That’s Good News

I find myself in witness to two groups of people:

The first is conservative Christians who break the first commandment. They place another god above the only God there is.

Their god is the Bible.

They see it as inerrant and infallible. It all speaks with equal authority. If Jesus does not agree with a passage in Deuteronomy, then Jesus must shut up and fall in line.

He can rise no higher than, nor say anything different from, what has been said before him.

Inerrancy strips Jesus of his authority to preach a unique message of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness for all people.

There is not a biblical inerrantist in the whole world who truly believes Luke 6:27-36—including this word: “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

Conservative preachers seldom preach from The Sermon on the Mount.

It is simply irrelevant to them.

But there is another group I find myself in witness to: Christians on the far left.

These folks reject the meanness of right-wing Christianity. They know what love is. They just don’t think God does. God is seen as impersonal, uninvolved.

These good folk have taken an overdosed of Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, and Elaine Pagels.

They don’t believe in a God who does anything.

And I am calling both extremes, left and right, to a new place—not between.

Not in the middle.

But above.

To a Christianity rooted in the experience of God. The God we meet in experience is the God we know in Christ.

And this God is neither mean nor impersonal.

And that’s Good News.