The Perfect Fear that Casts Out Love
In the US and UK alone, over 45 million people watched Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (a Northwestern alum, I am obligated to mention) get married on Saturday. And the star of the show, or at least the person that seems to be the one most people are talking about, is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry. He preached the sermon at the wedding, and he did what Bishop Curry almost unfailingly does, which is give a stem-winder that is heavily influenced by the rich and deep African-American Christian preaching tradition. If you have not read it (or, better, watched it), I urge you to do so.
If you want to distill Bishop Curry's message down to three core points, I would say they are (1) the foundation of the message of Jesus Christ is love, (2) the love we experience, including the romantic love on display at this or any wedding, ultimately has its source is Christ, and (3) love can change the world, and change ourselves. If you were interested in a 13 minute summation of the Christian message, you could do much worse that what Bishop Curry provided.
Not surprisingly, haters gonna hate. Many of the objections were of the standard sort--he went on for too long (look, I was raised Catholic, the heart of "keep the sermon short" culture, but 13 minutes is not overly long for a sermon by any definition), or he was "too demonstrative" and/or "made the sermon about himself (*cough* translation: "he was too black" *cough*). This sort of thing is to be expected.
Far more worrisome a critique, at least from the point of view of what it means for the writer, is this one by Gavin Ashenden. Ashenden, whom I had not been previously familiar, has recently been ordained a bishop by the "Christian Episcopal Church," one of the myriad of "continuing Anglican" organizations floating around (I will confess that the relationship between the "Christian Episcopal Church" and the Anglican Church of North America is illusive based on my research; I am tempted to make a "Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea" joke, but I will refrain). So, he clearly is not a fan of Bishop Curry or the Episcopal Church, and he was very likely displeased that Bishop Curry was provided a global platform to promote the Episcopal Church.
But, even putting that to the side and discounting for what one might consider "professional rivalry," I found his criticism of Curry's sermon to be deeply troubling. Simply put, I see no meaningful signs of the euangelion, the "Good News," in Bishop Ashenden's presentation of the Christian message, which is then contrasted with Curry's approach. If Ashenden is right and Curry is wrong about what Christianity means, then I fail to see why anyone should give a serious look to Christianity. That which is true in a nascent form in most of the conservative presentations of the Christian message becomes unavoidable in Ashenden's.
Ashenden begins by accusing Curry of "not defining love." One would note that neither does Ashenden. If I may be so bold as to speak for Bishop Curry, I suspect he might say that love is something that we experience, and as such eludes clear and easy definitions. You will "know it when you see it" (or, in this case, "feel it"). Most of us have been blessed to experience love in various forms throughout or lives--familial, companionate and friendship, romantic, sexual. It seems to me that Curry, when he spoke of love, was speaking about all of these dimensions (and, in doing so, was following along the trajectory established by Jesus and the New Testament when speaking of love).
Ashenden in several places tells us that Christian love is not about "romantic or sexual" love. So, then, what do we mean by love? The more we start stripping out and walling off the common, everyday meanings of the term from our consideration, the less intelligible the Gospel witness becomes. Agape is a perfectly fine Greek word, but if it refers to something wholly different from our common experience of love, it runs the risk of becoming a complete abstraction. And it is trivially easy to claim you "love" people in the abstract, divorced from any sort of commonly acknowledged burdens of obligation with regard to those people you claim to love. While it is good and important to acknowledge that love is not limited to the romantic and sexual context (a point which, by the way, Curry explicitly made in his sermon), it seems to me that conservative Christians have gone the other way and turned the notion of love into a completely empty signifier. They are obligated to talk about love because the New Testament talks about love, but it really doesn't mean anything and so as a practical matter can be safely ignored. Ashenden's piece is perhaps the clearest expression of this common feature of conservative Christian discourse.
Ashenden's second complaint is that Curry provides a false hope, in the form of his references to the possibility of social transformation, justice, quoting Dr. King, etc. I want to quote one passage in full because I was stunned when I first read it.
And this is the hope that always lets us down. It is the Hebrew prophets who give fire and articulation to this hope. But they see God as delivering political and personal transformation at the end of time; only then will the lion lie down with the lamb; only then will the tears be wiped away from our eyes, and by God himself, not by the army of emoting counsellors of the progressive utopia.
That's simply false. The Hebrew prophets spoke very clearly and forcefully in calling for justice in this world, in their present time. It is true that ultimate and final justice will only be accomplished at the end of time, but to reduce the prophetic message of the Hebrew prophets to some prediction of the state of eschaton is to denude it of its power and relevance. It is also extremely revealing of the theological two-step that allows conservatives to ignore all of the social justice content of the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament: "sure, Jesus spends most of his time talking about the poor and the underprivileged, but all of that relates to the end of time, so we can safely ignore all of that now." To that end, Ashenden uses "the poor will always be with you," as a sort of ur-text, used to magically vacate the bulk of the Gospels of their substantive content and positive obligations.
It's hard to tell whether Ashenden actually believes that all efforts to improve people's lives are futile, or whether this position is a cynical vehicle to buttress a pre-existing political agenda. Probably a little bit of Column A and a little of Column B. He does acknowledge that abolitionists, motivated by Christian principle, got rid of the slave trade, but then immediately dismisses that by noting that human trafficking is still a thing. But I can't take any of that particularly seriously, as the resulting principle of "if you can't be sure you can completely and permanently fix something through your efforts, then there is no value in trying," is absurd on its face.
But it goes deeper than that. According to Ashenden, all effort to improve the material conditions of our fellow man, work to fight injustice--all of that is futile. Our singular and only hope is that we will be relieved of our sufferings when we die. It is Curry's refusal to use a wedding sermon as a platform for denigrating any sort of positive goods from this world (whether in terms of love or in terms of social harmony and justice), in favor of an expectation of a Nirvana-like liberation from pain in the next life, that seems to be the heart of Ashenden's beef with the sermon. Here we see the apotheosis of the nihilism of modern conservative Christianity--nothing you do is meaningful, or even really capable of having meaning, except insofar as it sets you up to escape this world to some vaguely defined alternative. Ashenden expresses the Salvation-Industrial Complex vision of Christianity in its most dystopian form.
As an aside, and turning back to love for a moment, one of the most nihilistic parts of Ashenden's article is his repeated reference to the fact that love can cool. Everyone understands that this is indeed a thing that can happen. But it is also a thing that sometimes doesn't happen. There is no iron law of the universe that people will fall out of love with one another. I mean, my parents have been married for 42 years, and they still love each other, in both word and deed. Again, the idea that because something has the possibility of not working means that we should discount it from the jump is defeatist to a maximum degree. Based on this article, one wonders if Ashenden's episcopal motto (if Anglicans have episcopal mottos) is "Never Try."
Finally, we get to Ashenden's real problem with Curry, which is that he supports same-sex marriage and the full service of LGBT people in the life of the church. In the specific context of the Royal Wedding, I would note that it would be a strange wedding sermon indeed if a preacher used the wedding of a straight couple as a platform to talk about how The Gays need to repent of being gay (though, where there is a will, there is a way, as seen by the deacon at my nephew's baptism). As is customary, this objection is presented as a more general complaint that progressive Christianity does not have any sense of sin or need for repentance, alongside the Eric Metaxas-style drive-by Bonhoffer quote. Citing Bonhoffer's lament of religion consisting of "a Christ without a cross," is particularly inapplicable in a wedding sermon that goes out of its way to talk about the redemptive love of Jesus in going to Calvary ("He didn't die for anything he could get out of it. Jesus did not get an honorary doctorate for dying. He didn't... he wasn't getting anything out of it. He gave up his life, he sacrificed his life, for the good of others, for the good of the other, for the wellbeing of the world... for us.")
But the pretextual nature of this framing can be seen even clearer in the fact that Michael Curry signed a document which ends with:
Our urgent need, in a time of moral and political crisis, is to recover the power of confessing our faith. Lament, repent, and then repair. If Jesus is Lord, there is always space for grace. We believe it is time to speak and to act in faith and conscience, not because of politics, but because we are disciples of Jesus Christ—to whom be all authority, honor, and glory. It is time for a fresh confession of faith. Jesus is Lord. He is the light in our darkness. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).
That doesn't sound like the words of a man who sees no role for repentance in the Christian life. But, of course, none of that counts for people like Ashenden, because the repentance Curry and the other signatories call for has to do with the abuse of undocumented immigrants, the rampant corruption and deceit of the current US administration, the erosion of democratic norms under said regime, the treatment of women and minorities generally, etc. No, repentance in the conservative Christian discourse is only and ever about a narrow subset of sexual behaviors--nothing more, nothing less. Just as Christianity has only one hope in the Ashenden framing, so too does it have only one area of concern.
Ashenden quotes, so as to dump cold water on, a comment from UK politician Ed Miliband, that "this bishop almost makes me believe in God." I should say that I know nothing about Ed Miliband, other than the fact that his brother David is my sister's ultimate boss at the International Rescue Committee. But Ashenden poo-poo's the statement because Miliband has not immediately sought baptism, I guess. But, here's the thing--Curry has made someone like Ed Miliband give a second thought to the Christian message, whereas years and years of the Ashenden-style conservative brand has not. The people who are estranged from the Christian faith know exactly what the Bishop Ashendens of the world are promoting as Christianity, but they often do not know about the sort of Christianity one gets from Bishop Curry. Maybe very little will come from Bishop Curry or his sermon, but it offers the chance for someone to have an encounter with Christ, in a way that repeating the old messages at a progressively louder volume--the playbook for conservative Christianity for the last fifty years--has manifestly proven unable to do.
And the reason for this, and Ashenden's response to Curry's sermon is the clearest example, is because conservative Christianity is not Good News. Conservative Christianity is fundamentally a bait-and-switch--it calls the message of Jesus Good News, and then gives you a lump of coal. The message is "nothing matters in this world except abiding by a narrow set of rules regarding with whom and how you have sex, and if you do this you will be allowed an escape from the prison of the world when you are dead." There is nothing attractive or appealing about that message, and people know that. Whereas Curry promises a Christianity of joy and genuine love and peace and the reconciling of peoples and the improvement of the world (if not perfectly, or without struggle). That is Good News, that is something that can get people excited about God.
All of which leads to the question--how did this happen? How did someone who has dedicated his life to the Christian church end up with such a bleak and nihilistic picture of the world and his faith? As it turns out, I think the answer is pointed to in Bishop Curry's sermon. Curry quotes from one of my favorite books of the Bible, the First Letter of John, "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and those who love are born of God and know God. Those who do not love do not know God. Why? For God is love." If you keep reading in chapter 4 of 1 John, you will come to this line:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18).
The message from the Epistle writer here is a simple one--love and fear are essential opposites. It is true that perfect love casts out fear, but it seems to me that the arrow also goes the other way--perfect fear casts out love. If you are afraid--afraid of the world, afraid of yourself, afraid of God--you cannot love, and you cannot recognize love in your midst. And, in the preceding line, the writer notes that perfected love will give us "boldness in the day of judgment." If we love, really love others in a concrete way that imposes obligations on us and mandates that we step out on behalf of others, then we don't have to live terrified about the security of our place in Heaven at the end of our days, the fear that so consumes the conservative Christian discourse. But fear fills the space where that liberating love would dwell, leaving us looking for some deus ex machina lifeline. Ashenden has a problem with Curry's sermon because he is afraid, and as such cannot see his faith through any lens other than that fear, and especially not through the lens of love offered by Curry.
I say this truly, with no snarkiness or trolling--I feel sorry for Bishop Ashenden. If this article is in any way a reflection of the state of his heart or his soul, he is a deeply unhappy man. There is no Good News in his life if this is all he can see from Bishop Curry's sermon. But I don't know what can be said to the Gavin Ashenden's of the world at this point, as they have planted a flag in the middle of their fears. The only thing to do, I think, is to slide around them, toward the vision of the Gospel articulated by Bishop Curry. That is where life, and love, can be found.
If you want to distill Bishop Curry's message down to three core points, I would say they are (1) the foundation of the message of Jesus Christ is love, (2) the love we experience, including the romantic love on display at this or any wedding, ultimately has its source is Christ, and (3) love can change the world, and change ourselves. If you were interested in a 13 minute summation of the Christian message, you could do much worse that what Bishop Curry provided.
Not surprisingly, haters gonna hate. Many of the objections were of the standard sort--he went on for too long (look, I was raised Catholic, the heart of "keep the sermon short" culture, but 13 minutes is not overly long for a sermon by any definition), or he was "too demonstrative" and/or "made the sermon about himself (*cough* translation: "he was too black" *cough*). This sort of thing is to be expected.
Far more worrisome a critique, at least from the point of view of what it means for the writer, is this one by Gavin Ashenden. Ashenden, whom I had not been previously familiar, has recently been ordained a bishop by the "Christian Episcopal Church," one of the myriad of "continuing Anglican" organizations floating around (I will confess that the relationship between the "Christian Episcopal Church" and the Anglican Church of North America is illusive based on my research; I am tempted to make a "Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea" joke, but I will refrain). So, he clearly is not a fan of Bishop Curry or the Episcopal Church, and he was very likely displeased that Bishop Curry was provided a global platform to promote the Episcopal Church.
But, even putting that to the side and discounting for what one might consider "professional rivalry," I found his criticism of Curry's sermon to be deeply troubling. Simply put, I see no meaningful signs of the euangelion, the "Good News," in Bishop Ashenden's presentation of the Christian message, which is then contrasted with Curry's approach. If Ashenden is right and Curry is wrong about what Christianity means, then I fail to see why anyone should give a serious look to Christianity. That which is true in a nascent form in most of the conservative presentations of the Christian message becomes unavoidable in Ashenden's.
Ashenden begins by accusing Curry of "not defining love." One would note that neither does Ashenden. If I may be so bold as to speak for Bishop Curry, I suspect he might say that love is something that we experience, and as such eludes clear and easy definitions. You will "know it when you see it" (or, in this case, "feel it"). Most of us have been blessed to experience love in various forms throughout or lives--familial, companionate and friendship, romantic, sexual. It seems to me that Curry, when he spoke of love, was speaking about all of these dimensions (and, in doing so, was following along the trajectory established by Jesus and the New Testament when speaking of love).
Ashenden in several places tells us that Christian love is not about "romantic or sexual" love. So, then, what do we mean by love? The more we start stripping out and walling off the common, everyday meanings of the term from our consideration, the less intelligible the Gospel witness becomes. Agape is a perfectly fine Greek word, but if it refers to something wholly different from our common experience of love, it runs the risk of becoming a complete abstraction. And it is trivially easy to claim you "love" people in the abstract, divorced from any sort of commonly acknowledged burdens of obligation with regard to those people you claim to love. While it is good and important to acknowledge that love is not limited to the romantic and sexual context (a point which, by the way, Curry explicitly made in his sermon), it seems to me that conservative Christians have gone the other way and turned the notion of love into a completely empty signifier. They are obligated to talk about love because the New Testament talks about love, but it really doesn't mean anything and so as a practical matter can be safely ignored. Ashenden's piece is perhaps the clearest expression of this common feature of conservative Christian discourse.
Ashenden's second complaint is that Curry provides a false hope, in the form of his references to the possibility of social transformation, justice, quoting Dr. King, etc. I want to quote one passage in full because I was stunned when I first read it.
And this is the hope that always lets us down. It is the Hebrew prophets who give fire and articulation to this hope. But they see God as delivering political and personal transformation at the end of time; only then will the lion lie down with the lamb; only then will the tears be wiped away from our eyes, and by God himself, not by the army of emoting counsellors of the progressive utopia.
That's simply false. The Hebrew prophets spoke very clearly and forcefully in calling for justice in this world, in their present time. It is true that ultimate and final justice will only be accomplished at the end of time, but to reduce the prophetic message of the Hebrew prophets to some prediction of the state of eschaton is to denude it of its power and relevance. It is also extremely revealing of the theological two-step that allows conservatives to ignore all of the social justice content of the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament: "sure, Jesus spends most of his time talking about the poor and the underprivileged, but all of that relates to the end of time, so we can safely ignore all of that now." To that end, Ashenden uses "the poor will always be with you," as a sort of ur-text, used to magically vacate the bulk of the Gospels of their substantive content and positive obligations.
It's hard to tell whether Ashenden actually believes that all efforts to improve people's lives are futile, or whether this position is a cynical vehicle to buttress a pre-existing political agenda. Probably a little bit of Column A and a little of Column B. He does acknowledge that abolitionists, motivated by Christian principle, got rid of the slave trade, but then immediately dismisses that by noting that human trafficking is still a thing. But I can't take any of that particularly seriously, as the resulting principle of "if you can't be sure you can completely and permanently fix something through your efforts, then there is no value in trying," is absurd on its face.
But it goes deeper than that. According to Ashenden, all effort to improve the material conditions of our fellow man, work to fight injustice--all of that is futile. Our singular and only hope is that we will be relieved of our sufferings when we die. It is Curry's refusal to use a wedding sermon as a platform for denigrating any sort of positive goods from this world (whether in terms of love or in terms of social harmony and justice), in favor of an expectation of a Nirvana-like liberation from pain in the next life, that seems to be the heart of Ashenden's beef with the sermon. Here we see the apotheosis of the nihilism of modern conservative Christianity--nothing you do is meaningful, or even really capable of having meaning, except insofar as it sets you up to escape this world to some vaguely defined alternative. Ashenden expresses the Salvation-Industrial Complex vision of Christianity in its most dystopian form.
As an aside, and turning back to love for a moment, one of the most nihilistic parts of Ashenden's article is his repeated reference to the fact that love can cool. Everyone understands that this is indeed a thing that can happen. But it is also a thing that sometimes doesn't happen. There is no iron law of the universe that people will fall out of love with one another. I mean, my parents have been married for 42 years, and they still love each other, in both word and deed. Again, the idea that because something has the possibility of not working means that we should discount it from the jump is defeatist to a maximum degree. Based on this article, one wonders if Ashenden's episcopal motto (if Anglicans have episcopal mottos) is "Never Try."
Finally, we get to Ashenden's real problem with Curry, which is that he supports same-sex marriage and the full service of LGBT people in the life of the church. In the specific context of the Royal Wedding, I would note that it would be a strange wedding sermon indeed if a preacher used the wedding of a straight couple as a platform to talk about how The Gays need to repent of being gay (though, where there is a will, there is a way, as seen by the deacon at my nephew's baptism). As is customary, this objection is presented as a more general complaint that progressive Christianity does not have any sense of sin or need for repentance, alongside the Eric Metaxas-style drive-by Bonhoffer quote. Citing Bonhoffer's lament of religion consisting of "a Christ without a cross," is particularly inapplicable in a wedding sermon that goes out of its way to talk about the redemptive love of Jesus in going to Calvary ("He didn't die for anything he could get out of it. Jesus did not get an honorary doctorate for dying. He didn't... he wasn't getting anything out of it. He gave up his life, he sacrificed his life, for the good of others, for the good of the other, for the wellbeing of the world... for us.")
But the pretextual nature of this framing can be seen even clearer in the fact that Michael Curry signed a document which ends with:
Our urgent need, in a time of moral and political crisis, is to recover the power of confessing our faith. Lament, repent, and then repair. If Jesus is Lord, there is always space for grace. We believe it is time to speak and to act in faith and conscience, not because of politics, but because we are disciples of Jesus Christ—to whom be all authority, honor, and glory. It is time for a fresh confession of faith. Jesus is Lord. He is the light in our darkness. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).
That doesn't sound like the words of a man who sees no role for repentance in the Christian life. But, of course, none of that counts for people like Ashenden, because the repentance Curry and the other signatories call for has to do with the abuse of undocumented immigrants, the rampant corruption and deceit of the current US administration, the erosion of democratic norms under said regime, the treatment of women and minorities generally, etc. No, repentance in the conservative Christian discourse is only and ever about a narrow subset of sexual behaviors--nothing more, nothing less. Just as Christianity has only one hope in the Ashenden framing, so too does it have only one area of concern.
Ashenden quotes, so as to dump cold water on, a comment from UK politician Ed Miliband, that "this bishop almost makes me believe in God." I should say that I know nothing about Ed Miliband, other than the fact that his brother David is my sister's ultimate boss at the International Rescue Committee. But Ashenden poo-poo's the statement because Miliband has not immediately sought baptism, I guess. But, here's the thing--Curry has made someone like Ed Miliband give a second thought to the Christian message, whereas years and years of the Ashenden-style conservative brand has not. The people who are estranged from the Christian faith know exactly what the Bishop Ashendens of the world are promoting as Christianity, but they often do not know about the sort of Christianity one gets from Bishop Curry. Maybe very little will come from Bishop Curry or his sermon, but it offers the chance for someone to have an encounter with Christ, in a way that repeating the old messages at a progressively louder volume--the playbook for conservative Christianity for the last fifty years--has manifestly proven unable to do.
And the reason for this, and Ashenden's response to Curry's sermon is the clearest example, is because conservative Christianity is not Good News. Conservative Christianity is fundamentally a bait-and-switch--it calls the message of Jesus Good News, and then gives you a lump of coal. The message is "nothing matters in this world except abiding by a narrow set of rules regarding with whom and how you have sex, and if you do this you will be allowed an escape from the prison of the world when you are dead." There is nothing attractive or appealing about that message, and people know that. Whereas Curry promises a Christianity of joy and genuine love and peace and the reconciling of peoples and the improvement of the world (if not perfectly, or without struggle). That is Good News, that is something that can get people excited about God.
All of which leads to the question--how did this happen? How did someone who has dedicated his life to the Christian church end up with such a bleak and nihilistic picture of the world and his faith? As it turns out, I think the answer is pointed to in Bishop Curry's sermon. Curry quotes from one of my favorite books of the Bible, the First Letter of John, "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and those who love are born of God and know God. Those who do not love do not know God. Why? For God is love." If you keep reading in chapter 4 of 1 John, you will come to this line:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18).
The message from the Epistle writer here is a simple one--love and fear are essential opposites. It is true that perfect love casts out fear, but it seems to me that the arrow also goes the other way--perfect fear casts out love. If you are afraid--afraid of the world, afraid of yourself, afraid of God--you cannot love, and you cannot recognize love in your midst. And, in the preceding line, the writer notes that perfected love will give us "boldness in the day of judgment." If we love, really love others in a concrete way that imposes obligations on us and mandates that we step out on behalf of others, then we don't have to live terrified about the security of our place in Heaven at the end of our days, the fear that so consumes the conservative Christian discourse. But fear fills the space where that liberating love would dwell, leaving us looking for some deus ex machina lifeline. Ashenden has a problem with Curry's sermon because he is afraid, and as such cannot see his faith through any lens other than that fear, and especially not through the lens of love offered by Curry.
I say this truly, with no snarkiness or trolling--I feel sorry for Bishop Ashenden. If this article is in any way a reflection of the state of his heart or his soul, he is a deeply unhappy man. There is no Good News in his life if this is all he can see from Bishop Curry's sermon. But I don't know what can be said to the Gavin Ashenden's of the world at this point, as they have planted a flag in the middle of their fears. The only thing to do, I think, is to slide around them, toward the vision of the Gospel articulated by Bishop Curry. That is where life, and love, can be found.
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