I've spent most of my life studying the Bible and related
sources in an effort to discover who God is and what God wants to accomplish
through me. The longer I live the more important it seems that I continue to do
so. That activity is called theology, and everybody, even agnostics and atheists, has “a
theology.”
The greatest difficulty with theology is keeping ourselves
out of it. What passes for Bible study too often is really an exercise in
finding justification for what we already are doing or have decided to do. As
the old cliché goes: “You can prove anything with the Bible.” In seminary we
called that “seducing the text.” Sometimes it’s more like “raping the text.”
Perhaps the most egregious—and at the same time the most
denied—abuse of Scripture and theology is how it is twisted to support the use
of violence or the threat of violence to inflict and enforce specific doctrines or practices; and it makes
little difference whether the enforced doctrine or practice is religious,
political, economic or simple greed—even the enslavement of other humans has
been justified through the rape of Scripture.
In other words, the history of theology is filled with intrusions
of human fallibility. Theology and faith have
been shaped by human need, desire and ambition to a much greater degree
than they have shaped those human
foibles. While most theology emerges as a way of shaping human relationships and
culture, in virtually every case, culture eventually shapes theology, rather
than the other way around.
The bottom line is power and control. In a recent blog, Kyle
Roberts develops the idea that throughout Christian history theology has served
“to empower certain persons over others and to inscribe authority in one way of
theologizing over another way, one way of thinking of Christ over another, one
way of understanding salvation over another way.”[1]
Why drag out all the dirty laundry? Isn't it more uplifting
and constructive to lift up Christ and his grace? Absolutely. But, if that’s
what we've been doing, we've done a terrible job! We've been long on condemning the sins of others, and short on any kind of self-evaluation.
For a couple of generations
people by the droves have been bailing out of virtually every manifestation of
organized “religion.”
And the reason they’re leaving? They point primarily to a
lack of integrity between what religion preaches and what it practices.
Of course they often generalize the entire religious world on the basis of some single manifestation of religion—quite likely one particular
experience related to religion. But the tragedy is that those counterproductive
experiences of religion seem to outnumber those of religious integrity.
In short, the church has lost its power, and none too soon! The
problem with a power-based ideology is that power eventually runs out. The
church has reacted to its loss of power simply by redoubling its investment in
ineffective and counterproductive strategies of institutional maintenance.
Three quarters of a century ago those strategies spelled
power, and “success.” But success increasingly was measured by the standards of
the marketing industry, rather than by biblically-based theology. When “the
customer is always right,” the church cedes its power to the market.
Power was never a part of Christ’s agenda in the first place!
The truth is, we humans have gotten it wrong—over and over and over!
We’re not perfect; and one of the greatest manifestations of
our imperfection is that we don’t always recognize or acknowledge it. It’s
always the other guy who gets it wrong (you know, that cinder in the other
guy’s eye…).
But the cry from the “spiritually yearning, institutionally
disillusioned public”[2]
is simple: “Show us how to follow Jesus.”
WHAT A CONCEPT!!!
How does one “follow Jesus?” Many of us have spent the
greater part of a lifetime trying to do, and we still don’t get it right on a
consistent basis. But how about starting simply by adopting one quality of
Jesus at a time? For some of us even that will be a life-long struggle; and for
most of us it will be an ongoing exercise in one step forward, two steps back.
I propose the quality of humility as a starting place. Fair
or unfair, accurate or inaccurate, one of the most frequent stereotypes of
Christians today is arrogance. It’s easy to see in some people (please don’t
show me a mirror!)
In contrast, consider my favorite passage in the Bible:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross. ~
Philippians 2:5-8 (NRSV)
Humility, in this text, involves surrender of status,
acceptance of a life of servanthood and remaining obedient to the life of service
to which God called him.
How about that as a starting place for following Jesus?
That’s the way I see it through the flawed glass that is my
world view.
Together in the Walk,
Jim
