THE BEDFORD BLESSING PART 2: THE PRIESTHOOD!

The origins of the Mormon Priesthood

Continuing my series on the arrival of the 1995 "Bedford Blessing" at Dereham Road Baptist Church. This series was written in 1997, but only now has been released for general viewing.

The Priesthood ! - A means, sometimes the means by which one can relate to God or by which blessing may come. Priesthoods are an ancient spiritual architecture, not one cast in stone or brick, but in the systems of relations between leaders and the lead. It is an architecture which exploits a rich complex of emotions and motif, and which has helped stabilise the relations between the shepherds and the sheep down untold ages. Mystique, gnosis, patriarchy, autocratic authority, spiritual inferiority, nervous expectancy, dependency, submission. These are some of the elements of the religious complex at whose heart is the underlying fear of the numinous and of the awe inspiring, holy, glorious and, without Christ, nameless God, from whose awful light the guilty seek safe refuge. In the stumbling, hesitant, and tense relations humanity naturally has with a holy God, any one able to confidently take up the dangerous task of interfacing with the divine is a boon, and attracts like a magnet the religiously insecure. Priesthoods in their various shapes and sizes, can be big business. But it is not all bad. Given the problems man has had relating to God, priesthoods have, in times past, been a legitimate and sometimes an only way to relate to God, and a means of blessing. They are, however, a way fraught with difficulty and the possibility of corruption. Human agency is always fraught with difficulty and the possibility of corruption as the Israelites discovered when Kings were anointed over them. But given the terrible state Israel had got itself into by the end of the Judges period it had little to lose. In fact they may not have even had a choice here: Given their moral and political condition, Israel ‘s desire to become a kingdom was less plan B than it was plan A, the fault being not so much in the plan itself but in the conditions which engendered it; it was the next logical step forward given their condition. They also experienced that peculiarly human dilemma of having to choose solutions to problems that themselves had problems. And so it is with human priesthoods. The general lesson is this: The givens of the human predicament are met with plans and covenants that, with varying degrees of effectiveness, treat the human condition, taking it forward from where it is; but given the sin of man, covenants employing human agency, whether of kings or of priests, are only a pattern and shadow of heavenly things, and therefore must decay and grow old and eventually pass away to be replaced by a covenant of divine agency; a perfect plan meeting the imperfect precondition just where it is: “In those days .. I will put My law in their mind and write them in their hearts.... And they shall no more teach one another, saying know the Lord - for all shall know Me from the least of them to the greatest of them”.

PENDING POSITION STATEMENT

As a result of direct inquiries I intend to produce, at some stage, a position statement regarding my views on Christianity. However, I am currently absorbed with one two other matters that I am following up; hence this promissory note.

THE BEDFORD BLESSING
PART 1: THE COMING OF A PRIESTHOOD

In 1995 during a church family weekend an attempt was made by a visiting group of Baptists from Bedford to introduce Dereham Road Baptist church to the Toronto Blessing. A couple of years later in 1997 I wrote three essays in response to this weekend entitled respectively “High Pulpits”, “High Priests”, and “The Bedford Blessing”. The first essay, which was an analysis of the pulpit-centric architecture of Dereham Baptist Church, was circulated in 2000. However, the other two essays which concerned the actual “Blessing” at Dereham Road remained in my private collection ..... until now. I intend releasing the contents of these two essays in parts. Here is the first part.

History can be ruthless. The 70 year quantum of human life ensures that no one person's experience is measured in centuries, and so experience is constantly being destroyed and remade and old themes return as if they are new discoveries. In the sea of faith new spiritual life forms appear in response to changing spiritual environments and they are likely to have different attitudes to hi-pulpits and what they stand for. I saw one of these newer life forms one day in the early spring of AD 1995 when the Church on Dereham road had invited a Baptist minister from Bedford to speak for the day. This warm mannered bearded Bedford Baptist spoke intimately, if not profoundly on his theme, the "Father heart of God". He did not use the pulpit at any time during the day, but instead used the lectern at the side and below it, a position not unlike that of mediaeval times. At one point he indicated he would not be so presumptuous as to use the pulpit "up there", and his voice may have held a hint of contempt. Perhaps he knew that he needed nothing to stand on, because he stood for something else, for as the day developed a feeling grew on me, as it has done on other occasions, that I was seeing before my very eyes the formation and modern rediscovery of a spiritual ministry that recurs down the ages. Gone was the didactic logic and reason of the pulpit to be replaced by patriarchal expressions of feeling and warmth; one did not grapple with this stuff with the mind so much as with the emotions. In comparison to this “voice of the heart”, the sound of pulpit polemic would, to some, seem distant, and without the the ability to touch the inner most being. But the owner of that voice wasn't here primarily to talk, and a ministry of words was not what he was here to give; the purpose of his visit was to confer a blessing; a blessing that had its origins in a church in Toronto, Canada. The Baptist minister had recently visited this far flung church, and this visit no doubt made him better qualified to supervise the conferring of this blessing. Thus, in due time the assistants of the Baptist Minister moved amongst the congregation, praying over them for this strange blessing to come. It was as if they were custodians of some hidden spiritual power, holders of a mysterious gnosis that could not be imparted by expository logic, but only through their hands and upon those of sufficiently submissive and expectant attitude. I had seen it before; they were those kinds of believers who, apparently initiated into the inexpressible secrets of the Holy Spirit, are often sought out by those anxious for some deep experience of God, and those who fear divine disapproval if blessing is not claimed or taken. The ostensive qualities of the Bedford Baptist’s demeanour, their apparent agency to some mysterious blessing, the submissive, expectant, and dependent attitude required of those who were to receive the blessing were all things that were highly reminiscent. The members of religious cultures from the neolithic period to Salt Lake City would probably have been able to identify which class in their own communities this Bedford group most resembled and would have had little trouble finding a title for them: The Priesthood.