Praxis: Faith Inspires Justice and the Care of Souls

Over at Covenant, Episcopal seminarian Matthew Burdette writes on the place of theology in theological education as seminaries and seminarians push ever further towards the "practical":

A useful illustration of this dynamic is the centrality given to pastoral care, the current conception of which is a 20th-century innovation. Prior to this time, pastoral ministry was generally conceived of in moral and sacramental terms, rather than in therapeutic (and therefore medical) terms, which is currently dominant. It has become a widespread requirement for ministers of different faiths to undergo the training of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, usually in the context of hospital chaplaincy. One of the stretching and beneficial characteristics of CPE is that ministers work with ministers of other faiths, as well as offer pastoral care to people of other faiths. Beneficial as interfaith learning is, a question does loom over the whole process: If I can offer the same pastoral care to a patient as the imam, and if I think that pastoral care is at the center of ministry, then what is the significance of those doctrinal matters that separate me from the imam?

The question is a serious one, and my own suspicion is that there is a correlation between the pervasive focus on this model of pastoral care and the implicit Unitarianism espoused by many clergy in mainline Protestantism. The same question emerges from the focus on social justice. When a parish’s or cleric’s social vision is indistinguishable from a party platform, and when the Church’s message is said to find its telos in that social vision, one must wonder why anyone should bother with the religious baggage. Again and more pointedly: When pastoral care or social action are assumed to be the goal of theological education, then the particular matters of doctrine that are the content of the Christian faith become irrelevant and distracting; focusing on them deters from what theology or ministry is allegedly about.

...The presumption that theological education is for some practical end is perhaps also related to widespread biblical illiteracy and poor catechesis. It is difficult to prioritize teaching the Christian faith when the implicit assumption is that its content is inconsequential.

I couldn't agree with Burdette more. Just as "Intro to Worship" is about more than just what color stole to wear and the proper way to bless the assembly, so to should our classes on conflict transformation and pastoral care more than crash-courses in community organizing and family systems.

As I've said before, so many young clergy and seminarians are passionate about social justice and pastoral care but neglect any sense of theological framework. Instead, many of my colleagues -- wonderful and loving people that they are -- try to wrangle a Christian identity out of progressive social actions. In this view, the Church would function just as well without God -- perhaps even better if we get to catch up on sleep on Sunday mornings.

The Church's rediscovered passion for social justice and pastoral care -- even among younger fundamentalists! -- is commendable. Good will come of it. But this new passion is not enough if it is not based in belief in the Triune God.

The Church is called to work for justice and to care for souls, but those vocations flow out of our sacramental identity. We are the Body of Christ. Here we stand. We can do no other.

"Special" Eucharists: Against Novelty in the Liturgy

During the series on the paschal candle, I wrote about the difference between "special" and "unique." Something becomes special when it has meaning over and above what would normally be ascribed to a similar item, event, location, or what-have-you, whereas something is unique when it is less common. By way of example:

Woodcut of Holy Communion
Wittenberg, 16th c.

• A meal with the whole family might be more special than grabbing a burger at the drive-thru while rushing to an afternoon meeting -- even if the family meal is a nightly occurrence.
• Hopefully, rushed fast food meals eaten hastily in the car are a unique experience, happening very rarely. Presumably, that rather stressful lunch would not hold any special significance.
• A meal with the extended family is understandably special and unique -- reserved for a few holidays during the year.

Unfortunately, our culture has tended to conflate these two meanings. While I'm sure that Catholics and Orthodox Christians have made the same mistake, it seems to me to be a decidedly Protestant problem.

As weekly celebration of the Eucharist has become more common in the Episcopal Church and the ELCA following the height of liturgical renewal in the 20th century, many laity and clergy have objected that regular Communion makes the Sacrament makes it less meaningful.

Apparently doing something too often makes it "less special." 

To paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Ted Hackett, I would hate to be married to one of those people.

The Sacraments are special. This is most certainly true.

That is, the Sacraments have meaning beyond normal water, bread, and wine. They are special, though, not because of how rarely we celebrate them but because of a divine promise. Baptism is "special" because God has promised to unite us into the Body of Christ in our Lord's death and Resurrection through water and the Divine Word. The Eucharist bears meaning because Christ has promised to be present.

Paraphrasing another Candler faculty member, nothing we can do makes these Sacraments more or less meaningful. Their value is an act of divine grace; sacramental meaning is not derived from how rarely we celebrate them.

And while such resistance to the sacramental pulse of Christian worship is waning, another (equally harmful) emphasis on "specialness" is creeping in.

In many communities, there is a new push to bring in "special" elements to make "meaningful worship experiences."

A seminary might use champagne for the Eucharist on Easter.

One community might change wines in accordance with the liturgical seasons to highlight different emphases -- darker, heavier wines for Advent and Lent, a sweeter wine for Easter.

A parish might use a different, more "exotic" bread for World Communion Sunday. 

In a congregation where the bread is usually store-bought, they might have students bake a "special" bread for their first Communion.

While canon lawyers might argue over the validity and licitness of champagne or leavened breads, and I am interested -- if not entirely convinced -- by those arguments, that is not where I take issue.

Rather, I'm concerned with the attempts to make the Eucharist "more special," to bring out meaning other than the Body of Christ made present.

The Eucharist is and always will be the Church's participation in the Body of Christ, a lifting up of our hearts as we offer to God our thanks and praise. Every time we celebrate the Sacrament is a communion with the entire Church of God throughout all ages past and all ages to come. While we may speak of one Divine Service at 8:30 and another at 11:00, or one Mass on Saturday evening and another on Sunday morning, we truly celebrate only one Eucharist.

Any attempt, therefore, to highlight one eucharistic celebration over another -- to make the Sacrament on one Sunday appear different from the Sacrament on another Sunday -- is to obscure the essential unity of our worship. While the readings and prayers and paraments may change, God's means of grace remain the same.

Where is the harm? In trying to call attention to one over the others, we obscure the importance of all others. By using "special" bread, we call into question the meaning of every other Sunday when we use ordinary bread. By using "special" wine, we call into question the unity between the Sundays when we use other vintages -- or just the giant jug of Manischewitz. When we lift up one particular celebration over all others, we leading our parishioners to believe that the average Sunday is somehow lacking: that God is somehow less interested in plain bread or cheap wine.

God, of course, will show up in the Manischewitz and in the merlot, in the wafer and the fresh baked bread. Grace abounds. But we must be mindful of how our parishioners -- and we ourselves -- perceive the elements. We should do nothing to suggest the Eucharist is somehow "better" one Sunday.

If you are going to use fine wine, use it every week. Every time we gather is cause for the "good stuff."

If you are going to have your parishioners bake the bread fresh, do it every week. Every time we celebrate the Sacraments we should approach them with the joy of our first Communion.

God's Sacraments mean more than we will ever understand, are more special than we will ever know. Our task isn't to make them novel but to celebrate them with abundant joy. When we celebrate the Eucharist on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, we approach the same risen Lord that we celebrate during the Great Vigil of Easter.

A Divine Liturgy for a Fallen World

Jonathan Aigner at Ponder Anew highlights this quote from Robert Johnston:

Unwilling to address life honestly, our worship floats above the fray in irrelevance. Rather than recognize that pain is an important part of contemporary life, we anesthetize our existence. We fail to allow into our worship the dark side.

As is his wont, Aigner turns his attention to the shortcomings of contemporary worship, its tendency towards emotional manipulation, rock star adoration, and entertainment.

Johnston's words, though, call to mind a quieter but equally dangerous tendency within the "creative" liturgy movement. As the Emergent movement continues to disintegrate, one stream has continued in its attempt to marry a humanistic Protestant liberalism to a watered-down liturgy. As a result, we end up with Confessions that don't confess anything, Kyries that sound more like bad pop music than a cry for divine help (I'm looking at you, ELW Setting 8), and a refusal to sing hymns that are too "dark" or "heavy."

The problem is the exact same thing we see in the contemporary movement: a steadfast refusal to admit the necessity of lament, a denial of sin and evil, and a peppy self-help theology that focuses on Brene Brown rather than Christ.

We need to make room in the liturgy for "heavy" songs because the world is heavy. We can clap our  hands and sing "This Little Light of Mine" until the cows come home, but what comfort does this bring to the young widower or to the single mother on food stamps?

I've said it before, and I will say it again: the Divine Liturgy must confront the reality of sin in our world. It must confront us with our sinful prejudice and our unholy greed. It must find the words to express the grief of young black man who has lost count of how many times he has been stopped and frisked. It must offer TRUE repentance and reconciliation.

The Divine Liturgy is a source of great hope -- but that hope only has meaning when it is brought out of the context of lament. The Mass is the Light of Christ shining in the world -- but that Light cannot ignore the Darkness of sin and Death.

Credo: Progressives and the Need for Robust Theological Thinking

The Apostles' Creed
13th century

Eternal Functional Subordination is an odd debate, but why does it matter? Why pay attention to Fundamentalist in-fighting?

I'm tempted to say, "Because theology matters."

But why? Why does theology matter? Who cares?

Sadly, "Who cares?" seems to be the driving force behind many Progressive Christians -- even authors, seminarians, and pastors.

Or, more accurately, we have been freed to ask the questions that matter, but we have been too apathetic to think through the answers. The result is, at best, an orthodox but incomplete answer; at worst, it's heresy.

"How do we understand the inter-relationship of the Trinity?" has become "God exists in community" sans engagement with the Creeds or the debates between the Greek East and Latin West.

"How do we think about the atonement?" has become "All the theories suck, and in the end, God is love and forgives" sans any engagement with the imagery woven into Scripture or the writings of our ancestors in the faith.

"Who may partake of Holy Communion?" has become "It's mean to exclude people" sans any sacramental theology or discussion of Holy Baptism.

In its most extreme form, Progressives have adopted Bultmann's rejection of a historical Resurrection. (And, if that's the case, let's pack it in. Without the Resurrection, our faith is in vain.)

There are, among the ranks of Progressive Christianity, those trying to take us back to the early 20th century and the days of Protestant Liberalism.

Charles Taylor traces the genealogy of this move in his masterpiece A Secular Age (or, if you don't have time for a tome of that size, James K.A. Smith provides a thorough summary in How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor). In the Enlightenment, we see a shift from emphasis on the transcendent to the immanent, from things other-worldly to this-worldly. As a result, the emphasis moves from God's ability to save humanity to human ability. To quote Smith:

The result is a kind of intellectual Pelagianism: we can figure this out without assistance. Oh, God still plays a role -- as either the watchmaker who got the ball rolling, or the judge who will evaluate how well we did -- but in the long middle God plays no discernible role or function, and is uninvolved.

We are left with an emphasis on charitable action sans theology, a God who may be Alpha and Omega but is absent for the rest of the story, a God we do not need to contemplate and who doesn't care what we believe so long as we do good.

Picking up on similar themes while discussing Progressive Christianity's hesitance to think about sin and Satan, Richard Beck quotes Scot McKnight:

According to McKnight, for these "skinny jeans" Christians the kingdom of God means "good deeds done by good people (Christian or not) in the public sector for the common good." As he notes, given their focus on social justice these "skinny jeans" Christians have "turned the kingdom message of Jesus into a politically shaped message."

And sure enough, not a day goes by that I don't see seminarians posting heart-warming videos of good deeds proclaiming, "Kingdom of God is here!"

"The Kingdom of God has come near" becomes "Look at this cool non-profit" sans metanoia.

To be clear, I am not opposed to good deeds. As a Lutheran shaped by the Wesleyan tradition, I firmly believe that God's grace is at work in the world, even among those outside the Church, erupting into this world in unexpected ways. But as a Lutheran shaped by the Wesleyan tradition, I also believe that those works -- glimpses of God's grace though they may be -- are not sufficient to justify sinners.

Love and community are powerful speaking points. They are important elements of human existence and the Kingdom of God. But the very same reason these themes resonate also makes them important to define carefully. Too many Progressive Christians are unwilling to do the heavy theological lifting required to carefully define love and community.

Every human being desires love and community. It's part of the human condition. This commonality means that artists and culture makers have their own vision of human flourishing through love and community. It's why love songs and buddy adventure movies and rom-coms and dramas about human relationships (romantic and platonic) are so common.

The same can be said for charitable giving. There are a number of secular groups doing great work to alleviate human suffering across the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation chief among them. Countless non-profits are doing great work at the local level.

And yes, I will gladly grant that this is the Kingdom of God breaking into the world. The imago Dei didn't shatter in the Fall. Divine love is at work, even when human beings aren't aware of it.

But we must speak theologically about these things. It's not enough to look at someone feeding the hungry and say, "It's the Kingdom at work, y'all."

Such good works are like the first shoots of a crop coming up. They must be tended carefully, cultivated. For the Church, that means doing the theological heavy lifting to name the forces that defy God, to call out sin, and to name the powers and principalities for what they are. It means to speak of grace not in terms of human deeds but of God working through us.

And yes, it absolutely means feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and welcoming the refugee -- but doing so in the name of Christ. It means calling people into the Church through the Sacraments. Through our own works we might save people from the grave for a time, but by calling them into the Body of Christ by the grace of God through the waters of Baptism, they gain the assurance of salvation unto everlasting life.

Moreover, Progressive Christianity has a unique voice to contribute to the Church. Our willingness to engage with difficult questions (if we're willing to do the difficult work of seeking answers), our concern for things that happen in this life (if we're willing to care about matters transcendent), and our openness to the marginalized (if we maintain a belief in membership in the Body of Christ) can provide a powerful witness to the Kingdom of God. Affirmation of LGBT Christians, concern for the poor, and engagement with science are good; the Church should do these things. We must be aware, though, that our Fundamentalist kindred will push back against us.

Let us return to the EFS debate for a moment. Progressive Christians affirm egalitarian gender roles and the ordination of women. One of the driving forces behind EFS is precisely a rejection of these beliefs. If we want to engage our Fundamentalist friends and family, we must be well-versed in Scripture and the Tradition. We must engage with theology.

The Church is changing, especially in the US. We can no longer assume to be the norm. I for one, think this is a good thing. The Church some of its best work when it was on the outs. Justin Martyr, Iranaeus, Augustine, and Bonhoeffer wrote some of our best treatises while trying to figure out how to be the Church in the shadow of imperial oppression, the collapse of civilization, or, in Bonhoeffer's case, both.

But if we are to meet this challenge, if we are to re-discover what it means to be the Church, then we must be prepared to put forward a thought-out theology rather than a set of comforting aphorisms. If we are to continue being the Church, then it is not enough to do good deeds and think positive thoughts. To be the Church, to be the Body of Christ, to love as God loves, requires more. To be an in-breaking of the Kingdom of God means being more than Sunday morning do-gooders. I can feed the hungry and protect the environment without the Sunday morning wake up call -- and all the better, because I enjoy weekend brunch, hiking trips, and farmers' markets.  If we want to continue being the Church, we must be willing to stand before the assembly and say, "I believe...."

The Eternal Functional Subordination Debate: Why It Matters

Something strange is happening in the Fundamentalist world. For a few decades now, Wayne Grudem and a few others have been teaching that God the Son is eternally subordinate to God the Father.

The argument is as such:
Because
a) The Father begets the Son, and
b) The Son economically submits to the will of the Father
Therefore,
c) The Son is immanently (eternally) subordinate/submissive to the Father

The position is termed "eternal functional subordination," or "EFS" for short, and for a time, it was coupled with the position that the Son did not exist from eternity. Its advocates also attempt to maintain that while despite such subordination, the Son is not less than the Father.

The position becomes even more convoluted because EFS advocates then take this bewildering attempt at Trinitarian theology and try to apply it to human gender relations. It has become a long and mind-boggling way of arguing that women should submit to men while also trying to maintain that women are not inherently inferior to men.

The major disconnect is that subordination is inherently inferiority. To say that the Son is eternally subordinated to the Father is to say that the Son is immanently less than the Father. It is true that the Father takes precedence in the order of being (that is to say, the Son and Holy Spirit are begotten and precede, respectively, from the Father). This so-called "monarchy of the Father," (spelled out by the ELCA and Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America in this document; cf. para. 4) though, does not relate to obedience and submission. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that somehow the Persons of the Trinity have different eternal intentions or goals that the Son must relinquish to obey the Father. Or, using the terminology of the Athanasian Creed, would be to suggest that the members of the Trinity are not co-equal in majesty and glory.

(And, while we're at it, to say that women must submit to men is to say that women are inherently inferior to men. Of course, the claim is always just under the surface of Fundamentalist complementarian writing, but they refuse to acknowledge it. The Son is eternally begotten by the Father, and is consubstantial/of one being with the Father. In a lesser way, according to Genesis 2, Eve is made after Adam from a part of Adam's body; she is made of the same stuff. In Genesis 2 -- and notably, not in Genesis 1 -- Adam takes precedence in the order of Creation, but there is no reason to believe that Eve is therefore inferior to or must be submissive to Adam. Substance matters far more than order.)

For whatever reason, this debate exploded onto the scene during the summer of 2016. I won't go into the full details of the debate (there's simply not enough time), but you can read some of the main arguments as summarized by Scot McKnight here, as well as a longer rebuttal published on "Mortification of Spin" here and a snarky post "guest written" by John Calvin. patron of so many EFS advocates, here.

Interestingly, both complementarians and egalitarians sided against the EFS advocates. This is a minority position, even within the Fundamentalist/Complemenatrian/Pseudo-Calvinist camp.

The debate spread to the Evangelical Theological Society's annual meeting, where Bruce Ware (one of the EFS advocates changed his position to admit that the Son is eternally begotten after all. (Here's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's article on the matter.)

There are a number of reasons to completely discount this position. I won't go into them in detail (again, there really isn't time -- these are debates that have already raged  and lasted for decades leading up to Nicea and later Chalcedon), but I will offer a brief summary:

1) The Creeds -- As to the position that the son is not eternally begotten (now, thankfully, cast aside), it is one of the key elements of the Nicene Creed. To confess otherwise is to venture into the Arian heresy. As to EFS, in general: the Nicene Creed confesses that Father and Son are consubstantial. There is no lesser deity in the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed spells it out further:

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal....
....And in this Trinity none is afore, or none other; none is greater, or less than another; but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.

The Athanasian Creed goes explains that the Son is only subordinate in the Incarnation -- that is, economically. EFS, then, is right out.

2) The Trouble with the Trinity -- Discussing the Trinity is remarkably difficult. There's a reason that councils were convened and otherwise noble theologians were deemed heretics. It's easy to get on the wrong track; as when traveling a great distance, changing your bearing by a few degrees can put you off course by hundreds of miles. Turn too far in one direction, accidentally end up becoming a tritheist or a unitarian. In over-emphasizing the distinction between the Father and Son (and, let's be honest, ignoring the Holy Spirit through and through), the EFS advocates start down the shockingly short path to tritheism. If the Son is subordinate, and therefore lesser, then what we end up with is a set of three gods rather than one God who exists in trinity.

3) "God is not 'man' said in a loud voice." -- The basis for EFS is the assumption that because human sons should submit to human fathers, therefore the Son submits to the Father. Despite all of Fundamentalist rhetoric about God's holiness, that God is so much further above humanity (rhetoric that, while taken in weird directions, is at least rooted in sound theological thinking), how strange it is then that EFS advocates are attempting to take a model for human relationships and read it into the inner workings of the Holy Trinity, that blessed mystery which exists beyond human understanding.

So...why does this matter? Why spend time giving a crap about an esoteric point of theology within the Fundamentalist world? By and large, the Mainline and Progressives have ignored this debate. A few have pointed to it as an entertaining side show, but few bloggers have actually weighed in -- as though Mainline and Progressive Christians don't really care.

A few things.

First, and this one is personal: Fundamentalists, including EFS advocates, spend so much time calling progressives heretics, claiming that we are not truly Christians for our openness to the findings of modern science, for the ordination of women and an egalitarian understanding of Church and family, for a willingness to discuss, let alone affirm, the role of LGBT+ persons in the Church. And yet when Grudem, Ware, and others leaders in the Fundamentalist world accept an outright heretical opinion, Albert Mohler does mental gymnastics to explain why they are not heretics. Mohler is one of the men who led the crusade against moderates in the SBC. At SBTS, he is venerated as the patron saint of Baptist fidelity, the champion of orthodoxy, and yet he is unwilling to turn his inquisition upon his friends. Rampant hypocrisy matters, and we should be prepared to call it out while defending our position in the Church.

Second, and as importantly, orthodoxy matters. I'll write more about this in a coming post (this one has already turned out much longer than I expected), but let me offer a quick summary. Progressives have been far too quick to say that the only thing that matters is loving, but we have been unwilling to do lay theological groundwork about what Christ means when he commands us to love God, neighbor, enemy, and each other. Theology, for all of its complications, is vital to the Church. We cannot claim we are willing to ask difficult questions if we are unwilling to wrestle with how these questions might shape our theology. Otherwise, what's the point? If all we care about is a general sense of love and community -- noble goals, certainly -- but without a clear theological framework for what they look like, why not become secular humanists? It'd certainly be easier to preach on Steinbeck than Job. It'd be simpler to preach that the key to community is emotional vulnerability rather than Christ crucified and risen. This means, though, that we must be prepared to enter into debates over points of theology, to interpret Sacred Scripture and the Tradition and make arguments rather than "I feel..." statements. The EFS position is an attack on orthodoxy and women's rights
. If progressive Christians want to have a voice in the Church, we must be prepared to but forward an orthodox theology.