Don't Come Around Here No More

I read through so many theological web sites and realize that I know so little, and I have so little inspiration for knowing much in this particular area. Sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming.

After all, when I am sitting in a sushi restaurant, listening to Nora Jones on the Muzak (and that right there is a spiritual mystery all its own - why a Japanese restaurant would pipe in jazz/blues, etc.), how does my comprehension of the hypostatic union help me be a better person?

I am fully aware of the fact that somewhere in time, somebody stood up and said, "Jesus could not be fully God and man. He had to be half and half. Or something." There is a necessity in squashing that reasoning. So we squash it and go on. In my world, we do not sit and look at the squashed bug, and try to figure out how the thing got to where we were, and what chemicals are resident in the little guy's eyeballs that we might be able to extract and use in a wholesome manner. Instead, we squash the bug. Every time. With the same prejudice.

There is also something to be said for knowing enough to be able to recognize heresy and call it what it is. But lest we forget our less than fully regenerate selves and elevate our minds and hearts to full deity status, we must acknowledge that we all carry around a heretic inside us who is screaming, "God is not who He said He is!" The problem is that if we grab this inidividual by the neck, tie him to a stake and burn him, we will also be consumed.

So instead we whack him on the head every time we hear him taking a breath. We vigilantly stand guard over this captive nature, and trust that we will remain vigilant enough to keep him from rearing his ugly head. Invariably, we will fall asleep on guard duty, he will slip away from us, and we will find him standing on the street corners of our psyche screaming obscenities and blasphemies with great fervor. And we will stop to listen.

Theology is the study of God. It is the investigation of our Creator, who is not a Name-less spirit or an incongruous collection of concepts. We must study God the way we study our spouses and our most intimate friends. We must know Him and we must be willing to be known.

Too often, this study becomes academic. It embraces the Greek compartmentalizations (God is this. God is that. God is not this. God will do this. God won't do this.) and shuns the Eastern thoughts of the Hebrews (God IS.). And in our scientific, empirical study of God, we forget that everything we do has an effect on Him.

Why does a man believe in the omniscience of God except that he may know that God is interested in every detail of his life? How does predestination help us? It gives us the awareness that we don't love God because we are great and wonderful. In that concept, we are reminded that the only reason we love God is because He loved us enough to give us the ability to love Him.

To whom much is given, much is required. Those who live their lives with their noses buried in Calvin's Institutes or some First Century equivalent should be lifting their eyes to the hills periodically to remember where their help comes from. The religion that God sees as pure and faultless only involves a MDiv when the guy who earned the degree is helping widows and orphans.

So what's the point of all this? The point is that the heretic within us needs to be introduced to the transforming power of God. Once he encounters the Spirit that is at work in us, he will be less brash, and more likely to resort to slinking through the dark alleys and dens of iniquity in our hearts which still host whispered blasphemies. One day, he will be truly dead, and we will rejoice.