Chinglican Christianity: Sanctorum Communio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The people always respond: Thanks be to God.

Dispatches from the War on Christmas 2012

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Benedict XVI, Charles Taylor, Christmas, culture wars, ecumenism, First Things, Hannukah, IHOP, Jewish-Christan relations, Jon Stewart, Maccabees, N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart, Reform impulse, secular, secularization, Stephen Colbert, War on Christmas

I’ve heard an awful lot this Advent season and Christmas octave about keeping “Christ” in “Christmas.”  Blame it on me, maybe, for being a religious studies guy hanging around evangelical circles, but I swear, it’s more than the local churches with the signboards (or in the suburb where I live, the IHoP) displaying a sign with said call to conserve Christ in Christmas. Everybody seems to be talking about it: local pastors decrying the decay of secularism, worship leaders sermonizing before they lead their worship set, whispers among the laity about how terrible public schools are for disemboweling the season of any meaty references to the Incarnation.

Sure, keeping Christ in Christmas has been a staple of the “war on Christmas” that Fox News alleges to have been happening in a secular(izing) West.  I say “alleged” because Jon Stewart has a fairly convincing refutation of the notion.

But apart from pulpit thundering in evangelical churches and pundits on Fox News, the battening down of the hatches for the Christ child seems to have been an in-house affair.

This year, though, it seems like even that house is falling apart, for not only is there a secular war on Christmas, but a theological one.

First Things first. As Churl noted (and I commented recently), Peter Leithart thinks that we should not only keep the Christ in Christmas, but the canticles there too, songs like the Benedictus Deus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis that he thinks no Christian knows. One wonders, of course, how the Divine Office app keeps on getting voted About.com Readers’ Choice Awards’s “Best Catholic Website, Podcast, and Mobile App” yearly if that really is the case.  No matter, though, for Jeffrey Barbeau has written a rejoinder to Leithart, attempting to put the supposedly denuded Christmas hymns in the violent context of the English Reformation and Civil War.

For both Leithart and Barbeau, the Grinch who stole Christmas is none other than biblical theologian N.T. Wright, who seems to have been right about everything ever since his NT tomes hit seminary bookstores in the early 1990s. For Leithart, it’s Wright’s historical scholarship that has thankfully stolen Christmas away from the allegedly inane, apolitical songs we sing about the Christ child, no crying he makes. For Barbeau, Wright is a bit more of a bogeyman in Leithart’s hands, forgetting the political violence of early modern England because he doesn’t tune into BBC’s The Tudors. Move aside, John Piper: the Reformation has a new anti-Wright defender.

Either way you look at it, the central theological problem here is Wright on history: what happens to theology when you put the messiness and violence of historical reconstruction back into the picture?

And that brings us to the Holy Father. With the release of the third installment of Jesus of Nazareth on the infancy narratives, Pope Benedict XVI has been met with wild protest about how he, like Wright, has stolen Christmas. Secular protest about his historiographical method aside (courtesy of The Guardian), Vox Nova has a very interesting post on Benedict’s view of history that makes him sound eerily similar to Wright. The Bishop of Rome may affirm the historicity of the infancy narratives, but like Wright, it would seem, the affirmation of history in and of itself has played into a theological war over how political Christmas should be. Add to all of this L’Osservatore Romano‘s statement on how same-sex couples live in an “alternate reality,” and we find the pontiff in the real Grinch-y pickle of fighting the secular powers that be with the weapons of Christmas.

Wright, Leithart, Barbeau, the pope, his detractors, and First Things may all be stuff sophisticated Christians like these days. I mean, we must be smarter than the masses of co-opted American Tea Party fundamentalist-evangelicals clamoring for Christ in public Christmas pace Bill O’Reilly. But really, if this is what I’m reading this year in First Things, I don’t see much here that’s different from Fox News’s War on Christmas.

After all, Charles Taylor would call all of these skirmishes over the Christ in Christmas–be it his existence, his presence, or his nature–an “impulse to Reform” a “rage for order.”  The idea, as Taylor outlines it, was that in late medieval Christendom, there were a series of “reforms” where spiritual “elites” attempted to purify the practices of the masses and bring them to a higher form of spiritual intensity.  These reforms, as Taylor shows, looked like things as diverse as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Protestant Reformation(s), and the formation of Calvinist city-states in early modern Europe.

What’s hilarious in Taylor’s account is that it’s precisely this impulse that led to the secularization process in the first place. As Taylor reads it, this “rage for order” coincided with the development of “civility” in early modern Europe where states tried to discipline would-be citizens to be able to directly participate in the workings of a civil society.  This created a sphere of action where some practices could be thought of as merely “natural” without any “supernatural” engagement, and in time, the conditions of belief changed such that there wasn’t much of a need to consider spirituality seriously in the public sphere, although private fascination with individual spiritualities where you’re on this quest to find personal fulfillment would always “cross-pressure” this emphasis on the immanent. Give these cross-pressures enough time, Taylor hints, and these new religious subjectivities will begin to contest the very meanings of secularity.

And this brings us back to the plethora of theological views on the War on Christmas. What’s fascinating about all of them is that they are all strangely modern and can even wear the odd secular costume. Give Wright, the Holy Father, and Fox a little read, for example, and what you might find is that at stake is a fairly modern understanding of history, be it Wright’s critical realism, Benedict’s historical criticism, or O’Reilly’s rights of the religious majority. I mean, it’s perfectly OK if Wright wants the prodigal son of history to come home to the older brother of theology. But can we “sophisticated” modern historian-theologians all please remember that maybe we shouldn’t be behaving like secular academics and pundits at Christmas?

So in the spirit of Leithart, maybe I can suggest something both radical and old-fashioned at the end here, courtesy also of N.T. Wright. Anyone who has managed to actually read The New Testament and the People of God will be struck by how prominent a role the Maccabees play in Wright’s narrative. Moreover, anyone who has been following the daily mass readings leading up to Advent will have gotten an earful from the Maccabees in the first readings.

But what Wright notes about the Maccabees in relation to Jesus’ theology of the Kingdom of God was that Jesus upended the Maccabbean ideal of a messianic warrior with a “double revolution,” confronting the will to power in both Jew and Gentile, enacting a kingdom founded on a different ontology altogether. (OK, sorry, I stole “double revolution” from tome #2: Jesus and the Victory of God.)

And that brings us back to Jon Stewart. In 2008, Stewart asked Stephen Colbert if he could interest him in the Maccabbean celebration, Hannukah. In light of Wright’s analysis, there is a bit of irony here. Christmas, the coming of Christ with his proclamation of a new kingdom of God, once upended Hannukah’s ideals. But if Christmas is now a site of modern religious contestation, perhaps it’s also time to start thinking about who the collateral damage of such a war might be. Jon Stewart has already said his piece. Maybe it’s time for more of us to start singing this song.

can i interest you in hannukah? from camille c on Vimeo.

Peter Leithart, N. T. Wright, and the True Meaning of Christmas

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Advent, Christ, Christian, Christmas, Dr. Seuss, First Things, gnostic, God, how nt wright stole christmas, N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart

There are a variety of variations on the story. A character or group of characters are fixated on the material aspects of Christmas – what they will get as gifts etc. And then a crisis happens and these characters discover the “true meaning” of Christmas.  In Christian stories, this usually involves hearing the story of Christ’s birth, and pagan renditions tell us that the true meaning of Christmas is love. Both versions can be done successfully; Charlie Brown Christmas brilliantly avoids schmaltz through the ever depressed title character, Veggie Tales’ Toy That Saved Christmas brilliantly captures the near demonic frenzy that occurs around Christmas over absurd toys that have no reason to be popular, and Dr. Seuss’s Grinch is a well told rendition of the pagan version.

However, for Christian hipster types, the “true meaning of Christmas” thing is kind of overdone.  And the new popular thing is to turn to Advent.  Please don’t misunderstand me.  I love Advent.  It is one of the most precious things things God has discovered to me in my journey from low to high church.  And it is precisely because I love both Advent and Christmas that I need to call out a hipster-type Christianity that appropriates Advent via a postmodern tradition lite as an “alt, indie” way of celebrating the season.

I was particularly struck by this as I read Peter Leithart’s reflection on N. T. Wright, Advent, and Christmas.  Once upon a time, the narrative goes, there was a Bible that had some pretty powerful political things to say.  It stirred people up for a while, but then somewhere along the line someone lost the story and started thinking about sin and heaven and victory over Satan at Christmas instead.  And so we were left with only a partial understanding of Christmas – until one day a man named N. T. Wright was born to us and told us the true meaning of Christmas, that it was about politics and this-worldly stuff. And also that there should be no jollity; that we must be rid of any of those joyful festive parodies (such as  Twelfth Night, Christmas miracle stories etc.) that serve as foils for the real heavenly miracle and joy of Christmas; these are replaced by the earnest and dour voices of a certain kind of Protestant doing what he does best – protesting and politicking in a very grave religious way without the least crack of a smile.

The prior paragraph is a bit tongue in cheek, but it does in fact summarize some of the main problems I have with this article.  First, the article is exaggerated.  As if compensating for all those years of not having celebrated Advent, Leithart aggressively attacks certain aspects of Christmas tradition.  Now, I wouldn’t mind this so much if he simply critiqued Christmas commercialism, but he critiques things like joy, heaven, salvation from sin, Christ as the new Adam, and conquering the devil.  And the problem I have with this is, though limiting the season to these qualities is somewhat narrow, sidelining their association with the birth of Christ cuts against nearly all Christian tradition that I know of.

Leithart (and presumably Wright) here speak as if these things were mere inventions of modernity.  They are not, and so when Leithart sidelines them, he goes against much of the tradition of the Christian Church.  Of course, perhaps Leithart thinks that the Church went fairly wrong fairly early.  But he, and those agreeing with him, should be aware that in accepting his argument they are accepting an ecclesiology that sees the Church going wrong very soon after the time of Christ and being finally redeemed when N. T. Wright recently rediscovered it.  For though medieval and early modern Christians did use the language of politics in their interpretation of the Bible – Israel etc. – the more important thing this language was always understood to signify was a spiritual reality – yes, joy, heaven, salvation from sin, and beating the devil.

Leithart seems to accuse these traditions of being gnostic – paying too little attention to the earthly reality – but the curious reality is that a good portion of those who originally condemned gnosticism in its initial heretical form would in fact disagree with Wright’s and Leithart’s emphasis; though worldly particulars are important as a vehicle, the more important things are the spiritual things gestured toward – and this is not gnosticism, but what Christians, Protestant and Catholic, have believed for a good long time.  I understand why theologians like Leithart and Wright feel the need to speak as they do in a culture that has lost the ability to imagine a spiritual realm higher than yet not in competition with an earthly materiality (as in Dante’s Paradiso). The problem is that Leithart and Wright accept modernity’s either/or thinking, and choose earth over heaven, rather than trying to keep both.  There are four senses of Scripture, and here Leithart finds them in competition rather than in divine coordination, as they are.

The second issue is that I’m not exactly certain what Leithart means by a turn back to a political read on the Christmas story – to me, it frankly sounds joyless and wearying. I look at post upon post of hackneyed and simplistic political fluff on Facebook, and find fifty different ways to change the world, convenient automations that save us from the business of actually caring, which in fact involves listening, researching, and bothering with something more than cheap and clever punch lines. Of the making of many politics there is no end…

In fact, one might argue that it is precisely in such a politics-weary context that Christ came. And what made him different than the other messiahs was the fact that his kingdom was not of this world.  Of course this makes people mad in the political realm (and it would seem in the theological realm, too), and it makes people like Caesar mad enough to kill.  But saying that Caesar must kill Christ and His church for not being the world does not seem to be what Leithart’s article gestures toward, but rather a version of Advent that is the new Christian hipster form of political activism – an activism that seems to think it is up to us and our efforts to save Christianity and God’s world, and that places a huge burden on the theologian who must heft the burden of a completely revisionist theology while avoiding the traps of modernity-driven Evangelicalism as well as the “errors” of traditionalism.

Of course, God is perfectly capable of saving his Church without the shouting of someone like Leithart.  As my friend Chinglican noted on Facebook, the programme that Leithart advocates as such a radical and innovative project at the end of his reflection is hundreds of years old in liturgical traditions, and probably even practiced by people you know, too humble to shout about it in the obnoxious Advent-will-change-the-world tone of Leithart.  Of course, God will change the world and so will liturgy without regard for what people like Leithart do or do not say.  But if they want to be part of this in a way other than that of the prophets Jonah or Balaam, it might help them to stop protesting so much about Advent as the new secret weapon for an alternative and forward thinking church, and instead start grinding down their individualism on a liturgy that teaches them that they are dust destined for glory in Christ who gifts them in His Church with a holy anonymity that makes them ever more themselves.