Tag Archives: Faith

And so, to the Garden

01 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by in Faith, Lent

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And so, today and tonight the story moves to the Last Supper, a Seder meal remembering that God had set the Jews free from the Eqyptian Captivity, and for us, that is not unconnected, for that tradition moved into Christianity, and has led to the unparalleled freedom we have enjoyed and defended against all others. That freedom is one of the fruits of Christianity, it has never existed except where Judaism and Christianity ruled, and it still doesn’t.

From the time when Christians were the wonder of the ancient world as they disregarded the all but universal practice of leaving unwanted infants to die of exposure to this very day as we fight against the horrors of infanticide whose proponents use the euphemism of abortion to hide their crime. It is all down to Judeao-Christians honoring God’s promise.

But tonight Jesus will go to Gethsemene to camp one last time (in the flesh) with His disciples. There Judas will find his chance to betray the Lord and will take it.

In 2013 Jessica published an excellent meditation on Judas here on her blog. It starts like this.

Even the first time he appears, Judas’ name is associated with the betrayal which makes him infamous and immortal in history. We have two accounts of how he met his end: St Matthew tells us he hanged himself in a fit of shame and remorse; in Acts, Luke tells us ‘Now this man purchased a field with the wages of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out.’ He has become the epitome of the false friend. Why did he do it?

The Synoptic Gospels agree that Judas was bribed. Greed then, 30 pieces of silver; was it for this that the Saviour of the World was handed over to the torturers? John goes further, telling us that Judas ‘was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it.’  He objected to Mary using expensive, scented oil to anoint the feet of the Lord, giving us one of the few other insights we have into his behaviour.

I heartily recommend it, Jess does these better than almost anyone ever has. On that same day, on my blog, she was also speaking of Judas, and while you would do well to read the whole post, I’ll give you some of her conclusions.

Judas had clearly had enough. Though the Synoptic Gospels tell us he betrayed Jesus for silver, John gives us the clue that it was Mary’s use of expensive oil to anoint Jesus’ feet which pushed him over the edge. It might, of course, be, as John said, that he had been tipping into the till and helping himself to money, but his taking offence was clear enough evidence of what type of man he was.  He was a zealot, a puritan – how dare Jesus allow people to waste oil which could have been spent to help the poor. He, Judas, knew what was right, and he had lost patience with Jesus.

Simon Peter was headstrong, and didn’t always get it right. After supper, when Jesus had said He was going to wash the feet of the disciples, Peter protested and said He wouldn’t allow it. But when Jesus told him that if he didn’t, he couldn’t be with Him, Peter didn’t ask for an explanation, he told Jesus he wanted to be washed all over.

Caiaphas and Judas reasoned their way through to a conclusion based on their own insights, and they saw, as we all do, only so far. Peter also reasoned his way to what seemed to him a sensible conclusion, but the love he felt for Jesus opened his heart and he saw further than he had with his intellect. Jesus warned him that he had been handed over to Satan to be ‘sifted’. Peter declared he never would deny Jesus – but Christ knew what was coming.

As the disciples slept and the Romans and the Jewish guard came closer, the silence of that dark night was broken only by the anguish of Jesus. His time had come.

And so it was foretold, and so it happened.

Back Again Into the Wasteland

17 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Church/State, Lent, poetry, Tolkien

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The Hollow Men 5A note from Neo

Well, I’m back again, not that I really left, I’ve been posting on the Neo blog, as many of you know, because that has been more appropriate to my thoughts lately. I have been thinking of you though, there are a fair number of us here, but we tend to be, I suspect a good bit alike, and if you’re like me, you feel very much like a sojourner in a strange land.

Today is, of course, Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, when we traditionally give up things by which we commemorate Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, as we prepare ourselves for Easter.

I first republished this article of Jessica’s on Ash Wednesday in 2015, it is from 10 March 2013 originally on NEO and is quite similar to the one here also on 10 March 2013 called Mere Anarchy. I found the NEO version a bit more understandable, but I link them both because you may well differ. At the time I reblogged this well, it was a troubled time in my life, you who knew Jessica then will know that this was while she was at the Convent recovering from cancer, and our contact was severely limited. But God be praised that worked out. Here is Jessica’s post.

Into the Wasteland

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

The opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem speak with eloquence to any age and people who feel disconnected from what they feel is a calamitous and collapsing socio-political world.

Eliot was writing in the aftermath of the most catastrophic war in the history of the Western world. It was the war when hope died. How could one believe in progress after the Somme and the horrors of the Western Front? And what had all of that slaughter been for? A settlement at Versailles which few believed would really bring peace to the world.  Men like Wilson and Hoover, or MacDonald and Baldwin, seemed small men facing giant problems, and sure enough, within fifteen years the world had once more descended into the abyss.

Does the fault lie in our leaders? They do, indeed, seem to be hollow men, with heads stuffed with straw. The words of Yeats’ Second Coming seem apposite to our times:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

Writing in 1919, Yeats wondered:   

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand

But it was not so. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo tells Gandalf that he wishes he did not live in the time he did, when such dreadful things were happening. Gandalf’s reply is for all of us:

So do I,’  said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

It is not for us to decide such things. All each of us can do in the end is to decide how we live our lives and by what star we steer. Those of us with a Christian faith, like Tolkien himself, know we are strangers in this world, and we know by whose star we steer. We can rage all we like against the way the world seems to be going, so did our forefathers, and so will our descendants. Eliot ends with a dying fall:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

But Yeats, in best prophetic mode wondered:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For me, Eliot’s words in Ash Wednesday ring truest:

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

That’s pretty much what the world feels like, increasingly to me, at least, it seems that we may have to simply burn it down and try to rebuild in the ruins. but I continue to hope not, so we will see.

In many ways, Kipling asked the question I think our political, and a fair share of church, as well, leadership should have to answer

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

But as Jess said above, we don’t get to pick the era in which we live, we are simply called to do the best we can. And so we shall, God willing.  NEO

What Brought You to Faith?

10 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Faith

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I have a conversation currently still in process that started on Facebook and moved to private messaging with an atheist from Australia. He is very respectful, and to get me talking, that’s all I really need from a person. So his initial comment has stretched into multiple comments spanning everything from how we know what we believe is true, to progressive revelation, to secular morality, and more. We’re not even done yet, but I’m waiting for him to finally say, “All right, Jesus man. That’s enough.”

It’s gotten me thinking again about why I believe what I believe. More than that, why do those reasons work for me and not someone else? I guess we can all chalk it up to the Holy Spirit, but I’m sure we all have our own story here about how we got from no belief to belief, or how we grew up believing and got through the gauntlet of secular culture to the faith we are in now.

I put this out as a question to all of you who write on here – and I guess to anyone else, as well, but mostly to all of you who write here. What did it for you? What brought you to the faith or kept you there when you were teetering on the edge of doubt?

For me, it’s miracle stories. I know that might sound weird, but it’s true. In community college, I took an Intro to Philosophy class and had a crisis of faith. But I reflected on the life of George Muller of Bristol. He was a pastor who was frustrated that all the businessmen in his congregation were cutthroat and unscrupulous in their business practices. Their excuse was that their jobs were cutthroat. Unless you cheated, you would never be able to support yourself and your family.

Muller did not agree and decided to embark on building an orphanage from the ground up solely on prayer. He never asked anyone for money. He never asked for supplies. But by the end of his life, he had taken care of around 10,000 orphans and had established 117 schools that gave Christian education to more than 120,000 children. All on prayer. All on faith.

In his diary are stories of the children never having to wait more than half an hour for their three square meals each day – even when the cupboards were bare. Once, they were out of milk, and a milk truck or carriage broke down right in front of the orphanage. The man who rode it said the milk would go bad anyway, so the orphanage might as well have it. Another time, a baker couldn’t get any sleep because God kept telling him to bake bread for Muller’s children. His life is full of these stories.

Every time my mind would wonder, “Could I be wrong? Could this philosopher be right? Is my faith a sham?” I would immediately think, “But what about George Muller?”

It is his story and other miracle stories from other people’s lives that help keep me in the faith. I know great men and women have argued back and forth about whether God exists or not and whether Christianity has enough historical evidence to back it up. I know those discussions lead many to faith as well. But for me, it’s the direct action of God in the world in ways that cannot be easily explained away that inspire me to keep going.

Well, that and the donuts after Mass.

©2021 Catholic Anonymous.

Faith examined: some comments

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Epiphany, Faith

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Nicholas’ post here ttps://jessicahof.blog/2021/01/25/faith-examined/ is a fascinating one, but maybe I am not just speaking for myself if I say that as a non-philosopher, I found some of the terms rebarabative. I am so grateful to Nicholas for explaining them so well, and wasn’t, as it were, to riff off them to say something about faith.

In the first place by definition for me, faith is about a belief in something you can’t prove. It’s not like gravity. If you say you don’t believe in gravity, jump out of an upstairs window to check it!

I have believed in God longer than my conscious memory can recall. When I went to Sunday school as a small child it all just made sense if things. I’d always known I was not alone, even though I was an only child. Even though I had no mother, I felt there was a maternal love that was gifted me from someone. So when the Sunday school teacher explained about Jesus loving me, I knew who that someone was. It resonated with what I knew by intuition.

Was I indoctrinated? All I can say is that if so, it was a poor programme, as few of those who went to that class stayed with the Faith. I saw the other day that the head of the Humanist organisation in the UK, Professor Alice Roberts wrote about indoctrination in Church schools. That actually made me giggle. I can only assume that the professor has never been taught in one? Still, as she also likened the UK to Iran, and thought that the Bishops who sit in the Lords were part of the “goverment” maybe we should not take her too seriously? For sure, none of the Church schools I attended did much by way of indoctrination.

I actually loved school assemblies, but was one of the few girls who did. I also loved early morning chapel when I was a boarder, but again, was one of the few who did. In other words, while there was nothing in my environment growing up (other than my atheist father and a secular society, so nothing major then!) which militated against my believing, there was certainly nothing in the way of indoctrination. Indeed “Religious Studies” lessons were often more about other religions than they were my own.

It may be that I am just unusually suggestible. I loved my Confirmation classes and found them helpful. I love going to church. Communion, which I am denied at the moment, is so important to my well-being that it feels like the hardest and most prolonged Lent ever.

So, when atheists and others start up with the old routine of “where’s the evidence?” apart from their bad faith, as we all know there is nothing by way of an answer that could ever satisfy their sad reductionist idea of what evidence is, the thing that strikes me is the irrelevance of the question. The evidence is inside me. It is the love I know God has for me which draws my love out to Him.

The Creeds give me all the framework I need. I like my Church precisely for the reasons others don’t. It takes a very broad approach to membership. It often seems illogical and a bit vague on some issues, usually those where logic and precision might harm individuals. It gives a lot of voice to the laity, and it refuses (any longer) to torture itself over the place of women in the ministry, and in the absence of a Pope, we don’t get too worried about the obiter dicta of our chief Bishop. It still sees itself as a place where all who live here can go, and it allows you to come and go as you wish without too much in the way of expectations.

Most of all, it is a Church which recognises we are all sinners and which refuses, as a Church, to throw stones. There is a Judgement. But it will be God who judges, and if we are wise and humble, we will not attempt to anticipate it.

I believe because quite literally, I can do no other. There have been, and there are, times when God seems more remote, but I know why that is. He is where he has always been, it is me who has wandered off. But he’s there when I come back. There I have found praying the daily offices of the Church a real help. Even at the times I feel remote, I feel the connection tighten. Like any relationship, you get out what you put in.

As we approach Lent, it is a time to ask ourselves what we do put in? I am going to be running a Lent Book series, but more about that tomorrow. What we can all do at this time of pestilence and fear, is to be kind to each other, and loving, and examine what our Faith tells us about how we come through to better times. I am not sure that keep on keeping on is a philosophy, but it sounds awfully Anglican, so I will go with it.

Context

25 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in Audre, Faith

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There is a YouTube channel that I’ve been watching for some time now. It is a family man, Alex, in Alberta, Canada, a family man, who owns an antiques store. For Americans, he’s very Canadian (an inside joke, I suspect) but he’s a good guy and constantly busy doing ‘picks’ (looking for items for the antiques store) and or rebuilding old cars as well as typical husband/dad stuff. I enjoy his videos and I love antiques so it’s a good match.

I noticed a title to one of his videos, something along the lines of changing a person’s life for $20. I know my Bible pretty well after all these years and as many times as I’ve read it so I shied away from watching this video. (Matthew 6:4 4so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.)

Today I was watching one his videos and it turned out to be the background story of the video I didn’t watch. Then it was all clear to me. This is how he meets Adam $3500 from a dumpster?! Amazing garbage find! the things people throw away… – YouTube.

After success, Alex searches for Adam Paying it forward, changing a homeless man’s life forever for just $20. – YouTube. This is the video I didn’t want to watch because of the title. I watched it today.

This video is the follow up to the first two From $20 in trash to a new life. One year later… Homeless no more! Part 4 – YouTube.

I am humbled by Alex’s good heart and ashamed at my own rigidity or self-righteousness. I judged a book by its cover or, more accurately, a video by it’s title, made assumptions that were wrong, and learned that if I really knew my Bible, or really knew Jesus, I would have been – should have been – intrigued by the title and the promise of how one might change another person’s life. A little knowledge is, indeed, a dangerous thing and I am living proof.

Not everyone or everything is as they appear – there’s always a lot more to each story and I would do well to remember that, going forward. Perhaps this is also a reminder to all who may read this. That is my hope at least.

Oh! Now that you know Alex and Curiosity Incorporated, you may want to watch two series he has about buying a hoarded house – contents and house – called The Potter’s House and then one in which he bought the contents alone, called The Musician’s House. And as a special kick to your heart, watch the episodes in which he does a Go Fund Me for his sometime worker, Hans.

But! There’s this …

28 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by in Audre, Faith

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The year 2020 has been remarkable in so many ways. It seems there are no happy people on the planet. I admit, I’m having more down days than up days, too.

Prayers are built for comfort and they do comfort us. They remind us of Who is in charge and that we are never alone; He will neither leave us nor forsake us. Great comfort in that.

Being human, however, that confidence in Jesus can get a little weak, get a little dimmed by what’s around us. Sometimes, it takes something more to get us back on the right track, restore in full measure what we know so well.

This is a very short article because I’d much rather you focus on these videos. I can not explain in words how the elevate me, how they lift my soul.

So, yes; there’s politics and yes, there’s virus, and yes, there’s the economy. But! There’s this:

And this:

It is well with my soul.

There Is Something About Mary

24 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Faith, Marian devotion

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In her first post here, Jessica said this:

Our Lord Jesus Christ (OLJC) told the Apostles that men would know His followers by their love for each other, and He counselled them to be united; knowing us as He does, He can’t have been all that surprised that we’ve fallen away from those ideals. Perhaps if we were better at them there would be less for the polemicists to reproach us with? Great crimes have been committed in the name of Christianity, that is true, as it is of any great cause entrusted to fallen mankind. It is in our fallen nature to pervert whatever good things we have from God. In our folly we use the consequences of our own sinful state to reject the opportunity to reach out for God’s love; and in our pride erect a superstructure of Pharisaism on OLJC’s words, before proceeding to live in it rather than the love of Christ.

How very true that is we demonstrate each and every day. Yet there are things that we revere that bring us closer together. Today our Catholic brethren will celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham. That dream of Richeeldis de Faverches, A Saxon noblewoman who founded the shrine in 1061. It prospered all through medieval times visited by every King of England from William the Conqueror to Henry VIII. It was destroyed in the second round of the Dissolution of the Monasteries with its renowned statue of Mary being taken to London to be burnt, either in Chelsea or at Smithfield along with many other statues from the monasteries. or was it?

In an article on his blog, Dr. Francis Young summarizes an article he and Fr Michael Rear wrote for the Catholic Herald a year or so ago, on the circumstantial evidence they have found that a statue of the Virgin and child (apparently 13th century) referred to as the Langham Madonna, (pictured above) now at the Victoria and Albert Museum may, in fact, be the statue that once adorned the Holy House at Walsingham. He really doesn’t go into enough detail for me to have an opinion in his blog post, and the Catholic Herald article comes up 404. But he makes a pretty good case for it. Apparently, it was a common form at that time and this is the only one that survived. It’s worth your time to read and wonder. Walsingham has always had something of the miraculous about it, as you’ll know if you’ve read our various posts about it.

It started with Jessica’s Pilgrimage there in 2012 only a couple months after starting this blog, which she detailed here, here, and here. She gives a very good outline history of the shrine in the course of these posts, and in a personal note, she did indeed light candles for her readers, and at that almost precise time, I felt a great peace go through me, and that is when our friendship became deep and unshakable.

The shrine is also connected with us in other ways, including her miraculous cure from cancer.

The Shrine which has been so central to this blog (if you search for ‘Walsingham” you will find many articles, from Jessica, from Chalcedon, and from me dealing with it. But the main thing bout it seems to me to be a unifying force for Christians of all types and places.

There is a Catholic Shrine at the Slipper Chapel which is historically connected with it, there is an orthodox Shrine and Methodist and (I think) even Coptic chapels. And that is also what we for eight years have attempted to do here, to be ecumenical without being syncretic. In the main, we have succeeded.

In a post on Our Lady Day in Harvest, in 2017 A Clerk of Oxford gave us a very good reading as to what Mary meant to our forbearers.

Though they contain plenty of miracles and marvels and angels, they’re somehow very human and ordinary. At the heart of them is a woman, loving and much loved, whose life is traced from the first wonder of her conception to her peaceful death. In a sequence like that at Chalgrove, or in Ely’s Lady Chapel, or in the Book of Hours or the plays, Mary’s life is mapped out through domestic, everyday scenes: parents rejoicing in the birth of a longed-for baby; a little girl learning to read with her mother, or climbing the steps to the temple like a child on her first day at school; a teenage Mary with her female friends, happy with her baby, at her churching, or in the last days of her life. These were familiar rituals of childhood and motherhood which resonated with medieval audiences – with women especially, but not only women. They are completely relatable, not only for mothers like Margery Kempe but for anyone who has ever had a mother, ever been a child, and there’s something beautiful about elevating such ordinary family relationships to the dignity of high art. In these scenes Mary is not an unapproachably distant figure but a woman imagined in relationship to others: a daughter, wife, mother, friend. In particular, the story of her passing is full of other people and their love for her – the apostles and her friends gathering around her bedside, Christ cradling her soul in his arms like a child. She is unique, but never alone.

Personally, I always like to end these posts with these words from St Isaac the Syrian

In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the One who has performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.

“Believe It and You Have It”

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Lutheranism

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If you were to ask Martin Luther, the most famous question in American Evangelicalism, “Are you born again?” He would say, “Of course I am a born-again Christian, I am baptized.” As do many of us to this day. We are Christians, we have always been (as far as we can remember). What is this tosh about born again?

What this is all about is why Lutherans (and I suspect in some ways it applies to all of the older churches), at least those who use the phrase, “One Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church” as we do. we tend to be not wholly Protestant.

That is why there is no revivalism in Lutheranism, or indeed in the Orthodox or Catholic traditions, where we teach baptismal regeneration and practice infant baptism. Let’s look at some differences, shall we?

For Luther, justification isn’t tied to any single event but happens as often as we repent and return to the power of baptism. Justification by faith alone happens in the Catholic context of the Catholic sacrament of penance. Sorry, it’s not a once in a lifetime deal. This doesn’t eliminate choice (one can always refuse to believe).

Luther’s beliefs parallel the Catholic belief in sacramental efficacy, which places salvific power in external things. Without this, we must rely on faith as well, in other words, the fact that I believe.

Luther often says, “Believe it and you have it”, in many variations. This is not because faith earns it or achieves anything, it is simply because God keeps his word.

This is certainly not because of the perception of the mind, this is purely rigorously objective truth, God does not lie. Our certainty is based upon that, not on our faith. In Why Luther Is Not Quite Protestant,¹ Phillip Cary writes.

Whoever believes and is baptized is saved” (Mark 16:16) Luther teaches that the baptismal formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” is the word of Christ.  Luther is emphatic on this point: the words spoken in the act of baptizing are Christ’s own, so it is Christ who really performs the baptism.  Most importantly for the logic of faith, the first-person pronoun in the baptismal formula refers to Christ, so that it is Christ himself who says to me, “I baptize you….”  Ministers are merely the mouthpiece for this word of Christ, just as when they say, “This is my body, given for you.”

Making that decision for Christ or a conversion experience actually detracts from, the point about faith alone. We are justified by believing what Christ says is true. In short, God does not lie.

In brief, it is all based on the truthfulness of God, and we (and Luther did as well) like Paul’s saying in Romans 3:4 “Let God be true and every man a liar.”

And that every man includes us. We can put no faith in our own words, not even in our confession of faith. That is one reason for infant baptism, it’s pretty shaky ground to baptize on the basis of a believer’s confession of faith because we never really know what we believe. Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone means that Christians can’t rely on faith. Faith itself doesn’t rely on itself but only Christ’s promise,

This is the well known Lutheran pro me. The emphasis is not on our experience but on what God said. It’s quite unreflective.

More to come in this series, as I get it sorted myself.

¹Pro Ecclesia 14/4 ((Fall 2005)

Consistent with love?

01 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Reading the BIble

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I recently had occasion to quote this to our long-time commentator, Bosco: “Whatever is not consistent with love of God and neighbour cannot be a right interpretation of Scripture.” St Augustine was the author of this wise saying, and it is the key to our understanding of Scripture.

One reason, politeness apart, that I interact with Bosco here is that beneath the unappealing surface of what he writes, there is a child of God and a man who believes that he is “saved” and has a concern for the rest of us. Ironically, when he criticises St Thomas More and others in the Church for the way they treated heretics in the past, he fails to see that they were motivated by much the same thoughts that motivate him, namely the view that someone else is teaching “another gospel” and putting their soul in peril, as well as the souls of others. More, like his Protestant successors, had the power of the State on his side and could use it to correct error. Bosco only has the internet, which he uses to scarify the Catholic Church, which he believes is in error. And so it goes on.

The Bible is not a text-book, it is not a history book, it is not a work of scientific accuracy, and yet we believe, nay we know, that it contains everything we need to know in order to attain salvation. But how are we to understand it? Bosco tells us confidently that it explains itself to the person of faith, and follows that up by demonstrating that it doesn’t, by coming to conclusions the diametric opposite of others who read it. Now, it is of course, just possible that a small group of American Fundamentalists understand the Book Canonised by the Church better than the Church which Canonised it, but on the balance of probabilities, it would be unwise to bet the farm, let alone your soul, on it.

At this point in internet “dialogue” it is common to get into proof-texting. Well, I can speak only for myself and I don’t kow about you, but I am heartily sick of Christians from different Churches throwing proof texts at each other.

In her post yesterday, Audre advised us that she was a “big picture” person, and that is good advice. Once we realise that the biggest picture is that God is love, and therefore any interpretation of Scripture inconsistent with love of God and neighbour cannot be correct. It follows that in our dealings with each other, whilst love might lead us to be alarmed that x or y is “wrong” in their interpretation, so might we be.

It is for that reason that Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox look to the teaching of the Church to support the readings which their own reasoning suggests. No-one who knows anything about the Catholic Church could believe what only those who know nothing about it propound when they suggest that it seeks to tell its members how the read the Bible in every aspect of its richness. That is not, and never has been, the function of the Church.

The Church is the repository of the “rule of Faith”. It is the guardian of the Creeds through which it interprets what it received from the hands of the Apostles themselves. So, to take one example, you can argue about what you think the Trinity is, and you can support yourself with proof-texts, but the Church knows that heretical positions were, in the past (as now) supported by clever men (and it is always men … just saying) with arguments of their own devising, and so, if we are wise, we will turn to the Church to see what it has to say on the matter. There we discover the wisdom of the ages, guided by the Holy Spirit. We can then measure our own conclusions against that collective wisdom. If we think we are right, then of course, we shall act on that. But if we are wise, we will pray for discernment. I don’t know about you, but I lack whatever spirit it is that leads people to believe that they know better than the mind of the Church.

Love is the guide for how we should read Scripture. We bring to it emotional and cultural baggage which is bound to influence how we read and interpret, and it is right that should be the case; even were it not right, it is inevitable. But then let us measure our thoughts against the yardstick that God is Love. The Holy Spirit speaks to us in love, but in the struggle to translate that into words, we can miss the deeper level at which He communicates to us. God abides with us always. Of course we will feel ourselves “unworthy”, and we are – by our standards. If we look at us through God’s eyes, we are the reason that Christ suffered, died, was buried and rose again, we are loved that much. Do you get it? I don’t in my head, but I do emotionally. It makes no sense to my earthly standards, but that just tells me how far those are from God’s.

The Holy Spirit speaks through the Church, and He speaks to all of us if we have ears to hear and a heart open to receiving Him. I am unworthy, and yet Christ died for me, so I am worthy. Yes, I see the distance between this weak and fallible person and the infinite goodness of the Trinity, but then through prayer and through Grace, I have faith that the gap will narrow and I can enter more deeply into the ultimate reality of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.