Chinglican Christianity: Sanctorum Communio

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Alastair Sterne, classical Christian, communion, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Zizioulas, liberal, mass, N. T. Wright, orthodox, resurrection, Roger Revell, saints, Stanley Hauerwas, veneration

Roger Revell has hit the nail right on the head. There is nothing like full-bodied orthodox Christianity that elicits a rousing ‘Amen!’ from across the spectrum of those who are part of the diverse chorus of what St. Peter’s Fireside calls ‘classical Christianity.’

Revell’s brilliant response takes the wind right out of the sails of Douglas Todd’s suggestion that ‘conservative’ Christians are too heavenly minded for earthly good. Here’s Todd:

This might shock those who assume the main reason Christians become Christian, and embrace the Easter account of the resurrection of Jesus, is to be guaranteed a spot in heaven. But belief in heaven, or otherwise, is not a deal-breaker for entry into this camp. Some liberal Christians don’t think it is possible to have individual consciousness after death. That said, most liberal Christians appreciate how the story of Jesus’ resurrection exemplifies how “death is not the final word.” Even if they don’t believe Jesus physically rose from the grave, they buy into the metaphor. They accept Jesus’ followers had mystical visions of him after his death and that the love people show on earth lives on eternally after their body dies.

One might have expected that Revell’s ‘classically Christian’ answer would take us back to St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians where he castigates the Corinthian church for entertaining the idea that the bodily resurrection may not have happened. Certainly, within evangelical circles, a certain reading of this passage has yielded a cottage industry of apologetics (one thinks, for example, of Frank Morrison’s Who Moved the Stone?, Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ) seeking to demonstrate from putatively incontrovertible evidence that Jesus in fact was raised bodily from the dead and that classically orthodox Christianity must be believed. For these people, ‘belief in heaven’ and the physical resurrection are indeed ‘deal-breakers,’ and a response from this camp would have dragged Todd through the coals for a seeming denial of the necessity of Jesus’ resurrection.

Not so Revell. Quite obviously influenced not only by N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (which he cites), as well as Wright’s tome The Resurrection of the Son of God (which he is too modest to cite), Revell’s first argument is that Christians who are too heavenly minded for earthly good are in fact shirking their Christian obligation to be present and alive as, in the words of St. Irenaeus, ‘human beings fully alive’ and that ‘liberal Christians’ (say, Rob Bell) as well as their secular counterparts (say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) are right to be disgusted at these freeloaders mooching off the rest of us who are working for the common good. As Revell explains, the only problem with applying this logic to all classically-oriented Christians is that that’s not how the logic classically works. Emphasizing that classically-oriented Christians are not completely agreed on what it means to share in the risen life (say, whether or not to venerate the saints who have fallen asleep but are still alive, or whether the Bible talks about only about life after death or a life after life after death), Revell suggests that one point of convergence is that, according to Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the prize of eternal life is precisely what makes life in the present possible, exciting, and creative, making even prophetic statements in physical martyrdom (say, St. Perpetua or Dietrich Bonhoeffer) completely possible. Revell ends with a bang: life after life is not a ‘pleasant and fanciful idea’ but the path of full-bodied Christian discipleship.

Here, Revell is certainly influenced by orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion. At the risk of oversimplification (I’m not going to deal with the whole hypostasis and ousios thing, for example, because it gave me a splitting headache), Zizioulas argues that human planes of existence can be divided between the ‘biological’ and the ‘ecclesial.’ At a basic ‘biological’ level of living, people tend to be concerned about their own survival, literally stayin’ alive (ah, ha, ha, ha, ha…sorry…). But what happens when one gets baptized is that one gets immersed into the risen life of Jesus Christ — one quite literally, and not just metaphorically, participates in the resurrection. Because the ‘death factor’ gets taken out of the equation, one’s existence is not merely biological and oriented toward survival; it is now ecclesial and eucharistic. In other words, one continues to participate in the risen life of Christ by sacramentally eating his flesh and drinking his blood. This doesn’t just happen at an individual level. It happens together with the whole church — the ekklesia — which makes one’s existence ecclesial, which means that one’s existence is not merely oriented toward biological survival, but toward communion with the other.

Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian from a completely different theological tradition (and indeed, historical period!) from Zizioulas, this means that a Christian mode of social relations is marked by the sanctorum communio, the communion of saints. Indeed, Bonhoeffer goes as far as to say that the church is Christ literally and actually made manifest in the world: ‘Now the objective spirit of the church really has become the Holy Spirit, the experience of the “religious” community now really is the experience of the church, and the collective person of the church now really is “Christ existing as church-community”‘ (Sanctorum Communio, p. 288). As Revell suggests, a Christian is cut out to be the best kind of citizen, ‘the type who forgoes personal interest and entitlement because in due course, she will exist in a place devoid of want and lack.’ That’s because a Christian’s primary locus of existence is in the church, which is not a private voluntary association, but a public display of a new mode of social relations marked by always being for the other and not for one’s own survival.

Which brings us to that scandalous thing that Revell talks about halfway through his post: the veneration of the saints. Except that it’s not very scandalous…

In fact, that Revell seems almost unfazed by the scandal that his mentioning of this practice might cause indicates how central the veneration of the saints is to putting the resurrection to work. After all, when in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus defends the resurrection over against the Sadducees’ denial of it, he does it by saying that the reference to the God of the burning bush as the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ indicates that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not dead but alive, for God is God of the living, not the dead. What this means is that saints like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky, are not only alive, but can quite literally continue to intervene in the present world. A ‘classical Christian’ view, embraced by Catholic and Orthodox Christians especially, takes this radically catholic view, that the communion of saints not only comprises the living and the dead in Christ, but that all are in fact still alive by virtue of their participation in Christ’s risen life. That Jesus himself shows that this can be a validly Christian practice from the beginnings of the Scriptural tradition suggests that while Protestants may have historically found this practice problematic (idolatry! one hears them cry), every Christian should in fact find this practice relatively uncontroversial.

The beauty of politics called ‘church,’ as theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, is that not everyone has to agree with precisely how to articulate this sensibility. Indeed, Revell’s ‘classical Christianity’ makes room even for Todd’s liberal articulation of a spiritual resurrection, a rare feat in the currently polarized Christian theological landscape. If there is room in the Body for Protestants who cannot endorse the resurrection practice of venerating the saints, then there is certainly also room for those who may articulate the resurrection differently without actually denying its effects. After all, Todd does not deny the resurrection: even if some of Todd’s ‘liberal Christians’ do not believe in the resurrection, ‘they still buy into the metaphor’ and agree that ‘death is not the final word.’ While full-bodied ‘orthodox’ Christians might chafe at this, Revell is correct not to take Todd to task explicitly for this because he recognizes the reality that theology has never really only been about articulation — it’s about practice.

What Revell finally shows, then, is that ‘classical Christianity’ simply cannot be ideological. If indeed theology is about practice, then the comparisons between ‘classical’ and ‘liberal’ Christianity do not end with how Todd and St. Peter’s Fireside express their theology. What has happened over the course of our conversation, then, is that what started out as a debate between two polarized ends of the theological spectrum have been brought together by convergences in practice — the doing of justice, the doing of the contemplative life, the doing of confession, the doing of silent presence, the doing of the resurrection — have trumped whatever divisions we might have. As Pope Francis once declared, ‘ideological Christianity’ is a ‘disease.’ We must work together.

Now the theological discussion is at an end. We have come together more closely than we ever thought possible. We have discovered our unlikely affinities in the sanctorum communio. The liturgical formula from which we get the word ‘mass’ is Ite, missa est. After having partaken of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood in a deep sharing in the risen life of the God who became human, the people are dismissed. Go forth in the name of Christ, the deacon sometimes says. Or, go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Or, go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Or, let us bless the Lord.

The people always respond: Thanks be to God.

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Chinglican Christianity: Christ Our Brother

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agency, Churl, Douglas Todd, Hans Urs von Balthasar, hiatus, James Wellman, Jesus, kenosis, Mike Chase, silence, sovereignty, St. Peter's Fireside, suffering, theodicy

I deeply appreciate how the conversation among Douglas Todd, the St. Peter’s Fireside staff, and I have been shaping each other’s discourse. As I said in yesterday’s post, these posts are not only for the theological entertainment of a niche group of readers. They are public deliberations, put on the public record, in a public sphere that has one of its major items of debate what the place and privilege of Christians is in our society. That we can model public theological conversation and debate is a joy that we should not take lightly. For all we know, it could reposition the monolithic image of a Christian Right nefariously trying to take over a secular public sphere into a diffuse kaleidoscope of moderate Christians working out in very public ways the ways that they disagree yet remain in loving communion.

It’s in that spirit that I want to remark on how remarkable Mike Chase must be as a pastor. The post that he has delivered as a response to Douglas Todd on how ‘classical Christians’ understand divine sovereignty and human suffering is classically pastoral in the sense as it provides guidance for the people of God in Jesus Christ to develop a fuller life participating in his life. Here’s what Todd said:

When bad things happen, atheists sometimes turn to Christians and rhetorically demand: “So where is your God now?” The question hinges on the incorrect assumption that progressive Christians believe God controls everything, like a supernatural dictator. Liberal Christians tend to believe life is a combination of chance and divine purpose. Given they have free will, humans can engage in moral evil, whether they’re Hitler, members of Boko Haram or wanton polluters. In a creativity-filled universe, chance also makes it possible for bad things to happen in nature, like a destructive avalanche. Liberal Christians believe that, out of suffering, God works to bring new order and healing.

What’s interesting about Todd’s account of liberal Christianity is that it has plenty of room for a ‘classical’ Christian understanding of divine sovereignty and human agency, as it should, particularly because ‘liberalism’ in one sense shouldn’t mean much more than the development of an overlapping consensus among disparate socio-theological imaginaries. Chase correctly sees his ‘in,’ pointing out that his view and Todd’s overlap quite a bit, both in an understanding of God’s sovereignty and human suffering. Disavowing the ‘Calvinism stricter than Calvin’ that plagues contemporary theological discourse among evangelicals in which some have emphasized divine sovereignty at the complete expense of human agency, Chase observes that a ‘classically Christian’ understanding of God’s relationship to the world has a lot of room for human response and responsibility (although I really wish that, as in the previous post on race, Chase would add a bit of a qualifier in his quote from St. Augustine about Jewish-Christian relations). While some may read Chase’s insistence that ‘God controls everything’ as a mere assertion without argument, it sounds to me like Chase is sufficiently aware of Yale theologian Kathryn Tanner’s God and Creation in Christian Theology because Chase chalks up the disconnection between divine sovereignty and human agency to a modern metaphysics. For Tanner — and thus, for Chase — there were different metaphysical rules governing the ‘classical’ conceptions of divine sovereignty, especially in the quotes Chase selects from St. Clement of Rome, and while a nominalist account of God’s sovereignty that argues that God can basically do whatever he wants has presented modern theologians with an ‘either/or’ of divine sovereignty or creaturely agency, the older Christian ‘grammar’ of God as a divine agent working in the world sees no need for this dichotomy.

In turn, Chase argues that this means that there is no need to engage in debates about God’s sovereignty when it comes to human suffering. Instead, a pastoral response would be that human suffering, like the example of St. John Paul II slowly deteriorating and showing the world how a Christian dies well, is a participation in the crucified suffering of Christ. In this way, classical Christians don’t engage in intellectual gymnastics when they encounter human suffering. They enter into the ‘suffering of the other and point them to Christ,’ suggesting that, plainly speaking, we’re all in this together.

Chase’s pastoral response reminds me of some time that I spent with some priests associated with the Congregation of Holy Cross. I had gone through a very difficult season of ministry — yes, before this academic thing and indeed, before even this Thing, I was discerning a call to pastoral ministry — and had gone to live with the priests to refuel. Much of it was spent with good food — candied kielbasa, slow-cooked chicken thighs, Sunday night pizza and movie — and great table conversation in which the priests often exchanged collegial jabs at each other to hilarious effect. One moment that I will never forget, though, was during one of the daily morning masses. The celebrating priest that morning had to preach from the Gospel passage where Jesus tells off the Sadducees for their hypothetical situation about the woman marrying seven brothers and being confused about her real husband at the resurrection. Going beyond criticizing the Temple establishment for not believing in the resurrection, this priest argued that the real problem was that they didn’t understand that God had come close to them and was living and working among them in powerful ways. He then ended the homily with a prayer to ‘Christ Our Brother.’

Christ Our Brother. I understood that theologically; after all, St. Paul has himself written of Christ as the firstborn of all who share in the risen life and of Christians as ‘co-heirs with Christ.’ But this priest actually believed it. I remember asking him about it later, and he just said matter-of-factly, ‘You know, I think a lot of Christians want to think of God as very distant from them. But I’m afraid that’s not Christianity. As a Christian, you don’t believe that God is distant. God is close to us, and we’re afraid of that.’

Years ago, this same priest had introduced me to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and when he heard that I was still interested, he asked, ‘Have you read Mysterium Paschale? It’s Balthasar’s most accessible work.’

I’m sure that Mysterium Paschale is hyped up to be ‘accessible,’ but that book took me a whole year to read. That’s because von Balthasar completely messed with me. Most will talk about von Balthasar’s development of the ‘hiatus’ on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter where God is really dead. But what struck me was a formulation in the first chapter where von Balthasar contextualizes his understanding of that pause with the kenosis, the self-emptying of God in Jesus Christ. For von Balthasar, God’s action in emptying himself in Jesus Christ is the supremely sovereign act that shows that divine sovereignty is fully expressed in being completely helpless as a human being who is completely obedient to the Father, freely accepting even death, death on a cross. To put it in all of its radical glory, God exercises his sovereignty by falling into the hiatus of Holy Saturday.

In this sense, there is really no need for Chase to separate the two parts of his post between the ‘theological’ and the ‘pastoral.’ If God’s expression of sovereignty is not that God can do whatever he wants (as the nominalists assert) but to love us so much as to fall into the abyss with us, then a ‘classically Christian’ theology is that Christ our brother suffers with us — that is simply who God is as a divine agent. In turn, it is an unclassical thing — indeed, a modern nominalist thing — to start with ‘God’ as an empty, characterless category with a terrifying, arbitrary sovereignty who can do whatever he wants and does nothing to stop the evil in the world, which means that it’s also an unclassically Christian thing to assume that God’s real job in exercising his sovereignty is to stop the evil in the world. No, in this sense, both Todd and Chase would affirm a suffering God, one who acts by coming close to us, even down to hell, to bring us back to life.

That’s why our resident expert on suffering here on A Christian Thing, Churl, writes so publicly about his mental illness and his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. When I read Churl’s posts, the raw honesty always stuns me into silence. I suppose that’s the point. See, Churl is also a scholar who knows Job and Ecclesiastes like the back of his hand. When he is that honest in public, it’s like he’s putting up a finger, warning us that even ‘pointing to Christ’ cheapens his suffering. Don’t be Job’s comforters, he is saying, just don’t say anything. Or, in the words of James Wellman, a ‘liberal’ Christian who says too many ‘classically Christian’ things, ‘grief is underrated,‘ a feeling that he knows intimately in the wake of his wife’s death and his very public mourning over the loss of his ‘home’ with her. If God himself can fall into the silence of the abyss, we should, to take Ecclesiastes’s Qoholet out of context, let our words be few. If we really believe that God is near and that Jesus is present as a brother to the suffering, then there’s no need for us to say anything. The ‘classical Christian’ practice of the ‘theological’ and the ‘pastoral’ in the face of suffering may well be silence. After all, when Christ our brother is present but silent, what right have we speak?

And because that’s a perfect segue into the next post on death and the beyond, I’ll stop here and wait for Roger Revell’s response to Todd’s account of the resurrection.

Chinglican Christianity: The Civil Society Question

Tags

Alastair Sterne, BCTF, capitalism, Catholic social teaching, civil society, classical Christianity, deliberative democracy, Douglas Todd, Jürgen Habermas, Leo XIII, Occupy Central, political economy, public sphere, Rerum novarum, state

Let me begin this post by congratulating Alastair Sterne for finding common ground with Douglas Todd on the question of government. In the previous posts, I have chided Sterne for not realizing how much common ground his articulation of ‘classical Christianity’ had with Todd’s version of ‘liberal Christianity,’ and in this most recent post, he seems to be celebrating in their commonalities, so much that Sterne has written a ‘much shorter response’ for which we are supposed to ‘breathe a sigh of relief.’ In Todd’s words, here is the statement with which Sterne establishes ‘common ground’:

Along with Obama, Trudeau and Layton, B.C. Premier Christy Clark and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne would fall into the liberal Christian camp. Their political differences suggest just how diverse liberal Christians can be. But it’s fair to say most liberal Christians, from Martin Luther King to Tony Blair, are not anti-government activists like those in the American Tea Party. Liberal Christians generally believe governments can be a force for good, including for upholding human rights, providing social services and reducing the gap between the rich and the rest.

What Sterne finds so appealing about this statement is that the title statement – governments as a potential force for good — is the word ‘potential.’ Also eschewing the extreme neoliberal politics of the American Tea Party in which, as Ronald Reagan once said, ‘government is the problem,’ Sterne claims that classically Christian doctrine would hold that governments can potentially act as a force for good, though they could potentially abuse their power as well. Explaining that Jesus’ alternate vision of power seen through the matrix of death and resurrection would eschew the abuse of power for the common good, Sterne holds up Dutch Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper as the model for Christocentric politics, one in which the Lordship of Christ would ensure the goodness of the political system. In so doing, Christians may themselves be scattered across the political spectrum, but because they submit to a higher power that has redefined politics for the common good, they themselves work toward a common purpose of human flourishing through ‘the good functioning of government.’

Kuyper looking cheery.

In principle, Sterne’s simple political vision is relatively uncontestable in ‘classically Christian’ terms, although all the talk about the sovereignty and lordship of Jesus Christ over politics might have some, such as Globe and Mail journalist Marci McDonald, worried about a theocratic takeover of the Canadian government at various levels of governance. However, the question is whether Sterne’s simple vision of submitting to a higher power is workable in practice. That’s because — as both Todd and Sterne imply — the government in a democratic polity is not something that’s out there; it’s a governing force in which residents and citizens participate.

The word for that kind of participating polity is civil society.

The Pope Emeritus is there for added emphasis with regards to ‘classical Christianity.’

The classic text that’s used to understand civil society is critical theorist Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. In fact, I highly recommend it. That’s because Habermas gives a historical account of why the ‘public sphere’ of civil society, that is, the gathering of citizens to converse and deliberate about the workings of the state, is actually really important to the actual workings of the state. Once upon a time, what the ‘public’ meant was the state and its court, located out there from the citizenry as something to watch, sort of like a play. But as democratic sentiments developed and citizens were increasingly commenting on the workings of the state, these democratic deliberations — or what was known as public opinion — needed to be taken into account by the state. In this way, the state could be held accountable by its citizens, that is to say, the citizens never really banked on Sterne’s argument by ‘potential’ as to whether the state could work for the common good or abuse its power. Instead, they were going to make the state work for the common good by discussing it, criticizing it, deliberating about it, and participating in its policymaking. A democratic government is basically when this public opinion in this public sphere of civil society in effect runs the state.

And Canada is democratic.

This means that the real question that we should be asking isn’t whether government is a potential force for good and how they might hypothetically be turned for good. Even with Sterne’s theological answer that turns our gaze upon Jesus and looks full on his wonderful face, that the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of his glorious grace does not in fact somehow negate the way that governments are not simply out there, but are instead diffused among the citizenry, at least theoretically. (Practically, in Canada, this would mean that the citizenry needs to push back on the dismantling of the Canadian Broadcasting Company and in the United States, it means that they would need to work to overturn the Citizens United decision because, in the prophetic words of Elizabeth Warren, ‘No, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love and they die.) The question, then, is not whether governments are a potential force for good. It’s: how should the people of God participate in the civil society whose deliberations effectively run the state?

The great thing, though, is that there is a classically Christian approach to the civil society question. It’s called Catholic social teaching.

As I said in the very first post in this series, Catholic social teaching is a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century magisterial interpretation of how classical Christianity is to be lived in the politics of the contemporary world. It arguably dates back to Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, or less commonly, ‘On Capital and Labor.’ Speaking of a ‘middle way’ in the course of our conversation between ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ Christianity, Leo XIII proposes a middle way between two systems of governance that has dominated modern political imaginaries: capitalism and socialism. This means, of course, that much of what Catholic social teaching addresses is the state and its role in governing political economies.

What’s great about the argument in Rerum novarum is that the be-all-end-all isn’t the state, as much as the encyclical is about state governance. Leo XIII places a very high premium on civil society. Mirroring another argument that Todd has made about how ‘dignity’ is getting thrown around in public discourse with very vague definitions, Leo XIII defines the dignity of the human person as everyone’s right to flourish in a life filled with social relations marked by love, beginning with the family as the basic unit. While conservative Catholic debates of late have emphasized the family part of this whole thing, the point of Rerum novarum was that people made in the image and likeness of God have the right not to have their lives run completely by the state or the capitalist economy. That’s why Catholic social teaching ran a middle way between capitalism and socialism: it couldn’t be fully capitalist because treating workers with full human dignity is fundamentally incompatible with technocratic attempts to reduce everything to the profitable bottom line, and it couldn’t be fully socialist because the answer to the excesses of capitalist ownership could not be to transfer ownership of everything, including people, to the state. No, it was a bit of both. The people themselves have the right to an economic system that promotes human flourishing marked by love.

And when they don’t have that, they have the right to form labour unions and go on strike.

That’s why the British Columbian teachers’ strike is one of the perfect case studies for this kind of thing. Stretching the bounds of Rerum novarum, here we have a case of public sector employees — i.e. teachers who are employed by the government and who have formed a labour union called the BC Teachers’ Federation — who have gone on a full-fledged strike to publicly dispute their grievances with the BC Liberal government. For the sake of argument, we might ask, is there a classically Christian justification for this strike? Some might say that there isn’t. Given the New Testament injunctions to respect the governing authorities and for slaves to submit to masters, there is nothing justifiable about a strike that disrupts the educational system, places teachers’ interests at the front of the bargaining table, and subjects kids to hastily developed provincial exams and precarious uncertainty about their end-of-term marks.

But that’s just the thing: the teachers aren’t slaves. They are citizens in a deliberative democracy, and in classically Christian terms, they are made with the image and likeness of God and using that dignity to dispute the undignified conditions not only of stagnant wages, but classroom sizes that are unconducive to learning, a hopeless budget that doesn’t provide for basic classroom supplies, and a Liberal government that continues to ignore a Supreme Court case that grants the educational sector all of the dignified above. In this sense, the teachers, while secular and not Catholic, are putting the Catholic social teaching on civil society to work. That’s because in a deliberative democracy, citizens don’t submit to the government. They make the government work for the common good.

Or to take a transnational case, over 700,000 Hongkongers have now voted in a civil referendum on universal suffrage and civil nominations for Chief Executive elections, a move that has been condemned by Beijing’s central government. While seemingly unrelated to Vancouver, there is talk of Beijing’s imminent crackdown when these Hongkongers will make toward a movement called Occupy Central with Love and Peace to physically disrupt the Central district in Hong Kong with acts of civil disobedience. With such political nervousness, there is also talk of such activities triggering a new transnational migration wave to Vancouver. In other words, what is going on in a civil society across the Pacific is of deep public interest in Vancouver.

The question in Hong Kong is whether such ‘illegal’ acts of civil disobedience can be justified by classically Christian doctrine. After all, the major leaders of the Occupy Central movement are Christian academics and clergy, such as Professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting and the Rev. Chu Yiuming. Because of this, Christian theology has become central to the deliberations around Occupy Central. Just like with the BC teachers’ strike, these deliberations about the Christian praxis of civil society have been heavily contested. On the one hand stand megachurch pastors like the Rev. Daniel Ng Chung Man and the Anglican provincial secretary Rev. Peter Koon, who have disputed whether the planning of ‘illegal’ civil disobedience acts contradict a biblical injunction to submit to the governing authorities. But on the other hand are the Rev. Chu Yiuming, as well as the retired senior prelate Joseph Cardinal Zen, who argue that the people of Hong Kong have the human right to demand political agency from a state that is trying to tighten its authoritarian grip.

As Benny Tai has repeatedly emphasized, the point is not really whether all Hongkongers are on the same page with regards to civil disobedience, universal suffrage, and civil nominations. The point is that people in Hong Kong are talking, deliberating about precisely what the common good is. This is how a civil society ought to work. In a classically Christian sense, that’s because we all have the right to exercise our agency to build the common good together — and in so doing, to make the state work for the common good instead of passively hoping that it won’t abuse its power. In answer to that Douglas Todd piece on dignity, it’s that exercise of political agency that lies close to the heart of that vague word ‘dignity.’

This last point gets close to the real reason why these blog posts have been firing off the pages of St. Peter’s Fireside and my corner of this Thing. That’s because if indeed we do live in a deliberative democracy that is in turn deeply transnationally connected to another society that is having struggles with deliberative democracy, then what we are doing in this blog conversation is deliberation. That’s important because with Todd writing about liberal Christianity in the pages of the Vancouver Sun, as well as with news about Christians and Christian privilege circulating in Vancouver’s public sphere, one of the items for deliberation in our democratic civil society is the place of Christians — let’s be honest, as it’s not really about generic religion — in public life. As it is, these definitions and debates about ‘liberalism,’ ‘classical Christianity,’ and ‘catholicity’ are part of a wider public circulation about these items, which in turn has the potential to shape public discourse and government policy.

So while much of what we have seemingly done here is to provide public theological entertainment for a niche of readers, the consequences of all of our materials circulating may be beyond what any of us have intended. In this sense, I do have an answer to the cynical question of why we even bother to have this conversation, as if there were better things to do than this. It’s: did you forget that we live in a deliberative democracy?

We look forward to this debate getting extremely personal when Mike Chase blogs about theodicy next.

Chinglican Christianity: Race and the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Tags

Brian Bantum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Douglas Todd, Hannah Arendt, J. Kameron Carter, Jewish studies, Jewish-Christian relations, Mike Chase, New Testament, psychology, race, Sin, St. Peter's Fireside, Theology, Willie Jennings

The time has come. I wasn’t quite sure when we were going to talk about race and ‘classical Christianity’ in such a way as to upend the tacit assumption that ‘classical Christianity’ was the exclusive domain of white males. But Mike Chase has written quite the evangelical response to Douglas Todd on sin and hypocrisy, and I figure that this is as good a time as any to sketch some out some of the implications of what both Chase and Todd have written.

On the surface, neither Chase nor Todd have written anything to do with race. Todd’s bit is about psychology:

Jesus was a great psychologist. He had antennae for hypocrisy, especially among self-satisfied religious leaders. He challenged people who had a sense of moral superiority with admonitions about not “casting stones” and looking at the “log in one’s own eye.” Liberal Christians appreciate Jesus’ insight into the power of psychological projection, which leads judgmental people to fantasize others carry the bad traits they are denying in themselves. Jesus’ wisdom about hypocrisy relates today to self-righteous people who are quick to label others as “racist,” “competitive” or “greedy.”

As Todd would remind me, to use this snippet to talk about any kind of ‘unconscious racism‘ might be stretching the capabilities of this paragraph; indeed, in a quiet nod to South China Morning Post‘s Ian Young’s stories about ‘racism’ and Vancouver’s property market, his veiled reference to ‘self-righteous people who are quick to label others as “racist”‘ is directed to Young’s frighteningly competent investigative journalism into how wealthy condo developers use accusations of ‘racism’ in attempts to shut down discussion of offshore money in Vancouver’s property market. From the outset, I’ll write as a disclaimer that I am not calling anyone racist in this piece on the implications of what Todd has written for a conversation about race.

Ian Young in The Province

The same might be true of Chase’s post. On the surface, Chase’s response to Todd has nothing to do with race and everything to do with reinforcing a dialectic between humans and God. Much more than the other two on St. Peter’s Fireside’s staff (whose theologies seem to veer in more Catholic directions), Chase’s theological articulation seems to place a very (Protestant) differentiation between that which happens on a human plane and that which occurs on a divine axis. Within this theological framework, Chase reads those whom Jesus exposes as hypocrites as imputationally sinful in relation to God, that is, while a Jew identifying as a Pharisee (part of a first-century elite Torah-keeping sect) might not be personally an ‘extortioner, unjust, adulterer, and tax-collector,’ God might see him (to my knowledge, the sect wasn’t gender-inclusive — but I could be wrong!) as an extortioner, unjust, adulterer, and tax-collector on a different ‘frame of reference’ — a spiritual one in which the religious elite were taking advantage of the people of God and selling out to the powers that be. While such assertions might be an exegetical stretch in some places, the framework itself can be pieced together from parts of St. John’s Gospel and St. Paul’s letters, especially through a Calvinist reading in which the knowledge of God is the glorious light and mirror that exposes true human depravity. In other words, I may not agree with Chase’s exegesis in places, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t see where Chase is coming from. In turn, I’m very sure that Chase had no intention to write anything about race, and as a point of clarification, by writing about race in Chase’s theological framework, I am not calling Chase a racist — because he isn’t!

So if neither Todd nor Chase have written anything about race, then why write about race?

Easy. Because it’s hidden in plain sight.

When Todd and Chase write about Jesus’ exposure of the religious elite in first century Palestine, that establishment was Jewish. To be sure, I have read enough of philosopher Hannah Arendt to avoid the anachronistic stupidity of calling ‘the Jews’ a ‘race’ in first-century Palestine, especially when Arendt does such a brilliant analysis of how Jewishness became a ‘race’ in nineteenth-century Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (I am, of course, also keenly aware of Arendt’s contested status in Jewish studies because of her New Yorker articles, Eichmann in Jerusalem). But all things being equal with Arendt’s analysis, this doesn’t stop anyone from saying that the Jews and the Romans existed in — shall we say? — a colonial situation in first-century Palestine.

And that’s where a lot of the mess around anti-semitism in the modern West originated.

However one qualifies the notion that it was the religio-political establishment complex of first-century Palestine and not the Jews who killed Jesus (Benedict XVI is especially careful about this in his second installment in the Jesus of Nazareth series), the structuring power of the Roman occupation on the various political factions in first-century Palestine has to be taken into account. This is where my point about ‘race’ — or more properly, racialization, i.e. the process by which racial consciousness is formed — comes into play. As a diverse chorus of New Testament scholars observe, ‘Jewishness’ was a contested category in Jesus’ world, in large part because the Roman occupation produced a variety of political stances as to how the occupied people — the ‘Jews’ — should relate to this pagan empire. Should they cooperate with the occupation? Should they resist it? Should they resist violently? And how should they as a people be defined? Talk about psychology. Talk about the designs of the human heart. Yes, talk about it all because this context takes the framing outside of merely individual agency, personal corruption, and spiritual elitism to an entire colonial structure and its political fragmentation that structures personal agency.

By most accounts, that’s also the context in which Jesus was crucified. When Jesus proclaimed the ‘kingdom of God’ with the full implications of Hebrew Scripture, you could say that Jesus was wading into the political fray. As Todd and Chase would both affirm, one way to put it was that Jesus was killed because he exposed the powers that vied for political control over Palestine as just that: powers, often with a bent toward some kind of violence and exclusion. As each of the Gospel accounts detail in their own particular ways, these powers — including the Roman occupiers — while all in competition against each other — agree on one thing — kill that Galilean prophet. As St. Paul later writes in a letter to the Colossian church, this epic collusion to put Jesus on the cross unmasked the hidden violence of all of these powers, both colonizer and colonized.

And yet, as accounts of Jesus’ death were circulated through Jesus’ followers and as Jesus’ followers themselves refused to join in the increasingly hostile Jewish resistances against the Roman occupation, the fact that Jesus had himself waded into the Jewish debate as a Jewish rabbi became transformed into how Jesus had been killed by these people called ‘the Jews.’ As Christianity became the official Roman state religion, the category of ‘Christian’ became distinct from that of the ‘Jews’ — not that they had always been together, but Christianity was an inconvenient ‘Jewish sect’ because it was uncategorizable and thus unmanageable prior to Constantine — and as this happens, the ‘Jews’ become a problem. Where Christians were once the uncategorizable and unmanageable distinct people, this onus now fell to the Jews, who became victims of persecution often perpetrated by Christians in power. Fast-forwarding centuries and millennia of Jewish history, and this baggage adds up to the Jews becoming considered a distinct ‘race’ in Europe (see Arendt’s Origins for the brutal blow-by-blow details), leading fatefully to the events of anti-semitic fascist nation-building in Europe in which governments like Nazi Germany embarked on an increasingly violent campaign to exterminate the Jews.

I’m serious. You’ve got to read this book.

Given our post-Shoah context, that’s why it’s superlatively important to not carelessly use the word ‘Pharisee’ or ‘Sadducee’ as convenient ideal types for ‘religious elites’ — that’s because, given the baggage of Christian history, they’re racially charged. In fact, this is the current that runs through theologian J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account. Although many have misread Jonathan Tran to say that Carter and his colleagues are proposing a ‘new black theology’ (while they are all African American, their work is more properly a ‘theology of race’ that transcends black experiences), Carter draws on Denise Kimber Buell’s work on ‘race’ in early Christianity. What happened, Carter and Buell both point out, is that the classical understanding of Jesus as embodied within a Jewish body fell victim to elitist heresies that proposed that secret spiritual practices could lead to the rise of a new, elite ‘race’ of humans. In other words, the rise of such race-thinking and anti-semitism is in fact an elitist betrayal of classical Christian teachings. For Carter, that kind of race-thinking that grew out of ancient heresies became planted in turn in modern European Christian consciousness, leading (as Carter’s colleague Willie Jennings outlines in The Christian Imagination) to the justification of the slave trade, the occupation of indigenous lands, and the orientalism-driven colonization of the ‘inferior’ races.

Read this book.

That brings us to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Whether one thinks his ‘religionless Christianity in a world come of age’ should be classified as ‘liberal’ (as Harvey Cox does) or ‘classical’ (as Stanley Hauerwas does), at the overlooked heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology is a brilliant analysis of ‘sin’ and ‘ethics’ that is classically rooted in the story of the Fall. From Sanctorum Communio to Creation and Fall to Discipleship to Life Together to Ethics to Letters and Papers from Prison, the beating heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology revolves around a meditation on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For Bonhoeffer, a Christian ethics that takes its beginning by defining what is good and evil has forgotten the real beginning, in which God exists in relation to his people and his people have a social life based on communion with the other. One of the concrete levels where Bonhoeffer saw this play out was in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Bonhoeffer witnessed how American attempts to define the color line led to segregation and all kinds of economic injustices and psychological damage. In other words, the very structuring categories of race and their everyday effects are themselves evidence of the fact that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil have been eaten. As theologian of race Brian Bantum argues, Bonhoeffer calls us back again to a classically Christian understanding of sin and discipleship, for ‘sin’ is simply having followed these invented definitions of good and evil while Christian discipleship is about returning to the beginning sociality based on relationality.

What I’m saying is that race is a window into understanding Jesus as both a psychologist and a physician for the human heart. That’s because there are the concrete political effects of sin — i.e. eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil by engaging in the politics of sovereign definition — are all on display. And as Todd and Chase would both agree, the church should examine her own hypocrisy and corruption. I’m just saying that when that examination takes place, this is likely a lot of what will be found. And when that church hears the voice of Jesus afresh, it will not simply be as a psychologist or a physician for the human heart, but as having spoken through the anti-racist prophets that the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand, and that all things, including and especially the racializing structures of modernity, are about to be made new.

Having talked much about the rise of the state and tendencies toward political corruption, we look forward with great anticipation to an engagement with the question of whether governments are a force for good in the world.

Terrified

Tags

Catholic, Catholic Church, evil and suffering, Jesus, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Protestant

It was Good Friday, and I was doing, for the first time really, the stations of the cross. This was my first time, not because as a Protestant I had had any major problems with it, and not even because I was not attracted to it, but simply because, as a Protestant, doing the stations of the cross would have involved making a fuss of the emergent or high-Anglican variety. Anglo-Catholicism was the closest I could get to Rome outside of Rome, but it always seemed to involve a certain kind of hyper-ostentation, distinguished as Anglo-Catholicism is by such loudness. It is thank God possible to be quietly and anonymously Catholic (in humility rather than shame), but, as an Anglo-Catholic, one needs to be very loud about how Catholic one is, perhaps with a shrillness designed to convince oneself of something about which one has doubts.

In any case, it was Good Friday, the day before my reception into the Church, and I was doing the stations of the cross with my RCIA group. I was kind of hoping to slide into the Church – quietly, and without much fuss – and I knew my relationship with God well enough to know that I needn’t expect anything of the mystical or experiential variety – my relationship with Him was and remains enough, and it was sufficient for me to take this step He called me to without much ballyhoo or other diversion of the experiential, spiritual, or social variety. As is typical of my experience of God, he disappointed my expectations.

To contextualize this, I will need to backtrack a bit regarding the ongoing saga of my struggles to understand matters of faith, suffering, and death. As someone with a longtime history of depression and OCD (in the official fancy language my condition would cheerfully be termed “comorbid”), and further with various family members and friends suffering from such things, the question of the place of suffering in faith has always been much less easy for me to ignore than it seems to be for some Christians. Add to this the death of a close friend three years ago, deep alienation from Christian community (too Catholic for Protestants, too Protestant for Catholics, and deeply wounded by the effects of some nasty church and parachurch politics), and a tendency to always put my worst foot forward when it comes to interviews or applications in the area of my vocation, and it is fair to say that frustration is not likely to be something I can forget anytime soon. A fever pitch of suffering would be a bad way to describe it – that happened in the much more volatile period of our younger romance – and now Suffering and I had settled into the familiar routine of destroying each other even while relying on each other for stability like an addictive drug when the exotics and passion are gone, and all that is left is bathetic routine. Not only did I know Suffering, but I made myself an expert in all her ways – I would be the prophet proclaiming her existence to a stubborn and obstinate church. I could, quite literally, say what most could only say figuratively – I really did do a Doctorate on suffering.

But I return to the stations of the cross and Good Friday, with a caveat, which is this. When I describe what follows, I do not necessarily mean that all this hit me on the head at once, or that I immediately came to this realization. I’m pretty sure that every moment we mark of deep significance in our lives is preceded by so many other important moments we don’t notice, and, furthermore, may not even be initially understood – the post-experience reflection on the experience is as much a part of the experience as the temporal moment when one first marks it. What follows is the totality of my impression – thus far – of what happened on Good Friday.

What happened was that, at some point while we were doing the stations, I realized that I had met my match when it came to the understanding of suffering – in this church, in this place, I was becoming part of a people that knew suffering in her bones. Not in the sense that the Church has necessarily suffered more than other groups – indeed, in her imperfection here on earth, she has on a number of occasions been the cause of suffering – but rather in the sense that here, in Christ’s body, a body I could taste, touch, and smell in the sacraments and in my fellow Christians – here, in this body, suffering was understood, in the deepest and most mysterious sense of the word. Yes, other churches I had been part of had the crucifixion narrative as well – but the crosses were bare. In contrast, here was a devotional practice that was not trying to be radical or prophetic or sexy or relevant or any of those other things – it was not screaming for attention, as was my own “prophetic” bent concerning suffering – rather, it simply was. It was not some radical thing (except in the most literal etymological sense) that would strike like lightning and change my life fifty different ways to Sunday. No, it was a basic and humble grammar of suffering. And I, the expert, the self-proclaimed seer, with the Doctorate on Job, stopped my mouth, and was silent. No longer could I say, “But you don’t know what it’s like” – because She did. The Church did.

I don’t recall too precisely the exact moment this all came upon me, but I do feel it had something to do with the third time Christ stumbles in the stations. I knew enough of them prior to know that this is the part I most valued, the part where Christ looks at us, after having stumbled twice before already, and we have no clue what to do. Is it about us? Are we selfish enough to be glad for Christ’s suffering because we suffer too? On the other hand, when he looks into our eyes like that, the cross breaking his back, is there anywhere we can flee to evade that look that says it has everything to do with us? Is it an example? An act of empathy? The suffering servant? The broken beast of burden? Christ is physically naked, but it is we who are ashamed – he has looked into our souls. To stumble once might be a token example – even the best stumble. To stumble twice is a little more, but perhaps just another token – we can draw on his forgiveness if we happen to fall a few times, so long as we are generally consistent. But a third time. That is the clincher. He means it. He will really be there. Every time. Seventy times seven times, and more, if necessary. Every time. The face full of sorrow that is also mercy and grace. Eye to eye, and heart to heart.

That is a broken description of the glimpse I had into the Church – the place where suffering is uniquely understood – and the place where I covered my mouth. At that same moment, I felt a kind of release. It is a heavy burden to think of oneself as a prophet on behalf of all suffering everywhere, and suddenly I saw – Christ’s body, the Church, was carrying this burden. It was not mine to carry. I could help or participate or pray or not – I could understand or not – but whatever I did, God had suffering and death taken care of. And it was then I realized the most terrifying thing, that I was free, free to explore that thing far more frightening and unpredictable to me than any kind of pain or suffering: joy. I still have very little idea what this means – particularly as I am accustomed to associate the word “joy” with the facile glossing and painting of pain. And I don’t like joy, because it comes at all the wrong times, and doesn’t come to everybody equally. But it is a treasure, of Christ and His Church, and having retired from the position of self-proclaimed prophet of suffering and pain (though I make no promises concerning relapses), I am at liberty to explore it – joy – the greatest problem that we face as humans. I am terrified.

Chinglican Christianity: Mother of God, Pray for Us

Tags

Alastair Sterne, Angelus, Blessed Virgin, contemplation, Douglas Todd, liberal Christian, liturgy, Mary, rosary, sacrament, spiritual practices, St. Peter's Fireside

From what I can tell, Alastair Sterne is one cautious spiritual practitioner. His response to Douglas Todd’s sixth assertion about ‘Liberal Christianity’ is a bold attempt to fence the ‘classical Christian’ spiritual practices in for ‘baptized’ Christians, suggesting that the classical Christian spiritual practices must begin with the rite of Christian initiation before anything worthwhile can be done. While Sterne is not so much of a conservative as to insist that only spiritual practices within the church are valid — he stops at Christ — Sterne’s border-drawing must be read as a response to Todd’s putative liberalism:

Liberal Christians don’t go for things like speaking in tongues, known as glossolalia. And they are shy about pleading for God to directly do something for them, as if God were a magician or puppet master. They view prayer as a way to develop rapport with the divine. Open to learning from Eastern spiritual practices, liberal Christians are also rediscovering their own tradition’s overlooked paths to contemplation and the inner life. They’re following Barbara Brown Taylor, John O’Donohue and Jay McDaniel and meditating, going on pilgrimages (like Spain’s El Camino), lighting sacred candles, walking labyrinths, chanting and sharing sacred meals.

Sterne’s major issue here is that developing ‘rapport with the divine’ falls short of full Christian initiation. Moreover, putatively liberal practices of contemplation may produce three problems: self-reflective navel-gazing, gnostic elitism (or as University of Washington professor Mike Williams would put it, ‘what used to be called gnosticism’), and syncretism. Finally, in terms of a ‘sacred meal,’ Sterne narrows classical Christian practice to only the Eucharist. Unfortunately, glossolalia is left unaddressed, which is unfortunate, because plenty of people I know who claim to be evangelical Anglicans speak in tongues.

So does Megan Fox! There’s more than meets the eye!

Sterne should be commended for his attempt to keep the ancient Christian spiritual practices strictly sacramental. The only problem is that after Sterne’s entire post, I am at a loss as to understand precisely what I can do as a classical Christian within Sterne’s strict boundaries. Sure, Sterne may be giving me a catholic nod by acknowledging, say, the Real Presence in the Eucharist and baptismal regeneration. Yet these attempts to fence the classical Christian table feel oddly un-catholic to me, particularly as a catholic approach would embrace the proliferation of devotional practices. As the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops argue, ‘it is not possible for us to fill up all of our day with participation in the liturgy.’ Enter devotional practices — personal prayers to God, prayers in solidarity with the saints, prayers that give a special solidarity with Mary — to the rescue. (Remember also that after a harrowing Congregational of the Doctrine of the Faith’s investigation into Peter Phan’s integration of ‘Asian negative theology’ into Catholic practice, Phan was exonerated. So much for catholic anti-syncretism!)

I bring up Catholic devotional practices, especially Marian veneration, because the table that Sterne et al. deny that they have set up an exclusively evangelical Protestant one. Indeed, what I am about to say about devotions to Mary and the saints would only be controversial for evangelical Protestants, while a variety of Roman Catholic, magisterial Protestant (see the corrective notice at bottom), Coptic, Armenian, and Slavic traditions wouldn’t blink an eye. After all, that the Blessed Virgin is the theotokos (God-bearer) who brings us closer to Christ because she bore his human and divine natures within her very body (as defined in the Third Ecumenical Council) is as much a cardinal point of conciliar, ecumenical, orthodox, and (dare I say it!) classical Christianity as the Triunity of the Godhead (as defined in the First and Second Ecumenical Councils) and the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures (as defined in the Fourth Ecumenical Council). Indeed, both our resident Lutheran here on A Christian Thing and I have made arguments to our resident Catholic convert that if Mary is all he wants (she is not), then he can comfortably remain a Protestant. To require that our readers do their homework, I will not recapitulate our posts here.

Instead, I want to talk about Marian devotions in such a way that refocuses Sterne’s protest while making Todd’s account of liberal spiritual practices sound oddly classically orthodox.

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar asserts in his book on Prayer that a Christian may pray in solitude, but that that Christian is never praying alone. I say assert because, as Karen Kilby will tell you, von Balthasar never argues — he only asserts! It so happens that von Balthasar’s assertion is corroborated by the creed, in which ‘classical Christians’ confess to faith in ‘the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.’ What von Balthasar means by his assertion is that what makes a prayer Christian is that it is always done in solidarity with the entire Body of Christ, as well as all the saints and angels, so that even when a Christian prays alone, he, she, or xe (we are, after all, writing in Vancouver) is always praying in mystical communion with the saints.

Given this ecclesial context, Sterne’s attempt to fence the church with the liturgy is understandable. It is also unnecessary.

That’s because, given this new focus of prayerful solidarity, Sterne’s three objections to Todd don’t carry very much weight. After all, prayerful solidarity is prayer with the other, which precludes navel-gazing. That this is in solidarity also prevents elitism. That a catholic approach is not exactly worried about syncretism for some hypothetical pure Christianity’s sake, as I showed earlier via Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism, negates the third.

Instead, going on with a sort of Balthasarian approach, Sterne’s strict sacramental fencing somewhat puts the cart before the horse. Todd’s establishment of ‘rapport with the divine’ can be reinterpreted via von Balthsar’s insistence that a theological aesthetic — the glory of the Lord — is the beauty that draws people into participation with the Godhead. Yes, baptism is the rite of Christian initiation, and yes, the Eucharist is the focal point of a Christian’s participation in the life of God, but this does not prevent God from establishing rapport with us via unexpected pockets of beauty, including in the contemplative practices like labyrinth walking and communal acts like sacred meals that make visible restfulness and solidarity in a noisy, atomizing world. Indeed, this is why when twentieth-century mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote her books on mysticism, she insisted that she was writing to a public audience because the contemplative practices were for the life of the world and world peace could arguably be achieved if more members of the public were drawn into these acts.

Here is where the Blessed Virgin comes into play.

As an Anglo-Catholic friend pointed out to me from the get-go of this blog series, if there’s any classical contemplative practice that both Sterne and Todd have omitted from their list of ancient Christian practices, it is devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It’s a bit of a pity that both have omitted this item, particularly as Todd states that Roman Catholics are among the ranks of liberal Christians. That’s because if they would have both included Marian devotions, there would be no debate between the two of them. And that’s because Mary teaches us how to practice contemplative prayer.

This requires a bit of a know-how into how Marian veneration is actually practiced. Given the state of Roman Catholic and Protestant ecumenical dialogue, only the ignorami who cling to their anti-Catholic chick tracts would assert that those who invoke the intercession of the Blessed Virgin are, in Todd’s words, ”pleading for [Mary] to do something for them, as if [Mary] were a magician or puppet master.’ No, as von Balthasar himself states at the beginning of Prayer, the words of the Hail Mary — ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus’ — are uttered in Scripture by the lips of the angel Gabriel and the elderly Elizabeth. The practice of Marian devotions like the Angelus and the Rosary are requests to Mary that we might contemplate God and the world together with her as she ‘ponders all these things in her heart,’ as St. Luke puts it. Having contemplated the mysteries of God in turning the world upside down by his incarnation as a humble child born of a simple peasant virgin, we echo Mary’s words to the angel, ‘Be it done to me according to your word.’ That is to say, the Word of God spoken to us does not give us a programmatic agenda for what Christians are to do in the world; instead, as St. Peter’s Fireside’s motto itself emphasizes, we, in solidarity with the Blessed Virgin, join God in what he is already doing in the world, turning our eyes to contemplate the world together with the Blessed Virgin.

In Marian devotions, the Anglican dictum lex orandi, lex credendi is fulfilled. Typically referring (as Sterne would) to the liturgical practices in the Book of Common Prayer, this phrase — ‘the law of prayer, the law of belief’ — is amplified by praying in solidarity with the Blessed Virgin, who in turn shows us the world in solidarity with us. In this way, Marian prayer is prophetic — the Blessed Virgin may have spoken in tongues at Pentecost, but even before Pentecost, she prophesied in the power of the Spirit that this world with its colonial powers exploiting the poor and the vulnerable would be turned upside down, that the proud would be scattered in the thoughts of their heart, that the hungry would be fed, and that the people of God would be shown mercy. Now that’s glossalalia! (It’s probably also why there’s a tradition of the pope making observations about the state of the world and then praying the Angelus with a crowd gathered outside his window.)

There is a word, then, for the posture that Mary takes in prayer that both putatively ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ Christians would affirm. Todd might call it stillness, centeredness, and quiet. Sterne might call it liturgical, obedient, and Christ-centered. But as the Blessed Virgin prays and contemplates, the word that comes to mind is humility. The posture of quiet, contemplative prayer is a humble one — in the words of Henri Nouwen, a prayer with open hands, not clenched fists, ready to receive from God the full extent of divine love.

And at the end of the day, that is what the Mother of God prays for us, whether we are ‘liberal’ or ‘classical.’ We must join her.

We look forward to Mike Chase’s analysis of the psychology of hypocrisy next up on the St. Peter’s Fireside blog.

CORRECTION: Thanks to the careful reading of Jon Reimer, a church historian who is destined to become our generation’s authority on all things in ecclesiastical history (but especially St. Augustine), I am retracting my assertion that the magisterial Protestants would find Marian devotions unproblematic. As Reimer points out, Luther and Calvin may have retained a strong Marian devotion, but they also theologically undercut her cult. Moreover, as Eamon Duffy shows in The Stripping of the Altars, the English Reformation produced a heavy iconoclasm that wiped out a flourishing set of Catholic devotional practices in Tudor England. As a transition, this is what they got to say instead: ‘Ayle mary gretely in goddis fauour \ the lorde is with the \ blessed arte thou aboue women for the blessed frutes sake of thy wombe. Amen. Lede us not (lorde) into temptacion but delyuer us from the euel sprite. Amen.’ Reimer’s observations coincide with my previous posts about the rise of the state and the policing of religion (see here, here, and here). As I’ve said in this post, all theology is done in solidarity, especially prayer, and I thank Reimer, with whom I have not only studied but prayed, for being a brother. However, I would maintain that contemporary ecumenical dialogues have made Marian devotions for Protestants increasingly viable.

Chinglican Christianity: The Personal Is Not Private

Tags

Alastair Sterne, Anglican, Christian privilege, church, confession, Douglas Todd, Justin Welby, Michel Foucault, performativity, private, public, sexuality, St. Peter's Fireside

After four posts responding to the first four points of Douglas Todd’s account of ‘liberal Christianity,’ St. Peter Fireside’s lead pastor Alastair Sterne has gotten to the one that could explode in their faces in an uncontrollable ball of flame.

Sorry, couldn't help it!

Todd’s description of these explosive ‘sex-related’ items as ‘abortion, homosexuality, and not-so-hot-button items’ is more of a reference to what ‘liberal Christians’ might think of these items: no-brainers that ‘conservative Christians’ allegedly use to turn the clock back in the Dark Ages. Churl will appreciate the medievalism in that last statement. In Todd’s words:

Unfortunately, “hot-button” sex-related issues always draw the most intense media attention. Journalists generally focus on how conservative Christians go against the secular grain in opposing abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, divorce, sex outside marriage and contraception. Liberal Christians, on the other hand, have different degrees of openness to all these things, as well as to euthanasia.

In Todd’s word, ‘liberal Christians’ are allied with a secular agenda to liberalize sexuality. By contrast, ‘conservative Christians’ are conceptualized as going ‘against the secular grain’ in their lack of ‘openness to all these things, as well as to euthanasia.’

You could say that Sterne’s reply is an attempt to defuse the bomb. Echoing Todd’s ‘unfortunately,’ Sterne attempts to move the conversation about sexuality away from the media because for Sterne, the media broadcasting of these issues reduces conversation to soundbites and continues to marginalize those who still experience ‘pain’ from the overly public conversation. Sterne proposes that the proper place to do theology around these explosive issues is within the church, where pastoral care can be provided for people who are hurting. In this way, each person’s individual struggles can be dealt with individually, confidentially, and privately, and each person can be directed personally to find his or her (or xyr) journey converging with the matrix of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I recognize that Sterne’s ‘public theology’ is very much a work in progress. Check this out:

I am not against public theology, but problems arise when that public discourse happens in the media. When it comes to abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, divorce, sex outside marriage, contraception or euthanasia we are always talking about individuals.  These people — made in the image of God — have stories more complicated and beautiful than soundbites can capture. We’re talking about people who need theology that can meaningfully meet them as they are and where they are, which is precisely what we all need. With no disrespect to the media, this simply cannot be found through that medium (nor on a blog for that matter!). The limitations of the medium can unintentionally dehumanize the people of “the issues.”

This, not the hot-button ‘sex-related’ issues, is the crux of Sterne’s argument. Some might say that it’s a cop-out, a way of addressing controversy without taking on the issues head-on.

I don’t. But I do think that Sterne contradicts himself about ‘public theology.’

It is difficult to understand, for example, the meaning of the sentence: ‘I am not against public theology, but problems arise when that public discourse happens in the media.’ What could this possibly mean? If ‘public discourse’ does not happen in the ‘media,’ then where does it happen? If one is not against public theology but is against public theology happening in the media, then how is one not against public theology? If one finds both the media and blogging problematic, then why does one take the time to address Douglas Todd’s media representation of ‘liberal Christianity’ on a blog?

This contradiction of views about the ‘public’ becomes even stranger when Sterne applies it to ‘the church.’ Arguing that ‘the medium through which people can encounter theology sturdy enough for the roads they’re traveling is the church,’ Sterne calls for the revitalization of the spiritual practice of ‘pastoral care.’ Sterne implies that ‘pastoral care’ is private because ‘this ancient practice requires trust,’ which ‘won’t be developed in overly condoning or condemning soundbites.’ Citing Aelred of Rievaulx’s Pastoral Prayer, Sterne makes a very strong case that denominational formulas about the hot-button issues ‘does not mean it [a denomination or church] knows where to stand with a person.’

The problem with conflating ‘the church’ with the private practice of ‘pastoral care,’ though, is that the ‘church’ is a public assembly. As New Testament professor Sam Tsang emphasizes over and over and over again on his blog, the word ekklesia simply referred to an assembly, a gathering of the city’s people to build the polis. The early Christians adopted the word ekklesia to refer to the gathered assemblies of the people brought together by Jesus Christ to build the city of God in the various cities of the Roman Empire — and beyond. Cross-referencing Dom Gregory Dix’s Shape of the Liturgy where he argues that these gatherings could be analyzed as ‘private’ before they became ‘public’ under Constantinian rule simply won’t do, either. If one follows Dix, what could be said to be private about the early ekklesiai was the Eucharistic liturgy, where those who had not yet been baptized would be sent away before those in Christ partook in the Body and the Blood of Christ. That’s not what Sterne is talking about, though. Sterne is talking strictly here about pastoral care and its location within the practices of the church, the publicly gathered people in the name of Jesus Christ.

Now, it is true that there came to be developed a very confidential practice in the life of the Christian church: confession. It’s so confidential that there are both canon and civic laws around the confidentiality of confession. Roman Catholic priests speak of the ‘seal,’ the absolute secrecy of everything that penitents confess to them, so much so that they practice simply forgetting all the juicy material that they are told. In Canada, confession in non-liturgical contexts went to court, all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1991, to determine whether everything confessed to a pastor could be confidential in a court of law. The answer was no – for example, murder confessed to a pastor outside of the sacramental context of confession — which, in a non-liturgical and non-sacramental context doesn’t exist — is fair game for the secular courts. So too, the whole craziness of the child sex abuse scandals that hit the Catholic Church and is now coming down through the evangelical pipeline has resulted in a requirement to let the civic authorities know whenever such crimes are perpetrated. Finally, even though confessions are themselves confidential, the example of even Pope Francis going to confession before serving as a confessor demonstrates that confession is not just about the individual but about the people of God getting right with God as a people. This makes sense in a big way: the whole idea of confession as a sacramental practice comes from the medieval penitentials that prescribed rites for confession and absolution — rites that, by the way, made their way into Protestantism via the Book of Common Prayer and in the current alternative service books — which again means that the point of confession is not a ‘me and God’ thing, but a ‘people of God’ thing.

In other words, while it might be wise for pastoral care to be confidential, the point is that it’s never private. In some ways, confession is a public act, not in the sense that all your secrets get spilled to the public, but in the sense that the city of God is built on confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

The trouble is that Sterne seems to think that the ecclesial public has always been separated from the secular public in which the press works. In a collection of essays on religion, critical theorist Michel Foucault observes that these publics are really both based on ‘confession.’ The only difference is that while the ecclesial public prescribed confession for Christians as a path by which humans are united to God, the state has elicited confessions to exert its subjugating power over citizens, especially by getting citizens to govern themselves (this is what Foucault famously called ‘governmentality’). What’s even more complicated is that this confessional state has often used the church as its arm of moral regulation: in Canada, the story has become familiar in the First Nations residential schools, anti-buggery laws, and the contested legacy missionary attempts in various Chinatowns. That the term ‘Christian privilege’ is the talk of the town in educational circles in British Columbia suggests not an anti-Christian orientation on the part of radical secular activists, but the need to talk about the effects of the past on the present when it comes to the church’s complicity in making a certain kind of Canadian governmentality.

The trouble is that even though the church’s fall from privilege might actually help the church to stop getting co-opted by the state, this process isn’t exactly happening quietly. In each of the examples that Todd raises — abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, other ‘not-so-hot-button’ issues — journalists have been drawn to portrayals of conservative Christians as they have contested government policy positions, attempting to retain its pastoral power over the state.

But if the church were in fact to be the church, what Sterne might propose may not be pastoral care, but ecclesial performativity. As ‘classical Christians’ insist that they have been against abortion from the beginning — say, by rescuing infants in the Roman Empire from parents who abandoned them — theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has insisted that a truly pro-life stance requires that the church live out an alternate society in which abortion would be made unnecessary, not simply to require the state to outlaw it. Such a church would provide an environment in which having children could actually be imaginable in today’s flexible economy. Having understood St. Augustine’s City of God as framing the arrogant city of the pagans as founded on rape culture (think Lucrece in Rome), such a church would work tirelessly in solidarity with feminist activist groups to contest rape culture — which means that we should have heard churches speaking out when Rehtaeh Parsons’s suicide broke in the news and when Canadian universities’ orientation days featured underage rape chants. If indeed there is a case to be made for euthanasia about ‘quality of life,’ then if our churches really do oppose it, our churches must be welcome spaces for the disabled, the critically ill, the mentally challenged, and the aged. In much of this, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has provided a remarkable model. Without backing down from some of the socially conservative statements that the Church of England’s House of Bishops has made, Welby has gone out of his way to meet with LGBTQ+ activists and making statements that ‘we must have no track with any sort of homophobia,’ even going to lengths to get anti-homophobia curriculum into British schools.

In other words, Sterne may be correct to say that the media only tends to report ‘soundbites,’ but if the church were to actually speak a truly public theology, it would have to be through actions, not words. This is because at the end of the day, theology is performative — it isn’t so much about what we say and think, but what we do, that demonstrates who the God is in whom we claim to live and move and have our being. Given the public assembly of the ekklesia, the performances of the church, right down to the acts of confession, are never private acts. They are public, indicating to the world what the Christian church in fact believes about love for neighbours and enemies and the seeking of the common good.

It is on that public note that we look forward to what Sterne will say about the ancient spiritual practices in his sixth installment.

Chinglican Christianity: Can a Catholic Modernity Be Classical?

Tags

Alastair Sterne, Anglican, Catholic, Catholic modernity, Charles Taylor, Creation, Douglas Todd, evolution, evolutionary metaphysics, Gifford Lectures, Henri de Lubac, modernity, natural theology, naturalism, Pamela Klassen, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Rachel Held Evans, Roger Revell, Simon Conway Morris, St. Peter's Fireside, supernatural, The Exorcist

When I first began hearing about St. Peter’s Fireside a few years ago, I had heard that they had on staff with them an intellectual — some said a ‘genius’ — and that his name was Roger Revell. I was told that we would have fun talking. With these posts and ongoing conversation among Douglas Todd, the St. Peter’s Fireside staff, and yours truly (as Stanley Hauerwas is said to have said to Catherine Pickstock at their first meeting chronicled in legend, ‘Hi, I’m the turd in the punchbowl!’), I feel like this is an odd, yet providential, place to have met, though I am no genius. It has been certainly been a pleasure, and I hope that my sentiments are reciprocated.

And Pickstock just looked at Hauerwas…

Roger Revell has outdone himself this time. In what appears to be the most complex and intricate post in the St. Peter’s Fireside ten-part blog series response to Douglas Todd’s ten-point primer on ‘liberal Christianity,’ Revell gives an ingeniously complicated answer as to whether ‘classical Christians’ oppose evolutionary biology. This is in response to Todd, who has written emphatically on how liberal Christians disavow an embarrassing fundamentalist insistence on creationism:

Liberal Christians are definitely not Creationists (neither is every conservative Christian). They don’t believe schools should teach God formed the world in six days, etc. Instead, liberal Christians are environmentalists who have expanded Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories into a metaphysics, often called process theology or panentheism. Some of liberal Christianity’s biggest names are evolutionary theists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John Cobb, Michael Dowd, Sallie McFague, Ian Barbour and John Haught. Liberal Christians want to learn from scientists and want scientists to learn from philosophy and spirituality.

Revell has a complicated answer. Giving a nod to geographer David Livingstone’s Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders and Adam’s Ancestors, Revell correctly notes that when Darwin first published his findings, he was embraced by some of the evangelical luminaries of the time. Siding with Todd, Revell then shows that there is in fact a spectrum of views on evolutionary biology among evangelical Christians, from practicing biologists to diehard creationists. It’s for this that I have to give a standing ovation to Revell, for he has rightly moved the conversation away from an evolution v. creation food fight into a complex conversation with very blurry battle lines. I’m sure that Evolving in Monkey Town‘s Rachel Held Evans would also be pleased with his nuanced picture.

Revell’s protest is thus not about evolution — it’s about what Todd calls an evolutionary ‘metaphysics.’ For Revell, that smacks of ‘atheistic naturalism,’ a theology that would see little use for an actual ‘personal, powerful, and present God of the Bible’ (emphasis Revell’s). Reading Todd’s ‘process theology’ and wholehearted ’embrace of evolution and science’ as proposing a radically natural theology, i.e. where empirical observation of nature is all that can actually be known, Revell rejects an ‘evolutionary metaphysics’ on the basis that it would be radically secularizing, disposing any need for the personal God with whom classical Christians insist on relating.

The only problem with Revell’s protest against this kind of natural theology — the kind that both Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas also pushed back against in their Gifford Lectures (an endowed lectureship in Scotland on natural theology) — is that it’s not actually what Todd is talking about. To call, say, the process theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, an ‘atheistic naturalism’ is really to miss the point. As Todd himself clarifies, his reference to an evolutionary metaphysics is about panentheism, emphatically not a radically empirical naturalism, and the integration of theology with science is much more about what Pamela Klassen has called ‘scientific supernaturalism,’ an attempt on the part of liberal Protestants (in Klassen’s own analysis) to use science to understand supernatural, psychic, and paranormal processes. What Todd is saying is that if liberal Protestantism were the X-Files, they wouldn’t be the skeptics — they’d be Agent Mulder.

Put this way, the old stereotypes about ‘liberal Christians’ as agents of radical secularization fall apart. As Klassen reminds us, this means that ‘liberal Christians’ take seriously the supernatural, so much so that they want to understand it deeply using scientific vocabularies and methodologies.

The question is if this modus operandi can be described as classical.

I put the ‘SJ’ after Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to underscore a point: he was a Jesuit. In The Phenomenon of Man, de Chardin lays out precisely why he’s using an evolutionary approach to develop a ‘process theology,’ that is, a scientific account of the gradual evolution of human consciousness of the supernatural. For de Chardin, that’s a perfectly valid theological move because early medieval theologians once used Plato and Neoplatonism to do their theology, only to have that discarded by late medieval scholastics for Aristotle. If philosophical paradigms can shift like that in theological methods, then why not experiment with an evolutionary approach?

Experimental though de Chardin was, another Jesuit scholar, Henri de Lubac, SJ, would affirm that de Chardin’s approach is definitely classical. In his classic Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, de Lubac demonstrates that what it means to be Catholic from the church fathers is to be able to incorporate all kinds of philosophical traditions into Christian thinking by focusing them all onto the central person of Jesus Christ. As with de Chardin, de Lubac argues by the end of the book that this surely means that modernity, though condemned outright by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, can in fact be incorporated into Catholic thought because incorporating different modes of thinking is what it means to be Catholic. (You see why Pius XII also condemned this stuff in Humani Generis — the irony was that the next two popes had many of these guys as the theological experts at the Second Vatican Council!) As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, this should be called a Catholic modernity, that is, a scientific, evolutionary rationality whose thinking is focused on the God who becomes flesh in Jesus Christ. It’s no wonder that the exorcist in The Exorcist was based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Given this, I’d encourage Revell to revisit his disavowal of an ‘evolutionary metaphysics.’ Is he sure that all evolutionary metaphysics will do is to lead down to the path of atheistic naturalism? After all, if de Chardin, de Lubac, and Taylor are correct, ‘liberal Christians’ have nothing to worry about as far as ‘naturalism’ is concerned. Instead of tossing the supernatural, they’d be way more invested in what de Lubac called the surnaturel, the suspended middle between nature and grace, than most other Christians. In other words, an ‘evolutionary metaphysics’ may be more classically Christian than anyone expects.

And so it was when UBC’s Graduate Faculty Christian Forum invited evolutionary paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris to speak in 2009. Aside from being Austin Powers’s doppelganger, Morris unexpectedly presented a metaphysics from his work in evolutionary paleobiology — i.e. the fossil record — that had its grounding in the work of the Inklings — J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, etc. For an evangelical crowd, this was certainly unexpected — who could have predicted, for example, that the supernatural worlds of Narnia and Middle-earth would be commensurate with evolutionary paleontology? But if we had read de Chardin and de Lubac, this would have been no surprise, for it’s in the deep unknown of primal history where science converges with poetry, song, and art. A Catholic modernity is no naturalist fundamentalism, no disenchanted iron cage. It is a return to a world of enchantment where scientists confess that nature may well be a channel of divine grace, an urge to reveal that the classical Christian faith does not only confess a personal Creator God but where that God’s Spirit continues to hover over the waters of the deep and renew the face of the earth.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.

God, who taught the hearts of your people by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, send that same Spirit into our hearts, that we may always be truly wise, and ever rejoice in his consolation, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

This we pray especially for Alastair Sterne as he posts the next piece on ‘abortion, homosexuality, and not-so-hot-button issues.’ He’ll need it.

Chinglican Christianity: Practicing Jesus-style Decolonization

Tags

Alastair Sterne, Anglican, Chinglican, decolonization, Douglas Todd, fundamentalism, Jesus, Julia Nicole Sterne, liberal, Roger Revell, social gospel, social justice, St. Peter's Fireside, Vancouver

My hat’s off to Roger Revell for his third installment in the St. Peter’s Fireside ‘classical Christianity’ responses to Douglas Todd’s liberal Christianity primer. Whereas the series started out more combative than was necessary, Revell has managed to strike an ecumenically conciliatory tone, finding common ground between Todd’s liberal Christianity and his own classical Christianity in the practice of social justice. Although this ecumenism is precisely what I’ve advocated in my previous responses (see here for the first and the second), I won’t try to take credit here. As Johann Sebastian Bach used to write at the end of his compositions, SDG, i.e. Soli Deo Gloria.

My post will attempt to draw out the implications of Revell’s post for Christian practice in Vancouver. Once again, Revell is responding to Todd, who wrote:

Jesus was not status quo. He turned the established order upside down, de-emphasizing hierarchy. Instead of promoting “family values,” he asked followers to leave behind their parents. Progressive Christians note how he befriended outcasts, the poor, women, children and tax collectors. He advocated simple, equal, communal living. He also pressed for social and economic justice, for which he paid the ultimate price, execution. Many liberal Christians believe Jesus embodied the divine power of creative transformation.

As Revell suggests, practice is what matters. Noting that the practices of saints as diverse as St. John Chrysostom and John Calvin focused on the poor, as did a spectrum of Roman Catholic, evangelical, ‘creedal,’ Anabaptist, and liberal Protestant practitioners, Revell finds that liberal Protestantism does not have ‘the market cornered’ for putting Jesus’ ‘transformative values’ to work. He’s right, of course. As Benedict XVI put it in Spe Salvi, faith is performative, that is, what you do demonstrates what you actually believe.

Another way of putting this, of course, is that talk is cheap. Revell lists example after example of good works done by the historic Christian church as well as a diversity of ecclesial communities. But he also makes a jab at modern Protestant fundamentalism that I think is well worth revisiting:

If one pays attention only to certain “fundamentalist” Christian groups from the 20th century, this point can be missed. Fundamentalism, especially the American variety, sometimes boasts a poor track record on issues of social justice. In some such groups—as I know from personal experience—the term “social justice” is highly suspect. However, when this peculiar movement is situated in the broader context of church history, its muted concern for Jesus’ social vision can be seen for all its oddness.

In other words, while classical Christians have a long track record of social justice activism, fundamentalists are odd because they do not. One question to ask is why not? But because the answer has already been adequately provided in places like George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, there’s little need for me to delve into an in-depth history here, except to say that it was the fundamentalist movement’s battle with modernist mainline Protestants that made them withdraw so much into their private congregations in the 1920s that it became embarrassing – so embarrassing that Carl Henry, an evangelical theologian who was no friend of liberals, had to write a book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, castigating fundamentalists for not caring about important issues in the 1940s, like, say, worldwide military conflict, the ecological crisis, and the nuclear arms race. For all of that, you can do your homework and read that abundant literature, starting with Marsden and going to, say, Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason. Revell seems to be aware of all this work too, and so should all of our readers.

The more interesting question to ask, though, given that talk is cheap, is: what implications does Revell’s understanding of classical Christian practices of social justice have for churches in Vancouver? My answer to this question will suggest that St. Peter’s Fireside is pretty much standing on the shoulders of giants.

In 2007-8, for example, one of Douglas Todd’s big stories concerned Tenth Avenue Alliance Church, now known as Tenth Church Vancouver (and not to be confused with this story). At that time, Tenth’s attempt to renovate their building came under contestation from the municipal government because of their feed-the-hungry program and shelter. Although their social service plans had originally been helped by another department in the government, they were required by the city to get a social services permit. This produced an outcry among various religious communities from various traditions across Vancouver, and it led to the formation of an interfaith coalition called Faith Communities Committed to Solidarity with the Poor (FCCSP). FCCSP held neighbourhood meetings and press conferences for a year demanding that the city back down from their requirement for theological reasons — indeed, the same reasons that Revell discusses in his post. In a document titled ‘The Social Vocation of the Church’ posted on the website of Streams of Justice (another organization we’re about to talk about), FCCSP laid out what Revell would call a ‘classical Christian’ argument that within orthodox streams of Christianity, as well as most other religious traditions, serving the poor was a central element of faith practice that could not be separated from worship. If the city was requiring Tenth to get a permit, it meant that the city was doing theology and colonizing Tenth’s religious practice. After a year of FCCSP’s work, the city backed down – pretty much because of FCCSP’s classically Christian argument. In turn, since FCCSP, Tenth has itself also been articulating to its congregation the importance of the classically Christian spiritual disciplines, including the practice of social justice, so much so that its senior pastor, Ken Shigematsu, has written a whole bestselling book on the topic, God in My Everything.

And yet, to bring up Streams of Justice suggests that what ‘social justice’ means is beyond even Revell’s conception. For Revell, contemporary examples like World Vision, the Mennonite Central Committee, and evangelical relief agencies are adequate illustrations for the practice of justice. But for Streams of Justice, that only scratches the surface. Founded in large part by Hebrew Scripture scholar Dave Diewert, Streams of Justice takes a biblically (read: classically) prophetic stance against colonization in Vancouver. In technical political language, this means that Streams of Justice doesn’t just participate in social services, but in the politics of decolonization. With the buzz in Vancouver’s Christian circles around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one might think that this means that churches have to own up to their historical record of participating in the injustices of Canada’s residential schools to ‘kill the Indian within.’

Yes and no.

The politics of decolonization would say, yes, of course, churches have to own up to their historical wrongs. But no, that’s not all there is to it because there are also contemporary colonial policies to be contested, not least of which is the recently federally approved Northern Gateway oil pipeline through British Columbia that is being contested by several First Nations. Chinese Christians in Action’s Bill Chu has also recently been working with First Nations against a resort being built on their traditional lands. Streams of Justice chalks up Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside policies to be colonizing as well, often leading to community fragmentation in the name of scattering a skid row population when in fact it takes away informal networks of support for people who depend on it. For these classical Christians, social justice is not just a matter of service – it’s a matter of looking at the whole structure of cities, economies, and political formations and contesting the powers of colonization.

In Vancouver, this also hits close to home with the property market. True to form, St. Peter’s Fireside’s clergy have been inadvertently rolled into these politics. On June 10, Alastair Sterne’s wife, Julia Nicole Sterne, blogged about how to deal with disappointment, using her own frustration with Vancouver’s high-priced, hyper-competitive property market as an example:

Alastair and I have been in the market for a new home for almost a year. Almost. A. Whole. Entire. Year. We have never been in want, but we are now in a season of wanting; wanting a permanent home, wanting a place for Ansley and any other babies to grow up, wanting some stability and financial responsibility and to make something our own. In this past year we have made multiple offers with nothing secured.

This provoked a cranky response from Garth Turner, an investment advisor who was a Member of Parliament for nine years who took care of a lot of economic policy. Aside from highly misogynistic remarks about Julia — which, by the way, all classical Christians should contest — the post chalks up Julia’s disappointment to just another day at the market, where rational investors look at the ‘free money’ to be had in Vancouver’s property market and rationally capitalize on it. For geographer Nick Blomley, though, this kind of thing isn’t just market rationality — it’s colonialism that displaces those who can’t afford the increasingly unaffordable housing in Vancouver and that — mirroring Streams of Justice’s decolonization politics — fragments the social networks of the Downtown Eastside. For St. Peter’s Fireside, this is becoming a personal experience of colonization. The question is, what solidarities will these ‘classical Christians’ discover in their practice of social justice? What will it have to do with their engagement in issues of affordable housing as a human right? racial politics? indigenous sovereignties? ecological justice? Exciting times.

In other words, Revell has given Vancouver’s public sphere an excellent rundown of how what he calls ‘classical Christianity’ — a longstanding orthodox tradition that ranges from the early church to Chrysostom to Calvin to Wilberforce to the present — converges with ‘liberal Christianity’ in its practice of social justice. What I’ve attempted to do in this post is to bring Revell’s insights home. Don’t be surprised, then, if you see St. Peter’s Fireside exploring the politics of decolonization in Vancouver. It would be very much part of classical Christianity to do so.

I’m looking forward to Revell’s next post on evolution, which I am sure will be just as insightful as his thoughts on social justice.

Chinglican Christianity: Infallibility Is Political

Tags

Alastair Sterne, authority, Catholic, church, Douglas Todd, inerrancy, infallibility, politics, private sphere, public, St. Peter's Fireside

Stuff circulates when you’re having a good time. Over the last day or so, my Chinglican response to St. Peter’s Fireside’s ten-part response to Douglas Todd’s 10-point primer on ‘Liberal Christianity’ has circulated back to its author, Mike Chase. He has graciously responded in a comment in the previous post. I have not yet had time to respond – apologies to Mike, as I do plan to get back. Douglas Todd has also now read my post – I should apologize to him also for not realizing that he was being ‘coy’ about whether he himself was a ‘liberal Christian.’ Fair points all around.

And yet, as the Gospel song says, ‘This great caravan keeps on rolling along.’ And so, without disappointment, St. Peter’s Fireside’s lead pastor Alastair Sterne has now issued his response to Todd on the ‘Bible as history and metaphor.’ Here are Todd’s words:

We take the Bible seriously, but not literally.” That’s a phrase heard often among liberal Christians. They follow Bible scholars like Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and David Lull in viewing the Bible as a mix of history, myth, metaphor and poetry. They have long supported independent, critical study of the Bible. They recognize scripture was written by God-inspired humans, limited by time and context. Liberal Christians accept the Bible may include mistakes.

Sterne also seems to have read my post. Attempting a nuanced treatment of biblical scholarship, Sterne insists (along with Chase in a comment on yesterday’s post) that when he argues for ‘biblical infallibility,’ he is arguing a ‘truly Catholic and classical position,’ not the sort of narrow Anglo-American ‘evangelicalism’ that Chase outlines in his comment through what’s known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral, i.e. historian David Bebbington’s four-part definition of ‘evangelicalism’ as encompassing ‘biblicism, activism, conversionism, and crucicentrism’ (if you like polygons, wait till I tell you about the Larsen Pentagon from The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology). Citing church fathers like St. Clement of Rome and St. Augustine, Sterne argues over against a view of Scripture as only history and metaphor that the Bible must be treated as revelation. This means, he contends, that Scripture isn’t limited by historical context and isn’t subject to the whims of the reader; it stands over its readers and judges them, and it ultimately finds its culmination in the Word made flesh.

In many ways, I appreciate what Sterne is doing here. I’m glad, for example, that he and his colleagues now seem to be dealing more seriously with the implication that they’ve used the word ‘classical,’ not ‘evangelical.’ As one commenter I read somewhere said, ‘I wish Seattle were this theologically alive. But it’s intent on being cool.’ In many ways, I agree with this backhanded compliment to Vancouver, which has a public sphere that is not stupid. It’s the public sphere that is forcing St. Peter’s Fireside to clarify why they are using ‘classical’ instead of ‘evangelical,’ for changing a word without altering a theology raises more suspicious eyebrows than it calms fears in a putatively post-Christian Pacific Northwest. As our Catholic friends would say, it is right and just.

But, frankly, I’m still not entirely satisfied that Sterne has fully sussed out the term ‘classical’ by pairing it with biblical infallibility. That’s because using the word ‘infallible’ and then claiming an unbroken classical Christian heritage still doesn’t speak to how politically contested ‘infallibility’ is. That’s because whenever the word ‘infallible’ is used in ‘classical’ Christianity, we’re talking about politics.

 

It shouldn’t be shocking for anyone who has hung out in Christian churches of whatever variety to hear that the church is a political institution. As St. Augustine describes it, this is because there’s a city of God to be built, a polis premised on love instead of power, which means, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it, that the church is itself a politics. This, of course, has long had local expressions going back to the beginning of the Christian movement (back when we were still called ‘the Way’!), with local assemblies of Christians gathering in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, etc., and the way that these assemblies — these ekklesiai, from which we get the word church — saw themselves relating to each other was through their overseers — their episkopoi, from which we get the word bishop. As the bishops across the different churches were in communion with each other, these churches were catholic, that is, all the local expressions saw themselves as united in the universal practice of what it means to be God’s people in Jesus Christ.

It’s from the church catholic that we get the canon of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. That’s because of the many things that these assemblies did in their gatherings (e.g. eat bread and drink wine together, greet each other with holy kisses, baptizing people, singing spiritual songs, etc.), one of the parts of their liturgy — i.e. the collective work of the people in worship — was to hear the ‘apostles’ teaching,’ i.e. the teaching of Jesus’ immediate followers, who reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in light of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (see why Jewish-Christian relations is both tense and an imperative for continued conversation?). Eventually, these apostolic interpretations of the Scriptures (and frankly, how the whole world worked) in light of Jesus were written down, say, in the letters of Paul and Peter and John, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, etc. and read alongside the Hebrew Scriptures. While the Hebrew Scriptures pretty much had a set canon (they were usually reading from the Greek Septuagint), each of the local churches tended to have their own lists of which letters and books constituted the apostles’ teaching. One book, for example, that made it on some of the lists but not others was called The Shepherd of Hermas, which, if you ever get around to reading, is pretty trippy stuff .Eventually, the church catholic decided pretty much by consensus that it was probably a good idea to have a standardized list. According to most accounts, that was because there was this heretic Marcion going around denying that the Hebrew Scriptures had anything to do with the life of the church while cutting out parts of the apostles’ teaching to fit his own agenda, which tended to be all this body-hating, hyper-spiritual crazy elitist crap.

In any case, my point is: from this process of canonization — and I’ve simplified a few things here and there — you could technically make Sterne’s argument that the biblical canon is infallible for the Christian church. After all, Jesus speaks to the church through the Word in Scripture, which is what Sterne is insisting.

But in some ways, that’s an incomplete argument. That’s because you could also technically make the case that classical Christians believe that what’s actually infallible is the church.

In fact, speaking of the breadth of the church catholic and classical Christianity, what I’m saying might only sound radical to evangelical Protestants, because this other group of classical Christians — Roman Catholics — have pretty much been thinking this all along. You could say that this is how the whole idea of ‘papal infallibility’ came about. Sure, I’m about to oversimplify and not mention, like, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, Pope Gregory VII’s ramblings, and the crazy politics of the Vatican I vote on infallibility. But the idea that the pope could speak infallibly ex cathedra (on his seat on the Chair of St. Peter) was because the pope — the Bishop of Rome — presides over the church that, as Pope Francis says, has long ‘presided in charity over the churches’ to maintain that sort of catholic unity that I described earlier. Actually, you could say that the real schism that the Catholics are concerned about — the one with the Orthodox — is pretty much about how the church gets to be infallible: is it through the bishop of Rome or through the collegiality of the patriarchs? Some work has been done on this question (see The Ravenna Document), and it’s particularly interesting to see how Scripture is framed by these questions of church power:

15. Authority within the Church is founded upon the Word of God, present and alive in the community of the disciples. Scripture is the revealed Word of God, as the Church, through the Holy Spirit present and active within it, has discerned it in the living Tradition received from the Apostles. At the heart of this Tradition is the Eucharist (cfr. 1 Cor 10, 16-17; 11, 23-26). The authority of Scripture derives from the fact that it is the Word of God which, read in the Church and by the Church, transmits the Gospel of salvation. Through Scripture, Christ addresses the assembled community and the heart of each believer. The Church, through the Holy Spirit present within it, authentically interprets Scripture, responding to the needs of times and places. The constant custom of the Councils to enthrone the Gospels in the midst of the assembly both attests the presence of Christ in his Word, which is the necessary point of reference for all their discussions and decisions, and at the same time affirms the authority of the Church to interpret this Word of God.

See what’s going on there? Scripture is revelation, yes, but its place is in the assembled people of God, addressing the Church while being interpreted by the Church as Christ speaking.

In short, questions about infallibility are really about church politics.

The same goes for Protestant Christians, then, which is what Sterne is. You would think that when the Protestant Reformers insisted that the Bible alone is sufficient for salvation, that settled the question completely. The trouble, though, as Brad Gregory points out in his ambitious Unintended Reformation, is that Scripture didn’t stop getting interpreted — it started getting interpreted in lots of different ways. Moreover, the rising modern states saw how useful this was in asserting their authority over against the church, and in political wranglings that saw this, that, and the other Protestant or Catholic (depending on the state) getting burned at the stake or getting their head chopped off, much of the authority of the church in interpreting Scripture wasn’t transferred so much to the individual, but to the state!

Talk about politics.

In an effort not to read the sixteenth century into contemporary times, though, it’s safe to say that the politics of biblical infallibility — or as it has been recently called, inerrancy — hasn’t gone away. In a fascinating account of the unlikely alliances that could be shared between indigenous sovereignty movements and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith recounts the politics of biblical inerrancy vis-a-vis questions of gender. Smith’s point is that what passes for, ‘The Bible is true,’ is often an attempt to create and maintain a specific political vision based on an interpretation of the Bible. This makes sense also in light of the recent removals of evangelical faculty who don’t subscribe to a ‘Bible is inerrant to every word and punctuation mark,’ like Peter Enns and Doug Green – again, there’s a social vision at stake for certain evangelical seminaries where the inerrancy of the Bible is caught up with building private domains.

But you see, that’s the point. What we have there is another transfer of authority vis-a-vis the interpretation of Scripture — from the church catholic to the state, and from the state to the private sphere. And that’s a bit of an ironic point. While many complain that conservative Christians are trespassing the secular boundary line between private religion and public politics, what I’m saying is that the politics of biblical inerrancy goes hand-in-hand with the privatization of religion.

Charles Taylor would think that’s pretty trippy.

Back to the main point. The point is that for all of Sterne’s attempts to address my concerns about the usage of ‘classical,’ I still am not quite sure that they can speak for all ‘classical’ orthodox Christians because — unless one wants to claim that only Roman Catholics or only evangelical Protestants are ‘classical Christians’ — I’m still not sure I know what this monolithic ‘classical Christian’ is. Indeed, to make the claim that a Christian is ‘classical’ as opposed to ‘liberal’ is political — and arguably unnecessary. As for Todd’s point that opposes liberal critical readings of Scripture to the politics of infallibility, one wonders, given the actual transfers of authority since the Reformation, whether the conservative Christians he opposes are themselves in fact ironic liberals. After all, for all the ‘independent critical study’ of the Bible that Todd claims that liberal Christians do, the move toward inerrancy politics in the private sphere is about as independent and critical as one can get. As a matter of fact, there’s a new provocative book out by a secular New Testament scholar, James Crossley, that observes that all the scholars Todd discussed (John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and David Lull) and all the evangelical scholars they seem to oppose are all really doing the same thing. As Crossley argues, they’re all contextualized by what’s called an age of neoliberalism, that is, an age where the private markets are given more authority to govern than the state, producing a lifestyle that requires an Anglo-American empire to subjugate and colonize dissidents in other parts of the world in order to maintain their economic foothold. Whether one agrees or not with Crossley’s anti-imperial politics is besides the point – the point is that when I say that there are more similarities than differences between putatively liberal and conservative Christians in approaches to the Bible, I’m not making stuff up.

The real question for a classical Christian, then, isn’t whether the Bible is infallible, per se. It’s: how does the authority of the church catholic work, especially in an age of privatized politics? As a hint for further exploration (probably again during this ten-part series), the late Swiss theologian Karl Barth may be helpful here. Like Sterne, Barth had a strong theology of revelation, one that he went to town on liberal German scholars with beginning in his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans. For Barth, the Word of God causes what he calls a krisis for the powers that be, exposing them as they act like gods to be No-Gods — which, by the way, came to be a great theology with which to oppose the Third Reich. But in Romans, Barth doesn’t play the politics of biblical inerrancy (which is why he was later disliked by American fundamentalists and evangelicals). For Barth, the Word of God is definitively revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the political Word that God speaks to defy the powers that crucified him. As I hinted at earlier, the power of the resurrection may well be how the apostles started in the first place to produce their teaching based on the Hebrew Scriptures about Jesus.

Bottom line is: in discussing the infallibility of the Bible, both Todd and Sterne have opened a political Pandora’s Box. My hope is that they haven’t gotten more than they bargained for.

Now that the categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ are adequately confused, we now look forward to St. Peter’s Fireside’s third post on the person of Jesus.