So much has changed for me, and
so quickly. Two years ago, I was deeply entrenched in the evangelical subculture,
surrounded by missionaries and their teenage children on the other side of the
Pacific. Last year, I was investigating Orthodoxy, deconstructing the faith
culture I was raised in, and I felt like I was going through a spiritual
puberty, mood swings and all. Today, I am attending the Seattle School in hopes
of eventually becoming a therapist, and the cross around my neck and the creed
in my heart clearly identify me as a member of the Orthodox Church. In this
paper, I will attempt to outline my personal hermeneutic, a task akin to
painting a still-life of a lava lamp during a tornado.
To understand where I am, we must start with where I’ve been. I was raised in a weirdly ecumenical[1], fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic Christian home. I was taught that homosexuality was a sin (and apparently a really bad one) and that Darwin was incredibly misled, but also that “salvation belongs to our God”[2] and making definitive salvific statements one way or the other about anyone but yourself is stupid. A part of this contradictory tension is due to my parents’ conflicting spiritualities. My mother once told me that we didn’t attend a certain church close to our house because “they are all dead.” She meant spiritually, but my head was filled with apocalyptic imagery of pews filled with mummified parishioners. My father, on the other hand, often told me that everyone was probably wrong about something in their theology, from our pastor to the Pope, and that the most important thing was to try to live out your faith to the best of your ability, trusting that God would forgive us our misunderstandings regarding theological specifics.
When I was very young, my parents attended a reclusive, we-are-right-everyone-else-is-probably-damned kind of church[3]. The church fell apart[4], and that trauma deeply affected both my parents and me. After the grand explosion, I had a certain distrust for spiritual authorities. I was of the understanding that the scriptures were accessible to every person, and therefore we all had a right to speak about them, and to disagree with one another about them[5]. I felt especially allowed to disagree with youth pastors. That bit got me in trouble a few times.
I was wholeheartedly into the idea that intellect plus scriptures equals truth. I bought into the common evangelical idea that tradition was a man-made thing and therefore untrustworthy. I once spoke with a missionary in his seventies who literally spat the word tradition as if it were a curse[7]. This mindset has been critiqued by more traditional believers as being one in which “you make every man his own Pope[8].” Through my studies at SPU, I came to see the importance of tradition in forming communal faith, and the importance of a communal faith period[9]. Suddenly, the practices and beliefs of Christians living in the time between Paul and me seemed pertinent for the first time.
I had always held the scriptures as “divinely inspired[10],” as my upbringing had taught me. But what did that mean? As far as I could tell, the only universal belief among Christians is that this means the scriptures are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.[11]” But what did that mean for our hermeneutic? Did it mean that simply by reading the scriptures a person would have direct access to the fullness of divine truth? Somehow I no longer thought so.
What began as an investigation into the formation of the canon[12] became a discovery of the wealth of Christian tradition before the reformation, which, to be fair, is four times larger, time-wise. I began attending an Orthodox Church shortly after graduating from college. I became convinced and convicted by the incredible truth I found in Orthodox history[13], belief,[14] and practice[15]. I joined the Church on June 3rd of this year.
Now we have an interesting cluster of ingredients to cook up a hermeneut. On the one hand we have strong individualism and psychological reason to distrust the top-down theology of the institutional Church. On the other hand, we have a sense of the importance of the community of faith and a deep respect for the saints who have gone before us. How does this contradictory, tension-creating individual read anything, much less Holy Scripture?
The answer, out of left field, is through a lens of love. Rollins would call it a “prejudice of love.”[16] One common thread throughout my spiritual journey has been the belief, held by myself and by my various teachers, that the end goal of Christianity is to make us more Christ-like, more loving. If a faith does not produce love, then that faith is false in the most important regard. The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats[17] is foundational to my hermeneutic. This parable says nothing about belief, doctrine, or traditional affiliation. It says everything about love, justice, and how we ought to treat our fellow human beings.
One major downside to this hermeneutic is that I can easily be drawn into a kind of moral ambiguity that doesn’t allow for hardly any definitive statements about right and wrong. The draw towards easy mercy can relativize sin into functional non-existence. The method I have attempted to employ to counteract this tendency is to concede to the Church[18] on matters that I am undereducated in, with some exceptions. My Church does not ordain women. My Church believes that homosexuality is a sin. I disagree with my church on these things. I do not read these conclusions into the scriptures, nor do I see the history that gave rise to these traditions as sacred. My reasons for each of these statements could, and have, fill a bookshelf’s worth of theological tomes, or an online forum of theological posts. But, at the end of the day, my reason is simple. I believe that these doctrines inhibit the Church’s ability to love. Love doesn’t deny people what they are[19], or relegate them to second-class status. This is the same reason that I could not be a Calvinist when I was a Protestant. I do not read love into Calvinist doctrine. Thankfully, the Orthodox tradition has never felt kindly towards predestination.
This hermeneutic is messy. It is messy because it is practical. The world is messy, and we live in it. I could have, and have had, a hermeneutic that established a spiritual infrastructure that was entirely separate from the functions of the physical world. The implications of the doctrine of the incarnation make that a worthless endeavor. It matters what the world ought to look like, but if we are unable to work with the world-that-is unto the birth of the world-that-ought, then we have used doctrine to silence our love, and “love is not silent[20].”
My experience at The Seattle School thus far has continued to push the boundaries of my hermeneutic of love, while at the same time upholding a hermeneutic of tradition. With all due respect to my theologically inclined classmates, I do not want to take on interpreting the scriptures on my own. I do not want to be so detached from the faith of my spiritual fathers and mothers that I begin to question things affirmed in the most ancient creeds. I want the faith of the apostles. I desire to remain rooted in the tradition of my faith, and in the heart of my God, which is a heart of love for all mankind. I feel the pull towards the past in the form of my faith tradition. I feel the pull towards the future in the hope for eventual reconciliation of all with Christ. Living in the tension between the two, well, I believe Dan would call that love[21].
[1] For my context.
[3] In my lifetime, I have encountered many
churches with this exact same worldview. I came to expect it, which saddened me
and made me resistant to the institutional Church.
[4] For more information on this, see: Greg
Olsen. A Twisted Faith: A minister's obsession and the murder that destroyed
a church. (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2010).
[5] The Doctrine of Sola Scriptura, quite well
liked by the spiritual leaders in my early life.
[7] [Redacted], interview by Tyson Conner. Undergraduate
Research Project (2010).
[8] I don’t know where this saying came from. I
first encountered it in: Rev A. James Bernstine. Surprised by Christ: My
journey from judaism to orthodox christianity. (Chesterton, IN: Conciliar
Press, 2008), 115.
[10] 2 Timothy 3:16, (NRSV).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Here I owe special thanks to Dr. Daniel
Castello, Christo Lute-Wise, and Nathan Knapp.
[13] Timothy Ware. The Orthodox Church.
(London: Penguine Books, 1997).
[14] M. Charles Bell. Discovering the Rich
Heritage of Orthodoxy. (Minneapolis, MN: Light & Life Publishing
Company, 1994).
[15] Holy Trinity Monestary. Prayer Book.
(Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monestary, 2010).
[16] Pete Rollins. "The Third Mile." In
How (Not) to Speak of God, 55-71. (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006),
63.
[17] Matthew 25:31-46, (NRSV)
[18] The Scripture Project. "Nine Theses on
the Interpretation of Scripture." In The Art of Reading Scripture,
4.
[19] Mister Rogers may be the best example of this, and was very influential in my childhood. For more on Mister Rogers, see: Mister Rogers & Me. (Directed by Bejamin Wagner. 2012).
[20] A quote from a sweatshirt, part of a
marketing campaign for OMF, a missions organization that I maintain ties with.
[21] Dan Allender, “Priest, Prophet, King.” (Lecture, Faith, Hope, and Love: the Therapeutic Telos, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, Seattle, WA, November 19, 2012).
Posts
