is the title of this Washington Post op ed by E. J. Dionne, Jr.. It examines not only the remarks of the Pontiff and the patriarch of the Robertson family, but also the recent defrocking of Methodist Minister Frank Schaefer for presiding over the same-sex nuptials of his son.
I am not going to examine the entire column - you are well equipped to do that on your own.
There is a section of three paragraphs that caught my attention, beginning with this:
Yet when even the pope wonders aloud as to whether it’s appropriate for him to judge, you begin to see the difficulty of deciding what “true Christians” ought to believe. This raises the question of whether the religiously based principles are merely cultural artifacts that we bend to our own immediate purposes.
Please keep reading.
The two paragraphs that immediately follow are these:
The answer lies in embracing a humility about how imperfectly human beings understand the divine, which is quite different from rejecting God or faith. This humility defines the chasm between a living religious tradition and a dead traditionalism. We need to admit how tempted we are to deify whatever commitments we have at a given moment. And those of us who are Christian need to acknowledge that over the history of the faith, there have been occasions when “a supposedly changeless truth has changed,” as the great church historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan put it.
What distinguishes this view from pure relativism is the insistence that truth itself exists. The Christian’s obligation is to engage in an ongoing quest for a clearer understanding of what it is. Robertson would disagree with me, but I’d say that we are going through precisely such an effort when it comes to how we think about homosexuality, much as Christians have done before on such matters as slavery, the role of women and the Earth’s place in the universe.
Several things are to my mind important in these paragraphs.
First and foremost is the notion that while truth exists, our understanding of it is culturally dependent, and that when we recognize the limitations of our previous interpretation we may in fact not be abandoning the truth, but moving closer to a more complete understanding, as clearly we did on the question of slavery, which after all, is biblically condoned in both the Hebrew and Christian bibles - although I note the former contained the notion of the Jubilee, which established limits upon slavery and of indebtedness in general.
Here I am reminding of some words of the late Alexander Schmemann, long-time dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary of the Orthodox Church in America. Fr. Schmemann once wrote that the ancient Orthodox Church was constantly changing in order to remain the same, that it had to reshape how it expressed its understanding of the permanent truth it contained in order to properly communicate that truth in a different time and age.
Of course, there is an assumption that the Church in its collective wisdom has leaders in the current time able to bridge that gap. A large part of the dispute withing church structures is to whom the power to make such judgments should be entrusted.
Although I have a Masters from a Roman Catholic Seminary, I have never been Catholic and would not presume to speak on behalf of that Church.
But I see a parallel, one driven home forcefully to me because of my role as a teacher of government and politics. It is a similar interpretational problem, and it is that of Constitutional interpretation. Is it necessary to change the actual text of our governing document in order to appropriately apply it in a society that is very different, and thus maintain its basic principles in a very different age and culture?
It is interesting that those most forcefully arguing for what i see as a more rigid Constitutional interpretation (except when they need a different interpretation to reach a desired outcome) are themselves conservative Catholics, ones I suspect might have some real issues with the recent pronouncement of Pope Francis.
I will not engage in a debate of whether there is a universal truth, which of course is key to the Catholic Church's understanding of itself.
I reminded that in my days in the Orthodox Church theologians and teachers I knew would regularly remind us of biblical words attributed to Jesus such as In my fathers house are many mansions, and apply them to the notion that salvation was possible for those who did not acknowledge Jesus as God, Lord and Master.
But I left the Orthodox Church some 2 decades ago. I now find myself as a member of the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers, whose approach is to believe that the age of revelation is not closed, that understanding and insight are accessible to the ordinary person, that God can speak through any person willing to be open to the possibility.
Does that mean that every observation or expression is valid? Of course not. As humans we are limited in our understanding, which should be an occasion of humility rather than of arrogance in our own beliefs and expressions.
We need to admit how tempted we are to deify whatever commitments we have at a given moment. For me this sentence leapt off the page. It is a human process. Perhaps it is that we want certainty, or that we want to check off a box and move on.
But that can foreclose deepening our understanding, because having deified we have reified, we have made rigid and we tend to reject anything that does not fit into that now-frozen interpretation.
I claim little if any wisdom. Since I was a child i have had trouble with the notion of a rigid truth of any kind.
If one should not lie, what does one say or not say if the SS asks if you are hiding any Jews?
If abiding by a principle as we see us causes us to seriously harm a person about whom we claim to care, which is wrong, the claim to care or perhaps the principle as we understand it?
I remember vaguely a tale, perhaps apocryphal, that the painter Georges Braque, would get himself arrested for walking into galleries or museums which contained his works and attempting to continue to paint on them - he would argue that it was his painting, but it did not matter.
I also remember the last public performance by Bela Bartok, conducted by Fritz Reiner, where while performing one of his own work the composer in Bartok took precedence over the pianist/perfomer, and he started "re-composing" the piece as he performed. It was a tribute to Reiner's skill that the pianist(s) (I think Bartok's wife Eva was also performing) and the orchestra ended at the same time.
To me at least, whether in politics or faith, economics or interpersonal relationships, I start with the person(s) before me. If I cannot see them as something valuable in themselves not merely as instrumentalities to either advance or possible inhibit the goals I seek, how I am operating is wrong.
Perhaps Dionne's words will not speak to you.
Perhaps you have no interest in religion, or in the supposed notion of a permanent truth.
Yet for many people such a notion is critical to how they live. Many do so in an admirable fashion.
For me, I found the paragraphs I quoted very relevant, and thought it worthwhile to point them out and to offer the half-baked reflections that flowed from my having encountered them.
Peace.