One-Dimensional Faith
Few things are more rigid than the way one understands Holy Scripture. Liberal, conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist, or atheist: all have one thing in common, viz., an unbending understanding of scripture. Each is different from the other; and all are equally unyielding. So, what happens when two or more people (or two or more churches or book clubs, or eight deer hunters sitting around a camp fire after a few beers) approach a topic with differing—even contradictory—understandings of life and faith, and both ground their understandings in scripture? Or, what happens when two or more people (or two or more… well, see above) read the same scripture and come up with differing—even contradictory—understandings of “what the Bible clearly says?” Martin Luther comes to mind. Reading through the epistle to the Romans he encountered what, to him, seemed obvious truth; but which contradicted what the church had instructed him to believe. But there it was in black and white. I had a ...