The blogosphere has been on fire with multiple comments about the tornado that has devastated Moore, Oklahoma. The most notable exchange has been the one initiated by Rachel Held Evans, in response to a tweet by John Piper from the Book of Job attributing the tornado to the sovereignty of God. As the case has been more than adequately covered by the brilliant journalistic talents of Sarah Pulliam Bailey, we’ll save our comments on it for a later post. (I have one in the works.)
In contrast to all of this furor, we here at A Christian Thing have remained silent. Yes, all of us were very busy with our actual jobs this week. But we also did not pounce on this event as a moment for conversation on our Thing.
This is because this is not a time for conversation. It is a time for silent action.
I write this because some have recently asked me what a proper Christian response would be. If indeed both John Piper’s and Rachel Held Evans’s responses are a bit off kilter, then what is a proper Christian response?
I can tell you what it’s not: it’s not to do the me-and-God thing.
It’s not to leverage Oklahoma for our own personal reflections on the awesome sovereignty of God. It’s also not to blast those who do that.
This is because at heart, being Christian is about being involved in a set of social relations. That’s why the best theological responses to the Oklahoma tornado have been those who report their active solidarity with those in Oklahoma both in prayer and in material action. If you can believe it, for example, I saw status updates from both the Episcopal Churchand the Anglican Church in North America about what parishes were doing in Moore. Pope Francis has given his condolences to the Archdiocese as well and pledged his solidarity while asking the Lord to receive the faithful departed, especially the children among the victims; here’s also a roundup from Oklahoma’s Archbishop Coakley. The United Methodist Church has a place where you can donate. The nondenominational Life Church in Oklahoma is also taking donations and leading relief efforts and were commended by the World Evangelical Alliance’s Geoff Tunnicliffe for their initiative.
Those are Christian responses. As for me, I’m looking forward to finding out soon how we in the Pacific Northwest can help, whether, say, my home parish is taking a donation. Yes, I am praying because, as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, prayer is never a solitary task but always undertaken in the communion of saints, even when we pray alone. I’d like also to help materially, and any suggestions in the comments below would be most sincerely welcome. I mean, I’ve found a few things that I mentioned above, but maybe I’ve missed quite a bit. By saying all of this, I mean to really say that we don’t have to write a Christian response. We must instead simply be Christian.
We just celebrated Pentecost Sunday by pulling out all the Pentecostal musical stops at our Anglican church: I was on piano and I hit a few charismatic chord progressions, i.e. the ones designed to manipulate congregants to raise their hands (old habits die hard, and I don’t feel bad about good music, unfortunately). Because I learned those chords from Pentecostals, I want to give thanks to the Pentecostals who shaped me into the Chinglican I am today. Several years ago in Chicago, the radical Catholic priest Fr. Michael Pfleger told his congregation, St. Sabina, ‘It’s time to become Pentecostal.’ My reply is that I already am one.
Pfleger wants to be Pentecostal
Snicker as you might (does this Chinglican guy really have one foot in like every Christian tradition?), real bona fide Pentecostals have a special place in my Chinglican heart. I went to an Assemblies of God (AOG) school from preschool to the eighth grade, finishing what we in the States called ‘junior high’ before I went to a Catholic high school. My kindergarten teacher was, for example, an Episcopal Church parishioner until the charismatic movement washed through her parish, at which point she moved next door to the AOG church. This meant that at school, we were very used to hearing about God speaking to people randomly (usually our teachers), people (usually our teachers’ kids) randomly crying because they had suddenly been touched by the Spirit, and the need to surrender one’s life totally to the control of the Holy Spirit (as our Bible textbook said). There was a lot of stuff about prophecy too, both in the imminent season (‘God told me that you should…’) and the end times (‘in Revelation, it says…’). To be sure, not all of my teachers at the AOG school were Pentecostal, which made the experience more ecumenical than at first blush. I had one teacher in the fifth grade from a conservative Baptist background who took issue with our Bible textbook’s declaration that we should be ‘controlled by the Holy Spirit’ (she preferred ‘indwelling’), and come to think of it, our junior high principal was a Presbyterian pastor and choir director, a junior high Bible teacher was a Southern Baptist who later did a PhD in philosophical theology from a Southern Baptist seminary, and one of my favourite English teachers was a Mennonite from the Canadian prairies.
John Wimber making a point.
My Pentecostal exposure was not only limited to school. Come to think of it, the Holy Spirit was also causing trouble in my Chinese church as well. The senior pastor at the time, a Taiwanese guy who has recently become the senior pastor of one of Taipei’s largest megachurches, took two courses from John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner at Fuller Theological Seminary. Coming back in the power of the Spirit, this guy brought back to our church Vineyard songs, spiritual gifts checklists, and the uncanny ability to ‘slay people in the Spirit,’ i.e. put his hand on people, and they fall down. I might be making this up, but I think there was a little Toronto Blessing thing that happened too where people had this ‘holy laughter’ thing where they just laughed uncontrollably in the Spirit (it’s called the ‘Toronto Blessing’ because, apparently, the bizarre practices came out of this Vineyard offshoot called the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship). Nobody told me if anyone barked like dogs (which is apparently what they did in Toronto); maybe they didn’t want to traumatize me. I should note that this pastor baptized me when I was nine; thankfully, he didn’t slay me in the Spirit, or else there was no way I’d come out of that baptismal pool. Shortly after he did that, two things happened. The first was they changed the baptismal age to twelve to prevent kids like me from wanting to get baptized because our friends were getting baptized (true story). The second was that when that pastor left shortly thereafter, pastoral search committees from then on always asked whether incoming candidates were into the ‘third wave charismatic movement’ because they didn’t feel like getting slain again.
That would be *the* Aimee, our Pentecostal mother…
Pentecostals have also influenced my family’s theological education. My father attended a Pentecostal Bible college in Oakland founded by Violet Kiteley, a British Columbian disciple of the (in)famous Aimee Semple McPherson, the icon of second-wave Pentecostalism (if you want to get technical, the ‘first wave’ would be the Azusa Street revivals; the ‘third wave’ are the Vineyard charismatics, extending into the Toronto Blessing). Kiteley moved down from British Columbia to Oakland as a single parent, starting a home church in an African American woman’s house in the midst of the Black Panther skirmishes, seeking racial and gender reconciliation in Oakland. Mirroring Kiteley’s move, my father moved from British Columbia to the East Bay after receiving a call to ministry. He learned about Shiloh Bible College while listening to Christian radio; memorizing the phone number, he called them when he got home, got admitted into a master’s program, and read through his Bible the first time with these Oakland Pentecostals. He credits them with teaching him basic dispensationalist theology, i.e. the fairly modern framework in which the ages of the world are divided into dispensations (supposedly by St. Augustine) that categorically divide up the stuff God does in each specific age while foreshadowing the future dispensations with his current actions. Of course, when he went to Berkeley to do his Master of Divinity, they told him that he had to leave all that stuff behind to do ‘real’ hermeneutics. But that’s a story for a different day…
The Jesus People have a special place in my heart.
I’d venture to say that my dad never actually let go of the Pentecostal thing, especially the dispensationalism they taught him. My dad was in fact so excited when I was exploring a call to pastoral ministry that he encouraged me as a high school senior to enroll at Calvary Chapel Bible College, the non-accredited educational shoot-off of the Jesus Movement centre, Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa and its founding pastor, Chuck Smith. What I remember doing most in the distance education courses was reading my Bible in the King James Version because they were KJV-only as it was translated from the Textus Receptus, not what they considered the Trinity-denying Greek text of the Westcott-Hort. What I learned on the side, however, that Calvary Chapel was actually the origin point of the Vineyard Movement–for the record, Wimber was originally a Calvary Chapel pastor, and when he left, he also took Lonnie Frisbee, a key lay preacher in the Jesus Movement, as his go-to Holy Spirit guy. As I was steeped in these circles, I realized that the Calvary Chapel concerts were one of the birth places of contemporary Christian music, launching the careers of LoveSong (i.e. Chuck Girard), Ernie and Debby Retino (i.e. Psalty the Singing Songbook and Charity Churchmouse), Paul and Rita Baloche, and Kelly Willard through this entity that became known as Maranatha Music. I also discovered, like my dad, that these Pentecostals really liked their dispensationalist theology, almost as much as Dallas Theological Seminary–I mean, I hate to break it to you, but we used a disproportionate amount of Howard Hendricks, John Walvoord, Roy Zuck, and Charles Ryrie in our stuff. Oh, and Henry Thiessen’s Lecutres in SystematicTheology, which should be renamed as dispensationalism Wheaton-style, was the systematics textbook.
Of course, unlike Dallas, Calvary Chapel was charismatic–in fact, Chuck Smith was from the true-blue second-wave Pentecostal Full Gospel Church–which meant that we also talked a lot about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In fact, in Calvary Chapel Distinctives, Smith lays out his whole Pentecostal framework using three Greek words associated with the work of the Spirit. I can’t remember what the first two were–probably because they weren’t really important to Smith–but they were associated with the preparation and indwelling of the Spirit. But after you become regenerated and saved as a Christian, you have to undergo the Pentecostal ‘second blessing,’ associated with the Greek word epi, as in the Spirit comes upon you and fills you with spiritual gifts, which includes tongues, but can include all the other stuff too. (You see where C. Peter Wagner got some of his stuff.)
All of this is to say, I’m no book Pentecostal, although that relatively new edited volume called Studying Global Pentecostalism makes for fun methodological reading. But this is all very much part of my lived Christian experience, so much that I found myself nodding very much in approval much later on when I read Donald Miller’s Reinventing American Protestantism and Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back because both credited Calvary Chapel and its later derivative, the Vineyard Movement, for being the progenitors of what they termed ‘new paradigm evangelicalism.’ I was like: Damn straight. (Oh sorry, I shouldn’t say ‘damn’; it might grieve the Holy Spirit.)
You might say, then, that I have a pretty well-rounded Pentecostal education, thank you very much. In fact, I credit them for much of my journey, including my neo-Reformed stint (someone needs to give the neo-Reformed tribe some credit for being moderately charismatic and very influenced by Jesus Movement tradition) and my accidental entry into the Anglican Church (which is a long story in and of itself). More on those things in another post.
What I will say now, however, is that the Pentecostals prepared me to read Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism. When I read de Lubac, I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks. In Catholicism, de Lubac argues that dogma always has social implications because human personhood is social, originating in what he calls ‘original unity.’ This unity was in turn sundered by sin; in other words, de Lubac suggests that the greatest of all sins is the sin of schism because that’s basically to what sin boils down. Our redemption in turn happens as we participate again in the work of the Spirit, the Spirit who is ‘catholic’ because he restores our original communion.
It was then that everything the Pentecostals had taught me began to come together. See, the Pentecostals who taught me didn’t have it all wrong. They were right to emphasize the work of the Spirit. They understood that the redemptive power of the Spirit shook present scientific realities. They comprehended at some level that what it means to be a Christian is to participate in the work of the Spirit (which is why a participation soteriology has always made more sense to me than a strictly substitutionary one). But what de Lubac made me understand was that the work of the Spirit is not individualistic; it is to join us back into original communion. This is where right when Pentecostal theology has it right, it can get terribly wrong, emphasizing individual power, an instrumentalization of the Spirit, the parsing of Greek terms out of context to justify that power, the importation of pagan categories to fight power with power. But done rightly, I am starting to see that some of the most interesting stuff in evangelical theology these days is done by Pentecostals like Amos Yong, Veli-Matti Karkainnen, Rikk Watts, and Cherith Fee Nordling (Pentecostal scholar Gordon Fee’s daughter) who understand that our participation in the Spirit makes us catholic, not individually powerful.
Violet Kiteley once told my dad, ‘Don’t forget that we taught you about the Holy Spirit.’ I won’t forget either. I may have my serious reservations about dispensationalist eschatology, apocalyptic Zionist geopolitics, spiritual gifts checklists, weird charismatic hierarchies, crazy ecstasies where you can get slain in the Spirit, holy laughter, and literalistic fundamentalist hermeneutics. But these guys opened the door to the Spirit for me. I am grateful, and as always, my hope and prayer is that as the Spirit guides us into all the truth, we will all shed the chaff and come into the full catholicity of the mystical tradition that has always been a part of a Christian encounter with the Triune God.
Fr. Pfleger tells us that it’s time to be Pentecostal. He might as well be saying that it’s time to be catholic.
Research suggests that religious faith protects against suicide. Why do you think that is in light of how your community responds to suicide? How can we tread the fine line of discouraging suicide while not making the grief of family members worse?
The devil took me up on a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the world. And he gave me a research statistic. With this, he said, you will conquer the kingdoms of the world for you faith. Under this sign you will conquer.
As the prior creative bit might suggest, I think a statistic like this must first of all for Christians and others of faith included in the research be a great source of temptation. It is tempting to use it in a triumphalistic way. After all, in a culture of death (as the late John Paul II described it) it is no surprise that suicide is prevalent, and it is no surprise that faith is a deterrent in such a culture. If we would turn back to God, have a revival, become a Christian nation again, we would answer the problem of suicide. As usual, God has the answer all along, and we are just ignorant of it. Of course science supports us.
Before interrogating this attitude, I would like to say a bit about the research itself. From my own experience, it rings true. It is always difficult to play the “what if” game, but, as someone who is often depressed, and for whom suicide seems at times the least unattractive option, I do think it is possible I am alive because of the habits of hope that are part of Christianity. I say habits because I am not good a feeling hope, but there is something in the Christian insistence that one must get up again after falling, and being steeped enough in the church has instilled that in me, to my benefit. But then, I also wonder what kind of study produced this information. What if it is statistically true but only because those who do end up killing themselves are alienated in church and leave long before they actually do it. What if it is just because the church does not have a place for those so troubled they are on the verge of suicide?
But to return to the prior point, suicide is complicated, and a church that merely rests on its scientific ability to discourage suicide (and implicitly or explicitly blames secular culture alone) will be marvellously ill equipped to deal with depressed people, particularly as such churches are modelled on a culture that presumes there are “normal” people and then those ill people who want to kill themselves. For a moment I want to turn this on its head. We presume that the reasonable thing is to not want to commit suicide, and that people in their natural state are and should be happy, wanting to live life. But I actually wonder if this is the case.
I wonder because for very sane people throughout history, suicide, far from being a categorical sign of madness, has in fact been a deep philosophical puzzle – we need only think of Donne’s Biothanatos or Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus to see that suicide is not only taken seriously by “crazy” people – it is perhaps also taken seriously by people who can actually see the groaning world around them. And I would suggest that at least some of the attitude that distinguishes the modern division between “normal people” and “suicides” is the result of a great modern whitewashing of the world via a media that acts as an opiate of the masses. We do not consider suicide reasonable because we have swept under the carpet all the ugly bits that might in fact drive us to it. Modern society is a culture of death. But it is a culture of the kind of death that wants eternal life, and suicide is a chink in its armour. We do not appreciate the suggestion that the world might be so bad we might not want to live in it, and we appreciate it less for the nagging bit of our soul left that reminds us there might be parts of this critique that are true. (For further clarification here, please see Addendum)
As long as Christians do not see the compelling nature of suicide and simply think of it as a madness that their own sane faith can cure, they will not be helpful. And I hope to demonstrate this via Romans 7 and 8. Read Romans 7. But omit verse 25. I suggest that the picture painted here, minus the turn to God, leaves little option but suicide. Yes, this chapter is talking about a particular kind of despair pertaining to our inability to perform the law. But I think there are lots of ways one can take this. Biblically speaking, all such frustration is the result of original sin; for instance, though the degree of my culpability is something only God can know, I feel exactly like Paul here when I look after my son, knowing how many stimulating, encouraging, and beneficial things I could do with him, but sitting there paralyzed by fear and sadness while he watches TV. The good I want to do I cannot do, or so it feels.
But now I want to pars Romans 8. On a surface read, one might feel this is saying exactly the kind of thing I caricatured before. Everything is despair, but when we turn to Christ it will all be hunky dory. But I am not quite sure this is what Paul means, and I think the distinction hangs on what is meant by Christians having “the first fruits of the Spirit” (23) and the rest of creation groaning in expectation. The problem from a very practical perspective is of course this – there are very much some kinds of help that one can get for such despair outside the church, and I do believe that in the best instances these constitute real help. At the same time, there are those in the church who are very much being not helped – where is the glorious freedom we seem to be talking about?
What I want to say is that, though what is primarily talked about here are the “first fruits” of Christ, that is, his personal adoption of us, there is in this passage an implicit sense of second and third and fourth fruits. Though Paul describes what is probably the highest form of Christian interaction with Christ, we can imagine the Spirit (who hovered over the water) at work in so very many aspects of the creation we don’t understand or can’t trace, even as he is at work in so many prayers beyond the groans of our understanding. My point is that, if every good and perfect gift is from above, the business of us who have what Paul calls the first-fruits is not simply an act of entrenchment against everything else happening in the world, but rather an act of looking for places where the Spirit is working in the world – the flesh here does not in fact mean created material but rather the improper use and orientation of it. It is a Christian’s business to look for and applaud places in society and the world where God’s Spirit is working in and with material, even as it is the Christian’s business to ensure that those within the church can benefit from such material work (e. g. medicine, psychology, etc.). The church is the place where God’s first fruits have been endowed, and is thus the instrument capable of naming most fully such blessings. But the blessings themselves, like rain, fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike, the hardened atheist clinician and the habited nun, and the church’s business is not so much to have a corner on this grace as to recognize and name it when they see it.
Hence, Romans 8 answers the suicidal impulse, not by suggesting the Christians have a corner on the kind of grace, hope, and discovery that helps fight it, but rather by highlighting the first origin of all these secondary graces in Christ, as well as the Christian ability to name them and recognize them in their fullness. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the rocks cry out, and it is I think not untrue to say that the infinitely more odd things of God’s creation – psychologists, medications, treatment etc. – also glorify God in their way too.
This being said, the effect is not immediate. Paul still speaks of suffering (v. 18). The full redemption of creation is a long time coming. And so sometimes we need to wait with each other. There is no good excuse for sitting amidst suffering that can be avoided or helped in a healthy way, and many churches are culpable in this area. But when created matter has not caught up with our spirits, when (as with the experience of only partially treatable OCD), the tic in our brains has not yet caught up to the deeper spiritual knowledge of a graced world, we must wait with each other, weeping and laughing by turns. For this, I think, is what it means to be the church amidst a world still realizing the freedom Christ has bought and its extent into the deepest reaches of some of the very darkest corners of creation.
Addendum: I want to here clarify that I do not here mean to imply that depression is always due to societal problem that are ignored or not redressed. Indeed, depression in its most biochemically potent form will cause depression even in what is ostensibly the most perfect of external situations and environments. Of course, it is often the very fact of such an experience that many in the church implicitly or explicitly deny, for things that do not fit formulae trouble us, and when not confronted by them directly, we find it more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist.
Addressing an Anglican conference at Holy Trinity Brompton yesterday, Friedrich Cardinal Schörborn declared that the election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio to the papacy as Pope Francis was due to certain strong, supernatural ‘signs’ before and during the conclave events. He then compared the appointment of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to the election of the pope, calling it a ‘little miracle’ and ‘a sign from the Lord’ for the churches to move to closer unity.
By now, readers of this blog will know that such a declaration is the sort of thing that makes me ecstatic, both in the emotional and charismatic sense. After all, I am an Anglican, but I self-identify as catholic, and I am often conflicted over calling myself ‘Anglo-Catholic’ because I am not an Englishman and harbour no desire to return to that odd, dominating construct we once called the British Empire. That is why, after all, I’ve styled myself a ‘Chinglican.’ For some, these ambivalences may read as falling precisely into what Pope Francis–then Cardinal Bergoglio–condemned prior to the conclave: the ‘self-referential’ Church as a sick, old, and dying Church because it fails to participate in the missio Dei.
Indeed, even when I was an evangelical–that is, when I thought like an evangelical, I spoke like an evangelical, I reasoned like an evangelical–I was accused of being un-missional because it was alleged that I was more interested in church politics, contemplative spirituality, and complex theological terminology than in making the faith accessible through attractive programming and simple language. One time, for example, I was in the home of an evangelical mentor when I pitched the idea of having a class on eschatology, as many people to whom I had spoken (both those in the church and not) expressed a curiosity about the Last Things. He raised his finger and pointed at me: ‘You,’ he said. ‘How dare you. People are lost, and all you want to do is to make things more complicated. Our job is to make things easier for people to understand so that more people can teach this stuff. Who do you think you are?’
He was, in short, calling me ‘self-referential,’ a traitor to the cause of the mission to expand the kingdom of Christ through evangelism and discipleship.
It has been years since this experience, but I finally have a reply. To make my response, I’d like to appropriate critical theorist Judith Butler’s reply to those who call her anti-Semitic for criticizing Israeli state policy: ‘No, it is not anti-Semitic,’ she says, because of the internal contestations within Judaic tradition about the state and because she is hanging on to a narrative of dispossession and precarity within Judaica. In the same way, my appeals to the Christian tradition, particularly a revisionist Anglican one with a deep desire for fuller catholicity, can be framed similarly.
No, I say. It is not self-referential. This is because of the inconvenient fact of Catholic social teaching.
After all, May 15 is the day that we celebrate the promulgation of decisive encyclicals in Catholic social teaching: Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, Pius XI’s Quadrogesimo Anno, and John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra. Now, Catholic social teaching can often be confused with Catholic sexual teaching. After all, most of what people know about Catholic social teaching is drawn from Monty Python’s ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’ in The Meaning of Life, a hysterically hilarious lampooning of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s encyclical condemning artificial birth control as contrary to the natural gift of children through the unitive and procreative sex act. It’s so funny, in fact, that you should see it yourself:
To be sure, this misconception is not altogether unjustified. It has in fact been highlighted in recent forays into public politics by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in their opposition to the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate to require religious organizations that do not only serve members of their own faith to insure their employees for artificial contraception, including medications deemed by the bishops to be abortifacient (like Plan B). In addition, it’s fairly well-known that the current Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, was the ‘godfather of Proposition 8‘ when he was bishop of Oakland, raising money to promote a grassroots initiative to write into the state constitution that California only recognizes marriage between one man and one woman. Most recently, Archbishop Allen Vigneron has also told Detroit Catholics who disagree with these socially and sexually conservative stances to refrain from taking communion, implying that opposition to contraception and alternative kinship structures is the definitive Catholic view on sexual and social relations.
Whatever your stance on sexuality issues and traditional family values, these bishops’ interpretation of Catholic social teaching isn’t necessarily wrong or even misguided (it is, however, a particular strand of Catholic sexual teaching emphasizing natural law that is debated among Catholics). Instead, what you can say about it is that it elevates a part of Catholic social teaching that’s actually fairly latent in the encyclicals I just named. It’s actually a bit of a derivative dogma, something that can be drawn out of the concerns of Catholic social teaching as articulated in Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum.
See, Catholic social teaching is best articulated as a Catholic response to current political economic conditions, namely, the threat of unfettered market fundamentalism, what sociologist Max Weber would call the ‘iron cage’ of industrial capitalism with its disenchanting bureaucratic logic permeating everything it touches in the world, what Leo XIII called the ‘new things,’ rerum novarum.While commending socialists for attempting to better labour conditions, Rerum novarum rejects a socialist ideology that places property ownership in the hands of the state and out of the hands of workers themselves. Proposing a Catholic alternative to socialism, Leo XIII emphasized human dignity, arguing that it is the state’s duty to protect the dignity of workers, even as workers themselves had the right to own property, pursue human development in the arts, and make personal time for family. That‘s where the family doctrine comes in: Leo XIII affirmed the family as a basic unit of social relations to which all workers had a right as a matter of basic human dignity. In other words, workers have a right not to be subjectified by the state or the market into cogs in their industrial machine; their human dignity with the basic need for creativity and sociality must be fully recognized.
That‘s Catholic social teaching in a nutshell, a key theme that carries through the encyclicals that the Church is in solidarity with workers as they contest state and market modes of subjectification for their right to basic human dignity.
Anglican though he is, Justin Welby has taken Catholic social teaching as a sort of guiding light in introducing a new social priority to the Church of England: going after the corrupt banks that got us into the global economic mess that we’re in. What is needed, Welby argues, is a whole different way of imagining and managing the financial system, where the banks are not self-serving, but instead see their institutions as serving people. This is very close to what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate, where the Pope Emeritus notes that both justice and the common good both emanate from a will to love and that what is probably needed is a global financial regulator to keep markets from becoming unfettered.
This is why the healing of schism is so important. The Church’s role is not simply to speak words of love; it is to demonstrate it in action. Longing for the recovery of Christian tradition for the sake of healing schism is not self-referential because there is a distinct social priority at the heart of catholicity: bearing witness to the reality that there is another way of being in the world. Who knows what this will mean for Canterbury and Rome? If Bergoglio’s words to Anglican Southern Cone primate Greg Venables is any indication–he told Venables that there was no need for an Anglican Ordinariate because Anglican charisms were already a gift to the church catholic–might it be possible that the next few years might hold within it a full return to communion between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church? Might this in turn signal a new springtime for Catholic social teaching in which the Church will be seen as decisively on the side of the poor and fully oppositional to any sort of self-serving institution that neglects the common good?
Home reunion in turn might clarify some of the things that came to light in the tenure of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. I’ve often noted that both did a fantastic job at one key thing: managing to polarize their entire communions on the left and the right, even as an impulse to catholic reunion has sort of been latent among the faithful, slowly rising to the surface. The appointment of Justin Welby and the election of Pope Francis doesn’t signify a break with Williams and Ratzinger. It’s a sign, as Schönborn put it so eloquently, that the Church is coming into all the truth, that the Spirit is moving among the people of God to rebuild the witness we shattered through our schismatic actions. Indeed, as we saw in Welby’s ‘Journey in Prayer’ pilgrimage through rural and urban dioceses in the Church of England, as well as Pope Francis’s coming out onto the loggia and then into the midst of the people to the chagrin of his security detail, we saw two prophetic priests emerging in the power of the Spirit declaring to the people of God that the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel, the Gospel not as an ideology, but as a whole new way of being that places love and forgiveness at the basis of human dignity, justice, and the common good. In short, in the faces of Justin Cantuar and Pope Francis, we are seeing Jesus and following him.
And yet, here is where those obsessed with developing distinctive theological identities will cry foul. Home reunion, it might be alleged, will soften distinctive points in Catholic and Anglican theology, riding roughshod over disagreements over papal primacy, the role of women, the place of LGBTIQ populations, the veneration of saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the scientific inerrancy of Scripture, and the alone in justification by faith. In fact, as Rachel Held Evans pointed out in a post yesterday, it seems that it is evangelicals who are becoming more and more obsessed with constructing a distinctive identity, one that is becoming narrower with each blog post. In the spirit of attempting to remain distinctively evangelical, for example, the latest denial of Christian catholicity comes from Tim Challies, who rejects ‘mysticism’ as a subjective experience that challenges the inerrant authority of Scripture. Evans takes Challies to task by showing him how much she has grown from reading widely in the Christian mystical tradition. She even goes as far to say that Scripture cannot be a mediator between humans and the divine because we have no need for a mediator.
Here is where I can offer Rachel a bit of a corrective, as well as a parable for those who might oppose any sort of catholic reunion for ideological purposes. Our faith is mediated, but not by the Scriptural text, yes. It is through the sanctorum communio, what Bonhoeffer noted in his doctoral dissertation was the social manifestation of Christ in the present. To that end, we might note that Justin Welby offers evangelicals a different way forward, one that calls evangelicals out of being ‘self-referential.’ Welby has quite the evangelical life story. After all, he came to faith through the Alpha Course through the evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton, a church that has also given evangelicals some of their cherished anthems like ‘Here I Am to Worship,’ ‘Everything,’ ‘Beautiful One,’ and ‘Consuming Fire.’ But unlike much of the anxiety among evangelicals over a distinctive evangelical identity, Justin Welby has no trouble taking on Catholic social teaching as a moral compass. Neither is he averse to conversation with Rome–one that will prove to be interesting in the Franciscan pontificate–nor is he unaware of the vast diversity of theologies, liturgies, and politics in the Anglican Communion. Justin Welby might thus serve as an example to evangelicals on how to be an evangelical. His story is also a parable to those who entrench themselves in ideologies that are inimical to catholicity. You see, evangelical identity is not achieved by being self-referential. It is by participating in the mission of God through the church that is becoming more catholic as the Spirit leads us into all truth. In the words of the Lord Jesus, it is to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow our crucified and risen Lord.
Co-crucifixion and the new sociality effected by the Resurrection are hardly self-referential.
How has your religious community historically seen mental illness? – And how does your faith, today, shape the way you see mental illness?
My background is the Evangelical tradition, so however far from it I may be at the moment (being an Anglo-Catholic), it is probably the tradition I am best able to speak out of and address. As someone who grew up suffering from some Frankensteinian hybrid of OCD and depression, and as someone who had family members who were also suffering from depression, OCD etc., I can say that, in my experience, there really was no place for people with mental illness. To be sure, if we had perhaps been more candid about it we may have found some comfort – I don’t know. But in some ways this highlights exactly the problem that has been typical in Evangelical churches. It is only in extreme situations that they actually go out of their way to say something against mental illness or against talking about it; no, the most damaging thing, at least when I was growing up, was what was not said. What was not said is that not all problems can be fixed by a spiritual high, or a neat testimony. What was not said is that some problems are as physical – biochemical – as they are spiritual. What was really not said was that it was okay to be in pain. It was of course okay provided you could reflect positively on it in retrospect – things were bad until God the deus ex machina leapt in and made everything better. But chronic suffering was not okay.
Now, it would seem, things are changing. Talking about mental illness among formerly repressed Evangelicals is now all the rage. Like our secular society beside us, we presume the way to do this is to do lots of talking – have lots of awareness etc. And neither talking nor awareness are bad things per se. But they become bad when they become a way of making us feel good about ourselves rather than actually doing something. As we know from the book of James, talk can be very hollow indeed. I suppose the question for me is whether all this talk will translate into substance. That Christianity has the resources to do this I have no doubt; whether Evangelicals wishing for further discussion and awareness are willing to pay the price of becoming Christ’s instruments of grace for those with mental illness is a question that will only be answered by their actions; by their fruit we will know them.
This may sound harsh, but I say this because, if Evangelicals have become willing to talk about mental illness rather than stay silent, they have I think been less willing to give up their wedding to simplistic fixes for things. It seems, for instance, that in many instances, the former quick spiritual fix for something like depression – you just need to have more faith etc. – has merely been replaced by a quick medical fix – you just need to see a doctor. This is of course not unique to Evangelical Christians – the majority of secular “awareness” types are also addicted to a fairy tale ending for mental illness, and we can see this “redemption story” in Obama’s speech for Mental Health Month, quoted in the original call for the Patheos forum. In the past, so the story goes – those nefarious dark ages – we never used to talk about these things. But if people will just come out and talk about them they will be cured by doctors and everything will end happily ever after. In many ways we – both secular and Christian – seem to think it is necessary to offer a unified insistence that things will turn out all right in a this worldly sense. But what about when they don’t, when medication doesn’t work, when there is an incompatibility between patient and counselor, when side effects become nearly as problematic as the illness itself? And what about those instances in which there is only a partial fix? Or those instances where other complicating factors such as homelessness and substance abuse combine and send someone into the cyclical pattern of being in and out of the hospital again and again, always caught between a world that cannot fully “fix” them and another world that doesn’t bother to love them? What then? It is perhaps a lovely middle class dream to be able to send our mentally ill of to the doctors who will “fix” them and send them back good as new, like repaired cars. But it does not always work this way. And I do not think it fair to tell half-truths about the help on offer just so more people will seek it; indeed, setting people up for a happy ending that may not be as simple as proposed is a good way to make patients already suspicious of doctors twice as unlikely to return. I had a friend who once sought help for her mental illness at the diversity office of a certain institution. Seemingly, this institution could afford large glossy signs featuring troubled youth with depression-filled thought bubbles around their heads; the implication was that these invisible problems could become visible and helped if you went to the diversity office. She went. And found no help.
So this is the question I really want to put to the Evangelicals so ostensibly interested in raising awareness about mental health issues. By all means talk about mental illness. By all means encourage sufferers in their faith. By all means send them to doctors. But if none of these things “works” in the simplistic sense you were expecting, are you willing to stick with them in their suffering? Are you willing to let a part of yourself die with them? Because it might cost you that. You might end up like Mary, a sword piercing your own soul as you weep over a person you deeply love contorted in pain you cannot imagine let alone fix. And you may find yourself crying out with Christ, with the person you so deeply love so deeply in pain, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us.” For this too is a prayer of the church.
Put another way, I think at bottom the problem is not just with awareness but with the Evangelical theology (or non-theology) of the cross. Are we going, like we used to do in our city-wide Evangelical service, acknowledge, if somewhat uncomfortably, that yes we maybe have to talk about the cross, but then skip as fast as possible to a triumphalist read on the resurrection? Or are we going to do what Christians in fact do, which is stay by the person on the cross even when it seems all bets are off and we would do better to abandon that person for something or someone more cheerful?
Even for myself, I have a hard time answering these questions. I will with all my heart to be such a Christian, and hope there are times when I have shown such grace. But I pray for the future in the knowledge that this is something I can never do by myself. I need, and need daily, the grace of the Christ who knows what it is to suffer the full extent of suffering, the God who knows what it is to feel the pain of watching the person you love most die an excruciating death – the God with whom creation mourns, the God for whom such an act merits the ragged tearing of the temple curtain as one in mourning might tear his clothes. I need this as I daresay will anyone who is going to take on the task of caring – that is, really caring – about those who suffer from mental illness.
Such caring involves, I suggest, looking among us for the faces of the crucified, for it is in these faces that we will see Christ. This means not just talking, but doing. For instance, spend some time volunteering in some capacity where you will actually meet real people with mental illnesses, though it need not be formal. I have no doubt that all about you there are people suffering invisibly. Pray, and look for them. Seek and you will find. Watch for the ones on the margins, the ones who don’t fit in, the ones that nobody else is talking to. Watch for the popular ones hiding their deep sadness under the paint of superfluity. Watch even for the experts, even those who would seem to have far surpassed you in their knowledge of this kind of love. For these people suffer too, and sometimes the worst; it is so easy to forget that those best at loving and caring, with a seeming artfulness and ease, are also in need of love – at times starved for it. Love the foolish. Love even the wise. But, you will say, not all these people necessarily have mental illness. Yes, but it is certain you will never know which ones do until you begin to see them. Before we can start loving people with mental illness, we need to start loving people. And in order to love people, we are in most desperate need of the cross of Christ.
It has become a truism of late that some disaffected evangelicals want to become Catholic because Catholicism has so much more of a robust faith than Protestantism. (A few years ago, Eastern Orthodoxy was a big deal too–arguably still is!) While many more have a more informed account than the hipster one I will provide (I have some smart Catholic convert friends, you see), a typically recent narrative often goes something like this:
Unlike the format of rocked-out worship songs followed by a lengthy sermon, Catholicism (it is said) has a liturgy, a call-and-response between people and priest. Unlike the marketing ethos that pervades much of evangelicalism, Catholicism is like coming home to what Tolkien might call the ‘Last Homely Home.’ Unlike the cheesy literature that fills Christian bookstores that won’t let Rachel Held Evans use the word ‘vagina,’ Catholicism is the religion of what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls the ‘lay styles,’ the people like Dante, Péguy, and Hopkins who saw the glory of the Lord, got sucked in, and wrote it all down in sublime poetry. Catholicism rocks these evangelical converts’ socks because it’s just everything that they were looking for in evangelicalism but couldn’t find because evangelicalism has become corrupted by the free market and its chief political proponents, the Republican Party and their hard neoliberal equivalents in other countries.
As someone who grew up as a non-denominational evangelical and was confirmed into the Anglican Communion (what those who have jumped the Tiber might call the Americano version of Catholic espresso; I’d like to state for the record, however, that the primate who confirmed me had apostolic succession), I can attest to the feeling that Catholics have something that evangelicals don’t have. Catholic theologian James Alison talks about being blown into the Catholic Church from his evangelical Anglican background by falling in love with a classmate who had a grace that he associated with being Catholic (apparently, as a child, his family had John Stott as a close family friend). I remember living in a Catholic house of studies where the daily mass’s liturgical homily was more Christocentric than I had ever heard at an evangelical church. I also always go back to that time I attended mass at a Catholic church where the cantor led worship from guitar with a full band and took us to sublime heights (he even slipped in a Hillsong piece); incidentally, that day was the first day they used the new rites, and while everyone was sufficiently confused about the ‘and with your spirit’ and ‘under my roof’ lines, my sister described the music as giving her an ‘eargasm’ (Rachel Held Evans would like that). Even before that, I recall first partaking of the Anglican Eucharistic liturgy–which, incidentally, reminded me a lot of Catholic school (as one priest reminded me, you know who stole from whom)–and realizing that the Gospel that evangelicals always tried to articulate in fresh ways was already fully expressed in the liturgy.
Readers of this blog will be tempted to channel everything I say through those personal experiences. Fully aware of positionality issues, however, I’d like to state for the record that they are not what I mean by the Catholic thing, that is, the central theme that some readers have identified in my contributions to this blog: everybody seems to be a closet Catholic. In other words, however readers may assess the motives behind my Catholic gymnastics, I am categorically not trying to impose my own aesthetic fetishes on other brothers and sisters in Christ.
That said, the readers of this blog should not be blamed for thinking that I engage in frequent psychological imposition. This is really my fault, my own grievous fault: I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have committed a great sin of omission, for I have failed to define two very key terms. They are Protestant and Catholic. While most readers will take these terms’ meanings to be obvious, the crisis in theology and religious studies around terms like religion, secular, ritual, and myth suggests that I shouldn’t assume that everyone agrees about what these terms mean. Certainly, as we saw in the Anglican post, I’m inclined to a certain understanding of what it means to be ‘Anglican,’ one which, as I noted in the post, other Anglicans might recognize as a validly different form of Anglicanism and proceed to insult it accordingly. In like fashion, I’d like to say exactly what I mean by these two other terms. By Catholic, I simply refer to churches who recognize their communion with the see of Rome such that the see of Rome likewise recognizes its communion with those churches. By Protestant, I refer to churches that were once in communion with the see of Rome but fractured that communion in the sixteenth century for this, that, and the other ideological reason. As you can see, the theological method I’m using here is not very different from my assessment of Anglicanism, that is to say, the form of communion takes primacy over substantive confessional points. (Here, if you are an evangelical, can I beg you to hold your fire for a sec? I’ll get to the confessional points by the end.)
You can see now why I think so many people are closet Catholics. Schism is never pretty, and as Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac argues in his book Catholicism (with the cheesy English subtitle Christ and the Common Destiny of Man), the Holy Spirit gives Christians a ‘Catholic spirit,’ a desire for union with the rest of humanity. The fact that Protestants are out of communion with Rome should be cause for grief for the sheer fact that there are Christians (not to mention other humans) with whom we are not in communion, for the ontological reality in Christianity (well, the orthodox versions, at any rate) is that communion is what we’re made for. To say that the confessional differences on the Virgin Mary, the communion of saints, and the primacy of Rome are sufficient to erect boundaries should still be cause for ontological pain because plainly put, regardless of the reasons, schism still sucks.
This is, of course, why you have to laugh when an evangelical tells you they became Catholic for substantive confessional reasons. After all, everything I just said doesn’t give you much substantive confessional difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, per se. Take, for example, the typical conversion narrative that an evangelical Protestant might rehearse: tired of the market commodification of evangelical Protestantism, they became Catholic to practice a fuller form of the faith. This narrative, however, raises all sorts of questions. For one thing, don’t Catholics also participate in the market commodification of their own faith at times? I mean, have they ever visited a Catholic bookstore? Luther might also have one or two things to say about coupons, building projects, and cheesy jingles about hell and purgatory in the sixteenth century.
To drive home the point, I often scratch my head at the actual substantive difference between a Catholic youth ministry and a Protestant youth ministry. For every evangelical who tells me that they grew up in a big youth group, did the big flashy youth ministry thing, and have now resigned in disgust because it’s not about numbers but truly contemplative faith, I’m tempted to ask if they’ve ever heard of World Youth Day. For every evangelical who tells me that they’re sick of Christian music, I’m curious to know if they’ve ever listened to Audrey Assad, Jackie François, and Matt Maher, much less heard that selections of Hillsong, Vineyard, Maranatha, and even that classic evangelical hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ have all been imported wholesale and oftentimes unproblematically into Catholic worship. (In fact, given this all of this awesomeness–I happen to really, really enjoy listening to Assad, François, and Maher, thank you very much–I’m really rooting for Brooke Fraser to join this Catholic musical dream team, as she and André Crouch would say, ‘soon and very soon.’) For every evangelical who feels disillusioned with Christian media, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of EWTN and whether they know that Bishop Fulton Sheen donned in all of his episcopal regalia was really America’s first televangelist. For every evangelical sick of evangelical fundraising, I’d like to know if they’ve ever heard of a diocesan capital campaign.
The only real difference that I can really think of between Catholics and Protestants is this: being ‘Protestant’ is often tied to ‘maintaining a Protestant identity’ or holding onto ‘denominational distinctives.’ Sometimes this means adding a Latin ‘sola’ before everything and an English ‘alone’ after translations. Other times, it means abstracting Scripture from its historical canonization process and debating whether it’s scientifically inerrant (talk about form over substantive confession!). Still other times, it requires explaining why Catholics are wrong about everything, a favour that Catholics used to return by explaining why Protestants were wrong about everything (thankfully, the tone has softened). This, of course, is where the complaint about ‘protestantization’ in theology and religious studies comes from: over time, these ideological distinctives, formed through cognitive belief and emphasizing individual interiority, began to be believed by Protestants as that which composes religion itself. It’s little wonder that Jefferson Bethke decided to take a potshot at this account of religion; whatever complaints you might have about his oversimplification of religion and his ties to the neo-Calvinist crowd, his return to praxis, as well as his likely unintentional repudiation of overly ‘protestantized’ religion, should be welcomed as a surprisingly ‘catholicizing’ statement of faith. (Oops, I did it again.)
Ecumenical movements also provide excellent counterweights to how these variants of ideological maintenance don’t have to run the show, which means, thankfully, someone like me can still be a Protestant because I started out that way journeying toward greater communion. You could arguably say ditto about folks like Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank. In fact, if you look at the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) reports, you might find it a bit interesting, amusing, and (to some) troubling that the Anglicans end up basically agreeing with the Catholics on the historic primacy of Rome and the special role of Mary in the Church. As has been noted on this blog, relations between Catholics and confessional Lutherans are also getting mighty friendly. And this ecumenism isn’t just something ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives’ do; there are progressive ecumenical conversations going on about social justice even while there are conservative ecumenical conversations happening about confronting secularization. The trouble is, with ecumenism also came some (and let me stress: only some)fundamentalists and evangelicals who accused ecumenists of being modernists caving into a culture of relativism and failing to uphold biblical standards and doctrinal statements, that is to say, letting the Protestant guard down.
It’s people in the latter camp that my Catholic gymnastics target. While I’d argue that most Christians (if they’re honest) have seen the light on communion and ecumenism–whether or not they actually become Catholic or not is another story (I haven’t)–there are some who seem to insist that this is not the light. My tack is to argue that because they are Christian, they simply don’t know that they have already seen the light. To this end, I am not saying that they want to become Catholic for substantive confessional reasons. In fact, I’m saying that those who become Catholic to get away from all the evangelical hype and give substantive confessional reasons for doing it might be jumping out of the fire into the frying pan (I certainly think that’s true of those who become Anglican, myself included). However, I am also saying that I believe in the Holy Spirit, and if indeed the Spirit guides us into all truth–the truth that God in Christ is making all things new and reconciling things in heaven and things on earth into a Christological unity–then why wouldn’t anyone in their right mind not at least long (even secretly so) to participate in the greater catholicity of the church, even (oh, my) with Christians in the see of Rome? Why would anyone think that schism is a good thing to maintain? And if one truly confesses belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, why wouldn’t one at least entertain the possibility that God being God of the living and not the dead allows us to converse with the saints across time and space, including the Blessed Virgin?
What I mean by the Catholic thing, then, is nothing short of wanting to be part of the whole communion of saints, which incidentally usually acknowledges the primacy of the see of Rome in some way, shape, or fashion; at least it has as early as Clement of Rome’s first letter to Corinth in the late first century. In fact, nobody in recent times has recognized this interesting formulation better than Pope Francis himself. In his first appearance on the Loggia, Pope Francis never referred to his papal office as having primacy, per se. Instead, speaking as the newly elected Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis spoke of the see of Rome as ‘the church that presides in charity over all the churches.’ To be in communion with Rome is not so much to acknowledge papal infallibility, per se (much as Vatican I would make us believe that we have to). It’s to be in communion with the see that has historically held primacy as the unifier of all the Christian churches since the first century. Being in open communion with that see is technically what’s supposed to make you fully Catholic. Being formerly in communion with that see, but having broken it off for this, that, and the other reason is technically what makes you Protestant (unless, of course, you are the Society of St. Pius X).
What follows from this, finally, is that any charitable and gracious reading of Christians who actively make schismatic remarks is that they really don’t intend to do so. Assuming the best of the Spirit’s work in their lives, we must assume that what they are really longing for is to become fully Catholic. As Rachel Held Evans reminds us today, there is a season in our journey toward questioning and then re-establishing communion. We are looking forward to the season when we all realize that we long for communion. After all, Catholic or Protestant, we still recite the baptismal creed where we say that we ‘believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church and the communion of saints.’ I promised that I’d get to a substantive confessional point, and I finally have: if we say that the creed sums up the substantive teaching of the Apostles from whom we derive the ecclesial form of succession, we’d better mean what we say in that creed, and if we love our brothers and sisters, we’d better believe that everyone else who says it means it too, some of them more than they know. Together, we all long for the end of schism, for a church that is perfectly one, even as the Father is with the Son, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son.
Jesus says in Sunday’s Gospel reading: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid’ (John 14.27). These words are also the preface in most Christian liturgies to the ‘peace,’ the section in the Eucharistic celebration where we greet each other in the name of Christ, reconciling with those whom we have wronged and joining together in love before partaking of the body and the blood together.
This is more than liturgically appropriate–arguably one of the earliest parts in liturgical development–because the peace’s context is what has come to be known as the ‘Farewell Discourses’ in St. John’s Gospel, the conversation (well, OK, it’s more like a monologue with a few leading questions) where, in light of ‘going to the Father,’ the Lord enjoins his disciples to love one another as he has loved them, to wait for the Paraclete who will lead them deeper into the ontological truth of the death and resurrection, and to live so deeply in the truth that the Father and the Son make their home with them even as the world hates them and persecutes them. The emphasis on reconciling love and passing the peace pervades the other lectionary readings as well. In Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem is convened to deal with the theological assertions of a party of Jewish Christians who want the Gentiles to get circumcised and follow the Mosaic dietary laws. The Council concludes that non-Jewish Christians only have to do the bare minimum as they find themselves at peace with their Jewish brothers and sisters as part of the new covenant: don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols, don’t eat blood, don’t engage in porneia. By the time of the second reading in Revelation 21, it’s revealed that everyone here belongs to the New Jerusalem, the new Israel, the new Temple, shining with the glory of the Lord, who is the Lamb (thanks, Balthasar). The mystical communion of the New Jerusalem founded on an ontology of mystical love was aptly demonstrated to me on Sunday morning: at the free church that I occasionally attend with my wife (a likely surprise to everyone who thought I considered non-Anglican churches beyond the pale), the pastor preached on communion as a practice of reconciling love that cuts across the ecclesial boundaries we erect against each other. Without knowing what the lectionary readings actually were, this pastor (in my humble opinion) represents a sign that God still mystically unites his church catholic despite our intentional divisiveness, for he was practicing ecumenism as an evangelical without even being conscious of it.
This ‘mystic, sweet communion’ might well be applied to those who seem inadvertently and unintentionally to be set up as the arch-nemeses of this blog: the young and restless Protestant tribe dubbed the ‘neo-Calvinists.’ Mark Driscoll is in trouble again (what’s new?): at the recent Catalyst conference, he said something to the effect that because he knows his Maker, who is the maker of the environment, and he is certain that God the Creator will burn the whole thing up, yes, he drives an SUV. He followed this with a (typically) sexist joke that those who drive minivans are ‘mini-men.’ Upon making these remarks, my Facebook news feed erupted in anger, some with passive sighs, others with a call to arms, still others disavowing any connection with Driscoll. One friend even resurrected an old allegation that Mars Hill Church is in fact a ‘cult.’
As I’ve said before on this blog, I do not think the ‘cult’ accusation is very helpful and that Driscoll’s sectarian tendencies are better read as a psychological resistance to his longing to return to his roots as an Irish Catholic. In light of these Catholic musings, I wonder if diatribes against the neo-Reformed tribe don’t in fact stoke their sense of justification by sixteenth-century polemics alone. I wonder if instead passing the peace to them might in fact provoke them to reflect on theirschismatic tendencies and in turn infuse them with such a love that will cover a multitude of sins.
What would it look like to pass the peace to folks like Mark Driscoll and John Piper? I think it’s by arguing that they secretly wish they were Catholic, that they really don’t intend to be schismatic but long instead for deeper communion with the rest of the church catholic. The trouble is that they’ve built their pastoral careers on constructing congregations around hard Reformed Protestant theologies, so they find themselves between a rock and a hard place. It is thus up to us to extend a hand of friendship as they struggle between ideological (they would call it ‘doctrinal’) purity and their ontological reality.
I have argued sufficiently in the other post that Driscoll is a closet Catholic in denial, so I will not reprise my arguments here. Instead, in this post, I will subject one of his teachers, John Piper, to a similar (but briefer) treatment. (Incidentally, this treatment has already been undertaken by a hyper-Reformed blog seeking to undermine Piper’s credibility as a Calvinist. Where they wax uncharitable, I will attempt to be charitable to a fault.)
Piper put forward a (likely unintentionally) schismatic argument that if he were to have a conversation with the pope, he would ask him whether he believes that we are justified by faith alone and whether the righteousness of God is directly imputed to believers through their act of faith. If the pope were to disagree with this formulation, Piper would declare him a heretic. See for yourself:
When Pope Francis was elected, Piper put forward a clarifying statement, one that incidentally showed up on my news feed at the same time that Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler denounced the papal office as Antichrist altogether. (I will subject Mohler to Catholic treatment in a future post; stay tuned.) Walking back his comments on Catholicism as a ‘heresy,’ Piper admits:
I am thankful that God is willing to save us even when our grasp of the gospel may be partial or defective. None of us has a comprehensive or perfect grasp of it.
Nevertheless, God’s mercy is not a warrant to neglect or deny precious truths, especially those that are at the heart of how we get right with God. And the teachers of the church (notably the Pope) will be held more responsible than others for teaching what is fully biblical.
While refusing to walk back his absolutist statements on imputation (you can’t cede all your ground without completely losing face, you know), this, in the words of gay Catholic theologian James Alison, is nonetheless an attempt to ‘lower the temperature’ and ‘loosen the screws.’
Piper can do this because the figure in the theological background for his entire theological system is Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher whom I will also argue had loose Catholic tendencies (pax, Edwards). Piper draws from all parts of Edwards to build his theological system, from Edwards’s Lockean tabula rasa in his understanding of the process of Scriptural and scientific exegesis, to Edwards’s meditations on beauty to build a theology of Christian hedonism (i.e. that we exist to glorify God by enjoying him forever), to Edwards’s marriage to Sarah Edwards to build a case for gender complementarity (these themes emerge even more prominently in their daughter Esther Edwards Burr’s diary), to Edwards’s late evangelistic efforts to indigenous peoples to build a case for risking your life for missions (Piper likes David Brainerd too, btw, both of whom, in Piper’s reading, did not waste their lives by becoming too comfortable in academia), to Edwards’s treatment of religious affections to build a case for a Reformed charismatic theology (putting him in line with Sovereign Grace Ministries, the systematic theology of Wayne Grudem, Louie Giglio’s Passion conferences, etc.), to Edwards’s understanding of the freedom of the will to build his seven-point ‘double predestinarian’ Calvinism, to Edwards’s decisive handling of the medically pornographic ‘Bad Book Case’ to fight lustful thoughts in his own life, to Edwards’s long tenure as a pastor to argue that all of these metaphysical musings are precisely the work of pastoral ministry. Edwards, in turn, had an ironically high sacramental theology for a Puritan, which led to him getting fired from his Congregational Church for changing the mode of communion from his father-in-law Solomon Stoddard’s ‘converting ordinance’ to a members-only sacrament (or whatever is closest to sacrament that a Puritan can be comfortable saying: means ofgrace?)that could only be taken if you first inspected yourself for sin and if you weren’t under church discipline for ongoing sin in your life. (As an aside, I would put my finger here to understand Mars Hill’s bizarre church discipline cases: they’re attempts to do right by Piper qua Edwards. For a Catholic parallel, see Bishop Allen Vigneron’s suggestion that Catholics who differ on church teaching on abortion and same-sex marriage should not take communion.)
Of course, not all readings of Edwards are oriented to Catholicism; Sang Hyun Lee’s interpretations are notable examples. But you get the point: Piper is a closet Catholic because he reads Edwards as a closet Catholic. (In fact, Edwards’s work can be read as a fully catholic articulation of the Christian faith, as Miroslav Volf tacitly suggests in his reading list in A Common Word Between Us and You.)They both seem to have a fairly high sacramental theology. They take pleasure in contemplative spiritualities. They even both reinforce the gender complementarities in Catholic holy orders. And if you’ve given Piper’s oeuvre a fair reading, you’ll know that he knows the Tradition quite well (never mind if you agree with his assessments) through his discussions of Athanasius, Anselm, and even Aquinas in Desiring God and The Pleasures of God.
The real trouble, then, is that they are both given to excess in their insistence that because they are Puritan, they cannot be Catholic. These excesses in turn can be corrected.
Mirroring an Edwardsian ‘personal narrative’ of divine conversions, I personally know that these excesses can be corrected because I myself am a neo-Reformed convert. I had a conversation with someone this afternoon who said that they got into the neo-Reformed thing because they were looking for something more solidly Protestant after being in a ‘loosy-goosy’ evangelical church, and I daresay that my experience was the same. In university, after passing through a progressive Catholic school that taught me the basics of liberal Protestant biblical criticism and liberation theology as well as Chinese evangelical congregations that could be framed as ‘more grace than works,’ I got into the work of Driscoll, Piper, Mahaney, Harris, Chandler, Bradley, Keller, etc. in university because their Protestant-speak was so appealing. My wife, whom I had attempted to date (rather, court) at the time, tells me that I was kind of an absolutist jerk at the time, and I daresay most of the women who also rejected my dating advances at the time would make similar comments. (So much for the neo-Calvinist expertise on biblical courtship.)
However, as they say in these neo-Reformed circles, God’s grace is truly irresistible. When I was in high school, a Catholic priest planted just the right sort of seed in my proto-Reformed heart (mind you, for readers who wax critical of Catholicism due to its recent scandals, just as a cigar is sometimes only a cigar, sometimes a seed just a seed). He asked me what we were learning in school, and I replied that we were reading Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ in AP US History. I explained that Edwards’s vision of God as a fearful judge dangling sinners like a spider over the pit of hell was sure to shake any complacent non-Christian out of their wits and send them running to Christ for salvation, just as people did precisely when Edwards was reading that sermon in his New England church. I thought this would resonate well with the Catholic priest; the Fatima prayer is, after all, ‘Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. Amen.’ Or as the Death Cab for Cutie song goes, ‘In Catholic school / as vicious as Roman rule / I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black. / And I held my tongue / as she told me, “Son, / fear is the heart of love.” / So I never went back.’
But this Catholic priest looked confused. Genuinely bewildered, he asked me, ‘Is God angry?’ I sat there speechless, flabbergasted, in fact, probably somewhat infuriated at these Catholics who don’t take doctrine seriously. But he continued, ‘If God is love, can he really be that angry?’
You could say that this priest didn’t know the first thing about Edwards’s oeuvre. You could say that focusing on ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ fails to take into account Edwards’s metaphysical reflections on the Trinity, his explorations of beauty, his probing into religious affections, his insights into voluntary agency.
Or you could read it another way. You see, this priest was a devotee of the near-equivalent Catholic figure of Edwards to Puritan Christianity: Hans Urs von Balthasar. Both, after all, put beauty close to the heart of their theological reflections, and both talked an awful lot about ‘the glory of the Lord.’ I am aware that Karen Kilby has taken Balthasar to task for his worst speculative excesses and uncritical sexism. However, one excessive theologian can correct another theologian’s excesses, so another possible interpretation is that my Catholic priest friend was using Balthasar to correct Edwards’s worst excesses. Even if Balthasar were excessively speculative, he was able to check Edwards’s excessive morbidity and obsession with hell. Mind you, whatever you think of Balthasar’s ‘dare we hope all men to saved’ argument, Edwards can be a bit off the deep end with his ‘no, they burn’ answer at times.
It was this Balthasarian seed that drew me deeper into the bowels of Anglicanism, and in particular, a view of Anglicanism in which the state’s co-optation of the church is not necessarily the definitive view of the Church of England. After all, the question this priest asked me was a sincere one: how does this excessive view of hell display the glory of the Lord? While Piper might argue that it displays the absolute sovereignty of God, Balthasar would be quick to note that this sovereign Lord descended into hell on Holy Saturday, emptying himself of power to go to the dead. It is this hiatus, the silence in the death of God, that the logic of our theology is re-constituted, where the beautiful glory of the Lord is most definitively seen in the figure of Jesus, the one who died, the one who is risen, the one who will come again.
Our Sunday Gospel tells us that the Paraclete will draw us into all truth, that is, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger put it in his dialogue with critical theorist Jürgen Habermas (whom he was attempting to draw into all truth as well), the ontological reality that it is this mystic, sweet communion that holds the world together. Assuming that the Holy Spirit guides and directs the neo-Calvinists as our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, they will (of course) be drawn with us into all truth, which means that, if they haven’t already, they will necessarily recognize the ontological reality that we recognize, and the Father and the Son will come to them and make their home with them, along with the rest of us. Our worst excesses will be corrected; our mystic sweet communion will come to fruition. We thus pass the peace to our neo-Calvinist brothers and sisters (yes, believe it or not, there are women in this tribe), acknowledging the peace we have with them even if they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the peace they have with us.
Notice, of course, that my intentional source for this photo is The Gospel Coalition.
The passage that was read at my wedding was 1 Corinthians 13. Many will (of course) complain that the passage is not about marital love, that it is in fact about ecclesial love, and that to use it in a wedding is to join Hallmark in taking it out of context. Our Anglican priest’s homily, however, emphasized love within the church over the pride that ‘puffs up,’ placing marriage as a sacrament within the context of the church, and I suspect that it is because of those homiletical reflections that I can’t get the passage out of my head as I conclude this post. I realize that when St. Paul says that when he was a child, he spoke like a child, he thought like a child, he reasoned like a child, he is positing a contrast between the present in which we see through a mirror dimly and the eschatological future when of faith, hope, and love, only love remains. But because the church mysteriously lives an eschatological reality in the present, I can’t help but think that a bit of eisegesis is in order. You see, when I was a child, I spoke like a schismatic, I thought like a theologically insecure neophyte about fundamental doctrines, I reasoned like a ‘solid’ Protestant with an overly romanticized view of the sixteenth century. But now that I have become an adult, I have put childish ways behind me, trading schism for communion, hopefully growing deeper into the truth that holds the world together, the realization that, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it in A Better Hope, ‘the worship of such a God [who works through the church] means that we must pray and pray fervently for the reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants, as our very division wounds not only ourselves but the world itself’ (p. 45-46). I can’t wait for my neo-Reformed brothers and sisters to do likewise.
In this way, Driscoll’s most recent debacle need not be interpreted as him going off the deep end as a neo-Calvinist participating in the worst excesses of American Christianity. Instead, the poor guy is kicking and screaming against the Holy Spirit leading him into all truth. We should thus not issue a green Christian diatribe against him, castigating him for his idiotic sexist and anthropocentric jokes that we take to be a pox on the face of the contemporary church catholic. We should rather extend the peace in the hope that he will be at peace as the Father and the Son make their home with him. Pax Christi.
There is a certain church popping up repeatedly on my news feed advertising a church service that will potentially reach the downtown of the city in which I live. It is an Anglican church, or more precisely put, it is a church that thinks it’s Anglican because it likes liturgy but doesn’t want to become Anglican-extreme, as evidenced by its pastor’s theological blogs on the ‘misconceptions of Anglicanism’ and the ‘dangers of Anglicanism.’ The bottom line of these posts is that Anglicanism has been misconstrued as a ‘man-made ritual,’ which means that in many quarters, it’s lost a sense of the Christian Gospel, which (apparently) is to actively seek to transform the nations with the message of Jesus, which (apparently) ‘is an invitation to turn away from laws and threats, and to believe that Jesus paid it all’ in contrast to a Caesarean existence based on ‘laws and threats.’ Not only is this church seeking to change my city’s culture, but it boldly states on its vision statement that the reason my city is dying because of racism, sexism, and drug abuse, and that the church is failing to address these issues because the Protestant church in my city is numerically shrinking:
The church should be a part of the solution, but it is rapidly dying. In the last survey conducted by Statistics Canada, only 17% of the population in Vancouver consider themselves Protestant and 42% have no religious affiliation.
The suggestion is thus that mainline churches (like Anglican ones) have become so institutionalized and routinized that they’re losing the young people, so not only is this new church going to resurrect my city, but they’re going to tell us Anglicans how we’ve majorly screwed up.
I don’t blame them, as my city is also one of the three fault lines of the Anglican Communion crisis, that is to say, one of the three dioceses in North America where direct actions from the bishop (mostly to do with sexuality) have caused churches to split from the province, seek cross-provincial episcopal jurisdiction, and cause major schism within the worldwide Anglican Communion. This new church seems to have the solution to our problems, of course. Instead of focusing on Anglicanism as the church structure and the man-made rituals, we should rediscover this cool articulation of faith called the liturgy. We should also lay claim to our theology in the Thirty-Nine Articles, which is (obviously) the Anglican statement of faith, just like (duh) every Protestant church has a statement of faith, because (of course) Protestantism is confessional. In fact, Anglicanism is a great missional strategy to reach ‘postmodern’ people because its liturgy is so poetic, and it gives certainty in its theological articulation to an uncertain world. In turn, reaching people strategically will turn the church into a ‘capital base’:
…new churches also become resource bases for all other ministries. Most other independent or para-church ministries need ongoing financial resources, year after year. Once a new church becomes self-supporting it becomes the capital base (manpower, ministry expertise and money) for all other ministries within the city. If it is healthy and continues to grow it becomes a viable and vital partner in building other necessary, specialized and cutting edge ministries within the city. So, if we plant a church we can impact the city and world on a larger scale.
Never mind, of course, sociologist Nancy Ammerman’s analysis in Pillars of Faith that it’s usually parachurch organizations that make the money for congregations. Never mind also that despite the depiction of Vancouver as unclaimed, de-Protestantized territory, there are churches in my city like Tenth Church, Grandview Calvary Baptist Church, and First Baptist Church that are already pulling their share of the weight. This still sounds very nice.
It’s also a profound teaching moment about Anglicanism that is difficult to pass up. And so I shan’t. Let me begin with a question:
Is Anglican liturgy actually strategic? In other words, can you build the church as a capital base with a liturgical strategy?
This is an honest question, partly because many evangelicals nowadays absolutely (and “passionately,” of course) think so. In fact, it’s an increasingly pressing question because the last ten-ish years have witnessed a great awakening among evangelicals regarding something to which evangelicals claim Anglicans have special privilege among Protestant Christians: liturgy. (Never mind that Lutherans, United Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and other Free Church derivatives have all sorts of liturgical traditions too.) Having read the late Robert Webber as well as a few cool new books on “the grammar of faith” while discovering that the guys they love to quote were Anglican (e.g. C.S. Lewis, John Stott), Anglicanism’s “Catholic tendencies” are starting to become cool, poetic, hip. In fact, it may be the mark of the new Christian hipster, that is to say, the portrait of the young Christian as a hipster.
Now, of course, James K.A. Smith writes some pretty cool stuff about liturgy informing everything you do. But this new liturgical fetish weirds me out a little because it’s a bit selective. I mean, you don’t see any evangelicals who have read radically orthodox theologian Catherine Pickstock’s After Writing going off and using the Tridentine Latin Mass as an evangelistic strategy (or maybe Pickstock’s writing is too impenetrable for those working with that scandal called the ‘evangelical mind’). And, of course, within Anglicanism, there are all sorts of liturgies. There’s the established form from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, but unless you’re at my church where people are actually convinced that the poetry of phrases like “it is meet and right so to do” will win people to Christ (while being simultaneously confused as to why there are so many white people at our church), unintelligible language isn’t exactly a marketing strategy (besides the small detail that in Article 24 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, it’s ‘plainly repugnant’ to have a liturgy ‘in a tongue not understanded of the people’). If you want a liturgy ‘understanded of the people,’ you could look to the Book of Alternative Services, but then, the 1662 people will get you for going liberal.
Which, in short, means that when you use Anglican stuff, there are Anglican politics to deal with.
That leads to my next question: is liturgy all there really is to Anglicanism?
Let me submit to you that Anglicanism isn’t really about the liturgy, but rather, all about this dirty word ‘politics.’ Don’t ever forget that the Protestant version of Anglicanism started in the sixteenth century when this sexist king called Henry VIII wanted to get a divorce from his wife, which in turn led to his next wife getting beheaded, the next one dead in childbirth, the next one divorced because she couldn’t speak English (true story), the next one beheaded too because she cheated on him, and the last one survived because, in 007′s words, she was the ‘last rat standing.’ Then the king died, which led to all sorts of problems because half the royal family wanted to become Catholic again (so they killed all the Protestants) and the other half wanted to become Protestant (so they killed all the Catholics), until Elizabeth I came around, decided she liked the Protestant version because it made her (as opposed to the pope) ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England, and achieved what’s called the ‘Elizabethan Settlement,’ which meant that we got a prayer book, a few anti-Catholic diatribes, and a state-sanctioned Protestant religion.
And that leads to my next question: do you really have to deal with all of that junk as a missional church?
Uh, yeah, you do, because when it comes down to it, what this means is that there’s really no such thing as ‘Anglican theology,’ or even ‘Anglican liturgy,’ for that matter. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that we don’t have theologies and liturgies; I’m saying that there are too many of them. There are multiple Anglican theologies and liturgies in conversation (often heated ones) among Anglicans around the world. In technical terms, we call this mess the Anglican Communion. There are evangelicals who actually don’t like the liturgy that much (surprise, you evangelical liturgical entrepreneurs!), there are Anglo-Catholics who like the liturgy too much, there are latitudinarians who don’t really seem to care about liturgy and theology, and there’s every possible combination, permutation, contradiction, and exception to all of the above. We all made a show of getting along when the United Kingdom had this thing called an empire where folks who were technically Anglicans colonized the entire world (which is why the sun never went down on the British Empire), and when that empire fell apart due to budgetary reasons, we called it a communion of provinces, which sounded nice until some of the provinces wanted to bless same-sex unions and ordain gay clergy, which made some of the ex-colonial provinces excommunicate the more liberal provinces, which in turn made some conservative parishes drop out of the old provinces, which in turn has caused a ginormous mess about property rights, which in turn has led to a boiling animosity that has culminated in the voting down of an ‘Anglican Covenant’ that was the last ditch effort to keep the whole thing together.
Which leads to: what really makes you Anglican, then?
What really makes you Anglican is that you plug yourself into this complete mess of a conversation called the Anglican Communion and people in this mess recognize you as plugged in, talk to you as Anglican, and insult your version of Anglicanism.
Great, so do you get to say that you’re just in this conversation?
No. First off, if you’re already a baptized Christian, you find a bishop who likes you (politics, right?). Then you get confirmed with the guy/gal (depending on what you think of women bishops), which is good enough if you want to be a lay person in this conversation. If you want to serve the sacraments, you have to get ordained twice (deaconed, then priested). This process allows you to trace your Christian food chain back up to Augustine of Canterbury.
Who that?
Not to be confused with his namesake from Hippo, Augustine of Canterbury was a Catholic missionary sent to the British Isles by Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ I, who made the evangelization of Britain one of his top priorities because he saw some slave boys earlier on in his priestly career who were described to him as ‘Angles.’ He thought they looked so beautiful that he called them ‘angels’ (true story), so when he became pope, reaching them with the Gospel was his top priority. Augustine got there, got into major conflict with the existing pagan tribal leaders, managed to convert a few anyway, and started a primatial church at Canterbury that ordained priests and consecrated bishops in the effort to evangelize the island. The trouble was, there were already Christians there before Augustine, and they had also started monasteries (which, incidentally, had much earlier produced a guy called Pelagius that the other Augustine didn’t really like), so there was a lot of conflict between those pre-existing British Christians and the new Roman guys over how the church should operate as a communion. You can read all about the sordid details in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. They managed to sort it all out (sorta) when the British Christians finally agreed to adjust their Easter date to Rome’s.
In other words, these guys were Anglican Christians because they were a church among this group of people that Gregory liked who were called the Angles, who were in turn collaborating with and at war with other tribes (Saxons, Picts, Scots, Welsh, Irish, etc.) over British Isle turf.
Right away, then, you can see that Anglicanism wasn’t pretty from the get-go. There were conflicts between Christians, and there were conflicts between Christians and pagans, which became conflicts between the Christian church and the state. Some Anglican Christians (like Alcuin of York) eventually worked for the state. Some (like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Becket) pissed the state off. The state itself pissed itself off, which meant that there were all sorts of colourful wars fought around which dynastic line got to control the state (you know, the Normans, the War of the Roses, etc.). Eventually, these tensions boiled over when that Tudor king, Henry VIII, wanted to consolidate the state, so he straight up took over the church, which (as I said earlier) seemed to work and then didn’t, and then there were radical Puritan strands that tried to take over the Anglican Church and the state, which ended up turning into the not-very-pretty English Civil War and gave us the political theologies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. When the whole thing got settled, the one group everybody loved to hate were the Catholics, which became very inconvenient in the nineteenth-century when this thing called the Oxford Movement made Anglo-Catholicism a hit with their Tracts of the Times, and then pissed everyone off again when its major leaders (like John Henry Newman) jumped ship to Rome. Et cetera. Et cetera.
As you can see, there’s not much holding this beast called Anglicanism together, except for one thing: somehow, they can all trace their food chain back to Canterbury and the Gregorian mission, and even then, there were some churches and monasteries started before that mission which they had to whip into Catholic line. In other words, with the exception of having Canterbury as an ‘instrument of communion,’ nobody really agrees on much else. Even the Canterbury thing is fraying at the edges now, with the development of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), a selectively ‘Global South’ Anglican configuration that styles itself as an alternative to the ‘broken instrument’ of Canterbury.
But because even the GAFCON people can technically somehow trace their food chain back to Canterbury, the technical term for the Canterbury thing is apostolicsuccession, that is, Anglicans are part of a church that through Canterbury and Gregory can trace their own food chain back to the apostles. Of course, when I say apostolic succession, I realize that I’m going to be drawn and quartered for completely missing the point of being a missional Anglican: ‘The post-Christian world doesn’t care about apostolic succession! You’re one of those religious scribes and Pharisees interested in the institutionalization of the church!’
Ignoring the fact that you got that criticism of institutionalization from Max Weber’s secular reading of the routinization of charisma and then conveniently imposed it onto your Scriptural exegesis (shhhhh…), let me suggest that apostolic succession is what makes Anglicanism ‘Anglicanism,’ and in turn, is what makes the whole thing Christian.
Why? you ask? Because Michael Ramsey says so.
Who that?
Michael Ramsey. Archbishop Michael Ramsey?(Does this mean that you don’t actually read Anglican theology?) Yes, actually, as a matter of fact, you should read Michael Ramsey, especially a little book he wrote called The Gospel and the Catholic Church, in which he argues basically that if you dump apostolic succession, you’ve dumped the Gospel. That’s right: lose the Catholic, and you lose the evangelical too, because (in technical theological terms) there is no kerygma without church. As Ramsey argues, if Jesus commanded his apostles to found churches, if you have churches apart from the apostles, then you lose their message too. You have to be able to trace your food chain back to the apostles in order to validate the message. The Gospel is attached to catholicity, and catholicity is attached to the Gospel.
Which brings us back to using Anglicanism as a strategy: it’s not a strategy. By some accounts, it’s barely even a Protestant denomination.
It is a mode of communion, in which–unlike most Protestant denominations that would see politics as dirty (ewww…) and church politics as the worst of politics–we Anglicans see that dirty work as an integral part of our Christian lives.
Let me repeat myself: instead of running away from church politics, Anglicans treat church politics as Christian business as usual. Church politics doesn’t come from a ‘misconception’ of Anglicanism, it is not the ‘danger’ of Anglicanism, and it is not merely ‘man-made.’ It is Anglican Christianity.
This is why these issues have to be addressed. Unlike starting independent congregations where one could claim that what one does or says in the congregation should not be subject to the scrutiny of non-members (an argument that Jennifer Knapp famously pulled against evangelical detractors of her same-sex relationship), claiming Anglicanism puts us into very, very messy communion. It gets nasty. There’s name-calling, people get hurt, there’s backroom deal-making, there’s collusion with state and empire, there are radical movements contesting that collusion, there are charismatic people seeking direct access to God apart from the institution, etc. etc.
What it means to be Anglican is to have your Christian life formed in this mess. In fact, many of the most profound Anglican contributions to wider Christian theological reflection (that is, Christians who don’t trace their food chain back to Canterbury) has been formed by this political insanity. I once read in an introduction to Anselm’s work that despite all of his trouble with the state (exiled twice, poor guy), he never actually reflected on that experience in his theology, preferring rather to muse on metaphysical matters in classics like the Proslogion and Cur Deus Homo. I slightly disagree with that preface writer’s assessment. Instead of driving a wedge between theology and politics, this metaphysical reflection might actually be the way of dealing with nasty Anglican politics. I could go down the laundry list of Anglican thinkers for whom this category might apply–Bede, Anselm, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Thomas Cranmer, Richard Hooker, J.C. Ryle, John Henry Newman, Dean Inge, Charles Gore, William Temple, C.S. Lewis, Austin Farrer, Michael Ramsey, Rowan Williams, etc.–all of whom did deep metaphysical work in tough political circumstances (and didn’t all agree with each other).
I have to reference The Cloud of Unknowing here because if you’re going to appeal to the Anglican liturgy, the one thing that does actually set the thing apart is the Collect for Purity that we read at every Eucharist service, which happens to be the epigraph to Cloud:
God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Cloud of Unknowing then unpacks that, arguing that God is like this amorphous cloud you can never make sense of with sheer intellect. You can only pierce that cloud of unknowing with pure love.
Let me just postulate in turn that you never fully understand this unless you’ve been in the thick of ecclesial political contestation where your intellect just drives you mad and your best ideas still result in bloody conflict.
In short, Anglicanism probably isn’t a great marketing tool, if you’re trying to reach people with an authentic, unvarnished Christian spirituality in order to build a capital base. Anglicanism is religion for the dirty people, the scum of the earth, the scumbags that ‘this generation seeking authenticity’ love to hate for their hypocrisy and pretentiousness. If you want recent examples, our last Archbishop of Canterbury (whom I think did a fabulous job) was often lampooned as an elitist academic. Our current Archbishop of Canterbury (whom I think is also doing a fabulous job) is often called an elitist ex-oil tycoon. Both, if you will, are the scummiest of us Anglican scum. Incidentally, I’m proud of that, because if you really want me to articulate what ‘Anglican theology’ is, it’s being attached to a strand of the Christian church catholic coming down through Augustine of Canterbury whose political scars force its members to consider that the dirt of politics is precisely the place where we are transformed into the image of Christ. After all, it is only there where we learn to treasure the insight that love, not only our intellect, is the only way to pierce the cloud of unknowing. Join us only if you dare.
A recent Slate article entitled “Thesis Hatement” has sparked some discussion on this blog. As its subtitle proclaims, the article argues that “getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor” and traces the inevitable experience of a newly minted literature Ph.D. Told that if she works hard enough, she will finally land a tenure-track job, she finds this was a lie. She is a mouse trapped in a Kafkaesque maze with no way out—and a hungry cat. (The author, Rebecca Schuman, just finished a dissertation on Kafka.) The theme is familiar across the humanities: it is irresponsible for institutions to continue credentialing people for a career that is no longer available to the vast majority of graduates. It is quixotic for the students to undertake such a program. Don’t do it, and—if you really are “humane”—don’t counsel your students to do it either. Equally familiar are the articles on the other side, which point to the enduring value of the liberal arts in a time of economic trial and call for renewed interest in studying (and funding) them lest we suffer profound long-term consequences as a culture. Already Slate has published a counterpoint, by NYU journalism professor Katie Roiphe, who holds up the literature PhD as useful in many ways besides ensuring a tenure-track job “in a pretty leafy college town.” Foremost among these, says Roiphe, is the development of “a nurturing faith in your private preoccupations, a creative desire that is detached from questions of what other people care about.”
Both articles are depressing, though Roiphe’s is unintentionally so. I suspect that Schuman may not find her increased “faith in her private preoccupations” worth the sacrifices in job security and dignity outlined in her piece—nor is it certain that her newly nurtured faith will withstand the buffeting of market pressures and the ignominy of adjunct work. I want to take another tack, to answer Schuman not only as a fellow student of literature, but also as a fellow “sufferer” on the academic job market, something Roiphe is not. As a fellow literature student, I am interested more in the narrative backdrop to Schuman’s argument than in trotting out facts and figures and anecdotes to determine how dire the situation is, really, or where humanities PhDs might go if not to tenure-track jobs. As a fellow “sufferer,” I want to avoid whining, on one side, and on the other, an unfeeling dismissal of Schuman’s complaints. While many groups down the ages have suffered a great deal more than humanities PhDs since 2008, there is truth in Schuman’s lament that warrants our attention, both as people committed to liberal arts education, and as people called to respond to suffering with faith, hope, and love.
In this spirit I want to suggest that Schuman’s first mistake was in studying Kafka. There is a nihilism in the picture she paints that goes far beyond the drudgery of a job that just pays the bills. The mouse in the maze, she points out, “wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse.” She admits that this is a subjective take on the matter, that nobody outside of academia can understand our desperate need for tenure-track jobs. But a desperate need we have. We cut the same heartbreaking figure as a woman who has become attached to a cold man, sacrificing more and more to win his love, willfully ignoring signs of his indifference because the alternative has become too terrifying to contemplate. Psychologically the same forces are at work: having been lured in by early praise and displays of interest on the part of professors and graduate programs, we invest an increasing amount of heart, with the stakes eventually becoming so high that perspective and reason are lost. Schuman’s answer: don’t start down that road. Do something else.
But I wonder whether any commitment, any investment of heart in a calling or a person, is free from this liability. I wonder, too, how much of the blame for this suffering rests with the sufferer. In a romantic relationship, one person can lead the other on, and no doubt professors and administrators need to think carefully about the ethics of encouraging young people to pursue humanities PhDs and mounting PhD programs. But I am peculiarly qualified to scrutinize Schuman’s side of the story because I share her struggles: we began our graduate careers the same year, and next year looks bleak for both of us, career-wise. We also seem to think alike, because I too approach personal and political problems at the level of literary backdrop (or, if you like, metanarrative). She starts with Kafka; I want to explore a framework here that might offer a more hopeful alternative.
Whose Fault?
If there’s one category into which every book I really love falls, that category would be “literary theodicy”: narrative texts that wrestle thoughtfully with the question of why things aren’t better. These run from the book of Job to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” Like an old Western, the literary theodicy builds to a face-off in which two main figures gird up their loins, so to speak, and say what has been on their minds the whole time. Unlike most Westerns, in literary theodicy, one of the two figures is God. Usually the argument is not philosophical, but—this is the “literary” part—arises from the story that has been building to that point: to understand why I am grieved, you had to be there and see how it happened. In the case of Job, God’s response is, effectively, “Exactly”: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Works outside the biblical canon, constrained not to speak for God for fear of blasphemy,[1] typically focus on the other figure, the self. “Here’s my story,” they say. “Am I guilty?” The answer is typically a resounding “yes”: Adam and Eve are responsible for the loss of Eden; Ruby Turpin is a wart hog from hell. This is unusual. Stories are usually told for purposes of self-justification; these, by contrast, are works of critical self-examination, even self-condemnation. They call into question the motives and activities of the characters whose stories they tell—and often, by extension, of their authors. An example that springs to mind is The Brothers Karamazov, in which Fyodor Dostoevsky gives the loathsome Karamazov father his own first name. How might the self-examining narrative of a recent literature PhD read?
Let me make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that humanities PhDs are responsible for our own grief because we should have known better than to study humanities, nor yet that some divine boom is being lowered on us because of our sin (an assumption of Job’s friends and not of the biblical narrator). Christians are convicted of guilt; establishing any clear relationship between particular offenses and particular suffering, though, is notoriously difficult. Here again narrative can shed light in ways philosophy can’t. In one of his stories, Garrison Keillor explores the question of guilt and suffering by inviting us into the mind of a man contemplating adultery. As this man, Jim Nordberg, waits for his romantic interest to pick him up and take him to Chicago, he reflects:
As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they are no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families—my infidelity would somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection and someone’s child will be injured. A sixth grade teacher will think, “What the hell,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell—I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday—it certainly can’t be any worse today.”
“Far from being hidden,” Keillor concludes, “each sin is another crack in the world.”[2] And what is true of John Milton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor, I find true of myself. Not that I’m a famous author; that I’m guilty too.
These are gloomy reflections for a narrative purporting to be hopeful, but it’s important to know where I stand before I assess my prospects for next year and beyond. Nor do I think that the reality of where I stand “goes without saying”: the point of liturgy is that this particular narrative never goes without saying. The story doesn’t make sense unless all the movements are there. But the liturgy doesn’t end with confession, and neither do these literary theodicies end with utter destruction. In fact, if Schuman’s piece were a true “Jeremiad” (her word), there would be lots of confession of sin and a ray of hope for the future. Jeremiah has much in common with the texts I’ve just been describing: the prophet squares off with God, and God responds convincingly that Israel is responsible for her own desolation. Jeremiah’s most searing question, though, comes after all this: “Hast thou utterly rejected Judah?” Everything hangs on that “utterly.” Many bloggers and analysts are already calling the current generation of humanities PhDs “lost.” Are we utterly lost?
Both Schuman and Roiphe’s accounts of the situation facing the humanities PhD miss the distance marked by “utterly.” Both conflate one chapter of the story with the whole story. Roiphe no less than Schuman assumes that fulfillment for me, now, is the intrinsic good toward which all our efforts tend: that gained, we have won; that lost, we have lost indeed. The climax of Roiphe’s optimistic argument is that you acquire in graduate school “a habit of intellectual isolation that is well, useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.” Presumably if you somehow come out of graduate school without this, or if it is beaten out of you by the job market, then Schuman’s maze still obtains. This is one way to understand the human condition, but it is not the only way.
In Medias Res
Books eleven and twelve of Paradise Lost always come as something of a surprise to first-time readers. Having plumbed the depths of hell and soared to the heights of heaven, having managed his ‘great argument’ of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace after casting an eye over the story of Satan’s failed rebellion, Milton takes us through hundreds of lines of reiterated biblical history in the form of a lesson sent to Adam through the archangel Michael. At first moving slowly through events recorded early in Genesis, Michael’s narrative picks up speed (and switches from visual to aural), covering not only the events leading up to Milton’s time but beyond, to the consummation of time itself. This move on Milton’s part has not been met with universal praise. C.S. Lewis, usually an ardent defender of the epic, famously called the archangel’s survey an “untransmuted lump of futurity,” and my students sometimes feel the same. It’s not that the two books are boring—it’s the catalogues of unfamiliar place names that are sometimes accused of that—they just seem somehow unnecessary for moving the plot along. In asking my students why, in light of this objection, Milton might have chosen to lump futurity onto the end of his epic, I sometimes zag over to The Lord of the Rings. “In Tolkien’s fiction,” I ask (now I have their full attention), “why does he call it ‘Middle Earth’?”
A teacher I love once remarked that Dostoevsky writes “conscious of the stories he’s not telling because he’s telling this one.” Tolkien is that and more: he sets his stories in Middle Earth because they only makes sense if the characters (and the reader) live and move in the knowledge that there is a bigger story that started before they got there and will continue after they leave, in which their own peregrinations play a part. So too does Milton place his narrative of the Fall in the shadow of those last two books. Adam and Eve were made to understand that their story was preceded by mighty events in heaven, and they must also understand that they will be succeeded by epochs of human faithlessness and divine faithfulness. Books eleven and twelve extend this sense of “middleness” to the reader, in whatever age she lives: Adam and Eve’s story is our own story, and not in a metaphorical way. Like Adam and Eve, we see only in part, but we see enough to know that bigger things are afoot, that we have a destiny. This consciousness is characteristic of every epic since Virgil, but in the Christian epic—with its imputation of guilt to the hero (Dante’s Comedia begins with a culpably lost pilgrim)—it takes on peculiar poignancy.
There is a theological word for the failure to see the larger story, and that word is “despair.” It is the condition of those in Dante’s hell, the gates of which say lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate—“leave behind every hope, you who enter.” Earlier when I described the need for affirmation from the academy (in the form of a respectable job) as “desperate,” drawing an analogy to a forlorn lover, I was trying to be very precise. The word means, literally, “without hope.” What I want to point out here is that both Schuman’s negative account and Roiphe’s positive one are equally hopeless, in terms of a larger story that might invest their own with meaning. The backdrop to both accounts is very like the backdrop that C.S. Lewis identifies in epic before Virgil, in which, Lewis says,
no one event is really very much more important than another. No achievement can be permanent: today we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed. An inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used for it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. . . . [Homer’s] greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux.[3]
Many humanities PhDs have reason to be melancholic. But in the Christian story, darkness is a condition through which one passes, not an abiding reality so comprehensive that the pilgrim doesn’t think to question it. Bunyan’s Christian is tempted to wallow in the Slough of Despond, but called to recognize the Slough for what it is and move forward in faith.
Conclusions
My labor here has been to step back and see the Slough, to assess how my story might be important for reasons beyond self-affirming originality no less than prestige and tenure. Possibly the insights I can draw for my own peregrination in higher learning can be inferred easily enough from the literary reflections above—but for my own sake let me take stock.
(1) If any life in the academy—however exalted—must be located in a larger story in order to have purpose, then any life so located—however lowly, wandering and broken—has purpose. In this world there may remain a need to call for justice, to apologize, to crunch numbers and lobby for change, to educate people young and old about the importance of the liberal arts and those who teach them, but ultimately the worth of those teachers does not hang on whether the world listens. Following from this,
(2) I am responsible to work against the scale of values that sets tenure-track faculty above other members of the community, in both my thoughts and my actions. Many academic Jeremiads focus on violence suffered by contingent faculty because of a lack of attention given them, in Simone Weil’s sense. The fault for this rests not only, or even primarily, on the people who write their paychecks: it rests on all of us. Here again Tolkien is instructive, for he gives particular attention to hobbits, a species not usually thought worthy of attention.[4] Who are the hobbits in the story of the modern academy? A species that stands out in my mind besides the much-bewailed adjunct is the student. Adjuncts are now responsible for a large percentage of the face-to-face instruction received by students in the United States. In behaving as though adjuncts have lost in the game of life, we imply that students are worthless. There are few sights in the academy more heartbreaking than that of a contingent faculty member who has come to accept this view himself, whose students suffer the consequences. I need to remember that if I am a contingent faculty member, either for a season or for the rest of my life, I am doing work of infinite value in caring for the souls in front of me; and
(3) A teacher of humanities who does not understand (1) and (2) should not be teaching in the humanities. We likely pursued our PhDs because we believe that there are things more important than “success” in terms of money and prestige. It’s not wrong to want security, comfort, attention and respect, but neither we nor our students will get as much as we want in the way of these things—so I pray that, if I am going to experience dearth and difficulty, I can at least bear witness to the fact that there are resources to sustain people who lack “success.” In fact, my experience of dearth and difficulty may allow me to testify to hope in ways I could not do otherwise. I am not saying that this potential good justifies the suffering of everyone who has been trampled down in the dehumanizing of the academy; I am saying that, if I let it, my own suffering can be translated into good, both for myself and for my students.
(4) Ultimately, that good can’t be held back by my circumstances. I want to end by turning once more to the end of Paradise Lost, to the moment when Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden. This thwarting of well-laid plans comes with ignominy, uncertainty, and difficulty of the direst sort. But Michael offers Adam these words, which follow us in our story too, at whatever stage in our lives and careers:
Yet doubt not but in valley, and in plain
God is, as here; and will be found alike
Present; and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine.
[1] An exception is William Paul Young’s The Shack, on which see Katherine Jeffrey’s review in the January 2010 issue of Books and Culture.
[2] Quoted in Ralph Wood, Contending for the Faith, pp. 151-52.
