Friday, April 2, 2010

Woot

Please forgive the informal speech of this post, I was wicked excited and everything else flew out the window. I just had to share it and I don't quite have time to revise and proof it.

I had the most truly awesome revelation this morning reading proverbs, which is a collection of sayings regarding the virtue of wisdom and knowledge and how to find said virtue and knowledge but, get this, they were written TO an illiterate population. Shut yo mouf! An illiterate people with access to knowledge and wisdom?? Exhorted to seek knowledge and wisdom? And even more, an illiterate population interested in knowledge and wisdom?

The sweet part is that the last chapter of my "Comm in History" textbook discussed the role of communication in the religiously dominated middle ages, specifically highlighting the control that the church had over an illiterate society. The whole premise of such a heierarchy and actually most authoritarian governments is that the educated have the right and obligation to exert power over the uneducated. But here is a whole book (forget about Job and Ecclesiastes) chronicling wise sayings intended for those who are uneducated or at least illiterate.

Take it a step further and you get Hebrews 1:1 "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;"

Not only are the spiritual implications phenomenal (having been brought near by the blood of Christ, abolition of the human priesthood, etc) but what about the cultural implications? If government power was tied up in religious authority, then this idea revolutionized every level of society, bringing the ultimate and final authority, the greatest power in the universe and over men, into the mind and home of the basest levels of society.  Essentially Jesus brought about the spiritual and cultural democracy that God intended from the beginning.

I haven't wrapped my head around this yet but I've been looking for so long for proof that scripture, that God's design, validates this idea and that the religious, social, and political abuses of power in the Church's history were human perversions. This utopia that we are pressing toward, that many believe we will never reach until we are free from the shackles of Christianity, was founded by God and refounded by Christ! 

Of course, by way of disclaimer, I am just scratching the surface and there are still many issues to address but still, woot.

It's small and not Christ-like but I feel a "neener-neener" in my soul!

-Sarah Elizabeth

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