A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [114]
Third came our quest for power. We found ourselves in a world of competing city-states governed by powerful warlords. Each group needed a competitive advantage over neighboring groups. Many of us found a competitive advantage in an understanding of one God—ours—as superior to or supreme over all others. God became wedded to our national politics. As we developed kingdoms, we saw God as king; as we developed empires, we saw God as emperor; as we developed totalitarian regimes, we saw God as absolute dictator. Such views of God promoted civil order—who dares defy a dictator ruling by the decree (or divine right) of the Almighty? One might dare the risk of temporal torture for differing with a dictator, but who dares face God’s own threats of eternal torture for civil disobedience? Along with fear and political compliance, these views of God also promoted a sense of awe and transcendence; we imagined a God as far above humanity as a king is above a serf or slave. We’ll call this the yellow zone, the quest for power.
Fourth, there was the quest for independence. Something predictable had happened to us in the age of powerful kings: we increasingly felt that the more power they had, the more corrupt they tended to become. The more powerfully they protected us from other kings, the more they themselves became a threat to us. So we began to feel as exploited as we were protected by our rulers. We searched for something even higher than a human ruler: we searched for laws—principles, absolutes, universals—to which even dictators must submit. And now God became for us less the magical intervener or national protector (as in the orange and yellow zones) and more the rational architect of universal laws or principles. Put differently, God became less the king who rules by wish and whim (as in the yellow zone) and more the judge who enforces laws, mandates punishment, and negotiates settlements. For some of us, the laws, principles, or mechanisms eclipsed any role for God at all. The universe was rendered a giant eternal machine, comprehensible without reference to any supreme being, and God became either its distant and noninterfering engineer or an unnecessary hypothesis altogether. This we’ll call the green zone, the quest for independence.
Fifth came the quest for individuality. Once the world had become for us a rational machine—operating according to physical, biological, social, moral, and spiritual laws or mechanisms—we were free to discover and express ourselves as autonomous or independent individuals, joyfully exercising our personal freedom through competition for goods and services. We gained individual grades in school, salaries in work, degrees in education, ranks in the military, and even mansions in heaven; personal success and individual winning became everything to us. No wonder God became our personal Savior, and no wonder the spiritual life often involved mastering techniques for earning (or otherwise obtaining) God’s favor and blessing on our ambitious plans for personal prosperity and individual achievement. We formed voluntary associations—denominations, political parties, unions, ideologies—with others who shared our sense of which techniques best guaranteed individual success, both temporal and eternal. We’ll call this the blue zone, the quest for individuality.
Sixth came the quest for honesty. The mid-twentieth century hit many of us like a heart attack: What had we done? What had we become? What went wrong with us? We—meaning inhabitants of our enlightened Western civilization—had launched two world wars, a holocaust, segregation, and apartheid. We—meaning participants in our bigger, faster, more driven military-industrial complex—were covering the earth with cement, burning rain forests, turning fossil fuels into greenhouse gases, driving unprecedented extinctions, and