Friday, March 20, 2009

The logocentricity of the sacred

I originally intended this blog for my musings about the New Testament. Mostly because it is the only area that I feel confident to write about. I've spent a lot of time studying the greek and hebrew texts. I am a biblical scholar/historian, and not a theologian. But I have been thinking about the sacred lately and have something I want to get off my chest. Hopefully I'll have something useful, and ironically logocentric to post in the next week.

So I was driving home from Ikea last weekend and listening to CBC radio, as I always do because I hate almost all popular music that they play on the radio. As it was almost St. Patricks day there was a special about folk religions of Ireland. One scholar was arguing that the main reason many traditional people could never relate to western religion is the logocentricity of the sacred. It really got me thinking, that this is one, among many, of my major problems with christianity.

I know it seems ironic for a person who once spent over 60 hours on one word in the New Testament to criticize others for being overly logocentric, but there is a difference between a scholarly pursuit of knowledge and the religious pursuit of the sacred. As a biblical scholar, I never approach a particular biblical text in pursuit of an experience with the sacred or with god. Yet modern christians have almost deified the words of the bible (this applies to Jewish views of the Torah and Muslim views of the Quran even moreso but I don't want to criticize them too harshly because I was never one of them). In my 20 or so years in christianity this is one of the things i had the hardest time relating to. It never made sense to me that someone would search for a creator god in a book created by men. To me it always made more sense to search for the creator/s of the world in his/her/its/their creation. I don't ever remember feeling a sense of the sacred in church or when reading the bible, but I'll be damned if I haven't felt a powerful experience of something sacred everytime I see the ocean, or every time i've stood on top of a mountain. To me the world itself and all creatures within it are what is sacred and where sacredity is to be found.

That isn't to say that I am a panentheist, I'm not even sure there is a god. I don't think we should worship mountains or oceans, and I don't think they are gods. But I do think christians get way too caught up in the exact words of the bible and believe God can only be this or that because the bible uses this one word to describe god. It's very limiting on a supposedly supreme being. I have been told this idea is "silly" by christians. Oh well they are allowed to believe what they want. But I do find a certain absurdity in worshiping a god who created everything and searching for truths about that god in something created by men. If there is a god or gods, I feel confident I will find more truths about him/her/it/them in mountains and forests and oceans than anyone ever will learn from reading a book, even a book considered to be sacred.


But these are just my completely non-scholary thoughts about god and the sacred.