Theological rumination

Buzzwords and the "Gay Issue" in the Church

Buzzwords, and the “Gay Issue” in the Church

The following editorial was written for a church newsletter in November of 2003:

I have a love/hate relationship with buzzwords – those little sound-bytes that conjure up images and associations that are probably deceptive in their simplicity. They work well at accomplishing political goals, but they muddy the waters of informational conversation.
We use buzz-words when we talk about our church as a “welcoming” place whose “doors are open to all.” We want to convey the message that Trinity Church does not exclude people on the basis of sexual orientation and to succinctly distinguish our church in a positive way from those who practice such exclusion.
Well, that’s fine, but buzzwords can be manipulated to serve many purposes. Conservative Evangelical churches will call themselves “welcoming” and “open to all.” They mean it too. They mean, “come in and be converted.” They practice acceptance with a view toward personal change and transformation. For them it means coming to understand substitutionary atonement and then adopting a value system that closely resembles American values circa 1945. The details are a matter of scriptural selection and interpretation.
But wait. Let’s not shout, “Ah ha!” too quickly. We do this as well. Take, for example, the kleptomaniac or the obnoxious drunk who might wander through our church doors – how accepting are we at that time? We will welcome them in much the same way that Conservative Evangelicals welcome a homosexual, i.e. with a view toward personal change or transformation. In the Episcopal Church we are more likely to couch it all in terms of “healing” and “wholeness” – rather than as if we were expecting some kind of miraculous zapping by the Holy Spirit.
The difference between “us” and “them” is not in the way that we practice welcome or acceptance, even though the parameters might be different. The real differences lie in the ways that we understand conversion toward and faith in Christ.
It isn’t a simple matter of who is more Biblical. The same Pauline literature that declares that gender differences are irrelevant in Christ also declares that women must shut up in church because they are more easily deceived than males and because they were created for men, not the other way around. I should add that there is plenty of scriptural basis for reinstating the institution of human slavery. Did you know that “nature teaches” that it is shameful for a man to have long hair? Hey, Paul says so.
The point is that our Canon of scripture is not a unified coherent single stream of thought. The job of Christian prudence is something like creating such a stream of thinking out of our scriptural witness. The job is to put it all together in the light of Christ – to find the overarching themes and principles and prioritize ideas and passages.
When Jesus said that the Son of Man would be lifted up in order to draw the world to Himself, I don’t think that physical arousal for members of the opposite sex was implied as an inherent result of this drawing process. Conservative Evangelicals disagree. We need to show them that their interpretive priorities are wrong. In order to do that, we need to get beyond buzzwords.

Holding Death in One's hands

From an email I sent in 11/2003:

Yesterday I watched somebody die. It wasn’t anyone I knew. It was a Vietnamese or Chinese fellow –perhaps about 70 years old. He passed out suddenly in front of me. I pulled him up on the sidewalk, thinking that he was having a seizure. Paramedics arrived and did everything that they were supposed to do, the electric shock, the CPR. Cardiac arrest prevailed. There was nothing beautiful, nothing picturesque, or quaint in that vacant glassy stare and the gurgling sound coming out of his mouth. I thought it was obscene and hideous. I hated the scene so much that I felt compelled to hit the computer and spill out some reflections.
I remember well the big occasion in my life when death paid a call. The summer of 96 was when everything seemed to implode like a crash-dummy test film in slow motion. For a period of time it seemed like death was inevitable – stage four lymphoma – a T-cell lymphoma that had spread to the liver and to the bone marrow. My good friend, Andy, the RN with the unbearable gift of double-speak and “positive” thinking (a pet peeve of mine) stayed with me, taxi-ed me to places, and visited me constantly. He refused to talk about it though, and couldn’t stand to have me make passing jokes about the lymphoma. People have different coping mechanisms. I’m glad that I’ve been given a sense of humor.
My dad used to hint around at catechetical inquisition – “Are things right with God?” I love Dad, but his mind has been saturated with the academic material of turn-of-the-century Princeton Theology. Whatever hasn’t come from Hodge or B.B. Warfield has drifted in from English translations of 19th Century Dutch Reformed clerics. The mind-set carries a psychological reward with it – security – a catechetical check list for avoiding eternal damnation – repentance and faith, spelled out in detail, with stages and culminating definitive content. I’m not sure how I evaded discussion with him, but I managed.
I guess I left Dad with the impression that I passed the catechetical check list. I’m reminded of Martin Luther’s expression of anger against anyone who would “make Christ into a new law” – Luther didn’t mince words – “love God and do what you will.” –
“Papal decrees are the devil’s excrement.” I think that post reformation academic Theology did exactly what Luther inveighed against when it formed its intricate absolute definitions. The Council of Trent was simply the other side of the same coin.
I can remember the Leukemia Society placing me into a “support group” that was led by a woman who was well versed in the latest “New Age” gobble-dy-gook. She was one of those thin energetic types who never blink their eyes. I was that woman’s nemesis. She tried to tell suffering frightened people that they just needed to think pretty thoughts and all would be well. It was all in their heads, she maintained – the person with the biggest smile wins the game and pain is your own fault. I wanted to slap that woman so badly, and took a sadistic pleasure in torpedoing her sweet fluffy feel-good talk.
Christianity is always being influenced by the “Zeitgeist,” the current wave of thinking. Today mainline churches often preach about the enduring qualities of love – well, that’s nice and there’s truth there, but when you’re lying in a hospital bed and seriously considering the inevitable cessation of your own heart and the decaying of your own brain cells, you really don’t care much about the enduring qualities of love.
I don’t believe in programmatic escapes from ugly reality, but even so, death as an expression of Divine displeasure or rejection has a haunting, abiding truth to it. Speaking personally, I’m not worried about any literal “lake of fire” but the thought of annihilation remains a nagging possibility. Indeed, for Wolfhart Pannenberg (a contemporary German Theologian) the real meaning of hell is nonexistence. This is why the resurrection of Christ was so central and so vital to him – the resurrection as more than a metaphor for the life of the church or a narrative arising out of nothing more than thin air to be interpreted as the eternal value of love – blah, blah, blah, pass the collection plate. Christianity, says Pannenberg (and I agree) is able to address itself to the deepest longings of the human spirit.
Pannenberg was never childish enough to try to advocate the Easter story as a simple resuscitation of a corpse. His thoughts are unusual and fascinating. Resurrection appearances are appearances “from on high” – as indescribable as Paul’s analogy of the difference between the seed and the plant. Pannenberg speculates that something like a portal opens up between two entirely different modes of existence.
I’ve never seen a Theologian do this before, but he delves into German Anthropology for back-up on the notion that existence beyond death is fundamental to human nature. He mentions “Weltoffenheit” (openness in relation to the world) – “Umweltfreiheit” (environmental freedom) – Pannenberg’s footnotes contain extensive quotes from H. Plugge and A. Jores in which these Anthropologists discuss the formation of indefinable “hope” within the terminally ill – a hope in a future existence that in many cases arrises without a well defined object, so that they can confront an end that is no longer thought of as a “pit, nothing.” This seemingly unreasonable hope has a transforming power, and the Anthropologists even use the term, “saving” effect.
For Pannenberg the hope is given substance by Christ
• not the abstract Christ of Bultmann’s Kerygmatic message, but the historical Jesus.

Pannenberg insists that there is just as much reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus as there is that a human being walked on the moon. Isn’t that a curious assertion to be made by a Theologian who is still alive today?
Pannenberg is excessive here and there, but I believe he is more real and more comforting than advocates of reincarnation, or the immortality of the human soul, or, (worse than either of these) the idea that comfort in the face of death lies in believing that “loves lives on after you.”
• Phil

Radical Grace, a book review

An email book review – the book in question is The Parables of Grace by Robert F. Capon (available at Amazon.com)
January 26, 1997

Dear Lisa,

Thanks so much for your letter and the book by Capon. I know you're waiting to read a reaction from me so I'll oblige you right away. I was very impressed and delighted by it -- not so much by the book itself but by the fact that you were recommending it to me Lisa ! Pardon me if I sound condescending, but if this book represents the direction that you're moving theologically, we may not be as far removed as you seem to think we are. When I saw on the back cover that Lewis Smedes from Fuller Seminary endorsed it, I figured there must be something respectable in the book. I was right.

Most of the Theology professors at Fuller Seminary were universalists in the manner that Capon is. At first this confused me until I began to read the classic Neo-orthodox Theologians of this century and discovered universalism in the N.T. for myself. – e.g. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" The world needs to be reconciled to God not God to the world.

Preaching the Gospel then should simply be an announcement of an actual state of affairs between God and human beings NOT an attempt to create the state of affairs by getting people to concur with the truth value of intellectual propositions having to do with "substitutionary atonement". Karl Barth used the analogy of telling Japanese soldiers still in the jungles of the pacific islands that the war is, in fact, over and they are free to lay down their weapons. There are no qualifications or preconditions other than being willing to accept one's acceptance and to give up on the notion of approaching God on the basis of merit. One of the Eucharistic prayers in the Book of Common Prayer closes with: ".... in the fullness of time bring ALL THINGS in subjection under your Christ ..." Eventually all the soldiers will stop the fighting but in the mean time the bullets continue to fly. This was the high point of the book. I also enjoyed reading Capon’s illustrations of the ways that we are reluctant to give up "the Hell we've come to love so much" in exchange for a gratuitous invitation to a party. I would have liked to see him elaborate a little more on what he means by seeking salvation in the mystery of death and resurrection. I think he's on the right track but he sounds too much like a nebulous Episcopal priest at that point.

My primary criticism was partially answered by Capon in his discussion of Quietism which begins on page 156. It's the old "let-us-sin-that-grace-may-abound" objection which he addresses fairly well. He could have said more though.

Many of Capon's ideas are not new or particularly novel -- I'm sure you're aware of this. There's an excellent discussion of the values of the Kingdom, what Capon summarizes by his phrase: "the last, the lost, the least." His ideas correspond nicely to those summarized in a small book written by Emil Brunner more than 50 years ago entitled, "The Scandal of Christianity".

A seminary professor of mine used to characterize German Theologians as "getting hold of a good thing and then pushing it too far". Capon seems to do this occasionally with his sweeping, all-encompassing, grace/faith interpretative grist in the gospels. The story of Zaccheus, for example --- is it really INsignificant that Zaccheus wants to Do something to make amends and give money to the poor ? I don't think so.

It seems to me that truly accepting our acceptance by God leads to the beginnings of a change of heart. By "change of heart" I do NOT mean becoming a better rule obeying person through the power of the H.S. (as in the evangelical game plan we both grew up with), but instead, giving up entirely on rules (the Law) as any measurement of good in a broken/fallen world and thereby freeing oneself to act in love, in relationship to others, and in immediate response to the situation at hand (yep, situation ethics --- is there really any other kind of ethics ?). If the world were a static entity, then perhaps Law might work. No, it would still be only a surface description of genuine morality, at the rote behavioral level. I think Capon would agree with what I'm saying.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his work on ethics, cites the creation of human conscience as the original sin of Eden. Conscience is fundamentally self-centered. It sets a standard that is independent of relationship to God and others through which an individual can attempt to step outside of himself in order to judge his own conformity to it and thus become "like God, knowing good and evil"

Bonhoeffer is often thought of as a Christian who openly stood up to the Nazis and died as a martyr because of it --- Wrong !! He was active in the resistance movement. He willingly lied, cheated, stole, and took part in the plot to murder Adolf Hitler because he was willing to give up on a personal, individualized morality for the sake of others. As I remember, he referred to this mental condition as a kind of immediate obedience to the Christ who was "made in the likeness of sinful flesh". To put it more mundanely, the Nazis had to be stopped. --- to hell with the rules !!

I guess the only real criticism I have of the Capon book is that it is incomplete by itself. Remember 1 Cor. 13 ? --- Now abides faith, hope, and love but the greatest of these is faith?? No, the greatest is love. You know the passage.

I've seen love ----- but not in the pews of evangelical churches. I've seen it in the gay community during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Now don't get me wrong here, I acknowledge that there is plenty which is cheap, tawdry, and vacuous within the gay community. But the only place I've seen the kind of love which is self-sacrificing and truly other-directed is where men have held each other up while surrounded by the shame and contempt prompted by a fatal, sexually transmitted disease. It beats the social courtesies that are called "love" in the churches that we grew up in - hands down !!!

Well, enough said in response to the book. Thanks again for sending it to me.

I'm sorry my letters come across to you as arrogant and insulting. Okay, I admit that I'm probably guilty of being impatient with friends who seem to me to be clinging to evangelical churches. To me it's like watching a person insist on wearing an old pair of shoes even though they cause bleeding and blisters. After awhile one starts to wonder if this person has a phobia for new shoes or if this old pair has a sentimental hold on the individual -- especially if there are dozens of other pairs in his closet just waiting to be worn.

I realize how busy you are, so write back whenever you get a chance.

Love, Phil