Personal, theological opinion

So the little box at the side says this blog contains my "personal theological opinion" rather than an official position of the AJC. As a priest in the church, I have complete freedom of thought and opinion, just as any other member of the church does. At the same time, I'm never speaking on behalf of the church (only bishops get to do that).

You shouldn't infer from that that the AJC has some very complex theological position that is hard for its clergy to represent accurately, in fact it's the opposite: the AJC has a very simple theological position that it's hard for its clergy to represent accurately. The people who founded our church worked hard to keep the positions of the church very minimal – the essentials are what is in the Statement of Principles. The brevity of those positions make it very tempting to expand, define, clarify... but I think that's exactly what we shouldn't do.

Like other gnostic churches, we assert that the point of all this is the direct, unmediated, experiential knowledge of the Divine – that's what makes us free, that's what Christ taught, that's the always already present goal of what we do. Theology acts as a set of guidelines (bollards on the path, if you will) and that's all. Because we've all come from religious and cultural background that are propositionally-obsessed we tend to get all wrapped up in the idea of clear statements that we can understand and adopt intellectually. We confuse the bollards for the path, the episteme for the gnosis.

So because I get asked a lot of questions, because I read too much and because I think it's relevant to people in my parish to have some idea of what my opinions are, I'm going to lay some of it out on this blog. But these aren't AJC positions, you don't have to agree with me to join the church or come along to Saint Uriel's and none of this is necessary to the spiritual journey. Some of it may help, but your mileage may vary.