In the Gospel text (Mark 13.24-37), Jesus instructs his disciples, ‘Keep awake.’ Keep awake, he says. Pay attention to the signs: ‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.’
Though we may not seem like it, we are awake. Our founder Churl started A Christian Thing to be a Thing. Like the Ents in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a Thing is not an object – a Thing is a Moot, an Entmoot, a meeting of the wise. We do not profess to be wise, Churl wisely said. We only profess to have a Thing.
And suddenly, quiet. Maidan. Ferguson. The Umbrella Movement. Ayotzinapa. Burnaby Mountain. Silence.
Have we fallen asleep?
Before we started A Christian Thing, we Christians, most of us Protestant moving up the sacramental ladder in fits and starts, had about a year of very intense dialogue at a very secular university in a fairly secular nation-state north of the one that most people think about in North America. We talked up a storm about Charles Taylor, we had Baylor University’s Ralph Wood deliver some mind-blowing lectures on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor, we debated how Christians in secular universities should be doing theology, we created friendships that have lasted till even now when we are scattered over the four corners of these two aforementioned nation-states.
Around this time, we came across a book written by John Henry Newman, which for most of us climbing the sacramental ladder was a bit of an unapologetic inspiration. This book was The Idea of a University. I got myself a copy and found something in there I didn’t expect. In the preface, Newman lambastes people who feel compelled to have an opinion about everything on the news. It’s not the point of academia, he says. Academic reflection is – in the wise words of a reviewer of an academic article that I just got notice to revise – about ‘digging deeper, wondering, and digging deeper still.’
Indeed, the truth is that more of our writing is likely moving away from the blog into places with our real names on them, including in peer-reviewed journal articles. That’s not to say that we’re done with this blog – far from it. But in talking with some of those of us on this Thing, I think having this Thing has helped us appreciate what this Thing is about – digging, wondering, and digging deeper still. The character of that Thing has permeated our work, academic, popular, and whatever.
That contemplative work is Marian in character. It’s no surprise, then, that the figure who haunts this thing is the Blessed Virgin.
Here’s the Thing. Our Lord Jesus Christ instructs us to stay awake, to pay attention to the signs that the kingdom of God is breaking into the world, that the end is collapsing into the now. We have detected the movement of the Spirit: breaking from our criticism of the New Calvinism and the gospels of boundary-making isolations, we continue to see that the Lord knew what he was doing when he put Francis in Rome, Justin Welby in Canterbury, Tawadros II in Egypt, and Bartholomew in Constantinople. We watch as the hovering the Spirit yields new ecumenisms we have never imagined, ecumenisms that are ecclesial like Francis bowing his head for a blessing from Bartholomew, as well as ecumenisms that seek to establish a true ecumene in the midst of a world still plagued by colonial capitalist racialization and the attempted silencing of the poor. We are awake, pondering these things in our hearts because even while those whom Cornel West calls the ‘oligarchs and plutocrats’ seem to be tightening their grip on our institutions and our lands, the dignity of the human person has been asserted in more ways than one over this last year.
But who is the one who taught us to see these signs? Is it not the Blessed Virgin? Is it not she who has gone ahead of the Pilgrim Church, she who undoes the knots that our sin has tied, she who displays for us what the fusion of nature and grace is? Is she not the one whom we ask in every Rosary and Angelus, ‘Mary, what do you see? What is the mystery you behold? What are the things that you ponder in your heart?’
Our Lord Jesus Christ has instructed us to stay awake. We, with the Virgin Mother, are awake. And we still profess to have a Thing.
We call this a Thing, as Churl says, professing to have a meeting of the ‘wise’ without being wise ourselves. But as Churl screams at the evangelical churches he’s been at, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he seems to have gotten a variety of responses. Some have shown a lot of love and promised quite a bit of prayer. But he has also quite a bit of criticism from those who don’t know him, precisely the disembodied voice he addresses in his first paragraph. For those of us who dared to share the piece, some of us were subjected to the whims of Protestant polemicists who wanted to debate papal primacy and the use of tradition with us. We were accused of having superiority complexes even as we shared a post that asked where all of our accusers were when Churl (and by extension, others of us on this Thing) were when he/we were wrestling with our faith. Some of us who experienced this also asked, ‘Where the hell were you?’ before we shared that post.
As an Anglican, I stand in solidarity with Churl, regardless of whether he swims the Tiber soon or not. But as a Chinglican, I’d like to give Churl a bit of a reminder. Though Churl doesn’t mention it, one of the common objections to Churl jumping communions is that over there, they pray to this woman called Mary, which means that they love Mary more than Jesus.
I disagree.
For one thing, no Catholic in their right mind prays to Mary; they do talk a lot to her, understand her to continue to dispense the graces of her Son, and venerate her as Queen of Heaven insofar as she is the foremost pilgrim in our journey toward the fusion of nature and grace. For another, this view of Mary, I submit, is neither Catholic nor evangelical. It is Christian, and it brings together the ‘catholic’ and the ‘evangelical’ that we in our small minds have sundered since the Reformation (and arguably even before that). So as a Chinglican, I’d like to give Churl a bit of a reminder: whether he stays on this side or that side of communion with the see of Rome, the Blessed Virgin Mary will be his mother either way. (I realize that this may be a bit of a Flannery O’Connor reading of evangelicals, but Churl thinks that too.)
The rest of this post, then, is addressed to Churl.
Churl, the Blessed Virgin stands beside you. As you cry out in consternation at the evangelical world that abandoned you, Mary is the perfect mother, the Immaculate Conception, the one that John Paul II says in Redemptoris Mater has gone ahead of the pilgrim life of the Church, fulfilling the perfect fusion of nature and grace, bringing the eschaton forward to the present. As much as there will be people who will attack us for having this Marian discussion on our Thing, this conversation lies at the heart of ecumenism, not the new modern ecumenism of the latter half of the twentieth century, but the old ecumenism, as in the ecumenism of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus. There Mary was defined (contra Nestorius) as the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one who bears God for the life of the world and invites us to share in that divine nature through her human son. For those who might dispute this significance of Mary as it can’t be found explicitly in Scripture and thus seek to police our devotion to the Blessed Virgin, we might in turn ask them how it is that they hold it as orthodox that we believe in God as a Trinity of persons and Jesus as a hypostatic union of divine and human natures, for one finds these definitions precisely in the same set of ecumenical councils that produced the definition of Mary as God-bearer. That this radically ecumenical view of Christian theology may be scandalous to some might be a good thing; in time, we may finally reclaim the shock value that comes of all three of seeing God as Trinity, Mary as God-bearer, and Jesus as God and man.
And it was thus that though I, as an Anglican, once visited a Catholic nun (of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, no less), and she told me, as we prayed contemplatively and extemporaneously together over the future of my life, that she saw the Blessed Virgin standing beside me. I, an Anglican, believed her. Beyond our institutional differences, we were able to see clearly then what we see now in Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, that is, we saw the Spirit moving to bring us together as one despite our the impaired nature of our respective communions. The Spirit also brought my wife into my life a month later. She, a self-identified ‘evangelical,’ shows me daily how to embody the ‘catholic’ spirit in her forgiving spirit, her patient forbearance, and her decisively uncanny ability to see the best in the other. I, who purport to be moving in a ‘catholic’ direction, am forced to live as an ‘evangelical,’ always seeking to frame our everyday lives with the prophetic truth of the Word of God. Appropriating free church theologian Miroslav Volf’s terms in Exclusion and Embrace, the Blessed Virgin is both ‘catholic’ and ‘evangelical.’
The Virgin is ‘catholic’ because whether we are in communion with Rome or not, she is the eschatological fusion of nature and grace in the present. She doesn’t care what we call ourselves institutionally. After all, while the schism of institutions is often politically policed by ideologies (‘Catholics are bad because of x, y, z,’ or ‘evangelicals are bad because of a, b, c’), the Virgin, as James Alison reminds us, keeps our faith from becoming an ideology–precisely what you eloquently protested against in your first piece. She reminds us that God is not interested in ideological police work, but in the redemption of the world in a plane suspended between nature and grace, what Henri de Lubac terms le surnaturel. This is no ideology; it is embodied reality. If it is a superiority complex to have such a mother, then so be it. We know, after all, that we are loved and take joy in that love.
The Virgin is also an ‘evangelical.’ She will draw you to that Word that you desire, that Word that you rightly note many of your evangelical friends protect as inerrant but fail to actually read and live. It is a prophetic word, a word that calls us to bear God in us with the Virgin as the church, to confess her fiat: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. Be it done to me according to your Word.
Be it done to me, the Virgin prays. Balthasar taught me this one. He showed me that the Virgin’s prayer has never been about what she would do for the Lord, which is how many read the Word and attempt to live it out in their everyday lives. No, the way that the Virgin contemplates and lives the Word is to reflect on how the grace of the Lord is causing her to bear God into the world. It happens to her. It is thus that she reflects on the mysteries of the shepherds coming to the cave where her son is born, the old man and woman in the temple holding her child with joy, her son in the temple debating with the elders. She ponders these things in her heart as the word that is done to her. In many ways, then, the Word that is her Son is our hermeneutic for the Scriptures, but this meditation on Scripture can only be made real as it in turn becomes our hermeneutic for everyday life.
It is thus the Virgin who shows us how to truly be ‘evangelical.’ If ever there were an evangelical statement not co-opted by that movement styling itself as definitively ‘evangelical’ while defining itself as not Catholic, not ecumenical, not liberal, not neo-orthodox, and not fundamentalist, it is the Magnificat. As feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether reminds us, Mary is not a symbol of virgin church power; she is a figure of liberation for the wronged, the one who magnifies the Lord because the old order of powers and dominions is cast down, the poor are shown mercy, and the hungry are fed. Those who reject Mary because they purport to be ‘evangelicals’ fail to see that she is showing them precisely how to be an evangelical, one who proclaims that in her Son, the time is up, the kingdom of God is at hand, the Gospel is unveiled, God is visiting his people, reconciling them as he redeems the world precisely by drawing us into himself, his life suspended between nature and grace.
The Virgin is an evangelical because the Virgin preaches the Gospel, and she stands beside you. She is still preaching, you know, which means, as a Catholic friend I spoke with a few days ago put it to me, all Catholics should believe in women in ministry (the Holy Orders bit may be debatable, but in ministry? Well, yeah!). Those Marian apparitions that the Catholic Church have approved–there’s no monopoly on them, for this is the point of an apparition; it is a concrete embodiment for the life of the world, contra the very notion of an ideology. The apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego brought the Americas together because by appearing as a little brown girl, the Virgin taught us that racism is of the devil, that skin colour is a stupid way to judge people, that there is neither European nor indigenous in Christ, but all are one, fused together in our collective redemption. The apparition of our Lady of Lourdes to Bernadette Soubirous radically challenged the secularization of the French Revolution, unmasking the powers of the secular as colonial through the voice of a destitute girl saying that she saw the Immaculate Conception without knowing what the Immaculate Conception even was. The apparition of our Lady of Fatima to the three children in Spain was a prophetic word against the destruction wrought by geopolitical ideologies in the twentieth century. The Virgin is an evangelical because the Virgin is a prophet, speaking the Gospel of life into a culture of death so that we all, whether self-identified ‘catholic’ or ‘evangelical’ might hear and live the life of her Son.
This is how it will be, then, regardless of on which side of the Tiber you wind up. We are thus more than merely praying for you to make a good decision. We are praying that you will feel the solidarity of the communion of saints that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of schism and the beautiful gaze of the Blessed Virgin, our mother who stands beside you and me in this hour and who will be your mother whichever side you end up on.
Be blessed.
Chinglican would like to thank one of his evangelical Anglican friends for reading this over for him before posting it.
Addressing an Anglican conference at Holy Trinity Brompton yesterday, Friedrich Cardinal Schörborn declared that the election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio to the papacy as Pope Francis was due to certain strong, supernatural ‘signs’ before and during the conclave events. He then compared the appointment of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to the election of the pope, calling it a ‘little miracle’ and ‘a sign from the Lord’ for the churches to move to closer unity.
By now, readers of this blog will know that such a declaration is the sort of thing that makes me ecstatic, both in the emotional and charismatic sense. After all, I am an Anglican, but I self-identify as catholic, and I am often conflicted over calling myself ‘Anglo-Catholic’ because I am not an Englishman and harbour no desire to return to that odd, dominating construct we once called the British Empire. That is why, after all, I’ve styled myself a ‘Chinglican.’ For some, these ambivalences may read as falling precisely into what Pope Francis–then Cardinal Bergoglio–condemned prior to the conclave: the ‘self-referential’ Church as a sick, old, and dying Church because it fails to participate in the missio Dei.
Indeed, even when I was an evangelical–that is, when I thought like an evangelical, I spoke like an evangelical, I reasoned like an evangelical–I was accused of being un-missional because it was alleged that I was more interested in church politics, contemplative spirituality, and complex theological terminology than in making the faith accessible through attractive programming and simple language. One time, for example, I was in the home of an evangelical mentor when I pitched the idea of having a class on eschatology, as many people to whom I had spoken (both those in the church and not) expressed a curiosity about the Last Things. He raised his finger and pointed at me: ‘You,’ he said. ‘How dare you. People are lost, and all you want to do is to make things more complicated. Our job is to make things easier for people to understand so that more people can teach this stuff. Who do you think you are?’
He was, in short, calling me ‘self-referential,’ a traitor to the cause of the mission to expand the kingdom of Christ through evangelism and discipleship.
It has been years since this experience, but I finally have a reply. To make my response, I’d like to appropriate critical theorist Judith Butler’s reply to those who call her anti-Semitic for criticizing Israeli state policy: ‘No, it is not anti-Semitic,’ she says, because of the internal contestations within Judaic tradition about the state and because she is hanging on to a narrative of dispossession and precarity within Judaica. In the same way, my appeals to the Christian tradition, particularly a revisionist Anglican one with a deep desire for fuller catholicity, can be framed similarly.
No, I say. It is not self-referential. This is because of the inconvenient fact of Catholic social teaching.
After all, May 15 is the day that we celebrate the promulgation of decisive encyclicals in Catholic social teaching: Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, Pius XI’s Quadrogesimo Anno, and John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra. Now, Catholic social teaching can often be confused with Catholic sexual teaching. After all, most of what people know about Catholic social teaching is drawn from Monty Python’s ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’ in The Meaning of Life, a hysterically hilarious lampooning of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s encyclical condemning artificial birth control as contrary to the natural gift of children through the unitive and procreative sex act. It’s so funny, in fact, that you should see it yourself:
To be sure, this misconception is not altogether unjustified. It has in fact been highlighted in recent forays into public politics by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in their opposition to the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate to require religious organizations that do not only serve members of their own faith to insure their employees for artificial contraception, including medications deemed by the bishops to be abortifacient (like Plan B). In addition, it’s fairly well-known that the current Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, was the ‘godfather of Proposition 8‘ when he was bishop of Oakland, raising money to promote a grassroots initiative to write into the state constitution that California only recognizes marriage between one man and one woman. Most recently, Archbishop Allen Vigneron has also told Detroit Catholics who disagree with these socially and sexually conservative stances to refrain from taking communion, implying that opposition to contraception and alternative kinship structures is the definitive Catholic view on sexual and social relations.
Whatever your stance on sexuality issues and traditional family values, these bishops’ interpretation of Catholic social teaching isn’t necessarily wrong or even misguided (it is, however, a particular strand of Catholic sexual teaching emphasizing natural law that is debated among Catholics). Instead, what you can say about it is that it elevates a part of Catholic social teaching that’s actually fairly latent in the encyclicals I just named. It’s actually a bit of a derivative dogma, something that can be drawn out of the concerns of Catholic social teaching as articulated in Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum.
See, Catholic social teaching is best articulated as a Catholic response to current political economic conditions, namely, the threat of unfettered market fundamentalism, what sociologist Max Weber would call the ‘iron cage’ of industrial capitalism with its disenchanting bureaucratic logic permeating everything it touches in the world, what Leo XIII called the ‘new things,’ rerum novarum.While commending socialists for attempting to better labour conditions, Rerum novarum rejects a socialist ideology that places property ownership in the hands of the state and out of the hands of workers themselves. Proposing a Catholic alternative to socialism, Leo XIII emphasized human dignity, arguing that it is the state’s duty to protect the dignity of workers, even as workers themselves had the right to own property, pursue human development in the arts, and make personal time for family. That‘s where the family doctrine comes in: Leo XIII affirmed the family as a basic unit of social relations to which all workers had a right as a matter of basic human dignity. In other words, workers have a right not to be subjectified by the state or the market into cogs in their industrial machine; their human dignity with the basic need for creativity and sociality must be fully recognized.
That‘s Catholic social teaching in a nutshell, a key theme that carries through the encyclicals that the Church is in solidarity with workers as they contest state and market modes of subjectification for their right to basic human dignity.
Anglican though he is, Justin Welby has taken Catholic social teaching as a sort of guiding light in introducing a new social priority to the Church of England: going after the corrupt banks that got us into the global economic mess that we’re in. What is needed, Welby argues, is a whole different way of imagining and managing the financial system, where the banks are not self-serving, but instead see their institutions as serving people. This is very close to what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate, where the Pope Emeritus notes that both justice and the common good both emanate from a will to love and that what is probably needed is a global financial regulator to keep markets from becoming unfettered.
This is why the healing of schism is so important. The Church’s role is not simply to speak words of love; it is to demonstrate it in action. Longing for the recovery of Christian tradition for the sake of healing schism is not self-referential because there is a distinct social priority at the heart of catholicity: bearing witness to the reality that there is another way of being in the world. Who knows what this will mean for Canterbury and Rome? If Bergoglio’s words to Anglican Southern Cone primate Greg Venables is any indication–he told Venables that there was no need for an Anglican Ordinariate because Anglican charisms were already a gift to the church catholic–might it be possible that the next few years might hold within it a full return to communion between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church? Might this in turn signal a new springtime for Catholic social teaching in which the Church will be seen as decisively on the side of the poor and fully oppositional to any sort of self-serving institution that neglects the common good?
Home reunion in turn might clarify some of the things that came to light in the tenure of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. I’ve often noted that both did a fantastic job at one key thing: managing to polarize their entire communions on the left and the right, even as an impulse to catholic reunion has sort of been latent among the faithful, slowly rising to the surface. The appointment of Justin Welby and the election of Pope Francis doesn’t signify a break with Williams and Ratzinger. It’s a sign, as Schönborn put it so eloquently, that the Church is coming into all the truth, that the Spirit is moving among the people of God to rebuild the witness we shattered through our schismatic actions. Indeed, as we saw in Welby’s ‘Journey in Prayer’ pilgrimage through rural and urban dioceses in the Church of England, as well as Pope Francis’s coming out onto the loggia and then into the midst of the people to the chagrin of his security detail, we saw two prophetic priests emerging in the power of the Spirit declaring to the people of God that the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel, the Gospel not as an ideology, but as a whole new way of being that places love and forgiveness at the basis of human dignity, justice, and the common good. In short, in the faces of Justin Cantuar and Pope Francis, we are seeing Jesus and following him.
And yet, here is where those obsessed with developing distinctive theological identities will cry foul. Home reunion, it might be alleged, will soften distinctive points in Catholic and Anglican theology, riding roughshod over disagreements over papal primacy, the role of women, the place of LGBTIQ populations, the veneration of saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the scientific inerrancy of Scripture, and the alone in justification by faith. In fact, as Rachel Held Evans pointed out in a post yesterday, it seems that it is evangelicals who are becoming more and more obsessed with constructing a distinctive identity, one that is becoming narrower with each blog post. In the spirit of attempting to remain distinctively evangelical, for example, the latest denial of Christian catholicity comes from Tim Challies, who rejects ‘mysticism’ as a subjective experience that challenges the inerrant authority of Scripture. Evans takes Challies to task by showing him how much she has grown from reading widely in the Christian mystical tradition. She even goes as far to say that Scripture cannot be a mediator between humans and the divine because we have no need for a mediator.
Here is where I can offer Rachel a bit of a corrective, as well as a parable for those who might oppose any sort of catholic reunion for ideological purposes. Our faith is mediated, but not by the Scriptural text, yes. It is through the sanctorum communio, what Bonhoeffer noted in his doctoral dissertation was the social manifestation of Christ in the present. To that end, we might note that Justin Welby offers evangelicals a different way forward, one that calls evangelicals out of being ‘self-referential.’ Welby has quite the evangelical life story. After all, he came to faith through the Alpha Course through the evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton, a church that has also given evangelicals some of their cherished anthems like ‘Here I Am to Worship,’ ‘Everything,’ ‘Beautiful One,’ and ‘Consuming Fire.’ But unlike much of the anxiety among evangelicals over a distinctive evangelical identity, Justin Welby has no trouble taking on Catholic social teaching as a moral compass. Neither is he averse to conversation with Rome–one that will prove to be interesting in the Franciscan pontificate–nor is he unaware of the vast diversity of theologies, liturgies, and politics in the Anglican Communion. Justin Welby might thus serve as an example to evangelicals on how to be an evangelical. His story is also a parable to those who entrench themselves in ideologies that are inimical to catholicity. You see, evangelical identity is not achieved by being self-referential. It is by participating in the mission of God through the church that is becoming more catholic as the Spirit leads us into all truth. In the words of the Lord Jesus, it is to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow our crucified and risen Lord.
Co-crucifixion and the new sociality effected by the Resurrection are hardly self-referential.
It has become a truism of late that some disaffected evangelicals want to become Catholic because Catholicism has so much more of a robust faith than Protestantism. (A few years ago, Eastern Orthodoxy was a big deal too–arguably still is!) While many more have a more informed account than the hipster one I will provide (I have some smart Catholic convert friends, you see), a typically recent narrative often goes something like this:
Unlike the format of rocked-out worship songs followed by a lengthy sermon, Catholicism (it is said) has a liturgy, a call-and-response between people and priest. Unlike the marketing ethos that pervades much of evangelicalism, Catholicism is like coming home to what Tolkien might call the ‘Last Homely Home.’ Unlike the cheesy literature that fills Christian bookstores that won’t let Rachel Held Evans use the word ‘vagina,’ Catholicism is the religion of what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls the ‘lay styles,’ the people like Dante, Péguy, and Hopkins who saw the glory of the Lord, got sucked in, and wrote it all down in sublime poetry. Catholicism rocks these evangelical converts’ socks because it’s just everything that they were looking for in evangelicalism but couldn’t find because evangelicalism has become corrupted by the free market and its chief political proponents, the Republican Party and their hard neoliberal equivalents in other countries.
As someone who grew up as a non-denominational evangelical and was confirmed into the Anglican Communion (what those who have jumped the Tiber might call the Americano version of Catholic espresso; I’d like to state for the record, however, that the primate who confirmed me had apostolic succession), I can attest to the feeling that Catholics have something that evangelicals don’t have. Catholic theologian James Alison talks about being blown into the Catholic Church from his evangelical Anglican background by falling in love with a classmate who had a grace that he associated with being Catholic (apparently, as a child, his family had John Stott as a close family friend). I remember living in a Catholic house of studies where the daily mass’s liturgical homily was more Christocentric than I had ever heard at an evangelical church. I also always go back to that time I attended mass at a Catholic church where the cantor led worship from guitar with a full band and took us to sublime heights (he even slipped in a Hillsong piece); incidentally, that day was the first day they used the new rites, and while everyone was sufficiently confused about the ‘and with your spirit’ and ‘under my roof’ lines, my sister described the music as giving her an ‘eargasm’ (Rachel Held Evans would like that). Even before that, I recall first partaking of the Anglican Eucharistic liturgy–which, incidentally, reminded me a lot of Catholic school (as one priest reminded me, you know who stole from whom)–and realizing that the Gospel that evangelicals always tried to articulate in fresh ways was already fully expressed in the liturgy.
Readers of this blog will be tempted to channel everything I say through those personal experiences. Fully aware of positionality issues, however, I’d like to state for the record that they are not what I mean by the Catholic thing, that is, the central theme that some readers have identified in my contributions to this blog: everybody seems to be a closet Catholic. In other words, however readers may assess the motives behind my Catholic gymnastics, I am categorically not trying to impose my own aesthetic fetishes on other brothers and sisters in Christ.
That said, the readers of this blog should not be blamed for thinking that I engage in frequent psychological imposition. This is really my fault, my own grievous fault: I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have committed a great sin of omission, for I have failed to define two very key terms. They are Protestant and Catholic. While most readers will take these terms’ meanings to be obvious, the crisis in theology and religious studies around terms like religion, secular, ritual, and myth suggests that I shouldn’t assume that everyone agrees about what these terms mean. Certainly, as we saw in the Anglican post, I’m inclined to a certain understanding of what it means to be ‘Anglican,’ one which, as I noted in the post, other Anglicans might recognize as a validly different form of Anglicanism and proceed to insult it accordingly. In like fashion, I’d like to say exactly what I mean by these two other terms. By Catholic, I simply refer to churches who recognize their communion with the see of Rome such that the see of Rome likewise recognizes its communion with those churches. By Protestant, I refer to churches that were once in communion with the see of Rome but fractured that communion in the sixteenth century for this, that, and the other ideological reason. As you can see, the theological method I’m using here is not very different from my assessment of Anglicanism, that is to say, the form of communion takes primacy over substantive confessional points. (Here, if you are an evangelical, can I beg you to hold your fire for a sec? I’ll get to the confessional points by the end.)
You can see now why I think so many people are closet Catholics. Schism is never pretty, and as Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac argues in his book Catholicism (with the cheesy English subtitle Christ and the Common Destiny of Man), the Holy Spirit gives Christians a ‘Catholic spirit,’ a desire for union with the rest of humanity. The fact that Protestants are out of communion with Rome should be cause for grief for the sheer fact that there are Christians (not to mention other humans) with whom we are not in communion, for the ontological reality in Christianity (well, the orthodox versions, at any rate) is that communion is what we’re made for. To say that the confessional differences on the Virgin Mary, the communion of saints, and the primacy of Rome are sufficient to erect boundaries should still be cause for ontological pain because plainly put, regardless of the reasons, schism still sucks.
This is, of course, why you have to laugh when an evangelical tells you they became Catholic for substantive confessional reasons. After all, everything I just said doesn’t give you much substantive confessional difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, per se. Take, for example, the typical conversion narrative that an evangelical Protestant might rehearse: tired of the market commodification of evangelical Protestantism, they became Catholic to practice a fuller form of the faith. This narrative, however, raises all sorts of questions. For one thing, don’t Catholics also participate in the market commodification of their own faith at times? I mean, have they ever visited a Catholic bookstore? Luther might also have one or two things to say about coupons, building projects, and cheesy jingles about hell and purgatory in the sixteenth century.
To drive home the point, I often scratch my head at the actual substantive difference between a Catholic youth ministry and a Protestant youth ministry. For every evangelical who tells me that they grew up in a big youth group, did the big flashy youth ministry thing, and have now resigned in disgust because it’s not about numbers but truly contemplative faith, I’m tempted to ask if they’ve ever heard of World Youth Day. For every evangelical who tells me that they’re sick of Christian music, I’m curious to know if they’ve ever listened to Audrey Assad, Jackie François, and Matt Maher, much less heard that selections of Hillsong, Vineyard, Maranatha, and even that classic evangelical hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ have all been imported wholesale and oftentimes unproblematically into Catholic worship. (In fact, given this all of this awesomeness–I happen to really, really enjoy listening to Assad, François, and Maher, thank you very much–I’m really rooting for Brooke Fraser to join this Catholic musical dream team, as she and André Crouch would say, ‘soon and very soon.’) For every evangelical who feels disillusioned with Christian media, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of EWTN and whether they know that Bishop Fulton Sheen donned in all of his episcopal regalia was really America’s first televangelist. For every evangelical sick of evangelical fundraising, I’d like to know if they’ve ever heard of a diocesan capital campaign.
The only real difference that I can really think of between Catholics and Protestants is this: being ‘Protestant’ is often tied to ‘maintaining a Protestant identity’ or holding onto ‘denominational distinctives.’ Sometimes this means adding a Latin ‘sola’ before everything and an English ‘alone’ after translations. Other times, it means abstracting Scripture from its historical canonization process and debating whether it’s scientifically inerrant (talk about form over substantive confession!). Still other times, it requires explaining why Catholics are wrong about everything, a favour that Catholics used to return by explaining why Protestants were wrong about everything (thankfully, the tone has softened). This, of course, is where the complaint about ‘protestantization’ in theology and religious studies comes from: over time, these ideological distinctives, formed through cognitive belief and emphasizing individual interiority, began to be believed by Protestants as that which composes religion itself. It’s little wonder that Jefferson Bethke decided to take a potshot at this account of religion; whatever complaints you might have about his oversimplification of religion and his ties to the neo-Calvinist crowd, his return to praxis, as well as his likely unintentional repudiation of overly ‘protestantized’ religion, should be welcomed as a surprisingly ‘catholicizing’ statement of faith. (Oops, I did it again.)
Ecumenical movements also provide excellent counterweights to how these variants of ideological maintenance don’t have to run the show, which means, thankfully, someone like me can still be a Protestant because I started out that way journeying toward greater communion. You could arguably say ditto about folks like Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank. In fact, if you look at the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) reports, you might find it a bit interesting, amusing, and (to some) troubling that the Anglicans end up basically agreeing with the Catholics on the historic primacy of Rome and the special role of Mary in the Church. As has been noted on this blog, relations between Catholics and confessional Lutherans are also getting mighty friendly. And this ecumenism isn’t just something ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives’ do; there are progressive ecumenical conversations going on about social justice even while there are conservative ecumenical conversations happening about confronting secularization. The trouble is, with ecumenism also came some (and let me stress: only some)fundamentalists and evangelicals who accused ecumenists of being modernists caving into a culture of relativism and failing to uphold biblical standards and doctrinal statements, that is to say, letting the Protestant guard down.
It’s people in the latter camp that my Catholic gymnastics target. While I’d argue that most Christians (if they’re honest) have seen the light on communion and ecumenism–whether or not they actually become Catholic or not is another story (I haven’t)–there are some who seem to insist that this is not the light. My tack is to argue that because they are Christian, they simply don’t know that they have already seen the light. To this end, I am not saying that they want to become Catholic for substantive confessional reasons. In fact, I’m saying that those who become Catholic to get away from all the evangelical hype and give substantive confessional reasons for doing it might be jumping out of the fire into the frying pan (I certainly think that’s true of those who become Anglican, myself included). However, I am also saying that I believe in the Holy Spirit, and if indeed the Spirit guides us into all truth–the truth that God in Christ is making all things new and reconciling things in heaven and things on earth into a Christological unity–then why wouldn’t anyone in their right mind not at least long (even secretly so) to participate in the greater catholicity of the church, even (oh, my) with Christians in the see of Rome? Why would anyone think that schism is a good thing to maintain? And if one truly confesses belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, why wouldn’t one at least entertain the possibility that God being God of the living and not the dead allows us to converse with the saints across time and space, including the Blessed Virgin?
What I mean by the Catholic thing, then, is nothing short of wanting to be part of the whole communion of saints, which incidentally usually acknowledges the primacy of the see of Rome in some way, shape, or fashion; at least it has as early as Clement of Rome’s first letter to Corinth in the late first century. In fact, nobody in recent times has recognized this interesting formulation better than Pope Francis himself. In his first appearance on the Loggia, Pope Francis never referred to his papal office as having primacy, per se. Instead, speaking as the newly elected Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis spoke of the see of Rome as ‘the church that presides in charity over all the churches.’ To be in communion with Rome is not so much to acknowledge papal infallibility, per se (much as Vatican I would make us believe that we have to). It’s to be in communion with the see that has historically held primacy as the unifier of all the Christian churches since the first century. Being in open communion with that see is technically what’s supposed to make you fully Catholic. Being formerly in communion with that see, but having broken it off for this, that, and the other reason is technically what makes you Protestant (unless, of course, you are the Society of St. Pius X).
What follows from this, finally, is that any charitable and gracious reading of Christians who actively make schismatic remarks is that they really don’t intend to do so. Assuming the best of the Spirit’s work in their lives, we must assume that what they are really longing for is to become fully Catholic. As Rachel Held Evans reminds us today, there is a season in our journey toward questioning and then re-establishing communion. We are looking forward to the season when we all realize that we long for communion. After all, Catholic or Protestant, we still recite the baptismal creed where we say that we ‘believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church and the communion of saints.’ I promised that I’d get to a substantive confessional point, and I finally have: if we say that the creed sums up the substantive teaching of the Apostles from whom we derive the ecclesial form of succession, we’d better mean what we say in that creed, and if we love our brothers and sisters, we’d better believe that everyone else who says it means it too, some of them more than they know. Together, we all long for the end of schism, for a church that is perfectly one, even as the Father is with the Son, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son.
Jesus says in Sunday’s Gospel reading: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid’ (John 14.27). These words are also the preface in most Christian liturgies to the ‘peace,’ the section in the Eucharistic celebration where we greet each other in the name of Christ, reconciling with those whom we have wronged and joining together in love before partaking of the body and the blood together.
This is more than liturgically appropriate–arguably one of the earliest parts in liturgical development–because the peace’s context is what has come to be known as the ‘Farewell Discourses’ in St. John’s Gospel, the conversation (well, OK, it’s more like a monologue with a few leading questions) where, in light of ‘going to the Father,’ the Lord enjoins his disciples to love one another as he has loved them, to wait for the Paraclete who will lead them deeper into the ontological truth of the death and resurrection, and to live so deeply in the truth that the Father and the Son make their home with them even as the world hates them and persecutes them. The emphasis on reconciling love and passing the peace pervades the other lectionary readings as well. In Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem is convened to deal with the theological assertions of a party of Jewish Christians who want the Gentiles to get circumcised and follow the Mosaic dietary laws. The Council concludes that non-Jewish Christians only have to do the bare minimum as they find themselves at peace with their Jewish brothers and sisters as part of the new covenant: don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols, don’t eat blood, don’t engage in porneia. By the time of the second reading in Revelation 21, it’s revealed that everyone here belongs to the New Jerusalem, the new Israel, the new Temple, shining with the glory of the Lord, who is the Lamb (thanks, Balthasar). The mystical communion of the New Jerusalem founded on an ontology of mystical love was aptly demonstrated to me on Sunday morning: at the free church that I occasionally attend with my wife (a likely surprise to everyone who thought I considered non-Anglican churches beyond the pale), the pastor preached on communion as a practice of reconciling love that cuts across the ecclesial boundaries we erect against each other. Without knowing what the lectionary readings actually were, this pastor (in my humble opinion) represents a sign that God still mystically unites his church catholic despite our intentional divisiveness, for he was practicing ecumenism as an evangelical without even being conscious of it.
This ‘mystic, sweet communion’ might well be applied to those who seem inadvertently and unintentionally to be set up as the arch-nemeses of this blog: the young and restless Protestant tribe dubbed the ‘neo-Calvinists.’ Mark Driscoll is in trouble again (what’s new?): at the recent Catalyst conference, he said something to the effect that because he knows his Maker, who is the maker of the environment, and he is certain that God the Creator will burn the whole thing up, yes, he drives an SUV. He followed this with a (typically) sexist joke that those who drive minivans are ‘mini-men.’ Upon making these remarks, my Facebook news feed erupted in anger, some with passive sighs, others with a call to arms, still others disavowing any connection with Driscoll. One friend even resurrected an old allegation that Mars Hill Church is in fact a ‘cult.’
As I’ve said before on this blog, I do not think the ‘cult’ accusation is very helpful and that Driscoll’s sectarian tendencies are better read as a psychological resistance to his longing to return to his roots as an Irish Catholic. In light of these Catholic musings, I wonder if diatribes against the neo-Reformed tribe don’t in fact stoke their sense of justification by sixteenth-century polemics alone. I wonder if instead passing the peace to them might in fact provoke them to reflect on theirschismatic tendencies and in turn infuse them with such a love that will cover a multitude of sins.
What would it look like to pass the peace to folks like Mark Driscoll and John Piper? I think it’s by arguing that they secretly wish they were Catholic, that they really don’t intend to be schismatic but long instead for deeper communion with the rest of the church catholic. The trouble is that they’ve built their pastoral careers on constructing congregations around hard Reformed Protestant theologies, so they find themselves between a rock and a hard place. It is thus up to us to extend a hand of friendship as they struggle between ideological (they would call it ‘doctrinal’) purity and their ontological reality.
I have argued sufficiently in the other post that Driscoll is a closet Catholic in denial, so I will not reprise my arguments here. Instead, in this post, I will subject one of his teachers, John Piper, to a similar (but briefer) treatment. (Incidentally, this treatment has already been undertaken by a hyper-Reformed blog seeking to undermine Piper’s credibility as a Calvinist. Where they wax uncharitable, I will attempt to be charitable to a fault.)
Piper put forward a (likely unintentionally) schismatic argument that if he were to have a conversation with the pope, he would ask him whether he believes that we are justified by faith alone and whether the righteousness of God is directly imputed to believers through their act of faith. If the pope were to disagree with this formulation, Piper would declare him a heretic. See for yourself:
When Pope Francis was elected, Piper put forward a clarifying statement, one that incidentally showed up on my news feed at the same time that Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler denounced the papal office as Antichrist altogether. (I will subject Mohler to Catholic treatment in a future post; stay tuned.) Walking back his comments on Catholicism as a ‘heresy,’ Piper admits:
I am thankful that God is willing to save us even when our grasp of the gospel may be partial or defective. None of us has a comprehensive or perfect grasp of it.
Nevertheless, God’s mercy is not a warrant to neglect or deny precious truths, especially those that are at the heart of how we get right with God. And the teachers of the church (notably the Pope) will be held more responsible than others for teaching what is fully biblical.
While refusing to walk back his absolutist statements on imputation (you can’t cede all your ground without completely losing face, you know), this, in the words of gay Catholic theologian James Alison, is nonetheless an attempt to ‘lower the temperature’ and ‘loosen the screws.’
Piper can do this because the figure in the theological background for his entire theological system is Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher whom I will also argue had loose Catholic tendencies (pax, Edwards). Piper draws from all parts of Edwards to build his theological system, from Edwards’s Lockean tabula rasa in his understanding of the process of Scriptural and scientific exegesis, to Edwards’s meditations on beauty to build a theology of Christian hedonism (i.e. that we exist to glorify God by enjoying him forever), to Edwards’s marriage to Sarah Edwards to build a case for gender complementarity (these themes emerge even more prominently in their daughter Esther Edwards Burr’s diary), to Edwards’s late evangelistic efforts to indigenous peoples to build a case for risking your life for missions (Piper likes David Brainerd too, btw, both of whom, in Piper’s reading, did not waste their lives by becoming too comfortable in academia), to Edwards’s treatment of religious affections to build a case for a Reformed charismatic theology (putting him in line with Sovereign Grace Ministries, the systematic theology of Wayne Grudem, Louie Giglio’s Passion conferences, etc.), to Edwards’s understanding of the freedom of the will to build his seven-point ‘double predestinarian’ Calvinism, to Edwards’s decisive handling of the medically pornographic ‘Bad Book Case’ to fight lustful thoughts in his own life, to Edwards’s long tenure as a pastor to argue that all of these metaphysical musings are precisely the work of pastoral ministry. Edwards, in turn, had an ironically high sacramental theology for a Puritan, which led to him getting fired from his Congregational Church for changing the mode of communion from his father-in-law Solomon Stoddard’s ‘converting ordinance’ to a members-only sacrament (or whatever is closest to sacrament that a Puritan can be comfortable saying: means ofgrace?)that could only be taken if you first inspected yourself for sin and if you weren’t under church discipline for ongoing sin in your life. (As an aside, I would put my finger here to understand Mars Hill’s bizarre church discipline cases: they’re attempts to do right by Piper qua Edwards. For a Catholic parallel, see Bishop Allen Vigneron’s suggestion that Catholics who differ on church teaching on abortion and same-sex marriage should not take communion.)
Of course, not all readings of Edwards are oriented to Catholicism; Sang Hyun Lee’s interpretations are notable examples. But you get the point: Piper is a closet Catholic because he reads Edwards as a closet Catholic. (In fact, Edwards’s work can be read as a fully catholic articulation of the Christian faith, as Miroslav Volf tacitly suggests in his reading list in A Common Word Between Us and You.)They both seem to have a fairly high sacramental theology. They take pleasure in contemplative spiritualities. They even both reinforce the gender complementarities in Catholic holy orders. And if you’ve given Piper’s oeuvre a fair reading, you’ll know that he knows the Tradition quite well (never mind if you agree with his assessments) through his discussions of Athanasius, Anselm, and even Aquinas in Desiring God and The Pleasures of God.
The real trouble, then, is that they are both given to excess in their insistence that because they are Puritan, they cannot be Catholic. These excesses in turn can be corrected.
Mirroring an Edwardsian ‘personal narrative’ of divine conversions, I personally know that these excesses can be corrected because I myself am a neo-Reformed convert. I had a conversation with someone this afternoon who said that they got into the neo-Reformed thing because they were looking for something more solidly Protestant after being in a ‘loosy-goosy’ evangelical church, and I daresay that my experience was the same. In university, after passing through a progressive Catholic school that taught me the basics of liberal Protestant biblical criticism and liberation theology as well as Chinese evangelical congregations that could be framed as ‘more grace than works,’ I got into the work of Driscoll, Piper, Mahaney, Harris, Chandler, Bradley, Keller, etc. in university because their Protestant-speak was so appealing. My wife, whom I had attempted to date (rather, court) at the time, tells me that I was kind of an absolutist jerk at the time, and I daresay most of the women who also rejected my dating advances at the time would make similar comments. (So much for the neo-Calvinist expertise on biblical courtship.)
However, as they say in these neo-Reformed circles, God’s grace is truly irresistible. When I was in high school, a Catholic priest planted just the right sort of seed in my proto-Reformed heart (mind you, for readers who wax critical of Catholicism due to its recent scandals, just as a cigar is sometimes only a cigar, sometimes a seed just a seed). He asked me what we were learning in school, and I replied that we were reading Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ in AP US History. I explained that Edwards’s vision of God as a fearful judge dangling sinners like a spider over the pit of hell was sure to shake any complacent non-Christian out of their wits and send them running to Christ for salvation, just as people did precisely when Edwards was reading that sermon in his New England church. I thought this would resonate well with the Catholic priest; the Fatima prayer is, after all, ‘Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. Amen.’ Or as the Death Cab for Cutie song goes, ‘In Catholic school / as vicious as Roman rule / I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black. / And I held my tongue / as she told me, “Son, / fear is the heart of love.” / So I never went back.’
But this Catholic priest looked confused. Genuinely bewildered, he asked me, ‘Is God angry?’ I sat there speechless, flabbergasted, in fact, probably somewhat infuriated at these Catholics who don’t take doctrine seriously. But he continued, ‘If God is love, can he really be that angry?’
You could say that this priest didn’t know the first thing about Edwards’s oeuvre. You could say that focusing on ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ fails to take into account Edwards’s metaphysical reflections on the Trinity, his explorations of beauty, his probing into religious affections, his insights into voluntary agency.
Or you could read it another way. You see, this priest was a devotee of the near-equivalent Catholic figure of Edwards to Puritan Christianity: Hans Urs von Balthasar. Both, after all, put beauty close to the heart of their theological reflections, and both talked an awful lot about ‘the glory of the Lord.’ I am aware that Karen Kilby has taken Balthasar to task for his worst speculative excesses and uncritical sexism. However, one excessive theologian can correct another theologian’s excesses, so another possible interpretation is that my Catholic priest friend was using Balthasar to correct Edwards’s worst excesses. Even if Balthasar were excessively speculative, he was able to check Edwards’s excessive morbidity and obsession with hell. Mind you, whatever you think of Balthasar’s ‘dare we hope all men to saved’ argument, Edwards can be a bit off the deep end with his ‘no, they burn’ answer at times.
It was this Balthasarian seed that drew me deeper into the bowels of Anglicanism, and in particular, a view of Anglicanism in which the state’s co-optation of the church is not necessarily the definitive view of the Church of England. After all, the question this priest asked me was a sincere one: how does this excessive view of hell display the glory of the Lord? While Piper might argue that it displays the absolute sovereignty of God, Balthasar would be quick to note that this sovereign Lord descended into hell on Holy Saturday, emptying himself of power to go to the dead. It is this hiatus, the silence in the death of God, that the logic of our theology is re-constituted, where the beautiful glory of the Lord is most definitively seen in the figure of Jesus, the one who died, the one who is risen, the one who will come again.
Our Sunday Gospel tells us that the Paraclete will draw us into all truth, that is, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger put it in his dialogue with critical theorist Jürgen Habermas (whom he was attempting to draw into all truth as well), the ontological reality that it is this mystic, sweet communion that holds the world together. Assuming that the Holy Spirit guides and directs the neo-Calvinists as our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, they will (of course) be drawn with us into all truth, which means that, if they haven’t already, they will necessarily recognize the ontological reality that we recognize, and the Father and the Son will come to them and make their home with them, along with the rest of us. Our worst excesses will be corrected; our mystic sweet communion will come to fruition. We thus pass the peace to our neo-Calvinist brothers and sisters (yes, believe it or not, there are women in this tribe), acknowledging the peace we have with them even if they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the peace they have with us.
Notice, of course, that my intentional source for this photo is The Gospel Coalition.
The passage that was read at my wedding was 1 Corinthians 13. Many will (of course) complain that the passage is not about marital love, that it is in fact about ecclesial love, and that to use it in a wedding is to join Hallmark in taking it out of context. Our Anglican priest’s homily, however, emphasized love within the church over the pride that ‘puffs up,’ placing marriage as a sacrament within the context of the church, and I suspect that it is because of those homiletical reflections that I can’t get the passage out of my head as I conclude this post. I realize that when St. Paul says that when he was a child, he spoke like a child, he thought like a child, he reasoned like a child, he is positing a contrast between the present in which we see through a mirror dimly and the eschatological future when of faith, hope, and love, only love remains. But because the church mysteriously lives an eschatological reality in the present, I can’t help but think that a bit of eisegesis is in order. You see, when I was a child, I spoke like a schismatic, I thought like a theologically insecure neophyte about fundamental doctrines, I reasoned like a ‘solid’ Protestant with an overly romanticized view of the sixteenth century. But now that I have become an adult, I have put childish ways behind me, trading schism for communion, hopefully growing deeper into the truth that holds the world together, the realization that, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it in A Better Hope, ‘the worship of such a God [who works through the church] means that we must pray and pray fervently for the reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants, as our very division wounds not only ourselves but the world itself’ (p. 45-46). I can’t wait for my neo-Reformed brothers and sisters to do likewise.
In this way, Driscoll’s most recent debacle need not be interpreted as him going off the deep end as a neo-Calvinist participating in the worst excesses of American Christianity. Instead, the poor guy is kicking and screaming against the Holy Spirit leading him into all truth. We should thus not issue a green Christian diatribe against him, castigating him for his idiotic sexist and anthropocentric jokes that we take to be a pox on the face of the contemporary church catholic. We should rather extend the peace in the hope that he will be at peace as the Father and the Son make their home with him. Pax Christi.
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.
On January 22, 2013, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States of America. The inauguration itself had been the subject of some evangelical controversy. On January 9, Think Progress posted a sermon by Pastor Louie Giglio that he had preached in the mid-1990s. The sermon’s title said it all: “In Search of a Standard – Christian Response to Homosexuality.”
Giglio, the founder of the Passion Conferences and pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, promptly bowed out of the inauguration on January 10. He was then ridiculed by the secular media, defended by evangelicals, and finally given The Last Word‘s “Rewrite” by progressive Catholic and MSNBC news host, Lawrence O’Donnell.
The evangelical drama wasn’t over yet. After the Giglio débacle unfolded, Obama announced that he would put his hand on two Bibles as he took the presidential oath: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s Bible. That went pretty smoothly.
But then, there was this tweet from within the heart of the evangelical world from Pastor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church:
Praying for our president, who today will place his hand on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does not know.
Of course, Driscoll might contest that he could be characterized as being “the heart of the evangelical world” because he is from Seattle, but suffice it to say that it seemed like the Giglio drama was reignited. Driscoll perplexed the secular news media, was defended by fans on his social media pages (while called expletive names by others), was deconstructed by the Naked Pastor, and provoked not-a-few facepalms from Christians who deemed themselves thoughtful. Here’s Eugene Cho, just across the bridge from Driscoll, for example:
On MLK Day, you want me to honor his legacy by responding to a privileged white dude pastor who rarely-if ever-engages civil rights? No thx.
What was fascinating was that, in a piece completely unconnected with these incidents, the same Mark Driscoll posted a response to a young man seeking to know whether he should major in ministry during his undergraduate education. Driscoll’s answer, using the typical Driscoll-isms of masculine appeal to “men are like trucks; they drive straighter with a load,” turned into an all-out exposé of the contemporary seminary as a debt-inflating institution with which young men exploring a ministry option should be very cautious to engage.
True as Driscoll’s advice may have been, however, I found myself wondering about Driscoll’s musings on theological education in the context of the public pastoral débacles of the last two weeks. I mean, it seems these days that it might be better to read a few books than spend money on seminary curriculum built around Scriptural exegesis, church history, systematic theology, and a few practical ministry courses, plus an internship in which you pay the seminary to work for a church. I mean, if you can teach yourself these things, why waste your money and four years of your life? But I wonder if Driscoll’s advice, as responsible as it sounds, might be short-selling his readers.
Indeed, had Driscoll himself received broader exposure and critical pedagogical guidance to a wider set of theological traditions, his critique of Obama might have been more acute. Of course, I am assuming that one receives a broad exposure to a wide array of theologies in seminary, which, from my experience as a dropout from two theological institutions, is probably not a safe assumption to make about many schools. However, there may be a case here that it is precisely pedagogical guidance to the breadth in historical and contemporary theological conversations that should be the added-value of a seminary education over reading a book and that seminaries should be making sure that they are providing this service if they aren’t doing it already.
Take, for example, a hypothetical situation in which Driscoll, instead of being only narrowly exposed to a narrow system in evangelical theology during his theological training, might have critically engaged critiques of Obama and his theological guru, Reinhold Niebuhr, launched by James Cone and Cornel West, both faculty specialists in African American theology at Union Theological Seminary. (Sure, Driscoll has occasionally confessed to reading feminist theologians and not enjoying them, but one wonders if more pedagogical guidance here would have been necessary.) West’s critique of Obama sounds eerily similar to Driscoll’s, but with a bit more teeth:
I mean, that sounds so similar to Driscoll: West is saying that if Obama does not carry out policies of justice for the least of these in poverty-stricken America, he doesn’t have a right to put his hand on a Bible that is filled with verses of justice that speaking of a God of justice in which King believed. If West critiques Obama directly, Cone takes on Obama’s major theological influence, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his recent book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, where he suggests that being influenced by Niebuhr does not equate being rooted in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
There was, however, an important difference between Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. that partly accounts for why King became a martyr in the civil rights movement while Niebuhr remained safely confined in his office at Union Seminary teaching Christian social ethics, never risking his life in the fight for justice. Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history–a state of perfection which no individual or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve. For Niebuhr, Jesus’ cross was an absolute transcendent standard that stands in judgment over any human achievement. The most we can realize is “proximate justice,” which Niebuhr defined as a balance of power between powerful collectives. But what about groups without power? Niebuhr did not have much to say to African Americans, a 10-percent minority, except to recommend nonviolence, which he believed might advance the cause of civil rights, while never winning full justice. Niebuhr’s moderate view was not one to empower a powerless group to risk their lives for freedom. That might have been why he did not talk to militant black groups or black nationalists in Harlem. He had very little to say to them. (James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011, p. 71.)
Yes, that sounds like Obama-style pragmatism to me too. No, I’m not saying that Driscoll needs to become African American; that makes about as much sense as when St. Paul tells circumcised Christians not to seek to be uncircumcised (one wonders: were they really thinking about it?). I am saying, though, that in light of Eugene Cho’s response, Driscoll might have some theological reflection to do about the connection between his neo-Reformed evangelicalism and racial justice. As radical as this may sound for an evangelical, it is not impossible. Witness, for example, Tim Keller’s attempt that was itself a response to John Piper’s attempt:
Recalling Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s (2000) Divided by Faith, the Cone and West aficionados may wince a bit at these appeals to personal repentance and blunt critiques of ethnic churches that come out of an evangelical obsession with individual responsibility at the expense of structural forces. But come on; at least they’re trying, and maybe we should encourage them…especially by helping young clergy reflect on this in seminary.
In addition, getting back to Giglio, one wonders if a more intelligent exchange might have been had if only he had been exposed to feminist and LGBT theology during his theological training. Indeed, the fact that Giglio felt that he had to bow out of the public stage meant that he didn’t know how to think anything else except for what the Gay Christian Network founder, Justin Lee, calls the “gay-vs.-Christian” dichotomy.
Again, in the same way that I juxtaposed Driscoll with Cone and West, I’m not saying that Giglio would have to become a feminist or LGBT theologian, or that he even needs to change his view on sexual ethics (he could remain what Justin Lee calls a “Side B” Christian). I’m saying that if he might have had a few more tools in his theological toolbox than what he had already, that is, if he had been aware of the fabulous work out there, say, written by Patrick Cheng, James Allison, and Sister Margaret Farley (I mean, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did their thing, who in the theological world hasn’t heard of Margaret Farley), Giglio would at least know that he has to engage this stuff. Or, on that note, what about thinking through what evangelical ethicist Lewis Smedes at Fuller has to say about homosexuality as an identity not actually being found anywhere in Scripture in the revised edition of Sex for Christians? I mean, the sermon is about “biblical standards,” which suggests that at the time, Giglio thought of homosexuality as a loose lifestyle funded by a wealthy lobby to make some kind of sexually hedonistic Epicureanism an acceptable alternate lifestyle with no real moral standards or constraints on pleasure-seeking, which in turn has to be confronted with the truth that there are moral standards and those are found in Scripture (although the moral standards bit was probably learned from Part I of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity). I mean, whatever one’s theology of the body is, with the passage of two decades and a bit more reading, a bit more clergy development, and a bit more counseling, one should know that that portrayal was probably a tad too monolithic. Had he had a few more tools, his response to being called out by Think Progress might have at least been a little more interesting.
In other words, what I’m saying is that there is a very broad theological conversation that is happening, and that part of the point of theological education is to induct people entering ecclesial service into that dialogue. Sure, OK, some people may think I’m dreaming; after all, isn’t pastoral work about walking with the people, counseling them, providing pastoral care, being part of the major events of their lives (birth, baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral,etc.), and equipping them to live Christian lives? Yes, it is, and part of that happens to be precisely to equip them to be the church, and part of being the church is to be in communion with the church catholic that is having these conversations. And part of the way of training young ecclesial leaders on how to get in on the conversation is pretty standard pedagogical practice: give them a road map to the literature, make it required reading, and make your assignments about critical engagement! Of course, is this how theological education currently works? Likely not. I’m just saying that it’s an imperative.
But, of course, Driscoll’s post on theological education highlights three things that probably need to change before this is possible: 1) the cost of theological education, 2) the utility of theological pedagogy that would be of added value to personal theological reading, and 3) the support of churches for young clergy pursuing theological education. In other words, can theological education actually be available to young clergy who will likely not be able to repay their debts? Might churches be able to pool resources, even relying on the church catholic instead of struggling along as autonomous congregations, to train young clergy? Will seminaries be able to demonstrate that they can provide theological training that cannot be obtained by simply reading a good book by themselves?
Come to think of it, these questions may well strike at the heart of our ecclesiology. They inquire as to whether our belief in debt forgiveness as in the Lord’s Prayer, the parables of forgiveness, and the messianic announcement of the Jubilee actually matches our practice. They probe our models of congregational autonomy when, say, Paul’s collection for the church in Jerusalem appealed to anything but congregational autonomy; those who disagree will find 2 Corinthians a very challenging read. They challenge our understanding of education altogether, making us wonder when information accumulation replaced the discipleship and formation that seems to have been a long point of orthopraxy in the Christian tradition (thinking beyond Paul and Timothy, for example, one finds examples in Justin Martyr, Origen, Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, Basil Moreau, etc.).
That said, the Giglio and Driscoll débacles of the past two weeks highlight once again the real problem of evangelical leaders who are thought to be able to do theology until they are challenged on theological grounds. This is a problem because for all that is said about the persecution of Christians by a secularizing public sphere, to be martyred for less-than-informed remarks isn’t exactly how martyrdom in Scripture works, at least not in the Acts of the Apostles. Sure, OK, out-of-context soundbites were twisted in efforts to drag Stephen, Peter, John, and Paul before synagogue leaders and the Sanhedrin. Stephen, for example, was taken brutally out of context when the Freedmen’s Synagogue said that he was telling Jewish Christians to abandon Moses. But Stephen did not resort to whimpering about being taken out of context because he was too busy being a deacon-waiter or saying that that was not the focus of his message in the first place. No, he faced the Sanhedrin and retold the entire tradition through the hermeneutic of the people of God embodying stiff-necked opposition to the Law and the Prophets so that they ultimately lynched the culmination of the Scriptures. Acts 7 is actually a fascinating theological read, and ultimately, it suggests that people like Stephen were martyred because they understood the breadth of the tradition so well that they told such convincing theological stories with such an acute, subversive, and creative Christian hermeneutic that they couldn’t be silenced except by brute force. I’m not convinced that Giglio and Driscoll have done that.
I’ve heard an awful lot this Advent season and Christmas octave about keeping “Christ” in “Christmas.” Blame it on me, maybe, for being a religious studies guy hanging around evangelical circles, but I swear, it’s more than the local churches with the signboards (or in the suburb where I live, the IHoP) displaying a sign with said call to conserve Christ in Christmas. Everybody seems to be talking about it: local pastors decrying the decay of secularism, worship leaders sermonizing before they lead their worship set, whispers among the laity about how terrible public schools are for disemboweling the season of any meaty references to the Incarnation.
Sure, keeping Christ in Christmas has been a staple of the “war on Christmas” that Fox News alleges to have been happening in a secular(izing) West. I say “alleged” because Jon Stewart has a fairly convincing refutation of the notion.
But apart from pulpit thundering in evangelical churches and pundits on Fox News, the battening down of the hatches for the Christ child seems to have been an in-house affair.
This year, though, it seems like even that house is falling apart, for not only is there a secular war on Christmas, but a theological one.
First Things first. As Churl noted (and I commented recently), Peter Leithart thinks that we should not only keep the Christ in Christmas, but the canticles there too, songs like the Benedictus Deus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis that he thinks no Christian knows. One wonders, of course, how the Divine Office app keeps on getting voted About.com Readers’ Choice Awards’s “Best Catholic Website, Podcast, and Mobile App” yearly if that really is the case. No matter, though, for Jeffrey Barbeau has written a rejoinder to Leithart, attempting to put the supposedly denuded Christmas hymns in the violent context of the English Reformation and Civil War.
For both Leithart and Barbeau, the Grinch who stole Christmas is none other than biblical theologian N.T. Wright, who seems to have been right about everything ever since his NT tomes hit seminary bookstores in the early 1990s. For Leithart, it’s Wright’s historical scholarship that has thankfully stolen Christmas away from the allegedly inane, apolitical songs we sing about the Christ child, no crying he makes. For Barbeau, Wright is a bit more of a bogeyman in Leithart’s hands, forgetting the political violence of early modern England because he doesn’t tune into BBC’s The Tudors. Move aside, John Piper: the Reformation has a new anti-Wright defender.
Either way you look at it, the central theological problem here is Wright on history: what happens to theology when you put the messiness and violence of historical reconstruction back into the picture?
And that brings us to the Holy Father. With the release of the third installment of Jesus of Nazareth on the infancy narratives, Pope Benedict XVI has been met with wild protest about how he, like Wright, has stolen Christmas. Secular protest about his historiographical method aside (courtesy of The Guardian), Vox Nova has a very interesting post on Benedict’s view of history that makes him sound eerily similar to Wright. The Bishop of Rome may affirm the historicity of the infancy narratives, but like Wright, it would seem, the affirmation of history in and of itself has played into a theological war over how political Christmas should be. Add to all of this L’Osservatore Romano‘s statement on how same-sex couples live in an “alternate reality,” and we find the pontiff in the real Grinch-y pickle of fighting the secular powers that be with the weapons of Christmas.
Wright, Leithart, Barbeau, the pope, his detractors, and First Things may all be stuff sophisticated Christians like these days. I mean, we must be smarter than the masses of co-opted American Tea Party fundamentalist-evangelicals clamoring for Christ in public Christmas pace Bill O’Reilly. But really, if this is what I’m reading this year in First Things, I don’t see much here that’s different from Fox News’s War on Christmas.
After all, Charles Taylor would call all of these skirmishes over the Christ in Christmas–be it his existence, his presence, or his nature–an “impulse to Reform” a “rage for order.” The idea, as Taylor outlines it, was that in late medieval Christendom, there were a series of “reforms” where spiritual “elites” attempted to purify the practices of the masses and bring them to a higher form of spiritual intensity. These reforms, as Taylor shows, looked like things as diverse as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Protestant Reformation(s), and the formation of Calvinist city-states in early modern Europe.
What’s hilarious in Taylor’s account is that it’s precisely this impulse that led to the secularization process in the first place. As Taylor reads it, this “rage for order” coincided with the development of “civility” in early modern Europe where states tried to discipline would-be citizens to be able to directly participate in the workings of a civil society. This created a sphere of action where some practices could be thought of as merely “natural” without any “supernatural” engagement, and in time, the conditions of belief changed such that there wasn’t much of a need to consider spirituality seriously in the public sphere, although private fascination with individual spiritualities where you’re on this quest to find personal fulfillment would always “cross-pressure” this emphasis on the immanent. Give these cross-pressures enough time, Taylor hints, and these new religious subjectivities will begin to contest the very meanings of secularity.
And this brings us back to the plethora of theological views on the War on Christmas. What’s fascinating about all of them is that they are all strangely modern and can even wear the odd secular costume. Give Wright, the Holy Father, and Fox a little read, for example, and what you might find is that at stake is a fairly modern understanding of history, be it Wright’s critical realism, Benedict’s historical criticism, or O’Reilly’s rights of the religious majority. I mean, it’s perfectly OK if Wright wants the prodigal son of history to come home to the older brother of theology. But can we “sophisticated” modern historian-theologians all please remember that maybe we shouldn’t be behaving like secular academics and pundits at Christmas?
So in the spirit of Leithart, maybe I can suggest something both radical and old-fashioned at the end here, courtesy also of N.T. Wright. Anyone who has managed to actually read The New Testament and the People of God will be struck by how prominent a role the Maccabees play in Wright’s narrative. Moreover, anyone who has been following the daily mass readings leading up to Advent will have gotten an earful from the Maccabees in the first readings.
But what Wright notes about the Maccabees in relation to Jesus’ theology of the Kingdom of God was that Jesus upended the Maccabbean ideal of a messianic warrior with a “double revolution,” confronting the will to power in both Jew and Gentile, enacting a kingdom founded on a different ontology altogether. (OK, sorry, I stole “double revolution” from tome #2: Jesus and the Victory of God.)
And that brings us back to Jon Stewart. In 2008, Stewart asked Stephen Colbert if he could interest him in the Maccabbean celebration, Hannukah. In light of Wright’s analysis, there is a bit of irony here. Christmas, the coming of Christ with his proclamation of a new kingdom of God, once upended Hannukah’s ideals. But if Christmas is now a site of modern religious contestation, perhaps it’s also time to start thinking about who the collateral damage of such a war might be. Jon Stewart has already said his piece. Maybe it’s time for more of us to start singing this song.
As CaptainThin pointed out, today is Reformation Day and All Hallows’ Eve.
I think it’s a good day for Protestant jokes. Here’s one that my dad heard in seminary:
There was an interdenominational Protestant gathering, and a fire started in the sanctuary. The Pentecostals got up and screamed: “Fire!” The Baptists shouted: “Water!” And the Presbyterians said: “Order.”
Martin Luther once said that if he farted in Wittenberg, they smell it in Rome. Recently, excavators found Luther’s famed cloaca, the secret place where he did a ton of writing. It was a stone toilet. Could this possibly mean that the 95 Theses originated from 95 feces?
More conservative Christians seem to be scared off by Halloween as a pagan holiday. This year, though, it’s not the Protestants but the Polish Catholic bishops who are decrying Halloween as a pagan holiday.
I think we could use a bit more holy humour on All Hallows Eve, though, and so does Fr. Jim Martin.
In light of this, I have a few suggestions:
Nail the 95 theses on somebody’s door. This seems to be a yearly ritual between Valparaiso University (the Lutherans) and the University of Notre Dame (Catholic, Congregation of Holy Cross). This year, Nashotah House even had this done in-house. I guess this is what happens when you’re Anglo-Catholic. Note, though, that they use Rite I. Smells like Cranmer.
Tell a Protestant joke. You know, for example, how some Protestants like to remember the Diet of Worms by portraying themselves as totally depraved worms in a fit of utter humility? Here’s Happy Reformation Day to them from Pope Benedict XVI.
Go buy Rachel Held Evans’s book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Why? you ask. For the simple fact that it came out yesterday.
It also brings to mind Nadia Bolz-Weber being portrayed as a comic book “pastrix” in a pic worthy of both Reformation Day and Halloween.
Dress up as a morbid Reformation martyr. For example, somebody could do Michael Servetus.
In the spirit of Chinglicanism, I’ll leave it at 4 things. “4,” after all, is the Chinese superstitious number for death.
And that’s funny only if your hermeneutic for both Reformation Day and All Hallows’ Eve is the resurrection.
Today is the Memorial of St. Athanasius of Alexandria. Accordingly, I decided to give his De Incarnatione VerbiDei a re-read.
I read it first seven years ago. That time, I was sitting in a parking lot for a public park in my Vancouver suburb. An auntie I knew from the Chinese evangelical church I was going to–all women my mom’s age are called “auntie”–drove over and asked what I was reading. I said that I was reading Athanasius. Just the name weirded her out. “You are always reading such complicated stuff,” she said.
I would have explained to her that because she was a fan of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity–a book she recommended to everybody (though I doubt she’s actually read it all the way through herself)–she should read Athanasius. In fact, I was reading Athanasius because I had read C.S. Lewis’s foreword to On theIncarnation in one of the versions of Mere Christianity that I had flipped through. He talks about why it’s important to read old books: because each “age” has its particular ways of thinking and doing things, reading an old book helps you see all the blind spots of your own particular “age.” In this preface, Lewis talks particularly about the impact that Athanasius had on his own theological thinking:
When I first opened his De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as “arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature.” They are here shown to be rather the re-telling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to “borrow death from others.” The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life—a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance which Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that it is not Athanasius.
Of course, this sounds all so much like what Molly Worthen has recently written about the Anglophilia of American evangelicals trying to find intellectual moorings for an otherwise anti-intellectual American evangelicalism, and I won’t deny that at the time, I was soaking up the neo-Reformed goodies put out by Mark Driscoll and John Piper. In fact, to come completely clean, I was reading Lewis’s Mere Christianity for a course on Christian Living at Calvary Chapel Bible College, and yes, this was the Calvary Chapel where Pastor Chuck Smith baptized over 10,000 hippies in the 1960s and became the flagship church of what has come to be known as the Jesus Movement. (I learned about Lonnie Frisbee much, much later.)
I’m just trying to say that C.S. Lewis sounded really smart because he was British.
So, OK, fine, I’ll admit that I was reading Athanasius to show off that I could read “complicated stuff” by authors with complicated names with a hint of Anglophilia thrown in. In fact, I have to say that I was being outright Anglophilic because I was reading a horrible nineteenth-century translation that made Athanasius sound like some highfalutin Oxford don. Like Lewis, Athanasius sounded so smart because he was–well, at least in my translation–so British.
Fast-forward six or seven years. I’m completely done with Calvary Chapel’s dispensationalism–I threw in the towel when we were dissecting Romans for verses related to the Rapture–and I’ve jumped ship to Regent College. A paper topic for the Christian Thought and Culture course on pre-Reformation Christianity asked us to take a position on one of the old heresies in the early church. I chose Arianism, partly because a few faculty members had duked it out during their joint lectures over whether Athanasius’s polemics toward Arianism actually made any theological or biblical exegetical sense.
That’s when I read Rowan Williams’s Arius. One of the funny things about Anglophilia is that it’s so selective: American evangelicals love their Lewis, Tolkien, Stott, and all the rest that they re-baptize into their evangelical fold, but they most certainly are not going to take in Rowan Williams. Most of what I’d read and heard about Williams at that point, especially from Anglicans who had broken away from their dioceses over the blessing of same-sex unions, was that he was a “spineless moron” who didn’t have the guts to enforce the moratoria on gay bishops and same-sex partnerships called for in the Windsor Report. I expected him to be equally spineless on fourth-century orthodoxy.
Williams pulled a fast one on me. His analysis of Arius was that Arius was an ultra-conservative pastor in Alexandria whose view of God the Father was too high. He wanted to protect the Father from the suffering of the Son, and that’s why he insisted that the Son had to be sub-divine. Moreover, he was a worship song writer, so he wrote songs like the Thalia so that, as Williams astutely points out, when Arius’s teaching was condemned at Nicaea, Arius still had plenty of fans to keep him company and bury him when he died.
For Williams, orthodoxy did not mean the same thing as conservatism. If anything, it was just the opposite. It was the polemicists like Athanasius who had to keep on their toes, the ones who had to stay creative:
Athanasius and the consistent Nicenes actually accept Arius’ challenge, and agree with the need for conceptual innovation: for them the issue is whether new formulations can be found which do justice not only to the requirements of intellectual clarity but to the wholeness of the worshipping and reflecting experience of the Church. (235)
Little surprise that the conservatives in the Anglican Communion don’t exactly like Williams: after all, who would want to admit that “historic Anglican orthodoxy” with all of its “traditional” teaching on marriage and family is a modern creative formulation that needs more serious theological probing? I’m not even sure that Athanasius would have liked Williams’s assessment of his historical situation, as Williams does go out of his way to say that Athanasius’s polemics might have distorted and exaggerated Arius’s teaching quite a bit.
It’s with this new ambivalence toward Athanasius that I found myself reading De Incarnatione Verbi Dei this morning.
Lewis says that Athanasius’s writing throws the modern world in sharp contrast. On the one hand, Athanasius’s take on miracles is a robust reply to those who say that these things violate “the law of nature”: if the creative Word became flesh, after all, he can create whatever he wants, and that’s OK in a pre-modern enchanted context. On the other, Athanasius’s assumption that all Christians live virtuous lives cannot be said of Lewis’s mid-twentieth-century British experience. For Lewis, Athanasius’s world is fundamentally different from the modern world, and that’s why we have a lot to learn from him. (One could point out the superficial similarities between Lewis’s view and the heterotopias in Foucault’s Of Other Spaces.)
Forgive me, then, for sounding like a heretic to American evangelical Anglophilia and say that I found Athanasius’s On the Incarnation surprisingly similar to what an old-school Chinese Christian pastor in the late twentieth century would be hammering from the pulpit. In fact, as a second-generation Chinese Christian who has less-than-proudly joined the “silent exodus” by attending a non-Chinese church regularly (see also Doreen Carjaval’s original article in the Los Angeles Times and Esther Yuen’s Vancouver adaptation), I might say that it even revived so old-time resentments toward some of my first-generation patriarchs.
On the face of it, De Incarnatione is a very sophisticated theological argument. Athanasius’s main thrust through the work is that the Word became flesh because while the Word had created the world out of nothing, the Fall was corrupting all of creation back into nothing. You can see this corruption, Athanasius begins, in violence from personal adulteries and murders to outright warfare between city-states. The Word thus takes on a body so that he can resurrect to conquer death. A new existence follows in which adulterers are made chaste, murderers are made peaceful, and wars stop.
So far, so good. In fact, I like the pacifist implications of all of this.
That’s when it gets violent. As Athanasius gets polemical about Jewish and Greek interlocutors about Christianity in the second half of the work, I was like, “Wow, an old-school Chinese church pastor could have said this.” And that ticked me off a little bit.
First off, Athanasius would be as helpful to interreligious dialogue as a Chinese Christian fundamentalist. Maybe it’s my stupid nineteenth-century translation that makes the Orientalism come out so pointedly, but here’s a quick snapshot:
And whereas formerly every place was full of the deceit of the oracles, and the oracles at Delphi and Dodona, and in Boeotia and Lycia and Libya and Egypt and those of the Cabiri, and the Pythoness, were held in repute by men’s imagination, now, since Christ has begun to be preached everywhere, their madness also has ceased and there is none among them to divine any more. And whereas formerly demons used to deceive men’s fancy, occupying springs or rivers, trees or stones, and thus imposed upon the simple by their juggleries; now, after the divine visitation of the Word, their deception has ceased. For by the sign of the cross, though a man but use it, he drives out their deceit. And while formerly men held to be gods Zeus and Cronos and Apollo and the heroes mentioned in the poets, and went astray in honoring them, now that the Saviour has appeared among men, those others have been exposed as mortal men, and Christ alone has been recognized among men as the true God, the Word of God. And what is one to say of the magic esteemed among them? that before the Word sojourned among us this was strong and active among Egyptians, and Chaldeans, and Indians, and inspired awe in those who saw it; but that by the presence of the truth, and the appearing of the Word, it also has been thoroughly confuted, and brought wholly to nought. (De Incarnatione 47).
This brings back memories of old-school Chinese church pastors fuming at the pulpit about smashing Buddhas and burning them in tin trash cans in new converts’ backyards or imagining demons flying out of Buddhist temples to corrupt the suburb his people are living in. (Chinese women pastors are a recent phenomenon.) I certainly couldn’t imagine this turning into A Common Word or Nostra Aetate. In this view, there’s something inherently bad about religions other than Christianity. Other religions, it would be said, deal with demons and the devil. Christianity is the light that drives out the darkness, the good that drives out the bad.
Ditto Athanasius on Jewishness:
What is left unfulfilled, that the Jews should now disbelieve with impunity? For if, I say–which is just what we actually see–there is no longer king, nor prophet, nor Jerusalem, nor sacrifice, nor vision, among them, but even the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of God, and Gentiles, leaving their godlessness, are now taking refuge with the God of Abraham, through the Word, even our Lord Jesus Christ, then it must be plain, even to those who are exceedingly obstinate, that the Christ is come, and that he has illumined absolutely all with his light, and given them the true and divine teaching concerning his Father. (De Incarnatione 40).
It’s not Dabru Emet, that’s for sure. I’ve certainly heard my share within Chinese churches about the ignorance of Jews refusing to believe in the Messiah and how we’re so much smarter because it’s so obvious that Jesus is the one they’ve been looking for. As one Hong Kong Chinese pastor in Vancouver who did his Doctor of Ministry thesis on Jewish-Christian relations pointed out to me, that’s why there’s zero dialogue between Chinese Christians and their Jewish neighbours.
Athanasius then assumes that where Christianity is, it just triumphalistically pastes over an existing religious landscape with its own enlightened geography:
This, then, after what we have so far said, it is right for you to realize, and to take as the sum of what we have already started, and to marvel at exceedingly; namely, that since the Saviour has come among us, idolatry not only has no longer increased, but what there was is diminishing and gradually coming to an end; and not only does the wisdom of the Greeks no longer advance, but what there is is now fading away; and demons, so far from cheating any more by illusions and prophecies and magic arts, if they so much as dare to make the attempt, are put to shame by the sign of the cross. And, to sum the matter up, behold how the Saviour’s doctrine is everywhere increasing, while all idolatry and everything opposed to the faith of Christ is daily dwindling, and losing power, and falling. (De Incarnatione 55).
Rowan Williams casts a fair bit of doubt on this assessment with the view that there were lots of different kinds of Arians and lots of different factions within Nicene orthodox groups and that these guys duked it out for well over a century and a half. And yet, Athanasius’s polemic against all things non-Christian reminds me of the Chinese senior pastor in my childhood church who used to declare from the pulpit, “Where Christianity is, there is prosperity!” (How Weberian.) As geographer Judy Han writes about Korean Christians, there is often a lack of clarity about what’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the gospel of prosperity in all of this.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that–contrary to Lewis’s view of ages as so different from each other–I now find Athanasius’s On the Incarnation to be familiar childhood territory, not the “complicated stuff” with a hard-to-pronounce name laced with Anglophilic otherness. Perhaps, as Charles Taylor points out, the “disenchantment” of the enchanted pre-modern world was never fully completed. Instead, Taylor suggests that we live in a “cross-pressured,” if not “schizophrenic,” world where we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t believe in anything supernatural and are subsequently fascinated by anything remotely magical. (Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann has a fascinating take on how this all gets reconciled psychologically.) Athanasius isn’t so different from the rest of us, especially me as a Chinese Christian.
And yet, if Athanasius isn’t so different, I’d like to follow Williams and hold him accountable for some of his statements. Woe be to me to take a canonized church father in both Catholic and Orthodox communions to task, but I’m totally on with Williams in thinking that Athanasius may really have exaggerated some of his polemics. This is admittedly a frightful task, as nerve-wracking as trying to have a theological dispute with a first-generation Chinese Christian senior pastor revered by an adoring immigrant congregation. After all, I run the risk of being called disrepectful to my elders, the zhangzhe (長者) revered in popular Confucian ideology.
A helpful–but still admittedly problematic–way to push St. Athanasius a bit might be to follow the comparisons between him and twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth. Athanasius’s take on religion itself sounds very Barthian (or Barth sounds very Athanasian, which is probably more the case):
But men once more in their perversity having set at nought, in spite of all this, the grace given them, so wholly rejected God, and so darkened their soul, as not merely to forget their idea of God, but also to fashion for themselves one invention after another. (De Incarnatione 11).
This sounds an awful lot like Barth railing about religion as the “frontier” of human possibilities, that the whole point of the resurrection of Jesus is to show how far off the gods that we project from our own desires are from the beaten track.
The two of them came to similar ethical conclusions. For Athanasius, this sort of projected religion led to increased human conflict:
For formerly, while in idolatry, Greeks and Barbarians used to war against each other, and were actually cruel to their own kin. For it was impossible for anyone to cross sea or land at all without arming the hand with swords, because of their implacable fighting among themselves. For the whole course of their life was carried on by arms, and the sword with them took the place of a staff, and was their support in every emergency; and still, as I said before, they were serving idols, and offering sacrifices to demons, while for all their idolatrous superstition they could not be reclaimed from this spirit. (De Incarnatione 51).
For Barth, when the German nation-state made up versions of God for the church to subscribe to, it was well on the way to Nazi totalitarianism and the geopolitical madness of World War II.
If this is the case, this is a profound challenge to the old-school Chinese Christian pastors I think sound so similar to Athanasius. It would challenge them to say concretely what the links between idolatry and ethics are. Don’t just say that “other religions” or “folk religions” are inherently, essentially bad and evil systems associated with the devil. Are they actually violent in practice? How so? Be concrete. We believers in the incarnation are, after all, a concrete people.
And what about Henri de Lubac’s argument in Catholicism that the catholic impulse is all about re-focusing spiritualities on Jesus Christ? or Tolkien’s point that all true narratives find their fulfillment in the eucatastrophic redemption in the death and resurrection of Jesus? (I realize that the latter example brings us back to Anglophilia, which just goes to show that, as James Cone says about his training in white neo-orthodoxy, it’s pretty hard to shake.)
Or what if, as Stanley Hauerwas has it in his own reflection on interreligious interaction and the work of Fr. David Burrell, CSC, the whole point is that faith is all about embodied, performative practice, not propositional systems? Maybe St. Athanasius is making a René Girard argument, that all of this violence is caused by the projection of mimetic desire into religious ritual.
Sure, OK, maybe we shouldn’t tell St. Athanasius to read our twentieth-century theologians, but what I’m saying is that it’s not that St. Athanasius is wrong about religion. It’s that he’s got thoughts to develop. And our job, far from uncritically revering him, is to push that development along.
The point is, if we really do believe in the communion of saints, let’s not put the artificial distances of modernity, Anglophilia, or canonized sainthood between us and the church doctor. After all, Athanasius’s central point in De Incarnatione is that the Word became flesh to free us from the state of corruption so that we can share in the divine resurrection life. If this is so, St. Athanasius is still alive, and he is our brother.
Catholic popular theology would have us say then, “St. Athanasius, pray for us.” What Rowan Williams has shown us that we can also say is, “St. Athanasius, I’m going to push you on this one.” Growing up Chinese Christian, I’d say the latter is absolutely necessary for a more solid understanding of how the church ought to relate to the world.
But it’s a hard thing to say. After all, we don’t want to be disrespectful to our elders.