Clarity? (Labels, part II)

I've just gotten in from running. Within the cold, the music, and the exercise itself - everything else seemed to fade away. I'm hardly into the true zen of running, but with the right ingredients a certain clarity of mind, of being can emerge - where all the things that seemed so important and all the anxious attempting to figure everything out seem to fade away, if only for a little while. It's a feeling I need more of.

I spent most of the day today at a lecture series given by Marcus Borg, so the run was all the more necessary to put a stop to all the intense theologizing and processing I'm prone to do when new ideas are thrown at me - though maybe some of what was said is not altogether new. Parts kind of reminded me of a verse I read recently in the Psalms - deep calling to deep - something deep within me resonated with what he said, though I'm not sure I would say it the same way because to a certain extent, I think we all need our own language. Language itself, after all, is only metaphor - an approximation of what we feel, what we believe, what we try to say about God.

....which gets me back to some of what I started into with my brief rant on political labels. My dislike for categories applies even more in the realm of faith, especially as they are used to determine just who the "chosen" are and to send the rest to hell (which I am really not altogether sure I believe in, but that's perhaps another post). My problem with labels in relationship to faith is how quickly they can descend to idolatry - when being "orthodox" or "traditional" or a certain denomination becomes more important than being faithful to the Gospel. And so often with our labels and categories, we end up placing limits around God. When we try to turn the language we use to speak about God into an absolute truth in itself, faith becomes more of an intellectual exercise of assenting to beliefs than a real relationship with God - and the beliefs about God and Christ become more important than God and Christ themselves.

This gets me back to my previous post and questions about Truth. What does it mean that at the heart of Christianity we say that Truth is a person? "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life....." To say that Truth is bound up in a living and breathing person is a pretty incredible thing because no matter how hard we try to name and qualify and categorize, a person cannot ultimately be reduced to just words! Everything that can be said about me cannot say everything - and is this not that much more true for the one we say is Truth itself?

Yes, I wander into abstraction - but how much more powerful is it to say that Truth is something to be encountered (fully, with all the senses) rather than something simply to be believed (with the mind).

"Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, mind, and strength......."

vs.

"Thou shalt accept the doctrine of the Trinity, the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, the Anselm-ian explanation of atonement...."

I will grant that labels make things easier, that categories make faith and life a little less messy, that clearly defined doctrines are perhaps more comfortable - but are these things really the Gospel, the "good news"? I am again and again struck by the fact that the Truth we ultimately seek is a person and the Bible is true to the extent that it bears witness to the Word made flesh, but the authority is in the word as incarnate, not in the human language itself.

I guess I'm just not as concerned with defining what it means to be a Christan as with following Jesus. This is not to say that "anything goes" - I suppose it's more that the devil is always in the details in the sense that the more we try to define and exclude the greater the danger there is of slipping into the legalism of the Pharisees.

Perhaps, then, it is helpful to think of all religious language as poetry in which the words always mean more than their simple definitions and when put together mean all the more. Maybe this isn't exactly clarity, after all, but it is a new way of seeing even if I'm not sure all that it means.