Thing two: as to friends not fitting into any church you’ve ever been to, maybe you haven’t been to the right churches. Just throwing that out there.

Thing three: If you find God only in what you are passionate about (the implied reductionism in the story you quoted), God is not actually anyone. If God has no absolute transcendence, then his immanence means nothing either. If God is not fundamentally other, “Emanuel” is meaningless, and God is not with us, because he is not anyone. If you find God anywhere besides Jesus, you have not found God but his ghost, for He is truly dead, and still in the grave.

That being said, I think you are right that we don’t know all the ways to find Jesus, and perhaps we can find Jesus without knowing it. I’m fairly confident that you still believe that Jesus is the only true God, and that you wouldn’t disagree with my previous paragraph. But I think that your language, while not categorically wrong, is unhelpful.

It is less offensive, certainly, to say that God can be found everywhere. And it is true, in some senses. But it is also very much not true in many senses. Many people are very passionate about making money–but God is not in that. Many people are passionate about the Dallas Cowboys–but God is not in that. Many people are passionate about a particular political ideology–but God is not in that. No, those things are idols, which are deaf and dumb and lifeless, and will never, no, never satisfy. We may not know all the ways to find God, but we do know many ways that do NOT lead to God. And we know those things because the true God, who is a Person, revealed them to us.

God reveals himself to us in nature, in people, in feelings, and most directly, through his Word. Jesus Christ is the manifestation and revelation of God. To believe this is what it means to be Christian.

There is SO much that I want to say, but this comment is already way too long. I want to talk about how loving God sometimes looks like loving people through caring for them when they’re sick, sometimes looks like eating apple pie with contentment in your heart, and sometimes looks like singing worship songs alongside fellow redeemed-ones. I want to talk about how God reveals himself in different ways. I want to talk about how we experience the spiritual usually through physical means–though sometimes those physical means are bypassed. But that will have to wait.

I started reading this book yesterday and it’s brilliant as a non-Christian perspective from a really smart, well-read man about mythology and how the ‘mythologies’ of the different religions inter-relate. It’s fascinating, I can hardly put it down.

Anyway, I think this is a really intriguing quote. I have a very good friend here who believes that you find God in what you are passionate about, and this is probably why I felt the need to post this. And, while what he says and what this quote is saying don’t exactly line up perfectly, they both remind me of this, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

I’m just going to say this, because even though I know I’m going to get flack for it probably, I believe it: We don’t know all the ways to find God. Maybe it’s the Lewis fanboy in me (in regards to the judgement in The Last Battle and Calormene soldier who gets to Aslan’s country), maybe it’s the fact that I have so many friends now who I love who would never fit into any church that I’ve ever been to, or maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Love Wins, The Shack, Donald Miller and Anne Lamott and getting more out of them than I’ve ever gotten out of most Christian literature, but this is what I’ve come to.

…

Discuss.

Also, you need to read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making. Also, I don’t think people use the phrase “JPM” seriously. Also, your last complaint is really just a complaint against pop (in the sense of “popular” and “mainstream”) in general. Except CCM is a decade or so behind, or to be generous, 4-5 years.

But yeah, just for the record, my major problem with CCM is that it emphasizes the false dichotomy between spirituality and everything else in life, when in reality they are the same thing. Everything we do is steeped in spirituality, and to say that only music that has been deemed “Christian” can effect us positively spiritually is false. Obviously there is music that does the opposite–effects you negatively spiritually, but our ridiculous desire to define everything, in my opinion, does more harm than good.

Also, your last paragraph FTW. This, “because life does not consist of only books and words but of relationships and conflict and pain and joy,” made me want to fist-bump the world. And thinking about people legitimately using the phrase JPM made we want to spit.

Aaaaaand, one more thing. The way that CCM is produced that is played on Christian radio I think reveals a general problem in Church-thought; “Hey! People will like this if we glaze it over with effects and reverb! Power chords and simple drum beats make everything better!” That’s my metaphor for the day.