Posted by Helen on: 01.02.2007 /
JoAnn wrote the following comment on the first-time visitor’s page:
God and His teachings are absolute. To understand God one must be touched by His Holy Spirit to understand and believe as God would have us to believe. The bible states..”Lean not on your own understanding”…. and He will make your paths straight. There are no gray areas when it comes to God..
Comment by: Paul
1Well i agree, i’m sure God has no grey areas… fortunatly I’m not God and know his mind imperfectly at best altho i’m pretty sure he loves me and even quite enjoys my tom foolery :)
Still maybe that’s no bad thing, much as i want to be like God in his loving, his grace, his mercy and his justice, i’m pretty sure the moment i start thinking i know God i am not knowing God at all and doing what I want done… which or may not coincide with what he wants done…
I guess that’s why the prophet reminds us to walk humbly with God and to take him seriously and not ourselves…
Comment by: benjamin ady
2I used to think that way–no gray areas, and that’s the main reason I’m able to refrain from just responding “whatever!”
It reminds me of a story. A lovely lady I knew named Kay once drew me a little diagram and asked me a question. The diagram was a bar, maybe one inch high and ten inches long. It was divided into three equal parts. The left third was black in color, the middle third gray in color, and the right third white in color. (to see a really poorly done iteration, see here)She labelled the left side “Satan’s Kingdom” and the right side “God’s Kingdom”, and she asked, “Benjamin, how far does Satan’s Kingdom extend?”.
I replied “Through the black and the gray right up to the edge of the white”. This was back in … 1998, and thinking in terms of black and white still made sense to me back then.
Kay commended me for my answer, telling me that most people answered that satan’s kindgom extends somewhat into the gray zone, but not up to the edge of the white. “But”, she said, “Actually Satan’s Kingdom extends a little ways into the white, because the Bible tells us that Satan appears as an angel of light.”
A couple years after that, in late 2000, I used this anecdote in my farewell testimony on LOGOS II, when most of the ship’s company was forced to listen to me rant for 10 minutes or so. At that time, I said that I had come to realize that Kay was asking the wrong question. The far more important question is “How far does *god’s* kindgom extend?” And it was my opinion, in that farewell testimony, that god’s kingdom extends through white, gray, and black, and right on off-the-map! (grin). I was still solidly a christian back in 2000.
Comment by: Helen
3Benjamin, I like your way of looking at things better than Kay’s. I don’t really understand hers since Jesus said that the gates of hell won’t prevail. To me that means the Kingdom of God is the Kingdom that goes everywhere - just like you said.
Also I like Jesus’ image of the Kingdom as a huge tree that birds rest in. I like that trees are big and strong and safe and comfortable for birds.
Comment by: joe
4I suspect that ‘God and His teachings are absolute’ is coded language for ‘I and my theology are right and if you are arguing with me, you’re arguing with God, and did I say he was absolute and right and just an’all?’
The funny thing is that there is a school of thinking that says God can only be met in the shadows, at the edges, in the fragile and torn places of life.
I’m not entirely sure why that is - but I suspect God is actually cringes at the mental gymnastics we use to ascribe characteristics to him. Jesus certainly spoke in black-and-whites, but they were not the black-and-whites that everyone expected.
The women, the disabled, the lepers, the sinners and publicans were not excluded from the party - as everyone ’spiritual’ thought they should be - but were dragged in from the streets.
Comment by: Helen
5Thanks Joe.
I liked what Brian McLaren said at the Off The Map conference about good guys and bad guys. He said something like (I am going to mess this up but I hope it bears some resemblance to what he said):
“As soon as people get identified as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the good ones tend to get proud of their goodness, while the bad ones are humble about their badness. Which means the good guys get worse and the bad guys get better until they switch places…so there is continual interchange between who is on the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ list.”
Like you pointed out, I think we are still supposed to be being surprised by Jesus, rather than having things all figured out. The amount of certainty conveyed by some Christians about various things has bothered me for a while. I wrote about it on Christmas Day in The Christmas Story and certainty (which is on my own blog since this one was on break).
Comment by: Eliza
6Define “absolute”, please?
If there is one God, then it seems that God must be absolute, basically by definition…yet that’s the human definition, the human hope; seems to me we really can’t know.
As to God’s teachings being absolute, hmmm, seems unclear what exactly constitutes those teachings. Certainly worldwide there is not agreemeent among humans as to which writings contain God’s teachings. Do they all? Does just one? Which one? Why, then, do all of these writings seem to bear the stamp of humankind?
I’d be more inclined to interpret the laws of the natural world as those teachings, but hey that’s just me.
If there is not just one God, but two or more, then it’s not clear to me that either would be “absolute” - but maybe the group of them, however many there are, would make up absolute. (One hopes they would be in agreement!)
Hmmmmmm. The way I envision God, “we” can’t understand him. Inscrutable, unknowable (except perhaps in those little bits which intersect with our understanding & which we interpret - necessarily - in light of our human experience).
And how do we know how/what God would have us believe? Again, the problem of which teachings, if any, are the true teachings of God, and why they seem like they could have been written by humans, warts and all.
I can imagine that belief that one has a lead on God’s absolute knowledge & teachings is probably quite comforting, which may be why so many people over time have been so sure they they are the ones who have this “in” knowledge. (Just a guess…)
Comment by: Keith
7JoAnn,
Thank you for posting. Your quote comes from Proverbs 3, which begins, “My son, do not forget my teaching.” At its origin these proverbs were the words of a father to his son. Point being, this passage does support the idea of trusting the Lord, but not specifically the necessity of having the Holy Spirit to do so.
Also, if someone must have the Holy Spirit to understand God, why wouldn’t God give everyone the Holy Spirit? Said another way, if some do not understand because they were not touched by the Holy Spirit, how is that their fault? Your words could be met with the accusation that you are shutting the kingdom of God in men’s faces and allowing no way of entry, or that you are loading people with a burden they cannot carry and refusing to help them. IMO, Eliza and others are right to reject your words.
Comment by: Jim Henderson
8Eliza- I think you nailed it- It is hope and that is all the bible actually asks us to put our trust in.
There are natural absolutes which we can measure and observe. This could imply that there are spiritual absolutes which we cannot observe or measure but one doesnt necessarily follow the other.Nor can it be proven (like gravity can)
So when Christians (who voluntarily put their hope in that correlation)and claim it to be an absolute you are correct to ask “says who”?It doesen mean you are right it just means we can’t prove our assertions (and I would argue are not asked to by the bible)
Comment by: Doreen
9There are, in that we can never really know, understand, or describe God. Now if we are talking about God’s word, perhaps I’d have a different answer. Note I said perhaps.
If God is absolute, does that mean God does not change?
poetcomic.blogspot.com
I believe God is still speaking.
Comment by: Gregg Lamm
10Friends,
On page 91 of his book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (Harper and Row, 1973), author Frederick Buechner writes the following words under the heading of “Theology” …
Our egos want us and lead us to define God in ways that we believe will make God “safe”. And yet the word “safe” is much too close a synonym for “predictable” to fit God well … and encountering God leaves me breathless more often than not, and the word “safe” is usually nowhere to be found on the roster of descriptors that eventually roll out of my mouth when trying to define the holy bump in the night that happens when I choose to linger in God’s presence and when I choose to be attentive to God’s voice.
That’s not what I’ve experienced. Do I have deeply held convictions about what I believe? Yes. Do I have core assurances about what I believe God’s WORD says to me? Yes. Do I believe that within God’s WORD “gray is a primary color”? Yes. And this belief neuters neither God, or the Bible. It simply creates space for God to speak, move, teach, instruct, correct, reveal and move through the hearts and minds of people in ways that are alive.
Good night friends. it’s early, but I’m heading to bed. Teresa, my precious wife of 24 years is having surgery very early in the morning and will then undergo another major surgery six days from now. Thank you for your prayers and good thoughts. Godspeed.
read.think.pray.live.
Gregg Lamm
http://www.stayingthecourse.blogspot.com
Comment by: Seren
11I find JoAnn’s comment very interesting.
I am a very black and white thinker. Have been for as long as i remember. basic logic is my nesting place - none of the fuzzy stuff!!
but the consequence of this, for me, is that i am incredibly agnostic. i often try to set out in writing what i think about life, the universe, and everything. inspired by fox’s, “what canst thou say?” but i never get far. as soon as the premises come close to p & ~p i have to throw them all out. i’d rather have nothing than an inconsistency. i think it’s a personality thing.
Comment by: Helen
12Seren, this fascinates me because I think maybe I did something similar and that’s why I currently have so much ‘I don’t know’ in my own worldview.
Comment by: Seren
13Helen, i’m often curious about how personality shapes how, and therefore what, we believe.
i wonder if some of the socially radical neo-pagans who are involved in a new way of relating with the more-than-human today would have been more likely to hook up with christians back in the day (ie first or second century), than perhaps more conservative, bastion of society types?
Comment by: Pete Strobel
14Hmm….I ‘ve been trying to envision this illustration of Kay’s:
First of all I think Kay had the illustration wrong. Imagine a bar One mile high and ten miles long. It is divided into three unequal parts. One inch of black, two inches of gray and the vastness left over brilliant white. While we may spend our time within the smudge of grey off to one side, the vastness of brilliance all around us is a better reflection of God’s Kingdom. I really think that Satan get’s far too much credit. As for getting over two-thirds of “the bar” in Kay’s illustration, I think not.
Let’s not underestimate the degree that God will take to enter into our grayness, humble Himself through the blackness, and continue right on, “off the map” as benjamin ady put it. Bravo.
BICBW
Comment by: David H
15What would God have us believe? Apparently we can’t know unless “touched” by the Holy Spirit. What does that touch do, how does it manifest itself in terms of certain understanding? I have known some who were considered touched in such a way, but they haven’t always agreed on what they have been led to understand. That may not be gray, but it is certainly cloudy.
My experience with the advocates of an absolute God is that their certainty is that he absolutely agrees with them or at least their earthly leader. If I am not to rely on my understanding, shouldn’t I also discard all human interpretation? How do I know whose theology to trust when their are so many with opposing claims to understanding the true nature of God?
I would love a straight path, but not if it leads me to be a graceless moralist and rule monger. So, until the Spirit tells me otherwise, I’ll walk the crooked and confused route. That might at least help me keep my heart and my mind open.