The Questioning Christian

Scripture Can't Be the Be-All and End-All

I ventured into the middle of another let's-bash-the-liberals lovefest at TitusOneNine. In the course of the discussion, Nicholas (comment # 18) asked me: "The wishy-washy 'gosh I don't really know what's true we're all in a process of discernment let's stay united and dialogue' stuff is not something I can find a biblical model for. Can you?"

First, a biblical model would be helpful, but it's certainly not mandatory. We can't live our lives clutching the Bible as a security blanket, as an ultimate, preemptive authority on all matters of faith and morals. To do so would be to abdicate our individual, non-delegable responsibility to God, to make the best choices we can, using the sum total of the evidence he has revealed to us (and yes, I mean to include here one of the conservatives' favorite whipping boys, the dreaded demon Experience).

That said, however, I can find a biblical model to support my view -- well, sort of.

Faith Healing - Freeman Dyson's Grandmother

Just saw this in a piece in the New York Review of Books by physicist Freeman Dyson (hat tip to Salty Vicar):

I should here declare my personal interest in the matter. One of my grandmothers was a notorious and successful faith healer. One of my cousins was for many years the editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Both these ladies were well educated, highly intelligent, and fervent believers in paranormal phenomena. They may have been deluded, but neither of them was a fool. Their beliefs were based on personal experience and careful scrutiny of evidence. Nothing that they believed was incompatible with science.

RealLivePreacher - Interesting Blog

I just stumbled across an interesting blog, Real Live Preacher, hosted on Salon and mirrored at its own site. The (anonymous) blogger says he was raised Baptist but lost his belief in God while doing a hospital chaplaincy after seminary, then regained it, sort of. Here's a sample:

Interesting Debate at TitusOneNine

Over the past few days I've participated in an interesting and wideranging debate in the comments to a particular posting at the TitusOneNine blog, which is of a conservative / traditionalist bent. (The regulars on that blog call themselves "reasserters," as contrasted with us so-called "reappraisers.") Some of my comments are # 28, 30, 48, 51, 73, 86, and 87. I want to thank the regulars for their hospitality to someone whose views are decidedly in the minority there (to put it mildly).

Why Prayer Books Are Better Than Projection Screens

Last month our Episcopal parish closed the 50-year-old main church building for 15 months of renovations and repairs. This displaced four out of our six Sunday worship services. We are holding three of those four services in what we insist on calling the Parish Life Center, which others no doubt would simply call the gymnasium.

I've realized that the most jarring aspect of this temporary move is the absence of hard-copy Prayer Books (i.e., the Book of Common Prayer) and hymnals, which have been put into storage during the renovation. Instead of holding books in our hands for worship and singing, we now read the words from a projection on a pair of large video screens. Our contemporary service has done things exactly this way for many years, but it's a new thing for those of us from "the nine o'clock crowd."

The Disciples Didn't Recognize Jesus After the Resurrection - Why Not?

If we're to believe the Gospels, Jesus explicitly and repeatedly told his disciples that he would be put to death, but would be raised on the third day (Mt 16:21-23, 17:22-23, 20:17-19; Mk 8:31-32; Lk 9:21-22, 18:31-33; Jn 14:18-20, 16:16-20). The disciples very much got the message, judging by their reported reactions (Mt 16:22, 17:23; Mk 8:33). But they sure didn't act that way after Jesus actually died.

Christianity = The Great Commandment

The Scripture readings appointed for today include the story of Jesus announcing the core of his teaching, as recounted in Luke 10:25-37:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."

(Emphasis added.) This story obviously was significant to the early Christians, because it shows up in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, at Matt. 22:34-40 and Mark 12:28-34, as well as in Luke.

Matthew's version of the story seems to suggest that everything else is just details: It ends with Jesus telling his questioners, "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

What Revelations Can Be Authoritative?

One of the responses to my posting at the TitusOneNine blog was # 4, from Tim, who posed some good rhetorical questions about what new "revelations," over and above Scripture, should be deemed authoritative. The subtext of his questions seemed to be that none of them should be, and that only Scripture can have authoritative status. His questions were very helpful, and I've taken a stab at addressing them here.

Bibliolatry vs. Trust in God -- Additional Debate

This past week I left a comment on TItusOneNine, with a link to a longer posting here. It touched off a bunch of responsive comments from TON readers. Some responses offered nothing more than name-calling, but others were insightful and thought-provoking, and I thank their authors. Since it'd be impractical to try to write a series of detailed replies in another comment, I'll do so in some postings here and post a linking comment in the TON blog. I'm not doing so to convince anyone; I have no illusions about that, and am not particularly interested in that anyway. I'm doing it because for me, writing is the best way of sorting things out in my mind; I often don't know what I think until I sit down and write.

Broken Communion: What Does It Mean? How Much Should We Care?

For months, some Anglican churches and/or leaders in the "Global South" have proclaimed that they are in a state of "broken communion" or "impaired communion" with the U.S. Episcopal Church. These Anglicans are outraged about the election and consecration of Gene Robinson, an openly-gay priest in a long-term committed relationship, as Bishop of New Hampshire. This morning, Simon Sariento's Journal published a list of some twelve to nineteen provinces that have made such proclamations.

That got me wondering again: Just what does it mean when someone says we're in "broken" or "impaired" communion? To what extent should (we) Episcopalians be concerned about proclamations of this kind?

There's an obvious threshold question: What does it mean to be "in communion" in the first place?