+Z’ev

Commemoration of the Consecration of Samuel Seabury

Today’s assigned readings:
Nehemiah 7:73b-8:3,5-18, Revelation 18:21-24, Matthew 15:29-39

Ezra read from the Torah facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
Nehemiah 8:3-8

One of my favourite prayers from the Morning Service in the Jewish tradition is Emet v’Yatziv (”True and Firm”) recited just after the “Shema” - the proclamation that God is one. At the end the congregation says

True and firm, established and enduring, right and faithful, desirable and pleasant, revered and mighty, well-ordered and acceptable, good and beautiful is Your word given unto us forever and ever. It is true, the God of the universe is our King, the Rock of Jacob, the Shield of our salvation: throughout all generations He endures and His Name endures…

The progression of the acclamations, “True and firm, established and enduring, right and faithful, desirable and pleasant, revered and mighty, well-ordered and acceptable, good and beautiful” (which, I think come in an odd mix of Hebrew and Aramaic) are stirring, uplifting, moving… in short order, using my evangelical background, it makes me want to put my hands in the air.

All the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands.

And yet, despite the word of God being dddddddddddddddd, it takes Ezra reading and “Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah” giving interpretation at the same time, “so that the people understood the reading.”

And in the Orthodox Liturgy, after the consecration of the Bread and Wine, the celebrant prays for the local Bishop and other Hierarchs, “whom do thou grant unto thy holy churches in peace, safety, honor, health and length of days, and rightly dividing the word of thy truth.” The teaching of God needs to be “rightly divided”.

The question then arises, Who has the authority to do so?

The Jewish tradition is a sort of Pedagogic Succession: Rabbi X was taught by Rabbi Y, who was a student of Rabbi Z and so on, back to Moshe Rabbenu, “Moses our Rabbi” or “our Teacher”. Within some of the Christian traditions this pedagogy is replaced by a pneumatological process called the Apostolic Succession. The Holy Spirit, passed from one Bishop to another by the laying on of hands basically passes the entire tradition from one to another. The belief is that somehow, the Spirit functioning in a Bishop will give him the authority to, essentially, declaim the faith without error. Usually this is understood as functioning “in communion” or in community with other bishops, although the doctrines of Papal Supremacy and Papal Infallibility basically means there is only one bishop in the Roman community and all others function as an extension or shadows of that one man. And so we’ve moved quite far, at least along that spectrum, from the idea of “Studying with the Rabbi” (as the Apostles did with Jesus).

But on the other end of the spectrum we have those who claim the Bible needs no interpretation and that they can simply pick up the text themselves and, finding weak support for whatever doctrine they wish, they can claim they have, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, found the one true meaning of the text. Essentially each Protestant is his own infallible Pope.

Or is that the way we really want to look at it: positing “Catholic” against “Protestant” and Christian against Jew and insisting that one or the other is essentially different and right while they others fail to live up to the divine standard?

Each one comes up with radically different and contradictory conclusions. Surely one must be right? I have my opinion on that matter, yes. But that’s not my point. Essentially they all do the same thing: the fundamentalist who insists it’s all in the “Bible Alone” no more or less than the Rabbi who relies on centuries of debate to understand the text. They all arrive at their various and conflicting doctrines via the assumption, overt or covert, that the text requires interpretation given at the same time, “so that the people understood the reading.” And each arrives there by an act of faith.

Traditional Christianity teaches us that one side of a debate must be right and the other side must be wrong. Further, the idea that the Spirit will actively guide us gives the right to the popular majority in any debate to drive out the minority - even if that majority is only enforceable by political means or only to political ends.

But is that the only way? Is it the right way? Is there a way for both sides of a debate to be right? To settle down together and live together? Is there a way for those who disagree over even very primary matters of doctrine to exist together?

Today is the commemoration of the consecration of Samuel Seabury and the bestowal of the Episcopate on the American church. The American Church had recently separated from the British Church by virtue of the American Revolution. So there were some bitter feelings. The English Church did not want to consecrate Americans to be Bishops so, eventually, we had to go to Scotland. It’s all tied up in the secular politics of the time (being confused, as they were, with things spiritual):

However, the English bishops were forbidden by law to consecrate anyone who would not take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. He accordingly turned to the Episcopal Church of Scotland. When the Roman Catholic king James II was deposed in 1688, some of the Anglican clergy (including some who had been imprisoned by James for defying him on religious issues) said that, having sworn allegiance to James as King, they could not during his lifetime swear allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary. Those who took this position were known as non-Jurors (non-swearers), and they included almost all the bishops and clergy of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Accordingly, the monarchs and Parliament declared that thenceforth the official church in Scotland should be the Presbyterian Church. The Episcopal Church of Scotland thereafter had no recognition by the government, and for some time operated under serious legal disablities. However, since it had no connection with the government, it was free to consecrate Seabury without government permission, and it did. This is why you see a Cross of St. Andrew on the Episcopal Church flag.

But today we all get along fine. The things that divided us passed away. Today we are divided along more ancient lines: those parts of the Anglican Communion that are historically evangelical and more Protestant are divided from those parts of the communion that are historically more Catholic. (And Ft Worth is divided from just about Everyone.) Once again the communion is experiencing a tectonic event along the fault lines of the Elizabethan Settlement, which united Catholics and Protestants within the Anglican Communion. A friend recently said that in a world where everyone communicates and where (via the net) you can see far and wide, the Elizabethan Settlement no longer works.

Is that true? Is there no way for us all to be together despite our various ways of exegesis? Can minority and majority opinions coexist within the Christian community? We are all just applying what we know to the text of the tradition and drawing forth our doctrines. Can we not allow others the same primacy? If we can’t do it in the church - where the hallmark is supposed to be love of neighbour, charitable forgiveness and the assumption that the other person is Christ - if we can’t do it then certainly the rest of the world is doomed.

Much love,

Huw

Today’s assigned readings:
Nehemiah 9:26-38, Revelation 18:9-20, Matthew 15:21-28

Jesus answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel… It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Matthew 15:24,26b

We all edit the Bible in our readings: we leave out the uncomfortable parts, highlight the ones we like and try to live the Gospel as we understand it as best as we can with our filtres in place. This saying from Jesus is a perfect example.

John Wesley takes a perfectly modern understanding, saying “I am not sent - Not primarily; not yet.” He adds “not yet”, indicating that later Jesus will be sent to the Gentiles.

John Chrysostom glosses over the line entirely making the entire story (not surprisingly for John) to be an excoriation of the Jews and a lifting up of the humility of the woman. For Chrysostom, the words of Jesus almost have no meaning at all except to let the woman be humble.

And we might take one or the other approach or else we might take the words literally, or we could come up with our own understanding. But it all begins with a common realisation that in a literal sense these words mean that Jesus wasn’t sent for Gentiles and that can not possibly be true. And so we read into a meaning that makes sense. Even our most conservative sorts are not, at heart, Biblical literalists. We take the text and, using our mind, we resolve any issue we perceive.

I read today that, by a traditional reading of the creation text, the Hebrew word, YOM, rendered “Day” in English, does not have to mean 24 hours. Again, the point being not to pick a side in the “age of the earth” arguments, but rather to show that, once again, there are various readings.

I read with a bias towards inclusivism: I would, along with John Wesley, add “not yet” to the text above. And I know that I draw that inclusivist circle a bit too wide for some. Those same, I imagine, would also add “not yet” to the verse above, but without drawing a very logical conclusion:

Jesus refers to the Jews as children and to the Gentiles as dogs. Piouis Jews of Jesus’ day were not supposed to socialise with Gentiles. Yet, over and over, Jesus hung out with the unclean (impure) Jews of his day and, on a number of occasions such as this text, with Gentiles (or others who were cut off from Jewish Society. So we feel a logical assumption would be to add “Not Yet” to our understanding of the verse.

And yet those “unclean” folks that Jesus hung out with were, at least according to Jewish law, sinners, or the equivalent there of. The moral code was not divided from the “priestly” code or the rabbinic code as some Christians like to imagine today. This, in itself, represents a choice made between two different and valid filtres placed on the text.

Good questions might be, what sort of filtres do I use? Are they always valid? When to I switch filres, one to the other? Am I consistent in any way? Do I tend to use filtres that include or exclude? Is this what I want? Is this what is needed? Is this what is intended by the text? (Can we ever know that?)

Much love,

Huw

Commemoration of Charles Simeon

Today’s assigned readings:
Nehemiah 9:1-25, Revelation 18:1-8, Matthew 15:1-20

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.
Matthew 15:17-20

In referring to “Washing hands” they are discussing the tradition of Netilat Yadayim, the lifting of hands. It’s a simple rite done often, according to to tradition. By rabbinic tradition, one washes hands after sleeping, before certain blessings are said, after going to the bathroom, after cutting one’s hair or nails, after participating in a funeral procession, or entering a cemetery, or coming wihtin four cubits of a corpse…

The question in my mind is over importance: Is not washing one’s hands, in the mind of the Rabbinic Authorities equal to “evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander”?

I’m wondering where the idea of sin comes from. I don’t mean sin as equalling “original sin” or “sinful acts”. I mean where do Christians get the idea of sin? Christians logically read their understanding backwards into the the Tanakh. The wiki notes: “[M]odern Judaism’s views on sin and atonement are not identical to those in the Hebrew Bible alone, but rather are based on the laws of the Bible as seen through the Jewish oral law.” That’s all of Judaism - as Jews are *not* Torah fundamentalists. Christians seem to want them to be so, of course. It makes Jews out to be the bad guys, that way: doubly so.

If Christians project a Fundamentalism on Jews there are a couple of benefits: clearly God demands animal sacrifice from them - and they can’t do this. So Christians get to imagine a major defect in Jewish religious self-understanding. And, projecting fundamentalism, there are clearly a lot of Jewish customs that are not based only on the Bible so, Jews are “making it all up”. But to Jews, this is a bit of a confusion. Judaism is a process of evolution in which Christian “Bible Only” fundamentalism is alien.

As Yael wrote on her blog:

According to Paul in the NT, the purpose of the law is to convict people of sin. Without the law no one would know what sin even was… interesting claim to make when the law wasn’t even given until Sinai, but that is irrelevant for this conversation. Paul then writes that thank God he is free from the curse of the law.

Fast forward to today. According to Judaism the commandments have never been done away with and we are to still live our lives following the mitzvot. We speak of this in terms of observance and in Conservative Judaism the picture we use is of a ladder with various levels of observance. Our goal is to increase our observance, but we realize that it is a process, sometimes a slow process, and this is fine as long as we keep striving to move up. What we learned from the parting of the Red Sea and our years of wandering in the wilderness is that miracles don’t usually affect lasting change; lasting change takes time.

This is how I talk, this is how most Jews I know talk. If you read our blogs, if you listen in on our conversations or listen to our rabbi’s d’varim you’ll hear about observance at times but I really doubt you’ll read or hear much about sin except maybe around Yom Kippur. It’s not that we think we never do anything wrong, but when we do there’s teshuvah: repent, make amends, and the next time the situation arises we don’t do the same thing again. If we do fail again, teshuvah is there for us again.

What I find interesting is all the talk about sin from many evangelical Christians. They consider themselves ‘free from the law, oh happy condition’. They see the law as done away with, it’s purpose fulfilled. Jesus took care of all the sin stuff for them if they just believe….Yet their thoughts seem to dwell so often on sin. Books are written on sin, pastors preach on sin, bloggers blog on sin. I have to wonder about this fixation with sin.

We Jews are the ones who should have this view, right? According to Paul? After all, we’re the ones who still value to commandments. Yet we consider ourselves good people who fail at times but get up and move on with life. It seems to me that according to Paul we should be the ones drowning in thoughts of sin, yet we’re not, and Christians should be the ones free from all of that and getting on with life, yet most on the evangelical side of the scale at least are not.

She has a very good point. I’m tempted to write it off as a Western Christian problem - with our legal understanding of God. We think of God, sin and redemption is a tit-for-tat way, with God having a scale - and a very unbalanced scale at that. Our image of God involves X amount of punishment for Y sin. X is either a specific time in Purgatory for each sin or else X is infinite. The Western legalistic God offers eternal damnation for even the smallest of sins. And so great is his infinite demand that he sacrificed his son to himself in order to allow mercy to flow. That’s a western idea taken to an extreme, based in no small part on the reading of St Augustine.

As I said, I’m tempted to say this is a Western Christian problem. But it is also an eastern issue - perhaps not “in the old country” (Where ever that is) but certainly in Europe and the USA, where a massive influx of Western Converts has brought about the development of, basically, “Orthodox Fundamentalism” where the God of Mercy and Love gives way to tit-for-tat. Some of this was present in the East, of course, but Westerners have latched on to those fragments. But even some of those fragments - of ancient, Eastern provenance, seem to come from the west. Fr Seraphim Rose’s fixation on the “Arial Toll Houses”, for example, sounds like either RC teaching on Purgatory or else some ancient Gnostic Myth decked out with Orthodox trappings. (Thankfully, some other Orthodox are out there correcting him… but he is very popular among uberfrum converts.)

One can either say it’s a “Western” problem, or else note that, in fact, it is, as Yael writes, Christians who have fixated on sin. I will only reply that this is not the mystical idea - where saints and elders write rather differently on God.

And here, in today’s passage, Jesus seems to throw out the oral tradition of Judaism and, instead, institute a very different (from Judaism) understanding of Law.

As I said at the stop of the post, the question in my mind is over importance: Is not washing one’s hands, in the mind of the Rabbinic Authorities equal to “evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander”?

I’m not sure of the answer but I know that, from the sermons I’ve heard, we Christians like to imagine this to be the case. The point for us is, look how legalistic these Pharisees are: they worry about washing hands, a made-up rule, more than they worry about murder (etc). In doing so we divide the laws of ritual purity from what we imagine to be “Moral” laws. We insist God cares about the one, but not about the other. And we turn God into the tit-for-tat creation that we now have.

We then went further and added our own ritual laws - fasting before communion, Lent, etc - and we pretend that God cares about our ritual purity more than about Jewish ritual laws. For example - Orthodox Christians religiously refrain from eating meat and animal products during Lent and Advent, as well as every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year. But we act as if what we eat or not in these times is a religious obligation akin to the laws of what is Kosher and what is not.

I agree with Jesus that “it is what comes out” rather than what goes in that defiles us. At the same time Jewish understanding sees performing Mitzvot as a sacramental action, a way to connect with God, a way to grow Godward - not a “sin” in the tit-for-tat world that we imagine.

So how do we get here? And is it possible that we’re horridly wrong?

Much love,

Huw

Commemoration of Willibrord

Today’s assigned readings:
Nehemiah 13:4-22, Revelation 12:1-12, Matthew 13:53-58

And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.
Matthew 13:58

Unbelief. Well, it’s apistia, and if we read “Pistia” to be “loyalty” this would be “disloyalty” not “unbelief”.

And suddenly it makes sense: His townspeople are disloyal to him, their native son.

When I go home, where ever that might be, I’m called, “Billy”. It’s what my mother called me when I was growing up. It’s what all of my friends called me. Only when I got to College did people start calling me “Bill”. (As to how I got to “Huw”, that’s another story.) I worked all of my adult life as “Bill”, wrote for papers, got awards, broke sales records, was reported about in the Times of London, and Rolling Stone, and had an international readership on two blogs. I’ve worked with church leaders from around the world, politicians and movie stars, partied with rock stars and famous authors. But all I need to do is set foot in my home town or my parents’ (or grandparents’) house and all of that goes away. Suddenly I’m “Billy” all over again.

I know from asking my friends that I’m not unique in my experience. I know from asking my elders that it’s true for them as well. “You can’t go home again” only means the “you” that you’ve become. The you that left home is the only you that will ever exist for them. This realisation that you never grow up in some eyes seems to be a universal part of growing up.

I shared yesterday a story from the rabbinic writings about Jesus that I’d recently read in a book by David Klinghoffer. Today’s passage from Matthew can be read as a result of the Talmud’s story or as just an average event in the life of all human beings. Or Both.

This quote from a discussion of homosexuality in the Tanakh, but I think it applies to us here:

Greenberg, who was raised in Bexley and is in Columbus for five days, is America’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi. He isn’t saying that the Bible is not the revealed word of God. But according to Jewish tradition, he said, God gave that word to man and entrusted him to decipher it. “No one can say, ‘It says in the Scripture,’ to ground any policy,” Greenberg said. “All we can say is, ‘My community says this.’”

…

“God has not hidden a single divine intent in any verse that my rabbi or your pastor understands,” he said. “Instead, there are many meanings, and it is our job to figure out what they mean to our community.”

I had this pointed out to me by a conservative Anglgo-Catholic when I said that the Orthodox Church teaches this as well - although they go so far as to say they understand the true meaning of the text. This is the meaning behind the claim that the “the Bible is the Church’s book”. To pick up the Bible and read it is dangerous - because the meaning is not in the text, but rather in the understanding of the text.

The question is always whose understanding to you wish to accept.

We see this in the reading from Revelation today as well: the battle between angels in heaven and the fall of Satan to earth… to those who see the Apocalypse as a road map to the future, this is something dreadful that will happen later. To those who see the Revelation as already in the process of fulfilment, this happened before the dawn of time. The Woman Clothed with the Sun? Among the Left Behind crowd, that woman is Israel. Among the Orthodox and Roman Catholics she is at once the Virgin Mary and the Church.

Needless to say it comes up reading the Tanakh as well - what Christians call “The Old Testament”. The understanding of that text within the Christian community is radically different from its understanding within the Jewish Community.

There is another reading possible that makes me quite uncomfortable. Having heard of his preaching elsewhere, the folks in Nazareth instantly adopt the attitude of “We know this kid.” Instead of accepting what they have heard about him, they retreat to what they used to know. This can’t be the Guy that preached the Sermon on the Mount: he’s still the kid that used to pull my daughter’s hair in kindergarten. This can’t be the guy that heals the lepers because I still remember when he had the runs from eating too many figs at my daughter’s wedding!

And we, too, are cast in the role of the people of Nazareth. We can either believe what we hear or accept the average human opinion of him. This can’t be the guy that rose from the dead, he’s just a good, human teacher. never mind there is no evidence and no eye witnesses at all other than hearsay. Even the Gospels record no eye witnesses of the Resurrection. It’s possible to read the Gospels - all of them - and hear the Churches’ hymnody and still insist on a spiritual-but-not-physical reality. Unless you accept the hearsay.

This makes me uncomfortable because while I might have every reason to accept the word of a fisherman from Galilee (apart from his report about the size of his last catch), I’ve little or no reason to believe someone who purports to be that fisherman and yet writes in a rhetorical style reminiscent of the better classical learnings in a language the fisherman probably only knew slightly.

In doing so, I’m holding them to the same standard as my family holds me. Once a fisherman, always a fisherman!

But I may have reason to trust the community that produced the documents… or I may not.

The Gospel today asks us where we shall place our loyalty - but more or less than a “personal faith in Jesus”, it is clearly a textual loyalty placed within a community.

Much love,

Huw

Commemoration of William Temple

Today’s assigned readings:
Nehemiah 12:27-31a,42b-47, Revelation 11:1-19, Matthew 13:44-52

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
Matthew 13:52

I just finished reading David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews rejected Jesus (more info here), a fascinating book that delves into at least one strand of the history of Jewish/Christian debate, dialogue and diatribes. What is curious to me is David’s focusing on how unJewish Jesus is. Yet he does this without any denial of anything modern scholars know about Jesus.

Conservative (mostly Christian) writers as well as more ecumenical non-Christians and very liberal (ie Jesus Seminar sorts) of Christian writers have all focused on how Jewish Jesus is - some in an attempt to reclaim Jewishness, some in an attempt just to put Jesus in historical context, and some in an attempt to undo much of the Gentile’s church’s read.

It’s interesting that the same man can be described as A) a Rabbinic Student who went off into Heresy (as Jesus is described in the Talmud); B) a devout Pharisee who simply disagreed with some traditional teachings (as the Messianics and Conservative Christians see him today); and C) a devout Jew set on fire by the teachings of John the Baptist and drawn into a political/Messianic crisis (a la some in the Jesus Seminar school). What’s most interesting, of course, is how all three of these overlap and none of them need contradict the traditional Gentile Christian read. At heart, all of them posit the same thing a Reformer of Judaism (with or without Divine appointment). It’s only that last bit - the divine appointment - that divides us. If Jesus was God incarnate (a repulsive concept to most Jews who refuse to allow that condescension of the Godhead) then he had the prerogative to make changes to how we observe his law. If he was not, then his breaks with the religious tradition of his people can either be disturbing or liberating (or both). But they can also be ignored or repealed by others.

Klinghhoffer recounted a Rabbinic story that Jesus had studied under a prominent Rabbi of the time but, after a while, Jesus drifted off, theologically speaking. The Rabbi eventually cast Jesus out of his fellowship and Jesus, caught on fire by his own novelty, was unable to make reconciliation. Eventually, when even the Rabbi tried and failed, Jesus was left to his own devices. (Interestingly, the Talmud says that although the Rabbi was right in punishing Jesus, when Jesus tried to return the Rabbi should have accepted him. The Talmud thus puts part of the fault for Jesus’ heresy on to Jesus’ teacher.)

And then today’s reading in Matthew, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

This doesn’t tie into the preceding parables very well - save as a comment on Jesus preaching style. And here, really, is where Kinghoffer’s book would latch: Did Jesus have the right to act like a scribe, bringing out what is old (as all Jews should) and what is new (never a very popular position, no matter what religion you follow)?

Klinghoffer (and some other Jews) are writing from a two-pronged Point of View that can basically be summed up this way: our Tradition is of Divine Origin - God and The Rabbis have handed it down to us from Moses until Now. We may not change a thing. I’m familiar with this point of view from my time in the Orthodox Church where the exact same position is held regarding Church Tradition: that it was handed down by God-in-Christ to the Apostles. Nothing we do now would have been alien to them then.

Of course history doesn’t support either Klinghoffer or the Orthodox Church.

For both religions include what is old and what is new… and I wouldn’t blame God for much of either. I think the reality is that we all do what Kinghoffer accuses Jesus of doing. Only we are more or less honest about it.

I heard an interesting phrase recently: the Evangelical Unilateral. It refers to “Sola Scriptura”, the idea that we only believe what is in the scriptures, sans any form of interpretation. Of course, this is codswallop because all text requires interpretation. If you are reading it, you are making interpretation.

The Anglican Trilateral is Scripture, Tradition and Reason. It’s good as far as it goes: but I think it is partially in denial. There is one step further: the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, Tradition Reason and Experience.

I think that last is superior not because we “finally get it right” but rather because we finally become honest about it.

There is, of course, nothing new in the text: except in very rare cases where we discover completely wrong translations, we’re kind of set on a text. We may debate which text (LXX or Masoretic, for example) but the text is largely old. Was the Torah all written by Moses or was is cobbled together from older documents? Not important to the meaning, really: we have the Torah. Was the New Testament one of several possible orthodox canons or really the apostolic witness, culled from a universe of heresy laden forgeries? Not important really, at least as far as meaning goes: we have the text. Scripture is old.

Tradition is old. In some ways, Scripture and Tradition are the same age. In some ways Tradition is older. The Oral stories written into the scriptures were there long before anyone set them down. Moses (or whomever) merely codified them. The Evangelists (whatever their names or positions) merely codified them. Tradition, to us today, is what we are handed. It is old.

Reason is new. It takes the scholarship that post-dates scripture and tradition and applies it to both. In reality neither Scripture nor Tradition have any defence against reason. They were formulated and finalised long before the new arguments.

Therefore we need Experience. This is new, too. It is as new as my writing and your reading. It is as new as what happens to you on the way to work today or what happens to me in my next shift.

The experience of something causes one to make a decision - and that is how the Tradition grows.

Reason gave us the Bible and Liturgy in the vernacular. It took experience to make it real, however. And bad experience ruined it for some: poor translations, sloppy grammar, vapid prose. Latin is infinitely better than Grade School English or Politically Correct Water Boarding of theology just to make it all “work”. Scripture, by some lights, is opposed to women’s ordination. Certainly the Tradition developed that way. Reason would say there is nothing wrong with equity. But it took experience to finalise the decision. Some women clergy are, like men clergy, good. Some are bad. Some drop out. Some will retire and probably die in vestments, saying Mass at a retirement home. Experience has allowed us to include Women clergy within the Tradition. Some of us, at least. Gay marriage may move in this same route as more of us “test the spirits” and see the Gifts of God manifest in Same-Sex couples. Maybe. Who knows…

This is why I ask that posts and comments here come with personal experience rather than simple diatribes about how wrong or right I am. I try to bring my experience to the table in the discussion. That’s how the Tradition will grow.

Reconstructionist Judaism sees itself as part of an “Evolving Religious Civilisation”. Rather than being stuck in the past (as “more right” or “the way we’ve always done it”) here is a group that is honest about its engagement with the Scripture and Tradition - in terms of Reason and Experience.

Someday I hope we’ll get a “Reconstructionsit Christianity” that will be honest and thoughtful in that way as well.

Sign me up!

Much love,

Huw

(I think, in hindsight, this discussion goes well with today’s commemoration of Archbishop Temple. May he pray for us!)