Standardization is uniformity marketed at a mass scale.

The educational system is designed to make us conform. We’re sold in our society on a path to success that supposedly has a proven record, so who wants to reinvent the wheel? We live in a world where non-conformity seems to equal failure. So, we “mature”, we do the math and realize that choosing to play the game over following our own dreams just makes more sense so … we learn to blend in.

Since every area of our society has its own “way” (rules, standards etc.) that we either follow or we’re out, it’s only natural to expect Christianity to follow suit, right? In fact, when we take a look at the face of Christianity that’s exactly what we see. The various expressions of Christianity seem to each sell us on the notion that there is one way (usually theirs) to do this God thing. The mantra is:

God wants you to conform

You need to change who you are (which is what repentance is marketed to be) in order to be accepted by God or be able to connect with God (depending on the particular version of Christianity you happen to be in). You have to think in a certain way, you have to have a certain view of reality, you have to behave in a particular way and on and on you are being given a matrix you need to fit in. Now, as a person who lived the first 18 years of my life under the Romanian Communist Regime, I can’t escape but be reminded of the communist “new man”. Communist ideologs have come up with a well defined version of how this “new man” should be and have designed complex and sophisticated mechanisms by which people are to be molded into this image. For many years I saw Christianity merely as a competing mechanism that’s supposed to produce a better version of the “new man”. I wanted so desperately for the Christian experiment to work, if for nothing else to prove those atheist communists wrong. As years went by I came to realize that Christianity is supposed to be anything but a conforming machinery. The matrix of conformity started to fade a way and I started to see a new kind of Christianity. One that embraces and accepts instead of trying to alter, one that celebrates and enjoys instead of being in a fixing mode, one that discovers and explores instead of obsessing with preservation.

In the next post I will attempt to explore this vision of Christianity and why it makes more sense from a theological perspective. Until then, let’s hear of your stories of conforming or non-confirming.

[This post is part of the Big Tent Christianity synchroblog]

But then, we’re faced with this “other” God, who seems to be totally for revenge, who can’t take any insult … who can’t take NO for an answer. It is predominantly described in the Old Testament, although not only there, in texts such as the ones we looked at in the last post. So what are we to do? Throughout the history there have been various attempts to resolve this. My attempt is one that seeks to keep the Scriptures intact (no Marcionian purging), tries to find value in whatever particular human expression and is in sync with the God expressed in Jesus.

After examining the passages in the Scriptures that speak of God’s revenge I have discovered that most of them portray a God who is not defending Himself, but the plight of the weak, of the looser, of those taken advantage of. The revenge described is not a pay back as a reaction to a wounded EGO (God’s; BTW, God does not have an ego), but as a PROTECTION against further abuse. When God stepped in a situation He was not intending to make the wrong doers suffer for what they did as such, but used suffering (and death when necessary) as a way of STOP-ing the injustice. This injustice didn’t have anything to do directly with Him (as if people can really alter something of God, against His will), but had everything to do with the social imbalance of people oppressing and taking advantage of others. The weak and the powerless were the easy target. God identified so deeply with this group of people that their plight became His, their honor that was disregarded became His honor, their glory (God’s image that was woven in them by the Creator) became His glory. It is this theme that we see in Jesus when He says that whatever we do to these “little ones” (read weak, powerless, marginalized, voiceless etc.) we do unto Him. Later John in his epistles writes that we cannot separate our relationship with God from that we have with out fellow men and women. It is in this sense that we need to understand Paul when he talks about God’s revenge. We should not use revenge, Paul would say, to defend our ego (that is wrong and does not produce anything good), but allow God who fully identifies with our hurt deal with it in His infinite wisdom.

Is God revengeful? This happens to be one of the many instances of what I call, confused semantics, i.e. when semantics plays its tricks on us. Words, frequently, assimilate meanings different than their initial, original use and these various meanings get used then interchangeably.

When revenge is being referred to God in Scriptures, it has “sanitized” its meaning from pay back, ego rooted reaction … to taking the side of the disadvantaged, which is as altruistic as it can get.

Yes, this attitude is highly encouraged in anyone, especially in those who follow in the footsteps of Jesus. It is as noble as it gets to fight for the cause of those taken advantage of: the poor, the widower, the immigrant, those exploited etc., etc., not in perpetuating violence, not with the purpose of making people suffer, but in order to stop the suffering and injustice and bringing reconciliation between all people. The ultimate goal is not to put a group of people above others, but to bring about true and open friendship among all people. That is after all what the Gospel of reconciliation is all about, isn’t it?

So …

“I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, while my sword devours flesh: the blood of the slain and the captives, the heads of the enemy leaders.”
” I myself am against you, and I will inflict punishment on you … Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers … Then my anger will cease and my wrath against them will subside, and I will be avenged. … When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food. I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. ”

These words send shivers down my spine. I can only imagine crass cruelty and intense anger. Definitely not an attitude I would encourage in my kids. Yet, the unsettling fact is that it is God who’s described here. Yes, you heard it right; the first person singular pronouns in the above text are alleged to portray God (Deut 32:41-42; Ezekiel 5:8-13, 16-17). This evokes all kinds of mixed thoughts. How can the God I believe in and aspire to seem to act in ways beneath acceptable human behavior? (See the previous post) Does God have an ego that can be aroused? Does He really feel threatened, so much so that He needs to lash out in defending Himself, His image, honor, glory etc.? Does He need to establish Himself and His ways by sheer force, by punishment, by intimidation?

A vengeful god is nothing but a mythical Greek-type god to be feared, not a God to inspire faith in, a God who can fulfill our best aspirations and hopes.

In all honesty I have to say, if God is vengeful like this, than I don’t believe in God! He can’t win my allegiance. But

I do believe in God

and I do it strongly. It is the God Jesus revealed. I am after all a follower of Jesus and through Him of God. It is in Jesus that I come to get a peak into who God is and this God is anything but vindictive. Actually at the core of who God is, as portrayed in Jesus, is LOVE manifested in forgiveness, grace, everlasting mercy etc. It is God incarnate in Jesus who though unfairly sentenced to death did not feel the need to retaliate, to defend Himself, but accepted to be dead to those who didn’t want Him. Yes, He accepted to die in order to honor their freedom to say no to Him, all the while forgiving them, knowing they couldn’t possibly do this if they knew what they were doing. It is the God who loved us so much that when He crafted us He did not forced it upon us to love Him, He did not make us into robots, but allowed us the freedom to reject Him.

Hell is: the “space” God created out of love, where we can say no to God. Every time we say no to God we enter hell. Let’s be clear: if we feel distant from God is not because of God pushing away from us, but because and always because we push away from Him. We do this, I believe, because of our misconceptions of Him, because of the lies we believe.

Yet, the question still lingers, what about these texts? What are we to make of them? Should we purge, in a Marcion manner, the Scriptures from texts that don’t seem to fit them or better yet, – as many Christians do nowadays – overlook them and act like they are not there? Is there a way to save them and appreciate them in their own respect? Should we, as some Christians do, take them at face value and try to interpret the rest of the Scriptures in light of them? Or maybe we should re-evaluate our hermeneutic and reconsider the possibility of another way to read this. Does the Bible really present us with a vindictive, vengeful God or maybe there is a deeper meaning to all this?

In the next post we will try to deal with these issue and others as we continue to explore, “Is God vengeful?”

The other day my oldest son came in the house visibly frustrated. He told me he’s done playing or having anything to do with his long time friend. The reason: his friend mistreated and hurt him in front of the other kids. His friends’ actions were clearly wrong, but what should my son’s attitude be? Should I tell him to stand up for himself and not allow this to happen? Should he reciprocate and pay back? Should he give his friend the silence treatment and ignore him in front of the other kids? Should he end their friendship? In short, I had to take a position to encourage my son either toward revenge in some form or forgiveness and grace.

Unfortunately, more often than not revenge seems to be our choice for responding to the wrongs done to us, intentionally or unintentionally, from individuals to larger groups. Hollywood seems to thrive on movies that celebrate vengeance. Ironically, at first sight it appears to be an issue of justice. We invoke the cosmic balance where for every action there must be a corresponding reaction, for every decision there must be a consequence, bad has to be dealt with bad. It’s not right, we say, for evil to go unpunished. Evil has to be RE-PAYED or PAID-BACK.

When we look at revenge more closely, however, we notice that it doesn’t really have anything to do with justice. The goal of revenge usually consists of forcing the perceived wrongdoer to suffer the same or greater pain than that which was originally inflicted. It is the eye for eye retaliatory kind of system.

Instead of bringing justice, revenge has proven to be more of a clash of egos, hasn’t it. I cannot take the fact that my ego (my image, my reputation, my honor, my standing in the group etc.) has been threatened, so I retaliate.

The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, taught that aggression results as a psychological defense against threats of fragmentation. That is, as infants, we are just a jumble of diverse biological processes over which we have no authority, and our first task in life is to develop a coherent identity which “pulls together” this fragmented confusion. This identity may give the appearance of a unified personality, but it really is just a psychological illusion that hides our essential human vulnerability and weakness. And so, when anything or anyone threatens us with the truth of our essential fragmentation, the quickest, easiest, and most common defense available—to hide the truth of our weakness and to give the illusion that we possess some sort of power—is aggression.

By inflicting pain (in whatever form) I am telling the other party to stop doing this in the future or else. So revenge becomes, supposedly, a mechanism for self defense. The problem is that from the dawn of time revenge has not ended hostility, but has jumpstarted a cycle of violence, inflicting more hurt, causing more damage.

Although those who seek revenge are thought to be strong and powerful people, revenge shows weakness not strength. If you know who you are (which admittedly is not an easy task!) you don’t need to defend it by taking out those around you, by putting them down so you can stand above. A better attitude when hurt by someone is compassion, a sense of feeling sorry for the person’s insecurity and vulnerability, a sense of empathy and of embrace resulting in forgiveness, in letting go.

If vengeance doesn’t really produce anything good, if our human history has shown it to be a malady, a source of destruction, a reflection of insecurity, a narcissistic struggle, then what are we to do with the idea of a vengeful God? Does revenge belong to God? Can God and revenge co-exist? That’s what we will deal with in our next post.

Until then, what are your thoughts, experience on revenge?

After setting the stage the first part of the chapter presents the divine purpose in this event. Jesus has a clear picture of how things will play out: “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” v.4; “for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” v.15 and “Your brother will rise again.” v.23. Yet in the later part of the chapter we see Jesus’ humanity surfacing: “he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.” v.33, “Jesus wept.” v.35. He was deeply troubled and wept (which is the only record of him weeping).

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Now this is encouraging for us because knowing the bigger picture (the divine perspective) did not stop Jesus … yes, Jesus … from being saddened by the situation. He didn’t approach this with some kind of detachment saying: “Yeah, I know it’s bad from a human perspective, but, man, if you only knew (like I do) how amazingly things will turn out, you would be filled with joy and not be sad.” Even Jesus could not pull this one like so many Christians try on themselves or on others. In the situation, regardless of the overarching divine purpose, there is pain, things are bad and there are legitimate reasons to grieve. In Jesus we learn that is OK to acknowledge that the divine purposes don’t always work out smooth, but that there is pain and suffering, that they are not always clean but sometimes they could be messy. In v.38 we find a Jesus who works out God’s plan thinking: I wish it was different, I wish there could be another way (which reminds us of his prayer in the garden about His imminent death).

As we follow in the way of Jesus it is good to be reminded that it is OK to embrace our humanity.

I am wondering if people take the time or the courage to ask themselves what this really says about God and about us and see if they really believe this. In other words, to inquire about the theology behind this idea. Well, that’s what I am going to do now.

First observation on “God has a plan for you” construct is the deterministic view of God it implies. In other words God has already decided all the details of how things will happen and watches its unfolding. Those who actually do believe this knowingly, talk about God’s predestination and usually you can find them in the Calvinistic theological camps. Yes, we’re talking about the old age debate of predestination and free will. Don’t worry if you don’t understand this, I will explain. I just wanted to position these (for those theologically inclined) ideas in their proper place.

The second observation is that it effectively rules out true freedom of choice. If everything is predetermined there’s not much choice we are left with. This is why some have gone to this theological construct logical conclusion and say that some people are predestined (decided in advance) to be on God’s side (going to heaven) and others are not (going to hell). Some say there is a choice: get with the program or not. Hmmm …

Now here’s the issue I have with all of this. First, the Scriptures show a God who is constantly changed in His course of actions by people’s decisions. They speak of a God who does not only allow, but encourages people’s creativity and desire in crafting a future they can enjoy with God. People are not depicted as robots executing a predetermined plan, but are asked to make God a part of their life, to think with God in mind.

The relationship between people and God is better captured by the metaphor of a dance: both parties affect each other as new movements are created.

Secondly, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see (from my experience) life as a uniform unfolding of a predetermined master design. I am talking about the day-to-day life. There is variety. There is order and there is chaos, there is beauty and there is ugliness. You think your life is going one direction and then it changes on you. You can see how choices you’ve made has gotten you to where you are now to the degree you can pretty much trace it all and yet you see things that just don’t make sense. Choices that have had clear consequences in the past produce surprising new outcomes. We speak of God’s grace when things turn good when expected to be bad and we’re left speechless when they turn bad when expected to be good.

Does that point to a God who lost control, who is not sovereign and so can’t be God? Not necessarily, unless you believe in a deterministic God. What if God created intentionally this flexibility into the nature of life? What if God doesn’t have a predetermined plan for my life but left things open on purpose to see what I will do? How long is it going to take to realize that I can’t do this without God? That eventually I will realize that going on life’s adventure is better with God alongside. That together we can craft a wonderful life (with bad and good, with suffering and excitement). What if when sometimes asked what to do next God’s answer is: whatever you choose is fine with me. This kind of life is more exciting to me, more thrilling than living with the frustration of trying to figure God’s plan for me.

Life seems to be more of an adventure than a production line

Instead of looking to understand God’s plan, maybe it would be better to understand His desire. That sounds more like a love relationship, doesn’t it?

We long to know Him, to experience Him and yet wait for some day after death to fulfill our desires when God has created it all here just for that. I am wondering how insulted God must feel when he sees how low of a view we have of His creation. We want to meet Him and He is right here, surrounding us and showering us with His multifaceted presence. We want to know him in some abstract, spiritual way, when He is cooling us with a breeze and warming us with a sun ray. We look for God in miracles, in some out of this world (supernatural) phenomenon and we miss Him in so many, many ways every single day, every single moment. The question is not where is God, but where are we? As Jesus said it in so many occasions, God’s kingdom, his presence, is in us and all around us, the question is: do we have eyes to see it all, to enjoy Him and live abundantly?

Matter is the closest we get to understand and more importantly know (experience) God. It is the medium He chose to place us in and the means for communication.

If matter does not matter what can we make of the Incarnation? Matter is the point of contact between God and us. We can’t really know God outside the realm of the material, can we? Last time I checked, matter was God’s idea and he declared it GOOD. If we are spirit and matter and we are made in God’s image, what does that say about God?

This is where you take the conversation further … I’ve raised a lot of questions and I’ve offered some suggestions. What do you think? Engage. Do you see eye to eye or see it differently? What questions did I miss?

Let’s start by dipping a bit into a theology of the natural world. In Christian Theology, where we start for now, the universe is God’s creation (it has a beginning and God is the cause as Creator). The question is, did he create it like a clock and once set in motion has removed Himself from it, leaving it to work according to internal laws or did He create it in such a way that it cannot function without God’s involvement in every minute detail for its sustenance.

Our cosmology will reflect our theology and vice-versa. In other words how we view God (distant and removed or intimate and involved) will determine our understanding of natural world.

Although Newton was not the first to deal with natural philosophy he is the first who created a mathematical system to explain the workings of the natural world, which started the enterprise of modern science. So what? Our understanding of the natural (also known as physical) world is greatly influenced by this modern approach to nature. Although the “founders” of modern science strongly believed in God as Creator, as time went by God was slowly pushed to the periphery and eventually removed altogether out of the picture. Here’s the rationale in a nutshell: since we can’t see God, only the physical universe and since we can explain (by the articulation of the physical laws) how the natural world works, there’s no need for God … we can be in charge of our own destiny.

Now for someone who doesn’t have a category for God in their worldview this is as good as it gets in trying to make sense of the universe we live in. There are these laws and as long as we live in harmony with them, we’re fine. Again, I don’t want to engage with that right now. What I want to address here is those who believe in a God who created this universe and yet feel they need to incorporate this natural understanding in their cosmology. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware and I am all for the great discoveries and benefits of modern science. How can I not be? I am writing this post on a laptop for crying out loud and don’t want to change that!!! What I am talking about is this. Why do we accept that understanding and articulating the laws of this universe (albeit not entirely and thoroughly) excludes God’s presence and involvement in it all? Why for example when an apple falls to the ground we believe that the law of gravity is what causes it to fall and not God? BTW, did you know that although Isaac Newton is famous for “discovering”/explaining gravity he actually believed (secretly) that God was behind it all?

Here’s my point. Just because we can identify the movements of a glove does not exclude the possibility of a hand behind those moves, because we can’t see it. Why do we have to accept the verdict of a distant, removed God when the witness of Scriptures points to an involved God, intimate with his creation? What sense is there in the belief of God’s presence everywhere? I am wondering if in our reaction to a pantheistic understanding of God (where God is synonymous with the material universe) we have fallen for the natural philosophy gospel of a transcendental, removed, outside God. There is God up there and here we are down here and we’re trying to connect long-distance (maybe wirelessly) to Him. Hmmm …

The fact that we’re created by God implies an intrinsic connection with the divine. We are not just matter, we are not just chemicals and atoms, there is a transcendent dimension to who we are. Some refer to this as a spiritual dimension; others call it simply an immaterial dimension. Even science shows that while we can explain a whole lot and there’s more that will be explained, there is a mystery imbedded in things (in all the scientific fields) that will always evade us. Religion comes and says: that which is a mystery, that which is unexplainable is God, it is God’s dimension.

NOTE: While we can’t explain God in his very nature we can learn enough about Him to help us live a meaningful life. To say this in a different way, we can’t know (explain) God but we can experience Him and based on these experiences we can make provisional statements about God.

This divine connection is what makes us special, provides us with a unique status, gives us dignity. This is an unchanging fact, whether we believe it and therefore act on it or not. The more in sync the material and the spiritual dimensions are, the closer we are to realizing our humanity, the best we can be. The attempt to relinquish and play down our material side (by some in the religious community) is just as damaging as the attempt to renounce and play down our spiritual side (by some in the secular community).

So, how valuable we are? (Notice I didn’t say how valuable we can be?) As valuable as God is. Does that mean we are gods? No. There is an unbridgeable distinction between God and us, between the Creator and the creation. We can never be God, we can never be more than we are, a creation. We can’t change that, nor can we change our derived value.

Now surely, we can live and behave as if we’re not. We can behave inhumanly (as we call it) toward ourselves, toward others and toward the environment we live in and as a result cause damage, hurt and create chaos. But none of this will change us ontologically, in our very being. So

our goal in life is not to become something but to realize who we truly are and live accordingly.

As I said in the previous post, sin is a lie we believe and act on. As Jesus put it, it is the truth that can set us free to be what we are meant to be. Sin, this distortion of reality, does not change who we are (how can it? What is real is real – we are God’s creation and therefore good), only how we see ourselves and in so doing affect our lives.

To see ourselves, in a false humility, as “pure dust” and have a low view of ourselves (worthless, wretched etc.) is to fall prey to sin, to its lie and in so doing disrespect our Creator. But to think that we are special and think highly of ourselves without God in the mix, it is arrogant and deeply disillusioning.

Before we do that, let’s establish the the connection with anthropology, our view of mankind. In the Christian tradition God is a good God who, in turn, created everything good, people included. So far everybody is on the same page. But then there is this one problem: SIN. Now, some people believe that sin changes us ontologically (in our very nature as human beings) from good, as we were originally created, to sinful (bad people). The problem this raises is that whatever sin is it is more powerful than God, since it is able to change what God created. So the question is how can we maintain a high view of creation, specifically of mankind and yet address the reality of sin? By accepting the subjective nature of sin, that sin is nothing more than an illusion (albeit a powerful one), that it does not have any correlation in reality, except indirectly through its effects. This perspective changes everything, from how we see ourselves, to how we see others, to how we relate to God, to how we relate to creation in general. It does affect anthropology profoundly.

The Scriptures identify the nature of sin as A LIE. A lie is fabricated using imagination by projecting unto reality something that is not true about it. If we look at sins talked about in the Scriptures we can see they all originate in distortions. When we feel distant from God, for example, it is not because God is distant from us but because we have a distorted view of God which in turn makes us feel distant from God. When we hurt other people we do it (probably in an effort to defend ourselves) believing they meant us harm. We don’t hurt (intentionally) people we know are good, loving, who want our best, who are for us. People hurt each other because they believe a lie about the other. People who don’t achieve much in their lives are said to be people with low esteem, who believe a lie about themselves. And on and on, we see sin as a mental pathololgy, it is not an objective reality (in this sense) but a mere projection upon reality. That is not to say that sin doesn’t cause real problems. While sin at its origin is not real (i.e. it does not represent reality), its effects are real creating mayhem and suffering, a disturbance in the natural flow of life. The problem is that once you’ve started down this vicious road it turns into a labyrinth hard to figure out. We get lost in it, we get stuck. We don’t know what’s true and what’s not. So we need to be saved, we need to be helped to unmask the lies one by one and embrace the truth, that which is real. WE NEED GOD, WE NEED JESUS AS THE WAY OUT!!!

So a Christian anthropology will create a distinction between sin and our human nature. Ap. Paul, the first theologian, dealt with this throughout his epistles, but more directly in Romans 7:7-25. Part of the delusion of sin is to make us believe that sin is us and Paul says emphatically, NO. And a Christian anthropology will define sin as a lie, a distortion of reality concocted by our imagination.

What do you think?