Song: God is Still Speaking | Blog Post on Yvette Flunder's Third Testament | We have more to say about God |

Friends,

I headed to Austin next week, to explore the history of the Episcopal Divinity School at the Episcopal Archives. I never really liked history in high school, and took very little of it in college (I was a Chemistry major). But now I find it fascinating to learn where ideas and arguments and people come from. So it'll be an interesting trip.

-Liz

Insist! God is Still Speaking

The United Church of Christ (UCC) uses a slogan "God is still speaking". And "never place a period where God placed a comma". I know people who have comma tattoos!

I think that most Christians, from very conservative to very liberal, believe that God still speaks to us today. We think of God as parent, guiding us, the holy spirit as "walking" with us, of Jesus as our friend. Each of these are speaking roles.

But is God still speaking to the church at large?

We have commentary, diaries, and sermons from fairly early in Christian history of individuals describing how God has spoken to them, and how God is speaking to the church. These of course are each individual's interpretation of what they heard, and what they thought that God meant.

And we have the biblical account. While some suggest this is God's word, I would note that theologically Christians do not identify a book, as our foundation. Jesus the Christ is the word of God. But this collection of writings is certainly what humans believed they were hearing from God.

For the large majority of Christians, the biblical texts, the poems, stories, rants, rules, and histories, provide descriptions, metaphors, outlines, and ideas of how God has acted, and is calling us to act, in the world. Even people who claim to be literalists rarely are -- I've not net met anyone who refused to wash their hands despite Jesus' admonition against it. Few people are giving away all that they have, no one thinks the parable of the man who built a barn is a true story. The point is not the literal truth of the story, but rather the message underlying it.

For certain God spoke the world into being, the long history of God redeeming human kind, and gave us Jesus, the word, to continue speaking to us. God is still speaking today.

And yet, there is a huge uproar over Yvette Flunder's proposal that the church needs a third testament. Without reading the new words, the presumption is that it would put aside the previous testaments, that it would be wrong, bad, blasphemy. Of course knowing Flunder's work, it will be radical.

Despite the human decision to create a particular scripture at a particular time some 1600 years ago, and much insistence that "the canon is closed", the fact is there have been numerous debates about what precisely are the limits to what is in our scripture. Martin Luther suggested removing the book of James. The Catholic and Protestant bibles are not the same. Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy have written revised versions of the bible, and I grew up with the Gospel According to Peanuts.

The proposed third testament is no threat to our scriptures, and is certainly no threat to our God.

Our faith is not constant. The earliest Christians accepted, with arguments aplenty, that they needed to decide how Jesus message applied to their context. We have the Pauline decision to spread the gopsel outside the holy lands, to a people who were not saturated in Jesus' Jewish faith. We have the question of how food service should be shared (Acts 7:1-7), and about who should be in leadership of the daily worship.

Outside of our scriptures the questions continued -- can someone who avoided martyrdom still bless the sacrament? Where shall we meet when there is no room to all eat a meal together? What should a church building look like, and later, how can we create a cathedral? We've wondered if Latin is God's only language, despite the Greek and Hebrew originals. We've debated if church and government are one and the same. Whether any war can be justitified, whether any soldier can be Christian, and then later, whether we should head off to "protect" the holy lands from infidels. We've struggled to hear God's word as to whether, and how, and which pieces of music belong in church. We all know that are present hymns are only a few hundred years old, right?

I'm rather excited to imagine another testament to add to the ones we have. I've already added Walter Wink's The Powers that Be to my list of important, God-spoken words for the this time and place.

Will everyone like this new collection? I am certain not. But even those who claim to love the whole bible now generally limit their quotes to a few of the books.

I believe that God is still speaking.

I welcome a third testament, trusting that it won't be all right, neither will it all be wrong. I wonder if it will take sixteen hundred more years to write a fourth. I hope not.

How is the bible a part of your faith? What is important to you to be in another example of God still speaking? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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A blog post from Father Peter on Yvette Flunder and the Third Testament.

God Is Still Speaking a worship song by Marty Haugen.

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