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parachute epiphanies
...If I could have ten minutes back with the Prophet, I'd say this: "Close your eyes, friend, and imagine. You're high up in the air, in an aisle seat, looking past your neighbor and out the window. Down below you is a mass of cloud cover looking like fresh snow, marbled, marked with divots and craggy monuments of white. Imagine that your understanding of reality is defined by this view: what you see out the window and what's proximate to you there in the plane's cabin. The airplane and its passengers are what you might call a small, unique closed system moving inside what appears to be vast space with a visible boundary of white mass below."

Many well-meaning Christians, gathered together in various sects, present Christianity in just this way. They invite you to view reality from a very small window, and they are quite certain they're providing you with an absolutely objective view of reality. If you join them, you are expected to see as the sect sees. Failure to embrace their view of reality is sometimes commensurate with failure to be a follower of Jesus. And when people say you're not a follower and you are, it is very hurtful—and very troubling. For sects such as these, "anything other than absolute, unqualified, mathematically certifiable certainty betrayed a soul adrift."

Let's imagine some more. Get out of your seat, reach into the compartment above, and carry the yellow package to the rest room. It's a parachute. Strap it on. Now go to the big door with the red sign, open it, and jump. When you pass through the white stuff, pull the cord.

As you pass through the clouds, down below, previously hidden from your view, is a world of wonder and wickedness, joy and pain, sex, truth, and lies. It's a place full of story upon story where words are as plentiful as stars in the sky. And there's land and promise. Land where God walked. Land belonging to him, promise belonging to him. It's a place where men and women, boys and girls, either serve themselves or serve the God of the land and the sky and all that ever was and is. This land and sea, this earth and water, is the jazz of God and humanity: order and improvisation, beauty and ashes, boundary and freedom, choice and counter choice, mistakes and all. It is a place of storytelling and storied living.

When your feet touch the ground, look up. Do you see the plane? No? But it's there, isn't it? You know it exists; you've just come from there. Remember this: You know about the little sect's story, but they don't know about the one you just dropped into, do they? At least they don't act like it.

Now the hard work begins. At first you will feel compelled to throw out everything the little sect taught you. In fact, this is what you started to do when you encountered deconstructive literary theory and postmodern philosophy, isn't it? It feels like the answer, but it's not wise.

Over the years I've had several of these parachute epiphanies. With each one, the view widened and the clouds parted. I could see more of the Story, the one that was always there but had been obscured or hidden for various reasons....

...When I used to hang out with drunks and addicts, they would say, "More will be revealed." When I started hanging out with Christians, no one talked like that, or lived like that. They were largely a people of dry, almost mathematical certainty. The only time mystery entered in was when someone quoted 1 Corinthians 2:9, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him."

The mystery was all eschatological, a question mark in the great by-and-by. I wish my first Christian friends had been more like the recovering drunks and addicts and had just told me, "Hey, there's a good deal of mystery in the here and now, too. More will be revealed." Maybe they weren't keeping it from me; maybe they just didn't know another way.

But you knew, didn't you, Wilderness Prophet? You were on to something back then with your questions, skepticism, fist pounding, and youthful unrest. It was T. S. Eliot who said that "doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief." Did you get it sorted out? Did you come to understand that you can still be a student-follower of Jesus and not possess all truth, once-for-all universal certainty, and the answer to every question? I hope so. Especially since such things are beyond the scope of humanity, even Christian humans. ...

...Christian folk have often claimed to know too much. We've been guilty of speaking with far too much certainty. Well-meaning Christians have lived and spoken as if they've come to know what they know from someplace outside of history, outside of any cultural or social conditioning. They load you up with words, propositions, assertions, and acculturated behaviors, and then send you out as some sort of fleshy trump card to the gazillion other cards in the human deck—an agent of the gospel in the soul-saving business.

Then there comes a day when you parachute through the clouds and find out that this kind of hysterical optimism is the result of rationalism, Enlightenment dualism, and socially conditioned behavior—not necessarily what Jesus had in mind when he said to his first disciples, "Follow me." When you find out, you're relieved, but you're also angry. And with good reason, since it doesn't have to be this way. We need more parachute epiphanies on the front end, more clouds parting, no small sects in the sky on an exclusive charter flight. The growing tribe is too huge for such small thinking, for such a small epistemology....

...Try this on for size: The Bible is not an exhaustive record of a Tri-personal dialogue between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Bible is far from exhaustive with respect to the knowledge of God. It does not reveal with radical clarity everything there is to know about God, or all that ever was, is, or will be with respect to what is seen or unseen. Neither does it claim to, and Christians end up looking like fools when they make claims for the Bible that it doesn't make for itself.

What the Bible is, is revelation from God in the form of an accommodation to our human capacities. It takes into consideration our imperfection, our enmity with the Creator, and our failure to be what he has made us to be. It is God condescending to use human language and images from creation to bring us into a personal encounter with him. ...

...It's time for Christians to recover from the illusion of personal objectivity and the posture of unflinching certainty in every regard. These are untenable positions. ...

...Instead of a my-way-or-the-highway attitude, perhaps Christians could communicate something like this: We're sure of some things, so we speak with certainty about those things. But there's a lot we're not sure of, so we're trying not to speak with certainty about those things. Please forgive us when we confuse the two. In fact, that's one of the things we're certain about: We get confused, make errors, and sin against God by claiming to know things we don't.

The best we can do is (1) make a confession, and (2) offer an invitation....