http://www.inclusivechurch2.net/index.php?id=12873
This article on The Inclusive Church site seems to me to have more to say than the writer intended. While it speaks specifically to a church in danger of becoming exclusive and putting up the barriers, it talks also of issues that we have been struggling with in the small group I have been in that is thinking about Palestine and Israel and finding out a bit about Christian Zionism. The questions which are raised are what do we do with the bible, with the biblical text, and Richard also asks "what about doctrine?"
to look at the conclusion first:
"...Exclusivists are not playing games: they really do believe that they have a mission to save the world from the three abominations of secularism, pluralism, and relativism, which they see as co-terminous. And if history tells us anything at all it is that ideologues on a mission are dangerous. The two flies in the ointment are fast growing into an army of locusts."Yesterday I had a phone call from a young man called Chris. He seemed ok, wasn't asking for money, just wanted to say something. I held on and heard that I was going to hell. I'm a bit sorry that I was about to leave the house when I got the call and simply gave my "christian credentials" to him rather than finding out and talking with him some more. But going the web site he mentioned I find the traditional catholics who know (who know) that the pope is a heretic (will join me in hell no doubt) and that the church has been wrong since Vatican II. (and Anglicans since 1660?) So we shrug our shoulders and let him get on with hopefully meaningless telephoning.
But in the meantime, Ugandans are being stirred up to hate (and murder) homosexuals with the bible on their side (as the men who murdered Matthew Shepard (in Laramie, Ohio) "knew"); and fundamentalists are taking the land that god has given them from Palestinian villagers who have been farming land for generations; and others are planning bombings and any way they can to shake us out of our consumptive (Western) affluenza. <sigh>
Richard Lambert focuses on two problems for the church. One is the ignorance of scripture; ignorance of the status of scripture. What is this text? It is not a science text book, nor is it a (flawed) journalistic account or an English Essay. It is an attempt to understand, spread over three or four thousand years. And that understanding is changing and growing. It is "work in progress". Lambert says that doctrine is similarly being developed.
As someone who is wedded to Anglican liturgical practice I baulk a little (tiny little bit) at this. But then, I remember that I started with the 1927 prayer book with its diocesan amended booklet (All Saint's Ainslie practice in the 1950's and 1960's); moved to a newer prayer book in the seventies (from which turmoil of change Evan Burge's Thanksgiving Prayer translation of Hippolytus' Great Thanksgiving has now entered our tool box); ... I have used three different hymn books (as well as finding jewels in my grandfather's Methodist Hymn book and collecting many song books); soo, "how many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb?... none, because they don't change". well, it's wrong, we do... It actually doesn't take very long to memorise new prayers in a liturgical practice. The clue is "practice"...
To make this blog less of a rant; where am I going? If I argue with someone about women's ministry or homosexuality then I am often reduced to using their methods of argument, of using proof texts, using the bible in a way that is alien to me.
Richard writes: "Texts about divorce or love of money are seen nowadays as highly flexible, while those about homosexuality or women bishops (being minority concerns) are set in concrete.""
Last Sunday I read the first lesson, Isaiah proclaiming relief to the downtrodden and exiled Jerusalemites. "Your land will no more be called barren... it shall be "married".".. as a proof text it means one thing to a modern Israeli, another to a disempowered, landless Palestinian. But to humanity in this globalised world, it means hope. It isn't simply the way we read a text, it is where we read that text from and what other experience and knowledge we bring to it.
To be an inclusive church is to be a church which has its eyes and its heart open. Wide Open. Open to many thoughts and experiences, polupoikilos... many coloured. Not a church damning us all to hell. But a church inviting us to heaven!
No comments:
Post a Comment