Every religious system in the world has followers within it who claim that they have the only true understanding of God, the only true "church", and theirs is the only way to "salvation", whatever that happens to mean to them.
*Not being a Catholic, I’m afraid I don’t know enough about where their tradition and doctrine comes from. So, I’ve been reading a little. Here’s one tradition that is a prime example of ex post facto.
The doctrine of the immaculate conception was declared by the Pope in 1854 as undoubted truth. "The truth" is that it was declared out of "religious" necessity. The dogma states, if you are not familiar with it, that Mary was born without the stain of "original sin". This dogma became necessary when science proved without a doubt that men and women co-created life together. Up until this time women were thought of as only recepticles of a life that the male actually produced. Soooooo…..if Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, she still would pass on sin to Jesus and would have corrupted him. To provide her with an immaculate and sinless conception took care of that. Thus, the 1854 declaration by the Pope. Theology will adjust to reality, no matter what that reality is. Unchanging or infallible, religion is not.
Various religions around the world have claimed that their religion is "revealed truth", truth revealed to them by God. To think of a religion as "revealed truth" is to give to it the power to compel conformity and thereby to enable "nonconformists" to be effectively silenced, ostracized or worse. That is why excommunication and other forms of shunning have been such terrifying punishments throughout history. This is the main way that mainline as well as fringe religions today enforce conformity.
One of religion’s more absurd assertions has to be the claim for the inerrancy of the Bible. This claim is still made by many despite the fact that we now know that Matthew and Luke took Marcan material and incorporated it into their own gospels freely changing, correcting, editing, and deleting from and adding to Mark. This was not done infrequently. How can any one of these things be done to "the inerrant word of God".There are thousands of other illustrations of "bad" Biblical literalism. These will suffice until you do your own research.
"The time has come to look once again at what it means to be human and what it means to be one in whom the life of God lives, the love of God loves, and the being of God is made manifest."
~John Shelby Spong
GOD IS LOVE. What does that really mean to you?
Paul is quoted in Galatians as saying that inside the Christ experience there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female. This surely expresses the unbounded love of God, our Source. I see a new humanity emerging. A new humanity that sees that God, our Source, the Ground of all Being, is Love and understands what that phrase truly means. God not only loves unboundedly, but IS love itself. Therefore, a new humanity must always be the product of love. It must grow into an even deeper humanity , an unbounded humanity , even a transcendent humanity.
The more we understand that we are the beneficiaries of an unmerited gift of love from the Source of all, the Ground of all Being, the less we need to relate to the theistic images of our religious past. As this takes place, the realm of the supernatural fades and the experience of love as the ultimate dimension of the divine begins to grow.
While it is true that, to many of us, the advent of knowledge has rather thoroughly destroyed many aspects of the supernatural in our religion, the church as a whole has not been able to come to grips with the demise of the supernatural.
As a result, in the past five years, I have felt more and more alienated from traditional church life.
Increasingly I see the church as an organization for the spiritually immature. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying this in an elitist way, thinking I am better than others. I am not. However, the traditional church seems to be like a body of children vying for the approval of a heavenly parent. Also, it is engaged in a medieval attempt at the manipulation of the divine, for their benefit. I see the church increasingly retreating into unreality.
Church life seems to be more dedicated to behavior control, and church politics, who’s IN and who’s OUT of "the kingdom". I don’t want to be a part of a faith community that says that the color of one’s skin, the ethnicity of one’s ancestors, the gender of one’s body, or the sexual orientation of one’s brain determines a person’s worth, holiness, or access to being a part of who the Source really is.
I want to be part of a new humanity where LOVE is the theme.
Read it at: charterforcompassion.org/
"The church in America today is not very healthy because the Sunday diet consists mainly of SIN, the need to REPENT, and other WARNINGS about what God will do if one does not obey!"
*from Ernie Fitzpatrick at www.lrchouston.com/
A "You Tube" video worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJMm4RAwVLo
Karen Armstrong is a former Roman Catholic nun who has written more than 20 books about common themes in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, including "The Bible: A Biography." She received the 2008 TED Prize.
*This is part two of a post I wrote some time ago. I relied heavily on Bart Erhman’s, "Jesus Interrupted" as well as other sources. To read part one, follow this link
In 1934, Walter Bauer published a book which took issue with Eusebius’ view (history) of early Christianity. Bauer found that in many cases early Christianity had forms of belief later labeled heretical that were the original forms of Christianity, and in some parts of the church so called heretics outnumbered those who agreed with the orthodox form of the faith. Moreover, a number of Christian groups saw no sharp divisions between what would later be called heresy and what would be called orthodoxy. The clear theological distinctions of Eusebius’ day were not original to the faith, but created later along the battle lines which were drawn up.
Early Christianity (of the 2nd and 3rd century) was not the monolithic movement we have been led to believe it was. Early on there were all sorts of groups with all sorts of views in lots of different places of that part of the world. All these groups believed that their view, their beliefs were right, that their beliefs were "orthodox".
As stated in Part 1, the Roman Christian group asserted their considerable influence and over the years became the dominant Christian group.
When you read through the ancient discussions of orthodoxy and heresy, it becomes clear the the proto-orthodox, such as those in Rome, had three major weapons with which they did battle against beliefs that they considered heretical. These weapons were: the clergy, the creed, and the canon.
THE CLERGY
Unlike some other Christian groups, the proto-orthodox insisted that there should be a rigid hierarchy in the churches in which a bishop was given authority over the congregation. The bishop had other group leaders under him to meet the physical and spiritual needs of each congregation. By the early 2nd century, proto-orthodox leaders and writers argued that church members were to "regard the bishop as the Lord himself". The leadership would make all decisions for the flock" and exercised control over the churches.
THE CREEDS
These proto-orthodox Christians began to insist that there was only one true faith, the one they ascribed to. Over time the proto-orthodox developed a set of beliefs that it insisted were standard and had to be accepted by everyone in the church. We find early traces of this development in the writings of Tertullian and Irenaeus, who argued the "rule of faith" came down from the apostles and was to be accepted by all Christians and became the backbone of orthodoxy. These views became crystallized in the creeds or statements of faith that were written by the orthodox Christians of the 4th century, namely the "Apostles Creed" and the "Nicene Creed". By having a set of beliefs that everyone was required to accept and that the bishop enforced, the proto-orthodox would be able to weed out those who subscribed to what they saw as false beliefs. On what did they base their creeds? They claimed to have divinely inspired texts, the books of the canon.
THE CANON
In a sense the Christian church, in all its varieties, started out with a set of scripture, The Jewish Scripture. The Jewish Bible was the original Christian canon. We just don’t know what scriptures the early Christians accepted as scripture in Jesus’ day, but almost certainly the Law of Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms. The Jews were in the process of forming their canon at the same time as the Christians. It wasn’t long after Jesus’ death that Christians began the process of expressing which authority’s writings stood on a par with scripture. Jesus’ words, from whatever source functioned as a kind of scripture. Writers like Paul and others, even though they didn’t think of themselves as writing scripture, considered that their writings had authority over the congregations they had helped to start. Eventually, two kinds of scripture emerged: Gospels (containing Jesus’ words and story) and the writings of the apostles. The problem faced by the proto-orthodox was the plethora of so-called "Gospels" supposedly written by apostles. How could they possibly decide which to include (apostolic) and which to leave out? Four criteria emerged for selecting possible inclusions:
Antiquity- going back to the original decades of the church.
Catholicity- only books widely used by the proto-orthodox church could be accepted.
Apostolicity- for a book to be considered, it had to be traced to an apostle or a companion of an apostle.
Orthodoxy- the most important gauge of authenicity was whether it promoted the proto-orthodox view theologically.
As you can see, there was much room for judgements made by the ruling group or leader, so it shouldn’t be surprising as to the books which were eventually chosen. Did they do a good job in choosing the canon? Further research into the choices will reveal to one the answer to that question. That is an answer for the individual to decide.
Fundamentalist, conservative Christians say that God’s hand was on the process from beginning to end regardless of who took part. But, how can that claim be evaluated?
Who was really right? Who had right beliefs (orthodox)? The formation of the canon is in some sense a movement to decide that issue. The final decisions were not a foregone conclusion. For centuries there continued to be Christians who insisted that this, that, or the other had a rightful place in the canon. By the fourth century, the options had pretty well been reduced for those who wished to be a part of the "church".
Stumble it!
