Really, when someone says “I disagree with your theology,” what they’re saying is, “I disagree with your interpretation of theology based on my interpretation of theology.” So where did that interpretation come from?

Trace it back and it’s always from someone else. A person. With a tiny brain like yours & mine. Augustine or Calvin or Nietzsche or Osteen. Some church leader a thousand years ago, or some book written last year, or some preacher guessing at the Bible the best he or she knows how.

I’m not entirely sure how to discover which interpretation is the right one. Each of us have so much self-interest that we can use the Bible (and anything else) to justify any position we want, even under the guise of “the common good” or “your benefit.”

But if my opinion and my interpretation of the Bible are always matching up, then it’s possible I’m just making God into my own image and forcing my idea of God to conform to what I want. I’m then just colluding with myself as my own accomplice into the crimes I want to commit.

Then I wouldn’t be in dialogue with God, but rather manipulating a robot-idol that I designed to do my bidding and to turn off at my convenience. If the Bible is timeless truth, then I’d expect that it would sometimes press against what I hold to be personally and culturally true.

And we are all chronologically landlocked by harmful ideas that must be challenged and changed. I believe that if the Bible is true and read correctly, it would have to usurp the destructive and affirm the constructive. Still, I assume that these ideas can be confronted and rebuked.

In the end, I don’t think the Bible is some amorphous putty that can be twisted any which way. It‘s made some things pretty clear. Jesus said plainly: I must love people. There’s no equivocation or wavering there. How it happens might differ, but that it happens at all must not.

— J.S.

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