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.

The Heart Has Its Reasons

Tags

Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Christian, Christian Church, Christianity, Invisible church, J. R. R. Tolkien, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Protestant

For the next while, I will be stepping away from the Catholic/Protestant question, at least in the public forum of this blog. I will finish my post series on Giussani, and will still undoubtedly speak out of the broadly catholic tradition that so shapes my faith. But for the moment I would like to set aside the back-and-forth debate that I, admissibly, am responsible for – not because bad things have come out of this (far from it), or because my fellow interlocutors have been unfair or graceless, but simply because it exhausts me emotionally, and seems not to be what I am in need of right now spiritually. If you are thinking to yourself right now that this is very escapist of me, you are thinking exactly what I feel – I hate setting aside any question, and moreso because I have OCD, which insists that I should deal with such questions 24/7, if possible to the detriment of all other duties and responsibilities. So, yes, I too feel like it is escapist, but, as J. R. R. Tolkien wisely pointed out, sometimes those most concerned about escapism are the jailers.

I started this set of posts for two reasons. The first is that I feel like decisions like this neither can nor should be made in a dark corner. I appreciate Christ’s response when he is arrested, that he does not have some deep, dark secret conspiracy – if anyone had wanted to know his “secret” plans, they had only to listen to him when he taught publically. I have a deep respect for this kind of openness. Hiding in such cases may indeed mean one is hiding as much from oneself as from everyone else. And a decision made wisely should be able to stand up to external criticism.

But perhaps it is my second reason that has got me into trouble. This is that, having just moved to a new city, being painfully introverted, and in any case having a theological and spiritual past that makes Christian community difficult for me (I usually end up either saying nothing or rocking the boat), I figured I would spare those around me by blogging rather than making others talk about these things with me. In some ways this was necessary because it has constantly been hard to know who to talk to and how. But in others ways it has made things worse because the alchemy that occurs in writing – the transformation of thoughts and impulses into polished and sensible prose – leaves behind the raw emotion and pain that is behind much of this crisis. To be very, very clear, I do not in the least fault anyone for responding reasonably to my reasonably put arguments and musings – it is not fair to expect people to read the emotions behind arguments. But for my own sake – for the sake of a heart that seems inextricably woven into my brain – I need to step back. I cannot pretend to be arguing with disinterest, that the things I am saying are not in some way the lowings of a brazen bull.

Of course, I don’t know how well I will be able to maintain this stepping back process, because the particular difficulty is that for me everything is connected. My impulse is to say that I will on this blog turn my attention to more pastoral matters – such as, for instance, the Christian response to mental illness – but I feel that even this, like the most practical and simple good, cannot be talked about apart from doctrine. My response, I think, must differ, depending on what we think Christians are, and how we think about the visible and invisible church. My mind is a quaking bog – unsettle one bit and the whole body trembles.

This, of course, does not mean I am going to stop pursuing the questions I have been pursuing, or thinking about the Catholic church – I will. The difference, though, I hope, will be that I am more honest, and find communities in which to practice such honesty, and avoid the pretense that this is something that I can engage with anything less than my entire person. And so – as I did when I shared on Facebook my first post on this subject – I request prayer – I know not for what – I can only pray that the Spirit intercedes for me with groans, and that I somehow survive.

When the Riddles of God Are More Satisfying Than the Solutions of Man: Toward a (Hopefully) Irenic Response to Captain Thin

Tags

Bible, Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Israel, Too Dame Catholic

I have been mulling over Captain Thin’s response to my posts – very deeply in fact – and I finally think I may be able to respond. Let me preface this by saying that, in “real” life (as on this blog), Captain Thin has been a very supportive friend as I have been going through my sundry crises. This, of course, makes it all the harder to disagree with him, not only because I know how deep the ecumenical bonds between us are (and it pains me to focus primarily on the disagreement), but also because these matters cut to the very heart of us. For all the civilized tone that I hope we have been able to maintain here – in Christian charity – disagreement is still deeply painful, since the very fact of Christianity compels us to see the people we are arguing with as people rather than mere arguments; and even moreso when the people we are arguing with are some of our closest friends. All that being said, I would not for a moment expect a friend to agree with me simply for my sake, nor would I find it easy to be friends with someone who expected this of me – all that to say that, far from a distraction from our friendship, the theological debates and discusssions that Captain Thin and I have are part of the cement of our friendship; we have been known to get together to watch Dr. Who and end up being distracted from it by wonderful theological conversations; certain parties have also beaten us over the head with pool noodles on account of us continuing at length a good theological discussion when everyone else was ready to go out for coffee. All this to say that the disagreement I put forward here is a very painful thing and a very important part of our friendship all at the same time.

But let me proceed. From what I can tell, Captain Thin’s primary problem with the Roman Church is its close association of the church with an institution. This, in his argument, ignores the invisible church that exists both inside and outside institutional churches; moreover, it condemns many faithful believers to a set of anathemata announced at Trent. Quoting Donne, he notes that, since Trent, faith is become pricey and costs more, that is, things that people used to be able to get away with believing in an older, pre-tridentine church have now been codified and condemned. Quoting Luther, he situates the Church in her people, and not in her wood and stone.

On the anathema question, I am grateful to Louis Thomas, who posted a helpful link under Captain Thin’s post. Basically, this post clarifies that the anathemata put forward at Trent are not automatically put into effect; that is, the statement does not categorically apply to people, but only does so when matters have been investigated regarding the person charged, and when the church has formally charged them. Moroever, the state of anathema more or less is a description of excommunication (not necessarily saying anything about eternal salvation, but rather referring to one’s relation to the earthly Catholic church), and it would seem redundant to tell Protestants that they are not part of the Catholic church – one would imagine they already know as much, and that that by definition is what makes them Protestant.

Furthermore, as the Catechism makes clear (see sections 817-19), the Tridentine condemnation of Protestants it seems would not usually apply (except indirectly) to Christians who hold contrary beliefs in the present, insofar as their Protestantism is inherited rather than borne of open and deliberate rebellion against the church; indeed, such Christians are part of ecclesial communities and are recognized as fellow Christians by the Catholic church. Of course, what Captain Thin charges is that, while this is what the church might put forward in the present, its assertion is inconsistent with its beliefs about the deposit of truth in tradition; indeed, in his assessment, such a statement is not really a clarification of doctrine, but rather a clever manipulation that pretends that Catholics have always been saying the same thing when they really have not.

Frankly, I don’t feel I have quite enough knowledge and experience at the moment to be able to gauge on my own the degree to which the Catholic treatment of this matter is clarification and the degree to which it is manipulation – I feel that dealing with things like this is a very complex matter – but conversely, I’m not sure Captain Thin has given quite enough evidence to convince us of the contradictions with which he charges the church. The reason I say this is that I have encountered very similar arguments concerning the Bible. Skeptics will find little bits here and there and pit them against each other and make big deals of them etc., and the charge is usually that, since the Bible is internally inconsistent, it cannot be the word of God. In fact, it seems that the Bible itself even perhaps dares us to think about this, giving us as it does four different versions of Christ’s life (surely it would be easier for an authoritative holy text to only have one). But I have come to be glad of these alleged “contradictions,” precisely because the thing I trust least in the world is straightforward answers, because they fail to capture the complexity of the world. It would be much safer and simpler if, say, God had given us the four spiritual laws rather than a Bible. But it would not be a full response to the complexity of the human condition – a complexity in part created by God, and in part due to sin. This means that the conclusion to which I have come regarding life is not that I should seek the least contradictory and most internally consistent answers, but rather that I must seek the answers where the truth that I see of them is enough to convince me to trust the bits I don’t get, and where the complexity of the answer correlates to complexities we find in actual life.

Of course, all these things are value laden, and really all I can say about Cathoic tradition is that, what looks to Captain Thin like a clever dodge, looks to me like an attempt to reckon with a complexity that must be reckoned with by any Christian. I mean, as Christians, we do in fact believe we have a revelation from God – which one might simplistically equate with direct and unmediated access to the truth, not buffeted by the permutations of history. And yet somehow also the church very much is buffeted by history and is not simply given a truth that can pretend to be extra-historical. This, by the way, seems to me very much in keeping with the manner of a God who reveals himself through Israel (rather than directly through extra-historical illumination), and through the Christ who takes on flesh in history. In fact, in all these things, there are problems. When is Israel being (as it is) the chosen people, and when is it behaving in terms of its historical context (that is, should we recreate an Old Testament Judaism or not)? What bits of Christ’s life are pointers to direct Christian behavior, and what historically contextual (for instance, should we make a ritual of spitting and putting mud in the eyes of the blind to heal them in the same way we might promote the ethics of the sermon on the mount?)? These are complicated things, and one might dismiss them as internal inconsistencies in the Christian story (surely truth must be simpler than that?), except that we find our own lives reflecting the need for an answer this complex. Even the task of understanding what our selves are and how we might reconcile that with times when we seem to behave or think in different ways (cf. Romans 7) suggests that some version of such a complicated synthesis is working in us (whether we know it or not) as soon as we get up in the morning; If I had to respond to someone who charges that Christian faith is too complicated and casuist, I would not have him or her examine Christian doctrine, but rather examine him or her self, and then gauge whether the complexity of Christianity answers the complexity he or she sees in him or herself. This, I think, is what made classical philosophy such a wonderful prep school for Christianity, with the Delphic motto, “Know thyself.”

But to return to the question of the church: from my perspective – from what I have seen in church history, of the modern church etc. – the clarificatory aspect of tradition is not simply a clever dodge but an attempt to deal with the same complexities dealt with in Israel’s history and the life of Christ; what might it mean to communicate the eternal truth of God through finite forms, as God seems so bent on doing? Again, it would take far too long to outline what makes me see this in Catholic history, but that is okay; it has become clear to me that, whereas in Protestant circles one can maintain the illusion of a complete apologetic – a watertight proof – the Catholic church, by virtue of her largeness, catholicity, and bounty, cannot ever be singly defended. She is a large country with many borders, and one finds oneself able perhaps to defend the border by which one enters (if that), but also finds that one must trust by faith that the rest of the realm is in God’s care and is being defended as necessary.

Such, then is my response: the function of tradition in the Catholic church only looks like a dodge when one holds it up to an unrealistic expectation of “consistency” that neither reflects the complexity of Judeo-Christian history, the Bible, or life itself. I had meant also to write about some problems with giving the invisible church precedence over the visible – and why wood and stone, though perhaps not the defining materials of the church, are still an integral part of her. However, this post being too long already, I will leave that task for another time.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

Here is what I posted, alongside the link:

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

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

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

Oh, Rome Sweet Home–gag me.

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

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

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

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

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

All dudes up there, too, guys.

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

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

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

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the Catholic Church Anglicanism’s Orient?

Tags

Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Edward Said, Literature, orientalism, Pope, Rome

I am thankful for friends who raise difficult questions, because it forces me to answer them. Then again, it is difficult. It is difficult precisely because, while I would like to simply agree with what Chinglican has said in defense of Anglicanism, the matter lies too close to the heart of the issue. If what he says is true, there would not be that much point in becoming Catholic – I would be Catholic already as an Anglican. And so, while I want to answer as irenically as possible, my response might be shocking and kind of offensive because the matter is too pressing a question to be dealt with sensitively. So I request the forgiveness of those I offend.

Basically, Chinglican argues that there are two churches in the Anglican church, the political and the literary. The political is not really very justifiable. But the literary has been there time and time again to raise the thorny theologies that imperialism would suppress. In many ways, this read on Anglican history seems about right, which is probably why I became an English major. Early on, I realized that some of the most profound theological things happening in the English milieux were works of literature. Literature, for Chinglican, plays for the Anglican church the function the pope is supposed to play for the Catholic church – to call kings to account.

I will not get into the history of this, as such would be tedious and could be reckoned in many and various ways. I could imagine an interpretation that sees literature as theological protest, as well as an interpretation that sees literature as a political flunky. But the one thing I would point out is that the capacity of literature to fulfill its critical function is directly dependent on its connection to real theology. Donne could be what he was because he was so deeply indebted to pre-Tridentine Catholicism. And the political split did not immediately destroy all theology. It did not take away the wealth of things that had gone before.

But I can’t help wondering how sustainable this might be. I would certainly agree that, in the Early Modern period, literature is a form of theological protest and critique, seen particularly in someone like Milton. But by the Victorian period or so, I’m not so sure. The Blakean romantics have run off with sola emotion, and the Enlightenment types have run off with reason (see Pope’s Essay on Man). Literature gets appropriated by various movements and finds itself left without a theology, and all we have left is poor Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice to defend us from the monarch. What I am getting at is that, if English literature has in the Early Modern period the protesting character Chinglican sees in it, this has significantly cooled by the time the Victorians come around with their state-embedded church. There are of course exceptions to this. But if Chinglican can truncate history, so can I. What I am getting at is that English literature can protest just to the degree that it has in its cultural memory a kind of faith that can protest against the state, the kind of faith seen in Thomas More and (dare I say) Guy Fawkes? But amnesia sets in, and the church is integrated nicely with the state.

And I suppose this is my difficulty. I imagine I would find it much easier to be an Anglican (actually, the term Anglican is anachronistic here) in the Early Modern period – that is, if I didn’t lose my head for some reason or other. But now, the church is so far removed from that root that I imagine to actually be the kind of Anglican that wants union with Rome – that weeps proportionate tears and longs for the radix, the root – would be emotionally devastating. I am all for mourning. But the level of mourning required here would kill me and make me unable to function. Put another way, it seems to me that far too many Anglicans claim to want unity, but in fact are quite happy going about their merry lives without a pope. And this leads me to the question of orientalism.

Because in a very real way, I think the thing that annoys me about many Anglo-Catholics is that they are Anglicans discovering a Saidean orient in the Catholic church. I have a friend working on the French as the “other” to English “normalcy” – the other both exotic and dangerous – and I kind of think that a similar thing occurs with Catholicism. It is the deeply dangerous thing we all have to fear – reading some of the English indictments of Catholicism are a little like reading some of the modern indictments of terrorism (though again, there was a Guy Fawkes, who seems to have been both). But the Catholic church is also fascinating in all its gaudy dangerousness. Shakespeare’s attractive “Catholic” fool Feste is counter-posed to the “Puritan” Malvolio. It is no surprise that Oscar Wilde, when he becomes increasingly interested in faith near the end of his life, is interested to Catholicism. Like good Englishmen, we are attracted with Charles Ryder of Brideshead to the many exotic sins of Catholicism. The Catholic church is the foreign woman that both threatens and mesmerizes England.

But I will go one further: we are all, whenever we encounter anyone or anything, orientalists, that is, original sinners. We all of us will always initially encounter the other like this. The real question is what we do with this encounter. Do we keep the exotic as a pet, to pleasure us and remind us of our own superiority by turns? Or do we in fact engage – try to get past this impression and encounter the other on terms other than our own? Because this for me is the real question. Am I appreciating Catholic theology as an ornament or pet of my own individuality, or am I in fact in the state of knowing what it means to be fully Catholic, that is submitting to the Magesterium? Many Anglo-Catholics critique the highly individualistic appropriation of Scripture in Evangelical circles, but isn’t Anglo-Catholicism just the flip-side of the coin, an individualistic interpretation of Christian tradition ultimately unguided and undisciplined by the authority of the Church?

I realize that what I am saying here will anger many, but I can’t help feeling this way. If I am going to preach Catholicism, I want to know the pain of being Catholic, rather than preach something that I can leave at the door when I go home at night. Because I am not content manipulating a Catholic orient. No, I want the Catholic church.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman Catholics and Confessional Lutherans

Tags

Catholic, Catholic Church, confessional lutheran, ecumenism, Lutheran, roman catholic, roman catholics

This is just a brief post to let readers know of an article I wrote which went up on First Things recently. Entitled “Roman Catholics and Confessional Lutherans explore deeper ties,” it highlights emerging talks between the two church bodies. A selection follows:

In noting it was Roman Catholics who initiated conversation with confessional Lutherans, Dr. Klän suggested there was “a deep rooted disappointment [among] Roman Catholics—in Germany at least— with the Lutheran World Federation or some of its member churches.”

While dialogue between Roman Catholics and mainline Lutherans continues, a desire has arisen among Roman Catholics to begin looking to confessional Lutherans for more fruitful dialogue.

For more, read the whole story at First Things. On the same topic, a short article went up today over at The Canadian Lutheran entitled “Lutheran Church–Canada and Roman Catholics begin talks.”

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Review: Theology of the Body for Every Body, by Leah Perrault

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Catholic, Catholic Church, Christianity Today, depression, Evangelical, God, Good Friday, mental illness, Pope John Paul II, Theology of the Body

If you have spent any time with Catholics, or Evangelicals who have become frustrated enough with a quasi-gnostic perspective to look outside their tradition, you have probably encountered John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, whether through reading his work itself, being exposed to populist and less nuanced versions of it, or in magazines such as Christianity Today. Personally, I have encountered all sorts of reactions to it; I have seen it help revive the faith of some, and I have also encountered some who are frustrated by dumbed down versions of it that don’t account for the nuance of John Paul’s work. Of course, there are also those who mistakenly think that the Theology of the Body is solely about a controlling sexual ethics, and they accordingly reject it. Whatever your position, I hope that what I write in the following paragraphs will convince you that it would be a good idea to read a new book by a longtime friend of mine, Leah Perrault – whether you are Catholic or Protestant, married or single, frustrated by populism or elated and waking up to the realization of possessing a physical body.

In my opinion, Leah’s book, Theology of the Body for Every Body, starts exactly where the Theology of the Body should start, and does start for John Paul II. That is, if we only start talking about TOB when we talk about sexuality and marriage, it is I think a sure sign that we have missed what it is about, and have already fallen into a cultural dualism that has come to view romance in near materialist terms and conversely given up on material and bodies in many other spheres of life. What Leah does is defer the discussion of sexuality to talk about all the other ways that people in all walks of life might learn to appreciate the “bodied-ness” that God has given them. In doing this, she implicitly recognizes one of the key insights we should take from TOB; the problem in some of our churches is not so much that we need to change the way we talk about sex, but rather that we need to start talking about (and doing) everything else in ways that are more than thin. Out of this will come changes in the way we think about sexuality, but we may also realize that there are other things in the world – and very embodied things at that – that matter besides sexuality.

One of the most welcome implications of Leah’s book is the way it decenters Christian discourse that conceives of life as meaningless without marriage or sex.  There has been something of a crisis about this in Evangelical circles – what if those who save sex for marriage never in fact get married? (there are statistically three Evangelical women for every Evangelical man) – and thinkers in this area would do well to take a page from Leah’s discussion of John Paul II. She goes out of her way to offer examples of embodiment of people in all situations, not just marriage, and surely thinking about this is part of what we must do if we are to have a cogent understanding of Christianity that does not lean too heavily on marriage as the sole vehicle of meaning.

Another important thing about this book is that Leah does not think a Christianity informed by TOB will be a quick fix for the world. I must admit that, as someone who relates to God after the manner of St. John of the Cross, I sometimes worried that the book was at some points too optimistic (though conversely the book also challenged my own sinful proclivity toward cynicism), but by the end my fears were dispelled. In one of the most moving passages in the book, Leah describes her own Good-Friday reflection as she was going through a very difficult time in her life: “Jesus enters the tomb, and the wisdom of our tradition has us go there with him, every year, commemorating his suffering and death. God goes into the darkness and we can do nothing to change his circumstances. But we can go there with him and he with us. I thought of how supportive my family had been…They could not fix it, change it or take it away. They just surrounded me with care. So many times, I begged God to intervene, to make things go my way, and all of a sudden, on Good Friday, I was moved to tears by the God who simply and respectfully sits with us in darkness as well as light.”

Though I am largely Catholic in my theology, I grew up Evangelical and so speak with an Evangelical twang; on account of this, I am not in much of a position to give advice to my Catholic readers, but there is one caveat I want to make for Evangelicals, particularly of the emergent sort. Such emerging Evangelicals have played, and played loudly, the problems of Evangelical neo-gnosticism, and rightly so (cf. Parker’s Back by Flannery O’Conner). However, in disabusing themselves of gnosticism, Evangelicals, with the much chronicled scandal of their minds, do not have the deep liturgical and philosophical traditions of the Catholic church, which is the home of TOB. Thus, whereas Leah and John Paul II can reject gnosticism but also imagine a form of Christian embodiment different from secular materialism, I am not sure that emergent Evangelicals have the tradition necessary to give them the imaginative capacity for this. Let me put it this way: When I go into the Cathedral at Notre Dame U in South Bend, I am certainly called out of my gnostic proclivities – here is an entire building where every stone cries out to God – but there is a difference between this kind of embodiment and the materialism that a secular person might consider embodiment; in the former, heaven and earth meet, while in the latter, there is just earth. However, when I go into an emergent “pub church” or “coffee shop” church, I suppose I am embodied insofar as I am enjoying the material culture of a secular world.  However, I am not made uncomfortable by the fact that there must be something more than coffee shops and pubs – there is no yearning – and so while I may be very embodied, that embodiment might be too comfortable to be church, however commendable it might be as a social activity; the Church should pique in us a longing for embodiment of a holy kind, the kind that hungers for the Eucharist, and that experiences this as an expansion rather than a reduction of meaning. So, while Catholics and other churches with liturgical and philosophical traditions in some ways have built into them a safeguard against mere materialism, I would caution emerging type Evangelicals to be careful because they do not have this safeguard.

I would like to conclude with one of the quotes I most appreciate from Leah’s book, and a brief reflection on my own recent experience of embodiment. The quote is that, “if we take Theology of the Body seriously, then we have to shift our mindset away from issues and start to see, hear and love the people who are affected by them, just as we do when we are the ones facing hunger, fear or oppression.” Recently, I moved from the West side of Vancouver – one of the richest neighborhoods in Canada – to the North side of Winnipeg. We are not in the “rough area” proper, but we are close enough that, when I went to get a new prescription for my antidepressants, the clinic I went to was one that dealt largely with addictions – with helping some recover and turning away others looking for yet another prescription for the painkiller to which they are addicted. And I was struck by how glad I was to be there. Not because I was going to rush in and save these people, or because I romanticize their lives – I know their lives are often gritty and brutal and joyful in ways I do not yet understand. What I do know is that I was glad to be out of a community that prided itself in its issues and ideals but could not recognize themselves in the broken bodies lying on the street.  I will be the first to acknowledge that I am not good at loving my neighbor, but seeing them – and seeing them in the flesh – might not be a bad way to start.