I've been thinking a lot about Karl Bath’s essay “The Strange New World within the Bible.” I've been thinking about this whole notion of unleashing our ideas of God, Jesus, and the Bible.

You see, by reducing the Bibles to a source of propositions we have chained God. In his essay Barth talks about how we can find most anything we want in the Bible. If we look for history, it is there. If we look for morality, it is there. If we look for religion, it is there. If we seek to defend a certain from of religion, or worship, or whatever, we can find the ammunition to arm ourselves with all the propositional firepower we need to defend our position and defeat all other positions (except, of course, they too have armed themselves and fight just as sure of their version of the truth as we are). The point for Barth is there is something more contained in the Bible. The problem is, in Barth words, “we measure God with our own measure, we conceive God with our own conceptions, we wished ourselves a God according to our own wishes.”

I think that’s part of Paul is warning Timothy about when he says that “the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths” (2 Timothy 4.3-4). We tend to think of this piece as talking to heresies and “vain philosophies of the world.” And certainly it does. But I also think that it addresses the issue we face today with folks thinking their idea of truth is the Truth. I think it has to do with the tendency for religious folks to build their doctrinal fortresses around propositional proof-texts, thinking somehow they have defended God and truth when in fact all they have done is put a leash on God. I think part of what Paul is saying is there is a wildness to God that makes us uncomfortable. So our tendency is to want to tame that wildness, put a muzzle on the bite in the Bible, and control the Spirit.

Personally I think that is the great flaw of many fundamentalist movements of the church—especially here in America. They have gathered around themselves preachers who are willing to scratch their itchy ears. Not so much in the sense that they have “watered down the gospel,” or they are preaching a “prosperity gospel,” but in the sense that the Truth of the Bible is reduced to truths (or propositions about truths) about the Bible that can be codified and defended. Preaching the wildness of God is replaced by defenses of propositions. For many, the itching ear that needs to be scratched is the right human thought about God—as they define it.

Here’s where Barth really helps. In a brilliant piece from his essay, Barth says:

It is not the right human though about God which forms the content of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men. The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves to him, but the covenant which he has make with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which he has sealed once and for all in Jesus Christ.

When we forget that it all begins and ends with God, we begin to tame the wildness of God. When we begin to think that it is how we think about God that is important and not how God thinks about us, we begin to develop an itch and go looking for someone to scratch it (maybe that’s why there’s so much church hopping in our modern world). When we begin to think that we need to find a way to God, and loose sight of the fact that it is God who has already made a way toward us, we drift away from grace. When we begin to think that somehow our faith (and ultimately our salvation) is synergistic, we have caged God, putting God on display in our churches.