Not a Dinner Party Is a Chinglican

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

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

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

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

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

Donaldina Cameron as a saint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preaching Elijah

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Anglican, Asian American, Ba'al, Catholic, Chinese, Christian, Christology, Deuteronomistic History, Elijah, Faith, feminist, feminist theology, Hebrew Scripture, hermeneutics, historical criticism, homiletics, Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, lectionary, liberal, liberal Protestant, modernity, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Old Testament, Old Testament studies, Protestant, sermon

In the Revised Common Lectionary, today is the third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5.  The church catholic meditates on the Jesus story in Luke 7:11-19 where Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead at the town of Nain and is pronounced a prophet. (This theme is certainly brought out by tonight’s Vespers canticle antiphon: A great prophet has arisen among us and God has visited his people.)

I preached today in a young second-generation Chinese evangelical congregational context and set myself up for a challenge. Instead of using the Gospel reading, I tried something that I’d never done before: use the first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures to construct a homily for the lectionary themes for the week. Today’s reading was from Elijah’s visitation to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon.

Drawing inspiration from Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber’s weekly postings of her sermon texts, I’ll post mine here too, though she is a far, far better preacher than I could ever hope to become. (This is not because she is a good performer, though she is that as well. It’s rather because her pastoral gifts seem way off the charts.) Two prefactory notes to this Chinglican homiletical rendition of the passage, one hermeneutical, the other homiletical.

The hermeneutic I’m using here is a typically Chinglican one: typically catholic, typically feminist, and typically positioned between church and academia. Because I don’t read Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Aramaic, or German with any level of competency, I decided to do a light review of Hebrew Scripture studies in the last week by poking around the various journals. This literature troubled me on some levels because in the wake of historical criticism going into crisis, there seemed to be a few anachronisms, especially claims that religion could be ‘private’ in an antique text (I felt like throwing Talal Asad at them). However, there were also some gems: in the wake of the historical critical method undergoing some level of crisis since the 1980s, the most interesting historical readings of the text have been feminist materialist ones that probe the political economy circumscribing the text (props to Gale Yee and Alice Keefe for brilliant analyses of the Hosea narratives that were methodologically useful for the Kings text, and props to Phyllis Trible on her analysis on the Elijah narratives themselves). From these readings, it has become apparent that where an older generation of Deuteronomistic History scholars posited a series of binaries particularly between Ba’al and Yahweh (and also Elijah v. Jezebel), these binaries break down upon a close reading of the text itself, a typical task of feminist analysis itself (no, feminism is not just about ‘gender’; it’s about breaking down conventional binaries that uncritically prop up unwarranted hierarchies). Theologically, then, it seems much more convincing to analyze ancient Israelite ‘religion’ (I prefer ‘state cult,’ thank you) as viewing Yahweh as part of the Ba’alic cult, with monolatrous prophets and monotheistic editors during the Exile inserting their own theological analyses that posited a Yahweh that stood out from the Ba’alic cult.

This was helpful for the reading of the text for two reasons. First, it helped me get out of my modern habits, which would have been to read the text anachronistically as one where Elijah and the widow take a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ into the hands of the unknown God, and God delivers because he’s their Tillichian ‘ground of being.’ These studies helped to situate the political context of the text, helping me to see the political dynamics going on between Elijah and the Omride dynasty, between Yahweh and Ba’al. However, second, these feminist analyses cautioned me against taking a strictly dichotomous view between Yahweh and Ba’al, to acknowledge how interconnected they were in the Israelite state cult and to examine deeply the original theological contributions of monolatrous prophets issuing polemics to extract Yahweh from the Ba’alic cult. They also helped me to see parallels between Jezebel and the widow of Zarephath without positing either as ‘good woman’ or ‘bad woman,’ but as very interesting and complex theological actresses in their own right.

Where I depart from the feminist analysis is where I depart from the comparative religion enterprise altogether with a sort of catholic twist: this is the theological move I’m developing from the above hermeneutical method. Reading the feminist analyses, there was a sort of polemic against Yahweh as himself a god of terror, at least as revealed by the prophets. But if we are to take the catholic development of doctrine seriously (one posited by Peter himself when he says in his second epistle that the prophets longed to look into the things of partaking of the divine nature), even someone like Elijah might have been revealing Yahweh through only a glass dimly. Certainly, this is borne out by other interesting analyses in Hebrew Scripture studies where scholars currently note that the Elijah narratives seem to be schizophrenic (or in Charles Taylor’s terms, ‘deeply cross-pressured’) on Elijah’s theology: Elijah is himself a bit of a bombastic character (declaring a cessation of rain on Israel, staging a contest of the gods, slaughtering the prophets of Ba’al, telling Jezebel that dogs will lick up her blood, sending fire down on Amaziah’s army), but the narrative’s portrayal of Yahweh is that of a still, small voice, a gentle God who sounds nothing like Ba’al. If that’s the case, then what’s revealed in this passage is a God who cares for the widow, even if she is from the land of Jezebel, a portrait of Yahweh whose contrast to Ba’al is not one of power, but one of love, certainly foreshadowing the God who reveals himself as love in Jesus Christ, almost despite the prophet’s own over-the-top moments and the authors’ and editors’ ideological agendas.

Of course, I know that this may not be a kosher move in biblical studies; my friend Sam happens to have a fantastic post detailing why bad christological moves in interpretation shut down the congregation’s ability to participate in worship. But the remedy for this might not be to forego talking christologically in a Hebrew Scripture text–we are, after all, Christians; it’s what we do, and why we were considered heretical in the first century–it might be to display a fuller christology than the pet christologies in our traditions. This is a bit of a catholic move, joining these texts in a lectionary that includes the Hebrew Scriptures, the psalter, the epistles, and the Gospels that is read by the church catholic to all speak as a choir of different parts about Jesus (sorry, I got the choir thing from the second reading in today’s Office of Readings from the epistle of St. Ignatius to the Romans).

That ‘choral’ canonical reading is the catholic move that I think is liturgically important, even if it might be viewed with a bit of suspicion from the academy (which is why this sermon is positioned between the church and the academy). There are plenty of passages from which I can draw to make these comparisons, but responding especially to Sam’s point about how these moves should be cautiously made to avoid doing violence to the text, I think in a homiletical setting, these moves should be governed by the lectionary. For example, I could have used Luke 4 where there is a direct reference to the widow of Zarephath. But that would have taken this sermon in a radically different theological direction from the move via Luke 7, which is what the lectionary prescribes. With Luke 4, I would have had to make the sermon about radical inclusion. But the Luke 7 reading makes the piece about Yahweh’s radical self-revelation to the widow as a God of love whose character is radically different from that of Ba’al, a point that probably neither Elijah nor even the Kings writers and editors had fully worked out. Replying to Sam, then, these christological moves need not always be a disservice to the congregation if they are governed by the lectionary; in fact, they can be opportunities for theological creativity.

These hermeneutical and theological moves transition me to homiletics, the delivery of today’s sermon. Here’s where the Chinglican moves come in full form: I was preaching to a group of English-speaking second-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals whose company I really enjoy. They sing loudly in worship, they allow themselves to crack the most hilarious jokes during worship, they actually laugh at my jokes (brownie points for that), and they are just a fun group to be around. With their lives situated among their generally conservative Chinese families (‘Chinese’ does not equate conservatism, which is why the qualifier is needed), their fledgling second-generation ministry at church, and their secular lives in either school or work, the question became how to sharpen the text’s punch while speaking to this particular segment of the church catholic, even while at the same time keeping the church catholic in mind.

In terms of packing a good homiletical punch, I think Karl Barth has always done a particularly good job (I also said, ‘Now I can preach again!’ after reading Romans), so you will see a lot of ‘God says, “No,'” in this sermon. This especially includes saying ‘no’ to the notion that we as younger-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals need to develop an exclusionary identity. These identity politics are a fraught issue within the current conversation in Asian North American evangelical circles, but if Yahweh is so inclusive of a widow in Sidonian territory, then the politics of developing a distinctive identity cannot be pursued via the politics of exclusion. Asian American Protestant historian Timothy Tseng and radically orthodox theologian Jonathan Tran have helped me see this very clearly: our second-generation identity politics can be premised on exclusion, especially by orientalizing our parents. These exclusionary impulses should be homiletically countered: because Yahweh reveals himself to the widow as a gift, we too must reveal the Lord Jesus as a gift, as the Bread of Life come down from heaven to give himself for the life of the world, not to consolidate our distinctive identities. (I didn’t develop the eucharistic theme, though, because I didn’t want to get into a debate about the Real Presence, though as you’ll see toward the end of the sermon, there’s a brief mention of the Holy Spirit, which I think is crucial: the thoughtful charismatics I have encountered tend to be quite drawn to a high Mariology, a high Eucharistic theology, and a high ecclesiology.)

Here’s the sermon, then. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But I suppose it’s a good record of where I’m at so far in my wrestling with how I might read the Hebrew Scriptures as a Chinglican Christian.

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Elijah
A Sermon for Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 5
1 Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
This sermon focuses on the Old Testament and Gospel readings.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The Elijah reading is one of those passages where it looks like the take-away message is, ‘Don’t you trust God?’  It looks like one of those passages where the point is that the really good Christians are the ones who trust God, and the bad Christians who don’t have enough faith or the non-Christians who have no faith just live a lower order of existence.  If you’re not like this, then you should educate me as to how you think. But most of the Christians I hang out with occasionally make these sorts of off-hand remarks, like, Oh, that person is not a Christian, she doesn’t have any faith, and that’s why she has no hope in life.  Sometimes we mean well—we might think that we want to go evangelize those lost people if we get a chance—but this seems to be the way that many of my Christian friends talk.  That annoying colleague at work is annoying because he’s not Christian and because he has no faith, so he takes out his psychological imbalance on us (we think that God can fix him psychologically).  Those politicians of that particular party don’t know God, so they support immoral positions that don’t align with our Christian values; we must battle with them in the cultural arena because they will corrupt our society and our next generation.  Those friends who betrayed us by not taking our side when our lives were going rough—well, maybe they’re just not Christians because obviously if they had faith, they’d have the emotional security to stand with us.  This is even true among second-generation Chinese Christians of our age.  I don’t know if you think this, but whole books have been written titled Following Jesus Without Dishonoring Your Parents and The Chinese Way of Doing Things, where the premise is that because our parents are Chinese, they hold on to these cultural values that stunt their faith so that they end up controlling us, stopping us any time we say we want to become a missionary or a pastor and forcing us to become doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, and accountants (not that there’s anything wrong with that…my wife is a pharmacist, and we’re quite happy about that!).

It becomes easy to read the Bible like this.  As we read and do our Christian thing, we criticize people we think are losers, or people who annoy us, people who don’t share our values, or people whom we think want to control us.  We say that they either don’t having enough faith to trust God or maybe just have no hope because they’re not Christian.  It’s very tempting to read the passage on Elijah like that. God tells his prophet Elijah to go to Zarephath, a town north of Israelite territory, and to trust him to provide food through a poor widow who only has a handful of flour and a drop of oil in a jug.  It seems pretty straight-forward.  The passage is about trusting God, like if we were in Elijah’s shoes and God called us to go to a far distant land to maybe be a missionary, reach out to the poor widow, and fulfill his purpose for us in our lives.  The widow also has to take a leap of faith, trusting God’s prophet that when God says that the flour and oil won’t run out, they really won’t: do you have enough faith, brothers and sisters, to believe that?  The leap of faith, we think, is what makes us different from our non-Christian friends or from our bad Christian brothers, sisters, and parents who just don’t have enough faith.  In fact, we tell ourselves that non-Christians or bad Christians have little hope because they don’t have a God to believe in; that’s why they have no purpose in life.  Unlike our non-Christian friends, then, we say that we should be secure in our life, our future, our education, our careers, our family values, even whether we’ll meet that special someone someday and date them with biblical principles, and if we don’t have that kind of security, maybe it’s just because we don’t have enough faith.  We tell ourselves that we need faith in God to hear his calling and find out what his will is, just like Elijah heard God’s calling and found out that his will was for him to go north to feed the widow.  What makes us Christian, we might think, is that we take these leaps of faith because we believe in a god and we think we should obey him, leaping into the unknown, letting the invisible God give us a purpose and provide for us while we do his will.

The only trouble is, that’s not what the passage is about.

The whole reason that God is telling Elijah to get food from a widow in the first place is that Elijah is on the run from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.  Ahab and Jezebel believe in gods—in fact, they believe in too many of them—which means that they happen to have a lot of faith.  Just to give you some context: if you grew up in church, you might know the name Jezebel, and you might associate her with this evil witch-queen straight out of something like Game of Thrones who does like black magic and seduces weak men.  That’s not quite it: the real Jezebel was a princess, the daughter of the king of a fairly wealthy merchant city north of Israel called Sidon (actually, that still sounds like Game of Thrones, but whatever).  Jezebel’s dad and probably Ahab’s dad arranged for them to get married to cement the trade between their two wealthy kingdoms.  The trouble is, once Jezebel becomes queen of Israel, she gets Ahab to start worshipping her god, build an altar that god, build a house for that god, and host some 450 priests to that god at their dinner table (which means she was pretty rich).

That god was called Ba’al.

If you’ve been in church for a while, you might recall hearing this name Ba’al (some people pronounce it ‘bayle’).  Ba’al seems to pop up in every Old Testament story where there’s another god that the real God doesn’t like his people worshipping.  It’s like all these gods get called Ba’al.  They all get called ba’al, because technically, all that ba’al means is ‘lord,’ like some kind of sovereign god, king of the universe, powerful over everything, probably the guy to pray to if you’re a farmer and you’re hoping for some rain.  And for sure, there was a major Ba’al that people prayed to, but there were lots of ba’als (ba’al place names, people named ba’al, subgods that were ba’alish).  In fact, because Ba’al was so generic, some people even thought that worshipping Ba’al was the same thing as worshipping the God of Israel, who went by a name called Yahweh, the God who told the prophet Moses back at the burning bush that his name was I AM WHO I AM, Yahweh.

But here’s the point.  The issue was never that Elijah believed in a god who gave him a purpose in life and everybody else didn’t believe in a god, so they had no purpose in life.  The issue was more like, who is this God that everybody says that they trust and who gives them a purpose in life?

This is a really important question in this passage, because Yahweh and Ba’al really seem to hate each other’s guts.  With Elijah running from Ahab and Jezebel, you could say that Yahweh and Ba’al were sort of duking it out.  It’s pretty clear in the text that Yahweh didn’t really like Ba’al, because when Ahab started worshipping Ba’al, it says that he ‘did more to provoke the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him’ (16:33).  Yahweh is pissed (am I allowed to say that in church?): he doesn’t like being in competition with this Lord Ba’al.  So Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah to tell King Ahab that it won’t rain until Yahweh says it will (take that, Ba’al).  This means that, as the passage is starting out, we get the sense that Ba’al and Yahweh are both sort of rain gods. This means that they controlled the agricultural economy of the time by making it rain.  By getting involved in this sort of mean-spirited competition, humans become their victims: while they’re duking out their god powers, the humans get a drought.  We get the sense, at least initially, that Yahweh and Ba’al are pretty similar in character: they both like to be worshipped, they both like to control the world, they both have human pawns like prophets and kings and priests who tell people what God wants them to do.  In other words, it’s no surprise that some people thought that worshipping Ba’al and Yahweh was the same thing because it really was, you know, same difference.

And that’s where Yahweh, the God of Israel, begins to surprise us.  He’s nothing like Ba’al.

Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah, who’s been hiding by a creek living off bread and meat that ravens have been sending him, to go up north, up to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon, the same city where Queen Jezebel is from.  Elijah is going to Jezebel country.  There, Yahweh says, a widow is going to feed you.  Now this still sounds pretty mean and exploitative.  It’s like Yahweh saying that in this epic battle with Ba’al, he’s sending Elijah to Jezebel ‘Ba’al-mama’ country, and there, they’re going to exact revenge on Jezebel by making the poorest of the poor, a widow, pay.

The widow seems to read the situation like this as well.  Elijah gets up there and sees this widow gathering sticks, and he says to her in the middle of this drought where there is no water, ‘Hey, get me some water in a jar so that I can drink it.’  You get the sense that this widow goes like, Oh fine, but while she goes off to get it, Elijah demands more: ‘Oh, bring me a piece of bread too.’  The widow has it up to here.  She goes, ‘OK, I get it.  You and that Yahweh your God with your drought thing, you win. You’ve defeated Ba’al. I don’t have anything baked, I’ve only got a handful of flour and a little drop of oil in my jar, so I’m gathering sticks, going to take it home to my boy, we’re going to bake that last crumb of bread, and we’re going to die.  The end; you win.’

This is when Elijah surprises her.  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Elijah says.  Sure, go home and do all that stuff you said about dying if that’s what floats your boat, but first bake me a little cake and then make something for yourself and your son.  See, the thing is, Yahweh isn’t interested in exacting revenge on you and exploiting you.  We aren’t here to pick on Jezebel country.  In fact, Yahweh’s message is that your jar of flour and your jar of oil won’t go empty until it rains again and you can grow new crops.  I’m not here to exploit you.  I’m here as a gift.

And so they start living off the gift.  They live the good life in the middle of this drought, Elijah with the widow and her son, with the infinite supply of flour and oil.  Life is good.  The widow comes to believe that maybe this Yahweh is not so bad.  Maybe he’s not as vengeful as she thought he was.  Maybe he’s not duking it out with Baal after all.  Maybe he’s a good guy, a good God.

And then her son drops dead.  In anger, the widow confronts Elijah, ‘I knew life was getting too good!  So this is your god after all!  What do you guys have against me?  All you want to do is to drudge up my sin, our sin, the sin that Jezebel caused when she put Ba’al in competition with Yahweh.  And what happens?  Your Yahweh takes it out on my boy.  The little people always suffer for the politics of the gods!  I knew it!  All the gods are the same!’

Elijah then carries the boy up to his upper chamber, puts him on his bed, and cries out to Yahweh: ‘Oh, Yahweh my God, is this what you’re really like?  Like, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Are you really going to take out your conflict with Baal on this widow by killing her son?’  He stretches himself on the boy three times and cries out, ‘Oh, Yahweh, my God, let this child’s life come back into him!’  Yahweh listens.  The boy revives.  Elijah takes him down and gives him back to his mom.  And in that moment, the widow says, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.’  In other words, now I know intimately for myself that you truly speak for Yahweh when you say things like Yahweh is not in competition with Ba’al, that he’s not going to exact his revenge on us, that he has given you to us as a gift, that instead of exploiting the poor, he’s always on our side.

I said at the beginning of this sermon that many of us might think that what makes us Christian is that we believe in a god.  But as Elijah’s encounter with the widow of Zarephath shows us, there’s a big difference between Ba’al and Yahweh, between the gods as we normally think of them and who the living God really is.  Yahweh is not Ba’al: he is not a sovereign dictator who exacts revenge whenever we place other gods in competition with him.  Yahweh is a gift, loving us, giving us life, giving us himself.

Putting our faith in Yahweh, the God who gives himself to us, is what makes us Christian because this God is the God ultimately revealed to us in Jesus.  Here’s a Jesus story.  In Luke 7, Jesus is traveling with his disciples when he comes across the funeral of another widow’s son.  The similarity to the Elijah story couldn’t be more striking.  Jesus sees the widow weeping as the funeral procession marches out of the city, her only son, dead.  It’s as if he hears the cry of the widow screaming at Elijah, ‘Is this what God is really like?’  Jesus stops the procession and calls to the man, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’  The young man gets up, and just like Elijah gave the son back to the widow, Jesus gives the son back to his widow mom, and the whole town declares him to be a prophet, one who brings God’s favourable gaze to his people.  Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.

But Jesus is more than a prophet, greater even than Elijah.  Elijah reveals to the widow in Jezebel-country that Yahweh does not the exploit the poor as a sort of vengeance for being put in competition with other gods.  Elijah shows the widow, and through the widow, shows us, that God is a gift-giver: he gives bread that never runs out; he brings the widow’s dead son back to life.  So does Jesus.  Jesus comes breaking bread with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, and feeding thousands of people in one go; on more than one occasion, he also brings dead kids back to life to their rejoicing parents.  But Jesus does more, because where Elijah shows us that Yahweh gives gifts, Jesus is himself the gift.

As one greater than Elijah, Jesus doesn’t just bring sons back to life; he is the Son of God who comes back to life.  Elijah challenges Ahab and Jezebel about their Ba’al worship and then runs for his life.  Jesus also challenges the established picture of God during his time, a picture that saw God as taking revenge on behalf of his people against enemies who conquered them and currently ruled them, a God who will rightfully enthrone God’s people to take over the world and make the unbelievers pay for their crimes.  Jesus said, No, to that picture of God; he showed us that the way of God is not the way of conquest, but the way of the cross, loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who mistreat us.  But where Elijah runs for his life after he makes challenges Ba’al, Jesus gives his life to show us that God really is love.  Jesus gives himself into the hands of those who hang on to the Ba’al version of god for their identity and the preservation of their power.  As he hangs alone and abandoned on the cross, he cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?’ but because it’s in Aramaic (Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani), the people around the cross go, ‘What? Elijah?’ and they mock him, ‘Ha! Let’s see if Elijah will come save him now!’  Jesus the Son of God dies, Elijah does not show up, and the disciples go into hiding, screaming just like the widow: I knew it! All these gods are the same.  They’re just out for their own power, and the ones who suffer are the little people.

And that is when God speaks a word that rings clearer than any word he had ever spoken through Elijah: God raises Jesus from the dead.  God says, No, to the version of god that’s vengeful and evil and powerful at the expense of the little people.  God says, This Jesus who is raised from the dead, this is my Son, this is the man of God in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth.  Listen to him.

And Jesus, the Son of God raised to life in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth, remains consistent to the truth of the God that he reveals, the God who is a gift, the God who is love.  When Jesus says, ‘Do not be afraid,’ to his disciples, he tells them that he has not returned from the dead to seek vengeance.  Because he appears only to his disciples, he does not seem to care about confronting the political people who put him to death.  Because he eats and drinks with his followers, he shows them that he won’t punish them for ditching him at the cross.  No, he says to his disciples the exact same thing that Elijah says to the widow in Jezebel-country, the widow who thought he was there to take out God’s wrath on her: Do not be afraid.  But as one greater than Elijah, Jesus does not only provide flour and oil that won’t run out.  Jesus gives himself to them, to us, as the Bread of Life.  He sends the Holy Spirit on us, his church, joining us with the life of God, to his risen life, so that as he lives forever, we will also live eternal life.

That’s what makes you and me Christians: it is that we have received the life of Jesus as a gift.  This changes everything.  This means that believing in a generic god who controls our life and gives us purpose does not make us Christian.  What makes us Christian is that we have received God’s gift of life.  It means that we have come to realize that the living God is not a god who demands us to give him stuff, sucking us dry by putting time commitments on us and guilt-tripping us when what’s on our mind is not him, but school stress, family problems, workplace politics, unemployment depression, dating agonies, or just the boredom of an unexciting life.  It means that we don’t set ourselves up as superior to non-Christians and that we don’t even exact revenge on the Ahabs and the Jezebels who come after us with their sovereign, controlling lords.  We simply love everyone, even our enemies.

And that stops us right in our tracks when we start to say things like Christians have a purpose in life and non-Christians don’t.  That is just not a Christian thing to say.  The Christian way to live is to realize instead that much of what passes for ‘god’ in the world is the version that is angry, vengeful, competitive, demanding, and arbitrarily powerful.  In contrast to that, Christians embody in our everyday lives the surprise of God’s love, because we are the people who say, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  If Elijah can enter Jezebel country and say this to a widow, if Jesus rises from the dead and says this to the disciples who abandoned him, then we must say this in how we treat colleagues who annoy us, parents we think are controlling our lives, politicians with whom we disagree, friends who have betrayed us, and people for whom we think we don’t have time.  Instead of criticizing them and excluding them, we say with our lives, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  After all, that’s what Jesus says to us, and we have received his gift of life.

Amen.

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.

No, You Cannot Fence the Table with Orientalism

Tags

Asia-Pacific, Asian American, Asian American theology, capitalism, Douglas Wilson, Edward Said, feminist theology, Foucault, geopolitics, heterotopia, mystical theology, oriental monk, orientalism, postcolonial theology, Rachel Held Evans, Reformed

This morning, Reformed pastor Doug Wilson posted a response to a question from a friend about a recent tweet by Rachel Held Evans about how she would take communion with John Piper in a heartbeat. See for yourself:

I would break the bread of communion with @johnpiper in a heartbeat. We disagree, but he is my brother, and always will be.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) May 27, 2013

Wilson’s interlocutor didn’t have the same ontological understanding of communion as Evans, though. His query to Wilson apparently focused on how because Evans taught feminist ideas both on her blog and in her new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she should be excluded from the communion table. To pull a Catholic parallel case, this was like taking Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s statements in The Ratzinger Report about ‘radical feminism’ being a ‘different religion’ from Christianity to its logical conclusion. Indeed, this is no mere parallel with Bishop Allen Vigneron’s comments that Catholics should abstain from communion if they believe that abortion and gender-neutral marriage should be legal. No, Wilson’s interlocutor goes for the jugular, pressing him to articulate a theology of excommunication on the basis that Evans taught feminist ideas and was thus a false teacher.

Characteristically, Wilson’s classically informed Reformed theology leads to a thoughtful response, though one that in fact justifies schism instead of leading to its healing. Abstracting the question from Rachel Held Evans, Wilson holds forth more generally on excommunication. Wilson argues that there are two parts to this question. The first is: who is doing the disciplining? Were it an official ecclesial excommunication, then Wilson says that the church should withhold communion from the offender, but if it is simply Diotrephes from 3 John shouting down competition, the claim to discipline should be ignored. This leads to a second issue: the state of schism in the church, in which withholding communion from someone from another Christian branch of communion can be justified as disciplining that entire branch. If feminism were such a communion branch (to my knowledge, it is not), then one might have to start weighing whether ideological non-adherence is justification for church discipline.

The complications that arise from this thought process leads Wilson to wax orientalist. Calling these practices of withholding communion from anyone who does not subscribe exactly to one’s beliefs as the making of a practical ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ Wilson goes on to delineate the interweaving of ‘grace’ and ‘discipline.’ Acknowledging that his readers might find his explanation arcane, he jokingly apologizes that he may have ‘veered into some kind of Zen Presbyterianism here,’ and clarifies the ultimate point of this backhanded swipe at Evans: Wilson would not excommunicate Evans, but would intentionally show her grace in order to deliver her from her feminism.

While I take issue with this flippant characterization of feminism as a unitary movement (it is not, and thus, I’d argue that you can’t brand the whole thing as ‘false teaching,’ but of course, he might come back at me with how Gnosticism was a complex movement, and we’d go on and on and on), there will be bloggers joining A Christian Thing in the not-too-distant future who will be addressing the question of feminist theologies and will be more competent to speak on this than me. So I shan’t.

Instead, as I’ve taken others to task for their orientalizing statements, I’d like to take Wilson to task for his flippant usage of orientalist terms. By ‘taking Wilson to task,’ however, I’m afraid that I’ll have to provide a bit of a prolegomena. You see, I suspect that Wilson–as well as many Euro-American Christians of a variety of theological persuasions, Protestant or Catholic–may be intellectually allergic to the critique of ‘white (male) privilege’ that I am about to perform. This, after all, may lie behind why some, likely including Wilson, are allergic to feminist theologies; after all, they might reason, it’s just a bunch of women unaware of their own will to power trying to shout down an invented bogeyman called ‘white male privilege’ to be able to join the institutional ranks and redefine entire organizations with their own pet agendas. In turn, these people who imagine themselves to be victimized should be subjected to ridicule–not exactly exclusion, mind you–but enough teasing to show that they do not have a sense of humour and that this lack of joy can be attributed to them wanting power. The same may go for African American, Chicano American, and Asian American theologies, in which ‘women’ might be substituted with ‘racialized minorities’ who allegedly talk a grand talk about liberation, desegregating the church, diversifying seminary faculty, and discovering indigenous ways of doing theology. Because of this, the logic may go, these people are always on high alert for the racist remarks of white privileged men, failing to see that the occasional remark about ‘race’ is just an off-hand funny remark that maybe they could have done without if they weren’t writing off-the-cuff on a blog or speaking extemporaneously in a sermon, but that is really just harmless and funny. The joke’s on the racialized minorities, then, for being offended at everything and looking for things at which to get offended. They should instead (the reasoning might go) get off welfare and get a job.

I’d like to assure Wilson from the outset of this critique, then, that I was not looking to be offended (nor, I might note, do most feminist, postcolonial, and racialized minority scholars actually go looking to be offended). In fact, I hope that my comments will have some substantive value for his discussion of communion and excommunication, and indeed, I’d like to propose to Wilson that feminist, post-colonial, and minority theologies have an awful lot to contribute to the ongoing work of making the Body of Christ one, even as the Father and the Son are one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. Finally, I’d like to note that if you title your post ‘Some Kind of Zen Presbyterianism’ (emphasis mine), regardless of how much orientalist substance your post actually has (there are after all, only two, if we were to really exegete it), then you are asking for a response of this kind.

Indeed, following the advice of feminist theorist Saba Mahmood to not (as St. Paul would have it) despise all statements wrought by white male privilege but to examine fully ‘the force that a discourse commands,’ let me begin by congratulating Wilson on what must feel like a significant departure from the usual fare of classical Western education and his devotion to a unitary Eurocentric canon in his educational advocacy. In fact, this departure is quite courageous because he picks up on a post-structural tactic at the end of the piece described by Michel Foucault as ‘the heterotopia,’ that is, if you want to know what the norms are in any given place, interface it with a radically different space that can act as a mirror, and ‘the order of things’ in any given site will be clearly revealed. That heterotopia, you might say, is the geopolitical alignment of the contemporary Asia-Pacific region: churches that only take communion with people who believe exactly as they do are like an ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ which in contrast makes all the churches conducted by grace non-isolationist and thus connected to the global capitalist political economy like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and (to some extent) post-reform China. While these strict ideologically-driven churches are like North Korea, in other words, the rest of us in the evangelical world are more or less like the other capitalist Asia-Pacific regimes. I leave it up to your imagination to figure out who’s who on this geopolitical map.

However, to describe the state of theological malaise in this Asia-Pacific geopolitical map that stands in for the fragmentation of American evangelicalism, those interested in fine theological distinctions (as Wilson presumably is) have wandered into a sort of ‘Zen Presbyterianism,’ that is, if you are a Presbyterian (as a proud Chinglican, perhaps I might be configured as a ‘Zen Anglican’). As Jane Iwamura puts it in her startlingly incisive book Virtual Orientalism, Wilson is invoking the figure of the ‘oriental monk,’ a wandering contemplative sage who says wise things about nature and social relations that simultaneously confronts the excesses of Western capitalism while being lodged in capitalist processes as the monk has to be marketed to people as the new, hip thing in which to be interested. This is, after all, #2 on the list of Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like: ‘religions their parents don’t belong to.’ Appropriating the identity of the oriental monk for careful theological thinkers like himself, Wilson wants to tell us two things. Following the East Asian capitalist geopolitics playbook, he’d like to tell us that like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, parts of Indonesia, and parts of China, the evangelical world has capitulated to the shallowing influence of capitalism, at times deploying, as anthropologist Aihwa Ong notes, ‘Asian values’ (or in the evangelical world, ‘Christian values’) as bumper-sticker justifications for capitalist lifestyles and flexible families. Not so Wilson, though: keeping to the ancient traditions, Wilson the oriental sage is still interested in fine theological intricacies where true wisdom is to be sought. That’s where he flips the primacy of discipline over grace to grace over discipline, arguing that if that’s the case, he and Rachel Held Evans (my goodness, a feminist) could still take communion. This grace is profound, mysterious, almost impenetrable, almost like Zen.

As Edward Said noted long ago in his classic Orientalism, the space of the ‘Orient’ has long served as a heterotopic space to the occident (here, Said also thanks Foucault for the insight, though he then follows to take issue with Foucault’s anti-humanism), which in turn suggests that my earlier congratulations to Wilson might need to be qualified. After all, perhaps Wilson is simply doing what his Western canon would tell him to do, that is, when stuff gets difficult to explain, use a heterotopia, and all will become clear. The most convenient heterotopic space is the Orient, and Wilson deploys it skillfully.

Now, of course, all this is not so much offensive as much as it ultimately undermines Wilson’s case for communion where grace takes primacy over discipline. Here, Foucault might actually be more right than Said: these orientalist off-hand remarks don’t originate from Wilson, but are part of a longer epistemic movement within what can be called ‘Western Christianity.’ In two church history classes I’ve taken (I suspect this might be a common experience), for example, we were taught that arcane figures like Pseudo-Dionysius with his ‘Mystical Theology’ and via negativa were uniquely products of the ‘East’ and that the controversies between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church over the filioque clause, the primacy of Rome, and the value of negative theology were ‘cultural’ as the ‘East’ went more contemplative and the ‘West’ went more propositional. In his devastating critique of this sort of logic, J. Kameron Carter retorts that this goes all the way back to the earliest times of distinguishing Jesus from the Jews so that ‘Jesus’ became ‘Occidental’ while the ‘Jews’ became ‘oriental’ or ‘semitic,’ forcing a wedge between Christianity and the East from the get-go. The framing of Eastern Orthodoxy as ‘Eastern’ in turn is a justification of schism precisely on the grounds that the ‘East’ is heterotopic to Western Christianity.

These problems haven’t gone away in the contemporary period. Jesuit theologian Peter Phan, for example, was investigated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because it was alleged that he taught an ‘Asian negative theology’ contrary to the received teachings of the Church. This investigation’s orientalist claims still have yet to be decisively addressed by Asian American theologians who should be appalled that ‘Asian’ and ‘negative theology’ were unproblematically lumped together by Phan’s ‘occidental’ accusers, chief of whom has been the Archbishop of Baltimore, William Lori, whose Fortnight for Freedom deserves to be examined side-by-side to his inquisitorial stance toward Phan’s work. Or take another recent example in the evangelical world: the Deadly Vipers Case, a situation that surrounded a blog-based book published by Zondervan that framed sins as ‘deadly vipers’ to be attacked by the mixed-marital arts of the mortification of sin. Evangelical pastor Eugene Cho successfully launched a campaign to oppose the book’s continuation on the shelves of Christian bookstores, clarifying that this was not a vendetta against its authors, but that framing Asian Americans as the sinful ‘other’ would exacerbate racialized tensions in evangelical churches. So too, the discussion within Asian American evangelical circles around loving one’s parents without dishonouring Jesus continues to frame the conversation around orientalizing one’s Asian parents while occidentalizing the Christian faith, a premise that Baylor theologian Jonathan Tran pointed out is ultimately untenable if Asian American Christianity is to develop its own catholic expression of the faith.

In other words, Doug Wilson is not alone in using these orientalist frameworks to frame his argument; it is instead a problem that plagues much of Euro-American Christianity even within Asian American Christian circles, and its roots lie far back in the history of the church. The question one may pose, then, is this: is labeling ‘Asia,’ the ‘Orient,’ or whatever ‘other’ you might have to Western Christianity as a heterotopic space ultimately helpful for Christian communion?

My answer is no. And this, if those in positions like Doug Wilson’s have ears to hear, might be the way forward in answering the schisms that have plagued our churches. Instead of hearing the complaints of women, post-colonial peoples, and racialized minorities as emanating from a will to power and born of an unsanctified lust for immanent liberation, perhaps our cries for justice are in fact cries for communion, complaints that this table where the sacraments impart the grace of God to us remains a space of division and exclusion. If Wilson is reading this, the answer following the reading of this post is not to debate internally whether you owe Asian Americans an apology for colonizing our space to make your point, though if you were to issue this apology, we’d be happy to hear it. The proper response, however, is to critically and contemplatively reflect on our shared Christian tradition, to examine if this thread of orientalization actually has any proper place in our discourse, and to begin the long overdue process of healing schism, that the world may know the Father has sent the Son.

**Correction: an earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Wilson was a ‘homeschooling advocate.’ This error has been corrected to ‘educational advocate,’ as Wilson’s primary task has been to advocate for classical Western education in a school setting. We are grateful to our careful readers for pointing this out.

Theological Education and the Public Pastor

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academia, Academics, African American theology, Barack Obama, civil religion, civil rights, congregationalism, ecclesiology, ecumenism, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, feminist theology, gender, homosexuality, James Cone, Louie Giglio, Mark Driscoll, martyrdom, queer theology, Reinhold Niebuhr, seminary, St. Stephen, Theology

On January 22, 2013, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States of America.  The inauguration itself had been the subject of some evangelical controversy.  On January 9, Think Progress posted a sermon by Pastor Louie Giglio that he had preached in the mid-1990s. The sermon’s title said it all: “In Search of a Standard – Christian Response to Homosexuality.”

Giglio, the founder of the Passion Conferences and pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, promptly bowed out of the inauguration on January 10.  He was then ridiculed by the secular media, defended by evangelicals, and finally given The Last Word‘s “Rewrite” by progressive Catholic and MSNBC news host, Lawrence O’Donnell.

The evangelical drama wasn’t over yet.  After the Giglio débacle unfolded, Obama announced that he would put his hand on two Bibles as he took the presidential oath: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s Bible.  That went pretty smoothly.

But then, there was this tweet from within the heart of the evangelical world from Pastor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church:

Praying for our president, who today will place his hand on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does not know.

— Mark Driscoll (@PastorMark) January 21, 2013

Of course, Driscoll might contest that he could be characterized as being “the heart of the evangelical world” because he is from Seattle, but suffice it to say that it seemed like the Giglio drama was reignited. Driscoll perplexed the secular news media, was defended by fans on his social media pages (while called expletive names by others), was deconstructed by the Naked Pastor, and provoked not-a-few facepalms from Christians who deemed themselves thoughtful.  Here’s Eugene Cho, just across the bridge from Driscoll, for example:

On MLK Day, you want me to honor his legacy by responding to a privileged white dude pastor who rarely-if ever-engages civil rights? No thx.

— Eugene Cho (@EugeneCho) January 21, 2013

What was fascinating was that, in a piece completely unconnected with these incidents, the same Mark Driscoll posted a response to a young man seeking to know whether he should major in ministry during his undergraduate education.  Driscoll’s answer, using the typical Driscoll-isms of masculine appeal to “men are like trucks; they drive straighter with a load,” turned into an all-out exposé of the contemporary seminary as a debt-inflating institution with which young men exploring a ministry option should be very cautious to engage.

True as Driscoll’s advice may have been, however, I found myself wondering about Driscoll’s musings on theological education in the context of the public pastoral débacles of the last two weeks. I mean, it seems these days that it might be better to read a few books than spend money on seminary curriculum built around Scriptural exegesis, church history, systematic theology, and a few practical ministry courses, plus an internship in which you pay the seminary to work for a church. I mean, if you can teach yourself these things, why waste your money and four years of your life? But I wonder if Driscoll’s advice, as responsible as it sounds, might be short-selling his readers.

Indeed, had Driscoll himself received broader exposure and critical pedagogical guidance to a wider set of theological traditions, his critique of Obama might have been more acute. Of course, I am assuming that one receives a broad exposure to a wide array of theologies in seminary, which, from my experience as a dropout from two theological institutions, is probably not a safe assumption to make about many schools. However, there may be a case here that it is precisely pedagogical guidance to the breadth in historical and contemporary theological conversations that should be the added-value of a seminary education over reading a book and that seminaries should be making sure that they are providing this service if they aren’t doing it already.

Take, for example, a hypothetical situation in which Driscoll, instead of being only narrowly exposed to a narrow system in evangelical theology during his theological training, might have critically engaged critiques of Obama and his theological guru, Reinhold Niebuhr, launched by James Cone and Cornel West, both faculty specialists in African American theology at Union Theological Seminary. (Sure, Driscoll has occasionally confessed to reading feminist theologians and not enjoying them, but one wonders if more pedagogical guidance here would have been necessary.) West’s critique of Obama sounds eerily similar to Driscoll’s, but with a bit more teeth:

I mean, that sounds so similar to Driscoll: West is saying that if Obama does not carry out policies of justice for the least of these in poverty-stricken America, he doesn’t have a right to put his hand on a Bible that is filled with verses of justice that speaking of a God of justice in which King believed.  If West critiques Obama directly, Cone takes on Obama’s major theological influence, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his recent book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, where he suggests that being influenced by Niebuhr does not equate being rooted in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

There was, however, an important difference between Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. that partly accounts for why King became a martyr in the civil rights movement while Niebuhr remained safely confined in his office at Union Seminary teaching Christian social ethics, never risking his life in the fight for justice.  Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history–a state of perfection which no individual or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve.  For Niebuhr, Jesus’ cross was an absolute transcendent standard that stands in judgment over any human achievement.  The most we can realize is “proximate justice,” which Niebuhr defined as a balance of power between powerful collectives.  But what about groups without power?  Niebuhr did not have much to say to African Americans, a 10-percent minority, except to recommend nonviolence, which he believed might advance the cause of civil rights, while never winning full justice.  Niebuhr’s moderate view was not one to empower a powerless group to risk their lives for freedom.  That might have been why he did not talk to militant black groups or black nationalists in Harlem.  He had very little to say to them.  (James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011, p. 71.)

Yes, that sounds like Obama-style pragmatism to me too.  No, I’m not saying that Driscoll needs to become African American; that makes about as much sense as when St. Paul tells circumcised Christians not to seek to be uncircumcised (one wonders: were they really thinking about it?).  I am saying, though, that in light of Eugene Cho’s response, Driscoll might have some theological reflection to do about the connection between his neo-Reformed evangelicalism and racial justice. As radical as this may sound for an evangelical, it is not impossible.  Witness, for example, Tim Keller’s attempt that was itself a response to John Piper’s attempt:

Recalling Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s (2000) Divided by Faith, the Cone and West aficionados may wince a bit at these appeals to personal repentance and blunt critiques of ethnic churches that come out of an evangelical obsession with individual responsibility at the expense of structural forces. But come on; at least they’re trying, and maybe we should encourage them…especially by helping young clergy reflect on this in seminary.

In addition, getting back to Giglio, one wonders if a more intelligent exchange might have been had if only he had been exposed to feminist and LGBT theology during his theological training.  Indeed, the fact that Giglio felt that he had to bow out of the public stage meant that he didn’t know how to think anything else except for what the Gay Christian Network founder, Justin Lee, calls the “gay-vs.-Christian” dichotomy.

Again, in the same way that I juxtaposed Driscoll with Cone and West, I’m not saying that Giglio would have to become a feminist or LGBT theologian, or that he even needs to change his view on sexual ethics (he could remain what Justin Lee calls a “Side B” Christian).  I’m saying that if he might have had a few more tools in his theological toolbox than what he had already, that is, if he had been aware of the fabulous work out there, say, written by Patrick Cheng, James Allison, and Sister Margaret Farley (I mean, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did their thing, who in the theological world hasn’t heard of Margaret Farley), Giglio would at least know that he has to engage this stuff.  Or, on that note, what about thinking through what evangelical ethicist Lewis Smedes at Fuller has to say about homosexuality as an identity not actually being found anywhere in Scripture in the revised edition of Sex for Christians? I mean, the sermon is about “biblical standards,” which suggests that at the time, Giglio thought of homosexuality as a loose lifestyle funded by a wealthy lobby to make some kind of sexually hedonistic Epicureanism an acceptable alternate lifestyle with no real moral standards or constraints on pleasure-seeking, which in turn has to be confronted with the truth that there are moral standards and those are found in Scripture (although the moral standards bit was probably learned from Part I of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity).  I mean, whatever one’s theology of the body is, with the passage of two decades and a bit more reading, a bit more clergy development, and a bit more counseling, one should know that that portrayal was probably a tad too monolithic. Had he had a few more tools, his response to being called out by Think Progress might have at least been a little more interesting.

In other words, what I’m saying is that there is a very broad theological conversation that is happening, and that part of the point of theological education is to induct people entering ecclesial service into that dialogue. Sure, OK, some people may think I’m dreaming; after all, isn’t pastoral work about walking with the people, counseling them, providing pastoral care, being part of the major events of their lives (birth, baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral,etc.), and equipping them to live Christian lives?  Yes, it is, and part of that happens to be precisely to equip them to be the church, and part of being the church is to be in communion with the church catholic that is having these conversations. And part of the way of training young ecclesial leaders on how to get in on the conversation is pretty standard pedagogical practice: give them a road map to the literature, make it required reading, and make your assignments about critical engagement! Of course, is this how theological education currently works? Likely not. I’m just saying that it’s an imperative.

But, of course, Driscoll’s post on theological education highlights three things that probably need to change before this is possible: 1) the cost of theological education, 2) the utility of theological pedagogy that would be of added value to personal theological reading, and 3) the support of churches for young clergy pursuing theological education.  In other words, can theological education actually be available to young clergy who will likely not be able to repay their debts?  Might churches be able to pool resources, even relying on the church catholic instead of struggling along as autonomous congregations, to train young clergy?  Will seminaries be able to demonstrate that they can provide theological training that cannot be obtained by simply reading a good book by themselves?

Come to think of it, these questions may well strike at the heart of our ecclesiology.  They inquire as to whether our belief in debt forgiveness as in the Lord’s Prayer, the parables of forgiveness, and the messianic announcement of the Jubilee actually matches our practice.  They probe our models of congregational autonomy when, say, Paul’s collection for the church in Jerusalem appealed to anything but congregational autonomy; those who disagree will find 2 Corinthians a very challenging read.  They challenge our understanding of education altogether, making us wonder when information accumulation replaced the discipleship and formation that seems to have been a long point of orthopraxy in the Christian tradition (thinking beyond Paul and Timothy, for example, one finds examples in Justin Martyr, Origen, Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, Basil Moreau, etc.).

That said, the Giglio and Driscoll débacles of the past two weeks highlight once again the real problem of evangelical leaders who are thought to be able to do theology until they are challenged on theological grounds.  This is a problem because for all that is said about the persecution of Christians by a secularizing public sphere, to be martyred for less-than-informed remarks isn’t exactly how martyrdom in Scripture works, at least not in the Acts of the Apostles.  Sure, OK, out-of-context soundbites were twisted in efforts to drag Stephen, Peter, John, and Paul before synagogue leaders and the Sanhedrin. Stephen, for example, was taken brutally out of context when the Freedmen’s Synagogue said that he was telling Jewish Christians to abandon Moses.  But Stephen did not resort to whimpering about being taken out of context because he was too busy being a deacon-waiter or saying that that was not the focus of his message in the first place.  No, he faced the Sanhedrin and retold the entire tradition through the hermeneutic of the people of God embodying stiff-necked opposition to the Law and the Prophets so that they ultimately lynched the culmination of the Scriptures.  Acts 7 is actually a fascinating theological read, and ultimately, it suggests that people like Stephen were martyred because they understood the breadth of the tradition so well that they told such convincing theological stories with such an acute, subversive, and creative Christian hermeneutic that they couldn’t be silenced except by brute force.  I’m not convinced that Giglio and Driscoll have done that.

Rachel Held Evans’ “Biblical Womanhood” book

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biblical wisdom, Christianity Today, complementarian, egalitarian, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, feminist theology, Jewish-Christan relations, Kathy Keller, Rachel Held Evans, Talmud, women ordination

As my co-blogger Chinglican mentioned Wednesday, Rachel Held Evans has a new book out entitled A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  Evans is by her own account attempting to demonstrate that “biblical womanhood” is a misnomer and that the Scriptures contradict themselves on the subject of how a woman should live. “I felt as though ‘biblical womanhood’ was just a phrase being used really carelessly,” she explains in an interview with ABC News. I suspect Evans is right that plenty of people simply assume they know what “biblical” womanhood is without thinking critically; but, whether you find yourself in the complementarian or egalitarian camp on such subjects, her book might be better left alone.

In promotional materials about why she wrote the book, Evans fleshes that out: “I set out to follow all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year to show that no woman, no matter how devout, is actually practicing biblical womanhood.” The point? To foster “a fresh, honest dialogue… about biblical interpretation.”

And that’s precisely what’s wrong with Evans’ latest book. Its deliberate lack of interpretive method. Evans sets out to “follow all of the Bible’s instructions for women,” she says, but what she includes in the category of “instructions” is rather ludicrous. First off, the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament are back in force (even though they’re explicitly superseded in the New Testament, so no Christian is expected to abide by them). Kathy Keller, in an insightful review, notes wisely that Evans would have done better to “attempt to live by all the commandments the Bible genuinely addresses to Christian women, while discussing the rules of responsible interpretation along the way.” That’s not what Evans does. Rather, Evans seems to take all references to women in the Scriptures as if they were imperative—including (and this boggles my mind) narrative. Even the most basic hermeneutic principle (the description/prescription dichotomy) is simply ignored.

The resulting stick-figure of “biblical womanhood” Evans constructs is unsurprisingly easy for her to beat up on. And it’s hard to have “fresh, honest dialogue” when you’re simply ridiculing the idea that there could even be something like biblical womanhood at all.

Case in point (and this comes from a review by Douglas Wilson):

Proverbs 21:9 says this: “It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.” The ESV has quarrelsome for brawling, and the NKJV has contentious. One gets the idea. Still, it is a verse with a woman in it, and so one must do something.

What Evans did was this. Whenever she caught herself being verbally inappropriate, she put a penny in a jar, and every penny represented a minute she had to go up and sit on the roof of her house.

This is where I clear my throat tentatively, not sure I could have heard this right. But I did, and there are three obvious things that can be mentioned right off the top. First, the text says that it would be better for the husband to be up on the roof than downstairs with Rachel Held Evans when she is being bad. So what’s she doing up there?

Second, the text says nothing about penny jars, or each penny being worth one minute of penance time on the roof. Her suggested mechanism for biblical applications can be illustrated on this wise. The Bible says to be anxious for nothing (Phil. 4:6), and so what if I arbitrarily penalize myself with a minute of hopping on one foot on my front porch every time I find myself being anxious? How about that? But such hopping on one foot, waving at the traffic, is not making the apostle look silly. So we may conclude from this aspect of it that when Rachel Held Evans set up shop to teach us what the Bible says about womanhood, it took her about ten minutes to start producing Talmudic arcana and extra rules instead of straight Bible. Not only extra rules, but dumb ones.

Ouch. It’s this deliberately silly Talmud that Evans is living out in the book, Wilson suggests, not actual biblical instructions for women. At any rate, he says, “I think we have better things to do than learn about biblical womanhood from someone who is having trouble distinguishing subjects from predicates.” And then the Chestertonian-esque clincher: “This is a caliber of exegesis that thinks that Jesus went to Capernaum might mean that Capernaum went to Jesus. Who can be sure? Scholars differ on this controversial point.” You can read the whole review at Blog and Mablog.

A more serious and comprehensive review comes from Kathy Keller over at The Gospel Coalition (which I quote from briefly above). I won’t quote it all at length (you should really go read it yourself), but I will highlight Keller’s criticism of one particularly dreadful misreading Evans imposes upon the Scriptures:

Polygamy, concubinage, rape, adultery, and a host of other sins, many of them against women, truly happened and are recorded in the biblical record with unblinking faithfulness. Yet [Evans] cite[s] accounts of historical events such as Genesis 16, 30, and 35 and remark, ‘If you were a slave or concubine, you were expected to be sexually available to your master,’ as if the Bible condones this behavior.

Keller continues: “The Bible is not simply a collection of ethical principles by which to live. It is a record of human sin and of God’s intervention in history to save his people. Much of it should be read as news, just as we read the newspaper. Horrible acts are recorded in my copy of The New York Times every morning, but I don’t commit the hermeneutical error of supposing the editors of the Times are approving or endorsing such behavior.”

What’s disappointing is that Rachel Held Evans (recently recognized by Christianity Today as a leading female author/blogger in their “50 Women You Should Know” story) could have used the book to advance discussion between complementarians and egalitarians, making people on both sides think seriously about what Christian womanhood is/ought to be. Instead, she went with ridicule. And ridicule seldom brings about “open, honest dialogue.”

[As an aside: There’s been a bit of an uproar since LifeWay Christian Stores declined to carry Evan’s new book. Evans has implied/stated that’s because she used the word “vagina” in the book, and multiple groups (Slate, Religion Dispatches, Christian Piatt, The Daily Beast) have all picked up on that rather startling claim. A recent Christianity Today article fact-checks Evans’ assertion, and notes multiple books with multiple occurrences of the word “vagina” are carried by LifeWay. The article also notes that Evans has at other times publicly stated she never received a reason for why LifeWay refused to carry the book.]

———-

Note: It seems unnecessary to have to say this, but readers of blogs being what they are, I’ll be quick to point out that my quoting someone doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything they think. Take Wilson for example. I find some of what he’s written incredibly distasteful (and plain wrong), and I recently critiqued a Converge magazine article on masculinity for which he was interviewed. But his (and Keller’s) criticisms of Evans above are insightful and therefore worth considering.

We Need a Feminist Theologian (Or Maybe We Don’t)

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Alice Walker, ecumenism, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, feminist theology, John Piper, Katie Cannon, neo-Calvnist, Rosemary Ruether, womanist theology, women ordination

Today is the First Sunday of Lent, and I thought it might be a good day to issue a call for a feminist theologian who would provide some good counterpoint to the three of us men here on A Christian Thing.

Why a feminist theologian?

Because, as I learned in feminist studies, feminism in its current state isn’t solely obsessed with gender.  It has more to do with power.

I recall, for example, the opening vignettes in Rosemary Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk.  There, Jesus is portrayed as someone who comes into the world to show it that with all of its conceptions of a god of sovereign power and might, the God revealed in Jesus is one who refuses power and thus liberates us from the structures of oppression by revealing our false theologies.

Or maybe we don’t just need a feminist theologian. Maybe we need a womanist.  A womanist comes out of the black liberation tradition, a critique of the black liberation theology of James Cone for not taking into account theological reflection done from the perspective of the oppressed black woman portrayed vividly in the work of Alice Walker.

Why all this on the First Sunday of Lent?

Because of our meditations on the temptations of Jesus in the desert, the refusal to align himself with the powers to make the kingdom of God happen, the repentance from the way the world works by jockeying for power, the in-breaking of the eschatological kingdom that is constituted by love.

Part of that re-alignment has been pointed out by yet another feminist theologian, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. In Memory of Her takes its cue from Mark’s Gospel, the Gospel that we’re meditating on this Year B, to make the case that when Jesus said that the woman who washed his feet would be remembered in all proclamations of the Gospel has in fact been conveniently forgotten in a patriarchal re-constitution of Christianity.

We need a feminist theologian on A Christian Thing because we are already doing feminist theology. We are pointing out that the gendered stereotypes in conventional evangelicalism aren’t cutting it. We are demonstrating that bad theology is an alignment with the powers. We are arguing for the doing of Christian theology with the oppressed and the damned, with the depressed and the colonized, with the un-labelable and the unwanted. And we are positing that this is Christian orthodoxy because it is this that constitutes the real communion that Jesus lived with the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the “sinners.”

We are also three heterosexual men doing what could converge with trends in feminist theology. We probably could use some help, but then again, come to think of it, maybe we’re answering the call already.

Hm.

Maybe I’m mistaken to call for feminist theologians to join this blog, per se, then, as if the three of us were interested in perpetuating Christian patriarchy.

But taking up In Memory of Her, though, it might be nice if a few women joined, not least to undermine the “masculine feel” that certain neo-Calvinists might mistakenly think we are implicitly promoting by being a de facto male plurality.

A Catholic response to Driscoll-phobia

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Mark Driscoll scares Churl here on A Christian Thing. In fact, Driscoll scares a lot of people. There are blogs all over the web like Mars Hill Refuge, Wenatchee the Hatchet, and The Wartburg Watch, most of whom hint that Mars Hill Church is cult-like (a thought recently seized upon by Seattle’s independent newspaper The Stranger).

I think that debating whether or not Mars Hill is a cult is unhelpful, though, and it isn’t entirely fair to Pastor Mark either. Sure, it might give some disaffected people some comfort that they’re justified in leaving Mars Hill without “drinking the Kool-Aid.” But we should remember that Driscoll does talk about how he deals with critics; following Billy Graham’s axiom to “turn your critics into coaches” (and not Jim Jones’s path of alienation), he reads his critics, even the most critical, as helping him improve his ministry by providing “trials and tribulations” through which he can grow (James 1:2). To talk about him and his church as a cult will only read like persecution, framing Driscoll as the oppressed crying out to God for vindication.

But if we are critics coaching Driscoll, I’d like to try another tack.

I do think that Churl has inadvertently hit on a key but unexplored part of the Driscoll complex with his call to revisit Trent. You see, “the world called Catholicism,” as Stanley Hauerwas puts it (Hannah’s Child, p. 95-121), is not something foreign to Driscoll. Driscoll grew up Irish American Catholic, “the oldest of five kids in a hardworking, blue-collar Catholic family near the airport in Seattle, Washington” (Radical Reformission, 11). He describes himself as a “moral religious boy from a Catholic home who, for the most part, stayed out of trouble despite a short wick, foul mouth, and bad temper that resulted in dolling out more than a few beatings to various guys–usually for what they were doing to women and children” (Real Marriage, 6).  Besides all the quips about growing up in a church with “a gay alcoholic priest” whose “life of poverty, celibacy, living at the church, and wearing a dress was more frightful than going to hell” (Real Marriage, 8-9), he has more than once aptly demonstrated his Catholic creds for his congregation, not least during a sermon on Mary in his Luke series where he says:

I’ll say a lot today about the Catholics, because I was one. And I don’t hate the Catholics, I love the Catholics, but when it comes to Mary, that’s sort of their specialty. I was raised as a Catholic boy and I went to Catholic school. We were O’Driscoll, full-blown Irish-Catholic mix. My grandma was in a lay order of nuns pre-Vatican II. Latin Mass Catholic, I went to Catholic school. Catholic with a side of Catholic and Catholic for dessert, that’s how I was raised.

He has also been known to recite the Hail Mary for a wildly applauding congregation.

The trouble, I think, is that everybody, likely including Driscoll himself, thinks that Driscoll had a full-blown conversion to Protestant evangelicalism when the words from Romans 1:6 jumped out at him that he was “among those called to belong to Jesus Christ” (Radical Reformission, 13; Real Marriage, 8), as if Romans were a Protestant-only epistle (see below for Driscoll’s reading of Luther and Wesley).

I’m more inclined to think of him as an Irish Catholic kid in a Reformed Protestant candy store.

Here’s a thought from Harry Cronin, a Holy Cross priest who did his doctoral thesis on how American playwright Eugene O’Neill was a lapsed Irish American Catholic and who currently writes plays about redemption in alcoholic and queer experiences. Cronin argues in his doctoral thesis, Eugene O’Neill, Irish and American: a study in cultural context, that though O’Neill publicly left the faith, he couldn’t divorce himself from a Catholic imagination of Eucharist, confession, and purgatory. The same goes for his plays like Dooley, Dark Matter, and Memoirs of Jesus where Cronin always seems to highlight the redemptive truth of the human experience most manifest in Eucharistic transubstantiations in the queerest of places.

Ditto early twentieth century Irish writer James Joyce’s sacramental modernism. Joyce publicly renounced Catholicism, a shift autobiographically fictionalized in the Stephen Dedalus character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, yet in a letter to his brother, Joyce writes:

Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?…To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.

Ditto Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Lady Marchmain, the freakishly devout Catholic matriarch, is arguably worse than Driscoll’s “gay alcoholic priest who wears a dress.” And yet, one by one, each of the main characters, even the ones who have fallen the furthest from the Church because of Lady Marchmain’s overbearing conservative Catholicism, find their way back into communion because there’s just something about Catholicism they can’t shake. “I can’t shut myself out from His mercy,” one of the characters says at the end.

Ditto Jennifer Haigh’s recent 2011 bestselling Faith: A Novel, where a lapsed Irish American Catholic woman investigates in the wake of the 2002 Boston Globe Catholic sexual abuse scandal the claims that her brother, a priest in the Archdiocese of Boston, sexually molested a young boy. There is a Lady Marchmain matriarch–a conservative, rosary-praying, priest-adoring Mary McGann–whose daughter Sheila is the protagonist lapsed Catholic, whose adopted son Mike marries a Protestant and struggles alone to raise their kids Catholic despite his own lapse, and whose her birth child–Fr. Art Breen–is the investigated priest. For Haigh, the draw for Catholicism is not so much the sacramental power of the Church (as in Waugh), but rather the pull of the Mary McGann figure for the children as they discover womanhood, the guys in the women they are attracted to, Sheila in the woman she becomes. And yet it makes me wonder, the sacraments aside, if Driscoll’s Catholic family, including the lay nun, has shaped the way that Driscoll sees the place of the church in the world, not to mention also his (in)famous understanding of gender roles. Move over, John Piper.

Ditto philosopher Charles Taylor’s reading of Charles Péguy, a French political philosopher who left the faith only to return again because he just couldn’t see how he could subscribe to a notion of freedom that was continuous with the tradition of the past without returning to Catholicism. Peguy coined the term réssourcement, to go back to the sources of the past for political mobilization in the present, a term that Swiss Dominican theologian Yves Congar says became the motto of Vatican II’s re-receiving of the biblical and patristic traditions (The Meaning of Tradition, 6). Says Taylor of Péguy:

And yet it wasn’t really surprising that Péguy, “mauvais sujet” though he was, returned to Catholicism. In a sense he never left it. Péguy hankered after a time of creative action, linking different periods together, but he had an acute sense of how impossible this was to attain humanly, in fact of the seemingly irresistible slide into the mechanical and the habitual, the punctual present which is determined by the past, but no longer in living relation to it. All this pointed towards a Christian idea of eternity. (A Secular Age, 750).

To put it bluntly, could it be possible that what’s happening is that Driscoll can’t shake his Catholicism? Churl thinks that Driscoll would really benefit from re-visiting the Council of Trent, submitting his authority to the Church and her living tradition. I think that Driscoll could do some soul-searching to discover how Tridentine he already is.

Let me give some tell-tale signs:

• Mark Driscoll “sees things.” He sees his wife cheating on him in high school. He sees in lurid detail people getting abused in early childhood or having affairs. He casts out demons while doing biblical counselling, telling people with multiple personality disorders to “bring up the demon.” He tells stories of how his kids were scared in early childhood because they would hear horrible things from demons about the impending doom of the Driscoll family and church. This weirds people out. But would it weird the Catholic tradition out? With mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, and Julian of Norwich–or better yet, Bernadette Soubirous and Padre Pio–I wouldn’t think so. And so a Catholic probably wouldn’t try to discount Driscoll’s visions as fake. They’d say that he needs a spiritual director.

• Mark Driscoll is said to be “obsessed with authority” and “church discipline.” Paul Petry and Bent Meyer were fired for questioning authority. Maddening stories have emerged onto the blogosphere about how ex-members were “shunned” when they questioned the hierarchy. This shouldn’t be the way, these people cry, in a Christian church. But haven’t they heard of “fortress Catholicism,” what with Leo IX fulminating in the Vatican about papal infallibility and the errors of modernism in The Syllabus of Errors and Vatican I, with Pius XII condemning the nouvelle théologie of Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Jean Danielou, Marie Dominique-Chenu, Hans Kung, et al. for not subscribing to neo-Thomistic rationalism? Haven’t they heard of excommunications where you are “shunned” in the sense that you can’t take communion with the rest of the people of God? I’m not defending “fortress Catholicism” (or the Inquisition, for that matter), of course. In fact, in the current climate of the conservative turn of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the issue of the new Mass rites by the Vatican, I’d say that a lot of progressive Catholics are as disappointed as the Mars Hill Refuge with a shift back to the consolidation of the hierarchy. But isn’t it interesting, friends, that this Reformed Protestant non-denominational church with ostensibly zero connection to the Roman magisterium is doing the same kind of consolidation? Sure, Driscoll probably got this hierarchical idea from the “plural elder” model advocated in Wayne Grudem’s Vineyard charismatic non-denominational neo-Reformed Systematic Theology. But I still wonder if some of it is also from his Latin Rite Catholic background. Perhaps we should think of Mark Driscoll as a “bishop” or even “pope” of sorts with the “magisterium” existing not so much in the Church catholic but the church congregated. I mean this in the sincerest and least pejorative way I can.

(BY THE WAY: Neo-Thomism was a late 19th-century/early 20th-century reading of St. Thomas Aquinas that tried to extract from his work proofs for theological categories. What the nouvelle théologie, or new theology, people were trying to say was that this way of doing theology was just boring because you do a lot of abstract conceptualization to prove Christian theology right, but you don’t do much in terms of what Aquinas thought about being the Church and being captivated by God’s beauty. An example is the Eucharist. In neo-Thomistic thought, the idea was to prove that the bread and wine really transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. What Henri de Lubac critiqued was that if you look back at the Church Fathers like Augustine, they don’t really care about the bread and wine changing–it’s more of a matter of whether you change into the Body of Christ when you take them! In other words, for the nouvelle theologie, theology wasn’t so much about validating categories and proving concepts; it’s about the COMMUNION OF PERSONS!)

• Mark Driscoll preaches gender complementarity in such a way that reinforces male eldership. Catholic feminists like Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Rosemary Ruether probably wouldn’t like to hear this, as they attempt to re-read the tradition and the sacraments with a feminist preferential option for the poor, but paralleling Mars Hill, the Church also proclaims a gender complementarity of sorts in terms of saying that Holy Orders belongs to a male hierarchy. Benedict XVI actually has a very interesting reply to Fiorenza: in an interview discussing the possibility of women’s ordination, then-Cardinal Ratzinger says that even Fiorenza is saying nowadays that ordination is not what women seek because to be in an ordo is to be under submission, which is precisely not what women want (The Essential Pope Benedict XVI, 130). Maybe we should arrange for Driscoll to meet the pope.
• Mark Driscoll thinks in theological categories. On Mars Hill Refuge, this is called the “theological swordplay” of concepts that don’t seem to have much reference to Scripture. The authors of Mars Hill Refuge may be right to be distressed, but just going back to Scripture doesn’t do justice to the Mars Hill systematic theological method. Listen to or read Driscoll some time. His mind works in categories. There is a category called “sin” where there are a bunch of actions you do that are “sinful.” There is a category called “fornication” where sexual acts performed before marriage belong; after marriage, the category shifts into “visual generosity” and “loving servanthood,” complete with a taxonomy drawn from 1 Corinthians 6 categorizing sexual acts as “lawful,” “beneficial,” and “enslaving.” There is a category called “religion,” which apparently sucks and doesn’t save from the category called “sin,” and there is a category called “Jesus,” whose categorical “penal substitutionary” atonement both categorically “propitiates” the Father’s categorical wrath and categorically “expiates” the dirtiness felt by those categorized as “abuse victims.” Driscoll’s theology works with frozen categorical concepts, and doesn’t that sound just like the neo-Thomistic rationalism that Hans Urs von Balthasar hated so much that he put wax in his ears while listening to lectures in his Jesuit seminary? In fact, if Driscoll was wanting to get out of his frozen concepts and yet keep his strong emphasis on the cross and Christ, he could give von Balthasar’s dramatic understanding of theology a try, either in Mysterium Paschale or, if Driscoll had some time on a sabbatical, in Theo-Drama.
• Sola Scriptura though he might claim to be, Mark Driscoll does use the Tradition in his theological method, that is, in the sense that “sex is gross” (Real Marriage, 114-118). He sees the Reformation myth of Luther marrying Katie von Bora, the monk who wrote On Monastic Vows as a critique of special vocations and marrying a nun to boot, as the liberating moment from the Catholic “killjoy” Church raining on the sex parade (Real Marriage, 19-23); that said, speaking Protestant-ly, he doesn’t quite know what to do with another moment in evangelical history, that is, the tragic marriage of John Wesley, a.k.a. the itinerant preaching founder of Methodism who was converted by “a strange warmth” when he heard Luther’s Romans being read (Real Marriage, 97-99). (Following the Protestant Romans riff on sex and marriage, one wonders what he would have done with Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum’s non-marriage.) Driscoll also reads the Tradition’s emphasis on sex as procreative as suggesting that sexual pleasure is gross and sinful, and to wit, he quotes a Canadian Catholic bishops’ statement on chastity and procreative sex as the definitive word from the magisterium that “sex is gross” (Real Marriage, 116). Apparently, he doesn’t have much time for Augustine’s understanding of “concupiscence,” that sin sometimes is when you have too much of a good thing (which is a theme that John of the Cross interestingly carries into The Ascent of Mount Carmel where he says that too much spiritual reading is spiritual gluttony). But whether or not he gets concupiscence or not, Driscoll’s one major critique of the Church is just not entirely fair to the Tradition on sex, period. He doesn’t say anything about Humanae Vitae or Evangelium Vitae; conservative (and controversial) as these encyclicals are for their denunciation of contraception, their conservatism is actually based on a fairly intricate argument that sex is about unitive love in the way that God is love, and that is pretty pleasurable. Besides, for reasons that will become apparent below, Driscoll might actually really like these documents for their discussion of abortion and potential abortifacient contraception. But on the “sex is gross” thing, John Paul II does say in the Theology of the Body catecheses that he wants the Catholic faithful to see that “our human experience is in some way a legitimate means for theological interpretation” (TOB 4.4). Doesn’t that mean that, irony of ironies, Driscoll has some support from the magisterium for his promulgation of sex for unitive pleasure?
• Mark Driscoll has a fairly strong Mariology, which leads him to some fairly Catholic sexual ethical positions. Driscoll had a really blunt statement on the Virgin Birth for John Piper’s Desiring God conference on Christianity and post-modernity: “If the virgin birth of Jesus is untrue, then the story of Jesus changes greatly; we would have a sexually promiscuous young woman lying about God’s miraculous hand in the birth of her son, raising that son to declare he was God, and then joining his religion. But if Mary is nothing more than a sinful con artist then neither she nor her son Jesus should be trusted. Because both the clear teachings of Scripture about the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life and the character of his mother are at stake, we must contend for the virgin birth of Jesus Christ” (The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, 136). Driscoll’s denial of the Perpetual Virginity, the Assumption, and the Immaculate Conception aside (and don’t bring up “Co-Mediatrix”–remember, he thinks he’s Reformed!), this is pretty much the fairly standard Catholic (*cough*, “ecumenical”) idea that you don’t have Jesus as God and Man without a mother. This leads to a fairly strong anti-abortion stance. Aside from claiming Catholic creds, it is also telling that his sermon for the Luke series on Mary and Elizabeth was about abortion and his conversion from being pro-abortion in high school as a lapsed Catholic to being a Reformed Protestant pro-lifer who sees abortion as murder. It’s also interesting, good Catholic that Driscoll is, that while he’s supportive of non-abortive birth control measures, he converges with the magisterium in calling “the Pill” a potentially abortive contraceptive device because one of its three functions is “that it seeks to disrupt the ongoing life of a fertilized egg” (Real Marriage, 197). One could make the case, of course, that in general, Catholics and Protestant evangelicals are on the same team against abortion; witness, for example, even Stanley Hauerwas’s support for the generally fundamentalist Operation Rescue, and to boot, there is a whole spectrum within Christianity as to why we’re opposed to abortion, from the people who think of Mary as a symbol of virgin Church power that Rosemary Ruether critiques in Sexism and God-Talk to the more moderate Consistent Life Ethic fans of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s collegial reconciliation of conservative and progressive Catholics. But to make the jump from the Mary and Elizabeth story to abortion? That’s a move worthy of the conservative end of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
• Believe it or not, Mark Driscoll has a “preferential option for the poor,” especially women and children who have been abused. This should be a compliment to the unintentional Catholic genius of Driscoll because unlike the Church with its sexual abuse fiasco, Driscoll is encouraging people with abuse histories in his church (including his wife) to talk openly about them because they are the poor and the marginalized. He’s doing precisely what Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston had trouble doing, not to mention also what the Vatican had trouble doing during its long delay in investigating the claims that the founder of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi, Fr. Marcial Maciel, was a serial sex offender. What’s Driscoll doing right by the Church? Letting the victims speak out of a preferential option for them, not shifting around the hierarchy that perpetrated the abuse. (Mind you, we’re talking about sexual abuse here, not the disaffected ex-members on the Mars Hill Refuge discussing church discipline abuse.) In fact, going back to Cardinal Bernardin (who was the Chicago archbishop incidentally cleared of all sex abuse charges and is not to be confused with the Boston archbishop Bernard Law that is pictured below), this preferential option for the abused isn’t just a Consistent Life Ethic–it’s a Consistent Sex Ethic from womb (anti-abortion and anti-abortive contraception) to tomb (sex abuse victims and sexual abuse perpetrators, speak out and confess!). In so doing, Driscoll is also trying to re-imagine what it would be like to be in a patriarchal community, that the hierarchy serves the laity in helping them confess their sexual sin and be free to have free married sex. This too, I submit, is a very Catholic idea that goes back to Gregory the Great, “the servant of the servants of God.” While Rachel Held Evans would critique this as unqualified sex therapy, in Driscoll’s world, it would seem that such is the nature of servanthood to the least of these.

In short, Driscoll isn’t just any kind of Catholic, if he were to be labeled as such. He sounds more like a conservative Vatican I neo-Thomistic “fortress Catholic” whose theological method interestingly might converge with that of his pre-Vatican II grandmother. The trouble is that because Driscoll is so brash about his Reformed inclinations, we too are inclined to read him through Protestant lenses. That’s why there are calls for transparency, democratization, and the abandonment of what many people call the “cult” of the Mars Hill world. These are very Protestant, if not secular, terms.

But if there’s anything I take away from the stories of Péguy, Joyce, O’Neill, and Waugh, it’s that there is something humorous about “fortress Catholicism.” It’s this: much as you revolt, revolutionize, and reform against all of the authoritarianism, patriarchy, and sacramentalism of the whole thing, if you’ve been in it, you can’t shake it. I would submit that–far from being a cult (unless you’re with Walter Martin in The Kingdom of the Cults where everything that isn’t his brand of Protestant fundamentalism is a cult)–Mars Hill should be credited as a congregational microcosm for what the Catholic Church has looked like–good, bad, and ugly–because of the inadvertent Irish Catholicism of its key founder (one wonders if Lief Moi and Mike Gunn had similar backgrounds). Indeed, though Mars Hill was founded as independent, non-denominational, non-liturgical, and sola Scriptura, what’s funny about the whole thing is that it all sounds very fortress Catholic.

So perhaps the critics should not be calling for democratization at Mars Hill, as if it were really a Protestant church. What they can’t seem to see is that Mars Hill is more Catholic than they think. It may follow, then, that what they want is a Vatican II. But Driscoll’s got that one too: it was called “bylaw revisions and elder restructuring.” Just like it was across the Tiber, sounds like the progressives here also got the stiff end of the rope from this reform.

A better tack, then? Give Driscoll a break and a new reading list. Put some Péguy, Joyce, Waugh, O’Neill, and Chesterton on there. Throw in some Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, and Shusaku Endo. Make him read and re-read Haigh’s Faith. Get him the full set of von Balthasar’s triptych to wean him off neo-Thomism while preserving a vital Christo-centrism. Make him learn French so that he can be blown away by de Lubac’s Surnaturel. Let him discover ressourcement as he reads up on Yves Congar’s Tradition and Traditions and Lay People in the Church. If he’s into doing theology from the perspective of the abused, maybe add a womanist theologian, say, Katie Cannon, or staying consistently Catholic, there’s the legendary Toni Morrison. Give our brother some mystical breathing space and maybe hook him up with a spiritual director. And finally, suggest the RCIA in the parish down the street.