Okay, I admit it. I have become a shameless granny-driver.

I blame it on The Egg, my Prius hybrid.

Toyota put a heads-up readout on the dashboard that you can set to display your estimated MPG as you drive. It’s like a challenge, and it’s a challenge that I am not too wimpy to back down from.

When I drive, I try to make that readout go as high as I can.

Sometimes, that means some granny-driving. You know: 35 m.p.h. in a 35 m.p.h. zone (because the battery-powered EM mode can get you going that fast). Full stops at stop signs (so the gas motor will cut off). Coasting down hills willy-nilly and braking at speed bumps (it charges the battery array). Slow acceleration to speed rather than jackrabbit starts and anticipating stop signs and red lights by backing off the accelerator immediately (which will improve gas mileage in any car, hybrid or not).

I generally granny-drive on my way to work and on my way home. I take a little-used route through a pleasant housing development with low m.p.h. signage anyway. My route features a nicely-landscaped country club golf course, lots of private gardens, lovely homes, friendly joggers and walkers. I enjoy the drive. I don’t rush. I leave in plenty of time, and I don’t need to rush.

I don’t granny-drive all the time. I don’t granny-drive when there’s traffic pushing from behind. (Oh, all right, maybe the odd Jaguar or Hummer.) And I don’t granny-drive to be obnoxious. (Usually. Hey, there are two lanes, and no center lines!)

I granny-drive to get good mileage. And I succeed!

Coming back to work from lunch today, the readout was 63.5 MPG.

Your results may vary.

Yesterday, I read an essay defending the proposition that all who have not heard the gospel are automatically lost and condemned to hell. Its main “Aha!” was the metaphor that God is merely a traffic cop enforcing law, and ignorance of the law is no excuse.

How insulting to the divine nature of the omnipotent, omniscient, loving God, who gave law for the benefit of His creation, then supplanted it with the grace of Christ when we proved ourselves unworthy and incapable of obeying it and treating each other well!

I am glad Osama bin Laden is dead and I am not sorry to say so.

I am sorry he did not repent, but his actions would lead one to believe that he was among those people whose consciences are seared; who call good “evil” and evil “good.” I fear that it is almost impossible for someone to repent who cannot distinguish good from evil. And he recruited thousands to swear their allegiance to his inability to discern good from evil and murder thousands more at his command, believing that to be right and good.

That, as I’ve blogged before, is what (I believe) comprises the sin which cannot be forgiven – the sin of calling good “evil” and evil “good.” (See The Sin That Cannot Be Forgiven.)

I completely trust God to judge Osama bin Laden justly and mercifully, and I completely trust Him to do the same for me.

But Osama is not around anymore to do his part in leading others toward the sin of intentional mis-discernment and on to mayhem and mass murder and suicide – which any right-thinking individual in any culture should recognize as selfish, immoral, unlawful, wrong, evil, and wicked.

And I cannot be sorry about that. I can be reminded to be careful what I call “good” and “evil” by the way I live. Mistaking them for each other begins so easily when self comes first.

So ring the bell if you must.

Ding. Dong.

But ring it quietly for Osama.

Remember that the judgment bell tolls for thee and me – and not just he.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ….

~ Ephesians 5:21-25

All sorts of folks quote these verses. Some quote them to prove that women must obey their husbands in everything (but “obey” and “submit” are not quite synonyms).

I don’t know very many people who go on to define what “submission” means by continuing through the next few verses, but that’s what Paul does:

… to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

~ Ephesians 5:26-33

Jesus Christ submitted to the needs of His bride, the church, by humbling himself and taking the form of a servant and bathing – not only her feet – but her whole body … because he loves and cherishes it, feeds and cares for it … to the point that He left His Father in heaven and submitted to death on a cross to win her and wash her and feed her and be united with her.

That, good people, is what “submission” means.

And we must never, ever forget that it is not just how wives should relate to husbands, but also husbands to wives and believers to believers. Because right before verse 22 is verse 21, and there is no ignoring it, getting around it or explaining it away.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Okay, end of sermon.

Why do we draw our patterns for “what-church-should-be-like” from Paul’s correctives to the chaos in 1 Corinthians 12-14 rather than the exuberant harmony of Acts 2:42-47?

There are fewer verses in the latter — so it has an advantage there already!

But more than that – even though the Corinthian letter bears principles of great value – the greatest value is for churches which are in crisis; suffering from behavioral problems even during their times of gathered worship.

Are we accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative (as the old song goes) — or the reverse?

Does your church have a problem with severe jealousy over the gifts provided by the Holy Spirit intended for the blessing and encouragement of the body of Christ?

Is your church uncontaminated by genuine love for each other that shows in patience, kindness, humility, protection, trust, hope, endurance?

Does your church have women interrupting the speaker to say: “What? I don’t understand. Somebody explain that to me. That doesn’t make any sense”?

Does your church have people generally interrupting the speaker to say: “Oooh! Oooh! I just had a revelation from heaven! Shhh. Shhh. Let me share it!”?

Does your church have people interrupting the speaker, wailing and warbling in languages no one can understand, with no one around who can interpret?

Does your church gather with everyone having their own idea of what the (dis)order of worship should be – and demonstrating their willingness to make theirs happen right now?

All while visitors are sitting there, wondering what in tarnation is going on?

Well, Corinth apparently did. So Paul wrote them to encourage them to calm things down, do things in a decent order, show courtesy, take turns, keep things intelligible, and above all glorify God.

My guess is that people pretty much do that in your church as they do in mine, even if grudgingly sometimes.

So back to the original question.

Do our churches devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching, prayers, breaking of bread?

Are visitors awed with signs and wonders of near-miraculous changes in the lives of people touched?

Do we stick together and share everything we have?

Do we sell our property and possessions and give the proceeds to any among us who has need?

Do we meet every day at our church building campuses, putting them to some use more than just on Sunday?

Do we have each other over to the house frequently to dine, break bread, express gladness with sincere hearts?

Do we praise God constantly?

Do we consistently enjoy the favor of people around us?

Is the Lord adding to our number daily those who are being saved?

Have we got all of that part down yet — done the really difficult, challenging, character-building part of living like Christ in front of others — before we go on to the stage where rules must restrict behavior that isn’t even present?

Dang.

I think I just answered my own question.

Do you know what really chaps my saddlebags?

Of course you don’t – or if you think you do, you’re still reading to find out if you’re right.

What really chaps my saddlebags is people who think they know God better than He knows Himself.

There. I’ve said it. And I ain’t a-gonna take ‘er back.

I’m talking about people who say, “Oh, the Bible is bad because it mandates war and extermination and intolerance.”

Well, tough toenails, Person-Who-Knows-Gooder-Than-God. Tell you what. You pretend you’re God. You devise a brilliant way to keep order among millions of refugees in a desert with no visible means of support for forty years and if you come up with something better than law and punishment and providence, you give me a call.

And if you find something more efficacious than Christ’s blood and His grace in giving it for all who mature past the point of needing law, make it an urgent call, collect.

While I’m waiting, I’ll just go on yapping about people who say, “God is hateful and murderous and vengeful.”

Well, duh. He is also just and merciful and loving and provident and generous and omnipotent. Try telling the whole story in context instead of just the part that suits your purpose. Imagine holding back all of your emotions at those whom you might have created to enrich the world when they molest and rape and torture and steal and lie and annihilate each other instead of doing what you asked them to do, which was for their benefit and the good of all. I’m just real sorry He doesn’t measure up to your perfect standards of morality.

Oh, and by the way, see how you feel when they nail your firstborn to a cross and leave him there to die.

In the meantime, keep to yourself your brilliant perceptions about what the Bible says until you’ve read it through at least once, and about who God should be like until you’ve achieved perfection yourself.

He will still love you no matter how idiotic your notions are, and will still want you to be a part of His family in spite of what you are:

A doofus like me.

I know, because I’ve had some of those same snot-nosed, arrogant, indefensible ideas myself – probably still carry a few of ’em around in my saddlebags, when I’m thinkin’ with ’em as well as just sittin’ on ’em.

And He still forgives.

After you read this, you’ll know you want to:

http://www.christianchronicle.org/blog/2011/03/sudden-illness-claims-life-of-church-member-a-mother-of-five-young-children/

Maybe it’s because I purchased Rob Bell’s controversial short tome Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Everyone Who Ever Lived this morning and devoured it whole by early this evening, but “A Brief Impression” is all I can yield.

I like Bell’s writing style. I’ve used it for years, not even knowing that he would be born and grow up to use it himself. I like asking questions, especially leading questions, as I find that was a tactic favored not only by some influential Greek philosophers, but also Jesus Himself. It’s good to encourage folks to think for themselves.

But if I’m ever going to write a book “About” something, I hope I will give that something the treatment it deserves, rather than just a quick overview outlining the aspects I like and the reasons why I like them. I hope I’ll give a little fair time and reference to the aspects other people like or prefer and their reasons, and if I disagree, maybe some of the reasons why I disagree.

If that something is a matter of faith, I hope I’ll cite a lot of scripture illustrating many points of view and why I’ve settled on mine.

And if I’ve raised a lot of questions, I’d like to hope that I would try to give my answer to at least more than a token few of them.

Satan, for instance, only makes a cameo (pp. 89-90) in Love Wins, and by reading scripture you’d think he had something more to do with sin, fallen man, temptation, judgment, and final destiny than just the function and perhaps destiny to make people better by having them turned over to him for whatever he does with them. However, there is no mention of his other appearances in scripture.

This is just one example, and I’ll leave it at that because I’m trying to keep this impression brief and I find that example typical of Bell’s treatment of his subjects in Love Wins. (The word “salvation,” for instance, only appears about 10 times – once in the ISBN description of the book, oddly enough.) Fortunately, he doesn’t burden the reader with terms like penal substitutionary atonement or soteriology.

I actually sympathize with Bell’s charge that the story of Jesus has been co-opted for a lot of different and lesser stories, some of them patently false – but to be able to call them false, one would have to refute them. And he doesn’t. Nor does he really, definitively support the propositions that he seems to be suggesting.

I can’t sympathize with the ideas that heaven and hell are merely states of mind in this life (or aeion) enjoyed by or inflicted upon one’s self through the choices one makes, or that because God desires something – the salvation of all – He makes it happen by His irresistible love, even perhaps against the will of one who does not wish to be saved. Those may not even be accurate perceptions of what Bell was trying to say. (And I end up having more questions. Like, “Does justice win, too?”)

You see, conclusions of this nature are rarely stated as such in the text of Love Wins. One is left to draw one’s own conclusions … which is another part of the writing style I share with Rob Bell. Yet, to be able to do so, one needs enough information on all sides of a question to reach a conclusion.

Rather than a brief impression.

To be fair, at the close of the work, Bell suggests other and weightier references from which he has gleaned some of Love Wins. Hopefully, they discuss the questions and issues raised within it more fully. And I fully appreciate the need for a work that addresses them without becoming ponderously heavy.

I’m just not sure that Love Wins really addresses them.

I have a theory. My theory is that legalistic Christian thought is absolutely, incontrovertibly “right” … if you’re allowed to insert the word “only” wherever desired in scripture.

And if you’re allowed to ignore or explain away any other scripture which contradicts you.

Because if you insert the word “only” into a scripture, it can become the sole criterion for something to be true; the singular condition upon which a logical progression can be made.

And the genius of legalistic Christian thought is that the word “only” doesn’t even have to be expressed as part of a verse being quoted or a logical constructed being built … it’s assumed.

All thanks to the doctrine of the silence of scripture: Anything not expressly commanded is implicitly condemned.

Want to exclude the active, current, present role of the Holy Spirit in faith? Quote Romans 10:17:

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Because the verse is silent on any other way by which faith comes, there is no other way. Faith only comes by hearing. (Of course, you have to ignore or explain away 1 Corinthians 12:9 and Ephesians 2:8, but those are relatively minor inconveniences.)

The problem, of course, is that the word “only” isn’t there.

And most legalistic Christians would be quick to point out the condemnation attached to this passage:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll. ~ Revelation 22:18-19

“Faith comes only by hearing” is just one example of “the missing only” fallacy. I’ll bet you folks have encountered lots of others.

Share a few!