Is Your God Dangerous?

Another barn-burner of an editorial from Mark Galli:

Before giving us the Bible or the sacraments or music or theology or whatever, God should have attached a warning label: "Danger: Do not use this without proper supervision; handling this improperly could be injurious to spiritual health."

Instead—to take one example—God just hands us the Bible. And we take this pack of dynamite (with the fuse lit, no less!) and constantly misinterpret and misuse it; we manipulate it to manipulate others, and then ignore it when it suits our purposes. It is supposed to be a means of the gracious revelation of the love of God, but so often we turn it into a new rulebook for the righteous and religious. Yes, through the Bible many, many come to faith. And yet through our use of the Bible, people get confused, some get hurt, some are alienated from the church, others from God himself. The Bible is both a blessing and a danger in our hands.

Even worship, which takes place in a "sanctuary," a safe place, has a scary patina to it. Our services are crowded with cheerful tunes and inspiring sermons, with jokes from the platform and smiles everywhere—so much so that we forget sometimes that we are in the presence of God Almighty, our Maker and Judge and Redeemer. If we lose the sense that worship is a dangerous place, well, we're probably not in the presence of the biblical God. As writer Annie Dillard put it in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.