No Soup for You
How Partial Cultures Shape Our Ideas of God
We are exploring the spiritual formation journey from a somewhat anthropological perspective. If our purpose is to become more like Jesus from the inside out over time, perhaps the central question to ask is, “How does one person become more like another?”
The answer, it turns out, is not what is often assumed in many modern cultures and churches.
First, the human person runs on a sort of operating system, a series of unconscious, powerful forces (including ideas and desires) that sit on the bedrock of our hearts. If we wish to speak, think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus over time, these forces need to be transformed along with the conscious parts of ourselves.
Second, our unconscious desires and ideas are not normally reformed and healed until we become conscious of them. In other words, the spiritual journey involves a trip inward, a time of what theologian A.W. Tozer called “painful self-probing” to uncover the hidden ideas in our hearts.
Third, these ideas and desires are not generally influenced by instruction and rationalization, but by relationships and experience. It is here that we often find tension between what our hearts need and what our post-Enlightenment institutions provide.
Many of us live in societies that operate under the idea that character is formed through the intake of information, yet this idea leaves the deepest parts of ourselves unattended, longing for connection, intimacy, community, and transformation.
As it turns out, our unconscious ideas of God may be the most important thing about us, whether we believe He exists or not. How our hearts relate to Him may be the primary help or obstacle as we continue our spiritual journeys.
This inner formation we desire, this quest to love as Jesus loves, may not be so much about what we’ve intellectually concluded about God as about how we experience Him.
We’ve gently touched on one very popular, harmful idea of God: that He isn’t actually good. Today, let’s explore another idea of God that may be impacting how we relate to Him: that He is partial.
I’m On Hold Again
At least in my culture (American), I find myself living in a world that consciously and unconsciously treats people with great partiality. I not only experience it; I’m guilty of perpetuating it.
Have you ever flown coach? We know that money and power are sitting up in first class, enjoying wider seats, personal attention from flight attendants, and a warm meal. The rest of us sit cramped on cardboard chairs, enjoying our stale peanuts and soft drinks.
How about financial services? Banking for most of us is now entirely non-relational, online, and transactional. If, however, someone has accumulated a large portfolio, they likely enjoy private banking, personal financial representatives, and access to products and services the rest of us don’t even know about.
And it shouldn’t be lost on us that those more fortunate often employ various products and strategies to drastically reduce their tax burden, while other classes have little idea such things exist.
“The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.” - Will Rogers
If I asked us to brainstorm the number of daily interactions we experience that reinforce the idea that we are not worth as much as someone else, we might find ourselves occupied for days: sitting on hold with a customer service call center, attending a sporting event in the “nosebleed” seats, or just browsing online. The entire social media infrastructure is based on partiality. Those with more likes and hits make more money, gain more influence, and seemingly possess more value than those with less.
Whether it’s better treatment, greater access, superior quality, or simple personal attention, we live in a society where most of those things now have to be purchased with money, opportunity, or power.
No, I’m not making claims for or against various economic systems - that isn’t the point. I am wrestling with a heart issue, not a systemic one.
Not Much Different
If we think the modern Christian ecosystem is free from such partiality, we should think again.
Many years ago, I worked in the Christian music industry. Access to and time with Christian touring artists work the same way they do for any celebrity: pay-to-play. If you purchase the more expensive tickets, you receive “VIP” access to the mainstage artists.
Want a meeting with a mega-church pastor? Your chances go way up if you cut a large check or make important connections.
I’ve worked in various Christian fundraising environments, and they all operate the same. If you donate $5 a month to your favorite cause, you’ll receive some emails from the organization and maybe a piece of mail. If you donate $50,000, you’ll be assigned to what’s called a “major donor gift officer,” who will call you, visit with you, get to know your spouse and kids, and provide you with special inside information and access to the organization.
Depending on your church experience, you may be well-acquainted with some in which the pastor or head leader supposedly has special access to God, providing him or her with unique messages, special projects, powers, and insights to which you are not privy.
We are immersed in cultures that reinforce the unconscious idea that most of us simply don’t have the same value as those with more power, resources, and influence. And, ironically and sadly, some of us become fascinated with those who do.
Anyone who has read James 2 knows that this type of preferential treatment is not what God has in mind for us. And a quick read of the Gospels shows Jesus as a man who purposefully and intentionally interacted with and loved women and men across all manner of racial, political, religious, and economic brackets.
However, if we exist in societies where preferential treatment is the norm both inside and outside the church, how might these persistent experiences impact our ideas about God? Because we are susceptible to transference (we unconsciously “transfer” our lived human experiences onto God), do we relate to Him as someone who plays favorites and grants greater or lesser access based on qualities we do or do not possess?
The Transactional God
We might discover we unconsciously relate to God as though He operates a kind of spiritual first class. Surely some people sit closer to Him than we do. Surely some receive more attention, more delight, more access, more favor. The pastors, mystics, authors, disciplined people, emotionally healthy people, successful people, and productive people. The “super-Christians.”
The rest of us, meanwhile, sit quietly in coach, hoping for a few spiritual peanuts and a small cup of reassurance now and then.
So we begin approaching God transactionally. Prayer subtly becomes performance. Did we have our daily quiet time? Did we pray 5, 15, or 60 minutes today? Church involvement becomes an attempt to move up spiritually, to prove ourselves worthy of greater intimacy or blessing. We may say salvation is by grace while quietly living as though intimacy with God is merit-based.
The Shadow Self
If we live from the idea that God is partial, vulnerability becomes terrifying, because partial people eventually reject disappointing people.
If powerlessness lowers our value in the ecosystems in which we sit, why would we risk exposing our weakness to God? So we begin editing ourselves. We pray carefully curated prayers. We present polished versions of ourselves, hoping to remain acceptable. Perhaps we approach God the same way we approach social media: selectively honest, image-conscious, and quietly afraid that if the whole truth were seen, we would lose love, approval, or belonging.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” - Kurt Vonnegut
The irony, of course, is that the deepest transformation of the heart only occurs when love is received vulnerably. But if we suspect God’s love is conditional, vulnerability becomes nearly impossible.
The In Crowd
This idea may also help explain why celebrity culture so easily invades modern Christianity.
In societies built on partiality, we naturally assume certain people must possess greater access to God than others: the famous pastor, conference speaker, author, prophet, YouTube phenom. We begin imagining God as warmer, closer, or more attentive to the spiritually impressive than to ordinary people.
And sadly, much of modern church culture reinforces this idea - sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.
“Religious leaders have taken the Saviorhood of Jesus away from the people and have substituted a ‘Saviourhood’ of systems.” - A.W. Tozer
We may discover that we’ve been assuming that intimacy with Him belongs primarily to people who are smarter, more spiritual, more disciplined, more emotionally healthy, or more important than we are. And so the “with-God life” starts to feel reserved for a select few rather than an invitation extended to ordinary people.
What If?
But what if God doesn’t relate to us like the preferential systems we find ourselves living in? What if He speaks gently, with staggering consistency, to the single mom, the unemployed dad, the addicted professional, the church janitor, the sick, and the lonely woman languishing in the senior home, as well as to the successful, healthy, and powerful? What if He is wooing the guy with three likes on Facebook as much as the hot new TikTok apologist?
What if He doesn’t want any of us to experience Him the way we experience our preferential societies and subcultures? What if He is already inviting us into that sort of relational experience?
Maybe many of us do not struggle to believe God exists. Maybe we struggle to believe He is genuinely available to ordinary people.
As Henri Nouwen so beautifully wrote,
“The great spiritual battle begins—and never ends—with the full acceptance of that God is not only ‘the God of the sages, prophets, and saints,’ but the God of you and me.”
Duc In Altum,
Brian
Other Resources
The idea of God I’ve outlined above is not as plainly evident as some of the others we’ve explored, but I’m convinced it is one of the most powerful. Many people apprenticing with Jesus operate under the idea that He is closer and more intimate with those in power and influence, even though the Scriptures say something very different.
The question is how we experience God as He is compared to our lived reality. Ideally, we do so through our direct relationship with God, though we understand He is infinitely creative in how He wooes us.
Henri Nouwen seemed to understand that, and I found his Life of the Beloved to be particularly helpful.
Soil & Roots has been experimenting with small, intentionally formative communities over the years, as I suspect God prefers to form us in healthy ways (and unwind the types of ideas we are exploring here) primarily through other people.
Another group that has been around much longer and has various community options available is the Nurturing Communities Network. NCN’s vision is to “edify, equip, and encourage the building up of Christ’s realm across denominations, races, and cultures.” They’ve been kind to invite me into one or two of their meetings, and they have a keen sense of the importance of doing life together in spiritual formation.