Ross Douthat's "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" is useful as stimulus and hone.
However, "Reader Comments" were more informative than the text
itself. Perhaps this interplay between "text" and "context"
is the metalevel "point." It may even be the point of our whole Christian
Crisis. In effect, Central Texts are never as important
as the living conversations that takes place around it.
Authoritarianism - whether scriptural or sacerdotal - is not as important as
grassroots groundedness. The actual "culture" arising from a belief
system -- even when many formal beliefs do not appear on popular
"radar" is more important than the beliefs themselves. For example, I
doubt a single Catholic hierarch believes, de profundis, the
Vatican II view that "We are the church." Suffused by individual views that are as diverse as dogma-and-doctrine, we are reprising the existential
angst described by E.R. Dodds in his classic 1965 study, "Pagan and
Christian in an Age of Anxiety" (available online at
http://books.google.com/books?id=VBI6JppgQBAC&source=gbs_similarbooks) Drenched in partisan rancor, we live in the breach of a radical split between "the sacred" and
"the secular." Even more fundamentally, the "poles" have grown
antagonistic to one another, with "The Right" (always prone to puffy "Righteousness") hellbent on denying need for polar integration, polar unification, polar integrity. But unless "the right" and "the left" live
in closer-than-coital intimacy, they will both wither and die -- or
at least pupate -- as necessary prelude to the next integration, the next
fusion, the next unified field. In the meantime, there will be hell to pay. In the Dark Ages, "hell" was not "paid off" for 700 years.
We
will "get out of hell" when we realize that "The Left" and "The Right" will both collapse unless we realize an overarching reconciliation in which the urge to "excommunicate" "other" "believers" is anathema to the undeniable diversity of Christianity.
I marvel at the spectrum of faith and assume that the multiplicity of believers is the cornerstone of any church which aspires to transcend the narrow - and comforting - bounds of tribalism.
On the one hand, we have Amish fundamentalism, an absolutely pacifist and a biblically literal sect.
At another extreme of fundamentalism, I know Christian devotees who see nothing wrong with abortion since it is not mentioned in the Bible.
Under the umbrella of unbounded reconciliation, it only remains to be seen which Christians will excommunicate themselves by insisting on their own exclusive righteousness.
American
prophet, Wendell Berry, declares this act of faith: “I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that
God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love,
that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is
redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love,
incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward
wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with
God.” Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace:
The Agrarian Essays
Wholeness broaches no division (except, perhaps, self-separation) even when (perhaps especially when) division is rooted
in righteousness.
(Among Douthat's commentators, I draw your attention to Sequel, Adam S,
"gay priest" Mark Wood, and MS.)
Ross Douthat's "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" is useful as stimulus and hone.
However, "Reader Comments" were more informative than the text
itself. Perhaps this interplay between "text" and "context"
is the metalevel "point." It may even be the point of our whole Christian
Crisis. In effect, Central Texts are never as important
as the living conversations that takes place around it.
Authoritarianism - whether scriptural or sacerdotal - is not as important as
grassroots groundedness. The actual "culture" arising from a belief
system -- even when many formal beliefs do not appear on popular
"radar" is more important than the beliefs themselves. For example, I
doubt a single Catholic hierarch believes, de profundis, the
Vatican II view that "We are the church." Suffused by individual views that are as diverse as dogma-and-doctrine, we are reprising the existential
angst described by E.R. Dodds in his classic 1965 study, "Pagan and
Christian in an Age of Anxiety" (available online at
http://books.google.com/books?id=VBI6JppgQBAC&source=gbs_similarbooks) Drenched in partisan rancor, we live in the breach of a radical split between "the sacred" and
"the secular." Even more fundamentally, the "poles" have grown
antagonistic to one another, with "The Right" (always prone to puffy "Righteousness") hellbent on denying need for polar integration, polar unification, polar integrity. But unless "the right" and "the left" live
in closer-than-coital intimacy, they will both wither and die -- or
at least pupate -- as necessary prelude to the next integration, the next
fusion, the next unified field. In the meantime, there will be hell to pay. In the Dark Ages, "hell" was not "paid off" for 700 years.
We
will "get out of hell" when we realize that "The Left" and "The Right" will both collapse unless we realize an overarching reconciliation in which the urge to "excommunicate" "other" "believers" is anathema to the undeniable diversity of Christianity.
I marvel at the spectrum of faith and assume that the multiplicity of believers is the cornerstone of any church which aspires to transcend the narrow - and comforting - bounds of tribalism.
On the one hand, we have Amish fundamentalism, an absolutely pacifist and a biblically literal sect.
At another extreme of fundamentalism, I know Christian devotees who see nothing wrong with abortion since it is not mentioned in the Bible.
Under the umbrella of unbounded reconciliation, it only remains to be seen which Christians will excommunicate themselves by insisting on their own exclusive righteousness.
I marvel at the spectrum of faith and assume that the multiplicity of believers is the cornerstone of any church which aspires to transcend the narrow - and comforting - bounds of tribalism.
On the one hand, we have Amish fundamentalism, an absolutely pacifist and a biblically literal sect.
At another extreme of fundamentalism, I know Christian devotees who see nothing wrong with abortion since it is not mentioned in the Bible.
Under the umbrella of unbounded reconciliation, it only remains to be seen which Christians will excommunicate themselves by insisting on their own exclusive righteousness.
American
prophet, Wendell Berry, declares this act of faith: “I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that
God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love,
that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is
redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love,
incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward
wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with
God.” Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace:
The Agrarian Essays
Wholeness broaches no division (except, perhaps, self-separation) even when (perhaps especially when) division is rooted
in righteousness.
(Among Douthat's commentators, I draw your attention to Sequel, Adam S,
"gay priest" Mark Wood, and MS.)
By ROSS DOUTHAT
July 14, 2012 189 Comments
In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.
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As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.
Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.
This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.
Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2005 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)
Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.
But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.
What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.
189 Comments
At the same time, out West I've seen an explosion of massive megachurches, often with gun racks, conveniently located near a fast food outlet.
Perhaps you're not noticing any decline at all, merely a shift in tastes.
In my view, the concept of afterlife is a naturally occurring human conceit of self importance. Perhaps I should be revelling in the downfall of western christian dogma and practice. I am not.
Liberals and others seem to look out of their windows at the world from their armchairs and tacitly approve of the demise of christianity as a worldwide faith, somehow deluding themselves that the institutions such as the US government could exist just fine if christianity is on the rocks.
Africa is islamizing rapidly. Europe is islamizing. America is slowly islamizing. If you dispute this, you are not paying attention, at all.
Examples in africa: Nigeria (frequent christian targettings), Mali(takeover), Kenya (recent christian targettings), Ivory Coast (takeover by election), Egypt (withering christian minority). Sudan.
Islam does not allow minority faiths to thrive at all. This is not true in europe or america regarding islam. It is a one way street towards islam. A muslim is not free to convert to becoming christian, but vice versa is totally fine. Not too much non-islamic growth of communities in Saudi Arabia, for instance. Not too many conversions. Jews, and others, not welcome. No.
Institutions based on christianity, including the US government, will crumble, as will: freedom of thought, belief, right to question, of women. Dark age coming.
God is a humanist. God became Man. The Son of Man is the Son of God. God, to the extent God exists at all, exists in and through human beings (and the rest of the natural world.) Even in the Bible, there was seldom a miracle that did not have a human being as the medium through which the miracle happened.
When a child lies dying of cancer, where is God? If God is anywhere, God is in the nurses and doctors who do their best to heal that child, the scientists who spend decades toiling to find cures, the mother and father who grieve for their child and would gladly give their life for hers.
This is all I know on earth, and all I need to know.
Self-serving institutions that dole-out codified relief to those seeking physical well-being and spiritual fulfillment - should not exist.
Thank you for a well written and thoughtful piece. I am amazed when the Christians, liberal or otherwise, work to find the approval of the state and the culture. From its inception, Christianity has been a counter cultural movement, not one that sought to move with the trends of the times or the whims of the state. There is a danger to the church when it begins to look to the culture for acceptance and endorsement. While I am not one to suggest that everyone should be a fundamentalist, there have always been debates in the church, the Christian faith is defined by certain beliefs. Liberals and conservatives in the effort to change with the time have imperiled the faith and left some to wonder, what if anything do Christians believe.
While it is true that Christianity has always adapted to the soil in which it found itself, it has always looked Christian. When you begin to change the core values, beliefs, and doctrine that comprise Christianity you no longer have Christianity, liberal or otherwise. So to answer the question that your title poses, maybe. If liberal Christianity makes an effort to be Christian, it may be saved. If it continues to be a religious themed version of secular and intellectual liberalism perhaps it won't be saved but should just change its name.
Conservative religions are always inviting people to their churches and encouraging them to join. Liberal churches should try that.
In April 2011, in answer to the burning of a copy of the Muslim Qu'ran by a church in Florida that led to the deaths of innocent people, the leaders of our church purchased 90 copies of the Qu'ran and offered them for free to any who might want to read them (through a local independent bookstore here in Salt Lake). We wanted to remind our countrymen and women that people who burn books often end up burning people. We were not pushing the Qu'ran, we were just saying to people, "Here is a copy. read it yourself and decide what it says." We received some push-back from Christians who mistakenly thought we were replacing the Bible with Islamic scriptures. We were not. And we received a lot of kudos from Christians around the globe, from U.S. military personnel here and stationed abroad,and also U.S. Aid workers in Afghanistan who appreciated our action and saw it as a needed corrective.
What I am saying is simply that churches that live up to the mandates of the gospel as set down by Jesus, churches that seek to be as inclusive as Jesus was in his ministry, churches that value education and are not afraid of it, churches that stand for justice and that stand against bigotry of ever kind, will thrive.
Despite mounting evidence every time they looked that the people they called themselves helping were not interested in loosening things up, the leaders just stood by and wished more and more people good luck in their next place. How ridiculous!
Churchgoers need to fnd God's answers to the excruciating concerns of this life. When the leadership can't put its foot down and say, ''This is were we stand!'' without adding a hasty, ''At least today!'' People are NOT going to put up with that.
I don't know if Bishop Spong was a result or a major cause, but you don't actively distrust and dismiss most of Scripture and then challenge the supposed owners and customers to stick around anyway.
I realize this parallels the story of the Democratic Party that all these hopeless mis-leaders most assuredly belong to. It also decided to take off to the left mindless of what its voters actually wanted, and has continually re-defined its center until the people making up the party fifty years ago would no longer recognize it.
The ultimate irony is how much these Church leaders have wasted suing to retain ownership of the churches that have bailed on them and joined conservative branches of Episcopal life. As a result, those structures will now sit as idle as the Beijing Olympic venues. If the NYC bldg sells, they might hang on a while.
We will lose our sisters not because of the women in the Church but because of the men who run it.
Anyway, people like John Shelby Spong would be regarded as heretics by a vast majority of his co-religionists, as are many practitioners of 'sub-sets' of their religions. Again, any sympathy would be misplaced. Sorry.