One of the great challenges of communion with God is the abiding diffidence with which we must at each moment grapple.  Or, at least I believe, we should.  This is the struggle of Abraham, the hip-popping tussle of Jacob, the suspicion of Thomas, the transitional blindness of Saul / Paul.  We have been taught to deride these heroes of uncertainty, or at least their perceived moments of weakness, but I believe we do so at the risk of worshipping the wrong god.  Our need, our compulsion, for certainty has led us to deify a single part – a significant one, to be sure – of our faith over the person – the actual deity.  I believe we have made the mistake of worshipping the Word rather than the Speaker, the Name rather than the Named, the Text rather than the Subject.  I believe, further, that the danger in Evangelical Christianity’s worship of the Word is paradoxically both not enough and too much.

Doubt is a dirty word in many Christian circles, but this is a tragic mistake.  Our distaste for doubt has caused us to approach the unknowable in one of two basically errant ways.  These are the ways of the Assembly Line and the Scientist.

For those who treat faith like the Assembly Line, a few practical truths are enough for an entire lifetime.  They do not need any more to “live their faith,” and quite honestly does not want more.  They are content to labor away at resistance of major sins, participating in routine spiritual disciplines, and squashing the concept of doubt altogether.  For the Assembly Line perspective, faith depends in part on ignorance or scorn of the perceived impractical questions of uncertainty.  They do not need or desire to know how the machine works or how it was engineered or even how their role fits in to the finished product.  They simply want to do their part well and be paid accordingly.  Is this lack of curiosity and thoughtfulness a sin of omission?  Perhaps not, but there is a lack of depth – a missing out on something – a squandered chance of emerging from the partial shadows to the full light of God’s grace.  They are content to take the weekly instructions from their pastor or minister or priest and, in a pinch, refer to the Bible (their manual) to make sure they’re on track.

The second errant way of dealing with doubt, and the way upon which I choose to focus in the remainder of this essay, is the way of the Scientist.  The Scientist battles uncertainty directly, unabashedly, with force and vigor.  He must eradicate the disease at all costs.  Therefore, he treats God like an experiment.  He studies the texts, derives constants, proposes hypotheses, and figures things out.  Figures Him out.  On a bad day, the Scientist isn’t just searching for knowledge, but control.  That is the dirty motive behind the study of the Word – and why the Scientist worships the Word.  If God is like Physics, then the Scientist can figure out the rules and the next step is always to manipulate the system.  This is the way of the Western world, for the most part.  Since Guttenberg’s first Bible, we have been obsessed with the printed word – and by extension the printed Word.  It is no secret that, until very recently, the most credible word – the only credible word – was that which was “put in writing.”  The print-centerdness of the Western World fueled scientific discovery, philosophical exchange, educational reform, political discourse, and intellectual rigor.  But the most powerful and significant alliance occurred between print and Word.  The sweeping changes to our Faith through print are well documented – the Protestant Reformation, the accessibility of the Word to the common man, the many efforts to translate and print the Word in every language for every man.  So our view of the Word of God evolved in much the same way as our view of the world evolved.  It, like our genes, became something to decode.  Some have taken this concept to the extreme, searching for number and letter patterns within the text.  But we need not focus on the extremes to see the dangers of pursuing God from the perspective of the Scientist.

To understand the prevalence of Word worship in our Christian culture, one must only consider how very normal it seems.  Our churches are “Bible-based,” our services are primarily focused on teaching the Word, our pastors urge us to read the Bible more, our solutions to anything are more credible if associated with reference to chapter and verse.  In fact, Evangelical Christianity proudly bases itself on the Word alone: Sola Scriptura.  I dare to ask the sacrilege question…have we made a mistake?  Is there more than the Word?  Have we replaced God with His Word?

I acknowledge that these are dangerous questions.  They open the door for cults, heresies, and perversions.  The Scientist tells us that the only way to be sure of anything is to have a text – a divine, perfectly inspired and inerrant text – to consult and test belief against.  But could it be possible that this is a reflection of our culture rather than our faith?  Could it be that we have placed the text in the place of God Himself?  My contention is that because the Word of God is tangible, is in a form we find comforting and reliable, is able to be analyzed, dissected, memorized, cross-referenced, and consumed, we have elevated it to Be God in His stead.  It cures our doubt.  It makes God accessible to our collective intellect.  It coerces Him into predictability.  It gives us the comforting illusion of control.

Words have long been associated with control.  This has been true from the moment God spoke the world into existence to the magic incantations of nearly every culture’s folklore, from Lewis Carrols’s acknowledgement that he who makes the definition is the master, to God’s penchant for changing the names of those who serve Him.  He who controls the name of something, controls the thing.  Perhaps this is why God answered the most important question in the History of Names with enigmatic “I AM.”  So it is no surprise that we view the Word of God as approaching sanctified voodoo, but we must be mindful of those great gaping pitfalls with the elevation of the Word to the status equal to the Speaker.

First is the sin of idolatry.  The Bible can become, if we are not careful, the image of God we worship.  This is an easy mistake to make because the distinction between Speaker and Spoken is subtle, especially when the Speaker seems absent apart from His Words.  But there is a distinction, and denying it closes the door to other possible modes of revelation and makes the thing the god.  In relation to this distinction, I am reminded of the passage from John 1:1 “…and the Word was God” (NASB).  Here, John is identifying the pre-incarnate Christ (metaphorically referred to as “the Word”) as the agent of God’s creation, giving us a critical piece to the puzzle of the Trinity and reinforcing the doctrine that Jesus is God.  This passage does not, however, seem to refer to itself, or any other Scripture, as deity.  Attempts to make it do so are unnaturally forced upon the text.

The second error in elevating the Word to the status of deity is that of motivation.  As mentioned above, the underlying cause of doing so can be a desire for control, and by extension, the sin of pride.  This desire for control of one’s destiny, of one’s relationship with God, of one’s understanding of the universe and our place within it, is natural but not holy.  It is futile hubris to think this is possible and it shrinks the cosmos unnecessarily.

The third pitfall of equating the Word with the Speaker is that it is culturally determined.  The printed word and the truth have been synonymous concepts for centuries, but it has not always been so, and there are strong indications that it might be ending soon.  Before the printed word gained prominence, the spoken word reigned.  As a high school English teacher struggling mightily to extend the rule of the printed word, I must report that I seem to be involved in a losing battle.  The age of the image has already arrived, and in fewer than 100 years it will have replaced the printed word as the most reliable, credible sources of information.  What, then, will happen to a faith that has replaced God with a book?  It will be marginalized.  It will fossilize and become irrelevant.

The solution to errant ways of the Assembly Line and the Scientist is, as is often the case, a third path.  This path, that of the Artist, is difficult and painful, and above all fraught with uncertainty.  It is the path of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.  Those with the Assembly Line perspective call it heresy.  The Scientist calls it mysticism.  But the Artist finds his path to be the only one he can travel with integrity.  The Artist does not dismiss the Bible.  He embraces it as truth.  But he does not cling to it instead of God.  He acknowledges the mystery of God, the inexplicable character of a Being who we may not – can not – name.  He takes joy in the enigma of an invisible Creator who somehow became His Creation, whose words really do bring things out of nothing.  But in all of this, he realizes that it is absurd to think that we know Him.  The Artist realizes that we are like Plato’s man in the cave.  We see shadows, that is all, and if we claim to be able to define that existence outside the cave, we are fooling ourselves.

The Artist seeks God in all experience and thought and deed.  The Artist studies the Bible as a revelation, but know that He is beyond the words found there.  God is not found there.  He is not found at all.  He is sought.  He just is.  He is.  I AM is.