Christianity - A World of Bible Readers

The dispute was over the Latin word 'filio-que' ('from the Son as well'); the Aryan heretics ~ a group of people who seemed to believe something radically at odds with Church tradition ~ were claiming the Spirit came principally from the Father, and thus to a lesser extent from Jesus, and hence in turn that Jesus did not have joint and equal power with the Father (so destabilising the notion of the Trinity).

Once the Crusaders had sacked and looted the Eastern spiritual capital of Constantinople in 1204, during one of their missions to the Holy Land, there could be even less commonality between the two sides of the church, even since the (western) Pope and (eastern) Patriarch had effectively excommunicated one another at the time of the Schism.

In early 2016 their successors met for the first time in many centuries, to deplore the maltreatment of all or any Christians by others in the Middle East, and to seek other more positive common ground. We can but wish them well!

Chapter 5 of Romans (addressed to believers living in the money-conscious centre of the known world, of Paul's day) turned out to be a 'trigger' ~ as we'd now say ~ for the Reformation some 1500 years later.

The relevant words fit neatly in modern English since the gist of Paul's argument is: 'Not by WORKS but, by GRACE, through FAITH are we SAVED' (all key 5-letter terms). For modern clarity one might substitute DEEDS in place of WORKS, and perhaps also MERCY in place of GRACE ... but the aide-memoire would still work!

Paul refers to women not having their heads uncovered ~ but in context this could be taken to mean that they already wore more hair than closer-cut men, in which case they already had a natural covering distinct to their gender.

Your author can well recall a typical suburban Anglican parish of his childhood, where in particular the older women congregants (themselves quite probably born and raised as Victorians) unfailingly wore various hats both to and during worship, rather than perhaps taking them off once they were inside the building (as a man might have done, had be been wearing a hat in the first place; but by the 1960s, few men still ever did).

The splendid Stilgoe & Skellern song 'Mrs Beamish' comments on various changes in worship and behaviour in the later decades of the 20th century, from the supposed perspective of rather such an old lady; early on, when the 'brand new vicar' is described, we are also told of Mrs Beamish's dismay that 'the women don't wear hats, but the young men quite often do' (presumably caps, woolly and otherwise, which have been in and out of fashion). The whole song, available (carefully) on YouTube, casts a lot of church practices into kindly but coruscating perspective!

The original material 'changes substance'; with such a key feature of the ritual, it is not enough merely to accept that it might do, or to pretend so. Without delving into a deep and long-running debate, suffice it that there would appear to be some space to interpret Jesus' original words ~ in their original tongue, and in context ~ as inviting an analogy (i.e. 'Whenever you break bread together, remember My broken body') rather than explicitly stating a categorical fact or order ('Wine = blood' as it were, or maybe weren't).

In various major modern languages it would be enough merely to appose the ideas and suggest a link, because the 'be' verb either doesn't exist (as such) in the language, or wouldn't be used in any such situation. Very early in 'Teach Yourself Russian', for instance, you would be taken in your imagination to a hi-falutin' party in Moscow, and introduced to people in such terms as 'Boris: cosmonaut' and 'Svetlana: ballerina' without any explicit clarification that this is what they are or do.

In the case of Transubstantiation (or not ~ if, for instance, you are a Protestant) the weight of words that may never have been spoken is indeed great. The 'miracle at every Mass' (our phrase rather than Rome's) is a key stumbling-point for ecumenism; it does not seem wholly unfair, prayerfully to rue the irony whereby supposed sincere fellow-Christians can't even quite accommodate one another's divergent understanding of the very rite that defines their faith (i.e. commemoration of the sacrificial death of Jesus, from which He would then return triumphant at the Resurrection) ...

It had technically been an offence to say 'Our Father (etc)' instead of the Latin 'Pater Noster'.

It was the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed on the 'Mayflower' in 1620; King Charles I was executed early in 1649 and was later known as 'the Martyr' ~ there is a church named in his honour at Tunbridge Wells, where your author was baptised (his parents having been married there a year beforehand). The Puritans were certainly both believers and achievers, in their way ... !

200-odd years after the Reformation, this text ~ along with Luther's own Preface to it (see Question 2, earlier) ~ prompted the Wesleys to found a keen new movement within the established Church of England. John Wesley (who had already been to America and back) reportedly then embarked on preaching travels amounting to not far short of half-a-million kilometres, giving over 40,000 sermons to large audiences, many of these in the open air. One might feel that Paul himself, as a seasoned missionary traveller, would have regarded him with a measure of pride and admiration ( ... except that of course, Paul made it a principle never to 'do pride')!

Paul (in Romans, yet again!) also recommends people to submit to others whom God, in His wisdom, has set over them.

We are told that they were 'wise rulers' (presumably learned and leisured enough to be studying the sky for signs; and to be able to take protracted leave, with deputies securely in charge, for as long as an investigative trip might need); and that they brought along three distinct gifts with them, from which it is tidy enough to assume that this meant one substance each. But our 'Three Kings', whose camel-borne images faithfully adorn countless seasonal cards each year, are never identified by that precise term in Holy Scripture.

Most of us involved in this quiz would probably, at least, accept the broad premise of the Bible offering God's Word for all and forever. But within that God's world there is a marvellous array of different peoples and cultures who can only fairly be addressed in terms that will make immediate, clear and cogent sense to them.

Another missionary-related story concerns a previously remote Pacific island in whose language nouns belong to any one of three genders (grammatical groups that determine how they 'behave' within sentences, and which in most Western languages are traditionally referred to as Masculine, Feminine and perhaps also Neuter). In this particular language, a different system had developed: its noun-class groups were based on whether the thing in question was animal, vegetable or mineral (e.g. sea-shells, coconuts or sand, respectively). The missionaries touched down in their seaplane, pointed to it and said 'plane'; the local people, never having seen one close-to before, enthusiastically took on the word 'plen' ~ adopting it into their vegetable gender. Why so? Because the only man-made vehicles they already had for prior example were dugout canoes made of logs ... which are, of course, vegetable.

Isn't the diversity of God's world marvellous?