Monday, April 21, 2014

Words from God? An attempt at Theological Reconciliation (Part 1 of 5)

This post is the first in a five part series.  The intent of the series is to engage in discussion about Words that we say are from God.  We will discuss both written words (Scripture) and spoken words (as expressed after the phrase, "I recieved a word from God").  This discussion, however, is going to be noticebly differant than most other discussions of this topic.  Let me explain.

As the name of the blog implies, theological discussion for the sake of articulation of beliefs is relatively useless.  I'm much more interested in discussing beliefs in such a way as to lead towards the reconciliation of social bodies that believe differently.  But, you may ask, "how does that happen?  Can theological discussion actually lead towards reconciliation?  And if so, what does it look like?"  Let me try to answer.

Almost everything we believe has associated with it what I want to refer to as a "negative shadow."  The negative shadow of our beliefs effects those who self describe as not believing whatever it is that we believe.  As an example, if I say, "I believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus lives inside of my heart", I have expressed, as I should, a belief.  If you say, "I believe that we can't say God lives in us" then we believe differently.  I'm not interested in whether your belief or mine is correct -- I'm interested in the human cost that results when you and I interact.

How do I treat you?  How do you feel treated by me?  Do you feel like a human, or a human with a condition (the condition of not having Jesus inside of you)?  Do you feel loved as an equal, or as an equal with the caveate that you need to change your belief?  If I believe that correct belief is in some sense salvific, then how do you feel treated by me?  Do you feel loved or judged?  Does my belief (even though it is well meaning) actually create a chasm between us?  In what ways do you feel judged by my belief?  These are the questions I'm interested in.  I'm interested in them because they give us the ability to talk about how we are loving each other in the context of what we believe -- and so we can hope to hold truth and love together in the same conversation.

Theological discussion that creates reconciliation involves listening. It also involves unburdening ourselves of moments and places in which we are in each other's negative shadow.  Negative shadow's are almost never intentional.  The irony is that my beliefs are formed in a large degree by how I've reacted to the negative shadow of your beliefs, and your beliefs are formed in a large degree by how you react to the negatve shadow of my beliefs.  My hope is that we can become increasingly more aware of the human and communal cost that we unknowingly force each other to pay by how and what we believe.

Hopefully at this stage in the discussion we can agree that theological discussion that creates reconciliation is possible.  Hopefully we can also begin to see a way forward in this discussion.  The topic at hand is, as I mentioned above, about Words we refer to as being from God (wether written or spoken).  So I'm not going to define different classical views -- there are hundreds of blogs and books that already accomplish that goal with more eloquence and scholarship and popularity than my little blog.  What I am going to do is introduce a very useful rhetorical device I like to refer to as "verbing" a noun.  I am also going to lay the groundwork for the followoing 4 parts in this series by beginning to articulate what some of the costs may be when we talk about Words from God.

I want to introduce the intentional use of “verbing” a noun for the purposes of this conversation.  Almost any noun can be used this way.  Just pick a noun and apply it as a verb in a sentence (often followed by the “-ing” ending.)  The result carries with it all of the connotations of the noun along with the active aspect of a verb.  When this is done, essentially what is being asked (of the noun) is, “what sort of actions surround this noun?  What types of activity to we implicitly associate with this noun?” For instance, take the noun “bagel”.  If I want to “verb” that noun, I can put it in a sentence like the following, “we are begal-ing the eggs.”  Since we associate with a bagel the role of having jam placed on it, or of being toasted, it is reasonable to assume that one possible context for our example sentence would be using the egg as a bagel instead of as an egg.

The reason I went into that explanation is because I want to talk about what happens when we take either written words or spoken words and apply to them the property of being “spoken by God.”  In the tradition that I grew up in (and I’m assuming in the tradition that many of you grew up in as well, the assumption is that these written or spoken words lose their human element entirely.  They become verbam dei, words of God.

I want to create space here in this blog for us to ask ourselves and each other questions about this process of “inspire-ing” either written or spoken words.  What sort of actions do we implicitly associate with Scripture?  What sort of actions do we implicitly assume have taken place when someone receives a “word” that has come from God?  Once we have done this, we can (and must) also ask what the both the human cost and the communal cost are when we “inscripture-ate” or “inspire” or otherwise attribute to God either written or spoken words.

There are at least 3 ways in which I think we unintentionally create a negative shadow around words that we say are from God.  I'm going to address each of them in a seperate post.  I'll finish this series by suggesting a possible view that consciously attempts to decrease the negative shadow while still holding that inspiration is, in some sense, real.  Please rest assured.  I am not in any sense arguing against inspiration.

In the meantime, I’d like to leave you with these questions: in what ways do your beliefs cast a negative shadow on other people?  In what ways are your beliefs formed by the negative shadow of the beliefs of other people who have placed (perhaps perfectly unintentional) expectations upon you by their own beliefs?  As always, feel free to comment.

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