The Same Old Line

The comments on this Network Norwich thread about Todd Bentley seem to have at last dried up. Towards the end of the thread one commentator yearns for those “...THOUSANDS WHO HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED OUR WONDERFUL GOD”. This writer probably comes from a Christian culture where there is a premium on communicating mood, emotion, and vehemence. This is, of course, not easily achieved in writing, and so unable to find any other way to articulate her emotions the writer resorts to capitals.

“...experienced our wonderful God”? Now that’s a telling phrase: If relations with other humans are the nearest models we have for relations with God, (after all Christ, the express image of God, is human) then isn’t this usage rather unusual? Do we say “I experienced my wife” or “I experienced my friend”. Would the disciples ever have said they “experienced Christ”. One might say, “I experienced my bosses anger” or “I experience my wife’s love”, but seldom do we say of the whole person “I experienced him or her”. Not that I would claim that an "experience of God" is necessarily invalid, but to habitually use this phrase does betray the skew of a contemporary mind set. A person is, in fact, a highly complex cluster of differing and interacting traits, and although one might validly talk about experiencing this or that single trait, such usage does no justice to the complexity and differentiation of personality if it used to refer to the whole person. Above all, it is wrong to talk of God in the same terms that one might talk about “experiencing” a fair ground ride. The language of Christianity in some quarters has become degenerated and debased and has lost the vision that relating to a person is an analytical act of knowing carried out by a vastly complex built in mental toolkit.

In the face of a cosmos that has apparently been demystified and reduced to impersonal elemental matter there is a great yearning to reintroduce the human and the sacred. In the great polarised retreat from the analytical and rational that hallmarks much contemporary religion the return to humanity and sacredness has been distorted and caricatured in an inarticulate dance with the irrational, the esoteric, the mysterious, the gnostic and the fideist. The word “experience”, a word of that hints of something that cannot be analyzed into parts, is the only word left for the Christian fideists. For them God cannot, in fact should not, be analyzed because that smacks of the profane world of science and head knowledge, the world of elemental matter, the world from which they are trying to disconnect in favour of the truly sublime. To them one isn’t converted until one has “experienced” God.

And yet as they seek authenticity of faith their yearning for humanity betrays them; the Gnostic Christian environment is so often at an intellectually low ebb and its supporting narrative is wretchedly debased by spiritual cliché surfers who use a restricted vocabulary and repeated phrases: “A move of God”, “The touch of God”, “experiencing God”, “more of God” etc. Their followers are like bad actors reading a bad script: they know all the terms, but their delivery is flat, unconvincing and unauthentic.

If God exists the signal of His personality is subtle, and sometimes difficult to pick up and interpret against the background noise, but search for Him we must. But for the fundamentalist interpretation of God’s signal is not what he thinks himself to be about, for the fundamentalist is fundamentally a copyist; For him, tuning into the signal of God is like a pupil copying from the teacher’s board, a pupil who doesn’t really understand what he is copying and so copies all the mistakes, rubbish and background noise as well, and declares it all to be sacred. And of course they expect us to copy them!