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Watched the Carlton Pearson movie 'Come Sunday' last night. Interesting story although the film itself was quite dry. If I didn't have an interest in the material I would've checked out early and went right online to get the story.

Without giving away the ending, the choice he ultimately made and the 'trauma' he experienced, the voice of God, was not new. New to him maybe and, considering his position and prominence, a threat to the world in which he lived, but the subject matter, the controversy, was not new. Perhaps in the time in which we live it is in a different context as is all history but the 'shocking' conclusion he drew was not new in the annals of church history.

It is our lack of awareness of this history that is so detrimental to so many, especially those in leadership, who 'feel' as if somehow they are special, have a special relationship with the Creator, and this far too often leads not to humility but to a heightened sense of self and celebrity follows.

The beauty of being human, and the beauty of church history, is that none of us know for certain. This is not the relativistic believe what you want but an understanding that while there is a 'core' of the faith there is a point at which we cannot be absolutely 100% certain that the expression of faith or our understanding of it is right.

Using, weakly, the speed of light as a metaphor:

Starting with the Bible and the history of the Church's interpretation and/or understanding of the same as 'X' and our collective body of believers as 'Y' there comes a point where we start to splinter. Jesus is more or less the '0' point where X and Y meet and the attempt to explain, understand and live out after '0' unfolds along the curve.

Diversity, critical mass, enters the picture as the 'X' gets larger and at some point there is not enough energy, mental power, to make the leap to the speed of light. The speed of light, i.e. faith, exists but to cross the threshold requires us to accept faith as the datum and the rest of our pursuit is trying to understand the 'how' of that datum.

But the point is this: we have choices. I am moving away from the punitive understanding of the atonement and gravitating toward the more Eastern Orthodox emphasis of which atonement, and substitution, is wrapped up in a larger perspective and is not a 'pharmaceutical' approach to the faith.

Those who hold such a few can, and do, judge EO as wrong, heretical even, as the EO do to Protestants. There are divisions, obviously, within Protestantism as we well as within EO itself (the churches in Africa, for example). But there is no one body who can say 'this is wrong' and bring all into the fold.

The closest we have as I see it is Catholicism and the hierarchical structure from the Pope down. It is institutional. But we still have choices. I don't have to be Catholic. Or even as a Catholic, I would assume, there are various options within the Church which don't require fully leaving or being considered as having left the faith.

Something like that...