On Thursday, I made this Facebook post:
----
I am proofreading a seminary reading response piece before I turn it in, and I realized that instead of "the first Christians" I wrote "the first Questions." Hmm. And here's the full sentence, to help with the larger context: "I thought about the fact that the Bible really doesn’t say much about the Trinity and how we came to have so much theology that seeks to explain something which didn’t seem very important to the first Christians." You will see that Questions does work in that context, but I did mean to write Christians.
------
I was intrigued by the feedback. Some of my friends who have been to seminary or are in seminary made some comments about Trinitarian theology. One of my other friends asserted that Trinitarian theology is in the Old Testament if we know where to look, like Genesis using "we" for God, to which a pastor friend replied, "A sign that that's coming from the Elohist source. I think that probably reveals the multiple-gods culture out of which Hebrew monotheism emerged, rather than being a precursor of Trinitarian theology."
That same pastor and my spouse had an interesting exchange about the ways that the earliest Christians were trying to understand God, and the pastor finished by quoting Flannery O'Connor: "Well, to quote Flannery O'Conner: 'What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that — make mystics out of cheeses.' So there's hope for us would-be mystics, I guess!"
But perhaps my favorite comment came from a friend who is neither pastor nor seminarian: "Did you check to see if "The First Questions" was available for the name of your traveling minstrel group?"
No comments:
Post a Comment