Everything is Awesome with the Literally Lego Bible!  Only $239.99 at wesleybros.com!

I once took great comfort in a black and white faith, where the lines were clearly drawn and it was obvious who was right and who was wrong.  I believed that the scripture worked like Lego’s, to quote Will Ferrell, “Actually it’s a highly complex system of interlocking bricks.”  Every piece had to perfectly fit together, and STAY together.  And in order for it to stay together, every brick had to work the same way.  If Adam and Eve weren’t literal historical figures, if Jonah didn’t really survive three days in a whale, how could I believe that Jesus really performed miracles and was raised from the dead?  For me, it was the massacre of Jehu, which was commanded by God through Elijah, but later condemned by Hosea…why would God condemn something that God had ordered?

For some people, to have those bricks knocked out of their system means the end of their faith.  So they either lose their faith and walk away, or dig their feet in the trenches, Kragglize their system and make scripture unchanging and absolute.

I used the major scriptures of the Prosperity Gospel for the middle panel of the comic, but it could have been almost any espoused theology.  The founding brick of the Prosperity Gospel is the idea that God’s main goal is to make you prosperous.  What is the founding brick of your theology, though?  That God is sovereign above all other attributes?  That God is Love above all other attributes?  That Scripture MUST be literal (“inerrant”) for it to be true?

But Scripture is a conversation.  It’s less a rigid and absolute system, and more of a rubber-band (a tension that holds everything together, but sometimes painfully snaps back).  The Scripture itself evolves and offers multiple voices with different perspectives on who God is, how God works, even what God expects from us.  Scripture allows for multiple communities of perspectives, for the rigid law-keepers, and the Spirit of the law-keepers, so to speak.  Methodists do not use words like “inerrant” when we talk about scripture (because the Bible never talks about itself in this way, also, most of the history of interpretation has not looked at scripture this way).  Rather, we affirm with John Wesley that scripture “contains everything necessary for salvation.”