Bridge of Reason

I sat in a church meeting in which people were encouraged to ‘share.’ There was no shortage of candidates to walk up to the front and tell what they ‘felt God was saying to me.’ Some of it was encouraging and to the point, but some ranged from puzzling to outright wacky. One stood out for me as instructional in all the ways the speaker probably hadn’t intended. What was said was sufficiently couched in Christian lingo as to sound broadly biblical but ultimately so vague as to be as applicable as the words of a fairground fortune-teller; almost anyone could have identified with them. What was striking was the failed attempt to bring biblical content into ‘what God is saying to me.’ This was because the speaker’s knowledge of the Bible was patently and woefully inadequate to the task. It is troubling when people who don’t know the Bible, God’s written Word, nevertheless feel God can and does speak through them, that they can be God’s immanent word. You hear these things where someon...