I remember the last year I went to Camp Tamarack (and thanks for the memory, Facebook) there was this speaker there, a very good one in fact, who shall go unnamed for the sake of, well, not having Google searches for it end up here.

I don’t think I’ve ever written that many notes before, disagreeing with a single public speaking on any issue, including politics. While almost all of my then-friends were lapping everything he said up (though that phrase is a bit loaded, forgive me), I was wondering if they had all lost their critical thinking skills and were simply basking in the glow of his admittedly excellent oratory. Doesn’t the very scripture this gentleman was expounding require the weighing and balancing of everything? Doesn’t it say that there’s no room for private interpretation, that adding things in is a bad idea, and you know, don’t mess around trying to make personal convictions into doctrine?

Maybe I never really recovered from that week of seminars; it left me sort of jaded, as if no-one really cares to evaluate what they hear. Or worse, no-one’s capable. Or worse yet, there’s something completely wrong with me and I’m looking at thing ass-backwards. Sometimes I think it might be that last one.

I have not the exousia nor any expectation of it, but it seems to me that if a man proclaims himself pope exiguus and begins to pass down ex cathedra (even if he’s never said or even never thought either of these things), you have a more dangerous situation that the actual Catholic church, where at least things are oh so very clear.

Once, a man in a particularly exclusive club told me that “we don’t have a dress code here.” Yet everyone dressed the same, and the room exuded this pressure that says, “you must dress this way.” I’ve often wondered what the difference was, and if that man was being intentionally disingenuous or not. I image he wasn’t, although in retrospect this is all rather academic.

I say this to ask a question. What’s the difference between a group of people with an ossified power structure and extra-scriptural doctrine and other accoutrements of that nature, and a group of people who have a non-obvious ossified power structure with a bunch of extra-scriptural doctrines that aren’t actually called doctrines but are followed dogmatically nonetheless? As far as I can tell, the difference is that one group of people is simply more honest than the other; over-simplified, but true, I think.

The difference between a real pope and a bunch of minipopes is just in the robes, I think. The minipopes are part of this more democratic papal state, one that’s a little more free-wheeling, one that’s not particularly organized, but they get to say whatever they want to say as long as it’s crouched in the vernacular of holiness, as long as it’s in this or that particular dialect of Christianese.

Makes you wonder why God didn’t just drop down some bullet points instead, right? I mean, if he’d done that, we’d be able to actually say a lot of things with a lot of certainty, instead a few things with certainty and a lot of things with none at all. But as one of those minipopes said, unfortunately we’re still on this side of the pearly gates; and as a minipope of an entirely different stripe said, perhaps clarity is over-rated.

Tags: ruminations, scripture, theology