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%WORD OF GOD 780703
A preoccupation with the "Word of God" generates the
impression that God is a God who communicates only in
verbal languages---that all that God has to communicate
takes the form of linear sequences of words. This
impression undermines non-verbal dialogue, for the
impression suggests that the most significant
communication takes the form of linear sequences of words.
The impression blocks an awareness of non-verbal
promptings from God---for non-verbal communications from
all sources are discounted.
The preoccupation with the "Word of God" lays the
foundation for legalistic approaches which focus upon
verbal rules. Messages which are limited to verbal
formulations are easily perverted into legalistic messages
which appear to be equivalent to the original messages,
but are in spirit quite different. An intellectual
analysis of such a perverted message may not reveal the
different spirit which it represents---for the
intellectual analysis is carried out in the verbal
modality: the difference between the original and the
perverted messages are spiritual, not verbal. Thus,
legalists appropriate spiritual messages which are
represented in purely verbal ways---and pervert them into
legalistic messages which appear like the original
spiritual messages to purely verbally oriented
intellectuals. The biases of intellectuals make it
exceedingly difficult for them to perceive the differences
between the gospel of love and the gospel of law.
The gospel of law is readily communicated in
primarily verbal messages; the gospel of love is not
meaningfully communicated through primarily verbal
messages. Thus, verbally oriented people tend to fall into
ways of thinking and reasoning in exclusively verbal
terms, and communicating in exclusively verbal terms which
pervert the gospel of love into a gospel of law. No
verbal analysis will adequately reveal the inadequacy of
exclusively verbal analysis.
God's dialogue with us cannot be as rich as it might
be if we are tuned in only to one of the many channels of
communication. Each channel of communication introduces
it's own bias, and only by the use of many different
channels of communication is it possible to transcend the
biases which characterize the various individual channels
of communication. We need more than the word of God, for
God is Love.
(c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in
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