In praise of Vicky Beeching, evangelical Anglican (Part 2)

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Anglican, Anglican realignment, Evangelical, evangelical Anglican, GAFCON, Jennifer Knapp, Justin Welby, race, Rowan Williams, Scott Lively, sexuality, Vicky Beeching

In the spirit of more ancient texts that Churl will appreciate more than the average reader, I will simply say that I forbid you to read this post before you read Part 1.

In the previous post, I ended with a suggestion that Vicky Beeching’s gift to the church catholic by coming out brings enormous clarity to what is going on in the Anglican Communion, especially around the realignment that happened in the late 1990s and 2000s. For those who need a quick definition of what the realignment is, it’s a euphemism that refers to how Anglican and Episcopal parishes in the United States and Canada pulled out of their home dioceses because of North American Anglican moves to bless same-sex unions, ordain gay clergy, and elect gay bishops. Because they took cover in Anglican provinces mostly in Africa (though some in Asia, Australia, and the Southern Cone also took part), the narrative that took shape suggested that those who were historically the ones being evangelized were now re-evangelizing the evangelizers. This narrative usually flies under the header of Global South Anglicanism. For an academic version of this story, see Phil Jenkins’s The Next Christendom. For a popular version, Thad Barnum’s Never Silent is a fairly engaging account. For those who need all of the sordid details, please read my account of ‘Anne Hathaway Anglicanism.’

The reason I forbid readers to read this post before reading the previous post is because over in the other post, I’ve made all the necessary connections for why Beeching is an Anglican to whom we should pay attention — she’s an evangelical Anglican, her worship music has evangelical Anglican sources, she lived in Nashville and San Diego making contemporary Christian music so that her American evangelical connections are impeccable, and one of the privileged few to whom she had come out privately is the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Unwilling to rehearse of that here, I simply forbid you to read this post until you’ve done your due diligence with the previous post.

Vicky Beeching is an Anglican. This is very significant. That’s because of the person to whom Beeching would most likely be compared: Jennifer Knapp.

Like Vicky Beeching, Jennifer Knapp is also a popular contemporary Christian music personality who very publicly came out as a lesbian. Just as Vicky Beeching was confronted by outspoken anti-gay pastor-activist Scott Lively on live television when she came out, Knapp was also confronted by Pastor Bob Botsford on Larry King Live. Like Lively, Botsford told Knapp that his heart broke for her because she was living a lie that contradicted Scripture. Knapp’s response was that Botsford was not her pastor. If Botsford had been her pastor, Knapp reasoned, then it would have been fair to exercise pastoral jurisdiction over her as a church member. But she wasn’t. She was part of another congregation with other pastors who affirmed her, and her bottom line was that Botsford’s attempt to exercise pastoral authority over her was illegitimate because it violated the boundaries between his congregation and hers.

It would be tempting to compare Beeching to Knapp because almost the exact same thing happened to Beeching on live television. As I said, Beeching was called out almost exactly like Knapp because the more conservative evangelical man standing in for the Christian Right accused Beeching (like Knapp) of living a lie contrary to Scripture.

It’s what follows next that makes everything about Beeching different from Knapp. That’s because Beeching is an Anglican.

Beeching can’t make the congregational autonomy argument that Knapp makes. This is because, as I said, Beeching is an Anglican. Anglicans don’t believe in congregational autonomy; our polities are parishes in dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops that are in communion with each other and who all trace their succession through Canterbury to the apostles. Beeching can’t say to Lively like Knapp says to Botsford, ‘You are not my pastor,’ because congregational autonomy is not going to cut it for Beeching. Lively is thus not in a different ecclesial category for Beeching (as Botsford is for Knapp); he is in the same ecclesial category. He is a pastor, so Beeching merely says to him that it’s people like him who have caused her psychological damage. Observe well, then, the effects of this disagreement. The contention rests on Lively’s repetition that Beeching’s lifestyle is not ‘biblical,’ for Beeching argues that that there are multiple ways of reading Scripture and that the passages that he cites to condemn her sexual orientation have contested meanings.

Yet Beeching does not disown Lively the way that Knapp disowns Botsford. She knows that they’re stuck together in communion, terrible as that may sound, because as much as she may wish that she were ecclesially autonomous from him, the truth of the Anglican charism means that they cannot be sundered at an ontological level. Indeed, this raises the emotional stakes for her contention against Lively: if people like Lively have inflicted psychological damage on her and those whose sexual orientations are non-heteronormative and if they are ontologically stuck together, then it is an imperative for Beeching to demand that Lively stop oppressing her and hear her out on the multiplicity of hermeneutics, a demand that is in fact not unreasonable considering St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, where Augustine allows in the preface for all sorts of biblical interpretations if they are governed by the rule of faith, which is charity.

In short, as an Anglican, Beeching understands what Knapp does not: there is no such thing as total ecclesial autonomy, and the more that one understands that, the more one works to make ecclesial co-existence at least bearable.

Dig deeper, though, and one finds that this ecclesial ontology has implications that drag that construct called ‘Global South Anglicanism’ into the fray. That’s because, as the BBC program itself mentions, Lively is close to the leaders of a nation-state called Uganda. Deny as he may that he had a hand in the draconinan Anti-Homosexuality Bill that threatened to execute queer persons in Uganda, Beeching herself recently shared a link that an American federal judge has ordered Lively to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

This is significant because Lively’s actions in the mid-2000s in Uganda disturbs the larger narrative of the Anglican realignment. Provinces such as Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, the Southern Cone, and yes, Uganda, took in some of these ‘realigned’ Anglican churches. As I related in my definition of the Anglican realignment (see above, scroll past the Gandalf GIF), this was the story of how the Global South Anglicans, especially from Africa, were re-evangelizing North America, especially from its capitulation to what might be chalked up to (in Southern Baptist terms) a ‘gay agenda.’ In other words, Anglicans in African nation-states were going to save Anglicans in the West.

The problem is that Lively’s actions suggest that this Global South Anglican narrative may not be as ‘Global South’ as meets the eye. If Lively was moving around Uganda around the same time that the Anglican realignment was going on, how many other Americans were invested in making the realignment happen?

Let’s dig further.

In the lead-up to the Scott Lively confrontation, Beeching recounts that one of the more harrowing experiences in her journey as a gay person was when she had an exorcism performed on her at a British evangelical camp. This also messes up the Global South Anglican narrative. After all, one of the more celebrated stories of the 1998 Lambeth Conference was of an African archbishop attempting an exorcism on a gay rights activist. Certainly, analyses at the time noted that African and Asian primates, bishops, priests, and deacons had mostly attended the same seminaries as their Global North counterparts. Yet according to the narrative of Global South Anglicanism, this phenomenon could also very well be explained via the African archbishop’s Global South conditions, where spirits are real and demons prowl and exorcisms happen regularly because priests have the same status as witchdoctors. Certainly, that’s how Phil Jenkins explains why Southeast Asian primate, Archbishop Moses Tay, attempted to exorcise the City of Vancouver because of the totem poles in its urban park, Stanley Park (The Next Christendom, p. 130).

The question is, how does that exoticized Global South Anglican narrative explain Beeching’s story of British evangelicals trying to exorcise her? Might the explanation that those Global South Anglicans attended the same schools in the Global North and were in collaboration with conservative Anglican, evangelical, and charismatic groups in the Global North hold more water, in light of Beeching’s experience?

Let’s keep digging.

The impression that one gets about the Anglican realignment is that the parishes that broke away were mostly evangelical Anglican. Though this group certainly included charismatic and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, that the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) was heavily dominated by Sydney Anglicans (who apparently have to debate over whether their archbishop is ‘Reformed’ enough to hold office), as well as African and Asian Anglicans who emphasized the Bebbington Quadrilateral of evangelical distinctives (biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism), who held an after-gathering at All Souls’ Church in London seems to confirm this image. Certainly also, some of the charismatics would technically fit into an ‘evangelical Anglican’ stream — ‘evangelical’ here defined in Anglican terms as those in the English church who understand authority as primarily derived from Scripture, not, say, apostolic succession (like the Anglo-Catholics) or scientific progress (like the latitudinarians).

Well, like it or not, Vicky Beeching is an evangelical Anglican. Despite the image of those who push what Beeching calls ‘LGBT theology‘ tends to be from the more liberal wings of Anglicanism — James Pike, Jack Spong, Gene Robinson, Mary Glasspool, Marc Andrus, Patrick Cheng — how much of a shock to the system is it that Beeching continues to identify as an evangelical Anglican who takes the Bible so seriously that her post defending her theological views is based on the Bible?

What’s the point?

The point, then, is that Vicky Beeching embodies what the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, calls ‘the body’s grace.’ For Williams, the fact of same-sex attraction and even unions are a gift to the church because they help Christians think about how love is expressed corporeally. Certainly, when his successor, Justin Cantuar, expresses that same-sex couples often put opposite-sex married couples to shame in their care for each other, Welby is also referencing Williams.

But Beeching takes that one step further. Beeching’s body’s grace is an open sign of contradiction to the Global South Anglican realignment narrative. She is an evangelical Anglican theologian: she cannot afford to endorse congregational autonomy. Her interlocutor is Scott Lively, a person whose physical presence in Uganda also flat out contradicts the Global South Anglican narrative because he casts suspicion on whether homophobic prejudices in fact originated in what might be derisively regarded as the ‘primitive’ cultures of the Global South. Beeching’s exorcism flat-out contradicts the understanding of the Global South as ‘primitive,’ for if exorcism is a sign of prmitiveness, then the Global North evangelicals who tried to exorcise her would also be primitive. Her evangelicalism — rooted in a theological orientation based on Scriptural authority — flat-out contradicts accusations of latitudinarian liberalism.

In short, Beeching reveals where the Anglican Communion fault lines actually lie. The truth, as Beeching reveals it, is that the Global North-Global South imagined geography is a smokescreen. If there is anything that Beeching’s body’s grace illustrates clearly, the realignment has never really ever been about Global South, postcolonial agency, and Anglicans of colour. Postcolonial Anglicans, as Kwok Pui-lan and Ian Douglas have called people like me, have never really been addressed here — we have merely been spoken for and over.

Beeching’s closeness to the Archbishop of Canterbury is thus the ultimate gift. After all, one of Justin Cantuar’s major tasks is to reconcile this fragmented Anglican Communion. With Beeching coming out, the mist has evaporated, and the real fault lines finally have become crystal clear. As an Anglican of colour observing Welby’s talent for deep listening, his knowledge of the actual on-the-ground political realities in Africa, and his almost overflowing glee at welcoming those who regularly disrupt his own evangelical Anglican narrative, I expect great things out of this Archbishop of Canterbury for the Anglican Communion. After all, precisely because of Vicky Beeching’s body’s grace, we might see an Anglican Communion finally ready to tackle the deep-seated corporeal issues of race that have plagued us since the dawn of modernity.

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In praise of Vicky Beeching, evangelical Anglican (Part 1)

Tags

Anglican, Anglican realignment, Evangelical, evangelical Anglican, gay, Justin Welby, lesbian, LGBT, Scott Lively, Uganda, Vicky Beeching

This post was inspired by evangelical Anglican theologian and worship leader Vicky Beeching’s coming out story in The Independent. Read that first. Also, for a smart analysis of the reception of Beeching’s coming-out, read my buddy Ryan Cook’s post. For a roundup, Beeching has done it herself.

Those who knew me when I was on ordination track will know that I have admired Vicky Beeching’s work from the beginning. I was an intern at an evangelical Anglican church, although I think that’s a bit of a misnomer because while certain quarters of the parish espoused an evangelical theology (including the rector, at least publicly), the rector had been trained at Nashotah House and couldn’t exactly shake his Anglo-Catholicism. Those who worked with me at the youth group and second-generation ministry — why, yes, it was an Asian Canadian parish — joked at the time that I had a huge crush on Beeching. I was single, and I suppose when the worship leader played ‘Yesterday, Today, and Forever‘ for the first time, I was hooked. I bought her cd, I played it at odd hours at the church through its self-described world-class sound system, I learned how to play a ton of her songs on the piano, I followed her blog, and I may even have put some of the members of the youth group through my Beeching craze. I also told the worship leader at the time that when I was ordained, I’d like ‘Call to Worship’ to be played as the processional.

I also discovered that she had not one, but two, degrees from Oxford in theology. It made me wonder what on earth a theologian — yes, if you have an MA in theology, you are a master, and therefore an academic theologian — was doing in the buckle of the Bible belt in Nashville, a place that my father and I had visited as a sort of pilgrimage before I started grad school so that he could teach me how to drink beer before anyone else in grad school could. When we were there, we went to the Grand Ole Opry, ate fried catfish, and learned so much about country music that I bought the discs containing the ‘Bristol Sessions,’ the first music ever to be recorded that were considered within the genre of ‘country’ (although ‘gospel’ was probably a better description).

What on earth was an Oxford theologian doing there?

And on top of that, what was an Oxford theologian doing taking lunch pictures with Melody Green, calling Green her mentor, and claiming to have written several of the songs on Painting the Invisible on Keith Green’s old piano? I mean, of course, you could ask what the heck I was doing listening to Keith Green at the time as well — I do, for example, proudly own both the Silver and Gold volumes of The Ministry Years, Green’s complete oeuvre. It’s because at the tail end of high school, I attended a pastor’s conference at Focus on the Family — yes, the one of right-wing fame — where I met Dennis Jernigan, an ex-gay worship leader of ‘You Are My All in All’ fame (even though he wouldn’t identify as ‘ex-gay’). We didn’t talk long, but because I had zero experience chording on the piano, he advised me to listen to Keith Green to get ideas. I did, but apparently, Beeching got the real deal — she got to flesh out her ideas on Green’s piano.

Since then, I followed her blog, reading when she moved to San Diego and then had a mysterious sickness and then, ta da! right when I was starting my doctorate, she also became a doctoral student at Durham University. I remember the pictures she used to post of her very organized workstation — a stark contrast to my situation, I must say — and I’d read her blog where she boldly put up exactly what she was studying with regards to theology and the media, which is in stark contrast to how I operate as a blogger (seldom does my actual academic work make it onto my blogging). I remember the posts were thoughtful, especially when she said things contrary to what I’d hear all my other pious evangelical friends saying about taking sabbaths from social media — she rejected that, and defended her rejection like an academic boss. I saw less of her leading worship, although there was a fascinating promotional video for Eternity Invades put up where she took viewers on an urban tour of London, but I watched as she made it onto SkyNews, and then the BBC, and then was a contributor to the Guardian. I remember thinking — if she can do that as a doctoral student, then I’d better get my public act together as well.

I’d thought about writing her emails from time to time just to connect as colleagues because God knows she was affecting some of my career decisions as well; moreover, our career paths from popular evangelical ministry (hers far more large-scale, of course) to the academy would have made for good conversation. But I never did, and I suspect that’s because I didn’t have time. I’d click through the blogs, read her occasional Twitter and Facebook updates, but after a while, I suppose other things came up and her posts got buried, and I didn’t keep up, although I did read some time last year that she had come out in favour of same-sex marriage. I remember thinking, Hm. Theological studies can do that to you. I also did a happy dance when she wrote an acerbic reply to former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, on his loose usage of Christian ‘persecution’; I think that post seriously affected my reading of Carey’s Gate of Glory, not to mention shaping my perception of Carey’s tenure in Lambeth Palace.

Fast-forward, then. Justin Welby has become Archbishop of Canterbury; he was previously Bishop of Durham, which would have put him in the same diocese where Beeching was studying. I didn’t make the connection directly to Beeching, although I suspected that someone of Beeching’s intelligence, evangelical fervour, and public media participation would probably be on speaking terms with Welby. But I did know that Welby, having had much of his ministry formation at Holy Trinity Brompton and Alpha, would have had some familiarity with the same worship leaders who had formed Beeching: Andy Piercy, Matt Redman, Tim Hughes. I also suspected, listening to Welby’s opposition to same-sex marriage alongside his insistence on having ‘no track with homophobia’ (which, by the way, provides a fascinating lens through which to read Welby’s House of Lords speech against the marriage bill and his Synod speech soon afterward reflecting on ‘revolutions’), that he personally knew someone — and someone with evangelical weight — who was gay. He had said as much, relating his admiration for same-sex couples whose care for each other would put opposite-sex couples to shame (and thus revealing that he had not only read, but digested, his predecessor’s essay, The Body’s Grace). But there was something about the way he said it that made it sound like he had a secret to keep.

Well, it turns out that Beeching is gay and that Welby was one of the privileged few who knew about it. I’ll be damned.

As Zach Hoag notes on the Patheos Progressive Channel, this is huge for the Anglican Communion. It would, as he say, provide for a third way, precisely the sort of thing Welby has been talking about, between Christians whose theological articulations might either be ‘affirming’ or ‘non-affirming’ but love each other all the same.

But there is more: it means that there is a very real gift that evangelical Anglicanism can now bring to the church catholic. In particular, her coming out helps to clear the waters in this murky Anglican situation we have come to call the ‘realignment,’ in which certain parishes and dioceses in the United States and Canada pulled out of their dioceses and provinces over sexuality issues to realign themselves with ‘Global South Anglicanism.’

This post is getting too long. I’ll carry that over to the next post. I promise that it actually matters.

Assumptions

Tags

assumption, Ave Maris Stella, Catholic, Evangelical, Ferguson, Gaza, Islam, Islamic State, Justin Welby, Mary, Patheos, police, Pope Francis, Sam Rocha, state, Vicky Beeching, Virgin Mary

Hit play first. Then read.

The news cycle this week has been nuts. From the militarized police action and racialization in Ferguson to evangelical media theologian Vicky Beeching coming out as gay, from the mixed-up reports about the Islamic State to the unresolved crisis in Gaza, these ‘wars and rumors of wars’ have rung with apocalyptic tones.

The problem with even having a conversation about these things is that they are layered with assumptions.

My friend Sam Rocha over at Patheos Catholic has experienced this layering in quite a visceral way this week. After posting a rebuttal to conservative Catholics who accuse the Muslim ummah of not speaking out about the Islamic State, Rocha found himself in the midst of a maelstrom of misunderstanding. He had ended his post with a call to Patheos’s Muslim channel to cover the Islamic State news more, precisely as a way to disengage the channel from the atrocities in Iraq and beyond:

My question to my Abrahamic brothers and sisters at the Patheos Muslim channel is, why are you not reporting on — and joining  — the predominant voices of your religious community (and your channel editor)?

Rocha found himself quickly rearticulated by some on his channel who saw this as their opportunity to insinuate that the Muslim channel had insidious ulterior motives for their silence. Thankfully, there were those on the Muslim channel who responded graciously and informatively. But in all of these testy exchanges, Rocha’s conciliatory attempt to invite both the Catholic and Muslim channels to a conversation were rearticulated through the assumption that a question like the one Rocha posed needs to be interpreted through the lens of a holy war that had to be de-escalated. This is far from the case, of course — Rocha calls the Muslim channel his ‘Abrahamic brothers and sisters’ and promises to practice more fully what Pope Francis calls a ‘culture of encounter.’ But it was difficult to be heard. That was because Rocha was speaking into fora layered with assumptions.

Or take the example of Vicky Beeching coming out. The Independent‘s report on the matter confirms that the trusted sources who knew about her sexuality were Katherine Welby, her father Justin Cantuar, and her parents, some of whom have different theological understandings of the sexuality debates than her strong, earlier-acknowledged stance on LGBT theology. In an interview with Channel 4 News, though, Beeching’s story was paired with longtime anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who dragged her over the coals for living a ‘lie’ that denied the ‘biblical’ teaching on sexuality in Genesis. When Beeching clarified that there were multiple possible readings of the biblical text — a point that even St. Augustine acknowledges in De Doctrina Christiana — Lively spoke over her to charge that she was not giving him the chance to speak and express his ‘biblical’ view. But therein lay the dilemma. He had been speaking, expressing, articulating, and when Beeching asked to deconstruct some of his assumptions about being ‘biblical’ — especially because she had studied the Bible and tradition at a graduate level — he wouldn’t hear it. His assumptions led to a train of accusations that here was a major Christian leader who had now fallen.

Or take the convoluted stories we are now hearing about both Ferguson and Gaza, which are apparently linked because the militarization of the police in Ferguson took direct cues from the Israeli Defence Forces. What is even more confusing now, though, is that for all of the talk of Ferguson appearing like a war zone, the death of Michael Brown was passed off today as a botched attempt to arrest him for a convenience store strong-arm robbery, only now to have to backtrack on that when the public learned that the robbery was not connected to the actual reason Brown was stopped, which is apparently now jaywalking. These twists and turns also reflect the confusion around the Gaza story — who kidnapped whom? who shot first? how many civilians are dying? who’s really committing atrocities? The result is that the public is left to our own assumptions about what is actually happening, which means that what is really being allowed to control these stories is not what is actually happening — it’s one’s own knowledge of good and evil on race, militarization, Israel/Palestine, and the police state.

All of this arrives at the doorstep of the church catholic today on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. I’m sure that jokes could be made about this Protestant author talking about how Catholics assume that Mary was assumed into heaven.

But to simply stop at that corny punchline would be to miss the point.

The Assumption matters, even for Protestants. If indeed Mary has been assumed ahead of the pilgrim church into her full risen life, then the apparitions that she has made — and that Protestants doubt actually happened — take on much more powerful significance, for it would mean that the Blessed Virgin is living out her risen life by preaching to a world wracked by the conflict around its ideological assumptions — its continual eating in the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, as Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say — instead of dealing with the concrete historical and ethnographic realities before us.

In this sense, Mary remains a political figure in modernity. From race relations at Guadalupe to her protest against secularization at Lourdes to her interpretation of twentieth-century geopolitcs at Fatima — among her other apparitions — Mary says to us that when we allow ideological fictions to rewrite history and rearticulate reality, we are not encountering each other as human persons. We may encounter each other as racial projects, states of exception, theological heretics, and agents of the police state, but to do that is to reduce the human person to a set of disembodied ideas. No, Mary says. I am here. I have physically appeared to you. I am the Lady who is speaking to you. She will not let us exist as ideas. Her Assumption forces us to encounter each other as bodily persons. This is what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, means when he calls on us to a graciousness in ‘deep disagreement’ where one assumes the best about one’s ideological opponents, precisely what he has shown toward Vicky Beeching in her journey. As a practitioner of Catholic social teaching, Welby knows that he is channeling Paul VI’s ‘civilization of love‘ from his 1970 Regina Coeli speech. And thus he would have no problem with me, a Chinglican, saying that the Assumption of Mary is the krisis of our assumptions.

Hail, star of the sea,
Nurturing Mother of God,
And ever Virgin
Happy gate of heaven.

Receiving that ‘Ave’
From the mouth of Gabriel
Establish us in peace,
Transforming the name of ‘Eve.’

Loosen the chains of the guilty,
Send forth light to the blind
Our evil do thou dispel,
Entreat for us all good things.

Show thyself to be a Mother:
Through thee may he receive prayer
Who, being born for us,
Undertook to be thine own.

O unique Virgin,
Meek above all others,
Make us, set free from our sins
Meek and chaste.

Bestow a pure life,
Prepare a safe way:
That seeing Jesus,
We may ever rejoice.

Praise be to God the Father,
To the Most High Christ be glory
To the Holy Spirit
Be honour, to the Three equally. Amen.

An Open Letter Theology, Part 1: Marian solidarity and Asian American ecumenism

Tags

Asian American, Catholic, ecumenical, Evangelical, geopolitics, Mary, open letter, prayer, solidarity

I am writing this post for two reasons. The first is to begin a series of retrospective theological reflections on what happened during the Asian American evangelical open letter campaign after six months of the event and why it matters theologically more than anyone else thinks. The second is to convince you that Chinglicans can pray in solidarity with the Blessed Virgin without blinking an eye. As a Chinglican, I manage to do that simply by closing my eyes.

It has been way too long since my last post. My last two posts (here and here) focused on inviting Rick Warren to a conversation due to his Asian American faux pas last September 2013. Since that time, an open letter to the evangelical church has been issued, in large part inspired by the first Korean American woman to be ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, the Rev. Christine Lee. I do have some remaining comments about the dustup since that time, especially on how Asian American evangelicals seem confused about the word ‘schism’ and who is causing it. It has been six months since the open letter. It is time for a retrospective theological assessment.

But the doing of theology needs itself to be put into the larger ecumenical framework of how the Spirit is moving people like Archbishop Justin Welby, Pope Francis, Pope Tawadros II, and Patriarch Bartholomew into a new sort of oneness, and that in turn needs to be situated within geopolitical developments that we are all watching anxiously.

That anxiousness brings me to the Blessed Virgin.

For one reason or another, I have found it difficult to pray for the last two months. You could say that the reason I’ve had trouble in prayer is the same reason that I’ve had trouble blogging: simply put, life caught up with me. Prior to the last three months, I had a steady rhythm of daily prayer: the major offices during the day, the Angelus at noon, and the Ignatian Examen and the Rosary along with Compline before bed. But in the dustup of life itself, I felt as if I had been thrown into the secular fire. Suddenly, I became too busy to pray. I found myself mouthing the words, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love’ as the last bulwark against not praying altogether, and I think that may have saved my life. But secularity – what Charles Taylor calls ‘the immanent frame’ – has a way of making one too busy.

And so I became too busy and secular to both write and pray.

I was shaken out of my secularity on Monday evening. I don’t know how I found the impulse to pray. All I know is that I did. As I opened up to the offices, I discovered that the prayers prepared the church to celebrate the Annunciation. The words of the daily noon-hour Angelus came back to me:

V. The angel of the Lord appeared to Mary
R. And she conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death.

V. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
R. Be it done according to your word.
Hail Mary…

V. And the Word became flesh
R. And dwelt among us.
Hail Mary…

V. Pray for us, Holy Mother of God.
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray.
Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Angelus is the prayer of the Annunciation. It identifies us, the one who prays together with the whole praying church, with the Blessed Virgin receiving the message of the angel. As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in his book Prayer: ‘Was not the Hail Mary first proclaimed by an angel’s lips, i.e., in the language of heaven? And as for the words uttered by Elizabeth, “filled with the Spirit,” were they not the response to her first meeting with the incarnate God?’ (p. 14-15). It is why there has been a long tradition of popes praying the Angelus with the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

You could say that prior to these last few months, the Annunciation already had taught me how to pray. But like a bolt of lightning – or perhaps by the simple appearance of the angel proclaiming that Mary, like all the prophets before her to whom the angel of the Lord had appeared, had found favour with God – I was called to pray on the eve of the Annunciation. I was reminded of who I am and what position I have in the church. I do not have a merely secular existence. I am not running a rat race. I am not to eat of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Simply put, as an ecclesial person, I am by default simply in prayerful solidarity with the Mother of God who says to the angel, Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. I am the handmaid of the Lord: be it done according to your word.

I write this as a Chinglican with no intention to ‘convert’ to Roman Catholicism. I’ve said before that Roman Catholics have no monopoly on the Blessed Virgin; so has Captain Thin. I like to remind my friends who say to me, ‘Just convert already,’ that we also have a high regard for Mary in the Anglican Communion. Look no further than the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission’s Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ to get a feeling for how high that is.

As I hinted at the beginning of this post, the passage of six months since the Asian American open letter makes this finally a good time for theological reflection on what happened there and why it matters theologically. But I am writing about my prayerful solidarity with the Blessed Virgin before saying what hasn’t yet been theologically said about the Asian American evangelical dustup because if there’s anything worth saying, it should only be said with full consciousness of our ecclesial, prayerful existence.

That’s because the open letter was not about the open letter. We were – and still are – accused of using the open letter to advance a private interest in an American evangelical public. We were – and still are – accused of being divisive. We were – and still are – accused of failing to be Christians, for not forgiving our orientalizing brothers and sisters, for choosing to grind an axe instead of taking it to the Lord in prayer.

But seen in the context of Marian prayerfulness, the open letter was about the ecumenical movement of the Spirit. As the brilliant young theologian and historian Helen Jin Kim suggests, the open letter was a sign of visible unity in a theologically and ideologically divided church. And as geopolitical conflicts break out in Ukraine, Venezuela, Mexico, and Taiwan – among other places – the oneness that the Spirit is bringing is a sign that, as Mary later prays, ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.’ It turns out that prayer is how solidarity is done. It turns out that my secular busyness is that which has kept me from this solidarity. It turns out that prayer is not the opium of the masses – it is the fire by which the masses prophesy against injustice and schism. It turns out that the open letter is not about the open letter, but about being just one small part in a larger work of the Spirit in calling the church to be the church in a world crippled by the hawkish posturing of secular geopolitical insecurity. It was modest; make no mistake about that. But all acts of the Spirit, whether big or small, are events for theological reflection.

Justin Cantuar is fond of saying that there is ‘no renewal of the church without the renewal of prayer and praying communities.’ He walks the walk: he has invited a Catholic ecumenical monastic community, Chemin Neuf, to live with him at Lambeth Palace, and he and Vincent Cardinal Nichols have called on Anglicans and Roman Catholics to ‘walk together’ in prayer for social action during this Lenten season.

If the open letter sought to open up an ecumenical conversation about a racial schism in American Christianity, its aims can only be fulfilled by prayer. Just as a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, was fond of saying that Anglican theology is simply ‘theology done to church bells,’ the late German Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke told his first-year theology students in A Little Exercise for Young Theologians that there was a possibility that they might come away from seminary with a diabolical theology. Making fun of the theological novice who thinks he or she knows it all because of reading a first-year textbook on dogmatics, he says that the know-it-all attitude of a merely book-smart theologian criticizing the kitschiness of the parish church is of the devil. A theology that is from God is a kneeling theology. It is a theology derived from immersion in prayer. It is to approach the Blessed Virgin as she ‘ponders all these things in her heart’ and to ask her, ‘Mary, what are you thinking about?’ It is a prayerful posture that positions the theologian in radical solidarity with the church, however nuts he or she might be driven by the church.

Thielicke’s short book was the first book given to me when I first got my feet wet in Chinglicanism. It has never left me. A Chinglican theology – one committed to post-colonial ecumenism – must be bathed in the prayer of the church, the Blessed Virgin’s radically prayerful obedience to God: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. It is only then that we participate in the prayer, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.’

It’s with that in mind that we can finally proceed to an examination of what actually happened theologically and ecumenically six months ago among Asian American Christians. It is not passé. After all, if the Spirit has been at work over the last year toward ecumenical unity and has in his divine humour included Asian American Christians in this work, then we had better bet that the Lord has only gotten started.

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POSTSCRIPT: Some hasty readers may think that this post is motivated by the recent hastag #CancelColbert, in reference to Comedy Central’s satirical tweet from The Colbert Report about orientalization. While discussion about that hashtag is circulating through the blogosphere, I would seriously caution comparing the Asian American open letter to the evangelical church with these secular events. This is not to say that Colbert is secular; he is openly Catholic, though his show airs on a secular forum. While a theological reflection on his culpability in orientalizing processes may be warranted at some point, it would be categorically inappropriate to lump the two together, not least because the ecumenical implications would be obscured by such a careless move.

It would not be funny if I said that Rick Warren was the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’

Tags

Asian, Asian American, Chinglican, Deadly Vipers, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, Lifeway, Mee Maw, mental illness, orientalism, orientalization, psychology, Rick Warren, Rickshaw Rally, Soong-Chan Rah, Southern Baptist, trauma

UPDATE: The contents of the following post concerned a post by Pastor Rick Warren that has been deleted on the afternoon of 24 September 2013. It also coincided with an apology on Sam Tsang’s blog, Engage the Pews, which Tsang has accepted and on which he has written further reflections. Following the examples of other bloggers such as Sam Tsang, Kathy Khang (More Than Serving Tea) and Wm. Darius Myers (Death Pastor), we will be leaving this post up in order to maintain the integrity of the public record. After all, contrary to the comment by L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang that appeared on all of our respective blogs that the post was ‘immediately and personally removed’ by Warren, we acknowledge that while the apology may have been personal and may indeed be encouraging for a catholic way forward, a response following two business days is not ‘immediate.’ Indeed, given this post’s attention to the historical genealogy of these Asian American interventions into the orientalizing practices of prominent American evangelicals, it is an imperative that this post, as well as the others, remain up as a record of this episode so that we can propel further conversation that would lead to a radical de-orientalization of American Protestant practice. As Tsang and Khang have said on their respective blogs, the apology may be accepted, but the conversation is far from over.

UPDATE #2: We recognize that Rick Warren has issued a public apology on his public Facebook page. We welcome this. Following the reflections given by Professor Sam Tsang and by Kathy Khang to this apology, we have also decided to maintain the integrity of the public record by leaving this post up.

The recent Facebook photo posted as a joke by Pastor Rick Warren describing the staff at Saddleback Church as members of the Red Guard at the height of the Cultural Revolution is a bit difficult to process. Indeed, its invocation of the Cultural Revolution has troubled many a Facebook friend of mine for what they are now terming ‘cultural insensitivity.’  I should thus post a trigger warning, for I have reproduced it here.

Indeed, that he then used the comments section to lecture this Thing’s good friend Sam Tsang on humour in New Testament exegesis makes the situation even more ironic. I mean, one would have thought that Sam Tsang’s composition of the foreword to the new Chinese translation of N.T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God would position Tsang as the exegete. To the extent that our friend was then incensed by this reply, he wrote a response lambasting Warren for his culturally insensitive humour.

To defend Rick Warren as ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans (and by this, I include the Asian Canadians who are posting all over my news feed, as i take ‘American’ to be indicative of the ‘Americas,’ not only the nation-state styling itself as all-encompassing American) simply because he is an older white pastor living in Southern California is no defence at all. Indeed, at least as he is cited in geographer Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions, he claims that his own church is largely composed of Asian and Latina/o Americans. In fact, Wilford points out that Saddleback’s whole idea of the ‘small group’ where members meet in homes to discuss Christian spiritual formation is drawn from Korean megachurch pastor David Yonggi Cho’s ‘cell group’ model; whatever one may think of such a model, the point is that Warren is no stranger to Asia-Pacific churches. Moreover, Southern California itself could hardly be described as an Asian American terra incognita; in fact, Metro Los Angeles boasts a high concentration of Asian Americans, and one of its cities in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park, in fact served as the key case study for geographer Wei Li’s doctoral work on Chinese ethnoburbs in North America. Finally, Saddleback has itself planted a church in Hong Kong, which itself is no small feat, for The Purpose-Driven Church calls church plants to research their social surroundings in order to be relevant in their local evangelism. Indeed, Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions reveals that Saddleback itself is ingenious in its transformation of the postsuburban landscape’s fragmented geographies into purpose-driven sites through which God teaches Saddleback members how to reframe their scattered lives into purpose-driven ones. One would expect no less of its Hong Kong incarnation.

Any question that we ask about this situation, then, should not focus on why Rick Warren is ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans. It should instead interrogate why he ignores them.

After all, this is not the first Asian American challenge to orientalization in American evangelicalism. Indeed, in light of previous excursions into evangelical antiracism, one might be able to illustrate how Warren’s declaration that Asian Americans are humorless because of a joke taken at our expense might be understood if Asian Americans were to make a joke at his expense.

That joke is: who would find it funny if Warren were the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’?

That I now have to explain this joke suggests that it is probably not funny. In fact, now that I have likely offended you, I need to explain to you why you have been offended.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Publishers’ ‘Rickshaw Rally’ curriculum was but one of the episodes in contemporary Asian American evangelical challenges to the white privilege that has gone long uncontested in American evangelicalism. Published as the Vacation Bible School (VBS) material in 2004, the theme featured a white girl in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair, a karate-kid key chain, and name tags shaped as Chinese take-out boxes. As Soong-Chan Rah puts it in The Next Evangelicalism, Lifeway ‘caricatured and generalized all Asian cultures with various stereotypical images’ and was met with protests from Asian American pastors, some of whom were themselves Southern Baptist. However, instead of apologizing, Lifeway made a few minor changes and issued the material as its 2004 VBS curriculum all the same, all to the chagrin of those who decried the material both within and without the denomination.

Unsuccessful as the attempt to derail Rickshaw Rally may have seemed, though, it served as the first of several similar challenges that have propelled the conversation about orientalization in American evangelicalism forward. In 2007, Soong-Chan Rah wrote to Zondervan’s Youth Specialties for its book, Skits That Teach, that featured a skit similar to Rickshaw Rally, this one titled ‘Mee Maw.’ which featured a Chinese delivery person with a very demeaning accent as part of a church skit book. As Rah recalls, Zondervan recalled (to its credit) all of the extant copies and did away with them, issuing an apology on its blog. In 2009, Zondervan found itself again in hot water, this time over the publication of a book titled Deadly Vipers, a book for men that portrayed sins that men faced as ninjas sneaking up on them. Leading the charge this time was Seattle pastor Eugene Cho, whose campaign convinced Zondervan to again pull the book, destroy the copies, and have the authors remove their website.

What we should find hard to believe is that Rick Warren has not seemed to have heard of these high-profile cases, one of which affected his own denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention) and his own publisher (Zondervan).

But even more dumbfounding should be Warren’s inability to participate in solidarity with Asian Americans, even while many Asian Americans participated in solidarity with him and his family when they lost their son, Matthew, to a suicide due to mental illness. Contrary to popular perceptions that Asian Americans are unfamiliar with mental illness, the legacy of political and cultural trauma in the Asia-Pacific–including the Cultural Revolution–should itself be a signal that Asians and Asian Americans are all too familiar with mental illness, which is likely why we felt ourselves in such solidarity with the Warrens in the first place. The authoritarian rule of emerging nation-states in the Asia-Pacific were not the natural results of an ‘Asian culture’ that promotes hard work and obedience to authority. They were attempts at state formation whose efforts to dislodge these emerging nation-states from their traumatic pasts of European colonialism exacerbated the cultural trauma and psychological damage that began in the nineteenth century. If it weren’t from the direct trauma of elite state initiatives at nation-building–such as China’s Cultural Revolution, among many other similar projects in other nation-states–then there was the overwhelming sense that these nation-states and their citizens needed to catch up with the modernity of the West, resulting in authoritarian ideologies that framed citizens as patriotic hard workers whose objective was to make the nation modern overnight. While these efforts at subjectification led to some economic successes, one of the prices that was paid was the spread of mental illness; indeed, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that the frequency of demon possession reported on the Malaysian shop floor that she studied can be attributed to these efforts at capitalist state subjectification. The same could be said of the Cultural Revolution; in fact, my grandfather, who saw the decimation of his family in Shanghai through the double trauma of the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War and the Communist takeover of his family’s property (not to mention the news of his surviving family’s treatment through the Mao years right on into the Cultural Revolution), was plagued with manic depression for the remainder of his life. Indeed, the first time that I ever learned as a kid that there were pills that you could take that helped you with your moods was from seeing him take them.

That the rise of early Asian American studies at the San Francisco State College Strike in 1968 was done by Mao-jacket-wearing students from the Third World Liberation Front in solidarity with the Cultural Revolution does not blunt this point. For one thing, they were protesting the trauma of racism that ghettoized their communities in America; as Ling-chi Wang points out, Chinatowns were the result both of racist planning policies that kept Chinese people literally in their place and Chinatown elites who used this ghettoization to maintain their own power. The strikers protested both. However, to post a picture of a woman wearing a Mao jacket cannot be justified even by this fact, for though even members of mainline Protestant churches in Chinatown participated in these protests, migrants who had experienced the Asia-Pacific traumas transformed these churches after the strikes, bringing their trauma to bear on the real life experience of even the most liberal churches in these Chinatowns. By the 1970s and 1980s, then, counseling psychology became a field of great concern among Asian and Asian American Protestants themselves as they dealt with the traumas of colonization, state subjectification, racism, modern ideologies of Asians needing to ‘catch up’ with the West, and the resulting family dysfunction, and it has now become a commonly discussed stereotype that second-generation Asian American evangelicals seem to be disproportionately interested in psychology as a field of study because of how often these traumas are discussed in our churches and parachurch organizations.

In short, we as Asians and Asian Americans know mental illness intimately. That was why we really felt ourselves to be in solidarity with the Warrens when Matthew died.

If what I am saying is true, then, what is needed is not simply ‘cultural intelligence’ or ‘sensitivity training.’ It is an acknowledgement that just as we as Asian and Asian American evangelicals stood in solidarity with the Warrens when they confronted the abyss caused by mental illness in their family, so the Warrens stand in solidarity with us when we confront mental illness and the memory of trauma in ours. Indeed, it would not be funny if I called Rick Warren the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’ precisely because of this solidarity that we have with him. By the same token, the trigger for memories of cultural trauma should not be funny if indeed he acknowledges his solidarity with us. That he then complains that we do not find his joke funny is not only a failure of ‘cultural sensitivity.’ It is a failure of catholicity, a denial of his participation with the church catholic that is composed in no small part by Asians and Asian Americans. Indeed, that is what’s at stake in choosing to ignore the protests of Asian Americans who have challenged the orientalization that is latent in much of American evangelicalism: it is to deny that the Spirit is moving the people of God into greater oneness by shattering the ideologies that have long kept us apart. To reduce this to ‘political correctness’ on the one hand while calling for ‘sensitivity training’ on the other would fail to comprehend the movement of God in making his children one, even as he is one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. To fail to understand that such reconciled unity–such ecumenical catholicity!–lies at the heart of the evangelical mission is to miss the purpose for which the church exists, for she is a prophetic witness to a modern world traumatically divided by racializing ideologies (among many others) that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile all into one in his body.

To put it plainly, waving the trigger of our traumatic memories in our faces on Facebook is simply not funny. But even more curious is that Warren is neither a stranger to Asians and Asian Americans, and it is hard to believe that he hasn’t heard of the debacles like Rickshaw Rally, Mee Maw, and Deadly Vipers. The only conclusion that we can draw from this circumstantial evidence is thus that Warren is not ignorant, but is willfully ignoring Asians and Asian Americans in order to make a joke at our expense. And yet, hope against hope, we do not believe that in his heart, Warren is malicious enough to be that much of a schismatic; after all, to fail to have even a flicker of love for his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters would jeopardize his own place in the church catholic, for he that does not love does not know God, for God is love. It is thus for the sake of the healing of the catholic union and continual solidarity that we share in Jesus Christ that we demand that Rick Warren issue an apology.

Correction update: the original version of this post read that the woman in the posted photo was from the People’s Liberation Army. This was an error because she was part of the Red Guard. We thank the readers of A Christian Thing for their vigilance. I am also thankful for the presence of Not a Dinner Party on this Thing, for she is a China scholar and a truly competent one at that. See for yourself.

No, Ideological Sermons Are Not OK

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So without further ado, the critique:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short: please, please, preach the Word.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Topless.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘T-O-P-L-E-S-S.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to my third point…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, life killed the dream I dreamed too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary is yours, whether you are ‘catholic’ or ‘evangelical’

Tags

Anglican, apparition, Blessed Virgin, Catholic, Christian, ecumenism, Evangelical, feminist theology, Flannery O'Connor, geopolitics, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Justin Welby, liberation theology, Mary, Pope Francis, racism, secular, theotokos

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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