A few days ago, Rachel Held Evans posted
an article that I shared on Facebook, and a friend asked me to respond to some of the article's ideas. This post is what I came up with.
Whenever I try to map out how this journey through the
questions started for me, I immediately get stuck trying to choose “the”
beginning. Did it start when I was
seventeen and my youth group watched videos on young earth creationism? Was it when I was eighteen and my church
taught me that, since I was a woman, I always needed a man (father, brother,
husband, pastor) to be my spiritual authority?
Did it start in college, during years of doubt amid a culture of spiritual
one-upmanship?
For me, the 2004 presidential election was a coalescing
moment. I realized that, though I had learned
to repeat the acceptable answers as to why
I supported George W. Bush and the Republican party (anti-abortion, anti-gay,
national defense), I found I had significant philosophical differences with the
Republican party’s platform. This
realization was scary for me, because I had thoroughly absorbed the message
that good Christians vote Republican.
For a while, it felt to me like voting my conscience and voting my faith
were at odds, and that haunted me.
And then there is the nagging question/worry I’d always had
about my mother. I worried someday I’d
get a call that she’d overdosed or killed herself before I had a chance to
convince her about Jesus. And then after
each crisis, I worried that she’d missed her chance and that her mental
illness would bar her from heaven. And
what about other mentally ill people? What
about babies? What about people born in
other cultures? Would God really set up
access to salvation from eternal torture in such a way that only a tiny
fragment of humanity would ever have even a chance at it?
And then there is the question of The World. People live and breathe, work and create,
everywhere, in every culture, every day.
People laugh and mourn, dance and die.
Babies are born, and mothers and fathers are flattened by the power of
that love. People have created astounding,
beautiful things: music, architecture, art.
Under my old belief system, any of this that was done “outside” of Jesus
was basically meaningless. Most of the
events in human history, most of the people who had lived and died, most of
everything was destined for destruction.
At one point in The
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara
Kingsolver, one of the main characters, Adah, recounts the story of being
punished by her Sunday school teacher for questioning the so-called justice of
God eternally punishing people for, essentially, being born in the wrong place
or the wrong culture. She is made to
kneel on grains of rice and pray, and then she says, “When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded
in my knees, I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God.”
I can feel where she’s coming from, but I do believe. Sometimes I wish I could stop. I have asked those same questions, and I have
knelt and prayed through much darkness, but every time I rise, I find that I
still believe. How I believe, though,
has changed.
Some days, I long for the simplicity of my old belief
system, with its clean, defined, systematic theology. I now have many more questions than I have
answers: questions about salvation, about the bible, about our lifestyle of
consumption and its effects on our planet, about how our individualism affects
our societal psyche. I have questions
about faith and darkness and depression, about the future and the past and the
road between them. But I believe in
Jesus. I believe in Emmanuel, God with
us. I believe he came to us, to all of us, and that that means
something.
In the end, it comes down to a question of narrative, for
me. Ultimately, God is directing history
somewhere, and I just can’t get behind the idea that it’s an all-or-nothing,
cosmic soul sort, where the few “in” get in and everybody else is tormented,
forever. I think God is better than
that, I think Jesus means more to the world than that, and so that’s where I
place my hope: God’s goodness and love
for his creation, and his relentless pursuit of restoration.
