Below the Line of Despair

I've been meaning to post up my present spiritual condition for a while now and haven't had the gumption or opportunity to do it till now. An old close friend that I met in Bible college back in 1976 has come back into my life through email. John was the scholarly thinking, deeply passionate person who wanted to know God with all his mind and heart just like me. We fought many a theological battles together and John was as faithful of a friend as anyone could ever ask for.

So here is my reply to John that developed in an email in the context of each of us trying to discover after all these years what we have come to with our faiths. John is now a dedicated but somewhat fragile Chatholic living in the blood pump of the Evangelical America (Wheaton, Ill.) and I am left over road-kill from the same Christian protestant fundamentalism that arose during the last century and still boltsters forward in strong stride.

LETTER BELOW THIS LINE:

Oh John, oh John…. Good to hear you honest.

First things first: the southern phrase of you all is spelled and pronounced “ya’ll”.

But America is getting pretty homogenous so this is mostly a quaint cultural remnant hardly noticed by any here nor there, I suspect.



Well good to know you still have the faith, even if vulnerable. I’d love hearing more about your experiential side. Catholicism is obviously a deep faith and possibly worthy of great thinkers like yourself.

Please excuse me for being so hard on you and on the faith. I myself just barely (just barely) hold on to any smidgeon of faith I have left. Actually, I’m probably not even a Christian in nearly any kind of sense I can fathom – except for the church going (I go to a Baptist church) and Bible reading and simple spiritual apologetics and uplifting I try to give to my Sunday school class each week.

Inwardly, the spiritually experiential side of me has evaporated due to my intellectual and sensory sides (my eyes and ears, etc.) I’d still like to believe… but believe what? That Jesus rose from the dead? I think there’s a good chance that somehow maybe he did. So? What am I supposed to do with that? Worship the distant memory of him. Believe what his immediate disciples said and try interpreting that over and over again and again for the 21st century? I’ve done that. It leaves me hollow. So where is the experience? Where is he now? If he came up from the grave, why didn’t he stick around? (To leave, so this “spiritual” ghost can float around above our heads and induce circumstantial questionable events left open for our interpretation?)

The chief fundamental problem that Schaffer himself knew and entitled his first book – “God is There” – okay…. Where?

Well…. Enough of that stuff … sorry to dump on you… I even requested prayer in church last Sunday….. it all seems so lame… yet a remnant of faith must be there still… I feel like either such a pawn in this big joke of a game played by the gods or else just another typical human (fancy monkey) with this advanced need to worship a conceptual power to explain personal phenomena in my life and in the world. (the self-delusion you mentioned – thus implying that “good” is more important than “true”.)



Anyway… change the subject a little… Are you familiar with N.T. Wright ? Are you familiar with the “Emerging church” movement and the thoughts around it? A fair non-scholarly place to start is “A Generous Orthodoxy” by Brian McLaren if you’re interested… sounds right up your alley for the “God is one, church is one” thing.

Look at N.T. Wright’s 5 volume study on the original history and context of Jesus and Paul and 1st century Judaism for the scholarly side.

I know you’re life is busy and I’m using time here at work to write so you don’t have to respond in detail. I can’t imagine us really getting together, but it’s possible. Adena goes to Illinois once in a while and I’m toying with the idea of coming up around Thanksgiving.

Let’s keep conversing. Good to hear from you and good to know you still have faith. I have about 1 grain left. 

Mitch