What We Know: Starting the Journey

One of the great challenges for the church in our times is to make sense of life, yes, for ourselves, but also for the many, many people who have weighed religion in the scales and have found it wanting, who seek compassion, decency, common sense and inclusiveness but who have not found these things in churches, mosques and synagogues, who seek to make sense of a God they still believe in but whom they struggle to find in religion as they have experienced it.  Many, many people are tired of churches but they throng to interpretive spaces, to interpretive centers, to interpretive channels, to interpretive blogs and websites, to places that make sense of life and origins and history and religion and doctrine. 

How then might we, as followers of Jesus and as church communities, make sense of life and make sense of the world in which we live?  It begins naturally with making sense of what we know.  What do we know and how do we know that we know it?  And on what basis can we feel confident that what we think we know is truthful and squares with the way things really are?  In a world filled with new ideas, many of which challenge the ways we’ve thought before, in a world filled with competing truth claims, in a world filled with works of spiritual genesis that are not a part of our own faith tradition, how do we make sense of what we know?  

I will begin by tracing my own story.  I, like many others, grew up in a universe where everything was clear, exact and certain.  At least at first sight, and few looked deeper.  You knew who you were, where you came from, and where you were going.  You knew what was right and what was wrong.  You knew what was false and what was true.  You even knew who was saved and who was lost.  In fact, everyone and everything fit exactly into his, her or its own precise category.  Perhaps it is no surprise then that  I  had a professor back in my graduate studies in religion many years ago who would tell us that we could ask him any question, any question at all about anything, and given a little time, he could give us a book, chapter and verse answer from Scripture.  For anything.  He might have to go off and think about it for an hour or so, maybe a day or so – please smile, though he seldom did – but given time, he could give a book-chapter-and-verse answer to any question imaginable.  And it could be a question about anything: physics, biology, astronomy, any ethical dilemma, certainly any doctrinal matter, or who to date, how to raise your children, or who to vote for.  For any question, he could find the answer because after all had not Jesus promised us that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide his apostles into all the truth?  So, he reasoned, the Spirit came and inspired Scripture – gave us the Bible, and now we have this Scripture and it makes everything perfectly clear.

Even as he was saying these things, however, I came to realize that things were not at all that obvious to me or to most people.  I came to see on the basis of Scripture itself that there were many things that were not clear, exact and certain.  I began to read Scripture not through the lens or filter of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but as it was written – true to its original intent and historical context.  I began to read it with empathy for others as Jesus did.  I  began to see that it was not primarily a law code, that, yes, there were parts of it that were ancient law codes, but much of it was narrative and poetry and prophetic oracle and literary correspondence.  Within it there is mystery, and within it there are multiple perspectives.  Within it, ideas develop over time.  Within in, there is dialectic, that is, point and counter-point leading us to seek transcendent principles.  We are invited by Scripture to wrestle with a God who is simply I AM, I AM WHO I AM, beyond words and beyond category.  And I learned all this as a follower of Jesus who asks me to open my heart and my mind to others, to others who are very different from me, who gives me this Golden Rule, that I should do to others what I would have them do to me.  So I learned to respect others and to seek to understand them.  And I learned all this as one who has come to see that God is, in fact, love.