Pharisees, Sadducees, Sanhedrin, Churches

Some short thoughts about dogma and the artifice of explicit hierarchy.

According to the Gospels, Jesus clashed with various forms of religious orthodoxy of his day — most notably the pious, zealous, middle-class Pharisees; the conservative, literalist, upper-class Sadducees; and the formal governing religious council of the Sanhedrin. In the Gospels, all of these groups had members who attacked Jesus because they thought he violated the righteous spiritual order, and according to the Gospels, together these groups brought about Jesus’ execution.

It’s worth noting that, in the effort to create a shorthand for the people who opposed Jesus, the Christian narrative has tended to reduce what must have been a complex social situation to stereotypes. This dangerous enough to begin with, and it gets even more difficult when one reads the Gospel of John, for instance, and finds that the people who opposed Jesus are often just reduced to “the Jews.” (I’d like to try to avoid falling into the same pits if I can.)

But it’s also worth noticing that the simple references to stodgy, orthodox legalists in the Gospels are almost immediately recognizable. It’s as though we’re hard-wired to understand them. And it makes sense to me that this would be the case. Two of the greatest challenges to spiritual community, I think, are orthodoxy and the fossilization of power roles.

Orthodoxy is pervasive. You will find it in any religion, in any system of coaching or psychotherapy, in any system of human development. Sense-making stories help, but if they’re held too rigidly they keep people from seeing the real contours of truth. Artificial hierarchies are pervasive also. You will find them in almost any organization. You name roles and then people inhabit the roles somewhat presumptuously and pretentiously.

Artificial hierarchies are just a form of orthodoxy, I guess — a story that’s told about relationships that partly serves a sense-making function, and that also keeps people from seeing a more organic reality of the web of relationship.

I think it’s important to note that organized religion — of any form — inherently tussles with this drift. This indicates a great irony: that any form of Christianity is haunted — perhaps lightly, perhaps heavily — by a tendency that is not only apparently contrary to the Way of Jesus, but also aligned with the very forces that fought Jesus. Throughout history, this has taken obvious, egregious forms, written in the list of insightful mystics who were burned, Inquisition-ed, or excommunicated and whose insights still resonate with us today. But it’s worth noticing, too, the subtler forms of drift that can add up over time. Not to pile on with bilious accusation, but to detect the slight whine of oxygen leaving the room — and to address it.

Inquiry becomes ideology. Insight is put into language. Language becomes dogma. Get-together becomes tribe. Affiliation becomes a bubble. Part of the truth gets left outside the increasingly solidifying walls. Sometimes that’s where the teacher is — outside the walls.

Inside the walls, people are put in charge. Projection sets them apart and leads to idolization, turns them into greater authorities than they actually are. A mild tax is levied on the sovereignty, genius, and autonomy of other participants. Even if the organization reveres a wandering mystic, the wandering mystic still encounters friction when they actually show up.

What’s important to notice, I believe, is that orthodoxy and artificial hierarchy are not really choices, and that they can’t be avoided by choice. I think they are inevitable kinds of clutter and creep, like house dust or kudzu in your yard. And I think they should be embraced as such — which is to say, that they should be duly acknowledged and continually addressed.

A common Christian prayer is, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The point of the prayer is not to derogate oneself; it’s to acknowledge our natural tendency to miss the mark. This can turn into a form of self-flagellation, or it can engender a realistic, sincere humility that makes one best suited to the cleanest growth. At the most basic level, individual sincerity is promoted in Christianity through a sufficient emphasis on one’s tendency to make mistakes.

I think Christian religious organizations ought to bring the same level of awareness to the organizational level — and, more on point, that they mostly haven’t yet. Organized religion gets caricatured and straw-manned continually in our era, associated with its most egregious errors in the popular mind with nothing close to the same kind of effort made to articulate the good that it does. And for all its faults, organized religion, of many sorts, does and has done a lot of good.

But I think that religious organizations ought to own their “original sin,” which is to be inherently at least a little bit like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin. Owning it is the best way to transcend it, in order to pursue the deeper interrogation of the truth, which I tried to talk about here.

If you don’t want dust, then don’t build a house. But probably you want a house, so go ahead and build a house.

But then make sure that you dust it.