Tag: religion

Upstairs Downstairs Truth

I’m reading a book called “The Deconstruction of Chrisitianity: What it is, Why it’s Destructive, and How to Respond” by Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett. I’m only up to chapter 7, but it’s been a good book so far. 

In the book the authors acknowledge yet another author, Francis Shaeffer, who came up with the concept of upstairs and downstairs truth. And that’s what I want to talk about. So, the idea is that in this stage of history that we are in, we have come to organize truth in a two story house. On the bottom floor are things like science and math. Facts. These are unarguable, unmovable. 1+1=2. No one is going to reasonably argue with that. Then, in the second story of our house we have things that fall more into the category of preferences. I think chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla. I like Fall better than Winter. Green is the prettiest color. These are opinions and are going to be different for each person. You like green, but I think purple is better. So far so good. The problem arises in that our society has placed religion in the upstairs part of our house. You believe in God? Ok, that’s fine. I don’t. But, whatever makes you happy. Which, maybe you’ve seen that COEXIST bumper sticker that uses each letter of the word to represent all the world’s main religions? The idea being, you believe in Allah, and I’ll believe in Buddha, and they can believe in God, and we can all be happy together and support each other in our preferential beliefs. 

Except that, as Christians, we believe that our faith belongs in the downstairs part of the house. Jesus is real, his word, the Bible is unarguable truth. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6. We don’t believe that religion is preferential. If you don’t believe in Jesus then you are not saved. This is unarguable fact, like 1+1=2. 

I’ve been thinking about my own faith journey. I had some traumatic events when I was very young and my response was to retreat into my own little world of imagination and books. But, even at that age, I knew Jesus, and I took him with me into my own little world. I remember when I would daydream and create stories in my head, there was always that standard that my stories I made up and lived out in my fantasy world (stories that helped me makes sense of the world I was living in and make sense of the things that had happened to me), those stories always acknowledged the presence of God. And when I think back on the theme of most of the stories I made up, the heroes I imagined were very Christ-like. 

As a child who grew up on the mission field and whose parents were in full-time ministry, I saw a lot of the bad side of organized religion. I saw hypocrisy, abuse, and more hypocrisy. I saw a lot of legalism. Manipulation. Essentially, a whole array of things that should have turned me away from my faith. Things that should have made me think, well, if that’s what Jesus is like, then I don’t want anything to do with him. And here is where my testimony is, my story of how God kept me from falling away. Somehow, Jesus made himself known to me at such a young age and was so a part of my inner thought life, that when I saw all these things that were wrong, I knew that those things were not Jesus. Those things were people acting in such a way that proved they obviously didn’t know the true Jesus. 

I have known since I was very young that Jesus is fact. Not a preference. He is the truth and everything else is measured against him and his word as found in the Bible. And when Christians don’t act in a Christ-like manner, I know it means they’re not walking in step with Jesus, not that Jesus doesn’t exist. 

Reading about the Upstairs Downstairs method of organizing truth has been really helpful for me to understand where people are coming from when they approach religion as being a subjective experience. And it also helps make sense why people can get so angry about “fundamental Christians”. If my viewpoint of the world is that Jesus is a flavor of ice cream that I can choose to like or not like or just ignore if I want to, I can see how someone standing there telling me that Jesus is the only way would feel annoying. I pray that the Holy Spirit will move and open people’s eyes to see that Jesus is fact not preference, that he is Truth, not opinion. 

Freedom

I just finished the book “Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s one of those books that make you think. It takes place in some far distant future on some far distant planet that has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. The planet has withstood all the typical human problems, mismanaging the planet, corruption, slavery, violence, changes of government. They are now settled into a system that sounds a lot like our current way of life, but with proper management of the planet and its resources. The rich rule, the poor survive. Class systems. A great focus on material possessions. In the story, about two hundred years before, a group of social dissidents gain enough power that the local government is afraid of their influence, and so they give them permission to leave the planet and settle on the moon, which is habitable, but barely. It has water and fish and some vegetation, but not a lot. It’s a very fragile system and in order to live there everyone has to be very careful with the resources. This group of dissidents call themselves the Odonians, after their leader, Odo, and they set out to create their own utopia. This utopia is centered around anarchism.

anarchism: a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups Merriam-Webster

Their means of accomplishing this is to banish all ownership. Everything is commonly owned. People work together because in helping their community, they are helping themselves. And that is supposed to be the driving motivation to do the right thing. Their culture also helps promote this by disdaining and calling out any behavior that reeks of “propertarianism” or being an “egoist”.

There are all kinds of thoughts and ideas to dig into in this book, but one theme stood out to me, freedom. For the Odonians, freedom was being able to do whatever was best for yourself and the only way to achieve that freedom was to not be imprisoned by authorities or societal institutions directing your path or to be imprisoned by material possessions. There were no taboos for sex and no traditions supporting family units, though couples that wanted to stay together could, and parents that wanted to stay involved in their children’s lives, could, it was just not required. Work was seen as a fulfilling thing that everyone did, preferably in an area where you had obvious gifts and talents, but everyone also pitched in to help with nonglamorous jobs so that everything got done. And if someone chose to not work they could. But the people serving food could also choose to not feed those who didn’t work. And if a person behaved in a way that their peers found selfish or hurtful, the community could encourage them to move on to somewhere else. The underlying idea being that it’s our social structures and traditions and our material belongings that actually make humans not live in harmony with each other. And if you eliminate all those things, harmony will surely come.

Except, spoiler alert, we also learn that humankind is just bent to form bureaucracy and hierarchy and fall into power struggles, and it takes constant effort to remain in a “free” state.

I finished the book last night and then this morning I went to church and we sang a bunch of songs about being “free” . And that really grabbed my attention since I’d just been reading about this theme.

For a Christian, we understand that we have all been affected by the entry of sin into the world which happened in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Sin came into the world and the end result of sin was moral decay, rot, and death. And no matter how many structures we put into place, religions, sacrifices, moralism, structured civilizations, strict laws, none of these things had the power to free us from sin and its end result of death.

Then Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth and was killed on a cross and he took the punishment for all our sins, for all mankind for all time. He abolished death. He fixed the problem and made it so we could be free from sin. But in order to enter into that freedom we have to accept the work he did on the cross, repent of our sins, and submit ourselves to his authority. We become slaves of Christ. His will be done, not ours.

Christianity is a paradox. In order to be free, we become slaves. We serve the Lord of the Universe, and that Lord, lay down all his power and sacrificed himself for us. And then Jesus said, if you want to be great in God’s kingdom, you must learn to be a servant. And then he proceeds to lead by example and serves us, his people. We live in a utopia of being loved and held by God, slowly being changed by him, but we also look forward to the true “utopia” of heaven where everything is finally made right and all sin and pain are abolished.

The difference between finding freedom in Christ and finding freedom in anarchy is that Christ actually takes care of the original sin problem that makes humans not live in harmony. Anarchy is at best a bandaid that offers a temporary solution, but it can never deal with the root problem, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Increase My Faith

We went camping as a family this last weekend. It was a lot of fun. Canoe camping. We drove into a National Park, put into a lake and then paddled over two hours before we got to a creek/small river. We took our canoes out and then had to carry our stuff up the bank, down the trail about the equivalent of a city block to our campsite. We got our tents up, a campfire going, cooked some supper. The kids were running around the woods having a lot of fun. Suddenly my daughter started crying and grabbed her chest. She ran over to me. Mom! My chest hurts! I need my inhaler! Ok. I got this. I went and got my ziploc bag full of all my emergency medicine that I always have with me on these trips. (Be prepared!) I pulled out her inhaler with her spacer, handed it to her, she went to press the button and something was wrong. The actual medicine tube had fallen out of the casing. There was no albuterol. Just the plastic casing. Crap. 

Ok. Take a deep breath. (Me, not the asthmatic kid.) I stood there, holding her in a hug while I rubbed her back. It’s ok. Let’s get you out of this woodsmoke and stop running around. We’ll find a nice quiet place to sit till you feel better. I could tell she was starting to panic. I was trying not to panic. We just stood there quietly for a while. I got a camp chair and moved it away from the smoke. Sat her down. My brain was racing. Ok. People had asthma long before inhalers came around. I took mental stock of what I had. I could pound on her back to help loosen things up? I remembered that in my medicine bag I had some essential oils. We could put some in boiling water and have her breath in the steam with a towel over her head. Ok. We can do this. I stopped and prayed out loud for her and she slowly calmed down. 

It was bedtime. The girls were all going to sleep in their own tent, but this had thrown my daughter off. She asked to sleep in my tent. Sure sweetie. Then it was a domino effect as the other girls decided that they weren’t brave enough to sleep solo if one of the sisters was missing. So then I had three extra kids in my tent. And an empty tent all set up. My husband abandoned ship and took one of the little boys and they went and shared the abandoned tent and I layed down, surrounded by little ones. 

As I lay there in the dark my heart was pounding and I found myself fighting off fear. Yes, my asthmatic child seemed to be doing better. But what if her asthma got worse? I imagined us jumping into a canoe in the middle of the night, paddling for hours, and then driving trying to find a hospital for her. My other daughter said her head was hurting and she had a runny nose. What if it was Covid? What if she suddenly got really sick in the middle of the night, and here we are, out in the middle of nowhere??

And I found myself casting out a desperate prayer, God how do I stop living in so much fear? And he answered me. I lay there and God showed me image after image in my head of how I view Him. My warped understanding of Him. My default worldview that has me thinking of God as someone distant who constantly disapproves of me. I come to him as a slave to a harsh master, crying for mercy, but not sure about getting it. And then he brought to my mind a dream that he had given me back when I was nineteen years old. In college. I didn’t even know what a prophetic dream was back then. I just knew that the dream had been different. I told my roommate, I think God was trying to tell me something in a dream. And after I told her about the dream she said, Yes! God was definitely telling you something! I wrote the dream down. But, I still remember it vividly. 

I won’t go into all the details of the dream. But it was essentially, God loving me as a groom loves his bride. And I thought how different, how much stronger my faith would be, if I could fully grasp how loved I was by God. How my prayers would seem different. Asking for help from your lover is so different from asking for help from a Master. I know that if I asked my husband for something, he would want to do it for me. Just because he loved me. And he would take pleasure in giving it to me. 

We read the story last night of Jesus with his disciples out on a boat in a storm. And the disciples were all freaked out and Jesus stops the storm with his words. And then in Mark 4: 40-41, 

He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”  They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

Do you still have no faith? And then they ask, Who is this? And that seems to be really key to not being afraid. Having a true understanding of who our God is and having faith that he will stay true to his character. Religion and law teach us that God is someone that we are constantly trying to appease by being good, following the rules. Relationship with God is different. It’s understanding that he First Loved Us and then he Made A Way for us to be reconciled to him because of his Great Love for us. 

I feel like I have been on a lifelong journey to move from the position of viewing God through Law to the position of viewing God through Grace. I’m not there yet. But, I feel a lot more like I know how to pray. I know better what needs to change. God, let me understand you better as a God of Love. Let me walk in a fuller understanding of your Grace. Increase my faith.