Author Archives: Gregg Monteith

Two roads not to take

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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.

Another Christian option?

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On the one hand I’m loathe to type it.  How many times has Jesus been presented as the “answer,” irrespective of the problem?  How many times have people been naïve, been of “good faith,” or perhaps gone out on a limb with this Jesus only to be let down, or even abused?  So the problem—before even beginning with discussion—is huge.

I’m particularly sympathetic to the dis-ease (and at times, disease) that this Jesus can wreak because I was an evangelical Christian for many years.  I repudiated my Christian beliefs after a series of profoundly evil and destructive events led me to the irrefutable conclusion that evil is more powerful (and more real) than God.  In these clutch moments God fell short.  Or more accurately, from everything that I could perceive, God simply didn’t show up.

So where the cost of any belief system is one’s sanity and intellectual integrity, such a cost is too high: paying this price is effectively divorcing oneself from one’s personal history, one’s culture, one’s world.  In short, it is embracing irreality.  I was a truth-seeker and Christianity was a lie, so we really had nothing in common.  Yet while not ignoring or denouncing the preceding, I am, on the other hand, actually writing in favour of Christianity and its Jesus.

Why?

I am doing so because over the course of nearly 7 years as a hostile agnostic I had new experiences and understandings (of the world, myself, Christianity, and God) that are as real—and more powerful and compelling—than my experiences of evil.  In short, I am writing in favour of Christianity because the Christian God actually showed up in my experience and makes sense according to my new understandings.

This claim requires much more explanation and validation than I can offer here, but the end result of such experiences and understandings of God was that Christianity was possible, and in fact more than possible.

Before going on to present this specific Christianity and its “more,” let me state two caveats.  First, Christians, best not applaud at this point: if you presume that I’m another sinner who has “turned back” to what you understand as Christianity or that I’m simply “in your camp,” then what follows will be an even chillier proverbial ‘bucket of cold water’.  And second, Non-Christians, best not insist that I must be lying about either my initial, negative claims about Christianity or deceived about the validity that I find in my current Christian belief (as though no one who truly thought the one could ever again really think the other).

You’d be dead wrong in supposing the first.  And as to the second?  Well, I suppose that will depend on what you get from what you read here.  It depends, in other words, on whether there is another Christian option.