Wednesday, September 07, 2005

The Contemporary Church and the Enlightenment...

I have thought about writing a longer, slower philosophical genealogy, but

that is probably boring and meaningless to my ultimate goal.

Rather, I think I will point out the problems that the Enlightenment has brought to the church in its myriad forms.

1. Literalism and Dictionaries- It seems to me that with the advent of scientific method, there also came an assumption that language could be tested and proven in some sort of quantifiable way.

Therefore, during this same period of time, intellectuals began to compile dictionaries in which the meanings of words and their uses were fixed and regimented.

Most of you can probably see where this would become a problem (or series of problems) in the modern world.

Since people assume that the meaning of language is fixed, they can also assume that their interpretation is Correct. Sure, prior to the reformation, the Church fixed meaning, but there at least was a large quantity of debate about that meaning. We know about this quantity of debate because the loser was usually torured, imprisoned, etc as a result.

This leads to the difficulties today in synthesizing science and religion. If the Bible says "days," then obviously it meant days in the contemporary 24 hour period, regardless of the fact that the twenty-four hour day, with time zones etc, would not be set for centuries. This also does not take into account the possibility of nuance for the original Hebrew source material.

Of course, modern Christians will understand that when I write, "In the days past...," I am not refering to a specific period of time denoted by the revolution of the clock hand, but to suppose that this would be a valid understanding of something in the Holy Bible is absurd to some.

2. Printing, Authorship, and copyright- While I am thrilled that we have movable type, etc, I think that one of the problems that comes with it is the assumption of profit-making and setting a text in some sort of bound and commodified way. We must be able to print a definitive Bible that contains the approved text.

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Therefore, God is the author of the text. Now, what does this mean? Most Christians would not argue that God literally put pen to paper, but it amazes me at how unaware most Christians are about the actual source of the books that we now consider to be part of the Bible. Gasp, you mean Matthew, Mark, and Luke did not actually sit down and write their Gospels? Nope, ladies and gentleman, if you go back and look at an older edition (and I mean much older) of your Bible, you will often read "The Gospel according to St. Matthew as recorded by..."

Does this mean that Matthew is not an accurate testament to the life of Jesus of Nazereth? Nope, not at all, but it might make us pause before we base any major decisions on our understanding of any single passage or word.

I do not mean to impugn the Bible in any way. I believe that it is the Word of God, but I believe that it is the Word of God that has been filtered through the imperfect human authors, translators, and fallible and imprecise language.

This means that it is up to every generation and church to decide what "sexual immorality" is and what to do about the members of their church who practice it.

Lost, or never was, the need to look at the directives in the Bible as directives that must be analyzed in light of other directives.

That is probably enough babbling for now. I would like to talk about the evolution of the Law and contemporary understanding of the role of the Law in the Bible, but we will just have to see. Tah Tah for now!

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