And the Spirit said to Philip, "Go over and join this chariot."
So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?"
And he said, "How can I, unless someone guides me?"
(Acts 8:29 - 31a)As I become closer to Christ, I look back on my childhood and think, "Wow, I didn't know what goodness was! I made a lot of bad decisions in my youth." As I continued to grow closer to God, I looked at myself as I was a few years ago, and said the same thing. As I continued to grow closer, I looked at one year ago, and then month ago, and then yesterday. Now I look at today and think, "Good heavens, I have no idea who God is at all." I am so unversed, so unlearned, so ignorant of God's nature and His will. I am horribly ignorant, and also horribly unnerved.
All my life, I have thought of God as something that He's not. It might be even better to say that I've looked at pieces of Him, little descriptive attributes or qualities that He has (He is love, He answers promises, He is truth, He gives life) and didn't connect them all very well. I say now that I am beginning to understand Him better, but, how do you know when you hit the REAL TRUTH of who God is? Mustn't you always be humble and admit when you're wrong?
I think that part of the answer is this: Truth is real. There are real, true, logical answers to questions about reality. With good reasoning comes increased clarity, and the closer you get to the great Truth, the clearer the world gets, and the more clear it becomes how central God is to all things, without which nothing is possible. God is true.
I think it is the humble person who understands that he or she must submit to Truth. Contrary to what I was taught growing up, humility is not saying that you don't know in all situations; humility is being subservient to truth and really pursuing it, wherever it leads and in whatever it holds. When you know whether or not there are cookies in the cookie jar, it's not humble to say that you don't know. That's dishonest. A humble person here would say that, yes, there are cookies in the cookie jar. Humility is expressed in being able to listen and learn, not jumping to hasty conclusions (Treebeard would be greatly displeased), using your knowledge where it is applicable. And in respect to the great search for God, it is quite humble to look at the great holy men and women of the past who spent their entire lives reasoning from the Scriptures and from their spiritual leaders and engaging their knowledge of God into their lives, and contributing those understandings to the great conversation about God that has collected and continued through the history of the Church. Discarding this breadth of knowledge, which persists through time, without a thought is like discarding the knowledge of previous mathematicians or scientists without a thought.
I'm afraid this is going to be terribly unpopular, but this is how I've been coming to understand the issue and I see no way around it. The terrifying thought has been creeping up in me is that reading out of the Scriptures and pulling out my own interpretations as best I can understand them, without collaboration with others who know better than me and can reason better than me, is a horribly dangerous notion. We say that Scripture is the final authority, but when I engage Scripture this way, aren't I actually appointing myself as the final authority on how to interpret what those passages mean? Doesn't that make me the Pope of my own religion, and aren't I making God in my own image, however I see fit? Or, in a softer way, doesn't that mean that I make the Bible conform to what I understand? On what grounds do I say "no" to what the Church has been saying for 1,500 years? Me, in my sin that I can't even always see for lack of clarity; me, in my laity and mere 23 years; me, without a deep understanding of the Bible, church history, theology, philosophy, or God in the first place? No, that's a pride that I never wanted or thought to look out for.
Very well, then. I must abandon this way.
