It’s been a busy few weeks. I was hoping to be able to put a few more thoughts on this blog about my thoughts on Lent, but my schedule with travel and stuff hasn’t allowed me to give much attention to this venue.

During the last two weeks I have been interviewing candidates for elders orders and full membership in the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church. (if your not a United Methodist and you have no idea what that means basically I have been examining candidates who hope to be ordained clergy members in our denomination) The process involves the candidates answering theological and professional development questions as well as sermons and bible studies. Needless to say I have been involved in a quite a bit of theological discussions over the last two weeks. Hearing others formulate and defend (for lack of a better word) their theological thoughts always helps me formulate my thoughts on theology and doctrine. As look back on my own journey of theological thought it seems that my thinking is becoming more and more broad rather than more and more narrow.

I’m finding that more and more the church has had a tradition of doing the opposite. I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out the systems and formula that God had put in place to either grant me salvation or at least offer me some life benefits. The problem with that was that I found myself in a position of earning the free gift of Grace by right belief or correct behavior. the more specifically I could define the belief and adhere to the correct behavior the more faithful i felt I was.

My thinking has changed from God simply revealing himself to us through formulas and exclusive means that our Modern Philosophical view has ingrained in us to a revelation happening in a broad way that includes communities of faith, scripture, poetry, story, beauty, science, mysticism and ways that I probably never assumed God would use.

It seems that the history of our church has been moving further away from the Canon that the first Christians used as their spiritual core. The earliest Christians relied on not only the written text and the scriptures they had compiled but the communities of faith they lived in, the clergy and apostles, their histories and traditions. In Billy Abraham’s book Canon and Criterion In Christian Theology he states that there are ten spokes in the wheel that all made up the canon for the earliest christians.

Then all the other parts were made subject to the apostolic office of the Bishop in Rome. So the Pope effectively told us what was important at the expense of the others. What traditions were valid, what teachings, what the scriptures said were all subject to the pope. Then Luther took us a step further and it was solely scripture. Then the Princeton scholars that gave us the fundamentalists, narrowed it further to be not just scripture but the “inerrant verbal plenary inspiration” - that every jot and tittle of the “original text” was the inspired truth of God. Not as a theological decision but mostly as reactions to the growing liberal theology of the day.

I think our modern Protestant expression of faith and revelation is a mere shadow of the richness God has intended for us