Too Many Visions

Things are so often not what they seem. This is a statement that applies to the human condition whether the humans being referred to are believers or non-believers. It is a profound reality in the world as it now is and will be for as long as the world as a whole remains unredeemed.

Understanding that this is so is a very important requirement for Christian living that is both authentic and healthy. It is also important to understand that the spirit of deception seems to be becoming ever more pervasive in the opening decades of the twenty-First century. We live in an era when thousands of voices, many purporting to be Christian, are competing for our attention and doing so through an electronic media that is still growing in its already massive influence. The results are a multitude of ways to perceive “reality”, including the ultimate form of reality claimed by Christianity.

The Bible tells us that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but which leads to death”. As someone also once said it is eminently possible for a person to be “sincerely wrong”. Many are those in the Church today who have very sincere, yet differing, perspectives on what it means or doesn’t mean to be a disciple of Christ. The question is who is truly speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and who is not? With so many of the aforementioned voices out there it is becoming, in my view, harder and harder to know.

In 20 years of faith I have heard a myriad of takes on what true Christianity is and what it isn’t on both a macro and micro level. The winds of doctrine continue to blow and added to them we now have a number of not specifically-biblical philosophies that many of us are trying to safely interpret through a biblical lens. The social revolution that the West has gone through over the past four or five decades has introduced a multiplicity of “worldviews” which the thinking Christian cannot cavalierly dismiss. Every age has required believers in Jesus Christ to “take the good and leave the bad”, so to speak, as far as the surrounding culture. This age is no different, except in one cardinal way. We have to deal with much more available information than our forebears who did not have to contend with what might be called the “global electronic information hive”.

The airwaves and the internet are full of supposedly Christian voices that sound believable, yet have a tendency to subtlety or not so subtlety contradict one another. The result, it seems, are congregations of people who, already being too immersed in secular pop culture, are also becoming too open to the contemporary idea that one can hold multiple positions on what were once black and white issues.

Admittedly there are legitimate differences of opinion about just what is black and white and what is “grey” in following the God of the Bible. This has always been true and has always set off debate within the Church. But today we seem to be entering a period when almost anything can be made grey just as long as one can find enough internet bloggers disagreeing about it!

The basic heart of any debate is the fact of one person thinking that the other doesn’t understand what is true and what isn’t. This brings us back to the opening statement of this essay that “things are so often not what they seem”. As Twenty-First Century Christians we are in the process of becoming so overwhelmed with hearing differing visions of true faith, each of which seems reasonable, that we can no longer hear the still, small voice of the Spirit amid the din. If we in the process lose all ability to hear that voice of absolute truth then we are, simply put, lost.

The Bible speaks of a great apostasy that will mark the Church in the closing days of this dying age. I do not think it extreme to propose that we have entered into that period. The Scripture says that where “there is no vision the people perish”. Is it unreasonable to posit that the same is true when there are too many visions?