Scary Ghost Stories and Tales of the Glories: Wishing You All a Christ-Haunted Christmas

Tags

Advent, Christmas, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Tradition

This blog was begun out of Facebook posts I began writing during Advent. And so it is perhaps fitting that, as this time of year rolls around again, I should offer some thoughts on the season. As usual, they will be vexing and vexed, but here goes.

To begin, I don’t know who to be more frustrated with: those who reduce the season to commercialism and saccharine songs that are not even good by pagan standards, or those who allegedly want to put the Christ back in Christmas – by which they usually mean their favourite id(e)ol(ogy) which they have given the name Christ. If I were feeling uncharitable, I might make some sort of comment about it being impossible to put the Christ back in Christmas without putting the Mass back in Christmas, and you can decide for yourselves what I mean by that – at the very least, it means that it is certainly hard to understand Christ apart from the work of His bride through whom he has chosen to reveal himself. But I am not feeling much more uncharitable than normal, so I shall leave it at that for now.

What I do want to talk about though is how we navigate this odd holiday context in which Christ is in some way inescapable – for simply calling it “the holidays” or dating the world back to BCE rather than AD is just a manipulation of language; there is still the history behind the thing we are celebrating, and the uncomfortable fact that in secularity we are left with neither supernatural nor even basic pagan reasons for keeping the feast. In such a context, we are left with a vague feeling that we should have warm hearts and special generosity around this time because – well, because it’s Christmas.

Perhaps the most positive way we can put this is that the season is a mystery in the cultic sense – we don’t really know why or what we are doing when we celebrate Christmas, but we do so anyway because something in the mystery draws us; like Bryan Adams we simply feel that there’s “something about Christmas time,” and because of the difficulty of sustaining such a mystery religion in a modern, “progressive” world, we find ourselves longing for the infantile innocence of stupidity, which we excuse by mislabeling it as childlikeness, but nonetheless need if we are at all to maintain a state of confusion of which we are rightly fond as something preferable to pure secularity. In the immemorial words of Josh Groban, “you have everything you need, if you just believe” – and it is integral to the maintenance of this season that the fact of belief rather than the content of what is believed in is emphasized.

But if this is a problem for those who want to celebrate Christmas but have no idea why, it is equally a problem for Christians, who ought to know better than to simply lock themselves in a fortress-like dualism over against an ostensibly confused culture. We all know the rhetoric on the other side, the return to the “true meaning” of Christmas, whether this is understood as the iteration of Christ’s nativity narrative, a particular sobriety, the ousting of mammon, or the rather childish abolition of Santa Klaus and other Christmas mythopoeia. What always astounds me about this position is the dead certainty with which these people seem to know the “true meaning” of Christmas. Really? Is it so simple to grasp the fact of God becoming human and also remaining God? Have we really got a handle on this such that we can go about like busybodies correcting the imaginations of our friends and relatives? As you can see, I am happy about neither stance – confused secularism or dead certain faith with an emphasis on “dead.” So where can we find the answer? In ghosts, evidently.

Yes, quite seriously, I think we would do well to pay heed to Dickens and the spooky stories of twelfth night because they get at a fact about Christ’s incarnation that neither the secular sops nor the hard-nosed Chistian killjoys understand; what is primary about Christmas is that it is uncanny. Let me explain. In literary theory, when we talk about “the uncanny,” we are not talking about simple concrete gruesome horror, nor are we talking about something that cannot be known at all. No, what is uncanny exists in a realm that is related in a complicated way to our epistemologies – in negative terms, we might say it is uncertain, or in more positive terms, we might say it is a mystery. The uncanny disappears when certainty appears on either side, that is, when the ghost we are afraid of is debunked, or when it is put to rest within a solid and comprehensive metaphysics. In some Christmas traditions, this uncanniness is negative, as in the case of the poem “Old Christmas Morning,” but in Dickens, the uncanny ghost exists halfway between the worlds of marvel and terror, and the uncanniness of time – that is, the ungraspability – is shown in the persons of present, past, and future. What I want to suggest is that, far from being a distraction from the “true meaning” of Christmas, this tradition of uncanniness gestures in an analogical way to the central story of Christmas – the uncanniness of Christ’s incarnation. “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” speaks more truth than ought to be allowed such a schmaltzy song when it speaks of “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories,” for in a very real sense, the stories are of a piece. What ghosts are to our perception in a negative sense, the incarnation of Christ – inspired after all by a Holy Ghost – is in a positive sense. And we know this from the gospel of John.

For it is in John more than any other gospel that we get the fullest account of Christ’s birth. No, it is not the gospel we usually associate most closely with the Christmas story, given the omission of historical details. Yet there is a strong case to be made that John does in fact recount the Christmas story in the opening of his book – the difference is that he is recounting it from a metaphysical rather than merely human perspective. John, the eagle, looks into the sun of righteousness, and is dazzled. To say John points to the “true meaning of Christmas” here would be moot; rather, the logos has got hold of him and won’t let go. The fish need not draw attention to the whale.

But if this – what John is describing – can happen, then anything might happen. And this is the explanation of the uncanny stories that crop up at Christmas. Our imaginations are tantalized. In such a world, challenged as it is by the incarnation of God, men might come back from the dead. Flowers might bloom in the bleak of winter. Sinners might even learn to repent.

Aside from the more frightening instances of uncanniness, this also helps explains much of the needless frivolity, absurdity, and complete silliness of Christmas – which is perfectly justifiable on Christian grounds. In a world in which God can become incarnate, even the most foolish of things has potential to be folly for God. We do very silly things like sing songs of hope in the middle of a blizzard, or gather together with the people we argue most with – our family – and talk about peace on earth, good will toward men. Indeed, this overturn – this incarnation – may be enough even to redeem the most unredeemable of things. Even kitsch and schmaltz and jest might with the mages lay their gifts at the manger. This comes to pass, when a child is born.

What is clear then is this – that, when Christians seek to have a stranglehold on the “true meaning of Christmas,” they often miss the fact that its truest meaning is dazzling mystery, a mystery indeed patient enough to wait out their clumsy attempts to wield it like a club. Seculars and pagans get the bit about mystery – but without anywhere to point, it collapses into a dualism between ignorant sentimentalism and cynical despair. And it is with these problems in mind that I want to wish you all a Christ-haunted Christmas.

The description is Flannery O’Connor’s, asserting that if the US south is hardly Christ centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted. And it is precisely this perspective I propose in our approaches to Christmas. The season is saturated with Christian images, and imagery, and palimpsests, and erasures. Yet simply trying to go back to a “good old days” when people knew what Christmas was about is not the answer; nor is the answer steamrolling current society so we can rebuild a Christmas worthy of Christendom. No, what I suggest is a return to the mystery of incarnation, a mystery so powerful it does not even need to speak about itself all the time, but can in fact sustain imagination and the beauty of the world – from the highest instances of these to the silliest. All these instances point of course to the one Instance in the scansion of the inscape of creation, and we would do well to follow O’Conner in the realization that even a chaos and confusion of symbols and theologies – a thoroughly haunted labyrinth – is not a great obstacle to a God who calls order out of chaos and enters that order in the ambiguity known to us as flesh, and as the Ghost Who haunts us, moving as He lists.

Too Damn Catholic

Tags

Anglican, Book of Concord, confessional lutheran, Confessions, Council of Trent, First Vatican Council, Lutheran, roman catholic, Second Vatican Council, Tradition, Vatican I, Vatican II

Some time ago my friend Churl began a series of posts here on A Christian Thing discussing his frustration at the Evangelical tradition in which he was raised and his attraction to Roman Catholicism. Of course, Churl has always recognized these are not the only options: there is Orthodoxy, of course; and on the Protestant side, there are options like Anglicanism and Lutheranism. Alongside Churl’s posts, Chinglican has been chiming in with his defence of Anglicanism, but the Lutheran on this blog has been remarkably silent. That’s not to say I haven’t any opinions on the subject. I do. In fact, Churl and I have discussed the topic on a number of occasions outside of the blog (you know, in real life). But while I have many opinions, I have much less time in which to write them down.

Part of what has delayed an online response from me has also been the recognition that it would necessarily mean examining Catholic doctrine in detail. Indeed, talking about joining any church must, by definition, include a very real hashing out of doctrine, because it is doctrine that distinguishes one church from another. Such discussions can be very confusing to many people. They also, by definition, tend to make people angry, because if you say you believe X, you must also say you reject Y.

But I have told Churl I would write a response for the blog. So I will. And this is my response: I’m too damn Catholic to be Catholic.

That might sound flippant or even nonsensical. It isn’t intended to be. “But what does it even mean?” you ask. I’ll explain, but before I do, let me explain what I do not mean: I do not mean to say that I think Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism are similar enough that I can simply “act” Catholic while remaining Lutheran.

To be sure, Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism share many things in common. I would even argue that, of all Protestants, Lutherans have the most in common theologically with Roman Catholics. We both confess the efficacy of God’s grace poured out in the Sacraments. We both believe Baptism is for infants (that cuts out most Evangelicals). We both believe in the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in Holy Communion (that cuts out everyone else). Sure, some “high church” Anglicans believe in Transubstantiation, but it’s hardly representative of the church at large; in Anglicanism you can also find lowest of the “low church” symbolists, and consubstantiationists, and subscribers to Calvin’s “mystery” language (with its mysterious “spiritual (but not physical) real presence”). It’s notoriously difficult to talk about what Anglicans believe because there seems to be no authoritative voice in the church. Who speaks for Anglicans? No one and everyone. Is it Thomas Cranmer? Shelby Spong? J.I. Packer? Or perhaps it is Katharine Jefferts Schori or Justin Welby?

This kind of anything-goes theology doesn’t jive with Catholic or Lutheran sensibilities; we instead assert that there are authoritative voices who determine what doctrinal teachings are and are not allowed (by now it should be clear that by “Lutheran,” I mean “confessional Lutheran”). Lutherans and Catholics both accept that the Scriptures are God’s very Word and are therefore authoritative for faith and practice. Likewise, Lutherans and Roman Catholics both recognize the witness of the Church historic as normative for the interpretation of these Scriptures: we each assert, for example, the primacy of the three ancient creeds (The Apostle’s, the Nicene, and the Athanasian). If you deny these texts, you can be neither Catholic nor Lutheran.

Indeed, the first Lutherans saw no disagreement between their faith and the faith of the Catholic Church down through the ages. They write, “This is about the Sum of our Doctrine, in which, as can be seen, there is nothing that varies from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic, or from the Church of Rome as known from its writers” (AC 21:5). They believed themselves to be faithful to the historic Church’s teachings even as they rejected theologically errant innovation that had arisen in their own time. “Our churches dissent in no article of the faith from the Church Catholic,” they write, “but only omit some abuses which are new, and which have been erroneously accepted by the corruption of the times, contrary to the intent of the Canons” (AC 21:10).

To be sure, Catholics and Lutherans still disagree which of them truly remained faithful to the historic Church’s witness. But we both agree that this historic witness (whatever it is) is normative for the Church up to and including the present day.[1] From the Lutheran perspective, The Book of Concord represents an attempt at codifying a normative, indeed, authoritative interpretation of the Scriptures and the Christian faith, based on biblical exegesis and informed by appeals to the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils. Roman Catholics, for their part, define a much larger authoritative tradition, including not only the seven ancient councils but also fourteen others in later times, as well as a number of other assorted works like the Catechism and ex-cathedra pronouncements such as Munificentissimus Deus (which, in 1950, made the Assumption of Mary binding dogma for all Catholics).

Let me refer to just one of these authorities: The Council of Trent. To be Roman Catholic means to accept these extraordinary dogmata (ie, doctrines declared necessary by the church to be believed by all); failure to accept even one such dogma places one outside the Church (for such is the Magisterium of Roman Catholicism). To Trent then:

“If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified… let him be anathema” (Session 6: Canon 9). And again: “If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins… let him be anathema” (Session 6: Canon 11). And once more: “If any one saith, that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ’s sake… let him be anathema” (Session 6: Canon 12).

These anathemata apply to me, for I believe that “men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight. Rom. 3 and 4” (AC 6). Indeed, it seems doubtful that one could read these passages as anything but a deliberate condemnation of Lutherans.

And this is a key point: it is the people they condemn. “Let him be anathema.” In the Lutheran Confessions, we condemn errant teachings frequently enough; for example, “We condemn quite a number of other errors of the Anabaptists [ie, other errors in addition to errant views on baptism]” (AP 9:51). But we do not focus our condemnations on the errant. We draw our doctrines narrow in accordance with the Scriptures; but, equally in accordance with the Scriptures we draw our theology of the Church, the Body of Christ, wide. The visible church on earth is a manifestation of the Body of Christ; but it is not synonymous with the Church Catholic. I repeat, no church body stands in a one-to-one correlation with the invisible Body of Christ.

For, as Roman Catholics and Lutherans both teach, the visible church is made up of Christians as well as “evil men” who do not truly believe. If the visible church were, then, synonymous with the Body of Christ, we would have to say that both the believers and the unbelievers in this earthly fellowship were members of Christ’s Body. As a Lutheran, this seems to me obvious error. Only believers are truly members of the Body of Christ; only believers constitute Christ’s Bride, the Church.

And that goes for all believers, regardless of denominational affiliation. Lutherans do not believe one need hold membership in a Lutheran church in order to be a member of the Body of Christ. That doesn’t mean we diminish Lutheran distinctives; we believe our Lutheran doctrine to be true and that, consequently, the doctrine of others is wrong. But one such doctrine we uphold is the idea of the Universal Church—the belief that the Christ’s Bride is the invisible fellowship of all believers in Christ. “The Church is not only the fellowship of outward objects and rites,” we confess, “but it is originally a fellowship of faith and of the Holy ghost in hearts” (AP 7:4).

By contrast, Roman Catholics threaten non-catholics with damnation over topics like the primacy of the Pope’s authority [“This is the teaching of catholic truth, and no one can depart from it without endangering his faith and salvation” (Vatican I, Session 4 Chapter 3:4)]. There are too many things in Catholicism declared necessary unto salvation, too many things upon which membership in Christ’s Body has been made contingent. John Donne lamented this piling on of dogmata well: “All things are growen deare in our times,” he wrote, “for they have made Salvation deare; Threescore yeares agoe, he might have been saved for beleeving the Apostles Creed; now it will cost him the Trent Creed too” (Sermons Vol. 6, No. 12).

Roman Catholics have long been committed to affirming St. Cyprian of Carthage’s words in a very narrow way: extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—“outside the Church there is no salvation.” And by “Church” they have historically meant the visible Roman church. Indeed, as late as the 20^th century, Pope Pius XI could write his in encyclical Mortalium Animos: “The Catholic Church alone is keeping the true worship. This is the font of truth, this is the house of faith, this is the temple of God; if any man enter not here, or if any man go forth from it, he is a stranger to the hope of life and salvation.”[2]

It is in this sense that I say I am too damn Catholic to be Catholic. I believe too strongly in the invisible Church, the “Universal”—which is what “Catholic” means—Church to believe Roman claims that their church is the only true Church. I cannot believe that lack of membership in any particular visible church body makes one “a stranger to the hope of life and salvation,” as Pius XI wrote. No, it is not our membership in visible churches that is necessary for salvation, but rather our membership in the invisible Church—in Christ’s Body, the fellowship of all believers. This is something Lutherans believe, teach, and confess; I cannot say Roman Catholics teach the same—or at least they didn’t until very recently (more on that in a second).

It will not do to simply suggest we reinterpret these condemnations, or to say that our understanding of the Councils’ words have evolved over time. Indeed, Vatican I strictly condemns such reinterpretation of accepted doctrine: “The meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church and there must never be abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding” (Vatican 1, Session 3 Chapter 4:14). Saying we understand better (ie, have a “more profound understanding” of) the dogma than its framers is thus forbidden. And more forcefully: “If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has understood and understands, let him be anathema” (Vatican I, Session 3 Canon 4:3).

That does not mean the Roman Catholic Church has not, in fact, attempted at times to “clarify” (or, more honestly, reinterpret) some of these older doctrines. Indeed, Vatican II provided a very welcome new understanding of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Roman Catholics no longer condemn Christians outside the Roman church; instead, they declare that all the baptized have the “right to be called Christian” (though those outside Rome miss some of the benefits given solely to Christ’s Church, which is still defined as the Roman Catholic Church).[3] So too Roman Catholics have in recent years softened their anathemata against the Lutheran understanding of justification by faith.[4] While these things are to be applauded, there nevertheless appears to be a disconnect (to my mind, at least) between the original intent of The Council of Trent—and other texts which drew the definition of Church so narrowly—and Vatican II’s more recent pronouncements. Indeed, this reinterpretation of authoritative texts seems to directly ignore Vatican I’s warning about assigning to established dogma “a sense… different from that which the church has understood.”

And therein lies the problem: either the Roman Catholic Church was right when it narrowly restricted assurance of salvation to being a member of the visible church and accepting all Catholic doctrine (including the primacy/infallibility of the Pope, the assumption of Mary, the condemnation of Protestants at Trent, etc.); or it is right now when it grants the possibility of true Christians existing outside the visible church. If one attempts to fix the problem by saying our understanding of the dogmata in question has simply evolved—that we understand them better now than their own formulators did—we come up against Vatican I’s condemnation: none are to interpret accepted dogma in a way contrary to the Church’s historic understanding. So if we say we can, through new methods of interpretation, make Trent and Vatican II speak with one voice, then we must still reject Vatican I’s condemnation of such reinterpretation. The Tradition to which the Roman Catholic Church attaches authority, then, contradict itself; and if this Tradition—this Magisterium—is the grounds which support the Roman church’s declaration to be the one true Church on earth, I for one therefore find the foundation less than firm.

I agree that one must seek the Church in order to find Christ. She is His Mother, and through her we are brought into communion with Him. But do I believe the Church is to be equated with the visible Roman Catholic Church? No. Instead, I must agree with Martin Luther:

“Therefore he who would find Christ must first find the Church. How should we know where Christ and his faith were, if we did not know where his believers are? And he who would know anything of Christ must not trust himself nor build a bridge to heaven by his own reason; but he must go to the Church, attend and ask her. Now the Church is not wood and stone, but the company of believing people; one must hold to them, and see how they believe, live and teach; they surely have Christ in their midst. For outside of the Christian church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation” (LW 52:39-40).

This is the Catholic Church. This is the Universal Church—the company of believers. I will not abide any visible church drawing the broad boundaries of the invisible Church more tightly than does God. The dogmata of the Roman Church do just that, and so I reject them; I’m too damn Catholic to be Catholic.

———————-

I apologize if anyone found the above reading difficult or insulting. I do not mean to hurt feelings, nor do I question the sincerity of my Christian brothers and sisters’ faiths. But there can be no honest ecumenical agreement where there is not also honest recognition of disagreement.

Do I think I am in the right, theologically speaking? Yes. And I therefore necessarily think that others’ opinions are wrong. But I will forever count upon the mercy of Christ as the means of salvation, not my intellectual capabilities nor anyone else’s (whether used rightly or wrongly). “It does not depend therefore on man’s desire or effort [or, we might add, man’s denominational affiliation], but upon God who has mercy” (Romans 9:16). I count Roman Catholics and Anglicans and Baptists and all manner of other Christians fellow members with me in the Body of Christ. Wherever the Good News of Christ is preached and believed, wherever the Holy Spirit enters into the hearts of the faithful, there the Catholic Church is. There my sisters and brothers are.

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[1]    The early Lutherans, while asserting the primacy of Scripture, never suggested that we may approach Scripture in a vacuum, apart from the witness of the Church throughout history. Indeed, as John R. Stephenson writes, the “authors of the Formula of Concord sharply forbid any unbridled exegesis of the inspired text;” Christians are bound by the ancient Church’s witness. For more on this, see Stephenson’s article “Some Thoughts on Why and How Creeds and Confessions Exercise Authority over Lutheran Christendom” (originally delivered at LCC/LCMS/ACNA dialogues, recently published in Lutheran Theological Review 25 (2013):60-73 here).

[2]    To be sure, encyclicals do not have the same authoritative status as some other texts in Roman Catholicism. But Pius XI’s words demonstrate a long-standing Roman interpretation of what St. Cyprian’s ancient words mean.

[3]    “All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ’s body, and have a right to be called Christian, and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church. Moreover, some and even very many of the significant elements and endowments which together go to build up and give life to the Church itself, can exist outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church… Nevertheless, our separated brethren, whether considered as individuals or as communities and Churches, are not blessed with that unity which Jesus Christ wished to bestow on all those to whom He has given new birth into one body… For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help towards salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained” (Unitatis Redintegratio 3).

[4]    The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification affirms that Lutherans and Catholics have a much closer “consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification” now than in the past, and that “the remaining differences in its explication are no longer the occasion for doctrinal condemnations” (5).

Is the Desire to be Catholic Simply a Desire to Escape the Responsibility of Independent Thought?

Tags

Anglicanism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, community, Individualism, Mark Driscoll, Tradition, Western Christianity

This, in brief, is how some people see an attraction to Catholicism. We are complex human beings who have squarely on our shoulders the responsibility of being faithful to a long and arduous quest for truth that involves much searching, reflection, and exercise of our consciences, minds etc. But some of us are weary and broken. Worse still, some of us are lazy. And so we are attracted to an institution that can do our thinking for us. We can give up a God-given mandate to search and rest on our laurels while we let an all-powerful system take care of the rest. The more heroic stance is the one that remains tentative, open, and uncertain, whether this is in the secular realm or in regard to faith – for instance, many justifications of Anglicanism suggest this openness is one of the merits of it.

What I want to ask is whether this is a valid critique. Are people like me – with a deep attraction to Catholicism – simply lazy copouts? Or is there another side of the story? I suggest the latter, and here’s what I propose. People who make this charge have a fairly strong sense of self, what their self is, how it does it’s thinking. This sense of self in fact is not something that has come naturally to post-lapsarian humans. The self that we are called to pay attention to, to exercise, to depend on rather than authority, is a self built over the past two thousand years of Christian history. It is a self that owes its origins to the Christian salvation of the self that had been corrupted in Eden. And it seems we are all too happy to throw out all these trappings – all the props that contributed to making this self – and suggest that it is on this self we solely depend, and any other dependence is weakness.

Of course, as many of us know, this sense of self is very quickly collapsing with the collapse of what might be called Western Christendom. Please note I am not here making a judgment about what ought to be done about this or trying to say we should just go back to “the good old days.” I do think though that this concept of self is weakening – has indeed grown very weak – and so we are left in all sorts of postmodern crises of identity.

As someone very closely attuned to such crises of identity, it is very hard for me to identify with those who simply want me to take responsibility and forge on as an individual, embracing uncertainty over allegedly cheap certainty. Why is this hard for me? For one, I know what mental illness is. It makes one wonder what exactly one’s self is. It is profoundly disturbing to find that you can’t always trust what you think is the “I” doing the thinking, and I know how often I mistake mental illness for the true voice of this “I”. I suppose in a sense this has also allowed me to see how this works even in cases where mental illness is not involved. People often think they are asserting themselves, being radical and heroic individuals etc. And they are so often not aware that something other than the “I” is doing their thinking for them. There are an infinite amount of cross-pressures – to borrow a term from Charles Taylor – that masquerade as their selves. As we know from the Eden story, rebellion itself is the oldest of clichés. And so, when people lionize the heroic individual self forging its way toward truth, I can’t help seeing, not individual heroes, but mass-produced sophists. It is very rare when an individual – a real philosopher – breaks out of this, and usually when they do, their highest realization is that they really don’t know anything at all, and their end is a cup of hemlock. Modern people though, not liking the taste of either self-doubt (real self-doubt, not the fashionable half-hearted kind) or hemlock, are quite content with sophism producing a tentative non-committal attitude toward the rest of faith and the world. In my opinion, this lack of faith – not only in religion, but even in very basic human relationships – is one of the most grievous losses in the modern world.

To put it another way, modern society suggests that, at the end of the day, the complex “I” that I am must always remain on top and in control. To trust (at least when it comes to religion – I say nothing about nation states…) is a form of weakness, and though we may admit that there are some areas where we have to trust, it is important to keep such areas at a minimum. There is no place for throwing ourselves into something as a last ditch effort when all else seems lost – because we know ourselves to be strong and not lost. Would that I were lucky enough to be this strong. Actually, no. I am glad I am not, because this sounds a little to me like a description of hell.

To come to my point, most people assume that I am looking for something that my self recognizes as good, true, noble etc. They imagine me here, sitting in my armchair, surveying all the candidates and taking notes. But this is not the case. The case is much more like that of a dying man on a battlefield – I am doubting that he will interview his doctors to see which he gets along with, or which has the best bedside manner. No, the one thing he cares about is whether it is a doctor who can save his life. You see, I am not looking for something for myself; rather, I am looking for something that will root and sustain the self I am, a self-fast fading in the backwash of postmodernity, the self that is simultaneously the most mysterious and deadly thing we encounter as humans. It is not so much that I want to be Catholic. It is more that it is only within Catholicism that I can conceive of preserving and saving a self that even has the capacity to say “I want…” to anything.

Why Catholicism? Because of two things: obedience and catholicity. As far as I can tell, obedience and trusting others is the only way out of a self so ingrown it can no longer see itself. This, for instance, is why Anglicanism is hard for me. Yes, I can, as people like Chinglican and others say, be as Catholic as I want within Anglicanism. Yes, as Catholic as I want to be, excepting my need for boundaries and obedience. The Anglican church is quite happy to let me be as Catholic as I want, but it is also quite happy to let me be as hellish as I want. There is a terrible reality behind the idea that one can be oneself as an Anglican; perhaps one can, but one can also be oneself in hell. People balk at the power and authority the Catholic church claims. But such people, I suggest, do not understand – really understand – the power of sin and its entanglement with the fallen self. Sin is not so little that we can face it on our own.

But why the Catholic church? After all, there are plenty of churches everywhere happy to make me obedient (for instance, why not Mark Driscoll’s church?). My answer depends on catholicity. I want to be subject to all the saints in the room. This, indeed, is the difference between the Catholic church and a cult (because cults demand obedience too). The Catholic church in its ideal form is a mechanism for making all the voices of the saints (present, past and future) heard in a society that wants to confine meaning to the present moment. It is the widest possible jury of my peers. Unlike a cult, which generally depends on a particularly charismatic person who draws people away from their historical moment into his own world, the Catholic church draws the modern world itself into a crowded room of saints. As a Protestant, I have always considered it important to pay attention to what the Christian across from me says when we are doing a Bible Study – I may disagree with him or her, but we are both Christians, and I should at the very least be troubled by our differences. But how much more when we are reading the Bible with saints? Shouldn’t we be just a little troubled that those Christians we encounter from the past differ from us in some areas? Not that we can or should go back, or that we should automatically assume that Christians in the past got it all wrong and we get it all right. But we should be troubled, for they are Christians and we are Christians.

And yes, to anticipate the question, a lot of Protestants actually do think like this. They do look at as many saints as possible. But what they lack (as far as I can tell) is the mechanism for processing this tradition and the call to obedience so necessary as a safeguard against the waywardness of the self. You see, for the past number of years, I have been such a Protestant, trying to engage as deeply with a fully catholic Christianity as I can. But the task is daunting. I have spent some six years just looking at Gregory the Great, and I still cannot say I have “mastered” him – not that that would be a wise thing to say under any circumstances. But if it takes me so much time to even begin to think through the work of a single Christian from the past – indeed, a space of time that was only available to me on account of academic funding – how can I expect to process the rest of tradition? And how can I invite others to this burden when they probably have even fewer resources and time than I have been blessed with?

The temptation in this situation will be obvious: to play a game of cherry-picking exegesis with tradition. Pick the sexy saints, the Francises and the eminently quotable Augustines, and make a coat of many colors to match our moods. Again, here is where the whole issue of the self comes in. It will be much quicker and expedient to salvage what we like and abandon the rest. For all the claims that Anglicans make about tradition, I cannot help but see the Anglican church (where it is dealing with tradition, which is not everywhere) as one picking up “retro” scraps of tradition here and there and making it into hipster garb – it is flashy, but I prefer the seamless robe of Christ.

In contrast, the Catholic church is cursed with the burden of tradition – and I say this in the same way that I would say that humans are cursed with community and love. The Catholic church cannot think about something for a moment but there is a stutter from the past, a hiccup, something that must be considered. It makes for very slow processes of thinking and complex ones, but for my money, the complexity is something that reflects the complexity of reality, not an undue multiplication of entities without charge. As most modern people point out, tyranny would be easier – embrace what is progressive, what is winning etc. – but if we are going to listen to all the Christians in the room of history, who in turn are tasked with listening to all the people in the world, things are going to get messy and complex and yes it will take a while to think about things. That is the price of listening and loyalty – not just to those who exist in the present moment, but to those who have gone before us and will come after us.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Imagination

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Bible, Christ, Christian, Evangelical, God, Holy Spirit, Imagination, John Donne, Milton, Scandal, Tradition

One of the things that has most annoyed me about Evangelical culture is the lack of imagination. I think part of this has to do with the fact that we don’t know how to read the Bible in an imaginative way. Please don’t think that in making this criticism I am in any way suggesting that we read the Bible as merely an inspiring piece of art over against the church’s claim that it is deadly serious in speaking the truth about matters of eternal life and death.  It is certainly the latter.  But when I think of the Christian authors who have most inspired me, their imaginative treatment of the Bible, though often appreciated by Evangelicals, is something I would argue the latter do not have the capacity to replicate.

What I mean by this is that poets like Donne and Herbert, or the Old English poets, or Milton, seem to tap into what I would call a Biblical/Christian atmosphere. If you try to pin down by Biblical chapter and verse the metaphysical conceits of Donne or the extrapolation of the Genesis story by Milton, you can’t; much as most Christians believe in something like Milton’s conception of the fall, the devil, etc., there is no scripture they can point to to back it up in the strictest literal sense.  The serpent of Eden is only identified as the devil by later Christian (and possibly Jewish) tradition. And if we pared Donne’s poems down to only things that could be found in the Biblical text as understood by a modern Evangelical, they would be impoverished indeed. Though we recognize these texts as deeply Christian, they are not “biblical” in the modern Evangelical sense, but rather their roots are in a whole imaginative superstructure built via tradition atop the basis of Scripture. Like the best of Cathedrals, it took centuries of medieval trial and error (and councils) to build, and though we can’t always see immediately how the lines trace back to God’s word, our loss of vision does not make the superstructure less scriptural.  If you put yeast in grape juice and let it brew, it will become something different and better, even though it is no less the original grape juice with which you started.  I suggest that Christian tradition, in its best instances, is exactly this – scripture left to ferment in the wineskin of the church inspired by the active agent of the Holy Spirit. Yes, if a fly gets in the wine it can become vinegar, and even so can heterodoxy and sin produce sour batches of tradition – Christ on the cross is made to taste vinegar. But when it goes right, it goes very right, and produces exactly the sort of the thing that Miltons and Donnes and Herberts of the past could draw on, and exactly the sort of thing Evangelical churches have tossed out as “superfluous additions” to Scripture understood in the narrowest sense possible.

Lest my critique here should sound like a typical romantic idolatry of imagination, I do want to clarify that the imagination and imaginative works are not pretty toys we can bring out at parties, and then put away when we are done with them. No, if we dare imagine, we will be captured – whether by something good, or by something bad, for the imagination can engage in and promote both, as can tradition. But I feel like Evangelicals, seeing the negative side of tradition (that is, the imagination of the church), have gotten rid of it entirely.  It is a little like reading Proverbs and presuming that because there are some figures of temptresses, we should eschew women altogether – thereby missing the central figure of the text, Woman Wisdom.

But what can be done, and who can do it? I will post more concerning this in some following posts, but one thing I do think necessary is for Evangelicals to quit pretending that faith is a respectable and reasonable (by 21st C standards) business. I have seen many Christians attempting to defend Christianity by betraying their sisters and brothers in Christ from the past – and betrayal of Christ’s body is the betrayal of Christ. Yes, they will say, those awkward, ignorant, backward Christians in the past were entirely stupid, but we Evangelicals are eminently reasonable and easy to get along with – we will make good neighbors in your middle class suburbs (but don’t expect us to cross the street for you if you get beat up). Please notice I am not here saying that modern Christians should not own up to the sins and errors committed by Christians in the past – the place to do this is on our knees weeping before God in repentance.  What I am saying is that more often than not, our apologetics become a means of dissociating ourselves from those “weirdos over there, a couple of centuries back.” Christ bears the sins of the church on the cross, and as part of his body these sins are ours to bear as well. One of the best places to learn to love our enemies is the church, for on more than many occasions we will find ourselves called to love those we pray with and hate.

I suppose what I am getting at here is that addressing the scandal of the Evangelical imagination will be more than a mere shift in “worldview” or an attempt to be sensitive and emergent. What it will require is the ability to stand beside the historical church and say that we are one with them, for better or for worse, in poverty or plenty, in sickness or in health. To do this is to be the bride of Christ, and it makes sense that in neglecting this commitment we have lost the rich and fruitful imagination – the imagination of the Song of Songs – that was once part of our marriage.

A Catholic response to Driscoll-phobia

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Bernard Law, Boston Globe, Brideshead Revisited, Catholic sex abuse, Charles Péguy, Charles Taylor, church discipline, complementarian, consistent ethic of life, critics, ecumenism, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Eugene O'Neill, Evangelium Vitae, Evelyn Waugh, feminist theology, Flannery O'Connor, gender, gender roles, Graham Greene, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Harry Cronin, Henri de Lubac, Irish Catholic, James Joyce, Jennifer Haigh, John Wesley, Joseph Bernardin, Lief Moi, Lutheran, Marcial Maciel, Mariology, Mark Driscoll, Mark Gunn, Mars Hill Church, Martin Luther, Methodist, neo-Thomism, nouvelle théologie, Protestant, RCIA, Reformed, Romans, Rosemary Ruether, Seattle, Shusaku Endo, spiritual direction, Stanley Hauerwas, Stephen Dedalus, theo-drama, Theology of the Body, Tradition, Trent, Virgin Mary, Wayne Grudem, Wesleyan, womanist theology, women ordination, Yves Congar

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.

If Religion Doesn’t Save You From Sin, It May At Least Save You From Mark Driscoll

Tags

abuse, Catholic, catholicity, church discipline, community, covenant, gender, Mark Driscoll, power, Protestant, religion, Tradition, Trent

Mark Driscoll has scared me for a while, with his unbiblical perspectives on gender and what can only be termed overgrown schoolyard bully antics. I keep hearing that, yes, he is a little much, but at least he has good (or standard, depending on your perspective) reformed theology. To this, my general reply would be, as per James: You believe that there is one God – good – even the demons believe that, and shudder. You see, even demons can have good theology.

What is bothering me particularly at the moment is the recent news of what seems to be an abuse of power in Driscoll’s church. Yes, I realize that with so many denominations there is a lack of Christian accountability, and this is what they are reacting against. And yes, I think there is something wrong when someone compares a church covenant to the agreement you click on iTunes (interesting aside question: does the cavalier way that such programs have taught us to enter into contracts compromise the Christian practice of letting our yes be yes and our no,no?). But from what I can tell, it does seem that the response of Mars Hill to Andrew is grounded more in an exaggerated defensive stance against “sissy” Western culture than in sound Biblical exegesis. Yes, maybe we are supposed to treat Christians under discipline as we would treat tax collectors and sinners – but then again, our model of how we treat tax collectors and sinners must be Christ rather than the Pharisees.

In short, this looks like abuse of power, and it worries me greatly, given Mars Hills’ seeming lack of accountability to other churches. You see, people often make the assumption that institutionalisation kills churches, that it would be so much better if we went back to the good old spontenaeity of the early church. I would rather suggest that, in its ideal form, the Christian institution exists to protect us from the abuses of Biblical and Christian language by those abusing that spontenaeity. You see, when I think of corrupt Christianity, I do not think of the tottering and awkward bulk of the institutionalised church – it is often too bumbling to be able to maintain the prideful appropriation of Christian language for too long – God is always humbling it through its sheepish awkwardness. No, the abuse I fear is when people say we should “just” pray, or “just” be more biblical, or “just” be more discerning, or “just” listen to the holy spirit (just should be treated as a four letter word in the Christian vocabulary). Surely we should do all these things, but the problem is that such advice sets itself beyond appeal; anyone who questions whether its use might be self-serving rather than humble and Christian is accused of setting themselves against these good things – as if pointing out their abuses were the same as dismissing them altogether. And it seems to me that Mars Hill is guilty of this; it is the Biblical church (let me just say here that no contemporary church is Biblical in the way churches think they mean when they advertise this), and questioning it is tantamount to questioning God. This is particularly scary given that Mars Hill is hardly in submission to or under the discipline of two thousand years of Christian belief – it is in submission to and under the discipline of Mark Driscoll. While it may be exceedingly corrupt at times, Christian tradition, practice, and the communion of saints exist to keep pastors – shepherds – from becoming abusive celebrities. Church discipline is important, yes, but I think it should only be practiced by churches insofar as those churches are being the church in all aspects. If Driscoll is so keen about Christian submission to discipline, he should consider submitting his own church to the authority of a two thousand year old Christian tradition. And since he so dearly loves blood sport, I do not feel particularly bad in hitting below the belt and suggesting that he start by studying a certain Council of Trent, presumably undertaken with people like him in mind.