O, the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgements, and His ways past finding out!
-A.W. Tozer
Rob Bell has just ignited the fuse of the orthodox church and it is ready to explode. Why? Because they see someone jeopardizing the sanctity of what they believe. I fully believe that it is important to defend what we believe, and even something we're commanded to do. Paul spends much of Galatians, the second book written in the New Testament, defending the Gospel message that he was given. He adamantly makes his case to those people he was recently ministering to, not withholding his anger in his letter.
"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel -- which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!"
-Galatians 1:6-9
This passage reminds me a lot of the situation at hand. Those who are more traditionally rooted feel that the gospel they know to be true is being threatened by another man's teaching. Hopefully the real fear is that others will be led astray, but it's also likely that there is a great deal of pride on the line. There is likely a battle to control what is thought of as truth. This same type of situation has been shown throughout history, whether with questions of science (think Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, etc), government policy, or religious doctrine. It is the same thing Jesus encountered with the Pharisees. People are resistant to change and don't want to be told that their beliefs are wrong, they don't want to have their world turned completely upside-down. But in this there is the tension of truth, discerning what is right or wrong. Certainly both sides in each scenario believe they are right, so how do you tell the difference? All of this begs the question, what exactly is truth? Or better yet, what exactly is Truth?
I fully believe in Truth. I believe that this Truth is rooted in God, and since God is immutable (unchanging), I believe that these truths do not change. The problem we, as humans, encounter is the ability to know these truths. If absolute Truth is rooted in God, we must know God in order to know Truth. I've read and am currently re-reading A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy. If you haven't read it, do it. It's worth your time. Tozer focuses on what we can know to be true of God, attribute by attribute, and the section that recently has been on my mind is that of God's Infinitude.
Tozer profoundly explains what it means for God to be infinite. "Of all that can be thought of or said about God, His infinitude is the most difficult to grasp. Even to try to conceive of it would appear to be self-contradictory, for such conceptualization requires us to undertake something which we know at the outset we can never accomplish." The basic premise of this line of thought is that God created us. He created our bodies, this earth, and our minds. As a result, we can never possibly understand Him. He exists in a realm that is beyond anything we can comprehend, so to try is futile. He expounds further by quoting Novatian, who says, "At the contemplation and utterance of His majesty all eloquence is rightly dumb, all mental effort is feeble. For God is greater than mind itself. His greatness cannot be conceived." "All our thoughts about Him will be less than He, and our loftiest utterances will be trivialiteis in comparison with Him." What we know of Truth must come from what we know of God, and what we know of God must come from what He has chosen to reveal to us and nothing more. If our truth comes from anywhere else, we make ourselves vulnerable to deception.
This is paramount when examining Truth. The real problem here, as Tozer eloquently explained and Don Miller touched on in a recent blog post, is that Truth is beyond our grasp. We cannot know it, yet need to form opinions and lay down a foundation of sorts in order to function on a daily basis. The Truth is, indeed, immutable, but our perception of the truth is open to change. Look throughout history, and you will see a myriad of worldviews that have since been turned upside down. It was previously accepted as truth that the sun and moon were gods, that the earth was at the center of the universe, that the earth was flat, and so much more. We now know that these things are not true. The Truth has been the same throughout, but the perception has changed. As this happens, it requires a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift, as Thomas Kuhn describes it in his The Structure of Scientific Revolution, occurs when people encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the accepted paradigm.
So what do we do when we encounter these anomalies? Traditionally the response is a great deal of backlash and possibly persecution for those questioning the anomaly. This is what we see happening with Rob Bell right now. Given that we cannot know Truth beyond what God has revealed to us, I find it essential for us to at least respect and explore these anomalies. Any response other than this is to let our pride take over, believing that we hold the Truth and nobody can tell us otherwise. But we do not hold the Truth. Only God holds the Truth. Miller said it well when he said, "When theologians throw out anomalies that threaten their paradigms, they respect their interpretation of truth more than truth, or worse, believe their interpretation of truth is actually truth. They use terms like Biblical and heretic to convince themselves and others that their interpretation is the real truth and others are a threat to “the gospel” or to God Himself. This sort of language isn’t helpful or respectful of anomalies, not to mention it’s behavior indicates a genuine intellectual threat that should be taken seriously, not dismissed as heresy."
We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that we have finally discovered the Truth in any form, let alone on issues of God and His judgment. His ways are beyond our ways, and He has only chosen to reveal certain aspects of His being to us. So when we are presented with anomalies from our current beliefs, we need to compare them to the only thing that we know to be true and not be afraid to admit that we don't, and perhaps can't, know. What is the Truth about Universalism? Will all people end up in Heaven? How do you become one of the few if only a few get to heaven? I don't know all of the specifics, but I know that Rob Bell is right about one thing. God is love and love will indeed win, because God has told us so. When I find what I think to be contradictions in the Bible or in what God says or how He behaves, the problem does not lie in God's actions, but in my ability to comprehend them.
The God of Abraham has withdrawn His conscious Presence from us, and another God whom our fathers knew not is making himself at home among us. This God we have made and because we have made him we can understand him; because we have created him he can never surprise us, never overwhelm us, nor astonish us, nor transcend us.
-A.W. Tozer
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