We speak about God as easily as we speak of oranges and apples. If we speak of God to scare people they will hear only two or three times and no more. And we, ourselves, tend not to hear what we are saying after a time. The most dangerous aspect of this situation is that we do not believe what we ourselves are saying and even though we know that to be the case still we pretend to believe it. We are, as it were, hypnotized by our own beautiful and inspiring religious "words." We become irresponsible in our relation to God and neighbour through the careless use of 'many words'.
Yes, we use a lot of high-powered words, such as, 'love of God', 'Christ', 'the hope of the world', 'salvation from death', 'eternal salvation versus eternal damnation', 'hope against despair', and so on. These are, to use an image, very 'high-voltage' words. We must handle them with care lest we electrocute ourselves. Powers carelessly used destroy instead of serving.
Our church services are packed with high-voltage words. We sing:
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.
When we sing this to organ accompaniment and with a hymn book in our hands, we feel exalted but do we really mean 'we will be true to death?' Do we mean what we say? Isn't Christianity simply too talkative, not so much in the sense of speaking a lot but using high-powered words irresponsibly?
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar