I’m a cipher to myself. Can you help me? (The following is incoherent drivel. Ignore it.)
Maybe I’m too empathic but I read a bunch of blogs and books by solidly conservative Christians, then a bunch of stuff by liberal Christians, and I agree with most of the viewpoints and their respective justifications. To put it another way, I find that I fully agree with many opposing viewpoints within the Christian world.
I know it’s a paradox to think like this, but after all, love (which is the very nature of God, although God’s idea of love is often contrary to our ideas of what the love of God should look like) is the most paradoxical thing ever. It’s like Calvinism vs. Arminianism.
In general, opposing viewpoints within Christian theology seem this way: One side puts the defense of truth above all. The other side puts love above all. Both sides have lots of Bible passages to point to. Both sides can dissect the text and individual words in the original language to make it mean what they want it to mean. Both sides have intellectuals, scholars, pastors, enough wood pulp to choke a million hedgehogs, enough hot air to fly to the moon and back. And I see all this, and reflect that this is why we can’t get along. The problem is that people are arguing about the nature of God. The problem is that we can only know so much at one time. I think it’s the same situation that scientists experience when they are forced to choose between observing one or the other variable, but not both at the same time, since that is not possible. It just isn’t possible to see the whole. We only see one part, and then the other.
What is God to us, really? What exactly does God mean when he says this and that in the Bible? It’s as if the serpent in the garden is whispering, “Did God really say…?” It’s as if the church is a bunch of blind men trying to come to conclusions about an elephant that no one of them can fully comprehend.
This is why we attend different worship services. This is why we pretend to be separate, avoiding one another, acting as if we don’t care about each other, because it’s easier to pretend that we are a part of a little group of fake people who all agree with everything that everybody else agrees with even if it is only for the sake of faking love, that is, creating the appearance of peaceful interpersonal relations. when we all know that isn’t the case at all. We simply prefer to do our arguing behind walls and closed doors, out of sight of the masses, or even of our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. The politics of the Christian church have become a battleground for proud people to assert their power over other people. Bullies abound in the absence of faith, and money screams to be heard and will not be ignored. Hence the rise of the absurdity known as the “megachurch” and the abomination known as the “prosperity gospel”.
Everybody wants to believe that “indulgences” really do work! I’ll put money in a plate, sign up to give away my life savings, anything at all if only I don’t have to read the Bible for myself and have a personal intimate relationship with Jesus because I’m not willing to make myself that vulnerable to God’s criticism. So I’ll let the hotshot preachers figure it out and I’ll take their word for it and I’ll put my money in the plate and God will understand and He will bless me. (sarcasm)
Reading the Bible is so much fun! I love contemplating the mysteries of my Creator and Savior and learning more about God! I think I’ve learned more practical knowledge in the past few weeks by reading the Bible ravenously than I have from attending many many Sunday School classes and Bible studies and “self-help” sorts of studies held in church buildings. As I read the Bible I understood more fully the nature of God and salvation, and my faith increased and I wanted to read the Bible more, and God and Jesus have begun to make their home in my mind as the most real of all possible realities, not an America-shaped Jesus, but the Jesus of the Bible, the one who doesn’t need us to defend him with “reason” or “logic” because his word cuts sharper than a sword. He is the one who dies for His friends whom He loves more than His own life. And the moral is this: we remember what we want to remember, and going to a stable of race horses every Sunday doesn’t make you a race horse.
I can’t emphasize this enough. If you want to have a reason to believe in God and Jesus and all that, then read the Bible and ask God to help you understand it. Read and read and read. No, seriously. Christian music, no matter how pious it makes you feel or how trendy the lyrics are, is not going to cut it. Music is nice. Social networking is nice. Technology is nice. A lot of nice things interfere with the silent contemplation that is so vital to reading and understanding God’s Word. Read Christian books and blogs. Stuff your mind with the Word of God and the things of this earth will begin to look strangely dim when compared to the glory of God.
I see not hellfire, but an all consuming fire– the earth and the heavens awash in flame, the elements melting.
And to think, that so many Christians buy into the latest conference, or study, or retreat, or series of speakers, and think that God is gonna work in their lives because they spent a lot of money and parked their car in a crowded lot and sat in a stadium or stood up singing the songs. Of course God is gonna work wherever His Word is proclaimed, even if it is at a conference or seminar– but why not read the Bible for yourself at every opportunity? If you need a practical reason to do so, remember that it will save you money in the long run– money that would otherwise go to maintenance of buildings and paying middlemen who peddle messages for profit.
Salesmen aren’t only in it for the money, you know. They’re also in it for the thrill they get when they rip someone off. When you measure your eternal worth in dollars and cents and technological wonders, you tend to believe that you need an accountant to figure it out for you.
How much better it would be, I think, if we could talk honestly about our differences, as if they really mattered, and still show that we have the capacity to love one another as if the differences didn’t matter, because God drew us out of the world to Himself and who knows why He did that?
They lived so close to death, in those barbaric days of gladiators and slaves pit to fight wild beasts for the entertainment of the leering masses, ravenous for violence, and Caesar like a crown of gluttony atop the whole stinking pile of human corpses. That’s your human world for you. Everything made by humans is built atop someone else’s dead body. One faction asserting triumph and power over another. One denomination fighting to wipe all others off the map. And they still wonder why old people make the decisions that send youths to their deaths in foreign lands?