Session 24 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 24 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

We are on our way in trying to get some insights upon the great questions and answers that arose in the Hebrew Scriptures in how they set up the templates for the way in which the followers of Jesus presented their understanding of Jesus and the early Christian communities.

As a priest and preacher, a liturgical preacher who tries to reflect upon the Scripture readings appointed for the Sunday, most of the time it is easier just to pretend to jump into a biblical story and interact with the story as though it had self-consistent symbols that are being used.  But probably the most literal book in the entire Bible is the short letter of Paul to his friend Philemon asking him to receive back a runaway slave into his good graces.  The setting and context is so obvious.  For all other writings it is hard to determine what scholars call provenance: why was it written and to whom exactly was it written and where was it written.  When there are writings that have been collected and edited and reedited and applied to communities in completely different life experiences circumstances over such long time periods we have lost access to the actual occasion of the original writing events.  Do you see the easiest way out?  It is to limit scholarship about background information and just respond to the text itself as though it could exist with self-evidential meaning in every age.  And this is basically how most people read the Bible; a valid devotional way to read it to look for insights for living well.  But if we were to collect and write down the insights and “truth” that people say they have received from the Bible, we would find it to be varied and contradictory.  So there is some importance of doing scholarship in history, original languages, archaeology, historical anthropology and any other related field to help to put some “limits” on what something could mean based upon when it was written for the first time and also based upon accepting the laws of gravity.

What will biblical scholarship do for you?  For one thing it will confuse you thoroughly.  All biblical scholarship is “political” in the sense you can easily end seeing what you are looking for.  So even if you do a study using Wikipedia you will find that scholars disagree and widely disagree.  And these scholars are people who have spent their entire lives learning language and history very well.  So if scholars disagree, where does that leave a typical pastor or lay person?  A typical priest or pastor has some biblical knowledge somewhere in-between what the specialized biblical scholars have and what a lay person in the pew has.

What you cannot believe is when a preacher tells you, “The Bible says..”  The Bible does not talk like a unified person with whom you can have a dialogue discussion.  When a preacher says, “The Bible says,”  he or she is really saying, “This is way that I interpret a particular biblical writing.”  By saying, “The Bible says” the preacher may want to assume some self-evidential authority of some particular verse, but the use of Bible in this way is very misleading.

So in the midst of such disagreement among scholars how should we respond?  Well, if the experts can’t agree then perhaps the Bible is not reliable for truth; so why bother?  That is one response.  Another is to ignore all scholarship and make Bible reading a personal event where a reading can be like a personal oracle event between God and me.  This may be a valid devotional reading of the Bible.  There is another response: The continual collaborative reading of the Bible by a faith community to discover biblical insights in many forms of interpretation.  We do this not because we can find a final and perfect biblical truth or true reading of the Bible; but in the process of reading and discussing we are building our interior word base that hopefully is re-programing the lives of our deeds and words towards more excellence in the art of living well.  We interpret the Bible best with the winsome deeds of our lives that declare, God is Love and Christ loved us and gave himself so that we might give ourselves to each other in care and loving actions.  When someone is kind to me, that deed is an infallible truth to me.  It is biblical truth experienced by me.

This session is a digression of an always frustrated preacher who is always trying to look at biblical scholarship. Then I look for the universal patterns that are evident in the biblical texts because if I can intuit or articulate those universal patterns in the lives and language of biblical writers, I then look for their corresponding patterns today in our life and time.  Details of ancient cultures and our culture will be different and so deep patterns of God’s love and grace will render different words and different details today in our cultural behaviors.

The goal of the sermon then is to give my reading of the Bible and offer my reading to see if the insights can help a listener progress in the art of living towards the values of Jesus Christ, which I take to be: Loving God and our neighbor as our self.

Exercise:

Think about not so ancient writing and cultural details.  The Second Amendment of our Constitution is about the right to bear arms.  It was written in the days when the arms in question were muskets with less than rapid fire.  And jump ahead to now: How does one interpret principle of second amendment in the details of fire arms and weaponry available today?  How much disagreement do we find in our society today about principle and detail?  Now imagine principle and detail issues in biblical writing that were written long ago and we don’t have any original documents.  And the writings cover many centuries of development within changing communities.

Father Phil