Ubuntu!!!
Picture the scene. You’re a leading (at least you think you are) Christian church in the USA, preparing for your three yearly convention. You want a logo that’s going to communicate the core elements of what your faith in Jesus is all about, a logo that will be easy to understand and accessible to non-Christians and Christians alike. Something that is iconic, Something that immediately springs out at you and says, "Jesus Christ Rocks!!!".
So you pick this.
Right.
This was produced by the same chap who leads his church in a "Great Thanksgiving of Cain Our Father". We kid you not:
And though Cain our father rose in anger and killed his brother,
yet you had mercy on him.
You gave him a covenant,
and marked him with a protecting sign;
you placed the gravest sinners beyond human judgment.
Cain our Father? Ummm, do we want to do a review of the Genesis genealogy?
Is Cain your father? Methinks that would be a dangerous thought. His family line didn’t do too well did it? That’s what curses do to you.
Anyway, back to the logo. Looks like a dream-catcher to me (a thoroughly Christian object I don’t believe), but never mind. Apparently there are crosses etched into the rim to remind us of "God the Son, the Pain-bearer", but I’ll be dashed if I can find any anywhere. What I can find however is this wonderful example of something that looks oh so similar.
Anyone for a bit of Dharma?
What is the Episcopal Church coming to? I mean, even a different Ubuntu logo (the one for the Linux OS) is more Christian than TEC miserable pagan offering. Look, a circle which is three parts but one circle. Three dots in it which are all different. Three. In One.
It’s come to something hasn’t it when a bunch of geeks can beat TEC at such a simple thing, even when they’re not even trying…
There is something symbolic here. For some time, Ubuntu has been one of the leading variants of Linux. It was noted for its ability to work in a wide range of environments. However, of late problems and incompatibilities have grown progressively more obvious. While it still has dedicated followers, many are leaving for other, more traditional versions. Sound familiar?
Treg
Peter,
I think I have the perfect “hymn†for this Ubuntu “I in you and you in me†theology:
“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together….
I am the eggman (woo), they are the eggmen (woo), I am the walrus,
Coo coo, kachoo….â€
Kind of catchy, don’t ya think?
Rik
Your graph nearly had me thinking you were a proponent of British-Israelitism!
http://www.orange-street-church.org/text/beliefs.htm
Rik,
Oh let’s not beat about the bush. *This* is the TEC opening hymn (if we’re into this “I in you and you in me” business):
Seems to me you’re reading way to much into a logo that no one will see again after GC’09 and the Deputies’ reports to their dioceses. It was probably just picked because someone thought it looked cool, and the artist gave a cool sounding description. Of course I’ve never met a logo I thought looked particularly cool, but I don’t care for the vast majority of modern art, mabye there’s not enough art in my soul or something.
Why are you focusing on ephemera like this anyway? One would almost think you were looking for reasons to beat up your brothers and sisters in Christ, especially with the amount of space you devote to the stuff from St. Gregory of Nyssa (most, if not all, Episcopalians involved in national stuff know that that particular chuch is on the lunatic fringe of TEC).
Jon
The lunatic fringe of TEC? Gosh that takes me back a few years, back when pantheism was primarily restricted to eastern religions deriving from Hinduism. Back when it never occurred to the average Christian in American that a prominent Protestant denomination – i.e., the Protestant Episcopal Church, USA – might flirt with pantheism in the spirit of tolerance and inclusion. Back when Anglicanism was still in serious dialogue with Roman Catholicism because there was some hope Anglicanism as such – i.e., in toto – might have identifiably and authentically Christian beliefs. One would at that time have presumed PECUSA as such did not tolerate pantheism.
I am an ontologically distinct human person. You are I are no more in each other than I and my tabby cat are. I am a Christian and thus related mystically and sacramentally to the divine Persons of the Holy Trinity and every Christian human person (Communion of Saints). I am thus by the sacramental grace of Holy Baptism in the name of God the Holy Trinity, who are related perichoretically. I am indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. I partake of Jesus Christ, Body, Soul and Divinity, in the Eucharistic Species. Even my wife and I who are one in marriage are connected solely by the unique, distinct sacramental grace of Holy Matrimony. The minute I sense that she is in my head or whatever I’m calling my GP to get on a different prescription!
Of course, Anglicanism as such does not affirm any of those things. They are
ephemera to some (mostly extreme ‘evangelical fringe’),
dogma to others like me (a member of the increasingly extremised ‘catholic fringe’)
dharma to the extreme ‘liberal fringe’ like St Gregory of Nyssa in SF?
To all? Well, to put it in mathematical terms, one of the last domains affirming objective truth: the set containing complete Anglican consensus on these or any other theological propositions is null, i.e., {}.
The lunatic allusion reminds me especially of Pink Floyd and the track Brain Damage on Dark Side of the Moon. Now it’s playing in my head. The lunatic is in my head.
The lunatic is on the grass
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path
The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forbodings too
Ill see you on the dark side of the moon
The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me till Im sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
Theres someone in my head but its not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band youre in starts playing different tunes
Ill see you on the dark side of the moon
So many connections with TEC it makes me LOL insanely. Hah. Ah hah hah. Weh heh heh hah hah. Woo zet meh heh hah hah!
Fr Darryl, if you visited any church in my diocese, which is rather liberal, you would find no one who embraces anything like what is practiced at St. Gregory of Nyssa in SF. So can the “TEC is flirting pantheism” bs, it isn’t true. By the by, I wasn’t referring to doctrine or dogma when I was talking about ephemera, I was talking about the logo.
It is true that one could look at an artsy drawing of people dancing in a circle and the ambiguious phrase “I in you and you in me” and go “OMGZ TEC is running pell-mell into apostasy and thinking there’s no such thing as Truth!!!111!1!!11! Horror!!!11!Horror !!11!!1!”
On the other hand one could probably more sensibly and charitably go “So the artsy logo is people dancing over an ambigiguious phrase, huh. Well at least circles suggest unity. We could use some of that in the AC at the moment, and adding in dancing has echoes of Orthodox ways of talking about the Trinity. AS for ‘I in you and you in me’ maybe it’s a reference to that song about how we’re one in the Lord, or perhaps it’s a reference to our relationship to God. Either way there’s no real news here except for the artsy types who can go ga-ga over the lines and fonts or whatever.”
Jon
I showed how the Lambeth 2008 logo was not exactly a million miles from the British Unitarian logo – and not, as BabyBlue later claimed, taking the same two, the US Unitarian Universalist logo, which is different from the British one.
Oh absolutely Adrian – Lambeth / Brit Unitarian. So easy to see…
I was amused to see the genealogical table showing Cain etc. But surely the people mentioned in those genealogies can’t be the only people who were around at the time? The flood account implies there were far more than that when God told Noah to get building; and besides, what about women? Presumably the ancestors of Noah married someone, and how do we know none of the wives were descendants of Cain? On another tack, if “father” is used in an extended sense to mean “ancestor”, I don’t see why it has to mean only direct ancestors and not collaterals.
But given that the TEC people who so got Peter’s goat are unlikely to believe in the literal truth of the early Genesis stories in the historical sense, I can only suppose the word “father” is being used by them in a metaphorical sense, which I don’t see as illegitimate in itself – after all, when Jesus called the pharisees “brood of vipers” I don’t suppose he meant literally that their parents were snakes; similarly when they say they have Abraham as a father and he implies the devil is.
The issue is that it is through Seth’s line, not Cain, that redemption comes. Cain is *not* in any sense our father, and indeed to claim him as such is to claim a curse, not a blessing.
It is a bit difficult to understand why that chap Fabian made reference to ‘Cain our father’ in his eucharistic liturgy. Either he
naively assumed that Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve’s only children, or
attempted invoke a sort of solidarity with sin.
But surely the ubiquitous Pauline distinction of being ‘in Adam’ or ‘in Christ’ is sufficient. Original sin goes back to, well, our original parents, not the second generation. Why a rhetorical identification with Cain were helpful I cannot fathom.
What is much more irksome to me is his epiklesis and the eucharistic theology it conveys:
Now send your sanctifying spirit,
to show us that this bread and this cup
are the body and blood of your Son,
and every sin is pardoned, and every debt is redeemed,
and you have made us your holy people.
So the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with the bread and cup becoming the Body and Blood of Christ? And why pray tell are Father and Son capitalised throughout, but never spirit? Seems a bit depersonalising. I won’t go so far as to shout, pneumatomachian!
But apart even from such indelicacies, placing the Sanctus at the end of the prayer of Consecration is, well, not to put too find a point on it, goofy.
On the subject of Cain: to clarify what I meant earlier, I was not really trying to defend that liturgical piece as such (the one Peter took exception to), as I accept it is rather maladroit. But I was, and still am, a little worried about a couple of exegetical matters that arose in the course of the, er, examination of it. For one thing, Peter, unless I misunderstand you, you seem to be accepting as given that all descendants of Cain are (or would be if they exist) under a curse, but I have not been able to find anything in the Bible about that. In Genesis 4 God tells Cain he is under a curse, but says nothing about his descendants; and since the curse in question involves being a wanderer and fugitive on the earth it seems not to apply to Cain’s own son in the first generation, who founds a city (4:17). There is certainly no idea that the curse involves anything like untimely death, or dying out of the line – in Cain’s own case, at least, God intervenes to prevent that. Secondly, I don’t think the text supports the idea that Cain’s descendants went no further than the genealogical list follows them, in view of 4:20-21, which seem to imply that Cain’s descendants were still around at least at the time the text was written.
Robert,
Ask yourself a question. How many of Cain’s descendants do we know survived the Flood?
That is your answer to the question as to whether Cain is in any sense our Father, in the way that Abraham, Noah, Seth or Adam might be.
Peter: forgive me for being tedious, but how do you read Gen. 4:20-21 in this respect? I will then shut up for the sake of peace.
FrDarryl, as far as I can see from the context of the excerpt (there is a link to this from the posting) the mention of Cain’s story comes in the context of several examples of sins that have been forgiven; the other examples used are rather more convincing. [But it is true that the punishment God settles on for Cain is a good deal less severe than the punishement – stoning – prescribed in the Law for shedding blood on the earth unrighteously; hence the conclusion of some scholars that we are meant to understand God showed some mercy in his treatment of Cain, which is probably what the author of that prayer was thinking of.] The addition of “our father” after Cain’s name could have been omitted without altering the general gist of the argument. As far as I can see from a rereading, “father” here is just meant as the equivalent of “ancestor” used vaguely to mean “member of the ancestral family”, without consideration of whether he was a direct ancestor or not. You see what I mean by calling it “maladroit”!
Robert,
I’m trying to find a sermon I preached which looks at Cain and Abel. I’ll post a link once I have it online.