Some people understand what's wrong with having a spirit of rebellion against God, but other people may think that idea is just conservative religious language that really says "don't rebel against anything, least of all me (the religious authority)". It is possible for religious language to be a complicated metaphor for human life, and for talk of rebellion, or any other spiritual danger, to simply be a way for religious authorities to exert control over people. However, even if those authorities are using that language that way, and it is taken up by their listeners that way, it is still possible that rebellion against God is spiritually dangerous.
How could that be? One point is that if God is really right, and we rebel against him, we will have to act, trust, and prefer the wrong things. And our rebellion will keep us from him.
If the advice to "avoid rebellion against God" is too authoritarian, consider the word "rejection". When we rebel and we reject we often have the spirit of "f--- you". I wanted to find another way to make the point (and maybe I've softened it by not writing the word out directly), but I think the profanity captures the spirit in words in a way no non-profane words can. We have a spirit that says "f--- you" to authority, "f--- you" to people in authority, and, possibly, "f--- you" to God.
(Authoritarians can also have the spirit of "f--- you" to people who oppose them.)
The spirit of rebellion affects God as king, but the spirit of rejection affects him as father, friend, and personal being.
I think that to your point people, in their rebellion, frequently associate "God" with "religious authority". Many are hard-wired (or at least deeply soft-wired) to rebel against people seeking to control them, and religious authorities often come across as controlling. Whether "right" or "wrong", it at least makes sense, as an agent, to rebel against other agents seeking to "direct" your agency.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it seems God (depending on how one understands him) is of a different character. If one views God as *being itself*, rather than as a particular manifestation of being, then the idea of rebellion largely loses its meaning.
Put differently, it's easy to rebel against the rules of religious authority - one can simply ignore them or act contrary to them, for the reason of not wanting to be controlled. Rebelling against God (when taken as *being*) is not so easy - one can't really "un-be" (from the very abstract point of view, even committing suicide does remove ones matter and energy from the world).
I think a simpler way to put the above may be to say that since God is of a different character than religious authorities (and others from whom people resist control), rebellion is also of a different character (and ends up, in the case of God, losing its meaning).
I do like the move of saying that God is of a different character than religious authorities. Exactly how to flesh that out could go different ways. If I drew on things I've already thought of to answer, I would say that God is purely legitimate, because he is fully willing to take on our burdens, and to place the standard that he represents (and is) higher than anything else (and for other reasons). Religious authorities are not so purely devoted to legitimacy (are not absolutely legitimate). Also, I would say that legitimacy itself is a conscious being who is God, while religious authorities are not themselves legitimacy.
ReplyDeleteMartin Buber had a line in I and Thou about how the worship you give to idols is qualitatively different from the worship you give to God. So you can't just change the idol to come to worship God, you also have to change the way you worship.
I can begin to see a place for God as the "Big Exception" or the ultimate sui generis being. Maybe saying something like "you have to have your own relationship with God, who is apart from all the other persons you have known, and the relationship and how you see it is in some sense unaffected by any of your other relationships".
"God is being" sounds pantheist, which isn't literally compatible with what I believe, but I do think that thinking of God as being a person who is distinct from me, and potentially has a will that conflicts with mine, as being *being*, does make me feel less like rebelling, as I imagine that hypothetical situation. I think there's something in Buddhism about advanced bodhisattvas doing good things in a way that accrues no karma because they do them purely unintentionally. It is interesting to think of a personal God who has no intentionality, or who on some level just is, rather than having an agenda, even if he still has a will on another level. "I AM THAT I AM" and Jesus' personality both seem like plausible connections to that.