Ritual, Doctrine and Story

A few weeks ago I started wrestling with an Andrew McGowan talk I heard on Encounter (the full transcript is here). He's a man who likes his Xy steeped in ritual and is not ashamed of religion (as opposed to religiosity). He argues that Jesus and Paul and the early Xns were religious and to claim to have a religion less or "spiritualised Christianity is a serious theological mis-step". There was something about what he said that seemed to hit a nerve with me particularly having recently seen the film Whale Rider (post about that here) and been enchanted somewhat with the rites and rituals of the Moari culture. I know of Xn churches near me where rites and rituals are big part of what they do yet, I still don’t feel like I don't fit in, with these more Liberal ritual orientated churches. Conversely feel less and less like I fit in with more Evangelical doctrine and belief orientated churches. (Evangelical includes many emerging churches who I think are often just re-imagining evangelicalism, which is a fine pursuit for an evangelical to go on.)

None the less, I feel like I don’t fit and I think I have worked out why. It’s because I’m a post-modern person. For me ritual and doctrine come second and story comes first. By story I mean the big story of God’s relationship with the world. Now story is dangerous because it is slippery. Story is slippery because every story has an original historical context, it has an author with intentions, there is an intended audience all of which need to be taken in to account. Finally there is the reader. Each reader has different experiences and can relate to different aspects of the story in different ways. For this reason Jewish Scholars often speak of the Seventy Faces of Torah. You could read the same piece Torah and come away with seventy different ways of understanding it. That is simply the nature of story which is what the Bible is essentially. When Jesus says Love God and Love Others there is no list of exactly how to do that instead we are left with context specific examples and we have to work out how we can mirror those in some way in our own context. To make things simpler we devise doctrines and beliefs, to remind ourselves of what we know we devise rituals and rites. But they come second and are therefore somewhat more flexible. Not to say that we just toss away ideas that Xns have held for centuries, but we critic them with some reverence knowing they have been usefull to many before us but we none the less wrestle with them reinforce, revive, replace or reject them. We do this because story coems first. If you’re a post modern you’ll understand what I’m saying if you’re a modern you’ll be thinking this sounds awful dangerous.

Now, I’ll think I’ll spend some time reading the Bible and getting my teeth into the story.