The biggest theological challenge facing the Church today is the lack of value placed on our daily experience of God. This often translates into a perceived lack of imagination on the part of the Church – a one-for-all idea that says your experience isn't valid because there's no scriptural basis for encountering God in that way. Experience and scripture both reveal God's actions in the world, and must be checked in light of each other. Jesus is revealed within Scripture – but so too are the all-too-human reactions of greed, selfishness, and untruth. For many within society, if one interpretation of Scripture doesn’t hold up against experience, then all of scripture must be rejected. For many within the Church, if an interpretation of scripture doesn’t hold up against experience, then all that is experienced must be flawed. I maintain that the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these extremes – a balance must be found between scripture and experience. I believe that many of the conflicts that our denomination faces are the result of this tension. Whether historically or today, this balance underlies flare-ups over most of our issues. My ministry, then, tries to refocus our attention from the bottom of our own entrenchments to the Sun that we share, the light of God's love.
This is accurate to how I view things - experience and scripture should be at least equal when evaluating theological arguments, or you wind up with views that are, frankly, self-contradictory. It seems to me that many people within the church view anything outside of scripture as suspect. (When I say "the church", I am using a shorthand to refer to all who self-identify as Christian, and not a specific congregation).
In fact, just last week, I went to a church service where the pastor preached on the extra-Biblical (outside the Bible) doctrine of the Rapture. Now, because he was preaching in an environment where the Bible was assumed to be infallible and held the belief that anything extra-Biblical was suspect, he carefully detailed that though the word "rapture" is nowhere used in the bible, the Greek "ἁρπαγησόμεθα" (harpagisometha) meant "gathering together suddenly"and was close enough to the concept that he was going to use gathering when he meant rapture. It was a clear dodge to establish Biblical support for an extra-Biblical doctrine, and is one of the methods often used to get around troubling doctrinal and Biblical passages in these circles. I personally don't hold to the doctrine of Rapture, as it relies heavily on an understanding of the End Times that is picked out of the scriptures piecemeal, and on taking certain passages literally, while certain passages are left allegorical without a good governing principle for the choices. (Good governing principle here meaning something that holds up outside of the world of Biblical Literalism.) For me, I see the "End Times" as having come when Jesus arrived in the first place - that we are meant to work together to co-create a better world. But there'll be more on that in another post.
This same argument is evident in the political world today. This article presents a compelling view that the doctrine of patriarchy, so clear in the Hebrew Bible and Greek Bible alike (often called the Old Testament and New Testament, respectively) is part of what is responsible for the Christian politicians who are stating publicly that rape is part of God's plan. (Note: the article does use the Y-name for God in a few places, and talks about rape openly. If either of those things is likely to trigger a reaction in you, holding off on reading it is probably a good idea.) It makes the argument that in the Bible, Men are assumed to have authority over Women and Children. This authority, the article states, is designed to keep Men certain that the children they are raising are their own, and to encourage the community to stay together in difficult times.
Christianity teaches that God’s actions are not for us to question. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding.” “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Submit, accept, don’t question. In all cases, submission has a hierarchy: men are to submit themselves to the will of God or to the divine flow; women are to submit both to the will of God and to the will of men.I would argue that not all of Christianity teaches this, but it certainly is a doctrine of many denominations, both historically and today. And here is where my argument about experience vs scripture comes into play. This is a clear instance of experience teaching that Women have intelligence, souls, and independent wills from Men (thank goodness!). And yet, when presented with scripture that suggests otherwise, people who hold to these doctrines are saying that they reject their experience for one interpretation of scripture. And that, to me, is the root of theological disengagement. When you blind yourself to your own experiences, you have created an idol of scripture -- that is, scripture itself becomes what you are beholden to for your interpretation of the world, instead of God acting through the Holy Spirit directly. By taking this position, you have consciously shut out the still, small voice of God in your heart, that acts to direct all people. Instead, you have forced God into a shell - the shell of scripture - and chosen to blind yourself to actions of God outside of that framework.
Clearly, this is something I care very deeply about. And it is not my intention to reduce the value of the scripture - because it is an important tool that points to how humanity has seen God working in the past. Any new interpretation must be grounded in historical understanding - it's part of the cyclical nature of the world that ideas that fall into disuse eventually find their way back into the public eye, though sometimes in a different form. Even the President of Louisville Seminary (my most recent Alma Mater) has said in his recent blog post that he, a staunch Calvinist, had started adopting some Pelagian ideals in his behavior.
But what does it look like when scripture and experience work together? Something like this video, I'd imagine. Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr talks about the pattern of the Trinity visible in the great and small, how everything is seen to be relational. That relationality is newly visible, as we use science to experience things that were beyond our kenn mere decades ago.
Of course, this new information isn't "new" in the strictest sense. Letty Russell, feminist theologian, wrote in 1985:
The evidence for a biblical message of liberation for women, as for other marginalized groups, is not found just in particular stories about women or particular female images of God. It is found in God's intention for the mending of all creation. The Bible has authority in my life because it makes sense of my experience and speaks to me about the meaning and purpose of my humanity in Jesus Christ. In spite of its ancient and patriarchal world views, in spite of its inconsistencies and mixed messages, the story of God's love affair with the world leads me to a vision of New Creation that impels my life.And what about applying experience to scripture? This can lead to new insights as well. Here, a Rabbi takes a new look at a very familiar story - the Fall of Adam and Eve - by applying a personal experience with God to the story. In this version, Adam and Eve don't disobey God by eating the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil, but willingly choose to limit themselves in order to do God's work in the world. And that's got a familiar ring to me, as a Christian - this view of Adam and Eve parallell's God's limiting of Godself as a human in Christ. And that brings fascinating possibilities to the fore, which really don't belong in this post.
In the end, does it matter? Yes. It does. Because if we bind ourselves to one version of scripture, we willingly turn away from the world we could be creating with God, and tune in to our own selfish desires. Polarization is the result - and entrenchments. We create a battlefield out of what should be a simple plain of green and growing things, digging in and ignoring God's guidance.
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