Where We Are

This is Part 3 of “The Shape of Classical Christianity,” and continues to explore those elements, the shared beliefs and the historical consensus, which gives shape to the Christian faith. If you have not already read Part 1 and 2 it would more likely than not be helpful to do so. One way our question can be framed is: “What is Christianity, not as reconstructed by American fundamentalist ideology or reconfigured by modernity, but as it is in and of itself. With this in mind we take up where we left off.

Revelation
Classical Christianity acknowledges the authority of revelation, not as proof for things like the factual reality of God or the resurrection of Christ, but as a way of grasping and living by a deeper spiritual reality. Revelation is not the imparting of information, but the self-disclosure of God; and, consists of those events through which people of faith, both as individuals and whole communities, become aware of God. Revelation includes every manifestation of God through human consciousness, reason, conscience, dreams, visions, theophanies, and “illuminations of the intellect.” The validity of revelation must be tested by the wisdom and experience of the community of faith, by spiritual tradition, and by Scripture (1 John 4:1). But, to reiterate, revelation is not primarily about forensic evidence for God’s existence; it is about God’s self-disclosure, about God’s being made known. And the only way any person can truly be known is if he or she chooses to self-disclose –– chooses to reveal him or herself. God is revealed in many ways and in many experiences. When you look at the beauty of the natural world and marvel at it. When you feel a sense of wonder and gratitude for the experience of being alive, that is a divine revelation. Whether it is lost on you or not is of course up to you, but it is a revelation of the character and nature of God. For classical Christians the ultimate self-disclosure or revelation of God is Jesus Christ –– “the visible expression of the invisible God” (Colossian 1:15).

About 4,000 years ago in Ur of the Chaldees, a man and woman who had strange dreams and mystical visions came to believe that God was revealing Himself to them, telling them to leave their old, comfortable, predictable life and begin an arduous journey into a new land. As they journeyed they learned more and more to trust their God. And the more they trusted God the more they experienced God as friend. Thomas Cahill therefore says of this story and its extension in Hebrew history.:

Since it cannot be proved that God exits, it can hardly be shown that God spoke to Avraham, Moshe, or Isaiah. Each person must decide if the Voice that spoke to the patriarchs and the prophets speaks to them too. If it does, there is no question of needing proof, any more than we require proof of anyone we believe in. For in the last analysis, one does not believe that God exists, as one believes that Timbuktu or the constellation of Andromeda exists. One believes in God as one believes in a friend –– or one believes in nothing.

I think what Cahill is suggesting is that the “proof,” for want of a better word, of the revelation experienced by Abraham and Sarah is in your own experience –– in the discovery that their encounter with God is one shared by you. In this way God’s revelation to Abraham and Sarah becomes a revelation to and for the whole believing community. Revelation is not a piece of hard evidence that proves anything. It is not like E=MC2 that can be worked out mathematically and confirmed by observing a solar eclipse; or, like proving I ate a carnitas street taco for lunch. It is something known and confirmed only as you, like Abraham and Sarah live into it. How do I know, what makes me so certain, that in a time of crisis and desperation I can depend completely on my wife to act in my best interest. It is a knowing that has come, not by logical reasoning as such, but only by having lived into her love for more than five decades. It is a knowledge gained from her self-giving, her self-disclosure, her self-revelation.

Scripture
Classical Christianity understands Scripture as constituting the norm, the standard, the authoritative guide for the life and work of the people of God. It is useful for teaching the Way, for confronting character flaws, for correcting mistakes and making amends, and for training in the practice of justice, love, and wisdom. It is the Christians manual for spiritual formation. As the word of God Scripture is alive and active. “Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; and discerns the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” It is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are (2 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 4:12; James 1:23). It is not the church’s founding document, for the word was taught before it was written and collected into the twenty-seven books we know as the New Testament. The founding document of Christianity is not written on parchment or papyrus, but in the hearts of those who are in Christ and in whom the living Christ dwells. To call Holy Scripture the founding document of the church is somewhat like comparing it to the original charter of a club or charitable organization. This is all because the real foundation of Christianity is not a written text, but a living person. “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). When scholars get all tied up in debating the minutiae of the Bible they are, as the old Zen proverb says, so caught up in looking at the fingers pointing at the moon that they miss seeing the moon itself.

This is the high view of Scripture found in classical Christianity, which respects and honors the Bible as “inspired” by God. And what is inspiration? “Inspiration is the energizing power of God in the lives, discourses, and writings of God’s servants so that from these writings men and women can see life with God as supreme.” In his Confessions, Saint Augustine tells of the encounter with Scripture that led to his conversion and radically transformed his life:

From a neighboring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” Instantly I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find. I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: “It is time to wake up. You know that the day when we will be saved is nearer now than when we first put our faith in the Lord. Night is almost over, and day will soon appear. We must stop behaving as people do in the dark and be ready to live in the light. So behave properly, as people do in the day. Don’t go to wild parties or get drunk or be vulgar or indecent. Don’t quarrel or be jealous. Let the Lord Jesus Christ be as near to you as the clothes you wear. Then you won’t try to satisfy your selfish desires.” Then putting my finger between, or some other mark, I shut the volume.

Notice how well Augustine’s experience in reading from Roman 13:11-14 fits with Berkeley’s definition of inspiration as the “energizing power of God.”

As you perhaps already know the word translated as “inspiration” in Timothy is actually and literally “God breathed.” You may want to pause here and spend some time meditating on how the word for “spirit” (pneuma), means “breath.” Scripture is not primarily about the precise qualities of humanly written documents, it is about the breath, the energy, the spiritual life that comes from God through them.

You may or may not also know that this text from Timothy does not say all Scripture is inspired by God, as usually translated, but that all inspired (all God-breathed) Scripture is spiritually transformative. This leaves open the possibility that some Scriptures are not God-breathed. I have discussed this elsewhere, here I simply want to note that 2 Timothy 3:16 does not claim everything you read in the Bible comes directly from God, and that the Bible is, therefore, “inerrant” from cover to cover. The doctrine of inerrancy is, in fact, a little less than one hundred-fifty years old. While the early church fathers held a high view of Scripture and regarded it as inspired or breathed forth by the Spirit, they did not regard the written text as inerrant. Origen (185-253), for example, readily admitted there were human errors in the Biblical text. In fact he believed that even human errors in Scripture served to convey “deep truth.” He believed that ‘deep truth’ applied primarily to the level of spiritual interpretation, not to the grammatical historical details of Scripture. He was not concerned about the precision of incidental details of Scripture, and made no attempt to harmonize the differences in the Gospels but instead suggested: “. . . let these four [Gospels] agree with each other concerning certain things revealed to them by the Spirit and let them disagree a little concerning other things.” Saint John Chrysostom said, “But if there be anything touching time or places, which they have related differently, this nothing injures the truth of what they have said … [but those things] which constitute our life and furnish out our doctrine nowhere is any of them found to have disagreed, no not ever so little.” Saint Gregory the Great in his “First Sermon on Ezekiel” said, “The spirit of prophecy does not always reside in the prophets.” Gregory (sixth century), like Origen, was more concerned with the allegorical and spiritual sense of Scripture than with its literal and surface meaning. He said, “Holy Scripture by the manner of its language transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery.” Classical Christianity believes the Spirit of God is the source of Scripture, not in some fairy-tale sense, but as a power and wisdom by which we experience the reality and presence of the Trinity as the supreme glory of our lives.

Jesus
For the classical Christian Jesus of Nazareth is: Son of God, the promised Messiah, the one mediator between God and humanity, truly God and truly human, the one who liberates men and women from the power of sin and heals the affliction of blind self-will by his death on the cross, and who rose from the dead confirming his identity as the promised one.

I want to be clear that this is not an essay on apologetics, that while I believe all of this to be true of Jesus the point here is not to argue for the factuality or correctness of any of these claims, or to explain them, but to simply describe, as best I can, something of what it means to think and live as a classical Christian. Whether as a reader you believe Jesus was God with us, or whether you believe he rose from the dead or not, the fact is that these are essential convictions that have defined what it means to be Christian, and that have inspired men and women to consecrate their hearts, minds, and lives to Christ for over two thousand years in spite of persecution, torture, and death. What I am saying here I mean in an entirely nonjudgmental and simple way. Whether you are Christian depends on, among other things, what you believe about Jesus Christ. If when I was practicing psychotherapy, someone had come into my office and said, “I am a member of AA but I do not believe in a power greater than myself; and, I do not believe I am powerless over alcohol.” I would have wanted to explore with them why and in what sense they claimed to be an AA member when they repudiated its central principles. Given their denial of essential principles of AA I might even have explored with them alternative programs like SMART Recovery which thinks AA harmful and prides itself on a “self-empowered and science based” approach to alcoholism.

I love the story the humorist, and former educator, Sam Levenson told years ago on the old Johnny Carson show. That’s why I repeat it so often. A man puts on a tugboat captain’s hat and goes to see his mother. “Look Mom!” he says to his mother. “I’m a tug boat captain!” “Yes son,” his mother responds. “By you, you are a tugboat captain, and by me, your mother, you are a tugboat captain; but, tell me, by a tugboat captain are you a tugboat captain?” The question is not whether by me, or a certain type of modern academic, or denomination, or local church in which one can be a member while embracing atheism, or agnosticism, or worshiping green plants (as at Union Theological Seminary), or retain Holy Orders as Christian clergy upon becoming a Moslem Imam. In the latter case I would think both the reasonable Christian and Moslem would chuckle knowingly as Johnny Carson’s audience did that night they heard Sam Levenson’s little story.

Let me try to clarify with one further anecdote. We were having dinner in the home of a couple who had only recently become members of our parish. At one point in the evening their seventeen-year-old son who had been out, came breezing through the house before leaving again. His parents got him to pause long enough to introduce us. As soon as he knew I was a priest he said, I suspect to jab his parent more than anything else, “Well I am a Buddhist––you know, like a Buddhist monk.” Had a Buddhist monk, or simply Buddhist devotee, been there and participating in the conversation, they might have inquired into his devotion to the Buddha, to the Dharma, and to the Sangha, and upon discovering that he had no commitment, no consecration to or real interest in the Buddha, in Buddhist teaching or scripture, or in the Buddhist spiritual community they would have easily and rightly concluded that he was no Buddhist. That is, by a tugboat captain he was not a tugboat captain.

Now, I most certainly do not want to suggest that there is any real affinity between modern American fundamentalism and classical Christianity. I was once leading an adult Bible study on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, and when we came to the story where Jesus reaches out and touches the leper in 8:3, I asked the group why, unafraid, Jesus touched the leper. The answer I was looking for was Jesus touched the leper in and out of love. My intention was to point out that love and fear are mutually exclusive. But one young man of sincere faith quickly responded, “Because Jesus was God and knew he couldn’t contact leprosy!” His intention was to express a high appreciation and understanding of Christ. In reality he gave expression not only to a “magical” perspective, but also an ancient heresy which denies the full humanity of Jesus. American fundamentalism is not the same thing as classical Christianity.

While Christianity affirms the above characteristics as essential to the faith, it cannot be reduced to doctrinal or theological affirmations or slogans. Thomas Oden, a liberal scholar at the far left of the theological spectrum, went through a profound reorientation after immersing himself in patristics and wrote the following:

Christianity arose out of a particular human life ending in a disturbing terrible death––then resurrection. The meaning of Christianity is undecipherable without grasping the meaning of Christ’s life and death and living presence. . . . Being a Christian does not mean, first and foremost, believing in a message. It means believing in a person. Other ideas in Christianity are measured in relation to the idea of God known in Jesus.

How Much of This Do I Have to Believe?
A man who had lost a fortune began coming to church with his wife. He felt powerfully drawn to be baptized, and so one day he asked me, “How much of this stuff about Jesus do I have to believe before I can be baptized?” My response was to ask him in turn, “How much do you have to believe before you can entrust your life to Christ without reservation?” It is impossible to know the precise nature of the Easter event, and there is more than one way to understand the resurrection of Christ. But if someone does not embrace the resurrection as at all “real” (rather than as purely emblematic or metaphorical), it is difficult to understand how they can consecrate their heart to Christ. Once while drinking tea and listening to a classical violinist and guitarist play at Mr. Toots, a shop on the beach in Capitola by the Sea that looked out over Monterey Bay, I asked my good friend Tom Hostetler, who spent every day of his work like talking with physicists about their experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, if he remembered the moment he became a Christian, and what if anything he had said, “Yes,” he replied simply, “I remember it as vividly as if it just happened. I said, ‘Here I come Jesus, I hope I don’t stumble.'” A heart given to Christ is the essence of classical Christianity (Matthew 16:25). And that simple moment of consecration determines everything else.

Transition
There is a slogan once often used among churches in working out their disagreements but now seldom heard: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials (or doubtful matters) liberty, in all things charity.” Some version of that might be helpful here as we reflect on what has already been said about the classical consensus and before moving on to think further about its contours. The slogan suggests that there are certain essential elements to the existence of things whether seen or unseen. Psychologists sometimes talk about the solid-self and the soft-self. Your solid-self being those things so essential to who you are as a person that they cannot be compromised without losing yourself. The soft-self refers to what may be important but which can be compromised or discarded without damage to your “soul.” This little slogan also recognizes that in the spiritual realm nothing and no one can be forced or coerced –– nor should they be. But whether we are dealing with what is essential or non-essential we must always be guided by love’s generosity and wisdom.