Faith interview: Peter Carblis: I'm something of a mystic

 

One of my earliest memories of Pastor Peter Carblis is him leading us in exercises before school assembly. It would have been around 1983 and I was in fifth grade at Northern Beaches Christian School, my parents having transferred me from a local state primary school at the end of year 4.

 

Back then the school had about 100 students between third grade and year 12, and it was held in demountable buildings on a sloping bush block in Terry Hills, Sydney. Peter Carblis, or Pastor Carblis, as we addressed him, was Principal, while also sharing ministry duties at Northern Beaches Christian Centre, which was held every Sunday morning at a community hall in Mona Vale.

 

Religion was part of my life from the day I was born. My parents were part of the early 70s Pentecostal revival movement which, to the best of my understanding, was founded by Christians wanting to have a more direct, authentic relationship with God and the scriptures than what they found in mainstream, denominational churches like the Anglicans and Baptists. 

 

Peter Carblis taught me science in junior high, but later on he moved to the central coast and I focused on getting through high school so I could go to university, grow my hair long and meet girls. I lost track of him, but I never forgot him. Some people make an impression on you.

 

I was the odd one out in my family. Religion never made sense to me. It just didn’t add up. Why, I wondered, if God is all powerful and omniscient, does he require us to massage his ego by singing crap praise songs about how great he is? And why does he need us to pray to him, asking for special favours that won’t be granted to non-believers? And how can believers ignore the direct, irrefutable evidence of science in favour of a fairy tale?

 

Many years later Peter and I reconnected on Facebook, like so many of us do. I’d read his posts and sometimes comment, often disagreeing but my disagreements always being met with a thoughtful, respectful reply. We had radically different world views, but I respected the fact he’d given so much thought into what he believed and why.

 

But I was also curious. How did he reconcile science and faith? Was it just cognitive dissonance or was there something deeper to explore? And so, I asked him.

 

“Science,” Peter says, “is an act of worship of the creator.”

 

He cites Thomas Aquinas, and the question of why there is something rather than nothing. And if there is something, then where did it come from? “When you get into this kind of theology, it starts to get dazzling, it’s like staring at the sun,” he says. 

 

What it comes down to is ultimate cause, Peter says, and God is the ultimate cause, but the notion of God being the ultimate cause isn’t incompatible with science. In fact, it’s enabled by the idea of God.

 

Take the Big Bang, the evidence of which is found in cosmic background radiation, the same radiation that caused the dead channel static on an old school TV. “We’d been looking since the 50’s,” he says. “It proved the universe had a start and that was also the beginning of time.”

 

The question that remains is whether there something before the big bang, but it’s not a valid question because time didn’t exist. But there was a prior, Peter says, and that prior was not part of this universe.

 

To Peter’s way of thinking, that prior is God, but the creator is not amongst the creation. “God is not something that exists in the sense creation exists. He’s something whose existence is different.”

 

A dog returns to its vomit

 

One of the many, many issues I have with the church (and no, it’s not just the shit music and lack of inclusiveness) is the focus on personal success and wealth. These notions, generally called the Prosperity Gospel, are the antithesis of everything I ever learned about Jesus.

 

Jesus slummed it with thieves and prostitutes. He threw the tax collectors out of the temple. And I am guessing that, if he were physically among us today, he would be put off by the tepid MOR ‘oh God you’re so grouse’ songs that are thought of as contemporary religious music. Worse, he’d be horrified by people like Hill Song founder Brian Houston writing books called “God Wants You to Be Rich” and assuming his imprimatur on the idea that becoming wealthy is part of God’s plan for every obedient, non-questioning Christian’s life.

 

When I asked Peter about this, he mentioned a preacher named David Wilkerson, who founded Teen Challenge. Wilkerson, in turn, in a sermon, addressed the idea of the prosperity gospel and referenced 2 Peter 2:22* which speaks about people who had tasted something of God and gone back to their worldly lusts. Doing this, the Bible says, is akin to a dog returning to its vomit.

 

Which is a pretty clear statement on modern Pentecostalism and its associated theology of how, if someone is sick or poor, then it’s because that person is not pious enough or giving enough to the church in tithes. It is the fault of the person. God wants you to be rich and healthy and successful, the thinking goes, and if you're not, it's because you're doing something wrong. You're not a good enough Christian. 

 

“The real Pentecostal thing is understanding what it means to, or being open to, an encounter with God in a way that is saturating and penetrating and transforming your character,” Peter says. 

 

One of the ideas of Pentecostalism is the notion a believer can have a direct, personal relationship with God. Particularly if you’re up to date with your tithes and don’t question accepted dogma. And allied to that is the implicit bargain that God will intervene in the believer’s life. But is God an interventionist?

 

Peter says the answer is both yes and no, but adds God is not interventionist in the shamanistic way the prosperity and healing people believe.

 

“It’s one of the big battles I had through my ministry,” he says. “I’d constantly be picking up the pieces of people who had been defrauded by prosperity type preachers, or felt they were failures because they were sick.

 

“I’ve seen all those absurdities and there were often times I felt ashamed and confused to be part of a community that was identified with believing this stuff.”

 

The Bible, he says, does preach that God sometimes intervenes and there are sometimes miracles of healing, and he says he’s seen them. But it’s hit and miss. We can’t, he says, be afraid of the realities in which we live.

 

The scripture doesn’t guarantee a believer will not be persecuted and it doesn’t guarantee they won’t die young, he notes. The only real intervention, he says, is the incarnation of Christ.

 

The last question I had for Peter is that, if God is all loving and omniscient, how does this account for the human condition? Peter’s answer is that God did not create sin, man did by turning his back on God.

 

This doesn’t gel with me. Why would God tolerate chaos, pain, suffering and hate if he could solve it through his total power? It comes back to the way I started this piece. If God is all powerful, why does he need humans to venerate him? Does God have an ego problem? Peter says God is outside his creation, but it seems unspeakably cruel to create something and then leave that creation to deal with the unmitigated horrors of the human condition.

 

Religion didn’t, and still doesn’t, make sense to me. I think a lot of belief is a fairy tale people tell themselves because it’s too confronting to deal with the fact this life is all we have. There is no reward awaiting us in heaven. All we can do is strive for meaning and connection in this existence. And all we can do is try to be kind.

 

I want to thank Peter (although he will always be Pastor Carblis to me) for being so generous with his time and his insights. We may not agree on lots of things, but I respect the rigour he has put into his thinking to get to where he is today.

*This article was corrected on 7 Aug 2023 to correct an error regarding the verse in the Bible about a dog returning to its vomit. I regret the error.