The Organ of Meaning

Last night I was catching up on my feed reader and came across a link to this humorous post called You Might Be Emerging If…

The post is quite funny, and to be honest it doesn’t bring up a contention with the Emergent movement within the church as much as people’s “need” to draw lines and create camps of Christian (and other) thought.

This is the portion that bothered me the most:

You use these words in a positive way:

Missional, Liquid/Aqua, Ancient-Future, Post ___________, Jesus, Community, Derrida, Liturgy, Global, Creed, Experience, Social Justice, Conversation, Spiritual, Ritual, Beauty, Art, Blog, Ooze, Journey, Discussion, Open, Random, Culture, Technology

You use these words in a negative way:

Foundationalism, Absolute Truth, Church Growth, D.A. Carson, Calvinism, Modernism, Fundamentalist, Bush, Seeker Sensitive, Preaching, Pulpit, Doctrine, Innerancy, Power, Enlightenment, Rationalism, Meta-narratives, Universal, Judgmental

As I look through this list of words I identify positively with a number of them on both lists, and this is what kills me. The Emergent and anti-Emergent movements like to cast a lot of these things as if they were mutually exclusive, and they (quite simply) are not. And to be honest, there are some that I’m not even sure what they mean… (Ancient-Future, Foundationalism or Ooze anyone?)

The list of ones that I use in a primarily positive way are:

Missional, Liquid, Jesus, Community, Global, Creed, Experience, Social Justice, Conversation, Spiritual, Ritual, Beauty, Art, Blog, Journey, Discussion, Open, Random, Culture, Technology, Absolute Truth, Church Growth, Calvinism, Modernism, Seeker Sensitive, Preaching, Doctrine, Inerrancy, Power, Enlightenment, Rationalism, Meta-narratives and Universal.

What I don’t understand are what it is about lists like this that make people feel that the things on them need to be mutually-exclusive. In my understanding of the world at-large there are constantly beliefs and truths that seem to be exclusive and irreconcilable, but they often are. While I probably fall into a category that some would call Fundamentalist, it doesn’t mean that I don’t value people’s stories, experiences and artistic and subjective expressions of faith that are personal. While I lean towards Calvinism, I am convinced that it does not have to be something that is off-putting to people struggling with personal meaning and direction as we all perceive life as being self-directed and therefore find a need for personal meaning to our actions and our beliefs.

We must strive more towards unity in the worship of Christ regardless of it’s expression. Where I will largely credit the Emergent Movement (I don’t really hate it) is that they seem to strive to understand others’ perspectives moreso than Christians who are Modernist, Calvinist and Fundamentalist… and that moves toward unity. Our unity needs to be in Christ, not our church or our doctrine, but Christ himself.

Charles Spurgeon, the Puritan Baptist Mega-Church pastor from the 19th century had it right when he said that we all have fellowship and communion in the sacrifice and body of Christ – that we are united (even when we don’t like it) by our common love and reverence for Jesus Christ.

How is it that the Bible seems to claim this? Don’t get me wrong, I really do believe in the Bible as the Word of God.

Spurgeon writes this morning:

Be wise and attend to the obeying, and let Christ manage the providing. Come and survey your Father’s storehouse, and ask whether he will let you starve while he has laid up so great an abundance in his garner? Look at his heart of mercy; see if that can ever prove unkind! Look at his inscrutable wisdom; see if that will ever be at fault. Above all, look up to Jesus Christ your Intercessor, and ask yourself, while he pleads, can your Father deal ungraciously with you? If he remembers even sparrows, will he forget one of the least of his poor children? “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he will sustain thee. He will never suffer the righteous to be moved.”

Right. But, someone in Ethiopia in the 80s or someone else in the course of history must have been a devout follower of the Living God and still starved to death.

I do understand that these passages, the ones that can be “proven” wrong in some specific cases are not being said in a sense that it’s an unbreakable rule and way of God’s ruling of earth. It is, perhaps, the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Perhaps.

One of the things that I’ve been pondering recently is the threads of the Western Protestant tradition that, while on the whole good, are not part of the Church Universal. The main one being the assumption that the Bible is a book to be read and understood on a one-by-one personal level; really this is a generally new (renewed?) understanding to the Scriptures. I can’t help but accept that for most of history the peoples who have followed the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob and Jesus have not had personal copies of the Scriptures to read and study in a personal way – they were read on the weekend at the Temple, Synagogue or Ecclesia.

While there is no question in my mind that much, if not all, of the Christian Bible has a personal application and message, it seems doubtful to me that that is the exclusive (or even the primary) audience. Deuteronomy was read to all of the Hebrews before the entered the promised land. Josiah read the Book of the Law to all of Jerusalem when it was recovered. Nehemiah read the Law before all of the people when they were dedicating the city again. The Epistles were mostly written to communities of Christians, with a very small portion written to individual people. The primary application and intention of much of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures seems to be to the community of the followers of God at large, with the individual application to follow close behind.

I guess that individual interpretation can’t be removed from the equation though. It seems dangerous to me to leave it exclusively up to the institution of the Church, whether it be a denomination or to local leaders – we have to look no further than the history of the Roman Catholic Church or to the Judaism of Christ’s time where the ecclesiastical leaders’ claim to executive interpretation led to the abuse and ignorance of the people of the laity. Even when it’s just a local gathering, when the pastor or teacher speaks authoritatively it needs to be taken, examined and “chewed through” by the congregation so that error can be confronted by the church on the whole and so that the teacher can be corrected by those who care for him or her.

Maybe I answered my own question. God does provide for the communities who follow him at large; there are exceptions, but He still doesn’t do anything capriciously and fully owns our sorrows and our pain when He allows them to occur.