The Dating Game.

The various schemes for attempting to assign dates to the writings of the New Testament derive from Modernist ideologies and methodologies.  Therefore they function as a project of Empire.  The Church needs to hear such hypothesizing with the greatest suspicion, for by definition Empire never has the best interests of the Church at heart.  

Such efforts necessarily treat the text like an inert, inanimate, dead object; in other words, an "it."  This precludes any kind of real relationship with the text or with the community/tradition that lives in conversation with it.  Under Modernity, the text gets reduced to an object for dissection and a tool for utilization in theological arguments, rather than as "the unique and authoritative witness to the Word of God," Jesus Christ.

While scholars may come to broad consensus about the dating of documents, nevertheless there always remain outliers advocating radically different assessments.    People basically choose which valuations best support the argument they want to make based on where they want the church to go today.  In reality, since actually carbon-dated manuscripts of the New Testament go back only to the late 2nd century at the earliest, the issue of composition date of specific documents becomes more or less arbitrary, with scholars ignoring or challenging the consensus when it suits their purposes.  Sometimes their agendas reflect a sincere desire to inform and reform the Church, but at other times they have no more integrity than feeding a need for novelty, publicity, publication, academic advancement, media attention, or ecclesiastical influence.

In other words, in fact we simply cannot know with any kind of certainty or confidence how or when an ancient text arrived at its originally written form.      

Real spiritual authority therefore cannot derive from any assessment of a document's purported age.  Rather it emerges from the living community/tradition which keeps, interprets, and applies the truth to which Scripture points.  We have an "open source" document tradition that from the beginning underwent evolution, adaptation, embellishment, interpretation, expansion, and application by the community.  This process continues even after the text's crystallization by canonization in the Church's homiletical, liturgical, devotional, and theological tradition.  The only thing we might gain from an analysis of which pieces might have come earlier would suggest how the community may have responded to changing situations in the past.  But the idea that words assessed as "earlier" by this or that scholar convey more ecclesiastical authority than words deemed "later," does not accomplish anything but distract the community by miring it in pointless arguments about historicity, detracting from its active witness to the liberating love of the Creator in its own historical context.

We can no longer use "earlier" as a kind of trump card demanding that the Church accept the authority of this or that text.  Authority does not come to the Church from a cadre of specialists credentialed by Empire and guided by Empire's methodologies, standards, and criteria.  Rather, authority in the Church emerges from the movement of the Spirit in the living community.  The gathering of disciples discerns the Voice of the Creator in the creative tension between the core values of the tradition, and the demands of the contemporary historical context, the specific life situations of actual disciples.

+++++++

Spirituality and Religion.

Religion must serve spirituality; spirituality needs religion to work.

If you pray, that's spirituality.  If you agree with someone else to pray together at a certain time and place, that's religion.  

Religion is just organized spirituality.  It only becomes toxic when the organization grows more important than the spirituality it should facilitate.  At the same time, without religion, spirituality festers into a private, personal self-gratification, and fizzles out.

Idolatry happens when something intended to play a limited and supporting role, begins to usurp the center and assume power for itself.  A relative good spreads to take over the place of primary importance.

In the Church, discipleship remains paramount.  The Lord Jesus gives the Church its mission when he tells them to "make disciples" and "teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you."  That means bringing people into the life of compassion, service, humility, forgiveness, gratitude, equity, peacemaking, and justice.  Everything the Church does has to play a part in this mission.  Its organization should facilitate it.  It's doctrine needs to provide a foundation and its mythology a guiding and inspirational narrative, for discipleship.

To make an analogy from a Buddhist saying: Discipleship is the moon; the Church is the finger pointing to the moon.  If we start to focus on the finger and forget about the moon, we have not only missed the point, but we have also neglected and rejected the mission.  

If we focus on the religion and forget the spirituality, we have also gone far astray.  At the same time, the spirituality has no traction in the world without its application in religion.  It would remain a personal hobby or habit of an individual.  It does not make disciples, which means that even the individual's spirituality fails.  There is no such thing as individual spirituality; the communality of it is part of its essence.  To authentically connect to Jesus Christ inherently means connecting to and with others.  Spirituality without religion would be inert and dead.

Hence Modernity's hatred of religion and its need to co-opt it.  Nothing is more dangerous to any Empire than that people start following Jesus Christ.  Better to have people imagine they can be spiritual on their own, without the communal organization of religion, because without religion spirituality evaporates.  Authentic spirituality means connection to others, to an Other, to all.  Modernity pushes a false, ego-centric, counterfeit "spirituality" to undercut religion, and therefore discredit authentic spirituality.  It advocates for and underwrites a toxic Gnosticism in the place of real spirituality, ensuring that people will "do their own thing" on their own, and not connect to do anything real, because that would mean a repressive and restrictive "religion."  And we don't want that.

A religion has authenticity when it facilitates a real spirituality, and a spirituality has authenticity when it helps people connect to each other, to the planet, to the Creator; in other words, when it connects and organizes into religion.  Out of that connection then, it guides, inspires, encourages, and supports outreach to others, especially those in need.

Hence, Jesus founds a community of people whom he calls, an ecclesia, a church.  And the Nicene Creed includes the church as an article.  "We believe [or trust] in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church."  Because a living spirituality needs a religious community to give it traction in the world.

+++++++  

       

New Things.

Does our fetishizing change really work?

For my entire career in the Presbyterian Church, we heard a lot about change.  In particular we talked without ceasing about the "new paradigm," the "emerging church," the "next church," "adaptive change," and so on.  We have practically fetishized changed, even to the point of requiring churches to write about their enthusiasm for change on various documents and forms, even if they actually have no such enthusiasm.  

And we nearly always presented change as a very good thing.  How many sermons have I heard at various ecclesiastical gatherings about "Behold, I am doing a new thing; do you not perceive it?"  Most of those sermons seemed to indicate something good happening.  They don't mention that Isaiah here talks about the return of the people from exile in Babylon.  They do not appear to think about the Exile part.  

My generation, Boomers, always looked forward to "the revolution."  You can hear it in our music.  Like Thunderclap Newman's, "We got to get together sooner or later, Because the revolution's here, And you know it's right."  We always understood changing times as a good thing, in the end.  "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius," after all.  

In one presbytery I served, the Executive Presbyter advocated for closing a small congregation (against its will) by giddily offering, "Let's see what happens!"  This idea, that change, even when it means killing something, will always result in something good, as in the claim by an American officer in Vietnam that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it," pervades Modern thinking.  Yes, resurrection means death resolving in new life, but does this mean we start killing things for how much good it will do?  Do we call it good change when we reduce a mountain to wasteland in order to extract the coal from within it?  The attitude explains a lot of the history of Modernity, which has sacrificed untold millions of people, and the integrity of the planet's climate, to its to gratify its desires and fulfill its fantasies about the future. 

Change has always meant deterioration, decay, violence, depravity, and chaos... just not for the rich, white, men who invented, managed, and pushed Modernity.  We have always managed to fob the cost off on other, less privileged groups.  We still largely prattle on about change as some kind of inevitable "progress" and positive evolution.  Maybe that still works for us.  But most of the people on the planet still know that change usually means things getting even worse.  Hence, many of them embrace the nihilistic, "burn-it-all-down" solutions offered by wanna-be autocrats.  Indeed, who imagined a time when liberals would steadfastly defend the establishment against change... because the change comes in the form of reactionary maniacs?  Who ever thought white conservatives would storm the Capitol building?

 

We face no more profound and comprehensive change than the intensifying battery of climate crises we now endure and try to cope with.  Yet we seem to think we can turn even this catastrophic change into something purportedly good by using it as an excuse to re-configure our economy, as if technology and business have the capacity to save us even from this... even though these impulses got us into it.

  

I have read several good books forecasting Pentecostalism as the future of the church.  Harvey Cox, Phyllis Tickle, and perhaps James K. A. Smith suggest this.  Pentecostalism has many different forms, but it is the fastest growing branch of Christianity, by far.  How do we feel about this movement as our future?  Yes, the explosion of the Spirit at Azusa Street did express something radical, new, and good in its multi-racial, classless, inclusive character.  But the movement soon soured into exclusive racial segments, and tended to drift in pathological directions.  For one thing, the "prosperity gospel" pervades a lot of Pentecostalism.  And who foresaw anything as toxic as the New Apostolic Reformation coming out of this?  Much of Pentecostalism drips with White Nationalism, conspiracy theories, and the advocacy and perpetration of violence.

Whatever the next Christianity looks like, especially any movement trying to ride the Holy Spirit, the most essential reality we have to keep in the center of our consciousness remains "Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture."  He must remain our grounding and our goal, the Source of our energy and the form that energy takes when flowing through us into the world.  Otherwise we will drift into the same kinds of atrocities that have characterized the Church in every age, when it sells out to the Empire, and starts doing whatever people want.

The book of the Bible that most concerns change and new things, of course, is Revelation.  Revelation depicts the violent and spectacular collapse of Empire, finally giving way to the emergence of a New Heaven and a New Earth.  We do not get to the latter without passage through the former.  Actual change will always mean traversing the proverbial nine miles of bad road.  It will mean disintegration and deconstruction, before the wonderful new thing can appear.  

Jesus Christ and his Kingdom/Commonwealth is always and only the new thing emerging in the world with, within, and among us.  Everything else is same old same old, even with revolutions.  In the words of Pete Townsend who knew that revolution means going around in a circle, they're just, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  In the meantime we maintain a steadfast witness to Jesus Christ, the Lamb who was slain and yet who now reigns, by living his life of compassion, justice, equity, inclusion, forgiveness, humility, and joy.  He is always new, always present, and always real.  The Creator always wins in the end; but before that we suffer defeat after defeat.  Nevertheless we live in the light of that final victory which does still shine on us, even in the storm.

+++++++