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God and testosterone
Aug. 17th, 2008 02:46 amIt's rather late, and I'm sat up listening to Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable programme. I've been following their podcasts since I was on the programme a while back. The chap on the latest programme (MP3 link), Jonathan Castro, believes in Christianity but doesn't have the relationship with God which he's been expecting, and sounds a bit fed up about it.
There was some discussion of what the relationship Castro expected was. One caller blamed the excesses of the charismatic movement (check out the responses for some other musical variants) for the expectation that the relationship would be an intense emotional experience. The Christians in the studio disagreed that this was what Castro expected. They thought the sort of relationship he meant was like a relationship with a spouse, which has emotional component without usually giving you the full Benny Hinn thing. Christians like the spousal analogy, but I think it's pretty hopeless: they're using a special meaning of the word relationship which encompasses warm feelings without any communication from the object of desire. I think it'd probably be more appropriate to describe Christians as God's stalkers.
Listening to the programme, I wonder why Castro's still going to all this trouble. In the comments on this exchristian.net article from 2007 he sounds like he's already given up, but he turns up on Premier sounding like he hasn't quite let go. If I were him there's one obvious conclusion I'd've come to about whether a there's a God who wants a relationship with me. I wanted to yell this spoiler at him.
Still, he has gone to the trouble, so I'll add to the standard questions I usually ask of people who say they have a relationship with God: what of Castro and people like him, the earnest seekers who don't find?
One of Castro's criticisms of the churches he attended was that they were too emasculating. He turns up in the comments on the BBC's article about Geezers for Jesus ("to the geezers, I become as a geezer, init", as St Paul might have said), mentioning charismatic worship songs. Interestingly, Matt Redman, perpetrator of many of the "Jesus is my boyfriend" choruses familiar to anyone who's been to Soul Survivor, agrees that worship songs aren't for the blokes.
There seems to have been a reaction against this emasculation of the church, with Americans writing books about how Jesus wants Christian men to be Iron John.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
robhu recently wrote a scathing review of one of them, John Eldredge's Wild at Heart. I've talked about my own experiences as a nerdy CU bloke in the comments.
There was some discussion of what the relationship Castro expected was. One caller blamed the excesses of the charismatic movement (check out the responses for some other musical variants) for the expectation that the relationship would be an intense emotional experience. The Christians in the studio disagreed that this was what Castro expected. They thought the sort of relationship he meant was like a relationship with a spouse, which has emotional component without usually giving you the full Benny Hinn thing. Christians like the spousal analogy, but I think it's pretty hopeless: they're using a special meaning of the word relationship which encompasses warm feelings without any communication from the object of desire. I think it'd probably be more appropriate to describe Christians as God's stalkers.
Listening to the programme, I wonder why Castro's still going to all this trouble. In the comments on this exchristian.net article from 2007 he sounds like he's already given up, but he turns up on Premier sounding like he hasn't quite let go. If I were him there's one obvious conclusion I'd've come to about whether a there's a God who wants a relationship with me. I wanted to yell this spoiler at him.
Still, he has gone to the trouble, so I'll add to the standard questions I usually ask of people who say they have a relationship with God: what of Castro and people like him, the earnest seekers who don't find?
One of Castro's criticisms of the churches he attended was that they were too emasculating. He turns up in the comments on the BBC's article about Geezers for Jesus ("to the geezers, I become as a geezer, init", as St Paul might have said), mentioning charismatic worship songs. Interestingly, Matt Redman, perpetrator of many of the "Jesus is my boyfriend" choruses familiar to anyone who's been to Soul Survivor, agrees that worship songs aren't for the blokes.
There seems to have been a reaction against this emasculation of the church, with Americans writing books about how Jesus wants Christian men to be Iron John.
robhu recently wrote a scathing review of one of them, John Eldredge's Wild at Heart. I've talked about my own experiences as a nerdy CU bloke in the comments.
