For the Joy of the Journey

The Presence of God (8) – Leaving aTwo Storey Life

George April 17, 2024 The Presence of God 0 Comments

… a “two-storey universe.” In short, this is a description of how many modern Christians see the world. There is the first floor – the natural world which operates according to naturalist, “secular” rules, and the second floor – the world of God, heaven, hell, angels, etc. The spiritual crisis of much of modern man is the inherent disconnect in these two worlds.
How to believe in a God who is “everywhere present and filling all things” is a very different way of life than to believe in a God who is “out there.”¹

This post concludes, but does not exhaust, implications of abandoning a Two Storey life. In addition to “moving from abstraction to the realm of living“ “and “being more about knowing than believing“; today’s post focuses on Christian Atheism. at You can read the previous post HERE.

When we live our lives in the two-story world, we practice what Freeman calls “Christian atheism.” Since God is “upstairs,” God is “not here.” God isn’t close; God is elsewhere, far away and distant. And not just physically distant, mentally distant as well. God is at the back our minds, an afterthought, if we think of God at all.” ²

Having confessed to mostly living in a Two Storey life; Beck’s assertion that I have been practicing Christian Atheism is a shocking declaration worthy of some serious scrutiny. What follows is a synopsis of Christian Atheism from Fr Stephen Freeman’s essay “Christianity in a Two Storey Universe”

CHRISTIAN ATHEISM

How can one be both an atheist and a Christian?
In the history of religious thought, one of the closest versions to what I am describing as a “two-storey” world-view, is that espoused by classical Deism.
[In] an almost pure, two-storey worldview. God, “the Deity,” had created the universe in the beginning, setting it in motion. He had done so in such a way that the world could be described as directed by His Providence, but not in any sense interfered with after its creation.
The creator had accomplished His work: it was up to us to conform ourselves to His purposes and morality – which were pretty indistinguishable from natural law. If you read the writings of the period it’s much more common to read Providence where a Christian might put God. Many modern evangelicals mistakenly read such statements as Christian.

…other than having some notion of an original Creator, Deists were practical atheists. The God Who created had completed His work. Ethics were as much a matter of scientific discovery as any other principle of physics. They believed in something they called “God” or “Providence” but only in a very divorced sense. It would be hard to distinguish their thought from that of an atheist except that they clung to an idea of God at least as the initiator of all things.
…“practical atheism,” meaning by it, that although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God’s non-existence would make little difference.

…“practical atheists.” Though they had great, even absolutist, faith in the Holy Scriptures, they had no relationship with a God who is living and active and directly involved in their world. Had their notion of a God died, and left somebody else in charge of His heaven, it would not have made much difference so long as the rules did not change.
The more the secular world is exalted as secular, that is, having an existence somehow independent of God, the more we will live as practical atheists
Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, have only ideas which can be substituted – the result being the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than theoretical.
…much of modern Christianity functions on this ideological level rather than the level of the God-Who-is among-us, much of Christianity functions in a mode of practical atheism. The more ideological the faith, the more likely its proponents are to expouse what amounts to a practical atheism.

The more truly sacramental becomes the Christian life, the more thoroughly grounded it is in the God-Who-is-among- us. Such a God is indeed, “everywhere present and filling all things.” Our options are between such a God – as proclaimed in the New Testament – or a God who need be no God at all for He is removed from us anyway.

There is a dialog that may take place between Christians and atheists. But there is, prior to that, an even more important dialog to be had, and that is with the practical atheism of Christians who have exiled God from the world around us. Such practical atheism is a severe distortion of the Christian faith and an extremely poor substitute for the real thing.

Richard John Neuhaus has written frequently of returning the Church to the public square. I think the problem is far deeper. In many cases we have to speak about returning God to the Church. In cases where practical atheism is the faith of a goup of “believers,” their presence in the public square makes no difference. Who cares?

God cannot be exiled from our world no matter how men try. He has come among us, and not at our invitation. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He is already in the Public Square as the Crucified God who is reconciling the world to Himself, whether we like it or not. The opposite of practical atheism is to do the only thing the Christianity of the first- storey can do: keep His commandments and fall down and worship – for God is with us.

although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God’s non-existence would make little difference.

Next: Christianity in the One Storey life

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
Fr Stephen Freemanhttps://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/unbelief-and-the-two-storey-universe/
2
Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)

A Word or Two

Steve Elliott April 15, 2024 A Word or Two 0 Comments

You Never Know

A wonderful thing begins when the rule and reign over your life is ceded to the One who has given you new life, Jesus Christ. You abandon the sense of needing all the answers and needing to be in control and you never know what a day might hold or what wondrous thing might unfold.

Which must mean that you never know (1) what will come of an everyday conversation. At the end of John’s gospel we find Nicodemus at the foot of the cross, a fearless follower of Jesus who defies the Sanhedrin and identifies fully with Christ. But he doesn’t get there if the conversation doesn’t happen in John 3.

So I repeat myself, you never know what will come of a conversation. You with one of your children, you with a friend at work … you with that guy you meet at the auto parts store all the time. I meet people all the time who say to me, “Pastor, I’ll never forget the time you said…” and I’m too shy to admit that I sure can’t remember having said that.

But words last and conversations matter. Part of what it means to sew the good seed of good news, is to treat every conversation with the possibilities it contains. You never know when it might be the conversation of a life time.

Because there are times when like a young mom you walk someone toward the right understanding of what it means to be a child of God. Yet on a lot of days, you don’t have the chance to give the gospel explicitly. But folks should be able to read the gospel in you implicitly by what you say and how you relate to them. Every conversation is a doorway for Jesus to be seen through.

And another you never know is that you never know (2) how God might use you. Nicodemus proves that it’s not about credentials or status. It’s about who is reigning in your heart.

I remember a young man who ran a small trucking company, the kind of guy with grease under his finger nails from work and creases in his forehead from worry about work. His name was Gord and I was his pastor.

Gord was an introvert of the first order. Shy, quiet, a back ground kind of guy. He had a high school education, loved his family, loved golf and hockey… if you mentioned Augustine in a sermon, he’d probably ask you what team he played for. And Gord would often say of himself that he was a just a garden variety follower of Jesus.

But I always saw him as a great saint. Because he lived in such a way that people were drawn to him…they admired and trusted him. I remember a year or so after he moved out of our area, bumping into a neighbor of his at the grocery store. We knew each other a bit but we both knew Gord well and his name came up quite naturally in our conversation.

And Gord’s old neighbor said to me, “Ya know, the thing about Gord was, if ever I was going through a hard time, he’d be the guy I turned to.” Not to me, a pastor. Not to a credentialed counselor. Not to a lawyer. But to a guy with a grade 12 education who loved Jesus.

Somewhere this morning, Gord is probably wondering if his life really mattered to anyone. He has no idea. And neither do you, because you never know how God will use you. It’s not about your spiritual credentials. It’s about your spiritual life.

Steve

The Presence of God (7) Leaving a two-storey life

George April 10, 2024 The Presence of God 0 Comments

Embracing a reality that God is present everywhere all the time — God’s presence, constant communion with Him—must define the journey.

Embracing the reality that God is present everywhere all the time has been like “hitting the tar baby”.

Coming to grips with the truth that my life has mostly been and continues to be lived in a two storey universe¹ is disconcerting to say the least. Rohr captures the essence of my emotional and spiritual angst:

When we touch our deepest image of self, a deeper image of reality, or a new truth about God, we’re touching something that opens us to the sacred. We’ll want to weep or to be silent, or to run away from it and change the subject because it’s too deep, it’s too heavy. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.”
Richard Rohr – https://cac.org/daily-meditations/our-limited-perspectives/

The weight of that revelation cannot be ignored. Rejecting the reassuring lie of a two storey existence and embracing the reality of a one story universe has profound implications. This post and the next address abandonment of the two-story life. Succeeding posts will speak to the practical implications of life in a one-story universe.
“Christianity in a One-Storey Universe” by Fr Stephen Freeman is an in-depth article which has been helpful and challenging. Blog posts by Richard Beck have contributed significantly.

Abandonment of a Two-story Universe –

from abstraction to the realm of living

[In abandoning a two storey universe] we begin to move our Christian life out of the realm of abstraction and into the realm of living. We pray rather than think about prayer. We trust God rather than discussing the concept of trusting God. We act on the basis of faith rather than spending time talking about the importance of faith. We make every effort to embrace God as good and at work in all things. ²

Living a one storey life can be described as simply living here and now. It is being present to God Who is present to us. It is recognizing the true nature of the created world as the arena of both our struggle and our serenity. Our argument with those who do not believe should not be about whether or not their is a second storey to our universe, but about the true nature of the universe in which we live. Whenever Christians allow the gospel to be shoved upstairs, we have allowed ourselves to be disregarded and the gospel to be marginalized. God did not become flesh and dwell among us in order to establish the truth of a second storey universe: he came to redeem the one we live in. Those who cannot recognize hell among us will also be blind to paradise as well. Christ reveals both. Our daily struggle is to live in the latter and to proclaim the gospel to those who live in the former, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. ³

Abandonment of a Two-story Universe –

more about knowing than believing

..by mysticism I mean an experiential encounter with God, “bumping into God” …Here’s how I make the contrast between belief and experience in the Introduction to Hunting Magic Eels:
The issue is the difference between belief and experience. Belief is intellectual assent and agreement with the doctrinal propositions of faith. Experience exists prior to and drives belief. Experience gives birth to belief. It’s hard to “believe” in God if belief isn’t naming something in our lives, something we’ve felt, sensed, seen, or intuited. As the Christian mystical tradition teaches us, life with God is more about knowing than believing. The mystics didn’t believe in God; they encountered God.
Without an experience of God, belief has no content, no reference, no object. No way to get to “Yes!” ⁴

NEXT:
Abandonment of a Two-Storey Universe

leaving practical atheism

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
“We live here on earth, the first floor, where things are simply things and everything operates according to normal, natural laws, while God lives in heaven, upstairs, and is largely removed from the story in which we live. To effect anything here, God must interrupt the laws of nature and perform a miracle.” For us to see or hear from God, God has to come downstairs to visit us. But most of the time, it’s just us alone on the first floor. God is absent, upstairs and minding his own business.
FR Stephen Freeman
2
Christianity in a One-Storey Universe pg. 9
3
ibid pg.16-17
4
https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/04/apocalyptic-mysticism-film-with-work-of.html?m=0

So Much To Think About

George April 6, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it. _{^{Steven Wright}}

religion cannot be restricted to beliefs.

To reduce religion to “belief” betrays a distinctively Christian and perhaps even Protestant myopia in conceiving religion. Christians have always defined themselves as “Believers” and internally policed the boundaries of belief far more than other religions where the emphasis was on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. But religion more broadly defined is the totality of a life lived before God, something embodied, a way of life, rhythms and rituals, habits of holiness, calendar and community. In many religions it not conceivable let alone possible to compartmentalize religious beliefs away from the daily expressions of religious life.

Michael Bird

Success

I think we have to be very careful using the word “success” when discussing being Jesus’s apprentices. It is easy to perceive following Jesus as a project similar to getting in shape, fixing up our house, or obtaining a certification. We can incorrectly think of it as a process, that if we apply ourselves properly and learn the right principles and actions, we will act like him and thus be successful spouses, parents, friends, employees, leaders, etc. And while success in those areas may be a byproduct, that is not the primary goal of following Jesus. Being Jesus’ apprentice is not a program to make us successful in our lives and careers. It is learning from him how to naturally BE like him, so that like him we can be the embodied presence of God in love, faith, hope, joy and peace for the sake of others.

Jason Zahariades

Perception of the heart

There is a perception, a “seeing” that is beside the seeing of the mind. This is the perception of the heart. The tendency of our mind (thoughts and feelings) is to fragment everything. We see details. We are overwhelmed with details. We experience the world as a cacophony of the senses. Repelled by one and attracted by another, we stumble through life like a drunken man, pushed and pulled by the things around us. This is a description of the passionate life. With increased purity of the heart, however, there comes the increased ability to perceive the whole. To see one thing, not only as itself but in its relations as well, is the beginning of knowing the logos of something. Were we to perceive everything in such a manner, we would perceive the truth of all things. For nothing is as it is in itself, but only as it is in relation (including most especially its relation to God).

Either life is nothing more than the chemistry of his brain, and thus no more significant than the digital programming of a computer model, or there is something unquantifiable, something “ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, beyond understanding,” etc. within our experience and just beyond the edge of our knowing. [Our] choice lies between the fragmented mastery of the chemical equation and union with the Joy that extends beyond.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Idolatry

Idolatry may also seem far removed from modern life, conjuring images of ancient peoples bowing to golden statues. But we should understand that those who bowed before images did so because they believed they could persuade or manipulate the gods to give them what they longed for — fertility, rain, abundant harvests, victory, happiness, security and safety. We may use different means today, but modern people are driven by the same motivations. We also seek, in our own ways, to control our world and to wrest from it what we need and desire.

The idea of idolatry is not, necessarily, having false gods that we can name — or sculpt, for that matter. Instead, it is a term for disordered love. It describes a devotion to even good things that is excessive or obsessive. It conveys to us that well-meaning people who desire worthy things can seek them in ways that harm themselves and others, that we can be driven by longings that we may not know, understand or be able to articulate but that determine the shape of our lives and our society. The 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin famously said that “the human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We are constantly devoting ourselves to what will make us feel secure and safe, things that promise to provide what we most desire and need. Idolatry, Calvin thought, is a subconscious motivator. Our idols are the deepest loves and urges driving us under the hood of our conscious minds, our default mode of being.

Understanding our hearts as idol factories invites us to the difficult work of honesty and humility. It tells us that people do harm, sometimes without knowing it or without meaning to, which means that weprobablydo as well. It tells us that we are not driven by pure rationality or unfettered love to the degree we suppose we are. And this humility allows for compassion and charity to others, even our enemies. It tells us that they are not uniquely evil. They are driven by disordered passions and loves just like us.

Trish Harrison Warren NYT

Old men

“Every old man complains,” so said Samuel Johnson, “of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.”

Unintentional injury

The CDC tracks hospital admissions for unintentional injuries. You fell off a ladder, you fell on a bike. The people that get injured the most, traditionally, are teenage boys. They have very high rates of injury, and then as men get older, the rates go down. That’s the way it used to be.

But what happens beginning in the early 2000s is the boys’ rate begins going down and down, especially after they move on to smartphones around 2012. Boys are no longer going to hospitals for broken arms. It’s a very rare thing now. Now you might think that’s good, but boys are now getting injured at the same rate as 50-year-old men, teenage boys who you think are out taking risks, same hospitalization rates as 50-year-old men, and lower hospitalization rates than teenage girls had 15 years ago. Because boys are not doing anything where they could get hurt. They come home after school, they put on their headphones, they play video games with their friends. Now it’s great fun, but it’s missing most, it’s missing many of the active ingredients of play. It’s missing actual fear, actual thrill. And so I don’t think that, I don’t think our kids are getting the risk exposure that they need to be able to manage risks for the rest of their lives. By the time they come to us in college, they seem to think that reading Shakespeare could be dangerous for them.

All else equal, I would rather there were fewer broken arms. But if the cost of having fewer broken arms is a doubling of the suicide rate, I think from almost all of recorded history, at least as far back as I can see data, young people were much more likely to be killed by someone else than by themselves. But beginning in this period, I think it’s around 2012, the suicide rate for the first time exceeds the murder rate. So kids are still getting hurt and killed, but it’s by themselves now. And I think that’s really, really sad.

Jonathan Haidt

View from the Front Porch

Beliefs

Listening to a podcast recently, I was introduced to an interesting idea about beliefs. I do not recall the podcast but I have continued pondering the idea for several weeks and thought it worth sharing. My apologies to the authors but here is the gist of what I heard: Many Christians conceptualize their belief as a foundation, as a result, when a fault line appears the entire structure is threatened. The authors suggested that a better way to think about belief is as a net, interconnected strands creating a network that is sustained even when strands are weakened or destroyed.

The idea resonates with me. Early development of my beliefs was about building a foundation consisting of inviolable conclusions, the purpose being to establish an unassailable foundation that provided assurance of salvation and a roadmap for life.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Word or Two

Steve Elliott April 2, 2024 A Word or Two 0 Comments

My Marilyn was captured by a bumper sticker that read “Wonder Without Googling“. It gives me pause. Have we lost the wonder? The computer has given us this sense of omniscience that creates the illusion that we can know it all. That we can have dominion over this world, have vice grip control over our world that knows no limits.

Common cold remedy? Financial advice? Marriage counsel? Google will always have the answer for us, right? And even though it is only an illusion, it is of course, the death of imagination, wonder and mystery.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote that, “As our ability to control the world around us has increased, our respect for its mystery (of this world) has decreased.” So where is there room in our world for mystery when Wikipedia has all the answers?

Well, here’s the thing about Wikipedia: the articles written on the site about anyone or anything are literally written by anyone or anything. Anyone can add just about anything to an article on Wikipedia and we read it (and like so many lemmings) we take it for an indisputable fact.

I heard recently of a scientist who in response to a call from God, left his field of expertise to come to seminary. His field was astronomy and he shared this interest with his son who when they left for seminary was about 14. Astronomy for them became a great father/son bonding point.

Well one day in his seminary studies, he thought about how this certain thing in astronomy would be a good illustration of what he wanted to communicate in a paper he was writing. But just to be sure of his facts, he went on line to confirm his theory. And on Wikipedia he found an article that was exactly what he was looking for and it confirmed his idea completely, down to the last letter. Only after he had written his paper did he discover that the article he consulted in Wiki was written by a 14 year old boy, his son!

Could it be that what we need to leave behind a Wikipedia view of living this Christian life and what we need to begin is to get comfortable with not being in complete control … not having our every question answered by doing a Google search?

… you never know what will happen when you abandon the sense of needing all the answers and needing to be in control and instead, let the One who is meant to rule your life rule it and see what a day might hold or what wondrous thing might unfold. My best guess is that it holds the kind of mystery and wonder Google could never supply and Wikipedia could never explain.