Bishop Spong is giving me much food for thought. I really don’t believe that God wants us to simply accept everything we are told about Him at face value. I feel “called” to dig deeper, to study, and also to use the brain He gave me to think about what I find and use the logic He also gave me to decide what is “True.” I can accept the idea that the men who wrote the books of the Bible were God inspired. Even the men who chose which books to include may have been God inspired. However, they were still men, subject to error in spite of that inspiration. They viewed the revelations they were given through the lens of their own experience. If you are exposed to an idea or vision outside your experience and knowledge, you must relate it to something familiar in order to understand it.
An ordinary man in 900 BCE could not conceive of a mechanical device that flew. He would translate such a thing as a giant bird, a dragon, or perhaps a wheel. The instruction to “have dominion over the earth” was seen as having power over all, not a responsibility to take care of it. Woman as a “helpmate” became servant instead of partner. But we, as modern people, with a wider, more scientific, understanding have a responsibility to look at the scriptures and re-vision them in the light of present day knowledge.
The result may drastically alter our religious viewpoint, but it doesn’t have to cancel it out. Instead it can help us to see through the glass more clearly. We’ll still be a long way from understanding the Almighty or His/Her plan, but we can come much closer than “scholars” of the ancient world because we begin with a better understanding of the world God made.
I had never thought of the day of Jesus’ Ascension as a holiday until this year. I’m not all that familiar with Catholic holidays, but I don’t think very many Protestant churches in the United States celebrate the Ascension. Oh, the minister preaches about it. We know it happened between Easter and Pentecost, and we don’t deny its importance, but it just kind of gets lost somehow.
One of the things I am getting from the classes I’m taking is a wider perspective on religion as a whole. The book we are using for my current class is God is Not One by Stephen Prothero. The text is broken into chapters that each cover a different major religion. Most of them are the mainline organizations we are all familiar with, but it concludes with a strange outlook.
That “Something” then led me to the Religious Studies program at Western Kentucky University. So, it’s been more than a year now. I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface of what I need to know. Still, Something is telling me it is time to begin. I still feel that it is too personal and I am not qualified to tell anyone else what to think about religion. So, I am trying to figure out where to begin and what direction to go in. It feels like the most dangerous endeavor I have ever embarked upon. I am not ready. I may never be ready.