fundamental

Tonight I got to go to class by myself, yay. And I've found a spot to sit where I can hear and see, and bonus! the people next to me don't seem to mind me when we do group work. (Read: they are foreigners too.)

Turns out the instructor only got through half his slides last week, so I got to hear the end of the presentation I was complaining about reading on Friday night. It both was and wasn't what I thought it would be. The story, roughly, is that the idea of the Holy Trinity isn't biblical - it evolved after the Bible was codified, in a time Christians were trying to describe themselves in the vocabulary/context of Hellenistic philosophy. Then it got set in stone for 1600 years and now, when we try to explain it, we have the problem that we've lost the cultural context in which it was formed and we also can't point to the Bible for support. Conclusion: we should stop worrying about it and go back to the ideas of God that are in the Bible.

I'm just really suspicious of this idea of going back, and it comes up a lot - going back to the Bible, or back to Jesus's teaching, or back to the early Christian communities. Don't we have to go forward towards seeking a place for Christianity in a postmodern, atheistic world? Isn't the problem less that people tried to explain their religious ideas in a new context than that we stopped doing that, and started memorizing formulas in the terribly misguided belief that they could communicate some universal truth independent of cultural context? As well-intentioned as the various forms of small-f fundamentalism may be, erasing the intervening hundreds of years of imperial and colonial Christianity seems like yet another act of violence against their victims. And for all we've screwed up, we have also managed to learn a thing or two since 300 CE. Right??

But then, what does it mean to be "Christian"?

Poor Daniel wants to go to bed and I should too, there's playgroup tomorrow morning. More on this...sometime...