Off Every High Horse I Ever Rode
I’m going to reply to Karl Giberson’s essay in two ways, agreement and reservations. This month’s topic comprises an intimately challenging set of questions for me, as a Quaker Christian settled on the East Coast – a few miles from Yale, in fact, where I lived, researched, studied, and taught during recent years. I feel I need to be extra-careful in stating my views—well, actually, in forming them: that’s still going on.
Quakers of the “unprogrammed” sort, like myself, acknowledge our sect’s Christian roots but do not have liturgy (except in the marriage ceremony), clergy, preaching, a prescribed theology beyond the advice to see the “Light” of the divine in every person, or even writings we identify as scripture. Many unprogrammed Quakers describe themselves as refugees from religious dogma, arrogance, and presumption, and I appreciate that Quaker communities of both the past and the present have tried to exclude these things from their witness.
This, however, makes it awkward that I have had Christian experience—first that, a great surprise at a difficult time in my life—and then belief—which has surprisingly held on and strengthened. Openly gay Quakers and gay members and clergy of allied liberal denominations sometimes hold me in judgment for my more or less traditional Christianity. Many of them have been threatened with the fires of hell for what they’re deeply convinced they can’t help; they were told that the Bible and a just yet merciful God certified this punishment. So how can they listen to me without scorn when I voice my reliance on the supreme authority of the crucifixion, pretty much according to Romans?
But, well, the crucifixion is the answer I found: after an excessively long, quite liberal education (liberal in both the academic and the political senses: I studied the ancient pagan classics in centrist to leftist institutions), I was backed into an intellectual and emotional corner, and there was no way out but to make peace with that event two thousand years ago—but Quakers were going to let me make my own peace, so I belonged with them.
The conservative Christian part of my circle—including Catholics and Fundamentalists—struggles to accept this, and here, too, the issue of sexuality is a major source of conflict. In discussions with them too, I can’t keep my seat on a moral high horse, for the very reason that I do know the churched part of the gay community fairly well. But in these encounters, this means I can’t write off all resistance to “openness and affirmation” as ignorant and mean-spirited. Most gay men in fact don’t easily stay faithful to one partner; most lesbian couples lack a strong erotic bond and thus the visceral staying power that even troubled straight couples tend to show. I would never condone political oppression or hate speech based on clearly blasphemous predictions about another human being’s eternal fate; but on the other hand, I remember a Union Theological Seminary lecturer on “Gay Theology” commending a student for brushing aside the popular concentration on committed gay unions and insisting that even a one-night stand could be as holy as a lifelong marriage and deserved similar respect.
To the question of Christian exclusivity I offer the (probably very annoying) response that I suspect God wants me to be where I am, helpless and stuck. Right, religious authoritarianism is noxious. But my individual alarm at, for example, being targeted for indoctrination/induction/submissive-marriage-to-whichever-male member-of-the-church-is-looking-for-a-wife is counterbalanced by alarm at certain ideas opposed to authoritarianism that have wreaked subtle havoc on our society.
Once I heard a middle-aged lay preacher declare how uncomfortable she had always been with teachings about sin; now, she knew why: she had been sexually abused as a child, which made her not a sinner but a victim. She really seemed to believe this was a satisfactory solution to the problem of sin. To liberal Christians generally, even to those who are not survivors of childhood trauma, the idea of sin has become more and more offensive and its definition further and further separated from commonsense about human life and human nature: that all of us have experienced mistreatment and gotten our own back with interest, one way or another. Maturity can’t come about without the recognition of our own appalling behavior—and any special pleading for it—as just that. The Judaeo-Christian emphasis on pitiless self-examination—supported by the confidence in God’s love and care—is also the only possibility I know of (and I bet I’ve seen every kind of New Age spiritual-but-not-religious fad there is) for ending eons-old cycles of unthinking exploitation and revenge and becoming a species worthy of the belief that God created it for a transcendent purpose.
I don’t reckon that, if it is to keep giving that hope, our religious tradition is hugely tinker-with-able. A divinity student I know found himself rejecting certain theological alternatives simply because he was facing a lifetime of pastoral duties. To assert that divinity is within the nature of things rather than above it is to tell people that they have no ultimate appeal. Here are their suffering and despair, and beyond these is only an eager array of human authority, “spiritual” and “scientific” and even frankly commercial, claiming to hook them up with the essence of the universe—much more subtly and panderingly claiming this than the average TV preacher does, but (to me, anyway) more scarily claiming it for just this reason.
As a sort of refuge from both sides, inherited ritual and theology really do appear to matter. It’s important to have, for example, a rite that says a religious community recognizes and supports a couple’s marriage, the requirements for this rite depending on the community’s experienced judgment. For its part, theology by definition has to contain logic—and what overrides the logic of life? Theology’s fundamental logic doesn’t even require a belief in God: we are forced to conclude—from what we know about our own behavior—only that if there is a God, He is unimaginably wiser than we are, and that we must therefore judge any ideas and actions in His name the hard human way, over time, by the fruit they bear.
This reminds me of something Stanley Hauerwas once said in an interview: Catholics should be more like Anabaptists, and Anabaptists should be more like Catholics.
"Here I stand helpless and stuck between extremes, I can do no other" is an honest position and all the more so when its tenuousness is acknowledged. It's a profoundly unsettling fact for people committed to some type of membership in an institutional form of the church as a sustainable path, if not an Answer. Presenting Christianity as a cross of unresolvable contradictions and conflicts to bear really puts a damper on outreach and pep, but perhaps taking it up as such would force Christians to get real in their relations with others.
Sarah's observations end up where I found myself after reading some of Vince Bacote's remarks about a "generous evangelicalism" that is seriously open to learning from other traditions, just so long as they don't try to lure anyone over to their side. Crude and unwanted proselytism aside, I think perhaps to get the generosity, you have to be open to change, even a radical change. The pages of mainstream evangelical publications have been filled for decades now with the perspectives and labors of people who have done just that.
As Sarah observes and asks, radically iconoclastic, historically unmoored Christianity works where it works (where the inner teacher teaches), but doesn't its working over time depend on awareness of the very things it rejects in order to go on rejecting them authentically and accurately? (I think Vince was possibly saying something like this.) Indeed one cannot reject "authority" but only certain ways of exercising it; rejecting those ways does not solve the problem of authority, as Sarah well observes.
Even more challenging is how all the people, practices, and ideas we reject are included by reference in our rejection of them. We carry them on with us as either troublesome and despised strangers we don't understand well (which is bigotry), or as neighbors to whom we can relate convivially, intellectually, and ethically. We need to know them well to maintain an identity and practice based on declaring what we are not, what we do not do, and what we do not believe. Thus a really good Quaker would value understanding Catholics (and others) intimately, and a good Catholic would do the same. Why not strive in the same way to understand those who gender or sexuality we don't share without using relativism as a lazy way to deny rather than understand the differences and conflicts?
In an actual social context, such openness toward others will lead to the political "problem" of fences between neighbors coming down so that people cross them more freely by conversion and marriage. This is the country where this has happened for nearly everyone, and yet it is mostly by neglect of the fences and a very mixed record of attentive affection for our neighbors and the lazy optimism of people who choose forgetfulness and short memory to deal with the nightmares of history.
Thank you for this insight! To simply forget and lose touch with the Other is to lose oneself. At the bottom of difference and division: the prospect of a mysterious unity and affection!
This reminds me of something Stanley Hauerwas once said in an interview: Catholics should be more like Anabaptists, and Anabaptists should be more like Catholics.
"Here I stand helpless and stuck between extremes, I can do no other" is an honest position and all the more so when its tenuousness is acknowledged. It's a profoundly unsettling fact for people committed to some type of membership in an institutional form of the church as a sustainable path, if not an Answer. Presenting Christianity as a cross of unresolvable contradictions and conflicts to bear really puts a damper on outreach and pep, but perhaps taking it up as such would force Christians to get real in their relations with others.
Sarah's observations end up where I found myself after reading some of Vince Bacote's remarks about a "generous evangelicalism" that is seriously open to learning from other traditions, just so long as they don't try to lure anyone over to their side. Crude and unwanted proselytism aside, I think perhaps to get the generosity, you have to be open to change, even a radical change. The pages of mainstream evangelical publications have been filled for decades now with the perspectives and labors of people who have done just that.
As Sarah observes and asks, radically iconoclastic, historically unmoored Christianity works where it works (where the inner teacher teaches), but doesn't its working over time depend on awareness of the very things it rejects in order to go on rejecting them authentically and accurately? (I think Vince was possibly saying something like this.) Indeed one cannot reject "authority" but only certain ways of exercising it; rejecting those ways does not solve the problem of authority, as Sarah well observes.
Even more challenging is how all the people, practices, and ideas we reject are included by reference in our rejection of them. We carry them on with us as either troublesome and despised strangers we don't understand well (which is bigotry), or as neighbors to whom we can relate convivially, intellectually, and ethically. We need to know them well to maintain an identity and practice based on declaring what we are not, what we do not do, and what we do not believe. Thus a really good Quaker would value understanding Catholics (and others) intimately, and a good Catholic would do the same. Why not strive in the same way to understand those who gender or sexuality we don't share without using relativism as a lazy way to deny rather than understand the differences and conflicts?
In an actual social context, such openness toward others will lead to the political "problem" of fences between neighbors coming down so that people cross them more freely by conversion and marriage. This is the country where this has happened for nearly everyone, and yet it is mostly by neglect of the fences and a very mixed record of attentive affection for our neighbors and the lazy optimism of people who choose forgetfulness and short memory to deal with the nightmares of history.
Thank you for this insight! To simply forget and lose touch with the Other is to lose oneself. At the bottom of difference and division: the prospect of a mysterious unity and affection!
This reminds me of something Stanley Hauerwas once said in an interview: Catholics should be more like Anabaptists, and Anabaptists should be more like Catholics.
"Here I stand helpless and stuck between extremes, I can do no other" is an honest position and all the more so when its tenuousness is acknowledged. It's a profoundly unsettling fact for people committed to some type of membership in an institutional form of the church as a sustainable path, if not an Answer. Presenting Christianity as a cross of unresolvable contradictions and conflicts to bear really puts a damper on outreach and pep, but perhaps taking it up as such would force Christians to get real in their relations with others.
Sarah's observations end up where I found myself after reading some of Vince Bacote's remarks about a "generous evangelicalism" that is seriously open to learning from other traditions, just so long as they don't try to lure anyone over to their side. Crude and unwanted proselytism aside, I think perhaps to get the generosity, you have to be open to change, even a radical change. The pages of mainstream evangelical publications have been filled for decades now with the perspectives and labors of people who have done just that.
As Sarah observes and asks, radically iconoclastic, historically unmoored Christianity works where it works (where the inner teacher teaches), but doesn't its working over time depend on awareness of the very things it rejects in order to go on rejecting them authentically and accurately? (I think Vince was possibly saying something like this.) Indeed one cannot reject "authority" but only certain ways of exercising it; rejecting those ways does not solve the problem of authority, as Sarah well observes.
Even more challenging is how all the people, practices, and ideas we reject are included by reference in our rejection of them. We carry them on with us as either troublesome and despised strangers we don't understand well (which is bigotry), or as neighbors to whom we can relate convivially, intellectually, and ethically. We need to know them well to maintain an identity and practice based on declaring what we are not, what we do not do, and what we do not believe. Thus a really good Quaker would value understanding Catholics (and others) intimately, and a good Catholic would do the same. Why not strive in the same way to understand those who gender or sexuality we don't share without using relativism as a lazy way to deny rather than understand the differences and conflicts?
In an actual social context, such openness toward others will lead to the political "problem" of fences between neighbors coming down so that people cross them more freely by conversion and marriage. This is the country where this has happened for nearly everyone, and yet it is mostly by neglect of the fences and a very mixed record of attentive affection for our neighbors and the lazy optimism of people who choose forgetfulness and short memory to deal with the nightmares of history.
Thank you for this insight! To simply forget and lose touch with the Other is to lose oneself. At the bottom of difference and division: the prospect of a mysterious unity and affection!