The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me.
Meister EckhartThe beauty of not (yet) being a bona fide theologian is that I feel free to say theologically naive things. I am comforted by the knowledge we are advised to have a 'childlike' faith - it covers a multitude of...cop-outs. So here goes: why can't they both be right? (I thought about putting that sentence on its own line then realized that was a slippery slope to the very Bellspeak I have previously trashed.)
I am thinking, as usual, about the universalism/hell debate. It seems to me that since there are verses and stories in the Bible that clearly affirm universalist ideas, and there are verses and stories that clearly affirm the idea of hell, shouldn't the conclusion be that they are both true? Is the debate about getting to the truth out of a concern for each other's souls or about being Right? - you can consider that a rhetorical question.
We struggle, especially in Western thinking, to allow for this kind of tension, we have no place for it - science has trapped us into thinking 1+1 must always equal 2. I'm reminded again, however, of the story I previously wrote about, where the Navajo man described both his own people's story and the scientific explanation for Rainbow Arch in Utah and held both to be true. This theme came up again recently as I watched a geneticist argue with an Australian Aborigine about how, if the genetic history shows that his people traveled to Australia from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, that he can't possibly or logically be right that his people were created in Australia. Why can't both be true?
Think about the story of the prodigal son. As you might imagine if you know me, a lot of the time I can relate to this story: I need to feel like I have the free will and space to go off and figure things out for myself, to reinvent the wheel so that I feel I own the wheel, to feel that I've made my own decisions and decided to return. God, in his patience, allowed me to do this, like the prodigal son, but like for the prodigal son He kept his eyes peeled for my return. If that story implies free will then it makes sense that we can choose not to return, to be separated from God, which is what hell is.
On the other hand, think of the story of the lost sheep. Sometimes we feel plain lost and we panic and all we want is to be found by God. Then, God, as the shepherd, will stop at nothing to find us. God will actively seek us out (perhaps, for example, through the timely and unexpected care of another person) and carries us back, not resting until all of us are back in the fold. See how I put 'all' in italics?
Instead of picking apart the differences in the stories and their associated positions, feeding our fondness for division, and instead of trying to bend them to the same shape, let them be what they are and look at what they have in common. It's not sitting on the fence if there is no fence. God desires a relationship with us, individually and by name, with Jesus to show us how it's done, and to heal our relationship with God. Since it's clear that our backgrounds and psychologies shape our understanding and experience of God, it makes sense that God would use different approaches to draw us to him - he knows that we're all different and have limited, fragile understandings. I'm not sure the rest of it really matters all that much and I certainly don't think a one-size-fits-all point-by-point theology is necessary.
What definitely does matter, and what Jesus gets mad about, is when people use religion as a 'get out of hell free' card that they wave in the faces of other people: if faith in God (any god, for that matter) doesn't gradually save us to become, or at least try to become, more compassionate, less violent people, better at relationships with other people thanks to our security in a relationship with God, then it's pretty pointless. Of course, this kind of thinking might get you incarcerated, assassinated, crucified, or just plain ignored, but I guess that's why they call it the narrow path.
Everything that we see is a shadow
cast by that which we do not see.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
cast by that which we do not see.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
2 comments:
Emma, thanks for the link from Experimental Theology. I’ve been trying for a week to frame a response to one of your comments about Beck’s “Wrath of God” post. (Young fingers, young minds. You folks are so fast, I can’t keep up!) So, belatedly but fitting into your posts about universalism/hell, here’s part of what was a much longer response.
It seems to me helpful to hear what people who have had an affirmative near-death experience say about judgment. What they report defies easy description. Tens of thousands of accounts have been reported in the past three decades, many of them including portrayal of a nearly instantaneous run-through and evaluation of everything they had done in their life that had hurt or benefitted other living beings. The key is that in the life review they not only witnessed their actions but experienced their effects. In short, the pain and joy a person had given over the years was the cumulative pain and joy experienced in the review—what goes around, comes around. God-as-karma? And if the experience of review/judgment can be that powerful for ordinary people, what would it be for a Bin Laden?
Although the experiencers report how vividly they experienced the pain they had inflicted, and their regret for it, rarely do they explain it as punishment; rather, their most common response over the years has been a feeling of being overwhelmed by understanding—a life-changing “Oh, now I get it,” “I see how it all works, how I can do things differently.” Yes, they feel guilt, but it is less significant than the life-shifting revelation of what life could be—could have been—when lived out of compassion and love.
They say nothing about a place, nor a time sequence of punitively imposed eternal suffering (and in a timeless afterlife, what would be “everlasting,” anyway?). What matters is that shattering understanding, far from vengeance, that is typically a stunning experience of comprehension—pain, regret, “getting it,” and change. To my mind, this can certainly be understood as both the wrath and the love of God, as Richard Beck keeps pointing out.
To quote his “Wrath of God” post last week, “[T]he accounting books of justice are not ‘balanced’ through a just world, God-as-karma mechanism. Rather, the ‘balancing’ comes through God absorbing the wound of sin, dissipating it in the Divine love…The life and love of God, symbolized by the blood of Jesus, soaks up and absorbs the sin of the world. The residual of evil isn't balanced out via karma and just deserts. Rather, it is soaked up in the love of God.”
I have to ask, isn’t all of this what Jesus’ teaching (and therefore Christianity) points to—a compassion beyond our understanding and a love that, even in wrath, transforms all hatreds? Of course it exceeds our comprehension, and our egos’ passion for retribution, and the conceptualizations that ascribe our characteristics to God; but, back to Isaiah 55 (though not Frances Chan’s reading of it), the Mind of God must certainly have room for more than vindictiveness. More and more, it seems to me that we are asked not for vengeance but for transformation.
Yes, some near-death experiences are hellish; but that is a topic for another time. They are quite different in just about all respects from those I’ve mentioned here, which are far and away the majority. In the meantime, I am deeply pained by the number of near-death experiencers who come back and leave the church because “Christians don’t get it.”
Gotta thank you for getting me going on this—I’ll put some of it on ET, where it began, and a version will be going as an overdue post to my own blog, http://dancingpastthedark.wordpress.com
Nan Bush
P.S. Can you tell me about “blog-lurking”? Is that what I’ve been doing, reading but not commenting much?
Hi Nancy,
Thanks for your thought-provoking comments! I will check out your blog too.
I don't know much about near-death experiences so that was interesting to read about - I just finished The Great Divorce by CS Lewis who takes a stab at a fictionalized account.
I am beginning to feel like we make life (this one and the next) a lot harder for ourselves (and others) than it needs to be.
Have a great day!
Emma
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