Evangelical Christianity has always taught me, “God is X and Y, God is like this AND like that.”
Merciful and judging
- “You’ve turned your life around! God is so merciful.”
- “You can’t take communion here anymore. God will not be mocked.”
Compassionate and just
- “God forgives you. He is compassionate towards you.”
- “Jesus had to die in order for God to accept you. He demands justice.”
All-powerful and limited
- “Keep praying for her. God can change anyone’s heart.”
- “She died an atheist? She’s in Hell because God cannot abide sin.”
Good and punitive
- “You got a big raise? God is so good!”
- “You lost your job? God is disciplining you for your sin.”
Providing and withholding
- “You’re getting married! God provides!”
- “You’re still single? God is withholding this from you because you want it too much.”
Answers prayer and also doesn’t
- “You’re pregnant! What an answer to prayer!”
- “Your sick child died? God needed an angel.”
This whiplashing ying-and-yang of God is always presented as a testament to the complexity of God’s character, but it stinks of a human device to attribute every conceivable situation to divine orchestration.
If God can be used as a cover for every appalling circumstance, then the human beings who would otherwise be left holding the bag can abdicate their responsibility. It’s convenient to throw God under the bus when otherwise you might have to own up to some shit.
It’s extremely confusing to navigate a relationship with a highly unpredictable God. Is he the good guy today or the bad guy today? If he controls everything, and sometimes he does exactly what you hope for and other times he feels palpably uncaring or abjectly cruel, then it’s really difficult to know where you stand with this God. It’s really difficult to know the dynamic of the relationship. God seems to pull you close and then push you away, haphazardly and inexplicably, and it’s emotionally and spiritually exhausting.
I don’t think God is truly like this. I think God really is Love, and I think Christians have given God a really bad, volatile name. “It’s not me, it’s God” has been a very effective deflection tool for the Church/Christians, and a very negative PR campaign for God. I see through it now.
Stop using God as a get-out-of-jail-free card for your crimes.
Enough with the perpetuation of the hyper-dualistic God who is two contradictory things at the same time. It’s a control tactic. It’s gaslighting – it denies reality and cooks up a new one that is more convenient. If you know in your gut that something is wrong, and it doesn’t square with the God you know and the circumstances right in front of you, and it’s dressed in religious language with the spin that “Oh but God is loving AND just, God provides EXCEPT when He doesn’t, God cares about injustice AND lets abuses continue because, grace,” then you have just been gaslit.
It’s a maze that you can never escape from. It’s like being in The Truman Show…every door you get close to (“This doesn’t make any sense”) turns into an ocean or a car or your make-believe wife (“Sure it does! God is this, and this, and this! Now go to bed, Truman.”) I think that God is much bigger than we can grasp, but to say that God is everything but the kitchen sink is not mechanism of worshipping the divine, it’s a tool to keep people from questioning the system.
Sometimes “oceans” are not really oceans.
Photo credits
- Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
- Photo by Aaron Sebastian on Unsplash
- Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash
