What does it mean to be a Believer in the 21st Century in Portland, Oregon, USA? [Happens to be when and where I live.] What shapes my faith? Obviously, the Word of God does. I am what they call a person of the Book. And I study that Book both for what it can tell me about what was intended for the original audiences and for how it is to be applied or contextualized in my own modern world.
Such study takes skill. It is fascinating that the Word can speak to the simplest of minds, whether untrained or untrainable. Jesus’ parables, understood by the unlearned and simple-minded, were nonsense to the wise and scholarly. And yet, the Apostle Paul says it is necessary for us, as we are able, to be trained to correctly discern the Word. To learn how to hear the Scriptures as they spoke to those first hearers. To learn how to hear it for ourselves in our own context. Ignorance is no excuse under the law or before God.
So we study not only the Word itself, but also the history and cultures out of which it came so that we can better understand the Word. And we study our own world and cultures and ourselves so that we can better understand how to apply that Word.
Such skill is not achieved in a vacuum. It comes through being connected with the larger Community of Faith. No generation of believers has ever been so blessed by such interconnectedness, both with other contemporary Believers around the globe and with resources that can put us in touch with generations dating back into the dim past.
Much of this connectivity we owe, surprisingly, to secular and non-Christian scholars who help us shed light on the original texts and contexts, as well as on our own contemporary world and ourselves. We do ourselves and our world a great disservice when we dismiss those outside of the Faith as having nothing to contribute to the conversation about faith. Jesus recognized greater faith in a Roman Centurion than in all of the people of Faith in his day.
We not only learn our skills in Community. We execute those skills in Community. We practice our faith in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses, to borrow a word picture from the ancient writer of the Book of Hebrews. A company of witnesses made all the stronger for its human and cultural diversity today and its human, cultural, and historical diversity through the ages.
Can we not hear individually and directly from God? Most definitely yes. Then why do we need all this other stuff? Because we are not God. We are human and fallen human at that. And because revelation is relational. God speaks to us directly by and through His Spirit, but He also chooses to speak to us through His Community of Faith and through His Word again by that same Holy Spirit.
A skill we learn as we “study to show ourselves approved, rightly dividing the word of truth” is to ask questions and to question. Many Believers are afraid of questions. Odd then that all restorationist movements from before Luther and Calvin on down to the more recent Adventists and Campbellites and Pentecostals and Charismatics have all gained their blazes of insight precisely through raising questions and doubting what was then understood.
As with the pigs in Animal Farm, the reformers become more close-minded than the original masters once they have reformed themselves into power. Some argue that now we have all the understanding we need – now that we have the written Word or the Holy Spirit (the emphasis depending on which restorationist strain you claim). So, they imply, we don’t need to have any more doubts or ask any more questions. But such close-mindedness has more in common with the rankest of unbelievers than it does with sincere seekers.
Only those who continue to hunger and thirst and ask and question and doubt and wrestle will be satisfied. For a static relationship – whether with God or man – is a dead one. God, who is infinite, invites us to know Him and what we discover is there is no end to knowing Him. Just when we think we’ve cornered the market on revelation and understanding, we discover that there is far more that we don’t know about God than we do.
Some say we don’t need to probe all that, that we have eternity to explore, that in this life it is best to remain safe in limited understanding. But such Limiters confuse God with a rock. God is a Being, a person. He is dynamic, deep and vast and He invites us to plunge in and never give up knowing Him more and more. That infinite God is the One I long to worship.
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