Sometimes, though, you change and change and change some more, but eventually you hit a point of no return where you find yourself faced with the reality that a change of mindset is necessary to move forward, but you find yourself with no outward forces pushing that change forward. And so you spin your wheels for a while, trying to gather the courage to jump. I'm at that precipice right now.
To become convinced is something I have avoided for years, now. It's easy to toy around with new ideas, but to embrace them with no looking back is so hard. It's hard because I know I'll disappoint some, offend some, and confuse some. And I love those people. I want to please them.
And so I waver.
There's no strength in wavering, and in many ways I prefer weakness. I could even make a flimsy biblical case for it.
But I believe that God calls me to stand, to move, to love, to live. So I'm gonna do my best.
Last summer, I read a book that changed everything: Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns. I wrote a series of blog posts about it (see this link for part one). Things have been different for me since reading that book. I'm no longer threatened by things that used to threaten me, evolution being foremost among them.
Now I'm threatened by different things. Opposite things. I'm threatened by people who read the Bible as if it's a guidebook for individualistic American society. I'm threatened by a God easily understood or categorized, by a faith that is based more on American culture than on what the Bible actually teaches.
Of course, that's a lot of fancy sounding mumbo jumbo, and terribly vague. I'm sorry.
The truth is, I'm pretty scared of the new things I believe and think. I don't always have it thought through, and I know I'm wrong about a good deal of it. In spite of that, I believe it.
And it is time to stop hiding.
I'm currently working through a book called The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll. He details the theological underpinnings of the Civil War, arguing that theological disagreements were part of what drove the nation to war and what made the discord leading up to secession so heated. That's all good and normal history. But when things got crazy for me was when he got to a section in which he detailed the typical Southerner's biblical defense of slavery. You see, God allowed for slavery as a matter of course in the Old Testament, regulated it, yes, but definitely assumed that it would continue to exist. The New Testament isn't a whole lot better. Slaves commanded to obey their masters, Paul telling Onesimus to return to slavery (see the book of Philemon). And all of that is leaving out the curse that God gave one of Noah's sons that his descendants would always be the servants of their kindred. My equilibrium was further knocked off balance by this statement by a pro-slavery Christian of the 1840s. He said,
"His position is this: the moral precepts of the gospel condemn slavery; it is therefore criminal. Yet he admits that neither the Saviour nor his apostles commanded masters to emancipate their slaves; nay, they 'go further,' he adds, 'and prescribe the duties suited to both parties in their present condition,' among which duties, be it remembered, there is not an intimation of manumission, but the whole code contemplates the continuation of the relation...Here, then, we have the Author of that gospel, and the inspired propagators of the gospel, and the Holy Spirit indicting [i.e., recording] the gospel, all conniving at a practice which was a violation of the entire moral principle of the gospel!" (Noll, 37)To me, it seems like a, logically speaking, fool-proof argument. Sure, you could make (and some did) an opposite case. But this guy's argument is valid. It sounds good, biblical, even. It, frankly, sounds like stuff I've heard before on other topics.
And, if I'm speaking frankly, it really makes me wonder. Is it at all fair to expect the Bible to speak to the twenty-first century in such a literal way on such topics as slavery? What about the role of women in the church or in marriage more generally? What about homosexuality? How often do we expect things out of the Bible that it does not intend to deliver? How often do we read the Bible as if Paul was born in 1965 and grew up in American suburbia? How often do we assume that God intended for His Word to be read as a guidebook and forget to take the time to get to know God from his Word and then go out and spread Him to our world?
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that American Christianity is broken. Broken not because we're allowing our nation to be overrun by sin, but because somewhere along the way, we became Pharisees, more concerned with the letter of the law than its message.
This, then, is where I stand. I'm pretty convincedly standing in this place, even as I know that I'll look back at this me a year from now and shake my head at my short-sightedness. I'm always learning, never arrived. I make mistakes and have to unlearn my folly. And, yet, I'm not newly arrived here. This arrival is the product of years of spiritual and intellectual journey. God has been here through it all. Yes, I know myself to be hopelessly small in vision and misguided. I also, know, though, that I am called to stand confidently and add my voice to the symphony of voices. The harmony as well as the dissonance make a beautiful sound.
God overcomes.
And that, my friends, is the miracle of it all.
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