Spiritual Freedom, Part V

I am not saying the idea of freedom is wrong. Please do not misunderstand. What I am saying is the freedom is only right when there is a knowable absolute truth. That is when we can have true freedom. 

And God is a God of clarity and freedom, not of chaos and confusion. 

So, where do we go from here? I tell you my idea of absolute truth and you tell me yours. I say that you misinterpret scripture and you rejoin with "the scripture doesn't need interpretation, it is simple and obvious to those with the Holy Spirit." And then you walk away believing I am deceived for clearly Calvin or Luther or Joseph Smith or Ellen White or you alone were given the infallible understanding of scripture and I walk away thinking you are deceived. 

This is the perpetual ending to these discussions.  

And yet, stirring in all of us who call ourselves Christian, we hear a distant calling to our souls. We hear the heavenly song of unity and truth and beauty somewhere, we just can't precisely place it, somewhere out there soft and full of hope. Its song competes with the blaring sirens and commercials and carnival barkers until it is almost completely obliterated.

For a moment think about this, suspend all defensive responses for a moment and let this glorious thought cascade over you like rainfall to a parched desert. 

What if God gave us a route to knowing absolute truth, but it wasn't through a direct line of the Bible, the Holy Spirit and me. (Which has made a true mess of Truth.) What if He gave us a Church that has survived the centuries of personal interpretation and human corruption. 

What if the Truth was entrusted to a tattered and torn, battle weary Body encrusted with grime from two thousand years of spiritual war with the Devil? What if there is absolute truth, a knowable absolute truth given not to a woman of polished steel with arm held high upholding a flame of liberty, but an old woman whom the Devil has so caked in blood and sweat and mud that this truth looks more like a woman in labor or a kingdom of wheats and tares, like a field hiding a pearl of great price or a mustard seed that grew into the biggest tree or a dragnet full of edible and inedible fish? 

What if infallible truth has been entrusted by God to a Body of fallible men? What if God sent the Holy Spirit to guide a church into all truth rather than separate individuals? What if God gave truth to one strong rock rather than billions of little grains of shifting sand? 

Most Americans don't like that idea. We prefer a personal error to a corporate truth--or at least the right to a personal error rather than a right to an absolute truth. For the right to freedom cannot give both to us. Either we have a right to freedom based on absolute truth or we have a right to believe what we want to believe based on the freedom of lies. What we cannot have is both no matter how much we demand it and how much we think it is unfair and unjust for God not to give us both our personal truth and personal freedom. 

And there in lies the dilemma of Truth and the dilemma of Freedom and the dilemma of America. 

Spiritual Freedom, Part IV

America claims in its Constitution that God gives us certain inalienable rights, that among them is liberty of religion. We have cast God as the Great Capitalist in the sky looking down with approval that His eternal truth is just one in a cafeteria line of things claiming to be truth and that somehow His Truths will eventually work their way out in the marketplace of ideas. 

This Free Market god is proud when we become rich suing a soup company that mislabels its food products but he is even prouder when we fight to the death to protect a crazed prophet whose visions tell us that God wants us to paint ourselves purple, eat only raw radishes and marry our first cousin.

Maybe that's America's Enlightenment god, but it doesn't seem to be the God who tells us that the truth will make us free. Seems we have it turned around to say that freedom will make truth. 

Whatever the good intensions of America's Founding Fathers, what we have today is a miserable chaos of religious equality where sheep pretend they're shepherds, black pretends it is grey, grape juice pretends it's wine and a soft drink pretends that it brings happiness.

All that claims to be true is not. And humans were never supposed to try on each lie to see if it fits. 

Only when there is a clear Truth can we be free to choose or reject truth. And that was God's plan. The Devil salivates when he sees truth blurred and watered down. Mormons are tasty. (Not to say Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck are going to hell, but that if they do, they'd taste a lot better to the Devil than a John Boehner or Harry Reid type.)

The Devil has so stirred the pot of truth and lies that America is unable to even admit there is an Absolute Truth and that we can know it. I hear those who are paying attention wistfully hope that "one day, in heaven, we will know truth" and those who aren't paying attention say that Christians actually agree on essential Bible truths.

In America, we have the right to disagree, indeed it is a noble thing, as if the disagreement about truth is more noble than the truth itself. So we all go around assuming we have freedom and we don't for the Devil has made a garbage dump of lies appear glorious. 

And all the time, sitting among the rubbish of lies is a truth sparkling. The diamond is almost unseen among all the shards of glinting glass because everyone is heroically dying for the glass to claim it is diamonds. And people are spending their lives and their fortunes maniacally clinging to their "precious" glass shard thinking it is the pearl of great price.

Is that why Christ died?