Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile by Margaret Starbird

Author:Margaret Starbird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Studies
ISBN: 9781591439004
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2011-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

Concretizing the Word of God

This tension continues. Today, as in the past, Christian clergy are notably reluctant to accept ecstatic dreams, visions, and channeled messages received by members of their flock, believing that such transmissions are unreliable at best and at worst misleading and heretical. They prefer to confine the communications of the Divine to the word of God already expressed in the Bible. For them, the prophet does not go to the mountain to hear the word of God, but rather, the prophet went to the mountain, and the revelation received is a sealed book. Do they not muzzle God?

Visionaries over past centuries have received intense scrutiny, and endorsement of their testimony by the Church has been, in most cases, unenthusiastic if not absent. Numerous mystics, prominent among them Hildegard von Bingen and Teresa of Avila, were required to tailor their revelations to fit into the box of ecclesiastic restrictions, often restraining themselves from confiding their visions to their spiritual directors, lest their beliefs be declared false or heretical.

The gnostics of the early Christian centuries found themselves in this same awkward position. The more enlightened they became through spiritual experience, the less acceptable they were to the mainstream priests of the fledgling Christian faith. The Way of inspiration and visionary experience of the Divine was denounced by the orthodox, following the tradition of Irenaeus (d. 202) and Tertullian (d. 220), who wrote polemic treatises castigating gnostic teachings. Eventually the waters of the Spirit that had irrigated the emerging Christian movement were confined to specific, authorized channels, and the doctrines of the Church became concretized as Peter’s Rock—the monolithic institutional Church formed on the hierarchical model of the Roman Empire, whose patriarchs guard the walls and whose cardinals take a solemn oath to prevent scandal and keep secret anything that might cause harm to the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Like hierarchical priesthoods of ancient Israel, “The shepherds have been shepherding themselves instead of the sheep” (Ezekiel 34).

What began as a movement springing from the life, ministry, and teachings of the Jewish rabbi Yeshua, the Nazorean, celebrated in small gatherings around a Eucharistic meal of bread and fish, became a centralized liturgical religion promulgated by a hierarchy of exclusively male—often celibate—priests. At the same time, in the late second century and thereafter, the voice of his beloved, symbolic of his community, was silenced, a condition solidified by the orthodox when the First Epistle of Timothy was accepted as an authentic teaching of Saint Paul: “I do not allow women to teach or to have authority over men.” Based on linguistic studies comparing 1 Timothy with letters confirmed as written by Paul, modern scholars recognize that this letter to Timothy cannot be attributed to Paul. But that determination comes sixteen hundred years too late to restore the voices of women to Western civilization—women who, like the bride herself, had been forced into figurative exile. By the fourth century, the voices of female leaders of the Church, whose early ministry was modeled on

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