The Spirituality of the Church, a 19th Century heresy resurrected

For readers who don't know, I am a member of an ecumenical Franciscan fraternity, and off and on over the years I have subscribed to various Franciscan listservs, especially the ecumenical Francis-L. The other day, one of the more frequent users of the list sent a press release from Human Rights Watch to the list. For reason's of space, I have not included it here, but below is my response:


It seems so rare that I get anything over the Francis-l list anymore I hesitate to respond to this message for fear I might put people off of using the list. However, I have a huge problem with an ideology implicit in part of this message from Human Rights Watch. Consider the quote below:

Pope Benedict XVI: for undermining families. The leader of the Holy See has gone well beyond expressing the Church's theological views on homosexuality. The Pope has intervened in politics in many other countries to condemn and threaten figures who support equal rights or any form of recognition for lesbian and gay families. After Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, Pope Benedict's Pontifical Council on the Family commanded Spanish officials to refuse to marry same-sex couples or even to process the paperwork if they tried to adopt a child.

Notice that the message doesn't call the Catholic Church's moral theology in to question. In fact the opening sentence "The leader of the Holy See has gone well beyond expressing the Church's theological views on homosexuality." seems to indicate that the authors of this release respect the Pope's right to hold and even express whatever belief he chooses. But they claim he has "gone well beyond" that. Indicating that there is some sort of line that he crossed. Therein lies the root of my problem with this message.

For the record, I am not a Roman Catholic. I am a Quaker and have some sharply different views on a lot of things vis a vis sexual ethics. As a Christian and a Franciscan, however I must reject the notion that there is some sort of line between what we believe and what we do. If our beliefs are to mean anything at all, they must influence all areas of our life. For Benedict XVI this must necessarily impact how he exercises his authority as both a head of state and as the chief pastor of the Roman Catholic Church. I find it hard to believe that a Pontifical Council attempted to command anything of the Government of Spain or it's officials. However, I would believe that it instructed or even commanded Roman Catholics to act in accord with the teachings of their church and reminded them that, should they be officials of the Spanish Government, that their allegiance to Christ through his Church supersedes their allegiance to any civil authority.

In the United States, prior to the abolition of slavery, many Southern Protestant churches avoided confronting the inherent conflict between the Gospel and the institution of slavery by promulgating a doctrine known as the "Spirituality of the Church" which held that the church was a spiritual institution, concerned only with spiritual maters and that slavery was an economic and non-spiritual institution outside the realm of what churches were supposed to be dealing with, addressing or having opinions on.

The "Spirituality of the Church" was a Satanic doctrine then when it sought to limit Christian action against an institution I think we can all agree, in 2006, was an immoral one. Any statement that seeks to erect the same or similar barrier between church and world today is equally wrong. If someone holds a doctrine or belief inconsistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, confront them on those grounds., but don't attempt to erect a wall between belief and action unless it one day traps you too.

Shameless Copying

Rarely do I just copy a post from someone else's blog wholesale. However, here is the exception. It is the work of Br. Charles, a Capuchin Franciscan Friar who shares my love of the movie Fight Club and the band The Ramones. It is always good to be reminded of points we share in common across the Christian spectrum.

The feed for Br. Charles' blog "A Minor Friar" can be found at the bottom of the sidebar on this page.

This line from St. Francis' first Admonition has been fascinating me lately:

Thus, the Spirit of the Lord, who lives in his faithful, it is he who receives the sacred body and blood of the Lord.

So often we think of holy communion as something that we receive from Christ. In fact, it is the eternal communion of Father, Son, and Spirit, stretched forth to include us in the sacrifice of Christ, that we simply allow ourselves to step into.

Holy communion is the perfect joy and mutuality of the Trinity. The humanity of Christ--his Body and Blood we receive in the Eucharist--is just a portal for us enter into it.

Corpus Christi?

Blogs are addictive, you write them, then you read somebody else's and then you want to write again. It just never stops.

Something Bill Samuel said in a comment over on Johan Maurer's blog prompted me to write something I've been meaning to for some time. Briefly here is what Bill said:

Not practicing outward communion and baptism. Here I would parallel what Johan says about pastors - what early Quakers were led to protest here is not what many Christians are practicing today. I actually feel Quakers have had an impact here, which has gone unrecognized because it hasn't manifested itself the same way. I think there has been a change in much of the Christian church in how these are seen. Long before I formally left Friends, I favored the approach of Eastern Region and Southwest which made outward practice of these optional. And frankly, I just can't grasp how a God who chose to incarnate Himself in human flesh would reject using the incarnation represented by these as valid acts of worship.

I do disagree with Bill about the practice in Eastern Region and Southwest vis a vis outward sacraments as I have heard from a number of people in these yearly meetings that while physical sacraments are optional on paper they are all but required in practice. You have the option to do them or be ostracized. In fact, apparently, a proposal came before Eastern Region at their last session to require meetings to offer communion.

I also have been known as a critic of outward sacraments. That is essentially not true. I am opposed to meetings in Yearly Meetings whose discipline doesn't allow for physical sacraments blatantly violating the F&P they agreed to and not even making an attempt to change it. To me this corporate individualism on the part of churches and meetings is counter to the covenant relationship inherent in Christian community and ultimately damaging to the body of Christ. In any case, I am digressing.

frankly, I just can't grasp how a God who chose to incarnate Himself in human flesh would reject using the incarnation represented by these as valid acts of worship.

With this single sentence, Bill has stated the most important and profound truth about Christianity, Christian community, and sacraments whether physical or spiritual or both. That God became human in the person of Jesus Christ, walked talked, laughed, cried, suffered and died --in short experienced the totality of human existence-- is axiomatic to the Christian faith. We cannot call physical expressions of faith wrong or unholy. We know Jesus did drink wine and break bread with his disciples. If his disciples choose to do that today as an expression of faith who stands ready to condemn it? It is our job as Christians and Christian communities to be the embodiment, the continuing incarnation, of Christ's teaching and life in the world today.

Where I run in to problems is when physical expressions of faith do not embody the teaching of Christ. Even if the elements and motions replicate the most reverent Christian Worship:

An act that requires a dishonest, duplicitous breaking of a covenant agreement doesn't embody the message of Jesus who demanded integrity.

In one "Quaker" communion service I attended the stage (and you couldn't even begin to call it anything else) was spotlighted while the congregation, or perhaps audience, were in the dark. In the theater this is done to minimize an individual's awareness of people around him and make a play seem more like a personal interaction. This doesn't embody the message of a Jesus who was constantly calling people in to relationships, challenging them to expand their definition of neighbor, and creating community.

Outward sacramental acts that are in theory optional but in reality required are objectionable on many levels, but certainly aren't in keeping with the ending of the orthopraxy of the Temple.

It is easier to see these discrepancies among Friends who use outward sacraments, however, any meeting regardless of the tools used is supposed to be an incarnation of Christ's body. An unprogrammed meeting with no clear and consistent teaching about waiting worship can cease to be a part of the Church in any real sense and simply become a group of people trying really hard to prove they don't have ADD.

Personally, I like more contemplative worship, which doesn't rule out liturgy for me, it just has to be liturgy of a sort that re-enforces contemplation. Case in point there is a major US city I visit with some regularity. If I am there on a First Day morning I have found that the best place to find Christian worship that is life giving and authentic to the Quaker community I am united to is not at the Friends Meeting there. I can usually be found in the tiny hard to find chapel of the Poor Claires of the Perpetual Adoration sitting in community with around a dozen people, silently, in the presence of Christ. To some of them it is the wafer in the monstrance that is essential, to me it is they who are essential. The wafer maybe just helps a little.

The Richmond Declaration

To read a copy of the Richmond Declaration of Faith click here

The recent FUM board meetings in Kenya have brought the subject of the Richmond Declaration of Faith up once again. (Click here to read Johan Maurer's commentary on the discussion). This statement, drafted by representatives of 12 Orthodox Quaker yearly meetings in 1887, serves as the founding document for Friends United Meeting, the largest of today's big three Quaker families. It holds also is considered an important document by Central Yearly Meeting and by most, if not all, Evangelical Friends International Yearly Meetings.

Having come to Friends initially through an FGC affiliated unprogrammed meeting, and being a refugee from the Lutheran Church, I was deeply suspicious that the RDF was not a true Quaker document, especially since it so clearly used the Apostles and Nicene Creeds for its structure. Quakers were and are a non-creedal community, of that I was sure. However, then I took courses in Christian history (at a seminary affiliated with the similarly non-creedal Church of the Brethren).

By the 1600s, creeds were certainly used as a litmus test for who was in and who was out. However, if we look at the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, we see that neither of them is very long, nor do they go in to a lot of detail. In the 2nd and 4th centuries, respectively, these creeds would have been used to exclude certain fringe elements of the early Christian community such as Arians, Gnostics, Modalists and some others. However, their lack of detail and their brevity left a lot of room within the boundaries of the creeds for diversity and discussion. By the 1600's however it was not merely the creeds which one had to subscribe to, but a specific interpretation of the creeds. Consider that the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church were not very well disposed toward one another and questioned each other's Christianity, yet both used the same creeds. What once was meant to define the breadth of normative Christianity was now defining a narrow my way or the highway approach. I believe it was, in effect, this that Quakers were rejecting rather than creeds themselves.

In 1887, one of the many issues that separated Orthodox Quakers from Hicksite Quakers was ecumenism. Even though the contemporary descendants of Hicksite Quakers, FGC, are known for their Universalism (often Universalist about everything except Christianity), in 1887 it was they who wished to remain isolated and insular and didn't want to mix with the rest of the world. The Orthodox Friends conversely sought fellowship and cooperation with other Christian groups . Friends in the tradition of the RDF have have always maintained that it was not a creed. I would like to postulate that the Friends who attended the Richmond conference (whatever gadfly Chuck Fager may say about them) who were chosen by their Yearly Meetings to represent them recognized the historic creeds of Christianity for what they were meant to be. In the RDF, they showed the rest of the Christian world that Orthodox Quakerism did indeed fit within the boundaries of the larger Christian movement.

That many of the Yearly Meetings who were involved i it's drafting did not include it in their book of discipline initially is not important. We do not, to my knowledge, have records of any of the 12 yearly meetings rejecting it. It was never meant to be a creed for us. It was not and should never be something that we liturgically read on First Day morning. It was and is a symbol and a statement that we are part of the broader Christian community and thus, they a part of us.

DO SOMETHING OR SHUT UP, BUT STOP WHINING NOW!

It has been nearly a year since I left Indiana Yearly Meeting to come to Virginia and thus North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM), but the Quaker world isn't any bigger now than it was then and news from IYM still flutters in to my little corner of Virginia.

Several years ago, the last time IYM held their general session at Earlham College, one relatively new pastor to the yearly meeting posed a question from the floor to Nelson Bingham, then the acting president of Earlham College. I won't be able to quote this Friend Exactly but the question was to the effect of "What can we do in order to encourage Earlham to become a Biblically based institution". Nelson gave a very thoughtful answer which I, likewise, cannot quote exactly. The gist of it was that Earlham was not going to make an institutional move like that. However, there are student groups who shared this pastors view and opinions as well as other forums for discussions available, and that Earlham would welcome this pastor and others to contact these groups and use these forums to make sure that their viewpoint and opinions were not absent from the campus.

That was over three years ago, and to my knowledge neither this pastor nor anybody murmering in agreement with him has taken Nelson's advice. I wonder if this guy could even name the Christian organizations on the Earlham campus nearly as quickly or completely as he can name the ones he doesn't like. Has he or his meeting doen anything to assist Christian groups on campus? For example. Earlham is home to a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (My personal favorite among the national campus ministry organizations). IVCF staffworkers recieve training and program support from the national organization. However, like missionaries, they must raise the funds that support their position themselves. Very very very (did I say very?) few of the meetings in IYM are contributing to this fund.

No, it seems instead of attempting to actually do something productive, this pastor (who BTW came to IYM from Evangelical Friends International Eastern Region). would rather just sit around and whine and complain. Instead of trying to build something positive, he would rather destroy a relationship that has endured well over a century.

His latest problems are with a brochure he saw about a writers conference at my alma mater Earlham School of Religion for which he saw a brochure. In one of the tiny blurbs for one of several workshops, he found one clause which he has interpreted to mean that ESR is teaching religions other than Christianity. However his biggest problem is with Earlham's annual production of the Vagina Monologues which he bought a ticket and attended. Now let me be clear, this production isn't done outside on chase stage where somebody could just walk by and have it inflicted upon them. In order to be offended by it one must buy a ticket and go in to the auditorium and sit through it. Now why, instead of putting effort in to getting offended on purpose doesn't he just put the effort in to following (then) President Bingham's advice?

As it stands now two things are true. Indiana Yearly Meeting has almost no ability to influence anything at Earlham and Indiana Yearly Meeting is a more or less rapidly dying organization in which much of the leadership has spent the bulk of the last five years fighting about ephemeral things, calling eachother names, telling lies about each other and otherwise being downright un-Christian to each other. Which is probably why so many IYM pastors have moved to other yearly meetings and why meeting attendence is so low.

If IYM were to sever ties with Earlham they would then, necessarily, loose any chance they ever had of influencing anything there ever again. Additionally, If I were Earlham College, I'd be very happy to see them go. Who wants to be tied to an organization as non-functional, un-plesant and near death as IYM.

Christ Is Risen and I Got Pie!

In the various Eastern Orthodox Churches it is common in the weeks following Easter to greet each other with the phrase "Christ Is Risen" to which one responds "Truly He is Risen" or "He Is Risen Indeed". I have often thought that this was a wonderful custom that all Christians should take up, but it doesn't seem to have many takers, which makes me sad. We run around from November 1st to December 26th saying Merry Christmas, and sign petitions if the people at Target say anything else, but Easter gets no respect despite being an older celebration than Christmas by far.

In any case, I know this exchange of words in several languages: Greek, Russian, Arabic and Romanian. Indeed it is all I know in those languages. So today I stopped in to a local diner for a cup of coffee. I saw that the guy running the place was Greek, so I said "Kristos Anesti" to which he replied "Alithos Anesti". After which he turned to the waitress and said "He said Kristos Anesti to me, give him pie" As it turns out, he owns the diner, and the French Silk pie was really good.

Even the dictionary doesn't help much.

In addition to pastoral ministry, I am also a college professor. I teach religious studies at a large state university in Indiana, though that will all change soon when I move to Virginia. At some point in my course it is always necessary to talk with my students about the meaning of the words "liberal" and "conservative". We use or hear these terms almost daily, but few of my students will ever even venture a guess at a definition of either one of them. But when I throw out a social issue they can tell me whether it is a conservative or liberal issue. I say "anti-abortion" they say "conservative", I say "anti-death penalty", they say "liberal". When I throw out the name of a public figure, they likewise are able to identify the person as "liberal" or "conservative". When I say Dick Cheney, they say "conservative". Most of them are shocked to learn that Dick Cheney has spoken favorably toward the big "liberal" bug-a-boo issue of gay marriage. Back when the new pope was elected, they identified him as conservative. "How can that be" I asked, "he opposes the death penalty". Of course, possessing a grasp of logic all too often absent in the contemporary mind, he also opposes abortion. At that point I got the look that is all too familiar to both college professors and people who drive at night through the country, the one the deer give you in the headlights.
Recently one of the Quaker discussion lists I read, but seldom post to, has been bemoaning the spirit of liberalism infecting certain yearly meetings. And recently at the board meetings of a large Quaker organization certain yearly meetings (not the same ones as on the discussion list) were accused of having no moral grounding, being too liberal and told, by some people, that they should just leave.
Oddly, one of the board members accusing others of being too liberal is involved in a meeting at the heart of the sacrament controversy in one of the programmed Midwestern yearly meetings. In so far as the introduction of physical sacraments is a huge departure from the historic witness of the Society of Friends to the rest of the church and the world --a witness I seek to conserve-- I would label her opinion as quite liberal. Though I suspect she would equate being called liberal with being called any number of names I would never use and will not print here.
In 1688 slavery was an accepted part of life in the English speaking world and --many people are shocked to learn-- in the Society of Friends. That year, a small group of Quakers, Germantown Monthly Meeting, made up of German Quakers who had come to Pennsylvania at the request of William Penn made the first public deceleration against slavery in America. It would be the 19th Century before the rest of the Society of Friends would catch up. In a very real sense, those German Quakers were very liberal. They were attempting to introduce a new idea into a milieu that wanted to conserve something else.
To my knowledge, the Germantown Meeting was never pushed out of the Society of Friends , nor did it ever "leave". We tend to forget that Quakerism is based on the experience of God within community. That we are supposed to believe that God's will can be discerned in spite of our personal opinions on a given topic. Keep in mind, God makes his will known. He doesn't just put his rubber stamp on ours. The most heretical thing then that Quakers can do is seek to withdraw from or kick people out of that community.
It is true that at one time we disowned people for disorderly conduct. Rarely, if ever, was this for holding an opinion. it was for actual conduct in violation of community rules. It is also true that we have left or kicked out large sections of the community before. Hicksite and Orthodox Friends split, the Orthodox later split between Gurneyites, Wilburites and Uptagrafites. Indiana Yearly Meeting briefly split over slavery. As recently as the 1920's a split contoured resulting in the formation of Central Yearly Meeting. I wasn't there, but I promise you these were not joyous occasions at the time, nor can we look at them now and pronounce them good. I have read accounts of how these splits took place and read the rhetoric in the Quaker publications of the day. Regardless of which camp's opinion you favor, there wasn't a side in any of those splits not guilty of downright Un-Christian, sinful behavior. Oh and every single party in those old splits believed they were the conservatives.
It is also true that in our society, so used to getting things "now", this takes a long time and the party supporting the status-quo seems to have the upper hand. In reality God has the only hand in the entire game. Those of us who hold to a Quakerism in closer dialog with mainline or evangelical Protestantism run the risk of over emphasizing personal salvation. Other Quakers may even miss the whole concept of salvation. We all miss the biblical concept of salvation. God's salvific work through history -- including the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ-- is not just so Jeff Crim, or anybody else, gets eternal life. It is to restore a broken world to its' original created order where eternal life was the birth right of every one of God's children.
None of us knows precisely how much time elapsed between the creation of the world and the incarnation. We do know it has been 2006 years since that event though and we still live in a broken world that isn't even close to complete redemption. God is taking thousands of years to patiently fix what he made and we broke. All the while we go along trying to help fix one thing and breaking another. And we, in our tiny human self-centered rather than God-centered personal universes, label each other with words we cannot define and tell each other to go home.

Ann Coulter

I normally don't tackle politics here, and I am really going to try not to start with this post. However Ann Coulter's new book Godless is making lots of headlines and flying off the shelves. In fact, one copy flew off the shelf in to my hand. Ann asserts that "Liberalism" is a Godless religion and that "liberals" are a bunch of amoral godless people attacking traditional values and generally trashing up the world.
Coulter is taking on the spirituality of America, or at least a portion of American society. She also paid a visit to Earlham during my time there as a student and made some very deragatory comments. I think this makes her a fair topic of conversation for this blog.
I could spend time here discussing what is a religion and what isn't. I could discuss the words "liberal" and "conservative" and what, if anything, those words actually mean anymore. In fact, I probably will do that in the near future. Right now, I cannot get past the cover of the book. Ann is a very atrractive woman, there is no disputing that. But, seeing her in this form fitting, low cut, black cocktail dress, I cannot help but think that this cover is designed to appeal to the inner child in consumers. Specifically, those consumers whose inner child is a pimply faced homonally charged 15 year old boy. When you add the crucifix (BTW, Coulter claims to be Prebyterian, not Catholic), I begin to think I have seen ths look somewhere before:

Ok, so she isn't wearing a cross in this shot. --You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a picture of Madonna that I was willing to post to this blog--, but you all remember the ubiquitous "Matereal Girl" from the 80's and her boustiers and crucifix necklaces. Madonna was at least born Catholic (for the record Madonna, another name for the Virgin Mary, is her real first name). Like Coulter, Madonna also criticizes the Godlessness of America from the point of view of her red string wearing pseudo Kabbalah group.
Coulter's book is in fact causing many of the same sorts of sensationalist headlines that Madonna's songs have caused, and so far her book has about as much substance as Madonna's lyrics.
Perhaps I'm being unfair, an attractive woman like Coulter has the right to appear in an attractive photo on the front of her own book. Lets see how else Ann presents herself:




This is Ann on the Today Show, now this show is taped very early in the morning. Who wears a short, low cut "little black dress" at 7:00am? I mean honestly, is she trying to look as if she was out clubbing or pub crawling until just before she neeeded to be in the studio?

The photo at the right is from Ann's own web site. those appear to be the collumns of the US Capitol, with Ann wearing a shiny vinyl black dress. Now I lived in DC for a while and have even been an accredited member of the House Press Gallery. I've never seen anybody dress like this at the Capitol beofre. If they did, C-Span would have more viewers.
So there you have it, Ann Coulter, Madonna for a new century and the right wing.