In this essay, I will invite the reader to focus on an issue which I sincerely believe will be both challenging and thought-provoking. A good friend of mine in the past has jokingly accused me of "playing with fire." Well, I do have to admit that once in every once in a great while, I love to instigate trouble, lol. Those of you who know me personally (including my wife Ruth), know that I have a reputation for being a "trouble-maker." That goes with the turf of being a minister. It has been said that a good preacher knows how to comfort the afflicted and how to afflict the comfortable. I hope that this essay does both.
In previous essays, I spoke about the topic of whether God's truth is limited to the Bible. Many, if not most Christians, especially of the evangelical persuasion tend to believe that it is. They see no truth outside of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. They believe truth comes from Scripture and that truth and non-truth are ultimately determined by Scripture. I have also spoken about how some Christian theologians (like Karl Barth), the Bible is not "the Word of God," but rather "a witness to the Word, which is Jesus Christ."
In this essay, I wish to go beyond the Bible and beyond Barth, in spite of the admiration and respect that I have for him and other theologians. I want to challenge us to consider going over and beyond being what a good friend of mine calls being "biblically focused."
You, the reader, might ask how is that this Christian preacher (yours truly) can even think of going "beyond the Bible?" Some Christians will even think that this very thought amounts to blasphemy. For them, the Bible is not only the ultimate barometer of truth, but truth itself. Subsequently, since they believe that the Bible is the "divinely inerrant and infallible inspired Word of God," that to even suggest that we can go over and beyond this inspired document, is the epitome and height of sacrilege.
Without mocking or ridiculing my sisters and brothers who think this way, let me begin by reminding us that God's truth existed long before the Bible was written. In comparison to how long humankind has been on the face of the earth, the Bible is a relatively-speaking, recently written document. To insist that the Bible is the ultimate source of truth is tantamount to saying that those humans who lived long before the Bible was written had no knowledge of God's truth. That would mean that people like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, had no knowledge of the truth since the Bible was not written during their lifetime. This position flies in the face of the scriptural witness itself. Nowhere does the Scripture claim to be the ultimate criteria for the divine truth with which we should be familiar.
I would also add that to limit God's truth to the Bible, is to deny that God speaks through the sacred scriptures of other religions. If God's truth is not found in extrabiblical literature, then we would have no choice but to demonize these writings by claiming that the authors of these documents were inspired by a diabolical influence. It is this writer's humble opinion that only a very narrowly focused and bigoted mind is capable of thinking in these terms. God Herself/Himself is much, much bigger than our doctrines, and bigger than the Scriptures from which our doctrines supposedly come. Our Scriptures themselves point to a God who is not only sovereign, but also cosmic. God is not confined to or restricted by our concepts of Her/Him, even when these concepts are "biblically based."
En fin, I invite you, the reader to join me in exploring the myriad ways in which God is revealing God-self to the human race. As a Christian, my primary referential frameworks for knowing and understanding, albeit, with limitations, God's self-disclosure and liberative actions in history, are the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. But the Cosmic God-in Christ is also revealed in other scriptures and in the experience of total liberation for all humankind.
I invite you to engage in dialogue with us by commenting on the above. No matter where you stand on these issues, your comments and input will not only be respected, but highly valued.
In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.
Dr. Juan A. Ayala-Carmona
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