The Past as Present - On Essential Agreement

This post is more United Church of Canada than some - but should perhaps allow anyone to think about the relationship we have to the thinking of the past...

In explanation - when one is ordained into ministry in the United Church, we make a promise, backed up by people who have examined us, that we are in essential agreement with the recorded faith position of the church.

In our case that is taken to be the four positions we have taken: The 20 Articles of Faith (1925), The Statement of Faith (1940), the New Creed (1968) and the Song of Faith (2006)

It is interesting that if you take the last and read it - our faith is very poetic, very accessible, and very much based on the idea of human development towards the good. It seems, tilted, towards a modern way of thinking.

If you start the other way around and read the 1925 version is it like the King James Bible - jarring in its use of words we no longer use in phrases we no longer use. The tilt in this case is towards the power of God. God did things, in fact, everything, and we respond.

But like it or not, if you sit down and read carefully the "words" of all of these positions, carefully trying to weed out the poetic voice, they are, to quote the church, in essential agreement with each other.

You, as an average reader, would not want to do that, trust me. But in fact, the 20 articles are a bit repetitive, and thus with each version it gets shorter.... but almost nothing changes.

in 1940 We added the idea that God made us to be in "loving" relationship - not just relationship, while we admitted that Jesus, though God, also lived the perfect human life.

in 1968 we added the tag line, "to live with respect in Creation" which was pretty much the first time we officially suggested the idea of respect, or relationship with the created world around us.

and in 2006 God became less the old man in the sky, adjectives like Mother were added. The other major thing that I can see is that it says Jesus was put to death by the people... in other words, we are to blame. Where before it was stated as being more part of God's original plan.

But when we say essential agreement we are basically saying this:

We believe there is one God, who somehow exists in three: Creator, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Who is active in the world and in the heart of people. Who gives us free choice to turn away from the path, but who has planned out the path. Adam and Eve sinned and all of us have that kernel of sin within us, but God calls us and redeems us. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, came to earth and taught us how to be more faithful before being executed. By being executed as an innocent Jesus paid off our debt and saved us. Believe that and try hard to allow the Holy Spirit to work within you and you will be judged good after death and live forever with God, if not, you will be cast out.

Now, as you can imagine, there is more. It defines ministry, and church, and right action, and so much more... but "essential agreement" does not boil down to the nitty gritty, it boils down to the core of what is being said. Which is as above. Yes, yes, I know if you are a theologian you are going to say I did not express some stuff well enough, or deep enough, ok, it is more complicated than that, I agree.

NOW

In the United Church we have come under scrutiny of late because the fact is, clergy have, for some time, defined essentially pretty loosely.

I believe there is good and bad - so if you want to define it with personalities, ok. Let's call "Good" "God" 

(I made that up - but you get the point - do you, essentially agree with the above... there is a lot of wiggle room.)

It is being argued that the wiggle room did not include the modern post-theistic, radical progressive views that are held by many on one side of our church. And to be honest, I think they have a point. The reworking of those 20 articles over the last 100 years never touched the core belief. We have to admit that the United Church, for all of its social justice and left leaning history has stayed true to what it said it believed in 1925. We just say it in modern ways.

Which leads to a big problem.

And here is how I see the problem. The problem is that the faith statement of the United Church is bound to an antique way of understanding science, sociology, psychology and culture.

It is not the church that has moved - it is the world that has moved.

And somewhere along the way we forgot to write into our faith the belief that everything changes. In fact, we wrote the opposite - saying that things like God, the church, Jesus... are forever the same. Unchanging, immutable, etc.

But... no.  Galileo famously came up hard against the church when he claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun and not vice versa. They put him in jail and let him rot as a heretic. To be honest, the church did not care about celestial mechanics at all. Whether it is a circle or an ellipse, that meteors might seem to disappear and come back... who cares. What matters is that God is from Earth and therefore Earth is the centre of everything. That is what Galileo denied.

And we know he was right.

And because, eventually (in reality it took 350 years and the church only admitted he was right in 1992) we came to see that he was right, societal understanding changed. God was up/out there and not on earth. But we were still the favourites.

The reason people do not come to church these days, I think, has a lot to do with how far we have moved in our cultural understanding such that being in essential agreement with those 20 articles seems somehow wrong.

In basic ways, why would God only save the Jews? Why would the Messiah only come and save the western world? How do Buddha and Mohammed fit in? What "plan" are we talking about? The world certainly does not seem to be getting better and better every year? What do you mean prayers are answered? Most of us suffer greatly despite asking for help repeatedly... And on and on we could go.

You see, even the Bible, which is a record of peoples thoughts about God over 1000 years or so, portrays God as being so radically different at different times, that a lot of people assume the God of the Old Testament was a whole other person.

So when Jesus taught, he taught a radically different way of seeing holiness and humanity than that which had come before.... Which makes me wonder.... if someone comes along now... are they not also going to radically alter the way we see holiness and humanity?

Was it not the pharisees and the sadduccees, those we now consider the enemies of truth, but who were at the time, the church, who tried to stop Jesus from saying new and heretical things?

Maybe, just maybe, the essential agreement we should be adhering to is agreement to the statement:

WE CANNOT SEEM TO GET HOW TO BE GOOD - WE NEED TO KEEP TRYING NEW WAYS TO EXPLAIN IT 

In the Beginning... Was the WAY

Before the church councils, before the church fathers, before the Gospel writers, there was a creed that was the central tenet of belief for the fledgling group of followers mourning the loss of Jesus.

"Jesus is Lord!"

That is it. That's all. No Trinitarian formulations, no doctrine of salvation... just a claim that at the centre of all we are and all we think is Jesus. 

Now, scholars and folks will tell you that this had serious overtones and repercussions. "Lord" (Kurios in Greek and Adonai in Hebrew) was a term of social understanding given to one who is your better. But at its core it simply means ruler. 

One of the main problems was that the Roman Emperor at the time, Octavian, carried the title Augustus, a fancy religious term for Lord. In other words - the Emperor was Lord, not Jesus - or vice versa depending on where you stand. 

Most agree however, that whether you said this for political or religious reasons, the point of Jesus is Lord is that you give yourself completely over to the teachings and examples of this guru and become someone who owes everything and does everything for Jesus. 

I occasionally find myself pausing to wonder if 2,000 years of interpretation and development within the church did not lead us astray from everything Jesus stood for. But to say it less dramatically, I wonder if we are too often putting our thought and emphasis on the wrong thing.

The "Church" is an institution. The Creeds are interpretation. The priests are intermediaries. And we are a hundred steps away from being actual followers of Jesus. 

Even - and I mean this in the best possible way - even if we could determine what Jesus actually meant without it going through the filter of Paul, and the church, and all of those writings and sermons.... Even then - would most of us who attend or work for a denomination of this global network of institutions be able to say we are following Jesus? 

I had a professor once, and I cannot remember who or where or when, sorry, who told us that the original title for the movement that came about after Jesus was "The Way" The people of the Way were the people who followed the example of Jesus.

And in the early church they took this stuff seriously. They gave away their possessions, they decided not to get married or buy property, they lived together and shared everything in a good socialist way - knowing that this brought them closer to being able to live like Jesus... who was, by all accounts, a wandering, poor, itinerant preacher and teacher. 

Now, none of this is new thought - I want to make that clear. Some of the best minds of recent years within the Christian Thought Factory have written and dissected the idea of Empire and how Jesus lived in opposition to it.

But as a progressive who is trying to make their way in the dying days of ecclesial empire, I think about this at a much more practical level.

How far away am I from living and thinking like Jesus. How would I reclaim the original intent of the faith which was much more of a social reform movement than anything else? How do I lead a congregation in a way that actually honours what Jesus was trying to get across and does not just build on the last millennium or two of Christian Empire building.

First off - I no longer like to use the word Christian. I think we should go back to People of the Way.

Secondly - I think the focus of worship and work within existing church structures should change to be about social justice as the main path to spiritual enlightenment. Or, to be more direct, love and loving everyone should be the main path to spiritual enlightenment.

But mostly I think we need to let go of all the division and fighting that happens in the modern church as we struggle to take our last gasp before going under. We need to understand that almost everything we fight about is made up, an interpretation, or at best, our opinion.

Whether you are left, right, up or down in your own thinking, we can all agree that Jesus basic answer to every question was "love everybody"

how about we focus on that for a while?