Worldview Orbit

It could be said that every worldview has an orbit, a stable and continuous path through which adherents travel that is unaffected as long as there is no external influence. The Christadelphian worldview is no exception and those immersed in the Christadelphian echo chamber will live out their lives in the Christadelphian orbit. Outside that echo chamber things get a little more interesting and, as I’ve previously noted, our conscious minds are biased towards maintaining the orbit we are already in. But occasionally people will find themselves in an unstable orbit for one reason or another, and that is when their worldview can change – and it can change in one of two ways: falling back to earth with a bump or spinning off and becoming lost in space.

Those who fall back to earth with a bump could be likened to people who take a suborbital trajectory. People who blast off on their way into orbit by virtue of being children of Christadelphian parents, dating a Christadelphian, or having some other reason to be closely associated with them. But on the way something happens and their trajectory changes, they fail to build up enough faith to sustain their course and depending on how high they have got it can be a very long way to fall back down and the ground is very unforgiving when it does finally arrive.

The other route out is to spin off into space and this route is less well recognised. It is sometimes assumed that the only way to stop being a Christadelphian is to fall back to earth, but that’s not true. It is also possible to fly so high that you pop out the top. This is what happens when someone goes to where they think God is, they get closer and closer to that space in heaven they consider sacred, but when they get there they discover it’s actually empty.

To explain this further we can think about the temple in Jesus day which had progressively more holy areas. The inner most areas were the holy sanctuary with a veil at the end behind which was the Holy of Holies where it was understood that God dwelt. The only thing is that no one really went in there to check. It was too well protected, there was a psychological and physical barrier to entering in (and perhaps for the High Priest to disclose anything when he came out). Of course not everyone had these barriers and Tacitus records that in 63 BCE the roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) did go in and was surprised to discover that the room was empty – he didn’t find God there.

This same experience is recorded when Jesus died and the temple curtain was torn in two. The traditional interpretation of this is that it demonstrates that the way to God has been made open again, but there is also another way it has been interpreted. This second way is that it showed the Jews that their God was not where they always thought He was and that they should have been looking elsewhere.

I think this same problem can happen to people in the Christadelphian orbit; they have a fixed trajectory in heaven and are blindsided to the spinning off into space route that some people take away from Christadelphians. They are content in their path and don’t want to rock their boat, they don’t want to look behind the curtain in case there is nothing there and they can't fathom out people who do look behind the curtain. Christadelphians have limits on what is an acceptable question and what is not, what can be thought about and what can’t. There is a sacred area that cannot be tested or probed for fear of finding out that the sacred place is empty and the sacred object doesn't exist.

So belief in this sacred object also requires a certain amount of disbelief, a fear that if something cherished is examined then it will be found wanting which leads to a reluctance or inability to do the examination. We see this lack of belief in the daily actions of Christians across the world. They verbally confess that God is all powerful, but when their car breaks down they don’t pray for a repair, they take it to the garage. And in a emergency they don’t rely on their God alone, they call the emergency services. In other words, their daily actions look a lot like those of people who don't confess to believing a thing.

Falling out of the Christadelphian Orbit (or any stable orbit) disrupts and disturbs us to our core. Falling back to earth and spinning out into space are hard to deal with, and those who have left the Christadelphians can probably relate to them – I certainly can. In one there is the intuition that the god doesn’t exist and that the whole thing is nonsense, in the same way that we might reject Vishnu and fall back to the Hindu earth. And in the other there is the data that shows that the God previously perceived of as true is actually false and where we were looking there is nothing but empty space.