I experience it often; Christians who think they can confidently determine what their God is thinking or what his response would be to a particular question or situation.
The extreme example of this would be the Christian Fundamentalists who believe that they know when God is coming back, and who spend a lot of money in the promotion of the exact date.
But for the moderate or mainstream Christian they make much more subtle but yet just as arrogant a claim. They extrapolate from a text. Which is not a problem in and of itself – we extrapolate from a bank of information every day ; if you know a person well you can guess what their response would be to a question or situation. And Christian’s claim they know their God and have some form of communication with him and that scripture can gives us some of this information, so what is the problem?
Because Christians make their own God to their own spec – much like a LEGO shop that I recently visited that had all of the bodies, faces, legs, hair and hats from which to make your own LEGO man/woman exactly how you would like it. Similarly there is a huge choice offered to us through the scriptures that can be chosen from to make up God to our exact specification.
From the “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak” of the Old Testament to the kind, sacrificial character of Christ. It has been said that the good make good Gods for themselves and the bad make bad ones.
The problem we find with Christianity is that cheery-picking is actually necessary for any believer, good or bad, who wants a consistent or coherent faith. You have to jettison the uglier aspects of the faith to feel you KNOW what God would say or do. Which brings me back to my starting point; you do not know what God would do, he has so many polarised responses throughout the scripture – you cannot be confident of his response at all, not how you could extrapolate the thoughts of your spouse, because you have exorcized such a great deal of the source material to make that judgement.
Here is a real example of such a thing, in a discussion about prayer with a Christian friend after a bonfire and a few whiskeys:
Me: “…People have attempted to test the power of prayer using hospital patients and praying churches, it didn’t work. In those tests prayer seemed to be completely ineffective.”
Friend: “Do you know why? Because God puts his fingers up at that. He isn’t going to play those games. He is just not going to play along.”
Me: “And so he ignores those prayers and let’s those people die. Nice.”
I am not interested here in the prayer question right now, but in the response of my friend. He claims he knows what God’s rationale is to the attempt to test prayer.
The only insight from scripture that seems pertinent to this issue I can think of (there could be others) would be ‘do not test the Lord your God’ – but this is warning to humans, not a claim to God’s response to testing. I cannot think of any reference to God figuratively ‘putting his fingers up’ to questioning. In fact God (ok, Jesus) offers Thomas his palms when he asks for evidence – he doesn’t tell him to F*** off.
Either way, claims that Christians know what God’s response is are similarly arrogant and baseless, whether that be the fundamentalist or the mainstream.
