To many inside the churches that regularly get left, the prevailing
assumption, almost never questioned, is that when a person has no interest in
their church, it’s because she has no interest in God. It never occurs to them
that to make such a judgment is to make the self-idolizing assertion that their
church is synonymous with God.
But in fact, many times throughout history, and it’s no
different in our time, people have had to leave the church precisely because of their deep and abiding
interest in God. Or to say it a different way, the church stood for something
that struck them as antithetical to the good, so they had to leave for the sake
of the good. And to opt for the good, if it is genuinely good, is always to opt
for God.
In the church’s darkest moments, this has often been the
choice with the most integrity. But, obviously, if we always catch ourselves
checking out the second a given community teaches something we don’t already
believe, then it’s likely we’re not basing our choices on the good at all but,
rather, on our own preferences, biases, apathies and probably just a plain, old
fashioned inability to play nicely with others.
So how do we determine when we need to take a stand of
personal conscience against a certain depiction of the good and when we need to
let a different depiction of the good go to work on us, even though it is strange
at first, because it might be better than the one that we brought with us?
This creates a real difficulty for honest people who are
simply trying to live faithfully. The existentialist philosopher and theologian
Paul Tillich’s language for this conundrum was “autonomous” versus
“heteronomous law.” Thank your lucky stars that I’m not as smart as he was.
I’ll just use the words “internal values” (that which our conscience demands of
us) versus “external values” (that which the strange new system in question
demands of us).
On the one hand, if we reject every idea of the good that
comes from outside us (external values) because it simply doesn’t “feel right”
at first, then we have no check on ourselves and any governing principles we
might have are indistinguishable from our own self-serving biases and
preferences.
This is typically the sin of new-agey cults of “personal
fulfillment” or “self-actualization” (regardless of whether these develop
inside the church, outside the church, under a “Christian” heading, à la
Joel Osteen, or a “Buddhist” heading, or a “Scientologist” heading, or what
have you). Self-actualization isn’t a bad thing. But if the whole problem in
the first place is that we tend to want to be actualized on our own terms, then
we invariably seek self-actualization by pursuing what “feels right,” those
old, favorite methods, which, if they worked, would have actualized us already.
This is similar to the alcoholic who realizes that he is depressed about his
alcoholism and decides to fight the depression with alcohol. When “does it feel
right” becomes the sole decision making factor as to whether something is of
God or not, we have no external value system with enough backbone to jar us out
of this circle of cheap gratification.
On the other hand, if we’re always opting for the moral code
that feels alien and repressive simply because it’s that, then, aside from
having mortgaged our own intellectual integrity, we have simply given the same
arbitrary preference to some other depiction of the good rather than our own.
This is the sin of many conservative expressions of North American
Christianity. They take the initially valuable insight that what is actually
good and true might not immediately resonate with what we already prefer and that
we need to be vigilant that the good isn’t simply being confused with our own
personal druthers, but then blow this insight all out of proportion, assuming
that God’s values should be positively offensive to our internal values. To
suppose this is to suppose that humans were created as something of a
non-sequitur. Far from creating us in God’s own image, God would have created
something that comes virtually pre-programmed to contradict God’s character.
In much of conservative Christianity, the decision making
filter that determines whether something is of God or not becomes as simple as
this: if it seems especially harsh toward human habits and desires, it must be
from God. This is why, in each new generation, these circles will always fixate
on one or two issues revolving around sexual morality and private living
arrangements. The kernel of truth, of course, is that unrestrained sexuality is
destructive. This kernel gets blown all out of proportion, though, when the
knee jerk assessment is always that human desires must always be antithetical
to God because they are desires. This circular logic only begs the question why
God would create things with such desires.
Since God’s values are expected to be repressive, in these
conservative circles, it is the ease itself with which social norms evolve to accommodate
the ever changing circumstances of a culture that becomes the very proof that they
are anti-God. This is also one reason why these groups so predictably tend
toward biblical zealotry: because the bible is obviously heaping with historical contexts that are radically different than our own. So they are easy
pickings for moral and social orders that are alien and unworkable in a new
context. They get highlighted and plucked out specifically for that reason.
It’s not surprising that these groups so routinely come up with moral dicta
that are offensive if not downright abusive of their contemporary culture;
that’s practically their mission statement. The closely guarded secret is that
if everyone in the culture suddenly conformed to their moral decrees, then they
would have to find something even more alien with which to assault our
sensibilities.
For the sake of psychological integrity, we can’t abide long
periods where external values are our only values. Eventually that initially
strange and even offensive way of seeing the good needs to either be rejected,
to replace or to be synthesized with the internal values that we initially brought
with us. If the values we learn to assimilate are, in fact, good, the result of
this synthesis is what Tillich called “theonomous law” or what I will call
God’s values.
Note, that it would short circuit this synthesizing process to
just point mindlessly to a given tradition, or institution, or the Bible (as if
the teachings of the latter can be reduced to one monolithic thing) and call it
God’s values as these each represent one among many external versions vying for
that privilege. These are each just one
external code among many vying to have their say of what is God’s values.
We might privilege one and give it a special hearing for one
reason or another. But this is a very different and much more complex process
than binding ourselves to it slavishly and unquestioningly. In fact, to do the latter wouldn’t be
actual synthesis. To bind ourselves to something alien simply because it’s
alien doesn’t automatically bring us to God’s values. It is simply trading our
arbitrary preferences for someone else’s arbitrary preferences.
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