The Devil Made Me Do It

A couple of things have been going on. I read the AAR article “Dianomy: Understanding Religious Women’s Moral Agency as Creative Conformity” by Elizabeth M. Bucar – liked it!

I also read the Christian Century article “Double Belonging” about people who consider themselves in two faith communities at once (Buddhist/Christians, Jewish/Christian, Islam/Christian). Don’t like it. The article is fine, but the idea of trying to be completely in both camps at the same time is weak at best. Just because you are bi-spiritual (or in an “open relationship” with your God) does not mean that you can sleep with two at once.

What I wanted to write was about language and rhetoric and spiritual images. Yup, once more on language. I was in Shawnee Kansas at Central Baptist Seminary last week spending a lot of time doing basically nothing with 25 other “Adaptive” leaders, when one person stood up in the back of the room and said:

“The Holy Spirit has moved me to ask for prayer.”

This was a fascinating statement that brought into question power and discourse. If this person just said, “I think we should pray” then it is just that person making the suggestion. We can understand that the individual is trying to persuade everyone else that prayer at this time would be good. It is a basic request that is easy to understand. But when someone says, “The Holy Spirit has moved me to ask for prayer,” the request changes in a big way because there is a depth of meaning in the phrase, “Holy Spirit.” We now have to try to understand what the person means by “Holy Spirit.” The difficulty with such a phrase is that many people will hear this term in many different ways with different theological level of authority. So when someone says, “the Holy Spirit led me to ask for prayer,” does that mean we have to stop everything and pray, or does that mean we need to talk about prayer, or does that mean we should pray but only in one specific way. The use of the term is vague and difficult to grasp. This becomes especially problematic when the individual is using the term with a sense of power and authority. In this case the individual was trying to gain control of the meeting, but the facilitator would not relent.

So what is the take-away? If nothing else, we in the religious world, need to be very careful with our terms. So often we use religious language (it says in the Bible, God’s plan, Jesus told me, etc…) with a sense of authority, but we are not sure if the person we are talking to understands the term in the same way that we do. It is one thing to throw such terms around willy-nilly but don’t expect others to understand what you mean.

If you don’t like this post, take it up with God. God told me to write every word here…