This is the third part of the presentation I gave to a gathering of pastors at the LCMS Atlantic District pastor’s conference between May 12th and May 13th. The first two part may be found here and here. The topic of the conference was “Mere Christianity in a Pluralistic World”. I was asked to give two presentations dealing with the topic pluralism especially as it relates to the Episcopal Church. I’ll be posting these two talks, which each took about an hour, in a series of four postings and I’ll be posting the audio as soon as I get it loaded and sized down.
I’m going to start this morning, as I mentioned yesterday, describing some of the effects of pluralism on the Episcopal Church. Then I’ll draw some conclusions from that damage that might help us re-identify pluralism, or think about pluralism in a different way, at least as it relates to the church. Then I’ll talk briefly about Anglicanism and some of the elements of the Anglican way of being Christian that may have made us particularly susceptible to pluralist subversion and finally I’ll speak about the church’s engagement with pluralism both internally and in the world and offer six lessons I’ve learned together with my congregation from our experience on the front lines in a post Christian world.
Two years ago I wrote an essay and shortened it into an article called the Presiding Bishop’s Top Five. I took the Presiding Bishop’s published writings, sermons, and interviews and compared some of her theological statements with 5 major ancient heresies. I did this not to specifically pick on the Presiding Bishop but to show our readers that as the church has embraced cultural prerogatives she has begun to look less and less like the church and more and more like the world and few things illustrate that point better than the words of our own Presiding Bishop. For our purposes what is important to see about this is the gutting effect of pluralism on a church. As we said yesterday, once certainty in external revealed norms or measures is lost the ground of faith becomes the corporate experience of the church or the personal experience of the believer. In the case of the Episcopal Church that has resulted in the reemergence of significant elements of ancient heresies, elements that are reflected not just in the personal views of the presiding bishop but in the teaching of the Church as a whole. Let’s just take a look at two ancient heresies and the way significant elements of them have resurfaced in the Episcopal Church.
Marcion was one of the earliest heretics. Marcion imagined a god whose character was wholly grace, as grace was defined by Marcion himself. This god of grace, Marcion said, is revealed in Jesus, the redeemer, and stands opposed to the merciless creator god. I should say that perhaps “demiurge” is a better or more accurate word here than “god” but for our purposes, not to be distracted, I’ll keep using the term “god”. The creator god, according to Marcion, is the god of law. He is revealed primarily in the Old Testament. The creator god is the god responsible for binding humanity to the cold chains of justice. He is merciless, cruel, and exacting. Jesus came, said Marcion, to redeem his followers from the creator god. Using his “grace” as a norming criterion, Marcion argued that the scriptures of the church had been infected; that the creator god had had his way with the foundational books of the church. To be true to Jesus, the Church must systematically remove those books and excise those passages from the canon of scripture that do not fit with the gracious character of god he’d imagined.
One of the hallmarks of radical biblical theology that has been mainstreamed in the Episcopal Church is the use of cultural criteria to measure the sources and foundations of Christian doctrine. Rosemary Radford Reuther, the radical feminist theologian, has decided that her god or goddess, the god of her experience, is utterly egalitarian. Egalitarianism is the criterion she uses to measure scripture. Those passages found to be consistent with her understanding of sexual equality she acknowledges to be “the word of God”. Those inconsistent with her criterion are the product of cultural prejudice and may be discarded. She uses Galatians 3:28, for example, to measure and discard Ephesians 5:22 but in reality her measure of scripture is her own experience of the divine.
This methodology, creating an image of god grounded in experience and desire and using that image as a criterion to judge scripture, is not something unique to radical theologians. My former bishop, Gladstone Adams, sat in my library in the aftermath of 2003 and told me that the reason he felt free to disregard Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1, and 1st Corinthians 6:9 is because he did not feel that those passages were consistent with his understanding and perception of the love of Christ. I asked him where he got his definition of the love of Christ and he pointed me to Matthew 5, 6 and 7 the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the tail end of Matthew 5 and the first part of Matthew 6 where we are commanded to love our enemies and care for the poor. Those passages, he said, were most consistent with his understanding and experience of God and since they conflicted with what he now calls the “clobber passages” it must be that the clobber passages do not represent revealed divine truth. His experience has become the measure of divine truth.
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church wrote the following for her diocesan newsletter in the summer of 2003 to explain her vote for Gene Robinson:
“As Anglicans, we have always asserted that we listen to three primary sources of authority—to scripture, to tradition, and to reason. The debate which has risen to the level of the Anglican primates has its roots in putting different emphasis on those three sources of authority. The Episcopal Church’s General Convention acted last summer out of a sense that reason and a broad reading of the Great Commandment required a different conclusion about matters of homosexuality than did strict adherence to seven passages in scripture which seem to speak against it. The other wing of the church says that those seven passages have ultimate authority, and therefore “we will obey the Bible.”
The “Great Commandment”, as she experiences it, is her criterion for determining the authority and relevance of the rest of scripture because it (the Great Commandment), she says, at least a “broader reading of it” is consistent with the Episcopal Church’s experience of God. You’ll hear the great commandment argument often. “So long as you love God and love our neighbor it really doesn’t matter what people do in the bedroom.” This ignores, of course, Jesus’ words in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will obey my commands.”
The use of experience as the primary norming criterion has become the dominant hermeneutical method in radical academic circles but it has become dominant among those in leadership in the Episcopal Church and it has become common in the pews. I am not sure how prevalent this is in the LCMS, but in the Episcopal Church I cannot count the times I’ve had parishioners approach me after a particularly tough sermon or bible study and say something like, “My God wouldn’t do that”. I always ask “How do you know what your God would and wouldn’t do?” And the answer is always based in the individual’s own experience of God apart from any objective source of revelation. Mainline Protestants, by and large, have been trained to trust their own perceived experiences of God or perceptions about God above scripture and tradition and so they sit in the pews testing all that they see and hear by this prior commitment to their own opinions.
Methodologically speaking there is little difference between this contemporary measuring scripture by the subjective experience of the divine, arriving at your own personal canon and Marcion’s use of his own criterion of grace to do away with the Old Testament and much of the new. Both Marcion and the contemporary reader judge divine revelation by the measure of preconceived norms.
Notice how the uncertainty at the heart of pluralism that we spoke of yesterday leads people to ground faith in personal experience and personal experience then conditions and stands over the witness of scripture. We cannot trust the absolute claims of special revelation regarding eternal or transcendent absolutes because the ancient experience of God is no more valid than our own and much less relevant. Pluralism in the Episcopal Church church has produced a sort methodological Marcionism.
Let’s look at Gnosticism. Now Gnosticism is a very broad set of ideas. Marcion was and marcionism is a sort of Gnosticism because it accepts, among other things, the radical gnostic dichotomy between matter and spirit. One reason Marcion considered the Old Testament god evil is that he created matter and flesh to imprison once unfettered souls. In creating bodies, the creator god created prisons of flesh from which and out of which we must escape in order to be saved.
The influx and influence of Gnostic thought during the second, third, and fourth centuries provoked the Christological controversies that ultimately produced of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Gnostic “Christians” believed that true wisdom, true knowledge, about Jesus was not something you could glean from the scriptures. It was a secret knowledge that if understood would “save” the knower by ultimately freeing him from the prison house of the body. Matter and flesh were considered evil. Soul and spirit were good. Gnostics had little use for the 4 gospels and their secret hermeneutical codes they passed on to initiates allegorized, and/or denied the gospel accounts of the Virgin Birth, bodily Resurrection, and Ascension considering the idea that God would take on human flesh in the incarnation and then take it up again in the resurrection utterly repugnant. This, move from the external and objective to the internal and soulish served to detach Christian doctrine from public history and public revelation. What might be known about God cannot be found in the canonical books or public history but through the special insight of those who had gained knowledge.
Modern day radical New Testament critics like Marcus Borg, John D. Crossan and others take up the Gnostic flesh/spirit antithesis, and reassert a dichotomy between the “Risen Christ” and the “historical Jesus”. They reject the historicity of the Virgin Birth, bodily Resurrection, and Ascension. New Testament accounts of these things are reinterpreted as literary metaphor and allegory or reduced to mystical experience. Jesus did not, argues Marcus Borg (an Episcopalian) in “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” rise in the flesh and in so doing vindicate his claims to be Lord of Heaven and earth. Jesus rose in the experience of the disciples, in their spirits and souls. He rose as a metaphor, a mystic experience, of new life.
And in the same way the Christ figure rises in our own experience as we discover new life and spiritual renewal. Like the disciples we too come to know the risen Christ primarily as he is experienced in the heart. The historical Jesus is a dead Jew buried somewhere in Palestine. The risen Christ is alive in our experience.
It is interesting and important to note that this rejection of the public enfleshed historical claims of Christianity paired with the acceptance of what is often referred to as the “deeper” meaning of the resurrection or virgin birth or miracles, the spiritual or mystical meaning, permits modern-day Gnostics to employ the language of the Creeds while denying their doctrinal content.
Believing that Jesus “rose” in the disciples hearts and not as a matter of public history permits “Christians” who reject the historicity of the resurrection to stand with the congregation and say the full creed, using the same words, while pouring their own meaning into them. Modern day Gnostics go about claiming the title “Creedal Christian” because they can affirm the “words” of the creed while utterly rejecting their meaning.
Here, again, is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church echoing both the Gnostics and the modern critics:
“When we insist that the Christ event in the death and resurrection of Jesus brings a new possibility of life, a new kind of life to humanity, it is certainly akin to rebirth. When Jesus says to Nicodemus You must be born again from above, what might he mean? I think it is a way of the gospel saying that Jesus is a venue, an event, an experience, and an instance in which life is renewed, in which every human being has access to new life”
What is a “Christ event”? Christ is not primarily an historical person, according to the Presiding Bishop, but a “venue, an event, a experience and an instance in which life is renewed”. The historical, public, enfleshed events of Jesus’ life are reinterpreted in mystical/metaphorical terms.
Jesus, in this way, becomes a fetish for mystical self-exploration. The certainty of our own experiences of the Christ fetish is preferable and more trustworthy than an historical figure through whom God acted to save his people in the public realm of history.
The radical dichotomy between flesh and spirit central to Gnosticism is replicated or remanifest in the pluralist church.
There are several other interesting parallels between the common beliefs held by the leaders of the Episcopal Church and the content of ancient heresies, all related in some way to the acceptance of a pluralist world-view but instead of pursuing that further let me draw some conclusions.
A Church historian, and I cannot remember which, once lamented that the errors of the modern church are nothing compared with the hairy-chested manly heresies of the past. It took some intellectual muscle to put down Arianism and Marcionism. What are same sex blessings compared to the homousian/homoiousia debate?
For a while I agreed with that. But I’m not so sure any more. Some theologians are suggesting now that what we’re seeing, what we’ve experienced since Schleiermacher, the gradual emergence of uncertainty and the embrace of pluralism in the church and the resultant spinoff into a thousand errors, will one day, itself, be recognized and rated alongside the Great Heresies of the past.
If all of the minor errors and heresies of the modern church, viewed collectively, are manifestations of or direct results of the western church’s embrace of pluralism, if we accept that premise, then, I think, we will begin to see the long theological nightmare of the west in the proper perspective. We’ve been struggling against a manly heresy after all, one that attacks the epistemological foundations of the Christian faith undermining any claim that God’s own historical public self revelation in Jesus Christ is true in an absolute sense.
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