There was a little girl, maybe three or four years old, who was an only child. One day she found out that her mother was pregnant and was very excited about having a new brother or sister. Within a few hours of the parents bring the new baby home from the hospital, the girl made a request. She wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence on this made her parents a bit uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in the nursery. They realized that if anything strange or dangerous was happening, they could be in the baby's room in an instant. So they let the little girl go into the baby's room, shut the door, and raced to the intercom listening station. They heard their daughter's footsteps moving across the baby's room, imagined her standing over the baby's crib, and then heard her say to her three-day-old brother, "Quick, tell me about God. I've almost forgotten."
New Testament writers assert the idea that the Christ event is a fulfillment of Hebrew scripture. They point to a truth that is deeper than the literal events of Jesus' life and death. They assert that, as the Messiah, Jesus' death was within the framework of God's will for Jesus' life. Jesus' resurrection, his abiding presence, serve as the source of the church's commission to proclaim "repentance and forgiveness of sins" to the world. The resurrected Jesus came to the disciples and told them that they would receive the Spirit. That Spirit would receive power to open their minds to the deeper meaning of the Hebrew scripture. The Spirit would tell them again about Jesus when they had almost forgotten him. It was this Spirit power that enabled the New Testament writers tell about Jesus' life and convey the meaning of who Jesus' was -- even decades after his death.
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Modern scholarship tells us that the gospels were probably not written in their present form by apostles who had known Jesus in the flesh. These writings are the product of believers who knew the post-Easter Jesus by faith. Since that time, people continue to discern new depths of meaning in the Bible in light of their particular situations and cultural experiences. This happens by the power of the Spirit.
There was conflict within the second and third-century church concerning how far to take this continued inspiration of the Spirit. There were voices vying for uniformity of belief in the midst of terrible persecution of Christians by Rome. There were also other voices within that early church, voices of imagination, voices who supported a more metaphorical approach to scriptural interpretation and a more mystical approach to faith. The reality of persecution in the early church, a very personal fear of not surviving, led the Church to seek uniformity of belief according to clear-cut doctrine. In the midst of turmoil, there is resistance to much diversity of doctrine. People in an anxious state of mind can be reluctant to live with ambiguity. Those who favored an orthodox view began to dominate what would become the universal Catholic Church based in Rome.
Over the centuries, the church itself began persecuting those with different views. Voices advocating theological imagination became peripheral - quiet voices, mystical voices. More than a thousand years later, the ancient conflict was renewed in the Protestant Reformation. In our own time, there is again tension between the voices of theological orthodoxy and those of theological imagination.
This situation raises several questions. How should we respond to this modern tension within the church, within Christian congregations, and within ourselves? Given that we now know that our biblical gospels were shaped and reshaped with layers of interpretation to get to the form we presently have, there are options of belief so that we do not have to accept without question that there is a deposit of theological doctrine purported to come directly from the apostles. At the same time, we are not limited to the newest theological fads. The question seems to be how we can stay connected to the tradition without being constructed by it? Can we avoid cutting ourselves off from the teachings on which the Christian church had its beginning while also being able to follow the insights of our imaginations? Neither extreme seems tenable. The journey of theological exploration has integrity and value only by holding these extremes in tension. The teachings of the past can be clarified and deepened by our experience and understanding of the present and by our experience of the Spirit in our lives. Our theological imagination needs to be grounded in accountability to the experience of the ages. The word of hope is that we can develop our own understanding in such a working tension.
The Christian scripture effectively reinterprets the Hebrew scripture by seeing it as pointing to Jesus. According to New Testament writers, Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets. They believed that the Spirit's presence helped them to this new understanding. As a result, they perceived that the great biblical themes of death leading to new life, of transformation, and of growth found their fulfillment in Jesus. They had their defining revelation in Jesus. What does this mean for us?
Church as I envision it is a place where people explore the understanding of their faith in an atmosphere of trust and safety. Faith can be a shared journey on which people ask hard questions in love and share their differing understandings. One of the challenges on the journey of theological exploration is to live with a degree of uncertainty. It requires us to engage in an ongoing process of discernment. Paul's admonition to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling," is especially appropriate here. Being on the journey means being honest in the searching and honest in the questioning. The result is integrity of one's whole-life beliefs - integrating the sciences, the arts, and theology.
On balance, the idea of Jesus fulfilling the Old Testament is not a literal truth. It reflects a truth that the God we perceive in the Old Testament is the same God we perceive in the New Testament. This is the same God we see in history and the same God we perceive now in our lives. Seeking to discern God's nature and God ways requires that we exercise discipline, integrity, and consistency. This means that we hold in tension different understandings of God - the traditional understandings of God that have been meaningful in the past with the excitement and uncertainty of how we imagine and sense God working now and into the future.
Theological exploration done with integrity must be life exploration. Too often theological conflict is really just a mask for life conflict. Faith is both relationship and belief, but it is more relationship than belief. Faith is both trust and insight, but it is more trust than insight. Faith is both letting go of the familiar and taking on new understandings and directions, but it is more letting go than taking on. Paul was the apostle who never met Jesus in the flesh, yet he has influenced the faith of those who follow Jesus more any person other than Jesus. Paul used the image of "being crucified with Christ." He meant that he had experienced a kind of death within himself. It was a letting go of the goals and values that were dominant in his life before he knew Jesus. The biblical theme plays out in Paul's life. He died to the person he had been and was born anew into the faithful follower of Jesus we know from the New Testament.
God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, according to the New Testament. God who is revealed in the Old Testament, who is revealed decisively in Jesus, and whom we see in our history and in community, is one. Human cultures come and go. We make theology for our present time, but it is shaped on a past understanding in dialogue with current experience. If our theology is to provide a solid foundation for the next generation, it and we must take seriously our perception of God from scripture, from tradition, from the community of the faithful around us. This process includes the Spirit's working in our own experience.
The journey as a theological process has meaning for us when it is integrated around faithful living. Journey theology has integrity when it reflects the biblical themes of death, new birth, transformation of life, and growth in the Spirit. Life journey is honest when we approach it somewhat as the little children we are in relation to God. Let us ask the Spirit to tell us again about God. We've almost forgotten.
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