dazzleberry

I had an epiphany today. A real 'duh' kind of moment.

It actually started on Wednesday, maybe even a few Wednesdays ago.



My director and I have had this ongoing conversation about spirituality over the past couple of years. Being the kind of person I am, picking apart belief systems and analyzing them is right up my alley. So around the beginning of the month, Director asked if I would like to go to a Bible study at his church.

Okay, yeah, that's cleaning it up a bit. Translate that as: Director gave me a three-day sales pitch for a 'deep, intellectual discussion about some of the 'issues' with Christianity'. He'd been telling me about this Sunday school class of his for some time-- it's an open forum for discussion, it's very liberal, they have an extremely broad view, they challenge things that Sunday school classes don't normally challenge, etc etc etc.

Anyway, he invited me to attend, and I said why not? I don't really have anything pressing to do on Wednesday nights that would make it difficult to work this into my schedule, and if the discussion is half of what he makes it out to be, it will at least be more intellectually stimulating than the trashy romance novels.

So I said what the hey and went. And I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I don't think it was what I found.

You see, this Bible study-- and I'm not sure if that's the right term but I'll use it for want of a better-- is taught by a psychology professor at one of the local universities and the topic centered around a Girardian model of Christianity that I'm not going to go into (if you're interested, link: The Theologia Class at Highland)

Actually, some of this epiphany might make more sense if you read the first post there, about 'class culture'.

Anyway, as I was saying, whatever it was that I was expecting, it wasn't an actual 'class' concept, which is what this reminded me of. Now, keep in mind, I'm practically a perfect heathen. I haven't been in a lot of Bible classes or Bible studies or Sunday school classes (on Sundays or other days) but growing up in the Bible belt, I've experienced a few of them.

This was more on the order of a lecture, professor to student. Not terribly surprising, but not what I was expecting after the Director went on and on and on about the 'conversations' and 'discussions'. I was not anticipating someone with a whiteboard sketching models of early religious societies.

All very interesting.

In a nutshell, this theory is that in any society, there is inherent tension, and that tension is periodically relieved by sacrificing (literally or figuratively) a scapegoat who is voiceless and powerless. The society justifies this by putting 'God' or 'the gods' on their side-- see volumes of history of wars over whose god is right. Girard proposes that in Christianity, God is aligned with the victim, or the scapegoat, instead of the crowd. As I said, all very interesting concept with scriptures to support and an interpretation of the Old Testament as a process of giving voice to the victim and such. And the class finally culminated in a lecture on how Christ was the 'scapegoat to end all scapegoats'.

I have plenty of quibbles with the entire model, beginning and ending with the fact that the 'pagan religions' are presented in very harsh, cynical, real terms and juxtaposed with a pretty modern interpretation of what Christianity aspires to be. In fact, I spent most of the classes getting hung up on that particular quibble. Then at the end of this final class, the professor opened up some discussion, and listening to this discussion, I tripped over the epiphany.

Some of these people were really flabbergasted by the idea that they have to do anything to be good Christians. There was a bit of angst about this idea that simply believing in God isn't enough, and that just flummoxed me. The Director had been on about the broad world view and how liberal the class was and yadda yadda yadda, and I went in, expecting a liberal, broad world view.

And what I found was the most conservative intellectual discussion of religion I've ever been privy to. (Conservative intellectual as opposed to conservative propaganda I guess) Seriously, whether or not I buy into the faith, I do find the discussion of it interesting, especially at the academic level-- to discuss the Bible as a literary work rather than a religious text, even to consider it as a religious text but not a literal one. All fascinating. I've had some of these discussions with people who are not Christian, but I've never heard Christians discussing these things (which isn't to say I doubted they did, I'd just never been around those kinds of conversations.)

Therein lies the first part of the three-part epiphany.

I have this extraordinary mental block against faith. I constantly forget to factor it into my understanding of religion, and that's kind of a crucial thing to leave out. I do it invariably, though. I literally forget that there is a God aspect.

There's a dichotomy of grace (the idea that Christ died to save us from our sins and all we have to do is believe that and accept Him into our hearts in order to attain salvation) vs works (the idea that being a true Christian involves ministering to the needy, and witnessing, and being a generally good person) in Christianity, and I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind. I even knew it at the forefront of my mind. My mother is a Methodist, and the concept of 'works' is one of the cornerstones of the denomination, and I knew that. I've tossed this idea around a lot, and it's the main roadblock I can't get over with Christianity. I am very aware of this grace vs works dichotomy.

But I forget the 'grace' part of it. It just slips away from me, every time-- it goes in one ear and out the other. I can grumble about the dichotomy, I can point to it as my primary reason for walking away from Christianity, but in the end, I could not hold the concept of 'grace' in my head long enough to understand these people.

When I finally managed to shove that through my thick skull-- that there is a dichotomy and I was in a room full of people who had grown up in a tradition that all they had to do was accept Christ in order to be 'saved'-- once I finally managed to grasp that, I started understanding what I was seeing. I was sitting in a room full of people who were having the very foundations of their faith shaken.

I felt like such an interloper.

I felt like I should feel guilty for being so mezmerized by it.

The second part of the epiphany: Guess what, Jen? Your world view isn't quite as broad as you like to pretend it is if you can't accommodate roughly a third of the world population, and the majority of people where you live.

I kept waiting for the 'liberal' and 'open-minded' part of the conversation. The whole thing was liberal and open-minded, I just had to adjust my frame of reference. I went in expecting 'liberal' and 'open-minded' by my standards, which are not terribly liberal and are extremely open-minded. But in order to understand the class, I needed to adjust my lens, not just down to the level of Christianity (which I was more or less prepared for) but to conservative, evangelical, protestant Church of Christ.

I finally had to go through my exercise of consciously removing my assumptions, a mental exercise I used to go through all the time when I met new people. I really thought I had that down to a pretty exact science, something I didn't even have to do consciously anymore. Obviously I do. I have to let go of the labels 'liberal' and 'open-minded' in order to understand this group, and when I do let go of those labels, I find that most of my quibble disappear.

Third part of the epiphany:

Having reached these two conclusions, I went back and read the 'class culture' thing again and it suddenly made more sense. The traditional view in the Church of Christ is very much oriented to the 'grace' side of the dichotomy. This class is an effort to move the participants to treat the 'works' side with equal footing.

And therein lies the resolution to my primary quibble with the class. I stated it earlier-- "that the 'pagan religions' are presented in very harsh, cynical, real terms and juxtaposed with a pretty modern interpretation of what Christianity aspires to be"

What I thought was hypocrisy there, isn't. It's a call to action, a presentation of this aspiration to stop aligning God with the masses and to demonstrate by actions an understanding that the passion was meant to 'end all sacrifices'. It's a tiny tweak in perspective, but it's got massive implications. Now, instead of seeming bigoted, it seems like a lofty goal to try and live up to.

So anyway. I'm going back next week.