort of ‘knowing’ than academic publishing!

I could say a lot about this, but other people have said much more intelligent things about this subject than I’ll ever do. I do know that in certain protestant circles knowledge of God by any form of ‘personal experience’ is frowned upon, while other traditions, from the Charismatics and Quakers to the Eastern Orthodox, see it as normative in very different ways. Surely, not only experience is important,without wisdom and guidance we don’t even know what we’re following, so we need reason, tradition, scripture and experience or are in problems. But experience is in no way unimportant here. Let’s for example go back to the Orthodox tradition, where speaking about God is considered to be utterly impossible by one who has not experienced God:

Personal experience is requisite to any valid talk about God, from an Orthodox perspective. Such mystical experience of God in the divine energies not only draws us to God, it also confirms within us the appropriateness of both positive and negative theology. We must speak about God because we are Christian; but we must also rise above these concepts, because God is transcendent. Personal experience of God draws us into union with him about whom theology speaks. Without that experience, any such talk about God is vacuous and presumptuous, according to Orthodoxy. (Payton, Light from the East, p 84)

We have to notice here that the goal surely is not just to talk of God, or to be able to make money by writing books about God; He is the Ultimate Reality… And the goal of our life is to be united to Him, and outside of Him we or anything else cannot even exist…

I got a gut feeling that the more we experience of God, the less we will be able to talk about it and the less intellectual systems we will be able to proclaim with absolute modern certainty… Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest minds of the middle ages, wasn’t able to write anymore after a mystical experience with Christ. When they asked him to resume his writing works, he said that he couldn’t because ‘”all that I have written seems like straw to me”

And this leaves us not with less, but with even more problems in speaking about God, and the paradox of Peter Rollins:

“That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking”

Which might make it quite complicating, but who did ever say that it was easy??? It isn’t, and I have a long Way to go here, and maybe not much right to say anything about God… Who just IS beyond all we can say or understand…

What’s your experience here?

shalom

Bram

Some interesting things elsewhere

Travelling missiologist Andrew Jones, the blogger also known as Tallskinnykiwi, wants to write a book (that I want to read!!!) and needs some help with money to be able to do the stuff he’s doing, which is travelling around with his family to meet with all of gods children on planet Terra, and helping all kinds of Christians and Christian communities around the world.  There’s only one Andrew Jones on the whole planet Terra who does what he does, so consider helping him! Or at least read what he’s up to on the blogpost I’ve linked to…

Matt stone on glocal Christianity has started a very interesting series, which starts with six different Christian approaches to war and peace, something we need in times when it seems like a false dichotomy between ‘just war’ and ‘pacifism’ (which sometimes is explained really poorly) is dominating the discussion, while there are much forms of Christian pacifism on one hand, and ‘just war theory’ isn’t really followed by much people on the other hand actually.  His position is ‘apocalyptic pacifism’, and the other posts are OT bible verses that he sees as pacifist prophecies (part 1, part 2, part 3) to back his position up.

Apocalyptic pacifism starts from an ‘already and not yet’ framework, in which the ‘coming age’ (the Kingdom of God)  is breaking in into this age, and in which we as Christians are already living in the reality of that new age. Living as radical peacemakers is one dimension of the Kingdom, but if we read the gospels there is another one that can’t be denied: the supernatural signs of the kingdom are as clear and confronting in the gospels as the radical love for our fellow humans that includes enemy-love… And Ray Hollenbach has a very interesting meditation on this aspect of the Kingdom of God on Students of Jesus. The anabaptist peace tradition and vineyard Kingdom charismatics can learn a  lot from each other and make the Kingdom vision more complete together!

“He gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.” (Luke 9: 1 – 2)

[The perfect soundtrack here would be this gungor song, that we've sung last sunday in Vineyard Antwerpen. I love me some bluesfunk from time to time, and Michael is a very good musician!!]

And then for something else: Laura Ziesel has an interesting series on Christianity, intersex people and eunuchs in the bible. Thanks to Sarah Moon for  making me aware of them and posting an orderly list of them! We should stop seeing this kind of things as ‘issues’ and start looking at it as people who are loved by Christ and should be loved by us all the same!

shalom

Bram

atheists of all gods except for one?

Let’s start with a popular Richard Dawkins quote:

“We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” – Richard Dawkins

Now, this sounds plausible at first sight, given the fact that one of the accusations for which Christians were fed to the lions in the Roman empire was the charge of atheism, since they did not believe in the gods of the Roman empire.

But even then we need to bring more nuance, so here’s a second quote:

“If you are a Christian,” Lewis says, “you do not have to believe that all other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.” – C.S. Lewis in Mere christianity

I’m with Lewis here. It’s not because I’m an ‘atheist’ to Zeus or Odin, or ‘the God of the violent Jihad’,  in the sense that I don’t believe in them, that I have to reject all of the religion of the people who do believe in them in exactly the way Dawkins reject all religions. I do believe that their view on the spiritual world is wrong, but I will affirm with them that it exists. More like the way a Darwinist rejects Lamarckism than how she rejects Special Creation theory.

(a slightly irrelevant side-note: i do believe that Lamarckism is a valid theory for the evolution of most things without DNA, like cultures, musical genres and languages, mich more than Darwinian evolution…)

So I do disagree with muslims over the character of God (for whom some arabic Christians also use the name allah), but I affirm a lot of things they do believe about the monotheistic God of Abraham, creator of heaven and earth. I do disagree with a lot of the animistic worldview, but I will not say that all of their religion is placebo. I would say that the explanation they offer might be wrong, not that there’s nothing behind their faith… There are traces of the Creator all over creation, and seeds of light are likely to be found in every religion, mixed with human and other influence though… And every truth that can relly considered to be truth has its ultimate source in Him, wherever we find it. And truth is not just found by Christians or enlightened Westerners. We probably can learn from every human being and every culture, and even from most religions… Probably the most uncivilised Indian from the rainforrest can teach us a lot about a lot of subjects… there are seeds of light everywhere, Logos spermatikos as the church fathers called it.

I even do agree with some atheist critique on things done in the name of religion, or even in the name of Christ. Just like a lot of Christians had similar critique, and even Jesus was pretty harsh for the religious elite of his time. But that critique should be used by christians to re-evaluate, not to throw out the baby with the bath-water…

Atheism like the word is used today is not the rejection of a certain religion or God, but the rejection of all of them, even the slightest possibility of any spiritual entity even.  that’s way too drastic: I can say that I don’t believe in the Mokele Mbembe, but that does not mean that I have to reject all reptiles or the existence of living dinosaurs long ago…

shalom

Bram

Moving east to find lost treasures…

In the light of the current Rob Bell controverse (if you don’t know what I mean just google his name and ‘love wins’)  there are some thoughts that are not new, and there’s probably nothing new about them… For example, Kingdom Grace has made similar remarks earlier, but I’ll try to explain how I see it.

While not much seems to be happening here in Flanders in the (very small) evangelical world, it seems like the internet is announcing over and over the end of evangelicalism in the US, or its split. The fights over Rob Bells new book (ironically called ‘Love wins’, how naive of him, you know christians will never exhibit love if they disagree… hmm ) seems to make a division between the hardcore reformed who hold to a theology I find very troubling sometimes (and I’m not the only one) and all the others, who are not considered ‘in’ for some of those… But frankly,  I don’t believe calvinism is the most helpful tradition here.

I don’t think we need to return to seventeenth century ‘orthodoxy’ if we want to find our roots again, and neither do I think we need to read the bible through a few elect pauline verses… Yes we need to go back to our roots, but the problem with sola scriptura is that where we had 4 schisms in the first 1500 years, we have had 30000 church splits since protestantism, so even when teh bible is infallible, everybody seems to have another opinion about what it says… So we don’t just need to go back to the bible, but also look at the others who are going the same way as we do, and/or those who did in the past.

Yes I think that the ‘modern’ protestant church has been navelgazing too long, blinded by our cultural assumptions, and it might need some input from other traditions to refresh its vision (and more open ears to the Holy Spirit!!!). I might be quite unmodern being both pentecostel (which according to some is more pre-modern) and influenced by C.S. Lewis, who called himself the last ancient westerner, but I’m not going to do all the emerging church babble about postmodernism being better than modernism. Still I’m affraid that I’m convinced that modernism and Christianity don’t mix very well. Both fundamentalism and liberalism, the 2 polar opposite adaptions christianity made to late modernism are not the most vital and life-bringing forms of Christianity, and did much harm to the gospel.

So my proposal is to learn from non-modern christian traditions to find back what we’ve lost with the blind spots of our modern eyes. Thats’s in fact one of the things happening in and beyond the ‘emerging church’, and one of the problems for some is that those traditions are far away from standard dispensationalism and calvinism. One of those traditions which we can learn a lot from is the (neo-)anabaptism which probably is the most attractive side of the emerging church to me. A focus on discpleship and following the Jesus of the gospels is something we surely need in our churches! Every church a peace church!!

(another one would be the charismatic tradition, of which I am already part, which is frustratingly ignored in some parts of the emerging church tending too much to naturalism!)

So what’s the ‘new’ one I’m finding more and more interesting? It’s actually a very old one, and unlike anabaptism undeniably totally outside of protestantism, and it was even left out of Brian McLarens ‘generous orthodoxy’, but I don’t think it can really be considered ‘unorthodox’ in any way at all, since I’m talking about the so-called eastern orthodox church here. They own the word!

People who read here regularly know that I recently was very impressed with a video pointing out the differences between the orthodox and protestant view of salvation. I do indeed think that the orthodox have a much more complete, biblical and coherent view on salvation than the good-friday-only penal substitution some of us protestants preach! And we can and should also learn a lot from their non-dualistic view of reality, their insistance of the presence of God, and their embrace of paradox and mystery instead of trying to push all of reality into systematic theology!

And I’m not the only one who has been discovering this, even people in my own denomination (the vineyard) are discovering that the the eastern orthodox are theologically very interesting and very close to the ideas some post-evangelicals are (re)discovering. Yes indeed, the ‘heresy’ of some of Rob Bells or even NT Wrights views is in fact much closer to eastern orthodoxy and the church fathers than to calvinism, which is in return a heresy condemned by both the catholic and orthodox church… The whole idea that Jesus came to save us in the first place from the wrath of God would be totally alien to them. To quote American orthodox priest Father Stephen:

Intricate theories of the atonement which involve the assuaging of the wrath of God are not worthy of the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I can say it no plainer. Those who persist in such theological accounts do not know “what Spirit they are of.” It is not ever appropriate to exalt a Biblical system over the plain sense communicated to us in the Gospel. No matter the chain of verses and the rational explanations attached – we cannot portray God as other than as He has shown Himself to us in Jesus Christ. To do so makes the Bible greater than Christ.

It is very difficult in our culture, where the wrathful God has been such an important part of the gospel story, to turn away from such portrayals – and yet it is necessary – both for faithfulness to the Scripture, the Fathers, and the revelation of God in Christ.

I commend the referenced work, the River of Fire, for its compliation of Patristic sources. I also beg other Christians to be done with their imagery of the wrathful God. They do not know the God of Whom they speak. Forgive me

So, I think we can and should learn a lot from the orthodox (among many other traditions), who have a much more complete view of salvation, and who seem to be able to make a lot more sense of the ressurrection, without which our hope is in vain according to Paul, but which is reduced to just some counterintuitive fact that should be believed in to be saved by some fundamentalists.

but no, I’m never ever going to become eastern orthodox myself. My theology of church would fall somewhere between those of Frank Viola and John Wimber and is quite opposite to the hierarchical liturgical view of an old church with only male priests: I believe in the priesthood of all believers, where ‘everybody gets to play’ and where men and women can excercise the gifts the Spirit has given them. And I don’t buy the stuff about relics and saints (even though their theology of the communion of the saints and the witness cloud sounds interesting to me!)

So if we want to restore a truly ‘evangelical’ faith, we have to recover the good news of God redeeming all of creation and of the hope Jesus brought in the resurrection. The vision of Gods kingdom as layed out in the gospels is incompatible with a gospel that is only concerned with saving individual souls from Gods wrath, it’s about the restauration of all of creation! And here I think can learn a lot from those older brothers in our faith in Jesus Christ.

(Even if we’ll still disagree about a lot of things and not be able to be in communion with them because different views on church, priesthood and eucharist. )

But it’s not about which tradition is best. It’s about understanding God more, and participation in the mission of His kingdom.

shalom

Bram

ps: I am in no way an expert in orthodoxy, so if anyone has helpful links or book titles to enlighten me more, please share them with me and my readers!!!

The emmancipation of myth as a truer form of truth, and Truth beyond theory…

So here we go again with my weird rants, that might irritate some people.

Jason Coker on the pastoralia blog has a very interesting post called ‘the Lords prayer as a political manifesto‘. It’s about a very important subject that I’m struggling with myself at the moment, but I’m not going to repeat his point, you’ll have to read it for yourself (you really should!)

What I want to discuss is (in my opinion) probably one of his most controversial paragraphs up to date, at least from a more or less evangelical point of view.

It’s time to grow up. As long as the religious concept of evil remains limited to the personification of a mythical creature and our ability to imagine better possibilities remains limited to a mythical place, we will be forever relegated to the individualized realm of dualistic pietism.

We must follow Christ and the prophets in moving beyond our childish metaphors and concretely name evil for what it really is – starvation, exploitation, exclusion, vengeance, violence, and the like – so we can name goodness for what it really is: equality, provision, peace, and so forth.

My first reaction is one of protest. Calling satan a mythical creature and heaven a mythical place at first sounds like some kind of liberal theology that tries to do away with all things supernatural. But maybe that’s just how my modern bias tends to read it.

The use of the word ‘mythical’ here is interesting, because in a modern discourse its use would mean something negative. But that’s not the case, as Jason makes clear in the comments in an answer to his use on the ‘m-word’:

Well that’s a big question, but a fair one since I’m the one that dropped the m-word. I have no problem with the idea of realms of existence beyond our field of perception. Such a thing has already been demonstrated in theory by physicists.

However, I think we actually know almost nothing about that sort of reality. Moreover, I think the Bible communicates about those realities along the continuum of myth and folklore – which is not a bad thing, in my opinion, as long as you don’t confuse myth and folklore with objective facts. In other words, I think those stories represent real knowledge…just not the kind of knowledge we wanted it to be in the Modern age.

Especially with the note of Jamie Arpin-Ricci that “mythical” does not equal “fictional” and that Something can be mythical and still be true, I think this is a very important discussion. Tolkien and Lewis already spoke of Jesus as ‘true myth’, but I think it’s time to stop the pejorative use of words like myth, or even fable. (And I’m also talking here to people who use ‘myth’ as a synonym for ‘lie’ as Greg Boyd does in book titles as ‘the myth of a Christian nation’ and ‘the myth of a Christian religion’)

We cannot describe everything in modern categories of scientific knowledge… The fact is, that some of the most important things are far beyond fact and measurement. Creation, atonement, the nature of God, the nature of evil and the powers, the Kingdom in its full realisation/heaven, the final judgement, etc… are all things that are too big too describe with our language and the concepts we know from this world. We need to use methaphor and -yes- myth, because our modern conceptions of absolute truth are inaccurate. This is where Derrida and the medieval mystics meet: language nor science could ever descibe those things. Not because they’re not true, but because they’re more true than our so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge…

So all our methaphors fail. All our ways of decribing and imagining fail too, and indeed, if we think that our litteralised methaphorical stories about satan and heaven are all there is to say, we miss a lot. We cannot speak about these things with more scientifically accurate precision than my pet mice can speak about the openoffice program I’m using.

So what I’m advocating is the opposite of the modern ‘liberal’ idea that discards anything that’s non-scientific. Myth, methaphor and parable are the only ways to speak about the things that are most real! And still it’s not at all about speaking of those things, but about living the Life, and letting Christ transform us. Knowledge, be it scientific or mythologic, is not what saves us, except when we are gnostics maybe, but in reality it can only describe things.

If all we have is a faith in theory, we only have faith in theory, and are left with nothing. I am reminded here of the words of a bend from Antwerp called ‘think of one’ who sing ‘tzen gien fabels ginen thejorie’ (‘it’s no fable, and no theory’) in our beautiful dialect, which in turn reminds me of the working class people I’ve worked with. They used the word theory in a pejorative way, and did not believe that anything mattered that could not be used practically… If we don’t have the life of the resurrection in us, what use is there in all our theology?

So myth can be the only way to communicate something that’s truer than any scientific language can contain, and yet truth that’s not incarnated into our lives is not of worth…

Does any of this make sense?

Shalom

Bram

on Sodomites, (false) prophets, and dying birds…

I was kinda bewildered with a statement that a friend of mine quoted from someone elses facebookstatus, asking for my opinion:

God gives up a man or a state when she makes laws to accommodate sodomites

My first reaction was that I didn’t agree with the use of the word ‘sodomites’. The sin of sodom in genesis is not about what we would call homosexuality, but about a breaking of the guest right with a gang rape. Ezekiel even has something different: This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. (Ez 16:43) So using the word sodomite for homosexual is very unbiblical, even if it might be traditional.

(or should the sodomites in the saying be seen as those who don’t aid the poor and needy? even then I don’t think God gives people up. I hope so, I’m not always too good at it either…)

My second reaction was where this way of thinking comes from. I have no clue why God would be concerned with giving up states for ‘accomodating sodomites’, interpreted as giving rights to homosexuals I guess, when there’s actually not much about this subject in the bible (our way of thinking about sexual orientation is not that old). Should He not then react much harder to the things the bible is clear about? There’s a lot of warning from the prophets about oppressing the poor and other unjust violence, or for the worship of idols.

I also would say that God is more concerned about His Kingdom that comes among His children instead of being pre-occupied with the Kingdoms of this world. God cares about His Children inside an evil empire, be it the Roman or American or European one, more than He expects the empire to be Christian…

The weird thing about this saying is that I had just some minutes before had seen something similar on the dutch satiric Christian site goedgelovig.nl, from the ‘prophet’ Cindy Jacobs. I must confess I was just baffled by this little video.

Maybe I’ve been out of the hypercharismatic stuff for too long. Or maybe I should take some LSD to be able to understand the logic of this weird conspiracy theory stuff about how the repeal of the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy in the American army would lead to birds falling from the sky. But I don’t think that’d be worth the effort.

If God would kill birds for giving gays the right to serve in the army, then what kind of animals does God kill for the crimes against humanity the army commits outside of American soil? Or for the way the army even destroys its own people, when more American soldiers die of suicide than in battle! Would He kill raccoons for the worship of the powers of dollar, capitalism and consumerism? Would He have killed most of the buffalo’s for the way the natives of the continent have been treated? I don’t think so. So what kind of creature is dying for all those poor that are uncared for? What kind of creature is dying for all the lies and propaganda on your TV, the internet and other media ?

Wait, maybe the dying of animals in the gulf of Mexico is the price for the government allowing multinationals to have their evil way not caring for anything but their profit? Okay, maybe nature is telling us something when birds are falling from the sky: maybe some evil circumstances that are unhindered by the government are destroying creation! Or am I getting too logical and outside the realm of homophobic conspiracy theories?

The thing that bothers me most is that she is considered to be a ‘prophet’.  I do consider myself as a charismatic Christian, and I do believe in prophecy, and I do believe God does speak to us today in many way. But we also should test everything… And still there’s a lot of stuff in some ‘prophetic’ circles that in no way seems nor biblical, nor supported by common sense to me. And I’m not just talking about all the times or the coming back of Jesus or some great revival was predicted, sometimes even predicted with a date…

I wonder what would happen if false prophets would get stoned, like in the old days. But they seem too stoned already…

One more question: if this unbiblical unchristlike nonsense is not of God, what are those so-called ‘prophets’ channeling then?

Should I be scared?

Maybe it’s better to stay close to Jesus, and pray:

Oh Spirit of Wisdom
shine Your light
and lead us in the way
of Jesus Christ the Master
who gave His Life
to defeat death
so that we can live
the Life of the resurrection
Father, Let Your Kingdom come
and Your will be done
here on earth as in heaven
let us not be concerned with the kingdoms of the world
but with the transnational church,
that transcends all of our human borders, Your bride
Jesus, transform us
renew our minds
to Your Love
In the name of Father, son and Spirit
Amen

Shalom

Bram

Reclaiming supernaturalism III: Andrew Jones and exorcism

I’ve been writing about the problems some postmodern expressions of Christianity seem to have with the supernatural earlier (see reclaiming supernaturalism 1 and 2) and I’m reminded of the topic now Andrew Jones, the tall skinny kiwi, is blogging about exorcism.

On the lighter side, I must confess that I at first misread the title of his post, and thought it would be about exorcising baptist and catholic demons, which would’ve been a bit surreal and even more freaky I guess… [I once had a muslim tell me that djinns can have the same religions as humans, so you have muslim and christian and jewish djinns, so why not baptist and catholic demons...]

Andrew, who has been travelling around the world meeting all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, has seen way too much of supernatural activity to ever deny the existence of ‘demons’ who influence people. It’s a luxury of our sleepy Western church that’s lulled into materialistic oblivion to be able to deny such a thing I guess, and it’s very comfortable, since it feels very safe to have a worldview without all of these complications.

But my limited experience with those things, about which I won’t elaborate here, has taught me 2 things:

1. the standard evangelical demonology might not be completely accurate, but there is something that can’t be denied and that is affraid of the name of Jesus, how weird such a thing may sound even to the more modern materialistic liberal part of myself that feels comfortable in not having to think outside of the boxes of this world.
2. I’m not at all prepared to have such an encounter.

I know that this kind of things will be easily explained away as psychological disease, and whatever more, but there’s more than meets the eye, and it is not at all either/or, it can be very well an both/and situation. There is the danger to over-spiritualise everything and see demons and devils where they are not, like some Christians tend to do, but we have to be open and not explain it away if we bump on it.

I also tend to think that some ‘powers’ are less personal than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re less dangerous. Even if ‘mammon’ would be totally not personal, it’s still a strong power that enslaves people, and destroys the planet.

(I still need to read Walter Wink, anyone who wants to buy me his powers trilogy? And anyone has some amount of time in a box to share?)

Another problem is the unbalanced way some charismatics and other weird people seem to handle all of the supernatural, which has done a lot of work to discredit all of it, and makes it look all fake.

But it’s a subject we need to take serious, like Andrew Jones says in his post:

I think that a vigorous study of the Scriptures on how to deal with the demonic should be an integral part of any ministerial training, especially cross-cultural and global missions training. Otherwise we might sending out an army of spiritual wimps into an arena where they will get their ass kicked.

Right now I don’t have much ‘demonology’, except that I know there is something, and that we better take it serious, but that we need to take even more serious the fact that Christ is stronger. Christus Victor!!!

And then there’s the discussion -mainly semantic- about if Christians can be possesed or not. Possesed may be too strong a word, but surely they can be influenced. A theology about such things is not a question of theory we can make out of vague bible verse interpretations, we also have to look at the real world. And it’s true that Christians can be totally distracted by some kind of ‘religious spirit’, and that there can be an active oppressive power present in that. Or, like Mike Morell says in the comments on andrews blog, if you do consider ‘Religion’ one of the oppressive Powers, and Christendom as a particularly nasty manifestation of said Power…well, it makes sense.

It’s a topic I don’t know much about, and that I’m affraid of, also because it’s very ridicule to even believe in it in this world. And still….

shalom

Bram

 

Reclaiming supernaturalism III: on small coincidence miracles

At the pastoralia blog there is a very interesting discussion about smal coincidences and litte miracles, with the question if they are just coincidences or God. Jason gives an example of lost keys that were freakily found again (read it yourself) and he frames it as free will, but I’ll look at it from a totally different angle. Free will and providence don’t seem to exclude each other anyway for me…

Re-reading it my explanation that I’ve worked out here could not be relevant, for I don’t see him praying for those keys, but the things that have worked this way in my life were… And I’ve been thinking about those things from a different angle, and some aspects of it might be a bit ‘flashy’ and both ‘unorthodox’ from a charismatic view and totally ‘unscientific’. I have had a lot of ‘small coincidence miracles’ in my life, even though I tend to forget them. And I can not deny that there must be at least something beyond the material stuff we know behind them.

If it’s God acting, then woe to me! Why do I only have faith fo pray in faith for small insignificant things? Why don’t I have faith to pray in the same way for things that matter? I don’t know, and it’s very frustrating that most of the time that I have faith like a musterd seed only for things
most of the time that I have faith like a musterd seed only for things smaller than one… If it’s been GOd, the I have been faithfull in the futile and totaly unable in anything that matters…

And now for the flashy part: If it’s not God, what is it then? The power of faith and positive thinking is not only somehing that works psychologically nor something that only calls on spiritual beings to do something for us (God, demons, angels, whatever) but it must be an unknown power that lies in our own spirit. I would definitely place it in the category of what people call ‘paranormal’, or in the field of what we’ve left behind when we built up a whole science system on the materialistic dimension of the world. Things that might be a part of humans as spiritual beings, who don’t know about the abilities of their spiritual side… (I do think a lot of the ‘occult’ falls into the same category, not done by any kind of demons, but by the human spirit itself, which is not to say I don’t believe in evil spiritual entities, I can’t deny them at all) So what I say is that strong faith and willpower focussed in the right way can sometimes manipulate the physical world and do things that seem impossible. I know, it sounds magical and unscientific, but I am a supernaturalist after all, and this is by definition beyond the physical realm of science…

And now I’m reminded of Adrian Plass in one of his sacred diaries, who wants to unfold a paperclip ‘in faith’ I don’t dismiss psychokinesis, but I don’t see how God or demons could have anything to do with it.

And by the way, I think some of the miracles of some strayed-away hypercharismatics must be in the same category. They are so trained in the spiritual side that they wouldn’t even notice if they’ve scared away the spirit and doing it in their own power now (and sometimes they might be channeling something else too)

(and now everybody looks at me, yells ‘freak’ and never takes me serious anymore…)

shalom

Bram

Reclaiming supernaturalism II: on my problem with christian materialism

I’m in a blogging streak right now. so one more post in this ‘open-source theology project’ on post-evangelical thought and supernaturalism in Christianity, and I hope that after this one I’ll be writing one more post about Dan Brennans book on cross-gender friendships (see posts  -1, 0, 1).

So I started with my concern about how the currend trends of accepting evolution (and other ones) to me seem to open the door to (post-)evangelicals for a christianity without supernaturalism. I know very well this such a thing is not necessary outcome of accepting a more evolutionary creation view, and also that for example in the more liberal churches that there already are pretty naturalistic forms  of christianity. But still I do see that a lot of people beyond the post-modern paradigm shift and in the emerging church discussion don’t have much to say about the supernatural realm, and tend to be or silent on this subject, or to lean more to the ‘liberal’ side, which accepts naturalism as a reality and tries to incorporate it into a more materialistic kind of christianity.

But my problem -as someone from a charismatic background who from experience cannot deny the supernatural in different forms- with this christian materialism is that I can’t see it as something other than unrealistic synchretism of christianity with the theories of post-enlightenment western thinking, without being informed by a more spiritual reality. I don’t believe that the line between natural and supernatural is more than a practical line, which has been drawn during the enlightenment period between what could be measured and investigated, and what not… So we as westeners divided the visible from the invisible and made a materialistic wordview, in which only the visible exists, the rest is nonsense, superstition, whatever. (Very safe worldview if you are affraid of the onknown and looking for security…)

I do believe that this form on naturalism is mainly a western idea, and Christians nor non-christians in other parts of the world wil never fall for it since they do experience the supernatural…

Now it is true that the one big problem with the invisible still is that it is invisible, and we don’t know much about it… We cannot research it in a scientific way, as we can do with the visible. So it’s one area that we cannot know much of, except from experiences and subjective interpretations of things that go beyond our rationality. And what I lump together here as the invisble does not have to be monolythinc, in fact I very hard doubt it is… There might be lines and divisions in the invisible that could be drawn, that are way more clear than our natural/supernatural divide…

There are cultures in which there is no divide between the natural and the supernatural, in which all of the world is one continuum including both. And even if there might be a lot superstition, wrong explanation of the invisible and even demonic influenced false information, I think they are closer to seeing the world as it is than western materialism will ever be able to be. For example I think there is more than just demonic lies behind all the talk about chackras, auras and stuff, even if the explanations given are wrong, there is some reality behind them. And some stuff in the paranormal department might also be just ‘invisible physics. The problem with us westeners and the invisible is that we are totally disconnected with it, which is very dangerous if we are going to experiment with it unprotected. New agers flashing on everything spiritual and supernatural are very likely to meet some things that are not as friendly -and useful- as they seem….

So I believe that here in the ‘natural’ world there also is an invisible half that we don’t know of, and can’t know of in the same way as we know the visible half, since we are not able to investigate it in any meanigful way according to the standards of our rational and emprical paradigms… But to dismiss it for that reason is just wishful thinking in my eyes, like the proverbial ostrich who pust its head in the sand to not see his enemy. Or is that only an expression in dutch?

(this subject gives funny conversations with new atheists btw…)

The realm of angels and demons might be something totally different than the invisible part of ‘our’ universe… I’ve even wondered if there is a category of more ‘natural’ spirits that are part of our world, and that totally different from the messenger or archangels who have their own world… But that would be more speculation…

But my proposal is that we as postmoderns, even if we don’t know how to categorise it, make room again for the supernatural in our christian worldview. And then I’m not even speaking of the works of the Spirit, just about the supernatural site of Creation (our universe, and maybe beyond…)

(and I do not say that naturalist christians are heretics, I will only say that in my opinion they might miss an entire dimension of Christianity, in which they can experience the Salvation of Christ in the ‘here and now’ part of the Kingdom…)

shalom

Bram