On ‘Taking Unpopular Positions’

Tags

Christian, collegiality, communion, complementarian, egalitarian, homosexuality, Karl Barth, logic, mystical theology, philosophy, popular, Pseudo-Dionysius, sexuality, Theology, thing, unpopular

I am taking another break from my Anglicanism posts. I can assure you that parts 4, 5, and 6 are all slowly forthcoming. Now that I’ve deconstructed Anglicanism in parts 1, 2, and 3, I’m sure that many readers are wondering what the hell I’m still doing styling myself as an Anglican. I have reasons, I can assure you, almost as good as the reasons that Albus Dumbledore consistently hides from Harry Potter throughout the series.

But with the recent rulings by the Supreme Court on gender-neutral marriage (here’s Windsor and here’s Perry), I am frankly annoyed by the way that the conservative arguments against gender-neutral marriage have been framed. In fact, I am also annoyed by the progressive side of things, but that’s another discussion. But to make my point clear, watch this interview that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer conducts with the Alliance Defense Fund’s Austin Nimocks. Sure, Nimocks gives some (deeply flawed) reasons as to why Proposition 8 is still the law of the land. But basically, his position is: my position is less popular than David Boies’s. So I’m probably right.

Here’s how the argument is framed: we (presumably evangelicals) are taking an ‘unpopular position’ and so we are being vilified.

That’s almost like saying: what makes a position right is that it is unpopular.

Um, no. No, no, no.

But I’d like to point out that this sort of ‘unpopular’ framing is oddly popular in my anecdotal experience with many evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic Protestants, whatever political or theological position they hold on the left or the right of the spectrum. It’s almost because something is unpopular that we hold to that view. And this is ironic, precisely because the same evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics with whom I have interacted will say that truth is not a popularity contest. Because truth is not up to the will of the people–instead, it is objective–then it is often said that truth is about holding tight to a position known to be timelessly true.

And then always comes the punchline: I know that I am arguing for the unpopular position, so I will be persecuted.

Hm. Are we so sure that truth is not about a popularity contest when we say that? It seems like it still might be. It’s just that while everyone else might go for the ‘popular’ position when the contest is over, you’re going for the ‘unpopular’ position.

Note, then, that this ‘unpopular’ position logic is what works its way into so many glib evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic statements about truth. Most of these statements are pretty contradictory. Check this out:

Person A might say: I believe that homosexuality is a sin. I realize that that is an unpopular position to take, and I am wiling to face persecution for that. Of course, as I’m reading my Facebook news feed, I then see right underneath Person A the statement of Person B: I do not believe that homosexuality is a sin. I realize that that is an unpopular position to take, and I am willing to face persecution for that. (Of course, what’s really annoying about Person A and Person B is that they actually have a position on ‘homosexuality.’ What exactly are you taking a position on? On whether ‘homosexuals’ actually have a different sexual orientation? On how sexual orientation is constructed? On how modern sexuality owes a lot of debts to medical discourses circulating in the late nineteenth-century? On whether the disruptions to identity proposed by queer theory are a good thing? On what the Catholic Church’s ‘objective disorder’ language means? On whether they should be discriminated against in the workplace? On whether they should be allowed hospital visitation for their partners? On whether they should have to pay estate taxes if one partner dies? On whether they can get married? On whether they can adopt kids? Hm. Kinda complicated to have a ‘blanket position,’ no?)

Heh. But let’s move away from sexuality. I’d like to propose that this sort of diseased ‘unpopular position’ logic works its way throughout every evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic debate under the sun.

OK, let’s go to the neo-Reformed debate. Neo-Calvinist says: In today’s evangelical culture, Calvinism is not a popular position among the seeker-sensitive, emergent, and evangelical feminist stuff out there. I realize that my Calvinism is an unpopular position to take, and I am willing to face persecution for that. And then, coming right back at the neo-Calvinist is: In today’s evangelical culture that is totally saturated by the Gospel Coalition and all the cool neo-Reformed guys with so much certainty, my delight in mystery, my evangelical feminism, and my attempts to make the Gospel as relevant to seekers is an unpopular position to take, and I am willing to face persecution for that.

Ditto women’s ordination. Complementarian says: In today’s feminist culture, my belief that men and women have complementary roles where men are the leaders and women are the helpers is not a popular position to take, and I am willing to face persecution for that. Egalitarian comes back and says: In today’s ridiculously patriarchal and sexist culture, especially in the church, I support women’s ordination because men and women are created equally in the image of God and have the same gifts. I realize that that’s an unpopular position, and I am willing to face persecution for that.

Ditto parents trying to control youth groups more tightly because they oppose the youth pastor. Parents say: In today’s culture of disrespect, we want to have more control over our kids than the youth pastor, and I realize that that’s an unpopular position to take, and I am willing to face persecution for that. Youth pastor comes back: In today’s complete cultural disregard for the church, we need to have more tight-knit relations among youth in the church, and I realize that that will be unpopular with our parents, and I am willing to face persecution for that.

WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS GOING ON???

It’s like, if you invoke the ‘I am holding an unpopular position, so I am going to be persecuted’ card, then that’s what’s going to take the cake.

I refuse to believe that this is how our conversation, collegiality, and communion as evangelical, charismatic, fundamentalist, progressive, liberal, catholic, and orthodox Christians has to work. If there is any point of diseased thinking in our churches that needs to be ruthlessly refuted, it is likely this piece of logic.

If this is how all of us do theology now, it can be fair to say that we are all failures as theologians. (Heh. In today’s anti-intellectual climate, I realize that using the word ‘theology’ is unpopular, and I am willing to face persecution for it. GAH.)

So let me give two suggestions. First, why don’t we stop this ‘unpopular position’ logic, and actually do theology as Christians? This would mean listening to someone like Karl Barth when he says that it’s simply inappropriate for dogmatic theologians to have theological ‘positions,’ as if that’s what theology is about. It is not. Christian theology happens to be about Jesus Christ who reveals God in the form of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Here’s an idea: why don’t we start there when we do theology? After all, that’s the way out of most of these ‘unpopular position’ loops. If we really do claim to believe in an objective reality as Christians, it’s not that what makes something objectively true is its unpopularity. It’s its relation to what Christ has revealed about the Father.

Second, if we really want a negative theology, maybe we should actually read some mystics. Check out Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology some time. It’s a lot of this negative theology–God is not this, not that–but he’s not doing it because he’s trying to find the most unpopular position possible and hold to that. Pseudo-Dionysius wants to raise us to the highest point of union with the Triune God, stripping us of our projections and wrapping us into the objective reality who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This, by the way, is why you’ll never find that we on A Christian Thing take ‘popular’ or ‘unpopular’ positions. It’s because if that’s the way that we do theology, then we will have betrayed our very existence as Christians, which means that it would be illegitimate for us to say that we have a Christian thing. We are Christians, and frankly, we couldn’t care less how popular that is. For all we know, it might be more popular than we’d like to think.

Advertisements

No, Ideological Sermons Are Not OK

Tags

Anglican, Bible, Catholic, church, church-state relations, communion, Evangelical, free church, homiletics, ideology, preaching, Psalm, Sam Tsang, sermon

Taking yet another break from the Anglicanism posts (I trust that Churl has received a somewhat adequate answer in part 3), I’d like to write some reflections on a sermon that I heard at a free church last Sunday. I don’t have any interest in attacking either the church or the preacher, so I will keep both vaguely anonymous and instead critique the individual sermon as it stands on its own. Because I’m starting to feel a growing conviction that silence in the face of hearing these sorts of things is a form of implicit assent from a passive congregation, I’d like to speak with a critical tone. My aim (once again) is not to attack the church or the preacher, but rather to say that the church would have been better served if the preacher had not preached what I’ll be calling in this post an ideological sermon, that is, a sermon that uses the text as a vehicle to push an abstract political agenda. Because this church employs a congregational polity, I’d like to state for the record that I am not a voting member of this congregation and thus my statements are not representative of the congregation; they should be read, in many ways, as those given by a sympathetic outsider. However, as a baptized member of the church catholic, I’d like to appeal to our greater solidarity in the communion of saints as I voice my critique.

To demonstrate my complete solidarity with this free church despite my sacramental status as a confirmed Anglican layperson (which I’ll discuss more in part 4), I’d like to first express my deep thankfulness for the work of this congregation’s second-generation English-speaking ministry pastor. Not only is he one of my longtime friends, but he is an incredibly thoughtful evangelical working within a free church tradition with young people and their parents, skillfully navigating the tricky political waters that often come with that terrain. While I sometimes disagree with his exegesis of biblical texts (he often waxes a bit too individualistic for my liking), his careful engagements with pastoral care in the congregation and his sincere efforts to engage the neighbourhood around him with more than simply token words of appreciation are simply inspiring. It is fascinating and joyfully exciting to watch the growth of his pastoral work, as well as the work of the people who compose that church in their music, hospitality, and theological reflection, and as a Chinglican, I am glad to attend their services on a semi-monthly basis. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and my hope is that even as we speak of ecumenical reconciliation movements between Anglicans and Lutherans with the Roman Catholic Church, we might also someday be able to talk more deeply about the reconciliation of the free church with communions that are increasingly recognizing the wrongheadedness of their embeddedness with the state. In this, I am also expressing my sincere gratitude to free churches as a whole for their witness against the church’s entanglement with the state, and I am hopeful that we will all one day be fully reconciled in Christ.

It’s in that context that I’d like to express my utter dismay at the sermon last week, a homiletical piece that was delivered neither by my friend nor by anyone who grew up at the church, but by an older white man in a prominent position at a local evangelical institution here in the Pacific Northwest.

Let me first unfold the piece as I heard it. I will follow my summary with a critique.

The sermon was purportedly an exposition of the first psalm in the Psalter. As the preacher ran out of time, his focus was on the first three verses, which I’ve reproduced here in the New International Version, which he was using:

¹ Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
² but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
³ That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.

The sermon was itself a spirited critique of compartmentalization, the notion that one’s faith should be kept in certain spaces but should not exert any influence on the secular parts of one’s life, including one’s schooling, employment, or romantic relationships. The danger of compartmentalization, the preacher continued, was that it allowed evangelicals to be defined by the culture surrounding them, particularly through the media (and especially, as he was quick to point out in this second-generation Chinese Christian congregation, by video games). As a result, he argued that evangelical faith’s influence in the culture was slowly waning, that marriage rates were dropping, and that evangelicals themselves did not know right from wrong, which was apparently visible in their voting patterns, as they would often vote in favour of sexual liberalization. The preacher’s diagnosis came courtesy of the psalmist: evangelicals have stepped too long with the wicked, stood too long in the way of sinners, and sat too long in the company of mockers, often to the point at scoffing at the values in their own faith. (He then added, ‘If you are rolling your eyes at me right now, then you’re probably sitting with the scoffers too.’ He said that exactly as I was rolling my eyes.)

He then proposed two solutions to this evangelical erosion. First, he noted that in contrast to the acts of stepping with the wicked, standing with sinners, and sitting with mockers, it was important for evangelicals to spend much more time with fellow evangelicals who shared their faith values and could ask those going astray from these values how their thinking worldviews were consistent with evangelical faith. However, he quickly noted (and this was his second point) that the psalmist proposes a much more radical solution: it is to be rooted in the ‘law of the Lord,’ that is, the Word of God as revealed in the literal Scriptures, and to meditate on it day and night. In other words, while community is nice, the preacher argued that it was incumbent on individual evangelicals themselves to read the Bible, to meditate on it day and night, and then to be individual trees planted by streams of water, yielding their individual fruit in season, keeping their individual leaves from withering who prosper individually in all that they do. In short, God calls individual evangelicals to forsake the crutch of social relations and to apply his word literally in all situations in an individualistic way. Calling for solidarity among all evangelicals (and especially free churches) around this individual reading of the Bible, the preacher ended with an attempt to forge this reading of Psalm 1 as the central identity piece that defined who evangelicals were and how they should engage the world.

It’s like this preacher was just asking for a critique from the church catholic. I’m happy to give it to him.

Let me emphasize first that while this theology certainly floats around in this free church, it certainly isn’t the main thing that I often hear preached. In fact, as I said before, my friend’s work (the pastor) is much more thoughtful than the standard evangelical caricatures that I’ve also seen floating around. Indeed, if there is an exception to Churl’s scream against evangelicalism on the blog, it’s my friend. My critique, however, is not one of evangelical theology writ large, then, tempting as that might be. (Indeed, how can one critique evangelical theology writ large if evangelicalism itself is such a fragmented movement at present? More on this in a separate post.) Following the individualism in the sermon that was preached, this is simply a critique of one individual sermon unfortunately preached by someone of some stature in the local evangelical community, which means that despite its capacity to stand alone, it’s not something that should be overlooked. It should be rigorously engaged and refuted for the sake of the church’s well-being.

So without further ado, the critique:

This sermon, as it stands, did an utter theological disservice to both the gift that is the free church and the body that is the church catholic. It did so by reducing the church to an ideologically-driven community and the Scriptural text to an ideological manifesto. Let me take both in turn.

The gift that is the free church to the church catholic is its witness against Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican complicity with the development of modern nation-states. The story is often told in the free church that while the Protestant Reformers broke away from the Catholic Church because of Rome’s increasing corruption of both doctrine and ecclesial practice, they also quickly sold the church to the state in the German states, the Calvinist city-states, and the English nation. Standing against the ideological co-optation of the church by the state so that all citizens of those states became nominal Christians, the free church wrested control of church governance away from the state and put it into the hands of the people in the churches themselves. This was the origin of a particular kind of free church governance, one that prized congregational autonomy and the decision-making of the congregation itself over against any kind of hegemonic elite rule. The Chinese evangelical variant of this free church polity originated from evangelical congregations in North America whose senior pastors ruled the congregation with an allegedly iron first. Discovering the free church’s polity, Chinese evangelicals planted free churches with bylaws that wrote out the pastor from church governance, enshrining power within a democratically-elected deacon board that was always directly answerable to the congregation while putting pastors under the charge of the congregation and the deacons to make sure that they were doing their job of prayer, congregational visitation, and the ministry of the Word. Some ministers in this polity have described it as utterly oppressive, subordinating the clergy to the will of the people, while others have said that it is freeing to know that administrative matters are not within the provenance of the pastoral staff and are conducted instead by the congregation. Seeing the merits of both sides, my friend pleads ambivalence.

In any case, to reduce any of this free church polity to an ideologically-policing community does the free church a major disservice. At a textual level, this theological interpretation of Psalm 1 is already a hermeneutical blunder (shout out to New Testament exegete extraordinaire Sam Tsang and his blogs on Scripture and preaching), failing to take into account how the ‘wicked,’ the ‘sinners,’ and the ‘scoffers’ are framed in the Psalter and in the Torah: they are not framed as people who don’t hold ideologically to Christian values, but as greedy, exploitative, backstabbing, traitorous thieves seeking to murder the innocent, exploit the poor, and do violence to their communities for individual, private gain. The ‘mockery’ of the mockers is not the mocking of Christian ideological values (which is why I was rolling my eyes); it is the act of wickedly mocking the innocent, the righteous, and the pure in heart, the ones who do not take bribes or charge interest on their loans, the ones who help the poor and the least of these without thought for personal gain, the ones who forego wealth accumulation to be in radical solidarity with the downtrodden. Hang out with those who mock the poor, the psalmist says, and your entire way of life will become exploitative and scheming, out of step with the way of life prescribed in the Torah with its preferential option for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.

However, put into the context of the free church as a gift, the ideologization of Psalm 1 nullifies the whole reason that the free church broke away from the state churches: to escape the tyranny of ideology. The point of the church isn’t to teach what is right and what is wrong and to police its members’ values; it’s to live out a Christian life founded on an alternate mode of existence called love. This is arguably precisely why the free church had to depart from the state: it was the state that was policing its members’ values, co-opting theological concepts for its own political agenda. If the free church were to police its members’ ideological views, then we must ask what the political motivations of the free church vis-à-vis the state are. And if we were to find out that the free church withdrew itself from the state only to influence the state with its own ideological values more effectively, then does this posit that the free church was founded on a lie? I’d like to think not. I, for one and as an Anglican grappling with the baggage of state-entanglement in my own communion, treasure this witness from the free church that the church should neither be controlled by the state, nor have a political agenda to suggest to the state to enact on the free church’s behalf.

This brings us to the larger point that the preacher was trying to make: that individual Christians should be planted firmly in the Word of God, that is, the Bible read as an ideological manifesto. By relativizing the sociality of the Christian life (a good that is affirmed by Catholics in Henri de Lubac, by state-entangled Protestants in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and by free church theologian Miroslav Volf), the preacher is claiming that the church catholic is unnecessary and that everything we confess in the creed about the Holy Spirit is tangential to our common baptism. At one level, this assertion reduces the Bible from its complex canonical library, its purposefully ambiguous narratives about the mystery of everyday lives lived before the living God, and its radical disclosure that God is alive and incarnate in Jesus Christ. It strips away all of this textual richness and leaves us with an abstract code that can be mined for principles and values over morning coffee. There is nothing even literal about this sort of epistemic violence perpetrated on the text, except that it is literally a violent way of dealing with the text. It in fact enshrines the reader as interpreter over the text, drawing out values for his or her own interest in ideological formation with little reference to what Scripture is actually trying to tell the reader about God and the world. It is thus a betrayal of everything that evangelicals themselves purport to believe about the nature of Scripture, for the one that quickly becomes inerrant in this ideological reading is not the text, but the reader.

But to enshrine the inerrant reader as an individual Christian boasting of his or her firm ideological rootedness is a denial of everything that the Body of Christ stands for. The church catholic exists precisely to mitigate against these ideological claims to individual sovereignty. It tells us that our identity is not rooted in one’s individual ideological formation, but in one’s relation to the ‘other,’ in what Bonhoeffer called ‘being for the other.’ And here, the text of Scripture does not show us what values to hold. It unfolds for us these complex lives and stories of people in messy communion with each other, struggling between temptations to assume the ideological power to define the knowledge of good and evil and the life-giving way of the Torah to give ourselves up in love for our neighbour. This is precisely why the Lord Jesus founded a church, why St. Paul calls us to imitate him in love, why St. Peter calls us a holy nation and a royal priesthood, why St. John tells us that the Lord’s new commandment can be summed up this way: that we love one another as he loved us. Christian life is not about me and my rootedness. Christian life is about my neighbour, my brother, my sister, even my enemy, and whether I love them and give myself up for them.

And so I say to the preacher: no, ideological sermons are not OK. They are a disgrace both to your free church tradition (which is a gift to all of us in the church catholic) and to the church catholic itself (into which you confess yourself to be baptized). They reduce the means of grace which the Lord has given to us in both the Word and the church to abstract statements. They excarnate Christian life precisely where the Scriptures (and dare I say it, the entire Christian tradition) call us to incarnate life.

In short, I am saying to the preacher: by virtue of your baptism, you are better than this, and I am calling you out because you are my brother, preaching to your brothers and sisters, and as you get up to the pulpit and declare the whole counsel of God, you do not only speak privately to a church gathered by a common ideology. You are speaking to the entire church catholic because we Christians gather on Sunday not around abstract values, but around our risen Lord whom we confess to be in our midst. Don’t get up there and deny your solidarity with the church. Get up there and perform your ministry of reconciliation. It’s that to which the risen Lord calls us, whether we are free church or Anglican, Catholic or Chinglican. We are a gift to each other, exercising charisms that build up the Body of Christ in our collective witness that the old order is falling away and the new order of the Resurrection has already been inaugurated in the risen life of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

In short: please, please, preach the Word.

Remembering Another Anniversary

Tags

death, Family, Gerard Manley Hopkins, God, Hobbit, John Donne, Poetry, Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

My prior post was in celebration of the anniversary of my wife and myself. But there is another anniversary that also occurs for me, my friends, and my family during this week. But let me backtrack. Two years ago, perhaps two or three weeks earlier than this date, my son and I dropped our dear friend A off at the airport. A was a particularly close friend of our family, living as she did next door and often sharing family life with us, and so my son, then three years old, knew her well. When we dropped her off, and she began to go through Customs, my son was worried and wanted to follow her through. I reassured him that it would be okay, and that A would be back in a few weeks. But a few weeks later we learned that A, ten minutes away from her friend’s wedding, drove into a water-filled ditch by the road and drowned. My words had been lies. Things would not be okay.

It is two years today since she died, and I still don’t really know what to say. Yes, one goes on with life and gets by the best one can, and yes, our very makeup ensures that we are not going through the initial shock of grieving perpetually, but – she is not here. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that neither answers nor even lack of answers (the much appreciated “mystery” valued in emergent circles) is enough. It is not these I want. There was in her – as there is in every of God’s children – what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls haecceitas, a “thisness,” a particularity that was her. I do not long for answers. I look with longing for the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the particularity that was her.

It also seems to me that grief is a mess, plain and simple. My own manner of grieving – after the initial shock – is silence, and this I imagine can be very disconcerting to those who mourn by speaking voluminously. Part of the process for me in fact has been learning to show grace to those who mourn in ways not as silent and not as tactful as myself. But my silence also makes me a horrible comforter, and very bad at extending empathy to others regarding her. There have been many a time when I have wished myself capable of some small gesture of help or comfort – the kinds of gestures by which practical people can be helpful – and I am paralyzed. I am paralyzed because anything I can think of doing seems so small and so insignificant in relation to the one who was lost. In my more rational moments I realize it is by very small things like these – by enacting the grace of Hobbits – that we get through both life and mourning; in fact this was one of the most important things I learned from A, who was stubbornly practical in the way she would hunt people down and help them. But I am so very often paralyzed, particularly when it comes to helping others of her friends and family who are mourning – what I can offer feels less than nothing.

And then there is all the “stuff” that comes with it. I really don’t want to be angry with God. Philosophically and theologically speaking, I don’t think I have good grounds (and I don’t say this flippantly – I have spent the last twelve years of my academic career researching, among other things, the theological problem of evil, and still longer thinking about it). But there is so often a difference between what we want and what we are. Emotionally speaking, when I am not raging Job-like, it is because I have abandoned my emotions as a lost cause, something doomed and waiting for the fix of heaven. No, it is not ideal. But neither was her death.

And as I consider concluding this, I am still not sure what to say. Part of me wants to wrap it up nicely and bring everything to a hopeful close; part of everyone longs for that because of the eschatological desire placed in them by God, and this longing, if not dealt with in patient prayer, makes us liars, as I was to my son – we make up answers because we are not willing to wait for the answer we were designed for. And then there is the part of me that just wants to end with tragedy and loose ends. The honesty of it is appealing. But this too can be a dodge. Because not only does death cast uncertainty on the things and people in life we take for granted; it also casts certainty on the things and people that do and did matter. I am more certain, perhaps even than I was at the time, of the way that our time with A taught us about real meaning in life – not the abstract, theoretical intangible kind, but the concrete kind that exists when you regularly share meals with someone. And so I find myself not only thrown by the uncertainty of life, but also, in an odd way, by the uncertainty of death. Life – her life – was too real (difficult though it often was for her), too tangible for death to be the final word. Some I imagine will take this as just a sop for my wishful thinking, but I think there is a little more to it. There is a reason that, in the Christian tradition, Job is considered one of the first prophets to proclaim the resurrection. Our lives are either meaningless or clues pointing to something else, something higher, and hers was the latter – something I cannot of course here prove but something that her friends and family will understand. In one of his sonnets, John Donne triumphantly proclaims, “Death, thou shalt die.” At the moment I cannot be quite so cocksure – whether it dies or not, it’s still pretty bloody awful to experience right now. But if I cannot at the moment say this with such great boldness, A lived Donne’s words. She knew much of death, and kept loving – and that, I think, is a legacy worth coveting.

What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 3)

Tags

Anglican, Anne Hathaway, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Bede, Beowulf, bourgeois, canon, Canterbury, Canterbury Tales, Catholic, Charles Dickens, Charles Taylor, Charlotte Brontë, Chaucer, church-state relations, debt atonement, democracy, English major, English mystics, establishment, George Eliot, Great Books, Jane Austen, Jürgen Habermas, John Henry Newman, Justin Welby, Karl Barth, literary criticism, Literature, Michael Ramsey, Middlemarch, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Oxford Movement, Paul VI, Pope Francis, Prospero, public sphere, Rowan Williams, Shakespeare, social science, Stanley Hauerwas, state, Tempest, Thomas Becket, William Cavanaugh

If you haven’t read part 1 yet, or the ‘Is Anglicanism strategic’ post, go catch up there first.

I am now deeply satisfied. After reading part 2, Churl is now wanting me to perform some sort of ‘theological magic’ to enact a ‘Houdini-like escape,’ as ‘digging one’s grave very deep makes rising from it that much more spectacular.’ Moreover, after the previous Wong Fu diversion, he is now commending my Anglican theological acumen:

“It’s kind of complicated. Let’s talk about something else for a while and maybe it will go away.” I gotta say, Chinglican certainly knows how to do Anglican theology – and I mean that of course in the most loving and Christian way possible.

He knows, after all, that I really can’t live up to the order of the Resurrection; after all, that declared a wandering rabbi the Son of God, produced what Karl Barth called a ‘krisis’ of the powers that styled themselves as godlike, and started a church whose complex history we have been exploring. Moreover, the question of whether Anglicanism can rise from the dead? is likely territory where even angels fear to tread. While the Lord Jesus promises us that we will do greater works than those he did (cf. John 16:12), I unfortunately do not wish to presume that I can give life to whomever I wish (cf. John 5:21).

So I won’t try.

My question is more modest: why do I stay Anglican? Picking up on Churl’s question about ‘theological magic,’ today’s answer comes to us first by way of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.

Because The Tempest was the obsession of my Catholic creative writing mentor in high school and the first thing I ever read in university, I’ve come up with a reading of The Tempest that will make all the people who think that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic very happy (apparently, this hangs on a reading of Hamlet, but that’s another post).

Here’s my read: Prospero is a Protestant Anglican. Of course, it might be tempting to read Prospero as a Catholic: he has control of the winds and the waves, the spirits on the island, the book of magic that perhaps the pope has.

But this reading doesn’t quite work if, at least as I was taught, The Tempest is at heart Shakespeare’s ultimate parable about modern science and political sovereignty, making apparent what has long lain hidden in his theatrical oeuvre. For cryin’ out loud, the guy’s on an island, controlling the spirits (like Ariel), kicking the monsters around (like Caliban; yes, I read Prospero as a racist colonizer and Caliban as a post-colonial cry for liberation; that’s another post too), and micromanaging his daughter (Miranda) worse than any stereotypical tiger parent (sorry, had to throw that in there; I am a Chinglican, after all). Prospero is no church controlling the world; he is the state subjectifying his citizens, including their spirituality.

Here’s the comedic twist, though. Spoiler alert: at the end of the play, Prince Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, and the brothers who usurped Prospero’s throne back in Milan are reconciled with him. Once this happens, Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book of magic. He’s done with the magical subjectification of everything on the island under his sovereignty. He lets go of the establishment he invented. He is ready for reconciliation.

I’m sure that Shakespeare never intended The Tempest to be taken as a parable for Anglicanism. But it certainly can be received that way. After all, on a cursory reading of the play, one might think that Shakespeare is pro-Prospero: Prospero’s brothers stole his throne, Miranda is over-protected and rebels with Ferdinand, Ariel complains too much, and Caliban is a deformed asshole (can I say that on A Christian Thing?). But that Shakespeare makes Prospero give up the new establishment at the end of the play signals that he might be critical of Prospero, that is, critical of establishmentarian politics, as he is in many of his plays.

Shakespeare is thus providing a re-reading of Anglicanism. A non-establishmentarian reading.

Which brings me to the central proposition of this post: blessed are the English majors, for theirs is the Anglican portion of the kingdom of heaven.

I say this completely without guile, because I was never an English major. I am in fact a social scientist. (I need to put that in bold in case anyone wants to challenge my reading of English literature: yes, I am ignorant, untrained, uncouth, and make pronouncements on things beyond my discipline. Deal with it.)

But I wanted to be an English major in high school, so much so that while my Catholic high school required us to take at least one English course per semester, my junior and senior years were filled with at least two per term, partly because I liked literature so much and partly because I didn’t want to do home economics (imagine my regret when they cooked rotisserie chicken, though).  That all changed when I got to university. I’m frequently told that I took the smarter, more lucrative way out of things: rejecting my recruitment into an English honours program because the history honours program had no exams and lectures, I did my undergraduate degree in history, after which I defected in graduate school to the social sciences. We’ll talk more about the social sciences in part 5 (so stay tuned!), but while I suppose the stuff that i do in the social sciences is more ‘relevant,’ ‘scientific,’ and ‘secular’ (though the social sciences are also chafing under budget cuts), English majors and graduate students seem to have it the worst these days. They’re often told that they were fools to choose literature as a major or graduate specialization because of the putative death of the humanities in the academy. Become an English major, and throw away your entire career. After all, look at Anne Hathaway’s character in the often-panned Valentine’s Day (though my wife and I love this chick flick, partly because we quite uncritically love all chick flicks, and are proud of this ethic). Spoiler alert: we discover that Anne Hathaway’s character moonlights on the side as a phone sex escort because, as she explains, ‘how else is a poetry major going to pay back all her college loans?’ As the English graduate students on this Thing have also described it, the job market in literature is one that doesn’t value what they do, leading Lelbc43 to describe it even as a ‘theodicy.’ If English majors are indeed in such a state of poverty, it would be ‘very meet, right, and our bounden duty always and everywhere’ to acknowledge that they are poor not only in spirit, but in material means, and that their mourning will be comforted and that because of their meekness, they will inherit the earth, including the academy.

But poor as English majors are, the English majors will also inherit the Anglican portion of the kingdom of God because the English canon with which they wrestle stands as a crypto-theological critique of the modern Anglican establishment. Which leads to our second beatitude: blessed are those who ponder the English canon while hungering and thirsting for justice, for they will be filled.

St. John’s College. I wanted to go here once upon a time, but nobody would let me. Wah.

Of course, the moment I bring up the word ‘canon,’ I realize that I’m in very hot water. So even though I am a social scientist, let me say that I’m aware that I will be slowly boiled alive. I understand that what purports to be the ‘English canon’ is in fact the invention of American universities’ ‘Great Books’ programs from the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, and is now enshrined in the core curriculum at St. John’s College. I know full well that the canon has been used to construct a sort of ‘Western civilization’ approach to the world, one that is firmly pro-establishment and works against my post-colonial tendencies. I appreciate immensely the assaults on a fixed canon as a bastion of work written by dead white men (erm, Jane Austen? George Eliot? the Brontë sisters?) that is purportedly anti-feminist, pro-establishment, homophobic, exclusionary of subaltern voices, and discursively propping up an epistemic era in which (as Foucault would say) ‘man’ has become an object of intense scientific scrutiny. And so I fully take the point that in the English-American canon, it would seem that the ‘subaltern’ voices never seem to be heard, and everyone who’s worth reading are dead white men because those are the heroes of the establishment.

But allow me to protest by saying that this is a pro-Prospero reading of the canon. If we are trying to take apart modern Anglicanism from the inside-out, the canon is a remarkable gift. (I know that the One Ring of Power was too, but that’s different.) Because the function of the canon in elite universities has often been used to form a political class with critical civic faculties, you could say that the canon has often been used in the service of the state.

By canon, then, what I mean to refer to is that very loose collection of English-language books, many of which were written by British authors usually from Shakespeare onward to the nineteenth century (with some American inclusions for American state subjectification purposes and pre-modern works, usually of a Greco-Roman imperial nature, just to be well-rounded with the politics of pagan antiquity), that is often taught to us as ‘the classics.’ What I mean to say is this: if I start discussing a book that’s not in your canon, please don’t skewer me. Instead, it just proves my point that this is a ‘very loose collection of English-language books.’

I’d like to co-opt this (very loose) canon for our own purposes. Let’s move the canon back from its service to the state to the service of the church.

And thus, completely ignoring the canon debate because it really is a very state-centric conversation, let’s think about an alternate ecclesial way forward: let’s read the canon as Anglican theology.

In so doing, what we might find is that there is something in the canon that predates the modern Anglican establishment, something perhaps even akin to a Shakespearean critique of Prospero’s magical subjectification strategies. Indeed, let’s co-opt philosopher John Searle’s assertion that the reading of the canon inculcated a ‘critical attitude’ that ‘served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie’ and thus ‘once served an unmasking function.’ For us, the task of canon reading is not to be formed into an American political elite, although I’m sure that we’d all be better off as critics of American imperialism once we’ve read the canon. Instead, if we read English literature as Anglican theology, we might find that what has ended up in the canon is all the stuff with a tense relationship to the state establishment. In other words, the canon may well be the seeds that lead to the dismantling of Anglican church-state entanglement.

Here’s where some critical theory might actually be helpful. As a social scientist, I’ve found the notion of the ‘public sphere’ as a circulation of literary, artistic, and theatrical works particularly helpful. The go-to guy here is critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who says that around the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there arose (particularly in England) a bourgeois public sphere, which was located between the authoritarian Enlightenment state (it behooves us always to remember that the first iteration of Enlightenment monarchy was the ‘divine sovereign,’ even in the British Isles…or did you forget to read Hobbes?) and the governed masses. The public sphere emerged as a conversation among a liberal, property-owning middle class about how the state represented itself. Starting out by portraying the state’s court, these comedies and dramas in art, theatre, and an increasing amount of literature became texts through which the bourgeois could critique the state. As people like Habermas as well as Michael Warner show, what we now call the ‘canon’ was instrumental in creating this buffer zone between the state and its citizens, between the establishment and the masses. And in time, of course, this public sphere became a vehicle for the state, what we now call modern democracy.

Hauerwas probably just laughed.

While theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and William Cavanaugh have often knocked democratic movements for being overly state-centric and otherwise nihilistic (and indeed, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the church functions as just another democratizing institution in the service of the democratic state), I’d like to join someone like Nicholas Wolterstorff in saying that the language of democracy, human rights, and justice predate modern democracy.  Following that, I’d like to suggest that if the canon can be read as sowing the seeds for the relativization of state authoritarianism, all of this might imply a sort of Anglican impulse that predates the establishment of modern Anglicanism, one that finds itself constantly in tension with the state establishment, one that is ultimately concerned with the human person and his or her mystical communion with the living God as the critique of state subjectification. It’s that impulse that I am arguing is more properly called Anglican Christianity, one that functions constantly as an undercurrent of critique to the modern Anglican establishment that is so embedded with the powers of the state.

And thus, walking onto territory that is definitely more properly Churl’s and Lelbc43’s than mine, I’d like to suggest that what is needed is a reading of the English literature prior to the Anglican establishment that remains in continuity with what comes afterward. In other words, let’s read the canon as Anglican theology. Put another way, let’s read Shakespeare’s critique of Prospero as a continuous thread through the canon. (Just so you know, I’m going to be very selective here. As in, you may come away from this survey very dissatisfied that your favourite author didn’t get covered. I apologize for two reasons. First, I am running out of room. Second, I’m a social scientist and thus incompetent to discuss everybody competently. In fact, if you see any incompetence in what follows, please feel free to laugh.)

And let’s start precisely where I should not, that is, by colonizing Churl’s territory and saying that something like Sing Me Hwaethwugu is what I am calling a ‘crypto-Anglican blog.’  Let’s re-read Beowulf and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. Of course, by including these in the Anglican canon (heh, see what I did there), I’m saying that the ‘Anglican canon’ doesn’t need to start with the old pagan Near Eastern and Greco-Roman imperial ‘classics’ (as most canons go), as if those were really necessary for full catholicity (Augustine basically says that they’re nice to critique in The City of God, that is, except for Plato; Augustine kinda likes Plato). Let’s start instead with the Anglo-Saxons.

Heh. Just something to tick Churl off.

If we read Beowulf and Bede with an Anglican eye, we might find that much of what has been construed as ‘Celtic Christianity’ in our popular Christian parlance is more properly described as ‘early Anglican Christianity.’ After all, this was the point of the Gregorian missions: to evangelize the Angles, a job that St. Augustine of Canterbury discovered was much harder than Gregory imagined because the British isles were the site of all kinds of tribal warfare as well as already-existing monasteries that had to be brought into full catholicity with Rome (hence the need for the Synod of Whitby). This evangelization brings out a central theological point that arguably runs throughout medieval Christendom: the state can really only do so much against the forces of evil. From Ambrose excommunicating Theodosius to Gregory VII excommunicating Henry, the point is that the church always relativizes the powers of the king. Beowulf recognizes this limit. As the hero of the Danish court, Beowulf goes out to fight with Grendel and Grendel’s mother and wins a great victory for the Danes. But he’s outclassed by the dragon, whom he does slay, but he ends up getting killed himself. So too, the whole point of Bede’s book is that the Gregorian missionaries came to the British Isles, and, finding the tribes at war, they relativized the powers of the tribal leaders (sometimes even calling down curses upon them), and as peace came to the Isles, they relativized the independence of the Isles altogether by making the church there conform to an Easter date. In short, the church always says to the state and its proto-state ancestors, Your powers are limited. When they get too big, they cause all sorts of violence. Recognize your relative power. (This point is arguably also in the Arthurian legends, especially when we compare Galahad to Lancelot. But I’m running out of room!)

Forgive me the next anachronistic move (I’m going to combine a few centuries that I know that I shouldn’t; this blog post would never get past a peer review, which is why it’s a blog post!): this is why I think we should read Anselm and Chaucer together. After all, Anselm was an Archbishop of Canterbury in tension with the state: trying to bend William and Henry to submission to the pope (and arguably to Canterbury) even while those two kings were trying to consolidate their state power, Anselm got the the boot twice from England. In turn, Chaucer was writing about Canterbury pilgrims grappling with the murder of another Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, arguably by the state (and by another Henry) because he tried to resist Henry II’s consolidation of state power. After his assassination, Henry went and prayed at his tomb in penance, which is nice because that relativizes the state too.

Here we see that when the church tells the state that its powers are relative, the state sometimes wants to exclude the church, often to its own detriment. Read this way, and Anselm’s ‘debt’ atonement theology makes a lot of sense: after all, as he’s writing Cur Deus Homo in exile (well, he started it at Canterbury, and then got the boot), he’s probably thinking that William and Henry have a lot of debts to pay and a lot of divine wrath to satisfy for their actions. So too, as Chaucer concocts The Canterbury Tales, everyone–especially clergymen and monks out for their own power and pleasure–gets wickedly skewered in bawdy comedy, which suggests that in the tension between the church and the state, the struggle of the powers produces plenty of fodder for hilarity. Indeed, we learn something new from Chaucer: as the church vies for power with the state, as if the church should engage the state on its own terms of power, the church becomes no better than the state and should thus also be subjected to comedic critique. Struggle for power, Chaucer says, and the joke’s on you.

Match point.

It’s that hilariously critical hermeneutic that becomes veiled from Shakespeare onward. By the time that one gets to early modern English literature, especially after the Elizabethan settlement, it becomes easy to read the canon as pro-establishment, trying to subjectify citizens with moral virtues that are conducive to their participation as agents of the state. After all, Henry VIII was somewhat successful: in Henry, you could say, the struggle of church against state in the British Isles culminated with the state eating the church.

Marianne: Is he done yet?
Elinor: No, but my Edward always preaches short sermons.

And so, it’s now really easy to read British literature through a sort of Anglophilic, pro-establishment way. In fact, this is how I grew up. I was told that because I read Dickens, Austen, Trollope, etc. in late elementary, junior high, and high school, that I was a nice conservative child. To some extent, I believed it. I read ‘classical literature’ (Austen and Dickens as classical? Hm.), listened to ‘classical music’ (you mean to tell me that Bach and Elgar were classical?), and watched period movies and ‘classical’ plays (Shakespeare as classical?) because I was that kid. Not just the nerdy Chinese kid (as you may recall, the stereotype usually has more to do with math and science than with English), but the kid with character, the kid with virtue, the kid who was superior to all of his Chinese church and Christian school pleb friends because he was classical.

When I discovered that I was in Selina Kyle Anglicanism, I realized that it was precisely the canon–the same canon that I had read as a sort of pro-establishment conservative child–that in fact undermined the modern Anglican establishment. In other words, while the canon can be used for the purposes of state subjectification through the academy and the church, the works in the canon actually posit a tension between what the establishment is trying to do and what it means to be truly human as a critique of the establishment. (I suppose this is true of the biblical canon as well.)

In other words, read as Anglican theology, the English canon works to dislodge the church from state ideology. I don’t have time to now go back and re-read Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (a non-Anglican who wrote an awful lot about Anglicans), among others, with you. But I trust that with this hermeneutic, you’ll find out why despite the best-laid plans, the Austen characters working through their comedy of manners always wind up with the least-expected guy. You’ll re-think the whole plot of Jane Eyre as a not-so-subtle critique of Anglican colonizing missions and its impulse to subjectification, ironically finding in the ‘establishment’ of Mr. Rochester the seeds of the colonial state’s relativization. You’ll get your aha moment when reading Middlemarch and finding out that Eliot’s critique of the Anglican establishment is in fact a relativization of the powers of the church co-opted by the state for the sake of political gain. And you will laugh incessantly (as I do) every time a beadle shows up in Dickens’s novels.

As I read the canon as Anglican theology, then, I have great hope that the oppressive modern establishment that styles itself as the face of Anglican Christianity can be dismantled, and the true Anglicanism that predates modern Anglicanism can once again be known as Anglican Christianity. In fact, I know it must be dismantled because of the conclusions of yet another literary scholar, René Girard.

If we were to read the founding of modern Anglicanism through a Girardian lens, we would find that much of what modern Anglicanism purports to be was founded on a series of original murders, namely the long consolidation of Tudor England as a culmination to the War of the Roses. But what if we take those founding myths and posit them not as foundational, but as merely an episode in the ongoing tension between church and state in English Christianity? What if we take the long view and see that since the Gregorian missions, and arguably before that, the church has always been in tension with the state? What if we see in English Christianity that the church co-opting the state and the state co-opting the church, and both of them being subjected to literary ridicule, is business as usual? What if we say that Henry VIII founded nothing, that Elizabeth I settled nothing, and that Anglican Christianity does not actually hinge on the state’s actions because of the long ecclesial literary tradition that predates it? In other words, what if we stop thinking that the state won its battle against Canterbury in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that we still remain in an ever-unfolding story of Anglican church-state relations?

OK, that was the best tabloid I could find. For the record, Islamophobia sucks. But that’s another post.

This is precisely what’s so fascinating about the very people who should be the face of modern Anglican Protestantism over the last fifty or so years. Since Michael Ramsey, there has been an increasing recognition on the parts of Archbishops of Canterbury, especially Rowan Williams and Justin Welby, that the church should not be tied to the crown, or indeed, to a construction of what British identity (courtesy of the state) should mean. This, I submit to you, was the point of the whole poobah when Rowan Williams came out and said that shari’a law should be recognized in the United Kingdom. Williams was taking apart the whole notion of an established British identity, saying that the United Kingdom needs to understand that the Isles have always been a complex space with many different groups and that it’s pointless to impose one law on all people, especially if there are fellow Muslim citizens. The response to Williams was outrage: how can an Archbishop of Canterbury say such a thing about British identity? Here’s how: by not believing that the founding myths of British sovereignty are true and by disentangling the church from its modern role as the arm of the state, returning it to its original, pre-modern tension with the powers. (Ditto Welby’s comments on the banking system. Ditto the weird game that Welby and the English bishops are playing on the same-sex marriage bill.)

Sorry, Newman, this probably annoys the hell out of you.

I recognize that this argument for a pre-modern/post-modern Anglicanism sounds dangerously close to some of the arguments in the Oxford Movement, and particularly that of John Henry Newman. If there’s something that predates the schism and thus de-legitimizes it, then shouldn’t we all hop over to Rome? Maybe, and so, people like Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins did.

The only thing, though, is that Newman and Hopkins lived during the height of the British Empire. We live in the wake of its collapse, a crisis that affords us Anglicans who do not believe that Henry VIII’s state-eats-church move was legitimate an opportunity to do something unheard of: work for Anglican-Catholic home reunion from the Anglican side of things.

Michael Ramsey and Paul VI. Good times.

Indeed, you could say that the reason there have been so many good and interesting Archbishops of Canterbury since William Temple forward (yeah, actually, Ramsey can’t take all the credit) is that they were all too clear that with the dissolution of the Empire, it made the church’s entanglement with the state look increasingly like nonsense and madness. With the advent of Vatican II, this disentanglement has been coupled with serious dialogue with Rome and the Orthodox Church, particularly in the conversation that Michael Ramsey started with Paul VI that has led to the very interesting work done by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), who have released statements that basically say that despite different theological language being used for the sticky theological issues between the two communions, Anglican theologians basically concur with their Catholic counterparts on the primacy of Rome and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is the sticky issue of women’s ordinations and consecrations, as well as the status of LGBTQ+ populations in the communions, but I look forward to what ARCIC will do on this in years to come.

In other words, when I say that I’m staying in the Anglican Communion and when Churl says that he’s leaving for the Roman Catholic Church, we are saying pretty much the same thing. Churl is following Newman: having realized that the entire modern Anglican enterprise is basically a secular one, he is ready to jump ship into a Church where (as Charles Taylor points out) a real, full-bodied sacramental ontology is to be found. This is good and fair. But having read Newman, I’m not convinced that every Anglican who becomes convinced of what Churl has been convinced of must jump ship to Rome. If that were the case, I might ask: then how would the Anglican Communion keep being able to produce figures like Michael Ramsey, Rowan Williams, and Justin Welby?  What we see is that in the English canon, Anglicanism has its own internal resources for undermining its own establishmentarianism. As this becomes undermined, the central question behind the Anglican-Roman Catholic schism will sound increasingly more ridiculous, and that is: can a state’s sovereign exert his rule over the church and her claim to channel one into mystical participation in the life of Christ? Of course not!

Francis: Hey, he’s giving away our secret.
Justin: Don’t worry. The place I’ve reserved for him is secret too.

Then OK, if that’s so, then why continue the schism? Put another way: why can’t the Archbishop of Canterbury finally come home to Gregory? (Let me note that this is precisely what Justin Cantuar said to Pope Francis last week.) And put a final way: Churl and I are doing the same thing: we are working for the undermining of schism in different ways to which the Lord has called us. He will likely be going over to Rome; bless him. I will stay here in the Anglican Church. We both protest the notion that what is known as Anglicanism is founded on schism because, as the literary tradition suggests, this simply is not true. It is a state ideology. It should be disentangled from the work of the Body of Christ.

And thus, as we work for the truth on both sides of the Anglican-Roman Catholic conversation, who knows what will happen? I do not dare to predict the future. But know this: I’m an Anglican because I refuse to believe in schism. And since Anglicanism has its own resources for undermining schism, I’ll side with the long tradition of the Archbishops of Canterbury from Augustine to Justin who undermined the powers of the state (I forgot to say this earlier, but Cranmer also met a pretty ugly end when he finally ended up opposing the state). As a social scientist who loves his literature, I’ll also keep reading the canon that pokes fun at Anglican power wherever it rears its ugly head. I’ll stay right where I am and milk those traditions to the full, all in the hope against hope that one day, Anglicanism will cease to be a schismatic, self-referential modern identity and recognize its unique and vital contributions to the church catholic and the life of the world. Indeed, as I have suggested, this is already happening. It’s incumbent on me to join in.

So shouldn’t you go up for ordained Anglican ministry, then? Absolutely not. I’ll explain in Part 4. I might do some magic there too.

Wong Fu For Life

Tags

Asian American, Chinese American, Chinese church, Chinglican, Chris Dinh, Christine Chen, English ministry, ethnic, everyday, Kaba Modern, Korean American, life, love, nice girl, Nice Girls Crew, nice guy, Philip Wang, race, relationships, rigidity, romance, second generation, silent exodus, stereotype, Ted Fu, timelines, Wesley Chan, Wong Fu Productions, yellow fever, Yuri Tag

In a move that will likely annoy Churl to no end, I would like to take a short break from the Chinglican posts on Anglicanism (Part 3 is almost done, actually) and write something a bit more fun. When I first began blogging on A Christian Thing, I saw myself as a sort of Asian American voice on the blog, and it was my original intention to highlight how portions of contemporary Asian American and Asian Canadian arts and culture reflected the theological constitution of the world without the Asian American and Asian Canadian artists even knowing it. It was to that end that my first two posts on the blog were about Lynn Chen and Lisa Lee’s Tumblr blog, Thick Dumpling Skin, as well as on the Linsanity phenomenon in early 2012. At that time, Chinglican wasn’t going to write much about the practice of Anglicanism and about how certain major evangelical players were more ‘catholic’ than they made out to be. If you look carefully at how those posts originated, they were often provoked by some of Churl’s musings, say, about how Churl wished that Mark Driscoll were indeed Roman Catholic (to which I replied that Driscoll was more Irish Catholic than anyone has ever discussed him) while the more recent Anglican series is a reply of sorts to Churl’s desire to jump ship to Rome. I never intended to provide my analysis of the Anglican Communion, never wanted to address the neo-Reformed crew, and never thought that I would be speaking in my own Asian American voice to contest orientalizing voices within American evangelicalism at present. Indeed, I never thought that as Parts 3, 4, and 5 come out of the Anglicanism series, that I’d actually be doing Anglican (or better, ‘Chinglican’) theology on this blog. I suppose I had my own thoughts on these matters that I had personally worked out, but I never thought I’d be writing about them so publicly.

Three nice girls who have nothing to do with Wong Fu, at least not apparently. But they are (from left to right) Michelle Krusiec, Lynn Chen, and Sheetal Sheth. You should watch their stuff too.

Instead, I was supposed to be the happy voice on this Thing, still ridiculous to be sure, but happily ridiculous, blissfully looking at the most secular of Asian American arts and culture and finding good theological things to celebrate there. It was to that end that I wrote about how Thick Dumpling Skin’s address of body issues might appear overly individualistic, but Lisa Lee’s presumably Christian background (she says that her eating disorders hearken back to church potlucks) and Lynn Chen’s Catholic upbringing make them way too theologically thoughtful to end on an individualist note, even if they claim to be secular right now. On the same token, I also complained that while Jeremy Lin has been celebrated as the person to finally shine the spotlight on Asian American evangelicalism in the public eye, his theological assumptions have not been adequately interrogated, and we would be well-served as the church catholic if Lin were to tell us the painful story of how he was marginalized as an Asian American basketball professional as a theological reflection. For both, I wanted to celebrate the fact that we English-speaking younger generation Asian North American Christians (or at least, those with Christian backgrounds) aren’t simply making an alternative arts scene. We are actually doing theology, and doing an fantastically creative job at it.

It’s in that light that I’d like to celebrate Wong Fu Productions today. Wong Fu Productions is a small start-up film company started by three college friends who attended UC San Diego together, Philip Wang, Wesley Chan, and Ted Fu (they have also since added Chris Dinh). Currently based in Los Angeles, they have over one million subscribers on their YouTube channel and a successful business that sells T-shirts and plush toys, while they make film shorts (and aspire to make feature-length films) on YouTube. Over the last weekend, two of the co-founders of Wong Fu, Phil and Wes, visited Vancouver, along with Kaba Modern dance alumna Yuri Tag. Last week (June 8) was also the tenth anniversary of Wong Fu Productions. Because they’ve arrived on my home turf and because it’s time for me to appreciate them anyway, it’s time for an appreciation. (If you want to know what Wong Fu has to do with Yuri Tag, watch the entire series, ‘When It Counts.’ I’ve put the first episode down below.)

The appreciation that took place here in Vancouver treated Phil, Wes, and Yuri a bit like celebrities. Kept at a distance from the fans, the local Asian Canadian YouTube artists who hosted the festivities resorted to tactics that made the event seem quite needlessly formal, complete with raffle ticket draws, very formal and stiff interviews, and games through which the audience would purportedly get to know the Southern Californians. It wasn’t until near the end of the show that Phil broke the ice and reached out to fans, upon which he realized what the crowd control strategies were for, as someone shouted, ‘Will you father my children?’

It wasn’t always like this, though, and this is definitely not how I remember Wong Fu in the past, nor how I feel about them in the present. The Wong Fu guys are a bit older than me, probably by some two or three years. I know that that’s not much now that we’re all adults (but none the more mature, probably!), but in pre-university terms, that’s quite a bit. Not only would they have been seniors when I was a freshman in high school (thinking like that makes them feel old indeed), but in the Chinese church, we would have had to call them gege 哥哥 (older brother) and jiejie 姐姐 (older sister) simply because they were older. I mean, I’m sure that Phil 哥哥, Wes 哥哥, and Ted 哥哥 would chafe under their titles, but in a way, the fact that they have been able to carve out a path in Asian American arts and culture to the point that they’re taken seriously makes the attribution of older sibling ironically appropriate.

Like many, the first short I ever saw of theirs was called ‘Yellow Fever.’ Do yourself a favour and watch it below if you haven’t. The central premise of the short is that while white guys can get Asian girls, Asian guys can’t get white girls. Created prior to YouTube, the short became a hit, downloaded by many of my friends and shown to me at many a party at someone else’s house. We got the sense that these guys were big; they had struck a nerve with all of us relationally challenged, younger, single Asian Americans because they were able to articulate our relational frustrations without actually naming the cause. Instead, they made it funny without explaining anything.

But what really caught my attention was ‘Just A Nice Guy.’ (I’ve put it down below for you.) Again, Wong Fu pinned the relationship challenges of Asian Americans to a particularly corny answer that many Asian American (and arguably non-Asian American) guys give for the reason for the one that got away: ‘I’m just a nice guy.’ (This is why you have to watch ‘When It Counts’ above: Yuri Tag is a ‘nice girl.’ What a spin.) Again, the explanation is just ludicrous to be unbelievable as a non-explanation. Phil plays a ‘nice guy’ seeking the affections of a girl in his study group, but because he is a nice guy, he always gets ‘friend zoned’ by the women to whom he is attracted. It never occurs to him till the end to actually say something about his attractions and affections, which only goes to show that the ‘nice guy’ category is something in which he put himself in the first place. It’s not because he’s Asian that he’s a ‘nice guy.’ It’s not because he’s shy that he’s a nice guy. He’s a nice guy because he said so himself, and that’s what’s keeping him from pursuing relationships.

Since ‘Nice Guy,’ Wong Fu has been making fun of the categories we conservative Asian Americans from the suburbs have set up for ourselves. I say ‘conservative’ and ‘suburban’ as qualifiers because obviously, Asian Americans range the political and geographical spectrum. If you look at the shorts, though, there are a disproportionate amount of suburban scenes (for a new hilarious one, watch ‘Meet the Kayak‘), and the rigidity of stereotypes suggests that while Wong Fu itself is no conservative organization, they may have had fairly socially conservative backgrounds (and they are seeking to transcend it, which means that it’s nice that they got to meet with Barack Obama at the White House). What this means is that Wong Fu doesn’t speak for Asian Americans; how could they? (They certainly don’t represent any of the Asian Americans in poverty or who aren’t privileged enough to get higher education because of fears that they might be deported.) But for those of us suburban Asian Americans who grew up socially conservative (for a great complaint about us, see Glenn Omatsu’s ‘The Four Prisons’ paper), many of us grew up imbibing stereotypes of who we should be as a model minority focused on our own education and careers, and we proceeded to execute that prescription for our lives with rigid timelines and entrenched categories for how our lives should be. As we executed our lives with the instrumental rationality that we lived ever since we learned that we should be a model minority, we applied those same tactics to our personal relationships, leaving emotional carnage in our wake.

Wong Fu is a look in the mirror. One particularly poignant short is ‘Strangers, again’ (see below). If ‘Nice Guy’ is about the hard-and-fast categories in which we place ourselves as conservative suburban Asian Americans, then ‘Strangers, again’ is about the rigid timelines we set for ourselves. On a cursory view of the video–which, unfortunately, is how most viewers saw it–the film seems to be almost hyper-Calvinist in its stripping away of agency from people in a relationship. It’s almost predestined that every relationship will start with some form of excitement, degenerate into apathy, and then disintegrate into a fighting match that ends in two people, once in love, becoming strangers again. But this is not the way that even Wong Fu sees it. Spoiler alert: the final scene has the guy in the relationship (Phil) thinking about if he were to do it again, he’d apologize to his girlfriend (played by the fantastic Cathy Nguyen) halfway into the relationship, cutting off the ‘stages’ right in the middle. Relationships are not predetermined, the film is saying. You can do something about them. (If you want a view of relationships where these stages are but a dream, check out Wes’s Cannes selection, ‘At Musing’s End.’)

Wong Fu also has a variety of comedy sketches that take apart these stereotypes. The ‘Technology Ruins Romance‘ series takes apart the ‘nineteenth century’ notion of long lost love, showing how predetermined conclusions about hopeless romance are simply unrealistic in contemporary everyday lives. There’s also ‘Rick’s Man Tutorials,‘ a parody of Asian American men who attempt to show off their jock sides and look insensitive while falling apart emotionally on the inside. ‘Funemployed‘ delivers a blow to the idea that unemployment is simply failure, while also delivering to us in the midst of the unemployment story a classically creative Wong Fu music hit, the purposefully inane and vapid ‘Dance to This Song‘ that is a parody of every other club song to which to dance.

Put succinctly, Wong Fu Productions demonstrates time and again that the hand-wringing over what constitutes Asian American identity is so painfully silly that it should be laughed at. Instead, life should be lived. This is why they have also produced a variety of music videos for fellow Asian American YouTubers, a task that has culminated in them filming a music video for multiplatinum Taiwanese American artist, Leehom Wang. The music is where you can’t make the stuff up about life and love, where it’s impossible to put everything into a categorical grid or a rigid timeline, where artists must deal with mystery. That’s why Wong Fu now sponsors the International Secret Agents concert series that brings Asian American artists (many of whom are practicing Christians) to the stage to sing not about Asian American love, but their personal experience of love.

In other words, the notion of Asian American identity seems only to be a secondary concern for Wong Fu. If there’s anything to be said about Asian American identity, it’s that if we tell the truth about life and love, we find ourselves constituted not by some category we’ve imposed on ourselves. Instead, we are constituted by the ‘other,’ in that special word in younger Asian American circles called ‘relationships.’ Many of Wong Fu’s videos explore dating relationships in particular, but what’s increasingly striking is the way that their relationships are not merely sexual in nature (some, say, ‘The Last‘ and ‘To Those Nights‘ have slight hints that something subtly sexual might be going on). The overarching framework is not sex, though. It’s friendship.

The sort of friendship that Wong Fu portrays is a desire for deeper knowledge of the other for the other’s sake, to the point of critiquing one’s obsession with one’s own identity. When this is fulfilled–when that longing to know and to be known, to love and to be loved is fulfilled–then that’s what Wong Fu calls ‘home.’ Home is not only a place: it is a place if it’s filled with memories of relationships and times gone by, but it’s not just some physical space devoid of meaning. Home is not only one’s family by blood: it’s not the old stereotypical Asian American argument for traditional family values where the only people you should trust are those with whom you’re related by blood. Home is not even a place where everyone is of the same race; it’s not that Wong Fu is colour-blind (far from it), but race is not a relationship, and there’s no obsession with Asian American identity to make race a deciding factor for social relations. No, home is where your friends are, where the imposed categories and rigid timelines are stripped away and you can simply be with your friends. It’s in this context that we finally find what the Wong Fu holy grail of a dating and marriage relationship is: it’s one where one is loved because one is known and one knows the other. (For Wong Fu’s radical experiment with how far this idea can go, see their short-lived attempt at a television series, Home Is Where the Hans Are.)

Somehow, somewhere, there has to be something theological here.

It’s here that it’s easy to be stumped. After all, what’s so theological about all this? To be honest, there’s nothing really at the surface, although there’s plenty underneath. I mean, I could pin it to my sighting of a cross in an engagement video that Wong Fu did for a couple whose relationship spanned Los Angeles and Taipei, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have mutual friends with Wong Fu who are card-carrying Asian American evangelicals, some of whom were in their very early videos when they were students at UC San Diego. I also happen to remember that on an early version of Phil’s biography on the Wong Fu site, he said that his mom was a deacon in his church in Walnut Creek.

But I won’t go there because the films don’t go there.

You could say that there’s hardly anything worth our theological notice in Wong Fu aside from the occasional YouTuber that Wong Fu works with mentioning ‘God’ (say, Yuri Tag). Other than that, the Wong Fu shorts have really nothing to say about God.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

You see, if we can move this whole discussion to Asian American churches struggling with the ‘silent exodus‘ of their second generation to greener pastures, these shorts are an amazing resource for Asian American English ministries struggling to put their finger on what it is that their people struggle with in their everyday lives. I’m sure this could be said about a variety of non-profits and sundry dedicated to Asian American services. But English-speaking ministries in Asian American churches are notorious for trying to name what it is about Asian Americans in an effort to define their people and then move in to solve their problems in the name of Jesus. You have parents who tell you to be over-achievers. You are over-achievers. You are too much of a good Asian. You need Jesus. Note well: those are already the good ones. Some, of course, are worse, and may be downright racist: We are Asians, and we are superior to white people because we work harder and have stronger family values. So we are better Christians too.

It’s these stereotypes that are currently the plague of Asian American evangelical theology, and Wong Fu shows us another way. Perhaps ‘naming’ something that’s already there is not a defining action.

Maybe it’s a comic action.

It’s comic because once you bring up the categories with which Asian Americans have been defined and have set out to define themselves, they are funny because they sound so ideological that they’re just ludicrous. Why is it really that Asian guys can’t get white girls while white guys get Asian girls? Is there anything more to a ‘nice guy’ and a ‘nice girl’ that makes them so relationally hapless? Does anyone actually go into a relationship looking to become ‘strangers again’? Well, no, and the people who do should be given a sympathetic look in the mirror. This is what you’re doing to yourself, the Wong Fu shorts say. Get over yourself, and live for a change. There is so much more to life than your tidy categories, pressing timelines, and lame excuses for why you’re relationally challenged. Get out there. Live. (And if there are racist people in the way, tell them to get with the program and do something good for a change, like get to know someone personally.)

That’s a remarkable theological service done for Asian American English ministries. In answer to what exactly defines an Asian American that they can be targeted for ministry, Wong Fu wants us to know that we are not merely Asian American. Let’s get our theology right. God is not out to define us because we are not categories. We are not simply made of timelines. We do not exist to be defined for your next pet ministry project, and those of us who fit all of the stereotypes in the shorts are very funny people indeed. We are people, and we have everyday lives, and those lives are worth making fun of and turning into dramas. In fact, even if we defy the notion that our lives are stories lived comically before God, even if we insist that the categories define us and the timelines rule us, even if we purport to be a model minority because we have something about being Asian American to prove (of course, to the chagrin of progressive Asian Americanists), people like Wong Fu can still tell our stories as comedies, sometimes even at our expense. After all, the entire tradition in which we find ourselves is in fact a story, and it is a comic one, one that ends with us coming home to a place we did not expect with friends who have forgiven us for our instrumental rationality, even as we have forgiven them and have been forgiven by God himself.

And so, I’m just going to say it: Wong Fu for Life. Thank you, Phil, Wes, Ted, Chris, and Christine, and everyone else who works at Wong Fu. Your videos really do make my day better. Thanks.

Of Sacrament and Scandal: For My Beloved Wife on our Seventh Anniversary

Tags

Adam, Anniversary, beauty, Christ, Divine grace, Eve, God, Jesus, marriage, Wife

It is often hardest to write in a straightforward way about the things and people most central in our lives.  That, perhaps, is why I always seem to write around theology whenever I approach it – it would not feel right to simply reach out my hand and steady an apparently wobbling ark.

But theology today is not my topic, or at least not directly; rather, I want to say something to M, my wife, on this day marking the seventh anniversary of our marriage. And where do I begin? I suppose I could begin – in that time honored and now largely lost tradition – with describing your beauty. Yes, by this I mean your physical beauty, that still causes me to thrill when I see you, because you are breathtaking. And if anyone should protest that I am incorrect in claiming we no longer begin here – with physical beauty – I would counter otherwise. Modern society has trained us to be either materialists or idealists, either those who chase after a shallow and disensouled sexiness, or those who do not see the body at all – we are too polite, too sophisticated for that, too in control of ourselves to find ourselves viscerally attracted to beauty. But there you are, your body. And I hold my breath, and hold my tongue; the way I want to describe you is better done privately. And I look at you, and know what God meant at first creation when he looked at his work – when Adam first looked at Eve – and said with awe, “She is good.”

But this of course is just the beginning of who you are and what you mean to me – it is just the surface of the deeper beauty and love you keep deep within you.  I know even as I say this what your reaction will be – how you will roll your eyes at me in sarcastic disbelief.  But I have been married to you for seven years – and in a relationship with you for nine – and this is something I know; despite your attempts to make light of it, there is in you a very deep love and loyalty, so intense and firm that you are often reluctant to even acknowledge it in yourself sometimes. I am blessed to experience this love, a deep beauty you often go out of your way to hide, lest you become the centre of attention. You can try to hide under a bushel, but I will proclaim your beauty – and my love for you – to the world.

And then there is the fact that you put up with me, which I imagine takes some doing. You have to be a special kind of person to appreciate having Ecclesiastes 12 read at your wedding, or to appreciate a memento mori as a Christmas gift. You are that person, and I love you for it. And it also takes someone like you to appreciate that what is not easy may still be good – that amidst all the various happenstances of suffering and trial, we can still sit down and share a picnic beside the still waters in the valley of the shadow of death.

What’s more, you are generous, and willing to share these picnics with others. We came together through a mutual sense of woundedness and a desire to be something – a community – that could be helpful to others in their own pain. Yes, we were idealistic, and as always there are things we couldn’t have accounted for; just how deeply pain and suffering permeate the world is something that I realize now I cannot measure – the only measure of this can be Christ’s cross, and to think we can understand it – beat it on our own – is foolish.

But we can be a community gathered around this cross; together we are a sacrament, that is to say, together, beyond our particularities and problems and sufferings; or, perhaps better, despite ourselves and through these things; the grace of God visits earth. And I am thankful for this – for you – for us – daily. I am thankful for seven years of grace.

And I am thankful for the scandal of it, for in a society such as ours, bent as it is against radical loyalty, it is a scandal. And yet perhaps the scandal of such a thing is not as modern as we might think, for the disciples too seem to have found Christ’s words on marital faithfulness disconcerting (Matthew 19:10).  Mere common interests or friendship or desire is not enough to hold us together – it is by the grace of Christ, experienced inside and outside His church, that we are bound.  This grace is for us to whom Christ refers as “those to whom it has been given.”  It is our vocation – this riddle given by God to the world – the wonder of us together.

And so I am thankful: for you, for your love, for the past seven years, for the blessing of being one flesh with you. And it is with such thankfulness – a thankfulness and gratefulness that I often express only abysmally, as I do here – that I wish you, my wife, a happy anniversary. Thank you for the miracle of seven years together.

What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 2)

Tags

Anglican, Anne Hathaway, Asian American, baggage, Batman, bishop, Book of Common Prayer, British Empire, Catholic, Chinese, colonial, courtship, Dark Knight Rises, dating, denomination, Episcopal, Evangelical, Fantine, Global South, Global South Anglican, John Shelby Spong, Julie Andrews, latitudinarian, Les Miserables, liberal, marriage, neo-Reformed, post-colonial, Princess Diaries, Protestant, racism, Rowan Williams, Susan Howatch, television, Theology

I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Over the night after I posted my first post, Churl read it. The suspense is now killing him, and he is now describing my talents as made for television miniseries, such as ‘The Real Anglicans of Canterbury, Jordan Shore, The Amazing (G)race, and Survivor: The Evangelical Church, to be followed by Survivor: the Neo-Reformed Church (in which we don’t bother to vote anyone off the island because the matter is predestined anyway).’  For my part, I’m still thinking of something that includes Gordon Ramsay or Guy Fieri. Regardless, though, my wife has been calling me a ‘naughty Chinglican,’ so to say the least, I am quite satisfied. (Ew, Mark Driscoll, get your head out of the gutter.)

Anne Boleyn? Or Irene Adler? And if the latter, then whither Moriarty?

This second post will not satisfy any of Churl’s frustration. It is in fact intentionally designed to make it worse. By returning to the question, if Anglicanism is as bad as I described it in my previous post, then how did people like me enter it in the first place?, it’s like I’m rubbing it in. How on earth did we get in? Why the hell did we do it? What in God’s name were we thinking?

Since all theology is done through analogy anyway, let me begin my case by analogy. In fact, I’m going to try to make my analogies as shallow as possible in order to maximize Churl’s frustration. I recognize that the answer to this question will be very complicated. That’s why the post is so long.

It seems to me that most evangelicals who wind up Anglican (like myself; unless you were raised Jewish, in which case your name is Lauren Winner) found the Anglican Church in some kind of whirlwind romance. As the stories often go, Anglicanism is like that person to whom said evangelical was very physically attracted (oh, oh, see what I did? I made that gender-neutral!). As a result, said evangelical’s evangelical friends who have read I Kissed Dating Goodbye cautioned him (or her; I like evangelical feminists) against basing his or her relationship on sheer physical attraction. Indeed, they often ask, Doesn’t Anglicanism have a lot of baggage?

But we are in love, or as Stanley Hauerwas would put it, in lust. For every insecure Mark Driscoll masculinity quote about priests who ‘wear a dress’ (one wonders who is more insecure about their masculinity: the dress-wearing priest or Mark Driscoll?), we reply that the attraction is too powerful, too magnetic, to resist. Oh, that was so spiritual, we evangelical liturgical hipsters say about the liturgy. I’ve never had something that structured before, except when I planned out that perfect worship set three weeks ago that I executed with ‘rehearsed spontaneity.’ Through the liturgy, I really feel closer to God than I’ve ever been. It was so poetic. (I read somewhere, by the way, that this is actually how Rowan Williams became an Anglican.)

Yeah, I know, shocking that that’s how Rowan Williams became Anglican…

In some ways, this is my story, except mine is more along the lines of the Princess Diaries. There, Anne Hathaway begins the movie as a rock-climbing geek with glasses and very frizzy and oily hair (hey, sounds about how I look!), and not only does she not return her crush’s affections, but the crush of her life does not return her affections. After discovering from Julie Andrews that she is in fact princess of Genovia, she gets an ultimate makeover, and by the end of the movie (spoiler alert!), she is kissing the guy who had a crush on her (as opposed to the guy on whom she had a crush) and lifts her leg as she squeals.

Of course, I am certainly nowhere nearly as attractive as the guy on whom Anne Hathaway had a crush or the guy who had a crush on Anne Hathaway, but I think it’s quite apropos to say that Anne Hathaway is my Anglicanism. In fact, the real Anne Hathaway (I’m still talking about Hollywood, not Shakespeare) did once upon a time consider becoming a nun (Dolores Hart, round 2?), but when she found out that her brother was gay, her whole family became Episcopalian. While she now considers herself ‘spiritual but not religious’ (paging Lillian Daniel!), I consider her as the Beatrice figure in my story of the Anglican Church, which is (admittedly) my own idiosyncratic version of the Communion. (Let me note here, however, that everyone’s version of the Anglican Communion is personal and idiosyncratic. That’s probably why there is a crisis.)

You see, when I first entered the Anglican Church, I hated it for the same reasons the teens with whom I worked hated it. The liturgy was stale, the traditions were geeky in a very uncool way, the vestments were reviling, and the songs they sang sounded like three variations of ‘All Creatures of Our Bugs and Pigs.’ The kids hated it, I hated it; we just couldn’t see any beauty in it.

In fact, the funny story of how I became an Anglican begins with my defection from non-denominational circles to the realm of a man I like to call the ‘topless bishop.’ He wasn’t a bishop at the time, but he wanted me to work for his parish. For my part, I was looking for an escape out of the evangelical churches of which I was a part, mostly for political reasons: I was a very outspoken child in a conservative Chinese evangelical congregation with a congregational polity, so while the church’s congregational polity meant that I could hypothetically say whatever I wanted, that I had spoken too many times and with too little tact at several annual general meetings meant that it was time for me to go.

The ‘topless bishop’ saved my life. He called me while I was at work at a summer job doing industry manual labour, and he said over the phone, ‘Meet me for breakfast at a restaurant called Topless.’

Thinking that the machines around were making his words unclear, I yelled, ‘Where?’

‘Topless.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘T-O-P-L-E-S-S.’

That was my introduction into the Anglican Communion and its sexuality struggles. (The restaurant was called ‘Tops,’ by the way, which only makes one wonder about what the origins of the bishop’s derivative were.)

From there, I was coaxed into the Anglican Church with a combination of the encouragement of Anglican clergy who wanted new blood in the system and the overwhelming promise of my own ego. This, by the way, is why I first hated Anglicanism. If I were to be the saviour of the church, I needed to save these kids from boredom, to catch them before they all secularized and went the way of the ‘silent exodus’ (Asian American evangelical terminology…I’ll explain separately!). The liturgy, the organ music, the status jockeying, the unpoetic Cantonese elements: these were all unhelpful. The kids would tell me that they were bored; I used to pass notes to some of them in service, asking if the ones who bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and nodded through the sermon whether they were ‘praying hard or hardly praying.’ The kids needed excitement, a burst of their religious affections (remember, I was a Piper fan), a kindling of the Holy Spirit, and a new hip (or as one of my colleagues put it, ‘high octane’) presentation of the Gospel.

As I looked harder, though, I saw with the rest of the liturgical hipster defectors to the Anglican Church that I could give Anglicanism an ultimate makeover. Because the rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer really aren’t that strict, for example, we could have our worship team insert Hillsong, Vineyard, Passion, and Soul Survivor music between the readings. The sermons didn’t have to be drawn from the lectionary, because the lectionary was just a suggestion; we could make up our own sermon series and attempt to exposit whole books of the Bible the proper (neo-Reformed) way. The Eucharist could be very intimate, especially if you strummed an acoustic guitar while everyone was communicating. After all, with the rest of the evangelical liturgical hipsters, I saw that the Book of Common Prayer articulated Reformed theology in brilliantly poetic terms. Confirming this understanding were evangelical and Reformed books by Robert Webber, Marva Dawn, and Jamie Smith that argued that liturgy is the way that we’re formed, that we are made for poetry (we are, after all, God’s poema), and that because Anglicanism has such a rich tradition, liturgy, history, and spirituality, this is the perfect place to become formed into the image of Christ. This Reformed thing was admittedly dampened a bit by the Alternative Service versions where you don’t get to talk about ‘oblation, satisfaction, and propitiation once offered,’ but it was like the Eucharist could replace the altar call, which for us evangelicals was a big deal. In short, Anglicanism could save evangelicalism.

And that’s where I discovered Anglicanism’s baggage.

The baggage that I discovered in Anglicanism’s family wasn’t that she was the princess of Genovia with Julie Andrews as the queen mother. It was that Anglicanism was Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises.

There was quite a bit of baggage that I had ignored as an evangelical liturgical hipster and that I simply didn’t know about when I didn’t like Anglicanism and didn’t care to learn more. While I knew, for example, was that Anglicanism was founded by Henry VIII when he wanted a divorce from a political marriage (only to manage to get through five more women over the course of his life), I didn’t know about the political crisis in Tudor England and the consolidation of the state that those actions caused, as well as the political upheaval leading up to and past the reign of Elizabeth I. As a result, I also did not know to read Anglicanism as pretty much the state religion of the United Kingdom that was probably more interested in advancing the interests of nation and empire than I’d like to admit. This means that while I thought that someone like Bishop J.C. Ryle and his very Calvinist leanings were signs of ‘good Anglicanism,’ I thought I could ignore the crazy Anglo-Catholic and broad church cousins.

Actually being Anglican–and at one point, being on ordination track–meant that my pretty Anglicanism was devastatingly challenged.

As I worked in those Chinese Anglican parishes, I slowly started to notice that not all was as it seemed. There was definitely some wishy-washiness that went on, which, when challenged, would receive very wishy-washy theological justification. On top of that, I was privy to a few strange backroom political deals, some of which happened in the past and people told me a variety of versions about them, some of which happened behind my back to marginalize me in ministry, and some to which I was privy to marginalize others in ministry. (Come on, I can’t tell you more than that. They were backroom deals, for cryin’ out loud. I can only tell you that some were surprisingly ethical, with the only thing ethically questionable about them being that they were backroom deals.)  After the backroom deals, of course, we’d all pretend that whatever church split was on our hands wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Generally, we did not use the corny evangelical line about ‘God calling people to different seasons in their ministry’ to explain away people leaving. But we did come up with a variety of stories and explanations for people that were often so unconvincing that people would start to imagine their own versions of stories, which, layered over time, made the truth that we knew to have actually happened in the backroom to sound increasingly implausible. Add to that the involvement of a few out-of-town bishops whose actions must remain completely off the record, and you’ve got a story juicier than anything Susan Howatch could concoct for her Church of England series. (More on Howatch in Part 3.)

And so, at the parish level, I was ushered into the world of Anglican politics, the world in which Anne Hathaway is not princess of Genovia, but Catwoman trying to eke her way through Gotham.

And thus, to magnify Churl’s utter frustration and consternation about just how ugly the state of Anglicanism is, let me dish out some of the general dirt, that is, bits of intentionally vague data that I’ve collected over my time working in Anglican parishes and interacting with bishops and senior clerics (some of whom were very senior, let me assure you), and then using all of those experiences as a hermeneutic while reading Anglican theology.

The first thing I discovered was that racism is pretty much built into the lifeblood of modern Anglicanism. With no Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to refocus our attention, the racism that Anglicans have imbibed since the dawn of modernity seems to focus around reinforcing the sovereign power of the British crown at the expense of colonized, coloured populations worldwide. If indeed John Bossy is right about the ‘migrations of the holy’ from the church to the state in modern times, Anglicanism is a model for how a church got completely subsumed under the state, which proceeded to attempt to subjectify all of its citizens/parishioners into theological uniformity during things like the Elizabethan Settlement.

This subjectification under the crown became a sort of interesting colonial model. Since I’m a Chinglican, let me take Hong Kong as my guiding example (you can fill in all the blanks with Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, the African colonies, the Middle Eastern colonies, and the American colonies). As the British won the Opium War in 1841, there was a sense in which Hong Kong became the British crown’s chance to experiment with the creation of an Anglo-Chinese site (see Christopher Munn’s fascinating book, Anglo-China, for all the lurid and scandalous details). Within this colonial subjectification framework, Anglicanism played a very interesting role. As Anthony King shows in his work on colonial urban development, the idea of a ‘colonial third culture’ emerged precisely out of the segregation of the British colonizers from the colonized natives. That is to say, in the colonies, there were separate sections of colonial cities for the British colonizers–often working-class and lower-middle-class people from Britain looking for class advancement so that when they got to places like Hong Kong, they were the elites–and the colonized populations that they were attempting to subjectify (in Hong Kong, convert to ‘Anglo-Chinese’ citizens). In Hong Kong, St. John’s Cathedral functioned as the church in the colonizer territories. While the Cathedral currently (and commendably) serves as a hub for social justice especially for foreign domestic workers, it was the site of a lot of class conflict in the nineteenth century. In fact, if you read the early records, there was a big fight over who sat in which pews and whether you could put pews between existing pews (thus screwing with the class-stratified order of the space) in the 1850s, leading to a massive split in the church and the reconstruction of the pews.

What I’m trying to say is that in many places in the British colonies, Anglicanism was the religion of the colonizing elites within the segregated part of the colonial cities reserved for the colonizing Europeans. In turn, it generally wasn’t the Anglicans who first ran the schools and did missions among the colonized populations: those were Baptists, Union Church, Lutherans, and Methodists. The Anglican entry among the colonized populations came quite late in the game, which meant that the colonized populations (say, the Chinese) who became Anglicans also became attached to a symbol of colonizing power, i.e. if you were an Anglican, you were more European than the other Protestant plebs. Of course, throughout the early twentieth century, this dynamic sort of changed in parts of, say, East Africa where there was a revival. But argue this point as you might, the recent transition of the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) from the Province of Rwanda has a telling story. The new Primate of Rwanda, Onesiphore Rwaje, had an exchange of letters (read them here yourself) with the province’s dean, Bishop Bilindabagabo Alexis, about the financial accountability of the AMiA and whether money that was promised to flow in from the Americas had actually arrived. As if the financial scandal that caused ‘the transition’ weren’t bad enough, Alexis point-blank takes notice in a letter dated 9 June 2011 when Rwaje fails to acknowledge his title, and thus his status: ‘Also, in your reply to my letter, you failed to recognize me as the Dean of the Province. Was this intentional or simply an oversight?’ Facepalm. Revivals replaced status? Hm.

This, by the way, is why I find the central geographical claim of the current Anglican realignment–that the Global South Anglicans whom we in the West evangelized during the missionary movements of the nineteenth century are now returning to evangelize us–completely ludicrous. Again, this is like Hong Kong. By all accounts, the early British attempts to colonize Hong Kong turned out to be a complete failure, and it was not until the development of a Chinese merchant elite that the semblance of order took shape in the 1870s. But by the time the British left in the 1990s (and with some colonial political maneuvering since the 1970s), the narrative that was left over was that the British had done a wonderful job with Hong Kong as a ‘borrowed place on borrowed time.’ The idea that we in the West evangelized the Global South is already a problematic notion because one wonders how effective the missions that came alongside the crown actually were, especially if these were Anglican missions catering to European elites. Instead, as was often the case, there was a breakout of charismatic revival among the Anglican parishes quite late in the game, which made for quite a bit of indigenous revival, to be sure. And yet, these revival movements often didn’t often lead to the development of a new indigenous theology (Archbishop Paul Kwong in Hong Kong pretty much admits this in his fascinating book, Identity in Communion), but a recycling of the old colonial theologies in charismatic garb, partly because the church still needed to function under the auspices of first the colonial empire, and then the developing post-colonial nation-state. That these supposedly ‘post-colonial’ Anglicans whose identities are still heavily tied to their nation-state’s political regimes are now returning to evangelize us is a bit of a ridiculous claim in terms of Christian orthodoxy, then. It’s more like they’re rebuking ‘the West’ for shedding the old colonial theological frameworks that used to underpin their imperial regimes, for (to put it crudely) failing to be the good, strong white people that we used to be. There should be no celebration that race has been overcome in this new Anglican re-alignment; it should rather be the lament that race has been refashioned with post-colonial clothes.

What I’m saying here is that in the Anglican Communion, everything within its polity that has been touched by the British crown is subsumed under the rubric of class, including race. Anglican racism is about class hierarchy in a political regime. It’s about British colonizers being superior and segregated from the natives. It’s about the native converts being superior to the plebs. It’s about climbing the ladder of race for class advancement. It’s about class advancement for increasing political influence toward the established national regime. Class, and thus, race, are in many ways built into the fabric of the modern Anglican Communion. Modern Anglicanism, in short, is little more than a political theology for the colonizing state.

The second thing I learned was that most every other English-origin denomination is a church split from Anglicanism, which means that Anglicanism can be taken validly as a proxy for all that’s wrong with Anglophone Protestantism writ large. Think about it. Presbyterianism: split off from Anglicanism to form presbyteries with Calvinist theologies. Methodists: split off from Anglicanism based on missionary methodologies. Baptists: split off from Anglicanism over the credo-baptism thing. Even the separatist Puritans (sorry, J.I. Packer): split off from Anglicanism for a more pure form of religious practice.

This has two implications. First, if Anglicanism was the religion of the state, these church splits were no mere private backroom poobahs; they were political splits that challenged the authority of the crown. What we have in the various Protestant denominations is not simply the debate over fine points of theology; it’s also a debate over what it means to be English, what it means to be under the British sovereign, what it means to be part of a British colony, what it means to do theology for the state. If indeed Anglicanism is a political theology, then splitting from Anglicanism implicates all the other English-speaking denominations also as alternate political theologies to Anglicanism at the core.

Second, then, this means that Anglicanism has a very special and schismatic relationship to the other Protestant denominations. You can see this in the current Anglican crisis. Since the late 1990s and the early 2000s, it was like all the other denominations were waiting with bated breath over what would happen regarding LGBTQ+ clergy, LGBTQ+ bishops, and the recognition of gender-neutral unions and marriage within Anglicanism. Now if all the other denominations were really independent of Anglicanism, then you wouldn’t think they’d feel the need to do this. But they did. If I might steal from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s title as ‘first among equals’ among the primates, I’d speculate that this suggests that Anglicanism is first among equals in terms of the Protestant denominations, partly because all of them take their Protestant cues from the Anglican Communion. In fact, I know the English denominations do this. Go find a Presbyterian book of worship, a United Methodist hymnbook, or a Baptist manual of service, and tell me what you see. I see the wholesale importation of prayers, baptism services, wedding services, funeral services, Good Friday services, Easter services, Christmas services, and even some Eucharistic prayers straight from the Book of Common Prayer.

In short, I hate to be disappointing to the evangelical liturgical hipsters, but if you were looking to escape Protestantism by becoming Anglican, you have simply jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Modern Anglicanism is all about Protestant identity. All the Protestant identities. Too many of them.

Which brings me to my third point…

The third thing I realized was that this whole crisis about sexuality is not really about the authority of Scripture or the divinity of Christ, but about the conflicts among the various theological factions of Anglicanism finally coming to a head after the last five hundred years or so. What I mean to say is that the factions in Anglicanism are not simply theological disagreements about this or that articulation of God; they are deep fissures over what theology is, period.

Allow me to illustrate. A very senior Anglican cleric with whom I spoke (I should not reveal what his position was) told me that when he had worked in the Global South, he was in fact good friends with Rowan Williams when he was Bishop of Wales and had enjoyed a thriving Global North-Global South partnership with him during those years. However, as both of them were promoted into even more senior positions, they discovered that their different actions in the Anglican Communion caused their personal friendship to drift apart. My senior Anglican friend had supported a Global South excommunication of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, which had in turn led to the consecration of alternate bishops with alternate provincial jurisdictions. These were actions that neither George Carey nor Rowan Williams (both Archbishops of Canterbury) could support, for they felt that these cross-episcopal consecrations fractured the Communion.

I then asked my friend what he thought of Rowan Williams. He said this: ‘Rowan and I both have a line. I draw the line here; he draws the line there, and so if Rowan doesn’t like me anymore, I suppose it’s because we draw the line in different places. But I know Rowan has a line. When Jack Spong said that he denied the resurrection, Rowan went ping! like that to Jack Spong.’

What my senior Anglican friend was telling me was more profound than I realized then, for in that moment, all bets were off. My friend was within the evangelical stream, Rowan Williams in an Anglo-Catholic stream, and Jack Spong in a very extreme latitudinarian stream. That my friend emphasized ‘drawing lines’ demonstrated what he as an evangelical Anglican thought orthodox Christian theology was: it was about keeping within boundary lines that fenced in what the truth of God was. This was, after all, the logic of the Anglican Communion crisis: several bishops had crossed theological lines that should not be crossed, and thus, their provinces should be excommunicated and those who are faithful to historic Anglican orthodoxy, i.e. those who stayed within the fence, should find alternate orthodox episcopal jurisdiction.

Imagine my utter surprise and consternation when I actually went to read Rowan Williams’s book on Arius. As an Anglo-Catholic, Williams had come to a radically different understanding of orthodoxy. He argued that it was Arius who was drawing the lines for God while Alexander and Athanasius had to use their creativity in relation to the tradition to articulate orthodox formulations of God, articulations that eventually became known as the Triune Personhood of God. For Williams, orthodox theology had nothing to do with drawing lines; that was Arius, for crying out loud. Orthodox theologians had to use their creativity to find truly catholic solutions to sticky doctrinal problems. Orthodoxy wasn’t about drawing lines; it was about tapping into what Williams has long called ‘the mind of the Communion.’

I imagine that theology is even different still for Jack Spong. My evangelical friend told me that Williams had a line that Spong crossed. But in Williams’s actual open letter to Spong, Williams (as an Anglo-Catholic) asks, given Spong’s desire to change everything in orthodox Christian belief: why does Jack Spong even bother to stay? Williams wasn’t appealing to Spong’s boundaries; he was appealing to his sense of catholicity. This in turn probably puzzled Spong, whose latitudinarian tendencies had led him to conceptualize God as a progressive revelation that could be experienced through modernity. As a result, this liberal theology might cause him to see my friend’s boundary-drawing and Williams’s catholicity as too conservative and not open to the progressive revelation of God. As Spong might say, both put too much emphasis on tradition and the institution and in turn might be seen by him as heretical because they denied God’s ongoing work and revelation in the present.

You see what just happened there? My friend, Williams, and Spong don’t simply disagree about theological positions; they are deeply divided over what theology actually is. Get ‘sexuality’ as a catalyzer, and bam! you have an Anglican crisis with no one who actually even agrees on what theology is. Is it boundary-drawing? Is it creative catholicity? Is it progressive revelation through modernity? Who knows?

What we do know is this, of course: of these three theologies, only one of them is really accepted in the Catholic church, as the evangelical one sounds a bit Jansenist and the latitudinarian one was the subject of Pius IX’s fulminations in the Syllabus of Errors. And thus, back to the Protestant point: yes, Anglicanism is Protestant. It’s so Protestant that it has two streams of Protestant theologies called anathema by Rome and one stream for catholic theologies, none of which currently get along because none of them agrees on what theology actually is.

Now take all this insight from the level of global communion, and plug it back into parish life. That was my brief Anglican apprenticeship experience. Those backroom deals and private conversations that I was talking about was all about this stuff: class advancement and maintenance, racial hierarchies, Protestant identity, relations with other evangelicals (some of whom began working in the church and decided to introduce elements of congregational democracy, which caused a bit of a rebellion against the rector that was kinda fun while it lasted), potshots thrown at liberals without any knowledge of what liberal theology actually was (take that, Jack Spong, although we have no idea how you do theology!), reading other people’s theologies through your own theology, having parish members go to evangelical/charismatic/liberal/catholic events and coming back wanting to change the church into their image, etc. Of course, I’m sure you can say this about non-Anglican churches (I grew up free church most of my life; I definitely know that you can say this in non-Anglican settings), but within Anglicanism, you could read all of the political problems happening at the parish scale within ever larger diocesan, synod, provincial, and communion-wide scales.

The honeymoon was over, the beauty dissipated, the communion turned into infighting. Selina Kyle Anglicanism. Got baggage?

Stay tuned now for Part 3, on why I’m not about to call quits on Anglicanism, or, for that matter, Anne Hathaway.

Sure, life killed the dream I dreamed too.

What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 1)

Tags

Anglican, Asian American, baptism, Baptist, Book of Common Prayer, bourgeois, Cantonese, Catholic, Chinese, hypocrisy, natural theology, neo-Reformed, post-colonial

A comment thread that has been an extremely civil conversation on Churl’s post on evangelicalism via Flannery O’Connor (thank you to all the participants involved) now has got me reflecting on: what’s so good about being Anglican? I suppose that following my last post on Anglicanism (is Anglicanism strategic?), this is a bit of a natural follow-up. (Churl and Lelbc43, did you see what I did there? I used the word ‘natural,’ like ‘natural theology’ natural).

What is so good about being Anglican? Or put differently, if Churl is so dissatisfied with it–to the point that he’s letting out a scream about the whole Protestant enterprise, it seems (the big scream sounds so much broader than its particular focus on evangelicals)–then why am I reveling in being a Chinglican?

Honestly speaking, I really don’t know. I used to work in Chinese Anglican churches where the teens and twenty-somethings with whom I worked asked me the same thing. If there was anything they hated, it was Anglicanism. They detested Anglicanism because being ‘Anglican’ was only something that uncles and aunties who were Anglican from birth in Hong Kong cared about. It was a status thing: they went to St. Stephen’s Girls School, St. Paul’s Boys School, Diocesan Boys’ School, etc. and sang in the choir at Holy Trinity, etc., so they were really proud of being closer to their British colonizers than all of the other Chinese plebs. In other words, there was a sort of pride in being Anglican insofar as they could be proud of being elite colonial subjects. (I’ll bet this will absolutely thrill my post-colonial friends.) Indeed, if you look at the current discourse, there’s this idea in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) that the Global South Anglicans, i.e. the ex-colonial Anglicans, are going to save Anglicanism by doing what the (colonizing) missionaries did, except in the developed Global North: they’re going to re-convert (that is, re-colonize) the world. Thanks, guys, the collective amnesia about racialization is totally my sarcastic idea of what racial justice looks like.

Of course, the teens with whom I worked had no concept of this sort of colonial pride and elite status. Instead, they’d ask, Why on earth do we have to have a liturgy? Who cares about the liturgy if no one can understand it? Now, you also have to understand that I currently attend an English-speaking Anglican church where the service is taken from the 1662 prayer book, and most of my Asian North American church friends there complain about how, ‘It is meet and right,’ is simply not part of their vocabulary. But when I was working, I worked at Chinese Anglican churches, where the liturgy was done in Cantonese. And believe me, it was not only incomprehensible to second-generation English-speaking Asian North Americans; it was done in disgusting Cantonese. The offertory versicle–‘All things come of thee, and of thine own do we give thee. Amen’–translated into the Cantonese version of the classical Chinese (because, you know, that’s what the colonizers did: translate 1662 Elizabethan English into classical Chinese), put it into chant, and add an organ, and it sounds like, ‘All bugs go to the pig and we give the bugs from the pig back to the pig. Amen.’

Add to that what seems to be our theological wishy-washiness. I mean, I was on the conservative end of the Anglican breakaway, and I’m saying that I’ve experienced this sort of Anglican wishy-washiness. Sure, the conservative Anglicans split with their dioceses over stuff like gender-neutral marriage blessings and interfaith relations, but as far as I as a neo-Reformed charismatic Baptist was concerned (because, you know, that’s what you are if you’re a John Piper/Wayne Grudem fan), they were pretty wishy-washy. People who weren’t known to be ‘saved,’ or who weren’t living (sexuallly pure) Christian lives, did stuff all the time around the church, e.g. a guy who likely had gender-confusion played piano at one church; at the other church, an auntie invited some random family friend to work the sound system to ‘give him something to do so that he’ll come to church.’ Little kids who were baptized as babies and who (gasp!) did not have cognitive knowledge of their faith in Jesus Christ that wrought their justification were taking communion. You ask the rectors of these churches what their theology about all this was, and they’d say some mumbo-jumbo about being ‘pastoral’ and being ‘patient with people.’ Wishy washy. I can only imagine what the liberal side was like. (Little did I know that I was already in touch with some liberal Anglicans. Lovely people, by the way, and probably just as loose as the conservative end.)

But there you have it: if one is a Christian and wants to tell people what’s wrong with the contemporary church, one usually describes things like doctrinal illiteracy, irrelevant language, an obscene obsession with political gain, internalized racism, class superiority, bourgeois hypocrisy, etc. I hate to break it to you, but if that is your description of Christianity gone down the toilet, you have just described Anglicanism.

Put bluntly, Anglicanism sucks. Why would anyone want to be part of it?

Of course, that’s not the genuine question. The real question has two parts. First, how did we become part of it? Second, why do we stay? I’ll answer the first part about how I got blown into the Anglican Communion in Part 2. To answer why Churl is leaving and I’m staying, and why we’re OK with each other’s choices, I’ll make a Part 3. I can probably be pressured into a Part 4, where, if there’s enough interest, I can explain the post-colonial Chinglican thing.

So stay tuned. Because in spite of all of this, I happen still to be a confirmed Anglican layperson who actively practices an Asian American politics and is not about to jump ship.

*UPDATE: Part 4 will now deal with Anglican lay practice. Part 5 will deal with Chinglicanism.

Preaching Elijah

Tags

Anglican, Asian American, Ba'al, Catholic, Chinese, Christian, Christology, Deuteronomistic History, Elijah, Faith, feminist, feminist theology, Hebrew Scripture, hermeneutics, historical criticism, homiletics, Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, lectionary, liberal, liberal Protestant, modernity, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Old Testament, Old Testament studies, Protestant, sermon

In the Revised Common Lectionary, today is the third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5.  The church catholic meditates on the Jesus story in Luke 7:11-19 where Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead at the town of Nain and is pronounced a prophet. (This theme is certainly brought out by tonight’s Vespers canticle antiphon: A great prophet has arisen among us and God has visited his people.)

I preached today in a young second-generation Chinese evangelical congregational context and set myself up for a challenge. Instead of using the Gospel reading, I tried something that I’d never done before: use the first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures to construct a homily for the lectionary themes for the week. Today’s reading was from Elijah’s visitation to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon.

Drawing inspiration from Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber’s weekly postings of her sermon texts, I’ll post mine here too, though she is a far, far better preacher than I could ever hope to become. (This is not because she is a good performer, though she is that as well. It’s rather because her pastoral gifts seem way off the charts.) Two prefactory notes to this Chinglican homiletical rendition of the passage, one hermeneutical, the other homiletical.

The hermeneutic I’m using here is a typically Chinglican one: typically catholic, typically feminist, and typically positioned between church and academia. Because I don’t read Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Aramaic, or German with any level of competency, I decided to do a light review of Hebrew Scripture studies in the last week by poking around the various journals. This literature troubled me on some levels because in the wake of historical criticism going into crisis, there seemed to be a few anachronisms, especially claims that religion could be ‘private’ in an antique text (I felt like throwing Talal Asad at them). However, there were also some gems: in the wake of the historical critical method undergoing some level of crisis since the 1980s, the most interesting historical readings of the text have been feminist materialist ones that probe the political economy circumscribing the text (props to Gale Yee and Alice Keefe for brilliant analyses of the Hosea narratives that were methodologically useful for the Kings text, and props to Phyllis Trible on her analysis on the Elijah narratives themselves). From these readings, it has become apparent that where an older generation of Deuteronomistic History scholars posited a series of binaries particularly between Ba’al and Yahweh (and also Elijah v. Jezebel), these binaries break down upon a close reading of the text itself, a typical task of feminist analysis itself (no, feminism is not just about ‘gender’; it’s about breaking down conventional binaries that uncritically prop up unwarranted hierarchies). Theologically, then, it seems much more convincing to analyze ancient Israelite ‘religion’ (I prefer ‘state cult,’ thank you) as viewing Yahweh as part of the Ba’alic cult, with monolatrous prophets and monotheistic editors during the Exile inserting their own theological analyses that posited a Yahweh that stood out from the Ba’alic cult.

This was helpful for the reading of the text for two reasons. First, it helped me get out of my modern habits, which would have been to read the text anachronistically as one where Elijah and the widow take a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ into the hands of the unknown God, and God delivers because he’s their Tillichian ‘ground of being.’ These studies helped to situate the political context of the text, helping me to see the political dynamics going on between Elijah and the Omride dynasty, between Yahweh and Ba’al. However, second, these feminist analyses cautioned me against taking a strictly dichotomous view between Yahweh and Ba’al, to acknowledge how interconnected they were in the Israelite state cult and to examine deeply the original theological contributions of monolatrous prophets issuing polemics to extract Yahweh from the Ba’alic cult. They also helped me to see parallels between Jezebel and the widow of Zarephath without positing either as ‘good woman’ or ‘bad woman,’ but as very interesting and complex theological actresses in their own right.

Where I depart from the feminist analysis is where I depart from the comparative religion enterprise altogether with a sort of catholic twist: this is the theological move I’m developing from the above hermeneutical method. Reading the feminist analyses, there was a sort of polemic against Yahweh as himself a god of terror, at least as revealed by the prophets. But if we are to take the catholic development of doctrine seriously (one posited by Peter himself when he says in his second epistle that the prophets longed to look into the things of partaking of the divine nature), even someone like Elijah might have been revealing Yahweh through only a glass dimly. Certainly, this is borne out by other interesting analyses in Hebrew Scripture studies where scholars currently note that the Elijah narratives seem to be schizophrenic (or in Charles Taylor’s terms, ‘deeply cross-pressured’) on Elijah’s theology: Elijah is himself a bit of a bombastic character (declaring a cessation of rain on Israel, staging a contest of the gods, slaughtering the prophets of Ba’al, telling Jezebel that dogs will lick up her blood, sending fire down on Amaziah’s army), but the narrative’s portrayal of Yahweh is that of a still, small voice, a gentle God who sounds nothing like Ba’al. If that’s the case, then what’s revealed in this passage is a God who cares for the widow, even if she is from the land of Jezebel, a portrait of Yahweh whose contrast to Ba’al is not one of power, but one of love, certainly foreshadowing the God who reveals himself as love in Jesus Christ, almost despite the prophet’s own over-the-top moments and the authors’ and editors’ ideological agendas.

Of course, I know that this may not be a kosher move in biblical studies; my friend Sam happens to have a fantastic post detailing why bad christological moves in interpretation shut down the congregation’s ability to participate in worship. But the remedy for this might not be to forego talking christologically in a Hebrew Scripture text–we are, after all, Christians; it’s what we do, and why we were considered heretical in the first century–it might be to display a fuller christology than the pet christologies in our traditions. This is a bit of a catholic move, joining these texts in a lectionary that includes the Hebrew Scriptures, the psalter, the epistles, and the Gospels that is read by the church catholic to all speak as a choir of different parts about Jesus (sorry, I got the choir thing from the second reading in today’s Office of Readings from the epistle of St. Ignatius to the Romans).

That ‘choral’ canonical reading is the catholic move that I think is liturgically important, even if it might be viewed with a bit of suspicion from the academy (which is why this sermon is positioned between the church and the academy). There are plenty of passages from which I can draw to make these comparisons, but responding especially to Sam’s point about how these moves should be cautiously made to avoid doing violence to the text, I think in a homiletical setting, these moves should be governed by the lectionary. For example, I could have used Luke 4 where there is a direct reference to the widow of Zarephath. But that would have taken this sermon in a radically different theological direction from the move via Luke 7, which is what the lectionary prescribes. With Luke 4, I would have had to make the sermon about radical inclusion. But the Luke 7 reading makes the piece about Yahweh’s radical self-revelation to the widow as a God of love whose character is radically different from that of Ba’al, a point that probably neither Elijah nor even the Kings writers and editors had fully worked out. Replying to Sam, then, these christological moves need not always be a disservice to the congregation if they are governed by the lectionary; in fact, they can be opportunities for theological creativity.

These hermeneutical and theological moves transition me to homiletics, the delivery of today’s sermon. Here’s where the Chinglican moves come in full form: I was preaching to a group of English-speaking second-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals whose company I really enjoy. They sing loudly in worship, they allow themselves to crack the most hilarious jokes during worship, they actually laugh at my jokes (brownie points for that), and they are just a fun group to be around. With their lives situated among their generally conservative Chinese families (‘Chinese’ does not equate conservatism, which is why the qualifier is needed), their fledgling second-generation ministry at church, and their secular lives in either school or work, the question became how to sharpen the text’s punch while speaking to this particular segment of the church catholic, even while at the same time keeping the church catholic in mind.

In terms of packing a good homiletical punch, I think Karl Barth has always done a particularly good job (I also said, ‘Now I can preach again!’ after reading Romans), so you will see a lot of ‘God says, “No,'” in this sermon. This especially includes saying ‘no’ to the notion that we as younger-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals need to develop an exclusionary identity. These identity politics are a fraught issue within the current conversation in Asian North American evangelical circles, but if Yahweh is so inclusive of a widow in Sidonian territory, then the politics of developing a distinctive identity cannot be pursued via the politics of exclusion. Asian American Protestant historian Timothy Tseng and radically orthodox theologian Jonathan Tran have helped me see this very clearly: our second-generation identity politics can be premised on exclusion, especially by orientalizing our parents. These exclusionary impulses should be homiletically countered: because Yahweh reveals himself to the widow as a gift, we too must reveal the Lord Jesus as a gift, as the Bread of Life come down from heaven to give himself for the life of the world, not to consolidate our distinctive identities. (I didn’t develop the eucharistic theme, though, because I didn’t want to get into a debate about the Real Presence, though as you’ll see toward the end of the sermon, there’s a brief mention of the Holy Spirit, which I think is crucial: the thoughtful charismatics I have encountered tend to be quite drawn to a high Mariology, a high Eucharistic theology, and a high ecclesiology.)

Here’s the sermon, then. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But I suppose it’s a good record of where I’m at so far in my wrestling with how I might read the Hebrew Scriptures as a Chinglican Christian.

—-
Elijah
A Sermon for Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 5
1 Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
This sermon focuses on the Old Testament and Gospel readings.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The Elijah reading is one of those passages where it looks like the take-away message is, ‘Don’t you trust God?’  It looks like one of those passages where the point is that the really good Christians are the ones who trust God, and the bad Christians who don’t have enough faith or the non-Christians who have no faith just live a lower order of existence.  If you’re not like this, then you should educate me as to how you think. But most of the Christians I hang out with occasionally make these sorts of off-hand remarks, like, Oh, that person is not a Christian, she doesn’t have any faith, and that’s why she has no hope in life.  Sometimes we mean well—we might think that we want to go evangelize those lost people if we get a chance—but this seems to be the way that many of my Christian friends talk.  That annoying colleague at work is annoying because he’s not Christian and because he has no faith, so he takes out his psychological imbalance on us (we think that God can fix him psychologically).  Those politicians of that particular party don’t know God, so they support immoral positions that don’t align with our Christian values; we must battle with them in the cultural arena because they will corrupt our society and our next generation.  Those friends who betrayed us by not taking our side when our lives were going rough—well, maybe they’re just not Christians because obviously if they had faith, they’d have the emotional security to stand with us.  This is even true among second-generation Chinese Christians of our age.  I don’t know if you think this, but whole books have been written titled Following Jesus Without Dishonoring Your Parents and The Chinese Way of Doing Things, where the premise is that because our parents are Chinese, they hold on to these cultural values that stunt their faith so that they end up controlling us, stopping us any time we say we want to become a missionary or a pastor and forcing us to become doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, and accountants (not that there’s anything wrong with that…my wife is a pharmacist, and we’re quite happy about that!).

It becomes easy to read the Bible like this.  As we read and do our Christian thing, we criticize people we think are losers, or people who annoy us, people who don’t share our values, or people whom we think want to control us.  We say that they either don’t having enough faith to trust God or maybe just have no hope because they’re not Christian.  It’s very tempting to read the passage on Elijah like that. God tells his prophet Elijah to go to Zarephath, a town north of Israelite territory, and to trust him to provide food through a poor widow who only has a handful of flour and a drop of oil in a jug.  It seems pretty straight-forward.  The passage is about trusting God, like if we were in Elijah’s shoes and God called us to go to a far distant land to maybe be a missionary, reach out to the poor widow, and fulfill his purpose for us in our lives.  The widow also has to take a leap of faith, trusting God’s prophet that when God says that the flour and oil won’t run out, they really won’t: do you have enough faith, brothers and sisters, to believe that?  The leap of faith, we think, is what makes us different from our non-Christian friends or from our bad Christian brothers, sisters, and parents who just don’t have enough faith.  In fact, we tell ourselves that non-Christians or bad Christians have little hope because they don’t have a God to believe in; that’s why they have no purpose in life.  Unlike our non-Christian friends, then, we say that we should be secure in our life, our future, our education, our careers, our family values, even whether we’ll meet that special someone someday and date them with biblical principles, and if we don’t have that kind of security, maybe it’s just because we don’t have enough faith.  We tell ourselves that we need faith in God to hear his calling and find out what his will is, just like Elijah heard God’s calling and found out that his will was for him to go north to feed the widow.  What makes us Christian, we might think, is that we take these leaps of faith because we believe in a god and we think we should obey him, leaping into the unknown, letting the invisible God give us a purpose and provide for us while we do his will.

The only trouble is, that’s not what the passage is about.

The whole reason that God is telling Elijah to get food from a widow in the first place is that Elijah is on the run from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.  Ahab and Jezebel believe in gods—in fact, they believe in too many of them—which means that they happen to have a lot of faith.  Just to give you some context: if you grew up in church, you might know the name Jezebel, and you might associate her with this evil witch-queen straight out of something like Game of Thrones who does like black magic and seduces weak men.  That’s not quite it: the real Jezebel was a princess, the daughter of the king of a fairly wealthy merchant city north of Israel called Sidon (actually, that still sounds like Game of Thrones, but whatever).  Jezebel’s dad and probably Ahab’s dad arranged for them to get married to cement the trade between their two wealthy kingdoms.  The trouble is, once Jezebel becomes queen of Israel, she gets Ahab to start worshipping her god, build an altar that god, build a house for that god, and host some 450 priests to that god at their dinner table (which means she was pretty rich).

That god was called Ba’al.

If you’ve been in church for a while, you might recall hearing this name Ba’al (some people pronounce it ‘bayle’).  Ba’al seems to pop up in every Old Testament story where there’s another god that the real God doesn’t like his people worshipping.  It’s like all these gods get called Ba’al.  They all get called ba’al, because technically, all that ba’al means is ‘lord,’ like some kind of sovereign god, king of the universe, powerful over everything, probably the guy to pray to if you’re a farmer and you’re hoping for some rain.  And for sure, there was a major Ba’al that people prayed to, but there were lots of ba’als (ba’al place names, people named ba’al, subgods that were ba’alish).  In fact, because Ba’al was so generic, some people even thought that worshipping Ba’al was the same thing as worshipping the God of Israel, who went by a name called Yahweh, the God who told the prophet Moses back at the burning bush that his name was I AM WHO I AM, Yahweh.

But here’s the point.  The issue was never that Elijah believed in a god who gave him a purpose in life and everybody else didn’t believe in a god, so they had no purpose in life.  The issue was more like, who is this God that everybody says that they trust and who gives them a purpose in life?

This is a really important question in this passage, because Yahweh and Ba’al really seem to hate each other’s guts.  With Elijah running from Ahab and Jezebel, you could say that Yahweh and Ba’al were sort of duking it out.  It’s pretty clear in the text that Yahweh didn’t really like Ba’al, because when Ahab started worshipping Ba’al, it says that he ‘did more to provoke the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him’ (16:33).  Yahweh is pissed (am I allowed to say that in church?): he doesn’t like being in competition with this Lord Ba’al.  So Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah to tell King Ahab that it won’t rain until Yahweh says it will (take that, Ba’al).  This means that, as the passage is starting out, we get the sense that Ba’al and Yahweh are both sort of rain gods. This means that they controlled the agricultural economy of the time by making it rain.  By getting involved in this sort of mean-spirited competition, humans become their victims: while they’re duking out their god powers, the humans get a drought.  We get the sense, at least initially, that Yahweh and Ba’al are pretty similar in character: they both like to be worshipped, they both like to control the world, they both have human pawns like prophets and kings and priests who tell people what God wants them to do.  In other words, it’s no surprise that some people thought that worshipping Ba’al and Yahweh was the same thing because it really was, you know, same difference.

And that’s where Yahweh, the God of Israel, begins to surprise us.  He’s nothing like Ba’al.

Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah, who’s been hiding by a creek living off bread and meat that ravens have been sending him, to go up north, up to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon, the same city where Queen Jezebel is from.  Elijah is going to Jezebel country.  There, Yahweh says, a widow is going to feed you.  Now this still sounds pretty mean and exploitative.  It’s like Yahweh saying that in this epic battle with Ba’al, he’s sending Elijah to Jezebel ‘Ba’al-mama’ country, and there, they’re going to exact revenge on Jezebel by making the poorest of the poor, a widow, pay.

The widow seems to read the situation like this as well.  Elijah gets up there and sees this widow gathering sticks, and he says to her in the middle of this drought where there is no water, ‘Hey, get me some water in a jar so that I can drink it.’  You get the sense that this widow goes like, Oh fine, but while she goes off to get it, Elijah demands more: ‘Oh, bring me a piece of bread too.’  The widow has it up to here.  She goes, ‘OK, I get it.  You and that Yahweh your God with your drought thing, you win. You’ve defeated Ba’al. I don’t have anything baked, I’ve only got a handful of flour and a little drop of oil in my jar, so I’m gathering sticks, going to take it home to my boy, we’re going to bake that last crumb of bread, and we’re going to die.  The end; you win.’

This is when Elijah surprises her.  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Elijah says.  Sure, go home and do all that stuff you said about dying if that’s what floats your boat, but first bake me a little cake and then make something for yourself and your son.  See, the thing is, Yahweh isn’t interested in exacting revenge on you and exploiting you.  We aren’t here to pick on Jezebel country.  In fact, Yahweh’s message is that your jar of flour and your jar of oil won’t go empty until it rains again and you can grow new crops.  I’m not here to exploit you.  I’m here as a gift.

And so they start living off the gift.  They live the good life in the middle of this drought, Elijah with the widow and her son, with the infinite supply of flour and oil.  Life is good.  The widow comes to believe that maybe this Yahweh is not so bad.  Maybe he’s not as vengeful as she thought he was.  Maybe he’s not duking it out with Baal after all.  Maybe he’s a good guy, a good God.

And then her son drops dead.  In anger, the widow confronts Elijah, ‘I knew life was getting too good!  So this is your god after all!  What do you guys have against me?  All you want to do is to drudge up my sin, our sin, the sin that Jezebel caused when she put Ba’al in competition with Yahweh.  And what happens?  Your Yahweh takes it out on my boy.  The little people always suffer for the politics of the gods!  I knew it!  All the gods are the same!’

Elijah then carries the boy up to his upper chamber, puts him on his bed, and cries out to Yahweh: ‘Oh, Yahweh my God, is this what you’re really like?  Like, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Are you really going to take out your conflict with Baal on this widow by killing her son?’  He stretches himself on the boy three times and cries out, ‘Oh, Yahweh, my God, let this child’s life come back into him!’  Yahweh listens.  The boy revives.  Elijah takes him down and gives him back to his mom.  And in that moment, the widow says, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.’  In other words, now I know intimately for myself that you truly speak for Yahweh when you say things like Yahweh is not in competition with Ba’al, that he’s not going to exact his revenge on us, that he has given you to us as a gift, that instead of exploiting the poor, he’s always on our side.

I said at the beginning of this sermon that many of us might think that what makes us Christian is that we believe in a god.  But as Elijah’s encounter with the widow of Zarephath shows us, there’s a big difference between Ba’al and Yahweh, between the gods as we normally think of them and who the living God really is.  Yahweh is not Ba’al: he is not a sovereign dictator who exacts revenge whenever we place other gods in competition with him.  Yahweh is a gift, loving us, giving us life, giving us himself.

Putting our faith in Yahweh, the God who gives himself to us, is what makes us Christian because this God is the God ultimately revealed to us in Jesus.  Here’s a Jesus story.  In Luke 7, Jesus is traveling with his disciples when he comes across the funeral of another widow’s son.  The similarity to the Elijah story couldn’t be more striking.  Jesus sees the widow weeping as the funeral procession marches out of the city, her only son, dead.  It’s as if he hears the cry of the widow screaming at Elijah, ‘Is this what God is really like?’  Jesus stops the procession and calls to the man, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’  The young man gets up, and just like Elijah gave the son back to the widow, Jesus gives the son back to his widow mom, and the whole town declares him to be a prophet, one who brings God’s favourable gaze to his people.  Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.

But Jesus is more than a prophet, greater even than Elijah.  Elijah reveals to the widow in Jezebel-country that Yahweh does not the exploit the poor as a sort of vengeance for being put in competition with other gods.  Elijah shows the widow, and through the widow, shows us, that God is a gift-giver: he gives bread that never runs out; he brings the widow’s dead son back to life.  So does Jesus.  Jesus comes breaking bread with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, and feeding thousands of people in one go; on more than one occasion, he also brings dead kids back to life to their rejoicing parents.  But Jesus does more, because where Elijah shows us that Yahweh gives gifts, Jesus is himself the gift.

As one greater than Elijah, Jesus doesn’t just bring sons back to life; he is the Son of God who comes back to life.  Elijah challenges Ahab and Jezebel about their Ba’al worship and then runs for his life.  Jesus also challenges the established picture of God during his time, a picture that saw God as taking revenge on behalf of his people against enemies who conquered them and currently ruled them, a God who will rightfully enthrone God’s people to take over the world and make the unbelievers pay for their crimes.  Jesus said, No, to that picture of God; he showed us that the way of God is not the way of conquest, but the way of the cross, loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who mistreat us.  But where Elijah runs for his life after he makes challenges Ba’al, Jesus gives his life to show us that God really is love.  Jesus gives himself into the hands of those who hang on to the Ba’al version of god for their identity and the preservation of their power.  As he hangs alone and abandoned on the cross, he cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?’ but because it’s in Aramaic (Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani), the people around the cross go, ‘What? Elijah?’ and they mock him, ‘Ha! Let’s see if Elijah will come save him now!’  Jesus the Son of God dies, Elijah does not show up, and the disciples go into hiding, screaming just like the widow: I knew it! All these gods are the same.  They’re just out for their own power, and the ones who suffer are the little people.

And that is when God speaks a word that rings clearer than any word he had ever spoken through Elijah: God raises Jesus from the dead.  God says, No, to the version of god that’s vengeful and evil and powerful at the expense of the little people.  God says, This Jesus who is raised from the dead, this is my Son, this is the man of God in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth.  Listen to him.

And Jesus, the Son of God raised to life in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth, remains consistent to the truth of the God that he reveals, the God who is a gift, the God who is love.  When Jesus says, ‘Do not be afraid,’ to his disciples, he tells them that he has not returned from the dead to seek vengeance.  Because he appears only to his disciples, he does not seem to care about confronting the political people who put him to death.  Because he eats and drinks with his followers, he shows them that he won’t punish them for ditching him at the cross.  No, he says to his disciples the exact same thing that Elijah says to the widow in Jezebel-country, the widow who thought he was there to take out God’s wrath on her: Do not be afraid.  But as one greater than Elijah, Jesus does not only provide flour and oil that won’t run out.  Jesus gives himself to them, to us, as the Bread of Life.  He sends the Holy Spirit on us, his church, joining us with the life of God, to his risen life, so that as he lives forever, we will also live eternal life.

That’s what makes you and me Christians: it is that we have received the life of Jesus as a gift.  This changes everything.  This means that believing in a generic god who controls our life and gives us purpose does not make us Christian.  What makes us Christian is that we have received God’s gift of life.  It means that we have come to realize that the living God is not a god who demands us to give him stuff, sucking us dry by putting time commitments on us and guilt-tripping us when what’s on our mind is not him, but school stress, family problems, workplace politics, unemployment depression, dating agonies, or just the boredom of an unexciting life.  It means that we don’t set ourselves up as superior to non-Christians and that we don’t even exact revenge on the Ahabs and the Jezebels who come after us with their sovereign, controlling lords.  We simply love everyone, even our enemies.

And that stops us right in our tracks when we start to say things like Christians have a purpose in life and non-Christians don’t.  That is just not a Christian thing to say.  The Christian way to live is to realize instead that much of what passes for ‘god’ in the world is the version that is angry, vengeful, competitive, demanding, and arbitrarily powerful.  In contrast to that, Christians embody in our everyday lives the surprise of God’s love, because we are the people who say, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  If Elijah can enter Jezebel country and say this to a widow, if Jesus rises from the dead and says this to the disciples who abandoned him, then we must say this in how we treat colleagues who annoy us, parents we think are controlling our lives, politicians with whom we disagree, friends who have betrayed us, and people for whom we think we don’t have time.  Instead of criticizing them and excluding them, we say with our lives, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  After all, that’s what Jesus says to us, and we have received his gift of life.

Amen.

Once More With(out) Feeling: OCD as an Amplifying Factor in Thinking About Matters of Faith

Tags

Anxiety, Catholic, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Faith, God, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

Today I want to talk about the elephant in the room. That would be OCD. It plays a factor in all of what I’ve said, and it is only fair to address this. The factor it plays works in multiple ways.

First, the doubt and fear I have felt recently is something I haven’t felt quite so strongly since high-school, when I went through a very severe period of OCD, severely doubting simultaneously (it will sound odd) whether Christianity was true and whether I had in fact done the right things (e. g. prayed the proper prayer, been devoted enough etc.) to be a Christian. As with most OCD fears, my experience was based on fears that are in some situations valid, but that were amplified and made ubiquitous by OCD. It is, for instance, not an unusual thing for those who grow up in a Christian context to have doubts about their faith at some point, and about whether they are in fact Christian because they believe it or are just going along with their family. Usual, yes, but as I pointed out to a psychiatrist once when he asked how I knew it was OCD, it is not usual to be so caught up in one’s mind that one can’t even participate in regular conversation. It is not usual to hole oneself up in one’s room to replay a loop – an unanswerable loop that will in fact find chinks in any and every potential answer to all questions, no matter how absurd. It is to be afflicted with doubting for its own sake (it is not for no reason they call it the doubting disease), rather than in fact looking for something. They say that at the root of OCD is an inability to live with uncertainty, that is, to proceed (as most people do without realizing it) taking a certain amount of things for granted and being okay going what seems most plausible rather than waiting for 100% certainty to act (compulsions are attempts to neutralize and gain control over the uncertainty). People don’t realize how much trust and faith they exercise daily in living their everyday lives, how much they take for granted. And it is right that they should. But when you have OCD, you can’t. Every moment and every site is an instance whereupon the world hangs. And theologically speaking it may be so. But those without OCD are able to blessedly let God or fate or whatever they believe in worry about that for them. With OCD, the fate of everything rests on one’s shoulders. And that is presumably why, in the prior posts, the question has emerged so urgently, and why it has been the thing I obsess about day and night, often to the detriment of things I ought to pay attention to. This, I want to be clear, is not a function of the validity of the question or the matters I am dealing with (I have written an entire doctoral dissertation haunted by the OC mentality, and it does not I think invalidate what I have argued – just makes it much harder to know the difference between real, valid criticisms and that of my fiercest and most false critic, my mind). For those staunch supporters of the Reformation who want to simply explain away what I have said on grounds of madness, I will here note that Luther, an instrumental figure in the Reformation, very probably had OCD. So it cuts both ways. I will not explain the Reformation away as merely a function of OCD if you will do me the favor of not explaining me away.

The OCD amplifying factor is perhaps most relevant in understanding my first post on these matters. OCD makes it hard for me to tell the difference between the Evangelical church as it exists and the Evangelical theology my OCD latched onto and warped into tyrannical torture. Was I so very attacked, or was my brain attacking me? And if my brain was attacking me, was it doing so on its own, or simply amplifying a real fear or danger in Evangelical culture? To make the converse of the Luther parallel again, the number of hits on that post do suggest that writing it was a little like climbing a blind staircase and reaching out to a rope for support, and finding that the rope rang a bell that everyone recognized. OCD or not, I seem to have hit on something.

But there are also other factors of OCD involved, and this is where I do think one can identify more of a problem in Evangelical theology. It has taken a long while for me to be able to articulate this, but part of my brand of OCD involves a fear of emotional/spiritual contamination. One knows the horrors in one’s own head – particularly when one suffers from intrusive thoughts – and one knows the potential for perverted intentions and manipulation – and one knows that even the best of us may fall prey to these. And so, from childhood onward, one of the deepest things I have wrestled with is how to relate to others. More typical contamination fear in OCD involves fear of spreading germs and diseases to others – the compulsion that follows the obsession usually involves a ridiculous standard of cleanliness and an avoidance of others (if you avoid others you cannot make them sick – at least until OCD dissolves even this certainty). This is me, but on an emotional and spiritual level. As a human being I have, like all others, an innate desire to connect with people, in friendship and in love. And in my worst OCD moments I refrain as far as possible because I do not want to ruin it. I do not want to ruin the people I love around me. I do not want to manipulate or use them. I do not want to think of them in improper ways. And so I avoid. There is a sense in which I can in fact be physically present with people and emotionally/spiritually absent, or as absent as is possible, my mind clenched in a tight little ball of control.

And this, I suppose, is where I will take Evangelicalism to task, and this for its individualism. From what I can tell in my experience of it, community is allowed and encouraged for those who have a taste for it, those who are extroverted or make friends easily. But it is not enough of a tenet of faith to be enforced. That is, there is not a spiritual duty to seek out those on the sidelines, who are isolated, and ensure they are participating in the community of the church. Faith, for Evangelicals, at the end of the day depends on one’s personal – where personal is understood as individual – relationship with God, and, at the end of the day, community is not part of salvation economy – we are left alone with God on our knees, and expected to do anything – whether the community agrees or not – that we feel God wants us to do (and if you protest that we are not left quite alone – we have the Bible – well, OCD unguided by tradition can do very funny things with that as well). And very often these things we feel God wants us to do – crazy from all normal perspectives – belong in fact to the voice of OCD in our heads. The person with OCD is left alone before a God he or she can’t see clearly, and out of respect for personal piety, no one will pry into them and help them to be real Christians, to experience real grace.

And this is where I see, at least in its ideal form (practical may be a different matter), the Catholic church being an improvement. Christ’s grace is mediated through the Church, and this, far from being a dilution of faith, is a way of supplanting that other mediator – our personal spirituality, our minds, our OCD – and making sure we are actually Christian. You will understand how desperate I am for such salvation if you consider my position; take whatever passion, reason, and imagination you may find in my writing, amp it up about ten times, and then imagine it fueled by a boundless ferocity and viciousness toward a particularly unfortunate target. Now imagine that you are that target, and how that might feel. And now realize that I, in fact, become such a target daily, a target of my own most deadly weaponry. Let me introduce my traveling companion, OCD. Please to meet him; can you guess his name?

There are two relevant Chesterton quotes that I have been particularly thinking about lately. One is from the biography of Thomas, where he suggests that the beauty of Thomas’s incarnational theology is that it saves people from their own spirituality. I understand this, and it is in fact a very important aspect of the Church even before Aquinas – part of the Church’s uneasiness about eremitic monasticism emerged from this very problem – crazy people like me going off into the desert for reasons only masquerading as God-inspired, and unguided by the tempering factor of community.

The other Chesterton quote I am reminded of is his observation that the Church is like a detective that hunts down people and finds out their sins, not to condemn them, but to forgive them. This is what I need. I need a church that is a hunter, relentless as a hound, that will pursue me to the utter reaches of hell and batter my heart till the fortress falls. And I’m not sure how many ecclesiologies are strong enough to do this. Certainly, a church is weakened in this regard just to degree that it is not bound to the heavy and ponderous battering ram of tradition with Scripture glowing at its core. And though I am still having trouble explaining to others this next matter on anything other than grounds of desperate hunger, I want a church with the full package. Seven sacraments. A Mary blessed among women and called blessed by all generations (an assertion strangely not accepted by most alleged Biblical “literalists”). A full set of the communion of saints. And a real presence in the Eucharist (this IS my body) that I can not only appreciate in the experience of communion, but that I can also adore. Because the gates of hell are strong gates indeed, and they are very deeply embedded in me, and salvation can be nothing less than a full assault on these gates with all the forces available – material, spiritual, and otherwise – in heaven and on earth. Indeed, I even imagine that many Evangelicals and Protestants reading this are right now agreeing with me and wondering why I would have to be Catholic to think this. I may not, but I am not sure that it can come out of any other imaginative matrix than Catholic tradition infused to saturation with Scripture.