Stump the Pastor Blog

Here are a collection of your questions and Pastor Roger's answers. Be sure to keep those questions coming.

Question 2

(2) Dear Pastor: Are you getting discouraged over the split in the church? Will Church of the Spirit be able to survive in the midst of all this turmoil. It saddens me to think we are too small to survive by ourselves if matters go that way.

Answer:  Cue the Donna Summers song "I will survive ..." 

Yes, I get discouraged when I see how some people speak poorly of Christ or how some people get turned off from God because Christians continually argue. I am not as discouraged by the split in the church that is coming because I'm not the one splitting away. I have every intention of remaining a faithful Christ Follower, and an Anglican priest. I can not speak for others ... only for myself. I believe the Bible is our ultimate rule of faith and what the world needs now, not just some fuzzy feeling of love, sweet love. I want the real thing: God's love, becuase it transforms me into who God wants me to be. As a sinner, that's what I need most.

As for Church of the Spirit, we are actually larger than over 75% of the Episcopal Churches in this country. We have a phenomenal track record for baptizing new people, and our congregation is generous with their gifts. I love hearing stories of how people are healed, how their lives are changed by God in this place. It's fantastic. We are in fact, healthier by far than a lot of churches I know in the Diocese.

I have no thoughts about surviving. I have my sights set on thriving.

Question 1

Dear Pastor: What do you make of the Gosepl of Judas?

Answer:  I know the release of the Gospel of Judas was big news for a while in the paper, but there was in fact very little new in it. The parchment was a new find, but the information in it told us nothing new about Jesus or Judas. It was instead a document from the late 2nd to early 3rd century from a Gnostic group, and represents a lot of the same themes as found in the Nag Hammadi library documents, The Gospel of Thomas, etc. 

The Gnostics believed that Jesus gave out secret knowledge to a few elite folk, and that knowledge would lead them to a more spiritual existence, away from the physical existence of this world. The gnostics wanted to become enlightened, and that would mean finding the spark of divintiy within themselves and living free of the world. (For a modern piece of gnostic literature read Jonathan Livingston Seagul, popular back in the 70's ... it could have been written by the same author as the ancient texts we have). The Gnostics were not Christians or Jews, but people who turned both religions upside down, seeing creation as bad and the God of the OT as evil. Jesus, according to the Gospel of Judas, laughs at people who believe in God for being naive, and asks Judas to help him die so he can escape the evil world here and find his true divinity elsewhere.  No wonder Judas appears as a hero ...

The Gnostics grab headlines to this day because many current reviewers/scholars want to argue that Christianity as we have it is a bad thing. In its place we should be allowed to follow our inner light or discover our deepest spirituality within us ... ideas better described and debunked by early church scholar NT Wright in his latest book Judas and the Gospel of Jesus. Wright's book gives a scholarly review as well as some greta insights into why books like the Gospel of Judas seem to be so popular as a means to attack what Christianity holds to be true about the historical figures of Jesus and his followers.