In my regular perusal of a religion news aggregator, I held my Catholic nose to watch a video about currents in American Evangelicalism. I sorta see it like the Jesuits. Lots of words (read, spoken and sung) and lots of subject-based emoting. It's clearly compelling to some people, but I don't get it. As my friend the bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostic Sacramentorum says, I may be a Gnostic, but at least I'm not a Protestant.
Sola scriptura. Building your whole religion just on the Bible. On that library which masquerades as a book. As if it were the Betty Crocker Recipes of religion, that you could start from zero and build up a whole faith from it, just by itself.
Of course no one does that. They all have crypto-Traditions and crypto-Magisteriums. And Protestants pretty much start everything out from North and Western Europe in the 1500's.
Zzz.
I'd rather go to a Russian Orthodox liturgy in Old Slavonic where I couldn't understand more than a dozen words of it.
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4 comments:
Palm Sunday was my penultimate mass before my revelation. It was a Ukrainian divine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Now I know why the ambassadors of Vladimir the Great said they "could not tell if they were on Earth or in Heaven" when they went to the Hagia Sophia. Gorgeous and ornate in a manner that is sorely absent from most Western liturgies. It managed to make my parish, built in the fever of the Spirit of Vatican II, feel like a sacred space. It spoiled me, I think; the idea of having to go to another anaemic modern mass was painful. Give me a service that I can't understand half of over the drek of the Protestants any day!
-Sean
I am trying to imagine what a truly scripture-only religion would even be like, or how such a thing could be. There would have to be writing without any idea that the writers' opinions about the material had any bearing. Sort of "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the secretary of God."
Supposing instead we remove the scribe/prophet altogether and have a purportedly 'found' scripture ... it's discovered written on the far side of the moon, or within DNA, or the digits of pi. There would necessarily follow eleventy-twelve different schools of interpretation...
Actually, when I think about it, I think if I were God I wouldn't go writing a fat definitive Book about Myself at all; there is certainly a vast terrain of ways of communicating and influencing things... The idea is coming from people's thinking that writing is something magical.
--Nathan
Part of what makes "Gnosticism" such a controverted idea is that without a living community to shape reading them, the so called Gnostic scriptures have no context. It's as if there were no Christians and someone found, in no particular order, Revelations, James, John, Mark and two Pauline Epistles.
If I remember my C.S. Lewis, common morality was the mark that God left on humans to reveal Himself. This is revealed in the variations on moral issues: who a man could have sex with varied from culture to culture, but a man could not have sex with just anyone. The variation in morality is perplexing though. Why did some cultures not bat an eye at practices others deemed abominable?
-Sean
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