Knowtown…

Our family is out for the day on a quest to capture some Colorado Brook Trout. Should be a great day!

(click on image to view actual size)

this comment by Howard on the Radical Congruency blog captures a connection I was trying to make in my earlier post. Perhaps I used a poor choice of words by talking about “ownership”. What I was trying to show was that the fact that there is no vacancy in ecclesial leadership and dream making places and the discussion about which Tradition is the “right” one both seem to be rooted in “power” and “control”. So maybe a better question than “who owns it?” is “what are we to do with our power?” These issues were the bookends of my earlier post and I did not communicate that very well.

Many years ago I sat in a philosophy class where the prof was teaching Descartes’ idea, “doubt all things that can be doubted.” He was targeting one student in particular about whether or not the student “really” was a member of the family he grew up in.

“How do you know this to be true?” the prof would ask.

Eventually the student was forced to admit that he believed this to be true based on the authority of the story his parents told him to which the prof responded, “have your parents ever lied to you? I’ll bet they let you believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause for a long time…”

It is easy to fall into the place of giving the privileged voice to the doubter because it is so easy to show that we cannot be right about everything all of the time. We all have inconsistencies in our beliefs and practice. This way of looking at things gives power to the most articulate, the intellectual skeptic who would advocate for agnosticism in all areas. How can we ever really know anything at all and have certainty in that knowledge?

So the overwhelming, foundational questions that I have been getting in response to the “open source” analogy for communities of faith is “how do you know when a community is no longer faithful to the original?” “How do we guarantee the purity of the source code as it goes through revision after revision?” “At what point does the ‘DNA’ of a faith community change so radically from the original that it is a new code altogether?”

I think these are great and important questions that can and should be asked. But, ironically, it leads back to the original question I ask about who owns the orthodox faith? I would guess that at very crucial points of matters of belief and practice the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox church can all point to Church fathers from the first millennium of Church history–before the “Great Schism”. Finding our common roots in these saints of the original unified church does not eliminate the controversy however. The descendants of Ishmael and Isaac both share the same relationship to Abraham but that does not prevent them from excluding each other from “the family.”

What about practice? Certainly members of each tradition would claim that they are places where we can gather together to live lives of faithful obedience to the will of God. But who is doing it “right”? And who decides what “right” is? Certainly many Protestants have made the most erroneous step of leaning exclusively towards personal preference but not all of them have. And, in my opinion, it is equally destructive to make ownership claims on the one singular way of being the church. So on this day, in Parker, Colorado I wonder what it means to be part of the family of God. Can I claim to be a child of God or will I have to settle for being an illegitimate child of an unfaithful bride? Will I be forced to doubt my relationship to the family or will I allowed to believe?

Some would conclude that we simply must “agree to disagree”. That may prevent future conflict but it won’t bring peace. I hope for a day when we will recognize that we can “agree to be different.” (yeah, I really am an ecclesial dreamer). Before Pentecost, there were some shepherds watching their flocks at night who received “good news for all people” by some heavenly messengers. At the heart of that “good news” was a truth claim that God was “with us”. When we realize that the “us” there is plural and predates Pentecost maybe we will begin to understand that we have room to accept faithful followers of God as members of the family regardless of the traditions they were brought up in.

Dare to dream.

than mine are continuing the discussion here and here. There are some good insights lurking in both places so go check them out. Makes me reluctant to check out of the blog world for the weekend but I will catch up on Monday.

There is one more thing that I find helpful to this conversation and it is this outstanding article, “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along” by Stanley Fish that I pinched from the Fishbowl.

Have a great weekend everyone and please pray once again for our traveling mercies.

Following my “No vacancy…” post, Karl left an intriguing comment that led to a brief email exchange that has me thinking. I was referred to this thought provoking essay. There is not enough time to comment on that article fully but it leads me to the following question:

bq. “Who owns orthodox theology?”

It is obvious that in some ecclesial traditions, some groups of people have taken ownership of the places of dream making and leadership and that is why so many ecclesial dreamers choose to go into church planting/birthing/multiplication/whatever you want to call it. But now there seems to be a growing discussion about this ecclesial move. While some Evangelical churches actually have vision statements to become “churches that plant churches,” others see such vision statements as dividing the unity of the “one true church”.

As you start to follow that discussion the issue becomes which tradition can rightfully make the claim to be “the one true church”. The assumption behind this question is that there is some ecclesial institution that owns proper theology. Any deviation from the proper theology is therefore a step away from the faith. So who will adjudicate between all of the various traditions that have taken ownership of proper theology?

I wonder if we could learn some things from the emerging context of open source that could help us? What if the Christian faith is built on “open source” code? This seems to allow for a more faithful understanding of how history and context have an important role to play in our theological understanding. The New Testament tells us that the foundation of the church was laid and that we are now building on that foundation. This is “open source” language. We are not simply maintaining the foundation; we are building something on it–something that didn’t exist before.

In “open source” contexts no one group can claim to own the source code and everyone has access to it. But in some contexts there will be development of the source code to meet a particular need. In another context, that development may not be needed or may in fact even cause problems so it will not be adopted. But the source code is still the same. From my limited perspective (and I know many will disagree with this, and that I may be in error) it is impossible for any ecclesial institution today to claim that the content of it’s theology is the same as that of the early church unless that claim is made in this “open source” kind of context. And in that context there is room for multiple expressions of the source code. It is a mistake to believe that the church began with a complete and closed source code. To begin with that belief requires us to see any changes–whether they are historical, sociological or theological–as a destructive thing to the unity of the church. But in an “open source” context no single group could make the claim of ownership. Changes that are made can actually be productive. There may be different alterations that can still be faithful to the source code, such as language, institutional structure, etc.

Certainly there is the possibility for some modifications that are no longer faithful to the source code and therefore cannot be considered as being in continuity with the original. But there could be more than one expression of the source code that are faithful. In this light, I think there are many ecclesial institutions that have strayed a long way from the source code and need to make some serious corrections. But others have closed the code and will only accept those who will continue to use their code as if Protestants have no right to embrace the apostle’s creed without leaving the Protestant tradition. In my opinion, both straying from the source and taking ownership of the source are serious errors in need of repentance.

This reminds me a lot of Polanyi’s description of the scientific community. There are some interesting foundational reasons for embracing an open source understanding that I think can be beneficial in an ecclesial context. On the other hand, there is a lot of profitability in administering and using closed systems. I wonder if those who hold the resources and power that come with ownership of a closed ecclesial system will ever be willing to discuss this with open source ecclesial dreamers. Or, until we are willing to conform to one of the closed systems will we always be on the outside looking in?

bq. In order to get the maximum benefit from the process, the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources. Therefore we forbid any open-source license from locking anybody out of the process. –from the open source definition.