Evangelical Catholicism and the Emerging Church

It has been awhile since I did a posting on Evangelical Catholicism.  As you may remember I had been reading George Weigel’s book by that name and was taken by his proposition  

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

Unfortunately as Weigel fleshes out what this means, I think he betrays his ideal for something that is anything but evangelical, but that is somewhat beside the point I want to make today. 

I was at a wake last week and speaking with a Protestant pastor who was there when someone with little ecumenical sensitivity said to him: “you guys need to have a Vatican II.”  The minister good naturedly replied: “We did, it was Vatican II.”  His point was that the Second Vatican Council has impacted most of the Protestant Churches as much as it has Catholicism.  This is obvious enough in the mainline Churches—the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Churches, the Methodists and Presbyterians, all of whom have revised various liturgical practices and even some church polity to harmonize better with one another and with us Catholics.  But when one gets to the so-called Evangelicals, it is not always so obvious. 

I say “so-called Evangelicals” as I think a lot of people who refer to themselves as “evangelicals” or call  their denomination “evangelical” are anything but.  Evangelical comes from the Greek word, εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news” and specifically the news of a victory.  The Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ over sin and death.  But so many people who call themselves evangelicals are about bad news of judgment, condemnation, and the defeat of Grace and in reality they are anything but bearers of Good News.  

There is a movement among some evangelicals, however, that shows a remarkable move away from the gloomy Calvinism in which many of the so-called Evangelical denominations were rooted towards a faith that is more in line with the New Testament optimism that God’s Saving Work in Jesus Christ may actually be a victory over sin.  This movement, which is not a Church or a denomination but a loose-knit connection of Churches and individuals who have realigned their theological thought in some dramatic ways, parallels much of the shift that has gone on in Catholicism over the last sixty years and has received a fresh new impetus under the direction of Pope Francis.   It is called the “Emerging Church” and it has drawn a wide range of Christians from Lutherans to Methodists to Baptists to members of the Free Churches and to Christian fellowships who decline to identify with any particular denomination.  The main characteristics of the emerging Church seem—from what I have read—to be:

1.     an emphasis on a personal spirituality that calls the individual to be conformed to Jesus Christ—to live a life in which he or she learns to model himself or herself on Jesus.

2.     A belief that God is vitally concerned about this world and has given us, both as communities and individuals, a mission in this world to infuse the world with Gospel values and thus transform it.

3.     To be an inclusive and welcoming Christian fellowship in which each is called to personal conversion but in which no one is judged.  (Sounds familiar, Pope Francis?)

4.     A model of leadership in the Church that does not involve power or control.

5.     An openness to dialogue that sees the faith of the Church as a progressive appreciation of the truth rather than inflexible and dogmatic axioms that are imposed in the name of an ahistorical and immutable “Tradition.”

6.     An openness to the contributions of the various cultures in which Christians find themselves rather than an Euro-American cultural hegemony. 

7.     An ability to live with ambiguity that helps us realize that God us ultimately a Mystery in whose life we are invited to participate and that defies our ability to define and delineate. 

This type of Christian faith requires a spiritual maturity that permits us to walk in faith through a darkness of the intellect that was described by Saint John of the Cross: to come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you do not know.  In other words, to come to know God we must give up whatever knowledge we think we have.  When we are confident in our “knowledge” of “God,” the god we think we know is invariably a god of our own imagination.  To come to know God, we must let the slate of our knowledge be wiped clean and be willing to start over with an “unknowing,” the term that many of our Catholic mystics have used to talk about the direct encounter with God in which the human faculties, including the intellect, fall silent. 

What is particularly interesting about the Emerging Church movement is that it does not show the fear of spirituality and mystical experience that has characterized much of historical Protestantism. This is one of the tensions in Christianity—in Catholicism as well as Protestantism—the need for an orthodoxy that is rooted in doctrinal objectivity and the need for a personal encounter with God that transcends (though does not contradict) that doctrine.  Paul Tillich spoke of this tension, or at least one aspect of it, with the Protestant Principle and the Catholic Substance.  For too long perhaps we Christians, in our desire for doctrinal objectivity have substituted an embalmed deity for the Living God.  The Emerging Church movement is a call for us all to go again on the search for the Living God.  This is not a new call.  Read the Documents of the Second Vatican Council and you will hear the same summons.  Pope Francis has made this call a theme of his papacy which has rekindled the light of Vatican II among some and the anger over Vatican II among others.  

Post-Modern Catholicism? And What Is That About?

Nuns in traditional Indian garb dance at the papal altar

during the beatifiction of Mother Theresa.  Do you

really think the toothpaste is going to go bck in the

tube?

I posted that quote from Peter Rollins yesterday because it really made me think—and made me think about my approach to history and in particular to the history of the Church and what motivates my particular take.  Rollins is a theologian who belongs to a school of thought—it is anything but an organized religious group–called The Emerging Church.  The Emerging Church is not a denomination and it is probably an exaggeration to call it a movement or even a “school of thought.”  Like so much of the post-modern world it just can’t be categorized with any meaningful label.  Suffice it to say its adherents include Evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics, Adventists,  Pentecostals, Reformed, Conservatives—just about every type of Christian.  Post-modernism doesn’t look for agreement much less consensus so don’t expect the choir to sing in harmony—or even from the same hymnal.  I am really not sure what “The Emerging Church” is all about (or post-modernism, for that matter).  But I do know this—the labels and boxes and categories that we use to describe ourselves and our alliances and our ideas and even our churches really don’t work anymore.  And while the faith is—at least for some of us—deeper than ever, the doctrines and disciplines appear a bit shopworn and shabby—the stained glass is just a bit too old and too tarnished to allow the radiance of the Divine Glory to shine in its fullness. 
     Don’t get me wrong.  I am a Catholic through and through.  I got my membership card stamped by a couple of Popes.  I am there in the pews every Sunday—and most days in between.  My envelope number is L872.  I have no reservations in reciting the Creed or affirming my faith in the one holy catholic (even Catholic) and apostolic Church.  But there is so much more.  That is what I love about our history—the history with all its ups and downs, with its saints and its cads, with sin and grace each abounding and often running in rich veins through the same lives reminds me that the bland Catholicism peddled in the average American parish is just plain anemic.   It’s time to deconstruct a bit of the structures we humans have jury-rigged over the years in an attempt to house the Divine Presence, not to destroy but to let the Light of that Divine Presence shine out into our world.    
      The biggest religious body in the United States is the Catholic Church; the second are former Catholics.  Why are there so many former Catholics?  Can our leadership please wake up and smell the coffee?  The problem is not the Church—at least if one considers the Church as the Community of the Faithful.   But the problem is so much of the structures we have created and called “the Church” and the unsuitability of those structures to contemporary people of faith.  I am not saying unsuitability to contemporary culture—that could be a positive thing—but unsuitability to contemporary people of faith.  Certainly the failure of so many bishops to act responsibly in regard to how issues of sexual misconduct were handled is one example.  The highhanded attitude of Cardinal Law when he was Archbishop of Boston and thought that he was not answerable for his decisions was particularly galling.  Now we are seeing the problem of a lack of financial transparency and accountability in dioceses and parishes undermine the credibility of the institutional Church with its members.   The preoccupation in certain quarters with reviving the princely trappings of the past appears, at least to me, as silly, and more than silly, as reducing our Catholic Faith to the superficial and the pompously inane.  Authority structures that fail to take into account the available expertise of Church membership whether in finance, science, technology, psychology or other professions and disciplines make the Church a relic rather than an inspiration.   No, it is time to do what Pope John XXIII knew had to be done—to bring the Church into the contemporary world, not as its toady but as a prophetic voice that can point not backwards into a dead past but forwards into God’s Kingdom.    

A Post-Modern Thought That Makes Me Think

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think…

I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.

 --Peter Rollins