Changed World View

Does everything suck?  I was kind of raised to expect everyone and everything to.  And when writing Pharisee, I was trying really hard to express that reality of having grown up with such constant bible reading, memorization and discussion, yet somehow ending up with an understanding of the bible that was extremely narrow, one-sided and limited in scope. (Our bible discussions mostly sounded like this.)

I tried to express it all.  To convey that major stuff was missing.  To explain that odd stuff was getting focussed on to the exclusion of all else.  I have often found N.T. Wright helpful in pointing that stuff out.  Maybe it's not all about sin and death and hell and everyone sucking.

Today I watched a video with Wright explaining what the words "gospel" and "righteousness" (as English words looking to convey ideas from another time and place) might mean, beyond what I'm used to seeing in them.  What would the early readers of the bible have understood their words, now translated awkwardly into a different language, across a different culture, to mean?

I grew up with a purely "negative" understanding of most of what the bible tries to present to us.  God was good, we believed, which meant He didn't want to punish us, exactly, though we sucked.  We sang long, slow, sonorous hymns every Sunday morning about how Jesus suffered so much because we sucked so much.  We had the gospel, the message of which was that there was now a way to not go to Hell.  And that God was righteous (holy, holy, holy), which meant that He didn't sin.  Everyone sucked but Him.

All of that is kind of like seeing a child as "good" if they obey placidly.  Nothing else.  God, obviously, even if you only believe in Him as an abstract concept, has to be good in ways that transcend that childish understanding of "not doing anything bad." Not just good in that He doesn't suck like we do.  No, He's got to be good in ways that go right past even the world-famous, lasting accomplishments of adult human beings who made the very best inventions, paintings, symphonies, buildings and things in the whole world.  God is good all the way past that, to good-doing that befits the Person who made the whole world and everything in it to begin with: He was behind, inside and involved with all of the good stuff that ever happened.  He was there.  Cheering.  Having mostly made it happen anyway.

But just as, when I was writing Pharisee I realized that the word "virtue" didn't just mean "purity from bad stuff" but rather "power," "usefulness" and "effectiveness," the same is also true of words like "gospel" and "righteousness."  There is a whole "positive" dimension we didn't dream of, really, back in the day.

Wright paints an understanding of the bible which involves God saying millennia ago that He absolutely will successfully accomplish various good things, and then actually succeeding in doing those exact things, one after another. Taking His time.  Despite... everything. Certainly despite us.

God being righteous doesn't just mean He doesn't lie or break His word or punish unfairly. (bad things He doesn't do.)  It also means He manages, no matter what hot mess we manage to make of the world, to bring about those good things He always planned to bring to fruition.

The message of the bible isn't simply about a rescue mission, in which God plucks us out of the world, His Biggest Failure.  It's about God being faithful, and fair, and setting things right, eventually, but letting stuff play out first.  Of bringing down bad stuff, and letting good stuff be seen.  The world working as a big demonstration of God interacting with Man.  God gives Man the world, himself and other people.  Man gets to choose to do good or bad stuff.  Then it's God's move. And God does good stuff, and promises to do more good stuff.  Then it's Man's move.  Then it's God's.  And ultimately, God wins in the end.  The Nazis do not reign for a thousand years.  Stalin falls.  Nixon and Bill Clinton get caught.  Rwanda gets movies made about it.  O.J. ends up in jail.  Everyone knows there were no weapons of mass destruction, but that there are child molesters in the Church.

The bible, the gospel and Christianity are not just about God fixing man's mistakes and nothing more.  They're about God finding ways, in every century, to reconcile mankind with Good, in various ways.  Every single century of human history, there are human beings doing messed up things, but there are also wonderful things being done. And God is in all of that.  Goodness always and only flows from and through Him.  You can't get it from anywhere else.  If there is any small bit of goodness, humour, inspiration, passion, integrity, beauty, spirit or whatever in Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift or anyone at all, that came from the same place everything good comes from.

Artists talk of "muses," imagining helpful supernatural beings, or other means of tapping into an inhumanly deep, dark, mysterious and beautiful source of Good New Things. Beautiful things.  Sometimes some of them use drugs to try to get there and get to kind of helplessly touch all that.  Performers talk of being pulled right out of themselves, of stepping aside, as it were, and having excellence and inspiration and passion flood out of them from Somewhere Else, so everyone in the room can feel it.  As if they're just conduits.

And that's God, where all of that's coming from, if there's any good to it.  He is, before anything else, a Creative Person.  It's the first thing He is recorded doing: Creating. Everything.  And intending good with it.

Carl Jung said "People don't have ideas.  Ideas have people."  This is terrifying, when the ideas that "have" us are destructive ones.  And it is wonderful when the ideas that have us are inspired and new and true and beautiful. When God's ideas for the world have us swept up in their current.

When I was growing up, we Christian folks were quite sure that every pop musician who was a conduit for beauty, truth, passion and joy, was (obviously) lit on fire by the passionate, evil, sensual flames of hell.  We had to tell ourselves that there was no good in any of it.  We had to say that the very best performances given through the 50s, 60s, 70s and onward (performances people still watch recordings of today and gasp in wonder) were bad.  Evil.  Dangerous.  Seductive, of course, but pure bad.  We had to say "all that" came from the devil.

I think that's blasphemy.  Attributing the handiwork of God (creativity, beauty, passion, wonder, truth, sincerity, connection, talent) to the devil.  Imagining that the devil is a creative person.  That he writes songs with danceable hooks.  Inspires paintings with heart.  Helps write novels that reveal important truth about the human condition.  But we were so sure of ourselves.  The people who were writing novels, singing songs and painting paintings weren't religious or abstinent folk, often.  So anything they did had to be Of Satan.

N.T. Wright reads the bible and sees a drunken humanity stumbling toward reconciliation with a Creator God who works BIG, and takes centuries rather than hours to do a lot of things.  Wright doesn't see God giving up on the world and preparing to airlift a lucky, wise few of us out of it.  He sees a God who is looking for agents to help pour in and draw out good, in the world, today. Tomorrow.  Next week.  Next century. (yes, there may well be another century.)

It's really not easy, given what happens in the world every day, for it to be really clear to us that we are both free to act, and also that God is just/fair/righteous.  But God is up to that, says N.T. Wright.  God is up to all of the things that a country's justice system is trying to accomplish.  Not just to punish rule-breakers.  But also to comfort victims, arranging reparations, restraining orders and peace bonds, getting involved so that when something unfair is happening, maybe it can be set right without entirely taking away the rights and agency of everyone involved. Reconciliation.

Your spouse cheated on you?  Your business partner let you down and took off with money that was yours?  Your community gossiped unfairly about you?  N.T. Wright believes in a God whose business (and the business of his servants) is to make it possible to start to set things right.  To try to bring good out of it all anyway.  To look to work with everyone involved to try to reconcile things.  Sometimes this takes a long time.  Sometimes people won't play.  Sometimes what we like to call "karma" seems to set things straighter than before.  Well, to N.T. Wright, that's all God, being Himself.

Because human history is about people trying to wrap their heads and hearts around what it would even look like if an utterly trustworthy God made a covenant, and then people repeatedly broke and dishonoured it in the most egregious of ways, but that faithful God was determined to keep His end, for centuries afterward, and even try to help people know better and make more workable choices.

What all this leads to is something that dismays a dogmatically-raised, podgy person of middle years: a change in world view.

I was raised to view the world in these terms: It's all dangerous, exciting, dirty and horrible and bad.  The world and the people in it, and the stuff they make and do, their kids, what they say... all of it.  It's supposed to be good.  They do what they can to try to fool everyone into thinking it is. But really, everyone, everywhere and everything sucks. God will take us away from it one day, having forgiven us for sucking, once we stop pretending we don't suck.

This didn't encourage us to recycle much.  Nor to cut down on air pollution, or feed the hungry.  It and they would all burn anyway, and that right soon.

But now I'm thinking more in terms of: God made the world and the people in it, and intended it all to be and do and lead to even more good.  People want to be of worth.  Everyone wants excellence.  People even try a bit.  But sin is repeatedly falling short of a target we are repeatedly shot at.  We all fall short.  We are crooked still, and wobble and fall to one side or the other.

So the whole world isn't so much evil, in terms of cackling over a stated intention to hurt and destroy everyone and everything, as it is sick, weak, twisted and sad.  It tries, and it falls short.  And God lets kids fall down.  But he intends to teach them to ride bikes and swim and run and jump.   And still, having learned, they will fall, and will hurt themselves and act like jerks to each other, but God loves it all.  He's doing what He can, so to speak, without just forcing everything and making everything go perfectly, clumping it all directly under His Thumb.

God makes things that are alive.  And He lets them breathe.  And sing and dance.

It's a different way to view people, the world, everyone, everywhere, everything.  When it sucks (and it will), that's not the final nail in a coffin. That's just failed good.  And maybe the urge should be to help, rather than sneer, laugh or turn away in scorn or pious disgust.  And helping, we will fall short.  And our efforts will often be turned away by the ungrateful, or misunderstood by the single-minded.  Some of what we put into the mix will surely be wasted.  One cookie's probably going to fall off the plate.

But still...