Simplicity and Challenge

I’m attempting to organize some of my utterly hyperlinked thoughts (my brain tends to work rather like the Internet, and an orderly line of reasoning comes with great difficulty). As one of the tasks of writing is to organize one’s thinking, here goes. Perhaps some of you will be kind enough to let me know if I’m making progress. First, the anecdote that helped me to frame one particular issue: A couple of nights ago, I was part of another conversation, where the story was told of the [Espicopal] diocese’s Assistant Bishop’s (A.B.) attendance at a vestry meeting. He was questioned rather strongly about his vote in support of the ordination of homosexuals (I presume the vote to confirm V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire). The A.B. was quoted as saying something along the lines of “The New Testament changed the Old Testament, and now we change the New Testament.” To which the response was, “You are not God.” It reminds me of Lloyd Bentsen’s remark to Dan Quayle in a vice presidential candidate debate, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Whether I agreed with the A.B.’s vote, I would have been insulted by such a simplistic and, I believe, misleading explanation for what is a difficult, complex process. It sounds downright condescending. If what I’ve related is a fair representation of what he said, he deserved the answer he received. As I know how much my thinking has changed over the past 20 years (going from no thinking to probably too much), I think the A.B. absolutely lost an opportunity for fruitful discussion. He certainly lost any respect or forbearance that the vestry may have retained for him following his vote. Because of numerous interactions like the preceding, I’ve been quite interested of late in the history of the earliest Church. The major spark was Garry Wills’ “Papal Sins: Structures of Deceit,” in which he traces the impact of personalities (I would say personality disorders, based on descriptions of several Popes’ actions) and politics on the doctrine of the Catholic Church over the past couple of centuries. Wills skillfully utilizes incidents from more ancient history to illuminate dubious decisions of the Magisterium. He is an historian who makes the past come alive, and he lays out some startling information, which is too big to do other than mention in this post. In brief: One of his assertions—evidence for which comes from secular Roman historians, not church writings—is that even the earliest Church had a serious split. Some believers were betrayed to Roman authorities by believers with whom the rift occurred, and it’s one plausible explanation for the deaths of Peter and Paul (about which the N.T. is silent). So much for my thoughts on early Church unity. Several other points that have spurred me on to further reading: 1) there were no priests in the New Testament; 2) the earliest priests were not ordained by a central authority, answerable to a hierarchy, but were ordained by the community of believers in which they lived; 3) considerable evidence suggests that women were equal to men in the earliest Church, and held such positions of authority as existed. The last point I’d heard before, but Wills provides convincing argument. I can’t say I’m simply advocating a return to Church as practiced by the earliest Christians, for several reasons. One is that changes that were made had to have been meaningful to the community that made them, and it’s disrespectful and kind of stupid to throw out tradition simply because it’s revealed to be quite different from predecessor tradition. Mostly it’s that I want to understand the dynamics of changes as they occurred. Who, what, when, where, why? Throughout the Church’s history, besides the likelihood of personality-disordered believers sometimes gaining the upper hand (they were human after all!), choices were made based on the information at hand. Thanks to archeological discoveries, scholars today know a lot more about the earliest Church than did anybody in the intervening centuries. That helps us understand the nature of changes that were made, and perhaps we gain a new understanding of and respect for the resulting tradition. Or, we realize that they did the best they could with what they had, and those changes are no longer necessary to uphold. I next turned to John Dominick Crossan’s “The Birth of Christianity.” It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for years, but I no longer find it intimidating (it’s 653 pages including appendices, bibliography, and indices). Though I must confess I’ve been at it for two weeks and am only a third of the way through—all I can absorb of it in a day is about 40 minutes’ worth. If I were marketing this book, I’d call it a Classroom in a Book. Or, a Seminar in a Book. I’m pondering blogging through it after I finish slogging through it. He writes very clearly and methodically, but it’s slow going simply because he provides meticulous definitions of terms and concepts that either have been used sloppily or I simply haven’t known, as he uses a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic. There’s a LOT to ponder. However, I much prefer his respectful, caring, honest approach, as contrasted with the glib sound bite of the Assistant Bishop in the anecdote at the beginning of this post. Crossan provides his definition of history: “History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse.” Whew. I take a major risk in trying to distill the 28 pages of Chapter 2: Reconstructing Earliest Christianity, but as my understanding has been deepened tremendously by them and my search fueled further, here I go, mindful of the dangers of oversimplification. Why reconstruct (he prefers that term to “search” or “quest”)? Every generation needs to engage with the historical Jesus as best it can. It is not a task that is done, once and for all (though it would be much easier if that were true).

Historical reconstruction is always interactive of present and past. Even our best theories and methods are still our best ones. They are all dated and doomed not just when they are wrong but even (and especially) when they are right. They need, when anything important is involved, to be done over and over again. That does not make history worthless. We ourselves are also dated and doomed, but that does not make life worthless. It just makes death inevitable.

Crossan, p. 43 I can well imagine that millions of people would respond much like this commenter on a related topic at Blogging through the Bible in this post:

You know what, I don’t think this [blog] is the place for me. It’s my own fault, really. But in all honesty, I don’t want to waste my time debating the authenticity of the Bible. He said it...that settles it. Whether I or anybody else believes it...doesn’t really matter.”

[Ellipses in original] Well, I can relate to that thinking, as it used to be mine as well. What gets people beyond that? An ability to leave one’s comfort zone—a willingness to encounter challenge. If the challenge turns out to be unfounded, one learns from that. If the challenge results in enlightenment and growth—yes, deepened faith—we all benefit.