When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I had read the mega-church pastor’s books, he asked me why in the world I would spend my time on such a thing. The only possible answer beyond the somewhat inflated “Kingdom of Heaven” answer I gave in the previous essay is simply to find out what it is about. Sufficient reason in my mind to read anything from Don Quixote — the new translation of which I brought to the beach and haven’t cracked—to the backs of pork rind packages. One of the latter had John 3:16 on the label along with the not-too-startling information that you are consuming quite a bit of salt with your fat.
My friend mentioned my reading to an ex-mega-church member who was kind enough to send me a book on the house church movement which I read with interest. The book is anchored in the premise that most if not all of conventional Christian practice is rooted in pagan traditions. By pagan in this case we don’t mean Mayans or Druids or anything too strange, we simply mean the Greeks and Romans who were contemporaneous with the beginnings of Christianity. The book makes the point that Christian practices have evolved away from the original intent using a veritable forest of footnotes and bible quotations.
Most of the “base” origins of Christian practice were not too shocking to me because I had heard a lot of that from a friend’s Lenten lecture series. I’m also not too concerned about exactly how the Christian church — a human institution after all, no matter what they say — went off the rails. It is obvious to anyone with half a brain who has read the Gospels that it has. And this occurred over a long period of time with a lot of energy expended by a lot of people. Now a lot of energy is being expended to get it back on track.
One major problem with getting things back on track is that Christians have an unimpeachable sourcebook but one subject to a vast number of interpretations. I’m not sure going back to the “roots” will solve anything. My partner’s father after a lifetime as clergy believes we need a new paradigm—that the old paradigm is geocentric and science has brought us far beyond that view. Or perhaps we need to get rid of the sourcebook altogether—at least as the source of law and certainty. Some of my marginal notes on the book follow:
“When the spirit “leaves” we always replace it with stuff. A mere semblance of spirit, a symbol or trace of that which once was real. And over time the symbol replaces what it was meant to represent.”
“This book clearly demonstrates and denigrates the practices and driving forces behind the mega-churches.”
“No real nod yet as to why, what the impetus was for these changes. The human need to produce/create authority or at least a semblance of it?”
“We are back always to the Book. “Proof texting” is a great phrase and by god I’ve been subjected to it numerous times. And yet this is a more honest approach to the Book than the mega-church pastor’s.”
“Where do other religions fit into this?”
If you get rid of the book you get rid of a lot of unsolvable problems and conflicts. But where does that leave a Christian? It leaves them perhaps right where Krishnamurti says we always are with a lot of difficult individual work on our plates. Or maybe it leaves us with what was left after Jefferson tore the dross out of the New Testament or with the Jesus Seminar — though in some ways that is just more of the same. So where are we left?
The friend who loaned me the book on the house church movement has found a church of 40 people that provides him with the love and support he needs on his journey. And that is good. As for the larger institutions some words from David Souter’s brilliant and measured Harvard Law School commencement speech this year are perhaps useful as a guide.
Souter talks in the context of the US Constitution about “the basic human hunger for certainty and control, a longing for a world without ambiguity and for the stability of something unchangeable in human institutions.”
Nicely put. Hunger and longing put the need in its primary primal place. Justice Souter goes on to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes:
“Certainty generally is an illusion and repose is not in our destiny.”
Both quotes are perhaps too far on the humanistic side of things for my religious brothers and sisters but we are, after and above all, humans. What these quotes mean to me is that the reasons for creating the authority of institutions is real and deep but that their lasting utility is suspect, as is their ability to create a better world. And that one should always glance behind the curtain — no matter how uncomfortable that is — before jumping upon the next wizard’s bandwagon or balloon or green horse or whatever the newest incarnation promising certainty through external authority might be.
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