Human Structures in Review

We have spent three months on human structures.
In March we looked at Job, false structures and started talking about order vs chaos or Apollonian vs Dionysian and even touched on yin/yang.
In April we looked at the Wild at Heart phenomenon and how it has affected the church and perpetuated a not always female friendly male vs female structure. We also looked at the tiny boxes or structures that small-minded men build for women using religion to beat them into down into those boxes.
In May, we looked at big-hearted men and contrasted the loving freedom they offer to women with the limiting, restrictive structures that small mind men uphold for their sisters. We also did a rather long series on Chimananda Adichie's "Single Story" and how this applied to human structure.

Perhaps I've spend an inordinate amount of time on human structures. If so, it is only because I want people to start discerning the existence of these human structures and begin to hold them up to the light of scripture in order to debunk the false structures.

But this month, the lovely month of June, we will turn our attention on some of the ways that God structures things and how they differ from human structures.

And here I will leave you a verse.

Isaiah 55:8 For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Neither are your ways My ways," declares the Lord.
Vs 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, SO are My ways higher than your ways, And my thoughts than your thoughts.

The Single Story and Structure

One of the reasons that I spent so much time on the Single Story is because it was a new way of looking at what we have been discussing here.

Whether fiction or non-fiction, a story is a structure. It has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. And stories have always been one of the ways we have used to make sense in a world that often doesn't make sense. Stories help us to find or create order out of our chaos.

As mentioned before, structures, including stories, are not bad in and of themselves. We human beings crave structure for the sake of security. But structures, even decent structures, can be used or recreated into something limiting and abusive.

The forcing of religious, gender and family structures within Christianity has crossed the line and become abusive. They have been constructed by those who cling to the past and fear the future. They have been constructed by those who worship structure and find their safety in enforcing structures rather than in seeking and following God, the Chief Architect and Builder. [Hebrews 11:10 New American Standard]

My desire is to seek God and to find Him and to learn what is important to Him and to follow the structures He lays out.

One of the best places in the Bible to learn about the structures and order that are truly important to God is in the words of Jesus in red. And a good place to start for the weary is in Matthew chapter eleven.

28 “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. 30 For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

The structures of men are exhausting.
The structures of God bring rest to our souls.

The Single Story and Christian Marriage

Years ago I heard a lady speak of a time when she and her husband were going through marriage problems. When she went for counseling, the pastoral staff told her that she needed to go back and submit and that would somehow solve the problem.

So she did. But things didn't get better.

Then she prayed, which she should have done in the first place. When she prayed, she felt an impression concerning the problem which she had not thought of which led to a different solution. When she applied the solution, it worked.

The lady telling the story had no issue with submission, she didn't even have an attitude toward the pastoral staff and their single Story Solution. She was simply expressing the importance of going to God rather than men when looking for help because men can't see the whole story but God can.

Just the other day I was on a blog talking about something anonymously, mentioning difficulty in an area of my marriage. Some guy who knew that I leaned egal felt the need to tell me the reason for our issues. He suggest that the reason there was difficulty in my marriage was because I had 'wrestled' my husband's rightful position of 'authority' away from him in the family order which set all thing askew and topsy turvy. He recommended that I needed to set aside my egal views and submit as the Bible prescribed so that all things would re-align and come into a proper and divine order.

Her again is the Single Story cropping up where it doesn't belong.

Marriage is complicated and has many stories. Yet some people reduce it down to hierarchy, order, and a certain structure and make it all about who is the boss. They miss the fact that perhaps the advice they give may be wrong because it has nothing to do with the original problem. And they cannot even fathom that the advice they give may actually make a bad situation worse. The reason they cannot see it is because they cannot see pass the Single Story they have written or have been taught that marriage is.

And herein lies the danger of the Single Story. People and relationships cannot be reduced down to roles and rules, yet this is what is done in many Christian circles.

They reduce marriage and all the problems in marriage to different versions of the Single Story. And since it is the men who traditionally have been in power over scripture, translation, and dividing the Word, these men have written a certain story that that best suits them. If something is wrong in a marriage it must somehow be the woman's fault. Once she has tried everything to be perfect to the satisfaction of the men in power, then perhaps they might consider that submission isn't the solution.

And this is why women need to wise up and go directly to the Source concerning their story. God is the Author and Finisher of our faith, not men. Men don't see the many stories involved. They focus in on the one they like or is most important to them. Their view is finite. God's is infinite and He sees the end from the beginning and all the stories involved in the person of you.

People of the Spirit Wind

John 3:8 The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.

This scripture is found in the same chapter and same conversation as the famous John 3:16 verse and where Jesus talks about being born again.

And if this verse doesn't speak of the freedom of God's people, I don't know what does. The wind blows where it wills. This is what the people who are born of the Spirit should be like. They are to be free.

This concept is extremely frightening to people who embrace rigid structure. This appears to be a frightening thought to many men when they think of their women, mothers, wives, daughters. What are they afraid of? That their women will abandon them? Fly away like the wind? No wonder some men feel compelled to control. They fear abandonment if their women are given 'too much' freedom.

It's funny. I never hear preachers preach on this verse. You hear about the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus about being born again and about God loving the world so much that He gave...

But who ever talks about those born of the Spirit and how they are like the wind?
Are there no messages about being as free as the wind because men are afraid people will be gone with the wind?

There is some concern over this. After all, wasn't it here, on this blog, that I linked a review for Wild at Heart by a woman whose husband read the book, then he was gone with the wind?

Yes. Radical freedom can be a frightening thing. Perhaps this is why preachers don't preach it. Perhaps this is why, instead of freedom and liberty for the captives, structure and roles and 'divine' order are taught. It's because of fear.

And people are being crushed under the weight of so much order keeping people in their places. People of the Spirit wind were not created to bear such heavy loads. You can't fly free when you are overburdened by structure and order.

People of the Spirit wind need to be released from the oppressive structures of religion so that they can mount up with eagles wings when they wait on the Lord.

I'm Not Alone/Order vs Chaos

I guess others on Blogger are also dealing with this paragraph crunching monster. I've had several suggestions and am going to try one today.

One of the overviews of the Order vs Chaos thinking within the church that I want to look at is the Puritan view. The Puritans and other like groups are rigid and structured and lean heavily on the need for order and light. They shun any disorder and unorthodox creativity as devious and dangerous. The witch trials would be and extreme example.

There is a reason the term Puritanical was coined. This way of thinking is so rigid and so oppressive that people wilted under it until they could handle it no more, then they rebelled, either internally or externally. Those that rebel are looked upon as evil, dark.

The order and structure becomes the god and is cemented as God's divine order.
Women are particularly feared in these systems by the men in charge because women often approach things differently. And instead of being given space for this, the men of these systems are threatened by this because it doesn't line up with their view of God's order. So anything different than the rigid structure is viewed as apostate. Any form of freedom, even freedom inspired by the Holy Spirit, is squashed.

I heard the story of a Mennonite woman who began to seek God and find freedom in her own home. She did nothing out of order concerning her sect, she just started getting happy in the Spirit and in the knowledge of Jesus. After a while the elders of the church became uncomfortable and went to the woman's husband and ordered him to bring his wife back into submission.

The good news to this story was that it was too late. The husband could see that what his wife was pursuing was of God and in fact had benefited from this freedom himself. He left that Mennonite church and took his family to one that was experiencing a revival.

Here is a post on No Longer Quivering about a gal who suffered from a marriage to a mentally unstable, rigid-structure thinker. The paragraph I'd like people to note is tenth from the bottom (believe me, it was easier to count that way).
[Also note that the husband in this story, with all his rigid structuring upon structure was really hiding a dark secret that he ultimately would not be able to hide or defeat with all his complicated structures.]

http://nolongerquivering.com/2011/03/25/justice-is-no-lady-chapter-5-in-pursuit-of-biblical-theology/

What I Said Was...

Since my last Blogger post is all messed up, I thought I'd repeat something here that is at the end of the previous crunched together post.

Apollonian is always about light, structure, order, and is always portrayed as male. Dionysian can be chaos and negative. Or it can be freedom from over structured repression making it good. And even though Dionysian is a man, he had some 'feminine qualities.

I've seen people claiming that anarchy is good and believe what they mean is freedom from oppressive rule. Dionysian can also be portrayed as nature loving and happy dancing out in the forest with flower garlands on their heads. This is also generally viewed as positive but can also be viewed as negative.

I'm saying all this to point out that Apollonian/Dionysian can be portrayed as order/chaos or oppression/freedom or structured/freestyle or stiff/creative or any other number of things. It really is all quite squishy and mailable in the hands of whoever wants to tell the story or use it for their own purposes.

And again, for the sake of labeling and understanding our world, these constructs aren't necessarily bad. But they are not suitable foundations for building doctrine. And this is what I want to get into in future posts.

Order vs Chaos Recap

We've talked about order vs chaos here and I'd like to move on to more specific and general examples, but first feel the need to pull a couple things together and clarify something in particular.

We mentioned in the March 4th post the story of Job and how his friends tried to make sense of a situation that doesn't make sense and pointed out that it is human nature to try to do this. The story of Job happened long before the Greeks came along with their Apollo and Dionysus and even longer ago than when the terms and philosophy of Apollonian and Dionysian were coined by Nietzsche in the late 1800s.

Nietzsche was only labeling what he saw as the push and pull of the opposing forces that people have always seen like in Job's case. (We talked about the Philosophy in the March 7th post.)

We also compare the Apollonian and Dionysian concept to the concept of yin and yang in our March 12 th post. We talked about how sometimes good and bad are attributed to Apollonian or Dionysian or both or how they can just sort of balance each other and how this is pretty arbitrary and left to the discretion of the one who applies it.

One other thing I want to bring up is that, whereas Apollonian is nearly always about light and structure, Dionysian can be about either chaos and somewhat negative, or about freedom from restriction and even tyranny and this is always good. I've seen some people claim that anarchy is good, and it appears that what those people want is freedom from oppression.

Dionysian is also portrayed as nature loving, peace loving, all happy and dancing out in the forest with garlands on their heads. This is also viewed, generally, as positive. But just as much, it can be viewed as negative. I guess what I'm saying is that is it a bit mixed up. Apollonian/Dionysian can be viewed as, order/chaos or oppression/freedom or structure/freestyle or any other number of things. And again, for the sake of labeling and understanding our world, these things don't have to be viewed as anything more than description or light categorizing. But these thought processes are not a foundation on which to build doctrine. And this is what I'm wanting to deal with a bit in future posts.

Order vs Chaos in Pop Culture

The funny thing about order vs chaos and the human condition is how much it pops up in entertainment. The opposing forces of Apollonian and Dionysian fighting for power and/or balance crop up all over the place.

The girls and I were just watching Jurassic park the other night and sure enough, there it was. Though I was somewhat aware of it before, only after thinking about it for this blog did I realize how blatant it really was.

John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park, represents the Apollonian side. He's dressed in white and has complete control (or so he thinks) of this amusement park with electric fences and safety precautions.

Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and dressed in black, is spokes person for the Dionysus side which is actually represented by the Dinosaurs. He is the one who keeps talking about the chaos theory.

In this scenario, the Dionysian is not necessarily bad. It is just nature doing what nature does. And when that nature is as big and unpredictable as dinosaurs, it is the Apollonian that comes off as in the wrong for trying to create and control what cannot be controlled so easily.

Another obvious place that speaks of the struggle between chaos and control is the TV series and movie "Get Smart". The opposing forces actually bear the names. The good guys work for "Control" and the bad guys work for "Kaos". And in this scenario control is obviously good while chaos is obviously bad.

Remember the old Star Trek from the 60s or at least have you seen a few reruns? Did you know that Captain Kirk had Apollonian and Dionysian advisers. Dr. McCoy was Dionysian and ran on emotion and intuition, whereas Mr. Spock was strictly Apollonian in nature always concerned with logic and reason. And Kirk was always trying to find the balance between them. In this case, then, there are no good guys or bad guys, only a striving for balance between the two poles.

Others who were influenced by the concept of Apollonian vs Dionysian include Stephan King, Ayn Rand, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, and the band Rush

The point of this post is to make people aware of how our culture is influenced by this thinking and how WE are influenced by this thinking and how we may apply it to our lives whether we are aware of it or not. Again remember Job and how his friends worked so hard to Apollonize or use Apollonianisms to order and explain Job's unexplainable chaos. It is human nature to do this. But we must remember, our nature is flawed and fallen and we are but finite living in a universe much bigger than we are. We must take care and not use Apollonianisms when really we ought to be seeking God.

Seeking Order in a Chaotic World

I love talking to my friend, Jane. She stimulates my thinking beyond where I would normally go. Under my "Men Defining Sweet for Women" post we had a lively discussion about Greek myths and how we have inherited some of the ways they think and some of their attitudes in Western culture and how some of that thinking has infiltrated the church.

She brought up the Greek god, Dionysus and some of the debasing rituals that women had to go through to become part of this cult and how that relates today to the porn industry and porn entering the church via preachers who preach on sex and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in the marriage bed. She also brought up the link between porn, debasing women, and the teaching of strict gender roles and hierarchy within marriage and church. You can see her comments and her two links under that February 21 post.

And as I said, her comments and connections starts my brain up and I begin to make connections of my own. Because once a person brings up Dionysus, the Greek god of "wine, music, ecstasy, and intoxication," the first thing that jumps into my head is Dionysus's brother, Apollo, the Greek god of the "sun, dreams, reason, and plastic visual arts."

And the reason I associate these two gods together is because of a college course that I took back in the 80s on Aesthetics that used these two gods as opposing forces in the movements of art and music.

Here is a short Wiki explanation of this philosophy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian

Now, I actually have more to say on the push and pull of these opposing forces and how they relate to art, music, and literature. But before I get into any of that, if I ever get into that, let me point out how much this thinking affects us.

If Dionysus represents chaos and lack of order, then Apollo represents structure and order. And we humans have a tendency to crave order. Chaos and being unsure of things or not understanding things stresses us out. We always have to come up with reasons for things. And I've noted that Art, Science, Religion, and Literature are all means of making sense out of a world that doesn't always makes sense.

Let's look back at Job whom we talked about last Friday, March 4th. Job's friends suffered from an intense desire to make sense out of a situation that made no sense. From their limited understanding of God and our fallen world, they tried to superimpose reason or order on the chaos that Job suffered. But their reason and order were terribly inadequate and faulty. We can learn from their mistake and not jump to conclusions about situations that don't make sense. That is one of the things that prayer is for. It is finite and limited us reaching out to the infinite and unlimited God who knows the end from the beginning.

The infinite God did eventually answer Job. We can learn this from Job's story as well. There is an answer. One that we may not be able to see but that God sees plainly. This is what faith is for. Knowing that there is a God and that there is One who is in control and Who can answer and Who will answer. And it is God who can bring order to our chaos. But we must make sure that we are actually seeking God's answers and not what finite men with a Western Civilization Apollonian drive say that the answers are.