Christian Teens

Creating God?

nobody@vox.com(SimplyEmy) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:22:48 -0700

Today I was really upset, no... angry would be the better wording. It doesn't matter why or what happened, as that person has apologized. But while I was angry I got to thinking.

In English we read The Lord of the Flies. Now I mention this book because it demonstrated human nature in possibly one of the most disturbing ways. A group of British boys are stranded on an island after their plane crashes. They begin life on the island by electing a leader and creating a makeshift society with rules and boundaries. Everything seems to run smoothly until a power sruggle between two main characters, Ralph and Jack, surfaces. One of the young boys begins telling the others about a "beastie" he saw in the forest. It is then that chaos and fear break lose and their makeshift society begins to crumble.

Whose footprints?

So... our teacher brought up the philosophy of man creating a God if there isn't one already for him to follow. And that makes sense within the context of the story. Eventually the worst is seen in the boys, but nonetheless the "beastie" remains to be their focus, and ultimately their god. So to them their actions are justified.

No religion is pure. Each one has its history, its flaws, and its promises. When the Black Death broke out, the Catholic church was of no use to the people, so the citizens began performing white magi, also known as witchcraft. Because the Catholic Church did not meet the demands of the people, God seemed far away, probably even non-existant to those suffering and fearing the disease. Therefore, they created a God that to them felt there and now. Lo and behold Wicca becomes a religion and Mother Earth becomes the target of worship. Another god has been created.

I'm not going to go into full detail, as I haven't studied all the religions of the world. The two I mentioned above are just examples that came to mind. Whether or not man creates a god for himself, of course that's left up for debate and ultimately comes down to what each of us individually believes. However, believing in a god has its perks.

You see, by believing in ultimate good, we only stand to reason that there is an opposite force. In many religions around the world the opposite force is associated with Satan, darkness, death, etc. So when a person kills another human being or does something extremely disturbing, we take comfort in thinking that it wasn't human nature that committed that action, but instead some paranormal force that provoked him or her. Without religion or a god, people would be held responsible for a lot more things.

Having a god also creates authority and fear. Which would have been useful during colonization and in the expansion of the emipres. People followed those in authority (which for a long time was the Catholic Church) because they feared the ultimate power. They were taught predestination and were kept from questioning those in authority by having the bible and education unavailable to them. In other words, they followed the men in robes because they didn't know any better.

And lastly (though I'm sure there's a ton more), believing in a god leaves room for hope, faith, and miracles. And sometimes when someone's in the hospital or an actual miracle is witnessed, it's easier for us people to credit a higher power because our minds can't rationalize what just happened.

Despite all that, I have to say I do believe in God and I follow the Christian faith. It's what I was raised to believe in and it makes overall sense to me. However, in my opinion, human nature is more powerful than we're taught to believe. And I think that a man does indeed create a god for himself if there isn't one for him to already follow because that is his core of morals and values.

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lunchbreak musings: seekers' solidarity

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:40:04 -0700

Before the internet

All this online pugilism between Christians of different stripes! All these forum fencing-matches about free will and predestination and law and grace and evolution and intelligent design and miracles! All these arguments that might never have arisen if the Good Lord had produced for us a clearer bible, one that really spelled things out! A catechism, rather than a collection of stories, poems, genealogies, aphorisms...

Why are we so often angry at each other and so seldom irked at God?

Here's something to think about next time you see an online argument between a Christian who believes in miracles and one who believes that miracles belonged to the time of the apostles (ie a cessationist):

The cessationist has at some point prayed really, really hard for a miracle - and got diddly squat. The cessationist is some guy whose cancer didn't go away, or whose daughter died, or whose wife left, you name it. And instead of hating God, our cessationist friend has changed theological positions to make room for a God who didn't come through for him in any clear way.

Want to tell him to believe in miracles? Good luck! But don't rant hatefully at him - he may not be the dogmatist you think he is.

In every theological argument, you'll find at least two people who are trying so damned hard to be charitable towards God that they sometimes forget to be charitable towards each other. But God is sturdy enough to take human anger on the chin. Humans, on the other hand, break.

That person who believes in election? The person who believes in free will? Scrapping like hoods on some internet discussion board? God could have spoken decisively on this issue, and God didn't. Or maybe God did speak, through the Church of Rome - in which case, God should have done a whole lot more to preserve the unity of the church. And don't tell me that the bible is clear on these issues. There are very brainy and very holy people on both sides of every controversy.

By all means adopt the atheist solution to the problem and deny that God exists. But if you're averse to that move, let's not despise each other over issues on which God has not spoken loudly enough. We're in the same boat.

One thing binds us all together: we live in a more or less silent universe. Let's admit it! It's probably more silent than religious people say it is, and less silent than atheists say it is: but it is a universe in which someone can cry out to an invisible God and not receive any reply. It's a universe in which someone else always seems to be experiencing the miracles, and in which cries of 'It's a miracle!' sometimes seem obscene in the face of so many unanswered prayers. As Sheri put it recently on her blog, 'Do you really believe the Sudanese don't pray?'

In the face of this divine silence, we can never be anything more than co-seekers, and this should give us solidarity.

This seekers' solidarity should be the basis of every discussion about doctrine. Moreover, it should be the basis of our communion with each other. We should always be willing to at least imagine what might crouch behind the arras of a person's theological position, the stories behind the convictions. We should declare at the beginning of each exchange: We are on the same side. Let's end this exchange having gained an even greater sense of solidarity, irrespective of whether we move closer to an actual agreement. It's worth a try, isn't it?

Maybe if we achieved real solidarity in the face of God's silence, we'd discover that the possiblity of creating solidarity is why God opted to refuse to arbitrate on so many issues in the first place.

Maybe God's silence is a necessary condition of human solidarity. Maybe the compassion we might feel towards our fellow seekers is the thing that we, as seekers, are supposed to find.

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a visit to my old neighborhood

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:32:45 -0700

Fellow Nick Drake fan Scott Small over on Not In Me has been so kind (or imprudent) as to let me post some reflections on heaven and suburbia on his upliftingly lovely blog There's Treasure Everywhere. If you're feeling whimsical please do pop over and give it a read, as well as the other posts there, and grace us with your thoughts!

Ta,

Nick.

click here for a visit to my old neighborhood

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Lucky Trinity!

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:05:07 -0700

Me at school

When you are a teenager, your personality seems like something separate from you. You are aware that you are a person who experiences things, but you are also aware that the person you are is one of the things you experience - the most immediate thing, in fact, and among the most alien. Your image – the way you seem, especially to yourself – is at the same time something you are, something you experience, and something you have a particular relationship with. Some people hate the person they see themselves as being. Some people love that person. The kind of relationship you have with yourself determines what kind of person you are, and the kind of person you are determines what kind of person you are, and the kind of person you see yourself as being - or think others you think others see you as being - determines what kind of person you are. It is a complicated business, being a person. The complexities are highlighted in youth.

By age fourteen I neither hated nor liked my self-image; I had no fixed ideas about what kind of person I was. Consequently I never knew how to act in any situation. For many years this lack of persona was like a living death, only worse. At least real zombies are supposed to act like animate cadavers – it’s their job - but I assumed that everybody expected me to display the characteristics of the living. To meet their unspoken demands I felt pressured to invent characteristics from one moment to the next. It was exhausting. Sometimes I wished I could view myself from the outside, in action, during those rare times when I was not consciously trying to act like some character I’d seen in a film, so I could see if I had traits I didn’t know about. Once I considered asking someone close to me - my mother, for example, to describe me in, say, five words - so I could have some idea about who I was. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask. It did not seem preposterous to imagine that she would have had me committed.

Whenever I had the television to myself at home, I would watch videos of films my family had taped from the telly, and I’d wonder which of the characters I could profitably become. One of my favourite films was a comedy teen-movie called The Sure Thing, about a cheeky but loveable rogue who somehow wins the heart of a beautiful but stuck-up girl. I often felt I would make a great cheeky guy, and would write lists of the cheeky things that the cheeky guy did, so I could do them too. But then I’d watch The Breakfast Club, which featured a guy who was cool and moody and wore big boots and lots of layers of grungy clothing. After a few minutes of watching that, I wouldn’t be so sure about being cheeky. I’d consider being brash and smart-mouthed. But then I would watch my dad’s copy of First Blood, about a quiet but psychopathic soldier called John Rambo, and then it would be time to walk the dog and I still wouldn’t know who I was, and anyway, Rambo was not the best role model for a skinny boy who did not own a machine gun.

At school, I would ask myself from one moment to the next what such-and-such a character would do in my situation, a policy that usually resulted in paralysis.

My mother didn’t approve of me trying to model myself on characters from films. She always said to me: Just be yourself.

What on earth did that mean?

God, of course, did not have identity crises. Lucky God, I thought. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity came to represent, to me, the doctrine of an enviably healthy personality. Like me, God was conscious of himself; unlike me, he knew everything about himself, and did not have to wonder whether to emulate Rambo. Like me, God had a relationship with his self-image, but unlike me, his was positive, because he liked his self-image and didn’t have to change it every day.

The bible told me that Christ was ‘the image of the invisible God’, and though I didn’t understand this, I liked to think of God in the following, possibly blasphemous terms. God (I thought) looks at himself and sees somebody perfect; but in a sort of shy, bashful way, he refuses to take the credit for himself, and so honours his marvellous identity as though from a distance. I could relate to this idea because sometimes, at night, I would talk to myself as though ‘myself’ was a separate person who had deep wisdom and could offer me advice. The relationship between God and his image was like that, I assumed, only even better, because God’s image, about which God knows everything, actually possesses laudable traits. This relationship God has with himself is, therefore, not self-love, but other-love; and as God’s image is one with him and shares all his attributes, including intelligence and other things, his image can reciprocate that love. This relationship, as an elderly guest preacher at my church once said, is the original, primordial Father-Son relationship. (You could say that creation’s relationship with itself constitutes a cosmic Mother-Child relationship, but that would take us way off topic.)

Of course, we can conceive of a God who doesn’t have this ‘other’ focus and who therefore is a different kind of deity. The particular mode of the Christian God’s relationship with his image, with its other-focus, defines what sort of person the Christian God is – defines him, as the apostle John says, as love itself, purely giving. This distinctive relationship, itself a reality infused with all the attributes of God, constitutes the third ‘person’ of the Trinity (the third hypostasis, actually, to use the proper Patristic term, though I hadn’t read much Cappadocian theology by age fourteen): the Holy Spirit.

As a child I had often thought that God must get lonely. I felt sorry for him. But the more I learned about the idea of the Trinity, the more I realised, to my relief, that I had been wrong; God was not a solitary block but a family - a self-contained family that was so close-knit that it constituted one being. God was a person in and of himself because, like me, he was tripartite, a complex unity. Unless God contained relationships within his own being, as it were, then no personal characteristics, like love or mercy or wrath or whatever, could be said to absolutely belong to him; in which case, until he created beings who he could love, have mercy upon or get angry with, he would possess only a potential personality. To become personal, such a God would require us.

Ironically, the doctrine of the Trinity, which seems to some people like a pagan import (as though pagans didn’t at least subconsciously suspect that personalities are tripartite) or a baffling complication (see the Qur'an’s flustered objections), is the monotheistic doctrine par excellence; only Trinitarianism explains how a God could possibly be a fully-realised person without having to create other persons to be personal towards.

Incidentally, one of the questions on our R.E. exam the following year was ‘Explain the Trinity’. Explain the Trinity!

I wrote four pages, misspelt Saint Athanasius, and got a C-.

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toothless Q&A - faith and reason

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:57:16 -0700

Mental block

Question: Isn’t it always irrational to accept a claim ‘on faith,’ rather than on the basis of evidence?

Answer: Sometimes exercising provisional faith is the most rational way to test a claim.

(All faith is provisional at first, by the way).

Sub-question: ‘Provisional faith’? What the hell is that?

A: It’s the kind of faith you exercise when you approach the question of God’s existence by asking God whether he exists, rather than trying to prove his existence or non-existence with formal logic, mathematics, or half-remembered quotes from Nietzsche.

It’s also the kind of faith I exercise when I try to find out what my wife thinks by asking her, rather than utilising the more ‘rational’ method of putting Sodium Pentothal in her Ovaltine.

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true story: an angel did my laundry

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:55:04 -0700

Recently touched by an angel

It has taken me a while to realise that evangelicals are not immune to urban myths. On the contrary - in churches across the world, false rumours of God’s deeds are swapped like cigarette cards.

This admission of mine might amuse those sceptics for whom the whole of Christianity is based on one big Palestinian urban myth. To those sceptics, I restrict myself to saying that an urban myth about (say) Pentecost is worth investigating in case there’s any truth behind it. Especially since investigating it is no more difficult than phrasing a brief prayer to the God who supposedly blew into the Upper Room on that momentous day, as recorded in the book of Acts, transforming some terrified disciples into the world’s most powerful grassroots movement.

But I would recommend the same empiricism to Christians. Too many Christians are willing to believe almost any third-hand miracle-story you care to tell them, their odd assumption being that Christians don’t exaggerate when it comes to talking about God.

There are many examples of Christian urban myths. They take the same form as heathen urban myths. Despite the fact that the stories have passed through more people than Thames water, the storyteller always acts as though the subject of each story is either a friend or a friend of a friend.

‘There’s this friend of mine who…’

It seems like a harmless framing device, but Christian urban myths are far from harmless; they engender all sorts of mad expectations, expectations that God may not want to live up to.

One notorious story, which I heard several times from different sources (perhaps all referring to the same mutual friend), involved a Christian girl walking through a rough area late at night. She was scared and prayed for protection. After a while, a strange peace descended on her, and she got home unscathed.

Here different versions diverge, but the common denominator is her subsequent (and pretty implausible) discovery that some thugs had been watching her walk home that night and had been plotting against her virtue - but they had been deterred from assaulting her by the fact that two large, fierce looking men had suddenly joined her on the street and walked her home. Angels!

I leave it to the reader to imagine the damage such a myth could cause if disseminated among young Christian girls who might otherwise take normal precautions vis-à-vis roaming the streets at night, precautions like not roaming the streets at night.

I witnessed the beginnings (and merciful expiration) of a roughly comparable myth in my own church. One Sunday I arrived at church late and found the place charged with excitement. Our resident saint, Jenny, who had not yet arrived, had apparently phoned a fellow member of church during the week, with news of a miracle. An angel had done her laundry! And now the whole church was awash with giddiness!

The story was as follows. Jenny had been late for some meeting or other, but just as she was about to leave the house she remembered a load of washed clothing mouldering in the washing machine. Distraught, she raced back to take it out of the machine so that her children, Matthew, Mark, Luke and Joan, wouldn’t have to go to school the next day in uniforms that smelled like soggy beagles – and she found that the washing was neatly hung out to dry on the relevant plastic fold-out contraption! The man who told me this story was almost in tears. He concluded the tale with, ‘God must really love Jenny.’

Well, I thought the story was pretty stupid. It also bothered me that God might love Jenny enough to do her washing, but not love starving children enough to stop them starving. But I decided to believe the story anyway, just in case it was true, as I didn’t want to offend God or Jenny. Who was I to say what God could or could not do?

So when Jenny finally arrived, looking suspiciously glum for someone who had her own angelic domestic, I was the first to race over to congratulate her. She mumbled that her husband had taken the washing out and, disregarding the opportunity to quip that this was in itself a miracle, shuffled a few steps before someone else ran over to her, then another, then another.

To my confusion, I noticed that the story persisted for some weeks. Like the famed Japanese soldiers living in bunkers who didn’t know that World War Two had ended, numerous people at King’s Church failed to catch on that Jenny’s alleged angel was a husband called Gavin. Or perhaps they hadn’t wanted to catch on.

They were corrected eventually. But imagine – what if I’d spread the story to friends from a different church? And some of those people had infected other churches in the same manner, and so on? Would the news that the story was untrue ever catch up with the galloping myth of Jenny’s angel? Or would Christians across the UK, perhaps across the world, be telling the story to one another to this day, with wild embellishments involving fabric softener?

‘There’s this friend of mine…’

The Bible authors are scrupulous to establish the identity of witnesses, even if this doesn’t serve their purposes. (The classic example is the fact that the Bible explicitly reveals that women were the first witnesses of the empty tomb, even though in biblical times the testimony of women wouldn’t have carried as much weight as that of men). Given that personal testimony is central to evangelism, and given that the church is, among other things, a living repository of testimonies about Christ, I think that we need to take the Bible’s own approach to testimony as our precedent, and care about the sources as well as the substance of our stories.

It’s easily done. We simply make sure that if we receive a ‘disembodied’ story, we think twice before passing it on uninvestigated. And we can try to provide people with some way to trace the stories we pass on – even if it’s just the name of the ‘church of origin’. By taking this approach we demonstrate integrity and a concern for truth – for without the exercise of these virtues, the whole body of Christian testimony becomes insidiously devalued.

Forget Vatican gold - testimonies are among the church’s most valuable treasures. We should handle a marvellous testimony should as a Middle Ages monk would handle manuscript of Aristotle: as something to be valued, preserved, and very carefully duplicated.

Though not, I should add, gilded.

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Who's to Blame?

nobody@vox.com(SimplyEmy) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:17:42 -0700

Starting Young

Many times when people see an obese child they often conclude that his or her parents are to blame. When only one girl out of fifteen will raise her hand and say that she is content with her body image... do we still blame the parents? If I find myself thinking that I don't belong because I'm too ugly or fat for anyone to like me... do I still blame my parents?

So the question is... who do I really blame for this?

Ladies and gentleman, I give you for your viewing pleasure exhibit A. To your left is an image of what might be a little girl playing with scales... or it may very well be a disturbing image of what future generations are learning from our example.

We are taught in subtle ways to associate "fat" with "ugly". Our society puts so much emphasis on being slim, it's as if America is attempting everything to get rid of our worldwide hamburger-hotdog-eating image. We forget that their tiny eyes are learning from us.

When all we see on television are dramas that cast anorexic actresses and read in magazines how beautiful these people are... what message is America sending across to us, the teenage female population? If you want to be beautiful these people will show you how.

So why am I frustrated? Because no matter what the media will only show what it wants us to see. It'll brainwash our female population into buying those damn diet pills and we will spend hours working out at the gym after purchasing a full-year membership. We will endlessly worry about calorie intake, and some of us will start using a toothbrush for other purposes besides keeping our teeth clean.

So when this happens... does the media proceed to blame our parents? Or will it take responsibility for what it's doing to all of us? If that last statement sounds as ridiculous to you as it does to me... then we both understand that this thing, whether or not we like it... is unbeatable. Without change,expect to see more images like this one in the future. After all.... "monkey see, monkey do".

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let's stop being offended

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:54:39 -0700

Ploughshares while u wait

Let's stop being offended. Let’s just stop!

How about that?

How about if, whenever a book or film or play comes out that denigrates our faith and blasphemes our deity, we didn’t run shrieking to some board of censors as though we had something to be afraid of?

What if we beat our placards into ploughshares?

What if we viewed affronts to our religion not as occasions to ban things and purse our lips, but as opportunities to be embarrassingly gracious?

Has anyone ever been converted by our outrage? Might not grace accomplish more?

What if we stopped blaming J.K. Rowling for capturing the imaginations of the young people we failed to reach?

What if, in this preponderantly secular age, we made the most of those instances in which people raise the topic of faith, even if their terms are derogatory? What if we saw every blasphemy as a ‘buy signal’ (to use the sales lingo)?

What if we acted as though we weren’t the slightest bit afraid of religious criticism? Imagine! What would people think of us? If we laughed gaily and shared our stories about how we have met the God who our persecutors have proved doesn’t exist?

What if we all really acted like we live in a society that seeks to guarantee freedom of belief?

What if we all acted like we considered our particular religion uniquely capable of thriving in a society that guarantees freedom of belief?

What if we saved our righteous indignation for the defence of those who really are being persecuted?

What if we conceded that those blaspheming heathens and atheists make some jolly good points, and then tell them why we are Christians in spite those jolly good points? (My guess that if we’re honest, an account of why we believe will have a lot to do with encountering God, and not much to do with clever arguments.)

Few of us became Christians after looking at every possible criticism and answering it to our satisfaction. We didn’t embrace Christianity just because it commended itself to our sense of rationality (as though we should be praised for our powers of analysis). Nor did we convert because we were more morally advanced than non-believers. We became Christians because something happened to us, and we don’t need a PhD in apologetics to tell people about it. When someone attacks our faith, our testimonies should be the first thing we reach for.

(Of course, not all of us have snazzy testimonies. Mine is has all the depth of a handbag. When I was a teenager, I wanted to perform a witchcraft ceremony in my bedroom. The ceremony required me to chalk a magic circle on my bedroom floor, which was problematic, as I had a carpet. I discovered that the carpet was held on by little tacks. If I prised up a quarter of the carpet at a time, I could draw the circle in four stages, wait for the house to be empty, throw my carpet in the corridor and summon a demon. My mother went shopping one day, came back and caught me leaving my room with a carpet on my head. I actually bumped into her, which was scarier than encountering the devil himself. My mother sent me to a counsellor, who, unbeknownst to her, was a Christian. I converted because Christianity seemed less hassle than Satanism, but to my surprise I found in Christianity the transforming spiritual encounter that I’d been looking for. That, in short, is my testimony. If I’d had a wooden floor, I would undoubtedly have vanished forever into the twilit glades of witchery. I was saved by my mother and a carpet. Hallelujah!)

I stayed a Christian in spite of my common sense, not because of it. I believe because something has actually happened to me. That’s the best place for me to start when trying to address other people’s good reasons for not believing in the gospel. But nobody’s going to listen to me if I’m trying to suppress their right to raise these good reasons. Even if they do so in a provocative way.

Compare:

CONTROVERSIAL NEW FILM CLAIMS JESUS WAS A FRENCH ACTOR.

CHRISTIANS TAKE TO STREETS WITH TORCHES, CALL FOR BAN.

with -

CONTROVERSIAL NEW FILM CLAIMS JESUS WAS A FRENCH ACTOR.

PROMINENT CHURCH LEADERS AMUSED BY FILM, SAY THAT THEY’VE MET JESUS AND HE ISN’T A FRENCH ACTOR.

God doesn’t need our protection.

From now on, let’s stop being offended!

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Is evangelism necessary?

nobody@vox.com(Nick) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 08:47:01 -0700

Jack chick

Christian theology allows for the possibility that people will somehow respond to the gospel in this life without having consciously done so. Paul says that those who reject God will be without excuse; if one had to actually hear the gospel in order to accept salvation, then one might reasonably wonder why not hearing it in the first place doesn't count as excuse enough. Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness, and yet he had not so much as sniffed a Jack Chick evangelisation tract. The biblical God responds to the movements of the heart, and some such movements are salvatory, it seems, irrespective of the theological content of the brain. So the question arises: is evangelism, strictly speaking, necessary?

I'd like to look at some reasons why, even if it isn't absolutely necessary to have heard the Christian gospel in order to approach God, it is nevertheless important for Christians to spread the gospel message, perhaps through long-winded blogs with endearing pictures. The first one is this: Even if you can approach the Christian God without knowing the Christian message, there is a sense in which unless you’ve heard the Christian gospel, you can’t know what kind of God you’re approaching.

It is customary for Christians to say that God loves us. It is probably true to say that he loves us unconditionally. In at least one sense, though, it is not the whole truth. God’s love, if I'm reading my bible the right way up, is not the kind that doesn’t really mind what we get up to. He is, if I might so put it, infinitely sensitive to us; which is the precise opposite of being laissez-faire.

The God of the bible has his own standards, of course. We can’t meet them, of course. Such is the fix we’re in. But it is a mistake to think that a God who combines omniscience with intense love will simply accept us no matter what we do - as though we're simply interesting bacteria in a large petri dish. We have responsibilities, and these responsibilities are as real as God. Such is the awful dignity of being made in his image.

I’ve never understood the mechanics, but I do know that the Christian message is that God is willing – he told Julian of Norwich it is his perpetual delight – not to ignore but to bear our offences rather than demand that we try to meet his standards. He knows better than to expect us to achieve parity with our maker. But only in the historical Jesus can we see just what it means to bear our offences. Reject the picture of God that the Passion paints, if you like; but it is Christianity's distinctive picture of God. Until we behold the flesh and blood Galilean hanging on a cross, we won’t ever see in real terms how the God of the Christian creeds feels about us: the fusion of love and agony. We will never be able to approach this God in the one way that could really work, that could get us from where we are to where he is. That is, we could never approach him on the basis of a divine condescension that shoulders the pain that we cannot help but cause him.

The cross is both the symbol and the actualisation of the one thing that we must accept in order to draw near to the God of Christianity: the fact that we meet him not on the basis of obeying his rules, or of getting a wink and a free pass, but on the foundation of a gratuitous love that only embraces us because it suffers us. Christianity starts with the horrible truth that we are what God loves but cannot touch; he takes us into his hands as nails. But he takes us nonetheless.

To really enter this particular God’s love, we have to see what it is that we’re entering. Otherwise we could end up somewhere else. To try to enter this love on the basis of our own worthiness, or on the grounds that God must be too nice to turn us away, is to try to enter a different kind of love, or I suppose a different God. You might say that hell is this different kind of love, or the love of a different god; and the damned are those who settle eternally together on their idol’s altar, wondering why it’s so cold.

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