The Odes of Solomon

I had posted this week a couple of comments to Nick Knisely’s blog where he and some others are “struggling” with the doctrines of “the fall” and “the incarnation” as they might apply to the future discovery of non-terrestrial intelligent life.  I have twice advanced the opinion that “the fall” is overemphasized in Western Spirituality thanks to Augustine and Anselm of Canterbury.  I have also suggested that the “incarnation” is a doctrine that is not necessarily tied tightly to “the fall” nor ideas of human “sinfulness.” 

I was re-reading this week from a book by Philip Jenkins entitled The Lost History of Christianity.  This is a commentary-loaded history of the Christian East in the areas of Syria, Iran, Iraq, India, Tibet, China, etc.  These so-called “Nestorian” Christians had a vibrant culture and, in their day, far outnumbered the Christians of Europe and the Mediterranean.  

One text that we owe to the earliest days of Syrian Christianity is the so-called “Odes of Solomon.”  Clearly not Solomonic, but Christian in origin, they should not be confused with the similarly named Psalms of Solomon that are a pharasaic Judaic creation.  The Odes have been criticized by some for “gnostic” content (they mention “knowledge” here and there), but classical elements of developed gnostic thought are plainly missing (e.g. the “evil” nature of the physical world/creation for example).  In the translantion by James Charlesworth, they are incredibly beautiful poems/hymns and demonstrate a theology rather more akin to the Johanine tradition than anything else in our current corpus.   These odes were “discovered” in the late 19th/early 20th century and have since been found in multiple manuscript traditions.  Scholars have dated them to about the 2d century (some minority opinions say late 1st century) of the common era making them about contemporary with the Didache.  Had these texts been widely circulated in the Christian West, I think that they would have stood an excellent chance of inclusion in the New Testament canon of scripture. 

Since our canon is long-since “closed,” that is “water under the bridge,” but they are nevertheless beautiful pieces of Christian poetry.  They reveal a gentle and kindly God who, like a divine mother, offers “his breasts” for milk for his children.  They describe a view of the incarnation that is both ancient and fresh, singularly lacking in the dark colorations given that doctrine by Augustine and Anselm and their adherents in the west.  

There is a free online version of the Charlesworth translation that is available at the link: The Odes of Solomon

I’ll also “paste in” a copy of the segment that I quoted in Dean Knisely’s blog, Entangled States

From Ode 7

"For there is a helper for me, the Lord. He has generously shown himself to me in his simplicity, because his kindness has diminished his dreadfulness.

He became like me, that I might receive Him. In form he was considered like me, that I might put him on.

And I trembled not when I saw him, because he was gracious to me.

Like my nature he became, that I might understand him. And like my form, that I might not turn away from him.

The Father of Knowledge is the Word of knowledge.

He who created wisdom is wiser than his works.

And he who created me when yet I was not knew what I would do when I came into being.

On account of this, he was gracious to me in his abundant grace, and allowed me to ask from him and to benefit from his sacrifice.

For he it is who is incorrupt, the perfection of the worlds and their Father.

He has allowed Him to appear to them that are his own; in order that they may recognize him that made them, and not suppose that they came of themselves.

For towards knowledge he has set his way, he has widened it and lengthened it and brought it to complete perfection.

And has set over it the traces of his light, and it proceeded from the beginning until the end.

For by him, he was served, and he was pleased by the Son.

And because of his salvation, he will possess everything. And the Most High will be known by his holy ones:

To announce the coming of the Lord, that they may go forth to meet him and may sing to him, with joy and with the harp of many tones...

Let the singers sing the grace of the Lord Most High, and let them bring their songs.

And let their heart be like the day, and their gentle voices like the majestic beauty of the Lord.

And let there not be anyone who breathes that is without knowledge or voice.

For he gave a mouth to his creation: to open the voice of the mouth towards him, and to praise him."

I found this, frankly, to be stunningly beautiful.  What's more surprising is that all of the Odes are like this.  How did we "miss" this text in the West, and why are they not more popular? 

Christological Confusion.

It is becoming increasingly common to think of faith in the Christian West as going through a time of great change.  In the simile proposed by Phyllis Tickle, we have torn open the covering of the "cable" to the anchor of faith and are examining the cords/threads within.  The source of our modern "predicament" has been variously conceptualized, and I am drawn to the hypothesis proposed by Karen Armstrong that, in the post-reformation period, the Christian West has abandoned too much of the "mythos" in religion, opting for a  more purely "logos" approach, creating a new synthesis out of the interaction of traditional faith with the ideas of the enlightenment and the growth of modern science. This approach asserted the "understandability" of religious faith in rational terms in much the same way that the discovery of the "laws" of physics had rendered the physical world intelligible and understandable.  As the discoveries of science have rapidly rendered a literal understanding of at least the cosmology of the bible untenable, however, the "cracks" in the old religious synthesis have continued to appear in ever greater number and size.

Somewhat less credited, it would seem, in Armstrong's work, has been the influence of the so-called higher biblical criticism.  Shunned by conservative evangelicals who continue to espouse a "literalist" approach, it has become rather standard stuff in a modern seminary education for mainline protestants and also Roman Catholics. Although it is not frequently referred to in explicit ways in most Sunday sermons, it underlies a great deal of the public preaching in the mainline Protestant churches and lurks underneath the surface in more Catholic settings.  Currently, the "debate" between radical atheism and religious faith has focused on questions such as the "existence" of God and the attacks by the atheist activists on the literalist/fundamentalist form of Christianity that has arisen as a response to the tide of the degradation of the old-paradigm, post-reformation Christian synthesis. As in any bitter divorce, there is acrimony aplenty flowing in both directions between the now-atheist scientists and the Christian fundamentalists.  This has become further complicated by the "culture war" causes of civil rights for persons of color, women and GLBT persons.

One more subtle thread, however, often lost in this drama that plays out on the more public stage, has been what I might term the "Crisis of Christology." Traditional histories of Christianity relegate the great Christological debates to a long-past period of the first centuries of Christian development. The "settled question" of Christology, however, has begun  to resurface following assaults on many fronts: questions about the literal/factual nature of the resurrection,  "historical" Jesus research and the rediscovery of ancient "alternative" Christologies such as those found in the Nag Hammadi texts to name a few.  As an Episcopalian in a church where fundamentalist biblical literalism is a decidedly minority opinion, the Christological controversy is likely to prove much more divisive and destructive, and it is something that we would be well-advised to watch very carefully. It has already surfaced in a practical sense in the recent controversy over the consent to the election of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester in the Diocese of Northern Michigan.  It was implicit in the furor over the sermon of the Most Rev. Schori with her supposedly "universalist" comments at recent General Convention.  For conservative Evangelicals, little of their faith life has been grounded in any conscious/careful understanding of traditional Christology, although it "assumes" some of the basics.  For Episcopalians, however,  traditionally both reformed and catholic, continuing to affirm the Nicean-Constantinopolitan Creed and possessing an historical liturgical tradition, our whole religious life "reeks" with complex Christological underpinnings. In online debates I have seen this surface in what I might call a "mining" or rediscovery of more "eastern" orthodox traditions. We find quotes trotted out from the earliest fathers of the Church: Athanasius, the Gregories, Basil and others as "defenses" in a way that has not been seen in Christian theological debate for more than a millennium.  This reassertion of the complex Christologies to which they contributed has been countered by a contrary school of reaching back to more mystical traditional ideas with elements from Origen, Duns Scotus, Eckhart, pseudo-Dionysius and others revered for their works on religious experience/practice and some of them villified for their "defective" Christologies.  In a more profound way than the debates that have arisen over biblical literalism, this has touched the heart of more "catholic" strains of Christianity such as exist in Anglicanism and TEC and has contributed to the present unhappy marriage of biblical-literalist evangelicals and traditionalist Anglo-catholics. We saw this earlier this year in a debate in The Episcopal Cafe in which I participated in which the "meaning" of the incarnation and its "orthodox" understanding was a topic of lively debate.  It has resurfaced this past week on Dean Nicholas Knisely's Blog, Entangled States, where he was noted to have quipped, "Ugh. Who says the Christological controversies are fully behind us?"

Rather than being "fully behind us," I believe that the question of the place of Jesus in post-modern Christianity is very much an open one at present.  As someone who has moved in a non-theistic and more "mystical" direction in the "understanding" of religious faith and practice but who has also absorbed a great deal of the "higher criticism," I have been trying, so far, to "let the question ride."  Inasmuch as a "mystical" or "experiential" approach to the numinous requires a liturgical and ritual context, I had decided that it would be best to loosen my crossed fingers and just "do" the liturgy rather than placing each prayer, response and action under the analytical microscope.  I have also been drawn, as a response to the dreaded "Anglican Covenant," to the idea advanced by the V. Rev. Knisely of the idea of the BCP as a de facto covenant and one that precludes the need for the one under present consideration.  I have, therefore, been a bit "agnostic" of late in my own Christology.

It is clear, however, that the liturgical life of our branch of the church, so essential to our corporate identity, is strongly rooted in a "high"  traditional Christology.  The centrality of the eucharistic observation is tied up with dogmatic formulations such as the so-called doctrine of penal substitution.  The doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the problematic "God the Son" is so pervasive that one can scarcely find a single paragraph of the prayerbook that does not touch on it- explicitly, implicitly or formulaically.  In general, I think that the church will be better served by anticipating these controversies at this comparatively early stage and starting to deal with them in a conscious and considered manner rather than engaging in our usual practice of waiting for it to become an overwhelming and destructive tidal wave. We need to begin to consider that we may have to re-answer the old question from the Gospels of "Who do you say that I am?" regarding the Christ of Faith, if we are to be able to "save" Jesus for the next synthesis.

I would suggest that this has the potential to be far more divisive than the present hot-button issue of sexuality about which there is currently so much angst.  Admittedly, the "Christological Crisis" has not come fully to the attention of the everyman in the pew, but it is being heard increasingly in more liberal-minded circles in the church.  I find, in addition, that this type of "issue" begins to divide even the so-called "liberals" at a deep level.  There are clearly those who are ready to move forward on issues of morality/sexuality but are deeply suspicious of opening the Pandora's box of re-examining our Christology. Many otherwise "liberal" and intellectual persons in the church have begun to engage  in what I have tended to call "heresy cataloguing" in which the response to a "suspect" Christological statement is to "name the heresy" and slam the door shut on debate.  That a middle-of-the-road clergy person such as Dean Knisely could suggest that Christological controversy is not "fully behind us" suggests that the questions are widespread and deep, even if we do not talk about them.  I would hope that we could continue to exercise our Anglican/Episcopal open-mindedness in debate and discussion and allow some of this to "come out" into the open, particularly after the "sexuality storm" has settled down a bit. So far, much of the "Emergent Church" movement has come from a post-evangelical perspective, and seems little interested in resolving these issues or even discussing them, presumably as high Christology was never a strong "evangelical" concern to start with.  I would hate to see, however, the development/evolution in these new churches continue without the input of those of us from more traditional "mainline" backgrounds who are better equipped to deal with the Christological questions, having historically had a "high" Christology to start with, but we shall see....

Anyone ready to debate the "two natures?"  Don't be chicken!

The Church as a Sponge

I recently posted a reply to a posting on The Episcopal Cafe's Section, "The Daily Episcopalian," in which Adrian Worsfold wrote an essay entitled Anglican No Longer . He describes complicated reasons as to why he no longer feels comfortable calling himself Anglican or Christian for that matter. I oddly felt that I had "been there done that" and that, as one of the few non-theistic Episcopalians that I know, I needed to post some of my own ideas. I suspect that, as I took several days to put my thoughts together for that post, it will not get much notice. I did, however, want to incorporate it into my own blog, as it contains some ideas about what I have recently been thinking about church and the world. I am attracted, I think, to some of the "emergent" Christianity movement's ideas, but I often get the feeling that the persons writing in that area are coming from an Evangelical background and that their foundational assumptions and language "do not go far enough" to move away from that source. Another voice from both a more "catholic" as well as "pluralist" perspective is needed. As I read it over, I think that I "jump" a bit from the metaphor of the sponge to the metaphor of pilgrimage, and I could probably "clean it up," but I think that I will post it as I originally wrote it for now:

As an a-theistic (non-theistic) Christian/Episcopalian, I somehow feel that I should comment. Ultimately, however, paths like that which Adrian has taken cannot be walked by another, no matter how much sympathy I feel for many of his views. I can only wish him well on his journey, and I hope that his pilgrimage will be one of fulfillment and meaning.
I have thought a great deal recently about "what does it mean" to be Episcopalian/Anglican in this time of re-examination of our foundational "truths" and the inevitable anti-explorational reactions that this invokes. Somehow, I feel that, while I applaud our moves for "fuller inclusion" of LGBT persons and women, we are missing the mark. What Christianity and TEC/Anglicanism does not need so much is "inclusivity" (and certainly not more "exclusivity") but more "porosity." We need for the church to be more "porous" in terms of its experience of/with the world and creation, the "numinous" and the stories and perspectives of other religious traditions and how we understand and allow that to meaningfully interact with our own traditions and history. I was thinking recently that, in spite of our attempts to formulate positions/doctrines, Jesus in the Gospels often seemed to resist firm definitions. "What is the Kingdom of heaven like?" was answered mostly in parable and metaphor, not in creed/covenant/doctrine. "Covenant" Anglicans need to appreciate the irony of what they are trying to accomplish.
How about a new parable? "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a sponge. When it is taken out of water, it dries out, hardens, breaks and disintegrates. But when it is put into water, it takes up the water and grows and absorbs it. And when you take it out again, it drenches everything around it. "
The Church, I think, needs to be more sponge-like. It needs to absorb the concerns and needs of those that it encounters. It needs to avoid having firm boundaries and borders. It needs to be drenched in the experience of the world as it is, not as we wish it to be and also the possibility of the numinous that we may find/encounter in ways unlike any that we have known before. Scripture needs to be a springboard for experience/thought, not a wall around our minds and lives to fence them in. We need to break the canon open, not fence it in. The church needs to be immersed in the water of the numinous and the world, not out of the water and drying out on a storage shelf. It needs to "leak" the numinous and its reflections and experience back into the surrounding water and world.
At this point, I am more "optimistic" than Adrian that the churches, Anglican and Episcopal and others, can still possibly do this. It will not be easy, but what real thing is ever easy? In the year 2000, the liturgy for the opening of the Holy Door at St. Peter's in Rome was accompanied by a prayer containing a line that still resonates with me: "The Church is on a pilgrimage through time to eternity." Each of us is journeying in this Pilgrimage for such an infinitesimal time with no end in sight. We walk, yes, but wither none of us really can say nor can we say that there is some "end" at which we will arrive. I hope, though, that while we live and walk together or apart, we may find meaning in the journey itself.