Pondering Steve Jobs

At the beginning of a recent message I heard at church the Pastor read a quote from Steve Jobs: "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it." The message was from a series called "Christian or Disciple?" and was an excellent series. The word "Christian", the Pastor points out, is only used three times in the Bible and the definition is not to be found there. However, the word disciple is and is described as a follower or an apprentice, someone who chooses to follow a Master.  His point was being a disciple is not just about believing, but about how you treat and love other people and the world. The Pastor agreed with Jobs quote. I have not read the biography this quote came from, but it is on my list of books I want to read. He was the founder of the company I work for so I have an invested interest in learning about his life,  a respect for what he accomplished, and the vision and standard he established in technology. His life continues to impact people around the world. I did do some further research on the specific quote and thought it was interesting when I read some quotes that lead up to his opinion on Christianity:

"…Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”

The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”

Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?”

“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”

Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshiping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told the author of his biography, Walter Isaacson. 

I can't help but be curious as to what some of Steve Jobs "received dogma"s were to him. Was it just the over-all view of God allowing unimaginable suffering that turned him off or did he have some experiences with Christians and the dogma that goes along with Christianity? Maybe it was a mixture of both?

In the message from the Pastor he pointed out some ways the dogma of church-people, or what is commonly called as "Christians" can short-circuit the message of reconciling love that Jesus gave as a command to His disciples to the world. His command to love others as He loved them. To make disciples with the only avenue of that path being love. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus did not call His disciples to impose His values on all nations, threatening them, harsh words, not sharing gospel with love but coercion, or standing in superior judgement over the world. Instead, Jesus emphasized to love the world as He loved His disciples, in a humble, serving way. So it's not surprising that many in our world today, like Jobs,  are not drawn by the love that represented the Christ that is to be in Christians.

Was Jobs turned off by a God that allows incomprehensible suffering? This is understandable. It is not an easy thing to reconcile what God permits when He has the power to stop it or change it. There is probably not a person alive, Christian or non-Christian that has not grappled with the reality of pain and suffering. It is something I have wrestled with much. I don't claim to have a grasp on understanding all the why's. On a bad day I can get caught up in a tidal wave of why's and it's all too easy to get sucked under. On a good day I'm thankful for the freedom that lies behind the puzzle of suffering, for it does seem logical to equate the free-will of man with at least some of the responsibility of pain and heartache. God could of made us all so that we were wired to submit to Him, but would there be much freedom and relationship in that? God had to give us freedom, knowing what we might do with it. He could of made us puppets, but instead He made us persons. Our questions reflect our divine, inbred desire to grow. They can lead us into relationship with Him, which is entirely different than religion, which can turn into the dogma that might have been very unattractive to Steve Jobs. 

In his book "The Problem of Pain", C.S. Lewis says: " We can, perhaps conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became as soft as grass when it used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them....Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself."

So I can relate to Jobs questioning of God. I don't think it is a bad thing. In The Bible Jacob is esteemed for wrestling with God and not punished. It was then that God changed his name from Jacob to Israel. Later, close to death, Steve Jobs told Isaacson he'd been thinking about God and a possible afterlife. But then he paused for a second, Isaacson recounted. "Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone," he said, pausing again. "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices." Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as on-off switches when it comes to the afterlife.  It's worth pondering. It was just that kind of questioning that lead me into the most important relationship I've ever had and ever will have. A relationship of love that I have spent a lifetime questioning, receiving, wrestling and growing in. It is His love for me that matters and my love for Him.


http://hopechurchchandler.com/sermons#series_47