As I am writing this, I am looking over class responses to different historical perspectives on liturgy. We looked at ways that different, minority voices from history are important and often hard to find. Unearthing them is our jobs, right?
I also looked over some notes from a class I took in 2005, called “Modern Buddhism and its Roots.” It was a great class but what I want to recall was an idea that in trying to find the historical roots of something, we often end up creating something else. Most of our faiths grow out of movements very far removed from our place in history and in most cases, the primary sources of our faith are somewhat lost. We work with Bible translations of texts written down from oral tradition that stems from an actual experience of Jesus and it can be difficult to discern who that Jesus was, given the limited source material and our limited ability to find Jesus’ context and his words. In trying to figure out what first century Christianity looked like and incorporate it into modern practice, are we creating something new instead of recalling the old? Perhaps this new, history-based Christianity is newer, then, than whatever practice we are discarding in its favor. And is that okay?
I’ve also been listening to “God Talk,” a radio show in these parts that is hosted by an SJSU professor, Brent Walters. I took classes from him back in the day as well. His expertise is the early church and he is a huge supporter of exegesis and textual criticism not only of our gospel documents, but those of the early church fathers and other apocryphal documents, some of which are more “valid” than others.
How do we faithfully practice what Jesus “wanted” us to practice? How do we get at a movement and what it looked like 2000 years ago? And how do we translate that 2000-year-old movement into the context of 2014?
By doing our best.
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