Geoff Wilkins, Speaking Personally...

Orthodox?- Whatcha Mean By That?

When describing themselves, renewal groups in the old-line denominations quite frequently use the word "orthodox".  What do they mean by that? 

Well, "orthodox" comes from old Greek, where orthodoxia means something like "right opinion".  Later the early Church used it to mean "having right belief", as when St Augustine (354-430) wrote, "Religion is to be sought . . . only among those who are called  . . . orthodox Christians, that is, guardians of truth and followers of right."  Over the centuries, the Church hammered out agreement on at least the core essentials, most notably in the great ecumenical creeds and derivative statements, and this became "orthodoxy".

So, what's the opposite of orthodox? - Unorthodox?  That would fit if we were talking about some optimistic soul trying to sharpen pencils with an axe, but in religious terms, the opposite of orthodoxy is "heresy" - a good but now unpopular word, thanks to connotations of the Spanish Inquisition, and people being tortured and burned at the stake.  A red-button word.  A word most gentle-spirited folk try to avoid using nowadays.

So on one hand there's our squeamishness over this word, but there's another consideration.  In the West we're also regularly told that all truth is relative.  If that's actually so, and, if that's actually so, then heresy is an impossibility. After all, the argument is that whatever you believe (no matter how absurd to others) is a perfectly good truth, because it is true for you.  Denominations like mine (the United Church of Canada) are heavily invested in that sort of thinking.  They assure us it's OK, even as Christians, to believe (or dis-believe) almost anything.  So right off the bat (so to speak) there are two strikes against "heresy" - the term itself makes us uncomfortable, and as a concept it's redundant, out of date. 

That leaves one strike, and here it comes, whistling across the plate.  Now the assertion is that to pronounce anything heretical is to be judgemental, and surely we're not to be that, and wasn't it Jesus himself who said "Do not judge, or you too will be judged"? (Matt 7:1)  (One problem though is that Jesus was speaking of judging people, not their ideas.)  Still, to some self-appointed umpires it certainly looks like three strikes, and so heresy is therefore OUT!

How does all that play out in practice?  Well, take the UCC's recently approved "A Song of Faith", the new statement about where the denomination stands regarding its beliefs.  An earlier draft of "Song" received some trenchant criticism, which prompted significant changes, but the final version still has quite a bit to startle the orthodox Christian.  For instance, it names God "Mother".  Some will say, "So what in heaven's name is wrong with that?"

The response to that is, "It's wrong because it's un-Biblical.  In the Old and New Testaments, female gods are false gods.  And, tellingly, Jesus never speaks of God as "Mother"; he specifically directs us to call him "Father".  You might think that the scriptural record would clinch the matter, but some highly influential nominal Christians, look at that evidence pretty skeptically.  Why?  Because, while they concede the Bible is important, they still regard it as no more than the product of sincere and thoughtful (but error-prone) people struggling to put down their best insights about God.  Produced by fallible humans, it itself is inevitably fallible. 

The opposing view is that the Bible is not a human artifact at all.  It is a gift, from God, his revelation of who he is and what he intends.  Through it he speaks to us directly, through the medium of inspired (i.e. Spirit-filled) writers.  This is his book, not the writers' - and not ours, for that matter.

Moreover, God's book is not intended to be simplistic.  Its senior Writer specifically warns us not to try to understand him too thoroughly (Isa 55:8), so there's no surprise in finding that any but a superficial approach stretches our minds to the breaking point.  St John says as much in Rev 10:10, where he describes trying to absorb ("to eat") the scriptural text handed him. At first it tastes sweet, but then, as he digests it, it gives him huge indigestion.

If what was true for St John is true for us, how can we handle the discomfort?  Do we take antacids?  Limit ourselves to just the nice bits?  Change our diet completely and fill up on "comfort foods" from elsewhere?  Or, do we put our heads down and doggedly munch away, putting up with the prospect of stomach ache?

Very few of us choose the last option.  The others are more attractive - relying on commentators who provide soothing explanations, limiting ourselves to what is understandable and enjoyable, or turning away completely to study writings that are less challenging, more easily absorbed.

It would be nice to think that not many within the Church, the Body of Christ, would take that last option.  Still, there are a number who think it's just fine to blend in comforting elements from New Ageism, Buddhism, or whatever.  In doing so, they're opening a can of worms, and our "Mother" language is one example.  Consider just one problem:

If we are intended to call God "Mother", why would Jesus avoid doing so? Possible Answer #1: Because he didn't want to offend the people around him.  -- Come on, he was in the business of offending people.  It got him crucified! Possible Answer #2: Because he'd been brainwashed by the social attitudes of the day?  -- Come on!  You're saying Jesus, God incarnate, was hamstrung by the conventions of his day?

In general terms, those who argue along those lines have two main arguments for discounting the truth of Jesus' teaching: (1) Knowingly or not, the New Testament writers (or later revisionists) falsified the record, or (2) Jesus wasn't who he said he was.  He was just a man, and a deluded man at that - or a liar!

If the first of those two choices is correct, Christianity has no secure foundation.  Its whole structure rests on sand. There's nothing here to go to the mat about.  If the second is correct, Jesus wasn't who he said he was - God doesn't go around making mistakes or lying.  So God didn't come to live among us, and the person who died on the cross wasn't God.  He didn't take our sins on himself, and, if all of that is true, there's no hope for us in this or any other life.

There are, of course, all sorts of nominal Christians who say yes to both of those dismal assertions.  If I were one, what comfort could I take from those positions?  Well, if the Bible is fallible in any respect, then I can pick and choose and order my life as I see fit.  Or, if Jesus was just a Palestinian peasant with some excellent teachings (but was capable of getting things wrong), that gives me room to disagree with him for all sorts of reasons that seem OK to me.

There's no way the true Church could consider any of that "Orthodox".  It is in fact "Heretical".

Broadly speaking, the old-liner's renewal groups stand in what is sometimes called The Great Tradition, that is in the Christianity of the great creeds and of the faith statements that flow from them.

Jeremiah passes along some pertinent advice. Writing at a time of great danger for Israel, he told the people, "This is what the Lord says: 'Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.' " (6:16)

Looks to me like the instruction is to go with Orthodoxy. 

God bless --                     Geoff

Celestial Navigation

In the mid-1950s, I was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia. While there, three of my four summers were spent training as an Officer Cadet with the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the goal being a commission as a Sub-Lieutenant. The vehicle for attaining that heady rank was the RCN's University Naval Training Division, the UNTD, an acronym that led inescapably to the matelots referring to us as "The Untidies" - probably not because we were so terribly unkempt, but because our seamanship, at least initially, was often pretty inept.

Each summer, the Navy's main interest was in getting us to sea, and in our first year, we gathered from across Canada at HMCS Stadacona, the RCN's big East Coast shore base in Halifax. From there we were sent out onto the Atlantic in small ships - Algerine Escorts - apparently with the idea it wouldn't be a bad idea for us to get firsthand experience of mal de mer, and really small ships would pretty well guarantee that.  And so we quickly learned two of the RCN's maxims on seasickness: 1. You'll Get No Sympathy Here- "Nelson was seasick every time he went to sea, so what's your problem, . . . Sir?" 2. Never Barf to Windward - "That nasty mess is yours to clean up, . . . Sir."

There were other things to learn of course, some of them terminological - that the ship's sharp end is the bow and the blunt end is the stern; that anything between you and the bow is forrard and the other way is aft; that up is aloft and down is below, and so on.  Others were practical - no one in the real Navy ever uses a granny knot, even for a parcel to one's mother; and almost the greatest sin is to fall overboard, since turning around and picking you up wastes valuable time and is highly inconvenient.  (The Greatest Sin? - to wander up to the Captain and engage him in friendly conversation.)

As I remember, the two main seamanly skills learned on that first cruise were (a) the fine art of chipping rust off the ship, and (b) the messier art of painting over the bare patches.  We were quite good at the second of those, although a lot of the paint seemed to end up on us - it had the uncanny knack of migrating down our arms, staining our torsos, sometimes penetrating to undershorts, and, in one case, to socks.  (This last was clearly a flagrant violation of the naval dress code, gray socks being definitely non-regulation.)

The second summer we were on the West Coast, shipping out of Esquimalt.  Although now in larger ships - Frigates - seasickness was still a preoccupation for some.  However, the Navy's interest now lay in our practicing the navigational skills we'd just learned at Royal Roads.  First came pilotage - manageable enough, despite BC's complex coastline - but then we moved on to a bigger challenge: figuring our where the ship was when there was nothing but sea and sky to be seen.  An empty sea isn't much help, but providentially there are often two very helpful references overhead, the sun and the stars.  Just take readings on them, do some calculations, and presto, you know where you are.  Magic!

That sounds straightforward enough in theory, but taking readings on sun and stars from a deck that keeps moving around is really tricky.  It turned out in practice that our plots put the ship, quite literally, all over the map. ("That's a chart, Sir!)  And then, if by happy chance one of us did manage to come up with the right location, the cunning instructor would respond with something like, "OK, that wasn't too bad.  But now for the last 24 hours there's been nothing but heavy cloud .  Where are you now?"  Which plunges you into the unnerving field of "dead-reckoning" (i.e. educated guessing).  It's called dead-reckoning because, if you're wrong by much, you and you shipmates end up drowned.

Happily, no one was naive enough to consider our efforts as in any way indicative of where the ship really was. Nonetheless, that didn't stop our examiner, the ship's Captain(!) from fuming over our approximations, especially one in which advised him his ship was high and dry, 20 miles inland of the Oregon coast.

All of the foregoing is by way of introducing a metaphor to describe much of today's Christian Church, especially in Europe and North America.  Influential leaders in many, many denominations are steering their ships with a lack of precision akin to ours of 50 years ago.  And these leaders have much less excuse - they have training and experience in the spiritual navigation; their decks are not pitching and heaving; they have reference points just as reliable as ours.  Sure, we had the sun, but they have the Son; we had the stars, but they have the Scriptures; we had reference tables, but they have two millennia of authoritative Christian teaching.

Sometimes, in heavy overcast, we had to rely on dead-reckoning, But they don't, not ever - their navigational references  are always visible.  So why does their "celestial navigation" go increasingly wonky?  Because they have set aside the sun and the stars to concentrate on space ephemera - the theological and scriptural equivalents of meteorites, comets, space junk, unidentified satellites, perhaps even the Norther Lights. Here today, gone in an hour.  Their astronomy often approaches astrology.

My own denomination, the United Church of Canada, is a proud, confident exponent of all this nonsense.  The result is that not many people want to ship on our vessel, and those who are already aboard are increasingly jumping ship.  (The UCC's own statistics show our membership is now half of what it was in 1965!  Is that what God had in mind for the UCC at its founding just over 70 years ago?)

Like some others, this denomination has lost its way.  It's way off course.  It's about to run aground and sink.  In trying to be "contemporary" and "relevant" it has watered down the gospel message so much that almost no one is interested.

Mainline denominations like the UCC are in desperate need of leaders like our West Coast skipper, who didn't hesitate to be blunt about our more flagrant navigational errors.  Why did he always, without fail, call us on those mistakes?  Because in the real world, our blunders would have put lives at risk.  That is exactly what my denomination is guilty of, . . . and here we're talking about eternal life.  For his part, Jesus was pretty blunt about leaders whose navigation lead others astray (Matt 18:6).

God bless --                               Geoff

PS  For those who are interested, I successfully became a Sub-Lieutenant, but after a short time I went onto the inactive list, partly because being constantly seasick had become a considerable bore.  Still, several years after my rustication, a letter arrived with the news I'd been belatedly promoted to Acting Lieutenant (retired).  That got me thinking, and I decided to wait until the Navy offered me an Admiralship, and then I'd go back.  Sadly, that promotion has still to arrive.

When the Dust Settles #1

The "Bobble-head" Brouhaha

The early emoting over the United Church of Canada's half-dozen advertisments seems to have died away: having a short attention span, the media have moved on to other matters.  Still, a month on, various journals and newspapers are carrying the first ad., and that suggests this may be a good time for a sober appraisal of the ads. and indeed, of "Emerging Spirit", their parent program.

I periodically visit the ES website, but even so the media's excitement over the introductory ads. caught me completely by surprise.  I learned about them when the phone rang fairly early one morning - half way through my second cup of coffee, actually - and it was a CTV reporter demanding to know what I thought of the these apparently controversial ads.  Not having seen or even heard of them, responding was pretty difficult, but, undaunted, he immediately emailed them so that I couldn't plead complete ignorance.  He was of course on a fishing expedition, hoping to reel in something controversial and quotable.  After all, "You don't always see eye to eye with the United Church, right?" When I refused to mumble anything off the cuff, he agreed to call back several hours later.

Which he did.  So, what did I think of the ads. now? And what about the Emerging Spirit program? And what about the church spending $10.5 million on it?

Having tracked ES for some time, I had to say that initially I was somewhat underwhelmed.  Conceptually it had some strength, but in practice it seemed to me to be approaching its target group - younger adults - at a very superficial level, and their published responses were pretty much in kind.  As to the cost - on the evidence to that time, it looked like money largely wasted. 

So, having spent a fair bit on phone calls, what did the CTV person so far have for his money?  Not much.  Perhaps my take on the ads. themselves was more helpful, although I'm sure the quotability factor remained pretty low.  One ad. that did strike me as more or less on the money is the one now released in the print media - Jesus sitting in Santa's chair in the mall, with the caption, "Would you still take your kids?"  That seemed likely to stimulate discussion, putting its finger as it does on a very troubling characteristic of our society, its incipient Christophobia.

As to the rest of the ads. - there was, predictably for the UCC, a preoccupation with sex (two of the six ads.).  Another, the notorious "Bobble-head", struck me as puerile, especially given its caption, "Funny, or Ticket to Hell?"  I thought the remaining two might raise meaningful questions in people's minds, although I doubted they would be forceful enough to attract legions to local churches for the hoped-for meaningful discussions.  (All the ads. can be viewed on line at http://www.wondercafe.ca/ - just click on View Ad Campaign in the LH sidebar.)

As mentioned, the thrust of the program is to attract 30-45 year-olds to the church.  Recent blogs at WonderCafe seem to be more thoughtful than what was submitted earlier, so there may be hope for the program's success.  However, the proof of the pudding will rest with what happens when people go to their local churches with questions about the Christian faith and how it might impact their lives.  In some United churches they will be led to the tried and true answers the church has proclaimed for roughly two Millennia - and some of those answers are challenging.  Sadly, in a great many churches they will be told that pretty well anything they want to believe is more or less fine.  Given that, it's hard to see them staying if there's nothing very different on offer.  And therein, I submit, lies the main reason for the denomination's membership slide from 1,064,033 (1965) to 593,568 (2004).  There's no spiritual comfort in soft soap.

It's a time for prayer.  God bless --                    Geoff