Recovering Evangelicals #42 – “Personal relationship”
Many Christians insist that this is the main thing that distinguishes Christianity from all other religions: “we have a personal relationship with the Divine”. I certainly heard this many times during the first few decades of my spiritual journey.
The problem for me was, I just didn’t seem to ever experience what they claimed. The frustration and confusion this generated was one of the reasons I found I had to give up my Christian faith. And one of the things I had to leave on the ground for years as I began to pick up the pieces and re-build a credible Christian faith. It’s only been in the past year or so that I’ve actually dusted this particular fragment off again.
In this episode, we unpack how this relationship looks nothing like any other relationship we have. How can it? I mean, is God a person? Most believers will accept that God is far, far out of our league. Timeless. Dimensionless. Limitless. To say that we are like bacteria to God even stretches the comparison. And yet how can a bacterium have a personal relationship with a human?
Just the same, many fellow believers will claim that they do indeed have a personal relationship with God/Jesus. So why don’t I?
- am I the problem? am I not doing it right? is it because of sin in my life? Answering “yes” to any of these questions doesn’t square with other Evangelical claims like: “There’s nothing you can do to merit God’s favor …. God loves you just as you are.”
- is God the problem here? Why does God cloak himself in hiddenness and then expect us limited physical humans to find him?
- is the problem related to our understanding of “personal relationship”? God is so immense, that we can only ever understand him through metaphors. To put God in a “person-box” reduces him. Putting gender terms around that box further reduces … “him.” Many in the Bible reduced God to impersonal metaphors: a fire, a wind, a sound. Many today reduce him to mere sensory feelings: a warmth … quivering … ecstatic joy. Or they’ll say they experience God in a sunset … a poem … a randomly chosen Bible verse.
And yet, none of these push-backs seem to dampen their adamant claim that they do indeed experience God personally: they feel his presence … they see him all around them … they talk to him, and hear from him … he answers their prayers. I had to ask if perhaps they might be “generating the warm fuzzies”: manipulating their context, and creating the emotions and sensory perceptions which they then interpret as a spiritual experience with a “person”.
That question sets the stage for the next three episodes in which Boyd and I will explore how it is that humans experience the world around us … how we relate to other people, or to our pets … and even to God himself.
As always, tell us what you think.
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