The curse of bad memory presumes that the ancients were foolish or naive in the way they look at the Bible and it was not until real science and real scientific inquiry came along that we began to get Scripture right. So everyone prior to roughly 1800 or so was shooting in the dark at something we see clearly in the light?
The curse of bad memory presumes that the Church is as old as your own denomination and that all that went before your denomination was darkness and confusion. Here we are down in the last few hundred years of the endeavor called the Christian Church and God finally gets it right (or at least we do). So there really was a Roman Catholic Church before the great schism? So nothing that went before was worthwhile and God had to start over? (BTW Lutherans go against the grain of this insisting that they hold only the catholic doctrine and do the catholic practice that was, is, and will always be -- judge us on this but that is our claim -- no novelty here.)
The curse of bad memory presumes that the worship of God is an incidental thing that each age has adjusted for its own purposes, biases, and desires. Except that until more modern times and the evangelical movement the mass was the mass (even Methodists, Presbyterians, and all sorts of others still have it pretty much as it is in the liturgical churches but in the back of book and not probably in use in the parish).
The curse of bad memory presumes that infant baptism was an aberration that was foisted upon the Church by an enemy of the faith and allowed by a weak and impotent God until the Anabaptists, Southern Baptists, and a few others came along to correct the error. Never mind that it is the unquestioned practice of the Church for more than 15 centuries. An inconvenient truth.
The curse of bad memory presumes that alcohol always bad and grape juice is God's preferred fruit of the vine. Except that grape juice did not exist until about 1870 and was invented to bypass God's natural way of yeasty skin and sugary juice inside the grape. Read this to get your eyes opened.
The curse of bad memory presumes that Christians are responsible for the distortion and preoccupation with sex and that left to themselves the natural man is free and all is good. Read this for something on that history. We are not on the wrong side of history but the right side and the Judea-Christian tradition on this subject is not a bondage for which we need to be set free but freedom for all.
The curse of bad memory presumes many things that are usually wrong and all because we forget the past, ignore tradition, and believe it all began with me. Which, in my mind, means that the curse of bad memory is the fruit of a sinful nature. Could it be that our plea for the Lord to remember is really because we work so hard to forget?
1 comment:
Enjoyed the grape juice article and it is indeed true how Americans in the 1800's had serious drinking problems, culminating in the 18th Amendment. But taking communion in a Methodist church does cause me to make a face. My sister attends an Episcopalian church that sponsors a large AA chapter and they offer members who desperately need to stay on the wagon a grape juice option. Those members who prefer wine get a choice of red or white. Very Episcopalian.
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