In an old (January 1999 issue) Touchstone article, Anglican shock journalist David Virtue writes about the occasion in which he successfully orchestrated a meeting between Francis Schaeffer and Malcolm Muggeridge. The article highlights the collision between Schaeffer's emphasis on the historicity of the Christian faith and Muggeridge's otherworldly rejection of all earthly pleasures. In Virtue's view it was a disastrous meeting as each man enunciated his position, and dug in his heels to defend it. (Virtue attributes this to Schaeffer's pugnaciousness.)
What the article highlighted for me is that both emphases are important aspects of Christian belief and practice, each thoroughly grounded in the Scripture, but neither emphasis can be held alone, as each leads to imbalance and heresy.
To ignore or even denigrate the historicity of the Christian faith, leads one inevitably to the heresy of Gnosticism. Jesus either is or is not God Incarnate. If he is, then God has invaded space and time to reveal himself to us. History is important, indeed, essential, to the Christian faith . . . if we truly believe in the Incarnation.
On the other hand, Christians are resident aliens. The Kingdom into which we've been adopted is not of this world, though it is breaking into this world. Thus Christians cannot place their hopes in any earthly thing, or any earthly kingdom. We can eschew the norms of married life for Gospel celibacy. We are greater than our fallen earthly nature and can wage war against the passions which have been accumulated and reproduced themselves within it.
Unfortunately, my individual experience of the Christian faith has gravitated toward one or another of these poles. In the some of the churches in which I have lived we could recite the dates of the Kings of Israel and Judah (or I used to be able to do so). We could list the dates of composition of the New Testament epistles and tie them to the events of the Acts (or, that is, I use to be able to). But all this was to confirm certain doctrines and beliefs. The historicity was more about apologetics than the Incarnation. In other churches in which I have lived, less was emphasized about history--particularly biblical history--and far more emphasis was given a more otherworldly Christianity. The revivalist Protestant hymn "I Come to the Garden Alone" was an accurate description. It was just Jesus and me in a fragrant garden spiritual life.
It is only of late (it's been since Great Lent last year, but I'm so darned thick-headed) that I am coming to see that both of these emphases must be combined in a life. The Faith is not mere dogma and canon. The Faith is not some individualist initiate religion of otherwordly experience. It is, rather, a very incarnate religion lived from the life-giving wellspring of Christian Tradition and the energetic this-otherworldly grace of God.
This is why, I think, it important to assume a posture of suspicion toward new theological enterprises. The Athenians of Acts 17 were known for this sort of theoretical tinkering. On the level of a thought experiment, it might be "interesting," "revealing," even "enlightening" to contemplate liturgical language that explicitly refers to God as Mother or a neutered Parent. The trouble is, ideas have consequences. And as C. S. Lewis has so rightly pointed out, the thought experiment really does result in a different way of life, one antithetical to the Life that has come down to us through history: "[A] child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child." It should be well-noted that not many Athenians became Christian in Acts 17.
Similarly, and perhaps even more so, Christians are right to be suspicious of new practices in Christian worship and life. The constant retooling of worship that began here in the West with the Novus Ordo--and let me here admit that some of these new experiences are laudatory--and spreading throughout the mainline liturgical churches, is dangerous and inimical to Christian faith and life. The life of the Church, her beliefs and practices, flow from her worship, and the One whom she worships. To change that worship is tantamount to changing deities, and that will necessarily result in another sort of life--or, according to Christ, death.
Each family not only has a certain range of beliefs, and certain important rituals, but also has a set of practices that inherently flow from those beliefs and rituals. In my family, we read the second chapter of Luke on Christmas Eve and ate oyster stew. We did this because we believed God incarnated himself of a Virgin as Jesus of Nazareth. We ate oyster stew, because it reflected certain familial beliefs about community on Christian holidays. We could have left off the Lukan reading. We might have had duck or goose instead. But the absence of either of those would have failed to designate ours as the Healy family gathered together on Christmas Eve.
So it is with the Church. There are certain beliefs that are incarnated in specific practices, derived first from the Church's worship and ritual and her Scriptures. To change anything in this "equation" is to change the life of the Church.
This is not to say that certain aspects of the life of the Church are beyond change. The Tradition is a living thing and not an archaeological tour along the lines of Jurrasic Park. So the present form of the Divine Liturgy is not, in every detail, exactly the same as that over which Paul presided in Troas (Acts 20). But it is to say that such changes can only occur over many generations. A case in point, our parish priest loves to point out that the most recent change in the Liturgy (the addition of the Monogenes) came in the sixth (or fifth?) century A. D. It is a change that must be consonant with the present-past, and tested over much time.
Some of the current changes in Christian life have occurred in less than three decades: ordination of women, excising of masculine gender language from the Liturgy, the blessing of homosexual behavior and unions, the deemphasis on personal sin, and so on. And just on that basis alone, they are worthy of suspicion. They have not played out over enough time, and the current results are far from uniformly positive. Indeed, the vast majority of Christendom has rejected them.
Indeed, to be able to adequately discern what is and isn't Christian in these new practices and doctrines takes a life and mind thoroughly immersed in the life and mind of the Church. But such an immersion takes more than one's lifetime, and involves more than one's own discernment.
Which is why we Christians should be more about becoming thoroughly Christian in mind and life than worrying about the latest trends. To assume that we know enough about the Holy Trinity and his Life in the Church to be able to personally assess these new fads is, it seems to me, either dangerous naivete or more dangerous hubris.
Whether or not I am a Christian is not solely dependent on whether I believe certain dogmas, though one cannot be a Christian without certain dogmas. Whether or not I am a Christian is not solely dependent on whether I worship in a certain way, though one cannot be a Christian without the proper worship of the Holy Trinity. Whether or not I am a Christian is not even solely dependent on whether I live a certain moral creed, though one cannot be a Christian and live in immorality.
No, being a Christian entails an entire way of Life, a life that one receives as from a family, a life of specific beliefs, specific rituals, specific moral codes, all woven together into a single cloth. One cannot change any one aspect of such a life without altering the whole, unless such change takes place over generations and is tested through all the strands of the family's living in belief, ritual and practice. Which is to say, unless the family weaves in the change according to the already-established pattern.
The Christian family can have many in-laws, but it is only by adoption into the beliefs, rituals and practices of the Christian family that one can call the family one's own.
Posted by Clifton at July 20, 2004 08:00 AM | TrackBackYou know what I love about posts like this, Clifton? Nobody ever responds to them! Which, in some ways, is a shame. On the other hand it is proof, once again, that the truth stated in such bold and brilliant ways is hardly ever even met with anything other than silence.
Keep up the good work.
Posted by: Karl Thienes at July 22, 2004 10:36 PM