Monday, 24 June, 2002

The lead piece is from "Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. In this book she takes many of the words and images of the faith and attempts to put some reality and life to them.



HERESY

...feminist Mary Daly defines heretical as "weird beyond belief." As I understand it, however, heresy in the Christian tradition could better be described as "belief beyond weird," that is, a Christian doctrine that a believer has taken and stretched out so far along the spectrum that it reaches an unacceptable extreme, one that most Christians would not wish to adopt. As church scholar Eleanor McLaughlin has written, " Heresy and orthodoxy are not as rivers which never meet; on the contrary, they frequently arise out of a common source and one stream often flows into the other."... In the long history of Christianity, accusations of heresy have been made for all kinds of reasons, church politics foremost among them. But at times it has come down to a matter of mistranslation, or more precisely, an inability to translate the theologian of another place and time.



There have been many times when people have talked about the importance of studying church history and learning about the "heresies" of the early church. The reason for that advise comes down to the fact that some of those early heresies are being recirculated with new faces...but the same old same old "belief beyond weird." Every time I hear about a "greater consciousness" or "being enlightened" or when there is an attempt to make less of the physical and attempt to more and focus on the "spiritual" I begin to see the streams running off by themselves pulling people with them. But then I remember that John Hus was burned as a heretic...and yet...had he lived a hundred years later with the printing press at hand, he would have been Martin Luther! Heretic! On the edge and pressing for change can be see as "off the edge." And yet, if someone doesn't go to the edge we have a tendency to lose the "real life" engagement of the faith.



Connection: We cannot be afraid to walk out to the edge of the domain of the reign of God. Then again, somethings we hear and see during our day may indeed be, "beyond weird" and need to be observed more closely before jumping on their band wagon.



Lord of all the ages, you are the Alpha and the Omega who call us forth in faithfulness to you alone so that we may have new life within all of our days. Encourage our questions and uphold us as we search for ways to be the body of Christ in our world. Amen