law of the land

Hays, Paul, Jesus, Matthew, Mark, and those other distinguished gentlemen all have me thinking...

I'm getting a little ahead, so I am currently working on the reading for Thursday and I happen to find the passages that Hays highlights fascinating. Mark 10:2-12 tells the story of the Pharisees asking Jesus about divorce and trying to trap him by getting him to oppose the Law of Moses. All too often I feel as though I am living in a culture of the Pharisees. In our technology based world, nothing exists if it cannot be proven, if there are not rules and proofs for its existence. If you don't know the rules of the techno-world, then you will never survive in it. The Pharisees knew all of the rules and were living by rules alone, much as I feel like we are living in a world of rules and facts. This concept applies to the modern Christianity as well. If, in a discussion with a secular member of society, a Christian cannot provide exact citations quoting exact laws proving an exact action wrong, then I feel as though the ideas and ideals of Christians are often discounted.

But more than that.

I feel like we are attacking one another within the church too.

Each side of any theological argument seems to cling to the verses that bolster their argument. Christians everywhere are relentless in proving which specific actions are and are not appropriate by searching for Biblical proof. Proof, facts, condemning verses - all are constantly quested for by Christians.

Or we reject that attitude and simply rely on principle.

Love you neighbor, don't judge, look the other way when someone does something wrong because hey, you've screwed up too.

We warp and twist and take the Bible out of context. We use it to shove our proof of others' wrongness down their throats and hurl our own interpretations of it at our fellow Christians.



This - all of this - strikes me as wrong. So very wrong.

There has to be a balance.


I wish that I knew what the balance was, but I know that we have not found it collectively.