Reiter's Block

Open Questions About Open Communion

Jendi Reiter — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:42:45 GMT

A couple of years ago, my church switched from "all baptized Christians" to "all those worshipping with us" being invited to receive the sacraments, a practice that I hear is not uncommon among liberal churches. This change upset some traditionalists while making others, including my multi-religious family, feel more welcome. I'm content with the current policy, though I wouldn't be offended if they invited non-Christians to receive a blessing at the altar rail instead.

My personal opinion about communion is similar to how I feel about premarital sex: It's important to reserve certain intimate acts for a fully committed relationship so that those vows represent a real life change and not a mere formality. However, it's hard to point this out to someone without shaming them in a way that is worse than the original offense. A public distinction between people (like not inviting your daughter's live-in boyfriend to Christmas dinner) is less defensible than a private word spoken in love.

Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted a thoughtful defense of closed communion that's got me wondering about different theories of the sacraments and what they imply for salvation. Bryan writes:

My concerns about violating Church teaching, breaking ordination vows, and making discipleship optional derive from my principal concern that this new theology moves us away from an objective understanding of Baptism to a subjective understanding. On the objective theology of Baptism, here’s what the Prayer Book succinctly says:

“Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble” (BCP, p. 298).

It’s difficult to imagine a clearer affirmation that Baptism objectively makes persons full members of the Church than this. And the implications of the “indissoluble bond” created by God in Baptism are far-reaching. No matter what I do or fail to do – no matter how far away from the fold I may drift – the “yes” that God says to me in Baptism never changes to a “no.” I can always return home, where the father will come running out to meet, embrace, kiss, and welcome me back.

That’s powerful stuff. But since its core meaning derives from Baptism and not from the Eucharist, the baptismal theology of membership and of the “indissoluble bond” are put in peril by the new theology of “inclusiveness” that shifts the locus away from Baptism to the Eucharistic table.

Among other implications, the theology of communion for the unbaptized means that Baptism as the sacramental foundation of the Church gets replaced by the individual's desire to receive Communion as the 'sacramental' foundation of the Church. This signifies a virtually wholesale adoption of a 'consumerist' ecclesiology that turns the 1979 Prayer Book on its head. Instead of being primarily about what God does, the new theology is about what the individual human being does. It’s about what I choose and what I desire. Shifting the locus away from the “indissoluble bond” of Baptism to the individual subject's desires, we can no longer speak (as we do when introducing the Apostles' Creed in the burial office) of "the assurance of eternal life given at Baptism" (BCP, p. 496). The only assurance we have is what I happen to want right now.

Without pretending to understand how it "works", I lean toward a strong theory of the sacraments as conveying God's real presence, as opposed to a mere symbol. In our materialistic age, to say that something only happens in the mind is the first step toward letting it become unreal and irrelevant. I need a startling reminder that God can be as present to our bodies as He is to our minds. The plausibility of the Incarnation is continually refreshed when we are shown that God works this way all the time, infusing the finite with the infinite, bridging the gap between matter and spirit.

However, when we consider baptism as a similarly objective operation, making us "sealed as Christ's own forever" no matter what we do, are we endorsing a magic-ritual theory of salvation? Is it impossible to "lose" your salvation because the water sprinkled on your forehead had objective power apart from the vagaries of your current desires? I'm more convinced by C.S. Lewis' argument that heaven and hell are states of being (closeness or estrangement from God) arising from the daily choices that shape our character. I suspect most Episcopalians would agree, to the extent that they believe in hell at all.

Somewhat inconsistently, evangelical Protestants who believe baptism is the dividing line between heaven-bound and hell-bound also have a low-church view of the sacraments as mere symbols of fellowship. Now I am really confused.

I'm being a little unfair to Bryan, since his post wasn't focused on soteriology, but I'd like to know what baptism "does", in an Episcopal theology of the sacraments, beyond making the individual believer feel subjectively committed to Christ. As a practical matter, any church that's going to re-close its communion table will have to explain this to the congregation.

"Julian's Yearbook" Wins Chapter One Promotions Short Story Competition

Jendi Reiter — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:40:47 GMT

Marianne Moore may have wanted imaginary gardens with real toads in them, but what's even better is imaginary friends who earn you real money. "Julian's Yearbook", a chapter from one of my two novels-in-progress, has won first prize of 2,500 pounds in the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. In this episode, Julian grapples with first love and homophobia at his Southern high school, while taking steps to launch his career as a fashion photographer. Here's the beginning:

Desire smells like acid in the dark. Its face is a hundred faces, rising out of the stop bath, materializing on grey paper like ghosts. Your ghosts and mine; you knew them too. The football heroes joshing in a group shot, a chorus line of manly awkwardness. There's the clown, the golden boy, the dull and violent sidekick. You've got to remember that snub-nosed blonde with too much school spirit, whose mascara you almost forgot to clean off the backseat of your daddy's car. Memory kisses her lips back to pink, repaints these black-and-white yearbook photos in the streaked denim and poison green we wore when Reagan had his finger on the big red button.

Everything's digital now. Hollywood no longer needs a thousand sweating extras to watch a gladiator die. It's amazing that clients still fly me to Milan or Los Angeles to photograph an actual shoe on someone's foot. I'm a Southern boy so perhaps I romanticize inefficiency. But I miss the days when you put something more than your eyesight at risk for a picture. I wonder how many of us went mad as hatters from the darkness, the fumes, acid seeping under our rubber gloves, the tension of this hurried intimacy with a masterpiece we had only one chance to perfect or spoil.
...

The story will be published in Chapter One Promotions' 2008 anthology, which you can order here.

Northampton Pride 2008

Jendi Reiter — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:19:43 GMT

Yesterday Northampton held its 27th annual Gay Pride March, attended by 7,500 people. My husband and I and one of my moms marched with the good folks from MassEquality, the group that successfully lobbied to preserve equal marriage rights in Massachusetts, and their Connecticut counterpart, Love Makes a Family.

MassEquality is currently advocating for the Equality Agenda, a variety of state legislative and funding initiatives including transgender civil rights, "safe schools" programs, and HIV/AIDS prevention.

Behind that sign, I'm wearing my rainbow "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You" tank top, available here from Cafe Press. The leopard-print sequined lid is from Mrs. Dewson's Hats in San Francisco. (I received objective proof of my fabulosity when a young gay man asked to buy it from me. I let him try it on.)

That's MassEquality organizer Ryan Brown on the left, with other supporters whose names I didn't catch, as we march down Main Street past the courthouse.

An appreciative crowd on Main Street.

Some of our more colorful characters.

What to Do When Your Glasses Break

Jendi Reiter — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:40 GMT

My beloved, unstylishly large eyeglasses went kaput this week, after 10 years of faithful service. Since without them I am as blind as Mr. Magoo, I put on my driving glasses and headed to the eye doctor for a long-overdue checkup and a new prescription. I'm not sure what she said after "As you get closer to age 40..." (the very thought induced brain freeze) but the upshot was, I bought a lovely pair of Armani frames, then spent the afternoon on the couch in a darkened room waiting for my eyes to un-dilate.

Cut off from my usual sources of entertainment, I searched the Internet for someone to "tell me the story of Jesus". If you're ever in a similar predicament, start with the Coffee Cup Apologetics podcasts at the Internet Monk's blog. His conversational musings take a little while to get to the theological heart of the matter, but there's always a memorable original insight to take away. Recent topics include the New Atheists (Dawkins et al.) and what it means to be post-evangelical.

Then I headed over to God's iPod for a sermon by Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church. Just as in his book Velvet Elvis, his preaching includes a great deal of economic, social and religious background information to show how Jesus' parables would have resonated with his audience, yet his style is down-to-earth and approachable, not academic.

Still on my to-do list: check out the Charles Spurgeon sermons dramatized by Charles Koelsch on the Spurgeon Audio Page.

The Good Thief's Penance

Jendi Reiter — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:53:06 GMT

Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted this meditation from the late Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Bloom) that I hope to remember whenever I feel ensnared in persistent sins:

So often we ask ourselves and one another a very tormenting question: How can I deal with my sinful condition? What can I do? I cannot avoid committing sins, Christ alone is sinless. I cannot, for lack of determination, or courage, or ability truly repent when I do commit a sin, or in general, of my sinful condition. What is left to me? I am tormented, I fight like one drowning, and I see no solution.

And there is a word which was spoken once by a Russian staretz, one of the last elders of Optina. He said to a visitor of his: No one can live without sin, few know how to repent in such a way that their sins are washed as white as fleece. But there is one thing which we all can do: when we can neither avoid sin, nor repent truly, we can then bear the burden of sin, bear it patiently, bear it with pain, bear it without doing anything to avoid the pain and the agony of it, bear it as one would bear a cross, — not Christ's cross, not the cross of true discipleship, but the cross of the thief who was crucified next to Him. Didn't the thief say to his companion who was blaspheming the Lord: We are enduring because we have committed crimes; He endures sinlessly... And it is to him, because he had accepted the punishment, the pain, the agony, the consequences indeed of evil he had committed, of being the man he was, that Christ said, 'Thou shalt be with Me today in Paradise...'

Read the whole post here.

C.H. Connors and Other Smith College Poets

Jendi Reiter — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:02:41 GMT

Earlier this week, the Poetry Center at Smith College celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2008 with readings by alumnae from the past 60 years. Poems by the participants and other Smith graduates are featured on this web page. Carolyn Connors '60, who publishes her poetry online at www.chconnors.com, has kindly permitted me to reprint her poem "A Glory from the Earth", which she read at the gala. I especially love the last line.

A Glory from the Earth
by C.H. Connors

Our science has achieved its opposite
    and taken us down a peg or two.
    Our animal nature has come unglued
from ghost; we’re Things with skills and wit.

Once we had a soul because we thought
    the world was also made in part
    of spirit. Taught by story, art
and church, we went about the earth in awe.

Those who went before believed with ease,
    an opening between two roots
    gave passage to the underworld.
Enchanted bridges spanned the burning seas

between defeat and safety, peril and hope.
    Of host of angels, fairy host,
    song sifted from the sky or rose
in mists of heavenly vapor from the moat.

By silver water, fruit of gold bowed low
    to free the spellbound prince from form
    of tree or beast, or keep from harm
the peasant girl before whom all will bow.

What shall we do with all our magic now?
    Our wands are turned to sticks to beat
    each other off and school belief.
Once, our gift of meaning to our world

gave back the gift of meaning to our days.
    But even still, imagination
    lets all understanding happen;
even then, curiosity was praise.

****

Other favorites from the Smith College reading were Tanya Contos, Celia Gilbert, Anne Harding Woodworth (her chapbook Up from the Root Cellar, just out from Cervena Barva Press, tops my soon-to-read list), and Jane Yolen, whose original fairy tales enriched many hours of my childhood. If you can lay your hands on a copy of her out-of-print books The Hundredth Dove and The Girl Who Cried Flowers, pay any price. I'm grateful that I saved most of my picture books, including The Bed Book, a dreamy little oddity by late lamented Smith alumna Sylvia Plath.

Book Notes: Liberating Tradition

Jendi Reiter — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:30:27 GMT

Kristina LaCelle-Peterson's Liberating Tradition: Women's Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective offers a solid introduction to Christian feminism, and a wake-up call to the churches not to mistake culturally conditioned gender roles for gospel truth. Topics surveyed include the strong women of the Bible and their often-overlooked successors, from the female monastics to the 19th-century social reformers; feminine metaphors for God in Scripture; sex discrimination and body image; the diverse forms that marriage has taken in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and the egalitarian message of Jesus.

While at times I feel that Liberating Tradition goes in too many directions at once, this smorgasbord may be useful to conservative Christians who have not previously been exposed to basic feminist critiques of consumerism, for example. The book's main strength is that LaCelle-Peterson backs up mainstream feminist-egalitarian arguments with detailed Biblical citations and historical evidence of women's leadership roles in the church.

I was encouraged to see this book being sold at the recent Wheaton College theology conference, on the table of Baker Books, a leading evangelical publisher. As egalitarian perspectives become more reputable in evangelical circles, space also opens up for a more dynamic, historically aware method of reading Scripture, which hopefully can benefit other marginalized groups. It's no longer plausible to say that we must replicate the family structures of first-century Palestine or else we're undermining the authority of the Bible. Educated, active, Spirit-filled women, in numbers too great to ignore, are forcing the church to recognize that history and personal experience must inform our interpretive process, which means that our understanding of what the Bible says about women will change over time.

LaCelle-Peterson distinguishes herself from secular feminists and Christian complementarians, both of whom see the Bible and feminism as inherently incompatible. Instead, she argues that the Bible as a whole affirms women's full humanity and equal participation in God's kingdom. She does not take the liberal approach of throwing out texts that offend her politics, but rather contextualizes them and asks whether the "obvious" interpretation merely seems so because of the sexist cultural lenses through which we read.

God's maleness, for instance, is not evident from Scripture. Compared to the other gods of the ancient Near East, who all had consorts and fertility rituals, the God of the Old Testament is strikingly non-gendered. Why do we assume that God is a literal "father" when this metaphor appears, but have no trouble perceiving the figurative language when God is compared to a stream of water, a rock, a nursing mother or a brooding hen? Since the God of the creation story transcends gender, "made in God's image" applies equally to men and women.

After the Fall, hierarchy is introduced into the male-female relationship, with elements of oppression and unhealthy craving. Again, Christians have easily recognized that the other aspects of Adam and Eve's new situation are a curse to be alleviated: "Are the items in Genesis 3 describing the state in which God wants us to live? For example, since God said farming would be difficult, does that mean using tractors is contradicting God?...Is it wrong for a woman to have epidural anesthesia in childbirth, since God said that women will have increased pain as they bear children?" (p.40) By contrast, we take Adam's rule over Eve to be a moral norm, not a warning that their sin now taints all intimate relationships with the possibility of abuse of power.

In Jesus' earthly ministry, we see God's original plan for an egalitarian kingdom. Jesus validated Mary the sister of Martha when she assumed the posture of a male disciple, and provocatively ignored the purity taboos that would have kept him from healing, touching and speaking with women.

In a section titled "Discipleship Trumps Gender Roles", LaCelle-Peterson adds, "It is interesting that Jesus also refuses to affirm positive traditional roles for women, even when asked to. Most significantly, unlike the tradition of some sectors of the Christian church, he does not put his own mother on a pedestal and value her simply for having borne him." (pp.58-59) In Mark 3:33-35 ("Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother") he takes an exclusionary status marker, one's membership in a family, and makes it open to all who follow God. Women who fulfill traditional expectations as wives and mothers are no more privileged than their widowed, poor, or unpartnered sisters, including those with a checkered sexual history. Similarly, in Luke 11:27, Jesus proclaims that anyone, through discipleship, can be on a par with the woman who gave birth to him. "He isn't putting Mary down, but raising the status of all the women in the crowd." (p.59)

LaCelle-Peterson takes on the verses in the Epistles that seem to limit women's participation, such as 1 Cor 14:33-35 ("women should be silent in the churches"). She notes that these lines occur within a discussion of how both men and women should behave decorously when they pray and prophesy, so that non-Christians will not be scandalized. It is assumed that women will be preachers and teachers (e.g. Phoebe and others in Romans 16). As many scholars now believe, 1 Cor 14 probably refers to women in the congregation who talked during the service, perhaps asking their husbands to explain the Scriptures, since women were not generally literate.

LaCelle-Peterson suggests that 1 Tim 2:11-15 ("...I permit no woman to teach or hold authority over a man...yet she will be saved through childbearing") addresses a specific problem: female followers of Diana or other mother-goddesses who were proclaiming their superiority to men within the church. Saved "through" childbearing does not mean "by" (as in, salvation comes through being a mother) but "during"; God will bring them safely through childbearing, so they no longer need to hedge their bets by praying to Diana.

Anyone who's cringed at the selection of pastel-tinted "Christian womanhood" books in a Lifeway bookstore, or sat through one too many John Eldredge lectures on how men naturally long to be rescuers and women to be rescued, will appreciate LaCelle-Peterson's deconstruction of gender stereotypes that have been picked up by the evangelical marketing machine and reinforced with so-called divine authority. Consumer culture teaches young girls that their self-worth depends on being pretty, delicate, and unthreatening. Gimmicks like Revolve, the Bible packaged as a teen fashion magazine, misdirect Christian girls' energy toward externals rather than internal spiritual maturity. It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous.

One of the most helpful sections of this book is its tour through the many manifestations of marriage in Biblical times and beyond. What Christian conservatives call the "traditional" family, with the man working outside the home and his wife staying home to raise the children, is an artifact of 19th-century capitalism. Before industrialization, husbands, wives and children often worked side by side on the farm or in the artisan's workshop. Both parents were involved in teaching the children the skills they would need to carry on the business.

However, when capitalism turned men into salaried employees of a large corporation, women's non-cash-based labor became devalued and invisible. It was a sign of upward mobility if your wife could afford to stay home. This meant that the woman became an ornament to the male ego rather than a contributor to society. That pride-based arrangement doesn't sound like the model of mutual submission we read about in the Epistles, still less the actual patterns of discipleship in the early church. Yet today's conservative churches have uncritically adopted a commercialized vision of gender roles as if it were based on natural law.

To me this suggests the dangers of an ahistorical reading of the Bible. Human beings are inescapably embedded in history, both enriched and constrained by the specifics of our time, place, and material interests. When we are afraid to contextualize and move on from the social arrangements that happened to prevail in New Testament times, because we are seduced by an impossible dream of an "objective" social order that stands outside historical contingency and fallibility, we also lose perspective on our present-day social arrangements and how they unconsciously shape our hermeneutics.

Liberating Tradition contains many more useful arguments from history and Biblical criticism than can be summarized in this review. By necessity, LaCelle-Peterson limits her focus to women's heterosexual relationships and church leadership roles, but the logical extension of her critique of gender is unavoidable. Having admitted, in any context, that the meanings of maleness and femaleness are historically variable -- and having recognized that our fallen nature easily converts difference into inequality, contrary to the radically inclusive vision of Jesus -- we cannot honestly say "marriage is between one man and one woman" without admitting that most of the important words in that sentence are ambiguous, including (pace Bill Clinton) "is". Will the female pastors and theologians in today's conservative churches, who owe their leadership roles to feminist readings of the Bible, speak out against heterosexist idolatry, or will they pull the ladder up after them?

Poems by Conway: "Walls" and "Things That Hang"

Jendi Reiter — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:35:52 GMT

New poems below from "Conway", my pen pal serving 25-to-life for receiving stolen goods under California's three-strikes law. I'm exploring self-publication options for his chapbook, but would also appreciate being contacted by any interested publishers.

Walls

As I stand in contrast
questioning authority, to which it stands

Is this wall of concrete asking itself
why I stick around, never leave?
Seeming to grieve this stoic stance
held so long, by a pillar built society.
Do the walls rejoice, in my familiar visage
whenever I caress that sharp roughness
with this softer flesh
polishing the stone.

Or, is it just hope
that makes me imagine the wall alive
with sight, even sturdy voice?

Then, I wonder
is it this stone
that exiles me in
or the world out...

****

Things That Hang

A sound in the air
until caught by an ear
wanted people
on the post office wall
offering money to call
A kite by the wind
with a string
on the other end
that question
of doubt
you know
what I'm talkin' about
A hope
and a prayer
pants, on a leg
the shirt
off his back
A corpse
without any slack...

Poem: "Called Out"

Jendi Reiter — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:51:37 GMT

The baker, said Luther, glorifies God in bread.
He was a fat fellow, knew good beer from a bad sermon.
Enough of these piglets in neckcloths
sweating through bare words never meant
to be dragged up from belly to lips.
Inside every man I want, I want
cries like a baby, but ashamed
of bread sopped in milk,
choleric to grab his father's knife.
The helmsman glorifies God by seeing sharks.
The constipated scholar can afford to toss his ink
at demons in the frost,
his own chamber glass cracking.
But bluff sailors, their red hands freezing to the wheel,
need gloves, not Latin.
Bless the tanner and his scrawny boy
who sleeps in the horse-hay,
wakes to crack the trough's icy skin
and offer the first bite
of an ordinary apple to the steaming mare.
Let him be too young to dream of whores
like Reason, Luther's false bride.
She is all painted with vocations
of monk and knight and merchant,
pale halo, priapic spear,
the great ships laden with lemons.
The leper glorifies God by losing
his fingers. Luther counted beads
but could not count his dreams
where his shadow-self barreled through Cockaigne,
poor paradise without bakers
where sugar drops from trees and women
are all thighs and stopped mouths.
The beggar glorifies God by opening his hand
to the butcher and the nailsmith, the fool
by singing his cradle song over stones and pennies
flung round him like stars in the dirt.

This poem won third prize in the 2008 Utmost Christian Writers poetry contest.

Rediscovering the Trinity (Part Three)

Jendi Reiter — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:16:46 GMT

Highlights of the final day of last week's "Rediscovering the Trinity" conference at Wheaton College (you knew there were going to be three posts in this series, didn't you?):

Philip Butin, president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, was an engaging speaker who proposed that preaching could be a continuation of the divine speech that we find in the Bible. He cited the views of Calvin and other 16th-century Reformers that preaching didn't just expound God's word, it could be God's word under certain circumstances. Since the written text of Scripture is derived from a prior oral tradition, we can't say that God only works through written language. Proper preaching is not speech about God but speech by God, declaring what Jesus has said and done, and what He will do through the Spirit. To preach Christ means to allow the Spirit to speak through you. However, this is not automatic; the preacher has to unblock the channel for divine communication by staying true to Scripture.

Now, I find these claims for preaching to be unduly restrictive at best, dangerous at worst. Why should preaching be more likely than other verbal art forms, or non-verbal expressions of worship, to reveal the Spirit? And what does it mean when preachers disagree? The diversity of views within the Bible itself is confusing enough. Back then, we had church councils who decided which writings about Jesus counted as Scripture. Now that the church has fractured into thousands of denominations, we couldn't even begin to agree on an authority that would determine the divine status of particular sermons. I realize that Butin wasn't actually proposing a new canon, but in that case, what benefit is there to making these extreme claims for one human activity as opposed to all others?

Butin helpfully exegeted St. Paul's discussion in 2 Cor 2-4 of how his own words could carry divine authority. Paul's unique insight: because of the normative pattern of Incarnation, divine revelation is most profoundly and authentically communicated through ordinary, flawed human leaders and their words. We have this treasure in earthen vessels so that it will be clear that the power comes from God alone (2 Cor 4:6-7). God communicates through our sincere, vulnerable, broken selves. Through the transparency of not hiding our inadequacies, we remove the veil and let the gospel shine through. This is the most comforting and life-changing message I can imagine; again, though, I don't see why preaching should be singled out.

Leanne Van Dyk of Western Theological Seminary offered a more holistic, inspiring vision of how our entire lives can be a proclamation of our incarnate faith. The church first of all proclaims the gospel by being a community that lives differently, and only secondarily by verbal evangelizing. The church is the gathering of people who worship, confess, and give witness in concrete ways to the reality of God's kingdom that has broken into our world. The church is not mainly about generating personal spiritual experiences or dispensing true information.

The church's mission is a subset of God's mission, not coextensive with it. In the Bible, and the world around us, we see God using persons, cultures, institutions, and even nonhuman creatures (Balaam's donkey) who are outside the current covenant community.

Authentic and coherent patterns of Christian life are central to the task of witnessing. Don't discount the power of small, mundane acts of patience, deference, hospitality and unselfish love. When we make dinner, plant a garden, or spend time with friends, we are also proclaiming the gospel (or not!). Proverbs and Ecclesiastes show that God cares how we go about such daily business, because that's how we spend most of our time. Honoring the proclamatory aspect of everyday routine can make space for sabbath rest, freeing us from the pressure to be always busy at service projects or preaching. (One of my favorite bloggers, the Internet Monk, calls this pressure "wretched urgency".)

Van Dyk said mission is not a project or a goal so much as a way of life. No kind or honest or patient deed is wasted. It is all taken up into God's own purposes for the restoration of shalom.

Someone asked whether we could really call these activities proclamation if Jesus is not mentioned. I didn't get a clear sense of how Van Dyk would distinguish Christian "implicit proclamation" from other types of good works. But since she wasn't saying that action should replace God-talk, only that it's on a par with it, this may be yet another instance of Trinitarian "both/and" not "either/or".

During a wrap-up panel discussion at the close of the conference, the question was posed whether a proper Trinitarian understanding of unity would help us overcome doctrinal divisions within global Christendom? (John 17: "that they all may be one".) John Franke and Edith Humphreys disagreed over whether unity should even be our goal. Franke, who is writing a book called Manifold Witness, said the plurality of truth is part of divine design. Part of learning to manifest unity is living peaceably with our genuine differences, trusting that God is at work in ways we can't see. Humphreys saw differences as God's response to original sin, His plan to teach us humility and make us aware of our incompleteness, not His ultimate design for humanity. Franke put forth an alternate view that multiple perspectives are needed to capture a multifaceted God. Butin concurred; God is unity not in spite of diversity but because of it.

Want more Wheaton? Collected papers from each year's conference are published as anthologies by InterVarsity Press. I picked up their 2006 collection The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts at this year's bookfair, and the one from last year's excellent conference on the early church fathers has just been released.