This Is How I Feel

I've begun recently to get a clearer sense of our being aliens as Christians.  More and more I feel out of place.  There is a real sense of existential distress.  Not in a nihilistic way, not like Sartre or Camus, or others like them. But a very real and pervasive questioning of my life, the way I live and the way of life of the world around me.  And I find myself in a black-hole of sorts, in a vacuum between the church and the world.  I find the secular world-view to be vacuous and futile.  Greed, oppression, and violence are the rules of the game.  It's sad, frankly.  And it is death to the soul.  What is worse, the place that I should be able to turn, the church, is playing the same game, and playing by the same rules.  Now to be fair it's not all bad.  There are shafts of light that break through the stormy clouds.  I find myself drawn to those shafts and feel at home in the brilliance of Love that makes the light.  But at the same time, while traveling from shaft to shaft, the path is dark and cold.  And I don't know what to do.  The word of God is supposed to be a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.  But what do you do when that word is being distorted?  When it is being covered and causing the path to be shrouded in darkness all over again?  When those in whose charge it is fail to use it properly or effectively?  These are things I working through.  This is how I'm feeling right now.  I see more and more how much I bleed the half-truths and blatant lies of my culture, secular AND christian.  It's beyond my control, and beyond my ability to do much about it right about now.  That's all.

The Good Dead God: Killing a God With Philip Pullman

We find God, the Ancient of Days, on the limits of tangibility.  He lays in His portable seat like a withering wrinkly old baby.  Angels transport Him from a fortress in the sky, as Metatron, the soon to be Authority, watches a war between the Kingdom of Heaven and those who would initiate the Republic of Heaven.  On his way to safety, God, decrepit and senile, meets the enemy and his seat fall from the sky.  Not long after, rescued by two children who have no idea who he is and who help him sympathetically, even pathetically, God disintegrates into the air.  The end of God, the death of the Authority.  

Philip Pullman has great distaste for this God.  It is evident in his description.  This God is weak.  He is beyond old.  He can not even move himself.  Pullman admits to his hatred of religion.  He is forthright in his purpose in writing the "His Dark Materials" series, the first book of which was recently made into a Hollywood film.  Pullman is a militant atheist, so to him the obliteration of religion from the face of the earth would be a good thing.  To him God is dead, if He ever existed.  All that is true is reason and science.  Consciousness is God.

I see things diametrically to Pullman in so many ways.  But one thing we do have in common.  The God that dies in his series can burn forever in the hell He was born in.  He is a cruel God, even an evil God.  He is a tyrant, He is the Authority.  And we are better off without Him.  

There has been a lot of uproar over "The Golden Compass", the recent book turned movie.  Many christian parents are quite upset.  Pullman is gunning for impressionable children.  He is overstepping his bounds, and so we should boycott the film.  I couldn't agree less.  

Instead, I think that the church should stand up with Pullman and declare the God of the His Dark Materials series dead.  Because He is.  He fell with the modernist movement that created Him.  And like I've said, we are better off without Him.  

Pullman's dead God is not the God of Christianity.  He might think so, but I think he is wrong.  But the God I worship is a God of pure love.  A God who rescues and saves.  A God who gives and forgives.  A God who is unafraid of reason and consciousness, because God is the one who fashioned them, who gave them to us as a gift.  The God I worship is quite different from the dead God of Pullman's books.  The God of Christianity is a God who is alive; God is the author of life and all life is possible only through God.  What Pullman doesn't realize is that if our God is ever killed, then we die with God.  So the God he kills can't be the Christian God, but is a God who needs to die.  A God that too many christians worship, but who is not the God of the Bible.

We should not fear Pullman's books or the message they might send to our children.  Instead we should embrace this good death of a God who is dead.  And use this death to point to the God who lives.