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Message from Pastor Peter Marty

Re-examining Old Assumptions

By Pastor Peter Marty

The longer I am alive and the more I experience, I am coming to discover something very important. The more deeply I think and the more compassionately I behave, I am coming to cherish this same something. What is it? It is the wisdom of being open to having my mind changed. The subject matter might be a political issue or a social convention. It may be a faith topic or a biblical understanding. But more and more, the privilege of re-examining my old assumptions turns out to be just that — a privilege! The willingness to question some long-held prejudices becomes an opportunity. The freedom to admit error or misjudgment and start over proves to be nothing less than a precious renewal of faith.

College philosophy class taught me one principle that quickly became a doctrine for living: I have to be consistent. The last thing in the world I wanted someone else to say of me was, “You’re inconsistent.” Well, of course consistency matters, on certain things at least. God is love. I happen to be a child of this love. And, love from me to others is both desired and expected. Beyond these basic claims, however, there is a lot of wiggle room. Change, as in changing one’s mind, does not have to be a dirty word. It can be a beautiful word, especially as our faith perspective grows.

When George W. Bush nominated Harriet Miers as his Supreme Court nominee, the president’s own words may have doomed the nomination: “I know her well enough to be able to say that she’s not going to change, that 20 years from now she’ll be the same person… I don’t want to put somebody on the bench who is this way today, and changes. That’s not what I’m interested in.” Part of the dynamism of the Court may be the unpredictability of the justices as they strive to interpret contemporary issues against the backdrop of a historic constitution. The late chief justice Earl Warren once noted how he could not imagine how someone “could be on the court and not change his views substantially over a period of years… for change you must if you are to do your duty on the Supreme Court.”

If I could take college philosophy over again, I’d challenge myself and my classmates not to glorify consistency. I’d speak more about the beauty of re-examining old assumptions. I’d call to mind the time when a belligerent young man stormed at Mahatma Gandhi: “You have no integrity. Last week I heard you say one thing; today you are saying something entirely different. How can you justify such vacillation?” To which Gandhi replied, in his typically soft-spoken way, “It is quite simple. I have learned something since last week.”

Our fixation with NOT changing our mind, and resisting openness to new ways of thinking, may be traced all the way back to Aristotle. He is the one who suggested that God is unmovable and unchanging. If we admire and love this God, then it holds we will want to imitate similar consistency in our own thinking and doing. The problem is: God has the capacity to change God’s mind. In spite of our fascination with the word omniscience, God is truly open to changing behavior.

When God’s wrath is burning hot over the peoples’ idolatry, Moses implores God to alter course. “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster he planned to bring on his people” (Exodus 32:14). When God forms a swarm of locusts to devastate the land, Amos pleads mercy and the Lord relents: “It will not happen” (Amos 7:3). When God saw the Ninevites choosing a new way, “God changed his mind about the calamity that he said he would bring” (Jonah 3:10).

What inspires this change of divine heart and mind? It is LOVE, pure and simple. Love can bring dogged certainty to its knees. There are things love will not do and places that love will not invade. If God is love, then God will only do what is loving.

Think of your our own relationships of love. Where love exists, we become open to changing our mind. I have been doing it since the day I got married. Ten thousand changes of habit and mind have taken place (and keep taking place) in me because of love for my wife Susan. My prayer is that such changes of habit and mind will also keep occurring in my faith life as well, because of a deep love for God.

Pastor Peter Marty,

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