What I believe about the Church--a muddled manifesto

A year or two ago, on my friend Chris Armstrong's blog (Grateful to the Dead), I got in an argument about whether there was such a thing as "mere Anglicanism." As a result, I started writing what I called "An Anglican Manifesto," laying out what I believe as an Anglican. A very disgruntled one, but as a Methodist theologian once said to my wife when she described me that way, "Is there any other kind?"

The problem was, though, that what I was writing didn't seem very Anglican. Well, that was the point in a way--that I don't think there is a coherent "Anglicanism." Still, this isn't so much of an "Anglican manifesto" as a "Catholic manifesto by an Anglican"--a statement of what I understand historic Christianity to believe about the Church, and the problems that poses for Anglicanism.

I've held this in the "drafts" section of my blog for a long while for various reasons. But here it goes:

1. There is one, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, to which all baptized Christians belong, but in which we all participate imperfectly due to our sins and errors.

2. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in the form common to Eastern and Western Christians (that is, without the Filioque), is the basic doctrinal statement of the Church. Those Christians who do not subscribe to this Creed may fairly be described as heretics.

3. The Seven Ecumenical Councils, and generally the doctrines and practices commonly accepted during the first millennium of Christian history (which coincides with the doctrines and practices agreed on by the Christian bodies commonly known as the "Catholic Church" and the "Orthodox Church"), flesh out the implications of the faith defined in the Creed and are rightfully binding on all Christians. This body of faith and practice can justifiably be called "the Catholic Faith." To reject such doctrines and practices, or to adopt others fundamentally incompatible with them, is to reject historic Christianity and to render one's participation in the Church more imperfect than it would otherwise be. I will refer to such Christians as "unorthodox," to distinguish them from non-Trinitarian heretics. (What I'm calling "unorthodoxy" is traditionally considered heresy, but there are degrees of heresy, which I'm indicating by using two different words.) Ambiguity about this point--which is the case within Anglicanism, with some holding the position I've just described and others rejecting it--makes a particular church's claim to the title "Catholic" highly dubious at best, even in the absence of other factors.

4. Since the Reformation broke with the consensus of the Church as defined above, it was an unorthodox movement. Churches who base their identity on the Reformation are to some degree cutting themselves off from historic, orthodox Christianity, and ought to repent.That doesn't mean that all the doctrines and practices of the Reformation were wrong by any means, or that the Reformation was not provoked by serious disorders within the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century. It means that the Reformation is to be judged by Catholic teaching as defined in the previous point, and not the other way round.

5. Although, as stated in point 1, all baptized Christians belong to the Catholic Church, the term "Catholic Church" or "the Church" is most properly used for that body of Christians which has preserved the Catholic Faith--that is to say, which has not rejected some part of it or adopted formally a doctrine or practice incompatible with it. Even within the Catholic Church as so defined, there will be much sin and error. Outside it, there are many holy Christians with much to contribute to the Church. (That's without getting into the question of non-Christians!) Nonetheless, there is a clear, qualitative difference between the Catholic Church in the strict sense and those Christian churches which have rejected some part of the historic Faith.

6. The consensus of the Christian tradition (as defined in point 3) holds that the Catholic Church can subsist only in one body of Christians. In principle, any division among Christians involves the sin of schism, and there is always one group of Christians not formally guilty of schism (even though many members of that group may have done much to provoke the schism, being sinful like everybody else). The only justifiable reason for separating from another group of Christians is heresy/unorthodoxy. If some part of the Church no longer teaches the historic Catholic Faith, then the rest of the Church needs to discipline the erring members. In the present state of the Church, that means that either the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church must be the body in which the Catholic Church (as defined in point 1) most fully subsists. Obviously there are a lot of problems with this conclusion:

a. Most obviously, there are good arguments pointing toward both possibilities (technically, there's also the "Oriental Orthodox" and the "Church of the East," but let's keep things relatively simple). So the poor ecclesiological inquirer is left in limbo, unless one just closes one's eyes and takes a leap, or finds a "smoking gun" to point in one direction or the other. For me, the importance of unity and communion, and the concrete evidence pointing toward the importance of communion with Rome, make the "Catholic Church" the most likely candidate for being, well, the Catholic Church. But on the other hand, the Orthodox seem on the whole to be far more, well, orthodox, preserving a theological method that is recognizably that of the Fathers, and free from the legalistic over-definition that plagues the Roman Communion.

b. Whichever of the two "candidates" one is inclined to choose, one is faced with the fact that "the Catholic Church subsisting fully in this communion" is a lot more abstract than one might like, to put it mildly. (Note: I'm using RC terminology throughout--the term "subsists" comes out of Vatican II--but the Orthodox, as far as I can see, use different language to say similar things, except for their ultra-traditionalist wing, which is admittedly much stronger than its RC counterpart.) Roman Catholics like to talk about "the fullness of the Faith." But it's pretty obvious to anyone not completely eaten away by triumphalism that there are plenty of legitimate expressions of the Faith not found in the Roman Communion, and that it would be pretty hard to introduce under present circumstances. While the Orthodox, in my opinion, have a much more compelling core set of beliefs and practices, they also have much less room for diversity (ironically), insisting that the Tradition hangs together in all its details. So the same problem arises--as my advisor put it, one can't be Orthodox and sing Charles Wesley (well, maybe a few "Western Rite" parishes do--I'm not sure). And whatever the fullness of the Faith may be, I'm pretty sure it includes Charles Wesley.

c. Similarly, on the negative side of the equation, while both the RCC and the EOs can make a case for infallibility (stronger for the Orthodox, but not completely unbelievable for the Roman Communion either, if properly nuanced), it's pretty obvious that both Communions, as historic institutions, have messed up royally on a number of occasions. And it's pretty clear to me that these failings aren't just the result of generic human sinfulness, but of attitudes and patterns of behavior characteristic of the traditions in question. The Orthodox do seem to have a particular propensity toward cultural idolatry, identifying the Faith with cultural traditions and giving far too much weight to civil authorities in Church matters. And the Roman Communion does seem to have a propensity toward "putting on the Ring," using the weapons of worldly power in its own right and putting the interests of the Church as an institution above the claims of the Gospel. Are either of these failings really compatible with being the Catholic Church in sense 1? Not just part of the Catholic Church, but the Catholic Church in a way that excludes and supersedes the claim of other Christian communities?

If Anglicanism has any place at all, it is the space that exists between the competing claims of Rome and the East. Anglicans have no business arguing for a "mere Anglicanism" or staking out even a modest claim to Catholicity. Rather, we witness through our very existence to the brokenness of the Church. We ought to devote our energies not to defending our own claims but to admitting our own historic idolatry and witnessing humbly to the grace of God that exists even in what Ephraim Radner has memorably called "the ruins of the Church."

This is why I find Anglo-Catholicism to be a fundamentally mistaken project. Anglo-Catholics claim to be Catholic, and traditionally condemn Protestantism in terms that would make a modern Pope blush with embarrassment. But when it comes to addressing the errors of the Reformation, Anglicans need to admit that we have met the enemy and he is us. The same is true when addressing the juridical obsessions of Western Christianity (the Episcopal Church's present attempt to function as a religious equivalent of modern American democracy is no improvement over the Roman "tyranny" we are so quick to criticize) or the cultural captivity of the Orthodox (the Episcopal Church is largely a club of Anglophile snobs).

Our only "advantage" over other Christians is that we do not have to claim an advantage. We can admit to being orphaned Catholics, rootless Orthodox, petrified evangelicals. Instead of being the folks who have it right, we should claim to be the folks who know that we have it wrong. And even that does not give us an advantage. It's nothing to be proud of. In our brokenness and our disunion we bear witness to the crucified Jesus. But let's not kid ourselves. We could be in union with Rome or in full continuity with the historic riches of Orthodoxy and still be plenty broken. Precisely because our brokenness is what we share most fully with other Christians, we should not turn our admission of brokenness into a further excuse for separation.

This is my Anglican manifesto, which is neither very Anglican nor much of a manifesto. But it's where I am.

Religion and art--followup to a Facebook discussion

Yet again I return to this blog after a very long absence (the longest yet). I hope to post regularly, but we'll see what happens. At any rate, the occasion for this post is a recent Facebook conversation. One of my friends asked why Christians no longer produce great art. I replied that this wasn't entirely a fair generalization, but that the proportion of good art to "kitsch" probably is higher than it used to be, for the following reasons:

1. Both the Church and society in general are much more democratic and anti-elitist than they used to be, and
2. The elites are more secular than they were a few hundred years ago (maybe more so even than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, though that's a more dubious proposition.
So we have an elite "avant-garde" art that is largely secular; a pop culture whose movers and shakers are also largely secular but which has room for significant religious elements, often distorted and watered down by commercialism and the desire not to offend; and a Christian "subculture" (particularly among evangelical Protestants) that subordinates artistic standards to the demands of simple piety crossed with commercialism.

In this post, I'd like to expand and clarify what I meant by "kitsch" and how I think populism affects the production of art in modern Christianity (especially American evangelicalism).

First of all (not to rush in where angels fear to tread or anything), I'll define art. Art, as I use the term, anything produced by human beings which stimulates the imagination and thus causes us to experience reality in a different or more intense way. The peculiar virtue of art is its ability to transform our experience by uniting thought and feeling. The more radically it transforms our experience of reality, and the more profoundly it unites in itself the various other ways in which we experience the world, the greater it is.

A work of art is "bad" (aesthetically) insofar as it simply triggers an emotional or intellectual response without uniting and transforming our normal responses to reality. Both emotionally and intellectually, art can fail in two very different directions, either in the direction of excessive simplicity or excessive complexity. In both cases, bad art fails to stimulate the imagination in a transformative way, instead producing a response that owes its strength almost entirely to non-imaginative sources.

Emotionally, an excessively simple work of art appeals to one of the basic human emotions in a way that simply reiterates and confirms our non-imaginative response to reality. So, for instance, a bad love song does nothing to expand and transform the experience of romantic love. Someone who enjoys an unimaginative, artistically poor love song is doing so because the mere use of a crude formula pointing at romantic emotion is enough to awaken the emotion. Someone who enjoys a bad hymn or worship song, and feels closer to God as a result, does so because they already have pious emotions and enjoy feeling those emotions awakened and confirmed. As I use the term, "kitsch" is an excessively simple work of art that appeals directly to the emotions in this way.

Similarly, an excessively simple work of art may appeal directly to one's beliefs. Bad art is often didactic--that is, it simply reiterates what the hearers/readers/viewers already believe (or what they can be made to believe through non-imaginative means, including valid argument).

Therefore, a good rule of thumb is that art escapes the vice of excessive simplicity insofar as it can be appreciated by people not emotionally or intellectually well disposed toward its theme and/or argument. Great love poetry may be appreciated by people who have never been in love and do not want to be. Great religious art may be appreciated by atheists, or people of another religion, or simply people who don't agree with the particular theological claim being made. When James Weldon Johnson's God says, "I'm lonely, I'll make me a world," I recognize this as good art because I find it powerful and appealing even though I think I have very good theological reasons to reject the picture of God being offered.

But there is another kind of badness into which art may fall. An artist may seek so assiduously to evade excessive simplicity that he/she produces art which relies for its effect _solely_ on its complexity, on its failure to appeal to common emotions or accepted beliefs. Such art is in fact relying on the pride of its consumers: "this must be good because most people don't like it." In the case of religious art, a Christian with pretensions to sophistication may actually value a blasphemous or perverse work of art beyond what it deserves, even though it goes against the Christian's normal emotions and sincerely held beliefs. There may be atheists who similarly value religious art more than it deserves, but I have never met one.

Note that when I speak of "excessive simplicity" or "excessive complexity" I'm not claiming that there is some ideal level of complexity--indeed, I think simplicity and complexity are hard to define. I'm using the word "simplicity" to mean the direct appeal to emotion or belief, bypassing the transformative and unitive power of the imagination. And I'm using "complexity" to mean the avoidance of such a simple appeal--the deliberate choice of a tortuous path for the sake of an imaginative effect.

T.S. Eliot, reacting against what he rightly saw as the "dissociation" of intellect from feeling, attempted to reunite the two by means of deliberate obscurity, the use of unusual metaphors whose relationship to the emotions was remote and often paradoxical, and so on. C. S. Lewis ridiculed Eliot for comparing the evening to a patient etherized on a table. And in fact I agree with Lewis that this isn't one of Eliot's better choices. But Lewis was so hostile to Eliot that in my opinion he radically undervalued the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" taken as a whole. And Lewis himself was a much poorer poet than Eliot (not that this is a reason to discount his critical judgments).

The two errors--excessive simplicity and excessive complexity--feed on each other. The more anti-intellectual and simplistic the popular art of a culture is, the more deliberately obscure and self-referential and complacent its elite art will become, and vice versa. But kitsch and didacticism (using the word here for bad didactic art--in my opinion there is also good didactic art, but that's another conversation) are always going to be far more common than their counterparts. Not only are the cultural elites, who are prone to excessive complexity, by definition a minority of any society, but it is harder for even a member of the elites to fall into the vice of excessive complexity than it is for people who do not worship sophistication to fall into the vice of excessive simplicity. A highly sophisticated person may enjoy simple art more than its imaginative value warrants, although this will be experienced as a "guilty pleasure" (and really sophisticated people may make a point of enjoying "guilty pleasures" as a way of flaunting their sophistication, especially since the advent of postmodernism, since one of the perverse sophistications of postmodernism is the claim that artistic value is purely arbitrary). But most people are never going to be tempted to enjoy bad art that errs in the direction of perverse sophistication. The emotions awakened by bad art are emotions that even sophisticated people feel.

Hence, cultural sophistication does make it relatively easier to produce and experience great art. One of the purposes of a liberal arts education is to give people the tools (and habituate them to the effort) necessary to appreciate art that takes a somewhat roundabout path to the mind and heart (especially when the difficulty in appreciating a work of art arises largely from cultural unfamiliarity, as is often the case). And the more one learns to appreciate the great art human beings have already produced, the more likely it is (by and large) that one will produce great art oneself.

Therefore, even though plenty of good art has been produced by people who were not highly educated or among the elites of their society, a society that generally devalues elitism and sees democracy as a spiritual value is going to produce poorer art on the whole. And a religious community that deliberately crafts its worship to appeal to the "masses" will not, generally, produce great art.

I want to expand further on this concept of "deliberate crafting to appeal to the masses" and its relationship to commercialism and the mass production of popular culture. But this has already been a very wordy post.

Which Church Father are you?

You’re St. Justin Martyr! You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

Why does anyone vote for Romney?

It seriously puzzles me. OK, he's no doubt a competent administrator. But who cares how competent he is if he's sold his soul?

Romney and McCain campaigned in Michigan on the issue of the economy and the loss of jobs. McCain was honest, Romney gave a lot of smarmy feel-good talk that didn't mean anything, and Romney won. Did people seriously believe that Romney could deliver his promise to bring back lost jobs? Why would they believe a thing like that?

Romney has consistently taken the more immoral of two positions whenever given half the chance. His refusal to condemn waterboarding should disqualify him in the minds of anyone with any sense of decency.

McCain is an honest and honorable politician who would make an excellent president. For that very reason, he's almost sure to lose.

This campaign has almost made me think there might be some hope for American politics. Things aren't as sewn up as usual and there arethree serious candidates (McCain, Huckabee, and Obama) who seem to be sincere idealists. If any of those three gets nominated for their respective parties, I'll be surprised and delighted. I think Obama probably has the best chance of the three--too bad he's so wrong on abortion.

And yes, I'm trying to get back into blogging after another of my long hiatus. (And yes, "hiatus" is the Latin plural for "hiatus.")

Bush was right to veto the Iraq withdrawal bill

The war was stupid and wrong from the start. We (Americans, British, etc.) went into it on false pretences, and we have almost certainly done more harm than good. But we are there now. You can't just charge into a neighbor's house and make a mess and then run off. We have made ourselves reponsible for what happens. To withdraw unilaterally simply compounds the evil we committed by invading in the first place.

We must withdraw when and only when it is clearly the desire of the Iraqis as a whole that we do so. I would applaud Congress if it explored the question of whether Bush should be impeached for his dubiously constitutional actions in the conduct of the war, but it ought not and must not impose a timetable for withdrawal. Such an action will only embolden the insurgents. We had no right to invade in 2003, and we have no right to leave now. We can leave only when we are unambiguously told to do so by the Iraqis. It's no longer our decision.

Pope Benedict praises Origen

After 1500 years, Origen gets a break. Pope Benedict dedicated his Wednesday audience to him, saying in part:

I invite you to welcome the teachings of this great teacher of the faith into
your hearts. He reminds us that in the prayerful reading of Scripture and in a
coherent way of life, the Church is renewed and rejuvenated. The Word of God,
which never ages or has its meaning exhausted, is a privileged way of doing
this. It is the Word of God, through the work of the Holy Spirit, which leads us
always to the whole truth (cf. Benedict XVI, international congress for the 40th
anniversary of the dogmatic constitution "Dei Verbum," in Insegnamenti, vol. I,
2005, pp. 552-553). Let us ask the Lord to enable us thinkers, theologians and
exegetes of today to find this multidimensional nature, this permanent validity
of sacred Scripture. We pray that the Lord will help us to read the sacred
Scriptures in a prayerful way, to really nourish ourselves on the true bread of
life, his Word.

What is Anglicanism?

As the crisis in the Episcopal Church appears to be nearing a climax (but haven't we been saying this for years now?), one hears more and more virulent rhetoric on both sides. And the most common charge made by "reappraisers" and "reasserters" alike is that the other side has somehow betrayed what it means to be Anglican. These charges are made with great sincerity, and I think they are both correct--given the presuppositions with which each group is starting.

On the liberal ("reappraiser") side, the definition of Anglicanism is primarily methodological. Anglicanism is defined in terms of the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, reason, and tradition (a definition which I find either tritely obvious and common to all Christians, or completely ahistorical and false as a description of historic Anglicanism); or it is defined in terms of the independence of national churches (which I admit is a historic principle of Anglicanism, but which I believe has always been our Achilles' heel); or it is defined in terms of some vague principle of not being very assertive or confident about doctrine, and particularly not being fundamentalist (or anything that looks to a liberal Christian remotely like fundamentalism) in one's interpretation of Scripture. Obviously if Anglicanism is these things, then conservatives are betraying Anglicanism. That is to say, we do not believe that Scripture, tradition, and reason are equal and co-ordinate authorities for Christian doctrine (neither, of course, did Richard Hooker!). And we certainly treat doctrinal and Scriptural questions in a manner that seems too dogmatic and "fundamentalist" to the "reappraisers" (few if any American Episcopalians are anywhere near real fundamentalism, but by liberal standards many of us look fundamentalist). And it is certainly true that "reasserters" are becoming more and more convinced that the complete independence of national churches is fatal to any attempt to maintain a common Christian orthodoxy, and that we must have some structure of mutual accountability if Anglicanism is to be more than a gaggle of sectarian national churches each pursuing an agenda dictated by the local culture. (To the "reappraisers," I would hold up the Nigerian antigay legislation as an example of this--do you really think that Nigerian Christians should be allowed to support such legislation and still be part of the Anglican Communion? I don't.) Yes, this requires us to rethink the position taken by 16th-century Anglicans over against Rome. And apparently to some liberal Episcopalians this is the ultimate taboo. We cannot suggest that our spiritual ancestors might have been wrong in rejecting the concept of an international ecclesiastical authority. (Note--such a suggestion does not require us to accept every aspect of the RCC's understanding of that authority--papal infallibility, for instance. This is a common scare tactic used by liberals, and it's intellectually empty.) We can question every other doctrine of the English Reformation, but not this one. . . . .

Conservatives, on the other hand, see Anglicanism in terms of beliefs and liturgical practices. To "reasserters," it seems downright perverse to accuse people of being "un-Anglican" for wanting to develop new authority structures in order to defend traditional beliefs and practices. To conservatives, liberals appear to be fighting to keep the windowpanes intact while demolishing the building at its foundations.

Consider the very different way two retired bishops have been treated in the Episcopal Church. John Shelby Spong published "Twelve Theses" which rejected most of the things Christians have traditionally believed. He was never disciplined. But William Cox gets swift and speedy justice from the ecclesiastical courts for daring to administer the sacraments without the approval of the local bishop.

I have heard sermons in Episcopal churches implicitly comparing conservatives to the Pharisees of Jesus' day as described in the New Testament. But surely the privileging of questions of jurisdiction and canon over basic issues of faith and practice is as "Pharisaical" (in the traditional, pejorative Christian sense) as anything one can find on the conservative side.

That is not to say that the conservative flouting of canons is to be justified. There's something to the charge that the so-called "reasserters" are looking more and more like typical American Protestants out to start their own church. But they are doing this because the pursuit of theological, moral, and liturgical innovation by liberals has weakened or destroyed the hold of traditional Anglican structures and conventions on the volatile and individualistic minds of American Christians.

Thoughts on Tanzania

Since every other Anglican blog has naturally been holding forth for the past few weeks about the Primates' meeting in Tanzania, and since I'm trying to get back into blogging, here are my thoughts:

I am encouraged by the fact that the Anglican Communion appears to be holding together and that it is moving toward some kind of structure of authority and accountability. But I can't get away from the question raised by liberals on the one hand and Catholics on the other: on what basis does the Anglican Communion claim authority to decide controversial questions? We aren't the Church Universal. We are an incidental outgrowth of the British Empire. Not that God couldn't use the British Empire to form His Church (one could, after all, describe Catholicism--that is, historic Christianity excluding the Nestorians and Monophysites--as an outgrowth of the Roman Empire). But we don't claim to be the Church.

So while it's good that we're struggling toward being Church, soberly we know that we are at best one fragment of the Church. In other words, I can't really take much comfort from the victory of "my" side--if we are really winning--not only because I have become increasingly sensitive to the pain that such a victory would bring to the "losers," but also because the controversy itself awakens the basic ecclesiological doubts that gnaw at me as an Anglican.

And, of course, it's quite possible that the communique won't mean much anyway.

Lenten message from G. K. Chesterton

The two great parties in human affairs are only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we who are its misers.

On Tuesday I was old--I ate pancakes and sausage.

For the past four days I have been learning slowly, painfully, haltingly to be young.
Every morning of Lent, if we are willing to receive the grace offered us, the winged messengers of repentance come to us from the fiery mountains of the sun and place in our mouths the fruit that takes away a little of our age. And when we have become as young as the child born yesterday, we will be ready for the dance of Easter.

The real problem with the "Christian Right"

The catchphrase on the Left these days (and among many who see themselves as moderate) is "theocracy." Allegedly, conservative Christians are pushing for an explicitly Christian government ruled by Biblical law, in which those who offend Christian codes of belief or ethics will be persecuted. These claims are supported by copious citations from the more extreme writings of the small group of conservative Protestants known as "Reconstructionists," who are in fact working toward an explicitly Christian society based on what they see as Biblical law (although they admit that this probably won't happen for centuries at best). The easy way to respond to this claims is to point out the huge diversity of belief within the "Christian Right," and the minority status of strict Reconstructionists. Still, it does seem to be true that Reconstructionists have influenced some of the presuppositions of the broader "Christian Right," much as (in an earlier "red scare") hardline Communists exercised a certain influence over a much broader community of left-leaning intellectuals.

I would like to propose a more radical thesis than a simple denial that most conservative Protestants are going to the "extreme" of theocracy. Theocracy is not in any sense the logical outcome of what passes for the conservative Protestant political agenda. It is not even (despite their own claims!) the true position of the Reconstructionists.

No, the problem with the Christian Right is not that they are too theocratic. It is that they are not theocratic enough. It's not that they reject the separation of church and state, but that they have bought into a particularly vicious form of that particular piece of Enlightenment propaganda. And this is true even of the dreaded Reconstructionists.

I came to this conclusion while reading Greg Bahnsen's contribution to the anthology "Law and Gospel: Five Views." This is part of a series of books on various topics of interest to evangelicals, in which representatives of different perspectives (Reformed, Arminian, dispensationalist, etc.) offer alternative views and criticize each other's contributions. Bahnsen (recognized as one of the more thoughtful and moderate reconstructionists) rejects explicitly the claim that reconstructionists deny separation of church and state. According to Bahnsen, church and state are to be sharply distinguished according to their proper function. The Church is to teach doctrine, care for the poor, and proclaim the Gospel, while the state is to maintain order and punish the wicked. The state thus has a purely "negative" function of restraining human wickedness (according to God's Law) and dare not overstep these bounds.

Bahnsen explicitly contrasts his position to that of Richard Mouw, accusing Mouw of violating true church-state separation by advocating that the government engage in legislation on behalf of the poor (I haven't read the work by Mouw to which Bahnsen was responding, so I'm relying on Bahnsen's no doubt biased summary). This is not theocracy--Mouw is closer in this respect to true Biblical theocracy than Bahnsen (though of course Bahnsen claims that the Bible is on his side).

The problem with religion in American politics is not theocracy. The problem is that two different (but equally faithless) versions of church-state separation are being peddled by demagogues on the left and right respectively. The left doesn't want society to have any truck with Christian values that clash with the expression of individual freedom. The right doesn't want to have any truck with Christian values that clash with patriotism and capitalism and law and order and the nuclear family. Both are denying some part of the Gospel. The answer to both is not theocracy per se but an unashamed proclamation of what the Puritans (of whom the Reconstructionists would claim to be heirs) would call the "crown rights of King Jesus" and what Catholics used to call "the social reign of Christ the King." This doesn't mean what either the Puritans or traditional Catholics thought it meant, because both were too influenced by the world in their definition of kingship. Christ's reign is always a reign of the Cross. The reign of Christ may mean, for instance, that English-speakers cease to be dominant in the United States because our King has told us that in showing hospitality to the poor and needy we are serving Him. It may mean that we lose the "war on terror" because winning it would mean acting in a way unworthy of the Christ who refused to call legions of angels to defend Him. It may mean that married couples are unable to keep up a lifestyle suited to their education because doing so would mean neglecting their duties as parents (potential or actual).

It's not the purpose of this post to say just what recognizing the Kingship of Christ will mean. Indeed, nothing is healthier for us right now than a vigorous intra-Christian debate over just what it means. I am privileged to teach at a Christian college where such a debate is going on (painful as that often is). But the possibility of such a debate is short-circuited when one side plays the "theocracy" card and the other plays the "secularism" card, each arguing that the other side should be ruled summarily out of court because it is not making a genuinely Christian argument at all.

Those who consider themselves the spiritual heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., should be ashamed of accusing conservative Christians of theocracy simply because they have a different view of what the public implementation of Christian values looks like. The quarrel is not over whether religion should influence politics. The quarrel is always and only over how religion should influence politics and what kind of religion should do so. And the sooner that is acknowledged on all sides the sooner we can get on to the real debate.

Or rather debates--for the final irony here is that the accusation that one side is illegitimately bringing religion into politics violates the church-state barrier that really counts, namely the methodological one. People with religious convictions have every right to try to enact their beliefs into law, and their opponents have every right to fight them with all the weapons in the arsenal of democratic politics. And at the same time both sides also have the right to engage in a public theological debate as to the religious merits of their respective positions. But because this is not a country with an Established Church, the two debates are independent of each other (though not unconnected with each other). Recent attacks on the "theocracy" of the Christian Right (at least those launched by Christians such as Randall Balmer) ignore this. They claim to be defending democracy when in fact they are engaging in a particular theological debate running parallel to the political debate. Whether or not gay marriage should be recognized or abortion made illegal--these are both religious and political questions. As political questions, they should be decided by the proper instruments of democractic politics. But the question of which side Christians should take, and whether Christians qua Christians should care about these issues it all, is a specifically religious question and must be treated as such.

A better article on the same subject

I particularly like the point that the invasion of Iraq went astray in part because of its exclusively secular approach. A lot of people misinterpreted a perfectly normal (for any Christian) remark by Bush about seeking divine guidance as some sort of claim of divine inspiration for the invasion.

It's probably true that conservative Christianity leads to a rather dualistic mindset and thus tends to favor the demonization of enemies (this is one of the places where "conservative" and "orthodox" definitely don't mean the same thing). But the explicit reasons I hear from conservative Christians for their support of the war sound almost entirely secular to me. I don't think their problem is that their thinking is dominated by religion--the problem is exactly the opposite. They use Romans 13 to justify full support for whatever bloody actions the government may think necessary, and anyone who questions those actions is allegedly engaging in some sort of liberal utopianism that ignores human sinfulness.

In other words, the war in Iraq is not and has never been a holy war driven by Christianity. Like most modern wars, it's driven by perceived national self-interest, but it derives fuel from bad political theology that hands the job of moral reasoning over to the state, while lending the state's actions [purported] divine approval.

Interesting article on American Christianity

This report by the Council on Foreign Relations was published in the New York Times. It's a relatively fair account of American evangelicalism, though the tone (as one would expect) is patronizing, and there are some silly mistakes (such as the characterization of fundamentalism as "ultra-Calvinist"). At least they don't think that evangelicals are pushing for a theocracy, which seems to be a common belief on the left these days. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, especially with the appearance of Randall Balmer's book Thy Kingdom Come. Balmer unfortunately has put his seal of approval on this nonsense.

I'm hoping to get back into blogging now that things are settling down a bit, and I want to write on this topic as well as on my usual ecclesiological subjects. I agree that there are a lot of reasons to be concerned with the Christian Right. But criticism of conservative Christians as "theocrats" gets the problem exactly wrong, in my opinion. Of course there are the Reconstructionists/Dominionists, and undoubtedly they have provided some intellectual heft to the generally not very thoughtful conservative evangelical political movement. It's probably true that many conservative activists are more indebted to these ideas than they realize. But the same could have been said of hardline Communism in relation to the broader left-wing movement of the twentieth century. And of course just this was said by McCarthy. The same vicious rhetoric is being used on the left today--a new "red scare" (with far less basis in fact than the old one, IMHO) that like the paranoia of the fifties tars an entire wing of American society with the brush of hardline radicalism. (And actually even the Dominionists believe in a form of separation of church and state, contrary to liberal propaganda.)

This is perhaps just part of the game of democratic politics. We always make our opponents out to be more radical than they are, so that we can position ourselves as part of the mainstream. But in times of great social tension this polarizing game can become an extremely dangerous form of self-fulfilling prophecy. We use the alleged radicalism of our opponents as an excuse to become radical ourselves, and thus prompt our opponents to follow suit, turning them into the monsters we thought they were all along (and so justifying further extremism on our part).

The CFR article, for all its faults, avoids this approach. Perhaps this isn't as surprising as I think. I don't know the political composition of the CFR--it claims to be nonpartisan and this may be true. Ironically, I heard it mentioned a lot on right-wing Christian radio stations as I was growing up--they were of the opinion that it was part of a vast conspiracy to bring about the "New World Order." So it's good to see that they don't return the favor (except for the silly label of "ultra-Calvinism").

Evangelicals against Bush

Christianity Today reports that evangelical leaders including Franklin Graham and Rick Warren are criticizing the Bush administration's stance on North Korea. They call for open negotiations with North Korea rather than the current emphasis on containment.

How come? I thought evangelicals were supposed to be mindless toadies of the Bush administration. And of course we know that any humanitarian concern religious conservatives may display is a sham, because we're all just hungering for the end of the world.

How is helping the Koreans going to bring in the Apocalypse?

Lots of stuff has been happening

I have recently gotten a job at a college in Indiana (Huntington University), and the past few months have been largely taken up with getting a house, planning the move, etc. Hence my inactivity here. I do want to maintain this blog, however, and I hope to be more active in the future.

Reformanda vs. renovanda

Here I go again after another of my long lapses. I'm not going to become king of the blogosphere at this rate, but that's OK.

An online acquaintance of mine, Tim Enloe, asked me a few weeks ago to expand a remark I once made to the effect that the Church is not "semper reformanda" (always to be reformed) but rather "semper renovanda" (always to be renewed).

Here's what I mean by this.

"Semper reformanda" asserts that one must, from time to time, question the doctrines and structures that have already been established. They must be compared with Scripture (and/or previous non-Scriptural Christian tradition) and revised or even discarded as needed. The underlying assumption is that the Church progresses into a fuller understanding and experience of the faith by a continual process of questioning and reformulation. There's an intrinsic paradox here--on the one hand Scripture is the standard of perfection by which all tradition must be judged, while on the other hand a fully adult form of Christianity beckons from the future. Emphasize the first half of this paradox, and you have fundamentalism; emphasize the second, and you have liberalism. Mainstream, historic Protestantism stands in a fruitful tension between the two. Often, the Reformation of the 16th century takes a secondary place next to Scripture as the archetypal act of reform--in old-fashioned Protestant circles any attempt to "reform the reform" in the light of pre-Reformation traditions is likely to be met with outraged protest. Sometimes a similar status is given to the patristic era, or parts thereof; and sometimes even aspects of medieval Christianity are seen as important steps in the development of a fully mature, and hence fully reformed, Christianity (Anselm's atonement theology, for instance).

So the position I'm describing does not exclude a respect for the past and for tradition. In this it contrasts with the "restorationist" position which believes it can sweep away the past entirely and reconstruct the New Testament Church. (I'm sure my good friend thoughtspot is going to protest that this is a caricature, and maybe it is. I'll let thoughtspot make the case!) There's a lot to be said for the "semper reformanda" slogan. Clearly any orthodox form of Christianity must maintain Scripture as the norma normans, the ultimate standard that regulates all doctrine and practice. (And yes, that means that the Council of Trent is only orthodox insofar as it can be interpreted so as to allow Scripture to remain the norma normans.) And just as clearly, the Church does stray from time to time--even if it doesn't declare false dogmas, at the very least it tends to overemphasize one thing or another, or deemphasize some vital point of Christian discipleship, and has to be brought back.

Here's the question, though: does this re-centering of the Church around the Gospel take place primarily through the restructuring of institutions and the reformulation of dogmas? And does it involve the rejection of the past, even in a partial sense?

The "semper renovanda" position I'm arguing would answer no to both these questions. Yes, restructuring of doctrines and institutions is needed from time to time. But historically, these restructurings generally create as many problems as they solve. Real progress takes place, I believe, when Christians learn to live more deeply into what they have been given. Any restructuring necessary proceeds from this inner renewal, and when reformation works the other way around it doesn't work very well. Do away with the papacy and you deliver yourself into the hands of the civil government. Free the laity from priests and you subject them to the far worse tyranny of scholars. Reject indulgences and you wind up with a forensic doctrine of justification that describes Christ's redeeming work in terms of the same kind of account-book juggling engaged in by the indulgence sellers.

Insofar as the Reformation was a truly positive force in Christian history, it was a movement of evangelical renewal focused on the message of forgiveness through faith in Christ. But as Catholics are discovering today (Fr. Cantalemessa's sermon before the Pope a few months ago is the most striking example) , this is not necessarily incompatible with Catholicism. The evangelical message per se did not need to split the Church. (Indeed, David Bagchi and others have pointed out that the earliest opponents of Luther did not single his doctrine of justification out as heretical. Only after Luther had been announcing for years that justification by faith destroyed the structures of the Papacy did the champions of the Papacy start to believe him.)

I don't fault Luther for linking the evangelical message to a reform program. Reform was indeed needed. Indeed, I don't have the heart to blame Luther and the other early Reformers. I understand why they saw the Papacy as a foul parasite on the Church's life. I understand why they saw the material piety of the later Middle Ages as rank superstition. I understand why they thought true renewal could only come through sweeping away scholasticism and pilgrimages and all the paraphernalia of late medieval Catholicism. But I think history has proven them wrong. Indeed, some aspects of Catholicism began to creep back as early as the 1530s. Scholastic philosophy was entrenched once again in Protestantism by the later 16th century. The "tyranny" ascribed by the Reformers to the Papacy was nothing compared to the tyranny exercised by civil authorities over the Church--often because the Protestants had handed over control to the "magistrate."

This is why "semper reformanda" is a trap when it becomes the central program of the Church. Sweep the dust away and it will start settling again immediately. Dusting is one of the duties of life (though I do it far too seldom). But if we spend all our time dusting the house we will never enjoy it. And our problems will only get worse if we decide the furniture is bad every time it gets covered with dust. We'll bankrupt ourselves and fill our lives with chaos trying to get new furniture all the time. The sensible approach is to dust as needed and accept the fact that cleanliness will never be perfect. We need to _live_ in the house rather than always trying to make it perfectly clean.

Erec et Enide

In my last post I referred briefly to the medieval courtly romance "Erec et Enide," which I read this past year. I had intended to write a response to it on this blog some time ago, but never got around to doing so. Since I've brought it up, I might as well describe it in somewhat more detail, for those who were mystified by my brief reference to it yesterday.

Erec, the hero of the poem, is a young knight in King Arthur's court who becomes romantically involved with a poor (but "well-born") young woman, Enide, in the course of avenging an insult to Queen Guenevere. After defeating an arrogant knight in a tournament, Erec brings Enide back to the court and they are married. They have a rapturous wedding night and are clearly besotted with each other in every respect. Chretien emphasizes their complete equality, in social rank, in good looks, and in character. Their married life appears to be off to a good start--but their wedded bliss itself becomes a problem, because Erec has no further desire to do noble deeds and maintain his status as a valiant knight. This means that his vassals (he's a prince) don't win any glory (or booty) either, and they become restive. Enide realizes that she has ruined Erec's career, and she blames herself. Erec overhears her and becomes angry. (Chretien doesn't explain exactly why he is angry with her. Tennyson, in the Idylls of the King, has Erec--actually called Geraint in Tennyson's version--misunderstand Enide's words as a confession that she is in love with someone else. This is more plausible as a reason for his anger, but it is rather contrived and less psychologically subtle than Chretien's more mysterious version. I think it makes sense psychologically that Erec would make Enide the scapegoat for his own obsession with her, and that he would be provoked to do so by her obvious distress. He's sacrificed his career for her, so from his point of view the least she can do is be grateful. Footnote 27 of the online edition to which I've linked from the title of this post agrees with my interpretation, noting that the "jealousy" interpretation is found in the Mabinogion's version of the story. Since the hero of that version is called Geraint, that would seem to have been Tennyson's model, so I'm wrong in blaming Tennyson for what I find a less interesting spin on Erec's treatment of his wife.)

Erec rides off with Enide (much to her relief--she thinks he's going to abandon her at first) into the forest to have knightly adventures. Much of the rest of the poem consists of the usual knight-errant stuff--Erec fights off various marauding knights, evil giants, etc. But throughout these adventures, Enide repeatedly saves the day by warning Erec of approaching danger (against his explicit orders). This of course further wounds his pride--the point of the exercise is for him to demonstrate that marriage has not lessened his prowess in any way, and being dependent on his wife's scouting abilities spoils the whole thing.

At one point, Erec and Enide find hospitality with an apparently friendly count, who becomes enamored of Enide and offers to marry her and make her the lady of all his domains. Enide, of course, rejects his advances, even though he's being much nicer to her than Erec. The count then threatens to kill Erec if she doesn't give in to him, so Enide pretends to agree to his advances, asking him to come back later and overpower Erec. Then she warns Erec of the count's plans and they ride off together. The count comes after them with a large army, and once again Enide disobeys her husband and warns him that they are being pursued. Erec kills the count's foremost warrior and knocks the count off his horse, wounding him badly. The count comes to his senses (morally speaking) at this point, and praises Enide's cunning as well as her honor: "The lady who outwitted me is very honourable, prudent, and courteous."

Erec doesn't repent quite so quickly--it takes several more adventures before he can bring himself to "forgive" Enide for her criticism of him (i.e., her lament that she was causing him to lose his knightly honor). At the same time, he promises to return their relationship to that of lover and lady, in which the lady gives commands (in contrast to his imperious, indeed tyrannical behavior to her throughout their adventures): "From this time on for evermore, I offer myself to do your will just as I used to do before." Erec and Enide's trials thus end with Enide's complete triumph. Through her modest and loyal behavior, but also through her quick wits and her willingness to disobey her "lord" when necessary for his own good (though always with great reluctance), she has regained Erec's favor and put both him and her various would-be suitors to shame.

The poem doesn't end here. Erec and Enide have one final adventure, the "Joy of the Court." On his way back to King Arthur, they come to a castle where a knight named Mabonagrain waits in a garden with a beautiful lady. The knight challenges all who come into the garden to single combat, and up to this point he has defeated them all, killing them and putting their heads on poles. Erec, of course, defeats Mabonagrain after a suitably ferocious duel (bringing about the "Joy of the Court"). It turns out that the lady is a cousin of Enide's, who has made her lover promise to stay with her in the garden and kill every knight who came against him until a knight came who was able to defeat him. Mabonagrain and his lady have had a clandestine relationship--rather than asking for social sanction for their love they eloped from her father's court. Enide, in contrast, pointedly describes her relationship with Erec as a respectable courtship having the full approval of her family: "Fair cousin, he married me in such a way that my father knew all about it, and my mother was greatly pleased. All our relatives knew it and rejoiced over it, as they should do. Even the Count [Enide's uncle and the other woman's father] was glad. For he is so good a knight that better cannot be found, and he does not need to prove his honour and knighthood, and he is of very gentle birth: I do not think that any can be his equal. He loves me much, and I love him more, and our love cannot be greater. Never yet could I withhold my love from him, nor should I do so. For is not my lord the son of a king? For did he not take me when I was poor and naked? Through him has such honour come to me that never was any such vouchsafed to a poor helpless girl."

Mabonagrain and his lady are a foil to Erec and Enide. Their enclosed garden, complete with the rotting heads of good knights, is an image of romantic love turned in on itself, destructive both to the lovers and to their society (hence the rapturous "Joy" that follows Erec's defeat of Mabonagrain). "Erec and Enide" is a story about the social ramifications of erotic love. Erec's winning of Enide is only the beginning--the real conflict in the story is not between Erec and his various opponents in battle but between the couple's romantic relationship and Erec's social duties as a knight and a prince. Erec and Enide are model lovers because they are able to achieve happiness with each other without being false to their social duties.

If I've given the impression that Chretien is Jane Austen in chain mail, it's because that's the impression I received from reading the poem. I didn't expect it to read quite so much like a nineteenth-century novel. The experience has, I'm afraid, destroyed my already sagging confidence in the accuracy of Lewis's _Allegory of Love_ as an interpretation of medieval romance literature, and it's vastly increased my appreciation for the sophistication and wisdom of medieval culture.

Narnia in the Spotlight, Part 2

A more interesting critique of Narnia than Toynbee's (not focused on the movie, BTW) is the article "Prisoner of Narnia" by Adam Gopnik. Gopnik is himself a children's writer (his books sound interesting and I'd like to read one of them). He appreciates Lewis's imagination, but he clearly resents the fact that Lewis insisted on trying to "imprison" his marvellous fantasies within the "straitened and punitive morality of organized worship." The power of Lewis's fantasy, Gopnik argues, is that his imagination liberated him (if only partially) from his self-chosen dogmatic prison. Fantasy, in Gopnik's view, should exist in its own right. It is harmed rather than helped by being associated with any actual system of belief. It is an escape for Christians just as much as for materialists, since in Gopnik's reading Christianity is intrinsically hostile to myth and imagination.

Gopnik supports his claim by invoking none other than Lewis himself, in the _Allegory of Love_. Lewis argues that the writers of Renaissance romantic epics--Ariosto, Tasso, and Edmund Spenser--could exploit pagan mythology for imaginative purposes because it had been "disinfected of belief." Gopnik sees this as a brilliant insight into the nature of imaginative writing, an insight belied by Lewis's later attempt to "reinfect" his mythopoeitic imagination with Christian belief.

It's an ingenious argument, and I'd have to reread _Allegory_ in order to respond to it adequately. I read it more than ten years ago, and it shaped my views of medieval courtly love literature until quite recently. But the more actual medieval literature I read, the more I think that _Allegory_ is nearly as wrong-headed as it is brilliant. For instance, Lewis says that courtly love was intrinsically adulterous, incompatible with marriage (i.e., married people cannot possibly be courtly lovers of each other), and anti-Christian. Perhaps that's true in some original "ideal type" sense. But I'm not sure even about that. Erec and Eneide, the first known courtly romance of Chretien de Troyes (one of the earliest and greatest masters of the genre) is a romance about how courtly love relates to marriage. The hero and heroine fall in love and marry in the first part of the poem. Being married to one's lady does turn out to have some problems for a courtly lover--most notably that since you can stay in bed with her all day you have less incentive to do noble deeds in her honor. And later on Eneide's loyalty to her husband is tested when she encounters an amorous count who offers her the kind of courtly homage that Erec no longer gives her. But the conflict between courtly love and marriage is precisely what refutes Lewis's thesis. The two things are not kept in separate compartments. One does not drive out the other. The problem of the poem is how to relate them to each other successfully. And the far more Lewisian (though still not adulterous) courtly love couple who appear at the end of the story are presented as a dysfunctional foil to the (ultimately) successful relationship of Erec and Eneide.

True, Erec and Eneide is a very early courtly romance, but that's the point. Lewis says that the attempt to reconcile courtly love with marriage came much later, and if I remember correctly he attributes it to Protestantism (though I think he acknowledges that it's prefigured in Chaucer--at least I hope he does). But what we find in Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale," or even in Spenser, is not radically different (it seems to me) from what we find in Chretien.

I'm not sure that Lewis's argument about Renaissance mythological poetry fares much better. After all, the pagan gods were invoked in a very similar way throughout medieval literature. (Erwin Panovsky--at least I think that's who it was--in an article I once read on Renaissance art made the point that what was new in the Renaissance was the combination of pagan themes and classical style; both of these things had occurred separately at various points throughout the Middle Ages.) How does poetry "spread its wings" less freely in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" than in Tasso or Ariosto? And Spenser's use of pagan mythology is wound together with a copious use of Christian imagery. Lewis argues that since Spenser is a Protestant, this use of Catholic imagery is equally part of the "machinery" and is not related to Spenser's actual beliefs. But I don't think it's that simple. Protestant though Spenser was, he is clearly drawing on a tradition of Christian chivalry that he thinks has a very real relevance for Elizabethan courtiers. And I'd argue that the same is true of his use of pagan imagery. Spenser doesn't worship pagan gods, but he does believe in the realities symbolized by the "Garden of Adonis" in book 3 of the Faerie Queene. (Lewis, I should add, does not suggest otherwise.)

Insofar as the Renaissance writers do use pagan imagery purely for its own sake with no relationship to what they actually believe, I think that it weakens their art. I tend to agree with Tolkien to some extent that there is something very flimsy and superficial about much of the mythological machinery in Renaissance poetry (and still more so in the 17th and 18th centuries). Where Renaissance mythological writing is strongest--as in Spenser--it is strong precisely because it is trying to bring pagan and Christian (and, in Spenser, Catholic and Protestant) visions of life together rather than keeping them in separate compartments.

All of this is to say that insofar as Lewis and Gopnik agree, Lewis is wrong. And he was wrong on a lot of points in the Allegory of Love precisely because he was only recently converted and still suffered from his pre-conversion habit of keeping truth and imagination separate. (I'm not just talking about Christian truth here, but reality of all sorts. Lewis admitted after his experience with Joy, for instance, that he had been wrong in the "Allegory" when he treated courtly love as a purely literary construct. Gopnik makes a great deal of Joy's impact on Lewis. But part of that impact was the final erasure of the schizophrenia which Gopnik rejoices to discover in _Allegory_.) This was the subject of Lewis's "Great War" with Owen Barfield in the 1920s. Gopnik is absolutely right in suggesting that for Lewis Christianity was an escape from that separation. But Lewis was not guilty of "bad conscience" in trying to bring truth and imagination back together. Rather, he was struggling toward imaginative maturity--that complete fusion of intellect and intuition which his youthful atheism had made impossible.

Owen Barfield's criticism of Lewis is far more insightful than Gopnik's, I think. Barfield claimed that Lewis refused to discuss the subject matter of the "Great War" after his conversion and showed signs of great emotional distress when Barfield tried to bring the matter up. Certainly the relationship of imagination and truth continued to be a sore spot for Lewis. Insofar as the _Chronicles_ are too didactic (and naturally, as a Christian, I find this to be the case far less often than Gopnik does), it's because Lewis had not yet fully achieved that maturity. Few of us ever do. But _Till We Have Faces_ (didactic as it is) comes even closer than _Narnia_, I think. And there's reason to think that Lewis was still struggling with the issue at the end of his life.

Among the papers found after Lewis's death was the beginning of a novel set after the fall of Troy. Lewis took as his starting point a Greek tradition that the "real" Helen had never gone to Troy at all. Rather, a simulacrum of her had suffered and aged through the long years of the siege, while the real woman remained in Egypt, magically preserved in all her beauty to be reclaimed by her husband after the war. Lewis's manuscript ends with Menelaus face to face with the dilemma: which is the real Helen? The faded, middle-aged woman whom he found at Troy, or the radiant vision presented to him by the Egyptian priests?

This is the dilemma that we all face, not only in religion but in love, in work, in every aspect of our lives. Gopnik makes a great deal of the contrast between the magical world of Lewis's imagination and the humdrum reality of Christian church life. (To people like myself who came to Anglicanism from low-church evangelicalism, Gopnik's apparent contempt for Anglicanism as a source for imagination and beauty seems extremely odd. But Gopnik may be on target here as regards Lewis; Lewis showed little appreciation for liturgy and usually describes his experiences of church-going as more of a cross to be borne than anything else.) But the local church is important precisely because it is here that the magical world we encounter in imagination invades the world of our daily lives. In bread and wine, in hymns sung by creaky voices, in uncomfortable pews and sermons of varying quality, in the reading of a Scripture that took shape over centuries in the gritty heart of sordid human history--it is then that I hear the gulls crying over Cair Paravel, and feel on my face the air of Narnia on a midwinter night. (These are two of the moments Gopnik singles out as particularly beautiful in the _Chronicles_.)

Gopnik's division between imagination and mundane reality is poisonous. It is the easy way out, a way made increasingly easy by the proliferation of technological shortcuts to the world of imagination. Sex and religion and adventure--they are all only a click away. To bring our deepest longings into the world of daily life is a constant struggle--precisely the struggle to "keep one's belief going" which Gopnik observes and mocks in Lewis's letters. It is, as Steve Taylor remarked (paraphrasing Flannery O'Connor), "harder to believe than not to." The easy way is to "toss away the cloak that you should have mended." But this is not only true for Christians. It is true for every relationship, every achievement, every genuinely human act. To be human is to bring image and reality together. That is what we were made for, hanging in agony between heaven and earth, between angels and beasts. Lewis continues to be relevant, continues to delight and enrage, because he was a bold and articulate modern spokesman for this classical view of human nature--a view at once truly pagan and truly Christian.

Narnia in the Spotlight, Part 1

It's been a long while since I've blogged, as happens from time to time. I keep intending to blog more regularly, but it's probably best not to make promises!

I have been meaning to post a review of the Narnia movie for a while. By now most folks have said their say, and there' s little to add. There were certainly things one could object to, but the main effect the movie had on me was to remind me just how central Narnia has been to my life and to the way I view the world. The Chronicles of Narnia have done a lot to keep me a Christian. My concept of God is shaped in large measure by Aslan. And my uneasiness with most conventional political positions in contemporary society derives in part from my intuition that a really healthy culture would look a lot like Narnia. In the absence of an Old Narnian Party, I generally find myself saying "a pox on all your houses."

One of the most amusing (though also irritating) aspects of the attention Narnia has been getting in the media is the response from secularist critics, mostly British, who are clearly outraged by the fact that anyone still takes Lewis seriously. What these critics lack in numbers they make up for in shrillness--and, it must be said, in the ability to articulate their views in a pungent manner. Probably the most notorious of these reviews is the one by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. The vitriol of British secularism often baffles me. Secular Americans express paranoia about the "Christian right," but generally seem to have less sheer hatred of religion itself. I can't think of an American to match Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, or Christopher Hitchens (though Hitchens comes closest since he's lived in the U.S. for years). British secularists wax eloquent about the historical evils of Christianity, and certainly there's plenty in European history to cause them to do so. But after all, this stuff happened hundreds of years ago, and much that is nasty has occurred since for which Christianity is not (at least not primarily) responsible. The atrocities of the 20th century were driven for the most part by secular ideologies (though there are people who try to tell the story differently). The real villain of modern European history has been the secular state, not the Church. Yet somehow British public opinion seems to have become convinced that religion is responsible for everything bad in Western culture from Constantine to Margaret Thatcher. And since British intellectuals are, on the whole, less restricted by canons of courtesy and political correctness than their American counterparts, they pull no punches in saying this. I find the outspokenness of British secularists admirable. But the cogency of what they have to say doesn't match the vigor and (I believe) honesty with which they say it.

Toynbee is sickened by the idea of sacrifice. Well not really. It's OK for Arthurian heroes and people in prisoner-of-war camps to give up their lives for others. But not for Jesus. We didn't ask him to. What that really means is that, in Toynbee's view, we don't need salvation. Jesus performed an unwanted service. The Church has been dinning into our heads that we should be frightfully grateful for being saved, when there is nothing to be saved from. She doesn't say this, but this appears to be the gist of her remarks about the evil nuns who tormented her mother by saying that not eating greens drove nails into Jesus' body. Edmund, she says, is made "to blame for everything."

I think here we see the reason why British secular intellectuals are so obsessed with the evils of Christianity, even though (as they proudly proclaim) the influence of Christianity seems to be diminishing rapidly in Britain. If the evils of past and present can be blamed on a sinister, unnatural institution that has warped people's minds, then we don't need to look within. Making Christianity a scapegoat for social evils is a brilliantly self-affirming practice. We are bad because we have been warped by Christianity (and other, related institutions of the Bad Old Days, such as the monarchy), which means that we are not inherently bad, and so don't need Christianity.

It would be easy to speculate about the historical roots of this attitude--the Tudor monarchy's brilliant move in blaming the Catholic Church (especially the religious orders) for the injustices of early modern society, creating in the process a more docile national church that would do what it wanted; Lockean empiricism with its fantasy of the "tabula rasa" morphing into the Enlightenment dream of the naturally virtuous human being corrupted by culture and tradition (given vivid and heart-warming life by 19th-century writers such as Dickens); or simply the strong cultural and political tradition in Britain of freedom as the art of being left alone. The British may be deferential to authority, but in my experience (I'm technically British myself but have lived in the U.S. since I was six, so my experience doesn't amount to a great deal) they don't trust it much. (This attitude was, in fact, shared by Lewis. One of the most grotesquely false notes of Toynbee's criticism of Narnia is her characterization of it as a "neo-fascist" society where authority is worshiped for its own sake. But more on that in a later post.) As Pullman shows so dramatically in His Dark Materials, Christianity is, or can be seen as, ultimate Authority. Toynbee is, it seems, angry with Christianity because it won't leave her alone. It tells her she needs a salvation for which she feels no need. It lays unwanted claim upon her life.

I don't mean this as a dismissive ad hominem. Toynbee presumably thinks she has good reasons for supposing Christianity false. That being the case, she's quite justified in being angry with its claims. But what's interesting is the way Toynbee and other opponents of Christianity make the claims themselves seem self-refuting. Toynbee objects that the notion of Christ taking on our sins is "repugnant." Presumably she thinks this because she doesn't accept the idea of sin, or because she thinks there is a better way of dealing with it. But she doesn't say that. (Nor does she have to, I hasten to add. I find her comments distasteful, but not unfair. Her review doesn't claim to be an argument against Christianity.) Apparently, in her world, the non-existence of sin can be taken for granted. But for those of us who find the concept of sin convincing as a description of the evil that we find (to our horror) existing within as well as around us, the idea of being saved from sin is anything but "repugnant."

My Christian name is Edwin, one of those wonderful Anglo-Saxon names revived by the Victorians but not particularly in fashion these days (I inherited it from my grandfather, who was named after his uncle). People have frequently called me "Edmund" by mistake. So I have a tendency to identify myself with Edmund. (I'm somewhat like him in personality too--if I were a great king I'd be a lot more likely to be called "the Just" than "the Magnificent.") And this, of course, is what Lewis wanted us to do (something the secular critics find brazenly manipulative). The treachery and cowardice and snivelling hunger for power that characterizes the "unconverted" Edmund is within us all. How we respond to Narnia depends, in large measure, on whether we are able to believe that.

In defence of Rowan Williams

++Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, occupies one of the least enviable seats in Christendom at this moment. Arguably even the Pope might not want to trade places with him. When ++Williams was chosen as archbishop, the evangelicals in the C of E wore black armbands in protest. Just a few weeks ago, a poster on another blog denied that ++Williams was a Christian because of his speculation regarding the possible legitimacy of same sex relationships.

But the left is no kinder. Most recently, Williams' wise and eloquent responses to a question and answer session in Cairo (to which I linked in the title of this blog post) have incurred the wrath of a blogger named Anglican Scotist. Scotist is one of the more thought-provoking Anglican bloggers (at least in my limited acquaintance), and he is an eloquent and provocative defender of the recent policies of ECUSA. Scotist has repeatedly attacked conservative Episcopalians as right-wingers who have embraced an essentially fundamentalist hermeneutic. He has no use for any appeal to a "plain sense" of Scripture, and he argues that conservative Episcopalians are in fact "liberal individualists." In this latest post, however, Scotist has revealed his own deep commitment to liberal individualism, and even what could be called liberal fundamentalism (not as much of an oxymoron as it might appear).

Williams' central point (in the remarks to which Scotist takes exception) is that his private views as a theologian are not determinative of the Church's position. "The Church," Williams reminds us, "is not Williams' personal political party, or any particular person's." To this Scotist responds that the Church is the party of a particular person, Jesus Christ. Williams' deference to the Church is, Scotist argues, a deference to some other Church than the Church headed by Christ. The Church headed by Christ follows the mind of Christ, and this mind is not subject to the fickle whims of a "super-majority" (Scotist's term for what Williams calls a "consensus").

The problem with this, of course, is that such a Church is reduced in effect to the private judgment of individual Christians. If the individual Christian may know the mind of Christ directly and with certainty, then what becomes of the "epistemic humility" Scotist recently vaunted as a linch-pin of ECUSA's position (see Scotist's blog for Nov. 6)? If the individual Christian does not have certainty, but must act according to her best discernment of the mind of Christ (even if this contradicts the Church's consensus), then this amounts to liberal individualism of the most radical kind. I'm genuinely surprised by this argument coming from Scotist. Given Scotist's track record for brilliant and thought-provoking insights (with most of which I disagree!), he probably has a formidable rebuttal to this objection. But his recent posts seem (from my perspective) to contradict each other in the most direct manner possible.

If one claims to be a Catholic (as I believe Scotist does), and if one claims not to be a liberal individualist, then one surely must allow the community some role in one's decision-making. Yet this is exactly what Williams does, and exactly what Scotist's attack on Williams explicitly excludes. Williams says (rightly) that neither the Church of England, nor the Anglican Communion, nor the Christian Church as a whole today, nor the historic tradition of the Church supports the validity of same-sex (erotic) relationships. Scotist denounces Williams' deference to this combination of authorities as unfaithfulness to Christ. I challenge Scotist to tell me how one arrives at the mind of Christ without any reference to the consensus of the Christian community.

My understanding of Anglicanism--the understanding that drew me to Anglicanism and has kept me precariously Anglicanism in spite of my many misgivings--is that Anglicanism affirms catholicity as the consensus of the entire People of God, ordered visibly according to the historic polity of the Church (i.e., the threefold order of bishops, priests, and deacons) but not vesting authority in any particular institution or organ within the Church. Bishops do not have the authority to invent their own faith. Their responsibility is rather to lead God's people in discerning the mind of Christ on the basis of Scripture, interpreting Scripture through the lens of the Church's traditions but always remaining open to the possibility that Scripture may correct tradition.

This, it seems to me, is exactly the understanding of the Church that lies behind Williams' remarks at Cairo. Scotist speculates that Williams' "church" is led by "bishops" rather than by Christ. This is a particularly risible criticism, because Scotist's real beef with Williams is that Williams refuses to act as if he is the head of the Church. We long for bishops who will act with modesty and humility, and when we get one we revile him! Williams knows that neither he nor any other bishop, nor any caucus of bishops, is the head of the Church. As Scotist affirms, Jesus Christ is the only head of the Church. But Christ speaks to and through the actual, visible, organized, sinful, fallible community of Christians existing throughout space and time. To hear Christ means to hear the Church--not because the Church is infallible and not because it does not need to be challenged by prophetic voices, but because in the end prophetic voices are validated by the wisdom of the entire People of God. As a theologian, Williams has challenged Christians to think more carefully about many issues, including same-sex relationships. But as a bishop, he no longer has the freedom to voice his own views but rather those of the entire body of Anglican believers (with respectful attention to the broader community of believers throughout time and space) engaged in the common task of discerning the mind of Christ.

Scotist's attack on Williams is the cheapest form of fundamentalist polemic. Scotist assumes (like a good fundamentalist) that the mind of Christ can only be known by an individual, and he dismisses the consensus of Christ's Body over against the pristine intuitions of the lonely believer. This is the only way I see to read Scotist's argument. Without such an appeal to radical individualism, he has no case. (I'm sure Scotist will accuse me of caricaturing his position, and indeed I'm being deliberately provocative in reponse to his equally provocative attack on the Archbishop. I hope to draw from him one of his usual eloquent and thought-provoking arguments, and I await such an argument eagerly.)

I don't deny that it is possible for a moral issue to appear to the conscience with such clarity that one can no longer defer even to the consensus of the Church. (I'm dubious that this has been the case as often in the history of the Church as many would claim. The abolition of slavery, for instance, did not contradict anything in the Church's historic teaching as far as I can see, although that teaching had not gone nearly far enough in condemning slavery.) Whether a bishop in such circumstances should press his/her understanding of the issue or should rather step down and resume a purely prophetic role is something I'm in no position to decide. But clearly Williams does not see the legitimacy of sexual relationships between members of the same sex as a matter of such complete moral clarity.

This brings us to Scotist's specific criticism of Williams' remarks about same-sex relationships. Williams distinguishes implicitly between respect for gay people (which is a self-evident moral duty of the first importance) and approval of sexual relationships between members of the same sex (which he regards as something not yet supported by the consensus of the Church). Scotist denies that such a separation is possible:

What kind of viscious abstraction conceives a human person apart from the love of that person, that designs to separate person and character? Can this be done with the divine persons without violence? How can we abstract the homosexual from the love in which that homosexual lives his or her life? Yet this is what Williams would have us do in consigning their love to mere sin while prescinding from demeaning them--the person left over after the sinful love is removed is somehow pristine and whole.

Scotist's position is incomprehensible unless he rejects entirely the Augustinian tradition that fallen human beings are characterized by distorted loves of various kinds. We are called to love and respect all human beings, gay or straight, without necessarily approving of all the forms in which they express love. Most of all, we are called to do this to ourselves. The crying shame and scandal of "conservative," heterosexual Christians today is our lack of self-examination concerning the many ways in which our own loves are disordered and distorted. And yes, of course traditional Christian teaching places a far larger burden on gays (i.e., persons who for whatever reason experience exclusively same-sex attraction) than on most others, at least with regard to sexual desire. This is something that we must not treat glibly, but must reconsider constantly and prayerfully. It is possible (in my view) that the traditional teaching is wrong in this respect. Certainly many aspects of Christian sexual teaching throughout the centuries have been mistaken (though again, I would say that the extent of this is often exaggerated; indeed, the Augustinian teaching of the taint placed by original sin on all sexual desire may have something to say to "conservative" Christians today who blithely assume that heterosexual desire between a husband and wife is entirely innocent). But the case must be made theologically. Unfortunately it cannot simply be reduced to the self-evident moral necessity of treating all persons with respect. This begs the question of whether same-sex desire is morally neutral (and hence ontologically good) or itself a distortion of sexual love as God intended it. Scotist's blanket claim that one cannot distinguish between a person and the way the person loves is simply indefensible. We do this all the time. Furthermore, Scotist also fails (or rather refuses) to distinguish between love and the sexual expression of love. Only the sexual expression is controversial. Love between men or between women is certainly not sinful in itself, and arguably one of the problems in this entire controversy is that same-sex friendship is no longer considered (by many) a form of love.

The obvious question to ask is whether I, as a heterosexual, would be willing to make these distinctions with regard to my own sexuality. Obviously, I don't think that this is in fact necessary. I think that my sexual desires are disordered in many ways, but I don't think that the fact that they are primarily ordered toward the opposite sex is one of those ways. So an affirmative answer that is purely hypothetical will not carry much conviction in the face of the actual experience of gay people. But for what it's worth, I can certainly give an affirmative answer to that question. When I read early Christian texts that condemn all sexual activity as in some way sinful, or even the relatively pro-marriage Augustine who regards all sexual desire as sinful, I disagree with these texts, but I do not think that they demean me as a person. I could imagine growing up under the influence of such texts and believing my sexuality to be fundamentally sinful. (Indeed, while I was always taught in principle that sex was a good creation of God, the practical teachings I received about sexuality growing up tended to convey the opposite impression--so to some extent this is not an imaginary exercise for me!) I would agree that such an experience is/would be damaging in many ways. But I certainly do not think that those who inculcate such a view fail to respect human beings as persons. Rather, they fail to understand the implications of human personhood correctly. (I would say the same of those who reject women's ordination but are not explicitly and directly misogynistic.) Again, it may be that Christians have traditionally failed to understand correctly the implications of human personhood for same-sex relationships. The speculations of theologians and the lived experience of gay people may yet teach us better. But if that is so, we must be taught how to integrate this new insight into what we already know in Christ about human personhood. We must be taught how the legitimacy of same-sex relationships flows from the essential givens of orthodox Christianity rather than conflicting with them.

In my view, this is what has happened/is happening with regards to women's ordination (though I must confess that there too there is hardly an "overwhelming consensus" among Christians today that the new understanding is correct). And of course there are many other issues on which the Church's position has developed or even changed significantly. In this process, the Church needs prophets who are willing to be condemned as heretics in order to lead us to a fuller understanding of the truth. But we also need bishops--that is to say, we need shepherds who keep us from following every tempting bypath suggested by the cultural norms of our particular place and time. Bishops are not, either individually or collectively, the head(s) of the Church. They do not need to lead every new trend. They do not need to be the guides into a bold new future. They exist as visible, personal links among local churches united by Christ but separated in space and time. Their task is to keep us faithful to the faith once delivered to the saints. Williams understands this; Scotist does not (or rather refuses to understand it).

I believe that it is something close to a miracle that a figure of Williams' wisdom and (as far as I can tell) holiness sits in the seat of Augustine of Canterbury during the present crisis. Williams has made and will make many mistakes. But his fundamental humility with regards to his own office is not one of them. On the contrary, it is what we desperately need (and so often sadly lack) in a bishop of the Catholic Church. Williams is condemned as a timeserving "politician" precisely because he refuses to be one. He offends everyone because he refuses to serve any party but Christ's. And thus, it is fitting (in an ironic sort of way) that Scotist should accuse him of failing to serve the Church whose head is Christ. If the Church as a whole does, some day, come to a new understanding of the legitimacy of same-sex relationships, the principled moderation of Williams will be one of the major factors in that change. He points the way toward a liberalism that does not simply put the stamp on the spirit of the age, and an orthodoxy that does not accept blindly the cultural assumptions of other ages. Somewhere in this radical balance, I believe, lies the true mind of Christ, and we the people of God must seek it together.

Priesthood of all believers

One of the central slogans that's come to be identified with the Reformation is the "priesthood of all believers." For a long time I found this phrase very off-putting, because I associated it with the radical denial of any hierarchy or sacramentality in the Church. In my experience, Protestants used the slogan to turn the Church into a religious counterpart to modern liberal democracy. And I was (and am) convinced that that's simply a sell-out to modern culture.

Furthermore, as I became more acquainted with modern Catholic theology, I realized that Catholics do not deny the priesthood of all believers. They see the relationship between the universal and ministerial priesthoods as a both/and rather than an either/or. This has been more clearly affirmed by Vatican II and post-Vatican-II theology, and while Catholics are still debating the exact direction this reaffirmation nees to take, it's clear that some form of the priesthood of all believers is orthodox Catholic teaching.

The two contemporary issues that have forced me to give traditional Protestant arguments more of a hearing are the sex abuse scandal and women's ordination. Women's ordination deserves a post of its own, and I'll address it later. For now I'll just leave you with this teaser: I think that the priesthood of all believers is the central issue in the women's ordination debate (as it takes shape in Catholic and high-church circles).

I don't want to get involved in the horribly complex and sensitive arguments surrounding the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Of course other churches have scandals of their own, and indeed all large care-giving institutions have some pretty horrible instances of abuse, and have a tendency to try to protect the good name of the institution even at the expense of those they are allegedly trying to serve.

But at the risk of being accused of anti-Catholic bias, I can't help but think that a culture of clericalism played a large role in giving the Catholic scandal its shape and scope. I see no way around the conclusion that most bishops saw priests as belonging to the "family" in a way that the victimized young people did not. The long history of church-state battles over jurisdiction in cases of clerical wrong-doing, going back to the Gregorian Reforms of the 11th century at least, shaped the episcopal response in ways that have proved disastrous for all concerned.

The Gregorian Reforms have a lot to be said in their defense. The early medieval Church was tied up in the structures of civil society in ways that severely hindered its ability to proclaim the Word of God and speak authoritatively to social evils. But the measures taken by the reformers widened the gap between clergy and laity and created a set of parallel ecclesiastical power structures that became prey to the same corruptions and temptations as the secular hierarchy (and some of their own).

The Protestant Reformation undid much of the work of the Gregorian Reforms and placed the Church squarely under the authority of the state--at least in Anglicanism and Lutheranism. In some ways this resulted in the worst of all possible situations, with the Established Church benefiting from the coercive force of the state but not having the power to act independently. The "priesthood of all believers" too often translated into the domination of the Church by those who ruled the world of the laity.

Nonetheless, the positive message of the Reformation in this regard was that all baptized Christians are fully members of the Church, and whatever relationship to civil society is possessed by baptized laity is also the lot of the clergy. I think the Anabaptists had some important insights into what that relationship should be, and that the rest of us should pay attention to what they have to say. But the principle as I've stated it is common to Anabaptists and "magisterial" Protestants. Too often we have not lived by this principle. You hear even Protestants talk about being "just laity." And at the same time, I agree that the priesthood of all believers is often translated into a religious equivalent of secular democracy.

The priesthood of all believers does not necessarily mean that the Church should model its polity on secular democracies--though some degree of democracy is desirable, I think, and I certainly cannot see that a top-down structure is uniquely holy either. Nor does it mean that all baptized Christians should be able to perform all sacramental functions (though I think it does mean that in cases of emergency any baptized Christian can do anything any other baptized Christian can do). Ordination is a sacred rite within the Church (I have no problems calling it a sacrament) which sets aside certain men (and, in the traditions in which I participate, women) to carry out certain special functions of the Body. I bow when the priest passes me in procession, because the priest is the bearer of a particular sacred function of the whole Body.

The priesthood of all believers, as I understand it, means this: that ordained clergy are particular organs within the Body, but are not in any sense more fully members of the Body than laity. I recognize that Catholics would be unlikely to disagree with this, but the structure and daily operation of the Catholic hierarchy gives the lie to such a claim, except in the most spiritualized way. The abuse scandals were simply the most glaring example of a clericalism that pervades the Catholic Church.

While the current Pope is in my opinion a very holy man and is unquestionably a brilliant theologian (perhaps the finest theologian now living), he has a rather spiritualized conception of the Church which paradoxically leaves the over-centralized bureaucracy of the Catholic Church in a position above criticism. Unquestionably he is right that a merely structural reform is useless. But I am driven to the conclusion that many of the traditional Protestant criticisms of Catholic clericalism are borne out by the facts. This is not simply an external, political critique. The Protestant claim is that a vital spiritual principle is compromised when the Church proceeds as if only the clergy count. Insofar as Catholic structures have been built on this attitude--and I think it's clear that they have--they must be reformed, precisely as a part of the genuine spiritual renewal for which the Pope calls so eloquently. To oppose structural reform to inner renewal as if they had nothing to do with each other is to fall into a spiritualism incompatible with orthodox Christianity.

All organs of the Body of Christ are mutually accountable to each other. This does not have to be embodied in institutions analogous to those of modern liberal democracy, but it does need to have some institutional embodiment, or it will become a piece of pious rhetoric.