It’s taken much of the 55 years of my life to reach this point, but I think I could be wrong. Well, maybe it didn’t take that long to realize it, but to be willing to state it so bluntly. According to the enneagram, I’m a 5. One of the things about 5s is that we ‘react’ when told we are wrong. That’s certainly part of my background. Admitting we are wrong is not the easiest thing to say. It’s hard on the ego. There would be a lot less conflict though if more people were willing to admit it more often.
It opens space for dialogue. It lets you know that I’m willing to listen and consider what you have to say. It allows me to look past my intrinsic biases and think beyond what I was taught in the past. “The Book of God and Physics”, although fictional, attributes Athanasius Kircher as the last living man to hold the sum of human knowledge, which means he knew all that was known at that time. He was a real person, but whether or not this was true, and I certainly have my doubts that he even knew everything that was known in Europe, I’m sure there was much that he knew and that much of it was wrong.
I’ve commented before that there has only ever been one living person to know virtually everything, and he was never wrong. He even admitted once when he didn’t know something (Mark 13:32). Even his closest friends and students, people who hung out with him24/7 for three years, got a lot of things wrong, and you know the drill; they told two friends and they told two friends, etc. Before long, most people were getting a lot of things wrong and thinking they were right. They were still getting a lot of things right though too. Unfortunately we like to assume if someone is wrong about one thing, they must be wrong about other things and often they are right about those. Afterwards we are just in a position of a different wrong. If you’ve ever played the game Mastermind, you know that sometimes you can have one peg right, change three and still have one right but it’s a different one than you had before. It’s easy to think that the one you didn’t change was right all along and the others still are wrong.
A few days ago I was reading in the book of Mark (6:6&7). Jesus quotes the book of Isaiah (29:13) regarding people raising human tradition above God’s law. In the NIV, the passage from Isaiah reads “the LORD says; these people come near me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.”
It’s possible to believe we are worshipping Him when we are worshipping something else. It may be the Bible itself. It may be an idea of Him that we have been falsely taught. That’s not to blame our teachers, for in most cases, they are only passing on what they have been taught themselves.
Black and white thinking (all or nothing) is seldom helpful, because none of us are pure evil or pure good. There are nuances in all of us.
When we are having discussions that involve correction, they should always be held in private first, “if a brother sins against you..” is a good starting point, even if it’s not sin, but simply a difference of opinion. The magnitude of the error and the reaction will determine if the discussion needs to go to a larger stage. When you challenge someone’s words or actions, remember how you feel when yours are challenged. We will often just dig our heels in, especially when we feel we need to save face.
It’s ok to be an old white guy, as long as I’m willing to respectfully listen to and consider the voices of young/middle aged, black/Asian/indigenous, women/trans/queer persons, even if I don’t end up agreeing. Many things I believe today are different than they were 20 years ago, or even 6 months ago.
That’s what I think, but I could be wrong.
Percolations 