The Greatest Treason: The Implication of Christ

This is not a sermon. I am speaking not in my official capacity as a deacon, but solely for myself, from my heart, because I believe that the Gospel teaches that Jesus stands with the oppressed, the victimized, the disenfranchised--and yes, with the repentant, too. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a charter for abuse, nor can it, without wholesale distortion, be twisted to justify the abuse of minors or the harassment of women or of men by the powerful. And, in the last week, I've had a bellyful of watching just that twisting take place.

Rod Dreher has an important and, I think true, as far as it goes, take on religious defenses of Roy Moore's candidacy, either instrumentally (such as Gov. Kay Ivey's brushing aside her concerns about the accusations made against him, on the ground that "I believe in the Republican Party, what we stand for, and most important, we need to have a Republican in the United States Senate to vote on things like the Supreme Court justices”), or by theologically justifying or mitigating the acts of which Moore stands accused.

Citing and generously quoting Bethany Mandel's op-ed in the New York Times, Dreher draws his conclusion:

Roy Moore is not a pastor, but he has made his Evangelical Christianity so much a part of his public persona that he is rightly regarded as a religious leader. He has held himself out as the embodiment of a man of faith, one whose religious principles are the most important thing to him. He has raised his voice repeatedly in judgment of those who, in his view, violate God’s law. Now there is credible evidence that he sexually abused underage teenage girls in his 30s. There is no proof yet, but the evidence is credible. You can be quite sure that the world of unbelievers is watching how conservative Christians react to this news. And you can be certain that the adolescent and young adult children of Evangelicals — especially Alabama Evangelicals — are watching their parents, their pastors, and the adult community in which they were raised, to see how they react to all this.

This is a time of testing for Evangelical men and women in Alabama (and elsewhere). As you may recall, I heard from a small group of Evangelical pastors in Nashville that they were dealing with young believers in their late teens and early twenties — college students, basically — who were having profound crises of faith because of their parents’ and home churches’ enthusiastic support of Donald Trump. At the time, I told the pastors that I didn’t understand why their elders’ support of a politician would cause a crisis of faith. Those pastors told me pretty much what Bethany Mandel wrote here: “The foundation of so much of my religious practice is inextricably tied to that period of my life….” That is, those young Nashville Evangelicals had been so formed by the faith as practiced in their families and church communities that they were having a very hard time separating belief from the means through which they had come to believe.

You may ask why I, as a non-Evangelical--indeed, a liberal Anglo-Catholic--am writing about this test for a community very different than my own. Dreher is right that this behavior, like that Bethany Mandel was subjected to, like that of the Roman Catholic Church in the sex abuse crisis, will cost people their faith. Some will be unchurched, while remaining believers, some will find other spiritual homes, and others will become agnostics or atheists. But the harm goes beyond this.

The thing is, all of this behavior becomes the model of what Christianity is to the non-Christian, and that's not unfair. We are what we do. Charles Gore and his "Holy Party" called Christianity first and foremost "the Way," and we can't paper over hypocrisy with prayer, or by distorting the Gospel.

We are what we do. Faith without works is dead, after all, and while we're all flawed and are going to screw it up, sometimes right royally, we can't react to our failures by calling them successes. I'm no Barthian, but I think we have to accept that Barthian insight into human sinfulness and divine forgiveness requires us to accept when we fall short, seek forgiveness, and, where possible, to make amends, not to use our cleverness at self-deception to say that, no, what we did wrong was quite all right, indeed, the only correct thing to do.

And all of us, whether liberal or conservative, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox--whatever--are going to be tempted to such cognitive dissonance either for ourselves or for those we admire. But this fraught situation becomes especially toxic where politics come into play, because power--secular power, and spiritual power, provide ample opportunities for abuse.

As I've written before, T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral has long been a foundational text for me, especially the lines given Becket in rejecting the blandishments of the Fourth Tempter:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain;
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Now, credit where due; Eliot, like Anouilh, assumed the fundamental righteousness of Becket's cause in his dispute with Henry II. I do not. (Free earlier draft here.) Indeed, the Becket case, and John Henry Newman's theological justification of suppression of the truth through persecution, are given as archetypes of these temptations by me for just that reason in Command and Coercion.

Let's focus on the words of the Third and the Fourth Tempters, for a moment. The Third Tempter argues that Becket should bring his spiritual authority to form a political coalition with secular, political actors,the barons, and overthrow the King :

For us, Church favour would be an advantage,
Blessing of Pope powerful protection
In the fight for liberty. You, my Lord,
In being with us, would fight a good stroke

The Fourth Tempter takes it a step further, commending Becket for rejecting the purely political, instead advocating for ecclesiastical dominance of the secular state:

You hold the keys of heaven and hell.
Power to bind and loose: bind, Thomas, bind,
King and bishop under your heel.
King, emperor, bishop, baron, king:

He adds, "When king is dead, there's another king. And one more king is another reign," and then pictures all the kings in succession, attending at Thomas's shrine, adding, "Think of the miracles, by God's grace/And think of your enemies in another place."

In each case, Becket is offered power--secular power by the Third Tempter, the power to bring his enemies forever for his own personal glory down by the Fourth--in exchange for abusing the spiritual office entrusted to him, ironically enough by the King with whom he is at war.

The Governor, like the Third Tempter, argues that morals be damned, the greater good requires her party prevail--even if a little cooperation with evil has to be accepted to get there. In all conscience, that's bad enough, to put it quite mildly. But watching clergy and other religious leaders contort the Gospels to justify sexual predation is even more appalling. Because if you take Christianity at all seriously, it is is a Way, not a Why, a following of a man who, we are told, was the heir to the throne of David, but so resolutely stood for the outcast, the poor, the women who were so often ignored, and preached that they, and not those religious authorities who made logic-chopping distinctions to justify their seemingly righteous exclusion of those others, were blessed. This is, in truth, the greatest treason: to abuse spiritual authority for gain.

"What is Truth?": A Post-Palm Sunday Digression

Hearing the Passion Drama as read at St Barts yesterday prompted a few thoughts about Pilate as he is portrayed in the Gospels. See, here's the thing that stuck with me: there are two men in that room who know exactly what's happening. One of them is Jesus, of course.

Pilate's the other.

Think about it--he's depicted as passing the buck to Herod, trying to turn the crowd in Jesus's favor, and then, most famously, washing his hands of the whole thing (OK, that's in Matthew). He has the Cross inscribed "This is the King of the Jews." (In John, he is challenged on this, and delphically replies, "What I have written I have written.")

In the framework of the Gospels, he is described as vacillating; Josephus supports this in part, but also suggests a tougher, more authoritarian personality. It's a tough character to get a line on.

Robert Graves's King Jesus, which takes as one of its premises that Jesus was the Davidic heir, suggests that Pilate was aware of this, and hoped to use him to supplant Herod; in telling the Passion story, Luke writes,"before this they had been enemies." Graves postulates that Jesus's refusal to become a client "king" in Herod's place removed the basis for their enmity.

We'll never know, of course, what Pilate felt. Or why he, who could be ruthless, yielded to the crowd. Or even if he did--some scholars suggest that the whole story is inserted to let Rome off the hook, and make clear that Christians could be good citizens of the Empire.

Perhaps.

But what he wrote, he wrote.

And thereby hangs a library's worth of speculation, hypothesizing, and theology.

Heresy and Hope

I admit it; I'm not much of a heresy hunter. But there is one that has always rankled me, because, unlike so many heresies that debate or question the nature of Jesus, this heresy devalues his teachings, in favor of a credulous embrace of the world, or, worse, provides a modus operandi for snake-oil salesmen (and women) in clerical collars.

I refer of course to the prosperity gospel:

In the Gospel of Saint Matthew, we are told that Jesus said, "You cannot serve both God and money" and, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

The "prosperity gospel," an insipid heresy whose popularity among American Christians has boomed in recent years, teaches that God blesses those God favors most with material wealth.

****

Few theological ideas ring more dissonant with the harmony of orthodox Christianity than a focus on storing up treasures on Earth as a primary goal of faithful living. The gospel of prosperity turns Christianity into a vapid bless-me club, with a doctrine that amounts to little more than spiritual magical thinking: If you pray the right way, God will make you rich.

But if you're not rich, then what? Are the poor cursed by God because of their unfaithfulness? And if God were so concerned about 401(k)s and Mercedes, why would God's son have been born into poverty?

Nowhere has the prosperity gospel flourished more than among the poor and the working class. Told that wealth is a sign of God's grace and favor, followers strive for trappings of luxury they can little afford in an effort to prove that they are blessed spiritually. Some critics have gone so far as to place part of the blame for the past decade's spending binge and foreclosure crisis at the foot of the prosperity gospel's altar.

In my unchurched days, after I had left the Roman Catholicism of my youth and before I re-entered religious observance as an Episcopalian, I stood aghast at the antics of these prosperity gospel preachers on television, my fundamental belief in Jesus of Nazareth revolted by the hucksters who twisted his words that he had come to people "that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" into crass commercialism. In college, I saw its origins in the Calvinist fear that one could not know if one was of the "Elect" (saved), and in the hope that if one was successful in one's calling, that might--might, mind you--be a sign that was one of the Elect.

Yes, yes; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism per Max Weber gave me some insight, but oversimplified Calvin's teaching. Still, Weber had sussed out a part of American Christianity, and many of the misapplications of calvinist thought.

So, it was with some interest that I read Kate Bowler's recent essay "Death, the Prosperity Gospel, and Me", in which the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013). In her article, Bowler describes how her own cancer has led her to reflect on her research into the Prosperity Gospel:

I am a historian of the American prosperity gospel. Put simply, the prosperity gospel is the belief that God grants health and wealth to those with the right kind of faith. I spent 10 years interviewing televangelists with spiritual formulas for how to earn God’s miracle money. I held hands with people in wheelchairs being prayed for by celebrities known for their miracle touch. I sat in people’s living rooms and heard about how they never would have dreamed of owning this home without the encouragement they heard on Sundays.

I went on pilgrimage with the faith healer Benny Hinn and 900 tourists to retrace Jesus’ steps in the Holy Land and see what people would risk for the chance at their own miracle. I ruined family vacations by insisting on being dropped off at the showiest megachurch in town. If there was a river running through the sanctuary, an eagle flying freely in the auditorium or an enormous, spinning statue of a golden globe, I was there.

****

This is America, where there are no setbacks, just setups. Tragedies are simply tests of character. It is the reason a neighbor knocked on our door to tell my husband that everything happens for a reason.

“I’d love to hear it,” my husband said.

“Pardon?” she said, startled.

“I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying,” he said, in that sweet and sour way he has.

My neighbor wasn’t trying to sell him a spiritual guarantee. But there was a reason she wanted to fill that silence around why some people die young and others grow old and fussy about their lawns. She wanted some kind of order behind this chaos. Because the opposite of #blessed is leaving a husband and a toddler behind, and people can’t quite let themselves say it: “Wow. That’s awful.” There has to be a reason, because without one we are left as helpless and possibly as unlucky as everyone else.

****

The prosperity gospel tries to solve the riddle of human suffering. It is an explanation for the problem of evil. It provides an answer to the question: Why me? For years I sat with prosperity churchgoers and asked them about how they drew conclusions about the good and the bad in their lives. Does God want you to get that promotion? Tell me what it’s like to believe in healing from that hospital bed. What do you hear God saying when it all falls apart?

****

The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

I've ordered her book, because someone who can see past the charlatans, the well-meaning cranks, the eccentrics, and gaze into the human hopes that this especially American heresy is trying to support is the right person to write its history. The fact that she can view with compassion as well as objectivity--the double vision of the truly great historian--means that she can see it in the round, not just the shadow side that is flaunted so often.

Which is just the kind of historian I need to understand the allure of the thing, and to help me understand, rather than stand in judgment.

An Evening With Nadia Bolz-Weber

This evening was the first of two parts of the CRTC workshop with Nadia Bolz-Weber that I am attending. It consisted of an interview with Pastor Nadia by a moderator and a brief Q-and-A with the audience, followed by a book signing.

Hearing speak for over an hour was an illuminating experience She describes herself (accurately) as an orthodox Lutheran preacher of the Gospel. Oh, she's kinetic, funny as hell, and passionate--there's no way of describing here what her talk was like.

Although, it occurred to me, these clips of her speaking elsewhere hit some of the notes that resonated with me--a little differently, but you can see her doing it, and get a better flavor for her presentation than I can give you bu trying to summarize her words:

1. "God's Grace is Absolutely Free; We Don't Earn It, We Just Try to Respond to it"




This resonates with me especially. She related it to her experience in AA, andI can identify. Why one alcoholic gets sober and another doesn't is a great mystery. But when the obsession is lifted--that's grace.

2. "Accidental Saints": Finding God in All the Wrong People



Anyway, more tomorrow, with the actual workshop group. So far, an enlightening and inspiring event.

The SoCon Inquisition

Yeah, I had to. Sorry. But, c'mon, Ross Douthat's pompously titled "Letter to the Catholic Academy"begs for it:

MY dear professors!
I read with interest your widely-publicized letter to my editors this week, in which you objected to my recent coverage of Roman Catholic controversies, complained that I was making unfounded accusations of heresy (both “subtly” and “openly”!), and deplored this newspaper’s willingness to let someone lacking theological credentials opine on debates within our church. I was appropriately impressed with the dozens of academic names who signed the letter on the Daily Theology site, and the distinguished institutions (Georgetown, Boston College, Villanova) represented on the list.

I have great respect for your vocation. Let me try to explain mine.

A columnist has two tasks: To explain and to provoke.

****

So in my columns, I’ve tried to cut through those obfuscations toward what seems like basic truth. There really is a high-stakes division, at the highest levels of the church, over whether to admit divorced and remarried Catholics to communion and what that change would mean. In this division, the pope clearly inclines toward the liberalizing view and has consistently maneuvered to advance it. At the recent synod, he was dealt a modest but genuine setback by conservatives.

And then to this description, I’ve added my own provoking view: Within the framework of Catholic tradition, the conservatives have by far the better of the argument.

First, because if the church admits the remarried to communion without an annulment — while also instituting an expedited, no-fault process for getting an annulment, as the pope is poised to do — the ancient Catholic teaching that marriage is “indissoluble” would become an empty signifier.

Second, because changing the church’s teaching on marriage in this way would unweave the larger Catholic view of sexuality, sin and the sacraments — severing confession’s relationship to communion, and giving cohabitation, same-sex unions and polygamy entirely reasonable claims to be accepted by the church.

Now this is, as you note, merely a columnist’s opinion. So I have listened carefully when credentialed theologians make the liberalizing case. What I have heard are three main claims. The first is that the changes being debated would be merely “pastoral” rather than “doctrinal,” and that so long as the church continues to say that marriage is indissoluble, nothing revolutionary will have transpired.

But this seems rather like claiming that China has not, in fact, undergone a market revolution because it’s still governed by self-described Marxists. No: In politics and religion alike, a doctrine emptied in practice is actually emptied, whatever official rhetoric suggests.

When this point is raised, reformers pivot to the idea that, well, maybe the proposed changes really are effectively doctrinal, but not every doctrinal issue is equally important, and anyway Catholic doctrine can develop over time.

But the development of doctrine is supposed to deepen church teaching, not reverse or contradict it. This distinction allows for many gray areas, admittedly. But effacing Jesus’ own words on the not-exactly-minor topics of marriage and sexuality certainly looks more like a major reversal than an organic, doctrinally-deepening shift.

****

So I must tell you, openly and not subtly, that this view sounds like heresy by any reasonable definition of the term.

Now it may be that today’s heretics are prophets, the church will indeed be revolutionized, and my objections will be ground under with the rest of conservative Catholicism. But if that happens, it will take hard grinding, not just soft words and academic rank-pulling. It will require a bitter civil war.

And so, my dear professors: Welcome to the battlefield.

Um, where to start? Well, let's begin with the substance, taking the high ground for once.

Douthat's claim that the allowing of divorced Catholics to reunion with the Church would strip the doctrine of the indissoluble nature of marriage of all content, and empty it doctrinally? As a threshold matter, this observation is made in ignorance of the boom in both numbers of annulments petitioned for and percentage granted after the enactment of the 1984 Code of Canon Law--according to Dr. Edward Peters, a first-rate scholar who deplores the trend, in 1996 95% of applications for annulments that reached tribunals were granted. Dr. Peters notes that, when you correct for those cases that never reach a tribunal, for one reason or another, 80% is the more globally correct figure. Dr. Peters notes that the grounds for annulments burgeoned in the 1983 Code promulgated under John Paul II in comparison to the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code, which facilitated the expansion (which was, he notes, already under way.) Still, it seems fair to say that the "indissolubility of marriage" is not all too difficult to address in the Roman Catholic Church--good standing is a matter of using the Church's legal system, not that of secular society. (A familiar theme, no?)

And Douthat's notion that the "reformers" are "effacing Jesus’ own words on the not-exactly-minor topics of marriage and sexuality" which "certainly looks more like a major reversal than an organic, doctrinally-deepening shift," is likewise counterfactual. Let's consult the Gospel According to St. Matthew, in the Douay-Rheims American version, a Roman Catholic translation, in which Jesus says: "And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery." Jesus's teaching in Luke is stricter tan that in Matthew, and he was, it is well understood, rebuking a tradition of allowing divorce for trivial reasons that left women vulnerable. My point is not to argue that the Roman Catholic Church has no grounds to argue that divorce is not a sin, a "missing of the mark," a failure of a commitment from which much was hoped. My point is that the Gospel's are not univocal on the subject, and that Douthat's blithe assumption that it is does not comport with either scripture or the practice of his own Church.

More to the point, the notion that unless a sin is unforgivable--that is, there is no path back to good standing within the community and reception of the sacraments--the prohibition is "emptied" of content is both spectacularly unscriptural and places marital breakdown as a sin worse than all other sins, absent any compelling justification.

To scripture first. Jesus says, in Matthew 12:31: "Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. 32 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come." So, no, we have no scriptural warrant for declaring that marital breakdown is the unforgivable sin. Lots of other sinful behavior that cannot be undone is nonetheless absolved, and the offender reconciled--the Church's mercy can extend, should it choose, to the divorced, without changing the doctrine. Indeed, that's the basis for the Orthodox Church's teaching, in which remarriage after divorce is permitted. (In a rather bizarre bit of tribal over theological loyalty, here's Rod Dreher, himself a convert from Catholicism, cheering on Douthat, for vowing a civil war to prevent Dreher's former church from adapting the position of his current church. Even ecumenicism must fall before the great maxim of SoCons" Liberals must lose. Seriously--unless Dreher feels his new church is wrong on the issue, and is looking for somewhere else to go.)

I won't, having belabored the matter at such length, spend much time on the condescending tone--My dear professors," indeed. I will only allude briefly to the grandiosity--a "Letter to the Catholic Academy"--I hope he doesn't expect this to be read along with King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but I'm not taking any bets. No, what I'll point out is that this young Catholic convert only believes in papal authority--after all, it was the pope he named as the lead "plotter"--when he agrees with the decision at hand. He has no interest in a hierarchical church that isn't enforcing his, Ross Douthat's, personal vision of the faith. Which, effectively, boils down to a sexual purity code, with no room for mercy or the redemptive love of Christ. Note that Douthat at no time names what the heresy he deplores is--he cries "heresy" without identification of a doctrine denied, or of a creedal statement contradicted.

Douthat isn't a Catholic. He's a Puritan iconoclast, looking for a high-level heretic to hunt (and who higher than the Pope himself?), and, if he's really lucky, a witch to burn.

How perfect that his mewling little battle cry was published on Halloween.

The Shape of Things

I spoke not long ago with an old friend, and we talked a little bit about ministry to the sick. I haven't done all that much yet--my field parish didn't need any hospital or home visits in my time there, and so my main experience was Clinical Pastoral Training (the less-intensive version of Clinical Pastoral Education we deacons receive), which I did at at New York Presbyterian. But our conversation reminded me of ow afraid I'd been of CPT before I did it.

Not for myself, really--I was deathly afraid that I'd let down the patients that I was there to help. I doubted my own ability to bring any comfort, because my primary ways of dealing with the world--knowledge and deploying it--were useless. I knew that much.

What I didn't realize is that a willingness to plunge in, listen, and meet people where they are was really all I had to bring into the room. The rest was God and the patient. I was really there as catalyst to that conversation--a witness in some cases, in other, a proxy--someone to whom the patient could say the things they needed to say to God, but needed someone who would visibly hear it for it to have meaning. Sometimes I was there just to be a symbol that God and the Church had not abandoned the ailing person. And on one occasion, my role was to help the family by providing a liturgical framework n which to say their goodbyes.

In none of those roles did I do anything clever or special. To paraphrase David Niven, I showed up, I stood with the sick person, and I paid attention. I was mindful, I'll give myself that. And that's not nothing.

Mindfulness isn't easy--it's a personal flaw of mine that I can get so wrapped in my own thoughts that I am not aware of what's right in front of me. So the fact that I was able to get out of the way, and be there for the person I was there to serve and the God who called me to that service is a big deal for me. But this isn't ultimately about me.

***

No, it's about the shape of things--how there can be a beauty in the lifecycle, even with the pain that entails. I knew someone once who had fractured several relationships that were important to her. When she was diagnosed with a terminal illness, the jolt of impending mortality galvanized her into action; she used her last months to repair those relationships insofar as she could. I've never seen more meaning plucked from a tragic situation.

Sometimes I get asked--especially if I'm wearing the clerical collar--how my faith survives a world in which terrible things happen to good people on a daily basis--not in a hostile way, but in a sense of genuine curiosity. I don't have perfect answer, other than for me that's the point of the Incarnation--God isn't estranged from our sufferings, watching them afar like the gods in Lear; no, God is here in the world suffering with and for us, and helping us to draw meaning from suffering.

But why do we suffer, why do we die? Maybe we need to be finite, to have endings, to impel us to the sort of heroic reconciliation the woman I mentioned performed in her last months. Maybe we need to age and die to let go of this good Creation for whatever lies ahead. Because I don't believe that death is the end, you see. The writings of the mystics, and the weaker "peak experiences" described by Abraham Maslow, happen more often than we think. Inge wrote that the mystical facility is one which all posses, but few develop. Inge quotes his beloved Plotinus: "Nothing that truly is can ever perish." Robertson Davies agreed with him in his last novel, The Cunning Man. I don't believe it because they say so, but their testimony, and that of many others, validates my own experience and intuitions.

But this is becoming intellectual again, and that's not where I want to go. I'm not able to give you the answer why life has a shape that includes suffering, the sadness and rewards of aging and includes death. It does; that's all. But the experience of witnessing people drawing meaning and beauty from those facts has enriched me sufficiently that I don't experience these facts as undermining my faith, though they challenge me in living my own life.

"If you're going to try my case for me, I wish you wouldn't lose it."

So saith Paul Newman in The Verdict, and I have to say I agree.

You know, I am so very, very tired of conservatives telling me what I,as a liberal Christian, think; the latest example is Rod Dreher quoting Rev. John Azumah, a a Presbyterian pastor from Ghana, who teaches at a PC(USA) seminary in the United States, describing his students' reaction to an imam's guest-lecturing:

They were agitated by what the imam said about homosexuality, but seemed wholly at ease with his negation of fundamental Christian beliefs. If this were a seminary in Ghana, my home country, the reverse would have been the case.

****
I have come to the conclusion that the doctrinal differences between American liberals and African traditionalists originate in deeper conflicts. We may argue about what the Bible says about sexuality, but there is a broader, unstated disagreement over the Bible itself. For mainstream Western society, the Bible is an ancient text that might arouse intellectual curiosity or become the subject of historical analysis, but it is hardly a sacred book. It has no more authority in American culture than the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King’s speeches, and other notable historic statements. Dropping the language of “obedience to Scripture” and “conformity to the historic confessional standards” from the PC(USA) Ordination Standards underscores this point.

The Bible has a very different status in African societies. Where Christianity has become dominant in the last century, the Bible remains a sacred text, relevant and living. The Bible is more than a compilation of historical documents.

Oh, please. the Bible has many precepts that the neither we liberals nor the conservatives here or in the Global South don't follow. Usury has wreaked incalculable damage on the poor and has helped core out the middle class (subprime mortgage crisis, anyone), but I don't hear the SoCons railing against usury, despite its being the subject of 3 times the number of biblical prohibitions as is homosexuality. (For my overview on both usury and same-sex marriage see here). So please spare me the notion that the Bible is living and vital for conservatives but isn't for liberals. I'm just not buying.

But the effect of the Bible overall in my life has been immense. And I take this seriously. I was ordained a vocational deacon in May, after more than 7 years of discernment and training. That means that I have made a commitment. I hope that, with God's help, my ministry will be of service to those who hunger and thirst, who are prisoners and need encouragement, to the sick, the widows and orphans, and that I may, again with God's help and through His grace, bring the light of Christ into dark places. Trust me, I need to more than just believe in God to even try to do that; I need to rely n God. My hospital training taught me that. It ain't about me.

So I don't like to hear my faith being written off as Dreher and Azumah as if they knew me. I believe in the Creed, quite simply, including the Resurrection and the Trinity. Period. This makes me somewhat traditionalist in my theology (I'm in accord with the so-called Second Anglo-Catholic movement, as ably described by Charles Gore, but those whom I know in the Church who take more modern approaches--well, we're all reaching to describe the same experience, the experience W.R. Inge described in 1899 as the "raw material of all religion"--the experience of transcendence and of immanence. Of course we describe it differently; it's experience we're discussing, not mathematical theorems, and experience is filtered through our unique personal sensitivities and perceptions.

Why weren't the students pressing the Imam on his lack of belief in Christian doctrines such as the resurrection and the Trinity? Possibly, oh, let's have a wild stab at this--because they know he's not a Christian, but rather a Muslim, and therefore that part of his talk was neither new nor shocking? And maybe they were being polite?

I don't know; he was there and I wasn't. But the plural of anecdotes isn't data, as they say, and more to the point, if you're going to frame my argument for me, at least try to look at it as I experience and live it. If you're going to try my case for me, don't throw it.

The Universe Bends a Little More Toward Justice: Bishop Finn "Resigns"

From The National Catholic Reporter:

Bishop Robert Finn, the Catholic prelate in the U.S. heartland who became a symbol internationally of the church's failures in addressing the sexual abuse crisis, has resigned. He was the first bishop criminally convicted of mishandling an abusive priest yet remained in office for another two and a half years.
The Vatican announced Finn's resignation as head of the diocese of St. Joseph-Kansas City, Mo., in a note in its daily news bulletin Tuesday.

While the note did not provide any reason for the move, it is rare for bishops in the Catholic church to resign without cause before they reach the traditional retirement age of 75.

Finn, who is 62 and had led the diocese since 2005, was neither assigned a new diocese nor as yet given a new leadership role in the church.

Other than for reasons of health, only one other bishop among the some 200 U.S. Catholic dioceses and eparchies has resigned his role in such a manner in at least the past decade.

The hell-busted old public defender who will ever be a part of my psyche takes no joy in the conviction of anyone, let alone a man who dedicated his life to serving God to the best of his ability.

But it had to be.

I do not feel schadenfreude that the bishop was given the sack--albeit the ermine lined, velvet sack, allowing him to resign.

But that too had to be.

In 2011, I published Command and Coercion: Clerical Immunity, Scandal, and the Sex Abuse Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church (the final paper, subscription required; working paper available here). In it, I argued, I think convincingly, that the key to understanding the massive international cover up by the Church hierarchy, from top to bottom, of sexual abuse of children by priests is the doctrine that the Church is not subject to the secular state, and that its clergy, broadly defined, are immune from secular punishment. This doctrine has its jurisprudential roots in St. Augustine's City of God, became binding on state as well as Church in the wake of the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, and survived for centuries as benefit of clergy, or, more formally, privilegium fori. While the immunity's recognition withered in secular law, it found its way into the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law. In other words, the Church still taught that its clerics were immune from secular jurisdiction for crimes including raper and murder.

Since the publication of "Command and Coercion" a rather good book along similar lines has appeared--Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, by barrister and canonist Kieran Tapsell. Actually, I'm quite glad to see his book come out, for some of the reasons given by Fr. Tom Doyle in his perceptive review. Tapsell is lighter on the history than is my own work, but is, I think, a little more adroit with the impact of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. So, far from feeling displaced by his work, I think it complements my own, and does some of the work that I, as an amateur canonist, could not do as confidently. Tapsell brings an Australian perspective to the story, as well, and reminds us that this is not an exclusively American, or even Western story, but one that engulfed the Church around the world.

The hierarchy has, prior to Bishop Finn's forced resignation, been immune from consequences. That it took over 2 years from his criminal conviction for the Pope to act is to Francis's discredit--but act he did, at last.

The wall of clericalism has been breached. One must hope that the work of Fr. Tom Doyle, of all the good people at SNAP, and Bishop Accountability, and lawyers like Jeffrey Anderson, will continue. This is not the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.

Disengagement to Marry

According to Rod Dreher:

Father Patrick Reardon, pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, has just released the following statement:

"Because the State of Illinois, through its legislature and governor’s office, have now re-defined marriage, marriage licenses issued by agencies of the State of Illinois will no longer be required (or signed) for weddings here at All Saints in Chicago.

Those seeking marriage in this parish will be counseled on the point.

Father Pat"

No longer be required or signed. No recognition of the state’s authority over marriage. One is reminded of Alasdair Macintyre’s famous remark about the decline of the Western Roman Empire:

"A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium."

I could be wrong, but it sounds like the pastor of All Saints parish has concluded that the continuation of civility and moral community no longer has anything to do with shoring up the American civil order, and in fact depends on repudiating it in the matter of marriage.

Well, that's one approach, I suppose.

Look, it is the right of any religious sect to choose to get out of the secular marriage business. If this is the beginning of a trend, so be it. I confess that it seems a little petulant--particularly if Dreher is reading Father Reardon's motivation correctly--in that civil marriage has always diverged, in this country, from sacramental marriage. Indeed, in many Christian denominations, marriage isn't a sacrament. Period. Moreover, divorce has long been more readily available under secular law than under the rules of many traditionalist Christian sects, not to mention the rules of other faiths.

Oh, yes. Other faiths. Faiths that have very different definitions of marriage and its meaning.

But let's be charitable here, and assume that Fr, Reardon is not applying Macintyre's lines here. He just wants out, either to prevent a claim that his parish be required to conduct a wedding outside of the framework of its faith (which I an quite sure would not be upheld by the courts, even if tried), or to avoid complicity in the doings of the state.

Or even assume Dreher reads Fr. Reardon aright.

He should live and be well.

I think he's wildly wrong, mind you. I believe full civil marriage equality is coming sooner than I thought. And in my own Diocese, it's already here, for which I am glad. My marriage shouldn't, in my view, be privileged by La Caterina's and my gender. That said, I value religious freedom for others as well as for myself. That includes, in my opinion, the right to not exercise a religion,as either agnostic or atheist, and the right to exercise religions with which I have little or no common ground.

And that includes, of course, the right not to serve as an agent of the state in weddings.

So, it's not how I would react, but just as I respected the right of those clergy who decided not to perform weddings until equal marriage was the law of New York State, it's my duty to recognize the converse right of those who hold opposite views to disengage.

"It is Finished": The Beginning-- A Good Friday Meditation

(Photo by Millard Cook, 2014)

I again had the honor of preaching at the Liturgy of the Seven Last Words at my home parish,St Bartholomew's Church. The other preachers were exceptional this year, and the fact that it is Buddy Stalling's last Good Friday as Rector, added an emotional layer to the day.

You can actually hear my meditation here. The text follows:

***

“It is Finished”

A Meditation on John 19:30
St. Bartholomew’s Church, Good Friday
April 3, 2015

John Wirenius

Many years ago, when I was a boy, the first book I read that wasn’t written specifically for children was T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. It retells the story of King Arthur, whose Round Table White sees as an effort to overcome the notion that Might makes Right. Might makes Right was seemingly triumphant in White’s own time—he wrote as the Second World War was getting under way.

The book ends, as every re-telling of the King Arthur story must, in tragedy: The Round Table is split, the best are killed and scattered, and nobody is quite sure what happened to Arthur, “that gentle heart and centre of it all,” lost in a futile battle he struggles to prevent. But he, and his friends, are remembered by White as having “tried, in their own small way, to still the ancient brutal dream of Attila the Hun.”

At the bottom of the last page, are two simple words: The Beginning.

Not “The End.”

I always remember that on Good Friday. The battle’s lost, Might triumphant, the forces of light scattered or simply dead. And White, off to join the war effort, ends the book with a simple request: “Pray for Thomas Malory, Knight,” who compiled the Arthur stories into a coherent tale, “and for his humble disciple”—that’s White—“who now voluntarily lays aside his books to fight for his kind.”

He didn’t expect to come back, you see. But as he lay aside his books, he wrote: “The Beginning,” anyway.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus says “It is finished” with his last breath. He says it from the Cross to which he was sentenced for opposing the exploitation of the poor pilgrims who came to Jerusalem, for helping people on the Sabbath, for preaching love to a world that was governed by hate, and by law.

The late, great historian Marcus Borg called the Roman order in Jerusalem where occupier and occupied united to crush the presumptuous prophet from Galilee an “imperial domination system.” Today we commemorate that system’s crushing, seemingly final, victory.

Jesus took on the powers and principalities of this world, and they put him to death in the most barbaric way the ancient world had designed—a slow death by suffocation, shameful, surrounded by mocking crowds. Those who hated Jesus are there to gloat. Almost worse, those who didn’t know him were just there for the show, as a public entertainment, like Victorians attending a public hanging, and betting on who lasts longest, while they picnic.

Jesus dies, the imperial domination system wins.

Every telling of the story of Jesus has to have that dark victory.
It’s part of the arc of the story. A great scholar of Jesus’s life, John Meier, says that the uncomfortable fact of that victory is part of how we can be sure he lived—nobody would make up a Messiah who sets the people alight with hope, only to have him die a shameful agonizing death, the end.

And Jesus says just that, doesn’t he. “It is finished.” “Finis.” "The End."

But what was finished?

Jesus’s ministry? His life? A ritual sacrifice, as the mid-twentieth century scholar C.H. Dodd suggests? Or is Raymond Brown, perhaps the greatest expert on the Fourth Gospel, right when he says that Jesus’s last words from the Cross are “a cry of victory,” a triumphant shout that he has defeated the powers and principalities by enacting his role as sacrifice to the very end?

That doesn’t feel right today, as we grieve in front of the black-draped, rough wood of the Cross, as we hear the choir ravage our souls with some of the most heartbreaking hymns and anthems composed in the nearly two thousand years since Jesus’s death—

And wait just a second, there.

Where is the power of the Caesars today? Who would have heard of Pontius Pilate other than a few obscure Latinists if he hadn’t made it into the Creed?

Here we stand in New York City, in 2015, in a building hallowed to that presumptuous prophet who gave his life not just to oppose an imperial domination system, not just to point a better way to live, but to point the way to wholeness of soul. Don’t take that from me; it’s in the opening chapter of John’s Gospel: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” In the same chapter of the Gospel that first calls Jesus the Son of God, we are called to be Daughters and Sons of God.

And that Way—because that’s what the early Christians called it, not a creed but a way of life—has outlasted the Roman Empire in which it grew, and the rise and fall of a myriad of other empires. Domination systems—imperial or not—come and go. Through them all, pilgrims walk the Way.

So—a shout of victory? Not quite that, I think; the cost is too high—both on that day at Golgotha and in innocent blood since. No, not triumphant jubilation, exactly, but recognition that the world has changed forever.

Because what is finished is the notion that these domination systems will ever go unchallenged again. Jesus’s teachings are too subversive to sit well with exploitation, even when done in the name of God by self-professed Christians.

Jesus, in his words, and in the breaking of the bread and in the liturgy, keeps reminding us of who we are—and who we aren’t. In our hearts, we are not citizens of the Empire, whatever form it takes in our day. We just live in it.

In the moment of that terrible death, Jesus knew that one story was reaching a terrible and yet triumphant conclusion, ending in victory despite the tragic cost.

But he also knew that this story was not the end in itself. In the mysterious explosion we call Easter, Jesus on this day kindled the fire at which believers could, to paraphrase the Anglican martyr Hugh Latimer, light such a candle, by God’s grace, in all the world, as we trust shall never be put out.

And so the story ends.

It is finished.

The Beginning.

The Ambiguous Legacy of Thomas Becket

On December 29, 1170, in the late afternoon (and thus after the main meal of the day but shortly before vespers), four knights entered Canterbury Cathedral. Impelled, as far as history knows, by the angry words of King Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest,” they had come to confront Archbishop Thomas Becket, and win King Henry’s favor by forcing the long-simmering dispute between Becket and his King to some final resolution. When the Archbishop refused their conflicting demands, and reacted with scorn to their insults, the knights withdrew, only to arm themselves and follow Becket into the Cathedral for vespers. As the traditional account has it:

The bell for vespers began to sound, and the archbishop, with his cross borne in front of him, made his way in as usual into the cathedral. Hardly had he reached the ascent to the choir than the noise of armed men and the shout of the knights announced that the pursuers were at hand. “Where is the archbishop, where is the traitor?” resounded through the hollow aisles, mingling strangely with the recitation of the psalms in the choir. Becket, hearing this, turned back a few steps, and calmly awaited their approach in the corner of the northern transept before the little altar of S Benedict. “Here,” he cried, “is the archbishop—no traitor, but a priest of God.” Awed by his demeanor, and perhaps by the sanctity of the place, no one dared strike. A parley began. They sought to lash their failing courage into action by words. A hasty and insulting epithet gave Fitz Urse the opportunity he wanted. A blow aimed at the archbishop’s head only knocked his skull-cap to the ground, but it was enough to loose the bandogs of hell. A stroke from Tracy cut off the tonsured back of [Becket’s] skull, another from Brito brought him to his knees. In a minute all was over. The archbishop lay prone in his blood before the altar step, his brains scattered savagely on the floor, while his murderers slunk back through the dark and silent aisles with the chill of remorse already at their hearts, like Othello from the couch of Desdemona.

In the more prosaic retelling of modern historians, the story is dramatic enough: Only one witness remained with Becket as the knights tried to forcibly remove him from the Cathedral. As that survivor recounted, Becket resisted. It “was in the ensuing melee that he [Becket] received a blow on the head. As the blood flowed the four knights fell upon him with their swords.” When the knights had finished their “butcher’s job” as W.L. Warren aptly calls it, Becket lay dead on the floor of the Cathedral.

The result of this brutal murder in the most hallowed space in the English Church was almost as dramatic as the deed itself. Becket’s courage in the face of death, as well as the personal asceticism he had adopted upon his appointment as Archbishop fused into an idealized vision of Becket as martyr and saint; as Warren phrases it:
The dramatic transition from magnificent courtier to clerical martyr, heightened and fixed in the mind by the discovery on the corpse of a lice-ridden hairshirt, established him as a copybook examplar of the drama of conversion. His courage and steadfastness unto death marked him out as a martyr in an age uncommonly short of martyrs, and swept him on a wave of popular acclaim to an unusually swift canonization in March 1173.

So strong was the feeling in favor of Thomas Becket that the King, though denying that he had sought Becket’s death, performed a dramatic penance at his tomb:
The king dismounted outside Canterbury and entered the city barefoot, in plain woolen garments. Prostrate and weeping before the tomb of the murdered archbishop, he received physical punishment from the monks and other clerics, then spent the night there in prayer and fasting. In the morning he heard mass and then went on his way to London.

The resulting cultus of St. Thomas has lived in literature, stage and film. Pilgrimages to Canterbury in honor of St. Thomas form the frame of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But glossed over in most hagiography and popular depictions of the Becket story is the nature of the conflict between Becket and Henry—a conflict which prefigures the crisis in moral authority roiling the Roman Catholic Church at the present day. As Batrtlett summarizes in very capsule form, there were, essentially, three areas of dispute between Henry and Becket, “quarrels over the property of the church of Canterbury, the details of royal taxation and the extent that clerks could be treated differently from lay people in the law courts.” Bartlett’s correct but rather overly discreet phrasing may mislead the reader; what he, Warren and Wakeman accept as the most serious dispute between Becket and Henry II was Becket’s attempted creation of a parallel court system, in which individuals who had often only minimal connection to the Church could nonetheless claim exemption from the secular law, and be subject to the milder (and originally minimal) punishments applicable under canon law. Such individuals could be accused of crimes ranging from theft to rape and, frequently, even murder.

Becket’s cause, seeking to regularize a practice that had evolved during the weaker (and rather chaotic) reign of Henry’s predecessor King Stephen, was essentially successful, and canon law for many years ran along a parallel track to the secular law.
Becket’s view of ecclesiastical sovereignty prevailed in another way, too. From his time into the Twentieth Century, the relationship between Church and State changed from a united Christendom, to a divided and Reformed Christian Europe, to what many now call post-Christian Europe. Throughout that time, the Catholic Church defended its own separate canon law courts, and created an ideological-cum-theological justification for such courts being the principal, and, ideally the only, forum to take cognizance of criminal complaints against the clergy. In the sexual abuse scandals from the second half of the Twentieth Century into the present, defenders of the Church routinely take as a given the notion that such matters should be diverted to private adjudication in private, absent the secular authorities’ awareness of the underlying crime.

Throughout the succeeding centuries, even where such parallel courts were forced to give way to secular jurisdiction, the Roman Catholic Church continued to hold out ecclesiastical sovereignty as a model to be preserved, applied and, where limited, restored to the maximum extent possible. Only in the Twentieth Century did the Church grudgingly begin to come to terms with democratic theory; only in the years leading up to, and especially in the wake of, Vatican II did the Church begin to find some value in democratic society. That half-accomplished rapprochement did not extend to acceptance of secular government’s right to protect its citizenry against predation by clergy. Seeking to understand why this is the case, and the costs to the Church of this theological understanding, is critical in determining what steps secular government can take and ought to take, with respect to the crisis.

One salient factor in this continued existence of a parallel jurisdiction, not recognized by the secular government as having cognizance of criminal misconduct, is the tradition of ecclesiastical sovereignty championed by Becket, and justified in the Nineteenth Century by Cardinal John Henry Newman. Becket’s struggle for, and Newman’s defense of ecclesiastical sovereignty echo not just the tactics but the very language employed by the Church’s defenders in the sexual abuse scandal. The newly beatified convert from Anglicanism and the murdered Archbishop have never been more relevant.

More here.