iGod, Part 3 – The Practice of the Proxy

We train the new believer in the practice of God-by-proxy from the first day of Gospel witness.

We evangelize by telling the gospel story of Jesus to the unsaved. We encourage them to read the New Testament, and to pray that God would open their eyes. We promise them that if they ask God’s forgiveness and invite Him into their hearts, they will be saved, and they will become children of God. We assure them that the Holy Spirit will reveal Himself to them and show them the Truth of the Scriptures.

And so the sleight of hand begins even before day zero of the Christian life. The proselyte need not be concerned about judging whether the gospel is actually true. Intuition and a sense of felt truth is enough, because neither the intuition nor the feeling is to be regarded as human. You are, instead, entitled to regard your human faculties, feelings, and intuitions about the Gospel as God talking. That felt truth is not a mental sense, but a God sense.

But it is actually worse than that, as the process is bedecked with deplorable asymmetry. Doubts and disbelief are still considered human, and for that we prescribe prayer, the vocalization of a desire to believe. The equations may be laid out thusly:

Doubt and disbelief about the Gospel = the flesh and human reason.

A felt sense that the Gospel is true = God’s revealing to the heart.

For most people, neither appraisal goes much beyond a superficial intuitive sense. And though the same intuitive certainties would, as often as not, lead to ruin in either business or betting, we are meant to bet that that is how God does business. Uninformed and quite normal human intuition is thereby partitioned into artificial halves as a standard procedure in the recruitment process. The sword falls, cleaving the mind and leaving it in a self-empowered but hemorrhaging schism. The one half remains “human”, while the other is stamped as “divine” – or at least, as running on divine fuel.

So part of the Gospel message is simple self-empowerment. Part of the package rests in the new permission to think of one’s feelings and intuition as coming from a non-human Source. We accept the gospel by faith knowledge. And faith knowledge is simply a truth within our minds that we insist comes from above, otherwise known as God-by-proxy. And so we brand that little piece of ourselves that we like to call God.

But it is a splinter in the mind, tying forever one hand behind the believer’s back. Feelings and intuition – notorious and persistent in their failures to discern fact from fiction – ascend to the throne as the hallowed conduits for the divine. More determined thought and examination are relegated as second class citizens in the realm of the soul. Just as Cortez sank his ships, the believer prunes the organ that could actually navigate a way out of the smiling fog. And he only departs from the island by way of hazard, labor, or disaster, and that only in a cobbled and humbler vessel.