Punctum Saliens

I think that many, if not most, mainstream Christians would say that experience alone cannot tell us anything about God. We need to filter our experience through the Bible for it to be reliable and “true.” So, the Bible is the authoritative word on how we experience God and what we know about God. But, at the same time, the Bible is what it is because of who and what God is. So, the Bible tells us about God but God’s nature gives the Bible the authority to inform us about the God whose nature gives the Bible … Isn’t that a bit of the-chicken-n-the-egg reasoning?

But what to do to break this circular cycle? I think we need to iterate.

There are many “problems” that people struggle with. God’s actions do not always make sense to us. We don’t understand what happens in the world because it doesn’t fit with our understanding of God. The Bible has difficult passages because it seems to say two, or three or four, different things. It seems that most mainstream Christians just hunker down and hope that when they get to Heaven God will explain all. They take refuge in the fact of God’s love and omniscience and leave it all up to him. But most of the time, that doesn’t seem to provide much real comfort.

And this is where iteration enters the picture. If something doesn’t make sense then perhaps what we need to do is change something—iterate toward a more consistent solution. The problem is that we get so stuck in our current mindsets that we don’t even consider revising our basic assumptions. Our concept of God should not be static. Our handling of the Bible should not be the same today as it was yesterday. But these are too often not even considered to be variable and so we sit and spin and get no where.