Lie #9 – I Am Untrustworthy

from Helena Sorensen Aman:

Lie #9: “I am untrustworthy.”

If you want to watch a Christian squirm, ask him if an individual can hear from God. He will tell you yes, knowing it to be the correct answer, but then the caveats will come rolling in. “Under authority,” “within community,” “sound biblical interpretation,” etc. The church, while glorying in the idea that God and human were united in Christ, has for the most part utterly rejected the incarnational reality of God in me. In pulling away from the lie of “I am ultimate,” the church taught me that:

1. My body is untrustworthy and wholly corrupt. It is an impediment to true spirituality, and the day when I finally slough it off will be the greatest day of my life.

2. My feelings are suspect. They are not Truth, and they could never, under any circumstance, prove more valuable than (or even as valuable as) a well-researched and rightly-divided theological argument.

3. I can’t be trusted with money. I need the institution to take my money and choose how to spend it for me, because I could never identify a need in the world and meet it with my own resources.

4. I cannot be trusted to hear from God accurately. (More on this tomorrow.) Sure, John did it on a desert island, without a community or a Bible or anything, but he was special, one of the Founding Fathers, if you will. So his words are infallible.

By teaching that individuals cannot be trusted, the church has robbed itself of revelation. It has traded communities of equals for institutional power structures and placed unnecessary and unbearable burdens on its leaders. Still worse, it has taught generations of Christians to trust authority and profoundly mistrust themselves. Which is why we find ourselves in this wasteland, and why so many of us wonder if there is anything left worth trusting.