Scribes and Prophets
Once upon a time I suggested that there are two primary ways that people love the church. Some of us love the church like scribes and some of us love the church like prophets.
Those of us who love the church like scribes are looking to the past and to the church’s traditions as the place where life-giving wisdom is found.
Those of us who love the church like prophets are looking to the present and the future, urging the church toward life-giving belief and practice that it has not yet attained.
The truth of the matter is that we need each other. We need the scribes to keep us grounded in the story and we need the prophets to push us toward justice and faithfulness in our mission.
The other truths of the matter include these: that prophet simultaneously fits better with the western disregard of tradition and that it’s a lot harder to keep your job in a church if you’re faithful to a prophetic calling.
Prophets and History
But it would be a mistake to think that the prophetic voice is devoid of a sense of history.
The difference between prophet and scribe is not in their awareness of history. It is often, instead, a difference in the way that history might be normative.
Scribes look to the doctrines and practices and decisions of the past with a natural disposition to honor and follow these as the accumulated wisdom of the “Grand Tradition of the Church.”
Prophets look on these with the same self-flagellation that they apply to their own life full of screw-ups and miscues and see in them mistakes not worth repeating. Or, when they see something worthy of celebration, it is in the rare but seminal moment when new, life-giving waters were allowed to bubble up out of what had become hard, dry, encrusted, life-sucking layers of tradition.
Faithful Supersessionism
When people use the word “supersessionism,” they are usually talking about how Christianity sees itself in relationship to Judaism. I want to redeploy the word here for the prophetic victories we should all celebrate in the history of the church.
In the modern history of the church the fundamental equality of people of all races and nationalities is a given, together with the condemnation that it entails for chattel slavery. A Christianity that says, “Slavery is not ok,” has superseded the Christianity that used to be able to say, “Slavery is ordained and regulated by God.” The latter is no longer recognized as Christianity.
In the modern history of the church the fundamental equality of men and women is a given. For most of its first eighteen or nineteen centuries a fundamental inequality was assumed by most churches. Until the past 50 years it was still assumed by many. But now, even those churches that will not enact this fundamental equality in their leadership structures have to say that men and women are equal in dignity and worth and intellect and potential for virtue. A Christianity of fundamental gender equality has superseded the Christianity that used to be able to say, “God’s word establishes and regulates the superiority of men over women.”
Scribes are Not Enough
Here’s the deal: scribes would not get us to these places. Reiteration of the tradition would not have gotten Gentiles into the people of God without converting to Judaism in the first century. Grammatical-historical exegesis could never have moved the needle on the transatlantic slave trade. And nobody prior to the modern era read Genesis 1 as teaching the fundamental equality of man and woman (Genesis 2, together with 1 Timothy 2, saw to it things were otherwise).
Now these things are obvious. But they weren’t before. Now that the prophets have won the scribes can come in and ensure that these victories are long-lived. But before the scribes would have held us back, and based on their own backward glance would have been right to do so.
For the prophet what this history means is not that we now all get to live in peace and happiness but that we have to look to now and the future to vigilantly assess where we need to make the same sorts of moves again.
This is Where We Are
This is where we are right now in the LGBTQ conversation in the church.
The scribal hermeneutics that look to the past and to the Bible and make the airtight case against full inclusion and equality are the same hermeneutics that made the cases against racial equality, integration, women’s equality, and (still) women’s full inclusion in the church.
We need the scribes to remind us of the stories of the past–not just the beliefs long held but the miscues and the processes that have brought us to the places that we all know to be the faithful expression of Christianity that we cannot ever go back on.
The scribes calling us to the status quo love the church. And the prophets calling us forward love the church.
And as in these other critical junctures, the way that the prophets are calling us to love the church is to become the church whose larger and more consistent love for the now disenfranchised neighbor is simply the church as we know it. The church that loves its LGBTQ members as its straight cisgendered members will supersede the church that considers them morally inferior or socially and ecclesially restricted.
This is a change in the identity of the church as we know it. But is a change such as we have seen at critical moments in the past as well.
The LGBT issue is the swelling wave of the next faithful supersessionism.
Featured Image: Pam Link, Flickr Creative Commons
