Heart of Faith: Chapter 9

Chapter 9 — My Story

God laid upon the family household the duty to provide children with a frame of reference, a structure that would include and enable a grasp of God’s moral Law. It’s a bias. To be human in this fallen world is to live in the grip of certain biases. The only unbiased mind is the dead one. The only question for the living is which biases they will hold. I maintain that it must be a conscious choice.

We know that Jesus was born unfallen. In other words, He was born fully integrated, with His Spirit in control of His heart, and His heart in control of His consciousness. In that sense, He was a moral genius, born fully developed in the ability to sense directly His Father’s moral character in all things. We see the biases of Jesus in the substance of His disputes with the Jewish leaders of His day. Objectivity is a myth; truth is whatever His Father said it was. For us today, truth is whatever Jesus taught.

We can do better than we have so far. We could construct a society with a solid moral frame of reference, even if we now have to make it a parallel society hidden in plain sight. The Hebrew nation had none our complications in that respect. They had a mandate and written revelation, given directly by the hand of Almighty God Himself, to occupy a certain territory with the blessings of God’s moral character. But they kept running away to other things. One wave of influence after another washed over them, and their own inherent rebellious nature made them suckers for it all. They didn’t cull much, swallowing everything. So when Alexander the Great marched through in 323 BC and offered them his own Aristotelian Hellenism, they looked it over. After a very short courtship, they married it. Like Esau, they traded their rich inheritance of ancient wisdom for a relatively new package of shallow nonsense. This nonsense killed the last vestige of divine moral influence in their nation. They placed their own reason on the throne, and bowed down to worship it. Then they put God’s name on it and viciously defended it against any attempt to correct.

Those who followed Christ were striving to go back to the ancient frame of reference. The world at large joined the assault against this. In just a few centuries, the structural organization of the Christian religion was hijacked. As previously noted in this book, the leadership were sucked into a new civilization rising on the ashes of Greco-Roman ruins, but with the fresh vitality of wild heathen German tribal society.

Unlike Christ, I was not at all born morally mature. Still, I was born with a powerful sense of pull from my heart, striving to gain mastery over my mind. I suppose the children around me had surely experienced it at some point, but for the majority of them, it was crushed between fallen childish nature and a social mythology that denied the heart. That my pull remained so strong made me very alien and alone.

It’s not as if I was such a wonderful little boy. I could be as self-centered as the rest of them. Still, the powerful pull from those unconscious forces would not allow me to fully participate in any social setting. I didn’t even dare to admit those forces to myself, because I was punished for talking about them. My whole life was one long string of emotional disasters because I kept trying to act according to a moral pull that was too often wholly inappropriate for the world in which I lived. I could never reconcile the conflict. A dominant theme of my youth was constant embarrassment and shame from a cruel world that had no patience with me. My family was wholly unsympathetic, and it seemed they couldn’t wait to crow and bully me over the next mistake. I suppose everyone needs a punching bag, and I felt like I was everyone’s favorite for such abuse.

It’s not as if there were no good times. I know they loved me, but my social background was lower class and generally brutal about such things. Precious few were the adults in my world who realized I had a powerful calling that demanded I not be like everyone else. My own kin seemed to feel threatened by the mere existence of anything different. So my life was filled with nightmares and demons because, while such were actually rather few, they were simply so overwhelming in their size and impact on my awareness.

At the earliest opportunity, I took solace in literature. I read voraciously because it was a safe escape and generally acceptable to others. Into adulthood I pursued Science Fiction, always hoping to find a key to a better world. At the same time, my personal faith continued to blossom. Perhaps you recognize the jarring discontinuity between the generally anti-moral Science Fiction world and my even stronger allegiance to Christ. But while I was too Christian for the other nerds, I was also too nerdy for my fellow church members. Early in my life I professed to what my family referred to as the call to the Gospel Ministry and went to college for it. Despite my strongest efforts to conform to that profession, no one ever took me seriously. I never got closer than volunteer staff positions. Still stumbling often and facing embarrassment daily, I managed to find a place somewhere on the fringe of the mainstream where I could exist. I even became somewhat famous locally at the peak of my efforts to conform while serving in the military.

But along the way, key figures planted the seeds of truth in my soul. The first glimmer was when I realized that the Bible was an Eastern document, and Christianity was an Eastern religion. I had heard it said pretty much in those words long before they came to life. So I went back to my academic religious training and dug into the more obscure elements of Antiquities and Comparative Civilization studies. The fresh jarring disconnect between the approved “churchianity” I had adopted versus what I was slowly discovering to be the actual background of Christ’s teaching nearly brought me to suicide several times. It was as if the whole world conspired to destroy my faith, even as I was beginning to discover what God made me to be.

Once I got past the danger and the attendant turmoil, I was able to explore vast stretches of forgotten faith. The more I pursued the Hebrew intellectual assumptions and moral outlook, the more at home I felt. This is where I have always belonged. This is also where mainstream Christianity has attacked me the hardest. Over the past decade, I have made it a point to forgive everyone, but completely left behind mainstream organized Christian religion. And while it was only recently I stumbled across the language to describe what’s going on with my heart-mind (thanks to Christine), I have been walking in the guidance of my heart more than ever. Lord knows, I understand how this is not for everyone, because it rests entirely on His calling. However, I refuse to be silent about what I’ve found.

I’m not a reformer. No part of me has an interest in replacing one orthodoxy with another. I’m willing to let the mainstream Christians continue on their path. But for those who sense a need for Christ outside that mainstream, I’m offering hope. Not in aping my path and resulting stand, but I want to encourage you in the task of finding your own path. Don’t allow religious leadership to steal your faith. Mainstream Christian religion has tried to bury the truth. It won’t matter what the motivations are, the leadership finds themselves condemned under Jesus’ own words: “You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in” (Matthew 23:13 NET).