This time it's Presbyterians. Congregations are breaking away from the Presbyterian Church USA because of its "liberal" drift. They call their preferred alternative a "biblically based" approach to church life. They'll travel their own chosen path.
This time it happens to be Presbyterians, but the story is familiar across Christian denominations. Faith is equated with a particular line of dogma. The dogma becomes a reason to drop the hands of selected fellows. An ethic of rejection prevails.
Schism is not new in the Christian church. Nor are disagreements over biblical authority. Nor is resistance to change -- habit being comfortable in human institutions as well as human beings. History is full of such disputes.
Still, events of our own time and place merit attention.
In today's America, discussions of biblical authority are likely to be muddled. Our popular culture is textured by an ersatz scientific skepticism that questions everything but itself, and by epic biblical ignorance. (Exhibit A might be some of the debate about supposed conflict between the Bible and the theories of Charles Darwin. There is no real conflict, but a vernacular quarrel endures nonetheless. Hearsay versions of 150-year-old science are proclaimed as if they were holy writ, and the Bible is freighted with claims it does not make by people who haven't read it.)
The Bible is not a book in our contemporary sense. It is certainly not a history book, as no such thing was known in the years when it was created. It is a conflation of sermons, songs, poems, letters and narratives written at different times and different places, by different people for different audiences, all for different reasons.
The Bible is a collection of human attempts across thousands of years to express an understanding of God. Understandings varied with circumstance. Considered only as an array of separate parts, the Bible is a jumble of inconsistencies and contradictions. Considered as a whole, it tells an evolving story about human experience of the divine.
All of which is to say that the Bible cannot be typified by a single passage or group of passages. Thus citations of Biblical authority may be highly selective. And sure enough, in today's church upheavals, they often are. Common triggers of upset among conservative churchgoers are matters of sex, reproduction and gender role. They are seized upon as if they were central in Christian scripture. But they are not.
We should be careful about begrudging others their point of view, lest they welcome license to begrudge us ours. The very sweep of the Bible makes it approachable from different directions.
But it is fair to ask what's really happening when people insist they'll stand only on one small corner of its grand tapestry. It is fair to say that selective citations of biblical authority are, in fact, expressions of a point of view. It is reasonable to suspect that cultural bias is being broadcast through the voice of the church and called religion.
Of course every organized church functions at risk of putting words in the mouth of God. A principal admonition of the original Christian message went to that very point. It cautioned against claiming divine mandate for rules of human choosing. In particular, it charged the theocracy of its day with being hard-hearted and legalistic.
In today's denominational wrangles, the conservative church favors words that are exclusionary. The church adopts the posture of a club. Divine welcome is subject to the approval of human insiders. At its most extreme, the Christian right favors words of self-righteous condemnation. The language is -- well, hard-hearted and legalistic.
This crabbed and narrow view is nothing like what really is central in Christian scripture: A call to human community and social justice. In the injunction to love one's neighbor there is no room for any kind of moral caste system.
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