Did Jesus rely on the contemporary orthodox, traditional Jewish teaching and doctrine contained in the Hebrew scriptures and worship?
Yes and no.
Yes
He was a Jew, a teacher, a rabbi. rootedin his tradition, in the Hebrew scriptures and synagogue worship.
And No
He was deeply critical of contemporary Jewish belief and practice. He challenged the teachers and told parables that challenged orthodox, traditional understandings and interpretations. Jesus taught his disciples and followers to practice their faith and belief in God in a radically new way – the Way to be followed to enter the kingdom of God.
The habitual attachment to Jewish orthodoxy, tradition, teachings and truth, doctrine and worship that Jesus deliberately challenged and dismantled were human traits – “fallen” human traits, if you wish use that kind of language.
The Jesus movement, the movement that all too quickly became an organisation and then an institution attached to its own new creation of orthodoxy, tradition, teaching, truth, doctrine and worship. Christians like to think that their new, evolved formulation of Judaism, based on the life, teaching and practice of their Jewish leader, was a development of and better than the Hebrew model they were superseding. Because the new movement grew and spread, this proved to them that it was and is indeed superior. This is the argument being advanced today for the superiority of the HTB and Global South brands of Christianity.
The 2023 LLF crisis
The Church of England is living through a period of crisis characterised by disputes about tradition, teachings, truth, doctrine and worship related to the sexuality and gender of human beings. The Anglican Communion is living through the same crisis - at a distance (or so it thinks) so that it avoids being infected by the same ‘false teaching’. The same crisis – how does Christianity treat LGBTQIA+ people – is actually present in every Province where homophobia and transphobia are integral to the teaching.
Living through crises is something common to all human beings and institutions. We who are alive today find ourselves living through multiple crises at every level of life from the personal to the national to the global – failing public institutions in the UK, international economic and political crises and the global climate crisis.
The crisis in the Church of England is provoked by the presence of Jesus in history, his life, teaching and practice. Jesus provokes repeated crises throughout human history, both the history of the church and secular history. The Christian crises are personified in individual saints, mystics, visionaries, prophets and protestors, people now revered for their writings and remembered for the dissenting or reformist movements they initiated. Some are identified as saints and martyrs.
According to the arguments being advanced by conservative Evangelicals - the Church of England Evangelical Council and the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans - orthodox, traditional Christian teaching and truth is defined by and contained in Christian doctrine, Christian orthodoxy, the Christian Bible and Christian liturgy.
As a result they oppose each manifestation of a new movement towards human equality and justice. The powerful anti-LGBTQIA+ equality movement is the latest manifestation of the Christian reluctance to embrace the transformative implications of the kingdom gospel of Jesus.
Our humanity is more important than dogma and doctrine
People, our vulnerable lives and loves and intimacies, are more important than rules, canons, dogmas, doctrines and orthodoxies.
People who are uncertain about their faith and their experience of God are often closer to the kingdom than those who live with absolute, dogmatic certainty.
At this point in the blog I could go on again about the kingdom of God, life in all its fullness and God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love. That’s the heart of the Christian faith I live by and am inspired and empowered by.
The reason for my belief, unpopular as it is in the majority of Anglican Christians (according to Global South and conservative evangelical claims) is that each of us is or can be inspired to be, motivated to be, conscious of, the depth of truth and love at the core of our being, the God-essence heart of our being. All of us are embodied with the essence of and are carriers of the potential, the dream of God, the energy of unconditional love that infuses creation and inspires and generates evolution. This essence and presence, encountered daily in silence and contemplation and engagement with others is why I continue to be a Christian, a person of prayer, a contemplative activist.
The church could manifest this profound, simple pattern of the Jesus-centred life – but it has all too often allowed a rules-based model to dominate.
Developing our consciousness
I’m noticing something at the moment that isn’t easy to become conscious of. Our English Archbishops and bishops have great difficulty in being conscious of their own thinking. The Church Times report of the recent House of Bishops meeting and GS 2328 “Living in Love and Faith: Setting out the progress made and work still to do” and the current Church Times report on “Bishops’ divisions over same-sex marriage exposed” all show how unable the current College of Bishops is at processing information, experience and feelings and thinking through together how to make progress with LLF in the direction agreed and favoured by the majority. They are not functioning at a level of consciousness that could make this possible. Conversations between advocates for change and individual bishops reveal how woefully inadequate their understanding of LGBTQIA+ life and experience is – and this after over a decade of continual process and encounter and 6 years of LLF.
The church could be an institution and a meeting place that introduces people to the mystery of God’s infinite, unconditional love and goodness and, more importantly, teaches us how to discover and experience this for ourselves, how to become more aware of our inner world, our emotions, our unconscious, our whole body self. Instead, the College of Bishops, the training institutions, and therefore the clergy (with rare exceptions) are stuck with an inadequate, unhealthy model of God, life and human beings that is damaging rather than life-giving.
This results in a fixation on salvation theology. We are sinners first and foremost needing to be redeemed from our evil addictions. It is not a life-giving theology. It is killing the life in all its fullness gospel of Jesus and killing the church. It’s not who has the biggest congregations or the greatest number of members that matters. It’s the effect the church has on our lives. And at the moment in England and elsewhere in the Anglican Communion thanks to the Church of England, it’s having an incredibly damaging effect.
The Christian Church needs to engage with the question: “In what ways did Jesus rely on the contemporary orthodox, traditional Jewish teaching and doctrine contained in the Hebrew scriptures and worship and in what ways did he challenge them?”
More importantly, it needs to understand what “life in all its fullness” means in reality for every human being and learn how to live and communicate this transformational truth.