For the Letter Kills, but the Spirit Gives Life
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:1-6)
In the last week, I have found articles from two writers who I have discussed in these electronic pages--Melinda Selmys and Damon Linker--announcing that they are leaving the Roman Catholic Church. While there are differences in the rationales offered by both for their decisions, I think one can see a thread of commonality between them. Selmys points to an ethos of control and manipulation from the hierarchy toward the folks in the pews, cleverly set up with the parallel to the archetypal abusive spouse. Linker points to that same ethos manifesting in a different way, in the form of an aesthetic sense of the "uglyness" of the current situation and the revelations.
Both of those reactions are subjective, emotional reactions, to be sure. And it was almost a certainty that folks would attack those reactions on precisely those grounds. You can see that kind of push-back in the comments' section of Selmys's posts, but the clearest articulation of the idea can be found in a posting titled "Leaving the Church for Insufficient Reasons (Damon Linker)" by a Dave Armstrong. In the piece, Armstrong weighs Linker's "arguments" for leaving the Roman Catholic Church and declares them to be wanting. "I understand this on a purely emotional / 'passionate' level but not at all by a reasonable analysis."
It is here, in the first paragraph, the Armstrong makes his core mistake. Linker (and Selmys as well) is not making arguments--he is testifying to an experience. And Linker and Selmys are altogether right to do so, because Christianity is, at the end of the day, an experience of encounter with God and the risen Jesus in one's own life. Faith is the place of encounter between the finite us and the infinite beyond. The nature of that encounter is what it is, and Linker is reflecting on and testifying to the nature of that encounter in his current situation.
All of theology--doctrines, dogmatics, liturgy, and all the rest--is an explanatory super-structure that is in the service of the individual person making sense of his or her necessarily idiosyncratic encounter with the Divine. We participate in a tradition in order to make sense of what we are experiencing. It is unavoidable that we will compare our personal experience to the rubrics laid out by a particular tradition. And, if we find that there is a disconnect between the tradition and our experience, we will feel that as an internal division.
That's why Armstrong's statement that "[p]eople generally leave the Church because they have an insufficient grasp of apologetics and theology" is completely wrong. People leave a church community because they cannot reconcile a disconnect between their personal experience of faith and the "apologetics and theology" of that church community. This disconnect could be because they don't understand the theology sufficiently, but there is no particular reason to assume that is the reason, especially when you are talking about highly educated, committed folks who have studied these issues in substantial depth. Like, for example, Linker and Selmys.
Because, let's be clear here about the "apologetics and theology" that Armstrong asserts that Linker has an "insufficient grasp" on--Armstrong's entire ouevre is the persistent assertion that the Roman Catholic Church is the One True Church such that nothing that it might do or say really matters or is capable of undermining this claim. I am confident that Linker and Selmys understand that the Roman Catholic Church makes this claim about itself. But, based on their testimony, both of these folks are saying "yeah, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like the One True Church." That's the conflict--the truth claims the Roman church makes say one thing, and the internal experience says something else. What exactly is Linker missing, other than "they're right and you are wrong"?
I don't know Dave Armstrong. But in reading his piece, I have to wonder whether he actually has any subjective experience of God or the risen Christ at all. Because all of this business of whether or not Linker's answers are "sufficient" (sufficient for whom?) reads like he has turned the Christian faith into the worst and most asinine parts of high school policy debate. I may not know much about God, but I am pretty confident that when and if we meet our Creator, we will not be presented with a flow sheet. That's not how this works; it's not how any of this works.
But there is another element wholly absent from Armstrong's presentation, and that is the work of the Spirit. I am becoming more and more convinced that the #1 problem with modern Christianity (in its Roman Catholic, mainline/evangelic Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox forms) is the way it has functionally written the Spirit out of the faith, either shunting it off into mysticism pitched as the province of "elite" believers, or domesticating it as a property of the institutional structure that guarantees its legitimacy. No, no, no--the Spirit moves in and among all the believers, pushing back on our incessant human tendency to try to catalog and control the work of God. And sometimes the Spirit tells people things and pushes them in directions that are not seen as "Theologically Correct" by the strict reading of the "apolegetics and theology."
In other words, maybe God's trying to tell us something with all of this.
Do I know that to be true in the case of Linker, or Selmys, or me for that matter? No, of course not. But I don't know it's not true, either. If we are going to get through this, all of us are going to have to become a little bit Pentecostal, I think. Not because we need big signs or big healings or other headline grabbing displays, but because we need to recognize the reality of God working in our midst, and be more open than we have been previously to being dislocated by a loud, ungainly bird. And the first step in that process is listening and taking seriously those things that might be promptings of the Spirit. Like a feeling of being unsafe, or an overwhelming sense of uglyness.
Armstrong, I suspect, is totally uninterested in that sort of thing. After all, he's got all the answers, and he has a flow sheet to prove it. But that kind of faith--of proofs and arguments and whether or not reasons are "sufficient"--that's the faith (or, perhaps, "faith") of the letter that kills, as St. Paul says. Armstrong and his dopplegangers in the evangelical and old-line liberal Protestant worlds (who are all playing the same basic game, just with a different set of arguments) are sucking the life out of the Christian faith, making it into this bloodless, frigid intellectual exercise. And it's dying, and rightfully so.
I have no idea if Linker or Selmys will find the Spirit in their journeys, nor does anyone else. But they seem to be looking and listening for the Spirit. And that gives them a significant leg up on their critics.
Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:1-6)
In the last week, I have found articles from two writers who I have discussed in these electronic pages--Melinda Selmys and Damon Linker--announcing that they are leaving the Roman Catholic Church. While there are differences in the rationales offered by both for their decisions, I think one can see a thread of commonality between them. Selmys points to an ethos of control and manipulation from the hierarchy toward the folks in the pews, cleverly set up with the parallel to the archetypal abusive spouse. Linker points to that same ethos manifesting in a different way, in the form of an aesthetic sense of the "uglyness" of the current situation and the revelations.
Both of those reactions are subjective, emotional reactions, to be sure. And it was almost a certainty that folks would attack those reactions on precisely those grounds. You can see that kind of push-back in the comments' section of Selmys's posts, but the clearest articulation of the idea can be found in a posting titled "Leaving the Church for Insufficient Reasons (Damon Linker)" by a Dave Armstrong. In the piece, Armstrong weighs Linker's "arguments" for leaving the Roman Catholic Church and declares them to be wanting. "I understand this on a purely emotional / 'passionate' level but not at all by a reasonable analysis."
It is here, in the first paragraph, the Armstrong makes his core mistake. Linker (and Selmys as well) is not making arguments--he is testifying to an experience. And Linker and Selmys are altogether right to do so, because Christianity is, at the end of the day, an experience of encounter with God and the risen Jesus in one's own life. Faith is the place of encounter between the finite us and the infinite beyond. The nature of that encounter is what it is, and Linker is reflecting on and testifying to the nature of that encounter in his current situation.
All of theology--doctrines, dogmatics, liturgy, and all the rest--is an explanatory super-structure that is in the service of the individual person making sense of his or her necessarily idiosyncratic encounter with the Divine. We participate in a tradition in order to make sense of what we are experiencing. It is unavoidable that we will compare our personal experience to the rubrics laid out by a particular tradition. And, if we find that there is a disconnect between the tradition and our experience, we will feel that as an internal division.
That's why Armstrong's statement that "[p]eople generally leave the Church because they have an insufficient grasp of apologetics and theology" is completely wrong. People leave a church community because they cannot reconcile a disconnect between their personal experience of faith and the "apologetics and theology" of that church community. This disconnect could be because they don't understand the theology sufficiently, but there is no particular reason to assume that is the reason, especially when you are talking about highly educated, committed folks who have studied these issues in substantial depth. Like, for example, Linker and Selmys.
Because, let's be clear here about the "apologetics and theology" that Armstrong asserts that Linker has an "insufficient grasp" on--Armstrong's entire ouevre is the persistent assertion that the Roman Catholic Church is the One True Church such that nothing that it might do or say really matters or is capable of undermining this claim. I am confident that Linker and Selmys understand that the Roman Catholic Church makes this claim about itself. But, based on their testimony, both of these folks are saying "yeah, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like the One True Church." That's the conflict--the truth claims the Roman church makes say one thing, and the internal experience says something else. What exactly is Linker missing, other than "they're right and you are wrong"?
I don't know Dave Armstrong. But in reading his piece, I have to wonder whether he actually has any subjective experience of God or the risen Christ at all. Because all of this business of whether or not Linker's answers are "sufficient" (sufficient for whom?) reads like he has turned the Christian faith into the worst and most asinine parts of high school policy debate. I may not know much about God, but I am pretty confident that when and if we meet our Creator, we will not be presented with a flow sheet. That's not how this works; it's not how any of this works.
But there is another element wholly absent from Armstrong's presentation, and that is the work of the Spirit. I am becoming more and more convinced that the #1 problem with modern Christianity (in its Roman Catholic, mainline/evangelic Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox forms) is the way it has functionally written the Spirit out of the faith, either shunting it off into mysticism pitched as the province of "elite" believers, or domesticating it as a property of the institutional structure that guarantees its legitimacy. No, no, no--the Spirit moves in and among all the believers, pushing back on our incessant human tendency to try to catalog and control the work of God. And sometimes the Spirit tells people things and pushes them in directions that are not seen as "Theologically Correct" by the strict reading of the "apolegetics and theology."
In other words, maybe God's trying to tell us something with all of this.
Do I know that to be true in the case of Linker, or Selmys, or me for that matter? No, of course not. But I don't know it's not true, either. If we are going to get through this, all of us are going to have to become a little bit Pentecostal, I think. Not because we need big signs or big healings or other headline grabbing displays, but because we need to recognize the reality of God working in our midst, and be more open than we have been previously to being dislocated by a loud, ungainly bird. And the first step in that process is listening and taking seriously those things that might be promptings of the Spirit. Like a feeling of being unsafe, or an overwhelming sense of uglyness.
Armstrong, I suspect, is totally uninterested in that sort of thing. After all, he's got all the answers, and he has a flow sheet to prove it. But that kind of faith--of proofs and arguments and whether or not reasons are "sufficient"--that's the faith (or, perhaps, "faith") of the letter that kills, as St. Paul says. Armstrong and his dopplegangers in the evangelical and old-line liberal Protestant worlds (who are all playing the same basic game, just with a different set of arguments) are sucking the life out of the Christian faith, making it into this bloodless, frigid intellectual exercise. And it's dying, and rightfully so.
I have no idea if Linker or Selmys will find the Spirit in their journeys, nor does anyone else. But they seem to be looking and listening for the Spirit. And that gives them a significant leg up on their critics.
Comments
Leaving Catholicism (Not Primarily Due to Sex Scandals!):
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2018/10/leaving-catholicism-not-primarily-due-to-sex-scandals.html