Men’s Bible Study 30 Sept 2013: monopoly on God? Narrow is the way?

Literacy and the high cost of hand copying the Old and New Testament put an economic and ceremonial scarcity on Holy Books. As dear (expensive; beloved) elements of spiritual practice they were sometimes enshrined, chained or otherwise secured, encrusted in gold and precious stones and so on. And to hear the words spoken was like a faint whisper of God's voice, no matter if pronounced in the vernacular, in the Latin of Imperial Rome, or before that in Hebrew (OT) and Greek plus Aramaic (NT). But when printing and distribution fully develops and literacy speads along with it, access to The Word is less a logistical problem and more of an attention problem since many other printed works are in circulation, as well, and seekers face multiple translations, commentators and experts. In this sense the road of discourse and relationships across and between societies is wider and wider but all the while The Way is as narrow as it was at the time of Rabbi Jesus.

    At the organizational level, too, the primitive church was a small-scale and organizationally flat structure. But as property and edification accumulated one generation after another, the hierarchies and specializations of knowledge and spiritual practices multiplied until one person could not easily feel acquainted with the body of knowledge that has been expanding.

    One big change in the control of access to Holy Words (scripture) and relationships with God was the Reformation by the Protestants and with them the Anabaptists, ultimately with the extreme accountability on the cellular individual that Quakerism expresses as "that of God within each person." Thereby the circle is completed: from the egalitarian Primitive Churches to the layers of hierarchy to administer a giant body of believers and back to the flat structure with each person in relationship to God and to one's neighbors. By shifting the channel of communication away from Mass and the celebrant official, and instead privileging the Words of God (in one's own vernacular, continually being revised in light of growing scholarly understanding) there is meant to be direct access of the person with God and with one another. Any yet The Way remains as narrow as it was in the time of Rabbi Jesus.