If You Meet God On the Road, Kill Him

September 30, 2011 By Christian Piatt 3 Comments

I was talking to a woman at Church on Sunday who has been through more than her share of hard times. She wears her life in the lines on her face and along the scars and blemishes on her fragile hands. Through it all, she’s held on to her faith in God.

But the relationship has, at times, been strained by hardship.

“I know everything happens for a reason,” she said, “but sometimes I just can’t imagine what the reason is. I know I shouldn’t but I just get so mad at God from time to time.” I reassured her that any God worth believing in can likely handle a little bit of human anger. I reminded her of the scene in the movie, “The Apostle,” when Robert Duval rages against God up in his room.

“I love you, God,” Duval hollers, “but I’m mad at you!”

The woman smiled and thanked me for assuring her that simply being mad wasn’t cause for eternal damnation. What I didn’t tell her was that I disagree with her belief that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes, the universe is a chaotic, violent and unreasonable place. To suggest there’s a greater reason for it all seems to limit the Divine to the confines of human nature and logic.

This mentality about everything happening for a reason comes mainly from the constructs we build up around who we believe God is. As Jean Jacques Rousseau said, “God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”

There’s a fear that, if we don’t construct an image of God we can identify with, we will lose our connection. If we take the more anthropomorphic descriptions of God in scripture metaphorically, we then have to wrestle with what is left. For some, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Thomas J. J. Altizer, it leads them to proclaim, “God is dead.”

It’s understandable why this might feel terrifying for those still struggling to articulate what they believe. But there are those, like John Caputo, who approach Christianity from a deconstructionist point of view and show that Christian faith can be pretty exciting for those willing to wade into unfamiliar waters. Here, deconstruction doesn’t negate the role of faith but keeps it open so that it might be expressed in fresh ways that aren’t limited to our all-too-human images of God.

Following is an excerpt from a description of Caputo’s book, “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?”

“Deconstruction is not destruction but rather a breaking down of the object in question so as to open it up to its own future and make it more loyal to itself. This is because in deconstructing, the undeconstructible is revealed, in this case, the eternal truth of God revealed in the gospel.”

The title of this article comes from a frequently used paraphrase of a Buddhist koan (a poem used to provoke thought) attributed to Zen Master Linji, founder of the Buddhist Rinzai sect. The saying is, “If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him.” Though this sounds a little bit shocking, its intent is to shake the reader out of their spiritual or intellectual slumber to consider the deeper truth of the koan.

On the website, Daily Buddhism, Brian Schell explains the heart of this particular koan as follows:

“Whatever your conception is of the Buddha, it’s wrong! Now kill that image and keep practicing. This all has to do with the idea that reality is an impermanent illusion. If you believe that you have a correct image of what it means to be Enlightened, then you need to throw out (kill) that image and keep meditating.”

For some like Nietzsche, the deconstruction process led them to believe that there was nothing left at all. No God, period. For Caputo and fellow postmodern theologians, the deconstruction process actually is a liberation of God from the preconceptions we have built up about who or what God is.

It’s easy to assume that such theological perspective is a product of twenty-first-century philosophy. In fact, this way of thinking has been centuries in the making.

St. Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it is not God.” He lived from 354-430 CE.

Thomas Aquinas said, “The highest human knowledge of God is to know that one doesn’t know God.” His work, though more than seven centuries old, still influences our way of thinking about faith today.

Meister Eckhart, a 13th-14th century philosopher, prayed that God would rid him of God.

As a side note, indicating differences even within the postmodern camp: John Caputo would challenge Eckhart on this point because for him God is “wholly other.” Deconstruction opens us to the other by emphasizing Kierkegaard’s ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between god and ourselves. Caputo isn’t referring to God as a presence “out there” on the plane of being, but rather on the hope and dream of a different future that disrupts what is.

Even the Jews of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, never dared to utter God’s true name, because to do so was to try in vain to pin down God. In Exodus 3:13-15, God orders Moses to lead the Israelites, to which Moses responds, “If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they are going to ask me, ‘What’s this God’s name?’ What am I supposed to say to them?”

God’s response: “I Am Who I Am. So say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’”

A literal interpretation of such a text might argue that this passage supports an anthropomorphic God image: a God who speaks directly to humanity in an actual, audible voice. Taken in cultural and historical context, however, many scholars understand that the Jewish narrative was told generally in parable form, much like the stories Jesus himself told his followers.

Although such stories are not considered to be factual (the emphasis of literal, historical fact came along centuries later as a more Western way of thinking), they each contain an important truth that the reader or listener has to reveal for themselves, much like the Buddhist koan. The central message of this passage as it relates to the nature of God:

God is.

One can imagine Moses following up with something like, “You are what, God?” longing for more clarity. But instead he gets the message that God simply is what God is.

There’s a long-standing debate about theodicy, which questions how God could be both all-powerful and entirely good while such pervasive evil exists. It’s easy to get tied up in knots over this, especially if you conceive of a human-like God, with something resembling human consciousness and will. With this come all the questions about why a loving God would cause horrible things to happen, or would at least allow them to happen.

But all of this presumes an awful lot about the nature of a God we know really very little about. By killing all preconceptions we have about who or what God is, we do indeed free God simply to be, as stated in Exodus and by great theologians and philosophers ever since. Arguments about theodicy dissolve, claims that God punishes certain people selectively for whatever reason we deem valid lose their teeth.

In the preface of his book, “The Weakness of God,” John Caputo responds to the tendency of many pastors to try and explain away the devastation caused by the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean:

“Many religious leaders have been rushing to the nearest microphone or camera to explain that, while these are all innocent victims, we cannot hope to explain the mystery of God’s ways–implying that this natural disaster is something God foresaw but chose not to forestall. Others are telling us that God has taken this terrible occasion to remind us that we are all sinners and to dish out some much-needed and justifiable punishment to the human race…Those are blasphemous images of God for me, clear examples of the bankruptcy of thinking of God as a strong force with the power to intervene upon natural processes…the decision depending upon what suits the divine plan.”

In letting go of these proscribed human constructs, we actually free ourselves from a great deal of suffering, some of which we tend to blame on God. God is. We are. Let that be enough.

(Special thanks to Phil Snider, who contributed to this article.)

Christian Piatt is the creator and editor of “Banned Questions About The Bible” and “Banned Questions About Jesus.” He has a memoir on faith, family and parenting being published in early 2012 called “PREGMANCY: A Dad, a Little Dude and a Due Date.” For more information about Christian, visit www.christianpiatt.com, or find him on Twitter or Facebook.

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Would You Change?

September 29, 2011 By Christian Piatt 1 Comment

We play a lot of “secular” songs in our worship services ta Milagro. I use this term without entirely knowing what it means, namely because I’ve never met the mysterious panel of judges who apparently determines which songs are secular and which are sacred, likely in the dark basement of some old church in central Europe somewhere.

Semantics aside, I enjoy taking songs people typically wouldn’t hear in worship and re-purposing them for a worship context. We play everything from Patty Griffin and Bob Marley to U2 and Jack Johnson, depending on the theme that week. One of the most rewarding things about it is when someone tells me that, after hearing the songs in the context of a service, they never hear it quite the same out in the “real world” again.

I think that’s an important goal of any faith community: to help re-orient our perspective, not just for an hour a week, but for the rest of our lives.

Often times, however, I find that people’s attitudes about how things should be within the walls of church are more or less immovable. They have developed some kind of default “church mode” and they settle into that state of mind whenever they pass over the threshold. Then they seem surprised when the world beyond the doors appears to be passing them by, dismissing what they have to offer as antiquated or even irrelevant.

Part of what I do when I travel to churches to help them re-vision for the future is ask some version of the following question:

If you could realize the vision of your congregation for the surrounding community today, but the price of that achievement would be to walk away from your church building forever, would you do it?

The responses and reactions I get are very telling. They help establish the basis of the rest of our discussions from then on.

I like how Tracy Chapman puts it in one of her songs, called “Would You Change?” We use her song in worship quite a bit, and although the message is meant to apply to an individual, it presents an interesting challenge for congregations too:

If you knew that you would die today,
If you saw the face of God and Love,
Would you change?
Would you change?

Lest anyone thinks a new church – especially one started in part by a guy who puts these kinds of challenges to churches for a living – is exempt from such challenges, let me share a quick story.

About a year ago, Milagro was experiencing some growing pains. There was no small amount of friction around how organized we needed to be versus how open to adapting to the community that came. some argued that the reason for our rocky financial situation was because we lacked the accounting systems to show people exactly how those resources were used. Others suggested that doing the kind of ministry we do – often to the working poor,. the disabled, formerly imprisoned, addicts in recovery, etc – inherently brings with it a less-than-lucrative revenue stream.

But there was a deeper issue at play. As we waded through the tension, it was clear that the priorities of those around the table weren’t all the same. There were those who saw the need to maintain and improve our facility as top priority, while others were fairly content to allow the stains in the carpet and the leaky roof stay as they were while we kept focused on our mission. Finally one evening, a couple of folks had had enough.

“This is crazy,” one woman said. “It’s not like we can have church without lights, or water. These are important!”

“Not really,” said another guy. “We don’t need any of this to have church. All we need is each other.”

His response was met with silent, wide-eyed disbelief.

Ultimately some of the folks from the first camp moved on to another church, while the rest of us slog it out, paying bills as we have the money, including my wife’s salary as pastor. We might die today or tomorrow as an institution, but it’s worked out for seven years so far. and even if it was all over, does that make the ministry we did in the past any less important? Would we even be willing to hear truth if it came to us, beckoning us to turn these resources back into the ground, to help birth something new?

If you saw the face of God and Love, would you change?

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Trolls, Avatars and the Convertible Effect

September 28, 2011 By Christian Piatt 2 Comments

I remember when I first learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust in school. I could not imagine the type of person who could do such things to another person. I remember one particular story about an SS Soldier who would return home after a day of putting Jews in the ovens, kiss his children on the forehead and read the paper over dinner.

Was an entire nation of people born void of their soul? It would actually be more comforting if this was the case. But what’s most chilling about the stories of Nazi Germany is the idea that it could have been any of us in that situation. Are we so sure we wouldn’t have succumbed to the same kind of culturally normalized evil? Certainly we wouldn’t stoop so low as to dehumanize our sisters and brothers, would we?

Then in my psychology class, I learned about the Stanford prison experiment, where the basement of a campus building at the school was converted into a makeshift jail. Half of the student volunteers were assigned to be jailers, while the others were to be prisoners. The degree to which peoples’ behavior toward – and attitude about – one another over such a short time period in a highly contrived environment was sobering.

Recently, I read a study about how people treat one another in traffic. Anyone who has driven in an urban setting has likely been either the purveyor or the recipient of road rage, or maybe both. It seems to be increasingly normal that people act aggressively toward one another, though they don’t know each other at all.

The study found, though, that the aggressiveness toward other drivers was markedly reduced when the other driver was in a convertible. The theory as to why is because there are fewer barriers between the two people, so it’s harder to ignore their humanity.

In short, it’s easy to berate, or even cut off, the a-hole in the next lane; it’s entirely another thing to do it to a real, live human being.

Can a few pieces of metal and glass really make that much of a difference? Is our compassion for one another so fickle and fragile that we dehumanize each other as long as there’s so much as a window between us?

Or a yellow star?

So it’s no surprise that the vitriol some people spew at each other online is apparently everywhere. As I expanded my writing circles online to places like the Huffington Post, I came to know a type of user known by many as “trolls.” The moniker comes from the old fairytale stories where the trolls would hide under bridges, only to jump out to harass or scare passersby, then retreat to their hiding place down below. Granted, even the word “troll” as a dehumanizing ring to it, but I can see where the idea came from after reading some of the comments people post.

They don’t even know me, said the voice in my head. Why are they so…mean?

The fact is that we all have a little bit of troll in us. From a safe arms-length distance, we are much more inclined to cast off-hand judgments when there’s no perceived risk to ourselves. We’ll say things about folks in the media, distant relatives or even close friends or spouses when we feel like we can get away with it.

But when there’s a chance we’ll have to face that person with them knowing what we’ve said, well, that’s a different story.

I’ve written off and on about the value of mutual accountability, particularly in a recent post about Rob Bell leaving his home church, Mars Hill. Though a physical, flesh and blood community of faith is hardly the only way we can experience such accountability, it is one that adds an important component to our faith experience.

My wife, Amy, loves to point out that, although people can find God on a mountaintop or in a book, that mountain can’t come listen to you when you’re in crisis. The book can’t hug you back.

They may fall short on help keeping us in check when we start treating our sisters and brothers as a little bit “less than.” Sometimes the best reminder that God is in our midst is to do the hard work of acknowledging that same divinity in the eyes of someone you find very hard to love. But once you see it, it’s pretty hard to ignore.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of social networking and the benefits of having people connected in such different spaces, all at the same time. But when we begin to see it as a reasonable substitute for direct relationship, we risk treating the people on the other end more like the two-dimensional avatar we see on their profile.

There was a reason Jesus walked around and talked to people, face to face, most of the time. And it wasn’t just because he didn’t have a laptop.

Christian Piatt is an author, editor, speaker, musician and spoken word artist. He co-founded Milagro Christian Church in Pueblo, Colorado with his wife, Rev. Amy Piatt, in 2004. Christian is the creator and editor of “Banned Questions About The Bible” and “Banned Questions About Jesus.” He has a memoir on faith, family and parenting being published in early 2012 called “PREGMANCY: A Dad, a Little Dude and a Due Date.” For more information about Christian, visit www.christianpiatt.com, or find him on Twitter or Facebook.

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