Two religions…
This based on the text of an email sent to a mailing list I was once a member of. It had been shared with the list by the original recipient. It later came up in a sermon and spoke to me very clearly, through my memory of the event, down through the last 5 years, coming thoroughly into my mind since January of this year. But I could never remember the ful text. I’ve spent like 4 months trying to remember it, I finally had to ask.
I’ve removed the personal details, edited two phrases and added one sentence of my own. The email is over 5 years old… but I think the edits would express the writer’s current opinion as well as they do my own. The final paragraph speaks to the specific context of the email, but I think it makes a good example of applying the document.
Considering this was in 2000 or 2001, it’s “pre emergent” (as “Emergent Church” had only begun to percolate at that point) but it seems to fit on the progressive side of that spectrum.
X remarked at a Buddhist-hosted dinner that the main divisions lie not between religions, but within them.
It has long seemed to me that there are really just two religions in the world, and they show up in each tradition: one runs on risk/ welcome/ abandon/ grace/ transformation/ forgiveness/ creativity/ multiple-possibilities; and the other, on security/ control/ rules/ order/ stability/ only-one-possibility.
Both religions can quote the scripture and tradition in support, because both religions have contributed to the scriptures and teaching in every tradition. God must be finding a use for both or they wouldn’t be everywhere. Some “liberals” fondly suppose there are traditions free of the second religion, but I doubt it. Some “conservatives” fondly suppose there are traditions free of the first religion, but I doubt it.
At the same dinner table a Unitarian raged at length against all proselytizing, saying that’s how Christians mess up the peaceable religious order of the world–so even Unitarians include folks wedded to rules–and some Buddhists present nodded agreement while others sat politely silent.
Every label has been used by both religions: orthodox, faithful, traditional, mainline, visionary, etc. There’s no escape, no correct stripe to put on your sleeve and help you identify from a distance the soldiers in your own army. You have to get closer to find out. Even church publications devoted to one religion will feature occasional articles and editorials promoting the other.
Currently, the Episcopal church seems less devoted to the second religion than to the first, but you’re never safe here. That’s why you belong here. You don’t need safety.
Category: Progressive, emergent
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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thanks for this, this makes a lot of sense.
If you can spare nine minutes, you might enjoy the most recent. It’s called The Tragedy of Dogma. I’d certainly be interested to know what your reaction to that is.
Arrrgh. Mangled the html there.
Faith and Philosophy is the podcast.
I wonder if this is a false dichotomy. Consider Orthodox iconography. It has “rules” … a canon which says what you should do (respect the conventions of mystical symbology) and what you shouldn’t do (indulge personal eccentricities and sentimental expressions).
However, great iconographers within this canon are highly creative. Andre Rublev and more recently Gregory Kroug come to mind.
Perhaps the division is between those who won’t embrace the dialectic between tradition and innovation and those who will.
It came with the disclaimer at the end… dogma is not God, religious conservatism can be just as dangerous as liberalism, etc… but he speaks as a conservative using the hyper pious language that gives me a rash – and the reason I stay away from AF Radio. That’s not to say it’s not true! Just the form tends to obscure the content for me. Mindful most of my Orthodox friends sounded that way when talking about “spiritual” things. But a good many of them used more colourful or at least common language in their real life.
I do agree that the dogmatic definitions arose in response to perceived heresy. But that “heresy” was largely also part of the same evolutionary process that brought us Orthodoxy as we have it today. It took imperial politics to force a choice.
Clark plays on the myth that we got this stuff “directly from Jesus” when there is lots of evidence otherwise – development, evolution, change. The idea of “therapy” is, itself, so anachronistically applied to the simple reformation of Judaism that Jesus taught, that I’m speachless. I’m also amused at the idea that modern Orthodox have “strict adherence” to the decrees of the councils. I’ll only point at divorced clergy once, or the overlapping jurisdictions…
Speaking as someone in recovery from convertitis,… short answer is it’s amusing and sad in the way that one in a 12 step programme looks at a drunken comedy on TV. I may be able to hear it differently later.
Much of that I would go along with Huw. The trouble is that for many of us in the UK and Europe such brands of American Orthhodoxy give us just as many rashes as they do you. It would be rash though to characterise Orthodoxy as mainly of that ilk even if its proponents can cuss like good ‘uns when the camera ain’t rollin’.
Perhaps we will see a different perspective when the home-country-Orthodox get us off their asses, renounce their spiritual racism and speak up. Eventually I think that these will tire of their ignorant or even hate-full compatriots and speak up. I do hope so.
In the UK and Europe though it is very, very different.
Ohhh dear! Freudian slip. Typo: delete “us” from “get us off their asses.” Whatever was I thinking?!
Father – also, given our provincialism, maybe the initial post applies to the USA, or… perhaps… maybe the divisions you and I are talking about are so different inside and outside that USA that we have trouble talking about them?
I hear what you’re talking about in inconography but I also remember the self-identified Orthodox man who wrote to my former (Episcopal) parish and lectured us on the real meaning of icons and accused us of blasphemy because of our Dancing Saints icon.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer. Ten idiots don’t make a religion. Jonah was ungenerous towards the Ninevites. He had to learn his lesson as well.
I don’t think that the alleged polarity and my counter polarity are culture specific. What pertyains to Orthodoxy in America and differently to Europe has more to do with the growth of the religious right in America … which as a phenomenon we simply do not have at all.
True… I simply point out that the two “iconography” comments come from within the same ecclesial community (at least, as far as institution goes)! Culturally, perhaps, y’all are in two different Churches.
I hope the non-US Orthodox bloggers rise up to overthrow the US/Mostly Rightwing Hegemony on the net.
By way of defending “my country”, certainly some Anglicans outside the USA *seem* to think the American Christian Right is a good thing. I imagine that there might be others, albeit very quiet ones, even in the UK and the EU. But I also know that when I try to discern a religious right in e.g., Canada, while the politics may be similar (in terms of morality or social policy) the methods are so vastly different as to not warrant comparison.