Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Remembering Dorothy L. Sayers


Mystery writer and Christian apologist Dorothy L. Sayers died on this date in 1957, and is commemorated in a very informative thumbnail bio at The Daily Office. More reflections on her work can be found at the blog Dead Christians Society.

Her 1940 lecture “Creed or Chaos?” is a bracing rebuke to “enlightened” Westerners who would like to have religious sentiment without doctrinal clarity. As later postmodern critics of liberalism were to point out, everyone has a creed, a set of core beliefs about the nature of humanity and the universe, on which we base our political, ethical and economic choices. The historical context of her speech — Europe facing the rising Nazi threat — reminds us how high the stakes can be. Sayers argues:

While there is a superficial consensus about the ethics of behaviour, we can easily persuade ourselves that the underlying dogma is immaterial. We can, as we cheerfully say, “agree to differ.” “Never mind about theology,” we observe in kindly tones, “if we just go on being brotherly to one another it doesn’t matter what we believe about God.” We are so accustomed to this idea that we are not perturbed by the man who demands: “If I do not believe in the fatherhood of God, why should I believe in the brotherhood of man?” That, we think, is an interesting point of view, but it is only talk — a subject for quiet after-dinner discussion. But if the man goes on to translate his point of view into action, then, to our horror and surprise, the foundations of society are violently shaken, the crust of morality that looked so solid splits apart, and we see that it was only a thin bridge over an abyss in which two dogmas, incompatible as fire and water, are seething explosively together.

In this sense, militant atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have more in common with Sayers than with liberal-relativist Christians. They understand that religious doctrines have life-or-death consequences, though they disagree about what those are. (This theme was dramatized in G.K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross, about an atheist and a Catholic who propose to duel to the death, and instead become fast friends because no one else they encounter even understands why the issue is worth dying for.)

Here is Sayers on the Incarnation, also from “Creed or Chaos”:

It is quite useless to say that it doesn’t matter particularly who or what Christ was or by what authority He did those things, and that even if He was only a man, He was a very nice man and we ought to live by his principles: for that is merely Humanism, and if the “average man” in Germany chooses to think that Hitler is a nicer sort of man with still more attractive principles, the Christian Humanist has no answer to make.

It is not true at all that dogma is “hopelessly irrelevant” to the life and thought of the average man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that it is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all.

Finally, visit the archives of conservative webzine The View from the Core for more pithy quotes from Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker and other works.

Violence Erupts Over Gay Jesus Art

 

Kittredge Cherry reports on her Jesus In Love blog about violence that broke out at an exhibit of photos by Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin:


A group of young people tried to set fire to a poster at the cultural center that was exhibiting her photos of a queer Christ. Staff intervened and as many as 30 people joined the fight, according to news reports.

The recent melee broke out over her Ecce Homo series, which recreates scenes from Christ’s life in a contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) context. The conflict occurred in the Swedish city of Jonkoping, known as a center of evangelical Christianity.

Wallin’s “Sermon on the Mount” is one of my favorite images from Cherry’s book Art That Dares, which I blogged about in August. Buy a copy and sign up for the Jesus In Love newsletter here.

More provocative and enlightening images from Ohlson’s Ecce Homo series can be viewed on her website. The AIDS-victim Pieta and the gay-bashing crucifixion fit comfortably with compassionate liberal Christian sensibilities, but what to make of John baptizing a naked Jesus at the baths? Does it sully a spiritual moment with sexual innuendo, or reveal an unlikely place where Christ may be present? It speaks well of this photo that I can’t collapse it into a single meaning. Perhaps it illuminates how sex can be both transcendent and decadent–and how religion also contains the potential for vulgarity and excess.

All I know is, if the wedding feast of the Lamb is anything like Ohlson’s drag-queen Last Supper, I’d better start planning my outfit. (In heaven, everyone looks great in a thong.)


Episcopal Diocese Secedes Over Gay Issue


The Fresno, CA-based Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin yesterday became the first full diocese to split from the national church over disagreements about the Bible’s view of homosexuality. The diocese, which is also one of the three US Episcopal dioceses that rejects the ordination of women, voted to place itself under the authority of a conservative South American congregation. Over 50 Episcopal parishes have seceded from the national church in the past few years to protest the trend toward recognition of gay relationships. CNN.com has the full story here.

I find it sad and ironic that in the name of upholding “tradition”, certain Episcopal congregations are playing fast and loose with our entire system of church governance, as well as dishonoring their vows to respect the authority of their bishop. There are many Protestant denominations that operate on a more congregationalist model, where individual churches are free to reshuffle their allegiance when doctrines or personalities clash. The Episcopal Church is not one of them.

Is the episcopate a flawed system? Do we want every person, every church, to vote their own conscience and pull up stakes when their superiors fall below some level of doctrinal purity? That’s a popular position, especially in hyper-individualistic America, but don’t call it historic Anglicanism. It’s more like those 1970s wedding vows where you promised to stay together only as long as you were both meeting each other’s needs for self-actualization.

And they say the gays are ruining marriage.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Holiday Edition


Ship of Fools has posted its “Kitschmas Gifts” list, featuring 13 products to make your special someone say “WTF??” My favorite are the Thongs of Praise. Nothing says “Not tonight dear, I have a headache” like panties with the Virgin Mary on them.

Not to be outdone, The Onion‘s holiday gift guide includes essentials like Bacon Strips Adhesive Bandages. (Not recommended for people with dogs.)

For the second year in a row, Going Jesus treats us to the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities. Paddleball Nativity, Leprechauns in the Manger, Sad Kittens Nativity and more!

Book Notes: Openly Gay Openly Christian


Rev. Samuel Kader’s Openly Gay Openly Christian: How the Bible Really is Gay Friendly bridges the gap between serious Bible-believing Christians and those who want to affirm gay and lesbian relationships. The latter group includes liberal churches and theologians whose relationship to the Bible is vague, superficial or outright antagonistic, which has tended to confirm conservatives’ fears that gay-friendly theology waters down the faith. Many evangelicals have never heard a solid Scriptural case for GLBT inclusion.

Kader’s scholarly analysis of “clobber passages” in Genesis, Leviticus and the Epistles makes that much-needed case, though in other chapters he repeats familiar pro-gay readings of the Bible that I think are strained and potentially distracting. Hunting for examples of same-sex pairings in the Bible (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi) unnecessarily sexualizes all intimate bonds, a reductionism to which our culture has been prone since Freud. Moreover, while it’s true that Christians are free from all of the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus, Kader sometimes slips into trivializing the holiness code, arguing that Christians who eat shrimp or wear blended fabrics have no right to criticize gays. But these are minor problems with what is nonetheless a very valuable book.

Kader analyzes the key words in Hebrew and Greek that he says have been mistranslated as forbidding all same-sex intercourse. Using Strong’s Concordance to track where these words recur in the Bible, he recontextualizes the clobber passages and demonstrates that none of them describe a committed, monogamous relationship between two men or two women. For instance, the acts actually being prohibited in Leviticus 18 and 20 are the fertility rituals of neighboring pagan nations, which involved temple prostitutes, and also possibly the practice of soldiers raping a defeated enemy king or military leader.

What gives this book credibility, besides the rigorous textual analysis, is that Kader sounds like a genuinely orthodox, evangelical Protestant. Rather than appeal to modern secular ideals of tolerance or a generalized Christian ethic of compassion, he emphasizes that the issue is legalism versus salvation by grace. Welcoming gays into full Christian fellowship is exactly the same kind of scandalous, progressive leap as welcoming Gentiles was for the Jewish Christians in the early church (see the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10). And it is justified by exactly the same evidence: the empirical evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those once considered beyond the pale.

Saints and Laborers


One of the pleasures of praying the Daily Office is the juxtaposition of Bible verses, prayers and spiritual readings that makes me reflect on familiar verses in a new way. 

Yesterday’s gospel was the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, in Matthew 20:1-16. That’s the one where Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who pays all his workers the same amount, whether they worked all day or only for an hour. This parable sometimes comforts, sometimes outrages, and always fascinates me. To feel validated as a human being, I need to believe two somewhat contradictory things: that God cares about fairness, and that God loves each of us unconditionally, in some way that doesn’t depend on our relative merits. 

The online Daily Office at Mission St. Clare includes brief biographies of saints and great Christian historical figures. To these, also, I have a complex relationship. Sometimes I feel deeply and personally cared for by these people whom I have never met, who faced martyrdom so that I could know the gospel. Other times I’m uncomfortably aware of how high they set the bar. Isn’t envy often rooted in fear that the same miracles will be expected of us as well? Saints and geniuses expose how the heights of endurance and achievement that we wrote off as safely impossible are actually within human reach.

I’d bet that most people wrestling with the vineyard parable, like me, automatically identify with the workers who did more than the average and felt shortchanged. Compared to the saints, though, nearly all of us are more like the late-hired workers, who should be grateful that they get an equal share in the kingdom of heaven despite their meager contribution.

Robert Orsi: Scholarship as an Act of Love

 

Catholic historian of religion Robert A. Orsi delivered the 2007 commencement address at Harvard Divinity School. His speech, “Love in a Time of Distraction”, is reprinted on page 8 of the Harvard Divinity Today summer newsletter, online as a PDF file here. This excerpt stood out for me:


Scholarship is the practice of disciplined attention to the world as we find the world, in its undeniable otherness and difference, but most of all in its obdurate and resistant presence. It is our privilege in the humanities and social sciences to go as inquirers into the company of other humans in the present and the past. We meet these men and women and children in the archives, in texts and in fragments of texts, and in the field. We find them always in the immediate circumstances of their lives, at work on their worlds; we find them in webs of relationship with each other that come to include us, once we have entered their worlds, in the present and in the past. And we meet them in the circumstances of our own lives, from within our own stories, gripped by our own fears and desires and hopes. “Research is a living relationship between people,” Sartre wrote. “The sociologist and his ‘object’ [which Sartre puts in quotation marks] form a couple, each of which is to be interpreted by the other; the relationship between them must be itself interpreted as a moment of history.”

Understood this way, scholarship is the practice of a particular kind of love. Veritas is Harvard’s motto, but the ground of veritas is amor. The love of your family and friends has sustained you these years; your love for what you were studying kept you going. Love is there, too, at the heart of our epistemology. The canons of modern reason insist that love is the nemesis of rationality; scholars must be objective, love is subjective. But the paradox of scholarship in the humanities is that the more we are present as particular persons and scholars to the world—the more “subjective” we are—the more the world stands forth in its realness and otherness—the more “objective” it is. The deepest challenge of epistemology is not an abstract “objectivity” but the fearlessness to be radically present to the other as we permit the other to be radically present to us. This is the sacramental dimension of scholarship; sacramental meaning the practice whereby the self comes face-to-face with the real.

The Depressed Christian


Christians prone to depression, as I am, can feel extra burdens of shame and doubt. We’ve heard the best news in the world, yet we can hardly motivate ourselves to butter our toast. Are we failing to work the program, or does the program itself not work? Are we setting a bad example in a world already inclined to believe that our faith is useless at best, harmful at worst?

Travis Mamone’s article The Boy with the Thorn in His Side at Relevant Magazine asks these exact questions. With humor and pathos, he describes how he read The Bible Code last year and became paralyzed with fear that the apocalypse was imminent. Though he eventually debunked that specific worry, he was disturbed by how easily the habit of panic returned, despite his faith:


When will this struggle be over? I had been dealing with mental illness for most of my life now, and I was getting sick of it. There was nothing else I wanted more than to just wake up one day and no longer have another anxiety attack. Ever! The Gospels report that Jesus once drove demons out of a man who hid in caves and cut himself with rocks. I thought all my demons were supposed to be gone.

And then it hit me: this is exactly like the thorn in Paul’s flesh!

I can’t imagine how my weakness and hang-ups can possibly give glory to God. When people look at me, I want them to see a strong man, a man whose life has been changed by God. More often, however, people see my failures and moments of weakness when I let the negative thoughts drag me down. What kind of testimony is that supposed to give?

Or maybe that’s exactly the kind of testimony I’m supposed to give. If I had the strength to battle my demons on my own, I would have never given my life to Christ in the first place. But the truth is I’m not. I tried to do it on my own, but just fell back into the same cycle of depression and getting better and falling back again. It wasn’t until I came to know God that I realized I didn’t have to battle it alone. In fact, the battle is not even mine to begin with; it is God’s. There are moments when it seems as if all is lost and the darkness is completely taking over. But then there always ends up being something to keep me going; it could be a Bible verse, a memory of being blessed, or a gut feeling that everything’s going to be okay. God’s mercy always shines through the darkness.

There a particular Bible quote that comes to mind: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Maybe there’s some one out there right now, huddled up in his or her room, wondering when the darkness will end. Maybe this person is waiting to hear a story such as mine, a story that’ll make him or her realize, “Hey, I’m not alone!”

Today, that person is me. Thanks, Travis.

Check out Travis’ blog at http://tmamone.blogspot.com/. (What’s really disturbing is that the “What type of hipster are you?” graphic accompanying yesterday’s post looks exactly like me on a bad hair day. And you wonder why I’m depressed?)

Book Notes: The Gift of Being Yourself


Christian psychologist and spiritual director David G. Benner has written an intriguing but too-brief inspirational volume, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, whose premise is that knowing God is inseparable from knowing yourself.

This might sound like New Age self-deification, but Benner’s orthodoxy is solid. Relationships require authenticity. If we are afraid to be our true selves, he says, we are also afraid to encounter God in prayer. This observation rang true for me because fear of myself has been a major obstacle to my prayer life. Sometimes it’s that I don’t want to know my own sins; other times, I’m afraid that I couldn’t process the intense emotions of prayer without losing my mental balance. Then the people whose affection I want to retain will reject me, saying, “Who is this depressing person who cries all the time even though her life is so fortunate? Obviously, whatever she believes, it doesn’t work.”

And then there’s the Psalmist’s question, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” I look at my weakness, the mundane concerns that so easily overwhelm me, and imagine that God must see me as, well, a schmoe.

Some strains of thought in Protestant theology are less than helpful for this problem. I do believe that Christ died for my sins. However, some ways of talking about substitutionary atonement and human depravity make the transaction appear formalistic, almost false: I am actually loathsome, to the extent that I am myself, but God accepts the legal fiction that He is looking at Christ when He looks at me. This sets up a dynamic of God in opposition to the self, which can perpetuate the feelings of shame and self-avoidance that I always thought the gospel was meant to cure.

Becoming aware of my inability to cope with my sinful nature was the prelude to my conversion, but it was not conversion itself. Conversion was the realization that my deepest self was separate from that sin, cherished by God and somehow protected from ultimate worthlessness, but not through my own efforts.

Hence Benner’s well-chosen title. We are meant to be ourselves, but our personhood is a gift, not an achievement. Moreover, the unique talents and inclinations we discover in ourselves are clues to our God-given vocation. (This insight also reassured me, as I’ve found it hard to root out the Kantian anxiety that God will prevent me from finishing my novel because my enjoyment of it is idolatrous.)

 

Much of the book is spent discussing ways we construct a false self. In language reminiscent of the Buddhist doctrine of “non-self”, Benner suggests that we become overly attached to particular personality traits and preferences, which we adopted out of habit, or because they were pleasurable, or helped us manipulate others. We assume that these traits are our fixed “self” when perhaps they are things we do in order to protect our egos, and could be changed.

Whenever we act as if it’s our responsibility to create a unique personality for ourselves, we end up shoring up the false self and hiding from our flaws. By contrast, accepting that our uniqueness is given to us by God, and that our primary identity is being a person loved by God, frees us to discover who God meant us to be.

This worldview is appealing enough that I wished Benner had included narrative examples of what a person’s life might look like before and after giving up the false self. He briefly outlines the Enneagram, a list of nine personality types and their characteristic sins, but doesn’t give specific guidelines for working with it, nor explain why Christians should take it as authoritative. The book is the first in a series that includes Surrender to Love and Desiring God’s Will. I will continue to explore his works in search of more practical advice.

 

A Royal Priesthood

Today is the feast day of Pope Leo the Great, bishop of Rome from 440 to 461 AD, whose writings played a significant role in clarifying the doctrine of the Incarnation. James Kiefer at The Daily Office shares this encouraging passage from one of his sermons:

Although the universal Church of God is constituted of distinct orders of members, still, in spite of the many parts of its holy body, the Church subsists as an integral whole, just as the Apostle says: we are all one in Christ. . .

For all, regenerated in Christ, are made kings by the sign of the cross; they are consecrated priests by the oil of the Holy Spirit, so that beyond the special service of our ministry as priests, all spiritual and mature Christians know that they are a royal race and are sharers in the office of the priesthood. For what is more king-like that to find yourself ruler over your body after having surrendered your soul to God? And what is more priestly than to promise the Lord a pure conscience and to offer him in love unblemished victims on the altar of one’s heart?

Perhaps we’d behave better in our theological disputes and in the daily administration of the church if we tried to look at one another as members of a royal priesthood.  As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours….Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses…for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.