E19 “Why We Fear God: Escaping Fear-Based Faith”

In this candid episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, host Chris Jones challenges the safety of "community-first" religion using the powerful metaphor of the Bull Elephant. He argues that while gathering in the safety of the village to talk about God is comfortable, true faith requires an individual journey into the "jungle" to encounter the Divine firsthand. Jones critiques the traditional "hellfire" doctrines that use fear to enforce compliance, suggesting they actually prevent believers from seeking a genuine relationship with God. By re-examining the concept of Zoe (eternal life) and exploring the idea of conditional immortality, this episode invites listeners to trade the fear of eternal torment for a brave, personal pursuit of the Father's love.

Episode 19 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  

Transcript

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If perfect love casts off fear, then perfectly crafted fear creates control and makes love obsolete. In this episode, we open up and discuss why we have terms like exvangelical, deconstruction, or evolution of faith. Welcome. I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce. If you haven't listened to it, you should go listen to it. It's a lot of fun. But Kyle said something in that conversation that stuck out to me. And I've been in thought ever since about it. It's made me think. And the the statement was Christianity is about community. That's how it is to be done. It's in a community. It's not an individual thing. And I gently push back with the story of the bull elephant. And if you haven't heard the story of the bull elephant, it's this that you can hear a bull elephant out in the jungle, and you can get together with other people and you can talk about the bull elephant that's out there. And in your community, you share and you encourage, and it becomes its own thing. But until you go out into the jungle yourself and you experience the journey in the jungle and all of those things that entails, and you go through that process of your path of whatever that looks like, and then you find and you discover and you see and experience firsthand the bull elephant. Until that point, you've just been in community. You haven't had the real experience. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the community isn't important because it is. I think it's critically important, but it's not the destination. The journey to discover and experience the bull elephant is. If you want to learn more about what I'm talking about, go back and check out episodes eight and nine. It will give you an expanded understanding of what I'm talking about. So I started thinking about it in this way that people that are in deconstruction or in evolution, exvangelical, whatever the verbiage is, but they all had, I think, an experience with God that was driven through community. That if you ask them andor once you start talking to them and you get a better understanding, they all have that similar earmark. Their experience with God was always through the church, but never in isolation. So recently I started realizing how weird I am because I'm just the opposite. I've always been uncomfortable in the community. I am much happier out in the jungle looking for the bull elephant. Now that's not to say that I haven't been involved with a church community, because I have been, but the foundation for my faith in my relationship with God isn't an isolation in my own studies. And then that challenges me of how I interact with other people and how I live my life. But there's a reason why I'm like this. And that's why I want to share. And I think by sharing my a little bit of my story and why I have the perspective I do, that maybe I can help others understand why they have the perspective they have. See, when I was young, and I'm an Xer, my grandfather was a pastor, my dad was a pastor. I listened to both of them preach hellfire. So if you would have asked me back then and all of my friends, you know, when I was seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, what are you saved from? I'm saved from hell. I mean, that was our idea of the gospel. We're saved from hell. And now when I look back at that and I think of it in the terms of where I'm at now and where I'm at out in the jungle looking for the bull elephant, I'm like, man, I've that's what was wrong with us? What was wrong with that situation? And now I start to have a better understanding of why we have terms like exvangelical, deconstruction, evolution. Because in that state, I don't see that as salvation. I see that as coercion. Let me say it like this. If perfect love casts out fear, then perfectly crafted fear creates control and makes love obsolete. If that's our idea of salvation, of being saved from eternal torment, why would we ever go looking for the bull elephant? I mean, that has more to do with the city is under siege and the leader of that movement, the enemy at the gate, is saying, You will either serve me, or all of my power that I have will be used to create horrific torment that I will make last as long as I can. Now you take the creator of the universe saying this to us: you will either love me and you will serve me, or I will use all of my power to create the most horrific torment that I can come up with that has no ending. So love me. Surely that can't be right. So if you believe this message, then you will assimilate together. You will submit, you will, in fear, come together and worship God. And then in that, you start to see that that is the destination. Because it's in our community, because that we find beautiful. We are coming together, loving one another, encouraging one another, and comforting one another, and we see the value of that. We see how beautiful that is, and we start to feel that God, my experience as a Christian, is in that because that's the beautiful side of it. It's almost like that helps us deal with the fear we have of God of what could happen to us. And so we listen and we obey. It sounds more controlling, but we find encouragement and comfort in how we come together. We see the beauty of that, and there is a lot of beauty in that. But we never go looking for the bow elephant. We never have that experience. Why would you go look for the bow elephant? Be terrified of that, God. I don't want to go and have a conversation with you. I don't want to go and experience what you're like. I truly believe that the pulpit has done more damage to humanity than the enemy ever could have through this message. And we are seeing this exodus from the church because of it, with a misunderstanding of what God's nature is truly like. Is he truly like that? I mean, if that's the truth, then you don't need the bulk of the Bible. You don't need the love talk. You can get rid of that. You've said everything you need to say when you said you will obey or else. That's all you need to say. So it makes sense to me that you have pastors and preachers up at the pulpit begging people to go pray, begging people to go read the Bible, begging people to seek a relationship with God, but yet the parishioners never seem to really do that. Why would they? You've presented it in such a way, no one wants to go near that guy. That guy's horrifically scary. We're there out of fear. We're not there out of love. You can say all you want that the gospel's been spread with love. No, it's been spread out of fear, coercion, or else it's threat. We are simply in compliance with your demands. Now, I do want to say this. I think Christianity is a beautiful religion when it's done right. And I'm not trying to imply that all Christianity is horrific because it's absolutely not. And even the ones that's getting it wrong in the way that we're talking about still has a lot of beautiful things about it. When Christianity is practiced right and we just all you gotta do is keep it between the lines, it is beautiful, it serves humanity, it helps us, and it helps the community. It's just fantastic. But when you do it wrong and you don't keep it between the lines, then you end up with exactly what we're talking about. You end up with a hierarchy, you end up with the pecking order, you end up with some weird traditions because we get locked in this fear-based faith. I mean, the Bible speaks and talks in a way that we're supposed to go find our true salvation in the jungle looking for the bow elephant ourselves. That's kind of what it's saying, that we look into the mirror to see if we're counterfeit and that we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. But when you are so afraid to go out and look for the bow elephant that you're only in the community, it only makes sense that we start comparatively judging ourselves to others in the community. And we end up in this very weird place then of the hierarchy in the pecking order. And then we start identifying our value of our faith as in our community. So it makes sense that we would be communal Christians, and then we start to see the church as the destination. But the church was never the destination. Our relationship with God was supposed to be the destination. I've said it before, again in the other episodes, that church was simply a table of encouragement to keep us running on our race, to make the church the destination, and that your faith leads to an incomplete faith. It's very weird, isn't it, that in this religion somehow we've been estranged from God. I start to understand Carl Jung's interpretation and saying that an organized religion can keep you from a personal experience with God. But if we create fear to get us to the church, then it only makes sense that there's nothing that comes out of it except for the experience of the church. And I don't want to paint the picture that it's this big evil organization and that all of the leaders that think like that are maliciously trying to hurt us and control us. I don't think that's what it is. I think when you have a religion that has evolved, at least and I should clarify, an aspect of it, if you were involved in that religion of Christianity, then with that hierarchy that's created within that, trying to help others and become a leader and spread the good news of trying to save people from hell, I think that they are sincerely trying to help people. They're just trying to spread the information that people need. Now, both my dad and my grandfathers passed away, but I know they were very sincere in how they loved people and how they were just trying to help people. They weren't malicious. They were not trying to be a part of an organization to control others. They sincerely love God and sincerely love people and were just trying to help. But let's be honest. If you're going to spread Christianity and you're going to do it with how the Bible actually prescribes, and that's with love, and that's by being the Good Samaritan, that's by loving others as yourself, as Jesus commanded, as I've called the antidote to the poison, I would highly suggest that everybody go listen to Episode 11. It paints a different picture of the good news of salvation for the here and now. But if you're going to spread the gospel, the good news that we're saved, and it's to be done through love by caring for others and loving for others, loving our enemies as ourselves, that's hard. That's real hard. It's much easier to fill the pews if you do it through fear. It's much more effective. It's much easier, but it's compliance. I don't know if I would call it salvation. And it creates an idea that our relationship with God is our relationship with the church. The Good Samaritan parable, it starts off where it says that a lawyer asked Jesus, How do I inherit eternal life? That word eternal doesn't mean what we've always thought it's meant and how we've used it in the church. Originally, eternal and how it was used here meant it has no beginning, it has no ending, it's always been and it will always be. That it's with God, it's Zoe, it's this life from God for the here now as well as after now. And he says that we inherit it. We inherit something that by the natural order of things is not ours, that it gives us the idea in John chapter one, verse one through five, the prologue of John, that there was going to be a problem with us. So God sent Jesus to us with Zoe, his logos, his word with this life. And when you start thinking of it in terms of God giving us something, you know, in our conversation with Kyle, Kyle's a Christian materialist, he doesn't believe we live after we die. And there is scriptures in the Bible that support that. That it's death, it's its finality. I mean, the wages of sin is death. That means it's over, it's complete. God sent his only son that we might not perish but have everlasting life. That word perish means utter destruction. There is no life, and even a tormented life is still life. So in this story, it sounds like that Jesus is coming to bring us life, that this isn't it, that we have an opportunity to be assimilated with God in the afterlife in a different state, but of life, a life that's not ours, a one that's always been there, will always be there. It had no beginning, it has no ending, and in it we would describe it as heaven. So if you start thinking about it in terms of when we die, that's it. There is nothing else. But God didn't want that to be it with us. God wanted to be with us. So he sends his only son, his z logos, his word, as an embodying an idea with this Zoe, his life, that we might inherit it. And then after this, we go and assimilate and we are with him. That speaks about a father's love for his children. That doesn't speak about an enemy outside the gate. When Jesus was asked to show us the Father, Jesus says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. He's not talking about physically, he's talking about his nature. In episode 15, we talked about Jesus' nature, making himself a servant outside the gate, helping us. That's a whole different idea. And I get it, that idea may not fill the pews. That idea may not create mega churches, and that's not meant to be a slam against either, but that idea does create a desire for us to go find the bull elephant. That we now want a relationship with God. It's not about the church being the destination anymore. It's about us wanting to find that father that loves us, that wants to give us something that we, in the natural voter of things, don't have. That speaks more to a father wanting to make a path for his children to be with him. I would challenge everyone to go seek out God yourself. Go personally have that experience of what his true nature is. And in that, you'll find life. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments, andor concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.