Master-builders of Utopia

March 1, 2010

While doing some political theology research, I came across this fantastic passage in Heinrich Bullinger's Sermonum Decades on church unity, vigorously endorsing the principle extra ecclesiam nulla salus.  We might well debate whether or not Bullinger and his colleagues's Protestant principles and the actions they took in the Reformation can be strictly reconciled with this viewpoint, but it is certainly worth appreciating that they still had this viewpoint, and set it forth in terms that roundly condemn their modern Protestant (and particularly Reformed) descendants: 

“The unity and united society of this church of God is so great, that out of her fellowship is there no people found acceptable unto God, any true salvation or safety, any light or truth; for without the pale of God’s church are no wholesome pastures found, all are infected with poison.  No religion pleaseth God out of the church of God.  If of old any man had sacrificed to God himself without the tabernacle or temple, in the high places, he was accounted to have sacrificed to devils, and esteemed to have shed innocent blood.  Rightly therefore the blessed martyr and bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, hath left in writing: ‘Whosoever separated from the church is joined to an adulterous church, the same man is separated from the promises of the church: neither pertaineth he to Christ’s merits, which hath left the church of Christ.  He is a stranger, he is unclean, he is an enemy.  He cannot now have God his father, who hath not the church his mother.  If he might scape that was out of the ark of Noah, he may also escape that is abroad out of the church.  He must needs be a most wicked man, whoseover he be, that leaveth his own country and the fellowship of very good men, and falleth away to the enemies....Wherefore I cannot marvel enough at the corrupt and schismatical manners of certain men, who separate themselves for every light cause from the most wholesome and pleasant company or society of the church.  For you shall find in these days captious and fantastical men not a few, which of many years have had fellowship with no church, nor as yet have fellowship with any; for in every man that is they find some kind of fault, in themselves only they find nothing worthy reprehension.  Therefore they conceive with themselves a wonderful fashion of the church, which except they see somewhere established after that fashion which they themselves have devised, they contend (with shame enough) that there is as yet no true church of Christ in the world.  They are worthy surely to be master-builders in Utopia...where they might set up a building fit for themselves.”

The Excommunication Dilemma (Some Clarifications about the Gay Crisis)

Reflecting back on some of the reactions I got about Church in Crisis, and also to my “Wielding a Serrated Edge with Care,” I’ve realized that there are three questions that have to be carefully distinguished in dealing with this issue: 1) How do we respond to gays? 2) How do we respond to Christians and churches that are not responding to gays properly (e.g., are ordaining them)? 3) How should Churches respond to churches that are not responding to gays properly? It’s the relationship of the latter two that I particularly want to clarify here.

As for the first question, O’Donovan certainly touches on this issue a fair amount, and I think he is generally on the mark--as far as treating it like any other sin, preaching the Gospel with sympathy, etc. As Donny has suggested, we need to be careful that in speaking and listening sympathetically, we don’t omit Biblical word of judgment, but I think O’Donovan says this clearly at various points as well.

The second question is the one I was primarily addressing in my “Wielding a Serrated Edge with Care” (though, of course, I wasn’t addressing simply the gay issue). This is a question about Christian charity, not about homosexuality, or about church unity. It is the question that must be answered by ordinary Christians in pews, and by church leaders, denominational leaders, and denominations themselves about other denominations, over which they have no jurisdiction. That is the difficulty of Protestantism, of course--there may well be a church discipline issue here, but 95% of fellow Protestants are in no position to adjudicate on it. The PCA, and indeed the LCMS, cannot decide what disciplinary action the ELCA should take towards its churches. It can express an opinion about what it would do in like circumstances (an opinion that should be constructively, rather than destructively worded), but that’s it. To do otherwise would be like my parents deciding how my friends ought to be disciplined. The PCA, and indeed, the LCMS, certainly cannot decide what disciplinary action should be taken against the ELCA itself, or against TEC. To attempt to do so would be like my parents deciding how my friends’ parents ought to be disciplined.
Given the current situation of Protestantism, most church leaders and even denominations do not have a position of authority from which to enact judgments upon churches and denominations that may need judgment upon them. They can only speak as ordinary Christians to erring Christian brothers--admonishing them from the Word, and seeking to pursue single-mindedness with them. What they cannot do is say, “Well, heck...this church ought to be excommunicated, and no one’s doing it, so I’ll just personally excommunicate them...decide that I’m not going to treat them like Christians anymore.”

No, we can’t do that. We can’t decide that the local Episcopal Church is no longer Christian because they ordained a homosexual, and so we won’t treat them as Christian anymore. We may confront them, but we confront them as brothers, not as pagans.
This point could be summed up as “If your brothers are misbehaving, remember that they’re your brothers, not your children.” Now, this question is not part of O’Donovan’s discussion, because he is working in a Protestant communion that still has sufficient institutional unity that it can ask, “How shall we discipline erring churches in our own midst?”

O’Donovan is thus interested in addressing the third question--how should a Church (that is, a body like the Anglican Communion) respond to individual member churches (or member denominations, like TEC) that have taken unbiblical action regarding homosexuals (and other matters)? Since O’Donovan deals with this at some length (as I am still working through), I just want to address one crucial issue that is lurking in the background that he doesn’t address, an issue which we all too often take for granted.

If church discipline is what is called for in this situation, what does that look like? What does church discipline mean on a massive scale? In the New Testament, of course, we have no testimony as to what church schisms on a large scale might look like; what we do have is a fair bit of instruction and some examples about how individual sinners in the church should be disciplined. The Church, from these passages, has been able to develop a fairly complete and Biblically grounded set of procedures to use in reprimanding and if necessary excommunicating unrepentant sinners. In recent centuries, Christians have been quite ready to apply the paradigms of excommunication on a grand scale, excommunicating not only entire congregations, but entire groups of churches, or even denominations. I almost said “Protestants have been quite ready...” but then, it is only fair to note that they learned this strategy from the late medieval papacy, and from the acts of the Reformation-era popes that created Protestantism by means of such mass excommunications.

Now, my question is, can this application be so easily made? Is rebuking and excommunicating an unrepentant congregation or a group of unrepentant congregations really the same sort of thing as rebuking and excommunicating a single unrepentant sinner?

There are at least three very important differences that I can think of. First, the larger-scale action, in addition to multiplying all the other risks that excommunication on a smaller level involves, risks severely harming the unity of the Church. The judgment may be wrong, in which case, unnecessary and potentially harmful schism has occurred; but even if the judgment is right, such a decision may have devastating repercussions that break fellowship even among those who are united in the truth. Second, while I am the last to deny the reality of corporate sin, and corporate responsibility for sin, it seems dangerous to apply a tool as severe as excommunication to a large group of people, only some of whom may be guilty. It is as if a father committed murder and his whole family were sentenced to death. Can we really unchurch a whole congregation, even if there be ten righteous within it? Or a whole body of churches, even if there be ten righteous churches within it? This seems a very cavalier way to proceed. Third, the point of excommunication is to invite repentance and restored fellowship. When someone is truly cut off and alone, this is often effective. But when it happens on a massive corporate level, the cut-off body are likely to seek solace and solidarity in one another, rather than to be moved to repentance and restoration. Instead of being simply unchurched, they are likely to simply consider themselves a separate denomination, and go their merry way, and then proceed to confuse fellow Christians and the world about what is and isn’t the Church.

So, while it may be quite true that The Episcopal Church has crossed an important line that warrants disciplinary action by the Communion, it is far from clear how such discipline ought to be exercised. We simply have no good precedents for it--there are plenty of bad precedents, like medieval popes excommunicating whole nations when their kings were disobedient, or like the Presbyterian Church kicking out 30% of its member churches in 1837--but no clear precedents we’d like to follow. Many are loudly shouting, “Kick them out! Discipline them! Cut them off!” but we need to say “Hold on! How? Is there a Biblical and helpful way to do this?” And saying that does not mean you’re being soft and wimpy on the sin, as lots of conservatives seem to think. It is merely to recognize that the Church has never satisfactorily developed any clear understanding of how church discipline should function on a large, institutional scale, and the Bible provides very limited guidance. Such an understanding must be reached before we can even begin to decide how institutions like the Anglican Communion should respond to serious sins like those in TEC. And that’s the discussion we need to be having, but which seems to be almost entirely neglected in the current debate.

To Split or Not to Split (O'Donovan Review, Part Two)

Church in Crisis, Chapter Two: “The Care of the Churches”
In this chapter, O’Donovan sets out to clarify the ecclesiastical politics surrounding the gay controversy. This is especially important to those outside the Anglican Communion, who don’t understand the polity structure of the church, and who are thus at a loss to understand why recent events have proved so chaotic and difficult to resolve. He also lays down some principles for how to understand and pursue church unity. These, I think, are crucial for those of us in the hyper-schismatic Reformed tradition, who have, I think, very little ability to reflect critically on what church unity requires of us. Again, O’Donovan makes his argument so carefully and thoughtfully that it is difficult to disagree, though certainly questions arise at a few points.
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First, O’Donovan clarifies the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is not anything like a Pope—his personal authority is more that of influence than command. His responsibility is not to resolve crises on his own, but to help coordinate and guide conciliar resolutions. The Anglican Communion has a very conciliar authority structure, and the current ABC, Rowan Williams, believes very strongly on using that approach, rather than attempting to solve the problem by forceful personal gestures.

This makes good sense, I think. If people are determined not to get along, you can’t force them to just by shouting—at best, you might just keep them quiet until you leave the room…more likely, you’ll just make everyone shout louder.

O’Donovan then attempts to articulate the paradox of church unity. On the one hand, the communion we have together in Christ depends on Christ, and not on ourselves: “To claim evangelical communion is a statement of faith in God’s gift of himself, a gift that cannot be proved empirically, but must be believed in and witnessed to.” (21) On the other hand, this communion must be witnessed to, and properly discerned, by institutional structures, structures “equipped to exercise judgment, to draw a line, where necessary, between true and false communion.” (21) In other words, the function of church structure is not so much to make and break communion, but to attempt, carefully and patiently, to discern and declare where it no longer exists. O’Donovan returns to this point later, so I shall leave it for now.

He makes the additional point that “evangelical communion is never merely synchronic; it is always also diachronic, involving a communion with past Christians in receiving from them the faith they have witnessed to and handing that faith on again to further generations.” (22) This is a point he makes primarily against the liberals—the structures of the Church must ensure that the Church is faithfully in communion not only with itself in the present-day, but also with its past. Of course this does not mean slavish devotion, but it does mean careful attention.

What all this means is, again, that the role of the Communion as a whole, and of the Archbishop in particular, is not primarily to make ringing declarations of excommunication, but to engage in patient discernment of whether and how certain churches are in communion with the Church: “The heart of the Archbishop’s role in the Communion is to give voice and effect to judgments the churches have reached about the work of the Spirit in their midst, to speak and act on behalf of their common mutual recognition.” (23)

This patient process no doubt seems rather glacial and frustrating to most evangelicals, but this is only because we have become so accustomed to the process of schism that it seems a rather straightforward affair, and because we live in denominations so small and homogenous that we cannot imagine the difficulties of trying to manage church crises on a scale like that of the Anglican Communion’s. And it is also important, in this fast-paced age, to get a bit of honest perspective—the crisis in the Anglican communion has only been going on for six years now, the serious debate for eleven years. That is not a lot of time to be making decisions about making or breaking communion on a global scale.

And above all, this kind of patience is necessary if church unity really is as critical and earnestly desirable as I think it is, Biblically. O’Donovan has more to say about the imperative to seek unity with the kind of forbearance and longsuffering that God Himself shows to his people, and we shall return to this soon.

Getting back to an account of how the crisis played out, O’Donovan sketches the conciliar position taken by the Windsor Conference in 2004, in which the North American churches were chastised and put on a kind of probation, while giving them time to discuss the issue more fully among themselves; meanwhile, the Communion as a whole tried to develop a clear policy for addressing the recent actions of the American churches. The result of the conference, he says, was to split a two-sided issue into a four-sided issue. Now there were anti-conciliar revisionists (those who wanted to revise the Church’s policy on homosexuality, no matter what the councils of the denomination said), conciliar revisionists (those who wanted to revise the policy, but working patiently through proper channels), anti-conciliar anti-revisionists (who wanted to maintain traditional Church policy, and traditional Church polity be damned), and conciliar anti-revisionists (who wanted to maintain traditional Church policy through the proper channels).

I should mention, of course, that almost everyone I’ve had contact with before has been in the third party, and this is the party with whom O’Donovan is most mystified: “The emergence of an antirevisionist strand of opinion that was cool, to say the least, about the conciliar process was, perhaps, most perplexing. With the North Americans on the back foot, it might have seemed that antirevisionist sentiment only had to cling tight to the conciliar project.” The main reason, O’Donovan suggests, “was a confidence in the immediacy of moral judgments, such as underlay, also, the development of liberal Christianity. Where there seems to be nothing to discuss, there can be no discussion.” (25) In other words, the evangelicals said, “It’s obvious homosexuality is wrong, so we’re not going to waste time sitting around discussing the issue.” But O’Donovan objects, predictably, “A process of moral reasoning is needed if we are to reach well-founded concrete moral judgments.” The evangelical response of self-assured moralizing, he suggests, is little better than the liberals’ self-assured moralizing which precipitated the crisis.

Now, this is where things get sticky, because, as O’Donovan himself admits here: “antirevisionist ‘discernment’ could claim, with much greater prima facie plausibility, to be in line with the unwavering testimony of Scripture.” (26) Well, yeah, that’s an understatement! What O’Donovan goes on to say will likely be frustrating to the evangelicals who are of the opinion that “We know what the Bible says, so just get on with it!” O’Donovan says, “It is enough to remark in passing that, on this side as on that, the immediacy of the insight tends to make the interpretation of Scripture seem superfluous. The contrast with the rather careful hermeneutic of scriptural teaching on divorce and remarriage is striking.” (26) Evangelicals at this point will protest that there’s an obvious difference—Scripture has complex and conflicted testimony on the issue of divorce and remarriage, while it does not on the homosexuality issue. And I would have to agree that O’Donovan should’ve chosen a better example.

However, I think O’Donovan’s main point here warrants attention—first of all, it’s always a good idea, however clear the conclusion seems to be, to take the time to interpret Scripture slowly. Second, if the evangelicals are so confident of what Scripture says, then why fear taking a little time?—the end result will vindicate their claims. Third, though, and most persuasive, I think, is the practical point. Even if we are 100% sure about Scripture’s teaching, do we violently force that judgment on everyone else and lose 75% of the Communion, or do we take a few years to talk through things and keep 75% of the Communion? On this basis, O’Donovan is quite right to rebuke the antirevisionist anticonciliarists. Again, we’re only six years into this mess…hardly enough time for people to throw in the towel and say “To hell with the Anglican Communion—I’ll just hang out with the Ugandans!”

Anyway, O’Donovan continues, “When the Windsor Report posed as the alternative to its own approach, that ‘we shall have to begin to learn to walk apart,’ it clearly did not mean this as a choiceworthy alternative, one that the church of Jesus Christ could opt for with integrity. It was to be viewed as a horizon of total failure. Unhappily, it seems to have underestimated the capacity of Anglicans to think the unthinkable.” (28-29) Yes, unhappily indeed. Such wholesale schism as was now being contemplated by both liberals and conservatives was a suicidal alternative, for “the Anglican identity is constituted by its particular communities, and cannot survive a decisive breach in them. Even if we were to accept this as the price to be paid for a purer church, however, there is a more profound obstacle.” (30) This latter obstacle, he says, is that the schism, due to the fourfold division of opinion, could not occur on straightforward homosexual/anti-homosexual lines. Many evangelicals would stay in TEC, not desiring schism; conservative Anglo-Catholics would go to Rome or the East, preferring that to joining with the schismatic evangelicals, etc. “The idea of a united antirevisionist Anglican church is as fantastic as the idea of an amicable parting of the ways.” (30)

Now O’Donovan addresses the difficult question, to which everyone desires an answer: “what grounds justify a deliberate breach in communion within the church?” This question leads us into a paradox: “On the one hand, we are never justified in breaking communion within the church of Jesus Christ, for schism is sin; on the other hand, communion implies and requires fundamental agreement in the gospel….So unity in the truth turns out to be a commitment that may pull us in opposite directions to opposite conclusions: there is no communion-breaking moral disagreement, on the one hand; on the other, any disagreement is potentially communion-breaking.” (30) What is at least clear, though, is that you cannot draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say, “OK, now that this line is crossed, we must split”—as O’Donovan says, “The one answer we cannot find is the answer we set out to find: this, rather than that, is the specific cause that will justify a breach.” (31)

I think I am with O’Donovan on all this. Certainly, the experience of denominations that I have known is that, once the habit has been established of drawing a line in the sand, it becomes easy to do it over and over again, for increasingly arbitrary reasons. The only breach that justifies schism is the one that proves completely irreparable.

So here is how O’Donovan assays to resolve the dilemma—“one can address the disagreement. Communion should not be broken, but that does not mean disagreements can be ignored. There are ways of addressing serious disagreements that affirm and renew communion by proven willingness and determination to resolve them. And the very attempt to reach a resolution transforms our experience of the disagreement. Disagreements are no more unnegotiable natural forces than deliverances of the mistaken conscience are. They are openings for those who share a common faith to explore and resolve important tensions within the context of communion.” (32)

This “solution” can seem maddeningly naïve, or else compromised from the outset. “Address the disagreement”?! But that’s precisely what is impossible in this case! “Explore and resolve important tensions”?! How can we, when we can no longer even appeal to the fundamentals of the gospel for unity? When we disagree over everything, how can we attempt to address the disagreement? These questions will immediately arise from evangelicals, who will also feel like they are being asked to relinquish the force of their convictions from the outset—“You’re saying that I need to adopt a ‘Who knows?’ standpoint, instead of sticking by my convictions.” O’Donovan anticipates this objection, and his response is masterful, and must be quoted in full:

“This kind of proposal, is, of course, easy to mishear. It can be taken to mean that parties to disagreements must be less than wholly convinced of their position, ready to make room for possible accommodation. When really serious issues are at stake and talk of a status stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae begins to rumble like thunder, urging the search for resolution can seem like an invitation to capitulate, to concede essential points before beginning. It can seem as though Scripture is deemed to be inconclusive and ambiguous, so that either side is free to concede the possible right of the other’s interpretation. It can seem as though what is needed is an indefinite irresolution about everything important, in which there is no need for, and no possibility of, a decisive closure. But that is all a trick of the light. None of this is implied in the search for agreement. The only thing I concede in committing myself to such a process is that if I could discuss the matter through with an opponent sincerely committed to the church’s authorities, Scripture chief among them, the Holy Spirit would open up perspectives that are not immediately apparent, and that patient and scrupulous pursuit of these could lead at least to giving the problem a different shape—a shape I presume will be compatible with, though not precisely identical to, the views I now hold, but which may also be compatible with some of the views my opponent now holds, even if I cannot yet see how. I do not have to think I may be mistaken about the cardinal points of which I am convinced. The only thing I have to think—and this, surely, is not difficult on such a subject!—is that there are things still to be learned by one who is determined to be taught by Scripture how to read the age in which we live.” (32-33)

This is a convincing account of what the search for agreement amidst seemingly intractable disagreement, and why it is a challenge that no man of honour should decline. O’Donovan recognizes that this search may in the end fail, and “God may in his judgment scatter a church…and there may come a point at which this situation has to be given some kind of institutional expression.” However, such institutional expression “must be a declaration, a formal statement of what has obviously come to pass. It cannot be an act to produce a result.” This declaration must be made after much patience and forbearance, however, because it must be willing to “wait for God to purify his own church in his own time.” (33) O’Donovan concludes, “The only justified breach is the one we have taken every possible step to avert, the one that lies on the far side of every conciliar process that can be devised.” (34)

This is a hard counsel to accept, and yet, it is hard to contest. Schism is not simply a straightforward matter of church discipline. Even in local church discipline, while it may prove necessary to cut off a member for the health of the body, to hand over to Satan those who have repudiated God, this should be done after great patience and deliberation. How much graver a matter it is to contemplate the cutting off of thousands, or millions of members! And again, in the current crisis, many evangelicals are taking that fateful step after six years or less. Some may object that the current crisis has been a long time coming, and the liberal churches have been driving off the cliff for a long time. But God can purify and revive liberal and apostate churches! He has done so before, and can do so again. We must not lack faith and hastily take matters into our own hands.

To Gay or Not to Gay (Review of O'Donovan, Part I)

(That post title is for you, Donny)

It seems that God calls two very different sorts of people to do work for his kingdom in speaking, writing, preaching, and so on. On the one hand, He needs people who go around with flamethrowers, blasting false prophets mercilessly wherever they see them, hurling prophetic thunderbolts at the ungodly, men who when asked “Is it peace?” reply like Jehu, “What peace, so long as the harlotries of your mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?” On the other hand, he needs folks who are more even-tempered and soft-spoken, whose motto is “a gentle answer turns away wrath,” and who, like Joseph and Daniel, have learned the virtue of listening sympathetically and pursuing peace with their enemies. These two personalities characterize not merely individuals, but also denominations and traditions—Presbyterians are notoriously the former; Anglicans notoriously the latter.

The problem, of course, is that either of these personalities can often find themselves doing the devil’s work, rather than the Lord’s. The flamethrower may be so trigger-happy that he roasts friends and foes indiscriminately, and frightens away those who might be interesting in hearing God’s message. The peacemaker, on the other hand, might find that he has accommodated away his own grandmother in the interest of “seeking mutual understanding,” and has left anyone interested in hearing God’s message confused as to what exactly it might be.
And because of this, those of each personality may find it difficult to believe that the other group is doing the Lord’s work, and may dedicate themselves to thwarting the other’s work. Presbyterian hotheads start blasting away with their flamethrowers at the Anglican moderates whom they are sure are doing the devil’s work, and the Anglican moderates exasperatedly devote themselves to trying to douse all the flames that the evangelicals keep lighting.

It is precisely this predicament that has been thrown into stark relief by the gay controversy, and of which Wilson’s scoffing dismissal of O’Donovan’s The Church in Crisis provides such an excellent example. But of course, God needs both, and both need to figure out how to work together. Is O’Donovan making the kind of fatal compromise for which his race are so infamous (think Neville Chamberlain), or is he saying some profound and constructive things to which we all need to pay attention? Is Wilson raising a godly alarm against an attempt to sneak liberalism in through the back door, or is he, like the Confederate troops at Chancellorsville, getting spooked and pouring a volley into one of the best generals for his own side?

This is the puzzle I hope to solve in these reviews. I should be entirely forthright and say that, after careful reading and reflection, I think the answer is much more the latter, but I’ll try to establish that point-by-point.

In chapter 1, entitled “The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm,” O’Donovan seeks to trace the historical roots of the liberal movement, and in the process, displays the odd contradictions at its core—how did the middle-of-the-road peacemaker liberals become the drum-rolling radical liberals? It becomes clear in this first chapter that O’Donovan’s primary concern is with the liberal wing in the homosexual debate. This is a rather important point to note. Evangelicals might approach this book, having gotten it into their head (from reading reviews like Wilson’s) that O’Donovan is something of a liberal, and therefore, must assume that his main target is evangelicals. It is not. The audience he primarily wishes to address and call to account (albeit in as conciliatory a manner as possible) is the liberal wing of the Church that has pressed for gay ordination. We must keep this in mind throughout the book, or else we may find ourselves sorely confused at times.

He begins by observing that, in their actions regarding Gene Robinson and the blessing of same-sex unions, the North American churches were making political statements. He then remarks somewhat sardonically, “In defending them the North American churches followed the counsel that it was wiser not to be too explicit. The spoke to the world about a “discernment” they had been privileged to make over a long time and from the grassroots up, leaving the ontology of the question strictly to one side. The Windsor Report thought it surprising that the actions of the Canadian and US churches were so unaccompanied by theological explanation or interpretative commentary.” (2)

The Anglican Church, O’Donovan observes, has long been “liberal” in the sense that it has been in the “habit of negotiating stubborn oppositions by synthesizing them within a central, undogmatic stream of opinion.” This tendency became particularly important in the aftermath of the Oxford Movement, as the Church had to hold together strongly catholic and strongly evangelical wings. However, in the recent development of liberalism, we find that “the historically centripetal middle had become a new centrifugal pole.”

In response to the homosexual crisis, Canterbury and others have insisted on maintaining the traditional attitude of the Communion—“stepping back, untangling the skein, reconciling conflicting views, toning down exaggerated positions, forging coalitions, squaring circles, finding commonsense ways through,” but no one seems willing to do this anymore. “In its place are radical postures, strident denunciations, and moralistic confessionalism.” In this, again, it is important to note that his main target is the liberals, and to remark on the oddity that the liberals are now the feisty dogmatists; but of course, there is here also a criticism for the evangelicals, many of whom, feeling threatened, have felt the need to indulge in “radical postures, strident denunciations, and moralistic confessionalism” as well. Inasmuch as this is his point, we reach here a first point of tension, for the evangelical is going to insist that there are times when this is just what the Bible calls for. Perhaps so. But I would suggest here an analogy from Just War theory—only as a last resort, only when all peaceful means have been exhausted, because, while the conflict may in fact be just, there is a terrible risk that it may not be, and that we may do much needless harm. Biblically, I think, the danger of overhasty war is greater than the danger of overstrained peace. This point shall come up again and again.

As he sets out to tell the tale of liberal Christianity, O’Donovan first takes a moment to acknowledge the Church’s debt to liberalism. This will jar in the ears of many of us, but is surely a point always worth making. The questioning habit of mind that liberalism fostered, while deeply subversive of many valuable things, has also opened up insights and avenues of inquiry that the Church had never found before, and for this, we must give it credit. The jarring tone that O’Donovan here sounds is quickly harmonized.

O’Donovan’s analysis of the roots of theological liberalism is masterful. In the nineteenth-century (and indeed, beginning with Kant and pietism before), liberalism operated on the assumption of the priority of the ethical. That is to say, liberalism took it for granted that, while dogmatic conclusions were always debatable and doubtful, everyone could at least agree on what constituted morality. Thus, the liberals simply posited the reigning ethical norms, presupposing them to be valid, and then used them as a grid through which to force Scripture and tradition, disposing of the claims of each that could not stand the ethical test.

The liberal standpoint, while doubting all that the past held down, bowed in homage to the present: “The inner shrine of the liberal gospel was its attitude of respectful attentiveness to the world as it is.” The world as it was could be equated with the revelation of God, and liberalism thus broke down the traditional barriers between God and the world, and between the eschatological future and the sinful present. Because God’s revelation was coterminous with the present world, it could not stand in judgment over it, but always affirmed it. Church institutions, within the liberal paradigm, are an obstacle, since they are holdovers from a past that must be transcended, and since they display an antithesis between world and church that liberalism is keen to overcome.

All this is a sketch of the liberalism that prevailed until the World Wars, and which, by tethering the narrative of God’s self-revelation to the narrative of Western civilization, foundered on the same rocks that Western civilization broke up upon. Subsequently, liberalism had to find a way to reinvent itself, and the new form both contradicted and radicalized the earlier form.

The moral norms of Western consciousness could no longer be presupposed, since they were hotly debated and there was no longer (if there had ever been) an ethical consensus. As a result, liberalism, in keeping with its prejudice against the past, adopted as its new narrative and moral inspiration the struggle for emancipation, the struggle for minorities to overcome the prejudices of the past and assert their rights. The civil rights and liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s “threw a lifeline to a floundering liberal imagination, offering a matrix by which the present could be seen as standing in perpetual judgment on the past, allowing the Western hegemonic tradition of modernity to rebrand its anticonservative appeal….In grasping the lifeline, however, Western liberalism paid its price. From that point on, it became identified with one kind of moral cause to the exclusion of others. It became a church-party proper, a specific agenda to pit against other agendas.”

This picture of course reveals a number of deep problems within the liberal paradigm, but here’s the key one for O’Donovan’s purposes. The liberal agenda has simply posited the moral right of emancipation causes—the particular features and interests of any given minority party are really of little interest or importance to the liberal agenda. The liberal agenda simply drags minorities forward, says, “You know what you really lack? Equal rights, freedom from abusive prejudice. That’s what we’ll give you. And then you’ll have everything you need.” As O’Donovan sharply puts it, “The gay cause is grist for the liberal mill while it is in militant mode, for the mill processes victim classes in want of a fair deal.” But, once the cause has been dealt with, once homosexuals have gotten their equal rights, the liberal agenda will abandon them and move on to another cause.

Who we need to hear from, O’Donovan insists at the end of the chapter, are not the liberal activists, but gay Christians themselves. What is it that they are really looking for? How do they understand their experience, and what questions are they asking about how they fit into the Christian community? Until we start hearing answers to these questions from them, instead of from the liberal clergy, we will not be able to honestly evaluate the nature of the questions and challenges that the gay movement within the Church poses to the Church. O’Donovan concludes by asking, “Is the gay Christian movement still attached to the wheels of the liberal chariot, content with the victim mentality that the liberal program prescribes for it? Or can it present itself as the bearer of an experience of the human that is, at the very least, of irreplaceable important for our understanding of our own times? Is it of age, able to speak for itself? On the answer to that a great deal may depend.”

All this, I think, should be entirely uncontroversial. Perhaps the most strident among the evangelical ranks will protest that they have no interest in hearing the gay Christian movement “speak for itself”—just call these sinners to repentance, and have done with it, some will say. But this is surely not a Christian attitude—even if we are to assume that the gay Christian’s experience is wholly corrupt and sinful, with nothing constructive to offer (and we’ll come back to this), we are surely bound to listen sympathetically to the sinner even as we call him to repentance. And, as O’Donovan suggests, listening sympathetically is something that few among the evangelicals or among the liberals has done properly.

Worse than Ichabod...

Seems that "departed glory" is too kind to describe some Reformed people nowadays--seems like "Ham" might be more accurate, the mocker, or "Shimei," who cursed and mocked King David.

http://mongrelhorde.blogspot.com/2007/04/federal-vision-just-got-owned-again.html

Read it if you must. But only if you have a strong stomach.

One is reminded of the boys who mocked Elisha in the book of Kings, and were then devoured by bears...or of the fates of any who mocked God's prophets, for that matter.

May God have mercy on their souls.