THINKING “OUTSIDE THE BOX”

The expression may, by now, be a bit passe, but one hears occasionally within church culture references to thinking and acting “outside the box.” Unfortunately, many are willing, even anxious, to join the hordes of those who “think outside the box” (but who are most definitely, by now, calling it something else entirely), even when such thinking puts us squarely outside the confining walls of Scripture. Indeed, the “walls” of Scripture liberate, rather than confine.

The common refrain among these free spirits is that those of us who insist on permitting Scripture to limit our sin-prone mental wanderings are “putting God in a box.” Yet if true this proposition would leave us in the position of asserting that God created a box that he does not inhabit and necessarily ignores.