Episode 018 – How did you see God as a Pentecostal?

25 June 2021

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

 

B: Well, gidday T, how are we? Episode 18.

T: Yeah, I know. Can you believe we’ve come this far?

B: Happy 18th.

T: Happy 18th. Now I get to drink!

B: You do. Drink away. Well, last week we spoke about prophecy. This week we’re going to move on and talk about God.

T: Yeah, just that small, little topic, right? God.

B: Yep, a small little topic. Who knows what we’ll uncover? Who knows what we’ll talk about? God is such a broad, broad thing and really, I mean to look at being a Teenage Fundamentalist, it’s pegged on what? It’s pegged on God. So this concept – what is it? What does it involve?

T: Remembering that what we’re doing in this series is talking about what we believed then, and what we thought then, so whilst we might touch a little bit on where we’ve evolved to, this is going to be more about God as a Teenage Fundamentalist.

B: Definitely. It’s caused me to think a little bit more, this one, because it’s something you just take for granted. It’s this concept, but what does it involve? What does it mean? What do you identify God as? There’s a lot to think about and dig down into, but before we do kick into that, let’s remind people about our Facebook page and Twitter. It’s not a Twitter page – what do you refer to Twitter as?

T: It’s a Twitter handle, dude. 

B: A Twitter handle – see, this is why I have you here. Many other reasons, but I would never know it was called a bloody handle. What a ridiculous thing. We used to talk about handles on CB radio back in the 80s – what’s your handle? I can’t remember what mine was, but I had a handle. We’ve got a lot of people involved, we’ve got more and more people involved over the past few weeks. We have a closed group as we have spoken about, and that is to give people a sense of protection. It’s not for us to vet who comes in, it’s to make sure we give people a place where they can say what they want, and it doesn’t go outside that group. We do ask for respect, when people put something up that you might not necessarily agree with, and I think we’ve seen people play nice. It’s been good, I think it’s a really good environment.

T: Yeah exactly, and I think as long as people don’t evangelise, or troll, or get nasty, come on in. 

B: Let’s keep it with that spirit of whoever wants to be there, come inside.

T: So mate, I want to ask you, before you joined the religion, before you joined fundamentalism, what was your view of God?

B: Look, it’s interesting, I think I’ve spoken about it a bit in my conversion story, that my concept of God – it certainly wasn’t a personal thing, pre-church. It was a concept, God was out there, you could feel God, there was A God, there was a being which had an influence in the every day. Didn’t really know what that meant, I guess it was a sense of spirit, it was very much a spiritual type thing, but I couldn’t peg it as a person. Back then it was very conceptual. God lived in and throughout, the Mother Earth type concept I guess is where I came from. How about you?

T: Well interestingly no, I was the opposite of that. I was given a children’s Bible as a kid, and there were pictures in it. I very much had this view of God being an old guy, on a throne, with a big grey beard, somewhat grumpy even. I remember looking at the pictures of the Garden of Eden and them being kicked out of it – in this children’s Bible that I had. God was a pretty grumpy bastard in those pictures, so I definitely had this idea of – I guess it’s kind of more like Zeus, that you’ve got this all-powerful old guy sitting on the throne. But I had no idea of concepts like trinity, that there was a Holy Spirit or that Jesus was divine. I always had this idea that Jesus was just the son of God, so he was somehow less than God. But that being said, I didn’t think about it all that much.

B: No, and I don’t think I did. As we spoke about before, I didn’t grow up in a religious space at all. Interestingly at school we had religious education, it was something that was done quite independently of anything else. I remember you had to choose a side, it was either you went Christian or Catholic in the group you split off into. I had no idea so I went oh yeah I’ll go Christian. It was the local Baptists that delivered that one. It was probably a year or two later in primary school that I actually remember a conversation with my parents, saying something about religious education and they said something about us being Catholics and I said oh I had no idea. Apparently I should have been in the Catholic group, but they didn’t care either, because it meant nothing to them. Of my siblings, I was the only one to grow up and not have any contact or involvement with church, mum and dad went as Catholics I guess, habitually, until my next sibling down was maybe 3-4 years old, and I didn’t come along until 3-4 years after that, so I had zero exposure to what it meant to see God in any particular way.

T: Did you ever pray as a child, before joining Great Big AOG?

B: No, in this religious education class I remember them praying, and I remember looking around going what the hell are you doing? I had no idea what it meant. As I’ve said before in other episodes I had mates that went to church, both Baptist and Catholic churches. They were never involved in that religious side of it, I think they just went there because they had their family going there. So I didn’t have any exposure to anything, in terms of organised religion. 

T: See, my mother had us baptised as infants in the Anglican church, but then we never went, ever. I think I had more exposure to friends of mine that were Catholic because they did go, so I knew more about the Catholic church than I did about the Anglican church. But I do remember being a young kid and praying to God, I used to say my prayers but it was just me – maybe my mother taught me how to pray, I don’t know. But I do remember when I was a teenager lying in bed late at night, and I said out loud God, if you’re there, show yourself, and show me what I’m supposed to do, where I’m supposed to go, what’s real. I did actually pray that as a kid, before I joined the Revival Centre. For what it’s worth, don’t know how well that prayer was actually answered.

B: Yeah, although what God? Who knows?

(laughter)

T: It’s like God, show me the way I should go – then years in a cult. 

B: It was good the Revival Centre God was listening to you and showed you the way! So that’s a great. Thing. Look, for me when I think back more, I had no idea about a concept of God. Absolutely none. There was no construct for me, which in some sort of way when I look back, was slightly freeing.

T: Mmm, sure. When I joined the Revival Centre, the concept of God in there – of course it’s a religious group so God was everything, but like you were saying, it wasn’t very well defined. Even though it’s supposed to be what this is all about, nobody really defined it very well, and when thinking about this episode and what I was going to say, I thought I’ve got these impressions, so I want to talk a little bit about what God was like for me in the Revival Centre, and the first thing I want to say is that God was like a great big cop, a great big policeman in the sky. Whereas Jesus in the Revival Centre, he was like a distant, secondary figure. We didn’t speak about him very much at all. And then the Holy Spirit was like this impersonal force that regenerated us, saved us, gave us the gift of tongues, and then we didn’t have much to do with that either. So they talked about having a relationship with God, but not in the same way we did in the AOG. They talked about having a relationship with God but I didn’t know what that meant, even though I was in that group for years, because to me God was up there, out there, watching, waiting to catch me out for all the things I did wrong, so to me the Revival Centre God was totally about judgement.

B: I obviously didn’t have that exposure, but I saw it a little bit similar I think, coming into church myself. I guess the concept of God was God was watching you. He was watching every move you made. He was worried about everything you did and interested in every single thing you did, so it was that overshadowing God, the one that was there every step of the way, but there was a sense of judgement behind that I always felt, whereas Jesus – we’ll talk more about Jesus in the next episode so I won’t dig into it much, but Jesus was seen as that grace figure, the one that would show you love. It was that move from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Jesus was the personification of the Old Testament God. I guess that’s one point to pick up – the personification bit was the first time I came into the church, it was the first time I’d seen God as a person rather than a concept or a being, so that was quite different for me.

T: I think when I came into the AOG it was far more defined than it was in the Revival Centres. Officially the AOG was trinitarian, so that was the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but I want to throw something out to you, because whilst officially it was trinitarian – three persons, one God – my experience was I basically dealt with as three Gods. There was God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. They were not the same, and I didn’t think they were quite one either. How did you think or feel about that?

B: I agree. When I prayed, I would pray to one of them. It wasn’t as if I was praying to one that had three parts, I was praying to either the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit. I often heard it explained to me – because you’d say to people how do you explain the Trinity? What’s the deal with this, it’s such a mystery, and it was the old – you may remember the analogy better than me, but it was like water, water can take different forms, it can be ice, it can be steam, it can be water that is wet. But it was all the one thing. It was the same concept, but it was all in one. I never got that. I didn’t understand it, I still saw them as three distinct entities, I guess. 

T: I agree. That’s what I mean, when we studied trinitarianism at bible college, or even talked about it outside of bible college, it was definitely something that we gave lip service to but the way that I lived out my faith was that it was three Gods.

B: Yeah. Absolutely, and it was interesting – what was the subject we did at bible college – pneumatology? 

T: Pneumatology was the Holy Spirit, yes.

B: The Holy Spirit – even that, when you talked about pneumatology, you talked about the concept of a particular aspect of God. Or is it an identity of God, God identifying different ways whether it’s the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit. Really complex, and even though the AOG went to a point of trying to describe it, trying to unpick it, I guess to get people to understand it – I was in that scene for 10-12 years, and I was none the wiser coming out.

T: When I thought about God, if you said to me ok, let’s talk about God, even now I would think about the Father. That to me was the biggest God, the daddy God.  That was the biggest of the three, so definitely to me I think about God being the Father, so when I went into praise and worship, and I would praise God, whether it was singing or raising of hands and all that, I would often visualise the throne, heaven and all that, there’s all the angels around – to me that’s who I was praising. That was God, then you’d switch channels and you’re going to praise Jesus, you’re going to sing thank you Jesus for what you did and all that kind of stuff, when you’re praying and praising, but it was still a step down I always felt in the way I lived and engaged it. He was less than the Father, and then you had this thing, the Holy Spirit. I was thinking about this in prepping for this episode as well, that considering we actually believed the Holy Spirit lived inside us, practically it was always on the outside. I was always calling out to it, I was always looking up to it. I was never actually thinking oh this thing is inside me. We were talking before about God watching you, or Jesus watching you masturbate or whatever the things you were doing that were wrong. I never actually thought he’s actually inside me.

B: That’s a good point. I feel slightly dirty thinking about it, but I think you’re right. But I don’t think the Old Testament help in trying to unpick this either, because God in the Old Testament was always fire or mist, or he was whatever, but he wasn’t actually seen. There was only one person that has ever seen the glory of God and his face, but to everyone in the Old Testament he was a concept. So I think it was very difficult then for the AOG or Pentecostal scene to be able to do anything but just concentrate on Jesus and that personification, because you could actually picture him and see him, I think that’s why there was so much emphasis on Jesus.

T: Yeah, it was something that you could tangibly think about. I mean, it was God incarnate in the form of a man. And then there was the whole story of Jesus and his death and resurrection, but maybe we should get into that in our next episode.

B: Yep.

T: But what about your relationship with God? What sort of relationship with God did you have as a fundamentalist, or as a Pentecostal?

B: A lot of focus on hearing his voice, understanding his voice and knowing his voice. It was often referred to as discernment. How do you discern what is the voice of the world, or an interruptive voice that is trying to interrupt God speaking into your life, as opposed to the voice of God. There was a lot of trying to understand how that worked, and it was more about what sort of things would God speak to you, because they’re the bits that will identify if it’s God speaking to you; anything else, and it’s not God. But those constructs are something that are put together by whatever denomination or group you’re mixing in, so it really is only created within the box that you’re living in at the time. Are you ever hearing the voice of God, if you’re running down that rabbit hole?

T: So what do you mean, hearing the voice of God? What does that mean, you’re hearing a voice? Are you schizophrenic? What’s going on there?

B: Well some would argue that I am, but it’s not an audible thing, it’s a knowing, a sense, sometimes it might be referred to as intuition, it might be the fact that you are sensing something that is right, something that is overwhelming that you can’t ignore, and that was the voice of God. Quite often that would tie into prophecy, because you’d talk about that and go, God is telling me to, I am sensing God is saying, and it would run into that space.

T: So it was a two way street – you would talk to God, and God would talk back, but not necessarily with words. But sometimes, B, when we were in there, sometimes he would speak with words, right?

B: Yeah, absolutely. You would hear a word – it’s a fine line between that and things like clairvoyance, because it would be like there’s a word I’m hearing, God is saying to me “blue shoes”. 

T: He’s saying blue shoes, don’t step on the suede ones. 

B: That’s right! But it was those similarities, we called out, we’d try and get a connection and go are we right? But for me hearing God was always a sense, it was I feel I’m on the right track, and way before church and to this day, I rely on my intuition a lot, whether that is a concept of God or whether it’s a concept of a greater spiritual awareness, who knows. But the reality is I feel I tap into some sort of intuition.

T: There’s been a lot written on intuition, of late. When I say of late, like in the last 20 years where people say that intuition is parts of our consciousness that’s speaking to us about things that we know.  So usually we can trust our intuition about topics we know a lot about. We can’t trust our intuition so much around things we don’t know a whole lot about, so I think there’s a lot of scientific basis and even things coming out of psychology and science around the idea of intuition. But within church, for me there was a lot of anxiety around hearing the voice of God, and making sure that I’m on the right track and God is happy with me, and happy with where I’m going. When we talk about God, especially from an Evangelical or Pentecostal sense, you can’t escape the fact that it was about trying to keep this thing happy.

B: Yep. There was a fear associated with it, wasn’t there. And I think some of that concept was a warrior God, it was a God that would go in to defend his people.

T: Remember? (sings) Our God is an awesome God, he reigns… Anyway.

B: I was just putting my hands up.

T: Yeah praise the Lord, praise the Lord. Moving on.

B: PTL.

T: Praise…Shunda-ba-ba.

B: Hold on, I’ve got a word for you. But I think it was such a confusing time of trying to understand what is God, who is God and

T: And what does God want from me.

B: Well, that’s right. He just wants obedience, brother. That’s all he wants – obedience. I think some of that fear tapped into that space, too.

T: Hearing us talking about God the Father, God the Son, it’s very easy to differentiate those two. One is Spirit, floaty in heaven, whatever, one is the one that came down, he has a body – albeit a spiritual body now, whatever, but here’s my question, and this is what I used to always struggle with. What’s the difference between God the Father and the Holy Spirit?

B: Ahhh. Look, who knows. What’s the difference between any of them? It’s a good question, and from memory I’ve never been asked that one before, and I wish you would have given me a heads up on it. 

T: Because they’re both spirit, right? Jesus is sort of confined to a body, but these two – nuh uh.

B: Mmm, that’s right, they could have rationalised, and just had the two. 

T: Yeah that’s right.

B: Why go for three?

T: Could have had a Dichotomy rather than a Trinity. 

B: Ah, it’s just way too much effort.

T: But you know why they couldn’t – let’s not get stuck into church history and debate, it’s because the Bible seems to differentiate between God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

B: Yeah, and in the Pentecostal scene the Holy Spirit was very much about those gifts, wasn’t it. Prophecy and tongues, all those sort of things. Wisdom was associated with the Spirit too, but was it the Holy Spirit or was it God? I dunno.

T: There was this baptism in the Holy Spirit, right? We talked about that when we talked about speaking in tongues, you get baptised in the Holy Spirit, but at the same time, the Holy Spirit lives within you. So on the one hand, it’s all over you and anointing you, but on the other hand, it’s living inside you and regenerating you and changing you, but that’s not the Father, and it’s not the Son.

B: No, it was always has and always will be, so what came first? Well, all of them were always there was what we were always told. There wasn’t a time when they split off, when God went I need a couple of mates so I’m gonna create Jesus and the Holy Spirit, it was always there. 

T: Pre-existence is the theological term. They were pre-existent, brother.

B: Pre-existent, that’s right. But I think there was always that sense of the warrior God, the fear that I felt from the concept of God, and Jesus was the gateway to grace.

T: So did you feel that you had a relationship with God, in that you loved God?

B: Yeah, yeah I think so. For me it was all about how you created this – everything around us – you created it FOR ME. I took it very personally. It was thank you God that you have created this for me, thank you God for opening doors here and there and whatever.

T: Thank you God for Jimmy Barnes and Cold Chisel.

B: Oh, praise the Lord. I did grow out of Chisel and Barnsey and went far, far more alternative, but definitely in the 80s it was Jesus begat Barnsey.

T: Jesus Begets – that sounds like a name for a Christian café. I want to come back to this idea that we were told to have this relationship with God. I can remember leaving the Revival Centre and coming into the AOG and everyone was talking about loving God, and these people really seemed to live it. They seemed to really, genuinely love God. You would see them in praise and worship with their hands clasped and their eyes closed, looking up, and just adoring this thing – and I was too. 100% I was too, and I believe that I really genuinely had a relationship. Whether this thing was real or not, and I’m not going to say it wasn’t, but whether it was real or not, I had a relationship with this construct, or with this literal God. 100% I did. 

B: Yeah, I haven’t had enough exposure to the other denominations to go was it a relationship with the construct that we were exposed to and others had a relationship with the construct that they were exposed to, because I wonder. People out there who come from very different walks of life and different religious experiences – did you have a relationship with the concept of God that you had created or your community had created?

T: I had a lot to do with Mormons when I was still in Evangelicalism, because I decided I was going to learn about them and win them all to Jesus. Because even though they had Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit, it wasn’t the same ones. But the way they talked about God – they would talk about Heavenly Father, and the way they talked about Jesus and their relationship with the Holy Spirit – very similar to the way we spoke. But when you dug into the pictures of what they claimed to believe, they were somewhat different to us. They weren’t Trinitarians, and yet they claimed to have this relationship with God and Jesus, same as us.

B: Yeah, very true. I remember working with Jehovah’s Witnesses who were hellbent – well that’s probably the wrong term to use. But they were certainly very keen on converting everybody to the Jehovah’s Witness faith. And their concept of God yet again, was very different. It was very Old Testament centric in the way they spoke of him.

T: Very judgemental, you’re right. They had that God that just wants to destroy everything, right. But it’s not just Old Testament – Revelation, lakes of fire, all that kind of stuff. I think sometimes we had it pedalled to us that the God of the Old Testament was fire and brimstone and judgement, and then the God of the New Testament was love and Jesus and Death and Resurrection. But really, there is no concept of hell in the Old Testament. That’s entirely a New Testament thing. So the idea of this God of Judgement certainly is there in the Old Testament, but very present in the New Testament, too. And this God of grace in the Old Testament, but very present in the New Testament, as well. Sometimes we used to think about God the Father, he was Old Testament, and God the Son was New Testament, and he was a little bit more gracious and loving, but actually hell, fire and brimstone, book of Revelation – that’s all New Testament. 

B: Yeah true, a lot of judgement sitting there in the New Testament. A lot more scriptures that you can twist there too, and people did that a lot. 

T: So, did you believe when you were a fundamentalist that God loved you?

B: Yeah, I did. I actually believed that he loved me so much that he gave his only son, to die, so I didn’t have to. That’s how much I thought God loved me, and I felt a sense of love. I’ve said this before – I felt a sense of love and acceptance from the community of Pentecostalism, Great Big AOG. I felt that love. I felt that was a reflection of God. You did feel judgement as well, and there was certainly judging eyes looking upon you, but I think overwhelmingly a God of love was presented to me. There certainly was judgement, there was fear, there was warrior God that wanted to stomp on the heads of those who went against him, but overwhelmingly it was a God of love.

T: Did you ever stop to think about why God would create so many people and then damn them to hell? I mean, why create them at all if they’re going to spend an eternity suffering? Did you ever think about when you were in the church?

B: I did, I thought about it a lot. A lot of people in my life that weren’t of the same Christian persuasion would quite often ask me that. They’d go how can you believe in this loving and grace-full God who sends people to hell? Sends people to a place where they will suffer for eternity just because they don’t follow him or follow his son? How can you actually think that? I struggled with that. I couldn’t answer it. All I kept saying was oh well the path to that is Jesus, just believe in Jesus and everything will be ok. I’d brush over it. How did you deal with that?

T: I think, remembering that I brought a lot of baggage with me from the Revival Centres, I struggled with that a lot. I struggled a lot with getting it right with God. I said this before when I talked about my leaving the Revival Centre, that partly why I came into Great Big AOG was because I wanted to get right with God. I didn’t want to end up in hell, I didn’t want to miss out on all the good things and especially end up in a really bad place. So I always had this relationship with God that I had to do, be, say, do, and think the right thing, so that way I’m in. I’m in with God, and then I’m not going to hell. That was a huge motivator for me.

B: Mmmm. Yeah, I think I’d probably have to agree that it was a big motivator for me. I didn’t want to go to hell – that was one of the things that was put to me when I decided to become a Christian. I wasn’t in a terribly unhappy place in my life, obviously I was going through that teenage angst that everybody does at 17, but I didn’t want to go to hell. I didn’t want to go a place of eternal suffering, that was going to be a separation from this love that I was taught about.

T: From the perspective I look at now, I think it’s actually really sad, that there was a lot of anxiety around pleasing God. We used to say make sure you’re right with God. Jumping through the hoops, as much as we would give lip service to we’re saved by grace through faith, from Romans through the whole Reformation, Lutheran perspective, really we had to continually maintain that relationship with God and as long as we did that, we were in his good books. But the other thing too is there is a lot of “he” and “him”. Talk about the modern pronouns at the end of your signature file, but there’s a lot of he and him when we talk about God. He’s a father, he’s a he, and that was it.

B: Which is interesting – as I’ve said, I believed in more of a universal approach well before my time in church, it was always Mother Earth, very much a female concept, or a non-identified object. I wasn’t really hung up on whether it was a he or she. It was only when I reflect when I came into the church, the male form was God, definitely.

T: Yes, for sure. Well hey, speaking of the male form, next week we’re going focus more on Jesus. Probably some of these topics will flow into that as well, because officially, according to the Pentecostal scene, he is God. So why don’t we put a pin in this one, and next week we’ll come back and talk more about God but focusing on Jesus. What do you reckon?

B: Sounds good, consider the pin firmly put in this one. 

T: Cool mate, see you next week.

B: See you then.