Knowing more than God. . .

It is always a curious thing when some presume to know more than or better than God.  Pope Francis seems to wonder if combat can ever be moral.  Never mind anything in Scripture that might address the morality of combat for noble cause and the protection of the oppressed and vulnerable.  It reminds me of those Christians who insist that they are really pro-life because they oppose the death penalty.  Never mind that God approves of the taking of a life in certain occasions as both the right and responsibility of the state.  Or of those who look at the bodies and insist the biology has nothing to do with sex and gender (sort of like Ketanji Brown who answered she had not definition of a woman because she was not a biologist).  Choosing to ignore Scripture or rebuke it for its failure to reflect the modern mind has become something of a pattern.  While you might expect it from those outside the Kingdom, those who claim to be within the Church also take up the cause against Scripture and presume to know better than God or more than God.

Of course, this is not reserved to popes and pro-life folks or even to critics of Christianity, we as Christians do this every day.  We insist that what God has said is either not clear or wrong or not applicable to us and to our situation today.  This is nothing less than the convenient justification for choosing to ignore or dismiss what we do not like of that which God has said.  This is nothing new.  Recall Thomas Jefferson and his distillation of the New Testament down to a few pages of that which is essential, incontrovertible, and true.  In the end it tells us less of God than it does of Jefferson.  And that is the point.  What we choose to ignore or dismiss always tells us more about us than it does about God.  Which is all understandable since that is what we want to hear -- our voices speaking out loud what we think, feel, or desire.