I recently read an article in the Guardian by Alok Jha which made a very good point regarding “error”. Mistakes, he says, happen “all day, every day”. I don’t think anyone can argue with this, it is “fact”. I’ve made a handful of mistakes already this morning and it is not even lunch time!
The question however, is what do you take away from the mistake – the error. I  have been sitting with this for nearly two weeks now and it has opened a small proverbial Pandora’s Box. Why?
Jha correctly observes that outside science, where routing out error and changing our understanding or interpretation because of finding that error, mistakes are a challenge to authority, to the established order of things. There is no better place to see this fact in action than in Christianity. Indeed – it is due to a set of serious challenges to “the order of things” that brought about the Old/Independent Catholic movement.
This leads to a set of interesting questions about theological error in our OC/IC context. Have we asked the right questions about theological error; how do we “understand” it? What do we do when we encounter real or perceived “error”? How does it effect our practice of theology? These and a dozen other questions have been spawning and dividing in my notes over the past two weeks.
The big one, the proverbial elephant in the room if you will, is: Does a recognition of the value of theological error, necessarily require that we re-think our unconscious acceptance of the infallible nature of “The Church”? This is an idea that has been a keystone of “catholic” identity (east and west) since the second century. Has this teaching, and our interpretations of it, distorted our understanding of what it means to “be church”?
I am thinking that over the next few weeks I’ll offer a few posts to play with the idea and see where it goes. In the meantime I invite you to think about the effect of error, the value of error in our OC/IC ISM context, and toss me a bone or two in the comments.