In the beginning, God
created the sky and the earth. NCV
Welcome
back. I hope you are blessed reading
this today.
I
often wonder who the readers will be who connect with me, and surely I know
they will come. If you are someone who despairs
for that wholeness lost once upon a time gone by, having slipped away mainly
because you were unable to contort your mind to ignore truth, then we will
surely connect.
I
have been there, friends. I know how
devastating it feels, as if the earth has been yanked out from under me, and there
is nothing holding me up, but facts and data.
How unsteady are those two supporting legs beneath the weight of that
which needs four. I know that emptiness.
The
silence of God, once bearable to me because God’s voice, formerly found in
scripture reading, transformed into simple silence. Scripture became rancorous to me.
After
learning what modern Biblical scholarship revealed about the Bible, I felt deceived. The book I loved most had gone from being a
comfort to being an argument every time I returned to my quiet time. I began to count errors in the Bible. My head had been poisoned with inerrancy so
badly that when I read God’s written word, I looked for mistakes. I never had to look very hard.
So
I quit reading the Bible for twenty years.
Often, I feared I might die before my experiment ended. That would have been a shame because I love
the Bible.
I
did read Biblical scholars from time to time, and theology, but I stopped
reading books in the Bible. When I began
to read the Bible again, having aged in experience and knowledge by twenty
years, it was as if I first learned it in Braille.
For
instance, I saw before how important being kosher was to Jesus and his
critics. I never saw that he did not
dine with sinners defiled by original sin, but he dined with sinners defiled by
violations of kosher laws. Many of them
may have wanted to follow kosher laws, but were prevented by life. They loved Israel’s God, and the only rabbi
who accepted them undefiled into God’s kingdom was Jesus.
Here’s
another example. How could I read Noah’s
story so many times and never notice that in one place, God tells him to bring two
of every kind of animal, but in another God tells him to bring seven of every
kind of clean animal, seven of very kind of bird, and two of every other kind
of animal on the ark? (Genesis 7)
I
believed for decades that one pair and only one pair of every animal went with Noah.
Also,
there were so many things I had wondered about when I was a fundamentalist, but
never bothered to ask about because of the pressure to never question the Bible. After reading the Bible again, the same
questions remained.
For
example, how in the world could anyone follow a star to the place on earth where
it hovered. When I was ten, I could never
draw a straight line from my house to any star in the sky. I
always wondered about that. The star
would literally have to be just like the star in the movies. It would have to be a light leading the wise
men to Jesus, but it would certainly not be a sun.
How
many of us today struggle to love God, but find it nearly impossible when our
consciences crave intellectual integrity?
I have known that hopeless sense
of lostness when I wondered whether or not I prayed to an invisible man
projected inside my mind.
So
I read, studied, pondered, and kept telling God how much I loved God.
A
mystical unveiling over time occurred. I
realized that the problem was not science at all, not the Bible at all, for in
the scriptures the way God is perceived evolves.
I
would argue today that God must be true if science is true. The problem is not an expanding universe with
countless galaxies in tow, nor is it evolution, germ theory, or the
heliocentric view of our solar system. The
problem is language.
As
of today, I am serving as counselor at a Passport camp. Passport is an ecumenical ministry for young
people. The churches represented here
tend to be more progressive: Episcopal
Church, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian,
and Evangelical Lutheran.
I
am eager to observe for a week and learn if the language I hear used about God
is different in any way than the language I heard in fundamentalist
venues. I am eager to discover how a
transformation in language will sound to the ears and the mind.
I
agree with Marcus Borg that theological re-education is imperative today in our
churches. If we do not re-educate God
people how to God talk, then Christianity will dwindle into superstition.
It
is already happening. Today, we see so
many young people who are not persuaded by the misguided attempt to frighten
them into faith. The world of knowledge
is too much with them. We must do what
Christians have always done in the past.
We must retool our message.
Thanks
for visiting with me. I hope you return
tomorrow. Blessings…
,
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