A seat at the big table. . .

The image of the day is largely of a big table and of the need for everyone to be represented with a seat at the big table.  It has become almost inconceivable to think that anyone can be represented by someone who is not just like that person.  Woman alone can represent women, gays alone can represent gays, Blacks alone can represent Blacks, etc...  At least that is the current wisdom that prevails today.  The table has gotten very large and, in some respects, has become, in reality, many tables though tables of equal value and worth.  So in Rome Synodality has mirrored this idea in an ecclesiastical setting but other churches have long ago adopted this not simply as the ideal but as the minimum.  So in the ELCA a quota system was put in place to make sure that this cardinal rule was never violated.  In the end, we vote less for the most qualified and more for those who fit the bill -- the right sex, skin color, sexual orientation, economic status, etc...

What goes on in that big table or the many tables gathered together is largely talk.  I might call it conversation but it is hardly conversation with so many involved.  It is largely single voices and a small pool of those voices that tend to dominate.  Even if there was a real conversation, what is the point of that conversation?  If it is to give a voice to those who have not had one, that certainly is a legitimate cause for a governance in a political sense but it does not necessarily fit with a Church whose ultimate authority is not with what people think or want but with what Scripture says, creed professes, and confession bears witness.  In fact, the image of the big table in which everyone has a seat and a voice is largely an ideal in which consensus is the goal -- not the discernment of truth.  There is, to be sure, truth[s] that from time to time change but guard the outcome.  Today that is largely guided by the Woke agenda but it has been guided by other agendas at other times some of which were better or worse.

The resolution of conflicts or tensions is often given as a goal or even the primary goal of the big table and its many representatives and its grand conversations.  While that might deal with facts, more often it tends to deal with opinions and lives more in the realm of feelings than objective facts or truths.  I can well imagine that if Nicea were to happen today, the chief goal of that council would be to make sure every voice was heard, every oppressed minority was given a chance to sit at the table, and some sort of vague language adopted so that Arius and the others allied with him could live with the outcome as well as the orthodox Christians.  It would never have resulted in the creed that we know today nor would it have ever resulted in people confessing the outcome of that council at every Divine Service.  If the modern day ideal of the big table had been used at Nicea, there would never have been a Creed universally confessed in the Church today -- even, in some cases by non-creedal churches.  Rather, at Nicaea, the tensions, disputes, and conflicts in the Church were not resolved dynamically or by consensus but definitively:  what does Scripture say.  The Arian denial of Christ’s divinity was not dealt with by majority vote or even by consensus of the orthodox but rather on the basis of what the Scriptures say.  I wish I could say that this actually entered into the synodality conversations in Rome or the tables governed by Protestant quota systems or anything else.  Sadly, it is what is lacking.  Nicea was not interested in consensus or even peace (though perhaps the emperor was).  Nicea was interested in what the Scriptures say.

As much as it has become a tenet of the modern ideal, the big table are the great conversation around it should not and should never become about us and what we think and what we can live with and must always be simply about what the Scriptures say.  If that were the case, we might actually have some legitimate fruits of the consensus movement and its big table.  Because it is not, the fruits of the constant conversation without the norm of Scripture has born very few fruits of any real value.  Hopefully Rome has learned this and the rest of us should learn it sooner rather than later.  Ours is not a task of finding consensus but standing for the truth yesterday, today, and forever the same.  I am not trying to be mean or rigid but it is the one and only rationale for our gathering together, for our common life around Word and Sacrament, and our common witness before the world.