Re-Thinking God: Introduction

"Re-Thinking God" - I use this term a lot and I also talk extensively about finding the God of the Bible not the one that is commonly taught. Part of this comes from the simply fact that I had to discard the faith I once had in favor of something else otherwise; quite frankly, I was going to become an agnostic.

The dirty little secret is that most of our views of God have very little to do with taking the Bible at face value for what it says and more to do with a Western Philosophical view of God based on the Greek philosophers and (no surprise) what WE WANT God to be.

The problem is when you start to take what the Bible says for face value and compare it to what is traditionally taught by this Western theological- philosophy, you have contradictions and problems that abound from logical and common sense understandings. In some cases, the logic simply does not work at all.

In 2007, I ran head-long into this because of a personal crisis. The year before, I had resigned my second church and after fighting hard to keep my kids in that town till semester break, we eventually had to retreat back to my hometown. In March of 2007, I got a job at the same place I had left in 2000 to take my first church. After seven years I basically was right back where I started from, in far more debt, had lost a house and quite frankly I was angry at God. OK -- I was pissed off at God. So much so I had decided to quit everything - ministry, family, marriage - and start over. I was of the opinion, that quite frankly I had just wasted a lot of time and energy serving a God that was false. In the end, I decided I would give God one more try but I was going to be hard on Him. I decided to read the whole Bible in chronological order and search to see if there was anything that would change my mind and I was determined not to change it. I had some issues with God I wanted to see if 'His Word' would resolve them:

1. If it is so awesome to serve God, why do good people with perfectly good faith get screwed.
2. Does God in anyway change as revelation unfolds -- does he become different or do things differently as time goes by.
3. What does the God of the Bible say about himself compared to what I commonly understand.
4. I was also really wrestling with the Problem of Evil and wanted some answers.
5. I was also looking for anything that would allow me to keep my faith.

At this moment I had became an agnostic and was asking the simply question -- why should I believe in Christianity anymore? Unlike some, I kept this a secret, because I have seen how understanding Christians are when they have a fellow brother or sister have a crisis of faith. Kept going to church, kept singing songs and kept being respectable simply so no one would fire bullets.

In the end, I pretty much changed everything I believe about God. My views on his nature, attributes, character and will. They had all completely changed in many respects.

This series is about how I 're-thunk God' by simply taking His Word at face value. I want to contrast what is traditionally taught about God and the Bible. In short, I want to tell you what most people believe and then show how it is contradicted by the Bible when it comes to God. Topic Covered will include:
1. Gods Nature: Immutability, Imminence and Transcendence
2. God's Attributes: Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence
3. God's Character: Loving, Holiness and Justice
4. How God's Will Relates to Man.
5. Does God Always Get What He Wants?

It should at least be a fun ride if nothing else.

Five Reasons Why the Church is Failing

This post is in part a response to the more common reasons people leave Christianity and partially my own rantings.

1. The Church continues to fail to provide an adequate response to the Problem of Evil when someone has a personal crisis. In part this is because of some very bad doctrines and theological systems but mostly comes down to the fact that there is a very pat simplicity in our answers and an unwillingness to face the fact that maybe our ideas of God may be the problem. This is especially true when someone comes to us and says: "God huh, why did God kill my daughter?" Truth be told, the average pastor and his doctrine cannot answer this one, because the answer they have formulated is based on a certain concept of God they are stuck with. It is one that we have created that is comfortable to us, not what the Bible ultimately says about God or what God says even about himself.

2. Lack of deep thinking on the part of most Christians. The prevailing attitude in most churches, for some reason, is that if you think about your faith or use your brain to engage God, that it will destroy your faith. This is particularly prevalent in churches that are based on emotional experience for their core beliefs but all of them have it. The flip side is a cold intellectualism about faith where God is indeed a mean SOB. This creates a difficult environment for someone who wants both genuine answers by using their brain or common sense. The church unfortunately, seems to have forgotten the lesson of Galileo: "I find it hard to believe that the same God who has endowed us with reason and common sense, would require us to forgo the use of both." As long as reason is a perceived enemy of faith, the church will watch a more knowledgeable and secular youth and young adult population head to the door.

3. A Theological stuck denominational system. What I mean here is that many times people maintain doctrine or theology because of tradition. I have been continually amazed how many clergy and bible college and seminary professors are simply blind recordings of their denominations doctrinal system. New theological ideas are often met with same response as an atheist. There is actually only one root cause for this -- spiritual pride. We apparently think when we described God in theology and doctrine we got it right the first time. I remember when I first purposed open theism (a different way of looking at God's knowledge of the future) to a friend -- "Well that's wrong, because it denies the way we traditionally understand omniscience." Apparently we are so smart we got our understanding of God right the first time.

4. Hyper-fundamentalist Holiness. Simply put, we spend far to much time attacking people for their morals and 'incorrect' view of life and not enough time understanding the real meaning of grace and then putting some love and compassion into action. Between this and the fact that most standards of holiness in churches are too high for anyone to attain and you have to live a double life to fool everyone, it is no wonder people head for the door. We are becoming very good at proclaiming something publicly, but denying it in our lifestyle and yet keeping it covered up. What we are really creating is not holy saints but sneaky sinners.

5. Continued silence on why Christianity is superior to other religions and belief systems. There are two enemies here: 1) Ignorance because most people in Christianity simply don't know the foundation of their faith and 2) Misguided Tolerance -- 'lets just say there is no distinction between us and other religions'. Then why be a Christian, what is the imperative of Christian faith then?

My personal belief is that if these things are not ultimately corrected we will watch the church become nothing more than a footnote in history of the Western World.