A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Lutherans, Methodists, and open communion

    On paper I’m still an ELCA Lutheran, but I’ve been attending a United Methodist congregation for the last couple of years, so this news from the ELCA’s recent church-wide assembly is of interest to me. A resolution was passed during the assembly to initiate a process looking at the church’s practices of administering communion, particularly with regard to the unbaptized. This seems to have been motivated, at least in part, by the fact that while the ELCA’s official position is that only baptized Christians should partake of communion, other churches with which it is in full communion practice “open communion.” That is, anyone who is so moved is invited to partake of the sacrament, whether or not they’re a baptized Christian.

    This is, in fact, the practice of the United Methodist Church, with which the ELCA has a full communion agreement. The UMC’s official rationale for practicing open communion (a.k.a. communion without baptism) is this:

    The table of Holy Communion is Christ’s table, not the table of The United Methodist Church or of the local congregation.  The table is open to anyone who seeks to respond to Christ’s love and seeks to lead a new life of peace and love, as the invitation to the table says.

    The United Methodist Book of Worship says, “All who intend to lead a Christian life, together with their children, are invited to receive the bread and cup. We have no tradition of refusing any who present themselves desiring to receive” (page 29). This statement means that in practice there are few, if any, circumstances in which a United Methodist pastor would refuse to serve the elements of Holy Communion to a person who comes forward to receive.

    By Water and the Spirit affirms: “Because the table at which we gather belongs to the Lord, it should be open to all who respond to Christ’s love, regardless of age or church membership. The Wesleyan tradition has always recognized that Holy Communion may be an occasion for the reception of converting, justifying, and sanctifying grace.”

    I’ve worried before that the practice of open communion can sometimes be more “about the appearance of inclusion for inclusion’s sake than about inviting people to partake of the Eucharist understood specifically as the sacrament of Christ’s presence.” But understood along the lines described here, I think it can be a faithful practice.* As a practical matter, apart from a pro forma statement in the bulletin, even churches that don’t officially practice open communion are unlikely to turn anyone away from the table (I find it almost unimaginable that this would occur in an ELCA church). In my view, the main emphasis should be on the sacrament as the sign of Christ’s presence, love, and grace, and the invitation should be for people to respond to it as such.

    UPDATE: I should clarify that the UMC certainly doesn’t intend for communion without baptism to be the norm. The statement on baptism referred to above says this immediately after the quoted section:

    Unbaptized persons who receive communion should be counseled and nurtured toward baptism as soon as possible.

    And the church’s statement on communion adds this:

    Invitation to partake of Holy Communion offers an evangelical opportunity to bring people into a fuller living relationship with the body of Christ. As means of God’s unmerited grace, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion are to be seen not as barriers but as pathways. Pastors and congregations must strive for a balance of welcome that is open and gracious and teaching that is clear and faithful to the fullness of discipleship.

    Nonbaptized people who respond in faith to the invitation in our liturgy will be welcomed to the Table. They should receive teaching about Holy Baptism as the sacrament of entrance into the community of faith—needed only once by each individual—and Holy Communion as the sacrament of sustenance for the journey of faith and growth in holiness—needed and received frequently.

    This seems to me to strike a good balance.

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    *I’ve also become more comfortable with the idea of open communion after reading Charles Hefling’s recent essay, which draws on John Wesley’s notion of communion as a “converting ordinance,” as well as this paper from Lutheran theologian Ernst Käsemann, written 30 years ago.

  • Sallie McFague on the truth of theology

    Sallie McFague, Models of God:

    I begin with the assumption that what we can say with any assurance about the character of Christian faith is very little and that even that will be highly contested. Christian faith is, it seems to me, most basically a claim that the universe is neither indifferent nor malevolent but that there is a power (and a personal power at that) which is on the side of life and fulfillment. Moreover, the Christian believes that we have some clues for fleshing out this claim in the life, death, and appearances of Jesus of Nazareth. (p. x)

    Later she writes:

    It is evident that fundamentalism does not accept the metaphorical character of religious and theological language, for its basic tenet is the identification of the Word of God with human words, notably the human words in the canonical Scriptures of the church. The essence of metaphorical theology, however, is precisely the refusal to identify human constructions with divine reality. (p. 22)

    And in a footnote to that last sentence:

    Metaphors and models relate to reality not in imitating it but in being productive of it. There are only versions, hypotheses, or models of reality (or God): the most that one can say of any construct, then, is that it is illuminating, fruitful, can deal with anomalies, has relatively comprehensive explanatory ability, is relatively consistent, has humane consequences, etc. This is largely a functional, pragmatic view of truth, with heavy stress on what the implications of certain ways of seeing things (certain models) are for the quality of both human and nonhuman life (since the initial assumption or belief is that God is on the side of life and its fulfillment). This is obviously something of a circular argument, but I do not see any way out of it: I do not know who God is, but I find some models better than others for constructing an image of God commensurate with my trust in a God as on the side of life. God is and remains a mystery. We really do not know: the hints and clues we have of the way things are–whether we call them experiences, revelation, or whatever–are too fragile, too little (and more often than not, too negative) for much more than a hypothesis, a guess, a projection of possibility that, although it can be comprehensive and illuminating, may not be true. We can believe it is and act as if it were, but it is, to use Ricoeur’s term, a “wager.” At the most, I find I can make what Philip Wheelwright calls a “shy ontological claim” with the metaphors and models we use to speak of divine reality . . . . (pp. 192-3)

    According to McFague, religious language and concepts–as irreducibly metaphorical–do not represent divine reality in any straightforward way, but they can still refer to that reality. And their adequacy can be tested by certain criteria such as the ones she mentions. This “critical realism,” as she calls it, is meant to offer a middle way between a naïve realism about religious language and the kind of full-blown anti-realism associated with certain forms of deconstruction.

    I’m not very far into McFague’s book, so I don’t want to make any premature judgments. But in general, I find this approach pretty consistent with how I think about these things. I think where I might find myself more challenged is by McFague’s argument that traditional models and metaphors–such as those inherited from the Bible–need to be significantly revised (or maybe even replaced).

  • Presbyterians still believe in God’s wrath

    Christianity Today reported that the Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected “In Christ Alone”–a popular contemporary hymn–from its new hymnal because it mentions the wrath of God. Here are the offending lines:

    In Christ alone! who took on flesh
    Fulness of God in helpless babe!
    This gift of love and righteousness
    Scorned by the ones he came to save:
    Till on that cross as Jesus died,
    The wrath of God was satisfied –
    For every sin on Him was laid;
    Here in the death of Christ I live.

    The committee putting together the hymnal wanted to change the lines to “Till on that cross as Jesus died, the love of God was magnified.” But the writers of the hymn denied them permission to make the change, so it was omitted altogether.

    CT apparently couldn’t resist the “liberals ditch wrath of God” angle, but it turns out that the reason the PCUSA objected to the lines was their use of “satisfied.” In other words, the committee was rejecting not the notion of God’s wrath, but the satisfaction theory of the Atonement.

    Bob Smietana, religion blogger at the Tennessean, got the story right:

    Critics say the change was sparked by liberals wanting to take God’s wrath out of the hymnal. The committee says there’s plenty of wrath in the new hymnal. Instead, the problem is the word “satisfied,” which the committee says refers to a specific view of theology that it rejects.

    […]

    The new “Glory to God” hymnal, due out this fall, includes songs such as “Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded,” which talk about substitutionary atonement — the idea that Jesus took the place of sinners on the cross. It also includes songs about God’s wrath.

    “People think that we’ve taken the wrath of God out of the hymnal,” Bringle said. “That’s not the case. It’s all over the hymnal. The issue was the word ‘satisfied.’ ”

    That term was used by the medieval theologian Anselm, who argued that sins offended God’s honor, and someone had to die in order to satisfy his honor.

    The 15-member committee rejected Anselm’s view and voted 9-6 to drop the hymn.

    CT, to its credit, has updated its original story with a correction, though the headline still says “Wrath of God’ Keeps Popular Worship Song Out of 10,000-Plus Churches.”

    Ironically (considering that we’re talking about a Presbyterian church), it’s John Calvin, not Anselm, who is usually credited with formulating the view that God’s wrath was directed at Jesus on the cross. A more properly Anselmian line would be “the honor of God was satisfied.”

    (H/T to Daniel Silliman (@danielsilliman) for the links to the stories.)

  • The church’s introversion

    The church as the real content of the gospel, its glory the boundless manifestation of the heavenly Lord, sharing in it being identical with sharing in Christ and his dominion, his qualities being communicable to it–we know that message. It has lasted for two thousand years, has fascinated Protestantism, too, and is today the main driving force of the ecumenical movement. If only the theology of the cross were brought in to counterbalance it! But the church triumphant, even if it starts from the cross and guards it as its most precious mystery, has still always stood in a tense relationship to the crucified Lord himself. As long as the tension remained alive in it under violent friction, one could in some degree come to terms with the situation. The greatest danger always arose when the church pushed itself into the foreground so that Christ’s image above it faded into an image of the founder, of the cultic hero, or became an ecclesiastical icon to be put side by side with other icons that were set up from time to time. It was against that danger that the Reformation in fact rose up, not against the secularization of the church, although the two things necessarily went together. Where the world is dominated by the church, and even Christ is integrated in its metaphysical system, the church becomes conversely a religiously transfigured world. Its real Babylonian captivity, however, consists in its making itself the focal point of salvation and the theme of the gospel. The church’s introversion puts it into the sharpest contrast with the crucified Lord who did not seek his own glory and gave himself to the ungodly.

    — Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom (1969)

  • American Christians should relax about church decline

    Popular Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans wrote an article for CNN on “why millenials are leaving the church.” She really means the evangelical church, and she cites issues like excessive politicization, an anti-science attitude, and hostility to LGBT folks as reasons why people in her generation are jumping ship. She suggests that churches need to come around on these issues if they want to draw in today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings.

    Since I’m neither an evangelical nor a millenial, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Mainline churches have problems with numbers across the generational board, so we’re not exactly in a position to lecture evangelicals about how to boost theirs.

    But maybe that’s not really the point. I don’t want to attend a church that’s anti-gay or that tells me I can’t believe in evolution because I think those positions are wrong. Will a pro-gay, pro-science church attract more members? I frankly have no idea. But I do know that it’s better to live by what you consider to be the truth.

    It seems to me that behind much of this anxiety about church decline is an unstated assumption that America is still the center of Christendom. Numerically, this just isn’t the case, as Philip Jenkins and others have been pointing out for some time. Whatever the future of Christianity is, it isn’t likely to happen here.

    In light of that, maybe American Christians need to get over the idea that it’s up to us to ensure the future of Christianity. This could actually be quite liberating, allowing us to experiment with new forms of church life and take bold steps to live out our faith without constantly worrying about how it’s going to play to whatever demographic we’re trying to attract. Maybe we need to have a little more faith.

    The biggest problem facing us is not the numerical decline of the church. It’s things like climate change, persistent poverty and inequality, and wars and rumors of wars. If Christians worried less about the former, they might discover the resources for interesting and fruitful ways of responding to the latter. And communities that can do that might actually be worth paying attention to.

  • A liberal revival?

    According to the New York Times, after a period when it was more fashionable to study relatively marginalized religious movements like evangelicalism and Mormonism, historians are turning their attention back to liberal mainline Protestantism. One of the more surprising arguments, made by David Hollinger, is that the legacy of the mainline may be deeper and more enduring than its numerical decline suggests. He contends that, despite the apparent success of conservative evangelicalism in displacing it from the center of American Protestantism, liberal Protestantism succeeded in imparting certain broadly progressive values to American society.

    Perhaps providing some support for Hollinger’s thesis, a report released this week by the Brookings Institution and the Public Policy Research Institute suggests that the religious conservatism in America is actually declining, and progressivism is on the upswing. The report summarizes the results of a survey of Americans’ views on economics and religion, and a key finding is that younger generations are more likely to identify as religiously moderate or progressive (or not religious for that matter). This trend seems to mirror the same long-term demographic changes that are contributing to the woes of the Republican Party. In short: America is becoming less old, white, and conservative and more young, non-white, and liberal.

    Of course, “conservative,” “liberal,” “progressive” and the like are notoriously slippery and malleable terms (particularly when it comes to theology). And we don’t know if increased religious liberalism will translate to a revival of more progressive religious communities. At the same time, though, these trends hardly seem to support the oft-repeated claim that hard-core theological conservatism is the key to successful, growing churches.

  • God is no gentleman

    Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous ‘attributes’; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the ‘scientific,’ theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders.

    But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connection whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop’s fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute’s aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices.

    Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn’t suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism’s needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world’s richness. It is dapper, it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is ‘noble,’ that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.

    — William James, “What Pragmatism Means” (1907)

  • Putnam and Plantinga on religion

    This discussion on religion with heavy-duty philosophers Hilary Putnam and Alvin Plantinga is from way back in 2000, but I found it well worth a listen. Somewhat ironically–considering that Putnam is Jewish and Plantinga is a Christian–I found myself more sympathetic to Putnam’s overall approach. I’m not nearly as familiar with his work, but the way he draws on pragmatism, existentialism, and negative theology resonates pretty closely with how I think about this stuff.

  • Lewis’s trilemma in context

    Since we’ve been debating in the comments to this post just what Lewis was trying to accomplish with his trilemma argument, I thought it might be worth walking through the relevant passages in Mere Christianity step-by-step.

    It’s worth recalling that for all the attention it’s received, the argument only takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of five paragraphs. So we should be able to lay it out relatively succinctly.

    The argument (or most of it, anyway) appears in book II, chapter 3 of MC, which is titled “The Shocking Alternative.” Earlier in the chapter Lewis has been discussing the Christian view that the world is occupied territory–that, in Lewis’s words, “an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World” (p. 52).* Lewis then considers (1) how this state of affairs can be in accordance with God’s will and (2) what, if anything, God had done about it.

    With regard to the first point, Lewis invokes human free will as the explanation for why God’s good creation was able to come under the sway of the devil. Human beings have collectively tried to “set up on their own as if they had created themselves–be their own masters–invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God” (p. 54).

    This can never succeed, Lewis says, because we were made to be in communion with God–“He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on” (p. 54). Because of how we’re made, pursuing happiness apart from God is bound to fail.

    So what, in the Christian view, has God done to remedy this sorry situation? Apart from sending Jesus (which we’ll get to in a minute), Lewis said that God has given us conscience, so we can tell that we’ve gotten off the right track; sent us “good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men”; and selected the people of Israel to teach them, and the rest of the world, what kind of God, God is (see pp. 54-5).

    Only now after all this set up does Lewis turn to Jesus:

    Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. (p. 55)

    Lewis’s claim here seems pretty straightforward: Jesus appeared among the Jews acting like and effectively claiming to be God in the flesh. Now Lewis does not try to establish this point: he seems to be taking, at least for his purposes here, the gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did at face value. Lewis was certainly aware of modern, skeptical biblical scholarship (though he didn’t have a very high opinion of much of it); but for his purposes here he seems to be ignoring the possibility that the gospels don’t accurately record Jesus’s words.

    In the following paragraph, Lewis considers the implications of Jesus claiming the authority to forgive sins in particular. He argues that no human being can forgive wrongs done to someone other than himself:

    We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. . . . But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. (p. 55)

    This seems to be largely an amplification of the point in the previous paragraph: Jesus, at least as he is portrayed in the gospels, claimed, by both word and deed, to act with the authority of God. As Lewis puts is, “[i]n the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history” (p. 55).

    In the short paragraph that follows Lewis observes that readers of the gospels–even those hostile to the claims of Christianity–don’t come away with the impression that Jesus is a silly and conceited person. “Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him” (p. 55-6).

    Only in the final paragraph of the chapter do we get the trilemma argument properly speaking:

    I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feed and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (p. 56)

    Given what has gone before, I think we can set out Lewis’s argument so far like this.

    1. Jesus, through his words and actions, effectively claimed to be God.**

    2. Jesus was either (just) a man, or he was God.

    3. If he was just a man, then he was either insane or evil.

    Therefore, Jesus was either an insane man, an evil man, or God incarnate.

    The argument doesn’t exactly end in this chapter, but continues in the following chapter, “The Perfect Penitent”:

    We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. (p. 57)

    Lewis doesn’t offer further explanation of why it’s obvious that Jesus was neither evil nor insane, though we can imagine that many of his readers (then and since) would be inclined to agree. So, if they take his earlier conclusion as established, then they would probably readily assent to Jesus’ divinity.

    After going through this, I think part of the disagreement in the previous comment thread may have been due to different understandings of the scope of the trilemma argument. If we restrict it to just the final paragraph in chapter 3, then its intent does seem limited to the relatively narrow point that, whatever else Jesus was, he wasn’t (just) a great moral teacher. But if you read that as part of a broader argument encompassing the entire back half of the chapter and the first paragraph in the following one, then I think Lewis’s goals are more ambitious. That is, he’s trying to convince the reader that Jesus really was who he claimed to be (or who the gospels claimed he was): God incarnate.

    If that’s right, then I stand by my claim that the broader argument has some serious weaknesses–or at least some major undefended premises. But I do think the narrower argument has merit in rebutting a popular image of Jesus as a “great moral teacher.”

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    *Page references are from the 1996 Touchstone edition published by Simon & Schuster.

    **This originally said “claimed to be God,” but as Brandon pointed out, Lewis doesn’t say that Jesus explicitly claimed to be God. Thanks to him for the correction.

  • Lewis’s “trilemma” revisited

    Alan Jacobs takes issue with Anthony Kenny’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” argument in Mere Christianity for the divinity of Jesus. Here’s Kenny:

    One line of argument he made popular went like this. Jesus said that he was God. Jesus was neither a deceiver nor deceived. Therefore Jesus was indeed God. Mocking the idea that Christ was simply a great moral teacher, Lewis wrote that a man that said the sort of things Jesus said “would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell”. Yet even most conservative biblical scholars today think it unlikely that Jesus in his lifetime made any explicit claim to divinity, so that the argument fails to get started.

    Jacobs responds:

    Lewis’s trilemma argument does indeed have a serious weakness, and Kenny gropes towards it: Lewis’s argument depends on the assumption that the Gospels faithfully record Jesus’s words, but if you doubt the reliability of the Gospel accounts, then you can easily believe that Jesus was a “great moral teacher” who had certain words put in his mouth by later disciples. This is the assumption that underlies most skeptical redactions of the Gospels, from the Jefferson Bible to the work of the Jesus Seminar. But the great majority of biblical scholars today, as throughout the history of the Church, do indeed believe that the Gospels faithfully record Jesus’s teachings, which puts the trilemma into play.

    While I agree with Jacobs that many (if far from all) biblical scholars hold that the gospels (or at least the synoptic gospels) faithfully record the spirit (if not the letter) of Jesus’ teachings, Lewis’s argument still faces some serious obstacles. The biggest problem, in my view, is that Lewis and those who follow him tend to read a full-blown doctrine of the Incarnation back into the gospel texts, and sometimes put questionable interpretations on ambiguous passages. Many of the proof-texts sometimes used to show that Jesus claimed to be divine are susceptible of much less exalted readings.

    That said, I do think many contemporary scholars would accept that the historical Jesus claimed a special or unique role for himself in God’s unfolding plan. Many statements of Jesus in the gospels, while falling short of straightforward claims to divinity, do express the sense that one’s response to Jesus is determinative for one’s standing in God’s kingdom. This makes some on the liberal end of the spectrum uncomfortable, in part, I suspect, because it conflicts with the portrait of Jesus as a benevolent sage preaching a message of inclusive tolerance. (See the final chapter of Michael McClymond’s Familiar Stranger for a good discussion of this issue.) So if Jesus viewed himself as the agent of God’s inbreaking reign, even if he didn’t claim to be divine in Nicea-compliant terms, a modified version of Lewis’s trilemma argument could perhaps get off the ground.