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Consuming God
I haven’t really attended a church service up until recently. I went to two in one day… on purpose. I even enjoyed one, it was crazy. But it got me started thinking about Church services in general, and why we partake of them.
I grew up in a somewhat Fundamentalist church (I viewed it as fundamentalist, until I went to a school that was truly fundamentalist in a way that this would have fit right along side the “preaching” that went on there) before moving onto a more modern evangelical church that my friends were going to. These two institutions have ideas as to why we attend church, so lets look at them first.
The fundamentalist says we should attend church because we are commanded to do so, after completing our portion of the commitment God will then complete his and bless us, or grow our knowledge base, or some other ideal that falls in line with the legalistic thinking that you get from these sorts of institutions. The more moderate fundamentalist (does that seem oxymoronic to anyone?) realizes that we are not compelled (legally or morally) to attend church, but they say it is the right thing to do, and in doing such things (along with reading the bible, pray, etc) compels God to, again, grow us. The theme here is the legalistic ideal of compelling God to bless us if we fulfil certain conditions on our end.
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The modernist evangelical understands that God isn’t necessarily compelled into action based upon our actions, but instead feel like we should attend church because it offers an opportunity for growth itself. While this may be true, the idea that we can learn in a large ecclesiastical setting, often times evangelicals seem to backslide into the legalistic approach, that we should go to church because we are told to. (Doubt me? Tell an evangelical that you don’t attend church, nor enjoy doing so, and watch their face.) There are, however, subsections to the evangelical movement, you have the “seeker” group, and the group that doesn’t have the cool name but wants to “experience God.”
You can extract from these streams various ideas on how to best consume God, which we will shortly be doing.
First a note on consumerism
We are all consumers. It is in our very nature to consume, otherwise how do we survive. I am not condemning consuming itself, but I will resoundly condemn the idea that we can consume either people or God, as well as the propensity that we have to consume as much as possible.
Now, lets look back at the fundamentalist. The idea behind the fundamentalist (And the moderate fundamentalist) is that if we consume God through our actions we will be able to improve. (Improve what? Our lives, our souls, or anything of the like.) The fundamentalist, then consumes God because He gives back.
The evangelical tends to consume God not through an act such as attendance, but through acts such as “Worship” (musical) or learning (via Sermons or reading of scripture), or praying. In the first form of evangelical consumption, the evangelical consumes God in return for an emotional high (intrinsic to music is its ability to manipulate the emotions, when we let ourselves ‘go’ into the music, we get that emotion that makes us ‘feel’ in-tuned to God). The second form of consumption (and the one that I partake of the most, but not through sermons) is consuming the knowledge of God. The idea behind the consumption of knowledge of God is, that via knowledge, we are able to see more of Gods being (not literally, but you should get the idea) and thus understand him better (enabling us to feel more in-tuned to him). Finally via praying we open ourselves up to “leading” by God (which ends up being quite similar to learning about God) as well as an emotional connection (which feels much like musical emotional manipulation).
In and of themselves, I’d say the evangelical forms of consumption aren’t inherently evil, but we must look at the reasons why we wish to consume if we are to judge good/bad actions.
In his book, How (not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins delves into the topic of love. If you haven’t read the book, stop reading this blog now, go read the book, and I’ll see you in a few days.
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Done? OK good.
Remember when Peter talked about loving God for salvation is loving salvation? Or loving God for ______ is actually loving _____ ? The idea was, if we love God for what we get out of the deal, we don’t really love God, instead we love what we get out of the deal. The same principle applies when it comes to the consumption of God. Do we consume God because it grants us favor with him? (Fundamentalist) Do we consume God because it makes us feel good? (emotional manipulation) Do we consume God because we crave knowledge? (Oh… that’s me). Or do we love God because we find him infinitely loveable. Is it because of our love of God we crave knowledge of him? Is it because we love God we desire that closer connection through prayer?
Let me bring this down to a more mortal level, so we can better equate the idea to the understanding of God. I had this friend, way back in middle school, about whom we said “He isn’t in love with girls, he is instead in love with the feeling of falling in love.” He was “in love” with an emotion. He didn’t feel towards anyone because they were loveable, he instead felt feelings for people because he loved the emotion that it brought.
Fast forward a few years.
I love my wife. I don’t love my wife because she helps provide for our (two person) household, nor because she helps provide me with a clean house, nor because of the emotion I feel when she walks through the door. Instead, I love my wife because I find her infinitely loveable. It is because of this love I feel for her I respond with emotion, and even when emotion isn’t there, or the whatever acts are brought about by her love for me, I still love my wife.
It is this principle of Love that is central to our love of God. It shouldn’t be because of Salvation, because of emotion, or because of Blessing, but instead because He is infinitely loveable.
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4 Responses to “Consuming God”
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Whoa dude, that should do it. No need for soft lights & music. Leave the wine in the fridge, you got it now. The other stuff was nice too.
only allowing a few days to read “How (not) to speak of God” ? That seems harsh. It’s not an easy book… I kind-of like where you end up, though the teacher in me wants to make you go back and improve the argument :-).
On the other hand, why can’t it be “both and”; why this dualism? You’re right; God’s love isn’t contingent on anything, and nor should ours for him be. But he is also, indivisibly, the God who saves, isn’t he? The God who redeems. The God who reaches out. These are parts of his character, too. I don’t think you can separate this from his character of being loveable.
Revelation 5 gives a picture of the endless worship of God - on account of his saving actions. I’ve always read “the elders and the living creatures” as being both some of those who have been saved, and some who have no need of salvation - i.e. some whose worship is affected by their having been saved, and some who are consuming God, in your terms, just because he is the redeemer.
@Andrew- Teach away, I keep seeing some glaring things that I need to edit or clarify, but I haven’t had time to sit down and type out any real revisions (These, again, prove that I am certainly not a very good blogger, but shh… we’ll keep that on the quite side).
Now, as far as your arguments go, I would say that these are part of God’s overall character (to save and such), but is it these individual aspects we love about God, or the entirety of God. I guess that statement would lead off into another topic, loving in spite of things that are certainly unloveable (… most of the old testament). The idea that we isolate certain characteristics, when we discuss our love of God, would be the main culprit of this negative form of consumption.
Oh, I originally gave a few weeks for the book reading, but changed it when I realized that I would be very alone in cyberspace for too long.
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