Phoenix Affirmations #3

3. Celebrating the God whose Spirit pervades and whose glory is reflected in all of God’s Creation, including the earth and its ecosystems, the sacred and secular, the Christian and non-Christian, the human and non-human;

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One of the bugaboos of Christianity has been that its leaders have often claimed to have exclusive rights to the truth, and the only possible access to God. What I've heard most often is that all of truth is contained in the Bible, that anything which contradicts the Bible must be untrue, and that no truth can be known outside of studying the Bible.

That's a dangerous point of view for several reasons. First, by raising the Bible to the point of being the absolute and unquestioned truth, we effectively make it the center of worship. It's not a good thing for Christians to put anything, even the Bible, in place of God. In fact our word for it is idolatry.

What makes this worse is that the people who like to insist on the Bible being the absolute and only source of truth is that they actually mean their reading of the Bible. They will deny it, of course. Some like to claim that they don't interpret at all "we just take it as it is", but that is nonsense. It's impossible to read the Bible without interpreting, and even groups that claim to be literalist often get into arguments about what passages really mean. For that matter the way those groups understand scriptures have changed a great deal through history.

Human beings don't have the ability to read things "just as they are". The way we understand everything is influenced by the time and place we live in, the traditions that influence us, and even our own personalities. Any time a group says that the Bible is the complete truth, they are actually saying that their understanding of the Bible is the complete truth. In other words they have raised their understanding to the center of worship.

If it's dangerous to make the Bible your god, it's even more dangerous to make your interpretation your god.

To keep from falling into this trap, we do our best to keep our eyes and ears open for God everywhere. My church uses the motto, "God is still speaking". This takes scripture very seriously but reminds us that the fullness of God's wisdom and grace is too great to be fully contained in any single book. We are open to perceiving God's wisdom in the words of a talented authors, poets, songwriters, etc. We see God's glory reflected in the wonders of nature and the discoveries of science. God can speak to us using the words of Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, or Atheists.

That doesn't mean that we buy into popular culture wholesale. There are a lot of negative, destructive, un-Godly messages out there and everything has to be looked at faithfully and critically. But it does mean that we're not going to rubber stamp things as true because they're labeled 'Christian' or untrue because they don't have the ecclesial stamp of approval.

That's too lazy an approach for someone who is serious about exploring the truth that God has to offer.