Preface
The reflections below arose from a realization that several religious claims I had always treated separately may actually be connected by a single underlying assumption. The claim that believers have a personal relationship with God, the claim that scripture is a kind of divine message, and the claim that the universe itself is grounded in divine love all seem to presuppose a fundamentally personal understanding of ultimate reality. In retrospect, I think my instant emotional reaction has always been much the same: That is a very strange kind of relationship. That is a very strange kind of message. And if the universe is ultimately an expression of love, then that too is a very strange kind of love.
Missing out?
I think I may finally have understood something about myself that has puzzled me for most of my adult life.For many years I felt a curious sense of exclusion around evangelical Christianity. Not hostility, not disbelief exactly, but the persistent feeling that other people seemed to be participating in something to which I had no access.
The strange thing was that this feeling survived several dramatic shifts in my beliefs.
There were periods when I considered myself Christian and periods when I did not. Periods of theological certainty and periods of total doubt or agnosticism.
Through all of it, one feeling remained remarkably constant:
The evangelicals in my family and friendship groups seemed to have a very direct, intimate, and ‘vibrant’ relationship with God.
I knew I didn’t.
I heard the language all around me growing up.
“God spoke to me.”
“The Lord laid this on my heart.”
“I feel led by God.”
“God showed me this.”
“I have a personal relationship with Jesus.”
The people saying these things were often sincere, decent and thoughtful people whom I loved and respected. Yet even as a young man something about the language always made me uneasy.
At the time, I assumed the problem was me.
Perhaps I lacked faith, and despite my outward profession I was, in stark evangelical terms, inwardly ‘unsaved’.
Perhaps I might still get to the evangelical’s heaven, but lacked spiritual sensitivity.
Anyway, there were people in my life participating in a reality to which I simply had no access.
Only recently has it occurred to me that I may have been taking the language much more literally than the people using it.
The breakthrough came when I stopped asking theological questions and started asking phenomenological ones.
What actually happens when somebody says:
“God spoke to me”?
Did they hear words?
Was there a voice?
Was it auditory?
Was it internal?
What exactly occurred?
I have asked versions of this question many times over the years and the answers are usually surprisingly elusive.
What emerges instead are experiences of intuition, conviction, illumination, coincidence, significance, insight and meaning.
All perfectly real experiences.
Many of them experiences I have had myself.
The more I reflected on this, the more I realised that the same issue applies to scripture.
Evangelicals often speak as though the Bible is God’s message to humanity revealed to the biblical writers who then wrote it down, accurately and apparently ‘word for divine word’.
But whatever you think of that as a theological claim, or way of reading the text, the most critical insight is that the Bible – even at surface level and even as it presents itself to the uneducated reader – does not resemble a message in any ordinary sense.
It resembles a library. Poetry, law, history, prophecy, letters, wisdom literature and apocalypse composed by different people across many centuries.
Whatever scripture is, it does not remotely look like divine dictation.
Indeed, the very humanity of the authors is everywhere visible.
Jeremiah sounds like Jeremiah.
Paul sounds like Paul.
The Psalms sound nothing like either.
Long ago I arrived at what I still think is my most generous understanding of revelation:
The biblical authors were recording not communicated divine propositions but their reflections on their and their religious community’s experiences of God
Or perhaps more precisely, they were recording what they understood to be encounters with the divine in language not ‘received’ from on high but determined by their personalities and the surrounding culture.
That view never seemed especially radical to me. It simply seemed consistent with the nature of the text itself.
Yet I had somehow never applied the same reasoning to the claims made by contemporary believers.
Then another realisation followed.
Perhaps my deepest divergence from evangelicalism is not theological at all.
Perhaps it is ‘personalism’
Personal relationship.
Personal revelation.
Personal guidance.
Personal love.
These are not merely doctrines. They are ways of perceiving reality itself.
I increasingly realize that I do not perceive reality in this hyper personal way.
I’m now going to mention an odd perhaps silly analogy but please bear with me, as my mind works in ‘mysterious ways’. Anyway the difference became strikingly clear the other day while walking past a car park.
For some reason the sign of the parking management company caught my attention.
I know the company exists.
I can see evidence of its existence.
I am standing on property that it controls.
For all I know, it is watching me through CCTV.
Yet it would never occur to me that I have a personal relationship with the company.
The company structures part of my reality without entering into personal conversation with me.
Anyway these unusual thoughts of mine, also clarified something.
The idea of a cosmic consciousness, a divine ground, a supermind or an ultimate reality seems increasingly plausible to me.
The idea that such a reality has intimate revelatory conversations with individuals whether they be ancient biblical writers or modern believers seems increasingly implausible.
That does not make the underlying spiritual experience unreal.
Far from it.
I have had my own share of epiphanies, synchronicities, strange moments of significance and profound intuitions that seem to come from somewhere ‘outside’ myself or at least distinct from the normal everyday operation of my mind and senses.
What I no longer believe is that I am truly excluded from the category of experience that other people possess.
The experiences themselves may be remarkably similar.
The interpretation differs.
And then there is the deepest ‘personal’ issue of all, which I was once afraid made me morally very shallow:
I am not convinced that reality is fundamentally about love.
This may be where I part company not only with evangelicalism but with Christianity itself.
I can believe in some fundamental unity, and in the ‘Ground of Being’
I can also believe in ‘some kind’ of higher or greater consciousness of the whole
What I do not naturally perceive is a cosmos infused with benevolence in any ordinary sense.
I am drawn more toward Plato’s Good than John’s declaration that God is Love.
I see beauty in reality.
I also see tragedy.
I see birth and death.
I see creativity and destruction.
I see light and darkness not as enemies but as strangely intertwined necessities.
Perhaps my inner goth is showing.
But I find it difficult to imagine a world of finite creatures without death, loss, limitation and endings.
These things do not strike me as accidents.
They seem woven into the fabric of existence itself.
And that, ultimately, may be why evangelical Christianity never quite felt like home.
Not because I lacked spirituality.
If anything, I have always been an incurable spiritual ‘seeker’
Not because I lacked any spiritual experiences.
I have had plenty.
But because I never shared the personalist intuition that lies beneath so much evangelical piety.
The remarkable thing is that realising this does not make me feel excluded.
Quite the opposite.
For the first time in many years, I feel that the religious FOMO has gone.
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