Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
I disagree that we can look at the general landscape of Christianity and declare any to be, in terms of your metaphorical story, the first ship. I would suggest that the EO and the RCC may have some claim to being among the older of the ships. But other than through clever retelling of history, they were not the beginning.
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The Bible is a complicated book. Many authors, different languages, education or lack, viewpoints. The NT was composed by a Greek physician, several Galilean fishermen, and a Pharisee of pharisees (Acts 23:6). So we sort through it all, and if we are not careful we merely have a collection of disjointed aphorisms. What is the larger narrative? How to make sense of it all?
Ultimately, we do present those aphorisms - "do unto others as you would have done to you" - within a larger narrative. The problem of losing the past is that we create our own narrative. Surely the EO narrative is warped. But it is legitimate, in that it has a connection to the past. To reject it outright, as the Protestants have essentially done (I speak as a Protestant of Protestants) is to necessitate the creation of a new narrative which may be unconnected to the original. We lose the safeguard of past experience. The EO as an example (I also think of the Abyssinians/Ethiopians as another example) have a link to the past. This link is not paramount, hegemonic, and supreme... but I feel that it's essential. Why? It's a link.
Contrast that to WN and WL, who proposed a hegemonic link to the past: WN's "church ground", composed without even any understanding of the usage of the Greek word "ekklesia", from what I can see. Likewise WL's vaunted "economy of God" misses Jesus' use of the term "oikonomia" (in Luke 16) meaning responsibility, stewardship. Etc. We all do this, if left to our own devices. We create stories that make sense to us, and presume that through them we have an untrammeled link to the past. WN claimed guidance from the past, but Pember, Penn-Lewis and Miss ME Barber is not enough.
And sorry, but China wasn't "virgin soil" for the re-interpretation of scripture, and reconstruction of the original 'normal' church. China was populated by fallen human beings, struggling back to God, just like the Europeans, North Americans, Egyptians and Greeks before them. And left to their own devices, these Chinese ministers created a narrative just as warped by fallen human culture, with its values and shared expectations, as any of the ones they abandoned as useless. Look at any HWFMR: you get a few verses and the LSM narrative. And that narrative is quite possibly entirely disconnected from the original. The link to the past has been severed.
The EO doesn't have a monopoly on this link. Few that I've seen claim this (in the RCC, by contrast, claims of spiritual hegemony seem more common). But they do have a critical link to the original, shared narrative. Today I see that, and appreciate it.