I am in the throes of reading How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins, and I must say that I can't get two pages read consecutively without feeling a strong urge to go and pray. I don't know if that's a compliment or insult to Mr. Rollins. I think it's a compliment. PR loves destabilizing doctrine, which is wonderfully therapeutic intellectually, but can be emotionally weary. In the place of right belief, he plants the divine encounter which causes transformation. Hence, I am urged to pray.
Now, this is Black Saturday. Historically, we're trying to figure out whether or not to still be Christians, because our hero just died and the future is looking bleak. Also, rehearsing Paul-who I think wonderfully rehearses Jesus-we have been crucified with Christ (Gal 2:20) and no longer live. So now I'm caught in a dualism that Rollins would love: Jesus is dead, I saw him die yesterday, and I want to get out of here because I've been following the guy and I'm now thoroughly demoralized and freaked out. But surely that is not a faithful response, so I have this other option. Jesus was crucified and perhaps some part of me was also crucified, a part that hates God and other people and worships myself. I'm not literally dead as Christ was literally dead, but something has died in me, and it's painful! It hurts a lot, and it's scary imagining oneself up on the Cross, staring over at bloody Jesus and asking him how this is going to end. It's the unknown. I know my own selfishness and illusions of grandeur. I know what it feels like to want to have my name stamped all over everything, to receive praise and honor and esteem. My future, my self-expression, my theology, my direction. How much of that has to be crucified? Paul seems to think all of it (whatever the mystery of self-emptying requires of us).
So it's Black Saturday and I'm rehearsing what it means to hang on the Cross next to Jesus and what willingness is required to complete this drama in me. I won't understand this cognitively. When Paul writes that knowledge puffs up but love builds up (1 Cor 8:1), I think about the poverty of my own love. Try as I might, I can't love my parents, sister, housemates, and friends like I should. Like I want to. My error is thinking that love can find a true base in knowledge. Peter Rollins knows it cannot, and so do Jesus and Paul. Instead of knowledge I'll talk about feelings, and here I'm about ready to get really Wesleyan on you. You might snicker derisively, as I have, at the notion that our Christian walk could (or should) be based on something wayward like "feelings." Yet, when Wesley sat in that chapel and felt his heart "strangely warmed," is not "felt" the verb in that sentence instead of "thought" or "knew"?
If you tremor at the thought of being subject to feelings (they are so opaque and irrational!), then perhaps you also tremor at the thought of God holding us as a mother holds a baby, in the crook of her arm with her face about 6 inches from the face of her child. My counselor Mike said this is called the Mother-Child dyad, a foundation for healthy attachment. If the Love of God is only cognitive and rationally understood, we misrepresent not only the Gospel but also the human reality that our faith has to be felt. The poverty of my Christianity is isolating those feelings to worship time and perhaps prayer time, rather than letting the felt love of God (and of others we trust, surely) to run over into every aspect of our lives. I speak as a man and not a woman, but perhaps these artificial divisions apply for women as well. The masculine aversion to feelings, however, goes a long way to explaining why women are vastly overrepresented in our churches in the United States. If I, as a man, am not taught to feel and trust the loving presence of another, and especially taught not to use that love as a dominant mode of expression in my life, then why would I go to church? It's all a bunch of touchy-feeling nonsense, isn't it? But I'm convinced that the alternative to being filled with the love of God (which is felt just like one feels anxiety before speaking publicly or comfort in the arms of your mother or lover) is not nothingness. Nature abhors a vacuum. The alternative to being filled with love is to be filled with anxiety, with fear, and perhaps even with contempt or hatred.
This is Black Saturday, and God I pray that you are crucifying my darkness and will replace it with your love.
Thanks for the post. I enjoyed reading your reflections, including your John Wesley shout out. :-) A question that comes to mind: how does culture fit into or influence this discussion? Is the emphasis on emotion reactionary to our culture's lack of emphasis on it? Do other (more 'emotive') cultures have a head start on understanding the importance of the emotional over(?) in addition to(?) the cognitive?
ReplyDeleteLastly, what can scare me about people being "subject to feelings" is tied to their subjective, non-verifiable, individual nature. How do we synthesize feelings into faith in community? How do we respond when another's emotional faith experience creates a disparity in understanding between us?
@Adrianne Showalter Matlock - Adrianne, thanks for your comment and questions.
ReplyDeleteRegarding your first paragraph, I think culture has everything to do with it. You could approach this from every angle, but thinking about the way culture affected the way our parents nurtured us is enough. My mom and dad (and yours) raised us according to the imprinting they received and the norms as they understood them. I'm hesitant to comment on American culture as a whole, so let's stick to Nazarene culture. Sanctification has fallen out of fashion lately I think partially because of the dearth of emotional-religious expression in the church. If you read accounts of sanctification, they are usually always emotional intense experiences. Early Nazarenes formed a denomination around this intense feeling of certainty that they were freed from sin and liberated to be holy. Now we, 21st century Nazarenes, suspect emotional-religious experiences as charades a la Benny Hinn. We think about sanctification as an idea and refuse to experience it any other way except through the mind. Sanctification can be thought of and described, but cannot be brought about through description. Just one example and theory. As far as other cultures, I think that the level of religious emotional expression in some cultures is both healthy and dangerous (not to stereotype). As far it leads to anti-intellectualism and a rejection of reason, it undercuts the Church's ability to analyze complex social problems.
For your second paragraph, I think the fruits of the spirit lived out in community with each other is a great guide for comfortably living with each others' differences. Also, like any feelings, a lack of openness creates a vicious circle of tension and shame that leads to a rupture in true relationship (even while outwardly the relationship may exist with cordial smiles and tolerance). Beyond that, I don't know.