Part 216. Imprisonment or freedom?

Most of us have spent our lives building a theological mansion that only turned out to be a theological prison.

Justin Phillips. Church Pastor, USA 

This reminds me of a verse from a Charles Wesley hymn:

    Long my imprisoned spirit lay

fast bound in sin and nature's night;

   Thine eye diffused a quickening ray-

I woke  the dungeon flamed with light;

    my chains fell off, my heart was free.

I  rose, went forth, and followed thee.

By what may a person be imprisoned?   It may be by a Church's approach to biblical interpretation, by church tradition, by church dogma, rules or regulations. All may impinge on  understanding and application of our faith. 

An individual may be imprisoned by peer group pressure, by a desire to conform, by fear of isolation or rejection. Whatever the cause, passing through the cell door to freedom involves reevaluation and probably rejection of what has gone before.

For some the escape is a gradual process, for others sparked by a trigger event or experience. Over time I formed the opinion that the central driver of Christian faith is not church tradition, nor literal interpretation of scripture.  The driver is the centrality of Jesus and his command to love without limitations or conditions. We should understand this love through the lens of our experience and understanding of the world as it is, not as it was when the Scriptures were composed. Our understanding of God's love is ongoing, it did not end in the first century of the Common Era.  Sadly the early Christianity succeeded in separating the church from the teaching of Jesus by taking its lead from Pauline ideas and developing dogma far removed from the teaching of Jesus. 

The teaching of Jesus is to be discerned in the synoptic gospels. We do not need to consider the rest of the canon as anything other than of secondary importance. Also, we need to be aware that the synoptic gospels should be read to understand the ideas they convey, not by literal word by word forensic analysis. The authors of the synoptic gospels each had their own subjective opinions to advance in their selection and interpretation of oral tradition and existing documentation.  

This understanding of the central teaching of Jesus, the command to love all unconditionally, was my trigger moment  freeing me from the chains of fundamentalist bible-based faith and releasing me to proclaim God's love for all creation. Now I am free to follow Jesus,