Be sure to also check out the full-length version of this interview: The Paul Young Interview (17 min.)
“The religious god never healed me.”
OK, I’m on board with that.
“(Religion) is all fear and guilt based performance.”
Still with you Paul, keep going…
“There is a Christian religion that I think god is as opposed to as any other religion.”
Preach it!
“Religion is always about power and about certainty and relationship is about mystery and the loss of control.”
OK, now you lost me.
What do you guys think?
Updating…
Paul Young’s book is called The Shack.
Interview by Jim Henderson.
Alas-I get the same sense from Paul here as I did in the book–on the one hand a decrying of “religion” and of simple answers, and on the other hand an obnoxious repetition of old religious simplicities that just don’t work for me anymore.
For instance, the seemingly simple and dualistic religion/relationship dichotomy. It’s too easy. The wielding, giving up of, and exercising of power does and must come into relationships. And religion doesn’t have to be about certainty. My favorite religious people are those like George Macdonald, who are willing to be more mystical in their religion.
What if there *is* no meta narrative, and there *are* no easily categorized groups? What if each person has their own unique and ever shifting experience of an ever changing God?
When you say “The Religious God never healed me”, is the implication that there is a god who *will* or *does* heal me? Because for lots of people that’s just not the case.
Is Paul saying that “G-d” *does* love me all the time, whether I believe it or not? That feels circular and wierd. If it becomes increasingly clear that there is not such “G-d”, and thus we don’t believe it, then it’s not true, for us, is it?
Paul’s take on things seems to me fit very very well into a place that used to be filled by the charismatic religious power-mongers of my youth–thus all my buttons seem to get pushed, by his writing *and* his speaking.
I wish he would go all the way there, and come out and say that certainty is impossible, and that experience of a loving God is a refusal to open our eyes and see the real state of the world–of the teeming hundreds of millions who live and die in a poverty so abject, or in the midst of such ongoing physical and spiritual and psychological violation.
The same thing happened in the Shack. The setup was awesome, but then there’s this long theological treatise from a God who is repeating the same unsatisfying platitudes, and the character becomes less and less real as he more or less swallows them wholesale.
Sigh …
(ah dear–how’s that for the first comment in the thread? No offense is intended.)
Reality doesn’t care whether I believe in it or not…. I often get the feeling it’s waving at me 2 inches from my face, just smiling away, though… I just wish it were easier to pin what the hell reality is… And WHAT in tarnation is wrong with having proof, or at least a decent litmus test… I WANT PROOF HE LOVES ME ALL THE TIME. Is that too much to ask from the God of the universe, seriously??
Yup, like nailing Jello to a concrete wall.
These are very thoughtful quotes from Benjamin and Tami. Their honesty pushes me and helps me “own” my own version of reality which sits on top of faith in Jesus (which of course is a calculated risk) but one I remain willing to take.
I wish he would go all the way there, and come out and say that certainty is impossible, and that experience of a loving God is a refusal to open our eyes and see the real state of the world–of the teeming hundreds of millions who live and die in a poverty so abject, or in the midst of such ongoing physical and spiritual and psychological violation.
Reality doesn’t care whether I believe in it or not…. I often get the feeling it’s waving at me 2 inches from my face, just smiling away, though… I just wish it were easier to pin what the hell reality is…