Francis Berger
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The Distinction Between an Immature Christian and a Mature Christian Lies in the Answer to "Does God Believe in You"?

9/20/2022

6 Comments

 
Being a Christian entails professing a belief in God, but it also involves professing whether God believes in us; more precisely, how and why God believes in us.

When a Christian outlines if God believes in him, he reveals a great deal about his attitude toward God and his attitude about man. More significantly, he discloses his core beliefs about the divine-human relationship and the ultimate purpose of Creation.

This leads to many platitudes about God’s infinite love for man, which are then sharply contrasted by the insistence that God does not need man. It also leads to grand proclamations about God’s personal nature, which are then juxtaposed with descriptions of a great mystery one can never truly hope to know. And so on . . .

And don’t even get me started about Jesus.

I have categorized and described Christians in many different ways on this blog over the years. In addition to focusing on several denominations, I have written about liberal Christians, conservative Christians, traditional Christians, orthodox Christians, mainstream Christians, conventional Christians, System Christians, solitary Christians, mystical Christians, and Romantic Christians. I consider some of the Christians noted above to be serious Christians; others, far less so.

Though I will likely continue to refer to these categories in the future, I am becoming increasingly convinced that after 2020, serious Christians can and should be placed into two distinct, overarching categories:

Immature serious Christians and mature serious Christians.

The simplest way to distinguish immature serious Christians from mature serious Christians is to ask them why and how God believes in them.

Answers that mention love but then focus exclusively on human fallibility, human depravity, submission, fealty, fallen-ness, contingency, unworthiness, doctrines, worship, sin, rebelliousness, churches, obedience, authority, bending the knee, and the like are hallmarks of an immature serious Christian.

Not necessary a bad Christian, or an evil Christian, or a stupid Christian, or a wayward Christian, or a heretical Christian, or an apostate Christian, but an immature Christian – as in unripe, undeveloped, unformed, half-grown, callow.

Answers that mention love and then go on to describe something similar to what William Arkle outlines below are signs of a mature or, at the very least, a maturing serious Christian (bold added):

We can realise for ourselves that love can be passive or active. We can know for ourselves that it is possible to sit down and simply radiate love, like a light bulb radiates light, in all directions but not directed in any particular way to any particular thing. This is passive love.
 
We can feel that love becomes more active if we begin to direct it onto an object, say a stone; but we can feel a difference if we direct this loving attention onto something more fully alive, such as a plant or a flower.
 
This time we recognise a relationship which has a wider range of responses in it, and it is easier and more satisfying to love such a responsive thing. But now, if we look at how we feel if we direct our loving attention to even more living objects such as pet animals, human beings and children we realise that our love and relationship can grow again and become even more valuable.
 
And if these human beings are of a more deeply beautiful and gracious order, then the activity of our love leaps into higher and higher expressions which are more valuable and delightful. Finally from the experience of our love directed actively to a most valuable human being, we can move again to a situation in which we are able to love a perfectly beautiful and gracious person, and this is our God of love.
 
Because our God is the most alive and responsive being, this experience of actively directed love can be the most sublime.
 
In this highest form of active love we must therefore have the one who loves and the one who is loved in order to arrive at a responsive situation. So we have two individuals, our God of love and the one who loves God. In this situations, the one who loves God enters into a Divine relationship in which both individuals are of the same order, even if God is far more mature than the individual who is loving him.
 
So, at the moment that the individual really loves God as another individual who can be loved, then the two of them become friends in the Divine nature to which they both belong.
 
This means that God no longer has to be God, but can become a friend to the one who loves Him and can love his friend back again in the way that love must if it is to express the fulfilment of its nature.
 
The one who loves God also gradually realises that he is loving a real responsive individual with whom he is now a friend, and this experience is confirmed by all the other experiences of love to be different from worship. For worship is a sort of one-sided love which does not allow for a response and therefore cannot move into friendship, because in worship we do not relate to God as a living being but we idealise God in a fixed image that we have in our own understanding and thus we prevent Him coming alive.
 
We do this, no doubt, out of a diminished sense of our own value and adequacy and out of a sense of modesty. But we only have to look at the nature of love for a moment to realise that the truest form of love does not have to behave in this manner. In fact it is unkind to worship others, rather than to love them, because it fixes them in a mould they do not wish to be fixed in; in fact by worshipping people we imprison them.
 
But love does not wish to imprison the one it loves, above all, love longs to give expansion and enhanced beingness to the one it loves. Love longs to be in a creative and growing relationship with the one it loves.
 
Love is the highest expression of life itself, and life is never static, but always wishes to be aspiring and developing towards new and untried possibilities ties.

So what I feel the term a loving God really means, is that this God is trying to develop us to a stage where we can become His friends in this deeply loving, active, personalised way which allows the creative fruits of a friendship to arise between them which constantly keeps pace with the liveliness and creative aspiration of the living spirit of our common Divine nature.

Note added: As far as I am concerned, the distinction between immature and mature Christians is the only one that matters in this time and place. I firmly believe that immature Christians will find it increasingly hard to remain immature Christians in the coming months/years. They will either choose the path of maturity or they will become stunted and, eventually, cease being Christians altogether. 
6 Comments
Daniel F
9/21/2022 08:36:34

1. Obvious verse to quote, but I'll place it here anyway:

"Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you." John 15:15

2. "immature Christians will find it increasingly hard to remain immature Christians in the coming months/years. They will either choose the path of maturity or they will become stunted and, eventually, cease being Christians altogether."

My experience, particularly with nondenominational Evangelicals (which is who I interact with even though it is not who I share a common understanding of Christianity), is that their particular notion of what it means to be a Christian -- Republic of Nice, praying almost entirely for worldly things (i.e. their will, not Gods will), generally following the world in terms of moral priorities (vaxx, warming, antiracism) -- is so impervious to any additional outside information or context that they can very well go on practicing that sort of Christianity without slowing down, without experiencing cognitive dissonance and without second guessing themselves at all. Maybe I underestimate the trials and sufferings that will come and force people's hand, but I currently don't see it among most Christians.

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Francis Berger
9/21/2022 20:17:06

@ Daniel - I'm glad you included that passage from the Fourth Gospel in your comment.

As far as "nice" Christians are concerned, I've concluded that no trial or suffering will ever wake them up. They're like the churchgoers in Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor chapter of Brother's Karamazov -- unable to "bear" the freedom Christ offers.

It's become apparent to me that many (most?) self-professed Christians lack a real connection to their inner spiritual resources. As such, they are utterly helpless against external forces.

The sad thing is, they willingly and actively choose this mode of existence. Even worse, they convince themselves that this is what Christianity is all "about".

In light of this, I don't think any suffering or trial will ever jolt them out of that mode of consciousness -- primarily because the work needs to begin within, and it needs to be self-initiated rather than a reaction to some external event, shock, or development.

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Whitney
9/21/2022 15:43:08

This is perfect that it was written on the feast of St Matthew.

"These are the triumphant friends of God, who, despising the order of princes, won an eternal reward. Now they are crowned, and receive the palm."

"I saw men standing together in shining apparel: and the Angel of the Lord spoke to me, saying "These are holy men who became the friends of God. " "

St Matthew pray for us.

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Francis Berger
9/21/2022 20:17:36

@ Whitney - Good comment. Thanks for that!

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bruce charlton
9/21/2022 18:23:24

@Frank - It does my heart good to see you quoting Arkle! - especially this passage, which had a strong impact on me, too.

Reading Daniel F's quotation from the Fourth Gospel (during my year of intense reading and re-reading) was another point when it became clear to me that this was *and always had been* what Jesus asked of us; as is indeed implied by the fact of his incarnation and his life. Friends not servants - what could be clearer?

In that Gospel, Jesus's love is always personally and specifically directed - active not passive.

This is one reason why I find 'oneness' spirituality to be so pernicious in its effect - including among Christians. This fuels a spiritual snobbery that sees abstraction as superior to the personal, and a God of philosophical-attributes as a deeper insight than a personal God who desires loving friendship rather than to be tyrant or judge.

This seems to me specifically *Christian* because it is made possible, realizable, by Jesus Christ's opening the possibility of resurrection to Heaven. This mortal life is vitally important, or else we would not bother with it - yet it only makes sense in terms of Heaven.


(This is something that I believe William Arkle never really understood; partly because of his belief in reincarnation, which confused the issue, but seemed necessary to Arkle to enable sufficient time and experience to attain sufficient experience. Consequently, Arkle apparently never expressed a clear understanding of an *essential* role for Jesus Christ in salvation.

(Also, I think Arkle never appreciated that resurrection implies that eternal incarnation is superior to a purely spiritual existence.

(These were insights I gratefully received from Mormon theology. It's a great pity that they are not more widely known and understood - because the Mormon scheme of a boundlessly 'eternal' pre-mortal spiritual life (co-eternal with God), mortal incarnate life, and finally eternal post-mortal resurrected life - seems to be an understanding that can solve many tough theological difficulties.)

Reply
Francis Berger
9/21/2022 20:41:19

@ Bruce - Like you, I don't agree with everything Arkle offers, but I believe his assessment of the nature of God and the divine purpose of Creation is absolutely on point.

The irony of the mature-immature framework is that the Christians who believe in and emphasize the simplicity and clarity of the gift Jesus offers and the personal "friendship" nature of the divine-human relationship appear to be the "immature"ones, while Christians who bury Jesus's gift beneath heaps of rational abstraction appear to be the "mature" ones.

Yet on closer inspection, the clarity of Jesus's gift and the personal "friendship" nature of the divine-human relationship entail a great deal of hard work, dedication, discipline, and tough choices. In a nutshell, an ultra-high degree of commitment and personal responsibility. For example, the need for repentance becomes infinitely more pressing and meaningful if one knows he has betrayed or disappointed a loving friend.

On the flip side, the abstract, rational philo-theological approach takes a great deal of discipline and hard work to learn and internalize, but once it has been internalized, the real hard work, discipline, and tough choices of inherent in being a Christian can be largely avoided. Moreover, matters of commitment and personal responsibility can be easily rationalized away! After all, it is much easier to withhold repentance from an abstraction than it is from a person who loves you and whom you claim to love.

I've said it before, but I will say it again -- I sense that Christians who embrace the abstract-philosophical approach to God use it to obscure this lack of personal responsibility.

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