(From a 1998 Journal entry:)
First the thought, and then how I arrived at it:
We would criticize the native American for using drums to achieve some sort of spiritual contact during his religious ceremonies yet we Christians do the vary same things during ours. Whether during services we use jumpy charismatic tunes or they are old hymns, we hope to achieve a state of worship for the Lord.
How I got here:
I was thinking of a native American who believed in the “Great Spirit” before the time when the Europeans began to emigrate to this hemisphere. I have wondered if such a person, having never had contact with a Christian, and therefore could not properly state the Gospel, yet believing in the Creator of all things, could not be a “pagan believer”? He would be a person whose heart was sincere and earnest for God. I wonder if having a true desire to know the one true God, to be willing to forsake all for, and to suffer for the truth, has the equivalence before God to confessing Jesus with the mouth? Could the verses in Romans, the ones that speak of the physically uncircumcised acting as if they were circumcised, figuratively apply to such a person? Again, I am speaking of people who have never had any exposure to God as the sort of revelation the Jews and Europeans had through the Scriptures. If there were many like him in his tribe, could not the drums about the council fire be the same as our worship music?
Could the name of “Great Spirit” be to this person as “Jehovah” or “Christ” is to us? You would have to know his intended purpose for his calls to the “Great Spirit” and the intended purpose for the music. More fundamentally, you would have to know what he thinks the “Great Spirit” can do, what he can not do, what he did, what his requirements of us are. What is mankind's place in the world, in the after life and what is man's place before him? What if his understanding does not line up exactly with our understanding of God? Without the Bible how would he get that understanding?
But in the 21st century, with the spread of the Gospel over the globe, there are very few of such people to be found upon the earth.
