Jack Pelham

“If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.”

Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.

What you don’t know about your own religion is that if you are like most people, certain of your tenets are going to be non-negotiable—even if they are wrong.

Mere ignorance stands invisibly
In the place of what we could know,
As the blank spaces in a warehouse mark
The missing inventory that we would have
Acquired by now had we acquired it by now.

If you were willing
You could listen intently
To the words of Jesus and hear
That he was calling humans to a life of
Love deeper than most will want to realize.
And many think it the end of his calling
But if by chance you were willing
Those same pages would
Call you to a love of
Wisdom and of
Knowledge
Such as
To which few
Will ever attain in
This not-listening world.
And if you should be the sort
Who’ll shush his soul so as to hear
Even to the last whisper of the echoes
Those sacred and ancient pages
Would reveal to your heart a
Calling seldom perceived:
To take up that grand
Moral courage of
The Highest
That you
Should ever
Do what is right
Even as you continue
On this beautiful-ugly Earth.
And only then, my friend
Will you understand
Why it pains me
To hear love
Spoken of
As if it
Were the
Whole of the
Righteous calling.
For love without the rest
Is but an incomplete treasure.
And this truth I am telling you now
Is one that this Earth’s hordes
Of non-listening believers
Are quite obviously
Content not
To know.

He would never forget that late evening when those five foolish maidens came jabbering down his darkened street, their girlsong interspersed and echoing in the quiet of the lane below his rooftop patio. In the few seconds this parade would be in earshot, he would only make out two things distinctly. One was something or other about them searching for an open market at which to buy oil at this late hour. And the other was some nonsensical one-liner about God that he knew could not be right, for he remembered otherwise from the scriptures, he was pretty sure. And then they were gone, their shuffling and cackling fading into the city night.

One thing that will irk many about God
Is that he would have a too late
Designed into the scheme of things.

For the record, I am so not an atheist nor a cynic! What I am is a guy who’s got the guts to tackle some of the hard topics of Christianity, with a view toward working them out faithfully, honestly, rationally, and responsibly!

Some are exuberant in declaring the “power of prayer”, but I think that the topic is famously oversimplified. So I wanted to make a short post pointing out the two main problems I see with this popular view:

Ponder this and let me know what you think!

A lot hinges on how the believer answers the following question. It can make for wildly different outcomes of character and habit!:

Is it just my own mind that’s responsible for understanding the scriptures, or is God involved in helping me with that?

If he thinks it’s all up to his own self, he’ll most likely be more studious and ask questions more carefully and have more sense of duty in how he manages his mind regarding the scriptures. And in contrast, if he thinks God’s supposed to have his back, he’ll be much more likely to passively wait for things to “come to him”, rather than really going after Bible study himself. And if he says it’s both, watch and see if he doesn’t end up being just as passive as the last guy! Or ask him to list for you a few things he figured out himself, and a few things God showed him—and see if the whole concept is really clear to him after all!

But let’s suppose that God is involved in it—even to the extreme of 100%, where the believer is just a robot being programmed with God’s interpretation of the scriptures (however that would work in such an extreme scenario). Here’s a question for you:

With God involved in somebody’s heart/mind like that, would you expect to see that person develop a strong drive for Bible study?

Yes or no? If God were pushing the buttons, wouldn’t he set everybody’s settings such that they loved to read and study and learn from the scriptures? If not, why not?

And now let’s consider the opposite—that God leaves it up to the individual to decide how much he’s going to learn to read and study and learn from the scriptures. If this were the case, wouldn’t you expect to see a wide range of difference from one individual to the next regarding how much he cares for these things? And isn’t this, in fact, what we do see among the general Christian population?

I know there are some passages in scripture that people sometimes use to bolster their assumption that God has promised to be the one powering the understanding of scriptures for all Christians for all time, but I don’t think that what we actually see matches up very well with that expectation—and I think we need to rethink that idea to replace it with something that fits the evidence better. Or if not that, then we’re in the middle of some spiritual uber-emergency, and we need to stop everything right now in order to figure out why it is that, with God (supposedly) in control of our understanding of the scriptures, we are so utterly divided—and scripturally illiterate—as we are.

And if God were indeed in control of our convictions about the scriptures, why wouldn’t he give us such high convictions as I’m describing about the importance of them and of our unity about them? Why is this not Priority One in the churches this very day?

I think the answer is very simple. I think it’s because he’s left it to us, and most in the churches just don’t care that much about it—even while a very few invest themselves quite heavily in it, despite the disinterested church culture around them. That is to say that a few will gain higher proficiency in the scriptures not because of the church they go to, but in spite of it!

I don’t pretend that my reasoning here settles the matter. No, to settle if—if it can be settled—would require quite an extensive and responsible Bible study—of the very sort that most are not inclined to do! And isn’t that interesting? But if they assume that God has their back, then that’s just one simple step away from assuming that if God wants them to study it, he’ll have all that organized through the church—and from there, that since he has not yet done so, it simply must not be his will for us right now.

And what if they’re wrong?

That kind of assumption merely feeds itself like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s like having a seance and asking the spirit who is supposedly talking to you from the other world to confirm your assertions simply by being quiet. So when you assert your belief and there is silence, then you “know” that you have got it right. Do you see how that scam works?

Well, that’s what I think that most of Christianity today is doing, more or less. The answers that God is supposedly giving them regarding their interpretation of the scriptures are all over the place, and they resemble greatly the answers you might get from a disparate sampling of cliques, each having its own prevailing opinion. And rather than to be troubled over disunion between the cliques, the matter is dropped and the very existence of the clicks is assumed to be from God, and the boundaries between them are left unchallenged. Funny, though, God taught all twelve tribes of Israel the same doctrines. And Jesus led his apostles to teach all the congregations all the same doctrines. In neither case were there customized camps among them that had God’s blessings. So this is just another of the many substantial ways in which “the church” today operates differently from what was being done in the First Century when the apostles were still in operation.

And there are some who might well like to study this out—if only God would arrange that for them.

Here’s how it works, folks!

If you have faults and errors,
Most opponents will use them against you.

If life were a contest,
Wouldn’t it be interesting
If it were about who could come up
With the very best questions to ask God
When it’s all over?

America has an outburst every time they threaten to disarm her of her guns. She needs them, she insists, in case she ever has to defend herself against tyrannical government.

“And is she planning to overthrow the government?” one might ask? No, she has no such plan.