This is totally random. I’ve been having ratatouille lately. Ratatouille basically means “stew with eggplant.” It’s great stuff, and has added further fuel to my passionate love for the eggplant. It’s the coolest veggie in the world. It can substitute for anything.
So I have an idea: the next time I make chili, I’m going to substitute one eggplant, cut into 1 inch squares for every can of beans the recipie recommends.
Wish me luck…
for me to continue my discussion on the Bible, visit Maggie Dawn and read her discussion on the Holy Spirit and clothes.
I haven’t read her long enough to know what subgroup of Christianity she comes from, or whether I agree with her on everything, but she has some interesting things to say.
Check her out.
Part 1.
I’ve already made the point that God is the source and foundation of everything. I’d like to think, though, that I’ve also made a couple other points on the sly. One of those points I hope I’ve made is that the only way to really understand God is to experience Him. Job thought he knew God for the first 37 chapters of the book, but he realized he didn’t have a clue once he had first hand experience. The second point I hoped to get across was that there’s no way to experience God vicariously. I can’t experience God for you.
I have a droll joke I like to throw out, whenever the opportunity presents itself: Say I’m at work and a coworker turns to me and says, “Wow! I’m so cold I can’t feel my fingers!” Immediately I’ll say back, “Wow! I can’t feel your fingers either!” Inevitably, I get the stupid look—how am I supposed to feel her fingers when I’m way over here?
The same principle applies when it comes to knowing God. There’s no way my description of an experience I had is going to work for you. You have to encounter Him yourself.
So what good is the Bible? If the only way to really understand God is to experience him, why do we have a book?
I hope you can see where this is going, and why it gets a little kooky here. There are basically two groups of people in reference to the scriptures: those who believe it is authoritative, and those who don’t. That is, either you believe the Bible is right and you must conform yourself to it, or you believe it’s a handy reference for what people used to think. There are lots of degrees between these two poles, but those are the two basic positions.
For the record, I’m part of the group that believes in the authority of the scriptures. But out of their absolute trust in the scriptures, I hear some people saying a lot of strange things. For some reason, there’s this odd pattern in the world, of people pitting experience against scripture. Usually, the question you hear is something along the lines of “are you going to believe the scriptures, or your experience?” Inevitably scripture wins out. Honestly, this is pretty embarrassing.
The problem is that people forget that everything still comes through the human filter. Even if God dictated the scriptures word-for-word to Moses and Paul and all the other authors of the bible, what we have would still be the written record of someone’s experience of that dictation. So the question is really, “are you going to trust someone else’s experience or your own?” Which is an absolutely unfair question. You can’t have someone else’s experience! You can have a similar experience. You can experience the record of their experience. But you can’t have someone else’s experience. So these people are actually asking you to judge between two of your own experiences. How confusing is that?
How can you say to yourself, “these two experiences that I had, one of them is true, and the other one never happened. As it turns out, I’m actually a schizophrenic. I have mad delusions of ordinariness.”?
Fortunately, you don’t have to. There’s nothing wrong with your experience.
A few hundred years ago, a man by the name of Copernicus was dragged into court. His charge: seditious insults about the nature of the universe. Copernicus, based on his experience and a little math had determined that the earth was not the center of the universe. In fact the earth rotated around the sun. This was terrible bravado, because it was as clear as day that the sun rotated around the earth. What Copernicus was saying was not only in direct defiance of everybody else’s experience, but it was contrary to the gospel of Aristotle. Copernicus was ordered to immediately recant or be condemned to for heresy. (“Recant” – to take back what you said, as opposed to “repent” – to take back what you did.) Copernicus, delightful man that he was replied, “the earth stands.” Poof. End of heresy. But as he was walking out of the room, he finished his sentence: “But yet it moves.” Today we agree with Copernicus and decry that heretic Aristotle.
Fortunately for us, the Bible has never said that the sun revolves around the earth. In fact, it quite clearly states that everything revolves around the Son. But we can learn a little from Copernicus: there was no difference between his experience and the experience of everybody else concerning the movement of heavenly bodies. The difference was in how much thought he applied to his experience.
It works the same for us. If the Bible is authoritative, and I am not a schizophrenic, then there can be no disparity between my experience and the scriptures. If there is a difference, the problem must lie in how much thought I have applied to my experience.
Can somebody get me this T-shirt?
EDIT: actually, no. It would be great to have one, but I wouldn’t wear it.
It was absolutely wonderful to be able to go to church today. I was in a different church almost everyday in Italy, but only got to attend mass once. I didn’t understand a word of the Italian service but the singing was beautiful. I’m glad to be back where I can understand what’s being said in church and able to sing along; I really missed it.
Today’s stuff won’t come from my dailies; I need to catch up with my reading. Instead they’ll be recaps of the wonderful messages that I heard this morning in college worship and during the main service. They’re things I’ve heard before, but truth is truth and needs to be proclaimed so here goes.
Rule #1: I’m not now, never was, and never will be perfect while I still live in this fleshly body and world.
Rule #2: God loves me anyway and will work with and through me.
We are told not to unevenly yoke ourselves with other people in this life but he was willing to yoke himself with us. That means that he walks at our pace one step at a time and supports us when we stumble and fall flat on our faces. Because he walks with us, he knows our troubles intimately and is still willing to share our burdens. In fact, he tells us to let him handle the burdens for us; how amazing is that?
We cannot attain righteousness; we cannot be good enough. When you start to think that your life is pretty good in comparison to the rest of life and man, then you have fallen in to a self righteousness that is sin. God does not compare us to each other, why do we insist on doing so? God sees the heart of each individual person, their failings, desires, hopes dreams and even nightmares. He treats us as individuals; we need to realize that each and every one of us is wonderfully unique and incomparable especially when it comes to spirituality.
Being religious is nothing more than practicing a counterfeit Christianity. I would rather live in a hole and know my Lord than live in the most beautiful house, go to the most beautiful church (and I’ve seen quite a few), and go through the empty motions of an empty religion. Life is about relationships and so is Christianity.
Christian life does not come out of a book or a duty to pray at a certain time everyday. Ever heard of “pray constantly” and “walk humbly with your God”? Those are supposed to be continual things throughout your day no matter whether you’re in church on Sunday morning or walking around in a grocery store on Thursday evening. Worship is our response to God’s presence and he shows up anywhere and at any time. Rejoice and be glad always! We have a living Lord who loves.
We need to peel off the layers of quick spiritual fixes that we’ve applied to cover up our dirty surfaces. Let the healer cut deep, remove the gangrene that’s eating away at you and rekindle a love of life and neighbor in your heart. Let’s be religious people in recovery together; let’s stop trying to fill our own cups and drink from the overflowing cup of Christ. Only his cup is sufficient for everything.
Commit yourself to truth and you will never be the same again.
“If someone has accepted a false doctrine, such as Islam or Calvinism, do we as Christians have the responsibility to tell them they are lost and going to hell, if they don’t repent and ask Jesus to save them?”
Sometimes people ask the darndest questions.
Hi guys. Just a quick update: things are moving right along with me. I’m on about page 6 of my article on the Bible. I’m going to break it up several days reading, don’t worry.
While I’ve got your attention, I would like to point out that I have a new subscribe button over to the right there. You should be able to enter your email address in there and get an update from me whenever I say something new. You won’t get the whole article in your mail though, because it loses the formatting and it looks all weird then. So somebody please subscribe and then send me a note so I know if it goes through all right. I absolutely refuse to subscribe to myself!
Also, your thoughts on whether I should keep the Comment Forum to the right would be appreciated.
And lastly, here’s a great weblog from iraq that provides better commentary than the doom and gloom I’ve been getting lately from the major media.
Caffeine is waaay bad for you. I want you to know that.
Today is the first day of my new work shift. I took 3rd shift the last time we rotated, so I got in tonight around 11:00 pm. I’ll be working until 8:00 am. Yum.
Actually, it’s not so bad. I stayed up extra late last night, till about 3:30 (am), and then took an extra nap around 4:30 (pm). So I got up around 9 this evening and basically pretended that 6 and I had two hours to get to work before 8. I’ve just flip-flopped my working and my sleeping hours.
To help me in this shifting process, on the way to work I bought two frappucinos. One to keep me up and one for back-up. Did I mention caffeine is bad for you? It’s bad for me anyway. I generally avoid the stuff, so when I do get some in my system, it REALLY works. Generally, it hits me in two stages: The first stage is instantaneous. Within 20 minutes of my first sip of coffee, I get the shakes. When I was a kid, I had asthma really bad and either inhalers didn’t exist, or my parents had been convinced they were of the devil, or something, but we didn’t have them. One of the things we had instead was these little Ventolin pills. Ventolin is the stuff they usually put in the inhalers now, but the pills I had were a straight 8-hour dose of the stuff. Triggered an extended adrenaline rush. Now caffeine does something similar to me. After about 3 hours, though, the second stage kicks in, and I just feel really good.
I took a break around 2:30, and stepped outside, and ran about half a mile in the empty parking lot, just for the fun of it. Then I sang a couple of songs at the top of my lungs and danced a little jig before heading back inside. I barely avoided banging on the windows to harass my coworkers. Be very glad I resisted the urge to harass my coworkers.
I feel a little foolish, but *my* it’s a nice night.
Ok. Theology is just going to have to wait. I’m still processing what it is I think, I think. I also have a lot of projects that seem to have suddenly descended upon me. Let’s see:
I’m thinking about writing a novel.
Unfortunately, you won’t see it here. Oh, you may eventually, but I’m not going to immediately start putting up first chapters for review. I don’t want to put anything up until it’s finished porcelain. Right now I’m still looking for good quality clay. But here’s my background:
A few years ago, I was listening to a sermon on something or other, and the speaker was a pediatrician who explained that he became a doctor because of a TV show that he watched growing up that was the 1960’s equivalent of Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. It made being a doctor into a powerful romantic image for him. Going out, being a hero, saving the day, that sort of thing. Then he said that he might have gone into ministry if there had been a show on called Bobby Connor: Texas Prophet.
Ever since then, that’s been ruminating in my spirit.
I’m thinking I could do that. I don’t mean that I could come up with scripts and production for a TV show, but I’d like to write a book (or series of books) where the main characters were a group of Christians. Perhaps a something like X-Men, where instead of “super powers” they would have different kinds of spiritual gifts.
I could do it. I know I can.
What I’d like to do is set the story in high school, perhaps starting as early as 9th or 10th grade. I’ve got some basic plot ideas worked out in my head, but nothing worth showing off yet. The problem is, if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right, and for that I need more than my own memories of growing up in the church. I take that line about “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” pretty seriously.
So… If anyone is interested, I’d like to interview them. Please put a note up on the forum, or email me if you have that address. I’d put my email up on the site, but I’ve found that having traffic on a website and an email on the same website equals spam.
The next couple of days, if I get bored enough, I think I may put some of my own autobiographical stuff up just so I can hash through it for content (it has nothing to do with shameless egotism, really. J)
And with that, I’m off to church!
Comments are fixed!!!
neumatikos 