Luigi Giussani, Part 3: Why the Church? (Part I)

In the last review, I ended with a cliffhanger, and I have no doubt that all of my two or so readers have been holding their breath to hear Giussani’s answer to the question of how Christ – whose historical life proposes to be a riddling answer to the religious sense – might be mediated to us in the present. If the first thing that comes before everything else is experience, as Giussani claims, what can it mean to encounter Christ today via experience? Giussani, of course, is not the first to have asked this question, and so, like any good scholar, he begins by sketching three basic approaches that he sees characterizing contemporary approaches to this question: the Protestant way, the historicist way, and the Catholic/Orthodox way.

Giussani’s assessment of the historicist way and what he calls the Protestant way are, in my experience, right on target. To clarify the term, what Giussani calls “the Protestant way” might be better termed Charismatic or Evangelical, since it doesn’t quite deal with the nuances of things like confessional Lutherans and Anglican ambiguities. Basically, the Protestant way consists in trusting that the holy spirit will bring one intuitively to a right understanding of the Bible when one reads it on one’s own. The problem (and I can here speak directly out of experience) is that this relies on subjectivity just to the degree that a church’s understanding of God and the Spirit is detached from the broader historical conversations of the Christian Church about these Persons. The Christian God is a God who very firmly reveals himself in and through history, and the more emphasis a church places on individual interpretation apart from this history (or the more it does nothing to correct it), the more prone is Biblical interpretation to all kinds of subjectivities. While I have no doubt that God can speak to people in this immediate spiritual way, I do not think it is his usual way. His usual way is through a history, and through a people in that history – in the case of the Old Testament, Israel, and, in the case of the New Testament, the Church.

My own firsthand experience confirms the problems of this Protestant way. When one suffers from mental illness, it becomes eminently difficult to distinguish between the urgings of God and the voices in one’s head. On top of this, as an English scholar, I quickly became aware of how many cultural cross pressures come into play when we purport to interpret texts on our own. What we would call the “plain” or “literal” interpretation is in fact something that has been hundreds of years in the making, something detached and exaggerated from the more natural allegorical inclinations of readers (yes, this is a provocative statement; but readers were allegorizing well before the advent of Christianity e. g, philosophers trying to deal with the great Greco-Roman epics). We are culturally trained in certain ways to read in certain ways, and the more one becomes aware of this – and potential alternatives – the harder it is to adjudicate amongst them.

And this is precisely where the historicists step in and seek to make Biblical interpretation an objective science. People may have all sorts of ideas about Biblical interpretation, but what we really need is the “original” meaning. And we get this (allegedly) using modern historical methods developed in the nineteenth century. In the sea of subjectivity, the historical facts anchor us or not, as the case may be. One problem Giussani notes regarding this is the detached attitude it produces toward the Christian story. Rather than something we taste and touch, it is something we have come to study with the cool detachment of an academic. For Giussani, such does not in fact constitute an experience with Christ – perhaps only a historical measurement of the girth of the tomb where (we think) He lay.

What Giussani identifies here has also been part of my experience, and is I think very important for both Christians and detractors to consider: it is that the modern “quest for the historical Jesus” has become something of a red herring with regard to the claims of Christ. Seeking a way around the kind of subjectivity outlined above, some Christians exaggerate the importance of the wrong kind of historicity in their faith. Christianity cannot of course help being a historical religion, and it certainly hangs or falls on the historical person of Christ. However, many Christians have failed to make the distinction between this basic historicity and certain very narrow definitions of historical demonstrability. What we do believe is that Christ came to earth, in the world, in history, in time, as recorded in the gospels. What we do not believe as a tenet of faith is that this must necessarily be demonstrable via a particular means of interpreting history, in this case a hermeneutic with roots in the historical-critical method.

This is not to say that Christian claims should be entirely detached from our means of measuring history (as if they were mythical), but both Christians and antagonists have followed the red herring of historical demonstrability (by modern standards) as though it were the heart of Christianity. So we have books like Lee Strobel’s, The Case for Christ (as though using contemporary historical standards to measure the Bible somehow translates into a proof of the truth of Christianity); then we have all kinds of liberal books claiming to have discovered the “real” historical Jesus behind the Church’s façade; and then again, we have skeptics who imagine that poking holes in the contemporary historical methods/conclusions used by Christians (such as Lee Strobel) is tantamount to poking holes in Christianity (which it is not). It is quite the spectacle – watching Christians going to such great lengths to protect a straw man from skeptics equally deluded in their sense that burning this straw man will destroy Christianity; but it does get tiring, and one can only hope for one’s own sake that both such Christians and their detractors learn to become more interesting.

This has been something of a meta-discussion of historicism, but to return to the original issue of the mediation between Christ and our experience, the problems the individual faces in turning to “history” (as though it were singular) are comparable. First, it is worth noting that if we actually stuck to a rigorous definition of history – concrete verifiable facts without interpretation of any kind – we would not even have a history to speak of; what we would have is a collection of inexplicable artifacts. And scholars will spin different narratives from these artifacts, and there will be disagreements. And personal biases will come into play, and those who are being most honest will realize that multiple narratives are possible. And for the person seeking a certain kind of “objectivity” in these things, it will be hard to judge the opinions of the scholars unless one is an expert – if this is the mediating device, it would therefore mean one can be a Christian just to the degree that he or she can be a historian. This subjectivity should not, I think, keep us from being historians; it is natural and right that we should be curious about our pasts. But it should make us wonder about the degree to which historical contextualization can give us the right interpretation of the Bible when the very means we are using as a measuring rod are in flux.

Second, even where historical contextualization is possible and appropriate, it is by no means self-evident in what way we are to take these historically contextualized passages. The fact that certain passages may respond to certain problems in certain cultural contexts hardly tells what we should make of them. They are perhaps interesting as facts about something that happened long ago, but there are no clues in the text itself about what we should do with them. Are we to emulate them? Argue with them? Translate them into a moral code? Or what? Put another way, even if we believe that the Biblical text is inspired, there is the question of what exactly it means for something to be inspired; is the Bible a rule book, a narrative with exempla, or (as many seem to interpret the Song of Solomon) a sex manual? Or something else?

These problems I have noted – elaborations on the notes of Giussani – are not mere inventions; I can testify to them from my own experience. I know what it is to be burnt by the extremes of certain subjective “spiritual” experiences expected in more Evangelical circles as the medium by which one experiences Christ. And I know what it is to withdraw one’s hand from the fire in fear and retreat to an arm’s length rationalism, that will have many clever speculations about the meaning of the text, but that will fear to commit to any of them as revelation. Of course, eventually one becomes experienced in both these things, and one bounces like a helpless pinball between uncertainty and uncertainty, “blown and tossed by the wind,” if I may borrow a Biblical phrase. One comes to hunger for a medium that is something that can be tasted, touched, and handled – something that is not the vague abstraction of the Protestant “spiritual experience,” and that is also not the alienating detachment of a narrowly defined historicist method. This thing – this medium that one comes to hunger and long for in one’s encounter with Christ – is what Giussani discovers in the Church, to be dealt with further in the next post.

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What If The Coin is a Multi-Sided Die, and What If Reactionaries Have Stories Too?

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Anxiety, Catholicism, Dinner Party, G. K. Chesterton, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Orthodoxy, Reactionary, Scrupulosity

I too wish to welcome our new blogger to the table, even if she may insist there is no table because this is not a dinner party. I also think that it is worth noting the personality difference between myself and Chinglican – faith is not woven out of a single personality type – because it helps explain what I am going to say here. Chinglican, I think, is fairly optimistic about things; I am fairly pessimistic. Where Chinglican looks at the gates of the city lifting their heads in joy, I notice how silent the streets of the city lie. Both perspectives are Biblical and reflect reality, and are a matter of emphasis within Christian tradition. But since we have had an appreciation of what has proven to be a very popular post, I would like to add, as irenically as possible, a number of caveats. But first I need to get kind of personal.

I am a stay-at-home father. One of my favorite classes in my undergraduate degree was my feminist literary theory class. And I do a good portion of the cooking in our house, if perhaps not always a good job. Iterating these things is not a matter of boasting – I mean, someone has to do them, and it is no more or less commendable just because it happens to be me. But I do say it because I am attracted to Catholicism, and I hope these instances are enough to demonstrate that some people want to become Catholic for reasons other than that they want their wife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

Are some people attracted to Catholicism for this reason? Certainly; I have no doubt about it, just as I have no doubt that some (both male and female) who embrace the kind of open-mindedness-sans-authority proposed in the “Two Sides of the Coin” post do so on account of a non-committal attitude, a desire to run away when it all falls apart rather than go down with the ship. Much can be said about this attitude: extremists will point to it as the attitude their extremism is addressing even while missing its remedy; and modern liberals nurse it in forgetting that it is not commitment in the mind, but commitment in the gut, that at the end of the day determines where our loyalties lie. But in any case, it is not my purpose here to accuse Not A Dinner Party of this attitude – only to note that, for every visceral reaction that can be raised against close-mindedness, I have one that can be raised against the lack of radical loyalty – commitment – in our society.

What I would like to suggest, though, is that neither certainty nor uncertainty has inherent worth; it really all depends what one is being (un)certain about and how this is practiced. Because we are well into postmodernity, the problem most evident to us – and therefore less dangerous than the other – is the problem of a certainty that curtails complexity. This, it seems to me, is the target of Not a Dinner Party’s post. But I think there is also a problem of uncertainty; let me explain, with the aid of G. K. Chesterton and my own experience.

As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have OCD, nicknamed the doubting disease. Basically this means that, whereas others can feel the difference between a reasonable and an unreasonable doubt, there are many areas in which I cannot, at least on the usual internal cognitive basis used by most people. To take a common example, imagine someone who repeatedly checks the door to see if it is locked. What is driving this person is the recurring doubt that, when he checked it last time, he may have missed something. So he doubts; some specialists would say it is because the person with OCD lacks a certain kind of kinetic memory – whereas in others, their body itself would remember performing the action of locking the door or checking or whatever, the person with OCD lacks this capacity. Moreover, the person with OCD cannot tell differences between the magnitude of the matters he is worrying about; whether you tell him the world is about to end or that he may not have locked the car door, it will feel to him much like the same thing, because in fact no one can prove to him with a hundred percent certainty that his failure to lock the door will not in fact lead to the end of the world, or whatever he happens to love most. You see, the person with OCD has a very open mind. He can imagine all sorts of things, and is in many ways the model of what the new atheists seem to think they want to be – a doubter unchecked by any unverifiable boundaries or assumptions. Give him a space of time long enough and he will deconstruct the universe.

What is interesting is that this experience corresponds exactly to what G. K. Chesterton describes in Orthodoxy when he talks about the connection between the rationalism and madness. I know what it is to experience both, and I know the terror involved. And I know the only way out is through trust – of other persons and other institutions, that may perhaps be sane – of course the tricky part is determining who to trust and why. Intriguingly enough, this process – a process involving navigating multiple ways of knowing (such as that of fairyland) – is in some ways quite postmodern, and it attempts to evaluate truth via multiple means beyond a simple modernity-driven reason. So we actually have a paradox here – a desire for certainty that in fact invites us to broaden our definitions of what certainty might look like, or at the very least our understanding of the horizons to which we might look.

But, you will say, this is all well and good when you are talking about OCD, but what about “real life?” Not everyone (thank God) has OCD. True. But because I don’t think that anything evil can exist without being parasitic on something good, I would suggest this: mental illness is a parasitic totalization of a particular human trait removed from its proper context. Moreover, I would suggest that there is a delicate balance between biological determinism and free will. God help us if we ever forget the biological side, as so many Christians do when they tell their brothers and sisters to just “get over it.” Yet context, environment, and habit also have their place, and I do think it almost possible to diagnose entire societal aurae with these categories as well as single people. I wonder in fact if it is not possible that postmodern society itself has a bit of a case of OCD, with its stubborn insistence on an unachievable level of certainty that it must obtain before making any kind of commitment – which ends in apathy or anxious inaction.

If this is the case, it means that the desire for certainty so heavily critiqued in Not A Dinner Party’s piece is a pathology sprung from starvation. Always only offered the choice between a shiny liberal ideology and a basic human desire for trust fetishized as absolute certainty, people usually choose the former, but there is still an innate human hunger for trust and commitment that goes far beyond the Enlightenment fetishization, and when that part of the human is starved for too long, humans become ready to devour anything to get it, most prominently other humans. A starving person may raid a dumpster to try to fill his stomach. No, this is not the most sensible of behavior, and yes, it is reactionary and not the kind of thing one would contemplate in a comfortable middle class armchair. But simply calling the behavior reactionary seems to me to miss the point a bit. It would be better to offer a meal. But it is easier for us to live with our consciences if we reduce these people to mere “reactionaries” such that we don’t actually have to deal with them.

Of course, the analogue breaks down at various points, and I would suggest that the person stumbling upon Catholicism in this way is rather like the hungry person going off on his own, half crazed, and finding a feast in an abandoned warehouse that everyone mistakenly thought was inhabited by thieves. One hopes that, as he eats and drinks, his behavior might become somewhat less desperate and crazed, but this takes time – the day he found the feast that saved his life is kind of important, even if he sometimes gets carried away in being zealous about it, and maybe for a long time emphasizes the wrong parts of it. But calling him a reactionary is a sure way to kill any potential discussion.

You see, for all I have said about being unlike such reactionaries in my attraction to Catholicism, there is a part of me that wants to stand with them – not to condone categorically their perspectives, but because few other people will, and because I have to acknowledge Christian brothers and sisters even when they are still working things out. I know what it is to be on the other side of the “reactionary” charge. I am a fairly conservative Christian myself. I come from the Prairie provinces of Canada, and know what it is to have bishops come from Toronto to fix the non-progressive “backwardness” of prairie folk. When I first entered my Doctoral program at UBC, I think the leader of our cohort’s Intro to the Doctoral Program nearly fell out of his chair when I said that I had at one point wanted to be a medical missionary. And to put icing on the cake, I was home-schooled. From Kindergarten through Grade 12. The target I have painted on my back should be fairly clear by now.

And what I always wanted to say about these things – particularly about being home-schooled – is that there may be more to me than you think. But if there is, it is certainly a part of me you are not going to get to know (let alone advise) because your first step has been to provoke my defenses. If all I am to you is a backward, conservative, homeschooled Christian, that is how you have decided to see me, and I am not going to expend energy to disabuse you of that, because one has to pick one’s battles, and frankly, it is exhausting. So I know what it is to be thought of as the resident reactionary – what’s more, in some of the things I have said in this post, I have probably done little more than bolster these assumptions. But if you hear one thing, hear this: what the reactionary you so despise needs is not more arguments. What he or she needs is to see you love him or her as a Christian, as a human – such people need to see that your degree of love outweighs all your spite. A tall order, yes, and one which I myself don’t live up to. But I do think it is a Christian Thing. Something about loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you – even when they also happen to be fellow Christians.

Not a Dinner Party Is a Chinglican

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Anglican, Asian American, Catholic, Celia Allen, China, Chinatown, Chinglican, complementarian, Donaldina Cameron, egalitarian, feminist, feminist theology, liberation, Mao Zedong, missionary, neo-Reformed, Not a Dinner Party, orientalism, Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, white missionary women

Some time ago, I raised the issue on this Thing that we need a feminist theologian. You could say that we now have one, although I’m sure that Not a Dinner Party’s views are not quite as radical as Mary Daly’s, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s, or Rita Nakashima Brock’s. (Or perhaps they are, which would be very interesting indeed). Instead, Not a Dinner Party’s rant ostensibly places her in the same camp as those who have been labeled ‘evangelical feminists.’ What is striking about this is that even as Not a Dinner Party admits that she too has moved from a sort of Reformed evangelical confession to high-church Anglo-Catholic practice, so have some evangelical feminist bloggers like Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, to some extent for each, at least in their personal contemplative practices. If there are two sides of the same reactionary coin with regard to complementarian and patriarchal models of gender roles, there may be two sides of the same feminist coin as well.

Since Not a Dinner Party raised the possibility of the patriarchal reactionary coin, I will leave her to address this hypothesis of the feminist coin in her further reflections on this Thing.

My aim in this post is instead to celebrate the arrival of our second Chinglican on this blog. I regret to have not been able to proceed further with the ‘What’s So Good About Being Anglican?‘ series before writing this post, for I do plan to write an exposition of the Anglican charism in part 4 and of Chinglicanism in part 5. But if my post on Justin Cantuar and the Cursillo Movement was a preview of sorts into the nature of part 4, consider this appreciation of what Not a Dinner Party stands for as a preview of sorts into part 5’s more drawn out discussion of what it means to be a Chinglican.

I want to write about Not a Dinner Party’s admission that she is interested in all things China. To make such an admission may put her into the ranks of white missionary women who were very interested in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these women did not make it all the way to China; instead, some like Donaldina Cameron (Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, San Francisco) and Celia ‘Debbie’ Allen (First Chinese Baptist Church, San Francisco) mentored youth, alleviated poverty, and combated domestic violence in American Chinatowns.

Donaldina Cameron as a saint

Indeed, there is a fairly clear trajectory that runs from the work of these white missionary women in Chinatowns and the liberation movements of Chinese American youth combating racism and Chinese segregation since the 1930s Tahoe Conferences, efforts that eventually culminated in calls for social justice from the National Council of Churches’s National Conference of Chinese American Churches (CONFAB) and the joining of mainline Chinese churches with the War on Poverty and the ethnic studies strikes in the 1960s and 1970s, through which seminal organizations like Self-Help for the Elderly, the Chinese Hospital, and the Mei Lun Yuen Housing Project were started.  While some Asian American scholars are somewhat ambivalent about the sort of imposition of whiteness onto Chinese spaces by these missionary women, many Asian Americanists themselves often laud these white missionary women as prototypical anti-racist feminists in Chinatown (see, for example, Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue, Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet, and Derek Chang’s Citizens of a Christian Nation; for a critique, see Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals). That I know Not a Dinner Party to have worked in Chinese immigrant services and anti-poverty work on both the West and East Coasts may well indicate that she is following in this long legacy.

Yet even that is not the subject of this particular post, though we may well come back to these themes in the future.

What I want to discuss here is the influence that white Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have had on my thinking on Anglicanism. This is thus not an introduction to Not a Dinner Party, as if she needed one and had to work off a complementarian model where she speaks only under authority on this Thing. I am not introducing her. I am appreciating her.

As you will see from her more formal introduction on her Tumblr, Not a Dinner Party takes her name from Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s quip that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party.’ For some, this explicit invocation of Maoist ideology may be alarming, as it may suggest that there are some of us whose radical critiques may stem from secular socialist sources.

Yet if there is anything that Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have taught me, it is that we must categorically refuse to see China as the ‘other’ to the West. Timothy Cheek is one of these Anglicans. A scholar of Chinese intellectual history both in the Republican and Communist periods, Cheek writes in his introduction to relations between China and the West, China since 1989: Living With Reform, that especially those who do America-China relations often fixate on China as the ‘other’ without realizing that this binary geopolitical framework feeds deeply into how an American national consciousness is conceptualized. If this is the case, Cheek argues, then we need to understand China rightly. Throughout his work, then, Cheek makes the case that we need to understand that saying that ‘Mao is a bad man’ is not enough; we actually have to unpack who Mao was, who the intellectuals both for and against Mao were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the Republican era were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the post-Mao Reform era were, etc. Moreover, Cheek emphasizes that there is a ‘historical Mao’ who actually did things that were good and bad, as well as an ahistorical ‘living Maoism’ that endures today that places Mao as a mythologically good and evil figure in modern China. Seen in this way, China isn’t this big totalitarian land mass over there. Instead, borrowing from the Yale historian of China, Jonathan Spence, it’s a concerted ‘search for modern China,’ examining what we know as ‘China’ as a complex, modern political and economic set of systems whose activities are integral to international politics.

Cheek is not the only one doing such things, especially at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver’s Institute of Asian Research, where much of this complex political economic analysis of Asia-Pacific nation-states takes place in its various centres under leading scholars (both emeriti and contemporary) like Terry McGee, David Edgington, Abidin Kusno, Michael Leaf, Alison Bailey, and Tsering Shakya. To be sure, not everyone here is an Anglican. But the China scholars, like Tim Cheek, disproportionately are, for other scholars, such as Pitman Potter (a China law professor who has recently been ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada) and Diana Lary (an emerita professor of modern Chinese history, with interests particularly in Hong Kong, and who is a latitudinarian Anglican laywoman) certain are Anglican as well as leading China scholars. These scholars also take a similar view of China, refusing to frame it as a backward geopolitical ‘other’ but as a complex, modern apparatus with thriving public and private spheres and vibrant intellectual activity both for and against the state.

It’s here that Not a Dinner Party fits, and the fact that both her partner and I were both students supervised by Tim Cheek for our undergraduate history theses makes this point all the more poignant. (Parallels aside, however, her partner is much more mature in a Christian sense than I am–evidenced by his conversations with me when we were in history together–and whose emphasis on actually doing poverty work and working for social justice puts me to shame.) As a white woman interested in all things China, Not a Dinner Party’s command of Mandarin Chinese, both spoken and written, routinely makes me defer to her for translation, and her knowledge of the Chinese state apparatus and civil society usually means that it’s usually I who consult her for my knowledge of China.

But these people’s deep knowledge of modern China is not the point of this post. It is that this approach to China–one that emphasizes complex alterity in contrast to Cold War ideologies–seeps into their practice of Anglicanism and has deeply influenced the way that I understand Chinglicanism.

If anything, these sorts of approaches to China are far from anything orientalist. While Churl complains in a previous post that Catholicism may be Anglicanism’s ‘Orient,’ I’d like to propose that the alternative to that lies somewhere in Not a Dinner Party’s approach to China. Indeed, Edward Said made it clear in Orientalism that what he was critiquing was not that the ‘orient’ was being studied by ‘occidentalist’ scholars, but instead that ‘occidentalist’ scholars’ methodologies tended to frame the ‘orient’ as a monolithic whole without bothering to actually engage the region of the world called the ‘Orient’ in all of its complexity. The answer to Said is not to stop studying ‘Asia’ or ‘China’; it is to represent it as complex. And this is what these Anglican scholars of China do: instead of seeing the ‘other’ as a fascinating, exotic, but backward monolithic wholes, they examine China as very much a part of who we are and as a complex state apparatus straddling a very complicated economy with multiple publics and counterpublics vying for their voice to be heard. This is China; this is also Catholicism, with its very complicated hierarchy, its fascinating financial exchanges, and its various factions duking it out. What the Anglicans who study China have taught me is that while it may be geopolitically convenient to posit the ‘other’ as ‘wholly other,’ such an approach is neither a fair representation of the other’s complexity, nor an accurate view of how the ‘other’ constitutes our very selves, nor a good way to advance conversation that will lead to the ever increasing collegiality, communion, brotherhood, and sisterhood to which all Christians led by the Spirit are called.

This is what makes Not a Dinner Party’s initial rant on this Thing so on point. What she is pointing out to us is that Catholicism is not one thing. However, the reduction of the neo-Reformed converts running to Catholicism belies what she facetiously calls ‘orientalist’ bells and smells: they reduce Catholicism to one thing. She might declare to us that she herself is a ‘single issue voter’ on the subject of women’s ordination, but she goes on to say that ‘I think the trend is particularly troubling, beyond the gender questions, because the gender questions bring up something larger, i.e. things that become problematic when you go in this direction.’ One may read her as repeating the same ‘slippery slope’ arguments presented by John Piper in the Gospel Coalition video on complementarianism that she posted, only running in the opposite direction.

The only trouble is, a ‘slippery slope’ is not what Not a Dinner Party is talking about.

Not a Dinner Party is saying that it is troubling that when neo-Reformed converts go over to Catholicism, they reduce Catholicism via their narrow view of gender complementarity that only represents one wing (albeit the dominant wing, including in the magisterium) of the Catholic conversation. One wonders, for example, whether their Catholicism is big enough to include the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) or other conferences of women religious, to whom, by the way, Pope Francis went out of his way to say that they should keep doing what they are doing even if they are investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the same CDF formerly headed by a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who declared while still in office that whatever disagreements he had with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and her ‘radical feminist’ friends (which he unfortunately declared ‘another religion’), he considered her an important and thoughtful exegete. One wonders whether their Catholicism is big enough to recognize that liberation theology movements are now being vindicated by Pope Francis as part of the magisterium and that the Church has always had an ‘option for the poor,’ in which framework the free market advocates such as George Weigel, Michael Novak, Robert George, Richard John Neuhaus, and Paul Ryan with their subsidiarity arguments sound more neoliberal than Catholic. One wonders whether these people, instead of reading First Things, have been tempted by the free student subscription to Commonweal. If indeed there are single issue voters, Not a Dinner Party seems to be suggesting that it is these neo-Reformed converts.

And all of this can probably be traced back to Not a Dinner Party’s commitment to an Anglicanism that does not frame China as the monolithic other. In fact, one can only see that the neo-Reformed and conservative Catholic converts are two sides of the same reactionary coin from the vantage point of commitment to analyses that unpack modern complexity, for it is only from that perspective that one can point out reductionism in all of its insidious forms. Just as China should not be reduced to living Maoism (though that is certainly there), Catholicism should not be reduced to the magisterium (though it certainly has a place).

What do we call that vantage point in the Christian church? Well, Not a Dinner Party and I would call it ‘Anglicanism.’ Or better put, it’s called ‘Chinglicanism,’ because we realize that it’s a particular kind of Anglicanism that we are talking about here, one that is not interested in propping up the old colonial structures of the British Empire as it sets up racial hierarchies and segregated urban developments all over the world, but rather, one that realizes that the parish charism does not even allow for a strict spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world.’ It should, after all, be little surprise that the progenitors of ‘radical orthodoxy’ like John Milbank and some of their critical post-liberal allies like Rowan Williams and Stanley Hauerwas are also Anglicans who argue that that very spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world’ is itself a secular construct. As Milbank points out from the get-go in Theology and Social Theory, the saeculum as it has been traditionally conceptualized in Christian theology is not a place; it’s a time, a reference to the ordinary time between Christ’s first and second parousia. In this way, the spatial boundaries of the church are artificial, for the church is a display of an alternate but radically true ontology of radical communion, hospitality, and forgiveness in the midst of a violent world that erects and polices borders all over the place. It’s only in this context that Hauerwas’s mandate to make the church ‘the church’ and the world ‘the world’ makes sense: he is not talking about a physical spatial differentiation, but a radically ontological one in which the church and the world co-exist and where the church’s practices in the midst of the world threatens the world’s legitimacy as an ontological construct. That’s a deep articulation of the parish charism, that is to say, that the Anglican parish exists in the midst of a world that seeks to co-opt it because it doesn’t place those boundaries around itself, but where it ideally–and never completely successfully–displays an alternate mode of charitable social relations in the midst of a violent world.

Chinglicanism extends that parish charism and says that even imperial Anglicanism’s ultimate ‘other’–the ‘Orient,’ ‘Asia,’ or more precisely, ‘China,’ as well as ‘Catholicism’–must not be understood in the terms of colonial segregation or uncritical geopolitical posturing because that is a betrayal of the parish charism itself. It recognizes instead that a parish charism shows us what it means to be constituted by the ‘other,’ that our communion is deeper than we ever imagined, and that this communion is not easy and is in fact all too easily shattered by elitist political posturing. It requires us all to recognize that the ‘poor,’ the ‘Chinese,’ and the ‘Catholic’ are not others to be labeled and pushed away, but rather that we are all part of this parish together.

Not a Dinner Party is thus a Chinglican, for we both refuse to understand the ‘other,’ be it China or Catholicism, in static terms or even as apart from the constitution of our own existence, for doing so would be a violation of Anglican Christian practice altogether. Indeed, to the extent that I have committed these errors, Not a Dinner Party has often corrected me. In this way, she reminds me always that I must be a better Chinglican, for in practicing my Chinglican charism, I am contributing my share to the church catholic that we may all be irreducibly one.

Two Sides of the Same Reactionary Coin: In Which Chinglican Finally Persuades Me to Post on The Thing

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Calvinism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Complementarianism, critical thinking lapse, crossing the Tiber, Evangelical is Not Enough, evangelicals getting high, Franciscan University of Steubenville, John Piper, magisterial Catholicism, Mark Driscoll, neo-Calvinism, patriarchy, PCA, Peter Kreeft, Restless and Reformed, Rome Sweet Home, Scott Hahn, The Gospel Coalition, Theology of the Body, unedited rant, Young

So, of course, when one first posts on a blog made up of serious academics, read by thoughtful, educated people, one wants the post to be clever, well-edited, and planned, not cut and pasted from a recent Facebook rant (also, one wants it to include cleverly placed videos and pictures, as so many Thing posts do, but who’s got time for that??). However, our own Chinglican at Table can be very persuasive, and after enlisting me as a contributor to A Christian Thing some time ago, has not lost hope that I will, in fact, actually contribute something, so has asked me to post the following from a recent Facebook thread. Obviously, I would ask that you please forgive the rant-y nature of this initial post.

Aside: I also would like to have had a bio up before I posted this, for a little context, but alas, though an avid user of social media (you can find me here and here, in a less pseudonymous form), and moderately technologically adept, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add to the bio/about page. So, here’s a biographical summary: I’m a grad student at Regent College who studies religion in China, so I’m ostensibly interested in theology, attending theological graduate school as I do (spoiler alert: not that interested), but my interests also include dogs/animal rescue, American politics, West Coast 90s rap, feminism, and Crossfit. Oh, did I mention China? Because I’m really into China.

Anyway, there has been an article that has gone “viral” (in quotes, because it can only go so “viral” among a subset of Christians that is fairly limited in size but includes most of my Christian friends) (and probably yours), which observes that many evangelical colleges, universities and seminaries are inadvertently sending students down the Canterbury Trail, across the Tiber or, less commonly (in my experience) to Wittenberg or Constantinople. Many are posting this in a sort of smug way, as in, “that’s right, we ARE worshipping at high churches, as a response to evangelical schlock! Thanks for noticing!” This kind of posting skips right over the fact that the guy is clearly suggesting that a) this is a problematic trend and b) that serious, Reformed catechesis could stem the tide! His blogroll consists of Neo-Reformed standards, so we know where he stands. This caused me to reflect on the little-noted (but, IMHO, glaringly obvious) similarities between the appeal held by the neo-Reformed movement and the Catholic Church.

Here is what I posted, alongside the link:

As my friend Jonathan D. Fitzgerald would say: ‘altogether now, “evangelicals are converting to Catholicism!”‘ In other words, this is a trend piece about an ‘old news’ trend…in other words: yawn. EXCEPT: this guy, who appears to hail from a neo-Reformed background, himself, identifies the appeal/retention power of robustly confessional Protestant churches as the same appeal held by high church traditions. WHICH I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO TELL EVERYONE FOR YEARS. I think the simultaneous rise of the new Calvinists and the conservative catholic converts are a) two sides of the same coin, with that coin being discomfort with the realities of postmodern/late-modern rootless existence and b) troubling.

After I posted this, I got (justifiably) a couple of “what do you find troubling?” queries from various Facebook friends. I’m a busy lady (read: it’s July! I needed to sleep in and take my dog for walks!), so a couple of days of radio silence ensued before I posted the following, which Chinglican asked me to share–unedited–here (although WordPress thankfully removed the smiley-faces, as if to force this post to look slightly more professional):

I like how I sort of mic-dropped this and walked away, not answering people’s follow-up questions! What I meant by “troubling,” in case people were still wondering, is not that I am anti-Catholic or anti-Reformed. I respect many things about both traditions. In fact, I attend an Anglo-Catholic church, so I am “getting high” myself. What upsets me, i.e. what I find “troubling,” is that the sectors/iterations of the Reformed world and the Catholic Church that are experiencing general growth or attracting converts–Mars Hill in Seattle, the PCA in general, Piper, Driscoll, Mohler, Grudem et al, The Gospel Coalition, on the Reformed side or the “magisterial Catholic” scene, e.g. Kreeft/Hahn/Howard-esque converts, First Things and Register readers, the “JPII/B16 generation” types and Tridentine Mass lovers, chapel veilers, etc.–are both inextricably linked, in my mind, with very rigid and essentialist gender views and throwback, nostalgic traditionalism, both of which are a reaction to the challenges of navigating a world where patriarchy is no longer legislated or systematized in the same way, although we certainly have a long way to go, God knows.

Oh, Rome Sweet Home–gag me.

It is troubling to me that the discomfort wrought by figuring out how to share responsibilities in the home and workplace, whose career takes priority, how to make sure boys are still attended to and empowered in schools when girls have equal opportunity and are often more suited to traditional academic contexts, the problem of perpetual adolescence, the challenges of modern discussions of sexuality, etc. etc. have driven many to the easy answers of “biblical womanhood,” in the sense that, perhaps these problems wouldn’t exist if men just provided for their families and women took care of the home, NO PROBLEM TO SEE HERE! (neo-Reformed complementarianism) OR to Catholic teaching on gender, which doesn’t beat you over the head with proof texts, but with biology, i.e. if we just realized that WOMEN HAVE VAGINAS AND MEN HAVE PENISES, so obviously men are supposed to initiate/lead and women receive (my summary of Theology of the Body), then we would have modern gender issues all figured out. and also JESUS WAS A MAN, btw, so only men can rep Christ in the Eucharist. Don’t you see how important HUMAN BODIES ARE?

I’ve said many a time that I’m a “single issue voter” when it comes to ecclesial identification or attendendance, so I’m sure my view doesn’t shock anyone. However, I think the trend is particularly troubling, beyond the gender questions, because the gender questions bring up something larger, i.e. things that become problematic when you go in this direction.

Complementarian text, “Girls Gone Wise,” includes makeup, apparently.

If you think that REALLY INTENSE, ROBUST THEOLOGY is the answer to postmodern, wishy-washy livin’/church, then every issue is going to be a “gospel issue.” You can hardly read an article about this or that on the Gospel Coalition blog without being told that not holding a certain position sells out/loses/compromises the gospel itself. This is not a helpful posture toward Christians who have likely given a lot of thought to their biblical and theological positions and happen to have come out in a different place than you have. It also happens to be an ABSURD thing to say.

On the Tiber-swimming side, my greatest pet-peeve, also illustrated by the gender issue, but potentially illustrated by about any other issue, is that there is an endless stream of criticism of evangelicalism for being–I am not joking–really sexist, for say, not letting women preach or suggesting that there be certain gender roles in the home, based on biblical prescriptions of one kind of another, and yet a “see no evil” approach to all of the blatant and rife exclusion of women and bizarre biological theorizing that compose Catholic gender teaching and practice. Or, say, the evangelical attitude toward LGBTQ people (“so hateful!”), with no acknowledgment of what makes up the entirety of the US Bishops’ current agenda (“the Catechism’s position is so gracious!”). or criticism of evangelical silliness/anti-intellectualism, while dismissing any criticism of Catholic oddities/superstitions as being MYSTERY AND TRADITION.

All dudes up there, too, guys.

I mean, just please keep your thinking caps on in regard to all manifestations of the Christianity itself that you’re reacting to, even if you can’t see through the exotic (dare I say, Oriental) incense clearly enough to critique the new (or “ancient”) and different.

I think that BOTH the longing for a Westminster Confession/Sola Scriptura/Inerrant Bible full of clear, theological guidelines AND for an Infallible Magisterium and Tradition with a capital “T” are ways of avoiding the hard work of thinking through the ambiguities and challenges of modern existence. And I find that troubling, indeed.

*Note: I am a bit of a stickler, when it comes to spelling or grammatical errors, so am particularly nervous about this unedited post being rife with them–a good friend already noted on the ‘Book that there is a their/there error somewhere I have yet to identify. Yikes! So, I ask your forgiveness in advance.

Reflections on Luigi Giussani’s Trilogy, Part 2: At the Origins of the Christian Claim

Tags

Christ, Christian, Giussani, God, Gospel, incarnation, Luigi Giussani, Pharisee, Religious Sense

They had Christ right there – with them – and they missed it. How could they not see? Why were they so blind? How could they not recognize him? It is typical in Christian circles to ask such questions, with the implied assumption that we, had we been there, would have recognized him right away. We, the good Christians of the twenty second century, would have flocked to him, praised him, where the stupid people in the Bible – the Pharisees, the Romans, the keepers of the law – failed.

But I have always wondered about this. Of course, we hope that our place in the story is with the disciples, those who recognized Him, but how can we know? When I look in my heart – and see the piles and piles of problems there – I certainly want to be one of those who would have recognized him, but find myself fearing; what if, instead of one of the “good guys,” I would have been one of the bad guys? I would after all make an excellent Pharisee, fastidious and proud as I am. I also see in myself the figure of Pilate, agnosticism hiding behind a sensible-looking but false neutrality. Moreover, even when one doesn’t account for these proclivities to evil, there are still questions. From the perspective of hindsight, we feel we can of course “see” the outcome – Jesus was of course the messiah – but one wonders if it can have been at all clear at the time. There were after all all kinds of pretenders to messianic claims around Christ’s time, and the correlation of the Old Testament prophecies with Christ’s life – while certainly not false – nevertheless often require a somewhat counter intuitive interpretation of such prophecies. Put another way, there was, I think, another reason besides hardheartedness that people expected a military messiah – left with just the prophecies, it would be very difficult to hypothesize without divine guidance a messiah that takes the form Christ takes.

I preface my reflection on Luigi Giussani’s At the Origin of the Christian Claim with these matters because it is exactly such questions Giussani deals with in his second book. What kind of encounter would it take to convince an ordinary person, with all his/her virtues and flaws, of the divinity and messianic function of someone one initially mistook for just another generally wise man? Put another way, what kind of encounter had to happen for those curious – encountering Christ in all his curiously simple complexity – to transform from ambivalent onlookers to disciples of Christ? This question – what Giussani describes as Christ’s pedagogy – is the matter of the second book, which seeks to demonstrate that Christ is a concrete answer to the questions and problems raised by the human religious sense, outlined in his prior book.

Anticipating critics who suggest that Christ’s incarnation hardly accords with the kind of tough questioning and seeking involved in pursuing the religious sense, Giussani suggests that no seriously proposed hypothesis should be dismissed as out of hand before it is considered. The problem that the religious sense will have with the Christian incarnation is that it is not something one can figure out or hypothesize on one’s own; the path of such searching, left to its own devices, leads perhaps to Socratic irony at best and sophistry at worst. But, as Giussani points out, that the Incarnation cannot have been “figured out” by human searching alone does not necessarily indicate its falsehood – it is after all unreasonable to exclude out of hand the possibility that God could take initiative and propose an answer to the religious sense that humans could not have come up with on their own. But in opening ourselves to this possibility, one raises the difficult question of determining how one might verify it – what rubric do we use to verify the claims of someone who claims in fact to be the source of any and every such rubric? Hypothetically speaking, if one were to appear on earth from a realm beyond worldly experience, this person would presumably defy what we consider reasonable in many ways. Yet how does one tell if this person is telling the truth – if their claims of beyondness are actually real – or if their incoherence is in fact something that should be judged false when gauged by human experience?

For Giussani, we are left with a problem. If Christ is the messiah – God-made-man – then his very confusion of our sense of rationality and common experience will in fact constitute part of the proof that he is Other to us. Yet such confusion might equally suggest that he is a pretender using obfuscation as a cloak to conceal a scam. Is he hard to grasp because he is beyond us, or because he is simply incoherent?

This for Giussani is where the issue of method becomes important, that is, the issue of determining means of gauging a phenomenon appropriate to that phenomenon. This may sound complicated, but it is really a very fancy way of saying something that Christians have always insisted upon – that the whole person matters, as does the entire capacity of his/her judgement, and the most fitting answer to the problems raised by human existence is not that which simply answers a single niche problem confined to a single experience or criterion. Rather, the answer will be that which holistically answers in a way that does not do violence to the understanding of human nature as a whole, defined as generously as possible to include reason, emotion, psychology, relationships etc. – in short, all that constitutes human experience.

Turning to the gospels, then, Giussani discusses the way we see Christ encountering humans such that these humans are brought to a point of crisis where they either must acknowledge Christ as who he is and trust him – even beyond their understanding at times – or must decide against him and turn away. For Giussani, it is of the utmost importance that Christ’s appearance is never coercive; there is enough about him to invite further those who are curious and freely choose to explore, yet belief in him is never absolutely compelled or completely incontrovertible, as might be the case, say, in a mathematical equation. Giussani sees this as God’s way of honoring the free will he has given humans. There is enough evidence to go on for those who seek truth. But God will not compel anyone to follow him by the violence of a too narrow syllogism – those who wish to reject him can, and do. God will not compel stubborn hearts.

The shape of Christ’s answer to human experience – what is invoked in humans by the religious sense – is thus the matter of the book, and the book’s burden is defining and nuancing this answer such that it is mistaken neither as simplistic or completely incomprehensible. In my prior post, I described Giussani’s conception of human existence as a great riddle to be solved by as many legitimate means as are available to us. Conversely, Christ, for him, is a divine riddle posed as an answer to the human riddle. As such a riddle, Christ gives his followers just enough of himself to keep them following him – just enough of himself that they can know he is trustworthy – but there is always a part of Him beyond the bit of Him they see and measure, the part that continually challenges them to open themselves to the mystery of heaven beyond themselves, toward which He is the way.

The rest of the book is a sketch of how this Divine Riddle that answers the human riddle interacts with those he meets in the gospel accounts. I say “sketch” because the intention is hardly to exhaust what could be said on this matter, but rather to offer tantalizing glimpses of this interaction and so invite readers to further consider these gospel accounts for themselves – an intention in which (I feel) the book succeeds admirably.

But the series does not end here, and this in itself is a significant thing. I could list off any number of authors who might have ended here; the first book introduces the human need, and the second book shows how Christ answers that human need. What more can remain? What in fact remains is the question of how Christ’s life- a life lived historically two thousand years ago – is mediated to us in the present. It is, after all, one thing to say that Christ was such that he was sufficient as an answering riddle to those in the first century, but their experiences are not ours – say what we will about our personal relationships with Christ, we cannot say – at least in the strictly literal sense – that we have put our fingers in the holes in his hands, or that our hearts burned within us while he talked to us on the road. But if we have not done these things, how can we in fact evaluate Christ’s answer, if that very answer is a person – in flesh and blood – rather than a proposition? How can we encounter One who has not been present – at least in the full physical manifestation described in the gospels – for the last two thousand years? Is there another way that we might encounter Christ, not as a detached idea or historical artifact, but as His full Person, the very Person proposed as the answer to the religious sense? Is there a way of encountering this Person, not secondhand through accounts written thousands of years ago, but in such a way that we can evaluate him via our own experiences and judgements? This question – whether Christ can be encountered in the present as in the past – will be the matter of my third review, dealing with Giussani’s Why the Church?

We as a People Will Get to the Promised Land

Tags

African American, African American theology, George Zimmerman, James Baldwin, James Cone, lynching, Martin Luther King, mountaintop, Promised Land, The Fire Next Time, Trayvon Martin

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

-The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mason Temple, Memphis, TN, 3 April 1968

The day after Martin King uttered these words, he was shot dead.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman by a jury of his peers for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has brought to the fore a divisiveness over race and secular law that has driven us to the edge of civility, and indeed, sometimes into utter fear and madness. Even as protesters calling for justice for Trayvon Martin took to the streets in generally peaceful protests across major American cities, slanderous videos and photos were circulated online alleging that violent riots were breaking out, until some of those videos were exposed to be from Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots in 2011 and that reports of the Oakland police car burning had exaggerated the extent of the violence in Oakland and failed to report that across the San Francisco Bay in San Francisco itself, the protest had ended peacefully.

Even so, Zimmerman’s defenders went on the defensive. They told those of us troubled by the events, the trial, and the verdict that what happened in the courtroom was the result of a fair legal process that we were arrogant to judge. They said that by bringing up racial profiling and our objections to Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws, we were the ones being divisive. They told us that by calling Zimmerman white, we were ignorant because he is in fact part-Latino. They argued that we ignored the trial proceedings, that it was obvious that Martin had started the fight, that Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he fired, and that what we called the systematic character assassination of Trayvon Martin was a key plank in the case because his character flaws meant that he had a propensity to violence, that he had a tendency to use things like concrete as weapons, and that Zimmerman was well-justified to defend himself against this sort of hooded, thug-like teenager pummeling his head into the sidewalk. They contended that if we did not respect the jury’s verdict, then it was we who were the vigilantes advocating for mob rule.

We are divided. And yet, King prophesied that ‘we as a people will get to the Promised Land.’

Who are ‘we’?

It is tempting to write off King’s final speech by saying that ‘we’ are not being addressed by Martin King. Many of ‘us,’ for example, do not attend African American churches–what King would have called the ‘beloved community’–and even if I lay claim to my father as the only Chinese American to be ordained at Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church (a pillar in beloved communities in America), the fact is that my position in an African American ‘beloved community’ may be seen by many as ambivalent. For those of ‘us’ living outside of the United States, ‘we’ may be tempted even to write this off as an American problem, to pretend smugly that what happens down there–especially in the deep American South–is nothing more than the systemic sin of racism in America with which ‘we’ share no complicity. It is tempting to say that ‘we’ are not King’s beloved community.

It is there that we are wrong. Earlier in the speech, Martin King declares:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannseburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, George; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’

Write that off, if you will, as an imposition of American freedom beyond its borders, even though King opposed the building of the American empire during the Vietnam War on the backs of African American soldiers sent to die by white politicians. But if there is and must be, as King says, a ‘human rights revolution…to bring the coloured peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect,’ then being neither African American nor American does not free us from complicity.

The ‘us’ for King is us. All of us.

He says that ‘we’–all of us now–‘as a people will get to the Promised Land.’ If we as a people must get to the Promised Land, then we as a people are not at present in the Promised Land. If we as a people are not yet in the Promised Land, then we as a people are still in exile. If we as a people are still in exile, then we as a people are still in the bondage of slavery. And that is what King says in this speech:

It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

If we are still slaves getting together for liberation in Pharaoh’s court, then we are still colonized. This is not American freedom from taxation without representation. This is not African American emancipation from plantation owners. This is a declaration that we–all of us–are not free because we–all of us–remain colonized.

By what are we colonized?

African American theologian James Cone asks this question in a different way: why is it that there is virtually no reflection on lynching in American theology and religious studies? For Cone, the experience of African Americans as they fear a justice system that systematically criminalizes them just for the blackness of their skin makes them Christ-figures in America. This is not because African Americans teach us to be masochists redeeming suffering for personal growth. It is because the lynching tree reveals precisely how America is constituted, especially along racial lines, revealing the things hidden from the founding of the nation: that people of colour, especially black people, are scapegoated for the cohesion of white America.

Cone’s revelation reveals in turn that King’s suggestion that the ‘we’ who are in exile are not just the African Americans who live in perpetual fear of being lynched in America. The colonized are those who have systematically been made unable to even ask the question about lynching even when it is happening before their very eyes. It is those who uncritically buy into the systems of power that perpetuate political and economic injustice against people of colour. It is those who see a mass of people protesting against the unjust conditions that strip them of their human dignity and see only troublemakers rioting in the streets.

This is why King’s references to a global human rights revolution is so significant. The lynching tree may reveal the systems that perpetuate injustice against people of colour in America as ones that exercise illegitimate colonial power, but the references beyond America reveal that this experience is not limited to America. It was also apartheid in South Africa. It is also the treatment of the First Nations in Canada. It is also the cry of the subjugated in Tahrir Square. It is also the protest of those at Occupy Central in Hong Kong. It is that when the oppressed are given voice, the structures of power propped up by the colonized themselves are revealed even as the protesters are scapegoated for wrecking the coherence of the system.

It is in this declaration that the oppressed have the rights of human dignity that King declares, ‘I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.’ In the face of human rights protests, King declares that he knows where we the colonized are going as a people. We are leaving our exile and going to the Promised Land.

It’s the Promised Land of which James Baldwin speaks in the classic civil rights text, The Fire Next Time. I will talk another day about how reading The Fire Next Time in high school literally catapulted me into research and storytelling about Chinese churches and shaped me into a Chinglican. But here I will emphasize that Baldwin says exactly what Cone says in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, asserts precisely what Martin King declares in the ‘Mountaintop’ speech: we are colonized, and those who refuse to ask the lynching question while uncritically and unintentionally propping up structures of white privilege are to be pitied above all. Writing to his nephew about the pent-up blues of African Americans as they have been systematically taught to hate themselves by white people who don’t know that this is what they are teaching, Baldwin tells his nephew that as much as he is taught that survival in American society is premised on him integrating into white society and being accepted by white folk, this is a lie:

The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it…In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. (The Fire Next Time, p. 8-9)

Following this letter, Baldwin gives us an extensive autobiography exploring why the Promised Land must be founded on this kind of radical charity. He tells us that the church in his experience of African American communities is no better than the brothel, that many pastors are no better than pimps, asking like a pimp, ‘Who’s little boy are you?’ to which he answers, ‘Why, yours’ (p. 29). He recalls his early days as an African American Pentecostal preacher who swayed the churches with the opiate of the masses, blinding them to their colonized state and the economic injustice with which they were subjugated by white America. And yet, as he transitions into a discussion of the Nation of Islam, he realizes from encounters with Elijah Muhammad and the early Malcolm X that the solution is not to assume that all white people are ‘white devils,’ for this too perpetuates the colonized separation of whites and blacks in America premised on racial hatred.

No, Baldwin says, the revelation that the cohesion of white America is founded on the lynching of African Americans must lead us to love. This Promised Land must be love, Baldwin says, unless the fullest conclusion of racial colonization is realized in the apocalyptic bloodbath that will destroy us all in judgment; referencing Noah’s flood, Baldwin quotes the old spiritual that says of this judgment, ‘No more water, the fire next time!’

This is what is so poignant about Trayvon Martin’s mother’s tweet immediately after the ‘not guilty’ verdict was read:

Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!

— Sybrina Fulton (@SybrinaFulton) July 14, 2013

Sybrina Fulton is saying the same thing as Dr. King: ‘But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!’

This blog is titled A Christian Thing. It recognizes that above all things, the church of Jesus Christ as the beloved community is called in its actions to herald the good news that we as a people are leaving our exile to go to the Promised Land. Seeing the face of Jesus in the lynched and the scapegoated, the beloved community calls attention to the ways in which we are all too content to be colonized and declares that the kingdom of God is near. It does so in love, not repeating the scapegoating by calling for the lynching of George Zimmerman in return, but by protesting a system that justifies lynching for the sake of social cohesion, the ‘rule of law,’ and the ‘rights of self-defence.’ Martin King has been up to the mountaintop. He has seen the Promised Land. He declared to us as a people that we will get there, and thus, to attain the love not founded on the violent myth that harmony can only be achieved by burying the murders that undergird it, we must rise as the church in protest against systemic forms of racialization that only end in death.

In that protest and in that lament, we join Martin King as he declares that he is happy tonight, he’s not worried about anything, he’s not fearing any man, because as we head toward the Promised Land, we can say with Martin King and all the saints and angels that our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Reflections on Luigi Giussani’s Trilogy, Part 1: The Religious Sense

Tags

Chesterton, Christianity, church, Giussani, Human, Luigi Giussani, Religious Sense, Thought

I do not want to call this a review of Luigi Giussani’s trilogy (The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church?), because the term “review” seems to imply some kind of comprehensiveness. There is a lot to say about these books, and I am not even going to pretend to do them justice. What I will do, though, is relay some of my impressions from them, particularly those that struck me, challenged me, and reoriented my thinking. I will begin at the beginning, with The Religious Sense.

For those unfamiliar with the book, The Religious Sense deals with the innate human search for spiritual truth; at this point in the book, Giussani does not so much deal with specific theologies and religions as with what he conceives of as a drive, in all humans, to discover their destinies as humans. For Giussani, the world – existence itself – is a large riddle that humans have been left with, and it is in our hearts to decipher it. Even as I describe this I can think of two points that many of my secular colleagues would raise about this, and I want to deal with them briefly, as I don’t think they should be insurmountable barriers to appreciating this book.

First, a discussion of destinies – ultimate happiness, final truth, and all that – sticks a bit in our postmodern throats. Didn’t we leave all that behind with our abandonment of metaphysics and metanarrative? Can we actually use the word destiny seriously without evoking a cheap knock-off adventure movie with a title like “H. Ford and the Stone of Destiny”? To suggest an answer to the first question, I would say that we tried, but weren’t quite successful. We tried, allegedly because we outgrew these things as humans, but in fact because people without a metanarrative are remarkably pliable and easy to manipulate socially and economically. It is a political disaster when people start taking stories seriously, as if they might actually matter in real life; people might actually start thinking for themselves, and so it is always safer to stick with the wonderful liberal lie that poetry makes nothing happen – and if the readers believe it, nothing will happen. So, yes, there has been the suggestion that we are moving away from metaphysics and metanarrative, but it seems to me hardly a settled matter, and perhaps it is in fact a propaganda that pairs well with the convenience of nation states in helping people forget they have free will.

Second, many of my colleagues will worry about problems with positing anything innately human, including a common religious sense. On the more extreme end are the post-humanists, who believe that the idea of the human itself is completely a social invention; more moderately, there are those – say from a postcolonial perspective – who worry that speaking about something innately human in fact leaves out various cultures because those humans taken as models of typical humanity are racially and socially inflected such that humanism reifies culturally specific particulars rather than universals. To the post-humanists, I can’t say much, and in some ways I mean this very literally – what can we say to each other? – everything we think we have in common (even language) must be illusory and arbitrary. It is hard to talk to someone person to person when we begin by denying the hypothesis of persons. A face to face conversation is hard when there are no faces.

I am though more sympathetic to the post-colonial side of things, and I do think Giussani is particularly adept in this regard, and this can be seen through comparison to an author such as Chesterton. My own read on Chesterton follows that of Ralph Wood (The Nightmare Goodness of God), who argues that there are some problems in Chesterton – that in fact demand a critique via nouvelle theologie – and also some wonderful and necessary truths, which can be better appreciated once we have addressed the problems. And one of these problems I think is that, when Chesterton talks about the common man, or the common Christian, he is usually using a fairly narrow rubric for gauging this – he is in fact very often talking about a man (rather than a woman), and this man is very often quite British (though with some beautiful exceptions, like the childlike monastic hero of The Ball and The Cross). There is of course nothing wrong with appreciating either the British or men (though I personally often have trouble appreciating the latter), but when Chesterton speaks in his aphoristic way, the effect can seem totalizing – the only way to be a Christian is to be a British or at least Anglophilic male. This in turn makes things problematic when one wants to consider being a Christian when one is of other another culture, a woman, or a man whose masculinity does not always quite resonate with a Chestertonian spirit of warlikeness.

Here particularly is where Giussani’s approach shows its strength, for one of his prime emphases is experience. For Giussani, all our experience – all the things that have shaped our understanding of realiy, our emotions, our passion, our reason etc. – must be brought into play when looking for our destinies. The point for Giussani is achieving the greatest possible honesty when it comes to experience – to look it in the face, so to speak, and not cut corners in anything. A less confident apologist would probably omit this emphasis as a dangerous cipher that could blow up in one’s face at any moment – after all, what if one encourages others to engage their experiences only to find that these experiences lead these others elsewhere? I think Giussani might answer this in a twofold way, first that if we do not trust our faith to stand up to the measure of our experiences as humans, we probably do not in fact trust our faith. Second, he insists often on the role of free will – God will never impress himself so totally on a person that that person cannot choose otherwise, and so simply turning a person on to experience is not a mechanical guarantee of making that person a Christian.

To return to the main point, though, this emphasis on the discovery of what it means to be human by experience rather than by preset assumptions makes Giussani’s approach much more amenable for any culture or sex than Chesterton’s approach. We do not come in from a place of Archimedean detachment and just displace a culture’s understanding of humanity with our own. No, we listen to where that culture is also catching glimpses of what it means to be human and begin there.

Most surprising for me though was the way this applies to one’s own self. I am a historicist-type, particularly annoyed with most modern things, and particularly annoyed with myself for being one of these modern things. I do not care very much if something is relevant to me – when the modern “me” is so undeniably shallow, what can be the use of catering to it?  It is a bit like translating the gospel into a language called “Stupid.” This is perhaps exaggeration, but you will get the point – I am one of those who think that instead of speaking in simple ways that a person with a lobotomy can understand, we should maybe stop lobotomizing people. And so I find most of my kinship in the past, or with those who love old things, or at the very least embody old values.

But Giussani insists that I do the opposite. Rather than situating my heart in a distant historical time capsule and vacating the present as far as possible, my duty must always be to the present, and must begin with my immediate experience. Giussani does not of course say that it should stop there, but the way he begins here is remarkably different from the way I begin – I fancy a historicism that will squelch the modern self. Giussani, I will here add, is right where I am wrong, because what he is saying is more in accord with the Christian vision of incarnation – we always deal first with what our eyes see and our hands touch rather than some distant idea or concept. Not that such ideas or concepts are for Giussani innately bad, but it is our business to begin with experience – understood in the broadest possible sense – and build bridges toward such prospective answers. In Giussani’s read, the most sensible of these prospective answers to build toward is Christ and His Church. But that must await my discussion of the second and third books.

An Apology and a Parable

Tags

Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Bottle, Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Fountain, God

I am fortunate in having friends to remind me what it means to be a Christian, and in saying this I am not talking about friends from a particular denomination or even only my Christian friends; to the degree that they have held me up to the standard of the faith I claim to believe, atheists and agnostics have here served God’s purposes as well. And there can be no other response to this than thankfulness, a thankfulness I am very bad at expressing. But I do want here to take a moment to express it, particularly regarding my last post.

As Chinglican pointed out in an off-the-blog conversation, the tone I adopted in the last post was – well – not very catholic. Sometimes the words run away with me and I can speak in an off-the-cuff manner that wounds other Christians. I do continue to stand behind what I said, but I also apologize for the manner of delivery and whatever ungracious hurt might have been caused. I also request prayer.

To explain why I need prayer, I would like to post a response I gave to Chinglican privately in explanation of the tone of the post:

“I really hope [the post] did not come across as potshots; when I argue like this, my purpose is not so much to “shoot” at others as much as at the best form of a counter-argument that I can conjure up (drawn from comments of others, my own thoughts etc.). I want to see if what I am thinking can survive my own most devastating counter-argument. So I think that when I find myself arguing against myself like this I sometimes get carried away and permit some mockery. The points I will stand by, but you are right to remind me that when I talk about these things, I am saying things that are overheard by others and taken as directed at them. I will try to be more gracious, though it is sometimes hard with matters like this that reach to the very root of my heart and pluck all the strings of my being, still ungracious as it is this side of heaven.”

It is particularly this latter bit that I want to take up here and articulate further, that is, that though I speak in a fairly philosophical tone, these matters are quite close to my heart. Because I am good at hiding it, I don’t think anyone really quite understands how often and how close I come to utter despair. It is a little like this. Imagine you are on a desert island. And here and there you have found bottles, some more full, and some less full. And for a time you live off these, going from bottle to bottle. But soon you realize you are not getting enough water and eventually you will die of thirst. You keep drinking from the bottles – because what else can you do – but there is no longer the immediate joy and certainty of survival you had when you first found them. And then two things happen. You meet a friend, and a little later on, you discover a fountain. The friend is still fairly new to the desert island, and is happy living off the bits of water in the bottles. He still has hope in this water. But you are taking the long view of the bottles – what for him is hope has become prolonged despair. But the friend has also heard things about the fountain – that though it looks like water, it is really a deadly poison that will kill you certainly, though slowly. This does not entirely bother you because you know you are dying slowly anyway. But your new friend Is adamant and you are put in crisis; you look over at the fountain and are nearly driven mad by the sight of fresh water – you can almost taste it – but you do not want to move without further evidence. So you wait and watch. You see various animals drink from the spring, quite happily, but there is really no way to tell how it affects them – the poison, if it is poison, acts slowly. Finally, much to your amazement, another person comes along and takes a deep draught from the spring, and you ask him whether the water is poisonous. He laughs a little, and says, no, he hasn’t found it to be so. But you press further. What if he is a liar? What if he wants you dead? What if the poison just hasn’t had time to work on him and he doesn’t know? But he points to the stockpile of different bottles you and your friend have collected and tells you that the bottles you have been living off the whole time – variously empty and full – have in fact all been filled at this spring. You have no way of knowing with a hundred percent certainty, but if it is poison, it is a poison you have been drinking the whole time. In finding the fountain, you have not found something different, only the source.

The stranger leaves, and you turn to your friend very deeply hopeful about this, thinking that, with a fountain like this, you may be able to survive after all. But your friend’s reaction is completely different. He does not trust the stranger. But perhaps more irksomely, he is still elated at the fact of having water to begin with – the long-term plan is not in his mind. He is still very excited about the bottles of water, and thinks it is still a pretty good deal to be able to live off them, and he does not want to risk being poisoned when he can have more certainty in sticking to what he knows is safe (he does not in fact believe that the water from the fountain and the bottles are the same). He has not, like you, weathered years in the desert and seen that though the variously filled bottles will kind of get you by from day to day, eventually you start dying of thirst. You become parched.

And there you are, standing beside the fountain with your friend. You are nearly mad with thirst – the deep thirst only fresh water can quench – and at just the moment when you are about to take a drink, he decides you should sit down, share one of the bottles, and talk about the matter for three days, so as not to rush into anything. And you agree, because he is your friend. But you are still parched, and because you are parched, it is sometimes hard to tell where your words are coming from. Sometimes they are reasonable. Sometimes thirst takes over. And sometimes the annoyance at your friend’s reasonable pedantry is too much. You don’t understand how he can sit there and make a show of reasonableness when you are dying of thirst. And so, yes, you sometimes snap, and say things you don’t mean. You forget that, though the water in the bottles did not work for the long term, they did keep you alive up to this point. And they did, in fact, if the stranger was telling true, bring water from the spring. But because your friend is so bent on telling you over and over again how wonderful the bottles are – and wondering why in hell you would risk the poisonous fountain over the bottles – you snap and start badmouthing them. You start telling about the dirty dregs you found at the bottom of one bottle, or the tepid temperature of another, or the mosquito larvae you found in a third. And the more insistent your friend is, the louder is your protest. Not so much because you are arguing with your friend per se. No, it is because your friend has woken in you something that your heart very deeply fears – that he is right. But this for you is a fear where for him it is a hope, because, unlike him, you know that sticking with the scattered bottles means death. In this situation it is hard, to say the least, to speak objectively and without offense. There you are, and there is your friend. And there is the fountain, and there are the bottles. And your thirst is great.

My primary point in telling this story is to try to explain – though never excuse – the kind of uncharitable things that sometimes come through when I write about these matters. Evangelicalism and Anglicanism have indeed kept me alive thus far. And for that I can only be grateful. To return to the metaphor of the story, it cannot be denied that the water I drank from these bottles is real water. As Chinglican rightly points out, there are many things to be grateful for in the Anglican communion, and his examples hit home. I was blessed with the Alpha course when, just at the end of my time in the Evangelical church, its doctrinal stability had a calming effect on my more neurotic radicalist tendencies. The first Anglican church I went to – where my wife and I got married, and where my son was baptized – was and remains an amazing place spiritually – when I visit home, and go to St. Mary’s, the church too feels like home. And, as Chinglican also notes, there is Cursillo. My parents, who incidentally followed me into the Anglican church, have been deeply blessed by, and found ministry in, this movement. These are all things to be thankful for.

What one realizes though is that such things come and go. For instance (as in my case), one might find oneself in an Anglican diocese where the low church people cannot tell the difference between a lawsuit and Christian witness on the one hand, and the bishop can’t tell the difference between Christianity and his own political agenda on the other. And then again (having moved out of this diocese) one might find oneself in a fairly good Anglican church again. But as far as the primary experience of church goes, things can move and things can change yet again. And it is the same with other of the aforementioned spiritual things as well. They come and go, or, as my favorite author would say, “To everything there is a season…” And at some point you realize that these things sustain you for a time, but you cannot live off them. They are bottles of water, but they are not the source. And then you encounter Catholicism, where the deepest source of everything is Christ’s real presence in the sacraments. The positive and the negative experiences will still be there, the wheat along with the tares. But at the end of the day what one is called to drink from is not an experience here or a revival there, but the cup of Christ that is his blood. One of course never stops trying to bottle this water of truth and goodness and distribute it as far as possible among parched people. But the bottled water is not what you live on. The fountain is.

That is, if it is not poison. And there are so many people who want to tell one so. They are still excited about the spiritual experiences here, the liturgical order there, the intellectual rigor here, the ministry to the poor there, etc. And they should be, because it is right to be excited about these things – they are of God. But when they tell me there is no source – or rather that the source is in some kind of vague symbolism or ethereal spiritual experience or freedom to develop intellectually – I despair. And when I despair, I get just a little cranky, because I am thirsty, and have been for a long time. And I know this crankiness left to its own devices will turn into an ugly lack of charity. And so I request, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever side you are on, pray for me and use me gently – I am deeply in need of love.

Come, Holy Spirit

Tags

Anglican, Archbishop of Canterbury, Catholic, charisms, Cursillo, Justin Welby, parish

I will eventually write part 4 of the ‘What’s So Good About Being Anglican?’ series, but as Churl might need something more immediate, I wanted to say a few quick words about the Anglican charism before giving it a fuller treatment in Part 4. Consider this a trailer of sorts.

Churl has been responding to questions about why he cannot stay Anglican with a characteristically robust account of why he needs the Roman Catholic Church as a body in order to sustain his faith. His previous two posts on Anglicanism–the one about Anglicans seeing Catholicism as the ‘Orient’ and the one in which he laments that Anglicans do not have a robust enough account of ‘obedience and catholicity’–should be taken seriously as structural problems within the Anglican Communion that must be tackled not only for internal housecleaning, but for the sake of ecumenical dialogue for full, visible unity in the church catholic.

Yet in the midst of this theoretical talk about the problems of structure in the Anglican Communion, I wonder whether a better approach is to drive this conversation down to what’s actually happening on the ground as the Spirit is blowing the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church together. This can be seen in the recent elections of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio to serve as Pope Francis and Justin Welby to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury. I have written earlier on both, but I have concentrated on Pope Francis. Today, I want to say a few words about Justin Cantuar in what can be arguably called a ‘new Pentecost’ for ecumenical relations.

Opening his first press conference on being elected Archbishop of Canterbury, then-Archbishop-Elect Justin Portal Welby invoked the Cursillo prayer of the Holy Spirit over his episcopate: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.’ This prayer pops up everywhere in the Archbishop’s work. It most recently appeared as Archbishop Welby concluded his incredibly thoughtful speech on ‘revolutions’ at the Church of England’s synod. Variations of it pepper his speeches, particularly as they touch on the Anglican charism of reconciliation.

There has been a great deal of focus on Justin Welby as having first learned pastoral work from the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton. Called an ‘Alpha evangelical,’ Welby has recently been back for an interview with HTB’s vicar, the Rev. Nicky Gumbel, himself the poster boy for the Alpha Course for having developed it to international success after it was launched by his predecessor, the Rt. Rev. Sandy Millar.

To reduce Welby to Alpha, however, would miss the breadth of his life in the Spirit. Of course, he is an Alpha evangelical, and thank God he is, for the Alpha Course is indeed a key contribution to parish evangelism even beyond Anglican circles, as is HTB’s music in the work of Andy Piercy in the past and Tim Hughes in the present. Yet HTB is not all there is to Welby. He recounts in the interview with Nicky Gumbel that shortly after the death of one of his children, Johanna, in a car accident, he and the HTB staff visited the Vineyard Movement’s John Wimber in Anaheim and received a very compassionate prayer despite the movement’s emphasis on healing, which did not happen in Johanna’s case. Moving into seminary, then ordination, and then his first curacy, Welby became drawn to Catholic social teaching and to monastic communities, reading Rerum novarum and discovering many modes of prayer, all of which came to the fore in his Journey in Prayer as he walked through five dioceses en route to Canterbury Cathedral. He talks about his own eucharistic adoration, praying through the liturgy and also carrying a communion set with him when he was a reconciler from Coventry Cathedral in Africa so that when it became apparent that his life was on the line, he celebrated the Eucharist to, as he puts it, ‘clear the accounts.’ He speaks of ‘revolutions,’ of how the Spirit leads us to ‘fresh expressions,’ embracing even modernist movements in Anglicanism as he brings the church into incarnational encounter with the modern world, especially in his policy work responding to government austerity.

Justin Welby is no mere Anglican evangelical. He is also catholic. He is also charismatic. He is also latitudinarian. He is an ecumenist. He is, in a word, all of Anglicanism in one person.

What Churl wants to know is: what is that Anglicanism, though? If there is no way to speak of true ‘Anglicanism,’ then how can we even talk about Anglicanism? What if there is no there there?

This is where the figure of Justin Cantuar steps in, calling the Anglican charism one of ‘reconciliation in the world’ and deriving it from the ‘renewal of prayer and praying communities.’ From where does he derive this account, though?

The answer is one that I have yet to see discussed: the Anglican Cursillo Movement.

The Cursillo Movement is arguably the fullest expression of Catholic-Anglican relations I have ever seen. Cursillo was first born in the Roman Catholic Church in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War at St. James of Compostela. It is a retreat of sorts that brings parish members in for a weekend intensive set of workshops and prayer groups led by people in the parish who are only allowed to go by their first names, no titles. It is a time of intensive prayer for parish renewal in the face of political upheaval and a time of discovery for lay people in the parish as to what their charisms are. Originating in the Catholic Church, it was imported into Anglicanism in specific dioceses with the specific instruction that Cursillo is only allowed to happen if the bishop says that it can. In some dioceses, bishops themselves take off their mitres and join Cursillo groups as participants, often even surprising fellow participants when they learn that the bishop was sitting with them at dinner, and they did not even know it. If Anglicanism gave the world Alpha, the Catholic Church gave the Anglican Communion Cursillo, and we are extremely grateful for that gift of parish renewal.

I have written often of much of the pain that I experienced in my ministry internship and have not written of much of the good that I learned there. I must repent, for Cursillo was one of the good things. As it happens, my ministry mentor when I was an apprentice was one of the key figures in the Diocese of New Westminster’s Cursillo Movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Because he is Irish and stood godfather to me at my confirmation into the Anglican Communion (a moment in which I really believe that I received an Anglican charism), I often feel like there are two untold secrets about my attachment to Anglicanism, the first of which was that I was received into the Communion through the graces of an Irishman who felt the full brunt of the Protestant-Catholic skirmishes in Belfast and whose voice in my head daily goads me to reconciliation, and the second of which is that I understand Anglicanism almost completely through Cursillo lenses because that’s simply what I was taught.

I never attended a Cursillo weekend, as it had been canceled by the bishop in the 1990s. I just happened to be trained in ministry for two years by a Cursillo figure who made me feel like every moment, even the most awful ones when I felt my whole ministry disintegrate, was part of a long Cursillo parish residential discovery. I went often to his office, distracting him from his own preparation work for children’s ministry (sometimes I helped, but I was often bad at the crafts). We ate so much together that I could memorize his various menu favourites at the country food place that we frequented and the Chinese tea cafe at which we ate when he didn’t want country food; I was also in possession of his TimCard for Tim Horton’s for several months. He often made it feel like leading the youth group and the second-generation English service was like a residency (which is what made parts of it devastating when my plans fell apart). On Good Fridays, the two of us would stay up through the night at the parish, praying for the church and telling Irish jokes. He even trained me to brew coffee after I made several cups that tasted more like syrup than the liquid elixir of life.

It was in this context of living life deeply in a parish and learning to be prayerfully open to the Spirit that I learned about my gifts as an ordinary Christian. I learned that whatever academic work I was doing had to be at the service of the parish–not governed by it, but brought into conversation with other people who were working in different parts of the Father’s world. As in a Cursillo weekend, I was not special; I was ordinary, simply contributing my small gifts to a larger project of healing and reconciliation in the world. To do that, I had to be open to conversation, both with people in the parish and with the living God in prayer, and I had to learn that prayer was simply doing life with God. It was very ordinary stuff. It was an accidental Cursillo experience in a diocese where Cursillo had been canceled more than a decade before I began my internship.

In short, my mentor impressed on me that we live in a parish, exercising our charisms as part of the local church for the life of the world around us. Those charisms, in turn, are discovered in prayer through the Holy Spirit and grounded in the parish work of living life together as the church in the midst of the world.

That is Anglicanism, plain and simple: the parish charism of prayerful openness to the Spirit. And thus as I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury open his episcopate with the Cursillo prayer, my jaw hit the floor. This was the Anglicanism in which I had been trained. This was the Anglican charism that I knew that I still exercised. This was the emphasis on lay parish ministry that I still treasured.

And so it is that I’m not worried if someone like Churl needs to head over to Roman Catholic waters to find sustenance for his faith. I’m not anxious at all, because if this is the Anglican charism, any schism that we have with the Catholic Church is illegitimate anyway. After all, this particular Anglican openness to the Spirit–which is what i will discuss in part 4, so I won’t get ahead of myself by giving away what’s so uniquely ‘Anglican’ about it–is shared by Catholic parishes and Orthodox congregations, by free church polities and mainline gatherings. This parish charism makes us ecumenical, so if Churl feels that he is better suited to engage this ecumenical conversation from the Catholic side of things, yes, of course, he should go there.

But meanwhile, we who have been confirmed into the Anglican Communion will exercise our charisms as we stand open to the Spirit, and we pray the Cursillo prayer with Justin Cantuar as we live in our parishes and seek to contribute the fullest expression of the gifts of the Spirit to renew the face of the earth: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Amen.

Is the Desire to be Catholic Simply a Desire to Escape the Responsibility of Independent Thought?

Tags

Anglicanism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, community, Individualism, Mark Driscoll, Tradition, Western Christianity

This, in brief, is how some people see an attraction to Catholicism. We are complex human beings who have squarely on our shoulders the responsibility of being faithful to a long and arduous quest for truth that involves much searching, reflection, and exercise of our consciences, minds etc. But some of us are weary and broken. Worse still, some of us are lazy. And so we are attracted to an institution that can do our thinking for us. We can give up a God-given mandate to search and rest on our laurels while we let an all-powerful system take care of the rest. The more heroic stance is the one that remains tentative, open, and uncertain, whether this is in the secular realm or in regard to faith – for instance, many justifications of Anglicanism suggest this openness is one of the merits of it.

What I want to ask is whether this is a valid critique. Are people like me – with a deep attraction to Catholicism – simply lazy copouts? Or is there another side of the story? I suggest the latter, and here’s what I propose. People who make this charge have a fairly strong sense of self, what their self is, how it does it’s thinking. This sense of self in fact is not something that has come naturally to post-lapsarian humans. The self that we are called to pay attention to, to exercise, to depend on rather than authority, is a self built over the past two thousand years of Christian history. It is a self that owes its origins to the Christian salvation of the self that had been corrupted in Eden. And it seems we are all too happy to throw out all these trappings – all the props that contributed to making this self – and suggest that it is on this self we solely depend, and any other dependence is weakness.

Of course, as many of us know, this sense of self is very quickly collapsing with the collapse of what might be called Western Christendom. Please note I am not here making a judgment about what ought to be done about this or trying to say we should just go back to “the good old days.” I do think though that this concept of self is weakening – has indeed grown very weak – and so we are left in all sorts of postmodern crises of identity.

As someone very closely attuned to such crises of identity, it is very hard for me to identify with those who simply want me to take responsibility and forge on as an individual, embracing uncertainty over allegedly cheap certainty. Why is this hard for me? For one, I know what mental illness is. It makes one wonder what exactly one’s self is. It is profoundly disturbing to find that you can’t always trust what you think is the “I” doing the thinking, and I know how often I mistake mental illness for the true voice of this “I”. I suppose in a sense this has also allowed me to see how this works even in cases where mental illness is not involved. People often think they are asserting themselves, being radical and heroic individuals etc. And they are so often not aware that something other than the “I” is doing their thinking for them. There are an infinite amount of cross-pressures – to borrow a term from Charles Taylor – that masquerade as their selves. As we know from the Eden story, rebellion itself is the oldest of clichés. And so, when people lionize the heroic individual self forging its way toward truth, I can’t help seeing, not individual heroes, but mass-produced sophists. It is very rare when an individual – a real philosopher – breaks out of this, and usually when they do, their highest realization is that they really don’t know anything at all, and their end is a cup of hemlock. Modern people though, not liking the taste of either self-doubt (real self-doubt, not the fashionable half-hearted kind) or hemlock, are quite content with sophism producing a tentative non-committal attitude toward the rest of faith and the world. In my opinion, this lack of faith – not only in religion, but even in very basic human relationships – is one of the most grievous losses in the modern world.

To put it another way, modern society suggests that, at the end of the day, the complex “I” that I am must always remain on top and in control. To trust (at least when it comes to religion – I say nothing about nation states…) is a form of weakness, and though we may admit that there are some areas where we have to trust, it is important to keep such areas at a minimum. There is no place for throwing ourselves into something as a last ditch effort when all else seems lost – because we know ourselves to be strong and not lost. Would that I were lucky enough to be this strong. Actually, no. I am glad I am not, because this sounds a little to me like a description of hell.

To come to my point, most people assume that I am looking for something that my self recognizes as good, true, noble etc. They imagine me here, sitting in my armchair, surveying all the candidates and taking notes. But this is not the case. The case is much more like that of a dying man on a battlefield – I am doubting that he will interview his doctors to see which he gets along with, or which has the best bedside manner. No, the one thing he cares about is whether it is a doctor who can save his life. You see, I am not looking for something for myself; rather, I am looking for something that will root and sustain the self I am, a self-fast fading in the backwash of postmodernity, the self that is simultaneously the most mysterious and deadly thing we encounter as humans. It is not so much that I want to be Catholic. It is more that it is only within Catholicism that I can conceive of preserving and saving a self that even has the capacity to say “I want…” to anything.

Why Catholicism? Because of two things: obedience and catholicity. As far as I can tell, obedience and trusting others is the only way out of a self so ingrown it can no longer see itself. This, for instance, is why Anglicanism is hard for me. Yes, I can, as people like Chinglican and others say, be as Catholic as I want within Anglicanism. Yes, as Catholic as I want to be, excepting my need for boundaries and obedience. The Anglican church is quite happy to let me be as Catholic as I want, but it is also quite happy to let me be as hellish as I want. There is a terrible reality behind the idea that one can be oneself as an Anglican; perhaps one can, but one can also be oneself in hell. People balk at the power and authority the Catholic church claims. But such people, I suggest, do not understand – really understand – the power of sin and its entanglement with the fallen self. Sin is not so little that we can face it on our own.

But why the Catholic church? After all, there are plenty of churches everywhere happy to make me obedient (for instance, why not Mark Driscoll’s church?). My answer depends on catholicity. I want to be subject to all the saints in the room. This, indeed, is the difference between the Catholic church and a cult (because cults demand obedience too). The Catholic church in its ideal form is a mechanism for making all the voices of the saints (present, past and future) heard in a society that wants to confine meaning to the present moment. It is the widest possible jury of my peers. Unlike a cult, which generally depends on a particularly charismatic person who draws people away from their historical moment into his own world, the Catholic church draws the modern world itself into a crowded room of saints. As a Protestant, I have always considered it important to pay attention to what the Christian across from me says when we are doing a Bible Study – I may disagree with him or her, but we are both Christians, and I should at the very least be troubled by our differences. But how much more when we are reading the Bible with saints? Shouldn’t we be just a little troubled that those Christians we encounter from the past differ from us in some areas? Not that we can or should go back, or that we should automatically assume that Christians in the past got it all wrong and we get it all right. But we should be troubled, for they are Christians and we are Christians.

And yes, to anticipate the question, a lot of Protestants actually do think like this. They do look at as many saints as possible. But what they lack (as far as I can tell) is the mechanism for processing this tradition and the call to obedience so necessary as a safeguard against the waywardness of the self. You see, for the past number of years, I have been such a Protestant, trying to engage as deeply with a fully catholic Christianity as I can. But the task is daunting. I have spent some six years just looking at Gregory the Great, and I still cannot say I have “mastered” him – not that that would be a wise thing to say under any circumstances. But if it takes me so much time to even begin to think through the work of a single Christian from the past – indeed, a space of time that was only available to me on account of academic funding – how can I expect to process the rest of tradition? And how can I invite others to this burden when they probably have even fewer resources and time than I have been blessed with?

The temptation in this situation will be obvious: to play a game of cherry-picking exegesis with tradition. Pick the sexy saints, the Francises and the eminently quotable Augustines, and make a coat of many colors to match our moods. Again, here is where the whole issue of the self comes in. It will be much quicker and expedient to salvage what we like and abandon the rest. For all the claims that Anglicans make about tradition, I cannot help but see the Anglican church (where it is dealing with tradition, which is not everywhere) as one picking up “retro” scraps of tradition here and there and making it into hipster garb – it is flashy, but I prefer the seamless robe of Christ.

In contrast, the Catholic church is cursed with the burden of tradition – and I say this in the same way that I would say that humans are cursed with community and love. The Catholic church cannot think about something for a moment but there is a stutter from the past, a hiccup, something that must be considered. It makes for very slow processes of thinking and complex ones, but for my money, the complexity is something that reflects the complexity of reality, not an undue multiplication of entities without charge. As most modern people point out, tyranny would be easier – embrace what is progressive, what is winning etc. – but if we are going to listen to all the Christians in the room of history, who in turn are tasked with listening to all the people in the world, things are going to get messy and complex and yes it will take a while to think about things. That is the price of listening and loyalty – not just to those who exist in the present moment, but to those who have gone before us and will come after us.