Session 16 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 16 

At my current age of sixty nine is it possible for me to attain a realistic empathy with who I was at the age of six or sixteen or thirty or fifty or sixty?  I have progressively gained more experience and education and reflection upon my life.  So how do I pretend or imagine or even remember how I was at sixteen without projecting my experience of being sixty two onto my memories of how I was a sixteen?  Can I just black out forty six years and pretend that I am accessing my life at the age of sixteen?  I don’t think so.

If you understand the dilemma that I have with myself, imagine our collective dilemma of trying to access our Church’s memories from thousands of years ago when we did not live and must rely upon a small number of accounts in documents that have unknown paths of transmission in how they were put together and passed on and saved.  There is no actual original document of all of the writings that comprise the collection in the Bible.

How can my life and what I say and write in my current context ever be considered as relevant in any general sense to people beyond the immediate setting where I live, work, speak and write?   There are so many published words now that the selective process for gaining a hearing beyond one’s own immediate situation is daunting, accidental or based upon who has publishing success to make sure words have a wider public to find listeners or readers.  Ancient societies have very few words that have been preserved by the technology of writing so we can say that more attention and more authority is accorded to the few words we have that came to be translated and read.  A counter assertion would be to say that important words were bound to be remembered and saved because their inherent truth or importance.  What is the memorable importance of commercial billing transactions on ancient cuneiform clay tablets that have survived, except the durability of their text format?

As I attempt to draw from the history and the genealogy that provide us with information about who we are as Episcopalians, I fully admit that I live in 2020 and that I have been influenced by modern science and other disciplines available in a standard educational experience today.  I also admit that I have accepted the notion that all of our lives are mediated through our use of language.  And when we say that we use reason, we are referring to how we use language and how language orders all of our lives.  So being persons who possess language as a chief defining feature of our humanity proceeds any notion of Scripture or Tradition.  Scripture and Tradition presume a community people who use language and it may seem silly but from the outset we cannot ignore the fact that we are language using people.

As I look at the formative identity as it has come to us in the Bible and in the traditions that received the biblical writing and “voted” on the books to include in the Bible and who have used the Bible within a variety of worshipping traditions for perhaps three thousand year(assuming our continuity with Hebrew-Judaic religious traditions), I want to look for common questions of humanity and then look at the details of the answers to these common questions that have been given in the 3000 years of Scriptural and traditional communities of worship.

Let us look at the question of general issue and detail of culture in an example:

The issue of faster transportation.  Why do we need to go more than five miles from where we live?  How do we do it?  Details of Culture: Donkey, Horse, horse and cart, oxen and cart, chariot and horse, train, car, plane.  Transportation is a universal human question; the details of how it is answered varies in time.  Take for example the Amish.  They want to freeze the mode of transportation as horse and buggy as the divine designated stopping point for transportation.  Other religious people differ.  Point?  There is a universal question or principle in every human activity and there are details of different cultural practices throughout the history of people.

Cars and transportation are one thing but what about the value and meaning of personhood?  Human labor and division of labor and task designations of people is a universal question.  Ancient societies and some not so ancient have answered this question with various forms of servitude or slavery.  Just as I cannot go back that insist that I should have been seeking different values at the age of sixteen, we cannot go back to ancient cultures and insist that they understand human personhood in such a way as to prohibit slavery.  Even a person in servitude did not know how to understand the way in which we understand freedom.  Slavery as a detail of modern culture is one that we want to be completely rid of.  How do we tolerate details of culture in biblical people without judging them as having nothing relevant to offer to us today?  Wow, if these people practiced slavery, how can I believe that they were enlightened about God?  So how do we interpret the cultures of the Bible and subsequent Church history and tradition with a non-judgmental charity?  We probably can’t.  We do make the judgments even while we know it is unrealistic and anachronistic  to demand that people before us be like us in the details of how we express our values today.

My strategy then is to look at questions that might be common to humanity at in every age and see how the wisdom of the Bible and church traditions ask and illuminate those questions.  How can we look at the details of cultural practice from other era and find that they do not fit today?

Next up I will propose some of these common questions.

Exercise:

What great questions do you think people in the Bible were trying to answer as well as people of faith in the history of Christianity?

Father Phil