Thinking Out Faith
Incidental Writings on Books, Ideas, Theology and Culture

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

CRC Welcomes Women, Sort Of

My denomination, the massive and now ancient (just turned 150!) Christian Reformed Church, has made a decision to further include women in church office. This decision interests me, not only as a member but as a compelling case study of dealing with ecumenical issues.

The change that's actually occurring is a little confusing but let me try to recap, quoting the CRC Synod News Service. First, "since 1995, congregations and classes had been allowed to ordain women as office bearers under a system of local option. Currently 26 of the 47 classes have exercised that option."

What is new is that, "synod voted last night to remove the word 'male' as a requirement for holding ecclesiastical office in the Christian Reformed Church. This opens the way for any CRC congregation to ordain women as ministers, elders, deacons or ministry associates."

Whereas before, a classis had to exercise the option to ordain women before a congregation could choose to, now any congregation can make the decision on its own. Which means that under the old or new systems, any individual congregation could not ordain women if it so chose, regardless of its classis's decision or now its denomination's decision. There apparently wouldn't be a problem if a particular congregation just happened to have no ordained women now, or anytime in the future.

Already we see that the denomination is allowing a fair amount of diversity. It is leaving the door open for a CRC congregation to have no ordained women and presumably reject the possibility of any individual's ordination solely based on their being a woman while officially supporting the idea of women's ordination.

In addition to this change the synod affirmed last year's vote to allow women to be delegates to synod. By way of compromise and with the "desire to maintain unity in the church by respecting the convictions of those who believe the Bible prohibits women serving as office bearers. It allows classes to set restrictions on women serving as delegates to classis meetings."

Based on this, not only could there be an individual hold-out congregation that didn't ordain any women but a local classis could prevent women ordained by a local congregation, freed by the new rules, from coming to its classis meetings. They would, however, have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with ordained women at the denomination-wide synod.

Well that's the decision. The question is, is it a good one? Does this model the kind of unity in diversity that we should seek in ecumenical dialogues with other denominations? Or is it a compromise that satisfies no one, just barely preventing the splitting up of an already small denomination?

The first thing I thought when I read this was, What if it was any group other than women? What if the Church had a similar rule on an ethnic minority? What if the denomination allowed classes to restrict attendance of classis meetings based on ethnicity? Or what if the situation was reversed? What if a congregation or classis went to the opposite pole and decided they wanted only women to be ordained and they wanted to restrict classis meeting attendance for men?

OK, so these examples might be disingenuous. There isn't anybody seriously arguing that racial minorities or men shouldn't be ordained (at least any more? in the case of minorities) while there is, it seems, a reasonable case to be made against women's ordination. But what if there were such a one? Is the case for allowing these congregational differences just that "people of goodwill can disagree?"

My next thought was, If this is an acceptable route to take on women's ordination, why not on other issues? Why couldn't a whole host of schisms be undone along these lines of allowing the exercising of local options. Imagine that the Vatican suddenly said that, though they maintained their teaching as the right one, Lutherans could be allowed to dissent at the local level on issues of priestly celibacy, the doctrine of the sacraments, supremacy of the pope etc. etc. Then imagine that the Vatican and the Eastern patriarchs dropped their squabbling over the filioque and decided to just agree to disagree. Then really stretch yourself and imagine the CRC and the RCA got over their disagreement about lodge membership and got back together. Would that mean that the substance of the disagreement was judged in retrospect to never really have mattered much in the first place?

The tension is real. On the one hand I want to argue that many of these theological disagreements are important and we shouldn't just opt for a lowest-common-denominator unity. On the other hand it's obvious to everyone involved that the disunity of the church is a sin and striving for greater unity should be on the front burner for all. Our problem is just that we disagree on what matters are relatively unimportant enough for unity to trump or we just opt for the position that the church is united, it's just smaller than you thought.

In the case of the CRC, the synod is trying to maintain unity, obviously - nobody wants another denomination - while "respecting the convictions of those who believe the Bible prohibits women serving as office bearers." By officially taking the side in favor of women's ordination while allowing lower levels of authority to differ, they are in effect saying that a woman's equal standing in terms of ordination is important, but not that important.

I might agree, if it came down to either that or another split-up denomination, but then again, I'm not a woman.

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Friday, June 08, 2007

Everday Mysticism



It seems like everybody wants to be a mystic. The mystical way is usually taken to be that of the extreme ascetic: your stereotypical bone-thin, gaunt-eyed, cave-dwelling kind of saint. That way may well have its place, but a path for the more everyday mystic is pointed to by Richard Mouw who writes in his Praying at Burger King that:

"I seldom find myself in a praying mood while sitting in a restaurant. But I typically don't pray because I am feeling especially 'spiritual.' If I had to wait for those moods to set in, I wouldn't pray very often!" [1]

Mouw goes on to draw the analogy between greeting or recognizing the presence of a person and recognizing the presence of God, noting that when we see someone we know, we don't usually ignore them because we don't feel like greeting them, but bring ourselves to greet the person because their very presence obliges us.

How does this relate to God? If God is everywhere all the time, we should be continually recognizing his presence. True, we should. This is clearly the impulse behind the scriptural imperative to pray without ceasing and the various forms of life that have tried to take this seriously. But alas, most of us struggle to focus on God for more than a minute without distraction.

Michael Himes writes in The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to Catholicism that the basic idea behind everything from corporate worship to prayer is what he calls the sacramental principle: the idea that if something is true at all times and in all places one must pay attention to it at some time, and in some place. A finite human being just cannot attend to the infinite but in a timely way. (Moreover, this 'condition' of human experience should not, from a Christian perspective, be seen as simply negative but part of their originally good createdness. [2]) This picture of trying to recognize the infinity of God in some particular way is exactly what is given us in the image of someone like Professor Mouw trying to reach a momentary awareness of God sitting in a restaurant - a 'worldly' distracting Burger King of all places.

But isn't this type of activity, either greeting an acquaintance with a smile when you really wish they'd go away, or bowing one's head and praying when one's mind is anywhere but with God, just what we call hypocrisy? Well, it can be. The trap of hypocrisy is an ever-present danger for any of humanity's higher aims whether they be moral or spiritual. It is just false though to say that the choice is between either hypocritical pretending to be what one really isn't and just doing whatever the heck one feels like.

The other option is to act the way one wants to become. [3]

So a spiritual activity becomes hypocritical then, not when one has mixed feelings about it - otherwise spirituality would be only for the already perfect, but when it becomes the end in itself. Jesus compared people who evinced this kind of religion to white-washed tombs. But spiritual actions can also be a means to an end, a way of exercising an impulse one wants to become more and more spontaneous. It's no accident we call something like prayer a spiritual practice, because it is nothing other than training oneself to be aware of God's presence more fully and more consistently. [4]

This is why the discipline of prayer at fixed times, according to the clock or events like meals or waking and sleeping, is so important. It recognizes the infinity of God by immersing oneself more consciously into time as a way of reaching beyond it, and growing in awareness of that which is outside of time. The other option, of being 'spiritual' when one feels like it, far from getting us to God, just makes us more in thrall to ourselves and our own agendas.

To return to the comparison with a friend: we all recognize the difference between a friend we only like to see when we're in the right mood, and the deep friendship that is as important and as appreciated in the hard times as in the good. (Marriage should embody the ideal of the human relationship here.) What kind of a god would it be that was only there when we felt like turning to him? Truly that god would be one of our own making.

1. p.4

2. see Smith, James K.A., The Fall of Interpretation

3. I think there's a lot that could be said, if it hasn't been already, relating Christian ethics of character as in Hauerwas, and the theology of spiritual formation.

4. For further reflection on the spiritual life as training, see Willard, Dallas, The Divine Conspiracy

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