Worship and Common Prayer

Worship plays an important role in most Christian Traditions. However, in the Anglican Tradition, of which the Episcopal Church is the American representative, it plays a central and crucial role. We are one of the few, if not the only tradition, which defines itself by its worship. The boundaries of our communion are defined by the activity of worship because we know we are a community primarily, not by our experience of shared belief – as in- we all believe the same truths defined in the same way, but through our experience of worshipping together. For Episcopalians, Jesus’ saying in Matthew 18:20 – For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them becomes that where two or three gather to worship in my name, there am I with them. Episcopalians have another adage: as we worship so we believe.

We know ourselves and recognize each other in community when we gather to worship God. The worship of God is our priority. It is important for us to understand why this is and where this approach to Christian community has come from.

1. The roots of a worship-centered approach to religious identity are very ancient. At the time of the English Reformation the majority of English religious houses and monasteries followed in one form or another, the Rule of St Benedict. Benedict structured his religious communities around the centrality of worship. The Benedictine ethos has shaped our Anglican identity as a communion to a greater extent than is the case in any other Christian Tradition.
2. The Elizabethan Settlement (a series of Acts of Parliament during the reign of Elizabeth I) resulted in English Christians, whatever their theological or political beliefs finding themselves compelled by Law to sit alongside one another in their parish churches. Although they did not share theology, nevertheless traditional catholics found themselves sharing pew space alongside neighbors who embraced the protestant reforms.
3. Anglican identity did not emerge out of an agreed approach to belief based on a shared way of looking at God and the world. Anglican identity formed from having to tolerate difference within a national, Church of England.
4. With agreement on belief impossible, a notion of right relationship became the crucial element in the formation of Anglican identity. Anglicanism emerged from a shared experience of right relationship, which over the generations became increasingly shaped into a communal identity by the worship and language of The Book of Common Prayer.
5. This historical accident continues to shape our identity as a community. We are Christians who recognize one another through our willingness to worship together. We continue to be shaped by the words of The Book of Common Prayer, even though we may not share any common agreement as to what these forms and words might mean.

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

The Book of Common Prayer is unique. Other traditions have a book of services and prayers. No other tradition has anything approaching the contribution made by The Book of Common Prayer, which has single handedly shaped our community’s identity. On the landscape of American Christianity, it is the BCP that gives the Episcopal Church its unique characteristic as a community tolerant of considerable diversity, defined and held together by its shared approach to worship. Despitecover centuries there having been a number of revisions of the BCP, our current 1979 revision still carries the shape and linguistic stamp of Thomas Cranmer. Alas his soaring command of the English language, his poetic prose has to some extent been replaced by the use of contemporaneous English in the new Rite II service options. However, some semblance of Cranmarian English survives in the Rite I versions of Common Prayer and Eucharistic Services.

An Historical Overview of the BCP

In 1532, Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury during the last years of Henry VIII’s reign. In 1544 he published his first vernacular service. In 1549 he published the first Book of Common Prayer, based on an extensive reform of the English Catholic liturgy known as the Sarum (Salisbury) Rite. Cranmer was a master wordsmith and alongside the language of the later King James Bible, it is the cadenced prose of the Book of Common Prayer that has shaped the Anglican religious consciousness to the extent that Cranmarian English has become a term of linguistic classification. In 1552, under the more Protestant influences during the reign of Edward VI, Cranmer produced a first revision of the BCP of 1549. In 1559, the BCP was further revised in a more Catholic direction during Elizabeth’s reign. The prayer book of 1559 remained in effect until 1662. For the Church of England, the revision of 1662 remains the quintessential revision of The BCP, and remains the only Parliamentary approved version of the BCP despite more recent Church authorized liturgical revisions.

Cranmer’s intention was that the liturgy should be in the language spoken by the people. The hallmark of Cranmer’s approach lay in his insistence that the participation of the laity was as essential as the actions of the clergy. No longer could a priest alone, celebrate the Eucharist without the presence of at least one lay person, but the daily pattern of the Divine Office, hitherto prayed only by the clergy in private or in monastic choir now became simplified into morning and evening prayer or Mattins and Evensong. These became public services of the Church in which the laity were expected to take a full part. However, a subtle yet significant shift from the ancient Sarum Rite resulted from Cranmer’s creation of a tradition for worship and common prayer, not only accessible to ordinary people, but which celebrated the events of ordinary life in this world. This approach was in sharp contrast to the older liturgical emphasis on celebrating the life of Church and the Saints in heaven.

The BCP contained orders for Common Prayer, the Eucharist, and the liturgical celebration of life events in services of Rogation (blessing of the land and crops), birth (the Churching of Women), baptism, marriage, and death. It also contained The Thirty Nine Articles of Religion. These were a reformed interpretation, based on Cranmer’s return to Early Church and Biblical sources, of the historic belief and practice of the Church. The Thirty Nine Articles became the foundation for Anglican belief and practice. To complement the BCP Cranmer also compiled a two- year Lectionary of Scriptural readings for use in Church. He also wrote a separate collect prayer for every Sunday of the year as well as other major feasts and celebrations.

In 1789, following the Revolutionary War the newly established Episcopal Church authorized its own Book of Common Prayer. The first American BCP followed the English BCP concerning “the particular Forms of Divine Worship, and the Rites and Ceremonies appointed to be used therein”. The reason for a new book was the need to remove any political allegiance to the British Crown. The 1789 BCP followed the structure of the Eucharistic Prayer found in the BCP of the Scottish Episcopal Church rather than that of the English BCP. This was a condition imposed by the Scots in return for their bishops agreeing to ordain Samuel Seabury as the first American Bishop. The Episcopal Church revised the 1789 BCP in 1928 and then in 1979. The 1979 revision was needed to take into account the changes in liturgical practice resulting from the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgical revisions during and following the Second Vatican Council. The 1979 book remains the book in current use.

The Major Sections of the BCP

1. Historical Ratification (1798) and Preface
2. The Orders for Common Prayer – the collective daily pattern for the Divine Office or the prayer of the Church
3. The Great Litany – a form of prayer used in Lent and at other times of national or communal crisis
4. The Collects – opening prayers that pick up on seasonal and lectionary themes for a particular Sunday or feast days
5. Proper Liturgies for seasonal or special celebration such as Christmas and Easter, etc
6. Holy Baptism
7. Orders for the Holy Eucharist
8. Pastoral Offices – celebrations of significant life events such as marriage, ministration to the sick, death and burial of the dead, and the reconciliation of the penitent
9. Episcopal Services – those only performed by a Bishop such as confirmation and ordination
10. The Psalter of David
11. Prayers and Thanksgivings
12. An Outline of the Faith or Catechism
13. Historical Documents of the Church including the Articles of Religion
14. Tables for finding the date of Easter and other Holy Days
15. The Lectionary

Link to useful resources

file://localhost/Users/marksutherland/Desktop/Education/EP101/BCP/Book of Common Prayer 350 years (2) | Liturgy.webarchive

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Common-Prayer-Biography-Religious/dp/0691154813/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395872365&sr=1-12&keywords=book+of+common+prayer

http://www.amazon.com/Opening-Prayer-Book-Churchs-Teaching/dp/1561011665/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395872626&sr=1-3&keywords=new+church%27s+teaching+series

http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Worship-New-Churchs-Teaching/dp/1561011940/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395871736&sr=1-7&keywords=new+church%27s+teaching+series

http://www.missionstclare.com/english/

 Recommendation

Go online to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy of the Book of Common Prayer. It comes in a variety of formats: just the BCP, BCP and Hymnal combined, BCP, Lectionary and Daily Office combined.

The Bible II

Understanding the Text

“Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Acts 8:30-31

The Historical Backdrop

The most important event of the 16^th century is undoubtedly the Protestant Reformation. As the initial New Testament period -the period following Jesus’ ministry when the texts of the NT were written- drew to a close around the middle to end of the 2^nd century A.D., there followed a long period of approximately 1400 years during which Christianity became largely a Tradition dominated affair. Remember, that by the word Tradition with a capital T we mean that view of what it means to be a Christian which is defined by what the clergy say it is. In Western Europe, the Middle Ages identify the period from about the 9^th to the 14^th centuries, as the time between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Renaissance literally means the revival. Revival here refers to the rediscovery of the learning of Classical Rome and Greece. What is significant about the Middle Ages is not the absence of learning, but the restriction of education and literacy to a very small class of men and women religious, i.e. monks, nuns, and priests. For the largely illiterate nobles, knights, and peasantry alike, the Christian faith was something taught second hand through Tradition.

The Renaissance expands education with increasing numbers of people among the growing urban mercantile classes now able to read and write. They begin to question Tradition as the only source for Christian Faith. The Protestant Reformation was fuelled by the rise of a literate middle class, now able to read the Bible in its own language. We noted in our history session that 1522 saw the first German Bible (Gutenberg Bible) and in 1526 the first Bible in English (Tyndale Bible) appears. Once again the actual text of Scripture becomes a primary source for faith.

The most significant event of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries is known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a period when rational thought and Reason, fuelled by Renaissance rediscoveries of classical thought combine with an increasing ability to observe the natural world. The scientific revolution is born; initiating a movement away from Scripture and Tradition towards the importance of Reason as a new basis for understanding not only the natural world, but also Christian Faith.

The 16^th century Reformation led to Scripture becoming once again a primary source for faith. With advances in literacy, biblical translation, and the advent of the printing press greater numbers of people began to read the Bible for themselves. However, this posed a serious problem. People now have direct access to Scripture. With their ability to by-pass the quality control of Tradition the question arises: how will they understand what they read? 

The 17^th century Enlightenment led to Christian Faith becoming increasingly subject to the rational analysis of Reason. In reaction some Christians retreated into a new approach to biblical interpretation, which we know as Christian Fundamentalism. The answer Fundamentalism gave to the question of how were people to understand Scripture was, everything a Christian reads in the Bible is to be understood literally. The paradox is that this sets up biblical narrative in opposition to scientific reason by treating biblical narrative language as if it too, is a language of factual, observational description. We are still living though the false conflict created by Fundamentalism’s reaction to Reason; most prominently in the debate between evolution and creationism; a sub-discussion of the religion verses science debate.

Anglican Tradition of Scriptural Interpretation

The Anglican Tradition of the Episcopal Church with its emphasis on the mutual relationship of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason – the three-legged stool from our history session –rejects the Christian Fundamentalist approach to the meaning of Scripture. We accept that:

• Individual Christians have direct access to the text of Scripture, being free to hold personal views of interpretation.
• Tradition – the common mind of the Church as a community of belief and practice, ultimately decides the meaning of the text and the authority to be given to it. 
• Tradition is guided by the application of Reason as we take into account literary analysis of the functions of different forms of language.  For instance we recognize a difference between the way scientific language seeks to literally describe what can be observed, and biblical language, which is a language of narrative, creating meaning through the use of metaphor and allegory.
• We recognize the way advances in the disciplines of historical analysis elucidate the influences of the social and political context in which texts were originally written or later edited. 

In 2002 the Episcopal Bishops of New York published: Let the Reader Understand; A statement of Interpretive Principles by which we understand The Holy Scriptures. http://www.dioceseny.org/pages/372-let-the-reader-understand 

This initiative was in response to the 1998 Lambeth Conference discussions between Anglican Bishops on the interpretation of Scripture. Their starting point was Acts 8:30-31 quoted above. Here the Apostle Philip comes across an Ethiopian reading from the Prophet Isaiah. Philip asks him, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Let the Reader Understand offers a series of canons for interpretation, sourced from the teachings of Scripture itself, and consistent with the creeds and documents of the Early Church, and The Book of Common Prayer. 

Here is a paraphrased summary of the main points:

1. Scripture is the Word of God not because God dictated the text, but because God inspired human authors to write inspirited texts to be read within the sacramental worship life of the Church, in order to teach the faithful.
2. Scripture provides the guiding principles for our common life with God through narrative, law, prophecy, poetry and other forms of expression. Jesus as the living Word of God uses the Scriptures to call the Church as a diverse community of belief and practice, through which he shares his divine word, wisdom, and life.
3. Despite the huge variety of documents representing diverse authors, literary forms, and cultural contexts, the Church received and collected the Scriptures and interprets them in the light of what God has done in Jesus Christ.
4. The Scriptures witness to the relationship between God and humanity. This relationship takes the form of an invitation and response – a covenant, respectful of human freedom and evolving within changing historical contexts, cultures, individual experience and need. Through the Scriptures the Church as a community of belief and practice seeks to respond more faithfully to God’s covenant renewed in Jesus Christ.
5. The New Testament interprets and applies the Old Testament as announcing the coming of Christ. This is the lens through which the Church understands all the Scriptures.
6. Individual texts must not be isolated and made to mean something at odds with the revelation and teaching of Jesus Christ.
7. Not every text received by the Church is regarded as authoritative. The meaning of any text is never given, but always discerned within the lived experience of the community of faith.
8. Because meaning is never given and always discerned no text can be used to condemn or approve anything simply on the basis that it is somewhere in Scripture condemned or approved.
9. The first stage of faithful interpretation requires the Church to use the gifts of memory, reason, and skill to find the sense of the meaning through locating the text in its time and place (original context). The second stage is to seek the text’s present significance. Present significance is shaped in the light of Jesus’ commandment to love one another, and is consistent with the mystery of God as a relational community in whose image we have been created as relational beings.
10. The Church’s interpretation of Scripture is our human response to the experience of being transformed and empowered by God’s love.
11. The Church’s reading of Scripture is always subject to human fallibility and is an expression of a wayfaring community, which makes mistakes while discerning, conversing, and arguing to find its way.
12. Correct interpretation does not rely on the Church’s infallibility as a teaching authority. Correct interpretation is tried and tested through our individual and communal living-out of the grace of baptism, which is embodied through the promises of the Baptismal Covenant.
13. The Scriptures contain all that is necessary for salvation. The Scriptures operate within the sphere of human freedom. The sphere of human freedom places a limitation on tendencies towards justifying excessive demands in faith and practice by reference to scriptural texts. The Scriptures ultimate purpose and intent are to bring all people to the blessed liberty of the children of God, whose service is perfect freedom. 

Truth Claims

Truth as history remembered – the Bible records events that happened, e.g. Jesus did die on the cross.

But there are three contexts within which truth as history needs to be viewed. Context 1 is the historical context in which the event took place i.e. the events of Good Friday in 33AD. Context 2 is the way the event is remembered and recorded by the writer, writing many years after the event, i.e. what the cross and resurrection event means to the gospel writers and their communities. Context 3 involves the way history remembered impacts the mind of the community today.

It is possible to divide truth claims into two main categories: Truth as history remembered – the Bible records events that happened, e.g. Jesus did die on the cross. Truth as metaphor: (1) metaphorization of and event (Borg), e.g. Jesus walked the road from Galilee to Jerusalem. The spiritual significance of this event is not the physical journey but Jesus’ embracing his destiny as a metaphor for the road of discipleship.(2) purely metaphorical narrative (Borg) – no remembered event but story works   symbolically. A story that articulates a truth but has no origin in historical or factual event.

For a fuller discussion of this go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiF-U7zh0Ek

Biblical truth hardly ever responds to a black or white notion of true or false. In fact, biblical truth is not something to be passively believed in, but something to be actively engaged with.

Spiritual Practice

Over the coming week try, to spend some time each day reflecting on a passage of Scripture. I suggest the following example: Mark 4:26-28. If you don’t have a Bible go to: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+4:26-28&version=NIV 

Find somewhere to sit quietly at home or elsewhere and bring your attention to the rising and falling of your breath. Imagine the breath as deep within your belly rather than in your chest and simply observe yourself breathing. Through observing our breath we come easily into the presence of God who is the breath that brings life. We also become aware of something we do all the yet, usually are not ware of doing it. Breathing offers an image of the presence of God, here all the time usually not noticed by us. 

1.     Then read the passage slowly three times. What is the word or phrase that stands out for you? Repeat it softly to yourself over the period of a minute or so.

2.     Then read it twice more and ask yourself how does this word or phrase connect with my experience at the moment, what are my associations to it, what does it remind me of or make me think about?

3.     Read it again letting it sound in your mind or out loud and ask yourself – is there an invitation from God in this passage that applies to my life over the next 5 – 7 days?

4.     Finish with prayerful reflection on gratitude and thankfulness for what God is revealing to you through this passage.

This exercise is known as Lectio Divina and is the most ancient methods for engaging with Holy Scripture.

The Bible

I. History and Structure

What is the Bible? It is often referred to as the good book. Yet, it is not a book in any modern sense. The Bible is more akin to an encyclopedia or anthology, a volume within which a number of quite separate entries sit side by side. Their common theme is our human experience of God’s invitation to enter into faithful relationship together, and the struggles this entails. Although this is the common theme throughout the Bible, the way human beings and human communities understand and respond to God is dictated by context, i.e. time period, social values, and contemporary challenges.

The Old Testament

Otherwise known as the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament is the textual record of the relationship between the God Yahweh and the Hebrew-Jewish people. The first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are known in Judaism as the Torah and believed to be from the original hand of Moses. The Torah comprises a Hebrew history of creation and the development of the nation out of the covenant God makes with Abraham, who becomes the father of the nation. It traces events through the lives of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, collectively known as the Patriarchs. The relationship between the Patriarchs is pictured as son, grandson, and great grandson of Abraham. The second half of Genesis is concerned with the great story cycles of the lives of the Patriarchs and ends with that of Joseph. Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son. Because of this, his brothers envied him and into slavery in Egypt. This is the story at the center of the well-known folk opera Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  Being a resourceful man Joseph eventually rises to the position of Prime Minister to Pharaoh. To save them from famine he later invites his family and kin to come and live with him in Egypt. This brings us to end of the Book of Genesis.

The first chapter of Exodus opens with a genealogy of the descendants of Jacob. Then the ominous words in verse 7 – A new king arose in Egypt, who did not know Joseph. The Hebrews become enslaved because their numbers threaten the Egyptians. Many generations pass and the next great figure to emerge is Moses. So begins the Moses story cycle. Moses becomes the liberator of the people leading them from slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land. This is not a direct journey. Between leaving Egypt and arriving in Canaan the Israelites wander for 40 years in Sinai. It is on Mount Sinai that God renews his covenant with the people by instructing Moses in the Law. The Law was transcribed on tablets of stone, which we know as The Ten Commandments. The books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are concerned with the development of religion and society founded on the application of the Ten Commandments. They are books of legal regulations, commentary, and sermon on how the Israelites are to worship God and structure their lives in community. Scholars believe that although the Torah was traditionally attributed to Moses, the texts are the later written form of earlier oral traditions, compiled organized, and edited between 1000 – 800BC.

The Torah comprises only a small section of the Old Testament as we have it in the Bible. In addition there are books recording the history of the Jewish people: Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings 1 & 2 Chronicles. Each book is an interpretation of the central stories concerning Moses and the emergence of the Hebrews as a unified people, living in the land of Canaan. The third category of writing concerns the books of the Prophets. Though not part of the Torah they represent what in Jesus’ day was known as the oral tradition, which chronicles the struggle God and the people have in staying in relationship together.  Two other major categories of literature make up the rest of the Old Testament. The Wisdom books of the Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs represent a form of philosophical writing popular throughout the ancient Middle East and not original to Israel. In Wisdom, God takes on a feminine characteristic as a personification of wisdom. The Book of Psalms, is technically Wisdom literature, but is better thought of as the hymn book of the court of King David. The last type of literature is found in the apocalyptic books such as Esther and Daniel, although apocalyptic material can be found in several of the major prophets. Apocalypse means revelation and these are books that feature dreams and mystical events. The New Testament book of Revelation is part of this literary tradition. See my later comment on the Apocrypha in the section on the New Testament.

Why do we need the Old Testament?

Christians from the outset have argued over the relevance and importance to be accorded the Hebrew Scriptures. Christian fundamentalists claim that everything in the Old and New Testaments is the divinely dictated Word of God and so everything carries equal importance. Yet, not even fundamentalists can seriously operate on this basis. The more consistent position of historic Christianity towards the Old Testament’s authority distinguishes between the over arching themes, through which God communicates God’s longing for a faithful relationship with humanity, and culturally embedded texts that reflect the attitudes and structures of a particular society, or a particular stage in the evolution of Hebrew Society. Therefore, to take instructions offered in Leviticus as applicable to our contemporary social context is highly inappropriate and ineffectual. An example of this is where fundamentalists see the sexual injunctions in Leviticus 18 as relating to the modern experience of homosexuality, yet disregard the other injunctions that dictate the stoning of wives and daughters who stray from confinement during menstruation.

Looking at the development of the God’s identity and image over-time, from the wrathful and jealous God of Moses, to the compassionate God of Jesus, we might be led to suppose that God evolves with time. We grappled with this question in our first session when we looked at the question: Who is God? Perhaps the answer is maybe God evolves, maybe not, how can we know? What the scriptural record does show is that human understandings of who God is do evolve over time, as human society evolves in its complexity.

The New Testament

Otherwise known as the Christian Scriptures, the New Testament is the textual record of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Episcopalians do not refer to the New Testament as the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God, as we discussed in our second session: Who is Jesus? For us the New Testament is the textual word of God. It is the historical and literary witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

The New Testament is composed of two main types of writing, known as Gospels and Epistles. The Gospels record the life, sayings, and teaching of Jesus during his earthly ministry. The Epistles are Letters written by the Apostles to the fledgling church communities during the first 150 years of Christianity. During this period there was a profusion of Gospels and Epistles. There was a Gospel of Thomas and one of Mary Magdalene. There were many more Letters, each written in the name of an apostle. Most of these did not find there way into the Canon of the New Testament.

By the mid 300’s the New Testament Canon of 27 books was fairly universally recognized. After the finalization of the Canon no new books could be added, although Christians continued to debate the value of some texts up to the 16^th Century. Therefore, there are some small differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic New Testaments. The differences relate not to the major books but to a section of apocalyptic writings. This is the dream inspired mysterious apocalyptic genre occurring in both Old and New Testaments. Protestant Bibles leave these books out. Catholic Bibles include them, and Anglican Bibles separate them into a section known as the Apocrypha, which is placed between the Old and New Testament sections. For further information go to http://www.patheos.com/Library/Anglican/Origins/Scriptures?offset=1&max=1

The Gospels

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the Synoptic Gospels because they offer a chronological synopsis of the life of Jesus. Mark is the first to be written between 60 and 70 AD. Matthew follows and Luke is written last around the end of the First Century. Matthew and Luke draw heavily on Mark’s core structure and material but add additional material from a source known as Q, comprising oral sayings of Jesus. The Gospel of John is the last of the four Gospels to be written, probably around 100- 120 AD. John has a completely different structure and so is not included with the other three Synoptic Gospels. John’s Gospel is a theology of Jesus’ ministry, and the writer does not feel he has to repeat the familiar chronological  structure of events originating with Mark. John builds his theology of Jesus’ ministry  around seven signs of the Kingdom of God. Some of these are very familiar to us such as the first sign of changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana, and the last sign, raising of Lazarus from the dead.

Luke’s Acts of the Apostles

This is neither a Gospel nor an epistle although it might be described as the Gospel of the Church. It forms a companion to the Gospel of Luke because it continues the story after Jesus’ Ascension. Only Luke continues the story of the ministry Jesus initiates in this way. Acts begins with the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples and as we discussed in our session on the Church, empowered them in such a way that transformed them from disciples (followers) into apostles (messengers). Thus the Church is born. The rest of the book chronicles the apostolic ministries of spreading the good news of the Gospel. Acts should be read as a continuation of Luke’s Gospel, however it is placed in the NT following John’s Gospel, which obscures the connection to Luke and breaks-up the narrative of salvation history he records.

The Epistles or Letters

These are the Letters written by the Apostles or written in their name by someone else to the fledgling churches that began to form around of the Mediterranean World of the Roman Empire. Although the Epistles come after the Gospels in order, the Letters written by Paul are earlier and predate the writing of the Gospels.

Most of the Letters are written by Paul or ascribed to his name. The convention in the ancient world was for disciples or followers of prominent teachers to write is the teacher’s name. Traditionally the first 13 Letters were ascribed to Paul. Modern scholarship has raised doubts about this because of the huge variation in themes addressed and theologies espoused. Paul has a radical message: the Kingdom of God has come and through the cross and resurrection of Jesus the whole world order has been turned upside down. Paul proclaims that Jesus is Lord! For us this is not a provocative statement. Yet, in Paul’s world to say this is to deny that Caesar is Lord, a treasonous act punishable by crucifixion. Paul’s theology of the cross and resurrection sounds strongly in Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Borg and Crossan, two prominent N.T. theologians, identify this as the Apostle Paul as tag him Radical Paul. They doubt that Paul is the author of Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians and they identify this Paul as Conservative Paul. The issues here are more to do with the living of a pious and good Christian life and reflect the issues of communities that are more established and settled than the ones Radical Paul is writing to. Tradition ascribed Hebrews, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus to Paul. Borg and Crossan call this author Reactionary Paul whose theology can’t be squared with that of the Apostle (radical) Paul. No one seriously thinks Paul wrote these Letters anymore. They reflect a very conservative theology, which addresses issues of church order, i.e. women must cover their heads and not speak in Church, and the hierarchy of authority, i.e. only men and apostolic men may preach and teach and husbands are the head of the family. These were not issues for the fragile Pauline communities in the middle decades of the 1^st Century. The preoccupations of these Letters reflect strong established church communities where order and authority become issues and clearly date from a much later period of time

Letters not ascribed to Paul are Hebrews and James (possibly authored by James of Jerusalem, the brother of Jesus), 1 & 2 Peter, 1,2 & 3 John, (clearly the same author as John’s Gospel or a close follower), and Jude. Revelation is not a Letter, but another example of apocalyptic writing in the form of a dream and its interpretation and seems to be connected to the Johannine Community.

Abstract: God is a community within a single identity. An aspect of God (the Word) came to co-exist within the person of Jesus, who through his death and resurrection God does something new in the relationship of creator to creation. After Jesus’ ascension a different aspect of God (Holy Spirit) infuses the community of disciples with empowerment giving birth to the Church. The Church continues God’s work in creation. Baptism is entry into membership of the Church. The Church witnesses to the mystery as well as the revelation of God in Jesus through receiving God in the form of Spirit. God, Jesus, and Church are linked – Jesus died; God raised him to new life; the Church affirms this new beginning through the celebration of Eucharist. 

Trinity Joke

Jesus said, Whom do men say that I am? And his disciples answered and said, Some say you are John the Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elijah, or other of the old prophets. And Jesus answered and said, But whom do you say that I am? Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple. “And Jesus answering, said, “What?”

Jesus’ response to Peter is a fair summary of how many people feel about the Trinity, which is where I want to begin in responding to the remaining three questions in this Christian Essentials section of Episcopal 101. We have explored questions of identity with respect to God, the Creator and Jesus Christ, the Word of God. We are now ready to explore the fuller identity of God as a relational being. God as a community of relationship is known as the Trinity.

As the joke above captures, many regard the Trinity as a thorny theological and philosophical conundrum. However, the important and relatively simple thing to remember is that the Trinity emerges out of the ordinary experience of the first Christians as they begin to make sense of their experience of God. As Jews, they knew God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of their fathers and the Creator of the world who revealed himself to Moses and to the people through the gift of the Law and the preaching of the Prophets. They also had direct experience of Jesus as a revelation of God, this time within their intimate human experience. They now have a further experience of God as a force of nature that overwhelms them and leaves them in a completely changed frame of awareness.

Another way to approach this is to remember that to be human is to be relational. As human beings we are built for relationships. Our human need for relationship finds expression in the life lived in community – one Christian is no Christian- says the Early Church Father, Tertullian. Therefore, our relationality is a reflection of God’s relationality. For the first Christians, God as a divine community is powerfully experiential. They identified with the Father-creator – lover, Jesus the Son- communicator – beloved, and Holy Spirit empowering presence, love sharer. For them, all three were expressions of God, directly experienced.

In italics I have added nongendered relational terms to these identities – lover, beloved and love sharer. As we saw in our first session, God is neither male nor female, yet the principles of masculine and feminine are present in God’s nature. Although Jesus as a human being certainly was male, the Word of God (logos) is not male. The Father – creator, and the Son – communicator, can be viewed through masculine imagery without being defined as male. The Holy Spirit, in Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (peneuma), is feminine. The feminine principle is captured in the notion of the Spirit as generative, fecund energy, bringing life to birth. Traditionally the Holy Spirit was referred to as it, because I guess it was difficult for a patriarchal tradition to refer to an element of God as she.

As time passed the first Christians needed to be able to articulate their experience. As the influence of Greek philosophical thought grew among the gentile Christians, it was natural for them to turn to this tradition of learning in search of a way of speaking about their experience. The Trinity is a philosophical theory that gave the growing Christian Church the language to speak about God. In Greek thought, the term person could be used to speak about different identities that, nevertheless shared one nature.

There is a recognized psychological theory for how our individual identities are also the product of our relationships with others. Our individual identity i.e. who I am is constructed out of a complex dynamic of being in relationship with others. Who I think I am is as much a function of how I perceive others viewing me. I catch a glimpse of myself in the face of the other, looking back at me. It’s kind of like that, we can imagine, within the divine community. There are not three Gods, but three persons in one God, each reflecting back the image of the other. Each person has a function. The Father (the lover) is the creator source of all things. The Son (the beloved) is the communicator of all things – the Logos or Word. The Holy Spirit (feminine principle) is God in all things. But the main point is not their functions but the way each function emerges out of being in relationship with one another.

Please go online to http://www.sacredheartpullman.org/Icon explanation.htm  Here you will find a further explanation that uses Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity to demonstrate how this can be imagined.

What is the Nicene Creed?

The Trinity emerged out of the way the early Christians experienced God (see above). The doctrine is important not because it explains mystery, but because it protects the mystery of God from being reduced to mere human understanding. This protective function is what the Nicene Creed is, and does. The Nicene Creed gets its name from the Ecumenical Council that met in a place called Nicaea in 325AD. There were seven of Ecumenical (Greek for inhabited world) Councils up to the end of the 5^th Century. They met to iron-out differences and disagreements. They formulated statements that protected the full mystery of the relational nature of God, the incarnation, and the two natures in Jesus as the foundations for the shared faith in the life of the Church. They used Greek Philosophy to do this. The teaching of the seven Ecumenical Councils is the teaching agreed upon by the Latin-speaking catholic Church in the West and the Greek-speaking orthodox Church in the East. It is the teaching that Episcopalians recognize as the Historic (Catholic –universal and Apostolic – from the Apostles) tradition of Christianity. For further reference you can view the Historical Documents section of the Book of Common Prayer beginning on page 864.

Harry Williams, was a renowned spiritual writer in the middle 20^th century. His writing was a huge influence on me growing up. He was also a monk of the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican men’s community at Mirfield in Yorkshire. A story is told that during the recital of the creed in the Eucharist, Fr Harry would sit down and switch-off the light over his stall when he came to lines he did not believe. I am often asked do you have to believe every line of the creed? The answer is no you don’t. The Nicene Creed represents the historic faith of the Church. We related to the faith of the Church from within the dynamic experience of our own spiritual journey. Think of roaming about the many rooms of a great mansion, sometime feeling more, sometimes feeling less comfortable in various rooms. However, the faith of the Church continues to remain true and because it is the faith of the community, its truth does not rely on our individual assent, nor is it invalidated by our individual doubts. Remember, that we participate in the life of the Church not through holding at all times correct belief, but struggling at all times with the demands of right relationship. This leads nicely to our next question. 

What is the Church?

What we call the Church, the Christian Community in the world is born on the Day of Pentecost, literally 50 days after the Resurrection. On the Day of Pentecost those gathered were visited by the power of God in the form of wind and fire, both atmospheric phenomena that communicated the presence of God in a particularly new way. This is recorded in the second chapter of The Acts of the Apostles. This is the first experience of God as Holy Spirit.

The Evangelist we know as Luke wrote a two-part work. He wrote his Gospel as an account of what God had done in the life and ministry of Jesus. He continued the story in Acts, with the birth, life and ministry of what God is continuing to do through the power of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The Ascension of Jesus and the birth of the Church are linked by the Holy Spirit’s actions at Pentecost. Now that the ministry of Jesus is completed with his return to the divine community of the Trinity, something else is needed.

With the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, two elements came together for the first Christians. The pieces of knowledge that had remained as fragmented memories of Jesus’ teaching when he was alive began to make sense through their direct experience of a series of events, i.e. the death, resurrection, post resurrection appearances and the ascension of Jesus. The intervention of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is the catalytic event is a tipping point moving the disciples from a state of loss and confusion into a new order of perception.

Through Jesus, God shares Godself with the creation, a sharing that bridges the breach in relationship between the creation and creator. Through the Holy Spirit, God now shares Godself in order to further energize the work Jesus started. Empowered by the Holy Spirit the disciples, which means followers now become apostles, which means messengers. The Holy Spirit is God’s second gift of Godself. The result of this encounter dramatically changed the disciples of Jesus from bewildered followers into impassioned messengers who then proceeded to talk openly and publically about Jesus. The Church is born!

As Christians of the Historic Tradition, Episcopalians conceive of the Church as more than a voluntary association of believers, organized for mission. We conceive of the Church as the mystical Body of Christ, which has a corporate identity, which is greater than the sum total of its individual parts. The Body expresses itself primarily through liturgy – esp. the Eucharist. Liturgy is the mechanism for incorporating individual believers or worshipers into the experience of being part of the mystical Body of Christ known as, the Church. For example in Eucharist, even if there are only two of the baptized present, and one of the two is a priest, then the Eucharist can be celebrated. Two members represent the function of the whole as if the entire Church is present. I mentioned the Eucharist requires at least two baptized persons, one of whom needs to be a priest because each represents the separate function that together constitutes the whole. It’s time to talk about baptism.

What is Baptism?

Baptism is the ceremony of entry into the Church. Contrary to a lot of popular belief, baptism is not about individual salvation. It’s about belonging, nurturing and growing as part of a community of faith.

Baptism involves four key elements. The first is Spirit. Baptism finds an echo in the actions of God’s Spirit hovering and brooding over the void at creation in Genesis 1. It also finds echo in the Spirit breathing life into the lungs of the human being fashioned out of the elements of the earth in Genesis 2. The Spirit, which is the source of all life, is given to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. For Christians the Holy Spirit is the sanctifying and sustaining energy of God active in the world.

The second element is Water.  Water is necessary for life. It is elemental. It also nourishes, cleanses and restores. In our baptism we find an echo to the passing of the Israelites through the waters of the Red Sea  – a rite of passage. In the waters of baptism we also die and rise to the new life in Christ whether through the symbolism of total emersion or the pouring of water over the head. Both have the same meaning in the sense that the Eucharist is a meal even though we are only given a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

Thirdly there is Covenant. In the 31^st chapter of Jeremiah God speaks of a new relationship with his people in which his law is transformed from a set of commands to something written on the inside of their hearts. In baptism we are signing ourselves into the New Covenant initiated by Jesus through the cross and resurrection. Baptism is our response to God’s invitation to enter into covenant. Like a contract, a covenant is a conditional offer that requires a response of acceptance to transforms it into something potential to something realized.

The fourth element is Community. All of created life is sacred. Physical birth ushers us into the goodness of God’s Creation. Being created involves neither a choice nor a response from us. In this sense to be human is to be most like God. Baptism reminds us that no one drifts into the Kingdom of God by mistake. As Christians we embrace the fundamental goodness of creation by making the choice to enter into a deliberate and particular covenant with God. In this sense being Christian is to know that to be human is to be most like God. Baptism is our entry into the saving and cross bearing community we call the Church.

Baptism is the same for all whether you are three months-old or 30 years-old. It is a once in a lifetime event. No prior knowledge or demonstration of faith is necessary to be baptized. What is required is an intention to journey within the community of the Church. The importance for baptism is what happens following it. Its meaning and effect grow within us through a daily renewal of our baptismal promises of the Baptismal Covenant. There is no special status within the Christian community beyond that of being baptised. Both St Paul in Romans 12 and the writer of 1 Peter:2  speak of the community of the baptised as a royal priesthood. Even those set aside by ordination hold the same spiritual rank as all other baptized members. Ordination for ministry is a call from within the whole body of the baptised for leaders to guide the community into becoming more fully an embodiment of the Kingdom of God.

Baptism and The Eucharist

Entry to Holy Communion is by virtue of our baptism not confirmation. Historically, entry to communion became linked to confirmation as an attempt to ensure that people continued to present for confirmation. Confirmation adds little other than an opportunity to confirm baptismal vows, often made by us as infants. The current practice of the Episcopal Church is to communicate infants and children who have been baptized. Baptism is the sacrament of entry into community of the Church. Eucharist is the participation in the life of that community. Confirmation is the sacrament of personal affirmation of baptism and is the ceremony of entry into relationship (communion) with the local Episcopal Bishop. The unity of the Church is a result of local bishops being in communion with one another. 

Additional matters

The Order of Baptism in the Book of Common Prayer.

Take a look at the structure of how the rite unfolds and think of it as the unfolding of the drama of our salvation story. Note the different parts:

• Presentation and decision
• Blessing of the waters
• Baptism and sealing with the Holy Spirit
• Confirmation – note confirmation is the concluding part of baptism. Because it was reserved only to the Bishop to confirm over time as the Church grew beyond single communities each led by a Bishop, confirmation became increasingly divorced from baptism becoming separated by an interval of years.

Baptismal Covenant Pg 304 BCP

We affirm our faith through saying together the Apostles Creed, which identifies how to live the life of a baptized person in the world. It involves making three reaffirmations of belief:

1. Do you believe in God the Father – Creator God – Source of Being?
2. Do you believe in Jesus Christ – Redeemer God – Bridge of Being?
3. Do you believe in The Holy Spirit – Sanctifier God – Spirit of Being in and through the Church?

We affirm our faith through five promises:

1. Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in prayers? (be a faithful member of the saving community)
2. Will you persevere in resisting evil, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? (work to stay in right relationship with God)
3. Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ? (live out the values of the Gospel in the world)
4. Will you seek to serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself? (live a life motivated by love)
5. Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? (fight against social systems the deny human dignity to all)

I. The Bible

Isaiah the Old Testament Prophet speaks of the coming of the Messiah, or anointed one and one of Isaiah’s key images for the Messiah is that of a baby or child who ushers-in the Kingdom of God (7:10-16) which led the first Christians to identify Jesus as the one of which Isaiah was speaking. 

In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to by two principle titles: Son of Man, and Son of God.

The Gospel of Mark, the first of the Gospels to be written takes up the theme of Messiah with Jesus’ arrival being foretold by John the Baptist, who represents the prophet Elijah. Mark comes to identify Jesus with another section of Isaiah known as the Servant Songs: 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13 – 53:12. The servant songs form the text for Handel’s Oratorio: The Messiah. The servant is the one who offers to suffer on behalf of others. Mark’s Jesus is the Suffering Servant who offers his life for the world. In Mark, Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man. For me this title communicates a strong image of Jesus as the servant who becomes a man of suffering, accepting suffering on behalf of those God loves.

In the second Gospel to be written, Matthew writes for a very Jewish community. He portrays Jesus as the new Moses. Moses was the greatest of the Hebrew prophets to whom God gave the Law in the form of the Ten Commandments. Jesus, the new Moses brings the New Law, which replaces the Ten Commandments by summarizing them into two Great Commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew likes Jesus to refer to himself as the Son of God, a more exalted title than Son of Man.

Luke, writing in the more mixed setting of Jews and Gentiles pictures Jesus as the Son of God who is a reconciler and healer, a welcomer of those outcast and on the social margins, e.g. women, children, tax collectors, and other various bands of sinners. 

John, the last of the Gospels to be written understands Jesus to be God the Son, which turns the title Son of God on its head. This is a much more extensive claim for Jesus because it identifies Jesus and God as so closely intertwined that we can say they are one in the same. Following John’s Christology, the Early Christians would come to see Jesus as the communicative aspect of the Divine Community of the Trinity. They referred to Jesus as the Word of God (logos in Greek). Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son and John offers us a great set of images for this in Chapter 1: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. … The Word was made flesh and lived among us… Later Jesus in John’s Gospel Jesus talks in the language of: I, and the Father are one; to have seen me is to have seen the Father. 

II.  Identity through Adoption or Birth

Another way to approach this question is to look at how each of the Gospel’s narrates how Jesus comes to be, in one form or another, the Son of God.

Mark, writing some 30 years after Jesus introduces us to Jesus already as an adult coming to John for Baptism. During the baptism God’s voice is heard to proclaim Jesus’ identity – this is my Son in whom I am well pleased. Jesus becomes adopted into his special relationship with God. This idea of adoption is very strong in the earliest Christian writer, the Apostle Paul.

Matthew and Luke, each writing with a 10 – 20 year gap from Mark, approach Jesus’ identity from the perspective of his birth. Both construct similar yet different birth narratives to explain who Jesus is in relation to God. In Matthew there are shepherds, but no wise men and the Angel speaks to Joseph. In Luke there are wise men and the Angel speaks to Mary. Matthew’s emphasis is on Jesus born into the House of David, from which Isaiah prophesized that the Messiah would be born. Jesus is a descendant of King David through Joseph. So in Matthew the emphasis is on Joseph and Matthew is placing Jesus in the long line of lineage that identifies him as the Jewish Messiah. Remember that for Matthew Jesus is the new Moses. Tracing his lineage back into Israel’s history is crucial! Luke emphasizes the role of Mary and her conception, the hidden truth of which is explained to her by the message of an Angel. The wise men represent Luke’s concern with how the wider world comes to understand who Jesus is.

To summarize then, for Paul and Mark, Jesus is adopted into his identity as God’s Son through baptism. For Matthew and Luke, Jesus is born into the world as God’s Son. John makes no mention of either, pushing the origins of Jesus as God’s Son back into the life of the Trinity itself. Jesus is the Word come into the world. Jesus is the communicative element of God’s relational being.

III. The Incarnation

This is the doctrine that speaks in terms of God, creator of the universe entering into the experience of being part of the creation. God achieves this through being born as a human infant. The Incarnation speaks of Jesus as a person in which the human and the divine are present as two distinct and independent natures. They are not mixed-up in the sense of Jesus as a kind of divine human being – a god-man. Neither is Jesus simply an avatar, someone with an exceptionally developed God consciousness. The two natures are separate, existing simultaneously, linked through a mutual relationship (there’s that word again). In Jesus, the divine lives within the limitations of fully human life. In Jesus, human nature reclaims its original status at Creation (see back to Genesis 1), of being made in the image of God. In Jesus we come to see that to be fully human is to be most like God.

The Incarnation, although flowing from the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus, does not rest on the plausibility nor fall on the implausibility of the birth narratives as a description of biology, i.e. how it happened. The Incarnation is not a pre-scientific explanation of human procreative biology.  The Incarnation is a doctrine that functions to protect the mystery of God’s action. The Incarnation is the reconciliation of the human and the divine, paving the way for the events of the cross and resurrection.

IV. The Cross and Resurrection

The final element in the question: who is Jesus, is that Jesus is the Christ. We understand this to mean that Jesus accepts his identity within the Hebrew tradition of Messiah (promised or anointed one), but he gives the Hebrew expectation (earthly warrior king coming to restore the fortunes of Israel) a new meaning. Jesus, as the Christ comes not as an earthly king, but as the sign of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, which arrives through his death and Resurrection.

In Evangelical and American popular expressions of Christianity the cross is often spoken about as God’s requirement for a sacrifice to overcome the legacy of human sinfulness. Jesus is seen in this view as God’s willing victim and Jesus dies on the cross as a payment for our sins. The idea of Jesus being sacrificed for the sin of the world comes from the analogy that some parts of the N.T.(Letter to the Hebrews) make with the Jewish Temple where animals were sacrificed as an offering for human sin. In historic Christianity this is known as Atonement Theology (see Eucharistic Prayer A). In the Bible we also find another theological tradition known as Covenant Theology (See Eucharistic Prayer B), which understands the relationship between God and humanity as one of invitation and response. In Jesus we see God’s ultimate expression of invitation into a relationship of love. God, in Jesus offers his own life for the life of the world in the spirit of there is no greater love than that we lay down our life for those we love. The cross is an expression and offering of love as the ultimate act of invitation into relationship. This act of God is a dividing point in history. For Christians, the death of Jesus opens the way for God to do a new thing. This new thing is resurrection.

Resurrection –Jesus did not rise from the dead, God raised him from the dead as a sign of a new order. The new order we call the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is an idea that plays havoc with our sense of time. The Kingdom has come in Jesus, and yet, its fulfillment is still awaiting full completion. Because we live in the promise of its ultimate fulfillment, we live in the time between the inauguration and completion of the Kingdom.

Our role in this process is to live according to the expectations of the Kingdom in the here-and-now. When we do so we forward its unfolding. This is the New Covenant, that through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, God has invited us into participation.  Human beings can, and still do refuse (free will) that invitation, hence the broken state of the world as we see it all around us. However, the full emergence of the Kingdom is assured, and we are those who live-out the values of the Kingdom right now.

The expectations or values of the Kingdom can be summed up in one word: Love – expressed interpersonally as compassion and communally as justice. At the personal level love includes self-acceptance, mutual-acceptance, toleration, forgiveness, selfgiving service. Communally expression of love means championing the cause of justice, fighting inequity, embracing inclusion, practicing tolerance, and mercy. 

Introduction

Episcopal-101 begins with and exploration of what I term Christian Essentials. Of course the Bible is part of what is essential, but I am separating it and it will appear in its own section within the course. A companion book Welcome to the Episcopal Church by Christopher L. Webber provides a narrative overview of what makes the Episcopal Church distinctive. In the Christian Essentials, I want to explore 5 key questions:

1. Who is God?

God is the Creator of the Universe as pictured in the first two chapters of Genesis. As I write this I note a flare-up in the debate between evolution and creationism. Our Anglican approach to God as creator pictured in Genesis is theological being based in an understanding that the Genesis accounts are truth as metaphor, not truth as science. I find it regrettable that the closure of the Canon of Scripture prevents us placing a third (big bang) account, which also, operates as truth as metaphor, alongside the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2.

The first two chapters of Genesis form independent narratives with different origins but each offering an account of the creation process. Chapter 1 envisions God as the one who brings order to chaos, which is pictured as the void. As God brings order to the chaos, separating earth from sky and air from sea, God fills the new order with different elements of life, mineral, vegetable, and animal. In making human beings God reaches the peak of the creative process. All the elements of creation reflect the goodness of God. In the human race, however, God fashions a part of the creation to be not only a reflection of Godself, but more importantly to be the part of creation capable of knowing God in the intimacy of relationship. Humanity is capable of both self-awareness and awareness of God.

We also learn something startling about God in the making of humanity as recorded in Chapter 1. What is startling is that God refers to Godself as we. God is revealed not as solitary but as relational for which the pronouns we, and our, are appropriate. God is a self-sufficient community of mutual love and the creation can be seen as the material self-communication of that love i.e. the sharing of Godself beyond the boundaries of the Divine Community. The creation that takes material shape within an ordered dimension of time, space, and matter is none other than an expression of love.

The second creation story takes up the theme of creation in a different way. In the first story humanity is the last act of creation. In Chapter 2 humanity is the first act of creation. The rest of creation is set between the creation of the first man, Adam, and the first woman, Eve. Eve is created to enable human beings to live in relationships that mirror the communal nature of God. Like God, human beings are made to be essentially relational. This second creation story envisions a complementarity between male and female that reflects the relational nature of God. Yet, God is neither male nor female but the principles of masculine and feminine energy can be found within the divine nature. Therefore, the complementarities of masculine and feminine being present in all human relationships, same gendered as well as cross gendered reflect the relational nature of God. We will explore this further when we come to discuss the Trinity.

In chapter 2 we learn something further about God. In this story, Adam and Eve are placed within the protected space called the Garden of Eden. In chapter 3 we learn of the dramatic happening in the Garden of Eden. Eve eats of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and shares the fruit with Adam. Christianity refers to this event as the Fall. I would like to suggest that instead of the Fall we think of the events in the garden as humanity’s premature coming of age. All I want to emphasize here is that this section of the story tells us that God’s original plan for humanity included giving us free will. I suspect that God did not intend for humanity to be so willful in the exercise of freedom of choice. Yet, viewed from a relational perspective, it indicates that God intended us to possess a true capacity for relationship. Relationships cannot exist between parties where one is free to accept and the other is not. Freedom of choice is a necessary ingredient for any true state of relationship.

Who is God? This is a back-to-front way of really asking, who are we or what does it mean to be human? The answer to this is that to be human is to be made in the image of God. To be fully human is to be most like God. We are made for relationship, with one another and with God. We possess the necessary element for relationship which is the freedom to choose or not choose. To be Christian is to know that to be human is to be most like God.