Parade of Follies -- Hierarchicalizing Ecclesiology

Okay, I admit it. I got addicted to two-word phrases and as a result some of the words got more and more esoteric. It was either that or make the titles ever longer and longer -- in which case they'd break with Wright's pattern and I didn't want to do that -- or flatten the words down to the point where they reduced the idea to the ridiculous and meaningless. So instead, I choose these $45 words and you can all laugh at that. Comedic potential everywhere! No matter.

Hierarchicalizing ... by which I mean, bringing in hierarchy where it's not wanted and/or bringing in more hierarchy than is absolutely needed. Two ends of the spectrum: in Lord of the Flies, the boys needed some kind of hierarchy that everyone could accept in order to stay something like safe and healthy (but, if you find the real life scenario where this happened, their humanity and communal care didn't need much -- look for "Tongan Castaways" on Wikipedia) -- versus the hierarchy in "The House" where most of the plot of the "Morrow Days" books by Graham Nix takes place. The main character is assigned an ever lower number (higher status) as the books wear on.

Ecclesiology ... how do people "do" church? From the -ology you see everywhere, as in study of, fronted by a derivation of the Greek word that gets translated "church". Pastors, elder boards, deacons, consistories, conferences, presidents? or rectors, vicars, bishops, deans, archbishops and a pope or popes (they seem to have more than one of these among Orthodox churches)?

With that introduction..

And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'teacher,' for you have one Teacher, the Christ. (Matt 23:9,10)

Perhaps I have a “spiritual gift of mulishness” – I had that thought in re-editing one of these, where I reported having balked twice along the same lines. And perhaps that mulishness relates here. That it might be a dislike of authority, generally. I’d like to think not – I’d like to think I’m a good toes-the-line-mostly guy but maybe this item says otherwise. When you read the New Testament, it seems to me that Paul is divided on this subject: sometimes it’s “entrust this to faithful men” and choose people of good character as overseers; other times it’s there’s no difference, there’s no status gradient. With Jesus, it seems to me, the picture is much more consistent, culminating in that one verse, “Call none father”.

Of course, parents ought to be honoured as parents, but I have yet to encounter a healthy father who didn’t want, ultimately, to be more peer with rather than lord over adult children. And we have one Father, one Lord, so we definitely have some kind of authority structure. If Jesus, as a human, is that One, and if all humanity were mapped to real numbers, then I see this as a Dirac delta function (δ) which has the value 0 everywhere except at one point, where the value is "impossibly high".<1> If I had claimed this kind of egalitarianism as a young man (when I first felt it), I could rightly have been condemned as grasping for what I hadn’t earned. Now I’m over 60 and I still believe this. My record of co-operating with local norms regardless could open me to charges of hypocrisy, too. I deny them both.

When a family grows too big, it becomes difficult for the grandparently pair to keep track of all the grandchildren or great-grandchildren, though they manage – but perhaps for our Father, it’s different. His care for us is different from our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ care, anyway: they, freed from the task of day-to-day maturation of the children, from the “difficult” lessons that the parents must convey, can be entirely “irresponsible” – he is not: he continues to be deeply interested in our advancement toward Christlikeness and character, love, compassion, etc. But his attention can be towards all of his children, and except for the practicalities of keeping a regular situation going, or for all the more mature to care for all the less, I am convinced that his view of us contains not one hint of hierarchy. As lovely as the final cantos of Paradiso may be, the hierarchy they (and Inferno, and Purgatorio) convey flow from Dante’s view of earthly structures and not at all the heavenly structure.

But this thinking has tainted other things, too. It has corrupted the meanings of “saint” (every believer, not just some heroes), “apostle” (missionary, emissary of the gospel, initially the eye-witnesses, but eventually more broadly), “deacon” (anyone who serves in any way), and obscures, for instance, how Jesus hijacked and subverted Imperial jargon in “gospel”, “salvation”/“saviour”, “lord” – and it has left room for “priests”: but we have only one Priest. I don’t think his sacrifice needs constant re-enactment.

We, as followers of the one who died and rose again, are already living in the new age to come, whether we are aware of it or not. To impose on the ones living that life, the hierarchical structure of the present age tells structural lies that have repeatedly borne bad fruit and will continue to do so as long as we perpetuate them. If you don’t believe me, ask the ones at the bottoms of those hierarchies how things are really going and be prepared to listen, really listen, aggressively, actively listen.

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<1> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function