A gay Christian writes about returning to his fundamentalist Baptist roots to share his story–rather than debate “issues.”
Category: Theology & Faith
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Beyond “traditionalism vs. liberalism”
Nice piece from Harvard Divinity School professor Mark Jordan attempting to complicate the simplistic “traditional Christianity vs. liberalism” narrative that almost inevitably appears in reporting about religious controversies:
What we are living through is not a fight between a pristine Christianity and the encroaching world, but a divide within Christianity over what exactly should count as tradition. It isn’t a fight between religious conservatives and activist revolutionaries. It is a deep disagreement inside Christianity over what conserving faithfulness means.
Link via.
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The fundamentalist hangover
It occurred to me that there may be something more personal driving some of the points I tried to make in the previous post. I’ve enountered a fair number of people who were raised in very conservative or fundamentalist churches, and who had bad experiences in some cases. For some of these folks, encountering the writings of, say, Marcus Borg can be profoundly liberating simply because they hadn’t realized that there was a different way of looking at Christianity or the life of faith. They exult in a newfound freedom to explore possibilities that would’ve been closed off to them before. And I wouldn’t want to dispargage or downplay how important that can be for some people.
However, this experience of liberation, it seems, can harden into a permanent anti-fundamentalist defensive crouch. This means that any claims–whether on one’s belief or obedience–can appear to be the thin edge of the fundamentalist wedge. The result is that liberal Christians who are so busy being anti-fundamentalist aren’t always particularly clear on what they’re for (apart, that is, form tolerance, inclusiveness, and social justice, defined in somewhat vague and largely secular terms).
The problem for me–someone who didn’t grow up fundamentalist and is not particularly reacting against its strictures–is that I am looking for a positive, substantial vision of Christian faith. I don’t imagine that traditional formulations of that vision can be taken over by contemporary people wholesale, but I do think there is a stream of continuity. We catch glimpses of this in the creeds, the liturgy, the lives of the saints, and the writings of some of the great theologians and mystics, but our churches all too frequently come across as afraid to use these treasures they have inherited. Is this because any affirmation of a robust Christian identity is considered a step down the slippery slope to fundamentalism?
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On not exactly identifying as a “progressive Christian”
I’ve noticed a trend recently of Christians in mainline chruches, often self-identifying as “progressives,” developing an alternative “canon” of books, Sunday school curricula, approved authors, etc. parallel to those of their conservative counterparts, but which offers an interpretation of Chrisitianity more to their liking. Anyone who’s hung around moderate-to-liberal mainline churches will recognize some of the names: John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Diana Butler Bass, John Spong, Brian McLaren, etc. The idea seems to be that more liberal Christians need to construct their own identity, an identity that is at least in part one created in opposition to “conservative,” “fundamentalist,” or “evangelical” Christianity.
There’s much to applaud here, at least to the extent that one thinks that U.S. Christianity has been distorted by too close an association with certain conservative interpretations of the Bible and the conservative political agenda they supposedly provide support for. No doubt there are people put off from Christianity because they associate it with a particular social and political stance, and who are relieved when they realize that being a Christian doesn’t require adopting that stance.
But I’m not entirely comfortable with the “progressive” alternative either, for a few different reasons. First, it risks creating another theological ghetto where certain authors, ideas, etc. are “safe” or “sound” because they’re on “our side.” Second, the critique of fundamentalism–while appropriate–often fails to replace it with a substantial or satisfying alternative. Too many progressives seem opposed to the idea of doctinal truth, per se, creating a void into which rush all sorts of theological individualism and eclecticism.
Finally, the theology that many of these progressive authors promote is thin and unsatisfying because it’s too detached from Christian history and tradition. Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the person of Christ with a historical reconstruction of their own devising. Indeed, their theology threatens at points to be replaced by Jesus-ology: all we need are the social ethics of Jesus (appropriately filtered through a particular set of historical criteria), and we can dispense with most of the God-talk that has characterized historic Christianity, replacing it with, at most, a kind of vague mysticism.
This may be unfair to the more nuanced insights of some of these scholars, but once those insights get filtered down to the level of the layperson in your average mainline parish, the theology you end up with is thin gruel indeed. Maybe what we need instead is more of an ad fontes approach: recovering a more complex understanding of Christian tradition by actually engaging with it. Is it really beyond the average Christian layperson to, say, participate in a group study on Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, or Augustine’s Confessions, or the writings of Luther and Calvin, or even more recent authors who are accessible and firmly rooted in the tradition without being easily pigeonholed as “conservatives”? (Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, William Placher, Luke Timothy Johnson, and others come readily to mind.) Traditional theology can have surprisingly radical implications in the areas of social ethics–sometimes far more radical than the tepid liberalism sometimes offered as the only alternative to fundamentalism. And, as Christopher and Derek would no doubt remind us, our tradition is embodied in our prayers and liturgies, the history and theology of which most laypeople are, I think it’s safe to say, woefully ignorant.
Of course, really engaging with these sources would require leadership who actually believed there was something to be gained by doing this. But I can’t help but think that progressive Christians are too captivated both by a kind of presentism and a kind of primitivism: on the one hand, they take a dim view of tradition, but at the same time think we can leap back to the original Jesus, unobscured by ecclesiastical accretion, with the soul of an egalitarian social refomer and a tolerant, undogmatic theology. Once you’ve watered Christianity down to that point, though, I for one have a hard time seeing why it’s worth bothering about.
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Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus
In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up remarkably well, largely because the basic positions haven’t changed all that much. On the one hand, “liberals” appeal to the Jesus of history against the Christ of ecclesial tradition; on the other, “confessionalists” (we might now add postmodernists, Radical Orthodox, etc.) uphold the tradition of the church against “secular” historicism. Baillie (wisely, in my view) rejects both extremes. Turns out that I wrote a long post on his argument a couple of years ago, which is here if you’re interested.
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Needed: better friends
Salon has an article this morning written by a “closeted” Christian in New York who’s afraid that her liberal, atheist Brooklynite friends will look down on her if they find out she’s a church-goer (which, presumably they now will unless she’s writing pseudonymously). I can sympathize with not wanting to be identifiedid with conservative strands of American evangelicalism; sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth trying to hold onto a religion that threatens to become synonymous with far-right politics. But, really, maybe this lady needs to get a better set of friends. I move in circles here in D.C. that are similar to the ones she describes (eductated, gen-x, liberal/progressive) but have never felt like I needed to hide the fact that I’m a Christian from my non-religious friends. Maybe the problem is that her friends are just a**holes.
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Marcus Borg’s non-eschatological Jesus
I found Dale Allison’s book on the historical Jesus stimulating enough that I thought I should get another perspective. I had read Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision several years ago, but didn’t really remember much of it. So I thought it might be worth re-visiting.
Though he comes to different conclusions than Allison (Borg argues for a non-eschatological Jesus), Borg makes a very similar argument regarding our ability to know at least the general shape or pattern of Jesus’s life:
Though it is true that the gospels are not straightforward historical documents, and though it is true that every saying and story of Jesus has been shaped by the early church, we can in fact know as much about Jesus as we can about any figure in the ancient world. Though we cannot ever be certain that we have direct and exact quotation from Jesus, we can be relatively sure of the kinds of things he said, and of the main themes and thrust of his teaching. We can also be relatively sure of the kinds of things he did: healing, association with outcasts, the deliberate calling of twelve disciples, a mission directed to Israel, a final purposeful journey to Jerusalem.
Moreover, as we shall see, we can be relatively certain of the kind of person he was: a charismatic who was a healer, sage, prophet, and revitalization movement founder. By incorporating all of this, and not preoccupying ourselves with the question of whether Jesus said exactly the particuar words attributed to him, we can sketch a fairly full and historically defensible portrait of Jesus. (p. 15)
Borg is countering both what he regards as an excessive agnosticism about the historical Jesus and the prevailing image of Jesus in much 20th century scholarship–that of the eschatological prophet who expected the imminent end of the world.
However, Borg makes his case against the “eschatological Jesus” largely by denying the historicity of the “Son of Man” sayings, which suggest that Jesus identified himself with an apocalyptic heavenly figure who would usher in the end-times. He says that the scholarly consensus has shifted toward ascribing these sayings to the early church rather than Jesus himself, but I’m not sure he’s being completely consistent here. Allison would point out, I think, that the gospels provide the most reliable general image of Jesus we have and would question whether we have grounds for excluding an entire category of sayings (as opposed to doubting that any particular saying goes back, verbatim, to Jesus). Presumably Borg has more to say about this, so I don’t want to jump to any conclusions; but there does seem to me to be a tension there.
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The apocalyptic Jesus and the divine Christ
Continuing the series on Dale Allison’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (previous posts here and here).
Despite his defense of the general picture of Jesus offered in the gospels, Allison is not out just to comfort conservatives or other traditional believers. For starters, as we’ve seen, he’s dubious that we can determine with any real confidence that any particular saying or deed goes back to Jesus. Moreover, the historical Jesus revealed by the synoptics, while he has a high enough self-conception to make liberals nervous, can hardly be said to have a Nicene Christology.
During much of Christian history, theologians dedicated a fair amount of effort to explaining away passages in the gospels that seemed to make Jesus too human (e.g., passages about Jesus “advancing in wisdom,” not knowing certain things, saying things that seemed to imply that he was inferior to his Father). While Jesus may have regarded himself as a central figure in God’s plan for ushering in the new age, he almost certainly didn’t regard himself as the Second Person of the Trinity, the pre-existent Son of God.
Going hand-in-hand with this is the unsettling likelihood that Jesus was mistaken about how the end times would unfold. Jesus did not return to usher in the Last Judgment after his death, and many modern people–including many Christians–no longer buy into the mythological apocalyptic scenario which that would seem to entail.
Allison observes that the gospel of John, with its realized eschatology, already seems to be at work “spiritualizing” the apocalyptic elements so prevalent in the synoptic Jesus. But John is projecting this understanding back onto the historical Jesus, whereas we are forced to conclude, Allison thinks, that Jesus did not possess any such de-mythologizing hermeneutic:
[Jesus] envisaged, as did many of his time and place, the advent, after suffering and persecution, of a great judgment, and after that a supernatural utopia, the kingdom of God, inhabited by the dead come back to life to enjoy a world forever rid of evil and wholly ruled by God. Further, he thought that the night was far gone, the day at hand. (p. 95)
Whether or not we see this as mythic imagery containing valuable theological insight (much as the Genesis story contains insight about creation wrapped in mythic garb), Jesus probably didn’t. Coming to terms with that entails rejecting at least certain “high” Christologies.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Allison is right about this though, there have been efforts to articulate a Christology that doesn’t depend on denying or downplaying Jesus’s humanity. So-called kenotic Christology has maintained, for a century or more, that, in becoming incarnate in Jesus, God divested Godself–in some mysterious fashion–of the divine attributes. This would presumably include omniscience. And Jesus, being fully human, would have thought using the images, categories, and concepts supplied to him by his language, culture, and religious tradition. To think that Jesus could magically access supernatural knowledge about ultimate things and–moreover–express that knowledge in literal, non-mythological or non-metaphorical terms (whatever that might mean) is to fail to take his humanity seriously.
But these Christologies also maintain that God was really present in Jesus in a unique way. It’s possible to think that God’s love, grace, and saving will were enacted in a particular human life without supposing that the life so united to the divine will was anything but human. Allison is certainly correct, I think, that much traditional Christology has been functionally Docetic, but a Christology that takes proper account of Jesus’s humanity doesn’t, for that reason, have to deny his divinity.
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Manhattan evisceration
If you’re lucky, you’ve been blissfully unaware of the recent Manhattan Declaration, a quasi-ecumenical “call of Christian conscience” signed by a veritable who’s who of right-wing ecclesiastical celebrities (largely overlapping with the First Things crowd). The basic gist is to reaffirm opposition to legal abortion and same-sex marriage as the paramount Christian principles, but wrapped in a cloak of self-righteous victimology.
These things tend to be forgotten almost as soon as the ink is dry, but if you’re interested in a thorough smack-down, check out these three posts at the Slacktivist blog: 1|2|3.
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The real Jesus
As we saw in the last post, Allison thinks that the traditional method of sifting the NT materials to reveal pristine, authentic bits of knowledge about Jesus is doomed to failure. More promising, he argued, is discerning the general picture of Jesus, based on recurring themes.
For example, citing numerous passages in the synoptic gospels, such as Jesus’s prohibition of divorce, his command to love enemies, his admonition not to bury the dead, his enjoining of unlimited forgiveness, and others, Allison concludes that “Jesus made uncommonly difficult demands on at least some people” (p. 63). We can confidently believe this even if the individual units can’t be historically authenticated.
What matters is not whether we can establish the authenticity of any of the relevant traditions or what the criteria of authenticity may say about them, but rather the pattern that they, in concert, create” (p. 63).
We can make similar assertions regarding other recurring patterns: Jesus was an exorcist, he spoke of God as father, he taught in parables, he came into conflict with the existing religious authorities.
More controversially though, Allison thinks that we can be fairly certain that Jesus (1) was an apocalyptic prophet with a high sense of his own role in God’s eschatological drama and (2) was perceived and remembered as a worker of miracles. Both of these conclusions fly in the face, to some extent, of liberal opinion on the historical Jesus. Scholars such as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have downplayed Jesus’s apocalypticism and are uncomfortable with the notion that Jesus had an exalted view of himself. And much liberal theology is uneasy with the concept of miracles, period.
Note that Allison doesn’t claim to be doing the scholarly spadework to demonstrate these claims, and he isn’t claiming these are incontestable findings. But he does pose a dilemma for those who would deny them:
If the primary sources produce false general impressions, such as that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet when he was not, or that Jesus was Israel’s redeemer when he had no such thought, then the truth of things is almost certainly beyond our reach. If the chief witnesses are too bad, if they contain only intermittently authentic items, we cannot lay them aside and tell a better story. Given how memory works, how could we ever feel at ease with a Jesus who is much different from the individual on the surface of our texts? Wrong in general, wrong in the particulars. In order for us to find Jesus, our sources must often remember at least the sorts of things he did and the source of things he said, including what he said about himself. If the repeating patterns do not catch Jesus, then how can he not forever escape us? (p. 66)
I have to say this is pretty convincing to my mind. It’s not too different from the conclusion Luke Timothy Johnson comes to in his book The Real Jesus. The gospels, Johnson argues, preserve the pattern of Jesus’s life, even if they don’t get all the historical details right.
A Thinking Reed 