I would be repulsed by both Experience Jesus then Behave Yourself Evangelicalism and Fulfill Your Obligations, Do Some Good Deeds on the Side, and leave Serious Religion to the Professionals Roman Catholicism. Only the more severe and other-worldly manifestations of the Faith would seem to approach the genuine: the farthest thing from my understanding as biblical Christianity (and yes, my secular self would have read the New Testament carefully) would be the domesticated form in which Christians lived in the world, owned property, raised families, and “went to church.” This form of religion, best sustained by an attitude denominated “conservative,” would seem to me of a single kind with that denominated “liberal,” for both are so invested in the World, one in its body and the other in its mind, that they are equally willing to think and act toward Christ as Judas did. Kierkegaard and Simon Stylites and Mother Teresa and Nate Saint and the Amish I could understand as Christian; Harry Emerson Fosdick, Bishop Spong, and the megachurch, Catholic or Protestant, I would not. (That the Spirit of Megachurch is either new or distinctively Protestant, I doubt.)
These thoughts came in the context of a recent trip in which I had opportunity to meditate upon how churches present themselves in the attempt to seek the membership that sustains and enlarges them–and no doubt also to convert souls. They have the strong tendency to leave something out. How foreign to their customary operation, that is, of offering enjoyment of some kind as the chief benefit of joining, is the relief for the soul burdened by sin and confusion and worldliness implied by the invitation to come to this place and die, which is the first necessity for being born again. How many churches are filled by “take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” and “sell all you have and give to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me,” or, instead of giving them for charity’s sake things to sustain their bodies (thus doing good deeds for their own advantage), chiefly offer them the water that springs up to life eternal and which if given they will never thirst–this being the evangelical kindness from which all the others come?
Do these churches and their pastors understand, whatever the form of life given after this death, that what the man burdened by life seeks, under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, is death to himself and the morbid accretions of the world that cling to him, and that this is the first thing the Church offers him in its baptism? Instead we offer him (usually incompetently, and often risibly) pleasures and palliatives in accordance with the tastes and opinions and philosophies and desires that have already led him to despair, abandoning the serious pilgrim to the tender mercies of cultic thieves who, instead of offering him the infinite treasure of eternal life in Christ, will beat him and strip him bare.
The Church must seek only those upon whom the guiding hand of God already rests, and it must be careful to offer him what the Lord offers him, no more and no less. The only way it can enlarge its borders, to enrich itself as the Church and not as something else, is to enter the kind of death it offers to others, a baptism in which it dies to itself–which means the full willingness to sacrifice its institutional body for the life of its soul, and to see then what the resurrected Lord will do with the dead thing that has expired in his hand.
Only the more severe and other-worldly manifestations of the Faith would seem to approach the genuine: the farthest thing from my understanding as biblical Christianity (and yes, my secular self would have read the New Testament carefully) would be the domesticated form in which Christians lived in the world, owned property, raised families, and “went to church.”
… making you a perfect candidate for Manichaeism, which you would likely have become. Fortunately, whether by purposeful devotion or sheer laziness, you did accept the faith of those among whom you were born and raised! And, by the way, who, in this alternative secularist life, would have told you to search something known as “biblical Christianity”?
No one would have taught me to search for “biblical Christianity” in the sense of accepting the Christian scriptures as an authoritative canon. We are talking about a situation where someone with a secularist background and little firsthand experience of Christianity reads the New Testament and asks himself how a person who came to believe what he found in it should live. This should be obvious: your criticism can only be made by making “biblical Christianity” mean something unsupported by the context. Would it have been better if I had said, “the manner of living toward which the ethics of the New Testament appeared to point”? This meaning should have been clear to the unclouded eye.
The charge of Manichaeanism is too frequently tossed out by people who wish to accuse others of not appreciating, shall we say, the “institiutional” aspects of Christianity. I think they have forgotten what the earliest Christians believed about the promise of the Lord that he would return quickly, and the support this promise has in the teachings of St. Paul. What in fact happened in the Church was that a dialectic was created between worldly and other-worldly considerations and practices, each answering to and disciplining the other, much like that in the Old Testament between the prophetic and priestly witnesses. In either set of cases, partisans of each side could handily accuse the other of morbid “tendencies” toward their “logical conclusions.” But the question remains whether the accusations are justifiable in fact.
(I am frequently surprised by how shallow and unreflective some of our correspondents take me to be.)
“The only way it can enlarge its borders, to enrich itself as the Church and not as something else, is to enter the kind of death it offers to others, a baptism in which it dies to itself–which means the full willingness to sacrifice its institutional body for the life of its soul, and to see then what the resurrected Lord will do with the dead thing that has expired in his hand.”
This takes great courage, faith, and simplicity and would be a rare and beautiful gift to the Bridegroom. I heard an Anglican priest in a little Canadian village talk this way and I wished I could live in his parish.
Ministers who talk that way rarely rise in the world, but in my experience there seem to be enough of them to serve those who are seeking true priests. (Would someone care to accuse me of Donatism now?)
Mr. Hutchens, I’m glad you responded. No, I’ve read enough of you to know that you are not, in general, shallow and unreflective. Quite the contrary. Which is why I was so surprised by what was (even if elliptically) implied by this post.
To wit,
In either set of cases, partisans of each side [i.e., the worldly and other-worldly] could handily accuse the other of morbid “tendencies” toward their “logical conclusions.”
Yes, and you were explicitly taking one side in your observations as a well-read, and presumably unbiased, secularist observer. Did you mean to imply that your well-read secularist self had it all wrong (or maybe half wrong)? I didn’t see that. Secularist Hutchens seems to be completely ignoring the dialectic (or flattening it) that his Christian self perfectly articulates.
Making “institutional” into an epithet doesn’t answer the gnostic charge. And it is perfectly possible to recall what the earliest Christians (including St. Paul) believed about the soon return of the Lord, AND nevertheless defend and see as necessary the actions of those who came after the Apostles (serving in their office) to maintain the unity of (for which Christ prayed) and order in (which St. Paul (or his pseudo??) demanded) the churches of God.
Moreover, if your well-read secularist self would have been sufficiently well-read, he would not likely have approached the NT looking for anything called “biblical Christianity”. He would have known that the NT did not simply drop from the sky, and that Christianity predates any book of the NT, and its final canon by centuries. He, in short, would have seen the NT as agitprop (however poorly executed) for the “institutional” Church, transparently motivated to teach and support “their” version of Christianity. And he would have been mostly right, even if for all the wrong reasons.
It may be of some interest to imagine, as our secular selves, what Christianity might be like if we “just went by the book”. But then it wouldn’t be Christianity, as our Christian selves damn well know; but rather something more akin to Islam, I suspect.
Would someone care to accuse me of Donatism now?
Actually, and with respect, an no intention to opening up this war, I don’t see how any Protestant can avoid the charge; or at least fail to condemn (or simply ignore) the Donatists.