Chris posted on the irony that most Christians are attracted more to the Jealous God of the Old Testament versus the teaching of Jesus. The 10 Commandments versus the sermon on the Mount.
He has stirred in me an old sadness. As a boy I was a chorister. This meant that I was in church every day, twice on Sundays and two practices a week. I learned the Bible and the Anglican Service by heart. But I turned away from the church because it seemed to contradict all that I had learned about the meaning of Jesus's life and story.
Jesus constantly made it clear that the temple of God was in our hearts and not in a building. Yet the church was all about buildings. He chose his friends widely from a large group of sinners. The "church" was self righteous. Jesus, in a place and time that had women even lower than they are in the Middle East today, had women as his closest friends. The church has a problem ordaining women. Jesus was a man with a temper and with the feelings of a man - it always seemed highly unlikely to me that Mary was simply a fan. Would a fan stand by the cross? Would a fan go to the tomb? With all the disciples cowering in hiding, Mary Magdalene's actions are of at least of a lover. Yet the church denies his manhood and has hated the idea of love made flesh. Jesus' teaching is about assuming a moral character. The Church emphasizes rules. Jesus says love your enemy. At the moment of his death he cries out Forgive them for they know not what they do. The church has taught hatred and exclusion.
But as I grow older, I question the wisdom of throwing away all my spiritual heritage.
I wonder? In the 14th Century, Christianity was reinvented. The new church made it possible to have a direct relationship with God. This was surely a good thing. At the heart of this personal contact with God came a shift in how the story of God was told. It was enforced now by a book. It supported a bible that was easily available to all and sadly it made literalism and the old testament its core. The inner story of the gospels was in effect excluded and a literal approach that focused on the rules of the old testament and the literal requirement to believe in a rising from a bodily death was all that was allowed. Paul's views on many issues such as sin, women etc overshadowed the gospels. This reliance on literalism meant that the essence of Jesus was obscured.
Maybe if we drop literalism and if we see the old testament only as a context, there is an opportunity to renew Christianity again today?
How ironic to suggest that a renewed Christianity might be rooted in the lessons of His life and His words and that it would throw away literalism and find out that we can all live this type of life once we see the metaphor of transformation implicit in the gospels. A church that was held together by the Beatitudes, that is held together by the idea that God is in all of us and in all things, a church that saw the body and its needs as part of the temple, a church that saw women as its founders, would be a church where I would feel at home.
