Tried With Fire

Another timely quote from Body Broken: One of the reasons Christians tend to fight with each other over politics is that we are often secret utopians. We say we trust in Christ, but we really trust in ourselves, or some human solution, to make the world a better place. We keep hoping for and believing in the "silver bullet" - the candidate, the policy, the platform, the Supreme Court configuration - that will fix things. And when we find that someone else's silver bullet differs from ours, we don't trust him anymore - even if he is a fellow believer. Or we keep clinging to the mistaken notion that American is God's chosen nation, positioned to make things right in the world: if we can just get America "right" we will put the world to rights. And when we find someone with a different vision for what it means to get America "right" we demonize him. pg. 37, location 877 I wrote some comments about the above passage, but I deleted them. I'...

"While truth is based on facts, it involves more than facts and does not end with them... This is why pure rationalism and scientism cannot lead us to truth; such approaches cannot tell us how to interpret, arrange, and discern the meaning of what we see, touch, feel, taste, and hear. Nor can they ensure that we will be ethical in the process. Pursuing truth requires more than knowing where the facts lead. It requires the honesty to actually follow them, regardless of who they implicate."  (pg. 74, my italics) I first read All That's Good  by Hannah Anderson last fall, and I'm rereading it with a group of women from church. We are now on Chapter 4, which is one of the best chapters of the book in my opinion, because Hannah addresses an area that I am deeply concerned about. I was in a situation many years ago where the truth did not lead to transparency but a cover up of the facts and a minimization of sin. Even though I was not the target, I was badly burned...