Sjolander Road Fellowship

Why All the Confusion?
3/28/09

The question is this: Why is the Bible understood so differently by different groups. Anyone who claims the Bible as the inspired message to mankind on how to escape eternal punishment must logically deal with this question. Surely if God intended the Book to be the sole source of the information necessary to avoid Hell, then He would have wanted the message to be clear and concise. Otherwise, He would be guilty of insuring that at least some people would fail to satisfy Him because they were simply confused about the requirements.

Now some see God intervening through the Holy Spirit to allow some to understand and others to be confused. Exactly how some are selected for enlightenment and others selected for confusion is not clear; it is proposed as God's right to deal with each individual in whatever arbitrary ways He might choose. This explanation would not be very satisfying for many who believe that, if God is no respecter of persons, then He must give everyone the same opportunity to escape His wrath.

For those who would not accept the above concept of arbitrary pre-destination, the differences of opinion over what the Bible says, means, and requires remain especially troublesome. In trying to explain these differences, some imply that at least some of those who claim another dogma are willfully misrepresenting the obvious message of the Word. Exactly why these willful ones would want to do such a thing is either left to your imagination or described as a prophetic fulfillment. Others would assume that many who differ with them doctrinally are just ignorant through a lack of study or misguided by the traditions of their particular church or denomination.

In either of these two cases, the basic issue remains unresolved. Why is the Bible not crystal clear on the essential message? Differing opinions about these matters demonstrate a lack of clarity for at least some of those who take the Bible as their religious authority. Not everyone who sees it differently can be dishonest in their opinions or so unmotivated as to blindly accept the word of another on the matter.

One last possibility is that the Bible is actually mysterious, vague, paradoxical, and deliberately written to be less than perfectly clear and transparent. This final possibility would be another form of indictment of God, if the Book is actually the "How to Get to Heaven" manual that the institutional church claims it to be.

Of these possibilities, the one that makes the most sense to me is the last one. Jesus actually spoke of His message as being veiled in some sense. The Bible's use of parables and culturally inspired symbols and figures of speech demonstrate a lack of concern for being transparent to everyone, especially those of a different age and cultural background than the original writers. Since I don't view the Bible as the instruction manual others perceive it to be, its ambiguity is intriguing to me but not irreconcilable.

Spirituality is the realm of ultimate reality, the unseen realm. As such it is largely indescribable in human language. We just don't have the terms and context with which to deal with the associated concepts. The rational mind is not the avenue by which one addresses and "sees" spiritual reality. This realization implies that the historical, church approach to spiritual insight, i.e. parsing the sacred text through the vigorous application of the human intellect, is absolutely the wrong one. The Bible is like all efforts to transmit an "understanding of spiritual reality" through the use of human language, a veiled and insufficient transmission at best.