Putting God In The Dock

Unless other Christians aren't like me on this matter (which I happen to doubt), I think there are things we are not telling you regarding how we feel about our faith. You see, we get that God is an awesome, omnipotent, omniscient, creative genius who loves us without measure - and on good days this is all very well. And I'm sure that even on the bad days all that is still true - it's just that, for me, those bad days are more likely to bring about the tendency to put God in the dock a bit more.

It's in those bad times that my mind alters a bit - not that I'm deliberately any less pious or fervent, but just that I start to ask questions from the gut about how I'm supposed to feel according to this awesome, omnipotent, omniscient, creative, loving God. For I have to be honest; there are plenty of times when the Christian message that we're to be so worshipful towards this awesome God, that we're so very unworthy and undeserving, and so humbly penitent for all the times we've screwed up, and such hopeless wretches compared to Him does begin to grate a bit.

It's not that I suddenly lose sight of these things; it's that I get to a point when I feel like saying to God "Hey, don't you have a bit of explaining to do too?" or "It's alright for you out there, but couldn't you have made things just a little easier at times?". And I think that's allowed - at the very least it shows a genuine introspection and an honest pursuit of further understanding. I mean, for the most part of our human history our species has had to incur the most atrocious living conditions, and it's only in the last 0.1% of the passage of time that we've managed to get past our plight, and only in the past 0.01% of that time that fewer than half the population of the world have been in absolute poverty.

When you add to that the tremendous personal struggles we all have to encounter, and the frequent emotional contortions required to continually say to ourselves "It's ok, I know you're silent and in control of things, God, but couldn't you just do a teensy weensy bit more to make it clearer what it is I'm doing so wrong, or why life has to be this tough?", it's unsurprising that we feel despondent at times - it's not like we looked at the world beforehand, weighed up all the conditions, and made a conscious choice to be in it (although personally I'm still delighted to be in it).

I have no problem with the notion that my overall understanding on this is pants compared to God's, and that the gulf between His mind and mine is so great that I couldn't even conceive of such a distance - but there comes a point after a lot of soul searching about wanting to feel the things you'd like to feel (and told we're supposed to feel), and a lot of supplication in the hope of having more of the Holy Spirit working inside of us, that we resort to putting God in the dock.

And to repeat, I think that's okay, providing the motives are sincere and the application reverent. So if you find yourself in a similar position and worry that what you're doing is some kind of outrage against your faith, I want to reassure you that you definitely are not alone, and that far from being an outrage, at the very least it shows the mind is actively engaging in parts of the experience it finds intractable.

The Difference Between Biblical Facts & Biblical Truths

When scientists learned about the atom, electromagnetism, and genetics they were learning things that had been true of nature long before humans understood them. By a similar measure, Mount Everest had been the tallest mountain and the Nile the longest river long before we existed to name and identify them thus.

The Christian accounts recorded in the New Testament are accounts that convey powerful truths about Christ and about God's love that apply to all time. But equally, the fact of the Incarnation where God became a man in a human body and subjected Himself to pain, fear, temptation, upset, detachment, torture and death for us is not something that would have been a fact in, say, 350BC.

This is the distinction between New Testament facts and New Testaments truths. The facts are things that happened in history and would not have been facts a few hundred years previous, whereas the truths are truths that exist outside of the linear nature of time. The Bible is a book that uses facts as a mirror to reflect God's eternal truths.