godoutsidethebox

I remember a while back when I bought my big, shiny, leather-bound, gilt-edged, NASB study Bible. I remember holding it in the bookstore and admiring the weight of it. Admiring the smoothness of the leather cover and the feeling of the thin pages. (My friend Alex calls them Biblepages. Like it was all one word. Biblepages.)

It was the kind of Bible that carries some weight to it; it was the kind of Bible that someone important might carry - A theology professor, perhaps. It was the kind of Bible that was perfect for long hours spent debating theology, the kind of Bible that gives you an inflated sense of self-importance. In any case, it made me feel like a cooler Christian for carrying it.

And then I remember a few months later, standing in the middle of a gothic cathedral in France. Somehow, the building felt holy. Something about the midieval stone and the carved wood and the smell and the way the light filtered in gave the place the feeling that it was somehow holy ground - That this was somehow like the burning bush, where God told Moses to take off his sandals. It was easy to see why people associated God as being present in these places.

Brian McLaren talks about how in the Middle Ages, Christians built cathedrals to contain God, and in the modern era we built cathedrals of thought for the same purpose. I would argue that McLaren is right. We’ve moved away from capturing God in cathedrals in favor of more “Right thinking” about God. We’ve tried to capture God in a book, rather than a building. We want a neatly defined God, a God who gives us an instructional manual so that we can understand God.

Honestly, though, I think that such thinking is missing the point. God cannot be captured.

Jesus says it this way: “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, a woman asked him where the appropriate place to worship God was. Culturally, these people believed in what is called a henotheistic god - A god who lived in one place (A temple, or in the Samaritan’s case, a mountain) and could only be worshipped there. Jesus says that God is worshipped in a different way: God isn’t found in a place. God is found in a way of life - the way of Christ.