The Sin of Knowledge
What was he talking about?!
Wasn’t Paul a social outcast because the Gentiles rejected him? The very Gentiles who were the dictionary definition of “sinner” and all the good people in the world knew that Jesus was the one true God?
I listened with dismay and disbelief during the tour guide’s explanation about Greece having established plural Gods for centuries before Jesus the newbie came along to usurp them. The tour guide was speaking as if the Gentiles didn’t already know that God was THE God.
I could only assume that the tour guide must have been a non-believer. He made Paul sound like a crazy person instead of the self-sacrificing servant of God that he was. I had no choice but to dismiss this Greek man’s entire culture and knowledge of ancient history and defer to what I’d been taught from the Bible from an American banker-turned-rancher-turned-pastor, who had revelation from God to teach me the truth.
And yet. I couldn’t reconcile my small town, 100 church member education with the entire rest of the world who had other things to say about history.
I was on a month-long tour of Europe that included a Mediterranean cruise. My Auntie M, to whom I credit tremendously for opening up the world to me, generously brought me along. One day during our journey at sea, our ship made a stop in Athens and Aunty M sent me off on a land tour of Ephesus and Ancient Greece.
As a Christian, I was thrilled for the chance to step foot on the map that I used to study in the front of my Bible. I love maps. I get lost in them. I imagine myself voyaging them. In high school, the giant atlas and the big dictionary were my favorite things to study in the school library. Often during church, I forgot about the sermon as I journeyed with the Apostle Paul and traced the squiggly and arcing blue, green, and red lines that diagramed his life. How the heck he sustained sea travel and shipwreck and hot deserts at tremendous distances sent my mind into wondrous imaginings. I wanted to travel like Paul. I wanted to see what he saw.
When the Ephesus land excursion dropped me into Paul’s map like the little yellow Google person, my narrow truth and knowledge of the world were confronted for the first time. There was a remarkable contrast between what my pastor said in church and what an anthology of history, culture, people, and other religions said. I had studied one textbook, the Bible, from a singular point of view all my life which was suddenly rendered pitifully useless to help me understand the infinitely faceted real world. I can equate it to the slap in the face I experienced between studying French in school and then stepping foot in France; I felt like I’d never taken a French class in my life. I didn’t understand anyone, and they were using words I’d never heard.
During my European tour, I journaled and wrote of my encounters through the murky lens of my hemmed-in world view, challenged as it was becoming. Desperate to defend the truth I clung to, I wrote an embarrassing essay on how other parts of the world were too Godless for even God to save, perpetuating the kind of scary absolute thinking that lets a group of people believe they are superior to another group.
France received special attention in my journal due to smokers and perceived loose morals, which drove me to write out long despairing passages about the world in general. Since I now live in France, I can say that it is paradoxically and often frustratingly conservative, but my observations through the monocle of specific moral standards judged the entire country of France to fall short of God’s requirements.
London was ok though. London was cool. My church had connections with other churches in England, so it provided a comforting match for my brain. London was exciting and had the big city feel I had been after all my life. I could have stayed there and never come home. It energized me and lit my imagination. I returned to England a few times in my twenties after this initial trip thanks to the very fact that I’d developed friendships with other Christians from England. But even they were different from me. They had boyfriends that they kissed. They drank beer in pubs. They listened to secular music. None of those things fit into my programming. I was obligated to accept and love my friends, but also to judge them for not holding the same standard that I did. I couldn’t figure out how they got away with it and how God accepted their behavior but figured they’d come around once they had a revelation on the truth. I was so lucky to have already possessed the truth.
My brain didn’t contain many compartments in which to receive ideas and information. Mainly, my brain was one programmed compartment that received only exact matches; those ideas that perfectly fit my religious programming. Anything that wasn’t an exact match, therefore, got shoved into the pure garbage compartment. There did exist the curiosity compartment where new ideas and life tried to breathe but then suffocated, getting squashed between the programmed and the pure garbage compartments.
Incredibly, the new-ideas seeds that received no water and very little light during the years they spent in the abused curiosity compartment of my brain, did grow into little sprouts. By the time I made it to university, the straggly sprouts received water in Core class when we explored the idea of having a world-view. I knew nothing about the concept of world-view but drank in the idea from a gigantic thirst. The curiosity compartment expanded and embraced new thoughts and odd shapes while the programmed compartment became obsolete and dysfunctional. The more the curiosity compartment let in, the fewer exact matches found a landing place in the programmed compartment.
It started with a Greek man making bold claims about the Apostle Paul. I was forced to question Sunday sermons in the face of collective history in another part of the world.
If you have sinned, slide forward.
It was dangerous for me to journey into knowledge. To look at the world and take in ideas presented by people who were not my original programmers. I felt vulnerable and exposed. Every time I traveled with Aunty M, or on my own, or sat in classes, my mind brightened, my heart filled with happiness, and my soul was nourished.
I learned to love and accept other people who were not like me, and they became my teachers. Expansive ideas don’t fit into programs that only allow exact matches. And that is the risk a person takes. No longer fitting in. It’s impossible to squeeze down expansive ideas and border them into exact matches slots. Exact matches click and settle into a comfortable mold. Expansive ideas breathe, expand, and live. They move forward, they develop, they change. They live outside of compartments, and the knowledge of those ideas is powerful.
I’m grateful I no longer possess THE truth. Instead, I pursue curiosity, honesty, and respect for myself and others inside the real world. What is true for me one day might not be true the next, and that is a glorious freedom.
