Sunday, March 16, 2008

Week 10--Response to Emmet's Blog

Concerning Emmet’s post for the last day of class, I was also thinking the same things about the Christian Canon and secondary sources of “revelation.” Ultimately I think what this class has been about for us as Christians is to recognize that it is through culture that we come to know God and it has always been that way. The question is whether our current cultural setting is less revelatory about God than Jewish/Roman/Greek culture of the first century. The difference is that Jesus lived in that time. But doesn’t Jesus now live in our time as well?

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I think we need to be cautiously creative with our sacred texts in ways where they can be adapted to our time and place. Emmet alludes to the way in which early followers of Jesus did this very thing with their sacred Hebrew texts. They took great liberty (spurred on by the creative energies of the Holy Spirit) to make new meanings out of their Hebrew tradition (and some Jewish critics would say too much liberty). I see this kind of liberty as a good thing. In every stage of religious development in human history we see explosions of creativity, vision, and the courage to question tradition.

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