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With the holiday shopping season coming up, I've been busy making all sorts of silly thing... The Aaron Orear Store is officially open! These are mostly the kinds things I'd want for myself...a couple post-election steam blow-offs, a lot of Character items (he's a doodle I did in college) and some items made from All Saints' windows as well. Otherwise, I'm reading...oy, am I reading. And let me tell you, the book of Joshua is not bedtime material. City after city, "put to the sword," by which it means killed. Men, women, children, animals. Not God's best moment from a PR standpoint, eh? It takes a lot of stomach to come out the other side still wanting to serve this particular deity. A lot of stomach and a good sense that the Bible is a continuing revelation, and that not every incident recorded was necessarily the full will of God. Most Anglicans disagree with fundamentalists on that issue. I don't see how one could read about God walking through the Garden of Eden, looking for Adam as if God wasn't omniscient, unless the reader can see that this is an early notion of God. The God who can't find Adam and Eve in the bushes is not the same God who numbers the hairs on your head...either God has changed or the witness of scripture has matured. Since I find growth in an eternal being unlikely, I tend to think that Israel's theology grew in reaction to continued knowledge of the creator. Of course, as a Christian, I also believe that our knowledge of God was and is most fully experienced in the person of Jesus. Putting it that way, I hope, does not suggest denial of the very real experience of God known through Judaism, or any other faith. I happen to experience God through the Son...and you'll have to pardon the seminarian for thinking that it's the fullest and clearest path. It'd be rather dodgy of a future priest to think otherwise. Yet God is a lot bigger than the definitions we assign, and who's to say that God doesn't approach us by the paths we are ready to accept? Certainly there's enough difference between Christian denominations that they can sometimes feel like different religions...so is it really such a stretch to say that Islam knows God? How about Taoism? If that's not a still, small voice then I don't know what is. Oy. How did I get on that? Anyhow, Joshua is past, I've had fun with the Judges (people sin, God is angry, people cry out, God sends a judge, judge leads people back to God, judge dies, people sin, God is angry...they'd have helped themselves out if they wrote this stuff down earlier) and now I'm into Samuel. Notice we skipped Ruth. That's because in the Hebrew Scriptures Ruth is a lot later, in with the lesser prophets. Christians moved her up to emphasise the Davidic line, which would become so important in the New Testament...though why is beyond me since David's line ends at Joseph who is not, as any orthodox (small "o") Christian can tell you, Jesus' father. I suppose there's some notion of inheritance, since Joseph accepted Jesus as his own...but, really, Jesus wasn't "of the house of David." There I go again. |
