Despite this initial inclination, I am going to ask you to take what is often your own advice to those that challenge you on what you are clinging to and to really read. And why is it that I plead? Because the Church is Christ's... and I dearly love, labor, and possibly fight for that which is He loves. If you are His, then despite your internal reactions and desires to remain unprovoked I plead with you to hear what I am about to say.
These past few years I have become increasingly aware of just how much trouble we're in, and God help us, I don't think it's as simple as a lot of those I would typically agree with would say it is. It's been a slow, crock-pot-like process where contents have been added and reduced until what we currently have looks, tastes, and smells very different than what we began with. What is this trouble that I speak of? Well, its beyond me at this point to arrive at some pithy name for it, but I can pick out some things in this recipe that are definitely affecting the taste... and let me say that, from the outset, the taste is beginning to concern me.
There are those who believe that what the Church needs more than anything now is to be relevant. Brothers and sisters, those are empty words. It's how we go about being relevant that makes or breaks us, and it is in this I believe we are charting a course towards a dark and rocky lee-shore. A lot of phrases are thrown around in this debate, a lot of things are said that are, in my view, far from any recognizable truth and close to compromise with a world who is, at it's most basic level, in opposition to the glory of Christ and is by nature hostile to God.
One of these phrases that is tossed around is that some want to keep "God in the box." Look at this quote from a very popular Christian book called "The Shack" which I have recently been encountering frequently:
“In seminary he [The main character, "Mack"] had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice has been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while the educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just a book” (65-66).
There it is. You'll also find it used in some variation by someone trying to defend against anyone who takes a more careful, discerning and analytical approach to reading than those who chiefly long for sentimentality, experience, and frankly the infection of postmodern thought into the Christian worldview. Is the charge sometimes warranted, sure. But usually it isn't, and this quote from The Shack is a pristine example of how it is used as a sloppy ad-hominem attack against the caricature (read: straw-man) of many Godly, Christ centered people who typically have the audacity to assert that God's already set the grounds He wants us to perceive Him, meditate upon, and worship Him under. In a word, someone said "No, you shouldn't go there" and it seems that same Sin that was present in the Garden finds fertile soil today.
If your desire is to have God out of a box, and that "box" is what the special revelation in Scripture says to us about Him, upon what authority do you now assert that you can know anything about Him at all? How do you know it is Him you're now all snuggly with, and not a god of your own making? How does one go about testing every spirit when they have just denied the "key" to the test.
One philosophical conclusion is that you are relying entirely upon a experiential claim for truth. It is "real" and "right" because it made you feel a certain way, which you have presupposed as being good. It made you feel better about something; closer to something. One can't really rebut that claim, but if you are not willing to entertain the idea that what that something is may not be right. Experience alone cannot be your guide to anywhere except to an empty, shallow, and inarticulate kind of Western spiritualism which neither has the power to save, to set free, or to ultimately fill you full of knowledge. We have other religions that testify to this. Of the passionate Jews, Paul says:
"Brothers,my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. - Romans 10:1-4Belief here, (as in other places which space and time prevent me from mentioning) is tied not to desire, to impression, to feeling, or to zeal, but to knowledge. People are saved by what they come to believe according to what they know, not what they presume to establish themselves. Now, I'll couch that with a big caveat. What we call "knowledge" is not always so. These days, we like to divide it up by saying "head knowledge vs. heart knowledge." That, biblically defined, is false knowledge. Paul is speaking of real knowledge, that which can be known from what has been revealed in Christ and according to the Scriptures.
I submit to you, that there is an agenda at play here. You begin to see it in the modernists/liberals that were confronted by J. Gresham Machen in the early 1900's. You see it in the liberals who set out to erode the reliability and inspiration of the Bible. You see it in the rhetoric of the Open Theists. You see it in the Emergent church movement. You see it in a lot of people who love sentimentality and react violently against anything that threatens that sense of entitlement that proclaims "I know better" based upon nothing more than what they feel.
This "unboxed God" that some are so intent on saying is best, is a god whom is denied his very own voice for the sake of our pitiful opinions. It is a god you cannot really know anything about, or be certain of. An unboxed God is a God whom has said nothing, preferring rather to let us decide on our own. And how do we decide anything? By what we desire; by what we feel fulfills us or benefits us most? How often do you, professing Christian, know what is best for you? Who are you, oh pot, to assert that kind of place in its own making? Once again the death we bought into in the garden shows its head again: "Do not eat" is answered by "Do not tell me what to eat!" That which is given to us as a grace, as a means to surely know and experience God is wrongly called legalism, irrelevant, unloving, and in effect false.
The attack is often made "Do you really think we've got God figured out?!?!" The presumption here is that anyone who asserts he has an idea, regardless of where that idea comes from, is the arrogant one. The "unboxed God" can't be described or elaborated upon in the least detail. He is "mysterious" and "big, but he is also empty and fickle." It's a significant reason why, upon the whole, the Church in North America is in the sorry state it is in. It's why we often waver in seasons you have called "roller coaster" and captured in oh-so-many songs. It's why we come up with extra-biblical contrivances like "back-slidden" and God being "distant." Because so many of us have, at our most fundamental, presuppositional level denied one of the main graces given us to know Him. We have, in our serch for relevantcy, called things like doctrine and theology unimportant if not villifying them altogether. We've got it in our heads that the way to really know God is to do so with experience alone. All that theology and doctrine is just stuff for the intelligentsia and the nasty legalists who want to tell everyone that they're wrong.
If you sent me a picture or description of some kind, and I chose rather to prefer you to appear as something other than who you are, would you ever reasonably say that I knew you or was getting closer to you by my redefinition of who you are according to your own self description? Say you were a blonde, early 30's, with one child and you lived in Oklahoma. You say you like ice cream, musicals, 80's music and reading mysteries. Oh... but I don't like musicals or mysteries, 80's music or ice cream and, well... I prefer to think of you as a lover of classical, of tofu, of horror movies and ethnic non-fiction. While we're at it, I rather prefer to imagine you as a redhead, hip, single and not from a boring place like OK. Maybe you're from Seattle, or Miami, or DC. Nice and metropolitan - cultured and relevant - and not from some rural middle American town. Have I not redefined you by meddling with your specifics? Am I now appealing to who you really are? or who I want you to be? Is any deep relationship possible when I am set to redefine what you have presented to me as who you are? Would I know you if I saw you? Could I describe you accurately to others, so that they would know you?
The answers to those questions are clear. No. And anyone that really knew you would protest your redefinition. They would protest, because it is the only sensible thing to do. It is the right thing to do. Now imagine that knowing you was a matter of life now, and of life later after death.
Who is the one wielding arrogance? The one who appeals to what we do know about you or the one who, for his own desire, finds it appropriate to re-define who you are according to his preferences? Who is the competent one? The one who holds a picture and has the audacity to claim you're not right about a few, perhaps important, details? Or the one who shifts off the picture, preferring creative ways to describe you for whatever agenda they might have?
Arrogance. That's what this "you want God in a box, or a book." business is. It's not humility. It's not creativity. It's changing the answers on the test. It's going off script. It's changing the picture, the resume, the self-description of Father, Son, and Spirit. It is silencing Him because you don't like being told what to think, you don't like the picture, or you'd rather experience something else.
Arrogance. That's what this attacking anyone who asks you to test what you are reading, listening to, or loving is. Some people may be adults, but we are all sinners. The way that seems right to us ends in death. We are not our own, and it is not the picture we like that we're supposed to be conformed into, but that of Christ's. Well, guess what. Having an image defines you, at least to some extent. It puts limits on you. It lets people know who you are versus who you are not. To deny this is arrogance. To assert that we, sinners that we are, have suddenly arrived upon a better way to speak about God than God Himself, through prophets, Jesus, or apostles, is not refreshing or relevant - it's denial and departure.
Humility is when you subject yourself, your ideas, and your person to something else that is greater than you. Rather than proclaim your worth, your entitlement and your relevance, you trust and are are triumphed over by truth despite your own inclinations and ideas. You are a champion for it, that Greater thing. Humility is when you value yourself less and value God more. It;s not about what you feel, but what He says. It's not about your impressions, limited as the necessarily are, but His knowledge. It is not "knowing less" or "affirming less." It is not a triumph of experience over knowledge; of mystery over certainty. Those things are asinine postmodern fabrications.
Read what you want, but seek your own way and desires at your own peril. Perhaps it may benefit you, perhaps it will be your undoing. Are you beyond deception? But if you do so while chastising, casting denials and slandering those whose concern is for Truth and the Picture We Do Have, you are denying the very means God has given you to really know Him. And for what? Feeling warm and close to a contrary and mysterious God you have refused to listen to when He has certainly spoken? Or is it that you sort of deny that He's spoken there at all, and how you really know Him is by what you feel in your gut? Think about that next time you start throwing out one of those cliche's and asserting your rights. What rights do you have, what do you really know anyway apart from that which you have been told?
If you want to discuss individual interpretations on difficult topics, there's room for that, certainly. But it had better be about something real and not just what you think and feel. You had better know what you're talking about, at least when it comes to who God is and who He is not. Maybe that puts me in the camp of "intelligentsia" or "mean Calvinists" or "legalists" or whatever. But I am accountable for what I know, and so are you. There are lives at stake, after all.
If it's about being in certain "camps." I know who I am going with, and it isn't going to be where my feelings and own ideas usually lead me.Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. - Philippians 3:17-21
