GOD SAID IT
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler

I saw a bumper-sticker the other day, that read: "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." That sticker evoked a variety of feelings in me.

On the one hand, I envy people who enjoy such certainty. I long to understand the mysteries of our existence, and I wish that I, like some people, believed I had been handed the key to those mysteries by the Creator Himself.

On the other hand, there is something in that bumper-sticker that bothers me. As I have learned from my experience in doing call-in talk radio about the moral problems facing this country, the attitude it expresses can get in the way of our talking with each other in the ways we need to. Throwing out a line of text --about bringing up kids, about marriage, about homosexuality, about the roles of men and women-- rarely "settles" the question. And while it may be comforting to feel certainty on such difficult matters, I don't think any single text or system of belief has a monopoly on the important truths about human life.

I am not one of those who denies the possibility of revelation. My own life has been guided by some of what I believe was revealed to me. But I am troubled when any one or any group of us claims to possess some complete or final truth. "That settles it" is not only a conversation-stopped, it seems to me an assertion that no human being can ever be entitled to make --at least about such important questions as what we human beings are, how we should live our lives, and what our place is in the great scheme of things.

Even if there are sacred texts --inspired by divine revelation-- who is to say that any one text exhausts all that God has to say? The texts of Christianity and those of Buddhism both run deep. If I am born to Christian parents, on what basis can I judge that what my tradition has recorded of what God has said is valid while what others say they have received over thousands of years is not, when I know that if I had been born in some other part of the world I would probably believed the opposite?

If the Evangelical Christian asserts that Christ is "the Way," and if the Muslim asserts that Mohammed's word is God's final word, and the Mormon maintains that the Book of Mormon completes the picture-- how are they all to speak with one another? Must each, in embracing his part of what God has said, take the position that God cannot have said other things to other people?

Even human teachers may fashion their message to the particular needs and abilities of their students. I know that I, as the father of three children, have said some different things to each of my children, according to what I thought each needed to hear. What would happen to our understanding --to our humility and our sense of awe-- if we imagined that our Heavenly Father has given as much of His truth to His children in other traditions as to His children in our own tradition?

I know that my teaching to a child at age two years will be different from what I will say to her ten years later. To a two-year-old, maybe I'll simply say "Stay out of the street!" When she is eight, I'll try to make sure she looks in both directions when crossing, that she walks on the correct side, and stays away from the more dangerous thoroughfares. When the teenager learns to drive, still more complex teachings are required. I would not be pleased to hear my sixteen-year-old recall what I said to her at two, and say, "Dad said it, I believe it, and that settles it." Similarly, there may be moral and cultural questions that God would not wish to have settled by what He said to those pastoral peoples who preceded us millennia ago, nearer the dawn of civilization.

Then there is the whole matter of interpretation. Any human teacher knows that even the best student listening to the most straight-forward lecture is unlikely to grasp entirely what the teacher was saying. How much more fallible is the human rendering likely to be when the message is God's Truth, something our great mystics and theologians have said so far surpasses human understanding.

Revelation does not occur by FAX. So what grants any of us the certainty that the text as handed down to us by our forebears, and as read by ourselves, catches precisely either the spirit or the letter of what our Heavenly Teacher wished for us to understand?

So, what am I suggesting?

I am not suggesting that any of us discard the texts in which we believe. Nothing I am saying challenges the notion that these texts are sacred or that they are revealed. Nor am I saying that there is no such thing as moral truth toward which we should be striving.

What I am suggesting is that we talk with one another with the presumption that anyone may have some piece of the truth --even of God's truth-- that we ourselves do not yet grasp. That the human search for truth and understanding is inevitably either on-going, with questions perpetually to some degree unsettled, or else has been prematurely closed. That when it comes to our understanding of what God says we are like the blind men in the story from the Sufi tradition who come upon an elephant. One feels the trunk and declares the thing to be like a rope; one, feeling a leg, says no, it's like a pillar; while another, who discovers the ear, is sure it is a great flap. Only if they can learn from each other can they overcome the handicap of their blindness.

There is another bumper-sticker I think would serve us better: "A mind is like a parachute," it says. "It only works when it is open."