The Scandal I Cannot Escape
- Livinginbetweenall-Terry
- Aug 7
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 13
...Theology of being 'Human' inside a Star Trek Universe
Martin Luther framed it a question of "faith verses works". I've concluded that while there is a truth inside this contrast it is not my battle. James dictum remains. “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds" (James 2:18b).
My problem is older and framed well inside Augustine's 1a Confessional, even as he had Palagius 1b declared a heretic using his relation to the Emperor as leverage. He appealed to power to do what even the Pope had refused; to end the debate between Augustinian awareness of how deeply broken are the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve verses Pelagius more optimistic understanding of common grace; That God in Christ had renewed in us and through each of us the ability to do good and thereby save ours and our community's lives. Well, at least Augustine lived congruent with his beliefs.
It is clear that Augustine had never watched Star Trek. He was not privy to a perfect world that just a bit of rational, scientific, and enlightened education snd social engineering could muster. It's certainly not Palagius's fault if those pesky Romulans or Ferengi or Klingons or Domminion kept forcing the Federation into Red Alerts, followed by an array of photon torpedos and lazer weapons to maintain a fragile peace. K, so maybe it's a good thing they both lived in the 4th and 5th centuries (300s and 400s). Messing with the Borg would have made their resistance to one another futile, for sure. :)
The American Holiness and Revivalist tradition in which I grew up appeared at first glance far removed from the hopeful humanist model of Star Trek. Yet first glances can mislead, for inside my Wesleyan tradition was the rising optimism of Pelagius human freedom on grace filled Armenian 1c steroids.
Coming of age in the middle to late 1900s with slavery legally removed, the Industrial Revolution under way, political reform movements in women's rights and open government, and growing calls for temperance, American social revivalism dared to believe in the coming eschatological dawn of the Christian (and American) 20th century.
I'm reminded of an episodic wrap up conversation between Spoc, Captain Kirk and Bones following their first hand experience on a planet with a somewhat parallel history to earth. They had beamed themselves into a religious and pacifist resistance community against a Roman style, 20th century Nazi like dictatorship. 2a Admiring the morally developed political ideas of these devout followers still rooted in worship of the sun as God, Nyota UhIra, as Coms Officer, broke in. “I’m afraid you have it all wrong, Mr. Spock, all of you. I’ve been monitoring some of their old style radio waves. The empire spokesman trying to ridicule their religion. But he couldn’t. Don’t you understand? It’s not the sun up in the sky. It’s the Son of God.”To which Kirk responds, “Caesar and Christ. They had them both. And the Word is spreading only now.” Bones offers up his typical moralism. "A philosophy of total love and total brotherhood.” 2b
What tamed the historically American revivalism into a more tepid 20th century and Calvinistic imprinted gospel of individual salvation whose eschatology focused upon a raptured escape from the two world wars, Great Depression, Vietnam, climate change, social and moral chaos? It was, ofcourse, the problem of the Borg; 3 that Augustinian shadow of our fallen nature that clung around our good intentions as shame and guilt built up, following multiplied altar trips in attempts at fixing the seeming unfixable.
What had been a grand vision of the church and earth awash in Christ's love was reduced to the fears of adults and children that the Borg were everywhere, around us (Communists even in government and Hollywood and the Church) and in us (that bad boy Adam in rebellion against God). The fear of Soviet Russia, nuclear war, the devil (Borg) made this little boy try to reduce my own inner war with my human heart into a Palagian attempt to willfully feel what I was suppose to feel and do what I was suppose to do.
Perfectionism is a heavy weight for a pre-adolescent to carry, before one can distinguish between healthy sexual longing verses lust centric and hyper-sexualized desire to possess another as pleasure. Looking back upon my earliest addictive sensual patterns nurtured in cycles of self-stimulation or PG-13 pics, shame, sadness, altar trips, promises to not feel or increase the feelings at least, focuses on scripture or mission, hard work or play, avoidance of the feelings or triggers, eventual release from guilt; until.... next time; which might be days or months or years.
I finally see that much of my religious experiences, though genuine, were actually negative reinforcers; distorting both faith and my own sense of being human. Like a trans child or adolescent who feel 'out of phase' with their body, I have felt out of phase with the church's expectations on one side and the perceived damned world of humanity beyond the church, simultaneously. The problem wasn't simply the church, or the world, or belief systems, or the promise of the glory, or being human, or the very real broken spaces in relationships, or my own mis-perceptions—or, in a measure, all of these. At the center it included my inability and at times lack of desire to relax into my humanity aware of the pitfalls—graced as one surrounded by angels, humans, the church, cultural icons (like Star Trek) and God—in communal, frighteningly wonderful, spiritual, mystical and human Presence.
Stated differently, the problem is not simply Augustine or the deep, even tender awareness, that we who are human are deeply broken; systemically and personally so. Rather it is the attempt to believe and live "perfection" apart from the only actual source of the goodness and charisms (glory) we seek.
In vision, Plagius was not wrong back in the day, just as so much of Star Trek universe is not wrong in modernity. We are created to feel, be human in all its vulnerable majesty. Nor was Augustine wrong for pointing out what ought to be obvious. Our glory, our majesty is derived, reflected, participatory; just as it was for Jesus, the human-Devine Son of the Father. “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began" (John 17:3-5 NIV).
What I have needed, what you need, God has given, though I've not seen the half of it clearly. Still, from within II Peter 1: 3-11 & John 1: 1-24 and God helping, I will lean into three realities from today's text.
God's Glory
“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life
through our knowledge of him
who called us by his own glory and goodness.”
II Peter 1: 3
“Now this is eternal life: that they know you,
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
John 17:3
1. In Christ all the human brokenness, the mental and spiritual wounds that flow from our first human parents to each of us are covered, atoned, forgiven; not for me and you alone but all humanity.
God's Essential Promise
“Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises,
so that through them you may participate in the divine nature,
having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”
II Peter 1:4
““My prayer is not for them alone.
I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,
that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am,
and to see my glory, the glory you have given me
because you loved me before the creation of the world.”
John 17: 20-21, 24
2. This kindly heart of God in the gracious entanglement of love extends to each/all of us and our own chosen sins, provisionally. God need only our grace assisted human response to be born anew into God's Kingdom, even now filling the earth.
Becoming Human
Making Real our Ability to fully Reflect The Father, Son, and Spirit
“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.”
II Peter 1:5-7
“For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
"Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.””
John 17:19, 25-26
3. Growing up human is absolutely dependent upon entering into, partaking of, and living out the Divine Nature made available in Jesus own humanity, with him—in The Father. 4
The charisms or gifts of The Spirit in Faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, mutual affection, and love allow us an ever increasing ability to inter act with and know The Father.
The invitation to be fully human, at its best, joins these two ancient voices of the Church—freedom to mirror God's creative, intelligent, almost frightening discovery of the cosmos united in the reverence that confesses our creaturly vulnerabilities, including our tendency to eat the apple, knowing good through the taste of evil. The ability to live confessionally with Augustine is rooted—not by claiming the Tree of Life as a right of humanity—but in the self-giving sacrificial love of the human Jesus, Divinely rooting us in a restored garden.
In Christ's Cosmic garden there emerges in us the awareness of salvation that includes a heart purified in its affections and filled with God's restorative love. Herein lies my own deepest need of a continual and thorough washing away of my inordinate sensual hunger for sexual touch (Desire, not acting out). Like a reoccurring nightmare, lust holds on; no longer the immediate threat, certainly not the drugged medicating longings of a soul adrift, hiding, alone and full of shame. Thank God that addictive space, a living, lonely, nightmare is at last dead.
In its place has come a relaxed and gracious open space between my family and myself. My first draft of this blog began on the 870th day of living soberly, including a subtle yet real ability to briefly hug my wife or slide my arm around her shoulder, being responded to in the language of her body leaning in. Laughter comes easily; even sarcasm about my betrayal is occasionally allowed inside a knowing smile.
Along side is a renewed sense of joy in Christ's church, living sadly apart from my family as I attend my own church in Renton. Still I'm surrounded by an older community of friends who respect my honest confessional presence, laugh with me, listen with interest to my theological insight, giving and receiving friendship as though I never failed God, my family and God's church—yet knowing I have.
Yet the scandal remains, inevitably. This side of "the renewal all things" there is no turning history back to well before day 1, when the downward slide first reawakened, following my pastoral ministry—ever so subtly, slowly, intermittently until gathering mass like a snowball running downhill.The scandal lives in a thousand losses, hints, silent unspoken gaps. A grandchildren asking, "Pappa, will you ever be un-fired?" Honestly, it is as it should be for The Creator' at the center of all is moral, God's holiness penetrating all.
The worst part of this new life of thorns is the sensitivity I feel to the depth of damage to my own human spirit, my heart and imagination. The blood of Christ cleanses thoroughly in a relational sense, but the actual, deep, contrite repentance seems a task incomplete. God's gift of Pelagian human freedom and Augustinian confessional openness are present, each a deepening and expanding gift of grace; The communal embrace of The Father-Son-Spirit. It will reach a kind of fullness I have no doubt, but only in the unforced rhythms of grace. I am content.
Day 1,007 has begun.
Blessings! Terry
Teaching Resource on II Peter 1: 3-5 ..
With devotional reflections I often begin developing lesson plans for teaching. This is incomplete, but has some good material & you are welcome to use.
1a,b,c Definitions:
1a Augustine—Renowned theologian, writer, preacher who as importantly as anyone shapes Catholic and Christian thought about humans being happy only as they love objects worthy of humanity; God being of ultimate worth. He defined the human delimma in terms of our first parents originating sin, directly effectng the nature and person of every human descendent; such that the will and ability to choose the good, to love was not posible without God's immediate and special grace (Presence) reawakening and deepening the image of God necessary to being fully human.
1b Palagius—Significant Theologian at the time of Augustine, who in direct rebutal to Augustine argued for human freedom. Humans as sinner, and certainly impacted by humanity's bad and sinful choices, nevertheless remain free to choose to do good and hence be good. Salvation was a matter of choice, of being orientd toward the good and made possible by God's common grace gifted in nature and revelation, especially by example in Christ.
1c Armenius—Refined Pelagian theology, rejected as heresy by the Church, emphasizing with Pelagius human freedom, but enabled by the grace filled Presence of God actiing on behalf of and within every human allowing for rational and loving choices. Armenius further accepted Augustine's understanding of sin as inherited, affecting human ability to freely love by simple human choice or respond to God's saving initiative. However, Armenius emphasized salvation in relational terms and affirmed God's grace gifting humans to fully respond and participate in our salvation.
2a Star Trek: The Original Series) Bread and Circuses: Season 2; Episode 25
2b Phantom Knight "Star Trek: The Original Series - Words of the Son (Bread & Circuses)
3 The Borg—a cybernetic race known for assimilating other species into their collective
hive mind; becoming Earth's most frightening enemy. In assimilation they would upgrade humans with cybernetic implants in place of arms, eyes, etc.
I use them in this article to represent any person, idol, pattern than de-humanizes us, seeking to replace humanity with a "empowering" power or place or relationship, not in God's unique creaturely design.
The Borg Cube is almost a perfect image of Heaven as envisioned by St John of the Revelation; serving as a 'type' of alternate spiritual reality, part human, part demonic, don't you think?
5 Partaking of the Divine Nature: I explore this creaturly, humanizing and inter-participatory relation of exchanging our broken, wounded, arrogant de-humanizing spaces with the Divine goodness and glory of the Father-Son-Spirit in my book "Cross Purposes: ncarnational Atonement, Renewal & Communal Salvation"
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