Toward a Positive Vision of Liberal Christianity

Can the problems of the Episcopal Church be summed up with one silly t-shirt? That may be an overstatement, but New York Times columnist Ross Douthat got me thinking about it in his recent column, “Can Liberal Christianity be Saved?” Douthat argues that recent decades declines in mainline Protestant church membership and attendance is related to the church’s engagement in the divisive cultural debates of our day, principally but not exclusively the role of LGBT
people in society and the church.

Douthat cites two principal factors behind this. One is the influence of thinkers like retired Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose work eviscerates the core of orthodox Christian doctrine. The second is the failure of the church to articulate religious backing to its concern for social justice that in any way distinguishes the church from secular voices advocating similar positions. He's wrong on the first, and correct enough on the second that it's worth talking about. That's where the t-shirt comes in.

But let's deal with Spong first. I think Douthat vastly overestimates the influence of people like him within the church. Spong is not an instigator of where the Episcopal church finds itself today. His work is a last gasp of a line of inquiry that included Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God and Leslie Weatherhead’s The Christian Agnostic. The latter book concluded that it’s ok to be a Christian and deny the gospel miracles and the virgin birth, as long as you’re still on board with the physical resurrection of Jesus. Spong does Weatherhead one better and dispenses with the resurrection, too.

What all of these books have in common is a struggle to identify what is true about scripture and the creeds in the face of scientific discoveries about evolution, medicine, cosmology, and the like. Weatherhead’s book, alas, credulously relies on some junk science about spiritualism to support some of its conclusions. The debates contained in these books were perhaps necessary as the church grappled with the discovered world and chose not to be a faith that denies the facts in front of it. This is a good thing. But these authors erred in allowing discovery to constrain revelation, rather than expanding their understanding of revelation to accommodate discovery.

As quickly as I dismiss Spong and his intellectual forbears, I should acknowledge that the conversations they started opened up my own understanding of the claims of scripture and the creeds and gave me a vocabulary to express my own views. The idea of the virgin birth, the resurrection and second coming of Jesus, etc. do not require us to deny objective scientific reality, but they do live in tension with it. There is our daily lived reality, and a deeper real reality. We experience that real reality as if it is on the other side of a veil: close, but often invisible,
occasionally seen, only once in a great while truly breaking through. I cannot quantify how many other Episcopalians see things in this or a similar way, but I’d guess that it’s a greater proportion than those who say the Nicene Creed with their fingers crossed. It’s also not a unique or new idea, as I recently learned when I chanced upon a fascinating lecture on Jewish scholar Franz Rosenweig while driving the other night, but it's one that members of the church may not feel comfortable articulating.

Douthat’s second critique – that Episcopalians have failed to articulate a religious reason for their positions is worth spending more time on. It’s easy to get defensive on this point, to say, as some have, that if Douthat comes to any Episcopal church on a Sunday, he’ll find a congregation at prayer as sincere as Douthat’s own Roman Catholic parish. One might also reasonably argue that there’s some heavy-duty theological work behind the rite for blessing same sex relationships approved at the recent General Convention. Both of these things are true.

But these objections do not negate Douthat’s observation. To experience the church as a praying community, one must first walk in the doors. There’s no question that in our denomination, though certainly not in every parish, over the last couple decades, more people have been walking out than in. Heavy duty theological discussion deep in the pages of the Blue Book may be wonderful, but it’s no good if few within the church can restate them. Indeed, in the House of Deputies at the recent General Convention, just about the only folks expected to read the many hundreds of pages of documentation underlying all manner of legislation, referenced theology and the Bible rarely enough to make much of the debate in the house indistinguishable from what might occur at any other organization of humanists unusually well-versed in parliamentary procedure.

(On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn't judge the deputies too harshly for this, because one alternative to the status quo is some horrific proof-texting extravaganza. But I digress.)

Moreover, the Episcopal church has a problem not just in stating its reasons grounded in faith for the prominent social stands it has taken in recent years. It also has difficulty defining its reason for being in terms that involve God, or for that matter, positive terms of any type.

Take, for instance, what is perhaps the Episcopal Church’s most visible vehicle for attracting believers, the “Top 10 Reasons to be anEpiscopalian” t-shirt. The reasons are apparently derived from a Robin Williams HBO special a decade or so ago. They are:

10. No snake handling.

9. You can believe in dinosaurs.

8. Male and female God created them; male and female we ordain them.

7. You don’t have to check your brains at the door.

6. Pew aerobics.

5. Church year is color coded.

4. Free wine on Sunday.

3. All of the pageantry, none of the guilt.

2. You don’t have to know how to swim to get baptized.

1. No matter what you believe, there’s bound to be at least one other Episcopalian that agrees with you.

I’m going to set the question of whether t-shirts are an effective means of evangelism to one side (I think they can be helpful, but they shouldn’t be at the top of anyone’s list), and focus on whether this is really how we want to define ourselves as a church. Reasons 10, 9, 7, 3, and 2 all define the church in negative terms. Rather than saying what the Episcopal Church is, these reasons just define us in opposition to other Christians and they're smug to boot. Number 6 and number 5 don’t mean anything to outsiders. Number 3 and number 2 manage to demean what should be one of our top selling points, our sacramental life together. Number 2 further discredits immersion baptism, which is a perfectly valid and meaningful option. Number 1 simply reinforces the popular point that Episcopalians don’t really believe anything. Number 8 may be the only one worth saying in the
way it’s presented: it says something positive about our church and articulates a reason grounded in faith for it.

None of this is a judgment on Robin Williams’ comedy routine, by the way. I’ve never seen it; it may be very funny, though one certainly hopes there's more to it than these 10 lines. And there’s certainly no harm in making jokes about our church – that, too, is one of our selling points. But I emphatically do not think that these top 10 reasons should be adopted as any kind of official statement by the church, and the fact that these t-shirts were on sale at the national church’s booth at General Convention and are sold by a church affiliate certainly seems to indicate that they are.

I wouldn’t bother attacking this defenseless t-shirt if it were not broadly indicative of how we talk about ourselves as a church. We have a hard time saying who were are. Too often we define ourselves in the negative. It’s my bad habit, too. This is particularly perilous in a post-Christian culture. Trying to define ourselves this way implies that our evangelism strategy is to engage in a market share game, where we try to pick off converts from the Catholic church or our more fundamentalist brothers and sisters. Meanwhile the proportion of unchurched Americans is steadily rising, and we need to act as if we have something to offer those who do not yet believe. How do we tell our story?

To that end, the Bible study we undertook at the second evening gathering of the Acts 8 Moment (summarized here), is instructive. 30 or so people spent some time as a group reflecting on the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch from (you guessed it) the eighth chapter of Acts. Here it is:

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (This is a wilderness road.)²⁷ So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.²⁹Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to this chariot and join it.’³⁰So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’³¹He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.³²Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: 

‘Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
³³ In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.’ 

³⁴The eunuch asked Philip, ‘About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’³⁵Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.³⁶As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?’ He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.³⁹When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.⁴⁰But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. 

We talked about all kinds of aspects of this story (there's a whole lot in here -- what about that wilderness road?), but I just want to focus on one of them as a starting point. Philip's conversation with the eunuch starts not with the miracles, nor the virgin birth, nor the resurrection, nor the threat of the outer darkness, nor a liberal commitment to social justice, but with the profound mystery of the sacrifice of Jesus. He goes straight to the heart of God's compassion for creation, and builds from there. The foundation of our faith is that God became one with us in the person of Jesus, sacrificed himself for all of us, and gives us hope in the resurrection.

This is kind of heavy stuff, and it's a little weird. I've noted before how I never really got the resurrection (until I did), so the next task is to connect this foundational understanding to our personal stories and our collective actions as a church. This is far from a sufficient solution, but it is a starting point. It involves saying something positive about the God who grounds us, not putting other believers down.