Our Lenten Collage Repost: Going Deep with Scripture
Monday, 11 April 2011 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjbanningThis is the second in a series of posts reposting content from "Our Lenten Collage," in which my cell at the time blogged our way through the Lenten season of 2009.
In his post on Friday, Bryce talked about how my decision to read Scripture devotionally, as something outside my normal zone, inspired him to read a non-Scriptural work, possibly a novel by Steinbeck, devotionally:
But it is one way, one important way that is open to us as Christians, and it certainly isn't one we should discount. So when I was trying to think of a Lenten devotion, I thought of books I could read devotionally, mostly philosophical texts with a mystical bent, like Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or Derrida's Of Grammatology. Or I could read non-Christian Scripture, like the Principia Discordia or the Tao Te-Ching. Then I had a thought: "Wouldn't it be a wild, crazy, kooky idea to readthe Bible devotionally?" As Bryce notes, I finally decided to do this out of fellowship and solidarity with the rest of cell, which is generally more Protestant, low-church, and Scripture-oriented than I am.
Let me be clear here what I think Scripture is not. It is, to me, neither the sole nor the ultimate arbiter of what is good and what is evil. (Indeed, most of what it has to say on the subject is either hopelessly specific or hopelessly abstract.) It is not a set of instructions on how to live one's life, or a how-to guide on how to get into heaven. It is not a replacement for a properly-developed moral conscience, nor for God's gift of reason and the process of inquiry. It is not perfect, inerrant, or without flaws, it is not a dictation from God, nor is it primarily a credible historical document. These are my working assumptions as I approach Scripture.
It is important, I think, not to fall into Bibliolatry, to let our view of God's ongoing revelation be obscured by that part of it which has been canonized into Scripture. We worship a risen God, a living God who is dynamic and present in the world, not a many centuries-old document. Jesus is here with us right now.
But the Bible is, nonetheless, a gift from God, a tool for understanding God and seeing God and discerning God's will. As Christians, the Bible is part of our inheritance, the lens through which we understand the transcendent. It is a shared language and history which binds us together as sisters and brothers in Christ. It's the core of the basis for our entire religious symbology (with additions made here and there, sure). Its stories inform who we are, both culturally and spiritually. These are the documents which we as a Church look to as foundational.
When I was at the Diocesan Convention last week in Wildwood, I and the other volunteers had some wonderful theological discussions and debates. We discussed the merits of Anglo-Catholicism, what exactly different types of parishes are being called to do and what they must do in order to survive, the role of the ordained priesthood, and--of course--the future of the Anglican Communion. (Conclusion: it all comes down to apostolic succession.)
Well, it was a fairly natural progression from the future of the Anglican Communion to questions of what the Bible "really" says about homosexuality. (Wrong-headed questions, in my opinion. It doesn't "really" say anything; it needs to be interpreted.) And, lo and behold, our interlocutor who claimed that if we "really" understood Scripture in its "correct" context, we'd see it didn't "really" condemn homosexuality (for some reason, I think few fundamentalists would be convinced), also argued that by looking at non-canonical gospels, such as those of Thomas, Judas, or Mary, we'd have a better grasp of--well, honestly, I'm not sure what we were supposed to have a better grasp of; I think it may have been Truth with a capital T.
(I can think of a decidedly weak argument starting with the strange claim at the end of Thomas that
Central to this position (our interlocutor's) was the idea that these gospels were credible eyewitness accounts of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I don't think anyone but him actually believed this--most scholars date these works as much later--but it wasn't the kind of question that lent itself to being argued while gathered around the kitchen dining room table of an overcrowded condo with no wireless. So we stipulated the point for the sake of argument, then argued that historicity was the wrong criterion upon which to base Scripturality. After all, there are plenty of works which contain true statements about empirical events in the temporal past--The Origin of the Speciesjumps to mind--and in the sense that all things ultimately flow from God, they make up part of God's revelation. That doesn't make Darwin a book of the Bible. Instead, the Bible is constitutive of a truth of a radically and qualitatively different nature.
The Bible as we know it was, of course, compiled by a series of synods and councils in the fourth and fifth centuries. From Wikipedia:
Anyway, the defenses of the authority of these synods and councils in antiquity each took a different form. My ally defended the logic which was, she argued, utilized by the councils: the Gnostic texts were in contradiction of "basic" (scare quotes because I have problems with humans defining the "base" of) Christian doctrine, like Trinitarianism. As a theological liberal, this bothered me considerably less than it did her (which is not to say I'm not enthusiastically pro-Trinity; I like a little mystery in my religion); indeed if anything it bothered me that our interlocutor's approach effectively "de-gnostified" the Gnostic texts by treating them as historical documents and thus leaving little room for actual gnosis to be present.
My defense was at once more and less dogmatic: as a series of Catholic (in the non-Roman sense) councils and synods presided over by the Holy Spirit, their eventual consensus, eventually codified in the Vulgate version of St. Jerome and accepted at large by the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, was binding. (As it is bound on Earth, so shall it be bound in heaven, after all.) Our interlocutor's position bothered me because, to me, it seemed to overprivilege Jesus at the expense of the rest of the Trinity. (Not that one can teach something in contradiction of the others, but if we're going to understand it makes sense to listen to all three.) A document could be a direct transcript of everything Jesus said for a week (Jesus: The Reality Show?) but it still wouldn't be part of the inherited tradition of the Church, nor would it necessarily be all that spiritually useful. (Which isn't to say it wouldn't be fascinating for other reasons.)
When I was praying my Lenten devotion the other day, my eye caught the introduction (in my New American Bible to the "catholic letters" of James, John, Peter, and Jude, which makes the distinction between historicity and canonicity fairly well:
Our challenge today is not fundamentally different than theirs was: to use Scripture constructively, to find within it ethical solutions to the unique challenges which face us in our lives, and not to use it as an instrument of hate or war. (Obviously, at various moments in history the Church has fallen short of this challenge.) This is not a passive processs of God telling us what to do and us doing it, and to treat it that way is (I believe) a cop-out, an abdication of moral responsibility. The paradigm for our encounters with Scripture should be not Sinai, but Penuel.
I don't believe there is a "pure" or interpretation-free reading of the Bible. Our task is to, guided by the Holy Spirit and the evolving teaching of Mother Church, choose those interpretations which are most ethical, loving, and empowering to all human beings, drawing on in our discernment all the resources God has given us. This is why in my Lenten devotion my turn to Scripture is always done alongside prayer, many of them in the forms given to us by the Church: the Confession of Sin, the Apostles' Creed, etc.
Of course, often my Lenten devotion falls short of this. When one's reading yet another Hebrew Scripture passage about either Israel falling to its enemies or Israel's enemies falling to Israel, it's hard to milk out a new, constructive insight each time. But this is the ideal I'm working towards as I observe my Lenten devotion.
THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 2009
Going Deep with Scripture
To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, because we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by following his laws which he set before us. Daniel 9:9, 10That's another of the Scripture passages given in the BCP as a possible invitational to be used at the start of the Daily Office during Lent. Since one of the primary objectives of my Lenten devotion is to better acquaint myself with Scripture and the Scriptural perspective, I thought I'd use this post to focus on what I think Scripture is and what my relationship to it is and has been. Next week, presumably, I'll talk about the other major component to my Lenten devotion: prayer. (Speaking of prayer, that prayer at Sunday's PM was the Prayers of the People, Rite 2, Form I, no? Either that or something close to it--say the equivalent from the CoE prayerbook--and with the final "communion of saints" section, I think, omitted.)
In his post on Friday, Bryce talked about how my decision to read Scripture devotionally, as something outside my normal zone, inspired him to read a non-Scriptural work, possibly a novel by Steinbeck, devotionally:
Cole's comment at Cell last week made an impact on me as well. He commented that he found our devotional use of the Scriptures to be quite intriguing. The majority of his influences have been with the High Church where devotional practices are encouraged but aren’t commonly centered on Scripture alone. Since Scriptural devotions are common to me I thought I'd morph the idea to employ regular devotional readings from an alternate source. My first inclination was toward The Grapes of Wrath. The emotional connection I had with the Preacher the first time I read it was so strong that it felt like a religious experience. Maybe I should read The Grapes of Wrath devotionally...Now, I strongly encourage this project, especially if the idea is as foreign to him as reading the Bible is to me. (I have a fairly comprehensive idea of what's in the Bible, of course, but that's not the same thing.) As Christians in the contemporary world, there are many different ways that God can speak to us, so canonical Scripture isn't the only or even necessarily the best way to receive God's revelation at any given moment.
But it is one way, one important way that is open to us as Christians, and it certainly isn't one we should discount. So when I was trying to think of a Lenten devotion, I thought of books I could read devotionally, mostly philosophical texts with a mystical bent, like Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or Derrida's Of Grammatology. Or I could read non-Christian Scripture, like the Principia Discordia or the Tao Te-Ching. Then I had a thought: "Wouldn't it be a wild, crazy, kooky idea to readthe Bible devotionally?" As Bryce notes, I finally decided to do this out of fellowship and solidarity with the rest of cell, which is generally more Protestant, low-church, and Scripture-oriented than I am.
Let me be clear here what I think Scripture is not. It is, to me, neither the sole nor the ultimate arbiter of what is good and what is evil. (Indeed, most of what it has to say on the subject is either hopelessly specific or hopelessly abstract.) It is not a set of instructions on how to live one's life, or a how-to guide on how to get into heaven. It is not a replacement for a properly-developed moral conscience, nor for God's gift of reason and the process of inquiry. It is not perfect, inerrant, or without flaws, it is not a dictation from God, nor is it primarily a credible historical document. These are my working assumptions as I approach Scripture.
It is important, I think, not to fall into Bibliolatry, to let our view of God's ongoing revelation be obscured by that part of it which has been canonized into Scripture. We worship a risen God, a living God who is dynamic and present in the world, not a many centuries-old document. Jesus is here with us right now.
But the Bible is, nonetheless, a gift from God, a tool for understanding God and seeing God and discerning God's will. As Christians, the Bible is part of our inheritance, the lens through which we understand the transcendent. It is a shared language and history which binds us together as sisters and brothers in Christ. It's the core of the basis for our entire religious symbology (with additions made here and there, sure). Its stories inform who we are, both culturally and spiritually. These are the documents which we as a Church look to as foundational.
When I was at the Diocesan Convention last week in Wildwood, I and the other volunteers had some wonderful theological discussions and debates. We discussed the merits of Anglo-Catholicism, what exactly different types of parishes are being called to do and what they must do in order to survive, the role of the ordained priesthood, and--of course--the future of the Anglican Communion. (Conclusion: it all comes down to apostolic succession.)
Well, it was a fairly natural progression from the future of the Anglican Communion to questions of what the Bible "really" says about homosexuality. (Wrong-headed questions, in my opinion. It doesn't "really" say anything; it needs to be interpreted.) And, lo and behold, our interlocutor who claimed that if we "really" understood Scripture in its "correct" context, we'd see it didn't "really" condemn homosexuality (for some reason, I think few fundamentalists would be convinced), also argued that by looking at non-canonical gospels, such as those of Thomas, Judas, or Mary, we'd have a better grasp of--well, honestly, I'm not sure what we were supposed to have a better grasp of; I think it may have been Truth with a capital T.
(I can think of a decidedly weak argument starting with the strange claim at the end of Thomas that
[Jesus] will guide [Mary Magdalene] in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit like You males. For every female who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.and ending with a defense of gay marriage, but I tend to think that, were these gospels included in the Bible, few minds would be changed one way or the other.)
Central to this position (our interlocutor's) was the idea that these gospels were credible eyewitness accounts of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I don't think anyone but him actually believed this--most scholars date these works as much later--but it wasn't the kind of question that lent itself to being argued while gathered around the kitchen dining room table of an overcrowded condo with no wireless. So we stipulated the point for the sake of argument, then argued that historicity was the wrong criterion upon which to base Scripturality. After all, there are plenty of works which contain true statements about empirical events in the temporal past--The Origin of the Speciesjumps to mind--and in the sense that all things ultimately flow from God, they make up part of God's revelation. That doesn't make Darwin a book of the Bible. Instead, the Bible is constitutive of a truth of a radically and qualitatively different nature.
The Bible as we know it was, of course, compiled by a series of synods and councils in the fourth and fifth centuries. From Wikipedia:
Somewhat different lists of accepted works continued to develop in antiquity. In the fourth century a series of synods produced a list of texts equal to the 39-to-46-book canon of the Old Testament and to the 27-book canon of the New Testament that would be subsequently used to today, most notably the Synod of Hippo in AD 393. Also c. 400, Jerome produced a definitive Latin edition of the Bible (see Vulgate), the canon of which, at the insistence of the Pope, was in accord with the earlier Synods. With the benefit of hindsight it can be said that this process effectively set the New Testament canon, although there are examples of other canonical lists in use after this time. A definitive list did not come from an Ecumenical Council until the Council of Trent (1545–63).Trent, of course, postdates the Anglican schism under Henry VIII, but is prior to the "via media" of the Elizabethan Settlement (and I personally tend to be in agreement with most of what was decided at Trent).
Anyway, the defenses of the authority of these synods and councils in antiquity each took a different form. My ally defended the logic which was, she argued, utilized by the councils: the Gnostic texts were in contradiction of "basic" (scare quotes because I have problems with humans defining the "base" of) Christian doctrine, like Trinitarianism. As a theological liberal, this bothered me considerably less than it did her (which is not to say I'm not enthusiastically pro-Trinity; I like a little mystery in my religion); indeed if anything it bothered me that our interlocutor's approach effectively "de-gnostified" the Gnostic texts by treating them as historical documents and thus leaving little room for actual gnosis to be present.
My defense was at once more and less dogmatic: as a series of Catholic (in the non-Roman sense) councils and synods presided over by the Holy Spirit, their eventual consensus, eventually codified in the Vulgate version of St. Jerome and accepted at large by the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, was binding. (As it is bound on Earth, so shall it be bound in heaven, after all.) Our interlocutor's position bothered me because, to me, it seemed to overprivilege Jesus at the expense of the rest of the Trinity. (Not that one can teach something in contradiction of the others, but if we're going to understand it makes sense to listen to all three.) A document could be a direct transcript of everything Jesus said for a week (Jesus: The Reality Show?) but it still wouldn't be part of the inherited tradition of the Church, nor would it necessarily be all that spiritually useful. (Which isn't to say it wouldn't be fascinating for other reasons.)
When I was praying my Lenten devotion the other day, my eye caught the introduction (in my New American Bible to the "catholic letters" of James, John, Peter, and Jude, which makes the distinction between historicity and canonicity fairly well:
With the exception of 1 Peter and 1 John, the ancient church showed reluctance to include the catholic letters in the New Testament canon. The reason for this was widespread doubt whether they had actually been written by the apostolic figures to whom they are attributed. The early Christians saw the New Testament as the depository of apostolic faith; therefore, they wished to include only the testimony of apostles. Today we distinguish more clearly between the authorship of a work and its canonicity: even though written by other, later witnesses than those whose names they bear, these writings nevertheless testify to the apostolic faith and constitute canonical scripture. By the late fourth or early fifth centuries, most objections had been overcome in both the Greek and Latin churches (though not in the Syriac), and all seven of the catholic letters have since been acknowledged as canonical.So how does all this relate to my Lenten devotion? When I read Scripture every day, whether I perform my devotion in the morning or at night, I can know that I am turning to the same book that billions (yes, billions) of Christians have turned to over nearly two thousand years, since befoire Scripture was even Scripture. I'm walking in the footprints of the Saints.
Our challenge today is not fundamentally different than theirs was: to use Scripture constructively, to find within it ethical solutions to the unique challenges which face us in our lives, and not to use it as an instrument of hate or war. (Obviously, at various moments in history the Church has fallen short of this challenge.) This is not a passive processs of God telling us what to do and us doing it, and to treat it that way is (I believe) a cop-out, an abdication of moral responsibility. The paradigm for our encounters with Scripture should be not Sinai, but Penuel.
I don't believe there is a "pure" or interpretation-free reading of the Bible. Our task is to, guided by the Holy Spirit and the evolving teaching of Mother Church, choose those interpretations which are most ethical, loving, and empowering to all human beings, drawing on in our discernment all the resources God has given us. This is why in my Lenten devotion my turn to Scripture is always done alongside prayer, many of them in the forms given to us by the Church: the Confession of Sin, the Apostles' Creed, etc.
Of course, often my Lenten devotion falls short of this. When one's reading yet another Hebrew Scripture passage about either Israel falling to its enemies or Israel's enemies falling to Israel, it's hard to milk out a new, constructive insight each time. But this is the ideal I'm working towards as I observe my Lenten devotion.
3 comments:
On a tangential note, I like how you often use "scripture" instead of "the bible". Somehow, it makes it seem more accessible- rather than one rigid book, it is a conglomoration of holy texts written by people who were encountering God and trying to share those encounters- much like we are doing here.
Your posts reenergize me Cole, and make me excited about what God might be trying to do in my life this Lenten season.
You got the prayer correct Cole. Very observant of you. It's a great prayer for anytime...and I love it during Lent.
That's a very interesting comparison you made between Sinai and Penuel. I'll have to work with that a little more. Thanks for the imagry.
Thanks Cole - your words brought some insight to me.
Just the other day I shared with Andy and Lindsey about my Scripture reading. I am disciplined to read, but lately - nothing. No revelation, no "ah-ha" moment, no movement of heart and head, no wrestling. Arghhh....
Often I have found my face-to-face encounter (or Peneul moments) with God in my Scripture reading. Lately - not there. It's left me - wanting. I pondered the thought that I may have wandered away, because I cannot find Him. However, perhaps I must now come down from the mountain (this Sinai place) to carry His Word in my heart and to move in compassionate action. Perhaps I have not wandered away - but instead need His direction on where to find a face-to-face encounter in my everday "going-abouts." I shall, of course, still keep up my readings :-)