June 2012
97 posts
“God intends to be Lord on earth and regards all our exuberant zeal on God’s behalf as a real disservice. Herein lies our Christian secularism, that, in our very desire to see that God gets everything that is due God in the world, we actually evade God and so love the earth for its own sake, for the sake of this struggle.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come” (via invisibleforeigner)
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If Jesus is Lord of His church; if the text of Scripture is uniquely from God, such that God speaks in human language; if Christ’s Spirit can make His human words intelligible to human beings; if human beings can, under the guidance of the Spirit, speak God’s words accurately and intelligibly to the church – then sola scriptura follows. Denying sola scriptura entails denial of one or more of those conditionals: God can’t in fact speak without distortion in human language; or Scripture is not uniquely God’s Word in human words; or Jesus is a titular but not a living Lord of His church.
It works. God has in fact spoken against the tradition. It’s a contested, raucous process. It always is. But it happens. It happened in the Roman Catholic church in the past century as theologians cut through thickets of misleading quasi-Thomism to get back to Thomas, to the church fathers, to Scripture itself. Speaking as an outsider, and a Protestant to boot, ressourcesement looks a lot like God speaking against a powerful tradition to purify His church, often speaking through theologians interpreting Scripture. Can anyone doubt that the Catholic Church has gotten better at talking Bible over the last century? Which might make the Roman Catholic Church one of today’s most compelling proofs of Protestant convictions concerning sola scriptura.
“… The link between the supper of the Lord and service to others is at the heart of our Catholic identity…Every human person
deserves adequate housing and food, a just wage, and the right to life, happiness, peace, and justice. Vibrant parishes unite the
members of its community to the larger human family through works of charity …a parish must develop a sense of solidarity
with the human family…A vibrant parish is always realistic about what it can do. But it is always willing to challenge itself.” —Bishop Paul Bootkowski, Diocese of Metuchen, from his pastoral letter “On a Vibrant Parish Community.” (via getmetoanunnery)
deserves adequate housing and food, a just wage, and the right to life, happiness, peace, and justice. Vibrant parishes unite the
members of its community to the larger human family through works of charity …a parish must develop a sense of solidarity
with the human family…A vibrant parish is always realistic about what it can do. But it is always willing to challenge itself.” —Bishop Paul Bootkowski, Diocese of Metuchen, from his pastoral letter “On a Vibrant Parish Community.” (via getmetoanunnery)
“I am officially at a loss for words when it comes to the insistence of so many churches to try and preserve within their walls a snapshot of a certain cultural point in time…while at the same time bemoaning the fact that there aren’t any young people around, and secretly dreading whether or not their congregation will even exist 50 years from now (which I have found many mainline Protestant churches to be doing). How many meetings have I sat in on where so much energy and emotion was spent on arguing over seemingly non-essential things? For instance: whether you use a piano or organ during worship isn’t going to determine whether young people attend or not. It’s like asking a soon-to-be terminated employee what font they would prefer to have on their pink slip (and no, Comic Sans is not appropriate. Ever). Because if the entire repertoire of songs–or philosophy of worship in general–is distasteful to young people, they don’t care what instrument is being used to accompany said repertoire. And for people who are immersing themselves in genres like stomp-grass or post-rock or prog-rock or neo-rockabilly, whether or not a piano or organ accompanies a song that has no relevance in their world (musically, at least) is simply a non-issue.”
—Ron in “a letter from an exhausted/exasperated young person who has a complicated love/hate relationship with the church”
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I am grateful to be part of a church that recognizes God’s call to ordained ministry in the lives of people without regard to sexual orientation, and I am proud to be in a church that is on the verge of authorizing trial-use liturgies for blessing same-sex relationships. If the blessing liturgy in the “Blue” Book comes up for a vote as is, I will certainly vote for it. However, I am disappointed by much of what I will vote to support. My qualms are not with the intention of the text, but with the text itself.
Same-sex couples should not need to wait while the church gets its act together, nor should they be punished by the failure of a standing commission to do the thing it was asked to do. So for that reason, I will vote for these trial-use liturgies. But we have work to do! This work will benefit all couples, same-sex or opposite-sex and, indeed, the whole church.
“The man Jesus has risen up to a name above all names … he was crushed in the flesh of sin, bore the form of a servant, was obedient to death; he became ‘Kyrios’ (Lord), ‘pneuma’ (Spirit). He is, then, the same Lord who walked unnoticed and persecuted through the fields of Palestine and at last ended his life like a criminal on the cross; now he rules the world as king and the Church is his bride. All his life, beginning in the Virgin’s womb, is the great mystery of salvation, hidden from eternity in God and now revealed in the ‘ecclesia’ (Church). The deeds of his lowliness in that life on earth, his miserable death on Calvary appear now in a different light: God’s own light; they are his acts, revealed, streaming with his light.”
—Dom Odo Casel, OSB (via monastica)
“Even if every bit of the Bible were literally true, it would still be fiction because of the reason it was compiled, the reason we insist on reading it, and its presentational nature as a world unto itself with its own unique lessons to impart. If you want to know such things as the point of existence, the meaning of life, and the ways humankind has gone right and wrong, you cannot do a whole lot better than start with fiction: the fiction that is the Bible.”
—Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. in “The Bible Is Fiction” (Read the full article.)
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Paul didn’t treat the Bible the way mainstream Evangelicalism says you need to.
The way Paul handled his Bible–what we call the Old Testament – would keep him off the short list for openings to teach Bible in many Evangelical seminaries and Christian colleges. Heck, John Piper, John MacArthur, and R. C. Sproul probably wouldn’t let Paul lead a home Bible study, at least not without supervision.
Here is the main reason why:
For Evangelicals, the Old Testament leads to the Gospel story. For Paul, the Old Testament is transformed by the Gospel.
For Evangelicals, the Old Testament, read pretty much at face value, anticipates Jesus. For Paul, the Old Testament is reshaped in order to conform to Jesus.
For Evangelicals, the Bible is God’s final authority. For Paul, Jesus is the final authority to which the Bible must bend.
” —Peter Enns in “Would Paul Have Made a Good Evangelical?”
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So ask yourself: If it turned out that Jesus is risen but Darwin was right about human origins after all, would you give up your faith? If it turned out that Jesus was risen but Protestantism was wrong and Catholicism or Orthodoxy was right (or the other way around), would you opt to become an atheist? If it turned out that Jesus is risen and that the New Perspective is more right than wrong about Paul, would that be grounds to abandon Christianity altogether? If it turned out that Jesus is risen but the doctrine of predestination is true (or false!), would you see no more point in following Christ? If it turned out that Jesus is risen but Genesis 1-11 is ancient Near Eastern mythology, would you apostasy? If it turned out that Jesus is risen but Mark and Luke made historical slips here and there and Jonah was actually a non-historical children’s story, would your faith be in vain?
Here’s the kicker: If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, not only are you needlessly worrying yourself over secondary matters, you may have adopted “another gospel.”
“Moralists (archbishops included) can thunder away as much as they like; but they’ll make no difference unless and until people see that there is something transforming and exhilarating about the prospect of a whole community rejoicing together – being glad of each other’s happiness and safety. This alone is what will save us from the traps of ludicrous financial greed, of environmental recklessness, of collective fear of strangers and collective contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal – and many more things that we see far too much of, around us and within us.”
—Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon at Diamond Jubilee Service
“He is truly rich who does not desire great possessions, or surround himself with wealth, but who requires nothing.”
—Saint John Chrysostom (via inconceivables)
“He who is quick to condemn others demonstrates that he has never truly stood in the presence of the Living God.”
—Pope Kyrillos VI of Alexandria (via orthodoxbrit)
