Category: Theology

Yesterday’s Boston Globe carried an article about Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Massachusetts disassociating themselves from the national church body on account of the latter’s “teachings on gay clergy, homosexuality, and salvation.”

Leaving aside for the moment the controversy over V. Gene Robinson and the larger issue of homosexuality in the church, what’s this business about the Episcopal Church’s teaching on salvation?

A bit further on we read:

After the ordination of V. Gene Robinson , a gay man, as bishop in New Hampshire in 2003, disaffected congregations asked that the national convention of the church return to a literal reading of the Bible that unequivocally forbids homosexuality. They also asked Episcopal leaders to affirm that the only route to salvation was through Jesus.

The 2006 convention did neither of these things, leading congregations such as All Saints of Attleboro to leave the denomination and others to request that they be overseen by traditionally oriented bishops rather than those who support the new teachings, such as M. Thomas Shaw, the bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts.

And:

Parishioners concluded that the majority in the Episcopal Church of the United States, which backs full acceptance of gays and lesbians and does not hold that belief in Jesus is the only route to salvation, “are at odds with the vast majority of Anglicans, with the Christian community of North America, and with Christians throughout the world,” [All Saints parishoner Ron] Wheelock said.

Now, there are two possibly distinct things being claimed here. One is that the Episcopal Church denies that “the only route to salvation [is] through Jesus” and the other is that “belief in Jesus is the only route to salvation.” These aren’t necessarily the same thing. It’s possible that salvation only comes through Jesus but that explicit belief in Jesus (at least in this life) isn’t a necessary condition for that salvation. In other words, Jesus can save us even if we don’t know that it’s Jesus saving us.

So, it’s possible to affirm that Christ’s work is what opens the door to salvation without claiming that one must explicitly acknowledge that work in order to receive its benefits. I take it, for instance, that the Catholic church teaches something like this when it says that

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part I, Section Two, Chapter 3, Article 9, Paragraph 3)

Apparently part of the controversy has been fueled by some remarks made by new Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about the relationship between Christianity and other religions. For instance, in a recent Time Magazine interview, Bp. Schori said in response to the question “Is belief in Jesus the only way to get to heaven?”:

We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.

Now, that’s not as precise an answer as one might’ve liked, and I think Bp. Schori may be conflating Christ’s work and our belief in that work (just as the Globe article above seemed to be doing). But if what she means to affirm is that God can act to bring people to salvation who have never heard of Jesus, then I don’t see anything particularly problematic about that.

What would be problematic would be if Jesus was reduced to simply one manifestation of a kind of ineffable transcendence that is no more (or less) binding or normative than those claimed by other religions. In such a view, there are a plurality of “vehicles to the divine,” none necessarily better or worse than any other. This is not a tenable view in my opinion, and it’s certainly outside the historic Christian mainstream. If the Episcopal Church were in fact found to be teaching such a view, then there would be serious cause for concern.

Of course, it’s not entirely clear what it means for the Episcopal Church to teach x since there is no teaching magisterium to pronounce definitively on what the church teaches. I’m not sure what kind of force the pronouncements of the General Convention have, but failing to affirm a particular version of the claim that the only route to salvation is through Jesus is not the same as denying it.

Indeed, the proposed resolution that was defeated at the General Convention seems a bit ambiguous itself on what is being claimed:

Resolved, the House of _____ concurring, That the 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church declares its unchanging commitment to Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the only name by which any person may be saved (Article XVIII); and be it further Resolved, That we acknowledge the solemn responsibility placed upon us to share Christ with all persons when we hear His words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No-one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); and be it further Resolved, That we affirm that in Christ there is both the substitutionary essence of the Cross and the manifestation of God’s unlimited and unending love for all persons; and be it further Resolved, That we renew our dedication to be faithful witnesses to all persons of the saving love of God perfectly and uniquely revealed in Jesus and upheld by the full testimony of Holy Scripture.

One could interpret this in a polemcial way – that is, affirming that one must explicitly call on the name of Jesus in order to be saved, and affirming a particular understanding of Christ’s work (“the substitutionary essence of the Cross”), in which case it’s understandable that the delegates would have problems with it. I myself would be wary about setting conditions on what people have to do in order to be saved, or requiring that everyone adhere to a particular Atonement theory (something the larger church never saw fit to require in any of its creeds or councils). Or, one could read it as mushy boilerplate that essentially says “Yay, Jesus!” which, while not being a bad thing for the church to say, doesn’t seem to require being affirmed by a church whose entire raison d’etre is the good news of Jesus.

More to the point, I think one would be better off looking at the daily practice of the church to determine what it believes about Jesus. The Prayer Book liturgy, the preaching, the sacraments all presuppose and proclaim that Jesus saves. In my admittedly limited experience, that seems to be the primary way in which the Episcopal Church teaches what it believes. If that’s the case, why the need to reaffirm the basic foundation of the church’s mission in a General Convention resolution?

It could be that the controversy over soteriology is a stalking horse for the issue of homosexuality. Otherwise, it’s sort of hard to account for the outrage over a position which, on a charitable reading, isn’t really any different from the position of the Catholic Church, who almost no one has accused of selling out the exclusive claims of Christ.

On the other hand, it’s possible to imagine a case where a church does fall outside the bounds of orthodoxy. If the Episcopal Church were to promulgate a statement explicitly denying the unique mediatorial work of Christ, then I think you whould have such a case. But as far as I can tell it hasn’t done that, and its life and practice presuppose the opposite.

John Henry Newman once said that “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” Now, I’m certainly not going to claim to be “deep” into early church history after having read Chadwick’s The Early Church (along with a few other books along the way), but I think I can see what Newman was getting at. At least a certain kind of Protestant – the kind that sees little difference between the early church and his contemporary “Bible church” – is going to find a lot that’s hard to swallow in the early church history. The roots of things like Roman primacy, the threefold office of ministry, and Marian devotion may not exactly go back to the New Testament itself, but they certainly appear early on. It’s simply not possible to see everything “catholic” as some kind of late-medieval distortion of the unvarnished pure gospel.

However, I’m also inclined to turn Newman’s aphorism around at him. Reading Chadwick, hardly a radical deconstructionist historian, it’s hard to resist the impression that the “undivided early church” much beloved of C/catholic (including Anglo-Catholic and “evangelical catholic”) apologetics is at least in part an ideological construct. Rather than the serene consensus of orthodoxy, the early church looks more like a tradition in the way Alasdair MacIntyre defined it: “an argument extended through time.” And a fractious, intemperate, and at times violent one at that. Everything was hotly contensted by somebody at some point and there wasn’t any universally agreed upon court of final appeals, be it Bible, papacy, or church council. The boundaries between othrodoxy and heresy were in many cases quite fuzzy, and even “ecumencial” councils like Nicea and Chalcedon had their fair share of critics, not all of whom can easily be dismissed as out-and-out heretics. In some respects the early church ends up looking pretty “Protestant.”

Graham at Leaving Muenster has a characteristically challenging post on where Christianity falls short if it’s taken to be simply a set of beliefs and not a way of life:

I remember hearing Brian Mclaren talk a few years ago about an interview he’d given at a conference. I believe it was with Dallas Willard and they were discussing why a trip to your average bookshop would reveal a great upsurge of interest in Buddhism and New Age, but a sharp disinterest with Christianity.

Willard’s response was simple and – it seems to me – spot on: “Christianity is a set of doctrines, whilst Buddhism offers a way of life.”

At the time, I would have called myself a Christian and I was gutted. I couldn’t deny the truth in McLaren’s words. I knew the riches of Christian spirituality and the writings of Catholic mystics and Orthodox theologians, but these didn’t function as the mainstream of Christianity and seemed to be presented as something of an exceptional and optional extra.

(Note: I don’t intend what follows to be an argument with Graham as such; I’m not sure how much of this he would disagree with. This is more a riff on the idea that there is some fundamental dichotomy between doctrine and practice.)

There seems to be a common sentiment abroad that Christianity has focused too much on orthodoxy and not enough on orthopraxis. A lot of wrangling over dogma and theological formulations, and not enough following Jesus.

In fact, some would go so far as to say that we should focus on following the way of life taught and exemplified by Jesus in the Gospels and not worry about things like creeds and systematic theologies.

For my part, here as elsewhere, I want to say “both/and” rather than “either/or.” I find myself doing that a lot – maybe this accounts for my attraction to the via media of Anglicanism. I don’t think that it’s possible to separate beliefs from pracitce.

The reason for this is fairly straightforward: our beliefs are already embedded in our practice. We do certain things because, at least in part, we believe the world to be a certain way.

Those who would have us just follow the simple way of loving Jesus seem to overlook the fact that Jesus’ teachings are rooted in his proclamation of the mercies of his Father and his Father’s Kingdom. Because God has a certain character, we are called and empowered to live in a particular way.

Beyond this, we know precious little of any “Jesus movement” prior to or apart from the proclamation of Jesus as Risen Lord. It’s a commonplace of New Testament scholarship that all the NT books were written from the perspective of faith in the Risen Christ. In fact, you hardly need to be a scholar to recognize that. And apart from that faith, is there really enough material to base a way of life on the teachings one finds in the Gospels?

Moreover, why would we want to? If the teachings of Jesus are to be separated from the teachings about Jesus, it’s not clear why that particular way of life should be taken to be universally binding. As J.H. Yoder wrote, he is normative as a human being becuase he’s divine. If the church’s Christological claims are of (at best) secondary importance, it’s not at all clear why some other historical person wouldn’t provide us with as good a role model if not better (St. Francis? Mother Teresa? Buddha? Gandhi?). If nothing else, we have better information about many of them.

It’s because Jesus reveals the character and identity of God, or is the agent of God’s kingdom, or is the incarnation of the universal logos, or however we want to elucidate it theologically, that he provides the foundation for a way of life. Certainly there’ve been many nominal Christians (no doubt there are nominal Buddhists too), but I would argue that those who most faithfully followed Jesus also took with utmost seriousness the church’s claims about who he is.

I’ve been reading Henry Chadwick’s history of the early church (thanks, Josh!) and been struck by the relevance of that history for some of the issues facing the church today.

Consider, for example, the so-called new atheists (Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.) who specialize in arguing against a certain construal of Christianity as though it were the sole legitimate version. I call this the “heads I win/tails you lose” argument since the whole point is to brand one’s opponent as either a raving fundamentalist or a weak-kneed temporizer. Either you accept the most implausible literalistic version of Christian belief, or you’re a wishy-washy liberal sellout and therefore not a “real” Christian.

But as Chadwick demonstrates, the early church was well aware of the difficulties of some of the more literlaisitc versions of key beliefs, as well as the moral issues raised by certain troubling Old Testament passages for the Christian view of God, and resolutely grappled with them. Irenaeus offered a nuanced account of creation and the existence of evil, Clement of Alexandria questioned the idea of a “materialist” resurrection and earthly millenium, and Origen pressed the case for allegorical and metaphorical interpretations of Scripture (too far, some would say).

The point isn’t that we need to accept the answers provided by these early theologians (and, it’s worth recalling that they were writing during a time when church teaching was still in a great deal of flux and some of their ideas would later be deemed unorthodox), but that this style of theologizing and exegesis has as long a pedigree in the church as any, and modern fundamentalism (which itself even gets unfairly distorted by some of its critics) is a relative newcomer.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is just how radical a decision the early church made in deciding that the Mosaic Law was no longer binding upon Christians. We talk nowadays about “revisionists,” but, to take our most heated contemporary example, the argument for blessing monogomous same-sex unions looks positively conservative compared to chucking the Law. [Edited to add: Not that the Law was regarded as a bad thing. Rather, it was seen as a temporary expedient, or a “tutor” to lead people to knowledge of righteousness. But what’s striking to me is that Christians would feel free to set aside what were regarded as divine commands.] Of course, this by itself doesn’t settle that particular issue, but it does put into perspective some of the more dire pronouncements about overthrowing thousands of years of unbroken tradition, since that’s precisely what the church did!

Also noteworthy is how some of these early theologians resisted the imposition of a “new law” in the sense of hard and fast rules for Christian conduct. Consider Chadwick’s account of Clement’s discussion of Jesus’ advice to the rich young ruler:

Clement wrote a special discourse to help Christians puzzled about the right use of their money and troubled especially by the absolute command of the Lord to the rich young ruler, ‘If you would be perfect, sell all you have…’ On a rapid reading it might seem as if Clement were merely a compromiser trying to wriggle out of the plain meaning of a commandment. But a fairer reading of his tract shows that he did not see the gospel ethic as imposing legalistic obligations but rather as a statement of God’s highest purpose for those who follow him to the utmost. What really matters is the use rather than the accident of possession. Accordingly Clement laid down a guide for the wealthy converts of the Alexandrian church, which imposed a most strenuous standard of frugality and self-discipline. Clement passionately opposed any luxury or ostentation, and much that he protested to be lawful he regarded as highly inexpedient.

The exposition of the saying to the rich young ruler and several passages in the Paedogogus and Stromateis show Clement acting as a spritual director. It lay in the nature of his view of the Christian life as a progress towards the likeness of God in Christ that he saw it both as a dynamic advance in the comprehension of the nature of Christian doctrine and also as a process of education in which the aspirant would make mistakes calling for penitence. The church he describes as a ‘school’, with many grades and differing abilities among its pupils, where all the elect were equal, but some were ‘more elect’ than others. Accordingly Clement could take a view of the church which allowed room for the resotration of the lapsed and at the same time held the highest demands before all Christians. (p. 98)

Of course, alongside this fairly humane and tolerant ethic we also have the rigor of, say, Tertullian (though it should be noted that Tertullian ended his days outside the church). But the idea of Christian ethics as a way of life leading to a gradual increase in Christ-likeness, while recognizing the persistent reality of human sin and failure, strikes me as a deeply appealing one. And it appears to have significant precedent in the church’s history.

LutherPunk and Without Authority both have worthwhile stuff to say on the issue of Protestant/Lutheran identity.

October 31st is traditionally observed, at least in Lutheran and some other Protestant churches, as “Reformation Day.” The idea is to commemorate Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses and the unofficial beginning of the Reformation.

However, in these more ecumenical times, the triumphalism of Reformation Days past is significantly muted. The legacy of the Reformation seems to many Protestants to be an ambiguous one, and the shattering of the unity of the church something to be mourned rather than celebrated. Not to mention all the bloodshed that came in the wake of Christendom’s breakup.

Indeed, “catholic” has become a term that many Protestants have embraced with gusto in recent years. Everyone likes to think of themselves as catholic now, whereas the stock of being “protestant” seems to have declined. Some Lutherans, for example, prefer to be called “evangelical catholics.” The recently re-christened Episcopal Church (formerly ECUSA) dropped the “protestant” from their name (they used to be PECUSA) some time ago.

So what is the essence of Protestantism, and is there any point in still identifying ourselves as Protestants? Is it defined by adherence to the principle of sola scriptura or justification by faith alone? Both of these have been called into serious question by recent theology. A more positive view of tradition has undermined the biblicism implicit in some versions of the sola scriptura principle, and many theologians and biblical scholars have questioned whether justification was quite so central to Paul’s theology, and by implication, whether it should be so central to ours. This isn’t to say that there aren’t still able defenders of the traditional Protestant positions around, but the consensus that once existed has, I think it’s safe to say, been considerably weakened.

Some might identify the raison d’etre of Reformation theology with Paul Tillich’s “protestant principle,” the principle of criticism and the willingness to reexamine all absolutist claims and belief systems, be they papal, scriptural, or of any other ideological stripe. But this runs the risk of turning Protestantism into a purely formal exercise without substantive content. A debased version of Tillich’s principle finds expression in contemporary cliches about asking questions being more important than finding answers.

At the end of the day I imagine that many people are Protestants in large part because Catholicism or Orthodoxy don’t seem like live options for one reason or another. Either they don’t or can’t accept their claims to authority or their particular moral positions, or those churches just seem culturally alien. But these are largely negative judgments. What are the positive reasons, if any, for staying Protestant? What vision of Christianity does Protestantism have to offer to the larger church?