that in my challenged health when I don't feel up to writing new stuff that I could offer you parts of what I type out from others.
One of the things I started doing when I learned to use a computer was to type out long passages or even entire books as a means of studying their content more closely. I've typed out a lot of books over the years, many which I kept a copy of in some now antiquated format (floppy discs) or lost some other way. Keeping a typed out copy wasn't the point of it.
While typing out this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's great but too little known book Living Jesus I thought of all the parallels of the problem of needing authority but that reliance comes WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT NO AUTHORITY, EVEN THE BEST OF IT IS ENTIRELY RELIABLE. Of course I thought of all the other areas in life aside from organized Christianity that that is true of AS WELL AS THE OBVIOUS TRUTH OF JOHNSON'S CONFESSION ABOUT THE ENTIRELY FALLIBLE AND TOO OFTEN CORRUPT AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCHES.
Academia, and I don't even consider the one and only one that most academics seem to care about, actual and alleged and often quite dubiously attributed plagiarism. The replicability crisis scandal in science, the amazing record of outright fraud, misfeasance, nonfeasance such as is regularly recorded by that great and too little known reporter of it, Retraction Watch.
The legal profession, which is saturated with lies, corruption, the institutional creation of lawyerly deception, dishonesty, greed, graft, grift in which only the paying clients interest is the measure of professional practice and ethics and the higher and higher consequences of that as lawyers are elevated - often by corruptly motivated politicians, executive and senatorial - into the judiciary and on to that most corrupt branch of the U.S. government, the Supreme Court.
The "non-profit" groups which are, I suppose, something that is supposed to act as a secular replacement for all of the (sometimes all to human and fallible) religious charities. There are so many examples of the various defects of those groups, from the incredibly dubious identification of some of the most grotesquely wealthy and endowed legal entities in the world, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, other private universities, incredibly wealthy museums holding vast and often artistically or intellectully dubious collections of enormous and fungible value. There are interest groups that serve the most corrupt and evil of governments - the ADL these days is a signal example of that - and the interests of millionaires and billionaires - so many obscenely endowed think tanks and public interest group. Evil industry advocacy groups, the gun industry, pollution generators, etc. And so many daffy, hypocritical groups on the alleged progressive to liberal to lefty identity. All given tax exempt status as they serve the most corrupt interests and, through their having been granted the "non-profit" label, treated with an absurd and dishonest reverence by the media.
And don't get me started on the "free press" as the more often than not oligarchic knocking shop that it is.
Here is what Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about the vicissitudes of the necessity of Christian teaching authority within The Church (the entire Church) at the end of Chapter 2 Learning Jesus Through Tradition
The commitment to learn the living Jesus within the context of the church's tradition means coming to grips also with the leaders who from the beginning have been entrusted in a special way with maintaining the tradition. It is this aspect of tradition - namely, its explicitly institutional character - that both the scholarly questions after the historical Jesus and the televagelistic marketers of Jesus most despise. Academics resist authority in the name of intellectual freedom and integrity freelance preachers reject ecclesial authority in the name of charismatic freedom and power.
Those who commit themselves to tradition can scarcely miss the same inadequacies of human leadership that have been so brilliantly and consistently displayed in the history of Christianity. They know that ministers of the gospel are often not as holy as they should be, are seldom as intelligent as we would like them to be, and all too often identify the tradition with their own self-interest. No matter how egalitarian the leadership of a community, or how hierarchical, the same human frailty and pettiness appear.
Yet there can scarcely be tradition without institutional leadership. Christianity is not simply a loose assemblage of those who at any time prefer to associate with each other; it is a people with a history and a mission that must be articulated in specific social arrangements and dynamics. The witness of leaders in the community, furthermore is at the heart of this tradition itself. Those commissioned by the risen Lord as apostles were the first in a long line of shepherds for this flock If every pope and bishop and presbyter and pastor and preacher has been unequal to the task, that inadequacy has not made their role in maintaining the living thread of tradition any less essential.
The teaching authority remains essential today, however difficult it is to reconcile with the egalitarian and anit-establishment urges of our age. No more than the canon or the creed can the leadership of the church arrogate to itself the loyalty that is owed only to the living Lord; no more than the canon or the creed does this leadership adequately express the meaning of the tradition, much less the Lord in whose name the tradition exists. The teaching authority of the community functions best when it is not isolated. The teaching office of the church requires the voice of prophecy to be alive if it is not to grow distended; through prophets the living Jesus can speak in new ways. And the preservers of tradition need also to hear the voices of theologians whose task is not so much to preserve as it is to extend the boundaries of our understanding of the mystery of Christ. The tradition is impoverished if the voice of prophecy is stilled and if th teaching of theologians is, for whatever reason, made an enemy rather than an enricher of the tradition.
Like the canon and the creed, the teaching authority of leaders helps provide a framework for learning Jesus in the community. From generation to generation from the beginning hands have reached out to select, hands have been laid on heads, words of commission have been whispered in the ears of those whose mission is defined by the task of preserving and protecting the tradition within which Jesus can continue to be learned.
I doubt that there has ever been a more honest assessment of the necessity and danger of maintaining authority within human institutions and human life than that. People are always going on about his book The Real Jesus, his take down of the quest for the historical Jesus, but I think this book in which he explores the real consequence for Christians believing in the Living Lord Jesus and the continued experience of the Living Jesus in our lives is far, far more valuable.
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