I Don’t Go in for Hierarchy

I’ve been reading the first few chapters of Touching Heaven the last few days. There’s something in it that sticks in my craw.

In a word, it’s hierarchy.

So, first, some context: the book is about Orthodox Christianity, written by a guy who grew up Protestant and later (I assume) converted to Orthodoxy, spent some time with some Russian monks. A lot of what he says is good to my ear: the role of mystery, the way the liturgy makes faith tangible, the pitfalls of a faith that exists only in the vacuum of the mind or the pages of books, the startling experience of God in one’s practice. I like that he puts more importance on silently reciting the Jesus prayer while gardening than on the attempt to climb the rungs of church leadership.

The thing I get stuck on is

Self-assertion Started It

“Genesis… contains two major parts: the primeval history… which tells how human self-assertion brought the world to the brink of destruction; and the history of Israel’s ancestors” (The Oxford Study Bible, page 11).

Human self-assertion.

That is an interesting way to put it – and by far the most non-judgmental way I think I’ve ever heard to frame these first stories. Human self-assertion. To assert oneself isn’t inherently evil or wrong, and yet to do it in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons… the way we’ve been dealing with the environment for the last seventy-five years, and with natural resources since the whole colonial era, comes to mind.

Ask Me if I Care

“The Apocalyptic Vision” by Martha Himmelfarb (The Oxford Study Bible, pages 181-198): I don’t know why I  should believe any of it. Or care.

See, it’s this kind of thing: “Also, the falling axe, flowing blood, and festive eating would have produced that mixture of terror and ecstasy humans associate with experiences of the holy” (“Relationship to God” by Byron Shafer, The Oxford Study Bible, page 192).

So detached, it’s holier than thou. Do you believe this stuff or not; and if not, why are you writing about it?

It’s Personal

“When we ask, ‘Is God a person or is God not a person,’ we get lost. In fact, God is not a person, and God is not a non-person. There is a German theologian who expresses this very beautifully: ‘God is not a person, but not less than a person’ ” (Going Home, page 12).

In the unraveling of my worldview, I found this question to be one of the principal threads, one on which the whole tapestry hung.

Life Unknown

“Corporate and individual human life was lived in an environment affected by the character and conduct, the actions and reactions of these other personal beings. It was important to be informed about what they had to do with what was happening to a person or a nation… At times it was needful to communicate with them and seek to influence their purpose and power” (The Oxford Study Bible, page 165).

Other personal beings: “gods and spirits and demons” (164).

Not a Fib

“The divine name that is explicitly associated with [the Abrahamic covenant] is ‘êl šadday. Its sign is the circumcision” (The Oxford Study Bible, page 154).

Does not the word Shaddai mean God’s breast? How strange that God would give Abraham this explicitly feminine name to call her, and then ask him to respond with an explicitly masculine sign. I don’t know, maybe not so strange.

Sterile Gloves

I don’t like it when people write about the gods and myths of this or that time and place with a tone of superiority, intellectual distance and essential disbelief. Why should I trust anything they have to say? They’re trying to hand me something while refusing to touch it. I don’t need their sterile gloves.

The Hebrews’ Book

It seems that so much of biblical interpretation in the early church was an attempt by Christians to find themselves in the Hebrew Bible. To prove it a mirror in which their reflection was clear, a prophecy of self, a validation of their belonging. What does a relationship with this text look like if that’s not your attempt? Do you still belong if you allow it to be only itself? Can you have a friendship with someone and still let them have their own life? Must you continue to tell them that only in having become your friend have they fulfilled their identity in this world?

I am interested in a friendship of freedom.

Whose Scriptures Are They?

Reading this article – “Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church” (Oxford Study Bible, pages 129-140) – I’m struck by how hard these particular early Christians were working to justify the cognitive dissonance engendered by the fact that they had appropriated the heritage of the Jews without actually converting, submitting, to Judaism. The points that get me are these:

New v. Old

“…in the early second century, some Christians believed that if you could not find a teaching in the ‘charters’ of the Old Testament, you should not believe it in the gospel” (Oxford Study Bible, page 129).

Funny, because in my undergrad class on hermeneutics, I remember them saying the exact opposite. The culture of interpretation has changed such that if you can’t find it in the New, you can or should discount it in the Old. (Or at least, take it with a large grain of salt.) What a transformation. What a revolution, in the literal sense.

Sola Scriptura Sadducees

“Sadducees, a group notorious for its refusal to acknowledge the binding validity of any religious custom not explicitly ordained in Scripture” (Oxford Study Bible, page 123), remind me of extreme evangelicals in this respect. This is ironic, because those same evangelicals talk about the Sadducees in Sunday School with an air of rejection. I don’t remember being told as a child why the Sadducees were wrong. Could it be in part because of their sola scriptura stance?

That’s a silly question. In any case, limiting the possibilities of your practice to what happens to have been written down by others who observed no such limitation is like putting hobbles on the donkey before leading it out to pasture.

Christianity was Young Once

“The oldest surviving document delineating regulations for church life… usually goes by the title The Didache…. After establishing ethical expectations for the community, The Didache then prescribes the proper performance of Christian rituals, establishes rules for the community organization and discipline, and concludes with apocalyptic prophecies” (Oxford Study Bible, page 119).

I find this compelling. Today, Christianity is a tradition two thousand years old, with all the inertia, the generational ancestry of practice, that one could need. Today, I consider ways to transform or even recreate my tradition, and balk in the doorway because one person does not have the weight to create that kind of inertia: the kind it would take to affect the direction of such a force.

But once, Christianity was young. Once, they wrote a document defining what it looked like, because it was new and had no inertia, no ancestry, no established practice.

I suppose we have permission to do so again. I suppose what will last is what resonates, and continues to resonate, with those who encounter it.

Relax, and Go

I see in myself a holding back. I see in myself a constriction, an inability to relax and experience, a fear. Of what am I afraid? That if I let go, nothing will be. That if I let go, there will be too much. I see in myself a closing of doors, because being known is painful, and being real is scary.

What kind of courage does it take to let oneself be seen and touched? To relax one’s eyes and see clarity instead of fuzz? To open one’s heart without immediately noticing and getting in the way, and communicate with the great?

Sometimes I feel that my inner rooms are messy and unreachable. Sometimes I wonder if I can let go of the locks that keep me out. I think of the way that what you need, the secret, is always available, not difficult but immediate. I wonder how to change worlds. I wonder how to scrub myself clean. I wonder if I trust myself. I think I don’t. I think that is the problem.

Canon is Community Food

“A canon provides answers to the two basic questions of life – ‘who are we?’ and ‘what should we do?’ – in ever changing circumstances and situations” (Oxford Study Bible, page 94). In other words, canon is myth. No, it’s the literary or oral vehicle of myth, while myth is the story itself. And as long as we’re on definitions, let me add that mythos is the spirit, the ephemeral quality contained in the myth: the content within the content. Mythos is encapsulated in myth, and myth is both carried and stabilized in canon.

This makes me wonder: what is our – my – canon?

And the question following on its heels is, to which community do I belong? For canon is a community food.

So Say Yes

I have found a key. Nothing is ever lost. You can never be lost. When the stomach flu racks your body or death disintegrates you or you’re born or born again or you fall in love or lose a leg, nothing is lost. When you fall, God catches you. You can never be lost.

You can be transformed. Sometimes forces beyond your control