Theologian as Programmer

For a long time now, I have viewed religion (particularly Christianity as it is what I am most familiar with) as analagous to a game. As an extension of this idea, I want to float the idea that Theologians are programmers.

To begin with, every good theologian worth their salt works from a well-accepted set of variables (e.g. God, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, Salvation, Redemption, Miracles, omnipotence, omniscience, eschatology) and from there, the variables are re-fashioned and re-valued for use in the overall code of the theology. If the theologian is skilled, this re-fashioning process will be virtually unnoticeable and to most of us will appear to result in a flawless stream of logic. A solid theology thus depends on crafting a solid set of variables to be used for the construction of the game itself. Next, the theologian organizes these variables, introduces new ones as well as new equations, and then posits the results. If done successfully, a new theology is born; one that can easily be transmitted to others through the use of the common game manual (in this example, the Bible). The programmer/theologian has thus brought to the people who chose to play by the rules set forth, an entirely new game for their enjoyment, frustration, anger, edification, etc.

From my own point of view, I delved into a fair share of theologies without seeing them as games, but rather as matters of eternal significance (eternal life also being a variable). After a while, I came to realize that for myself, getting good at the game would be as far as I would ever get. I would never beat the final boss, never master the code, but rather, I would inevitably become a theologian/programmer myself–creating a new game for others to tackle.

Now, I choose to not play the game at all (although, this could be deemed a game choice as well), but rather to try to understand each game on its own terms and to discover what makes certain games enjoyable for their adherents. Games are fun, and to some degree, human beings seem to be game-bent creatures. Thus, without games, we really aren’t satisfied, challenged, or stimulated. Without games (even religion, science, mathematics), I would argue that we would have no reason to hope–no reason to live.

As an additional note, a common trend among theologies is that they incorporate current cultural ideas/norms into their own game-systems. In this way, I have also tried to bring the role of programmer to bear on the theologian. We theologians (myself included) are always trying to stay fresh…the public demands it! How would you characterize a theologian? How do you view theologies? Do you like games? What makes religion different than playing a game?

To get more specific, and possibly more painful, why Jesus in the 21st century?

–Nate

Bad Things To Good People………..Why?

It is my pleasure to introduce a very good friend. He is currently in Japan doing missionary work, while simultaneously making sure our other project runs smoothly. He is a man of many talents who rarely goes by his real name, but will usually respond to Burrito (don’t ask me why). But, more importantly, he is a man of God who is committed to his faith. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you El Burrito!

I know many people who state quite clearly that they don’t believe in God.

At least until something bad happens. Then suddenly they believe in God so much that they hate him. They are outraged that something so unfair could happen, especially to someone so good. The truth is, they have every right to be outraged, but not necessarily toward God, or even the Fates, or Destiny, or the Chaos Theory. In this article I’d like to clarify the most basic Christian explanation of why bad things happen to good people. So far as I know, this is held by all the main bodies of Christianity, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.

I’ll get right to the point: mankind has the free will to make moral and behavioral decisions and couldn’t be described as having any kind of freedom unless this were true. Because of this, people sometimes act in ways that harm others. Therefore in part, bad things happen to good people because other people make bad choices or moral decisions. It’s not God’s fault the drunk driver killed the innocent pedestrian. It’s the drunk driver’s fault. God allowed it to happen because he doesn’t break his own rules: everyone has freedom of will. The responsibility is ours to use this will for good.

If you’ll bear with me – God created mankind with this ability to make decisions because otherwise we would just be automatons and that’s not much of an existence. Hopefully we’ll all agree that we’d rather be free to make our own decisions than to have no choice in the matter, especially no moral choice. But as soon as we say this, we have to accept the fact that people will make different decisions. We are all unique, and we are all different. We will not all fall on the same side of the fence, and this is a key point.

But a second key point is this: our decisions will be influenced by our sense of morality. We all view some things as fair and some things as unfair, and thereby we acknowledge that there are such things as right and wrong. You can go on all day telling people there’s no such thing as moral objectivity and how unfair or insensitive it is to say otherwise, but you won’t get very far: people just don’t behave that way, and you’re proving yourself wrong by even making the assertion. Right and wrong do exist, and good and non-good exist as well. Christians call this non-good “evil,” and define its appearance in human behavior as a “sinful” nature inherent to all human beings. According to Christian teaching, people were made good, but have an innately “sinful” nature and are thus born flawed. It’s not the end of the world mind you, and Christianity has a lot more to say on that matter, but it is there nonetheless. People have the great and marvelous capacity to do good things. But they also have the capacity and even the tendency to do bad things. This is why no one has to teach a child to lie: humans can’t help themselves. The problem of evil is real and it is often ignored in our society. The line holds true, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Evil does exist, and so does Good. Wrong exists, and so does Right.

But some want to blame God. Because what did he ever do for them, after all? They may not even believe he’s real, but they still hate him. But he’s not responsible for how we use our power of free will. It really is a gift that we have it at all. It’s no use blaming mom and dad for buying the toy that your brother hit you over the head with. It’s your brother’s fault for hitting you. And if we complain that mom and dad didn’t intervene…well, the analogy stops there, because we aren’t children, and we want to keep our free will. And what kind of God would take that away from someone? Well this one wouldn’t, because he has made everyone equally.

I’ve touched on a lot of sticky issues here. Just a reminder: this is what the basic Christian teaching on the subject is, in case you hadn’t heard it before. Comments and criticisms are welcome. I’m a layman and make no pretense of having great intelligence or exhaustive understanding of such matters. I just wanted to address an issue that I see pop up every day.

The Tree of Knowledge

You know, I wonder sometimes what it might have been like prior to when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. It had to have been a time unlike anything that we can possibly imagine, especially for those of us who do not consider this story to be only an allegory. It was a time so early in the scheme of Man that Faith was really not an issue because God walked with His creation through the garden.

But it was that dog gone Tree of Knowledge that set things up to where we are today. There was a reason why God said not to eat from the fruit of this tree. And that reason, as far as I’m concerned, is this: The more “knowledgeable” we become, the less we depend on God. The more worldly intelligence that we have, the less Faith we choose to exhibit.

It is as if the more “intelligent” we become, the more we abandon the simplistic understanding of God and our Faith in Him. Our childlike Faith becomes tainted with the knowledge of this world in which we live. We begin to depend on our intelligence to better understand God, and in so doing we end up with some pretty screwed up ideas that literally fly in the face of what God is and what He has in store for us – as viewed from my theological perspective.

It is my opinion that worldly intelligence creates that void that we sometimes feel about God. Because God does not walk with us as He did with Adam and Eve, we are left in a position to understand a God that is invisible, (but not non-existent!). We are naturally prone to exercise our minds to help explain the unexplainable. We utilize an intelligence that is completely based on this material world to explain something spiritual. Therefore, our understandings of God become influenced by this world from which our intelligence has been molded. Talk about a recipe for disaster. By using our finite intelligence, we create an image of God that we are not satisfied with and explain our dissatisfaction away with concepts originating from this world.

We utilize our intelligence and not our Faith so that we can struggle less when it comes to matters of spirituality. However, that intelligence is flawed from the onset; it is material and worldly based. We have gone about the Bible and God in the same manner. We utilize our material based intelligence instead of Faith to interpret God and His Word found in the Bible so that we don’t have to struggle much about getting to the end result of God’s plan. We throw up our “intelligence card” when we question everything that we think we know about God that we don’t like. We feel we are justified to question the very fabric of the mind of God because we are “intelligent.” Has our intelligence made us arrogant?

God has made us to be inquisitive creatures. And, I don’t think it’s wrong to go about questioning things, for that is how one learns. However, at some point you have to recognize that when you’re dealing with God, you’re going to hit a wall that cannot be side-stepped or scaled by intelligence alone. This wall can only be overcome by the use of Faith. When we try to confront this wall with our intelligence alone, we do not reach God, but only our comfortable understanding of what God is. Our intelligence will lead us to a God that didn’t take much struggle to get to. Our Faith will cause us to struggle, because it is a very difficult thing to let go of our “intelligence” and step out with a leap of Faith. When we struggle by Faith, we grow closer to the real God, though we may not understand Him as we think we would by using our intelligence.

Struggle is necessary! Faith is necessary! Intelligence is a responsibility as well as a blessing given by God, but it is not necessary to a relationship with God. Intelligence is sometimes a double bladed sword in that it can doom you. The intelligence that God gives you is a powerful thing, and that power can lead you in the direct opposite direction from the One who gave you such a gift.

Intelligence can be likened to a strong thoroughbred horse. It is strong; it propels you through life with confidence and more efficiency than someone without a thoroughbred, someone who might be slower and walking. However, without a jockey to manage that power and direct the reigns, that thoroughbred horse might easily jump the track and run off toward the desert and eventually die of thirst because it was not properly managed. That jockey in this example is Faith. Intelligence without Faith is that dangerous. I have known intelligent people who have denied the existence of God because Faith was too much of a burden for them. Some people refuse to be ridden, or at least governed by the jockey of Faith because it is a struggle to do so.

The less “worldly intelligent” we are, the more God makes sense because Faith is utilized and trusted in. One is not going to understand the mind of God. A person of Faith knows this and accepts that ignorance. A person of “intelligence” will continue down the road as far as possible, using his “intelligence” to answer everything and every question that comes up about God. However, the intelligence that he or she uses only creates further turmoil. At some point I feel that you have to throw down the “Faith card,” to find peace with God.

“I had to set limits to knowledge in order to make place for faith”
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1826)

In The Beginning………………….

Greetings! This is the Dead Theologians Society and I am absolutely honored that you have chosen to take the time to check this out.

For all you pursuers of God out there, this is your site! The DTS provides a home where theological perspectives can be weighed and intelligently discussed. Even though I tend to gravitate to more of a conservative take on things, my liberal friends (and I have many) can usually provide unique perspectives that are usually needed when going about something with the big picture in mind, and that is my goal here.

Why the Dead Theologians Society? We each have based our theological understanding on a dead theologian in some way. Unless you’re an atheist, you have derived your own personal theology from someone. It could be the depictions of Jesus as written in the Gospels, or it could be a profound work of literature from one of many theologians like Luther, Lewis, Moltmann or Calvin who have each impacted the entire concept of God. Or, it just might be from your preacher who speaks to you every week from the pulpit, but he or she, in turn got their theology from someone and more than likely the trail will lead back to a dead theologian. All of them dead except for One, which leads me to my next point.

There are three concepts to which I hold:
1. Jesus Christ is the living Son of God and He sacrificed Himself for you and me.
2. Altruism is the answer.
3. Christ will return and we will see it.
So there you go!

About me: at one point, I thought I knew what I believed but didn’t think about asking why I believed it. And then once I began asking why, I didn’t know what the hell I believed. It was a very miserable time for a while. I was a ship without an anchor. However, now I know what it is I believe and I know why – like Tarterus, my faith is strong!

It is who I am, and it has taken a $75,000.00 post graduate education at a liberal institution for me to realize it – go figure! This is not to say that I am completely fundamental in my perspectives for I am not. It is my understanding that God resides in that gray area between the rigid fundamental and liberal theologies. Too much of one will lead you to the Westboro Baptist Church where you can justify and celebrate the death of soldiers and innocent Amish girls. Too much of the other will lead you to the complete dismissal of a genuine God, and I have seen both happen.

Whatever your stance, I ask that you put aside your emotional reaction and look at what we discuss here from a logical manner. This site will not tell you that your method of going about God is wrong or right, this is only a place to commune with other novice theologians and enjoy the journey. Maybe God will move through our efforts here and maybe we’ll find what we each are looking for – or maybe not! Either way, we won’t know until we do it. So let’s do it.

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