dogma, doctrine and theology: an act of hysteria

The scene opens in a textile factory where they make dresses somewhere in the US. One by one, the employees began to feel numbness, nausea and dizziness, some experience these symptoms so deeply that they are hospitalized. They all claim to have been bitten by a June Bug. After much research though, no one can find the mysterious June Bug that all 62 employees had claimed to be bitten by. Some later would call this an event of hysterical contagion, where people experience things together within a closed atmosphere and began to believe the same things and taken on the same attributes which tend to be in reality a social or psychological trigger. But because the experience is intense reality becomes the experience, the goal rather than the outcome.

In the year 1000 AD the world was in disarray. Many people believed Jesus was going to return. The belief in Christ’s return was so intense that people began believing they were the disciples come back to usher in the ultimate return of Jesus. This was also proved to be a common experience of hysteria.

I wonder if in our attempts at getting to know God we too have been experiencing hysteria? A belief system built upon a mass experience of truth. Where truth is the victim of our hysteria? Where our psychological and socially fragmented views of the world, religion, and religious leaders have somehow painted how we see the world and the things we proclaim to. This isn’t everyone (I too fall into this category). I am asking a question of our history, not necessarily now, although the now is an after-effect of our history. I think it is okay if we began asking the hard questions about what we believe and how we have come to believe them.

Let me explain a bit more. Because prominent leaders got together and made some important decisions about what Scriptures we should consider authoritative or not (e.g., The Apostle Peter was at the First Church Council (Jerusalem)) then, like an act of hysteria, that means we should feel more than inclined to jump onboard? We feel the same things. We claim they all have the same source which is also symptom indicative of an act of hysteria.

Paul wasn’t the only writer of his time. Philo of Alexandria who was a Hellenistic Jew had this view that all the words in scripture were divine, not simply the words that are delineated and separated out by the authors of each work recorded in what we now know as Scripture. There were many other contemporaries of his time that were doing considerable things for Christianity as well as other religions. Are we willing to claim that all we have is all that God has said? Are we willing to claim that all of God’s authority in spoken word is only contained in 66 books? Are we comfortable enough to state as fact that what we have is all there is? Couldn’t there be more?

If there is more, it doesn’t devalue what we have it, it just enhances it that much more. Doesn’t one of the writers even say that the acts of God/Jesus couldn’t be contained in a book? Do we find our origins in a book or in the divine?

Wouldn’t it be better to say that it is a holy book a chronicle or narrative of stories of people who have met the divine? Was this compilation of holy writings meant for us to simply reduce the divine to a few pages or theological standpoints? Or wouldn’t it make more sense that it is a book we are drawn to because it resonates with what has been implanted within us, a hunger for the divine? That it is how people have learned to interact with this being they call YHWH (Yahweh) and how we too can interact with Him and learn about Him? And in doing so, we also learn about yourselves. Maybe it was meant to be an interaction of endless discoveries where we too get to join in on the conversation with God.

The danger is that we can too easily arrive (and have so in the past) to a close-ended conclusion that the Book is the point. That our understanding of God can only be discovered in a set of pages. Judaism (where Christianity is birthed from) believed God couldn’t even be named let alone be placed within pages. I am all for a relational being, but I wonder if we have made the divine too human for His own good. Their way of life had origins around campfires where they each shared miraculous intrusions of the divine in their everyday life. There was one shepherd who told a story how God met him in this bush that was endlessly burning. There was this army general who told this story about how YHWH met him by damping a wet fleece to confirm his Shekinah (Hebrew idea of the presence of God). There are also a set of traditional campfire myths about how the divine shows up; like one myth about how YHWH tested one of the holiest of holy men named Job. Or another myth that represented the heart of YHWH for all people not just the Jews and how the divine changed his mind about them by being digested by a whale.

Another danger is that we can become so distracted by the book, that it actually points us away from the purpose of the book. Which is to invite us to not simply believe in the divine, but to partner with the divine and become the change we want to see in the world. To partner with YHWH in what the sages would call Tikkun Olam, an invitation to repair and heal the world. To get the world back to what it was meant to be. To partner together and help one another meet YHWH. But, if we focus all of our energies preserving the sanctity of a compilation of experiences of the divine aren’t we actually working against the very thing that those who put it together were trying to do?