“Is parchment then the sacred fount from which a draught will quench our thirst forever? You must draw it from your inward soul or else you'll not be satisfied.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
GOD-centric Bible Statement:
I love God and I passionately reject the idea that God chose a certain group of people to love best, helped that group slaughter others and murdered quite a few himself, created humanity with flaws and free will but then was surprised and violent when that will was used poorly, punished the innocent with the guilty, sent his son to be killed to appease himself by somehow atoning for human sins but only if that atonement were acknowledged, and relies on an evangelical game of telephone to spread this one, true message throughout the globe while damning for all eternity those who do not hear and believe the message in time. I find it offensive to God to believe that God would not be wiser, more loving, and more equitable.
Obviously, trouble ensued when I dated a conservative Christian and the issue of biblical inerrancy came to the fore. I decided to read the bible cover to cover for the first time. I am not versed in its original languages nor in the history of the time; however, if the bible were in fact the inerrant Word of God, I cannot imagine that God would require sophisticated language skills or vast historical knowledge for the message to be understood so I read it straight without higher analysis in the NIV.
Throughout my reading, I asked “if that were literally true, what would it say about God?” If the passage implied God’s goodness and fairness, then the passage went into my Devotional. If the passage implied that God was not good or not fair, then it went into my Undevotional. Obviously, this method does not acknowledge the possibility of the passage’s being metaphorically true or reflecting a truth for the writer or inviting us into a conversation; but, my purpose was to become familiar with what the bible literally suggests about God.
Bottom Line: I have never heard a minister preach on nor a biblical devotional include most of the passages in my Undevotional. If we pick and choose verses to exalt, then the bible is a great Rorschach test for how we perceive God which is a Rorschach test for the nature of our own soul. If we are forced to accept the whole biblical collection on face value, then I reject because the God I worship is never mean, never not good, and never unfair. My God is an eternal God of love who desires, rather than builds obstacles to, our homecoming.
