Why I’m not yet Episcopalian
10 September 2007 - 28 אלול 5767 by Huw
Susan Russell, a noted Episco-Blogger, offers a post on how to read the bible, accusing her opponents of “selective literalism”.
But she does the same thing and I called her on it in the comments.
We all do the same damn thing - no matter what denomination or stripe we favour. We read the parts we like. We read into the parts we can. We discard the parts we don’t like. And then we cut off those who disagree.
We’re all fucked up - we sinners - because we’re all human.
The unwillingness of the left and the right to sit down together in ECUSA is as tedious as is the unwillingness of the EOs to sit down with anyone else. It’s pride, arrogance and “we’re right/you’re wrong”. No one - not even me - is willing to just suck up and be at table with people they disagree with.
That’s the reason I’m not Episcopalian or Orthodox (or anything else): I’m just like everyone else.
sigh.
Huw,
Your comment to Susan Russell was spot-on. I am glad you called her on it.
In actuality, Russell’s approach to Scripture is similar to the Church’s approach to Scripture. She has decided what the central message of Christianity is (radical inclusiveness, etc.), and that central message is the interpretive rule she uses to read the Scriptures.
In the same way, the historic Church believed that it knew the central message of its faith, and the Church used that central message as its interpretive rule in reading the Scriptures. If Russell is reading her own beliefs into the Scriptures, then the historic Church did so as well.
The difference, I suppose, is that the Apostles and the early fathers made the claim that their interpretive rule (the “rule of faith”) was not something they made up, but was given to them by the Messiah. And so, while that rule is perhaps not obvious from the Scriptures themselves, it is nevertheless (on this view) the correct one.
You are right that we all “.. read the parts we like … read into the parts we can [and] discards the parts we don’t like.” But where that comes from is the altogether modern notion of treating the Scriptures as a vast well of information from which we, as autonomous rational agents, can deduce the Truth. Russell does that, the “reasserters” do that, I do that, and (quite possibly) you do that as well.
But that is not what the Holy Scriptures are for …
The church’s way beats trying to make sense on your own of all that sex’n'violence in the Old Testament (Google Toujours Dan’s blog for an entry with some really graphic examples), or even the googlies in the New (like the common modern Western lectionary yesterday with Jesus saying to hate your parents for his sake). Do it yourself and you get Joseph Smith, Jim Jones and Sun Myung Moon. Or dead ends like John Spong’s passé regurgitated atheism.
You don’t have to! Of course reading and studying scripture are good but the church saves you the bother of trying to interpret it all yourself.
In yesterday’s sermon/my after-Mass online read, Revd Jane at Hoosier Musings had a good go at explaining this.
Of course the church selectively interprets things too. That’s not in itself bad.
Sorry, Protestants and liberals, but I’ll take the church’s reading of it all.
In the end the Episcopal row isn’t really about obeying canons and ecclesiastical polity like the liberal side pretends. It really IS a battle of the absolutes, between two magisteria: the church versus private judgement. (Even though many of the liberals do believe in the creeds and most of the conservatives are Protestants.)
BTW the outcome of that battle won’t affect 99 per cent of Episcopalians in any way.
I hear you, Fogey. But I’m part of the Church too. All of us are. Our consensus is what makes the reading. That’s important.
And the church is local. The Vicentian Canon being a myth that is easily dismissed from our vantage in history: name one thing that was “everywhere always and by all” outside of the Resurrection. We can’t even, historically, agree on what that means - unless you start slicing off people as heretics until you’re left with one sect and say “this *is* everyone everywhere.”
In Philippians Paul prays that “your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best”
That’s also the book where he says “work out your salvation.”
I agree it’s a bunch of absolutes conflicting. Even the claim that there are no absolutes is an absolute. I think they are all trumped by the absolute command to sit down together in love.
Your anti-spam thing just caused me to lose my comment. I put exactly what was in the box. Anyway, I no longer believe in the one and only true church anymore for that same reason — you have to label everyone who falls outside of a very strict set of guidelines as heretics until you have very few left.
Not to sound like a bleeding-heart liberal, but that doesn’t sound like the Christ of the New Testament.