Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to be plagued by self-doubt every day of my life. When I still called myself a Christian, I became increasingly uneasy with the beliefs therein, and I distanced myself from people who I considered to be loud Christians. I was not comfortable being lumped in with people like Jimmy Swaggart and Benny Hinn, or even people like Dr. James Dobson or Billy Graham, people who had seemed so easy to respect years ago. Now it seems to me that even Billy Graham is running a scam. Not purposely, I don't expect that from him, but he's chosen to promote something that I think might be damaging, and which I do not think is true.
On the other hand, there are so many things in my life that trigger Christian reactions in me. So many triggers... I just finished reading The Return of the King in preparation for the third LOTR movie's release, and there are so many parallels to Tolkien's faith in the books. I love Gandalf, and if Gandalf represents Jesus, what do I do with that? I don't yet know how to love Jesus and not be Christian. He's not a neutral issue for me, it's not like with other people. I will love Dietrich Bonhoeffer as long as I live, and that's an easy thing. He was a good guy with an incredible intellect and an overpowering compassion. He was noble if anyone ever was. But Dietrich doesn't hold the same impact that Jesus does.
What's the difference? Well, Jesus isn't just a poor Jewish carpenter with some nice ideas about loving people and social justice to me. He's been an overpowering mythological figure in my life, but he hasn't been a myth, he's been a person that I have been taught to believe I was interacting with, someone that I was constantly told loved and forgave me and who was supposedly interested in my daily goings-on. I know Dietrich from books. I know Jesus from experience. Or do I?
When you have trained yourself all your life to be still and know that God is there, it is very hard once you give up the idea of a personal interaction with that God to know what to do with all of the things that you considered spiritual before. I cannot say that I have not sensed God in the last month. I just can't say that what I call "sensing God" has anything to do with the outside world, with anything concrete and real outside of my mind. I still feel a familiarity with an entity I don't even believe exists.
It's not that I don't believe that God exists, it's that I don't know what exists. I don't know if there is a God or not. However, the thing that I have been taught to call God, this triune Father-Son-Spirit God, that I can't believe in at the moment. I believe that Jesus died and then something happened, some disciple got mixed up or something, some wishful thinking maybe, and a huge movement got started. I can't bring myself to believe in the resurrection. I don't know how to explain the advent of Christianity at all without it, but I just can't believe. For so long, the existence of the Gospels, the Epistles, the existence of the church at all has been enough for me to say that something definitely happened there. But now I'm at a loss to explain it. If not Easter, then what? I don't know.
Basically, I, like Charles Templeton, cannot accept Jesus anymore, but I miss him.
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