ALIENLIFE

First Things

I blame it all on my mother.  She planted the seed that grew into my embrace of Orthodoxy back in my preschool years. We were Southern Baptist, and knowing in some vague way that not everyone was Baptist I asked my mother one Sunday why we were Baptist. She replied that she and Daddy believed that what the Baptist Church taught was the closest to what the Apostles believed and taught back in Biblical times. That thereafater became my measuring stick, my metric, for all spiritual life. Whatever I came to believe in the many years since that time I believed because I was convinced those beliefs where those closest to or actually held by the Apostles during their earthly ministry.  Boiled down it is really a question of authority and authenticity. Authentic Christianity must bear an apostolic stamp. But what is that stamp?  What determines what is or is not the faith in the midst of many competing truth claims? What if anything distinguishes the Baptist claims from that of the Methodists, Reformed, the Mormons, or the Catholics, or any other group that self identifies as a Christian Church? It is at this point most "discussions" break down into squabbles over biblical interpretation, the idea being that the "truest" or "closest" church will have the best and least assailable biblical arguments in defense of it's beliefs. Of course, in my experience winners and losers are determined more by how good and knowledgeable a presenter/apologist one has enlisted in any given theological fray.    In short the presumed answer to any question of theology is expertly argue the Scripture, which is believed to be so clear as to be easily understood by anyone who is diligent and who has ears to hear.  Funny how so many assiduously diligent hear so many different things.  How could that be? How could the Spirit teach so many conflicting things. That has long been a problem for me...but one for which i had no answer until I encountered Orthodoxy.

You see if somewhere in the welter of Christian belief there was one which was more right... substantially more right  than the others, and if for some reason it was not what I currently believed, then how could I know if what I held was in greater or lesser degree some species of theological error?  All honest readers and searchers of Scripture that I came to know over the years thought they had it right, that they were led by the Spirit into all truth. But there was no reconciling the certainties of my earnest Mormon friend with that of my earnest Baptist, Reformed, or Catholic friends (who while united in opposing the Mormon faith were united in little else). What I eventually came to learn from this was that I could be wrong. It was certainly incumbent upon me to try and "be right" in my beliefs, but my sincerity was no guarantee that I would get it right.  After all there were millions of others who differed from me in all sincerity and in some great exegetical detail, and if I was right, then wherever we had substantial difference, they were wrong no matter that they thought God had opened the Scriptures to them. If God was no respecter of persons, then I had no grounds to believe my faith had of necessity any firmer theological foundations.

My conclusion was that either God cared far less about what I had come to think of as "dead doctrine" or I had missed some important consideration along with several million of my closest and dearest friends and co-religionists, or perhaps both.  How could we know after 2000 years which interpretive formula was the right one. Which was authoritative, if any?  

I had no idea how many questionable assumptions there were in my arguments and my questions and in those of my contemporaries. It just took a while to discover them...to wake up to the walls of "intellectual" box I and so many others were ignorantly trapped in. However, I was not mistaken in this...the need for an apostolically established measure of truth and Christian experience. Only what could it be?  More on this next time.