I'm processing the lack of response as a response itself with several possible implications which I am processing within the larger picture of our respective views and approaches to God. I will share my thoughts here about this as I feel it's important for both of us to understand.
There was an interesting article entitled
Understanding Trump I read recently before the Trump election here in the states talking from a Cognitive Sciences perspective on political divides. He, and others, attribute how we respond to political parties to how we were reared in either the Strict Father family home, or the Nurturant Parent family home. Though I'm not talking politics specifically here, I feel this understanding translates quite well at a basic level into our religious views of God, and our subsequent understandings of the Bible and its contents, which our discussion has been a marvelous demonstration of.
In my case, I was raised in a Nurturant Parent home. I experienced unconditional love by my parents. Though when I was a child my parents were certainly the authorities I needed to heed for my own safety and protection as a vulnerable youth, it was never the kind of home where I was, or felt at anytime threatened by them. Dad was never someone who threatened us with harm. Ever. Period. No belts, no hitting, no yelling assertions of "I'm in charge here!". Yet guidance was present. Protection was present. I felt no fear of them but rather an invisible backdrop of unconditional love. It was never about living up to their expectation that earned me their love.
As a teen in finding my own path in life I moved into other directions that were not so good for me, which my parents were unaware of at the time. This led to me creating for myself an existential crisis in trying to find out who I was. The result of that ultimately led to a cry for help out into the Deep, against the face of death itself. It was in that instant that I met God in a moment of utter timelessness, "face to face", as it were. It was staring into the face of the Infinite which held and embraced me in Infinite Love, Infinite Grace, Infinite Compassion, Infinite Awareness, and Infinite Knowledge. I saw my entire life played out before my eyes with a knowledge that I was never alone, that this Grace, this Love, was always there despite my unawareness of it as I lived out the story of my life.
In that experience, there was no judgement, no "measuring up". That would be impossible in our efforts as humans. God could "see" these shortcoming we as humans judge ourselves by, but I could see in that moment that is not the eyes with which God sees. God "sees" with Love. It is the "thought" of God, not the judgement that we judge ourselves by. I have a saying I came up with that becomes for me a standard for myself to live up to which reflects that exact realization. "If we accept ourselves with the acceptance of God, then we become able to accept ourselves to God." In other words, we need to learn to love ourselves as God loves us. Then we do that, which we can, we become Free to love another with that self same Love that God loves us with.
I feel my experience of God, in no small way was helped facilitated by my home life with parents who were the nurturant parent family. God did not judge me, but through Compassion "told" me "come up hither". It was an invitation to know that Freedom, in God. A release from my own "sin" as it were, to realize I do not need to live in the darkness of my own self-judgments which ultimately separate all of us from the Love of God in our own thoughts and beliefs about ourselves first, and God in relation to us. We create our own expulsions from that Garden, as it were in this.
Now, on the other hand, I imagine those in the strict father family have a different experience or interpretation, or translation of God. God with a belt in his hand demanding strict obedience under threat of severe punishment. That type of parental family life does in fact bear a great deal of resemblance to the God portrayed in the Old Testament, as it's called. This would not be unexpected considering the period of history and the culture out of which these ideas and views of God were expressed in scripture were very much Patriarchal systems! They were very hierarchical with male Authorities at the top. Strict compliance and obedience was the expectation, and death or shunning or banishment the consequence of failure to conform to the rules of the Authority over you.
In the article I linked to where he touches on the strict father family, he states,
In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. Many conservative spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father’s authority, and are strict in those realms of family life that they are in charge of. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good.
These types of experiences of our parents will of course quite naturally translate into our views and expectations of what God must be to us, since God is the Absolute itself "above us", as we see God in some sort of hierarchical ordering. I often tease people about the nature of God is that we as humans, especially in our Western Christian culture, project upon God our human experiences of life and reality and create God in our own individual and cultural image making him our "Sky Parent". And while that does have certain truth and value to us, it is ultimately our own human way of looking at and relating ourselves to the Ultimate, or the Infinite which we call God. It is a reflection of ourselves putting a Face of that which is wholly beyond such conceptualizations.
So to the Bible verses you quote from. Yes, of course, those largely reflect that very human interpretation of God. But God is beyond those understandings that we as humans project upon "him". The Old Testament as I mentioned is very much a product of a culture modeled after strict hierarchical patriarchal systems. The fact God is a masculine "Him" rather than a feminine "Her" or non-gender "It", is clear evidence of this. But in my opinion what you see happening in the New Testament with Jesus in particular in many places is an evolution of that strict or narrow image of God as purely external Authority, to a God understood with the heart. Not a God whose law is chiseled in hard stone, but written and being written in hearts of love. That's a shift, in my opinion, towards the nurturant parent image of God, loosening the strict do or die image of the strict father view of God.
You can of course cite that you see the nurturant parent image of God in the OT, and you can cite passages which speak of God in the strict father image in the NT. While those voices, words spoken by Paul, or attributed to Jesus himself, are present, it is the overall center of gravity image of God that is shifting. Of course you will see in a collective whole different voices at different times in history, but it's the
center of gravity of the whole that I am looking at. And clearly, the NT God is the God of Love, of Grace, and Forgiveness. And this stands in contrast to the OT. That's the shift I am talking about. I can cite numerous passages which contrast the two "dispensations" as they frame it.
And so today, like then, you have those who cite verses to support their image of God. In my case, I hear the nurturant parent, where unconditional love and acceptance despite our own lack of it in ourselves is extended at all times to all us. God is always there, and never has been anywhere but fully here with me. In your case, it is a God you must fear reprisals from if you don't do the right thing and obey the Gospel to "get saved", or to be accepted into the family, as would fit the strict father family model. We have two very different ways in which we approach the Divine, and I believe they are reflective of how we have in fact been programmed in ourselves through family and cultural life. To cite "scriptural authority" is also a reflection of that on your part, whereas for myself I understand it as reflective of a human expression of our reach to find and understand the Divine and to put some form of a face on it.
As far as fundamentalism goes, I want to make this statement here that I do not believe the strict-father image of God is what makes someone a fundamentalist. Not at all. It goes outside of that. I do not view the writers of the NT, or the OT for that matter as fundamentalists. Most certainly Jesus was NOT a fundamentalist! I'll swing back around later to talk about that, and explain why I call fundamentalism a type of pathology. But for the moment I will say it has to do with it being a reaction against something, and that the self-definition prevents it from seeing beyond its own ideals as absolute truth.
It becomes cancerous in that way, eating the healthy cells of the body to keep itself alive. You can have healthy forms of religion, and unhealthy forms. Fundamentalism is a mentality that you can see in any belief system, even atheism. I'll get to that later. But at least for now, I thought it was fair to address the verses you cited in how I view and understand them, and to acknowledge why or how people understand God as you do, without it being a judgment against them. But I do not believe telling children they are going to hell or at risk of that is healthy for them or helpful in them developing a healthy relationship with God or themselves.
