 Spiritual: April 20, 2022 Issue [#11324] |
This week: I Might Be Wrong Edited by: Jeff  
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"Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief."
-- C.S. Lewis
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff and I'm one of your regular editors for the official Spiritual Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 350 newsletters across the site during that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me via email or the handy feedback field at the bottom of this newsletter! 
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I Might Be Wrong
In the New Testament, the Book of Acts chronicles the rise of the church in the wake of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. The TL;DR version, for those who aren't familiar with it, is that the apostles Peter and John are preaching the message of Jesus, performing signs and wonders (like miraculously healing a lame beggar at the temple gates), and they meet with resistance among the orthodox Jews who see the message of Jesus as a direct contradiction to the strict religious customs, practices, and laws they've observed for their entire lives. Resistance to the point of being jailed and, in some cases, risking the same fate of Jesus.
The Bible often presents the Sadducees, Pharisees and other sects of orthodox Jews as the antagonists of the story. The people who were trying to stop the apostles and other heroes of the faith from accomplishing their goal of bringing the message of Jesus to the world. But I think it's important to point out that these weren't faithless, bad people; they were living their lives according to the Laws of the Covenant present in the Old Testament which, up until Jesus showing up on the scene, was how you lived a pious life.
At the risk of vastly generalizing two major world religions, the primary difference between Christians and Jews is that Christians see Jesus as the fulfillment of God's promise; a messiah and a personal savior. Jews don't see the life of Jesus as the fulfillment of that promise. In the days of the Book of Acts, Peter and John were preaching a message that, if you didn't buy into the idea that Jesus is the fulfillment of God's promise, was downright heretical. Christian believers, on the other hand, would say that the Jews were missing the way God was moving in the world.
What does that ultimately mean?
There is always the possibility that we might be missing what God's doing in the world.
And if that possibility exists, what's the way to realign ourselves with God's plan?
We must be humble and willing to course correct.
Neither of those things are possible in circumstances where we are fixated on our own inerrancy or rightness. We risk being like the Sadducees and Pharisees of the Book of Acts who missed what God was doing through the story of Jesus because they were so focused on what they thought they were supposed to be doing instead, and because they saw this new message as a direct challenge to what they had believed for their entire lives.
This isn't just limited to Christians, by the way. It also applies to other systems of beliefs. Many belief systems are rigid and some are even downright absolute in their application of theology, philosophy, morality, etc. But the thing about belief systems is that they can also be complicated. Christianity is based largely on a roughly two thousand year old collection of texts, some written hundreds of years apart. The Quran, the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Talmud, the Dao De Ching, the Tipitaka ... all written a very long time ago. Considering how much legal and political argumentation is made over what America's founders intended when they wrote the United States Constitution less than 250 years ago, I think it's safe to say there's some room for interpretation when it comes to religious texts. Given that there are roughly 200 different denominations of Christianity and over 1,700 different translations of the Bible in hundreds of different languages, I think it's safe to say that even the most devout and spiritual of individuals might have slightly (or dramatically) different opinions on how to live a worthy life.
To grow in our faith and spirituality, we have to be humble enough to admit that we don't always have all the answers. Or even the right ones. We have to be willing to process new information and changing landscapes in a way that's authentically true to our beliefs, while also allowing for the possibility that we need to make changes when they're required.
In other words, we have to be willing to allow for the possibility that we might be wrong sometimes.
The "catchy question" in this week's newsletter (which sometimes gets posted to the Newsfeed to inspire conversation) is as follows:
Is there a particular tenet of your faith/spirituality that you think might be wrong?
There will likely be an initial feeling of resistance (there usually is for me when someone pushes me to admit the ways that I'm wrong  ), but I would encourage you to lean into it and look past that initial resistance this week. The question isn't intended as "gotcha" where you admit your beliefs are silly or flawed. It's a genuine challenge to share something about your faith or spirituality that you struggle with. That you wonder if maybe you're like the Sadducees and Pharisees in the Book of Acts, trying to live your best spiritual life but wondering if God's moving in a way that you're just not seeing at the moment.
For me, I struggle with a lot of what the Bible says. Without getting into the Biblical inerrancy argument (which is a much longer topic for another day), I sometimes wonder if modern Christian positions on hot-button topics like homosexuality, abortion, etc. are truly God's position on those issues, or if it's humans interpreting God's will in a way that fits their beliefs and may or not be what He intends. I suspect that the exploration of those uncertainties will be the project of a lifetime and something of which I'm constantly taking stock and asking myself the question, "What if I'm wrong about this?"
How about you?
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"Blogocentric Formulations"
"New & Noteworthy Things"
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Feedback from "Spiritual Newsletter (March 23, 2022)" about the way:
dmci07  writes:
Catholics believe Jesus is present in the host and the wine, and they become the body and blood of Christ. This is more than a remembrance to us - the Eucharist transforms us to be more like Jesus. I agree some faith communities regard communion as a remembrance, but to Catholics this is the center of our faith.
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