06.07.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Traditions vs. sacred texts
Those of us living now in post-Christendom have something of a collective memory of the once violent conflict between Christians who placed priority on their sacred texts and those who placed priority on their sacred traditions. You know, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.
I tend to be a bit Catholic on this one myself because it seems to me that all sacred texts are traditions. The Christian bible was written by a few dozen people over several centuries. (Although the New Testament itself was written within a fifty year time span.) The often taken-for-granted collection of these works is the product of tradition. Someone, some time, had to decide to lump these books together into a collection. And then someone else (several of them) at some other time (several of those too) had to decide to keep the collection together and hand it down.
Tradition is also responsible for the exclusion of a good many books. The Other Bible is a handy collection of just those books. Some, like the Gospel of Thomas, are quite excellent and present an alternative view of the Christian message that Constantinian Christianity chose to reject. Martin Luther was no fan of James–it argues that “faith without works is dead,” a troublesome verse for his doctrine of salvation via faith alone–and made noise about kicking it out of the canon. And many, many folks over the centuries have made a case for kicking Revelation out the canon.
Currently, there’s a movement to start using “faith tradition” in place of “religion.” Why? Many people know exactly what a religion is: it’s a collection of superstitions they don’t like. (That this view is just plain rude and a junior high level of faith development is the subject for another post.) If “faith” is understood to be a lifestyle orientation toward someone’s “ultimate concern,” then a “faith tradition” is the communities, cultures, and institutions that support the individual’s life of faith.
Click to continue reading “Traditions vs. sacred texts”
(Adapted–as encouraged–from the pamphlet “60 Ways to Share Christ’s Love,” published by the Evangelism Division of the Baptist State Convention of South Carolina.)
Sixty Ways for Sixty Days
One of the greatest joys a No Doubt fan club member can experience is that of having a part in leading another person to saving faith in No Doubt. We are surrounded with people who need to hear the life-changing message of No Doubt. Our role is that of messenger.
The suggestions in this booklet offer a variety of ways to open the door for a witness. These sixy (60) ways to share No Doubt are not all-inclusive. Adaptations and variations of these suggestions are encouraged as you seek to be an effective fan club member.
Lifestyle evangelism is essential in reaching those with whom we come in contact daily. Share No Doubt’s message in both action and words. A SUCCESSFUL WITNESS occurs when a fan club member shares the No Doubt Good News in the power of Ska and leaves the results to No Doubt. No Doubt alone convicts and brings individuals to the point of decision in Their appointed time. They ask Their followers to be faithful in sharing Their message of ska.
Personal Activities
1) Invite a friend to a No Doubt concert. Following the concert, go out for dessert and talk with him or her about the message presented in the concert.
2) Send a birthday card to a friend. Enclose a personal note sharing about your own “ska birthday.”
3) Clip a No Doubt article from the fan club newsletter or newspaper music colum and mail it to a friend who needs to know Gwen Stefani. Include a personal note conveying ska and compassion.
4) Subscribe to the fan club newsletter for a friend.
5) Write a letter of encouragement to a college student. Point them to the Band who encourages you daily.
Click to continue reading “60 Easy Ways to Share No Doubt’s Love”
The Happy Tutor has an excellent post imagining global civil society circa 2015. It’s said that where empires have subjects, states have citizens. Nevertheless, Foucault argues that the state still makes heavy demands on its citizen-subjects. These often unspoken obligations include:
- to live (in as close to full health as possible)
- to work productively (so as to contribute to the GNP)
- to consume (so as to contribute to the GNP)
- to die, if necessary
- to believe, if not in an ideology, then in “our way of life”
- to reproduce (ultimately, so that there will be others available to die on behalf ofthe state)
- to learn
The state then monitors its population along these lines so as to protect its own health. (The health of its population is merely incidental.)
My question: Will global civil society circa 2015 (whichever form it takes) require any of these of its “population” on behalf of the health of the global order? Will any of them fall by the wayside, even for states? What new obligations will arise in the global order of 2015? (Will it require us to blog?)
Include in your personal canon all texts –books, poems, films, music, art, etc.– in which you have experienced the sacred. (Don’t include those you merely liked or found meaninful, or you’ll end up with the world’s longest list.) They do not need to be what you’d traditionally consider religious texts. It’s okay to include fragments (say, a particular paragraph in a book or a scene in a movie).
Pay particular attention to include texts you’ve returned to again and again over the years and texts you’ve been known to push on friends. A good criteria: would I want to pass this particular text on to folks I care about? Another good criteria: does this world read me and my world?
What patterns do you notice in your canon? Is it predominantly one medium (say, scifi films or renaissance poetry) more than others? Are there any common themes? Are any of those themes at odds with each other? Are your selections dominated by one or more periods of your life? If so, why? If your canon doesn’t include traditionally religious texts, is it from lack of familiarity or lack of experiencing the sacred in those texts?
Does you personal canon challenge you? A canon that only affirms what you already know and believe will not feed you over time and indicates a stagnant spirituality. Does anything in your canon trouble you? Absense of prophetic imagination signals hollow character. Do you understand everything in your canon? Absence of mystery indicates a denial of life’s ambiguities and crises.
Allow your canon to shrink and expand. There is no shortage of new texts that could be windows to the sacred, and it’s likely that forgotten texts will return from time to time.
Most formal god-talks have a chapter or two up front dealing with the question of how it is that we could come to know anything at all about god. More to the point, they lay out which ways of god-knowing are correct and which are incorrect. (Theology tip: if you can throw out your opponent’s way of knowing god at this point, you can use it against her later.)
I was raised Methodist (among other things), and last century Methodist god-talkers synthesized founder John Wesley’s disparate thoughts on god-knowing into what’s known as the “Wesleyan quadrilateral.” (Wesley’s god-talk was written on an as needed basis, so he was never so sytematic as to have spelled it out just so.) And you thought you’d never use geometry.
The quadrilateral sets out four methods of god-knowing. All four methods should be used, each in the way appropriate to it. The four methods check and balance each other. The four methods are scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Wesley makes scripture the first and last method used; all disagreements among the other methods are ultimately resolved via scripture. If you think as the quadrilateral as a baseball diamond, scripture is home base. If the primacy of scripture is his nod to Protestant influence, then his inclusion of tradition is a nod to his catholicity. (Wesley died an Anglican priest.) Wesley’s understanding of reason and experience stems from John Locke, which we might today understand more narrowly as logic and sensory experience. (You could group the two together as early modern empiricism.)
For starters, I propose we make each corner of the quadrilateral plural: that is, scriptures, traditions, reasons, and experiences.
Click to continue reading “How can we know god?”
Next time you run into the village atheist, ask him which “God” he doesn’t believe in. Invariably, he will go on to describe “the Man upstairs” or some other version of “Evil Santa Claus.” Or as sung by the cast of Futurama:
He knows when you are sleeping,
He knows when you’re on the can,
He’ll hunt you down and blast your ass
From here to Pakistan
You better not breathe,
You better not move,
You’re better off dead I’m telling you dude
Santa Claus is gunning you down
Good, classic theology. Well, actually not. No classic theologian I’ve ever read describes “God” as a cranky old man in the sky, ready to strike you down with lightning should you displease him. (Sounds like some cross between Odin and Thor.)
Well, no serious theologian since the Yahwist. Biblical scholars now believe that the Hebrew Bible was composed by several different “author traditions,” each of which had their own god-talk. The priestly tradition has a well-ordered if abstract god who likes to lay down a lot of ritual purity laws. The Elohist tradition calls its god “Elohim,” and he seems to operate mostly as an influential friend of the family (of Abraham). The Deuteronomist tradition wrote the biggest single chunk, and it’s keen on showing how the fortunes of Israel correlated directly to how much attention they were giving Yahweh versus Baal. (Except for the parts that don’t match up, which they ignore.)
Click to continue reading “Why “god” and “God™?””
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