Category: Theology and Church

Good run this morning, despite a variety of transient pains and stiffnesses; fruit and coffee, then cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, and now settled at R&R for public office hours.

Since the public isn’t flocking to consult me — can you imagine? — I’ll take a few minutes to vent an amplification of something from my post in response to Mark Clavier last week. At the end of that post, I noted that ‘[T]he single greatest impediment to clergy flourishing is the demand on their time. The church needs clergy who are not running at full speed fifty hours (plus) a week.’ That’s true and important, but I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. You and I can identify a tranche of the population who haven’t been afflicted in this way — but even the privileged elite have swallowed the pernicious myth that unless work is exhausting you, making your life a woeful succession of frustration, desperation, and drudgery.

I wish I could turn up the volume on my shout of No! to this. Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. Literally ‘unimaginable’: hardly anyone can imagine what it would mean to have at one’s disposal even one billion pounds, much less multiple billions. Yet the financial oligarchs crave more, and expect that it’s their prerogative to extract it from your nerve and sinew. If you’re not miserable, you’re not enriching them enough. Nowadays, the most obvious tactic for reclaiming this time comes from digital distraction on an employer’s time, but this is a pallid substitute for rich, deep, healing leisure.

Subsistence labourers have always known this, always felt this misery. As the regime of industrial and post-industrial capital has advanced and progressed, it has immiserated more and more of the populace. The once-secure middle class erodes day on day; home ownership (problematic as land ownership will always be) dwindles and disappears as one of the last bulwarks against predation from above gives way to the rentiers’ goal of eliminating the last trace of possible independence from their private taxation draws closer to realisation. ‘Wretched man that I am [ed: I’d say ‘Oh, the humanity I am!’] Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ Clue: it sure won’t be any of our current proliferation of self-interested billionaires.

Cory Doctorow constantly quotes Stein’s Law — “anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops” — perhaps hoping that by dint of repetition, the import of that maxim will at last sink in. Eventually, this ouroboros will be slain by government regulation (which is why the predators so dread regulation) or run out of tail to swallow (which is why they preach the false gospel of limitless growth, in the hope that the snake will provide a continuous diet of added length to consume).

To return to where I started: since the economic role of clergy is, to a great extent, symbolic (and I mean that in a very positive sense), one way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). Unionise. Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. Find ways to pay workers what their employers won’t. Unionise, again. Press for a diminished working week in the teeth of demands for greater productivity. Tax wealth. Tax surplus (as, for instance, vacant housing stock and vacant commercial property). Refuse to feel guilty for loafing. And for those who will, pray.

Ran this morning, coffee and fruit, on my way to Morning Prayer, after which I’ll go on to Oxford for a tutorial. Who knows what I’ll get up to when I get home?

The Griffiths event on Tuesday was productive, though (to my disappointment) Paul himself wasn’t taking part. All the pnaelists seemed cautiously appreciative (I’m assuming Kendall Soulen, with whom I overlapped at Yale, agreed; Kendall is a genuine pioneer of theological anti-supersessionism, and I would especially have wanted to hear his segment, but I was called to the front door on church business, and missed the one participant whom I had been looking forward to hearing) (bar Griffiths, of course). Criticisms included Griffiths’s decision to omit footnotes, which make it difficult to situate his position in the broader range of possible responses to Christian anti-Judaism, and his abstraction from the actual experience of actual Jewish people, a decision Griffiths made deliberately in order to pursue a strictly speculative theology. Given the particular task Griffiths set for himself, I don’t find either of these objections to invalidate his endeavour, though they make it more brittle. The discussion, though, gave a hopeful indication that Christian theologians took the malignant inheritance of supersessionism seriously, and were trying thoroughly and carefully to locate, develop, encourage, and support a sophisticated version of Christian theology that might begin to undo some of the cruel damage Christians and their theology have inflicted over centuries.

Before I close, I should add that Griffiths and his interlocutors were vigilant to avoid trying to foist any of our problems onto Jews — no one was saying, in effect, ‘You figure this out for us’ or ‘We’ve solved this to our satisfaction, so it’s up to you to accept our conclusion (and thannk us for our conscientiousness)’.

All this seems promising. We haven’t solved our problem, but clever, dedicated, humble people are working at it.

Church people often quote the familiar slogan that a sacrament is ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’, which is true enough as far as it goes. But there’s more to be said: in a sacrament, the Church teaches that God has promised that what is signified in the sacrament will be effected. This differentiates sacraments proper from things that are similar to sacraments (the sort of thing people call a sacrament when they want to indicate this or that communicates (to them, at least) that God’s grace is active in the world — vocal harmony, perhaps, or the practice of convivial visits with dear friends, or dawn over a mountain lake).

Moreover, though sacramental interaction will be effectual on the Godward side, people can still refuse grace by fraud or by repudiating (whether explicitly and deliberately, or implicitly by living in a way that repels the divine openness to swathing us with grace).

There’s been an almighty stramash in the past week or so concerning the importance or insignificance of praying from church buildings when videocasting services. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York forbid it; the Government allows it (and the Roman Catholic Church practises it); and various parties (myself include) have exchanged heated words about the proprieties and legalities involved.

In my very firm advocacy of clergy being permitted access to the churches in which they [ordinarily] minister, I want to make sure that several things remain clearly in sight. First, that I don’t suppose that my theology of sacraments or space should be binding on anybody; if someone else holds to a different ecclesiology, or to a catholic-minded theology but a different assessment of law or epidemiology or whatever, they should by all means follow their consciences. Second, as a catholic-minded theologian, I take as given certain theological premises in thinking out my response to these events — but I don’t assume anyone else takes those premises for granted.

Now, down to business: I cannot see any theological, legal, epidemiological, or any other rationale for forbidding a solitary priest going into an adjacent church to videorecord a service of worship. I can see many reasons why many people might disapprove of that, or wouldn’t care, but their disapprobation doesn’t bind my hypothetical protagonist’s conduct, any more than a member of the Society of Friends might disapprove of Solemn High Mass at St Peter’s Basilica without His Holiness the Pope experiencing pangs of doubt. Different premises lead to different conclusions. If you don’t believe in the sanctity of particular places, if you perceive the high altar at St John the Evangelist Church as in no wise different to your kitchen counter (except perhaps less well adapted for chopping vegetables), it’s entirely reasonable for you to think that closing up churches and videocasting from your parlour solves several problems all at one go. (I can think of reasons to hold up against that conclusion, based solely on arguments that derive their force from circumstances not affected by the premises you stipulate, but I won’t press them here.)

By the same token, then, I ask that you observe the analogous reasoning when you consider my plaidoyer in behalf of permitting clergy to pray in and to videocast from their churches. Nobody is endangered by this practice; if the cleric is alone in videorecording and praying, to whom could they transmit the virus? One can’t say that the cleric is endangering themself by being alone in the church, or one would have to close down the church building altogether for health and safety reasons. Manifestly, many parishioners and other would-be viewers find this practice important. Some long at least to see familiar architecture and furnishing when they’re barred from entering their spiritual homes. Some regard the physical characteristics of the setting, the various appliances, ornaments, and affordances of the church building constitute a significant element of their experience of worship. I can imagine a practical churchwarden wanting to call attention to the beauty of the church, such that casual videostream viewers might someday be moved to have a look-in at the church they admired online. (I have not myself recorded or livestreamed worship services during this pandemic save the sermon to which I alluded in my other post of the day, which (you may note) did not involve any in-church footage.) Whatever the reason, the disciple who finds value in participating in worship videostreamed from a church building is not ipso facto an idolater, a hidebound conservative, a heretic, a threat to Western civilisation, or any other such characterisation.

In other words, if your manner of worship works as well — or better — in a secondary-school gymnasium as in a centuries-old church building, God bless you and encourage you to worship in the gym (or wherever you like). And if mine is better suited to a specific architectural context, why may I not exercise my theologically-grounded conviction that this is the most fitting way to praise God and offer the sacraments?

The Archbishop of Canterbury offers five reasons for closing churches altogether, even to those responsible for their oversight and upkeep. First, to set an example to all other people whom the government urges to stay at home. Now, this doesn’t apply to the number of clergy whose homes are (for exactly this sort of reason) physically connected to or proximate with the churches they oversee. It makes no sense to say ‘Give a good example by not going into your second bedroom’ or ‘Don’t go into the shed at the end of your garden during the lockdown.’ If so very many people were aching to get into our church buildings, we would probably have an inkling of it by now.

Second, the Archbishop says, ‘The second reason is that part of the church’s role is to be with people. The church building is a building, the Church is the people of God…’. I struggle to find any coherence to this point. A minister videostreaming from their kitchen is not more ‘with people’ than one streaming from a church. The whole point of the lockdown is to not be with people, and if videostreaming affects that at all, it affects it no differently if done from the setting of a church than of a sitting room. His Grace goes on to say, ‘…when we don’t go to the church building we go back to what we did in the early centuries of the Church and what churches all around the world do at present, which is we meet in homes, just family and household…’. Again, the sense of this eludes me. In the first instance, staying home with our families isn’t what early Christians, or most contemporary Christians, do at all. (Fr Peter Anthony has prepared an informative video talk on the worship life of the early church, for those interested.) I mean Yes, some church groups meet in households — but these are specifically groups coming together from other homes, not the same old residents you eat, sleep, shelter, and shop with. And yet again, if the ‘meeting’ part of the claim means ‘meeting by digital media,’ then it ought to apply equally to church buildings as to walk-in closets. He concludes this thought ‘we use the wonders of technology to be in touch with each other, but we recover the sense that Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name I am there with them.” And they don’t even actually to be physically gathered, virtually gathered does very well indeed. Jesus is quite up-to-date on this stuff.’ As I’ve said three times already (‘What I tell you three times is true’), the whole point of videocasting from a church is to use ‘the wonders of technology’ to make possible a participation in worship that the present pandemic (and the decision of the bishops) makes impossible, wherever the setting of that worship. This is not an argument for closing church buildings; it’s top to bottom a red herring.

Third, Archbishop Justin says ‘it’s about sharing in the inconveniences, the restrictions, the isolations imposed on us.’ I can attest, and I know that many of my clergy siblings can attest, that videorecording oneself without help is not evading an inconvenience, it’s taking on a massive inconvenience. If the Archbishop sets as a goal ‘sharing inconvenience’, then videocasting from a church qualifies in spades. Oh, but also ‘It’s about being part of the flock rather than some super special category that can go and do its own thing.’ Apparently clergy who videocast worship from a church rather than from a box room do so because they perceive themselves to be ‘some super special category,’ ‘doing their own thing.’ (At this point, I cannot help envisioning the late James Brown as a vicar, and honestly I’d be very interested to see him videocast Evensong.) (Yes, I do know that the Isley Brothers made ‘It’s Your Thing’ a hit. I was listening to it on my transistor radio before you were born.) Some people in so speaking would be indulging in a cheap appeal to anticlericalism, but since the Archbishop of Canterbury mustn’t being doing that, he must have some other point in view. I will continue searching for it.

Fourth, ‘we need to remember that the Church of England is the Church for England’; ‘there is the sense you’re there for everyone. And if you’re there for everyone, it means you have to think about everyone. You have to be available in whatever way is best.’ The relevance of this claim to the possibility of videocasting from a church building remains murky. Presumably, he means something along the lines of ‘If people view your videostream and recognise that you’re in a church building, that implies that you are less accessible than if they can tell you’re at home.’ Further, he points out that the NHS has said to stay home — but again, my case rests on the circumstance of a cleric who lives on the grounds already. (There’s a different, and only slightly less compelling, case for clergy who live apart from their church using the church building, but I won’t dilute my point here by introducing that at this stage.) A vicar who videocasts alone from the church is no more or less accessible than is a vicar who videocasts from the sofa, and (in the case in view) no greater a risk to public health, until the NHS insists that nobody go to their garden sheds, or that all should stop exercising altogether.

Finally, ‘it’s not just about us you know, the believers, it’s about everyone, it’s about being welcoming in every way we can.’ I think this implies that videocasting from a church is intrinsically unwelcoming, a claim which if he holds true, will set the cat among the pigeons at Synod, since it would tend to imply that a truly welcoming Church of England must divest itself of all church buildings and operate out of disused warehouses, vacant storefronts, gymnasiums, and off-duty theatres. I think all of these are fine places to worship, by the way, especially if one has no convenient alternative better suited to Christian worship according to the discipline of the Church of England. I would resist the idea, though, that we should auction off St Paul’s in the near future.

Most of what Archbishop Justin said makes much more sense if one adopts an ecclesiology that holds not just that ‘the Church is the people of God’, but that the church better reflects God’s will for the people when they worship in non-specific surroundings. To such an outlook, church buildings truly are an impediment. It must frustrate people greatly that England has so many of them, so conveniently situated, built specifically for the purpose of Christian worship, without which Christian worship might prosper abundantly.

Now, granted all of the above, this is my concluding point: I don’t require (nor would I if I had authority over… well, anything, which I don’t) that Christians who object to church buildings should have to use them, or even feel happy about other people using them. Those who prefer worshipping in gyms should feel entirely free so to do. I’ll defend them with as much breath as I have left after I catch COVID-19 and, I dare hope, recover. Is it too much to ask that those Christians who hold to a carefully developed, longstanding tradition of appreciating churches and cathedrals as settings for Christian worship might be accorded the same encouragement?

The estimable Revd Dr Canon Alasdair Coles (there should be an ecclesiastical office that confers that ‘estimable’ honorific; perhaps for parish clergy with earned academic doctorates or summat) of All Saints, St Andrews, called my attention to an article on becoming a distributed church without becoming a virtual church, by Bob Hyatt on the Ecclesianet.org website. Bob notes that gathering is one of the vital elements of the church (a legit claim), so that the practice of streaming worship services threatens this essential facet of ecclesiastical life. I suspect that part of his argument rests on an ecclesiology that soft-pedals the role of formal liturgy and sacraments in favour of the Spirit’s empowering presence wherever two or three gather in Jesus’s name.To that extent, we’re on different wavelengths from the start, but it should likewise be noted that (as Metropolitan John Zizioulas has recently reminded us, ‘The church without the Eucharist is not the church’. Both Spirit-gathered ecclesial assemblies and sacramentally-focused liturgical congregations face challenges in the face of a COVID-19 lockdown. (Not that God cannot sustain the Church through such hardships, but that human labour toward cultivating a spirit of fellowship and piety may suffer catastrophic impairment.)

There are people in the Anglican Communion who are more devoted to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar than I am — but not a very large proportion. It’s precisely because the Eucharist constitutes so crucial a sign and cause of Christian community that I stand very firmly with those who advocate a priest’s ‘solitary’ communion shared with the community by whatever means possible. If that means participating by watching and listening, so be it; I will make my spiritual communion in keeping with what the church teachers. But there’s all the difference in the world between making a spiritual communion when one is kept from the breaking of the bread by compelling circumstance (on one hand) and shrugging, having a lie-in, and tuning in a selected Mass on the telly out of diffidence (on the other).

While the essay from Ecclesianet makes reluctant allowance for the situation I describe, it manifests symptoms of what I have called ‘replacement panic’. That is, it suggests that staying away from church in favour of watching streamed services will become the new normal, just as once people warned that television would kill cinema, home taping would ruin the music business, and e-books would destroy the print publishing economy. I will no more forgo participation in the Mass because I could just watch Fr Damian on Facebook than I would skip visiting my grandson because his father opens up a Facetime chat with us every few days.

But why must we take the streamed-services phenomenon as dangerous, rather than marvelling that despite the comprehensive difference between the experience of going to Solemn High Mass and watching a priest offer the Mass in their drawing-room, people persist in wanting to watch the streamed services (possibly even more than they would have attended)? Isn’t this at least as much a positive sign and an opportunity as it is a cause for hand-wringing? If I am moved to view a streamed service, with only modest musical, visual, olfactory, and sacramental nourishment, how much more likely am i to long for the full Supper?

I’m not so much enthusiastic about streamed worship as I am confident that the reasons people might go to church, might belong to a church, after the plague abates will not differ dramatically from the reasons for going to or belonging to a church did five months ago. Rather than fretting about the makeshifts that help us get along while prohibited from attending, I give thanks that I have so many opportunities to join (to the extent possible) in worship while I await the freedom to meet with my sisters and brothers, to sing, pray, breathe deeply the ceremonial incense, admire the festal vestments, and most importantly to receive the divine nourishment of the Body and Blood of Christ.

A couple of my recent ecclesiastical posts have attracted a lot of attention, thanks (on one hand) to the convergence of digital activity around the time of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA and related areas (which I’ve dubbed, for shorthand purposes, ‘ECUS&’ — not out of disrespect for the non-USA portions of that body, but because ‘ECUSA’ is inaccurate, as is the grandiose self-designation ‘The Episcopal Church’ [Scotland, then, must not be ‘episcopal’, eh?] — hence, ‘ECUS&’, whose ampersand even looks like an ‘A’), and on the other hand from Kendall Harmon, who is a web traffic titan*, and on yet a third hand (where’s Zaphod Beeblebrox when you need him?) from Twitter. There’s a shared point in both my GenCon and my ‘excellence’ posts that I’ll try to state briefly.
 
That point is that attendance is not a direct index of anything vital to the church. Sometimes high attendance correlates to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a blessed community’s faithful prayers and praises, but sometimes it’s a sign of cultural habit, sometimes of crass demagogic pandering, sometimes of fortuitous location or pleasant appearance. I’ve known congregations with pretty hollow high attendance figures, and deeply holy congregations where only a few hardy saints worshiped. And just as I wouldn’t want my detractors to gloat if I were responsible for a declining congregation, so I would hope not to snicker and jape at the stumbling of institutions where I’d be unwelcome.
 
And attendance numbers are fiddly things anyway; anyone who’s been in a sacristy after services may have noticed that clergy sometimes share with fishermen a capacity to see larger than the rest of us. (Put it this brutal way: Does having a liar for a rector make the congregation spiritually healthier? ’Cos it’ll for darn sure improve your attendance numbers.) While attendance statistics are not insignificant, neither are they an immediate cue for ominous staccato violins in the background, nor for raucously exultant fanfares. It’s more complicated than that.
 
Numbers are not an unambiguous index of spiritual decline, nor of spiritual vitality. The discussion amounts mostly to spin-doctoring, cheerleading, rather than praying, serving, studying, or any other Christian responsibility. Instead of arguing about how reliable the numbers are, and about what they mean, I strongly advise everybody concerned to redouble their commitment to seeking the well-being of their cities; to proclaiming the Word more soundly, persuasively, beautifully; to bearing humble, patient witness to the good news we profess; to costly service to hungry, wounded, outcast strangers and friends. If you spend hours polemicising against your enemies (who nonetheless don’t change their minds), what good have you done?
 
Pro, con, liberal, conservative, reasserter, reassesser, Episcopalian, Anglican, whoever you are, you have much more important — and more godly — things to do than over-investing in numbers. As Titus 3:9 reminds us, ‘Avoid stupid debates, genealogies, conflicts, and legal squabbles, which are useless and pointless.’
 

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* I just noticed, and I’m impressed, that Kendall serves only one banner ad per page; that’s real restraint, when he could fill wider margins with smaller ads. He’s voluntarily forgoing a decent sum of money, which warrants respect.
 

Here’s a shocking news flash: my boss at the Cathedral and I disagree about things. Shock! Horror! We disagree about things, and we go ahead with life and serving God, and he doesn’t try to stifle me, and I don’t try to undermine him. And as far as I’m concerned, we get along fine.
 
So I don’t take it for granted that we’ll agree about sermons or liturgy or theology or church life. And when it happens that we do agree, when he knocks it for six, it’s not just cosy log-rolling for me to affirm his point. This morning, Kelvin says what great many people won’t: that excellence and forethought and diligence and attention really do make a tremendous difference in church vitality. If people don’t bother coming to church, it may be that church is giving them no reason to attend.
 
Now, that requires a few further clarifications. If you love Jesus all the way, you understand that we go to church not just because the choir is good or the preacher is wise or the worship raises your spirits to new heights; we go to church because it’s by faithful participation in the Body of Christ that we renew our sense of who we are, and of what we’re doing here — and by our participation, we encourage others to recognise themselves and their own callings. And there are some circumstances that call for us to withdraw from expressing our commitment to God in church gatherings, but those occasions are always fewer than our moodiness and self-interest incline us to think. So I’m not saying, and I don’t think Kelvin is saying, that the principal reason for going to church is or should be, to appreciate the exquisite production values of a Sunday-morning show of ecclesiastical proficiency.
 
But if we grant that the Spirit longs for us to draw near with sisters and brothers, and together to bear witness to the truth in ritual and song and speech, we ought every bit as much to acknowledge that it’s fully possible for us to put obstacles between people and the Spirit. Our behaviour — insufferably posh, or self-consciously folksy, or toxically partisan, or explicitly exclusivist, or whatever — can chase people away. Our disregard for our social environment can make it hard for people to get to our threshold (much less to cross it). Our neglect of our own capacities can tempt us to push beyond the bounds of competence into the miasmic swamps of (unaware) mediocrity. Our churches can be positively, effectually repulsive to people, and saying, ‘I guess it’s just the Holy Spirit’s will that they not come’ or ‘It’s just not realistic to expect these people to appreciate…’ or ‘Maybe this new technique will…’ misses a great proportion of the point.
 
As many of my readers have heard me say before, we don’t hear Bruce Springsteen saying ‘Guess the Holy Spirit doesn’t want people to come to this show’, or ‘It’s just not meant to be’. Springsteen doesn’t implore people to ‘bring a friend to Springsteen’ in order for people to find out that his concerts aren’t as unpleasant as everyone assumes they are. The E Street Band doesn’t hold committee meetings to figure out how to put bums in the pews. The terrific (and long!) profile of Springsteen and the band in the New Yorker underscores the point that being Springsteen is very hard work. Genious, of a kind, but damned hard-working genius, costly, painstaking, and unrelenting. And folks who spurn anything that smacks of ‘performance’ in their worship may roll their eyes (theatrically), but very few congregations work anywhere nearly that hard, that carefully, that thoughtfully, that energetically at raising a joyful sound unto the Lord.
 
So at the convergence of Kelvin and Bruce… (I’m pausing to let the imagination of that conjunction blossom in your minds)… at the convergence to my boss and The Boss, I propose some hard lessons about church life. One, if your aren’t trying your very hardest, then don’t blame God or the people or the organ or the organist or the choir or the lack of a parking lot or the building or the stifling liturgical tradition or your bishop or synod or presbytery or fellowship or any other person or entity. Start with yourself, demand the utmost of yourself, if for no other reason than that angels and archangels and all the company of heaven are always present, and if your cack-handed liturgical observance and half-baked sermon and torturous musical offering affront those who are always present in the Spirit, then you have no business imagining that those who have the option of skipping out in the flesh will not avail themselves of that opportunity.
 
Two, if you sense in your circumstances particular limitations — if you know yourself not to be a competent preacher, or if the leadership of the musical element in your worship falls short of pitch-positive, or if the building reverberates, has no sightlines, drops bricks on congregants’ heads once a month, find some way to work with or around those circumstances. Don’t repeat the Charge of the Light Brigade week after week; you don’t have five thousand souls to squander. And by all means don’t pretend there’s no problem, nor spend all day apologising. Grace and humility and imagination and thoughtfulness go a lot further than sheer bloody-minded determination. (Unless ‘determination’ is your spiritual gift, but maybe be sure that’s really the gift rather than a curse.) Kelvin’s column foregrounds ‘cathedrals’, but no one expects a rural parish to reflect all the many dimensions of excellence that a cathedral may; instead, cultivating small excellences, modest beauties, focused brilliances. Here’s a tip: the heart of the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer has served for hundreds of years, in staggeringly diverse cultures; do you really think you’re a better writer? Is your bright idea really that much more relevant, truthful, illuminating than what has been handed down to you? (Obviously non-Episcopal congregations will have different resources for worship, but the premise is the same: get over yourself. You don’t write better drama than Shakespeare, you don’t write better hymnody than Wesley(s), you don’t know Jesus better than the evangelists, and so on.) Small, limited congregations have the opportunity to flourish in ways different from cathedrals — but some modes of excellence will always be available to you. If nothing else comes to mind, try improving yourself, your worship leadership, your preaching, because you can always improve.
 
Three, encourage excellence where you find it without stirring up needless, empty conflict over ego, turf, credit. If you don’t know, through and through, that positive worship arises from cooperation and teamwork on the part of every participant, you probably don’t adequately understand what’s going on. The more you give away, the more thankful you are for everyone else, the more freely people can size up your contribution. If they join you in applauding the choir, the organist, the office administrator, the ushers, and acolytes, and Altar Guild, the flower arrangers, and the sexton, but it never occurs to anyone to applaud you, there may be a lesson in that.
 
Four — it is, from beginning to end, a matter of serving God. If you lost sight of that, you’re asking for the demons of egotism, laziness, prejudice, insularity, and narcissism to move in, and your latter state will be worse than the first.
 
And if hard work, collaboration, selflessness, and thoughtful openness seem unreasonably onerous to you — then I invite you to blame God, and the rest of us will draw our own conclusions.
 

One of the majestic blessings of my years studying in Duke’s graduate program came from spending time in seminars, in the grad lounge, and generally to and fro with a great man and a great theologian, Willie Jennings. I don’t think I’ve ever studied with someone alongside whom it was more fun to learn. Whether we agreed or disagreed, I found that the workout of testing ideas in conversation with Willie was always seasoned with generosity, respect, and a manifest sense that each was striving toward a goal we shared.
 
Willie spent many years working hard in the Duke Divinity School administration, but a few years ago he published The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, a book that Margaret had known to be excited about since she had picked up the hints and clues about it from Willie while she was studying for her doctorate, and on publication Willie’s book won the 2011 American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Constructive-Reflective Study of Religion. When I had the chance to teach at Duke for a year, it was great to work alongside Willie again.
 
So when Mary posted videos of Willie’s lecture and Q-and-A at Luther Seminary last year, I rushed to check them out. They‘re long, but Willie’s a terrific lecturer, and it’s well worth it to learn from a first-class theologian whose brilliance — and especially, whose friendship — helps me understand how to think better and how to be better.
 

 

In the aftermath of the Episcopal Church (USetc)’s General Convention, there’s been a flurry of breast-beating, moaning, finger-pointing, boasting, and other edifying demonstrations of ecclesiastical vitality (or not) in the various social media sites. So far, my favourite has been George Conger’s riposte to the Wall Street Journal’s slimy mendacity about General Convention, since Conger is by no means carrying water for the ECUS& establishment. But no sooner had most readers agreed that you get what Rupert Murdoch pays for when you read a financial red-top, than Ross Douthat stirred things up again by musing that (with specific attention to the Episcopal Church (US&) ) ‘liberal Christianity’ might not be able to survive; and then my grad-school classmate Diana Butler Bass parried that without liberal Christianity, the whole enterprise might not survive. Add in all the various supporters and detractors, and one can sympathise with Rachel Held Evans’s plea that people remember that not everyone has to belong to a partisan ‘side’.
 
As an observer, it seems that several points are being bandied about as though they all lined up tidily to separate sheep from goats. It ain’t necessarily so.
 
First, let’s please stop treating attendance statistics as simple indicators. They’re not by any means irrelevant, not a bit, but if I had a savings account, I’d bet a sizable portion of it that you could shift those attendance figures considerably just by making clergy into better preachers. Regardless of whether they’re preaching the true gospel, a false gospel, justice and equality, holiness and traditional sanctity, one can almost certainly improve attendance by recruiting and training better preachers. So if all you want to do is boost your attendance statistics, there’s a (non-partisan) way to increase attendance. Of course, that also suggests that attendance per se isn’t a very revealing test — but tackling the preaching deficit might enable you to game the system and claim something about your parish, or your side, or whatever.
 
Second, the rush toward cheerleading for one side and finger-wagging at the other side underscores a different problem (again, for any ‘side’). Rather than upholding deliberation, humility, respect for difference, and determination to seek truth and to support desperately needy, injured, oppressed people, a very great many people opt to stand on sidelines waving pom-poms for one side and taunting the other side.
 
Third, contra Ross Douthat, liberals have been doing theology over the past decades. But pro Douthat, that theological reflection has tended to allow itself to drift increasingly from points of orientation by which Christian faith can readily be distinguished from cultural humanism. So on one hand, it boots not to say ‘You haven’t done your homework!’ nor to respond ‘Oh yes we have!’ Douthat reasonably asserts that ‘liberals’ tend to relax their allegiance to the discrimen (‘a configuration of criteria…’) by which one recognises sound Christian teaching; and responses to Douthat say “Captivity to tradition is the problem!’ — but that’s not an argument against Douthat’s concern that ‘liberals’ don’t hew close to the Christian doctrinal tradition, it’s an affirmation of it.
 
Fourth, neither ‘we have to update doctrine’ nor ‘we mustn’t change anything’ bears a demonstrable causal relation to attendance numbers. You can sell people bottled tap water, my friends; you could fill a church with fiery social activists, or you could fill a church with entrenched doctrinaires, but neither proves anything about what the gospel is or should be — any more than the popularity of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted shows that it’s a better film than Moonrise Kingdom. You can’t prove church teaching with attendance numbers, can’t, can’t, can’t. (I will offer a tip: the New Testament, if one still regards that as relevant, offers several lists of characteristics by which to identify the presence and effects of the Spirit. ‘Big attendance numbers’ doesn’t appear on any of those lists.)
 
Fifth, as a Christian theologian, I believe that the soundness of theological teaching does indeed manifest itself over the long run. That doesn’t imply that the churches should teach only what has been handed down from long ago; the church has changed its mind, and the church has erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith. There is no way to guarantee that you’re not off-base. On the other and, if you adhere to what millennia of the saints have taught and believed, you’re a least somewhat less likely to be found in error than if you decide that you’re going to think it all up on your own, taking as fundamental a set of political and philosophical ideas developed over the last couple hundred years. The Enlightenment wasn’t A Bad Thing, but neither was it the dawning of the messianic era. If there’s something you want to identify with Jesus, or Christianity, then your argument is stronger if you can actually give numerous reasons for making that identification; and the more such reasons that you can provide, the stronger the theological argument. And if you want to repudiate a great deal of what is plausibly associated with Jesus and Christianity, it’s not unreasonable for people to question the extent to which your enterprise is still ‘Christian’.
 
I won’t set myself up as a prophet who speaks God’s mind and adjudicates conflicts among ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ relative to the vitality of churches. On strictly secular grounds, though, I can assure people who laud shallow theology and deprecate reasonable criticism that they’re selling sackcloth as silk, and that’s not a recipe for long-term viability. It’s not a family trade you want to hand down to your children. Cheerleading and finger-wagging help you sort out who’s on your side and who’s not, they make for great pep rallies, but they don’t obviate the need to do something wisely and well.
 

In a curious development pertinent to my recent post about being obliged to ‘renounce my orders’ so as to serve in a different province of the Anglican Communion, the House of Bishops of the Province de l’Église Anglicane au Rwanda has had to instruct some its member bishops about orders and jurisdiction as well, though apparently with different terminology.
 
For the benefit of anyone who’s interested by the topic, but unfamiliar with the current state of play among Episcopalians/Anglicans around the world: some US Episcopalians are disaffected because of doctrinal/disciplinary matters in the US Episcopal Church (most prominently involving sexuality), such that they no longer can acknowledge the spiritual authority of bishops whose teachings and practice seem (to these disaffected Episcopalians) to fall culpably short of the standards for bishops. Some clergy among these US Episcopalians have been consecrated bishops by the Rwandan province, so that they can minister as bishops to other alienated US Episcopalians. A number of these Rwandan-US bishops recently withdrew from the authority of the Rwandan Anglican Church (for reasons to which I am not privy).
 
Now, I read that on 29 March, the Rwandan House of Bishops has advised these (separated) missionary bishops that

there are only three ways that we may “release” clergy affiliated with us:
 
1. By transferring them to another jurisdiction within the Anglican Communion;
2. By their voluntary renunciation of orders;
3. By formal ecclesiastical discipline.

 

So, at least in Rwanda’s understanding of canon law, ‘renouncing orders’ is categorically different from ‘transferring to another jurisdiction within the Anglican Communion’.
 
Obviously Rwandan canons don’t affect the canon law or interpretation of the US Episcopal Church — but this interpretation of ‘orders’ and ‘transferring’ appears to make more sense. The bishops in question must (on this interpretation — I’m not arguing anything about their side of the disagreement) have a canonical relationship with one or another Anglican province, but that’s a separate question from whether their orders as bishops are valid. If on the other hand they have no relationship to another recognised Anglican body, the status of their request to withdraw from the Rwandan Church is canonically intelligible only as a request to be removed from the roll of actual bishops. If my situation were interpreted on this basis, we would say that I wish to move (‘transfer’) my vows of obedience and allegiance to the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway and the Scottish Episcopal Church — not to renounce my orders altogether.
 
If I understand the interpretation of canon law from the US Episcopal hierarchy, my priesthood is not in question — they’re interpreting my ‘orders’ as sort of ‘the ordered relationship that binds me to my bishop and the doctrine, disciple, and whatever of this [US Episcopal] Church’. On their account, then, it would be possible for me to maintain my ordained status without having a canonical relationship with a particular Church (and, by extension, so would the US-Rwandan bishops, if in fact the US Episcopal Church recognised their episcopal orders in the first place) — though I would not be authorised by any Church to exercise that priesthood. The Rwandan interpretation (again, if I understand it correctly) is that apart from a relationship with a particular Church, the idea of ‘orders’ is incoherent; the validity of orders depends on a living relationship of authority and accountability with a Church.
 
Of these two, I had been operating on premises closer to those expressed by the Rwandan bishops than those I’ve been instructed to observe by the relevant US authorities. I see elements of soundness in each. Ordination confers a grace that isn’t itself dependent on temporal authorities, or geography; but on the other hand, ‘orders’ outwith a relationship to a Church are gravely problematic.
 
I’m not usually very interested by canon law — but these developments point toward intriguing theological and political (in the sense of ‘church polity’) nuances. In all of this, I emphasise that I’m cooperating with my understanding of US policy, not repudiating anybody’s authority or rebelling against them. “Dissenting about what I think is a good idea’, maybe; but not rebelling or repudiating.
 

The Diocese of Eastern Washington Oregon has made formal what is increasingly the normative practice in US Episcopal parishes, by proposing the abolition of the canon that strictly forbids offering communion to people who have not been baptised. Over the past decade, this canon has been so widely, publicly, proudly flouted that one wonders how any canon might be enforceable; that’s a topic for another day, though. I call this situation to mind because my ecclesiastical boss, the Provost at St Mary’s Cathedral, has reiterated his sense that communion without baptism is an adiaphoron. On this, as on a number of things, Fr Kelvin and I reach very different conclusions.

I won’t repeat the careful arguments that colleagues have articulated (Matt, Derek, Robert, Tobias, Bryan, list courtesy of Matt); the Web makes generously possible the exploration of related links, and I can’t presume to gild their lilies. It may be worth remembering a few points of orientation as we consider the pros and cons, though.

First, Fr Kelvin perhaps skews the discussion by characterising those who disagree with him as being ‘obsessed’ with which sacrament precedes which. It is not in our power to control God’s freedom to introduce some people to the captivating grace of the gospel, so no one is suggesting that we quench the Holy Spirit. ‘Obsession’ may apply as much to persistent demands for change as to persistent conviction that a particular change is unwise.

Second, narratives about who received communion before baptism and how it affected their lives may inform, to some extent, the discussion — but they can’t decide the issue. Last January, a climber fell 1000 ft during an attempted ascent of Ben Nevis, tumbling down three cliffs, and survived with only relatively minor injuries. He may have reconciled himself to his enemies during that fall, he may have attained blissful oneness with the universe, he may only have enjoyed the adrenaline rush of confronting death — but none of those makes ‘falling off Ben Nevis’ a good idea as a normative practice, no matter how benign its effects in his case. If someone can show that communion without baptism as a general practice builds up the Body of Christ, that’s one thing; but no matter how much we give thanks for the positive effects of pre-baptismal communion in individual cases (such as Fr Kelvin himself, Sara Miles, or any other person) these remain the marvellous instances of the unpredictable power of the Spirit, rather than decisive warrants for a far-reaching change in the theology of the church.

For (third) theology remains a complex system in which changes to this point here affect the entire network. Kelvin appositely cites the example of the Episcopal Church USA, which put great energy behind what they call ‘Baptismal Theology’ (itself a shift in emphasis with far-reaching effects), only to find themselves now confronting a popular proposal that would relativise baptism altogether. Change we must, by all means; we’re never not changing, whether we like it or not. But since so much of the church through so much of history (especially in the Episcopal tradition) has held firmly to the premise that baptism — as sacramental incorporation into the Body of Christ — should normatively precede Eucharist — as the sacramental nourishment of that Body — that it’s somewhat misleading to minimise the proposed change. The magnitude of the discernment and articulated theological deliberation that undergirds the practice of baptising before participating in communion far overshadows the infrastructural foresight that has been advanced to justify communion without baptism.

Let’s set aside bugaboos of ecclesiastical storm-troopers demanding identity papers before allowing people to line up for communion. In even the most sternly traditional churches, strangers receive communion every day without proving that they’ve been baptised, and no one’s suggesting (to the best of my knowledge) that this principle be enforced more rigorously. Let’s not indulge in trivialising characterisations of one position or the other as ‘trendy’, ‘politically correct’, ‘fusty traditionalist’, ‘fascist’, or other arguments ad opprobrium. If the sacrament of the Eucharist matters in some way, let’s take the discussion seriously and mount deep, considered, theological arguments one way or the other, with a view to strengthening the Body of Christ. It doesn’t seem to be the case, just now, that we’re suffering from a hypertrophy of theological wisdom, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that current stresses have favoured partisanship over profundity.
 
[Late addition: Link to Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s thoughts about communon without baptism.]

The other day, my [old] grad-school classmate Craig Keener wrote a column for the Huffington Post about belief in miracles. I think that we do agree about some things, but it would take some ground-clearing to figure out where our agreements lie; and since it’s a topic that draws much attention, which topic generates more heat than light, I too decided, after having thought things over, to write a blog entry for you, most excellent reader.
 
First, I see no point whatever in trying to persuade people that miracles happen. People who repudiate the idea of miracles have excellent reasons for so doing — and citing the number of people who do (or don’t) ‘believe in miracles’ is absolutely beside the point. The number of people who believe absurd things, or disbelieve obvious things, will always depend on what you think is absurd or obvious and on the credulity of large numbers of only-partly-informed respondents, and the case of miracles represents a paradigm instance of what many people will think a priori to be absurd (or obvious). If you think miracles are absurdity, rest assured that I’m not trying to rope you into something you resist; I ain’t. You just stick with what you already know to be obvious and absurd.
 
Granted that a great many very sensible people think that the idea of miracles is absurd, why do I not count myself among them? Let me suggest several ways. First, I am heir to a body of wisdom that upholds the category ‘miraculous’ as a significant, if rare, constituent in our way of life. ‘Miracles’ are significant in subtle ways, admittedly (and some wiseacre will submit that those ways are so subtle as to be invisible); but I don’t understand a way that someone who professes Christian faith can simply write off the category of ‘miracle’ as useless, unimportant, regressive, banal, superstitious, or whatever. Some things about Christian faith involve (so far as I can understand) assertions that run counter to common sense — and I’m OK with that. If I self-identity as a Christian, as a servant and teacher of the church, and a brother of the great theological sages throughout the ages, I cannot simply discard what they handed on to us. Among those hand-me-downs, the saints have consistently included assertions about ‘miraculous’ things having happened.
 
Second, I am amply aware that I don’t know enough about most topics to submit what cannot have happened, or why. I quickly add that I’m not appealing to this as if it were a positive argument in favour of ‘miracles’ — no way that works! — but it does require me to hesitate before I say ‘I know the causes of this event well enough to rule out (or rule in) X or Y influence’. A miracle-skeptic will very rightly say, ‘I know the way of the world sufficiently well to assert that material causes (including a certain apparent randomness) suffice to explain why this improbable event happened; indeed, improbable things happen all the time, in theologically-coloured situations and otherwise, such that it’s meaningless to assert that this is miraculous whereas that is just one of those things’. They are satisfied by their knowledge of causes and effects (bless ’em); I’m not satisfied by mine.
 
Third, I don’t understand how one can imagine the Bible in any non-Pickwickian relation to Christian life without taking miracles as something more serious than something to be explained away. If one supposes that the Bible holds a primary place of reference for Christian life (and I acknowledge that my boss doesn’t*, in the sense I propose here), one ought to have something to say about the prominence of extraordinary events in that compendium. Moreover, since we are instructed repeatedly in Scripture to pray with specific ends in mind, and that those prayers are not merely adventitious to what ensues, my understanding of the Bible obliges me to pray even for apparently impossible developments.
 
So I advance my own affirmation, subject to correction, that I don’t suppose that I know the causes for all of the extraordinary occurrences in life. Some are assuredly the strictly random outworkings of contingency in material existence, even if to us subclinical pareidoliacs it seems as though there must be some obscure casual connection. But at the same time, the occurrence of apparently inexplicable events, and their occasional convergence with prayer, and even their correlation with identifiable causes (or ‘congruent circumstances’ or something like that, if one wants to be cautious about asserting causality) fit coherently within a picture of a cosmos brought into being in a particular way — and in that way of envisioning a cosmos, I am satisfied for ‘miracle’ to identify the category of remarkable developments that fits particularly aptly into the biblically-limned character of a Creator-God, a Divine Author, whose temporal fingerprints are healing, release from shackles, transformative illumination, and perhaps above all else, amazing grace.
 
I think Craig probably wants more mileage from the miracles in which he believes, but maybe I’m wrong. (Wouldn’t be the first time!) The reticent version of miracles I sketch here, though, tries to preserve an elasticity that may strengthen it to survive harsh winds and fierce discursive storms. At any rate, it’s my best effort (for now).
 

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* I’m a bit perplexed by several points in Kelvin’s argument. As far as I can tell, there’s simply no evidence that Hooker held Scripture, tradition, and reason to bear equal authority; I’d be interested to see evidence supporting that point, when Book V, Ch. 8.2 (p. 34) says ‘Be it in matter of the one kind or of the other, what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.’
 
There are surely differences among (a) asserting that the Bible provides ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’ (which I take to indicate a sort of theological court of last appeal, always (of course) requiring reasoned interpretive work), (b) affirming sola scriptura (not I, by any means), and (c) asserting that the BIble constitutes ‘one, single infallible source of authority’. In the church’s tradition, the teaching of the creeds hangs on their being plausible authorised interpretations of what the conciliar fathers read in Scripture, so I don’t think I can own allegiance to the creeds without at the same time allowing a primary authority to Scripture (without just planting a flag at the creeds and saying, ‘Here and not elsewhere I choose to recognise ecclesiastical authority’). This, however, probably marks one of those spots on which the Cathedral’s clergy arrive at different conclusions, which is not surprising.