Session 15 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 15 

 Review: I have explained the Episcopal Church as a particular Christian family among other Christian families.  As each family has a name, I began by looking at the meaning of our name.   Each family has defining heirlooms and I spent quite a few sessions reflecting upon the chief heirloom of the Episcopal, the Book of Common Prayer.  I presented the Book of Common Prayer as being organized by invoking God’s presence upon the times of our life.  I see the Book of Common presenting prayer strategies for our various experiences of time, regular time, special time, and rite of passage time.

A family has a history and a genealogy and with this come legend and lore and a continual looking to the resources of our past and the current resources of our age in our methods of defining and living the significant purpose of our lives.  Our Episcopal Church has a history, it has a genealogy but much of it we delve into not because we can return to the past but because we are seeking significant purposes of faith in our current life.  We also hope for a future in what we are leaving for the people in our lives who will outlive us.

I would to present the history, the genealogy and the lore of The Episcopal Church as an interacting dynamic between Holy Scripture, Tradition and Reason.  The relationship between these three are something like trying to argue about what came first, the chicken or the egg.

It is false for any family to think that they exist alone and so when I talk about my family, I do so, also by referring to who is not in my family.  The world outside of my family helped to define my family.  So too when we are speaking about the Episcopal Church and all of its ancestors in faith traditions, we and all faith traditions cannot escape the fact that we existed among people in the world who have not been members of one’s faith tradition.  Traditions derive and form in world settings greater than their own arbitrary community boundaries.

Holy Scripture refers broadly to the Bible in the content form that it has come to be used in the Episcopal Church.  Tradition refers to the communities that received Holy Scripture and collected the writings and passed them on but also it refers to all of the faith practices that have been standard for various communities of faith at various times.  So there are practices and applications in community traditions that may not have explicit formulae in the Holy Scriptures.  (For example, it may be a tradition for a priest to wear a chasuble at Eucharist without claiming that Jesus wore the same at the Last Supper. The use of a chasuble comes from adopting a standard Eucharistic vestment.  It becomes an honored tradition even while not mentioned in Holy Scriptures, though it is consistent with Temple priests wearing robes).

Reason refers broadly to human experience and specifically how we work collaboratively to interpret the meaning and function and value of Holy Scripture and Tradition for our lives today.

We could say that our history, tradition and lore date from pre-historic times and Holy Scripture relate significant oral traditions that derived from pre-historic times and eventually became written as writing became a significant technology of memory in being able to connect people of the past with succeeding generations.

Part of my American tradition is the inheritance of Pragmatism.  In Pragmatism we admit that truth values are revealed by how an idea or concept functions for a community.  I would like to be as “functionally” orientated as possible in leading up to the functional value of the Episcopal Church in our lives.

The history of the past is so vast that all one can do is choose arbitrary reductions of information to present a view of history.  This does not make the views true; it only means that they are offered to see if useful insights can arise.

For my own understanding, I divide history into Pre-Modern or Classical, Modern and Post-Modern Periods.  Each of these periods have habits and features that define their utility as it pertains to human relationship to what has come to be called the Divine.  Subsequent period retain the habits and understanding of the previous periods even though same words or terms can come to have different functional meaning or value in the later period.

In the Pre-Modern or Classical understanding of God, God became one who is known and who speaks directly to and through people in ways that “seem” to be self-evidential to the ones who present the words of God.  God may be special and different (such difference is so great as to disqualify limited humanity from knowing such greatness) but this great God can become known and supports purposeful behavior within the community.  God was also located in space but also able to be invisibly evident.

In the Modern Period, the understanding of God comes to be admitted as a “human understanding” of God in a very deliberate way.  In the Modern Period when Reason takes over as an interior attribute that humanity has access to, it essentially replaces God as the self-evident reality of life.  From the Pre-Modern view it seems like arrogant “humanism” to say that all experience of God is but human experience.  But from the Modern point of view it seems to be humble to but admit that nobody has a “non-human experience” of God.  The pride of the Modern period is modern science and the constant attempt to find alternative answers for the phenomena that used to be attributed to actions of God.

The Post-Modern Period is much more recent.  The Post-Modern Period involves a critique of the Modern Period and in part is caused by disillusionment with the modern notion of progress.  Look what progress has done; we can really now do atrocious things to destroy the world and each other.  It seems like each scientific advance has several devastating consequences, e.g., environmental ruin or unchecked population growth.  In terms of theology and philosophy, Post-Modernism is based upon the insight that human experience is essentially mediated through the use of language, so whether word or deed, everything has come to language.  Everything is constituted by language including the long history of humanity with the sublime entity that is known in the English language as God.

In our next sessions, we are going to try to look at our history, genealogy and lore of Scripture, Tradition and Reason in light of these characterizations of human history.  But we cannot be but where we are in 2013, and whether one likes it or not, by participation in all of the manifestations of our informational age, we are Post-Modern people.  Lots of people are living in reactive fear and nostalgia to this while I would like to explore the possibility of a vital and dynamic faith in our Post-Modern Age as members of The Episcopal Church.

Exercise:

Why does the Bible or Greek mythology sometimes seem inaccessible to us today?  What does Holy Scripture mean to you?  What does Church Tradition mean to you?  What does Reason mean to you?  If we say that our authority and identity in the Episcopal Church involves the relationship between Scripture Tradition and Reason what does that mean in practice?  Can a person like St. Peter who is a Jew honoring their dietary restriction be led by the Holy Spirit and reason to think that a Gentile who eats pork can be regarded as equally obedient to God?   Can people of reason come to judge slavery as inhumane and unchristian even though New Testament times tolerate slavery?  In what other areas can reason over turn Scripture?  Geocentric or Heliocentric solar system?  Flat earth or round earth?  Evolution or seven day creation?

Father Phil