Making new words and re-using old ones - problems with religious language

I had a bit of time today to continue reading Bishop Spong's book, "The Sins of Scripture." In the chapter on "Reading Scripture as Epic History," he reminds us that spoken language is a fairly recent development on the cosmological scale- about 50 thousand years for us. Written language is even more recent - no more than five to ten thousand years. In a blog, written language is essentially what it's all about. Our ability to write about religious ideas, however, is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it allows us to depend a bit less on our fallible day-to-day recall and to "acumulate" and "build" ideas and knowledge. It is a curse, to a degree, because of the problem of religious language. Not only does religious language not "follow the rules" always of logic and discourse, but the very most central terms are ones that are so hard to define. Whether we are talking about God, the Buddha, Enlightenment, Brahman, etc (you can extend the list), we are in essence using words/terms that are not clearly definable by any great concensus.

Last night, I participated in some back-and-forth discussion on the 11th hour decision of the Episcopal General Convention to pass a resolution that in substance would seem to be at least a temporary moratorium on the consecration of more gay/lesbian bishops. It is, however, a document that is outstanding in its vagueness. It specifically avoids talking about sexual orientation and rather foolishly talks about persons who might be viewed as inappropriate (see, I'm paraphrasing) in other parts of the Anglican communion. One wonders if their intent is to hold on consecrating any more female bishops? As there are only three provinces to date that have women bishops and, for many in the world, the issue of female priests and deacons is far from a done deed, a woman primate is clearly going to be offensive to some--reference the petition of the Diocese of Ft. Worth to have alternative primatial oversite. Having just elected Katharine as the new PB, this seems extremely ironic. It was also rather choice that another candidate who was twice divorced and thrice married was consented to just before this "gem" of a resolution was agreed to as the "best we can do for now."

I am, however, digressing a bit. What I meant to come to was that I realized in my postings in the discussion how much I had redefined religious language in ways that I knew were far off the mainstream. As a theoretical non-theist (all belief is conditional and I am "trying out" non-theistic Christianity as it were), I feel that words like "God" and "Faith" and "The Spirit" and others seem to demand to be "in quotes" somehow. I rather feel that, until I have new and unique words to convey what I am coming to believe about these things, I have to use quote enclosures to at least remind me and any other reader to pause and consider that we all may mean very different things when we use these words. As I try to explore what a new non-theistic (and perhaps non-religious as the Rt. Rev. Spong has conditionally proposed) Christianity might be like, I know that I will have to be careful at every step to consider the meaning of the words that I use and, when necessary, to define them as best I can, or if I cannot define them in positive terms, to at least do so in negative ones (e.g. God is not a personal entity watching over us from heaven above.)

As a final note, I have read on other blogs some fairly harsh criticism of PB-elect Katharine, and I would suggest that we moderate our criticism to allow her to grow into this awesome responsibility. I suspect that, just like all of us, she has had and will have more and less inspired moments. Fortunately, being an Episcopalian does not require that I view what she says as infallible. It does, however, require that I am charitable. For someone who has been dumped into the fire, as it were, we need to consider how we might do in such a position. I, for one, wish her well and hope that she will become the inspiration to all of us that I know she has the potential to be.

In the meantime, and a bit contrary, how about a quote from Benjamin Franklin? "Well done is better than well said."

Jeffrey Shy
Struggling in Mesa, Arizona