Bent Notes

It’s one I’ve been having in my head all day.  Let’s label the participants A and B.

A: The thing that puts me off about conventional Christianity is this notion that I’m sullied by sin from the get-go.  That all humannkind is.  Orginal sin, Calvin’s doctrine of the Total Depravity of man, all that stuff.  I’m a pretty good guy.  On balance, I’m inclined toward good. I consciously strive to cultivate virtue within myself.  What is this sin business all about, anyway?  It looks to me like human behavior falls along a continuum from evil to good.  You just get the ones at the bad end of the spectrum to get with the program and stop being jerks.  That’s the end of the story, isn’t it?

B: What does the Bible have to say about how you should live?

A: Oh, for heaven’s sake.  Pun intended if you care to take it that way.

B: Just trying to answer your question about “this sin business.”

A: Alright, then.  Well, let’s see.  Here in Deuteronomy 5 is The Ten Commandments.  And in Deuteronomy 6 is The Great Commandment.  And here in Matthew 5 it says to love your enemies.  Here in 1 Corinthians 7 it says that if you can’t resist the urge to touch someone of the opposite gender, marry her or him and rule over each other’s bodies.  Hmmm.  Now I’m finding all kinds of places where it says to do this and not to do that.

B: And do you follow these various commandments, and admonishments to the letter?

A: No, certainly not.

B: How does that play out in your life?

A: Well, I think there’s a pretty direct correlation between that and the fact that sometimes I feel empty inside, alone, confused.

B: You have lots of friends and loved ones who care about you.  Could any of them give you perfect advice as to a way out of those feelings?

A: Well, no.  They fall prey to them, too.  In fact, everyone does.

B: So what kind of being could provide such guidance?  Have all your years of meditation and materially induced mystical states provided such guidance?

A: They have not.

B: How about God, as depicted in the Bible?

A: Well, dang it, nowhere in the Bible does it once and for all say, “In a nutshell, here is the essence of what or who God is, fully defined in the way that water is defined as two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.”  This God of the Bible, you can’t see him!  It’s absurd to invest energy in communicating with a being no one has ever seen.

B: Moses saw him.  He conceived a baby with Mary.

A: Well, a lot of good that does the millions of us who have come down the pike in the thousands of years since.  How can I learn more about the nature of this God no one can actually see?

B: May I suggest this Bible that has figured so prominently in our conversation?  A good deal of it is in fact devoted to describing Him, providing indications of His nature.  Psalms is full of such stuff.  Rock and Redeemer, Most High who knows the number of hairs on your head.  Likewise the Gospels: a Father who loves you in spite of your waywardness.

A: But in what sense is this Bible the word of this God?  I mean, what did the inspiration that infused the humans who wrote it down - over the course of many centuries, I might add - look like?  What is the scientific explanation of how that happened?

B: You and I may not know the details of that, but there are only two possibilities: either they really were inspired by God, or they had some set of lesser, merely human motives - in other words, they were jiving us.

A: Ah, I still can’t take literally certain things.  I’m just not a fundamentalist.  The most glaring example of that is the six-day creation depicted in genesis.

B: Fine.  You’re in solid company.  C.S. Lewis doesn’t do creationism, either.  But does that get you out of either adhering or not adhering to the broad and consistent outline of what the Bible tells us about God and our relationship to Him?

A: No.  There is indeed a coherent story that is told throughout the course of the sixty-six books, even though they were written under disparate circumstances.  I’ve definitely thought enough about this to see that the New-Thought-there-is-no-sin-or-need-for-redemption denominations are glossing over what they want to in the Bible, and in some cases adding stuff to it.

B: Anything else still bugging you?

A: Well, the fact that there’s no way I can comply to the letter with all the laws and instructions God has handed us in this Bible.  By ten o’clock every morning of my life, I’ve taken his name in vain.  I cut all kinds of moral corners.  Not a day goes by that I don’t see some fellow human being of the female persuasion and think to myself, Man, what bliss she would be in the shower!

B: Again, you’re in good company.  There’s a few billion of us throughout history who are in the same boat.  Think about this: the only perfect person who ever existed suffered the full consequences of everything we’ve ever done.  We’ve been sort of sleazing along, kind of getting away with our rebellion against He who created us, in the sense that we rise to face another day, get our three squares and such.  That one perfect guy, though, on a Friday afternoon that, everywhere else in the world besides that hilltop at Calvary, proceeded much like any other Friday afternoon, took the full heat for us and made it all okay with The Big Guy.

A: Wow.  da–

B: Don’t, man.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Religion & Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.