Chinglican Christianity: The Personal Is Not Private

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Alastair Sterne, Anglican, Christian privilege, church, confession, Douglas Todd, Justin Welby, Michel Foucault, performativity, private, public, sexuality, St. Peter's Fireside

After four posts responding to the first four points of Douglas Todd’s account of ‘liberal Christianity,’ St. Peter Fireside’s lead pastor Alastair Sterne has gotten to the one that could explode in their faces in an uncontrollable ball of flame.

Sorry, couldn't help it!

Todd’s description of these explosive ‘sex-related’ items as ‘abortion, homosexuality, and not-so-hot-button items’ is more of a reference to what ‘liberal Christians’ might think of these items: no-brainers that ‘conservative Christians’ allegedly use to turn the clock back in the Dark Ages. Churl will appreciate the medievalism in that last statement. In Todd’s words:

Unfortunately, “hot-button” sex-related issues always draw the most intense media attention. Journalists generally focus on how conservative Christians go against the secular grain in opposing abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, divorce, sex outside marriage and contraception. Liberal Christians, on the other hand, have different degrees of openness to all these things, as well as to euthanasia.

In Todd’s word, ‘liberal Christians’ are allied with a secular agenda to liberalize sexuality. By contrast, ‘conservative Christians’ are conceptualized as going ‘against the secular grain’ in their lack of ‘openness to all these things, as well as to euthanasia.’

You could say that Sterne’s reply is an attempt to defuse the bomb. Echoing Todd’s ‘unfortunately,’ Sterne attempts to move the conversation about sexuality away from the media because for Sterne, the media broadcasting of these issues reduces conversation to soundbites and continues to marginalize those who still experience ‘pain’ from the overly public conversation. Sterne proposes that the proper place to do theology around these explosive issues is within the church, where pastoral care can be provided for people who are hurting. In this way, each person’s individual struggles can be dealt with individually, confidentially, and privately, and each person can be directed personally to find his or her (or xyr) journey converging with the matrix of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I recognize that Sterne’s ‘public theology’ is very much a work in progress. Check this out:

I am not against public theology, but problems arise when that public discourse happens in the media. When it comes to abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, divorce, sex outside marriage, contraception or euthanasia we are always talking about individuals.  These people — made in the image of God — have stories more complicated and beautiful than soundbites can capture. We’re talking about people who need theology that can meaningfully meet them as they are and where they are, which is precisely what we all need. With no disrespect to the media, this simply cannot be found through that medium (nor on a blog for that matter!). The limitations of the medium can unintentionally dehumanize the people of “the issues.”

This, not the hot-button ‘sex-related’ issues, is the crux of Sterne’s argument. Some might say that it’s a cop-out, a way of addressing controversy without taking on the issues head-on.

I don’t. But I do think that Sterne contradicts himself about ‘public theology.’

It is difficult to understand, for example, the meaning of the sentence: ‘I am not against public theology, but problems arise when that public discourse happens in the media.’ What could this possibly mean? If ‘public discourse’ does not happen in the ‘media,’ then where does it happen? If one is not against public theology but is against public theology happening in the media, then how is one not against public theology? If one finds both the media and blogging problematic, then why does one take the time to address Douglas Todd’s media representation of ‘liberal Christianity’ on a blog?

This contradiction of views about the ‘public’ becomes even stranger when Sterne applies it to ‘the church.’ Arguing that ‘the medium through which people can encounter theology sturdy enough for the roads they’re traveling is the church,’ Sterne calls for the revitalization of the spiritual practice of ‘pastoral care.’ Sterne implies that ‘pastoral care’ is private because ‘this ancient practice requires trust,’ which ‘won’t be developed in overly condoning or condemning soundbites.’ Citing Aelred of Rievaulx’s Pastoral Prayer, Sterne makes a very strong case that denominational formulas about the hot-button issues ‘does not mean it [a denomination or church] knows where to stand with a person.’

The problem with conflating ‘the church’ with the private practice of ‘pastoral care,’ though, is that the ‘church’ is a public assembly. As New Testament professor Sam Tsang emphasizes over and over and over again on his blog, the word ekklesia simply referred to an assembly, a gathering of the city’s people to build the polis. The early Christians adopted the word ekklesia to refer to the gathered assemblies of the people brought together by Jesus Christ to build the city of God in the various cities of the Roman Empire — and beyond. Cross-referencing Dom Gregory Dix’s Shape of the Liturgy where he argues that these gatherings could be analyzed as ‘private’ before they became ‘public’ under Constantinian rule simply won’t do, either. If one follows Dix, what could be said to be private about the early ekklesiai was the Eucharistic liturgy, where those who had not yet been baptized would be sent away before those in Christ partook in the Body and the Blood of Christ. That’s not what Sterne is talking about, though. Sterne is talking strictly here about pastoral care and its location within the practices of the church, the publicly gathered people in the name of Jesus Christ.

Now, it is true that there came to be developed a very confidential practice in the life of the Christian church: confession. It’s so confidential that there are both canon and civic laws around the confidentiality of confession. Roman Catholic priests speak of the ‘seal,’ the absolute secrecy of everything that penitents confess to them, so much so that they practice simply forgetting all the juicy material that they are told. In Canada, confession in non-liturgical contexts went to court, all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1991, to determine whether everything confessed to a pastor could be confidential in a court of law. The answer was no – for example, murder confessed to a pastor outside of the sacramental context of confession — which, in a non-liturgical and non-sacramental context doesn’t exist — is fair game for the secular courts. So too, the whole craziness of the child sex abuse scandals that hit the Catholic Church and is now coming down through the evangelical pipeline has resulted in a requirement to let the civic authorities know whenever such crimes are perpetrated. Finally, even though confessions are themselves confidential, the example of even Pope Francis going to confession before serving as a confessor demonstrates that confession is not just about the individual but about the people of God getting right with God as a people. This makes sense in a big way: the whole idea of confession as a sacramental practice comes from the medieval penitentials that prescribed rites for confession and absolution — rites that, by the way, made their way into Protestantism via the Book of Common Prayer and in the current alternative service books — which again means that the point of confession is not a ‘me and God’ thing, but a ‘people of God’ thing.

In other words, while it might be wise for pastoral care to be confidential, the point is that it’s never private. In some ways, confession is a public act, not in the sense that all your secrets get spilled to the public, but in the sense that the city of God is built on confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

The trouble is that Sterne seems to think that the ecclesial public has always been separated from the secular public in which the press works. In a collection of essays on religion, critical theorist Michel Foucault observes that these publics are really both based on ‘confession.’ The only difference is that while the ecclesial public prescribed confession for Christians as a path by which humans are united to God, the state has elicited confessions to exert its subjugating power over citizens, especially by getting citizens to govern themselves (this is what Foucault famously called ‘governmentality’). What’s even more complicated is that this confessional state has often used the church as its arm of moral regulation: in Canada, the story has become familiar in the First Nations residential schools, anti-buggery laws, and the contested legacy missionary attempts in various Chinatowns. That the term ‘Christian privilege’ is the talk of the town in educational circles in British Columbia suggests not an anti-Christian orientation on the part of radical secular activists, but the need to talk about the effects of the past on the present when it comes to the church’s complicity in making a certain kind of Canadian governmentality.

The trouble is that even though the church’s fall from privilege might actually help the church to stop getting co-opted by the state, this process isn’t exactly happening quietly. In each of the examples that Todd raises — abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, other ‘not-so-hot-button’ issues — journalists have been drawn to portrayals of conservative Christians as they have contested government policy positions, attempting to retain its pastoral power over the state.

But if the church were in fact to be the church, what Sterne might propose may not be pastoral care, but ecclesial performativity. As ‘classical Christians’ insist that they have been against abortion from the beginning — say, by rescuing infants in the Roman Empire from parents who abandoned them — theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has insisted that a truly pro-life stance requires that the church live out an alternate society in which abortion would be made unnecessary, not simply to require the state to outlaw it. Such a church would provide an environment in which having children could actually be imaginable in today’s flexible economy. Having understood St. Augustine’s City of God as framing the arrogant city of the pagans as founded on rape culture (think Lucrece in Rome), such a church would work tirelessly in solidarity with feminist activist groups to contest rape culture — which means that we should have heard churches speaking out when Rehtaeh Parsons’s suicide broke in the news and when Canadian universities’ orientation days featured underage rape chants. If indeed there is a case to be made for euthanasia about ‘quality of life,’ then if our churches really do oppose it, our churches must be welcome spaces for the disabled, the critically ill, the mentally challenged, and the aged. In much of this, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has provided a remarkable model. Without backing down from some of the socially conservative statements that the Church of England’s House of Bishops has made, Welby has gone out of his way to meet with LGBTQ+ activists and making statements that ‘we must have no track with any sort of homophobia,’ even going to lengths to get anti-homophobia curriculum into British schools.

In other words, Sterne may be correct to say that the media only tends to report ‘soundbites,’ but if the church were to actually speak a truly public theology, it would have to be through actions, not words. This is because at the end of the day, theology is performative — it isn’t so much about what we say and think, but what we do, that demonstrates who the God is in whom we claim to live and move and have our being. Given the public assembly of the ekklesia, the performances of the church, right down to the acts of confession, are never private acts. They are public, indicating to the world what the Christian church in fact believes about love for neighbours and enemies and the seeking of the common good.

It is on that public note that we look forward to what Sterne will say about the ancient spiritual practices in his sixth installment.

Chinglican Christianity: Infallibility Is Political

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Alastair Sterne, authority, Catholic, church, Douglas Todd, inerrancy, infallibility, politics, private sphere, public, St. Peter's Fireside

Stuff circulates when you’re having a good time. Over the last day or so, my Chinglican response to St. Peter’s Fireside’s ten-part response to Douglas Todd’s 10-point primer on ‘Liberal Christianity’ has circulated back to its author, Mike Chase. He has graciously responded in a comment in the previous post. I have not yet had time to respond – apologies to Mike, as I do plan to get back. Douglas Todd has also now read my post – I should apologize to him also for not realizing that he was being ‘coy’ about whether he himself was a ‘liberal Christian.’ Fair points all around.

And yet, as the Gospel song says, ‘This great caravan keeps on rolling along.’ And so, without disappointment, St. Peter’s Fireside’s lead pastor Alastair Sterne has now issued his response to Todd on the ‘Bible as history and metaphor.’ Here are Todd’s words:

We take the Bible seriously, but not literally.” That’s a phrase heard often among liberal Christians. They follow Bible scholars like Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and David Lull in viewing the Bible as a mix of history, myth, metaphor and poetry. They have long supported independent, critical study of the Bible. They recognize scripture was written by God-inspired humans, limited by time and context. Liberal Christians accept the Bible may include mistakes.

Sterne also seems to have read my post. Attempting a nuanced treatment of biblical scholarship, Sterne insists (along with Chase in a comment on yesterday’s post) that when he argues for ‘biblical infallibility,’ he is arguing a ‘truly Catholic and classical position,’ not the sort of narrow Anglo-American ‘evangelicalism’ that Chase outlines in his comment through what’s known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral, i.e. historian David Bebbington’s four-part definition of ‘evangelicalism’ as encompassing ‘biblicism, activism, conversionism, and crucicentrism’ (if you like polygons, wait till I tell you about the Larsen Pentagon from The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology). Citing church fathers like St. Clement of Rome and St. Augustine, Sterne argues over against a view of Scripture as only history and metaphor that the Bible must be treated as revelation. This means, he contends, that Scripture isn’t limited by historical context and isn’t subject to the whims of the reader; it stands over its readers and judges them, and it ultimately finds its culmination in the Word made flesh.

In many ways, I appreciate what Sterne is doing here. I’m glad, for example, that he and his colleagues now seem to be dealing more seriously with the implication that they’ve used the word ‘classical,’ not ‘evangelical.’ As one commenter I read somewhere said, ‘I wish Seattle were this theologically alive. But it’s intent on being cool.’ In many ways, I agree with this backhanded compliment to Vancouver, which has a public sphere that is not stupid. It’s the public sphere that is forcing St. Peter’s Fireside to clarify why they are using ‘classical’ instead of ‘evangelical,’ for changing a word without altering a theology raises more suspicious eyebrows than it calms fears in a putatively post-Christian Pacific Northwest. As our Catholic friends would say, it is right and just.

But, frankly, I’m still not entirely satisfied that Sterne has fully sussed out the term ‘classical’ by pairing it with biblical infallibility. That’s because using the word ‘infallible’ and then claiming an unbroken classical Christian heritage still doesn’t speak to how politically contested ‘infallibility’ is. That’s because whenever the word ‘infallible’ is used in ‘classical’ Christianity, we’re talking about politics.

 

It shouldn’t be shocking for anyone who has hung out in Christian churches of whatever variety to hear that the church is a political institution. As St. Augustine describes it, this is because there’s a city of God to be built, a polis premised on love instead of power, which means, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it, that the church is itself a politics. This, of course, has long had local expressions going back to the beginning of the Christian movement (back when we were still called ‘the Way’!), with local assemblies of Christians gathering in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, etc., and the way that these assemblies — these ekklesiai, from which we get the word church — saw themselves relating to each other was through their overseers — their episkopoi, from which we get the word bishop. As the bishops across the different churches were in communion with each other, these churches were catholic, that is, all the local expressions saw themselves as united in the universal practice of what it means to be God’s people in Jesus Christ.

It’s from the church catholic that we get the canon of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. That’s because of the many things that these assemblies did in their gatherings (e.g. eat bread and drink wine together, greet each other with holy kisses, baptizing people, singing spiritual songs, etc.), one of the parts of their liturgy — i.e. the collective work of the people in worship — was to hear the ‘apostles’ teaching,’ i.e. the teaching of Jesus’ immediate followers, who reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in light of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (see why Jewish-Christian relations is both tense and an imperative for continued conversation?). Eventually, these apostolic interpretations of the Scriptures (and frankly, how the whole world worked) in light of Jesus were written down, say, in the letters of Paul and Peter and John, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, etc. and read alongside the Hebrew Scriptures. While the Hebrew Scriptures pretty much had a set canon (they were usually reading from the Greek Septuagint), each of the local churches tended to have their own lists of which letters and books constituted the apostles’ teaching. One book, for example, that made it on some of the lists but not others was called The Shepherd of Hermas, which, if you ever get around to reading, is pretty trippy stuff .Eventually, the church catholic decided pretty much by consensus that it was probably a good idea to have a standardized list. According to most accounts, that was because there was this heretic Marcion going around denying that the Hebrew Scriptures had anything to do with the life of the church while cutting out parts of the apostles’ teaching to fit his own agenda, which tended to be all this body-hating, hyper-spiritual crazy elitist crap.

In any case, my point is: from this process of canonization — and I’ve simplified a few things here and there — you could technically make Sterne’s argument that the biblical canon is infallible for the Christian church. After all, Jesus speaks to the church through the Word in Scripture, which is what Sterne is insisting.

But in some ways, that’s an incomplete argument. That’s because you could also technically make the case that classical Christians believe that what’s actually infallible is the church.

In fact, speaking of the breadth of the church catholic and classical Christianity, what I’m saying might only sound radical to evangelical Protestants, because this other group of classical Christians — Roman Catholics — have pretty much been thinking this all along. You could say that this is how the whole idea of ‘papal infallibility’ came about. Sure, I’m about to oversimplify and not mention, like, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, Pope Gregory VII’s ramblings, and the crazy politics of the Vatican I vote on infallibility. But the idea that the pope could speak infallibly ex cathedra (on his seat on the Chair of St. Peter) was because the pope — the Bishop of Rome — presides over the church that, as Pope Francis says, has long ‘presided in charity over the churches’ to maintain that sort of catholic unity that I described earlier. Actually, you could say that the real schism that the Catholics are concerned about — the one with the Orthodox — is pretty much about how the church gets to be infallible: is it through the bishop of Rome or through the collegiality of the patriarchs? Some work has been done on this question (see The Ravenna Document), and it’s particularly interesting to see how Scripture is framed by these questions of church power:

15. Authority within the Church is founded upon the Word of God, present and alive in the community of the disciples. Scripture is the revealed Word of God, as the Church, through the Holy Spirit present and active within it, has discerned it in the living Tradition received from the Apostles. At the heart of this Tradition is the Eucharist (cfr. 1 Cor 10, 16-17; 11, 23-26). The authority of Scripture derives from the fact that it is the Word of God which, read in the Church and by the Church, transmits the Gospel of salvation. Through Scripture, Christ addresses the assembled community and the heart of each believer. The Church, through the Holy Spirit present within it, authentically interprets Scripture, responding to the needs of times and places. The constant custom of the Councils to enthrone the Gospels in the midst of the assembly both attests the presence of Christ in his Word, which is the necessary point of reference for all their discussions and decisions, and at the same time affirms the authority of the Church to interpret this Word of God.

See what’s going on there? Scripture is revelation, yes, but its place is in the assembled people of God, addressing the Church while being interpreted by the Church as Christ speaking.

In short, questions about infallibility are really about church politics.

The same goes for Protestant Christians, then, which is what Sterne is. You would think that when the Protestant Reformers insisted that the Bible alone is sufficient for salvation, that settled the question completely. The trouble, though, as Brad Gregory points out in his ambitious Unintended Reformation, is that Scripture didn’t stop getting interpreted — it started getting interpreted in lots of different ways. Moreover, the rising modern states saw how useful this was in asserting their authority over against the church, and in political wranglings that saw this, that, and the other Protestant or Catholic (depending on the state) getting burned at the stake or getting their head chopped off, much of the authority of the church in interpreting Scripture wasn’t transferred so much to the individual, but to the state!

Talk about politics.

In an effort not to read the sixteenth century into contemporary times, though, it’s safe to say that the politics of biblical infallibility — or as it has been recently called, inerrancy — hasn’t gone away. In a fascinating account of the unlikely alliances that could be shared between indigenous sovereignty movements and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith recounts the politics of biblical inerrancy vis-a-vis questions of gender. Smith’s point is that what passes for, ‘The Bible is true,’ is often an attempt to create and maintain a specific political vision based on an interpretation of the Bible. This makes sense also in light of the recent removals of evangelical faculty who don’t subscribe to a ‘Bible is inerrant to every word and punctuation mark,’ like Peter Enns and Doug Green – again, there’s a social vision at stake for certain evangelical seminaries where the inerrancy of the Bible is caught up with building private domains.

But you see, that’s the point. What we have there is another transfer of authority vis-a-vis the interpretation of Scripture — from the church catholic to the state, and from the state to the private sphere. And that’s a bit of an ironic point. While many complain that conservative Christians are trespassing the secular boundary line between private religion and public politics, what I’m saying is that the politics of biblical inerrancy goes hand-in-hand with the privatization of religion.

Charles Taylor would think that’s pretty trippy.

Back to the main point. The point is that for all of Sterne’s attempts to address my concerns about the usage of ‘classical,’ I still am not quite sure that they can speak for all ‘classical’ orthodox Christians because — unless one wants to claim that only Roman Catholics or only evangelical Protestants are ‘classical Christians’ — I’m still not sure I know what this monolithic ‘classical Christian’ is. Indeed, to make the claim that a Christian is ‘classical’ as opposed to ‘liberal’ is political — and arguably unnecessary. As for Todd’s point that opposes liberal critical readings of Scripture to the politics of infallibility, one wonders, given the actual transfers of authority since the Reformation, whether the conservative Christians he opposes are themselves in fact ironic liberals. After all, for all the ‘independent critical study’ of the Bible that Todd claims that liberal Christians do, the move toward inerrancy politics in the private sphere is about as independent and critical as one can get. As a matter of fact, there’s a new provocative book out by a secular New Testament scholar, James Crossley, that observes that all the scholars Todd discussed (John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and David Lull) and all the evangelical scholars they seem to oppose are all really doing the same thing. As Crossley argues, they’re all contextualized by what’s called an age of neoliberalism, that is, an age where the private markets are given more authority to govern than the state, producing a lifestyle that requires an Anglo-American empire to subjugate and colonize dissidents in other parts of the world in order to maintain their economic foothold. Whether one agrees or not with Crossley’s anti-imperial politics is besides the point – the point is that when I say that there are more similarities than differences between putatively liberal and conservative Christians in approaches to the Bible, I’m not making stuff up.

The real question for a classical Christian, then, isn’t whether the Bible is infallible, per se. It’s: how does the authority of the church catholic work, especially in an age of privatized politics? As a hint for further exploration (probably again during this ten-part series), the late Swiss theologian Karl Barth may be helpful here. Like Sterne, Barth had a strong theology of revelation, one that he went to town on liberal German scholars with beginning in his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans. For Barth, the Word of God causes what he calls a krisis for the powers that be, exposing them as they act like gods to be No-Gods — which, by the way, came to be a great theology with which to oppose the Third Reich. But in Romans, Barth doesn’t play the politics of biblical inerrancy (which is why he was later disliked by American fundamentalists and evangelicals). For Barth, the Word of God is definitively revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the political Word that God speaks to defy the powers that crucified him. As I hinted at earlier, the power of the resurrection may well be how the apostles started in the first place to produce their teaching based on the Hebrew Scriptures about Jesus.

Bottom line is: in discussing the infallibility of the Bible, both Todd and Sterne have opened a political Pandora’s Box. My hope is that they haven’t gotten more than they bargained for.

Now that the categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ are adequately confused, we now look forward to St. Peter’s Fireside’s third post on the person of Jesus.

The Liberty of “China Wine”

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accountability, Barack Obama, Catholic sex abuse, celebrity, China Wine, Chuck Grassley, church-state, City Harvest Church, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, evangelism, Fortnight for Freedom, HHS mandate, Hong Kong, Kong Hee, Ms K, Obamacare, orientalism, prosperity theology, public, public good, religious freedom, secular, Singapore, Sun Ho, Thomas Jefferson, Timothy Dolan, USCCB, Wyclif Jean

The recent uproar over investigations over the misuse of funds at City Harvest Church in Singapore has taken the media by storm. Not only has it been plastered all over Singaporean media at Channel NewsAsia, the Straits Times, and Yahoo! Singapore, but it has been recently picked up by blogs at Time Magazine and Christianity Today as well.

The reactions have been typical:

• I knew it; this is another prosperity gospel preacher who’s getting his dues like his counterparts in the States.  You know, there’s the whole thing about Creflo Dollar and his alleged domestic abuse, not to mention Senator Chuck Grassley’s probe of the tax wheelings-and-dealings of six prominent televangelists.

• We at City Harvest trust this guy because we donate our funds to God, and our leaders do what they want with it.

• LOOK AT HIS WIFE BEHAVING LIKE A POLE DANCER IN THIS ORIENTALIZING VIDEO! (Notice, of course, that by collaborating with Wyclif Jean, the pastor’s wife has teamed up with “The Preacher’s Son.” That said, I don’t think this is what Vijay Prashad was calling for in terms of Afro-Asian relations in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting.)

To be sure, scandal can whet our appetites, and a scandal like this takes us in all sorts of critical directions: orientalism, prosperity gospel, the need for church transparency and accountability to the public, the place of Christian celebrities, Bill Bright’s “seven mountains” vis-a-vis James Davison Hunter‘s To Change the World, etc.

The problem is, all of that elides what I think is the central issue here: church-state relations.

I think what’s interesting about this case is that it can easily be juxtaposed to something that looks completely irrelevant on the surface: the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Fortnight for Freedom.

The Fortnight, of course, seems to have far less bearing on church scandal, than, say, the 2002 Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic sex abuse scandals and the efforts that followed that made the Church more compliant with public investigation of pedophilia among priests through the June 2002 release of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and its 2011 renewal.

As it is, on the face of it, the Fortnight is irrelevant to Kong Hee because it seems to have more bearing on the passage of universal health care in the United States. But it is relevant, I argue, because the opposition by the bishops to most of Obama’s health care policies is least rhetorically based on what it perceives as the Obama administration’s curbing of religious liberties by removing the right to conscientious objection to abortion, contraception, and welcoming undocumented migrants, all in relation to health care policy. (The evangelical response, it seems to me, is based more on libertarian principles than right-to-life activism.)  Not only were the bishops disappointed in the Roberts Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, but they began the Fortnight for Freedom prior to the ruling to oppose Kathleen Sebelius’s Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that all employers must provide contraceptives, including allegedly abortifacient ones, to all of their employees.

When the administration compromised by exempting religious organizations, the bishops weren’t satisfied: the exemption only applied to organizations where the membership is Catholic, not to, say, schools, hospitals, and non-profit organizations that are under the jurisdiction of Catholic bishops but mostly serve and employ non-Catholics.

psst…there’s a Canadian one too

The bishops argue that the state has no business telling the Church what is and is not religion.  The Church’s services do not only serve other confessional Catholics; the slogan goes: we don’t serve people because they’re Catholic; we serve because we’re Catholic. Part of the Catholic thing, the bishops argue, is that they should be able to abide by their rule of conscience on right-to-life issues when they run even these “secular” organizations, and for the state to police that is to violate the Church’s freedom of religion.

Let’s bring this back to Kong Hee and Sun Ho.

The allegations at City Harvest Church are that five members of the board misappropriated church funds to finance Sun Ho’s music career and lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles. More technically, it is that the usage of $23 million that were supposed to be for charity were found to be irregular as they were allegedly used for the secular purposes of financing music as non-religious as “China Wine.”

Bear with me, but if you think about it, you could make the same argument for the board members at City Harvest as the American bishops are making during the Fortnight for Freedom.  You could say: what business does the state have in determining what is and is not religious activity? After all, the point of Sun Ho’s Crossover Project is to use secular music to evangelize non-Christians.

That’s a pretty religious motivation for a non-religious activity. It could even be construed as charitable if your theology is that evangelizing non-Christians at all costs is the most loving service you can do for your neighbour. Just as the Catholic bishops would argue that schools, hospitals, and non-profits that serve non-Catholics still remain Catholic because they serve out of a Catholic spirit, so Kong Hee, Sun Ho, and the leadership at City Harvest could maintain that Sun Ho’s Crossover Project is religious, if not charitable, activity not because it is targeted to Christians but because the intention remains Christian evangelism.

Of course, especially on blogs like A Christian Thing, we could open discussion on whether we agree with this theology or not. We could talk about the fundamental theological differences between Catholic bishops and prosperity gospel preachers, and we certainly could do a series on how to write about Christian scandals that are exploding left, right, and centre at the moment, from Kong Hee to Creflo Dollar to Korean property tax scandals regarding church cafes to allegations of sexual harassment by a Ms K in Hong Kong when she went on a short-term missions trip to Taiwan with a Pastor/Mr. X. The Asian American in me also wants to rant about how orientalizing “China Wine” is. We could–and should–talk about all those things, and yes, of course, bring on the critique.

But like it or not, we cannot deny that Kong Hee, Sun Ho, and the board at City Harvest Church in Singapore have a theology. Much as some progressive Catholics think the bishops have gone too far, they can’t deny them their theological reasoning either. Critique, yes, but a full critique of these things would have to be a theological critique.

However, to acknowledge such theologies as theologies in their own right would also change the conversation from scandal to a more intricate theological question: what is the power of the state to regulate what constitutes theological activity in a religious organization?

Preston Manning on Christian engagement in the public sphere

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Canada, public, public sphere

Preston Manning

In a video posted to YouTube in January of this year, Preston Manning (former Leader of the Opposition in the federal government) addresses a crowd at Regent College (Vancouver, B.C.) on the topic of Christian witness in the public square. There are many comments and suggestions he makes that are well-worth considering, but perhaps the most important thing he has to say is this: “If there’s one guideline that would enhance the contributions of Christians believers to public discourse on any issue, it is not ‘Be vicious as snakes and stupid as pigeons.’ It is ‘Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.’”

Preceding that little quip, Manning demonstrates how Christ himself used gentleness joined with wisdom to turn aside questions intended to trip him up. When asked  a yes or no question whether it be lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he does not give a yes or no answer. He wisely realizes that answering the question in the way it has been posed will paint him as either a sympathizer with the Roman occupation or as in league with the zealots who want to overthrow Roman rule. And his eventual answer—to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s—not only frustrates the evil intent of his questioners, it also gently teaches listeners from both sides of the issue (collaborators with the Romans like Matthew and zealots like Simon) that God’s thoughts on such matters are much deeper than are their own. The public hears him and is “amazed” at his answer because he does not allow his opponents to define the terms of engagement.

So too, when the woman accused of adultery is brought before Jesus, he does not answer the crowd’s question in a way they expect. “Deny the Law and proclaim mercy,” they demand, “or affirm the Law and forgo mercy. There is no other way.” But Jesus, of course, finds another way. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”—again, a wise answer that prevents Christ from condemning the woman to death while nevertheless affirming the severity of the sin. None born of women can claim to be without sin, save Christ. And he—the only one with the authority to pronounce judgement—chooses, in mercy, to forgive instead. “Neither do I condemn you.” In gentleness Jesus meets this broken woman where she is and shows not anger but compassion; and this compassion then gives him the personal authority to speak into her life in a way the Law of Moses never had: “Now go and sin no more.” As Preston Manning says in this video, “Incarnation precedes proclamation.” It is in identifying with the lowly that Christ opens their heart to hear what he has to say. So too, if we would be heard in the public arena, then we must learn to speak as Christ did. Like Christ, we too are called to identify with the lowly (Philippians 4:5-8). We must not speak merely at people but instead with them.

If we as Christians could learn to speak in this way, with that deliberate commingling of gentleness and wisdom, perhaps then we would find our voice better received in the public arena. When we are asked leading questions, let us refuse to answer in the way we are expected. Let us be wise, like Christ, and avoid entrapment. But let us also, like Christ, use the opportunity to meet the broken and suffering in their lowliness, proclaiming mercy and forgiveness of sins. (As Manning says later answering a question later in the video, “If we don’t identify with the suffering, I don’t think we’re the right person to make the moral ennunication.”) For it is to such people that Christ came; as a doctor to the sick. And, indeed, we are all of us sick.

As a bit of clarification, I build a bit in the above paragraphs on some of the things Manning says in the video; so if you want to disentangle my thoughts from his (and see how some of this might work out in practice; for example, in the current debate on physician assisted suicide) you’ll just have to watch the video. And really, you should. It’s not even hard work. I was good enough to embed the video right here in this post. All you have to do is click. (A word of warning: there’s a few minor audio glitches in the first couple of minutes, but they clear up relatively quickly. And while the video looks lengthy, Preston Manning’s talk is actually just the first forty minutes. Mary Povak, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation in B.C., offers a response, and then the two take questions.)