FR Kevin Ryan (CL 14/4/02) gave insightful and incisive views.
However his overall theme misunderstands history and Jesus’ effect on it.
To understand things simply someone has to understand the complexities. The clerical Church has always had the role of teacher in that regard.
The failure of the Church is its inability to cope with today’s complexity. The reasons for that is a task for the Brisbane archdiocesan synod.
The synod will not reveal a simple Jesus that we have all missed. The value in the synod is that it will empower clergy and laity to handle complexity. Jesus’s life did not effect a dramatically instantaneous impact on 1st century history. There is no doubting the permanent ability of Christians to attend church while living a life contradictory of Gospel values. Even the Acts of the Apostles outline stories of disagreement within the Church and within the Jewish/Gentile dichotomy.
The Bible is not a simple book and we will need scholars for some time before we can say that we understand the Bible. Our distance from the 1st century continues to turn the Bible into something it is not. It has been a problem since the 1st century given the cultural separation between the Middle East mind and the European.
The Bible is strong on God’s love because the world of the Bible was one where powerful gods exercised dominion over man. This was a cosmic and communitarian message rather than merely a personal message. The preaching of Jesus’s message to a Western civilised world led to a domestication of the biblical message.
This reduced the practice of Christianity to the level of merely personal relationships. Personal sexual morality became the substance of the Sacrament of Confession. The Church became the local parish.
We live in an international economy of “nuclear families”. We feel powerless to help at best and guilty at worst.
The information age has exposed religious debate to a broad public beyond the censorship and control of the intellectual elite. We must empower broad debate.
Cultural and scientific progress has led to a loss of belief in deities. We live in a world that seems to get by without God.
The world does not so much fear God as much as it despises God. For many, God is a deity who seems to have so little to do with its day to day needs.
That is the task of the synod. It is as simple as it is complex.
My worry is that there are many who believe in God but don’t believe in the need for a Synod.
My view is that we need a synod because so many no longer believe in Jesus as the revelation of God.
VINCENT HODGE Paddington, Qld
