Wrestling with traditional Christian scripture and prayers

So here's the thing.

There are many wonderful people who have come to such profound insight into the Divine, and through this to a solidarity with the core insights of other religions, by practicing with traditional Christian scriptures and prayers.  They have inspired me, and I mention them often: Fr. Thomas Merton, Fr. Thomas Keating, Fr. Richard Rohr, Fr. Bede Griffiths, Br. Wayne Teasdale, Br. David Steindl-Rast (to name a few).  So for reasons discussed elsewhere I joined a politically tolerant, theologically inspirational Episcopal parish with a strong anglo-catholic flavor ("high church liturgy"). The Anglicans, including the Episcopal Church, recommend their version of the Daily Office to both priests and laity alike, religious and secular.  So this sounds like a good idea.  Many in the Anglican tradition simply don't do any of the Daily Offices at all, let alone on a regular basis.  And when they do go to Mass, the reading from the Psalter (the Psalms) tends to be edited so that the harsh portions are left out.  So I will offer some background on my views as well as examples of why this practice hasn't been working out as well as I had initially hoped.

It should be recalled that I see no reason to defend the Bible as something it isn't but rather to appreciate it for what it is.  It is an attempt to record people's understanding of their encounter with the Divine Mystery.  This means appreciating things such as historical and cultural context in the use of language and thus not missing the point of why something was phrased a particular way rather than assuming it would have been said the exact same way if it were written today.  Otherwise much of the power of the texts is muted and we risk misunderstanding that can be profoundly damaging. The necessary process of maintaining the vitality of such texts and their commentaries produces a perpetual tension between between received wisdom through tradition and insights from ongoing revelation.  I don't have any need to deny that there is all manner of ugliness recorded in the Bible, often framed as the will of God, nor should anyone be surprised to find such things.  The human path to peace and wisdom is filled with wrong turns and dead ends because of our shortcomings and poor choices.  Our hearts, the deepest parts of our selves, are often hard, narrow, and crowded, which causes plenty of distortion in discerning who God is and what God wants.

We know Jesus, and the Buddha, and the rest too well

Or to put it more accurately, in many ways we don't really know them at all.

I have alluded before to something that many theologians have known for a long time, something I didn't come up with on my own, that in many ways Jesus was a radical.  That isn't to say he was a raving ideologue, or some kind of Jewish anarchist.  From the depictions we have of him he favored quiet, peace and rest as well as good times with friends and family.  He also appears to have been very observant, going to the temple, singing the Psalms, and reading from the Torah.  Yet he saw past clinging blindly to the letter of the law and ignoring its spirit, in which he revealed its source and intent: love for God and for neighbor.  No interpretation of religious law that defied this mandate could be genuine and no secular law that ignored it could be just.

Then there were the early churches.  I've heard they initially shunned the iconography of the cross.  It isn't surprising.  The cross in that era was a sign of shame, terror and agony.  It was the visible symbol of what happened to those who defied Rome and its Emperor.  To look at a cross was to look at the power of the largest known empire in the world and its dominion over your life.  To have taken up the cross as their own symbol, the members of the church would have been doing what so much of the Gospels did, inverting familiar signs of power and meaning.  It was an act of defiance.  What you proclaim as death we proclaim as life.  What you intended to cause despair has become a source of hope.  But how can that symbol carry the same impact today?

The tension between tradition and revelation

***Note: I thought I'd published this months ago and I've been going mad looking for it.  It may or may not appear to be congruent with the development of my thoughts,  but it was intended to be up around July 4, 2010.***

Following up on previous thoughts on the tension between received wisdom and unfolding revelation I examine that tension in the issue of salvation as it is framed by Christianity. Note that my thoughts on these matters, especially what it means to know or follow Jesus, will almost certainly offend or unhinge someone, so if you are really wound uptight on such issues, be forewarned.

There are some common/popular traditional ideas to be addressed, so let's look at each of them in turn: