Mary is yours, whether you are ‘catholic’ or ‘evangelical’

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Anglican, apparition, Blessed Virgin, Catholic, Christian, ecumenism, Evangelical, feminist theology, Flannery O'Connor, geopolitics, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Justin Welby, liberation theology, Mary, Pope Francis, racism, secular, theotokos

We call this a Thing, as Churl says, professing to have a meeting of the ‘wise’ without being wise ourselves. But as Churl screams at the evangelical churches he’s been at, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he seems to have gotten a variety of responses. Some have shown a lot of love and promised quite a bit of prayer. But he has also quite a bit of criticism from those who don’t know him, precisely the disembodied voice he addresses in his first paragraph. For those of us who dared to share the piece, some of us were subjected to the whims of Protestant polemicists who wanted to debate papal primacy and the use of tradition with us. We were accused of having superiority complexes even as we shared a post that asked where all of our accusers were when Churl (and by extension, others of us on this Thing) were when he/we were wrestling with our faith. Some of us who experienced this also asked, ‘Where the hell were you?’ before we shared that post.

As an Anglican, I stand in solidarity with Churl, regardless of whether he swims the Tiber soon or not. But as a Chinglican, I’d like to give Churl a bit of a reminder. Though Churl doesn’t mention it, one of the common objections to Churl jumping communions is that over there, they pray to this woman called Mary, which means that they love Mary more than Jesus.

I disagree.

For one thing, no Catholic in their right mind prays to Mary; they do talk a lot to her, understand her to continue to dispense the graces of her Son, and venerate her as Queen of Heaven insofar as she is the foremost pilgrim in our journey toward the fusion of nature and grace. For another, this view of Mary, I submit, is neither Catholic nor evangelical. It is Christian, and it brings together the ‘catholic’ and the ‘evangelical’ that we in our small minds have sundered since the Reformation (and arguably even before that). So as a Chinglican, I’d like to give Churl a bit of a reminder: whether he stays on this side or that side of communion with the see of Rome, the Blessed Virgin Mary will be his mother either way. (I realize that this may be a bit of a Flannery O’Connor reading of evangelicals, but Churl thinks that too.)

The rest of this post, then, is addressed to Churl.

Churl, the Blessed Virgin stands beside you. As you cry out in consternation at the evangelical world that abandoned you, Mary is the perfect mother, the Immaculate Conception, the one that John Paul II says in Redemptoris Mater has gone ahead of the pilgrim life of the Church, fulfilling the perfect fusion of nature and grace, bringing the eschaton forward to the present. As much as there will be people who will attack us for having this Marian discussion on our Thing, this conversation lies at the heart of ecumenism, not the new modern ecumenism of the latter half of the twentieth century, but the old ecumenism, as in the ecumenism of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus. There Mary was defined (contra Nestorius) as the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one who bears God for the life of the world and invites us to share in that divine nature through her human son. For those who might dispute this significance of Mary as it can’t be found explicitly in Scripture and thus seek to police our devotion to the Blessed Virgin, we might in turn ask them how it is that they hold it as orthodox that we believe in God as a Trinity of persons and Jesus as a hypostatic union of divine and human natures, for one finds these definitions precisely in the same set of ecumenical councils that produced the definition of Mary as God-bearer. That this radically ecumenical view of Christian theology may be scandalous to some might be a good thing; in time, we may finally reclaim the shock value that comes of all three of seeing God as Trinity, Mary as God-bearer, and Jesus as God and man.

And it was thus that though I, as an Anglican, once visited a Catholic nun (of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, no less), and she told me, as we prayed contemplatively and extemporaneously together over the future of my life, that she saw the Blessed Virgin standing beside me. I, an Anglican, believed her. Beyond our institutional differences, we were able to see clearly then what we see now in Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, that is, we saw the Spirit moving to bring us together as one despite our the impaired nature of our respective communions. The Spirit also brought my wife into my life a month later. She, a self-identified ‘evangelical,’ shows me daily how to embody the ‘catholic’ spirit in her forgiving spirit, her patient forbearance, and her decisively uncanny ability to see the best in the other. I, who purport to be moving in a ‘catholic’ direction, am forced to live as an ‘evangelical,’ always seeking to frame our everyday lives with the prophetic truth of the Word of God. Appropriating free church theologian Miroslav Volf’s terms in Exclusion and Embrace, the Blessed Virgin is both ‘catholic’ and ‘evangelical.’

The Virgin is ‘catholic’ because whether we are in communion with Rome or not, she is the eschatological fusion of nature and grace in the present. She doesn’t care what we call ourselves institutionally. After all, while the schism of institutions is often politically policed by ideologies (‘Catholics are bad because of x, y, z,’ or ‘evangelicals are bad because of a, b, c’), the Virgin, as James Alison reminds us, keeps our faith from becoming an ideology–precisely what you eloquently protested against in your first piece.  She reminds us that God is not interested in ideological police work, but in the redemption of the world in a plane suspended between nature and grace, what Henri de Lubac terms le surnaturel. This is no ideology; it is embodied reality. If it is a superiority complex to have such a mother, then so be it. We know, after all, that we are loved and take joy in that love.

The Virgin is also an ‘evangelical.’ She will draw you to that Word that you desire, that Word that you rightly note many of your evangelical friends protect as inerrant but fail to actually read and live. It is a prophetic word, a word that calls us to bear God in us with the Virgin as the church, to confess her fiat: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. Be it done to me according to your Word.

Be it done to me, the Virgin prays. Balthasar taught me this one. He showed me that the Virgin’s prayer has never been about what she would do for the Lord, which is how many read the Word and attempt to live it out in their everyday lives. No, the way that the Virgin contemplates and lives the Word is to reflect on how the grace of the Lord is causing her to bear God into the world. It happens to her. It is thus that she reflects on the mysteries of the shepherds coming to the cave where her son is born, the old man and woman in the temple holding her child with joy, her son in the temple debating with the elders. She ponders these things in her heart as the word that is done to her. In many ways, then, the Word that is her Son is our hermeneutic for the Scriptures, but this meditation on Scripture can only be made real as it in turn becomes our hermeneutic for everyday life.

It is thus the Virgin who shows us how to truly be ‘evangelical.’ If ever there were an evangelical statement not co-opted by that movement styling itself as definitively ‘evangelical’ while defining itself as not Catholic, not ecumenical, not liberal, not neo-orthodox, and not fundamentalist, it is the Magnificat. As feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether reminds us, Mary is not a symbol of virgin church power; she is a figure of liberation for the wronged, the one who magnifies the Lord because the old order of powers and dominions is cast down, the poor are shown mercy, and the hungry are fed. Those who reject Mary because they purport to be ‘evangelicals’ fail to see that she is showing them precisely how to be an evangelical, one who proclaims that in her Son, the time is up, the kingdom of God is at hand, the Gospel is unveiled, God is visiting his people, reconciling them as he redeems the world precisely by drawing us into himself, his life suspended between nature and grace.

The Virgin is an evangelical because the Virgin preaches the Gospel, and she stands beside you. She is still preaching, you know, which means, as a Catholic friend I spoke with a few days ago put it to me, all Catholics should believe in women in ministry (the Holy Orders bit may be debatable, but in ministry? Well, yeah!). Those Marian apparitions that the Catholic Church have approved–there’s no monopoly on them, for this is the point of an apparition; it is a concrete embodiment for the life of the world, contra the very notion of an ideology. The apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego brought the Americas together because by appearing as a little brown girl, the Virgin taught us that racism is of the devil, that skin colour is a stupid way to judge people, that there is neither European nor indigenous in Christ, but all are one, fused together in our collective redemption. The apparition of our Lady of Lourdes to Bernadette Soubirous radically challenged the secularization of the French Revolution, unmasking the powers of the secular as colonial through the voice of a destitute girl saying that she saw the Immaculate Conception without knowing what the Immaculate Conception even was. The apparition of our Lady of Fatima to the three children in Spain was a prophetic word against the destruction wrought by geopolitical ideologies in the twentieth century. The Virgin is an evangelical because the Virgin is a prophet, speaking the Gospel of life into a culture of death so that we all, whether self-identified ‘catholic’ or ‘evangelical’ might hear and live the life of her Son.

This is how it will be, then, regardless of on which side of the Tiber you wind up. We are thus more than merely praying for you to make a good decision. We are praying that you will feel the solidarity of the communion of saints that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of schism and the beautiful gaze of the Blessed Virgin, our mother who stands beside you and me in this hour and who will be your mother whichever side you end up on.

Be blessed.

Chinglican would like to thank one of his evangelical Anglican friends for reading this over for him before posting it.

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And Yet He Has Not Left Himself Without Witness: A Retrospective Look at Catholicism and Evangelicalism with Special Guest Flannery O’Conner

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Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Eucharist, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Protestantism

Yesterday’s post was a cry of pain. I state this, not as an evaluation, but as a description. It is as much a cry of pain as those of Job, or the groans of the Israelites that provoked God to bring about the exodus from Egypt. That it was a cry of pain is certain. What we do with that – and how we interpret it is another thing. So I would like to take a moment to perform a little exegesis on that post and add some clarification.

The two points I was trying to make – and ones I still support – are these:

1) Evangelicals who have been complicit in pastoral neglect in the past have no right to suddenly become the theological police when someone speaks of leaving. There are people who do have a right to speak, and those are the people who have been with one from the beginning and intentionally walked with one a long way. Indeed, I would worry if someone became Catholic without speaking to such people. What annoys me are the people who suddenly become interested when they need to tow a party line they have not explored themselves, and do not bother to familiarize themselves with the person involved or the facts. Indeed, I do even admit it is fair for a latecomer to the conversation to offer input, provided they do so respectfully and with the proper awareness that there is a large part of the story they have not lived through. Indeed, part of why I wrote the post was to help myself understand who I should and should not trust as I discuss these things with people.

2) Staying with the Church in the midst of corruption and believing God is still there often in spite of his ministers is in its strongest form a Catholic doctrine. It may I suppose also be found in some versions of Anglican and Lutheran theology, but of the three the Catholic church has the strongest doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist, and it is this belief that Christ is really (rather than just symbolically) present that suggests faithfulness to the church – we go, so to speak, because it contains the conditions needed to really partake of Christ’s body and blood, not because of good or bad customer service. For instance, imagine I want a real Mars bar. If I am to actually get it, I will have to get something made in the original Mars bar factory. Even if all the staff are rude and the service is terrible there, there is no way around it – I’m sure I could find companies that produce knock-off brands with much better customer service and much better manners – but all my griping about this will not turn a knock off into real Mars bar. This is a somewhat poor comparison because I do not want to denigrate Protestant communion by referring to it as a “knock off” – even in its most symbolic form, it certainly does not deserve to be called that. But I do think the analogy gets at my point. A Catholic theology says there is Something there regardless of the ministers. An Evangelical says the Church is a meaningful body just to the degree that there is a certain level of vibrance, dynamism, etc. If these are wanting, the only conclusion I can come to from an Evangelical perspective is that I should leave and find somewhere where they are not – and I will never find that place because the world and churches are broken. It is not a question of finding a healthy church. It is a question of finding a church that tethers us to Christ in the midst of its unhealthiness. Not that unhealthiness is ever an ideal. But the Catholic I think would say that the beginning of the cure for that unhealthiness lies in Christ’s presence in the church – it comes from outside and into us – whereas for an Evangelical the cure is posturing oneself – emotionally, intellectually, etc. – in a certain way toward Christ and his word. The latter really do want to make their faith their own.

I also want to clarify what I did not mean to say. As Father J wisely clarified in the comment section, it would be imprudent to suggest that one simply become Catholic because the pastoral care in Protestant circles is flagging. Indeed, if this were the reason, it would just make sense to find a Protestant church with better pastoral care – and who in any case can tell if the pastoral situation on the Catholic side is better or worse? No, what I am looking for is a church with a doctrine that suggests radical faithfulness to the Church regardless of one’s experience with it. It is the Church where I may find myself sitting beside Judas and Peter at the Last Supper Table, knowing that I could follow the paths of either of these figures, both of whom denied Christ, but had different ends.

In addition, another thing I did not intend to say (and don’t think I did if one reads the post carefully) is that there were no blessings, or graces, or support in the Evangelical church; God, I am confident, was there. Perhaps not in all the places I was looking for him – particularly not in my inner emotional self so ravaged by sadness and fear – but He was there. I was blessed to be born to a mother with a deep sense of piety and a father with a good deal of heroic endurance, surviving as he was with depression in Evangelical circles. From my mother I have the capacity to feel, and from my father I have the capacity to think. I was blessed to be born into a house jam-packed with books, the books I could turn to when there was no one else, and the seeds of what has become my academic career, tied also very closely to my faith. I was blessed with friends – yes, we were outliers, but we were friends. I was blessed by Bible Quizzing (long story, ask me sometime); the huge chunks of Scripture I memorized through this program are still with me, and the Biblical orientation of the program meant that real Christian friendships could be formed more gently, unlike the more intense Youth Conference deals from which one was expected to go away changed. I was blessed by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the friends who took pains to draw me out of myself; I was blessed to meet my wife there, with whom I have been now for seven good years. The intent of the last post, then, was not to say that nothing was there, but rather that it puts me out of sorts when a good number of people who have not bothered to be supportive suddenly show up and start asking questions when one mentions Catholicism. And maybe in some ways these people are less likely to show up than I expect. I got a surprising amount of encouragement and feedback on the post – sometimes from unexpected sources – and I also have to consider the “amplification factor” of OCD, which I will explain in another post – the part that will take a criticism one heard no matter how long ago and cling to it burr-like so that it is always in my head as fresh as the day it was said, and as menacing.

This of course will leave most people puzzled. If God is in some way in the Evangelical church in spite of problems, why not just stay there? And my answer must be that it can offer no solid reason for staying with a corrupt church, which the church militant will always in some way be. In the face of corruption, it will seek exclusion and perfection (with the illusion that somehow drawing another circle will keep those in that circle from problems) – it is as if one had auditions to decide who could get into a hospital, and those who were healthiest were given precedence while the sick were bumped lower in the line or bumped off entirely (dare I say this sounds like social Darwinism?).

But how can God be both in both the Catholic and Evangelical Church? For an answer to this – and I expect no one to like it – I turn to Flannery O’Conner. O’Conner was in the interesting position of being a Catholic in the southern U. S., which meant she probably saw far more extreme incarnations of Protestant Christianity than I ever have up in the less heated reaches of Canada. And I like her response to these Christians because it was complex. From a certain perspective, one might imagine she was in a perfect place to support her own Catholicism by showing up the sheer lunacy of some of these Protestant extremes. But she doesn’t. In fact, often in her stories it is very strange kinds of Christians – Christians of the sort I am certainly not comfortable with – that are vehicles of grace. For instance, in “Greenleaf,” Mrs. Greenleef collects newspaper clipping of tragedies and crimes, buries them in the dirt, and prays over them in what can only be describe as a charismatic way. She is not the Christian we want her to be. We want the exemplar of Christianity to be sane, reasonable, like (or so we imagine) us. But that is not what we get. I had the pleasure of taking a class on O’Conner in Vancouver, one of the more secular cities of Canada and somewhat correlative to the “north” often criticized by O’Conner. It was extremely interesting watching the students – many of whom had come to this particular theological seminary to escape such “crazy” Christians – squirm at the thought of such an embarrassing person being a conduit of grace. And O’Conner also holds the converse – being Catholic is not a free ticket to assumed superiority. This she shows in “The Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where the main character must learn to be chastened of her pride, much of which consists in her assumption of her “superiority” over uncultured low-church Christians. She critiques where we think we are safe, and sees grace where we can only think of shame.

And this, I suppose, is how I have come to see the Evangelical church. From a Catholic perspective, God works both in and outside the Church. In the Church he largely works through revelation, the synthesis of this revelation (tradition), and participation in the sacraments. Outside he works more generally if less directly and in a less immediately perceivable way through all sorts of things in the world – the theological distinction here would place revealed theology within the Church and natural theology without. What I want to suggest – and it is bound to make some angry – is that Evangelicals exist in a twilight zone between these two theologies. Whatever else it wants to claim, much of what Evangelicals have by way of spirituality, theology etc. is a pared down minimalist version of broader Catholic tradition – Evangelicalism doesn’t have the entirety of the tradition, but there are lots of points Evangelicals and Catholics agree upon – the Catholics are different not so much in overt disagreement, but rather in that they have an extra helping of tradition and the real presence etc. This, as far as I can tell from the Catechism, is perfectly good Catholic doctrine, though I will be happy to accept clarification on that point from someone who knows better what they are talking about.

On the natural theology side lies experience. Evangelicals, I suggest, cannot be such without it – the strange warming of the heart – and it seems to me impossible to have such a thing as a negative theology in Evangelicalism, or at least the modern incarnations I am talking about. We are probably not used to talking about spiritual experience as “natural theology” per se, but strictly speaking I think it fits the definition – theology gotten from things that happen in creation, and this includes spiritual experience because such experience is never disembodied (that is, outside creation).

And this leads me to the way I, via Flannery O’Conner, interpret Evangelicalism. Let us start with natural theology. Nature in some way points to God, but the exact way this works out is often circuitous and confusing – nature is both beautiful and brutal by turns – and the character of God is hardly self evident from nature. So natural theology involves interpreting signs that point to God, but also the recognition that these do not always point to God in any kind of straightforward way.

And it is something similar I would suggest with Evangelicalism, but one step up. If nature points to God, how much more a group of Christians? But, I would argue, this group of Christians does not point to God in exactly the way it supposes. Lacking what must always be the first commentary on Scripture, tradition, the signs they produce are often broken, angular, and hard to read. But, as Flannery O’Conner suggests, these signs are nonetheless still signs, no matter how twisted. They may not be perfect, and in many cases may be something we will not want to emulate at all, but we have a strange God who will speak by strange means, through the mouth of an ass if need be. And so, much as I am uncomfortable with the undisciplined and emotive character of Evangelicalism, I cannot deny God’s grace in it. He has, after all done stranger things, not the least of which is stooping down to earth to visit someone like me.

No, You Cannot Fence the Table with Orientalism

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Asia-Pacific, Asian American, Asian American theology, capitalism, Douglas Wilson, Edward Said, feminist theology, Foucault, geopolitics, heterotopia, mystical theology, oriental monk, orientalism, postcolonial theology, Rachel Held Evans, Reformed

This morning, Reformed pastor Doug Wilson posted a response to a question from a friend about a recent tweet by Rachel Held Evans about how she would take communion with John Piper in a heartbeat. See for yourself:

I would break the bread of communion with @johnpiper in a heartbeat. We disagree, but he is my brother, and always will be.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) May 27, 2013

Wilson’s interlocutor didn’t have the same ontological understanding of communion as Evans, though. His query to Wilson apparently focused on how because Evans taught feminist ideas both on her blog and in her new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she should be excluded from the communion table. To pull a Catholic parallel case, this was like taking Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s statements in The Ratzinger Report about ‘radical feminism’ being a ‘different religion’ from Christianity to its logical conclusion. Indeed, this is no mere parallel with Bishop Allen Vigneron’s comments that Catholics should abstain from communion if they believe that abortion and gender-neutral marriage should be legal. No, Wilson’s interlocutor goes for the jugular, pressing him to articulate a theology of excommunication on the basis that Evans taught feminist ideas and was thus a false teacher.

Characteristically, Wilson’s classically informed Reformed theology leads to a thoughtful response, though one that in fact justifies schism instead of leading to its healing. Abstracting the question from Rachel Held Evans, Wilson holds forth more generally on excommunication. Wilson argues that there are two parts to this question. The first is: who is doing the disciplining? Were it an official ecclesial excommunication, then Wilson says that the church should withhold communion from the offender, but if it is simply Diotrephes from 3 John shouting down competition, the claim to discipline should be ignored. This leads to a second issue: the state of schism in the church, in which withholding communion from someone from another Christian branch of communion can be justified as disciplining that entire branch. If feminism were such a communion branch (to my knowledge, it is not), then one might have to start weighing whether ideological non-adherence is justification for church discipline.

The complications that arise from this thought process leads Wilson to wax orientalist. Calling these practices of withholding communion from anyone who does not subscribe exactly to one’s beliefs as the making of a practical ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ Wilson goes on to delineate the interweaving of ‘grace’ and ‘discipline.’ Acknowledging that his readers might find his explanation arcane, he jokingly apologizes that he may have ‘veered into some kind of Zen Presbyterianism here,’ and clarifies the ultimate point of this backhanded swipe at Evans: Wilson would not excommunicate Evans, but would intentionally show her grace in order to deliver her from her feminism.

While I take issue with this flippant characterization of feminism as a unitary movement (it is not, and thus, I’d argue that you can’t brand the whole thing as ‘false teaching,’ but of course, he might come back at me with how Gnosticism was a complex movement, and we’d go on and on and on), there will be bloggers joining A Christian Thing in the not-too-distant future who will be addressing the question of feminist theologies and will be more competent to speak on this than me. So I shan’t.

Instead, as I’ve taken others to task for their orientalizing statements, I’d like to take Wilson to task for his flippant usage of orientalist terms. By ‘taking Wilson to task,’ however, I’m afraid that I’ll have to provide a bit of a prolegomena. You see, I suspect that Wilson–as well as many Euro-American Christians of a variety of theological persuasions, Protestant or Catholic–may be intellectually allergic to the critique of ‘white (male) privilege’ that I am about to perform. This, after all, may lie behind why some, likely including Wilson, are allergic to feminist theologies; after all, they might reason, it’s just a bunch of women unaware of their own will to power trying to shout down an invented bogeyman called ‘white male privilege’ to be able to join the institutional ranks and redefine entire organizations with their own pet agendas. In turn, these people who imagine themselves to be victimized should be subjected to ridicule–not exactly exclusion, mind you–but enough teasing to show that they do not have a sense of humour and that this lack of joy can be attributed to them wanting power. The same may go for African American, Chicano American, and Asian American theologies, in which ‘women’ might be substituted with ‘racialized minorities’ who allegedly talk a grand talk about liberation, desegregating the church, diversifying seminary faculty, and discovering indigenous ways of doing theology. Because of this, the logic may go, these people are always on high alert for the racist remarks of white privileged men, failing to see that the occasional remark about ‘race’ is just an off-hand funny remark that maybe they could have done without if they weren’t writing off-the-cuff on a blog or speaking extemporaneously in a sermon, but that is really just harmless and funny. The joke’s on the racialized minorities, then, for being offended at everything and looking for things at which to get offended. They should instead (the reasoning might go) get off welfare and get a job.

I’d like to assure Wilson from the outset of this critique, then, that I was not looking to be offended (nor, I might note, do most feminist, postcolonial, and racialized minority scholars actually go looking to be offended). In fact, I hope that my comments will have some substantive value for his discussion of communion and excommunication, and indeed, I’d like to propose to Wilson that feminist, post-colonial, and minority theologies have an awful lot to contribute to the ongoing work of making the Body of Christ one, even as the Father and the Son are one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. Finally, I’d like to note that if you title your post ‘Some Kind of Zen Presbyterianism’ (emphasis mine), regardless of how much orientalist substance your post actually has (there are after all, only two, if we were to really exegete it), then you are asking for a response of this kind.

Indeed, following the advice of feminist theorist Saba Mahmood to not (as St. Paul would have it) despise all statements wrought by white male privilege but to examine fully ‘the force that a discourse commands,’ let me begin by congratulating Wilson on what must feel like a significant departure from the usual fare of classical Western education and his devotion to a unitary Eurocentric canon in his educational advocacy. In fact, this departure is quite courageous because he picks up on a post-structural tactic at the end of the piece described by Michel Foucault as ‘the heterotopia,’ that is, if you want to know what the norms are in any given place, interface it with a radically different space that can act as a mirror, and ‘the order of things’ in any given site will be clearly revealed. That heterotopia, you might say, is the geopolitical alignment of the contemporary Asia-Pacific region: churches that only take communion with people who believe exactly as they do are like an ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ which in contrast makes all the churches conducted by grace non-isolationist and thus connected to the global capitalist political economy like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and (to some extent) post-reform China. While these strict ideologically-driven churches are like North Korea, in other words, the rest of us in the evangelical world are more or less like the other capitalist Asia-Pacific regimes. I leave it up to your imagination to figure out who’s who on this geopolitical map.

However, to describe the state of theological malaise in this Asia-Pacific geopolitical map that stands in for the fragmentation of American evangelicalism, those interested in fine theological distinctions (as Wilson presumably is) have wandered into a sort of ‘Zen Presbyterianism,’ that is, if you are a Presbyterian (as a proud Chinglican, perhaps I might be configured as a ‘Zen Anglican’). As Jane Iwamura puts it in her startlingly incisive book Virtual Orientalism, Wilson is invoking the figure of the ‘oriental monk,’ a wandering contemplative sage who says wise things about nature and social relations that simultaneously confronts the excesses of Western capitalism while being lodged in capitalist processes as the monk has to be marketed to people as the new, hip thing in which to be interested. This is, after all, #2 on the list of Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like: ‘religions their parents don’t belong to.’ Appropriating the identity of the oriental monk for careful theological thinkers like himself, Wilson wants to tell us two things. Following the East Asian capitalist geopolitics playbook, he’d like to tell us that like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, parts of Indonesia, and parts of China, the evangelical world has capitulated to the shallowing influence of capitalism, at times deploying, as anthropologist Aihwa Ong notes, ‘Asian values’ (or in the evangelical world, ‘Christian values’) as bumper-sticker justifications for capitalist lifestyles and flexible families. Not so Wilson, though: keeping to the ancient traditions, Wilson the oriental sage is still interested in fine theological intricacies where true wisdom is to be sought. That’s where he flips the primacy of discipline over grace to grace over discipline, arguing that if that’s the case, he and Rachel Held Evans (my goodness, a feminist) could still take communion. This grace is profound, mysterious, almost impenetrable, almost like Zen.

As Edward Said noted long ago in his classic Orientalism, the space of the ‘Orient’ has long served as a heterotopic space to the occident (here, Said also thanks Foucault for the insight, though he then follows to take issue with Foucault’s anti-humanism), which in turn suggests that my earlier congratulations to Wilson might need to be qualified. After all, perhaps Wilson is simply doing what his Western canon would tell him to do, that is, when stuff gets difficult to explain, use a heterotopia, and all will become clear. The most convenient heterotopic space is the Orient, and Wilson deploys it skillfully.

Now, of course, all this is not so much offensive as much as it ultimately undermines Wilson’s case for communion where grace takes primacy over discipline. Here, Foucault might actually be more right than Said: these orientalist off-hand remarks don’t originate from Wilson, but are part of a longer epistemic movement within what can be called ‘Western Christianity.’ In two church history classes I’ve taken (I suspect this might be a common experience), for example, we were taught that arcane figures like Pseudo-Dionysius with his ‘Mystical Theology’ and via negativa were uniquely products of the ‘East’ and that the controversies between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church over the filioque clause, the primacy of Rome, and the value of negative theology were ‘cultural’ as the ‘East’ went more contemplative and the ‘West’ went more propositional. In his devastating critique of this sort of logic, J. Kameron Carter retorts that this goes all the way back to the earliest times of distinguishing Jesus from the Jews so that ‘Jesus’ became ‘Occidental’ while the ‘Jews’ became ‘oriental’ or ‘semitic,’ forcing a wedge between Christianity and the East from the get-go. The framing of Eastern Orthodoxy as ‘Eastern’ in turn is a justification of schism precisely on the grounds that the ‘East’ is heterotopic to Western Christianity.

These problems haven’t gone away in the contemporary period. Jesuit theologian Peter Phan, for example, was investigated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because it was alleged that he taught an ‘Asian negative theology’ contrary to the received teachings of the Church. This investigation’s orientalist claims still have yet to be decisively addressed by Asian American theologians who should be appalled that ‘Asian’ and ‘negative theology’ were unproblematically lumped together by Phan’s ‘occidental’ accusers, chief of whom has been the Archbishop of Baltimore, William Lori, whose Fortnight for Freedom deserves to be examined side-by-side to his inquisitorial stance toward Phan’s work. Or take another recent example in the evangelical world: the Deadly Vipers Case, a situation that surrounded a blog-based book published by Zondervan that framed sins as ‘deadly vipers’ to be attacked by the mixed-marital arts of the mortification of sin. Evangelical pastor Eugene Cho successfully launched a campaign to oppose the book’s continuation on the shelves of Christian bookstores, clarifying that this was not a vendetta against its authors, but that framing Asian Americans as the sinful ‘other’ would exacerbate racialized tensions in evangelical churches. So too, the discussion within Asian American evangelical circles around loving one’s parents without dishonouring Jesus continues to frame the conversation around orientalizing one’s Asian parents while occidentalizing the Christian faith, a premise that Baylor theologian Jonathan Tran pointed out is ultimately untenable if Asian American Christianity is to develop its own catholic expression of the faith.

In other words, Doug Wilson is not alone in using these orientalist frameworks to frame his argument; it is instead a problem that plagues much of Euro-American Christianity even within Asian American Christian circles, and its roots lie far back in the history of the church. The question one may pose, then, is this: is labeling ‘Asia,’ the ‘Orient,’ or whatever ‘other’ you might have to Western Christianity as a heterotopic space ultimately helpful for Christian communion?

My answer is no. And this, if those in positions like Doug Wilson’s have ears to hear, might be the way forward in answering the schisms that have plagued our churches. Instead of hearing the complaints of women, post-colonial peoples, and racialized minorities as emanating from a will to power and born of an unsanctified lust for immanent liberation, perhaps our cries for justice are in fact cries for communion, complaints that this table where the sacraments impart the grace of God to us remains a space of division and exclusion. If Wilson is reading this, the answer following the reading of this post is not to debate internally whether you owe Asian Americans an apology for colonizing our space to make your point, though if you were to issue this apology, we’d be happy to hear it. The proper response, however, is to critically and contemplatively reflect on our shared Christian tradition, to examine if this thread of orientalization actually has any proper place in our discourse, and to begin the long overdue process of healing schism, that the world may know the Father has sent the Son.

**Correction: an earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Wilson was a ‘homeschooling advocate.’ This error has been corrected to ‘educational advocate,’ as Wilson’s primary task has been to advocate for classical Western education in a school setting. We are grateful to our careful readers for pointing this out.

An Open Letter to the Evangelical Church: Where the Hell Were You?

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Bible, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Trinity

For a good long time now I have been very attracted to and defensive of Catholicism.  Certain things recently have made this attraction more pressing, and something I need to figure out now rather than at some point in the distant future. And usually when I bring this up with some of my Evangelical friends, they are uncomfortable – usually the strategy is to point to some superficial, cherry-picked proof text that allegedly tells against Catholicism, and to tell me that I am becoming un-Biblical or something and that I need to be careful. That there are scandals in the Catholic church, which are inherent in the Church and not incidental, as apparently is the case in Evangelical scandals. In fact, as someone who grew up in Evangelicalism, I don’t even need someone around to tell me these things; my brain is so trained that these responses pop up all by themselves. Here is my response, but I want to begin with a clarification. As I write this I do not have a specific person in mind, and I will also add that not all the Evangelicals I know and knew are like this (though incidentally usually those who are not seem to be outliers in their churches). But I do want to respond to this voice, and my response can be summed up as follows: You who care – who suddenly care so much about my faith – where the hell were you? Where were you, when I was spiritually thirsty and you did not give me a drink, when instead I got a shiny powerpoint presentation? Where were you during the times of doubt and fear, depression and OCD, when I was forced to dig – deep into Christian tradition – to find those parts of the communion of Saints that actually spoke to my condition? Where were you when my world was shattered, multiple times? Where were you when I was the odd person on the edge – the person who didn’t and still doesn’t fit in – and you had the advantage of being normal? If it matters so much now to you – that I stay – where were you when it counted?

And do not, for a moment, think of answering with something emergent or hipster or some such bilge. As far as I am concerned, this is just Evangelicalism 2.0, yet another attempt to be culturally sensitive, that is, to absorb and overlook the most destructive elements of a culture of death just because you want to be relevant. When we were children, we wounded with the sword of modernity. Now that we have become adults we have put away childish things and taken up the more sophisticated passive aggressive sword of postmodernity, or whatever it is we are in right now. No, I do not want to attend your church with some cool and sensitive symbolic name. And yes, I do suggest your ecclesial structure is as unstable as the shifting movement of history. And no, I don’t care what you think “modern people” (whoever they are) need. I need love. I need Christ. And you think I want a trinket wrapped in the gaudy disguise of ostensible sincerity.

Of course, others will say all this is not at all the issue. Surely one should hold to the truth regardless of one’s experience. So, these will say, you have had a bad experience with the Evangelical church. So what. Christ and Christianity are not synonymous with the church. Maybe you should just stay the course regardless – suffer through it for the sake of truth. But what truth, and how do I know it is truth? The things that Evangelicals think are so self-evident Biblically are in fact not (show me how we get the doctrine of the Trinity without tradition and I will be happy to listen to you). Just reading through the Bible will not make me an Evangelical – it will not even necessarily make me a Christian. Because the Bible is received through the church. What you are telling me is that I should, despite bad experiences, stick with the Bible as understood by the Evangelical church out of a sense of loyalty to truth in spite of difficulty. And if you protest that yours is simply a plain reading – not informed by and dependent on the Evangelical church – I will be happy to point out all the cultural and other factors that have slanted your “plain reading.” There are many heretics who were “just plain readers” of Scripture. So you are faced with a choice: are you asking me to stay true to a Biblical faith unmediated through a certain Christian community? Or are you asking me to trust the Evangelical community? If the former, I would suggest that such a Bible does not exist (given that individual interpretation itself is shaped by the community that it is part of) – if you think you are just reading the Bible plainly, on your own, you are manifestly unaware of the structural and ideological forces that have shaped you. Not (I think) that being so shaped is necessarily a bad thing – but it does make things a matter of which communities one trusts rather than a matter of looking under a rock and finding God one day.

And this is where my problem is. I cannot trust Evangelicalism, with its suggestion that somehow, in spite of the fact that most Medieval writers had the Bible at the tip of their tongue in a way that no one does today, they went wrong whereas we in our modern laziness and stupidity have somehow got it right via “progress.” Evangelicals protest – what about the Bible, won’t it get lost in tradition? I would reply that the Bible is precisely the reason I question Evangelicalism. I question it because the Bible, a book that ought to be read as God’s word, has become a pawn of modern relevance. And those who become reactionary – the “it isn’t popular but God’s word says it” kind of people – are usually just the same people in a converse dress. Their agenda for the Bible is set by a reactionary knee jerk reaction to the relevant “liberals.” Far from being a simple confrontation of corrupt modern culture with God’s word, theirs is the dissolution of the Bible in a simplistic and modern worldly polemic. And so, no, I’m not sure that I would stick with this community in spite of bad experiences – because often there is not even a Bible at the heart of it to keep me there.

As far as I am concerned, the ecclesiology I have found that actually supports sticking with a Church – amidst and despite its sins and scandals – is a Catholic ecclesiology, because it insists that Christ’s church inheres in its material manifestation beyond some vague ethereal thing that disappears every time you try to grasp it. It insists that there is something in the very material fabric of the Church herself that justifies sticking with her over against any of the pain-sparing merits of disembodied spirituality. And I have come to see that being part of a church will mean being faithful to something because God is there rather than because I feel a certain way about it or have a certain experience with it. And unless you can convince me that at the heart of Evangelicalism there is something worth trusting, all the picky little trick questions and idle challenges you can throw at me won’t do a thing. Even a single tear or a gesture toward recognizing my pain might do miraculously more, though it may be too late for that. You – who care so much, so concerned about protecting a Bible you don’t actually read, a Bible you appropriate for you own purposes – where was your concern when I was in pain? Where the hell were you?

Cædmon and the Christian Poet: A Reflection Between the Feast Days of the Venerable Bede and St. Augustine of Canterbury

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Anglican, Arts, Bede, Caedmon, Catholic, Christian, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetry, protest, secular

Cædmon and the Christian Poet: A Reflection Between the Feast Days of the Venerable Bede and St. Augustine of Canterbury.

The Curses of Trinity Sunday

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Anglican, Athanasian Creed, Augustine, Catholic, Lutheran, marriage, Ordinary Time, psychology, sacrament, saeculum, secular, trinitarian, Trinity, Trinity Sunday, Watchman Nee

You could say that Trinity Sunday is a day of curses. Traditionally, after all, it is the day to say the Athanasian Creed, the Quicunque vult, as it’s known in some circles. Here it is in its full English translation, as it is in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (as in the Episcopal Church’s prayerbook), with all of its anathemas unadulterated:

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.

Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.

For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.

The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate.

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.

The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.

As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.

So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty.

And yet they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.

So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God.

And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord.

And yet not three Lords, but one Lord.

For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be both God and Lord,

So are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion, to say, There be three Gods, or three Lords.

The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten.

The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten.

The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.

And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other; none is greater, or less than another;

But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.

So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.

He therefore that will be saved must think thus of the Trinity.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;

God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;

Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;

Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.

Who, although he be God and Man, yet he is not two, but one Christ;

One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of the Manhood into God;

One altogether; not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of Person.

For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and Man is one Christ;

Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead.

He ascended into heaven, he sitteth at the right hand of the Father, God Almighty, from whence he will come to judge the quick and the dead.

At whose coming all men will rise again with their bodies and shall give account for their own works.

And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.

This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.

This is pretty stern stuff. On first glance, you might say that it sounds extremely exclusionary, so exclusive that one wonders what it’s also doing on the inclusive Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s website.

But saying the Quincuque vult on Trinity Sunday makes me think about this: what happens if we misuse the doctrine of the Triune God?

After all, the Athanasian Creed keeps pretty close to how we got a Triune God in the first place. The point is, after all, that Jesus was identified with God by the earliest of early churches, that Jesus prayed to a Father who was also God, and that Jesus and the apostles spoke of a Holy Spirit whose identity as the Paraclete was spoken of as a person. You see this at the end of the Athanasian Creed, where after you get all sorts of mysterious affirmations and anathemas about what the nature of personhood in the Trinity is, you get a treatment also of Jesus’ hypostatic union as fully God and fully human.

So far, so good.

But like all doctrines that have developed in the church, you could say that the Trinity, when used badly, is a curse on the church. This is an especially important point on Trinity Sunday, the Sunday that opens to us the weeks of Ordinary Time leading to Advent. During Ordinary Time, we live our lives as a spiritual exercise of living life in what’s classically known as the saeculum, the ‘secular’ time where we conduct lives in the midst of the world.

To live in that time, we are often given models of how to live, some of which purport to model our lives after the triune nature of God. While Augustine’s De Trinitate has an amazing treatment of the psychological triunity of humans as the image of God, there are some that are particularly unhelpful, such as Watchman Nee’s tripartite division of the self into body, soul, and spirit, after which he condemns the body and the soul so as to only focus on the spirit, purging ourselves of fleshly desires. Suppose one followed Nee during ordinary time, hating one’s body and ‘soulish’ ambitions to life, always examining ourselves to beat ourselves into more humility while detaching ourselves from attachment to the world in the effort to make ourselves more holy. Apart from the fact that we might literally go crazy, this morbid understanding of Christian life doesn’t sound entirely right in light of the incarnate reality that is Christianity. Or take also marriage and the thoroughly unhelpful analogy of the triangle that substitutes husband for ‘Son’ and wife for ‘Holy Spirit’ and alleges that as we walk closer to God, we get closer to one another. In an act of subordinationism, this model can also be used to subordinate the wife to the husband and thus justify all manners of sexism. While this trinitarian analogy sounds very pious, it negates the whole point of marriage as a sacrament, that in our marital interactions, we as spouses mediate graces to each other. It’s as if by focusing on an unmediated God to the exclusion of each other, somehow, we’ll grow mystically closer to one another. I don’t know about your spouse, but I don’t think my wife would like that very much.

However, even as I call foul on these examples (I’m sure there are many more), the fact that we have an Athanasian Creed might mean that I find myself on dangerous ground and hot water. It could be said that if I think these models of life don’t have to be normative Christian models because they are theologically unsound, then I have denied a Trinitarian pattern for our lives.

But here, I suggest, is where the Athanasian Creed helps us. The Quincuque vult does not give us a trinitarian model of life. It articulates the mystery of the Trinity in light of the Son’s hypostatic union. That’s all it does, neither affirming the unhelpful models that I’ve presented nor denying some helpful trinitarian models that might be floating around out there.

So next time someone gives us a Trinitarian model of life that we can import into the saeculum, perhaps we should ask some critical questions. Perhaps we could ask if what is presented to us has anything to do with the self-giving obedience of the Son to the Father. Perhaps we could ask if what we’re being asked to follow draws us into participation in the mysterious hypostatic divine-human nature of Christ. Perhaps we could ask whether we are being asked to contemplate more fully the mystery that we worship a God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ as three in one and one in three, a God whose three persons reaches out to us and draws us into his eternal life.

For if we follow these models of life purportedly modeled on the Trinity but miss the Son, we are cursed indeed. After all, by doing so, we have secularized the Trinity, co-opted the Triune God to justify our models of life instead of opening ourselves, as Gregory of Nyssa puts it, to the work of the Father who sends the Son and the Spirit to draw us to participate in his divine nature. That would be, after all, the summation of the curses of Trinity Sunday, to deny the ‘catholic faith’ by inventing our own god and shunning the catholicity of life given to us by God through the Son, who is the exegesis of the Father.

On this Trinity Sunday, then, we remember that we have not merely been given a model of life to follow as we live life in the saeculum. No, we have been given God himself.

Our Silence on Oklahoma

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Anglican, Christian, Episcopal, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Piper, Life Church, neo-Reformed, Oklahoma, Pope Francis, prayer, Rachel Held Evans, response, social media, solidarity, tornado, United Methodist, World Evangelical Alliance

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 Church and 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.

Thanking my Pentecostal teachers

Tags

Aimee Semple McPherson, Anglican, Assemblies of God, Azusa Street, C. Peter Wagner, charismatic, Chuck Smith, contemporary Christian music, Dallas Theological Seminary, dispensationalism, ecstasy, Episcopal, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, glossalalia, Henri de Lubac, hierarchy, holy laughter, Holy Spirit, Jesus People, John Wimber, King James Version, Lonnie Frisbee, Maranatha Music, original unity, Pentecost, Pentecostal, Pentecostal theology, power, redemption, schism, Shiloh Church, Toronto Blessing, Vineyard, Violet Kiteley

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 Systematic Theology, 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.

On Suicide, Part 1: A Response to Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Illness and Health

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Christ, Christian, Christianity, church, Epistle to the Romans, Faith, God, Jesus, Mental health, mental illness, Paul, suicide

Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Health

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.

No, It Is Not Self-Referential

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Anglican, Archbishop of Canterbury, Benedict XVI, Canterbury, Caritas in Veritate, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, catholiclity, communion, critique, ecumenism, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Friedrich Schonborn, Humanae Vitae, John XXIII, Judaica, Judith Butler, Justin Welby, labour rights, Leo XIII, love, Mater et Magistra, neo-evangelical, ontology, Paul VI, Pius XI, Pope Francis, Prophetic Critique, Quadrogesimo Anno, Rachel Helds Evans, Rerum novarum, socialism, Tim Challies, witness

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.