Growth in Christ through the Nicene Creed, and the Icons

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Dear Christopher,

Thank you very much for your quite beautiful description of the Pietist spirit/ethos.

I think, from an Orthodox perspective, there’s so much to be affirmed in the Pietist’s heart-cry, as I understand it, for deeply meaningful, ongoing, living experience with the Living God, abiding in deep personal communion with Him.  And in and through this communion/fellowship with Him, at the same time abiding in deeply meaningful, living, vibrant communion/fellowship with all our fellow human beings, all made by Him in His image and likeness, being connected with them in profound ways, especially through prayer for them and service to them, as much as we may be able to, in whatever small ways we can, through the inspiration and energizing of the Holy Spirit.

To add to what you’ve said, may I suggest that the modern-day Pietist whom you winsomely describe could perhaps be strengthened and enriched in her faith-walk with Christ if she were a little less hesitant and/or skeptical about the importance of sound doctrine/teaching about Him. She may not realize the possibility of sound, trustworthy doctrine about Him being a source of even deeper communion with Him—and indeed, with the Father and the Holy Spirit as well.

For I believe there can be tremendous joy and strength gained through meditating on

Who Christ is, and on what He’s accomplished for us and all of humanity.  In one luminous paragraph, written back in the year 325 AD, in the city of Nicea in western Asia Minor, over 200 bishops—as the result of their united prayer, their common spiritual experience, their common understanding of the Holy Scriptures, and with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth—unanimously proclaimed the essential truth about Who Christ is and what He’s done for us.  Here is that paragraph from this Nicene Creed, which has been the quintessential, foundational Christian creed ever since:

“And I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, then Only-Begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made; Who for all of humanity and for our salvation came down from Heaven, and was Incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man; and He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; Whose Kingdom shall have no end.”

As the Church Fathers and the hymnology of the Church say, “Remaining what He was, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He added to Himself what He had not had before—human nature, taken from His Virgin Mother in her womb; and in that humanity, with which He later ascended into Heaven, He endured pain and hardship, persecution and betrayal, yet without any trace of sin.  And He then assumed all the sins of humanity in His sacrificial, totally unjust death on the Cross.  And then He conquered death by rising from the dead, emptying hell of all the souls held there, and reopening the gates of Paradise for all who believe in Him and live for Him.

There’s surely far more here for us to meditate on for many lifetimes, and to be more and more thankful for, and to be more and more energized and inspired by to share His Love with others.

And on this day, two days after the celebration of the Triumph of the Icons, which is celebrated on the first Sunday of Great Lent every year in the Orthodox Church, may I also humbly suggest that your Pietist friend might be strengthened and enriched in her faith in Christ through beholding an icon of Him, and through meditating and praying before such an icon, which can make His Presence even more tangible when approached with faith, reverence, and love for Him.  For we understand that every icon of Christ proclaims the doctrinal truth that the pre-eternal Son of God Himself really did come to earth and take flesh, to be knit with us forever in unbreakable, ineffable union, and for us to be in ineffable union with Him, our Creator and Savior, now and forever.

Thanks again for your contribution to this wonderful, ongoing conversation!

Yours, in Christ,

David

 

 

 

Following Jesus to Faithful Action in the World

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Dr. Gehrz’s reflection on what it means to follow Jesus from a Pietist perspective reinforces what I believe is a critical understanding in our Respectful Conversation series – following Jesus is a lived practice that is reflected in our devotional life and engagement in the world. To call ourselves disciples of Jesus means that we take seriously His call to go and make disciples, actively exhibiting our faith in our relationships with others. I do, however, have a further point of inquiry for Dr. Gehrz as it relates to the Pietist social action in the world: does this action remain at the individual, charitable level or does it extend to efforts to create systemic change?

The Pietist focus on “living faith” echoes much of what drives the Black Church’s perspective of what it means to follow Jesus. In both traditions, being a disciple of Jesus Christ is a task that requires action – within an individual’s inner life, with one’s peers or partners – action that as Dr. Gehrz notes, from German Pietist August Hermann Francke, makes “faith active in love of others.” Just as Francke demonstrated his commitment to following Jesus by creating orphanages and schools that took in disadvantaged children, so too do Black churches co-develop programming and institutions that can support children (and parents) that are experiencing economic and social devastation. Many of our first Black churches and the pastors and congregants that established them are the result of Jesus followers who made it a priority to create schools where both clergy and laity could learn how to lead other believers, similar to Francke’s own work to build a university that trained pastors, missionaries, and military chaplains. In other words, the Black Church tradition is not new to this idea that following Jesus is done in both word and deed; we cannot follow Jesus unless we commit to facilitating work in the world that reflects the very heart, mind, and spirit of the One we profess to follow.

Such a perspective is helpful in our modern conversation about being a disciple of Jesus because too many people see the Christian faith as lacking the vigor or vitality to make a tangible impact in the world. I am currently interviewing millennials for my dissertation on millennial church engagement, and quite a few respondents have lamented that countless churches and their leadership seem to be overly focused on money and internal church dynamics rather than service outside their walls. The Pietist and Black Church traditions teach me, however, that there is a long tradition of Jesus followers that understand their faith means nothing if it does not spur them to be change agents in their communities. By using the model set forth by Pietists and those in the Black Church, we can challenge those who believe that following Jesus solely means prioritizing personal piety and others who are convinced that Jesus followers have nothing to say about social injustices.

It is important to note that Pietists do not simply act at random or without vision and guidance. Dr. Gehrz writes that for the Pietist, we often find her “seeking God by herself, practicing the solitary piety of private devotions.” To determine what type of work she should participate in, she “prays to a God who is always listening” and “studies scriptures inspired by a God who is always speaking.” By engaging in this centering practice, a disciple of Jesus can increase the likelihood that her action is one not only endorsed but also ordered by the Jesus whom she professes to follow. Jesus followers also realize that to follow Christ is something that begins in the private life. There can be no public demonstration of one’s followship unless she has made the private decision to allow Jesus to orient her thoughts, perspectives, and life goals.

I appreciate Dr. Gehrz’s acknowledgment of this reality because it means that there is no point in which a Jesus follower should be acting on her own accord. This Pietist framework helps us to understand that living for Jesus is not something we pick up, put on, and take off but rather an embodiment of His way and life each day we are graced with life. I do not mean to say that we will be perfect. There will be times when our emotions and desires get the best of us, and we disregard the things of Jesus at best, or completely forget them at worst. However, the Pietist perspective reminds us that our entire life should be structured around that question that became popular on jewelry, particularly wristbands, several years ago – What Would Jesus Do (WWJD)?

Despite the helpful resources that the Pietist life offers when determining what it means to follow Jesus, I did finish Dr. Gehrz’s reflection with one question: how does the Pietist suggest we deal with and pursue collective action to create systemic change? I can clearly see that Pietists support collective action to solve social ills – how else would Francke have been able to create schools, an orphanage, and a publishing house to aid his community if not for the help of others? But each of these efforts appears to try and address the symptom of the ill and not the cause. An orphanage can take care of children who are poor, but it does not necessarily alter the societal conditions that create poor children and the need for orphanages in the first place. A publishing house can provide affordable resources, but it does not appear to decrease the ever-increasing cost of goods that widen the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else.

I realize that systemic change is difficult. It is much easier to run a soup kitchen than to solve the problem of food insecurity or rectify a food dessert that is preventing access to healthy food options in communities. However, the Black Church tradition was founded and continues to be driven by an emphasis on the structural changes need to address the economic, social, and political gaps that exist in our society. More importantly, when Jesus flipped tables in the temple, I argue it was his attempt to upend unjust economic policies that highlighted inequalities among the people and took people’s attention from worshipping God. To follow Jesus then is to be concerned with and pursue solutions to undo the structural oppression we all live under. How can Pietists be thought partners along with other followers of Jesus in making this world more just and inclusive for all?

Stirred by Tender Pietism

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In his stirring rendition of “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” Christopher Gehrz illumined for me the reality that a fair amount of what I’ve experienced as just part of my heritage is indebted to Pietism. I needed barely to  read more than that one of my favorite hymns, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” has Pietist roots to grasp this.

This intrigued me enough that I pursued Gehrz’s fuller comments on the song writer, Carolina Sandell, learned that she is his favorite hymn writer, that she engaged in bride (of Christ) mysticism, and that

Still more controversially, she inherited the Radical Pietist and Moravian interest in the divine feminine. The first draft of “Thy Holy Wings” asked God to spread “warm mother’s wings,” and a hymn inspired by the martyrdom of Swedish missionaries in Ethiopia implored God to “tenderly hover” over Christ’s witnesses on Earth, “Embracing their cares like a mother.”

Reading this took me to my childhood as an often-lost missionary kid trying to survive both the beauties and bafflements of life in Cuba and Mexico. By the time I was 12 the crosscurrents of the missionary experience and my escape into secular inspirations like science fiction had me flirting with atheism. Yet repeatedly a backdrop of hymns and gospel music playing most bedtimes on a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder brought comfort amid pain.

Many a troubled night I’d listen to songs like George Beverly Shea singing “Tenderly He Watches.” Here the controversy of feminine images for God is dialed back. This is done perhaps intentionally and as Sandell herself sometimes seems to do (not least as in “Heavenly Father” children safely to God’s “bosom” are gathered). God remains in such renderings a male who watches over me not as but “like” a mother, a “mother watching o’er her babies.” Still the tenderness is explicitly and implicitly palpable, and it strikes me how often Pietist-flavored hymns leaven the sternness of traditionally patriarchal faith expressions.

When I aged into a culture-shocked teenager trying to make sense of college in the U.S. after leaving Mexico just months before, key to my surviving the tough days was lying many an evening on the couch watching the reels turn on what was now my more advanced stereo Dokorder tape recorder. I would put on the most tender hymns I knew. Shades of Sandell.

Which then takes my heart and memories back to the scores of hymns offering God’s tender care that healed my wounds way back then, bless me still today, and surrounded the bed of my dying mother-in-law Mildred. As she faded, her daughter and my wife Joan, along with our three daughters, sat by her bed singing such hymns. We accompanied the tracks playing on an old Ipod I had loaded with hundreds of hymns and gospel songs for Mildred to go to sleep to in her retirement community much as I had as a boy.

Many of the songs,  in fact, were precisely the same ones I had listened to in Cuba and Mexico, plenty of them with that Pietist flavor. I had resurrected them by buying lost vinyl records on Ebay and laboriously transferring them to the MP3s that eventually ended up on my and Mildred’s Ipods.

All of which is to say this: I certainly have long loved such hymns. But it was Gehrz who helped me more fully understand that through them I was experiencing aspects of a Pietism that did indeed help save my life.

I need to rethink some of my own personal history and my Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage in light of Gehrz. I’ve under-credited Pietism. I’ve long been reasonably aware that strands of piety did heavily influence the communities within which I was most primally shaped. I’ve been less aware that these pieties were not just floating in the Anabaptist-Mennonite air but were a gift from sources such as Sandell and the many others Gehrz identifies, including Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Franck, and more.

Citing Roger Olson, Gehrz observes that “if there is no Pietist movement, we might nonetheless discover what Olson calls ‘the Pietist ethos’ in Lutheran, Wesleyan, Baptist, Anabaptist, Reformed, and other churches represented by other participants in this conversation.” Indeed.

Gehrz himself names what I might otherwise worry a tad about from within Anabaptist commitments to social ethics. This is the possibility that piety can so turn inward as to forsake the outward. I’ve heard Mennonite preachers worry, precisely, that the more Pietistic hymns can generate a me-and-God as opposed to us-and-God or God-and the-world Christianity.

Gehrz, however, makes the case that as with “Francke (1663-1727), personal conversion to Jesus Christ sparked social action.” And my own experience suggests that the tenderness that watches o’er the troubled ones of us safely in God’s bosom gathering can be a key source of returning to the world healed enough to care for it.

Thank you, Christopher, for this tender report, on behalf not only of your own tradition but our many traditions enriched by it, of a week in a Pietist’s life.

 

It is the Pietism That Brings Faith Alive: A Baptist Response

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Reading Christopher Gehrz’s essay about pietism, I was once again reminded of my primal Baptist experience, a bit of which I have narrated in an earlier post. His essay helps clarify for me that pietism was alive and well in that Baptist congregation in northern Virginia in the late 1970s. I was taught that the Christian life was definitely NOT mainly about doctrine, or about ritual, or about tradition, and certainly not about politics, but instead about a vital, living relationship with Jesus Christ.

We too were taught to come to church not just to learn things but to draw near to Jesus, to feel that spark of connection, to sense the “sweet, sweet” Holy Spirit descending on the community and on the individual Christian heart. We too were taught to get up every morning, read Scripture and pray fervently. A day could not begin well without that practice. We too were invited into (multiple) small group experiences every week. And we too were instructed to demonstrate this vital, loving, heartbeat of faith in our daily interactions with others.

I continue to be struck by the legacy of pietism in one of the most crucial and distinctive primal Baptist practices that I experienced. It was not uncommon — indeed it was quite common — to be asked to speak extemporaneously in a Bible study, Sunday School class, or even public church service, to narrate “what Jesus was doing” in our lives, how he “showed up” this week, what the Spirit was teaching or telling one or more of us. We learned so much from this practice, including the very fact of it — Christians were just the kinds of people who could offer such storytelling at the drop of a hat.

Even in more formal settings, such as ministerial ordination councils or job interviews for academic posts, often the very first inquiry looked like this: “Would you please share your testimony with our committee?” And that did not mean testifying under oath, but instead telling the story of how one came to enjoy a vivid personal relationship with Jesus and what it meant today. Think about that. The first question was not about an academic c.v., publishing history, or point of doctrine, but whether we could offer a pious testimony.

Such testimonies could not be evaluated objectively. But evaluating was going on nonetheless. I would say that testimonies were tested primarily for feelings such as passion, vitality, and devotion. The sisters and brothers needed to get to, or near, the “heart” of the candidate, to sense a kind of shared heartbeat, a resonance of devotion and Spirit. They wanted to be able to “sense” that this person was a “true Christian.” That was essential before the newbie could be admitted into full, trusting participation in the community. And the expectation was not just pious feelings, but a pious life. A devout person living a devout life, not just by churchgoing and praying but through high standards of morality.

This background, filtered through Brother Gehrz’s essay, helps me clarify why I find coldhearted, coldblooded, doctrinaire, politicized, and sometimes amoral Christian folks — so visible in our context and this moment — to be so completely befuddling. You see, I was taught that being a Christian was a matter of the heart, of the Spirit, and the spirit, of the LIFE. And that a healthy Christian community could only be sustained when this expectation of true heart-religion, lived religion, was expected of everyone. Being a Christian is certainly about more than affirming orthodoxy, voting for the right party, and owning the libs. How did so many so badly lose their way?

Perhaps the Mother and Child Reunion is Only a Couple Clarifications Away

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  To paraphrase the 1972 Paul Simon hit:  

Now I would not give you false hope, 

on these great and mournful [Lenten] days. 

But the mother [Lutheran] and child [Pietist] re-u-ni-on 

is just a couple of [theological] clarifications away.      

Can we grant that Lutheranism is the mother of Pietism?  This relationship is readily apparent when historians like Christopher Gehrz has in his paper considered the roles of Philip Spener and August H. Francke in the development of the Pietist movement.  Next month, I’ll proceed to remind us all that Wesley had his life-changing Aldersgate Experience while reading Martin Luther. 

    As for the reunions of mother and child, haven’t they transpired in a lot of ways?  Such reunions are incarnate in your Lutheran affiliation, Chris, in Harold’s early Christian nurture, and even in my pilgrimage from Haugean Norwegian Pietism to Evangelical Catholic Lutheran while in my heart and private devotional life never really leaving that Pietist legacy.  And these experiences are by no means atypical.  You and Roger Olson have both said this.  We both know how these links have been historically institutionalized in Lutheran denominations with a Pietist profile.  In America, one thinks of the Church and the Lutheran Brethren and the former Franckean Synod of our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America legacy.  And in Europe several Lutheran Free Churches and even at least one German Landeskirche are or have been decidedly Pietist in theological profile.  Of course I do not need to tell you, though perhaps other readers would find it interesting, about the Lutheran roots of the Moravian Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church, and the Evangelical Free Church.   

     Yes, the mother and child kinship of Lutheranism and Pietism is a reality.  But as Simon sings, I would not give us false hope.  Reunion is badly needed, but it won’t come easy.  We have had centuries of bad blood and schism between Pietism and Lutheran Orthodox Confessional theology.  We know the Lutheran denominations (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod) which want no part of the “Pietist corruption” of Lutheranism.  And then, as you have probably noticed, classical Lutheran Pietism is a dying breed in our denomination.  It does not seem to have much of a voice in denominational headquarters’ personnel or programming, and in my own lifetime I have seen it diminishing in the denomination’s theological profile, to the point of no longer having a real voice.  With recent retirements, I do not know of a single Pietist serving on the faculty in any  seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, do you?   

     Of course the Pietist legacy is still around.  Even denominational headquarters are proud and still support a lot of our numerous social-service agencies, most with Pietist origins (E. Clifford Nelson, The Lutherans in North America, pp.197-199).  (Lutherans are said to have more of such agencies in America than any other Protestant denominational family.).  And even denominational leaders know and from time-to-time (when not caught up in the latest “must-do” management or social-media program) urge more small-group Bible studies.   What will it take to get a more vibrant trust of Pietism in American Lutheranism?  What will it take for Pietists to overcome a sense that Lutheran Confessionalism is a barrier to its agenda?  It’s just a couple of theological clarifications (in dialogue with your paper, Chris, away).            

     You start out by defining Pietism in terms of practice, with a slight critique aimed at just knowing the Church’s theology.  My first Lutheran Confessional reaction to that comment is to raise the question of who is practicing the faith.  The concern is whether you are advocating the autonomous practice of faith.  What of grace and the Holy Spirit (The Small Catechism, II.III. 6)?  If you and Pietism would systemically make it clearer that all practice is by God’s grace, driven by the Holy Spirit, that practice of the faith is not an autonomous choice, then a lot of Lutheran Confessional (and maybe Reformed Confessional) suspicions would go away.    

      Next question (call for clarification): Though perhaps there have been Dogmatic Orthodox theologians who have reduced the Christianity to doctrine, I do not know of a single theologian of our denomination who does that.  For most of us who are Confessional, doctrine and theology are the grammar and etiquette of faith.  They teach you how to speak and behave properly.  It is like Martin Luther said: When you have your doctrine clear and pure, you will also live a holy life (The Small Catechism, III.1.5).  Can a Pietist live with that understanding of Confessional fidelity?  Spener could, as he spoke of the pure doctrine he and his colleagues maintained (Pia Desideria, p.51).  Mother and child always have been united it seems, and just not always noticed it.  But if you have too much stress on practice and not enough on doctrine, then the winds of change can easily get you moving towards secularized practices, and I fear that in too much mainline Lutheranism an insufficient lack of understanding what they believed has led them to follow the practice of Liberal Theology.     

      Professor Gehrz also says that the Pietist actually wants to meet Jesus, not just think about the idea of Christ.  This can be a problem with some versions of Lutheranism and Protestantism which teach Forensic Justification (the belief that God merely declares us righteous).  Such a manner of teaching justification and our encounter with God largely prevailed in Lutheran Orthodox Theology against which Pietism first reacted and was the version of Luther Wesley read (Luther’s Works, Vol.25, pp.31,37).  But when we recognize that Luther understood justification in terms of union with Christ (Luther’s Works, Vol.31, p.351; The Smalcald Articles, III.13.1), and as American Lutheranism more and more embraces this notion that in faith we are intimately united with Christ, then it should be in interests of Pietism to embrace Lutheranism and even embrace this Mystical concept more than many of its practitioners historically have.  Indeed, a Pietism caught up in the joy of intimacy with Christ will not need so many directives, exercises, and guidelines (Third Use of the Law) and can instead freely respond to the love of God like a happily married couple can spontaneously revel in their love  

without too many guidelines.  That’s the real freedom which Professor Gehrz says he wants in his closing comments.  But too often the directives and guidelines of Pietism have led to rule-bound Christianity and guilt-trips, at least in my expereince.  In that connection, I am pleased to note, Christopher, that you did not say anything about striving for perfection like Spener (Pia Desideria, p.81) or most Methodists and Holiness Christians, as that could be a deal-breaker for the reunion from the Lutheran side with our commitment to simul iustus et peccator (Luther’s Works, Vol.25, pp.258,332).                              

     Lutherans also believe that they meet Jesus in the Lord’s Supper, as well as all the faithful in the historic liturgy (The Augsburg Confession, X).  And since Chris concedes that at least some Pietists believe this, the question becomes why Pietism has historically tended to be associated with less fidelity to liturgical worship and Sacramental life.  Why be judgmental of the dangers of “going through the motions.?”            

     Professor Gehrz also characterizes Pietism as believing in a God Who speaks through Scriptures.  This belief and commitment to regular Bible study is precisely in line with Lutheran thinking, as Luther himself embraced a story-telling hermeneutic, not only unlike the Black church’s conviction that we can find ourselves among God and Christ in the Biblical accounts (Weimar  Ausgabe, Vol.10I/1, p.130).  These three traditions are natural coalition partners in trying to foster revival in an American Christianity struggling to reverse the growth of the Nones (Religiously Unaffiliated) and the ever-growing Biblical illiteracy in our churches.  We’ve got a living Bible, not just a book of doctrine.   

    This coalition is a natural on two other agendas that Professor Gehrz sees as characterizing  Pietism.  He notes how Swedish and Norwegian Pietists were counter-cultural, breaking the established laws which were unjust.  Of course the Black church is our model for that kind of way of following Jesus, and it’s certainly part of the Anabaptist heritage.  Thus Pietists and Lutherans have got some allies.  Though the Lutheran Church has not lived it out historically very well, its Theology of the Cross with its affirmation that God is seen through suffering and the Cross, that God destroys of the wisdom of the world  (Heidelberg Disputation, 20), clearly creates a counter-cultural ethos which opens the doors to endorsing the sort of counter-cultural Christianity practiced in Pietist circles (practicing spirituality, praying, and Bible reading when it is not fashionable).  Don’t we have some clear grounds for a mother and child reunion?  And this is a reunion which could help the Lutheran church and other mainline denominations to get the revival we need in trying to stem our membership erosion. 

     Professor Gehrz highlights a point I have already made about how Pietist faith sparks social action.  This is a part of its heritage I love.  But although I agree that conversion to Christ motivates our social engagement, again I want to ask if a Pietist can concede the Lutheran belief that it is best if you seek to rely on reason and the natural law in formulating social policy (Apology of The Augsburg Confession, XV; Romans 2:14-15), for then you are less dogmatic about the “purity” and non-negotiability of the social positions you take.  I submit that my hero H. N. Hague did that, relied on reason and common sense, in setting up his paper-mills and sketching other strategies for the Norwegian economy (The Apostle of Norway, Ch.XLI).  A Pietism open to this sort of social ethic can cut through a lot of misconceptions about its realism and the role it might play as an ally in and for Lutherans coping with the realities of modern-day life.  Working in tandem, Pietism and Confessional Lutheranism (and others of its theological and liturgical stripe) might be able to marshal the clout and media interest to turn things around among all who would follow Jesus, to get the kind of attention American Christianity might need to kindle a revival.  Let’s get to work on the clarifications it will take to build this mother-child coalition.                

Pondering on a Pietistic Week

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One dictionary’s first definition of pious is “having or showing a dutiful reverence for God, or an earnest wish to fulfill religious obligations.” Another is “sacred rather than secular.” It is unfortunate, however, that two definitions in that same dictionary treat the word pious as a pejorative term: “practiced or used with real or pretended religious motives, or for some ostensibly good object” and “characterized by a hypocritical concern for virtue.” Sadly, too often when we refer to a woman as being a pious individual, many would not perceive that remark to be a compliment to her. For that reason, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to read and reflect on Dr. Christopher Gehrz’s excellent essay on how a Pietist follows Jesus.

One of my earliest encounters with pietistic movements took place some time ago when I read a series of biographies of John Wesley. One biographer described Wesley’s fear and apprehension during a rough storm as he and his company crossed the Atlantic; John realized how terrified he was of death. The author explained that “a terrible screaming began amongst the English. The Germans [Moravians] calmly sang on.” After the worst had passed, Wesley asked one of the Moravians, “Were you not afraid?” He replied, “Thank God, no. . . . Our women and children are not afraid to die.” “Wesley rejoiced to be in the presence of such Christians,” the author added. “The Moravians’ conduct seemed to confirm the strength of beliefs built on Primitive Christianity.” For the greater part of the voyage, Wesley “agonized about the best way to pursue the pattern of holiness which at the time he thought was the most certain road to redemption.” (Roy Hattersley, A Brand from the Burning: The Life of John Wesley, 2003, 104, 105.)

I appreciated reading Jakob Spener’s comment that “It is by no means enough to have knowledge of the Christian faith, for Christianity consists rather of practice.” This intrigues me. I have discovered that far too often the depth of one’s Christianity seems to depend far more on orthodoxy than orthopraxy. In my own case, the ever-present attack on my own faith and way of life seems always to be centered in what one believesrather than what one does or, more importantly, what one is or is becoming. I do not encounter many assaults on my faith and my people for being strongly family conscious; for having a welfare program that cares for members of our Church who cannot meet their financial obligations; for a humanitarian center that responds quickly to victims throughout the world, to those not of our faith, in times of disaster—hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, earthquakes. Too often the test of a person’s Christianity is not an examination of one’s heart, by the way he or she deals justly and charitably toward others. Instead, it is determined by one’s acceptance or non-acceptance of rational theological propositions. I love the words of a later paragraph: “[S]he worries that right belief too easily decays into a ‘dead orthodoxy.’”

I appreciate Christopher’s observation that “while our Pietist might repeat the words of a creed or nod along with the theology presented from the pulpit, she has come to church this Sunday primarily to experienceGod through practice, not just to have her belief in God reaffirmed. . . . [S]he is here to meet Jesus, not just to think about the idea of Christ. . . . [S]he might admit that the most important part of the service is a simple hymn.” I particularly identify with this last sentence. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I am now in my 75th year of life, but I find myself weeping during the singing of a hymn far more often than I did as a 40-year old. That is especially the case with hymns that focus on Christ and what He has done for each of us. The chorus of one beloved hymn that stirs my soul is “O it is wonderful that he should care for me enough to die for me. O it is wonderful, wonderful to me!” Another hymn, in which Jesus is the speaker, is:

Reverently and meekly now, let thy head most humbly bow.

Think of me, thou ransomed one; think what I for thee have done.

With my blood that dripped like rain, sweat in agony of pain,

With my body on the tree I have ransomed even thee.

The same is true when the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is passed to the congregation. Partaking of the emblems of the body and blood of the Savior—reminding ourselves what it cost to win our salvation—is deeply moving to me.

Dr. Gehrz wrote that our “modern-day Pietist can’t shake her desire for something more: the new life that starts with new birth; grace that doesn’t just declare sinners just, but regenerates and sanctifies them.” About a decade ago I decided that I no longer believe in imputed righteousness—that justification is merely a statement of my legal standing before God, that I was not righteous myself but rather the righteousness of Christ had been imputed to me. I simply can’t buy that notion any longer. I believe the scriptures teach us that through exercising faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and by repenting of our sins, we can become truly righteous by virtue of the Lord’s atoning sacrifice. I believe we can be worthy. We can become righteous. We can become holy people. I believe that this is not juridical, but is actual.

I identify with Dr. Gerhz’s statement that “our Pietist knows that her relationship through Christ must intersect with her relationship with other followers of Jesus.” I am fully persuaded that the Christian life must be lived out in community. A person whose heart has been changed, whose soul has been transformed, comes to love God in a whole new way. He or she lives a life of thanksgiving, in a state of gratitude, acknowledging always the hand of God in all things. We come to know the love of God by receiving and accepting his Only Begotten Son as Savior and Lord (John 3:16)—that is, when our vertical relationship (with the Almighty) is put right. Being enlightened and cleansed by the Holy Spirit, we are in a much better position to reach out and bless the lives of others. That is, the love of God we have enjoyed can now be extended to others by us. In this way, our horizontal relationship (with the children of God) is put right. John the Beloved wrote: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16, NIV). I like the comment of Don Fisk that Dr. Gehrz referred to, that our new life in Christ consists in “following Jesus by following him into the world.”

I really like Christopher’s thought that to be truly converted is to “see the world through the eyes of Christ, to share his compassion, to perceive his will for the world, and to strive to follow it.” I believe this is what the Lord had in mind when he spoke of a woman or a man having “an eye single to the glory of God” (Matthew 6:22). For one who’s eye is single to God and His glory, it’s the kingdom of God or nothing. I believe this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote to the Corinthians that those who seek for and maintain the Holy Spirit in their lives gain “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). To think like the Master, to feel like the Master, to act like the Master—that is the grand goal, the path on which true followers of Jesus press forward.

A Week in the Life of a Pietist

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In many ways, I represent the most unusual member of this gathering of Christian traditions. So I hope you’ll understand if my version of the lead essay seems atypical as well.

Please join me in imagining a week in the life of a Pietist seeking to follow Jesus.

The Power — and Limits — of Corporate Worship

Let us first follow her to worship on Sunday morning. Immediately, we notice that “Pietist” is not found in the name of her church. If she worships with a congregation of the Evangelical Covenant Church, we might overhear some reference to those Christians’ heritage as “missional Pietists.” Something similar is possible, but still less likely, if we find ourselves in a Converge (Baptist), Evangelical Free, or formerly Augustana Lutheran church, since those are historical cousins of the Covenant, fellow offshoots of a mid-19th century revival in Sweden whose leading periodical was called Pietisten. Or if it’s a Methodist, Moravian, or Brethren congregation that’s particularly attentive to its history, we might happen to hear how John Wesley, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, or Alexander Mack took inspiration from a now-defunct movement in early modern Europe called Pietism.

None of those instances is probable. For unlike every other participant in this year-long conversation, the Pietist Tradition has no ecclesial shape or institutional structure. And the number of Christians worldwide who identify as Pietist is vanishingly small.

Yet theologian Roger Olson claims that Pietism “became the main form of Protestantism” in North America (The Story of Christian Theology, p. 491). For if there is no Pietist movement, we might nonetheless discover what Olson calls “the Pietist ethos” in Lutheran, Wesleyan, Baptist, Anabaptist, Reformed, and other churches represented by other participants in this conversation.* 

But if we’re to recognize that ethos this Sunday morning, we first need to keep in mind what Pietist forefather Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) wrote in the pivotal passage of the original movement’s founding text, Pia Desideria: “It is by no means enough to have knowledge of the Christian faith, for Christianity consists rather of practice.” So while our Pietist might repeat the words of a creed or nod along with the theology presented from the pulpit, she has come to church this Sunday primarily to experience God through practice, not just to have her belief in God reaffirmed.

To put too fine a point on it: she is here to meet Jesus, not just to think about the idea of Christ.

So even if she frets that she is participating in a version of Christianity prone to anti-intellectualism, she might admit that the most important part of the service is a simple hymn. Perhaps one by Lina Sandell, the greatest poet of the Swedish revival. Tears well up as our Pietist sings softly of a God who resembles both the heavenly father who gathers his children close to his chest and the mother hen who spreads gentle, holy wings around her chicks, a God who makes mercies known “day by day, and with each passing moment.”

As that music fades and the preacher begins the sermon, our Pietist hopes not so much to hear an erudite exposition of Scripture as what Spener begged of his fellow Lutheran clergy: “plain but powerful” preaching that touches “the inner man or the new man” — or inner/new woman — “whose soul is faith and whose expressions are the fruits of life.”

Of course, our Pietist may also encounter God through other means available in any Christian worship service: prayers, readings, and sacraments or ordinances. But in all these practices, she might find herself unable to shake the spiritual dissatisfaction that has always energized Pietism, for better and for worse. She might reproach herself for suspecting other Christians of going through the motions of rote repetition. Still, she worries that right belief too easily decays into a “dead orthodoxy” that makes no discernible difference in how believers live. Most of all, she longs for a Christianity more “authentic” than a religion of custom and culture.

She might then start to admit that Spener’s critics weren’t wrong to coin “Pietist” as a pejorative for Christians who seem to think themselves more pious than their neighbors. But our modern-day Pietist can’t shake her desire for something more: the new life that starts with new birth; grace that doesn’t just declare sinners just, but regenerates and sanctifies them. 

The Devotional Life

And she has long since decided that Pietism’s “living faith” depends on practices and experiences other than corporate worship led by a member of the clergy. So as Monday (or any other) morning dawns, we find our Pietist seeking God by herself, practicing the solitary piety of private devotions. She prays to a God who is always listening; she studies scriptures inspired by a God who is always speaking.

In the pages of the Old and New Testaments, our Pietist seeks transformation, not information; relationship, not rules. For the Bible, as the Covenant Church has taught, is above all “an altar where we meet the living God.” “Pietists loved the Bible,” explain Roger Olson and Christian Collins Winn, “not because it contains propositional truths about God to feed the mind, but because it is the principal medium for the Christian’s relationship with God” (Reclaiming Pietism, p. 99). In God’s written word, our Pietist meets the living Word and walks alongside him — traveling her own version of the Emmaus Road until Jesus’ teaching leaves her heart burning within her.

But just as Cleopas did not walk alone, our Pietist knows that her relationship with God through Christ must intersect with her relationship with other followers of Jesus. The next evening she repeats the same spiritual disciplines, but now in the company of a few others. By meeting weekly with her small group, she repeats the oldest, most influential innovation of the original Pietist movement. Even before Spener published Pia Desideria, a lawyer named Johann Jakob Schütz convinced him to convene collegia pietatis outside of their larger congregation — little churches within the larger church (ecclesiolae in ecclesia) whose members worked through prayer and study toward a closer connection with God and each other.

While that idea went back at least as far as the early years of Martin Luther’s reformation (or the late medieval Brethren of the Common Life), it was the German Pietist movement that established small group Bible study as a staple of modern Christianity. Like much of the Pietist ethos, that kind of collective practice has become so pervasive as to seem mundane. Yet “inoffensive as [Spener’s conventicles] might sound,” explains historian Alec Ryrie, “they marked a decisive shift in religious power” (Protestants, p. 162) — from the clergy to the laity, from the church hierarchy to the common priesthood. When my Swedish ancestors — like their Haugean counterparts in Norway — met in their small groups, they were breaking laws established in protection of state churches that jealously guarded those institutions’ right to control the meaning of God’s word. The very existence of the small group underscores that, for Pietists, no single person and no single understanding of Scripture has the authority of the Bible itself, whose interpretation requires multiple perspectives, lest old error maintain itself against the correction of new insights.

Of course, that doesn’t happen if the small group simply clusters like minds together. But if our Pietist’s version of the collegia is anything like Spener’s original, it spans the theological and political divisions of its time. It serves as an enduring witness to the original Pietist desire that Christians cease their “angry polemics” and “needless controversy” and restore something of the unity that Jesus prayed for and Paul exhorted.

Making Faith Active in Love

At the same time, such devotional practices also highlight a danger inherent to the Pietist Tradition. Mennonite scholar Robert Friedmann, for example, scorned Pietism as “a quiet conventicle-Christianity which is primarily concerned with the inner experience of salvation and only secondarily with the expression of love toward the brotherhood, and not at all in a radical world transformation” (Mennonite Piety Through the Centuries, p. 11). As she heads into the second half of her week, our Pietist might worry that she’s being “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.”

But after she wakes up the next morning and continues her regular daily routines at work, home, and elsewhere, she may be conscious of the other great legacy of German Pietism: August Hermann Francke’s commitment to make faith active in love of others.

For Francke (1663-1727), personal conversion to Jesus Christ sparked social action: the creation of an orphanage and schools that took in poor children, a university that trained pastors, missionaries, and military chaplains, a pharmacy that healed illnesses, and a publishing house that churned out affordable Bibles and devotional literature. But even if our Pietist doesn’t work in education, health care, or what we’d tend to think of as Christian ministry, Francke would tell her that Christian faith can be made lovingly active in a myriad of ways. Whatever her vocation and wherever her setting, advised Francke, the Pietist should carry out her “calling joyfully and cheerfully to the glory of God and his neighbor’s good without greed.”

As the week continues and these God-glorifying, neighbor-loving practices repeat, our Pietist lives out her new life in Christ as the Covenant theologian Don Frisk defined it, following Jesus by following him into the world:

Whatever form conversion takes it will be characterized by entrance into freedom — the freedom which comes through the presence of Christ in one’s life — and by involvement in Christ’s mission to the world. To be converted to Christ is always in a sense to be converted (turned) to the world. It is to see the world through the eyes of Christ, to share his compassion, to perceive his will for the world, and to strive to follow it.

 

* Olson even claims overlap with Pentecostalism, his home tradition. Precisely because the Pietist ethos leavens so many different versions of Christianity, it would be a waste of scarce words to sketch all the differences. I’ve tried instead to emphasize what Pietists might have in common. To give some specificity, I’ve leaned most heavily on my own branch of Pietism, that stemming from the 19th century renewal within Swedish Lutheranism that — after migration to the United States — gave rise to my home denomination (the Evangelical Covenant Church) and my employer of nearly twenty years (Bethel University). 

Responding to Eleven Very Gracious Christian Friends

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It was a treat reading the engagement of the entire “Following Jesus” team with my little essay laying out my understanding of Baptist ways of following Jesus.

I especially appreciated how my turn to spiritual autobiography elicited considerable storytelling from other sisters and brothers in Christ. There is something instructive there, I think. Certainly many of our traditions make testimony, in one form or another, an important part of the discipleship journey. I cannot count the number of times I have been asked to “share my testimony,” nor the occasions in which worship services included spontaneous or planned testimony times. While such testimony times can reinforce individualism and self-focus, at their best they serve as sources of instruction about the Christian journey. We teach each other about the spiritual journey with Christ through the stories we tell.

I would like to respond, however briefly, to each of the essays so graciously offered by our team. It was like a conversation with eleven very gracious Christian friends. We should do this more often!

To David Ford and the Orthodox, with a nod also to Sarah Lancaster and the Wesleyan tradition, I want to heartily affirm the term “sanctification” with the meaning of real, actual, growth in holiness, to name what is supposed to happen in that never-ending journey of Christian discipleship. I have been struck by how few Baptist pastors and churches actually use the term. I also affirm the church as the community in which together, deploying all relevant resources of past and present, we pursue sanctification as both gift (of God’s Spirit) and task (involving our effort). I see sanctification more as becoming fully human in Christ than as theosis, but that is an old argument, isn’t it?

To Randall Balmer and the Anglicans, Sarah Lancaster, and Mark Ellingsen for the Lutherans, I want to reaffirm that 1) my conversionism remains strong, though I know it is not everyone’s story, 2) the Wesleyan version that Sarah laid out really offers an enriching contrast with the Baptist paradigm I encountered, and 3) I cannot accept infant baptism as part of the conversionist paradigm, except perhaps as marking a kind of conversionist opportunity for many parents, as the depth of their Christian-formation responsibilities with their child are so powerfully symbolized.

I also want to put Terry Todd’s poignant Pentecostal response together with Michael King’s Anabaptist account and with Mark Ellingsen’s post to affirm this truth: Baptist/evangelical conversionism can create spiritual morbidities when especially young or hyper-scrupulous people are unable to be convinced that their conversion is “sure” or has “taken.” Add that to the constantly ramped-up fear of hell and this is a path to spiritual panic.

The Lutheran perspective that we remain sinners who must repent again and again is a very helpful corrective here: who among us is truly “converted”? And yet we semi-converted semi-followers of Jesus are the ones on the journey of discipleship. Such paradoxes abound in the Christian life.

Wes Granberg-Michaelson (Reformed), Christina Wassell (Roman Catholic), Farris Blount (Black Baptist), and really most of the posts in one form or another, worried about individualism and individualist tendencies in Baptist versions of Christianity, especially in our very individualist society. I agree. Such individualism can make Christians little more than church-hopping, church-shopping consumers, pulling us away (as Farris mentions) from thinking about where we can best serve, to instead focus on where we can best be served. Individualism can also fragment churches theologically as people have no framework of accepted authority to settle doctrinal differences. It can also make Christians and congregations utterly blind to their social, ethical, and political responsibilities.

I do agree with Terry, however, that the term “conscience,” which can be collective but is sometimes quite lonely and individual, needs emphasis. I have indeed taken a number of conscientious stands in my career; they have been driven by my conscience and conviction, and they have sometimes broken with the convictions of  the communities to which I belonged.

On the issue of what’s my beef with the US Reformed types, Wes’s essay named it better than I ever have, and that kind of tactical/political Reformed theology bears no resemblance to what I see in winsome people like Wes Granberg-Michaelson, and so many others — many of whom I have encountered in wintry climes in Michigan!

I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize to Christina for my assumptions relater to her parish and its relation with Vatican II and the current pope. Thank you for your grace and for that clarification.

I want to thank Robert Millet (LDS Church) for his storytelling related to the endless altar call from his own friend. That is truly bad form. Conversionism can be experienced as spiritually abusive. I am impressed, Robert, that your friendship survived. That says much about your own Christian maturity and God’s grace in and through you. Remind me to tell you about the time when I was 18-years-old and I held open an altar call for twenty minutes in order to browbeat my ex-girlfriend into converting so that she could she be my “equally yoked” girlfriend once again…

Finally, with special nods to Christopher Gehrz (Pietist) and Michael King (Anabaptist), and others as well, it is certainly true that my professional work has involved an awful lot of articulating Christian social ethics. (Thanks for several kind comments about my work!) I agree with Christopher that being irenic is not enough, though it is a heckuva lot better than the irascibility so often encountered in Christian circles. Still, we need a social ethic. And developing that social ethic takes a lot of work — biblical, historical, theological, social-scientific, and every other kind of resource is needed to do it well. It also involves a willingness to take hard, definite stands and to make arguments against other views. It can be assumed to connect with and to create controversy. Some of what Christian ethics does challenges the world and its powers. All of it challenges the church.

I have made one more (one final?) book-length effort along those lines. It comes out on Monday, February 28 — the day this essay is due. Check it out: it’s called Introducing Christian Ethics: Core Convictions for Christians Today. This is my “here I stand, I can do no other” statement of core beliefs.

There are indeed days where I wish for what seemed the relative simplicity of my new-convert days. My Christian vision was simpler. My sense of calling was simpler. Both church and world seemed simpler. But Christian life is a journey, and there is no going back, only forward.

I am glad to be on this journey with so many wonderful Christian kinfolk.

 

 

 

 

Conscience of a Baptist

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My mother grew up a Southern Baptist. She was born a stone’s throw from the small clapboard church in Shiloh, Tennessee, where she first met the Lord and learned the hymns she sang throughout her life:  Tell Me the Story of Jesus, I Love to Tell the Story, and In the Garden.  Each one of those hymns, and many more, expressed a deep intimacy with Jesus as Lord, Savior, Friend, even Lover. (If you don’t believe me on that last point, listen more closely to In the Garden.)  And she was tutored to believe, as I was in my childhood church, in the supremacy of the white race and the inferiority of black people, a reality I could not see clearly until my adult conversion to Pentecostal faith and practice.  Such are the moral contradictions of being a white American evangelical – Jesus loves me this I know, but you . . . not so much.

U.S. Protestant revivals in the nineteenth century – Baptist and Methodist, black and white and Native American, the occasional Presbyterian, and a spiritual hothouse of others, to use Jon Butler’s memorable phrase – showered a Jesus-inflected language on hymnody, preaching, and prayer in evangelical Protestantism. This Jesus language is also evident in David Gushee’s account of his conversion at New Providence Baptist Church in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, back in the late 1970s:  invite Jesus into your heart and accept him as your personal savior.

David, I was deeply moved that you began not in an abstract manner about Baptist ways of following Jesus. You start with your testimony. You start with how Jesus changed your life. Your experience and your witness would be recognizable to most of the world’s Pentecostals. In the church where I serve, we shout as someone stands to narrate their deliverance: “Tell your story!” “Tell your story!”

In the 1970s – David, we must be around the same age – I had similar conversion experiences.  I say “experiences” because my personal relationship with Jesus seemed never to stick.  Jesus and I kept breaking up and getting back together.  You could say I was born again. And again. And again. Preachers never really explained, not to my satisfaction, what it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus. The emphasis was almost never on Jesus as teacher; the message of atonement through blood sacrifice took center stage.  An incomplete notion of atonement, if you ask me.  Back then, in order to  answer rightly the question asked in evangelical revival spaces in the 1970s – If you died tonight, where would you spend eternity?  Heaven or hell? – I would give my life to Jesus repeatedly. I did it to escape the fear of damnation that haunted my nightmares, yes, and also in hope that I would experience again the fleeting moments of intimacy with the God-man. Oh, what a friend we have in Jesus! Can we find a friend so faithful, Who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness; Take it to the Lord in prayer . . . 

I was surprised – maybe you were as well? – that Gushee offers only a passing reference to baptism. He doesn’t dwell on the eponymous practice but rather on the Christian life that comes after it, what he calls, in good evangelical parlance, discipleship, a word familiar in most Pentecostal settings as well.  With that old-school term – discipleship –Gushee pushes closer to our guiding question of what it means to follow Jesus.  He writes succinctly of Christian faith “as receiving the ultimate gift (of God’s saving love in Christ) and undertaking the ultimate task (of reorienting one’s life to serve Christ with everything).”   Personal conversation is necessary, he seems to be saying, but not sufficient. “A social, ethical, political vision is needed and not just a personal one.”

As one of the world’s most prominent Christian ethicists, David Gushee has spent a lifetime not just studying but practicing what it means to reorient one’s life to follow Jesus. Of course he recognizes the importance of context (place, space, and time) in defining what that means.  Take, for instance, the situation in what Gushee memorably calls “Baptistland.” Since the first time he walked into a Baptist church years ago, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention, has shown itself to be a welter of competing visions of what it means to follow Jesus.  Divisions have hardened in the last forty years and continue to grow more brittle within the SBC as within American life more generally.  Gushee himself got caught up in the battles.  His 2014 change of heart on same-sex relationships – that neither Jesus nor the Bible condemns such relationships – rocked the white evangelical world, bringing to Dr. Gushee a torrent of denunciations as well as grateful praise.

In making that courageous stand, was Gushee following Jesus?  I certainly think so.  Did he betray the SBC’s majority position? Yes. In doing so I wonder if David was living out another source of authority in Baptist faith and practice – conscience. After all, one of the signal achievements of Baptist theologizing has been to uphold personal conscience as a north star for charting ways to follow Jesus. This emphasis can tip over into individualism, sure, but more often it’s a crucial resource for calling a covenanted community – and maybe even a nation? – back to its senses.  Many Baptists of late have ignored the role of conscience, but such ignorance will not snuff out its light.

Dr. Gushee closes on a note of nostalgia, yearning (it seems) for the transformative faith he first experienced at that Virginia Baptist church back in the 1970s – “before the scorched-earth wounds and stuck arguments of forty years of US religio-political warfare.”  I get that nostalgia.  And I get the desire to be in fellowship with Baptists outside the United States since they have the wisdom and witness that arises from experiences far from these shores.  I yearn, too . . . for the Jesus-intimacy I experienced in my many conversions as a young adult. And I yearn, in spiritually arid moments today, for intimacy with the Holy Spirit who guides me when by God’s grace my ego allows it.

On this side of the basilea that Jesus taught us to pray for, following him will always and everywhere entangle us in the moral and ethical matters of our time and place. In the politics of our time.  I was not yet able to understand that fact in my upbringing among good and decent, Jesus-loving, God-fearing white evangelicals, including white Baptists, who continued to live out our old patterns of anti-black racism. We would not bring ourselves to see that our evangelical theologies had sustained slavery and Jim Crow, and now, the racial animosity that haunts so many quarters of MAGA-world.

I have stumbled countless times in my intention to follow Jesus.  Still, conscience (and consciousness-raising interventions by my spiritual siblings) has brought me to a new understanding of the kin-dom Jesus proclaimed.  In my best moments I have been able to grasp, through God’s grace, Paul’s world-shattering instruction to the church in Galatia. Possibly quoting a baptismal formula in circulation within early Christian communities, Paul proclaimed, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither make nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”  Translated into today’s argot, what are the radical implications for church and society today?  Perhaps only conscience can tell us.

Not Your Average Baptist, Methinks

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At the end of the day, I’m a sucker for a good conversion story.  The tale Dr. David Gushee shares in his posting is a moving account of a soul moving toward the open arms of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It conjured for me the youthful memories I share with him of what this encounter was like: “a rush of excitement, relief, and tears,” and on the other side of that moment, the realization that something had changed, and that consequently my life would have to change along with it.  It was glorious!  And while I no longer feel the language of ‘inviting Jesus into one’s heart’ in that classic, sinner’s-prayer-way is necessary for souls to enjoy union with Christ, I do think every soul (even and maybe especially those baptized as infants) should enjoy a moment of developmental maturity where suddenly one’s walk with the Lord becomes one’s own. 

It would be tiresome here to discuss the obvious ways that Catholics and Baptists disagree.  Dr. Gushee does, however, invite an interesting discussion about how his walk in the Baptist tradition is rather atypical.  While it could be described as the position of at least some Baptists that Catholics may be going straight to hell, or that Catholicism is a pagan cult masquerading as Christianity, Dr. Gushee has embraced certain aspects or practices of Catholicism in his response to my original posting.  He doesn’t get explicit about what this looks like, but it certainly makes a more welcoming space to talk about places where our traditions could enrich each other than some Baptists I’ve encountered.  

A concerning observation of the Baptist tradition for me (which Dr. Gushee mostly eludes) is a certain individualist bent.  The “me, Jesus and the Bible” take on Christianity that I’ve witnessed at times doesn’t resonate with my experience of what it means to submit to something larger than myself in the form of Holy Mother Church.  And yet, Dr. Gushee seems NOT to affirm this individualistic tendency when he writes: 

“A historical sensibility is needed to compare and contrast Baptist ways with other ways and to understand the ebb and flow of Baptist patterns over time. Such awareness would lead, among other things, to seeing that the churches as covenanted communities of disciples, and not just earnestly striving individuals, is the longer Baptist heritage.”

This idea of ‘covenanted communities’ seems somewhat closer to the experience of the Church that I most appreciate.  Presumably a covenanted community would become an entity more imposing than each individual member, and those individuals could lean in on that ‘largeness’ as a way to combat individualism.    Why is this important to me?  Because ‘me, Jesus, and the Bible’ can quickly turn in on itself. Human nature tends toward a kind of narcissism, and it becomes easy for us to remake Jesus into someone we want or need Him to be in a given moment without the safeguards of tradition, and how the Church has understood Him (or God’s Word, for that matter) through the many centuries.  I realize that last bit might make average Baptists uncomfortable…though maybe not Dr. Gushee?

I also love the Dr. Gushee shared in his response to my original posting that his wife’s conversion to Catholicism has been a part of the openness he has to the Roman Catholic tradition.  In one of the finest encyclicals on marriage, Casti Connubii, Pope Pius X1 asserts:

“This outward expression of love in the home demands not only mutual help but must go further; must have as its primary purpose that man and wife help each other day by day in forming and perfecting themselves in the interior life, so that through their partnership in life they may advance ever more and more in virtue, and above all that they may grow in true love toward God and their neighbor, on which indeed ‘dependeth the whole Law and the Prophets.’…This mutual molding of husband and wife, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof”  (23, 24).  

Dr. Gushee seems to exemplify this dynamism in marriage, as he has allowed his own Christian practice to become ‘hybridized,’ presumably in part as a way to live out the sacrament of marriage with his Catholic wife.  One could argue that marriage is also a safeguard against the narcissism which is rampant in our culture.  Dr. Gushee explains this openness to something outside his own Baptist tradition as fulfilling:  

“My spiritual life now feels whole, reflecting the entire religious trajectory of my often fragmented life and with each Christian tradition offering dimensions of liturgy, theology, tradition, church culture, and ethics that speak profoundly to me. This is religious hybridity, which is not unusual in these days but certainly not what I expected my journey would look like.”

I confess I can’t tell, reading his generous words, whether I hold a misguided stereotype of Baptists, or whether he just doesn’t fit the average mold of his tradition.  Perhaps it is both, and I’m certainly inspired by his openness! 

Still, every now and then Dr. Gushee worries me with language that does harken back to something I’d call individualistic.  For example, he writes, 

“I cannot claim to ‘represent’ either Baptists or Catholics. Just myself — and, yes, maybe a whole bunch of post-fundamentalists and post-evangelicals, yet another community in which I now claim some measure of religious identity.”

I say that this worries me because it sounds like so much depends on how each individual figures things out, in the context of his own walk with Christ.  It opens the door for a kind of ‘cafeteria Christianity’ where we pick and choose the parts that look yummy to us and assemble them according to our own preferences and sensibilities on our own divided plastic tray for personal consumption.  We might hear echos of individualism in this passage from Dr. Gushee as well:

“My path looks more like creative, critical, appropriation of scripture and tradition by modern Christian people who want to bring the best insights of the faith to bear in their lives and churches for the reign of God, care of creation, and human flourishing in this broken world. The riches of the Catholic tradition, including the insights of Vatican II, are a key part of that. Count me as one who honors the legacy of Vatican II and has attempted to weave its best work into my own efforts to follow Jesus.”

I’m of course thrilled that Dr. Gushee is open to the parts of the Roman Catholic Church that please him!  But somehow, this picking and choosing doesn’t ring true with my understanding of the obedience Christ demands when he calls us to follow Him.  Alas, this is the sadness of the fragmented Church, in that the call to follow our Lord is no longer a simple choice to follow Him, but rather a wading along trying to find our way through the many, many ‘Christian options.’  We have all played a part, in one way or another through our various traditions, in this fragmentation.  But Dr. Gushee makes it easy to hope, especially in that vibrant picture of the spiritually hungry young man he describes, that we can all continue to commit to being on the path, following Christ.  Dr. Gushee’s posting bears witness to a stalwart hope that Christ will lead us into truth, and to that heavenly banquet, where cafeteria trays will no longer be needed.

P.S.  Dr. Gushee, while part of your response to my posting read, “I cannot help but read Christina Wassell as belonging to one of the most resistant anti-Vatican II sectors of American Catholicism. I find myself in near-complete disagreement on that score,” I must politely ask you to reconsider.  

My attendance at an FSSP parish is a deliberate choice NOT to reject Vatican II.  The Fraternity celebrates the old rite in all its fullness and glory, but doggedly remains in full communion with Rome and the Holy Father.  There can certainly be disagreements about how elements of Vatican II have been implemented (any serious reader of the documents of the council has to admit that implementation of the documents has been faulty at best), but even in the midst of the harsh, recent motu proprio, the FSSP ascribes to a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ when it comes to Vatican II.  

Perhaps worth a look:  https://fssp.com/official-communique-following-the-publication-of-the-motu-proprio-traditionis-custodes/

Or:  https://onepeterfive.com/fssp-superior-distinguishes-fraternity-from-sspx-eschews-traditionalist-label/