Who Decides What Is The Pure Milk?

1 Peter 2:2-3

“Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

            We know Peter was married, it is possible he was a father, although I do not know the historic traditions about that.  But he had some experience with babies at least.  His metaphor carries much truth about it.

            A pure, unadulterated milk of truth about our faith, one that we can invest ourselves in without the controversies of the day.  Would that not be marvelous?  I remember a discussion with a Seminary professor way back when.  There was a consideration of the center of the biblical message and the periphery of the biblical message.

            The stuff at the center was this pure spiritual milky stuff, straight from the mother’s…  Well, not sure Peter is willing to carry the metaphor quite that explicitly far.  Anyway, the stuff at the center was all the stuff about Jesus and salvation and so on.  The periphery stuff was still biblical, but might be open to debate. 

            What struck me was who got to decide what the pure, spiritual stuff was and who got to decide what was on the periphery, presumably Pablum for the newborn.  The structure of the church, for example, was one of these peripheral issues.  Yes, being Presbyterian, we believed in the order of the committee.

            Were not the disciples the committee of twelve? 

            But some of those other churches that did the bishop thing, concentrating power into the hands of one person coming down from some unbroken apostolic succession from, well, Peter himself.  That was peripheral, not central to the absolute truth of the church, even though the Reformation minds behind the Presbyterian Church knew they were better than Catholics.

            But touch on the issue of gender inclusion, can women lead in the church?  Maybe one got a gusty laugh and an assertion that the women were certainly skilled in the leading of bake sales, but what else?  That became a central issue, because it was a power struggle for the right to interpret Scripture. 

            At the time of the Reformation, the hierarchy of bishops was as surely a central issue to the ‘freedom’ loving Protestant breakaways as the issue of women in authority was at this particular Seminary.

            And that lesson has never left me.  Who is going to decide what is the pure, spiritual milk that we, the newborn infants in the faith, should be seeking?  Kind of depends on whose in charge.