It is difficult at the outset to know which direction to take: to discuss how/why evangelical Christianity has value, or to begin by examining how (and how much) evangelical Christianity is broken (and indeed, dysfunctional). I’ll explain my choice by way of analogy.
After completing my graduate studies I ran across something that I had never experienced or had an interest in: a community dance. I fell in love. After so many years of living “in my head” I was suddenly aware of just how much of me simply could not be expressed through my intellect, or even my voice or pen. Unlike church (which I found alienating and problematic on so many levels) I attended regularly for several years, finding it a catalyst for catharsis: within my dance I could bring out my pain, my frustration, and loneliness. I did not dance them away, but let them be.
Before I left Vancouver I had a chat with the founder. He had started this dance—a family-friendly, no drugs / alcohol, not-for-profit event—because he just wanted to dance. No club scene, no strings. I was considering starting a similar community dance in my new town but had no skill as a DJ. The best tip he gave me was this: play what you like. You won’t please everyone, so if you can’t get into it then it’s not worth doing and, really, it won’t work.
As with dancing, so too those who read these entries may have diverging views about what should be said first in a blog making such big claims (i.e., Christianity is real—prove it! Evangelical Christianity is deeply flawed—prove it!). Yet in keeping with my favourite DJ’s perspective, I’m going with what’s on my front burner at the moment and will move on from there.
But my story about dancing is more than a long-winded analogy. Beyond being cathartic for my negative emotions dancing was also the space where I could best express my response to the fullness of the love and truth that I encounter: through my existence, my family, my world, and my experience(s) of a God who actually shows up.
Joy.
And that too is why I’m doing this—why I’m writing. (As an aside I think it should be odd to us, and evoke some suspicion, that the word joy itself is “weird” nowadays and that its connotation seems, somehow, deeply awkward). So if you’re expecting me to start by laying down proofs you’ll be disappointed, or perhaps happily surprised. Because being intellectually convinced of something, as important as that is, comes second. Or rather, where any truth claims to be “full”—making a claim on both my existence and all of existence—and also to be supremely about love, it must be as philosopher Søren Kierkegaard notes: truth that is “for me.” And intimately so.
In my own experience the greatest “truth-for-me” is to be deeply beloved by one who knows me truly, and whom I deeply love in return. Thus my view that truth and love are co-central to both human existence and Christianity / the Christian God comes not only out of intellectual examination or theological interpretation but because it has been my experience, and this experience has transformed my life. Absolute (or ultimate) truth may indeed exist, but as I have no absolute (or ultimate) access to it, it means nothing to me unless it is true for me.
So which road am I taking? Neither. I refuse the view that the binary opposition between proving Christianity or disproving it is the only way to go, nor do I believe that “proving” in any modernist sense even represents a valid option. Instead the path I choose, full of detours and discursions, will take love and truth as joint polar stars towards a way of being that looks for validation through reason and experience, even the experience of joy.
Loved your thoughts and reflections on the word “Joy.” Wow, it does cause me to take a step back and wonder when the last time I observed or experienced joy… I think it was in relation to interacting with children, perhaps a connection to innocence and complete inhibition–I see the dance connection when I think uninhibited.
I’d love to see a post or more of your thoughts on not being able to access “absolute truth” and “being true to you”–what those things really mean and how they work themselves out.
My experience of the Evangelical sub-culture is that this is one of their bedrocks–that they have “the absolute truth” or the “true Truth” and that everyone else is misguided and does not have it.
They would also argue that if one person asserts something as “being true for them,” but it is not for others, then it is relativistic and that we are each making up our own mis-guided “truth,” which considering our “fallen and sinful nature” cannot be trusted because we are apt to create frameworks that selfishly serve us and not others or the truth.
It’s interesting to reflect on the order of events your espouse–experience before knowledge. I’ve always pursued knowledge piece first, hoping the experience would follow. I can’t say it’s worked very well.
I’m definitely looking forward to hearing what you believe is third option.
Hi Santiago,
I’m glad that you found this post helpful. Your comments on joy are what I’m pointing to here–it seems so foreign to us yet we can find it in such common places. I wonder if the places we find it (with children, for example) give us some better indication about its nature (kids are unconcerned about “outcomes” or “performance,” but be themselves in their experiences with each other and the world around them).
Thanks for your comments on Truth vs. truth-for-me. One of the greatest ironies I see is that in wanting to have more, Evangelicals end up with much less. So their view that God and the Bible are absolutely True almost always comes packaged with the view that they have absolute access to this Truth. Yet claiming the second (this degree of clarity about their understanding) is something that only God can have. Also, by claiming the first (expressing such undeniable certainty about their knowledge that God and the Bible are “just this way,” and not otherwise) they set up their own, limited perspectives as absolutes–they enshrine their views as gods. So they both claim equality with God and indeed supplant God with a smaller, tighter version. In biblical terms, with an idol.
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I can totally relate to the power of uninhibited dancing to bring forth joy in the body. That has been my experience as well. I love it more than I can express. It seems to me I am familiar with the dancing opportunities you shared about and have attended some of these in my own town. I love losing myself in the uncontrollable urge of my body and soul to move, to release and be free. I continue to meet God in these moments while I am grinning ear to ear surrendering to the music.
Hi Mama Moonbeam,
As I’ve been writing this blog I keep hoping that I’ll find people who think that this material is relevant. I’m glad to know that you resonate with what I’m saying.
It’s good to hear that you have had opportunities where you live to have these experiences of dance, movement, and joy. And I like how, for you, it’s “the power of uninhibited dancing to bring forth joy in the body.” In other words, that movement brings joy. It’s interesting that, primarily, for me it was the opposite: feeling so overwhelmed with my experience of God that, even following a very innovative and well-received graduate thesis (which was a philosophically theological “take” on this experience of God), it was not enough.
It’s not as though I was trying to “say it all,” like trying to encompass the experience and so control it, but I was still surprised by how much more of it there was that I both could not bring to out and which compelled me to find other modes of expression.
But I suppose too that this is consistent with the nature of the experience: of being loved more deeply that I best love myself and known more truly that I most know myself.
In my view, a creativity is born out of this sense of being known truly and loved profoundly which is never exhausted in contemplation or expression, but which ongoingly gives rise to rich, new forms of joyful response (such as dance) and which seeks to find fulfillment in echoing back this love and truth by offering it to others.
When Christians speak of God as trinity, this is what best I understand that to mean.