At a time when most boys my age were focusing on determining the broad outlines of their interaction with the opposite sex for the next decade or so--that is, between the ages of 15 and 18--I decided to join up with a local Jesus Jumper church. That's my own term, of course; technically they're known as Charismatics or Neo-Pentecostals. The distinguishing features of a Charismatic Christian church are--usually--threefold.
The first is restorationism, the belief that the supernatural gifts of the early aspostolic church (1st-2nd century AD) are still available today, particularly speaking in tongues (think Robert Tilton on your TV at 4AM going "hum daba ceeta da abba ta, Praise Jesus" ), healing (think Robin Williams smacking you on the forehead and yelling, "You Are HEALed, yay-us!"), and prophecy (think...well, there aren't many preachers actively prophesying on the TV that I can think of at the moment).
The second characteristic is continuing revelation, the belief that God still delivers revelation to his people, via the Holy Spirit, just as He did in the first century. This tends to piss off Bible-believing Protestants, who are a bit hung up on the sufficiency and completeness of God's revelation as found in the Bible. The idea that God might be toddling off and giving new, authoritative, extra-Biblical revelations to folks who aren't them is a bit off-putting, I suppose.
The third characteristic is a certain ecumenism, whereby charismatic Christians seek unity with other Christians of any denomination, based on a personal experience of God rather than on some of the core doctrines of the Bible.
A fourth characteristic, not usually mentioned in academic treatments of the subject, is that charismatic churches must meet in school auditoriums, other churchs' basements, or members' houses. Once they get a building of their own--usually a converted supermarket--the whole meeting in upper rooms to hide from the Romans first-century mystique tends to fade a bit, I think.
My particular church was big on numbers one, two and four but not so big on number three...there weren't many charismatic Protestants or Roman Catholics offering guest sermons while I was in attendance. And I doubt that I could've asked Pastor Larry or any of the elders about how restorationism figured into their personal theology and gotten a straightforward answer. Partly that's because, like a lot of Pentecostal churches in general and Charismatic churches in particular, ours was a lay ministry...no Masters of Divinity or Doctorates in Theology. It's also because I didn't actually know about terms like restorationism and ecumenism back then. But while the terms themselves weren't bandied about, on any given Sunday in the school auditorium you could witness people dancing before the Lord (hopping, really...there were a lot of, well, white people in the church), babbling in tongues and, if the Spirit was really cooking, falling over backwards and spouting a prophecy or two. Usually those had to do with the rewards due to the faithful and how the church was moving into a season of triumph and so forth...as far as I know nobody was ever told not to go to the grocery store after church because they'd get into a car accident or some such thing.
Ours was an experiential church, based on personal relationships with God and a certain amount of ecstasy, not that they'd call it that. Anyone who's been to Grateful Dead concert--sober or not--can probably imagine what I'm talking about. You put a bunch of people who are intent on having an ecstatic experience in a room together and you can be pretty sure that they'll have one. It's the result of a focused group dynamic, and people were doing it long, long before the followers of the Galilean began sprouting tongues of flame and speaking in other languages as the Spirit enabled them (Acts 2:3-4). For many people in my church, that regular injection of the "Holy Spirit" was the tie that bound them most closely to the community of the church, and there were those that couldn't get enough: church on Sundays, prayer meetings once or twice a week or more, if they could manage it. I know that was true for me--not the three-prayer-meetings-a-week part, but I definitely felt the charge and the allure of the weekly ecstatic experience, and did my part as a member of the group to bring it about.
Until, as Renita Weems has written, I began to feel that it was naïve to believe that "breaking out into goose bumps at talk of the sacred was a signal of intimacy with God." I am again projecting superior knowledge and sophistication backwards in time upon my floundering self: I certainly didn't frame my dissatisfaction in those words then. What I came up with, in the aftermath of breaking with the church, was that I objected to the feeling that I was supposed to turn my brain off. I had questions about faith, about Scripture, and about my personal experiences of God that were not being answered to my satisfaction by the people ostensibly placed there by God to shepherd my faith.
So I became my own shepherd. This process, as it turned out, involved large quantities of illicit chemicals, lots and lots of goose-bumps, and hallucinatory encounters with a sensual and ephemeral world that had all the hallmarks of ecstasy, but was, I think, a bit lacking in divinity. I'm thankful that I got myself out of that before I ended up like the author of The Keys To Death And Hell. He called himself Infek bin Laden and spent much of his life undertaking a psychedelic exploration of that sensual and occult ephemeral world, only to realize in the months before his death from cancer that he had completely missed something of vital importance. His information-age legacy is a freakish website hundreds of pages in length, full of deliberately disturbing imagery, inverted necrophilial eroticism, horror, and chaos, all of which is contradicted by his last statement before his death. As a whole, this statement is a plaintive attempt to explain the site's contents, to declare some sort of paradoxical meaning for it all: "But for any who would wonder, or wander lost in Temple Dahmer, I want to declare that the real secret of Deathandhell.com is Infinite Compassion." When real death stared him down--as opposed to the death that is the fetishized plaything of the fashionably depressed and the gothically hip--he was forced to attempt to reconcile the undoubtedly real experiences he had collected under the influence of drugs and occult practice with the undeniable sense that he had, quite simply, focused on the wrong things. But by then it was too late.
Which brings me back to the three Charismatic characteristics, all of which are experiential in nature. The apostolic gifts are spiritual powers, bestowed by God and experienced by the believer. These gifts were not limited to the big flashy ones like tongues or prophecy; there were people in my church known to have the "gift" of compassion, or of faithfulness, or some other no-less-worthy holy power. It was like Superfriends for Jesus, sometimes. After I gave a brief talk at a Youth Ministry meeting, the minister who ran the group told me, "You'll never be a preacher, but you'll sure be a teacher." That meant that I didn't have the gift of fiery oratory that could whip up a meeting, but that I did have an intellectual, "knowledge-based" gift. I remember feeling as though that was a backhanded compliment, of sorts...I wanted to be a preacher, the sort of person who could charge people up into a frenzy for God and bring the Holy Spirit down upon everyone. Preachers were exciting. Teachers were a bit dull and dry.
Revelation is an experience as well--after all, that's supposed to be God speaking to you, coming down on dove's wings and setting your mind aflame with insight into His Plan, or His Will, or what's in His Refrigerator. I've had some revelatory experiences, and while I won't claim that they're from the God, they were certainly memorable.
Charismatic ecumenism is sort of a combination of the previous two: if you experience the blessings of apostolic gifts and continuing revelation, you go and seek out other believers of whatever denomination who have had similar experiences.
Unfortunately, like most groups of this sort, it wasn't just the experience that bound people together as a community of God. There were other things, too, which were reflected in such terms as obedience and authority and order, and found expression in various political and social ideologies that I didn't necessarily agree with. All of those terms are found in Scripture, to be sure--particularly the bits attributed to Paul--but I eventually discovered that my experience of God wasn't quite as important as some other folks' experience of God, and of course was as nothing compared to the experiences laid down in the hardcoded pages of the Word Of The Lord.
Every group has boundaries that define it, even the most Unconditionally Loving And Accepting groups. Once you stray beyond those boundaries, whatever they may be, you find that there are conditions, and eventually it becomes clear that the acceptance--if, arguably, not the love--can be withdrawn, and replaced with judgment. This judgment goes by many names; I forget, exactly, what they called it at New Jerusalem Christian Fellowship. And if you're looking for acceptance--as I was at that green and tender age--then the love of the community no longer feels genuine. Wrap all of this up with even the slightest genuine desire to explore the Possible Divine, and it's quite easy to imagine the anger and bitterness that might result from anyone's bad experience with a church, a priest, or a proselytizer.
I'm often bemused by the raving atheists out there, the ones who make it their business to expose every hypocritical failing of every religious group, to mock the professed faith of all who dare voice it, and to defeat by logical argument every proof of God's existence ever conceived by humanity. I'm bemused because--even though I don't call myself a person of faith, or even a theist--I believe that I know something about faith, and about theism. These things are not about religious groups and their sins; they're not about professed belief; and they're certainly not encompassed by arguments made of frail words created by human minds. All of those are constructs. Words, made semi-imperishable, which in turn become the ideas that drive the creation and evolution of human cultures.
Beneath all of that, below the complexity, the philosophy, the ethos, and the words...are individual experiences and desires. That's why the committed atheist often expresses such frustrated incredulity when confronted with the truly committed theist: the theist has had an undeniable experience which the atheist has not. And while experience can be explained away, it can't be dismissed. Experience is a powerful thing, and can wrap a person up in a sheltered, solipsistic cocoon. That's what happened to Infek, and to this person here, who's off his nut in the same way but hasn't had the Uh-oh moment that Infek had.
That's why, when I happen to pray--which I do often, despite an acute lack of belief--there's always an element of Show yourself! in the act. Beguile me. Give me an experience. I've already dismissed the arguments of theist and atheist alike as beside the point. Ah, but to know, fully...that would be something, wouldn't it?
A very interesting story. It explains, somewhat, your distrust of groups, occurring as it did during the teen years - the time when one arguably most wants and is most vulnerable to being hurt by a group.
I think the real reason why atheists get so tongue tied trying to out-argue believers is that religious beliefs and personal experiences of the divine have to be described in words - we have no other vehicle for transmitting information.
But because, as you pointed out, words are inadequate to describe the ineffable, atheists are misled into thinking that's all there is to the experience. That because something is described in ordinary language (and generally vague and enthusiastic language at that - for there's often no other way to put it), it's just like anything else you'd put into words, subject to the same rules of logic, of proof and disproof.
But it's not. It's a shame, really, that more humans don't paint. It's a lot harder to argue with colors.
Posted by: Valencia | January 6, 2003 10:29 AM
Blue! No, yellow!
Ahhhhhhh....!
Posted by: --iaw | January 6, 2003 10:34 AM
Come to think of it, I did have a teacher tell me I couldn't put a particular color where I wanted to put it once. And it was like he was defiling my religion.
Posted by: Valencia | January 6, 2003 10:53 AM
My mom started to break with the Roman Catholics when she heard about the banned list of books. She dragged us to Latin mass for years. My brothers were choir boys.
I myself have only felt I've spoken to God (but always with that tiny little voice telling me I was talking to myself) when I was sober. There was always that doubt about WHO exactly was answering. And that doubt is anathema to faith of any kind, isn't it?
So, I'm torn between believing and not believing.
Your thoughts are, as always, very interesting.
Posted by: Terry | January 6, 2003 06:20 PM
Thanks; I try.
Actually, Terry, I've come to suspect that doubt is one of the defining characteristics of faith...
Posted by: --iaw | January 6, 2003 07:18 PM
Maybe doubt just comes with the territory - we're such literal - and visual - creatures that we doubt anything we can't see in front of us. If we feel doubt, it may just be a sign that something mysterious is happening. We doubt the reality of love, too, for example.
I like that moment in the movie "Contact" when (lapsed priest) Palmer Joss says to (scientist) Eleanor Arroway, "Did you love your father?" She says "Of course." And he says, "Prove it." They're arguing about how one can believe god exists when there's no tangible proof. Maybe it's an obvious parallel to make, but it's an unusual thing to see in a mainstream (and sci-fi at that) movie.
Posted by: Valencia | January 7, 2003 09:30 AM
One explanation for hearing voices, having mystic experiences, struggling with good-evil, god-satan, angels-devils, is that the human brain functions like several separate brains, nested inside each other. At the center is the Reptilian Brain (RB), a remnant from ancient times when that's all we had, concerned solely with survival, and only handling the basic needs.
The outside layer of our brain is the Neocortex Brain (NB), which our species acquired later, as we evolved from the lemur level. The NB handles signals from the outside world and does lots of habitual, automated functions. In between the NB and the RB are other brain levels that interpret the signals and create the illusions, constructs, abstracts, and experiences that we struggle with.
The key point here is that the RB is blind and deaf; it responds to whatever the rest of the brain tells it about the outside world. If it is taught that there are horrible monsters in the dark, it will protect the body whenever it is dark, and you will find yourself strangely afraid in dark places. If you are taught as a child that the word "popo" is bad, you will find yourself reacting 40 years later at hearing a newscast about the volcano Popocatepetl.
This is, of course, an amateurish view of the brain, but it is useful for giving people who are obsessed by thoughts, visions, or voices a first glimmer that what they think is real may/not be real. Once you can see your thoughts as logs floating in a river, you can sit on the river bank and watch them drift by, without reacting to them as "truth".
Posted by: June | January 8, 2003 08:28 AM
I can see how that might be helpful for, say, this fellow.
Posted by: --iaw | January 8, 2003 09:46 AM
No, a man who shoots his neighbors because he thinks they are demons is too far gone to respond to a rational explanation for how the human brain protects itself.
I was thinking more, let's say, of people who "happen to pray often, despite an acute lack of belief" :)
Posted by: june | January 8, 2003 10:52 AM
Ah, I see!
It seems to me that the passive "logs floating in a river" metaphor doesn't really apply to prayer. Prayer has a certain intention behind it, at least the way I do it, and while I know that there are folks out there who pray in response to "thoughts, visions, or voices," I certainly don't. At least, not yet. But I wasn’t raised in a religious household, and my parents taught me nothing one way or the other about God in particular or spirituality in general. So I haven’t got any reptilian fears of the dark, so to speak, to deal with when it comes to things divine. And although I can’t claim complete self-knowledge, I’ve been thinking and writing about this stuff long enough to have a pretty good handle on the different sorts of artifacts my mind produces; in other words, I’ve identified the logs in my particular river. It’s what’s left over that’s intriguing.
There's plenty to be said for the materialist conception of consciousness--which is where the 'brain as onion' explanation you outline comes from--and also for the idea that our experience of the numinous is an artifact of neurology rather than an experience of anything real. Recent experiments by V.S. Ramachandran and somewhat wackier claims by Michael Persinger certainly suggest that, as do my own, uh, ‘experiments.’
But there’s more to God, I think, than sensual experiences, which is what all of these neurological artifacts boil down to. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a real hog for sensual experiences, especially of the numinous variety. That’s why I focused on euphoric and psychedelic drugs, when I was doing such things. Sure, you can hook up an EEG to a mystic while he’s in his mystical place and measure his mystical brainwaves, or try to induce the Big Holy Rush by spinning an electromagnet over someone’s temporal lobe. But that’s just sensation, the equivalent of the folks jumping up and down at my old church every Sunday. It’s juice, and people want it because it feels good.
I'm after what's beyond the juice.
Posted by: --iaw | January 8, 2003 12:23 PM
Let's say that the other night, while viewing a particularly brilliant constellation Orion, I was overwhelmed by its siza and beauty, and thought something like "Oh mighty hunter, couldst Thou step down and smite some of the Aholes that are messing up the world?"
Next morning, I will laugh at my gin-and-tonic prayer, as my Neocortex pulls me back to the reality that Orion is a set of widely-separated stars that just happen to look like a giant from our position in space.
Just a thought floating in the river.
Posted by: june | January 9, 2003 05:15 AM
I see that you left out a portion of your original post from RA:
AND ATHEISM THEN BECOMES A MATTER OF WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE'S FAITH LOGS DRIFT BY AND WONDERING SMUGLY HOW ANYONE CAN FALL FOR SUCH BUNK.
Why was that?
Posted by: --iaw | January 10, 2003 06:45 PM
Detachment from one's own thought stream is very difficult. Our emotions, our ego, our reality, our reasoning, our personality are all derived from our thoughts. We THINK we can recognize and filter out our own foibles, but actually we are duped by powerful mechanisms such as layering, denial, transference, protection, instinct, and habit.
And once we convince ourself that a given thought is logical, it becomes real and there is little point in anyone arguing with us. I forget who said it, but it is powerful and recursive: "We are interested in our thoughts much more than our thoughts are interested in us".
Why did I omit the last sentence from this blog? I didn't omit it. I ADDED it as I was copying it to RA, because my personal pride of having written something quite convincing (to me) and just could not hold it back. The idea of hundreds of blogs watching each others faith logs and snarling at each other about how bad their thoughts are was just too good. Now, everyone will see this, and will say "Oh yes, June has seen the light. We are ignorant armies clashing in the night. All hail to June. Let's pray to June. Let's build a church and sing to June."
Just another log floating in my river.
Posted by: june | January 11, 2003 10:28 AM
You're sounding more and more Eastern. Have you spent some time under the Bodhi tree?
Posted by: --iaw | January 11, 2003 01:27 PM
First, thanks for a brilliantly written, non-inflammatory description of your experience and thoughts.
As a scientist/logician (computer guy), artist (music, specifically jazz), and believer (very liberal Christian), I'd like to ask what you think of faith as an act, or decision.
If you're praying, like me, but you claim not to believe, then it seems like you've just made a decision not to believe (a valid, logical choice). I've always seen it that way...there's no proof to my belief, I've had plenty of experience pointing to something, and I've CHOSEN to use that experience to believe.
It's a commitment for me rather than an argument. Just like when someone tells you something that could be true but might not, and you have no way of finding out, you choose whether or not to believe them. Or when you think your eyes might be playing a trick on you. That's what makes 'faith' such a cool idea. The only answer is the one you choose for yourself, whether you THINK it's provable or not. Given that humans don't have perfect information, I'm surprised there are so many people trying to prove it either way.
I'm not trying to enlighten, but I do want to thank you for a very well written article, by offering my own observations on the point. So, thanks.
-Doug
Posted by: Doug | August 19, 2003 11:26 PM
And thanks for the comment. I'm always interested when someone lands on an old post and comments--I had forgotten about this one.
You write,
"...I'd like to ask what you think of faith as an act, or decision."
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I admire genuine conviction, because there is so much in this world that is founded upon cynicism and nihilism. On the other hand, I am troubled by conviction that too often lends itself to dogmatism and irrational certainty.
Spiritual faith represents a kind of peronsal certainty coupled with a dual epistemological stance; that is, one chooses to believe, but very often the "bar" for what constitutes sufficient evidence for that belief is lowered. For example, as a computer guy you are probably familiar with the workings of hardware and software, which follow definite rules no matter how erratic their behavior might seem. If there is a system problem, there is a logical solution to it, and the problem can be solved by using machine-like reasoning. But that same level of logical rigor cannot often be applied to the certainties of faith. So, in one instance, you believe what you beleive about computers because they are explicable and knowledge about their workings is readily obtained. In the other instance, you believe what you believe about God, but use a different, "good enough" standard of proof.
Throughout history there have been those who have insisted that there is no dual epistemology, and that the same certainty which applies to mathematics, for example, can be applied to matters of faith. Right now I'm reading Peter Brown's excellent biography of Augustine, so that African bishop springs to mind. His genius was a dialectical ability to logically and mercilessly eliminate all positions counter to his own interpretation of scripture and matters of theology, so that his opponents were left unable to reply.
However, his basic premise--that God exists--is what, today, derails all "logical" attempts to derive faith. Pointing out the logical flaws in proofs of God's existence is the simplest of piscine barrel-shoots, which is why I am singularly unimpressed by the obsessive mockery of the Raving Atheist and others like him. Add to that the fact that the modern age is decidedly lacking in religious minds of Augustine's caliber, and you end up with a pointless landscape of arguments and counter-arguments, all seeking to achieve certain knowledge about that which, ultimately, cannot be known.
[This comment was interesting enough to me that I'm expanding it and turning it into a post for today, 8/20]
Posted by: --iaw | August 20, 2003 12:09 PM
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