gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) (10/01/90)
On 27 Sep 90 07:23:23 GMT, davidh@tektronix.tek.com (David L Hatcher) said:
[ Other points leading to this conclusion left out ]
.> Now I do not feel that Christ likes the type of thinking that
.> has a way of creating separation. I've seen a number of family
.> ties broken up because of this over riding feeling.
.> David Hatcher
There is a lot in what Davit Hatcher says to be sympathetic toward.
There are Christians who condemn others; in fact, probably every
serious Christian falls into that trap at one time or another.
To me, it is interesting to see what Jesus said about the Samaritans
when he talked to the Samaritan woman. He said, ``You worship what
you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the
Jews.'' This also brings to mind the story of Paul at Athens, where
he found the shrine to the unknown god, and said, ``What therefore you
worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.''
If Christianity is really ``good news'' then this is one aspect of
it--the making known of the unseen, otherwise unknowable God.
Unfortunately, this involves the claim that ``what to you is unknown,
I make known.'' It takes a lot of tact to say that. But if we
believe that Christ is God making himself known, then we have no
choice but to find a way of saying it that doesn't alienate the
hearer.
Another problem is the fact that content is involved at all. It is
easy to ``feel the presence of God;'' it is more difficult to wrestle
through to the truth about that presence. Is it really God? If we
believe that the commandment ``You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, soul, strength and mind'' applies, then we have to
come to grips with God with all our being, including our rational
facilities. This means that we have to affirm some things about God,
and reject others. If we leave our heart behind, our beliefs are
sterile; if we leave our mind behind, our beliefs lack substance. In
either case, we lose the full benifit of the commandment; our love
for God can draw together the diverse portions of our scattered being
and make us whole by virtue of the fact that we devote ourselves to a
single thing.
Our attitude must be one of openness to God; but at the same time we
have to be closed to other things. This is just a fact of life for
us. In the same way that when we get married, we ``sacrifice'' our
right to pursue other men or women for the sake of being more fully
open to the one we marry, we sacrifice the right to pursue every
``wind of doctrine'' for the sake of pursuing the Christ who is
witnessed to in the Scriptures.
The assumption behind all this is that we take God seriously. We
assume that it matters that we get our ideas about God right; not that
God won't forgive our honest errors or lead us into light, but rather
that we are so easily fooled and so easily fool ourselves. Not only
that, Christianity goes against the grain. It is hard to be a
Christian because it means laying down our natural proclivities, even
(especially) our religious proclivities. There's something I wrote a
long time ago, when the gurus were really big out here:
``Today it will be levitation,'' I think.
``Today they'll teach us how to levitate.''
Instead I am taught to love my neighbor.
It's a lot more fun to levitate than to ``take up your cross daily.''
--
Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com
``Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.''