Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Wheaton College Conference on Spiritual Formation: Part 2


Today I continue blogging about the Wheaton College theology conference I attended April 16-17. See my last post here.

When last we left our intrepid heroine, she was eating cookies from the awesome Wheaton dining hall during two afternoon lectures on spiritual formation in the writings of classic Protestant theologians. These lectures were more specialized than the preceding ones, and probably most interesting to folks who had read the authors in question, but still contained some useful insights for the average person.

Dr. Kelly Kapic, a professor at Covenant College, spoke about John Owen’s concept of “evangelical holiness”. Owen was one of the leading 16th-century Puritan theologians; his many books included Communion with God. (Four hundred years later, he has his own fansite; according to the thumbnail bio, “In his early twenties, conviction of sin threw him into such turmoil that for three months he could scarcely utter a coherent word on anything; but slowly he learned to trust Christ, and so found peace.” Oh yes, I’ve been there.)

Kapic said that for Owen, “evangelical holiness” was not only about right actions. In fact, Owen used “moral virtue” as a negative phrase, because self-generated effort is inferior to the holiness produced by grace. Sinful humanity likes to create a substitute (external or civil morality) for real spirituality, which does nothing to close the chasm between the holy Creator and the rebellious creature. True holiness is dependent on the gift of the gospel.

The moral law tells us what to do, but doesn’t give us the power to do it. That comes from our knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself in Jesus. The gospel is the only thing that brings spiritual strength, cheerfulness, courage, perseverance, and relief from fear and despair. The Law is still our guide for action, but we now live out of the freedom and power of the gospel. (Once again, I would have liked to hear about some specific spiritual practices that make this a psychological reality for the believer; one could easily walk away from a conference like this with the impression that the gospel message is a magic wand that taps us on the head and turns a frog into a prince. I wonder if many Christians suffer silent despair when they agree with all the right ideas but don’t feel better inside.)

Owen’s emphasis on divine gift, said Kapic, does not nullify his call to self-discipline, but it’s a matter of priorities: the ultimate goal of spiritual life is not self-improvement but communion with the Triune God. “Triune” is an important word here. Evangelical holiness is Christ-centered. God is most clearly represented when we look on the face of Jesus. It is the only way that humans can see the essential glory of the invisible God. By contrast, Kapic criticized some modern evangelical theologians for talking about God’s attributes without much discussion of Jesus.

The difference between the Holy Spirit and false spirits is that God’s true spirit always points people to Christ. In Owen’s day, there were a lot of religious enthusiasms and awakenings, and he wasn’t convinced that all of them were truly from God. The test: does this spirit shape you into the image of Christ, in your mind, body, and affections?

According to Owen, all the blessings of the Christian life flow from our being partakers of the same spirit with Christ. By virtue of this union, Christ suffers in our afflictions. (Does this mean Owen was taking a position against the impassibility of God? If so, good for him.) This union is participatory and life-giving, not only transactional and abstract. The cross doesn’t only point to the past reality of salvation. It continues to shape the present reality of his body, the church–the wounds we bear by virtue of being godly in a fallen world.

Owen distinguished communion from union with God. Will we lose ourselves in absorption in God, and lose our creaturely distinctness? No, we do not lose our individuality, but rather participate in God’s spirit, each in our unique ways, brought into harmony but not obliterated. Unity with Christ glories in that diversity, while overcoming the sins that divide us.

Sadly, it was hard for me to believe the proponents of this utopian vision, given the evangelical church’s discrimination against sexual minorities. More than in past years, I found myself struggling with trust issues, and had to remind myself that the speakers might know some things about God even if their hearts were not open to everyone He created.

Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh, a professor of spiritual theology at Regent College, discussed how early evangelicals like John Wesley and George Whitefield appropriated and popularized pre-Reformation resources on spiritual practices to develop a modern Protestant vocabulary for spiritual formation. I have to confess that I did not take very good notes on this presentation. Not having read the authors in question, I had only a limited interest in Hindmarsh’s detective work to trace how they read and reprinted one another’s writings, though I was moved by his reverence for the centuries-old book that he showed us.

He made an interesting comparison between Protestant and Catholic treatment of new movements that arise in the church. Protestantism splits into new sects, while the Catholic Church prefers to incorporate them as new “schools” (to use Prof. Cunningham’s terminology from his lecture) like the Franciscans, Dominicans, and so forth. Had Wesley and the evangelicals appeared before the Reformation, they might have become a new religious order within the wider unified church. A school of spirituality could be described as a particular way of hearing and relating to the gospel, identified with a particular cultural milieu and group of people.

That’s enough fun for today. Next time: Gordon Fee puts the Spirit back in spirituality; Dallas Willard reveals the three rules of humility; and some women are allowed to speak.

Wheaton College Conference on Spiritual Formation: Part 1


With the cognitive dissonance for which this blog would be famous if it were famous, I’ve decided to follow yesterday’s post on NOM parody videos with my report on the theology conference I attended at Wheaton College last week. The topic of this year’s event was “Life in the Spirit: Spiritual Formation in Theological Perspective”. Wheaton is the leading U.S. evangelical college, acclaimed for its rigorous academic program as well as the quality of its dining-hall food, and I partook liberally of both resources. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the Saturday morning session because of my flight time, so this report will only cover Thursday-Friday.

Dr. Jeffrey Greenaman, a professor of Christian ethics at Wheaton, introduced the theme of the conference with a clear and lively lecture that defined spiritual formation as “our continuing response to the reality of God’s grace shaping us into the likeness of Jesus Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit, in the community of faith, for the sake of the world.” He then unpacked several aspects of this definition. It’s a continuing response because formation into disciples is a lifelong process (a theme picked up by Dr. Dallas Willard on Friday in his lecture on sanctification). Greenaman emphasized God’s grace because the fear of works-righteousness looms over discussions of spiritual formation. We can only change because God chose to offer us new life, but on the other hand, we have to do the work. Formation into what? Into the likeness of Christ, the suffering servant who is humble and gives himself for others. However, this process does not end with the individual or even with the church. Formation is for the sake of the world because the church is a sent body. (This phrase made me think of Christ, who was sent to us in a human body.) The church is not an end in itself, Greenaman said; it exists to be the presence of God in the world.

Greenaman also said that “the chief purpose of theology is whole-person formation for mission.” If your theology has no bearing on the formation of a whole person (head and heart) in God’s service and in community, it’s got some problems. He recommended Elizabeth O’Connor’s Journey Inward, Journey Outward.

This was a useful reminder because intellectuals (myself included) tend to get lost in worshipping beautiful abstract systems. Notwithstanding this, at some points during the conference I still felt that we were becoming too bogged down in history and theory, considering our practical topic. This was also influenced by my personal gripe that evangelicals sometimes pay more attention to the Bible, as a sacred object, than to the world in which it is applied. But I digress.

Dr. George Kalantzis, an associate professor of theology at Wheaton, discussed “Spirituality and the Mimetic Impulse”. Kalantzis, a Greek Orthodox Christian, is the director of Wheaton’s new Center for Early Christian Studies. He was one of the speakers who addressed the meaning of “spirituality”, that much-abused word that can mean anything from a vague religious feeling to a serious faith practice. According to Kalantzis, spirituality reflects the radiance of Christian faith in daily life. It is the charism (anointing) of the Holy Spirit, a life transfigured and cleansed of evil.

Kalantzis described the second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr’s journey from classical philosophy to Christian faith. Like Christians, Greco-Roman thinkers understood the transitory nature of cosmic existence and tried to find a way for the soul to transcend the temporal and be united with the eternal good. Justin sampled various philosophies and stuck with Platonism for awhile, until one day an old man asked him how the philosophers could talk about a God they’d never seen. Truth cannot be reached through the mind alone; you need God’s self-revelation. Justin prayed, was converted, and studied the prophets, “friends of God” who had direct knowledge, not just theory.

(Since I’m all about empiricism these days, I wonder if there’s a lesson here for Christians who behave as if the bare text always trumps personal experiences and real-world observation. Has the era of prophets ended? How would we know?)

Kalantzis then discussed ascetic disciplines as a means of spiritual formation, another trait the early Christians had in common with Greco-Roman sages and some Jews (the Essenes). Martyrdom was the first such extreme practice. It was an anticipation of the eschaton, in which the power of the Spirit was revealed by the super-human deeds performed by weak and marginalized people (slaves, women, etc.).

After Christianity was legalized and then made the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century, “the world was in the church” and it was no longer so easy to distinguish the holy from the hypocrites. Thus the era of martyrs gave way to the era of monks as the new exemplars of spiritual perfection. Martyrdom became self-martyrdom. The desert fathers’ writings were a program for theosis, humans becoming God-like through the grace of God who became human. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, we cooperate with God through practical obedience, assenting to let the spirit transform us. Human will and divine grace interpenetrate, rather like the persons of the Trinity. The monk’s progress leads to apatheia, or passionlessness, letting go of attachments to particular forms. Contemplation springs from simplicity. Then perfection follows, the true knowledge of God.

Kalantzis ended with some wise words from Basil the Great, who thought that life in a monastic community was healthier for the soul than pure solitude. “If you’re living alone in the desert, whose feet are you washing? To whom are you last, if you are alone?” For Basil, salvation was personal but not individual.

Dr. Lawrence Cunningham of Notre Dame was not alone in lamenting that the modern usage of “spirituality” had stripped it of association with the Holy Spirit. Instead, it’s often deployed as a vaguely uplifting contrast to the seeming rigidity of organized religion. This way of speaking about spirituality was coined during the Enlightenment to mean religious experience without the discipline of living in community with ordinary worshippers. By contrast, the Catholic understanding of spirituality roots it in Romans 8, where Paul contrasts those who live in the spirit (i.e., under the impulses of the Holy Spirit) with those whose ruling impulses come from the flesh (not the body per se, but the world). The way of the Spirit is the way of holiness. God is holy, meaning, wholly other. All else is made holy only by having a nexus to God.

While Jesus is “the Way” (John 14:6), there are many ways of discipleship, Cunningham said, showing himself to be “catholic” in the small-c sense as well. Throughout church history, people were always trying out different methods of discipleship, and if a method seemed to work and gained adherents, it would become a “school”. Hence the various monastic traditions developed to emphasize different spiritual practices, such as the Franciscans’ giving up their possessions to serve the poor. Each school developed traditions specific to their community, including a different “pedagogy of prayer”: monks pray psalms in community, for instance, while Ignatians study the life of Jesus.

Cunningham compared the Catholic Church to a house that people have live
d in for generations and accumulated a lot of “stuff”: you may not use it all, but it’s all there for you to use. This rich and diverse vision held a lot of appeal for me personally.

More to come!

Defense-of-Marriage Laws as Religious Violence


On the progressive Christian website Religion Dispatches, John Pahl, a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, makes some concise and cogent arguments that “defense of marriage” laws such as Proposition 8 are a form of religious violence. Laws restricting civil marriage to one man and one women, Pahl writes, “violate sacred texts, are idolatrous, and scapegoat a powerless group.” I particularly appreciated this argument, which I hadn’t heard before:

DOMA Laws perpetuate an association of sex with power, and thereby do damage to any sacramental sensibility that might remain in association with even heterosexual marriage. As Hendrik Hartog and other historians have shown, marriages have shifted in the modern era from patriarchal patterns of coverture to social contracts in which couples seek mutual fulfillment. Such contracts might be compatible with a sacramental sensibility, since they entail pledges of sexual fidelity and commitments to share social resources and responsibilities, along with (one might argue) other gifts of God. DOMA Laws associate sexual fidelity with legislated forms of coercive power, and inhibit the deep trust and mutuality intrinsic to modern (and sacramental) marriage. They establish hierarchies of relationships, and associate heterosexual unions (and sexual practices) with dominance.

Read the whole article here. Other recent articles of interest at Religion Dispatches include an overview of progressive Christianity’s diverse roots, and an investigation of the Christian Patriarchy movement.

Now the Green Blade Rises…

Now the green blade rises
from the buried grain,
wheat that in dark earth
many days has lain;
love lives again,
that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

In the grave they laid him,
Love whom hate had slain,
thinking that never
he would wake again,
laid in the earth
like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

Forth he came in quiet,
like the risen grain,
he that for three days
in the grave had lain,
quick from the dead
the risen Christ is seen:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

When our hearts are wintry,
grieving, or in pain,
Christ’s touch can call us
back to life again,
fields of our hearts
that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

Words: John Macleod Campbell Crum (20thC)
Music: Noel nouvelet, medieval French carol

Sing along at The Daily Office. Happy Easter, everyone! Enjoy these photos from the Smith College Bulb Show (March 2009):


A Sampler of Spiritual Reflections for Holy Week


Since today is Maundy Thursday, I wanted to start by encouraging you all to read this sermon from MadPriest’s blog. MP is a progressive Anglican clergyman whose deep understanding of the gospel is cleverly concealed beneath a wickedly farcical sense of humor. Reflecting on the story of the woman who anointed Jesus with the costly ointment from the alabaster vessel, he writes:

Jesus is not just the servant. He is also the one that is to be served.

And that, we are not so keen on.

When we think about images such as the vine, too often we see ourselves as the branches sucking the sap out of the trunk, that is Jesus Christ. But the vine image is not about dependence so much as connectedness. That other image of the body with its limbs is a better metaphor. Every part of the body needs every other part of the body. No one part serves all the rest without being served in return. Without this mutual dependency the body dies, the vine produces no fruit and withers.

So, tomorrow night, enjoy the divine foot massage but on Friday, don’t forget to help him carry his cross.

An earlier Lenten sermon by MadPriest, decrying the stigmatization of the mentally ill, is also a treasure:

…So, what does it mean, to take up our cross? Let’s take a look at what it meant for Jesus.

Firstly, the cross of Christ was a physical reality. He was no false martyr bemoaning some exaggerated offence against his character or person. His cross, traditionally those two pieces of crudely assembled wood, would be used to kill him. He had to physically carry his load through the streets of Jerusalem and up to his place of execution and we are shown in the Passion narrative that his cross was a heavy burden. So heavy that he needed help to carry it. Orthodox Christianity has always insisted in the reality of Christ’s torture and execution. It is not just a metaphor for some spiritual truth. In fact, for many of us for whom the incarnation of God in man is of the utmost importance, there would be no salvation without the birth and death of a real, flesh and blood, messiah.

Secondly, as well as the physical reality of the cross there was also an emotional reality. There was the emotion inside of Christ. His despair, his feelings of desolation that were revealed to the world in the Garden of Gethsemane, his anger, his knowledge that he had been betrayed by both one particular friend and the whole world. But there was also the emotion being spat in his face by the crowd who had turned against him. Great hatred, anger, disappointment. This emotional burden that Jesus carried to his execution was, most likely, far heavier than the wood of his physical burden.

Thirdly, the cross was a burden in the sense that it was Christ’s duty to carry it. Once Jesus had accepted his mission there was no honourable option for him other than to carry the cross. His being and his duty were one. If Jesus had turned his back on the cross and walked away he would have been walking away from himself. He would no longer be himself.

Jesus is the example par excellence for the Christian life. Although many who call themselves Christian still cling on to written laws, true followers of Christ follow Saint Paul’s teaching, free themselves from the obsolete human law and base their lives on the teaching, attitude and actions of Jesus Christ. One of Christ’s main teachings is that his followers must take up their own cross. It’s a command. Deny yourself and take up your cross. Jesus never hides stuff in the small print of the contract, he doesn’t work for a bank, he doesn’t hide the bit that says that the interest rates can be increased without warning or explanation whenever they feel like it. No, he is always upfront about the terms and conditions of our Christian employment.

So, if we want to be be followers of Jesus we have to grab a cross of own and because Jesus is our example, our cross will be similar to the cross of Christ. I’m not saying that we should be happy to accept our burden. I’m not saying we should want to carry it. Such attitudes would be perverse. But I am saying that we should be willing to carry it and be proud that it is the cross of Christ.

For many thousands of Christians over the last 2000 years their cross of Christ has almost been a literal one and they have met their deaths proclaiming his gospel. Fortunately, for those of us in what are presently still Christian friendly countries, we do not face such danger to any large extent. But, even so, it is usual for our cross to be of a physical nature. Maybe illness or caring for somebody who is old or ill. Maybe poverty or unemployment. Maybe you will be asked to live and work in a unappealing or dangerous situation, at home or abroad. Sometimes we choose such things for ourselves. Sometimes they just happen.

One thing I have noticed about the burden of Christianity is that it often involves being pushed to the margins of society. This can be accidental, as in the case of someone caring for a relative who becomes cut off from friends and activities. It might be chosen as in the person who goes to work in a shanty town in Africa. Or it may be because of hatred and/or fear, as in the case of the foreigner in a strange land or a person who suffers from a mental illness, for example.

And we should not be surprised that the cross we carry will propel us to the margins of society. Jesus spent much of his ministry among the marginalised. The poor of his own country. The foreigner in his land. The hated Samaritans. The sick. The sinners. Women and children. And then, when he was condemned to death,when he himself was as far outside of society as you could possibly get, he is taken to a hill to be crucified and placed between two thieves. Two outsiders of the lowest rank. And Jesus ministers to them even as he is dying.
…

Read the whole sermon here.

On a related note, the Internet Monk (Michael Spencer) has re-posted one of his sermon-essays about embracing your brokenness. It seems that I, as a naturally pensive/moody/ironic person, have not been alone in worrying that anything short of constant cheerfulness would make me a poor advertisement for the gospel. It was actually exposure to Buddhist thought that allowed me to accept my light and dark moods as temporary waves on the ocean. To use a Buddhist concept, is there still too much “aversion” in a lot of Christian writing–too much telling us how we should feel, rather than how Jesus helps us endure and learn from what we do feel? Quoth the i-Monk:

I hear of those who are depressed. Where do they turn for help? How do they admit their hurt? It seems so “unChristian” to admit depression, yet it is a reality for millions and millions of human beings. Porn addiction. Food addiction. Rage addiction. Obsessive needs for control. Chronic lying and dishonesty. How many pastors and Christian leaders live with these human frailties and flaws, and never seek help because they can’t admit what we all know is true about all of us? They speak of salvation, love and Jesus, but inside they feel like the damned.

Multiply this by the hundreds of millions of broken Christians. They are merely human, but their church says they must be more than human to be good Christians. They cannot speak of or even acknowledge their troubled lives. Their marriages are wounded. Their children are hurting. They are filled with fear and the sins of the flesh. They are depressed and addicted, yet they can only approach the church with the lie that all is well, and if it becomes apparent that all is not well, they avoid the church.

I do not blame the church for this situation. It is always human nature to avoid the mirror and prefer the self-portrait. I blame all of us who know better. We know this is not the message of the Gospels, the Bible or of Jesus. But we- every one of us- is afraid to live otherwise. What if someone knew we were not a good Christian? Ah…what if…what if….

I close with a something I have said many times before. The Prodigal son, there on his knees, his father’s touch upon him, was not a “good” or “victorious” Christian. He was broken. A failure. He wasn’t even good at being honest. He wanted religion more than grace. His father baptized him in mercy, and resurrected him in grace. His brokenness was wrapped up in the robe and the embrace of God.

Why do we want to be better than that boy? Why do we make the older brother the goal of Christian experience? Why do we want to add our own addition to the parable, where the prodigal straightens out and becomes a successful youth speaker, writing books and doing youth revivals?

Now, I’m not completely on board with the i-Monk’s extended metaphor of the Christian life as a war against one’s self (a part of the sermon I didn’t quote above), because grace feels to me like loosening your identification with your sins, as a prerequisite to honestly naming and working on them. Taken to extremes, Luther’s simul justus et peccator can sound like divine hypocrisy, introducing an element of untruth into our most fundamental relationship: God chooses to see me as other than I am, to merely ignore my wickedness instead of teaching me that my true self is larger than my sinful ego. Perhaps feeling like a faker before God reinforces the shame that makes us fakers to one another. But the sermon is still a valuable read.

Finally, a friend directed me to this reflection on atonement from the inward/outward blog, a project of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. I liked how the author, Ched Myers, offers an alternative to crude understandings of “wrathful Father/innocent Son” that have obscured God’s self-giving in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus:

Reconciliation is not something accomplished by Christ for God, nor inflicted on Christ by God, but forged by God through Christ. This wreaks havoc on the medieval (but still widespread) doctrine that Christ’s death functions to placate an angry or offended deity. Rather, the “crucified God” represents a fundamentally restorative initiative by the Divine victim towards the human offender.

“Blogging for Truth” Counteracts Hate with Stories of GLBT Lives


A new collaborative website for GLBT folks and their allies, Blogging for Truth, is collecting examples of virulent anti-gay propaganda from the radical right, and urging pro-gay bloggers to counteract those lies with the stories of their own loving, wholesome, spirit-filled lives.

Want to help? Sign up to be added to their blogroll; then, during the week of May 25-31, 2009, “LGBTQ bloggers and all allies are invited to write articles about the truth of our existence and lives. To blog facts and/or the results of real scientific studies carried out by real scientists. To blog your personal experiences, and how the hate affects you personally.”

Lent: A Time to Be Free


A wonderful new article by Jim Palmer at Relevant Magazine proposes a different kind of Lenten discipline: What if, instead of giving up food, Facebook and foolin’ around, we fasted from the self-critical and fearful “voices in our head” that keep us from resting contentedly in God’s love?

I wonder what Jesus would think of all our inventive Lenten practices. One thing I know for sure is that Jesus desires our freedom. Jesus said his mission was to set captives free, and that knowing the truth would set us free. I know a lot of Christians who are knowledgeable, zealous, moral, and disciplined, but who are not free. There is always some inner malady or life circumstance disturbing their peace, stealing their happiness, diminishing their worth, disconnecting them from love, or filling them with fear and anxiety.

What would it be like to be free? Free from the emotional baggage that sabotages your life, free from that static anxiety that interferes with enjoying the moment, free to be yourself, free to be at peace regardless of your circumstances, and free of all the self-conscious preoccupations constantly ricocheting around in your head. Jesus never promised we’d be rich or that our lives would be void of difficulties and hardships, but he did say we could be free.

Paul wrote in Galatians, “Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.” I can think of no better Lenten practice for embracing the significance of Jesus Christ then to take our stand in freedom. Sometimes the person who is putting “a harness of slavery on you” is yourself. Paul admonished in 2 Corinthians to “take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”

What if our Lenten practice was to deny every thought floating around in our heads and hearts that compromises the freedom Christ wants for us? What if we took advantage of the Lent season to give up every idea we have that opposes freedom and embrace the truth that offers peace in whatever situation we find ourselves in?

To be “free” would mean you were not affected or restricted by any condition or circumstance. Freedom in Christ means nothing can affect or restrict your experience of love, peace, fulfillment, and contentment because these spiritual qualities emanate from the presence of Christ within you. In every moment, those spiritual realities are alive within you and available to you without condition.

So why don’t we experience these realities? Because we listen to that voice in our head. What voice? You know; that voice in your head that is constantly telling you that you lack something. You know the one? It’s the voice that tells you that you’re not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, gifted enough, cool enough, creative enough, disciplined enough, spiritual enough, or competent enough. The voice also tells you that if you were somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else you’d be happier.

The voice gets you striving after possessions, money, beauty, success, status, power, recognition, or a special relationship. It promises as a result that you will feel better about yourself, feel complete and loved and worthy, and be happy. What the voice doesn’t bother telling you is that it’s a bottomless hole you are trying to fill. As long as that voice is running your life, you will never be at peace or fulfilled except for those fleeting moments when you briefly obtain what you wanted before realizing it’s not enough, and you need and crave more.

Read the whole article here.

Trusting One’s Self More Than One’s Culture


Teresa Wymore, an author of lesbian erotica who blogs at Flesh and Spirit, has posted an incisive rebuttal to Eve Tushnet’s critique of James Alison’s gay-affirming Catholic theology, which I wrote about here. (If that’s too “inside baseball” for you, read Teresa on Why Sex Matters instead.)

Teresa writes (Eve’s comments in italics):


Like many converts who are drawn to the Church, she seems to be seeking a perpetual engine of moral clarity, as if one’s hard moral choices shouldn’t rely on time, place, or circumstance but come in a handy indexed volume. Post-modern morality is a challenging thing because, like a box of squirming puppies, it means you have to be alert to changing priorities and consequences.

She begins her argument with her own coming out story. And then, there is this:

Experience is itself a kind of text, and texts need interpreters. How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses?

Yes, she’s an apologist. Do you recognize the first step of any institution seeking control? Don’t trust yourself. Tushnet continues:

To my mind, Johnson’s approach places far too much trust in personal experience. He views our experience as both more transparent and less fallible than it is. To take personal experience as our best and sturdiest guide seems like a good way to replicate all of our personal preferences and cultural blind spots. Scripture is weird and tangly and anything but obvious-but at least it wasn’t written by someone who shared all our desires, preferences, and cultural background. At least it wasn’t written by us.

At this point, I see Tushnet has abandoned her reasonableness. Scripture is a result of personal experience, both produced and interpreted by the personal experiences of a fraction of humanity during ages of class oppression. I do believe it is divinely inspired; I’m just waiting for the divine interpretation. The Tradition that has given us our current understanding of Scripture is based in patriarchal culture, which Tushnet herself seems to acknowledge with a nod early, but now forgets.

And so I ask, with what experiences and values shall we interpret that Scripture? Who is wise enough that they should trust themselves to understand? Finally, Tushnet sums up her experience:

The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants.
…
I feel as if every week or so I discover yet another hidden treasure of the church that speaks to me in exactly the way I need in order to deal specifically with my struggles, resentments, longings, and strengths as a woman and a lesbian.

I want to ask why she gave up sexual relationships. Did she surrender that expression through discipline or did one desire replace a stronger one in her? My question, you see, is whether she chose her own sacrifice and finds more rewards when she chooses to support tradition and live in conformity with official teaching on sexuality. And yet, she seems to be telling other lesbians who find greater rewards in personal sexual relationships that they are not listening to God.

Tushnet has chosen to make a sacrifice of her lesbian sexuality, but maybe God wants her to sacrifice her attachment to a patriarchal tradition. I would say only she knows the answer to that. She would say the Church knows better than she does.

What would make me more open to Tushnet’s ideas is if she simply made the point that she chooses celibacy because she finds greater rewards in it, not because she’s choosing the moral high ground.

Teresa has hit upon the central question in the gay Bible wars: can I trust myself to know God’s will for me, or must I always defer to the institutional interpreters of the text? If, as individuals, we must be vigilant against letting our judgment be distorted by sin, that potential for error is only increased at the corporate level. It is a lot easier to hold an individual accountable than an institution, which is why scapegoating is such a powerful agent of social cohesion (as Alison tirelessly points out).

I’m sure I will be citing Teresa’s blog again in this space. Like me, she is working to stake out a position that is pro-erotica but anti-porn, that affirms the libido of the creative imagination while acknowledging how that imagination has been co-opted by our culture’s misogyny and violence. (Read her post “Mythbusting Women’s Erotica“.) Hey, anyone who’s a fan of James Alison and Bob Jensen has got to be an interesting thinker.

Abuse of Women, Misuse of Faith


In a new article on the Relevant Magazine website, The Church and Domestic Abuse, reporter Lyz Lenz describes in chilling detail how conservative churches keep women in abusive relationships. Citing the sanctity of marriage, women’s duty to submit to their husbands, or the general Christian obligation to forgive wrongdoing, these faith communities wholly ignore the power imbalances that were the primary focus of Jesus’ own moral teachings. Lenz writes:


I can’t tell you her name or how I know her. This is because she is still living with her husband despite years of emotional and physical abuse. He’s cheated on her and cleaned out their bank account to spend on drugs, pornography and online gambling. She left him briefly after a young girl accused her husband of molestation, but she went back to him after a week. Why? I asked her.

She told me that a woman spoke at their church a couple weeks before. The speaker explained how her husband used to be violent, but she didn’t leave him because she knew that God’s plan for a marriage was that it should last forever. Once, the husband’s violence put their baby in the hospital. When he saw what he’d done, he repented and was never violent again.

“That’s why I went back,” the woman told me. “What if it doesn’t end?” I asked. But the woman didn’t answer. The conversation was over.

According to the Department of Justice, almost one-quarter of Americans were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner or date at some time in their lifetime. Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and author of Woman Submit! Christians & Domestic Violence, argues that the Church’s teachings on women and submission have given rise to an epidemic of domestic violence among Christians. In her book Quiverfull, journalist Kathryn Joyce argues that the Christian belief system, which focuses on women’s submission and the headship of men, encourages the abuse of women. In his book Domestic Violence, What Every Pastor Needs to Know, Al Miles reveals that the theological training and beliefs given most clergy can actually contribute to increased violence and abuse of the victim. Christianity, according to some, is the problem….

Later in the article, Lenz tells the story of a woman who was ostracized by her church for trying to divorce her abuser:


“I was raised in the church and fully intended on marrying someone who fully shared my faith,” says Lisa Van Allen, a licensed therapist and owner of Van Allen and Associates. “I went to a Bible school and came home and met the man who would be my husband at church. There was a total of three years from the time we started dating until we were married. ”

Not everything was perfect. Van Allen found out later that there were some people in the church who knew her husband had problems, but no one told her about them at the time. She says: “When it got closer to the wedding, I had some concerns. He struggled with intimacy. Anything with touch or opening up, he pulled away.” Van Allen took her concerns to her pastor who told her that they were just pre-wedding jitters and all the trouble would go away once they were married.

But it didn’t go away. “In the car on the way to the honeymoon, I knew I had made a horrible mistake,” she says. Her husband began to exhibit bizarre behavior on the honeymoon: He locked himself in the bathroom and ranted and raved in front of the mirror. When they got home, the physical abuse began. Again, Van Allen took her concerns to her pastor, and he told her she was nagging and henpecking. She talked to her pastor a third time he told her, “You go home and you obey your husband and everything will be fine.”

The violence escalated. At one point, he exploded and pushed her down the stairs. Van Allen tore a ligament and hurt her back. She told her parents who confronted her husband, but it didn’t help. “The way I was raised,” Lisa says, “divorce was never supposed to be an option.” Van Allen and her husband moved and went to a new church, but there she experienced the same accusations and stonewalling she endured at her previous church. “No one did anything,” she recalls. “Most of the time I was put down, I was told I was ‘pushy’ and not being ‘in submission.'” The violence escalated and Lisa reached out to a professor she was working with in graduate school. He got her husband into a drug trial and his personality improved. “Toward the end of the trial,” Van Allen says, “I went to the pastor and I told him how sick my husband was and how the drugs had helped, but that I knew he would go off them. I asked them for help and again, they blew me off, like they did before.”

Van Allen stayed in her marriage for 10 years because of the advice of her church. “It was hard for me,” she says. “I was raised to believe that pastors were second to God and that wives were supposed to be submissive and that divorce was not an option.” But that changed the night her husband tried to kill her. When her church found out that she had filed for divorce, they disciplined her. “They told me I could no longer serve. They told me I could come if I wanted, but I could only sit on the pew. I couldn’t sing anymore, I couldn’t play the piano, I couldn’t work with the kids. I was treated like a pariah.”

“Looking back,” Van Allen says, “what [the church] did to me was abuse. They used their power to control me—to not help me but to add to my pain.” After the divorce, Van Allen left the church and went on what she calls a spiritual journey, visiting and working with different churches. When her husband started stalking her, those churches provided refuge. Van Allen recalls once when her husband broke into her apartment; she fled to the Episcopal church she had only recently started attending. “The pastor there sheltered me and went with me to make sure my apartment was safe.”

Read the whole story here.

For good advice on the difference between healthy Christian forgiveness and submission to abuse, I recommend the book Don’t Forgive Too Soon by Dennis, Sheila and Matthew Linn, and the Boundaries book series by Henry Cloud and John Townsend.

“They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4, TNIV)