Benedictine Obedience Defined: Obedience Part II

In my previous post I attempted to give enough of a positive picture of obedience to at least get the idea a hearing.

To continue recussitating the idea of obedience - to try to get it up on its own two feet so we can get it doing some real work - we need to flesh out a bit more of a definition.

For this work I'm turning again to the tradition of Benedictine monasticism. Where better to explore the real implications of a practice than with the supposed experts?

First, many authors point out the significance of the term's etymology. Contemporary Benedictine Esther De Waal is typical here in describing her prior assumptions and how they came to be challenged. She writes that the idea of obedience "used to present me with difficulties until I realized that it came from the word obaudiens, to listen intently, to listen to the voice of God, to hear God's voice and follow it-so that we are led along the path of God's will rather than our own." [1]

Grammatically the word is an intensification of the root word audir, to hear. So we have the word obedience meaning something like: to listen intently or perhaps intentionally. This might initially seem like a cop-out, a kind of saving interpretation. None of us think of merely listening to someone as constituting obeying them. But this objection is based on a misunderstanding. First of all, we do use the word 'listen' as a kind of synonym for 'obey' as in when children are told that they have to listen to their parents. What is meant is obviously more than that the child hear what is spoken. The parents want response; they expect obedience.

The misunderstanding, and the strong negative connotation to the idea of obedience comes from the same mistaken conflation I wrote about before where authority is equated with power. Here we see that when most people react to the idea of obedience, they are reacting to the idea of mere compliance. Instead of complying with a power under threat of force, I am differentiating here a willing obedience to a respected authority.

I remember hearing that phrase 'willing obedience' in a hymn a while back as if for the first time. It was a kind of forehead-slap moment for me. "Of course!" I remember thinking, "Obedience can still be willing!" Perhaps obedience can only be willing. Why is it that we always tend to assume obeying someone can only be in order to avoid punishment?

But while obedience is not fearful submission to power, it also is not just doing what another asks of us when we happened to want to do it anyway. The wind does not obey the voice that commands it to blow the direction it is already headed.

The reason that the mere coincident overlapping of wills is not obedience is that the whole point of obedience is growth. "Real obedience depends on wanting to listen to the voice of God in the human community, not wanting to be forced to do what we refuse to grow from." [2] If we want to grow through obedience - and if we want to grow, we must be capable of obedience - we will have to do things we don't want to do. There is no getting around this. Some things we are asked to obey and that we should obey will be distasteful. Some will of course turn out in the long run to have not been the best course of action.

Monks in the Benedictine order, the biggest and most influential in the West, do not make the vows most are familiar with: poverty, chastity and obedience. Benedictine monks are chaste and do give up owning much in the way of personal property, but their vows are: obedience, stability and conversion of life. And I think it's safe to say that the first two are aimed at the third. The point is to live in closer communion with God. Benedictines believe the way to do that is to commit to one community in one place and submit to the wisdom of that community.

But this seeming self-limitation must not be seen as oppressive but rather liberating. The first work of liberation is the liberation from the tyranny of the self to its own desires.

Another contemporary commentator makes this point well describing this first work of liberation as "the cracking of the thick crust around my 'I' and the orienting of myself to who or what has something to say to me." [3]

I think the dangers of obedience are obvious to everyone. We do not need to rehearse them here. The point to me is that it is clear where the pendulum has swung in the 21st century western world. Most of us as adults are really in no danger of willingly submitting to dangerous authorities. The very air we breathe is that of anti-authoritarianism. (The authorities now co-opt our insurection by marketing to it. The new standard of conformity is to be non-conformist. It is demanded of us that we be our own person. The only truly revolutionary stance is one of submission to an-Other who is not just any other.)

I say this is the case for adults. Where to draw the line in children is wholly another matter. We all know how the natural trust of children and their being taught to respect any adult authority can be tragically taken advantage of. Here too though it is possible to go too far. We could go so far in protecting our children from any possibility of danger that we would have damaged their ability to trust anyone. How much risk-avoidance is worth living a life of relative fear and mistrust? Part of the blame here is on the sensationalizing of the media of what really amount to very rare occurrences. The 'never talk to strangers' stuff we all had drilled into us endlessly is aimed at avoiding a vanishingly small possibility. Kids are almost never abducted by strangers but we're all afraid of it because we've all heard of the few cases where it has happened. [4]

The other serious problem is that with children a lot of what we often expect is just simple compliance. And we do often try to get this any way we can. (If you don't have kids you can't talk.) This is a thorny issue I can't solve here but let me just say that I think there is some room for growing into the willing part of true obedience. Perhaps in children the place of a fully-developed will and the rational mind capable of deciding to submit it, is filled by the loving attachment of trust and respect for the parent. I'm trying to think through my own theories of parenting so I'll have to return to this later.

Finally, it should also be obvious that willing obedience to an authority is not giving up the freedom of the will and the freedom to voice and act upon dissent. Also clear is that any Christian who is in the position of exercising authority would only do so with an eye to fostering the growth and development in freedom of the individual willing to be obedient. Exercising authority requires maturity and great self-discipline.

"The self-giving of real obedience is very clear to Benedict. When we follow the voice of the ones who call us to higher service, we put down our own concerns, allow ourselves to be led by the sights of another, treat our own best interest with a relaxed grasp. We empty ourselves out so that the presence of God can come in, tangible and present and divinely human." [5]

Being able to treat my own best interests (especially when I'm not sure of them) with a more relaxed grasp would sound many days like a little slice of heaven. Would that they were a little easier to actually lay down.


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1. De Waal, Esther. Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict p. 13

2. Chittister, Joan. The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages p. 59

3. Derkse, Wil. The Rule of Benedict for Beginners p. 28

4. Daniel Gardner makes the case for how many of our most prevalant fears are not only irrational but downright dangerous in his book The Science of Fear. Fear of child abduction is just one example where we choose to avoid a tiny risk of a horrible event in favor of taking a much higher probability of fairly serious negative consequences like child obesity for example, because our kids aren't allowed to walk to school alone or play outside unmonitored as much as they were in the past. I heard him make his case in an exceptional interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

5. Chittister, Joan. The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages p.57

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Obedience and Harvest Customs: Obedience Part I

Here begins the first installment of my second attempt at a conceptual rehabilitation. I'm officially adopting concepts I find useful but that are currently orphaned by our culture including, largely, the church and trying to get them a fair hearing. I previously took a stab at the word 'authority,' and I continue now with the perhaps even less popular concept: 'obedience.'

In coming installments I will explore some definitions of obedience, but - to get things off on a lighter note - I begin with a poetic meditation on the concept followed by my initial reactions to its place in our current lexicon.

What follows is a work by former Calvin professor Stanley Wiersma, aka folk poet Sietze Buning, taken from his book, Purpaleanie and Other Permutations.

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Obedience

Were my parents right or wrong
Not to mow the ripe oats that Sunday morning
with the rainstorm threatening?
I reminded them that the Sabbath was made for man
and of the ox fallen into the pit.
Without an oats crop, I argued,
the cattle would need to survive on town-bought oats
and then it wouldn’t pay to keep them.
Isn’t selling cattle at a loss like an ox in a pit?
My parents did not argue.
We went to Church.
We sang the usual psalms louder than usual-
we, and the others whose harvests were at stake:
“Jerusalem, where blessing waits,
Our feet are standing in thy gates.”
“God, be merciful to me;
On thy grace I rest my plea.”
Dominie’s spur-of-the-moment concession:
“He rides on the clouds, the wings of the storm;
The lightning and wind his missions perform.”
Dominie made no concessions on sermon length:
“Five Good Reasons for Infant Baptism,”
though we heard little of it,
for more floods came and more winds blew and beat
upon that House than we had figured on, even,
more lightning and thunder
and hail the size of pullet eggs.
Falling branches snapped the electric wires.
We sang the closing psalm without the organ and in the dark:
“Ye seed from Abraham descended,
God’s covenant love is never ended.”
Afterward we rode by our oats field,
Flattened.
“We still will mow it,” Dad said.
“Ten bushels to the acre, mabe, what would have been fifty
if I had mowed right after milking
and if the whole family had shocked.
We could have had it weatherproof before the storm.”
Later at dinner Dad said,
“God was testing us. I’m glad we went.”
Mother said, “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
And even I thought but did not say,
How guilty we would feel now if we had saved the harvest.
The one time Dad asked me why I live in a Black neighborhood,
I reminded him of that Sunday morning.
Immediately he understood.
Sometime around the turn of the century
My sons may well bring me an article in The Banner
Written by a sociologist who argues,
“The integrated neighborhoods of thirty years ago,
in spite of good intentions,
impaired Black self-image and delayed Black independence.”
Then I shall tell my sons about that Sunday morning.
And I shall ask my sons to forgive me
(who knows exactly what for?)
as they must ask their sons to forgive them
(who knows exactly what for?)
as I have long ago forgiven my father
(who knows exactly what for?)
Fathers often fail to pass on to sons
their harvest customs
for harvesting grain or real estate or anything.
No matter, so long as fathers pass on to sons
Another more important pattern
defined as absolutely as muddlers like us can manage:
obedience.

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I was reading this poem a while back, not for the first time, but on this reading the poem hit me in a way it hadn't before, even bringing tears to my eyes. Maybe it means way more to me personally than it could to others for a variety of reasons: conflicts and resolutions in my own relationship with my parents on religious matters, or my current possible tendency to sentimentally idealize rural life.

What I like about this poem, along with most of the others in the book, is its seeming ability to strike a sincere and nuanced balance between critique and reverence for tradition. There's not much humor evidenced in the above selection, but many of the others in the book are quite funny - if you know the subculture. The critique side of the more humorous poems is often carried out with a gently satirical edge, much like that of Garrison Keillor who has a similar gift for being able to satirize his tradition without losing a greater sense of gratitude for what it has taught him, thus avoiding the twin traps of easy sentimentality and unearned cynicism.

Obedience is such a tricky word at anytime, and to modern Americans the very idea has become almost anathema. Much of the reasoning for how this came to be is very understandable, given what it was sometimes in reaction to, even while the current situation of hyper-individualism is obviously lamentable. I'm nowhere near sure where the line falls between healthy and destructive obedience but I'm pretty sure which way the pendulum is swinging. I'm also certain that a Christian life which doesn't have any room for ego-humbling obedience, serving God and others, is just plain incoherent. Within the Church in America it seems like Protesants in general and evangelicals in particular have all but destroyed any structures worthy of obedience or at least any capable of asking for, let alone demanding it.

I believe American Evangelicals are in need of remedying this situation whether they know it or not. I'm not sure how to get there, or even where there is, but I know that we are in thrall to the god of freedom and the only way we can be freed from that most unforgiving of tyrannies - the tyranny of the self to its own desires - is to try to regulate it with a little obedience. Any degree of obedience might be a bitter pill to swallow for those of us on a saccharine diet of instant gratification, but I think the message of the gospel is that it ultimately leads to the only true liberation: the freedom to be who we were created to be, not who we merely want to be. Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden light. He never claimed that following his way was without burden or yoke. Adjusting to the harness might chaff at first, but it will lead to where we are meant to be.

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Patrick Henry College, Paradigm of the Evangelical Liberal Arts?

I recently listened to a podcast of a booktalk by Hanna Rosin giving a talk (about a year ago) on her book, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.The book is about the school that seems to be a veritable breeding ground for White House interns, Patrick Henry College. In her talk, Rosin marvels at the juxtaposition of a student body which is intellectually sophisticated, culturally, well ... at least aware, and yet made up of students who maintain their rigorous fundamentalist faith.

Her main goal seems to be to understand this seeming juxtaposition and drive home just how unique a position Patrick Henry College occupies in the intellectual landscape. I would agree that the school seems to be quite an outlier in terms of many of its specific ends and means. I would not agree with what seems like the implicit assumption in much of Rosin's story: that the fundamental issues Patrick Henry College was specifically set up to address are all that different from other Christian colleges.

First of all Rosin sets up her story describing her view of the tension between the sacred and the secular in the lives of the student body. Rosin describes how she "could sense a real tension between the school's dual missions of leading a faithful Christian life and impacting the culture. The school really wanted the students to study Plato and Nietzsche or the modern novels or the enlightenment thinkers but they were worried that they might be corrupted by their ideas."

The way she characterizes the problem makes it seem like 21st century fundamentalists who are also busy competing for jobs in the White House are somehow the first set of Christians to feel a tension in how to live out their Christianity in public. But this is not a new problem at all. Christians have been wrestling with this at least since Saint Augustine penned his book City of God struggling with the right view of the Church after the fall of Rome. But of course it has really been an issue for followers of Christ from day one. Christians tend to adopt the language of 'two kingdoms' to deal with these issues. We sense two basic tensions: on the one hand there is the eschatological tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom, on the other hand there is the incarnational tension in how we are called to be ‘in but not of’ the world. And we Christians call these things ‘tensions’ with good reason. Answers in this arena are never merely plain on their face. I think anyone who takes their Christianity seriously and lives in a secular society, with secular neighbors or with a secular vocation - which is to say: everyone - struggles with striking the right balance in regard to these tensions at some time or another.

The next problem is that having missed how universal the felt tensions described above really are, Rosin depicts politically hyper-active Patrick Henry College as having somehow stumbled upon the idea of engaging in politics and the broader culture at the same time as maintaining a firm orthodoxy. She then backtracks and uncritically adopts Patrick Henry's characterization of other Christian insitutions of higher learning. Patrick Henry College sees itself as paradigmatic for any theologically robust evangelical liberal arts institution and views other schools either as lacking in true intellectual sophistication and thus not worthy of being called liberal arts institutions (Bible Colleges), or as accomodating too much to the secular University and compromising their orthodoxy (mainstream evangelical schools). Rosin apparently buys their story.

But Patrick Henry College is merely one recent, perhaps unique in some regards, example of a Christian institution of higher learning seeking to have some impact on the wider culture. Rosin is certainly aware not only that there are many other kinds of Christian colleges - liberal Protestant, Catholic, etc. - but even that Patrick Henry is exceptional among evangelical institutions; she mentions in response to a question, both Wheaton and my own alma mater, Calvin College, saying they are places that would almost certainly not hire a six-day, young-earth Creationist. So they seem to fit Patrick Henry's conception of an accomodationist school. But if she knew anything about these institutions, she would know not only that they maintain what most American Christians would see as a conservative core theology, but also that a central part of their missions is to have an impact broader than on their students private spiritual lives. Finally, if she did any more than scratch the surface she would also have know that, on the whole, places like Calvin College have very different ideas on how to go about this cultural and political engagement.

For example, in another place she mentions Farris [the school founder]'s model of reading atheist philosophers as one of doing 'opposition research.' As if one has to read this stuff just to be versed in enemy strategy. But I can't imagine an understanding of liberal arts education more divergent from this than the one in which my reading of atheist, secular or just plain old pagan books took place at Calvin. (Even on this front there is an internal discrepancy in that she admits that not all PH professors agree with Farris's views.)

The problem I think is that Rosin has appropriated wholesale Patrick Henry’s very wooden view of Christianity's two-kingdom mindset. From her viewpoint, a bright young student listening to secular music and reading secular philosophers on the one hand and then going to congress to lobby about teaching itelligent design, is seen as someone completely stepping in and out of their identity as Christians. They might listen to good music because it's entertaining and read secularists because it's useful, but they lobby congress because they're Christians; they do the former just because they're modern young people and only the latter specifically as Christians.

At another point she relates how the students "try and follow Farris's model of living in two worlds at once. Of keeping a running conversation with Jesus in your head at all times while still making it in the real world." ... "Michael Farris is not interested in adapters who bend to the will of the mainstream. He wants shapeshifters who can move in between two worlds with their essential natures in tact." As I've said, I think all Christians try to strike a balance here but Rosin does not see how the line could be tread in any other way than Farris's. Nowhere does she seem to contemplate the possibility of an orthodox Christianity that actually encourages an appreciation for art, even secular art, because it's beautiful and recognizes that all beauty comes from God, or a politics that seeks engage in the public sphere as Christians in order to contribute to the common good without merely seizing power and imposing as much theocracy as possible.

And this is where Rosin's lack of the ability to theologically critique Patrick Henry's understanding of Christian vocation matters. While I have asserted that all Christians feel tensions in how to live out their callings in life, the orthodox view is not that we navigate between purely sacred and secular spheres of life where we could alternately put on and shed our identities as Christians. This strict dichotomous view is not more orthodox or conservative but essentially an instance of the Christian heresy of gnosticism. Against this, Christians must recognize how, in Abraham Kuyper's words, "there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'mine!'" But while this means that we are called to engage specifically as Christians in all spheres of life, this engagement need not, and almost certainly should not, look like that of the stereotypical culture warrior.

Perhaps Rosin's portrayal of what Patrick Henry teaches its students to think is correct. I am not in a position to say. Even if it is, it is a serious error on her part to accept the school's own take on the theological landscape of cultural engagement and to uncritically employ its own self-assessment and characterization of the options available in Christian higher learning.

But this is probably exactly why she wrote the book. Patrick Henry's students and their mission are headline grabbing. They are more than likely unique, but not because of their intellectualism and not because of their desire to engage the culture, but merely in what they think constitute the right weapons for the Christian to take up and for which battles. If she had started out with a little background discussion of the historical significance of Christian conversations surrounding eschatological and incarnational tensions she could have given us a much more interesting account of exactly how Patrick Henry is, and is not, unique.

So Ms. Rosin and journalists everywhere, please take note, if you meet someone trying to act like a Christian out there in your 'public' sphere, know that we're not all from Patrick Henry.

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Cynicism, Faith and the Battle of Experience

In a review of a new Library of America collection of journalist A.J. Liebling's work, Fresh Air contributor Maureen Corrigan relates the following intriguing quote taken from one of his WWII pieces. He writes:

"Cynicism is often the shame-faced product of inexperience."

I found this line immediately striking as a succinct counterpoint to the overly relied-upon assumption that level of cynicism equates with quantity of experience.

We are all acquainted with that kind of world-weary skeptic who is always telling us that if we only knew what was really going on in the world, how truly nasty people consistently are to one another, we'd give up on our faith. This line of thinking will often present any religious faith in a good God as a holdover from the naive infancy of our species whereas now we should all be too grown up to get on with that kind of nonsense. As if human beings in centuries or millenia past were somehow less acquainted with suffering and death than is modern man, or too dull to realize that continued suffering in the face of God's goodness and power was difficult to comprehend. Not so the new enlightened man. We are all so very adult now.

When Liebling says it is inexperience that leads to cynicism, he seemingly says the exact opposite of the above assumption, but I think I know where he is going with this. The cynic usually assumes that the optimist has just led too sheltered a life. This is sometimes the case. But our experience of an event involves both the event itself and how we interpret it and the cynical interpretation is never just a strict conclusion from analyzing the facts.

What seems clear to me is that our interpretations of events, which we will have at least some control over, has much more to do with our overall level of cynicism than we might like to think. We all know that there are those who have lived through the worst humanity has to offer - think holocaust survivors - with their faith in God or maybe a general regard for humanity intact just as we have come across those who seem ready to resign themselves to a jaded view of all life has to offer simply because a girlfriend dumped them. The mere possibility of these two types existing side-by-side shows the lack of causation.

We need to keep ourselves open, whatever the events we live through, to interpreting, and thus actually experiencing life, otherwise than cynically. This openness to re-interpretation does not constitute a diminished experience but an alternative experience and offers a horizon vastly wider than that of the cramped complaints of the cynics.

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Rowan Williams and Creeds as the Least Silly Things We Can Say About God

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The Blasphemy Challenge and the Banality of Atheism in a Secular Society

In the bad old days of yore, as we are taught to call them, when religious beliefs were not mere matters of private opinion, one could get in real trouble for expressing the wrong beliefs. One could occasionally lose one's life! Now we just get mocked on the internet.

Today, in our enlightened age, one's beliefs or disbeliefs are no more the business of anyone else - let alone anyone in authority - than our tastes in clothes, food or entertainment.

Enter The Blasphemy Challenge. A group calling themselves the Rational Response Squad has come up with a new test of orthodoxy, or perhaps heterodoxy. Their challenge, posted via YouTube a while back, is to make a video of oneself blaspheming the Holy Spirit, the so-called unforgivable sin. The video responses seem to be mostly angry teenagers eager to shock and the occasional atheist celebrity trotted out to verify his credentials (as an atheist clergyman?) by publicly 'passing' the test. The irony of a test of heterodoxy is apparently lost on all involved.

The Rational Response Squad sets itself up as both defending and advocating for atheism. Defending because atheists are a persecuted minority whose right to disbelief is in peril. (From whom?) Advocating because ... well, I'm not quite sure. Altruism? The squad seems to not so much respond as to downright proseletize for their disbelief. They have debated the likes of Growing Pains child actor cum creationist Kirk Cameron (very telling!) and apparently have a weekly internet radio broadcast. Are we to expect late-night televangelists for the new atheism? Why do they care so much if I pass or fail their test. (For the record, I suppose I have failed their test simply by viewing their challenge and not meeting it.)

It's true, unlike the orthodoxy enforcers of old, they do not pretend to wield authority over those they test so they don't threaten those who fail their challenge with more than their enlightened scoffs. (Their method of 'rational response' is basically that of a schoolyard taunt. They've dared me to blaspheme and I've resisted so far. I can only hope they won't double-dog dare me.)

The very idea of the challenge relies on an understanding of Christian faith which is the very worst kind of caricature. It pretends to an understanding of Christianity by rummaging around in scripture's closet for a debatable doctrine based on a single text in order to pick on it. Holding it up for all to see, they can safely conclude, "See, Christianity is silly and thereby obviously false!" This all just goes to show, as if further demonstration were required, that many of this brand of atheist are far more fundamentalist than their Bible-thumping targets. Two sides of the same old coin.

One odd thing about the challenge is that, while it's obvious that it doesn't aim at serious engagement, it doesn't even get the most basic of facts right. Even in this highly debated quote, the scripture says nothing of denying the existence of the Holy Spirit as being unforgiveable but only about blaspheming against it. The scene one where Jesus' good works are attributed to the power of demons. I think that, given this context, a more likely candidate for commiting this kind of sin would be the kind of Christian who condemns the work of the Spirit just because it is carried out through the agency of a secular or non-Christian organization, not some kids saying they don't believe in the Holy Spirit the same way they don't believe in Santa Claus. Give me a break folks. You'll have to try harder than that.

Many Christians are offended by all of this though. Which is probably at least part of the point. Many post videos arguing back. Apparently some have even threatened the atheists to the point that they won't use their last names and even broadcast from an undisclosed location out of fear for their lives. This is deeply disturbing but not that surprising. There will always be those who take these kinds of things personally.

Now I for one am not offended by their blasphemy. I am not God, so how could I be. I also believe that, at least in this respect, God doesn't need me to stick up for him.

This does not mean that I am not offended by the blasphemy challenge. I am. Deeply.

I am offended, as a person who tries to be reasonable, at their use of the word 'rational' to describe what they are doing. Reason's got enough of a reputation problem without this response squad needlessly dragging her name through the mud.

So have your fun with your non-attempts at understanding scripture if you must. Nobody can possibly take that seriously. But lay off reason, some of us need her!

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Baptism, Why Bother? Sacramental Infighting and Clues to Original Meanings

This past Sunday, my son, Jonah Gregory, was baptized. But, "Whatever for?" you might ask. Well I've wondered this myself.

Everyone knows Christians get baptized. Few of us, even if we call ourselves Christians, think about why we were baptized, or why we should baptize anyone else.

Baptism is just one of those things. People don't want to talk about it or think about it because either A.) It's just what every Christian does, so who cares, and/or B.) Talking about it too much will lead to differences of opinion, disagreements between individuals or even divisions between churches, so it's better to leave well enough alone.

Baptism is central to Christianity so discussing its meaning is a shortcut to delving into the heart of the gospel itself. No wonder then about the disagreement. While the divisions we persist in are lamentable (let alone the violence perpetrated in the past by those willing to take just about any division as sufficient excuse), I subscribe to the theory that theological disagreements should be addressed and hashed out instead of ignored in favor of a race to the lowest common denominator. If the teaching of Christianity is worth thinking about, then it's worth arguing about. So we should maintain civility, but let's keep talking. Baptism is worth exploring.

I find it useful to address what baptism itself is from the angle of these divisions internal to Christianity. The basic split is between those who baptize babies and young children, and those who do not. The former group includes the majority of Protestants as well as Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. This position represents what is called technically paedo-baptism (child baptism). The latter group practices believer's baptism or credo-baptism, holding that one must affirm belief before being baptized. They are commonly referred to just as Baptists (from Anabaptists, meaning re-baptizers because, since they do not recognize the validity of infant baptism, they re-baptize in their own manner those already baptized as infants in another Christian Church).

Now I am obviously a paedo-baptist. Both John Calvin, the founding father of my own Reformed tradition, and Luther, the original reformer, taught paedo-baptism. But, though I am personally persuaded by the reasons given in the tradition for baptizing infants, I fully recognize that the tradition of credo-baptism arises out of a sincere desire to be faithful to certain genuine aspects of the Christian life.

At its most basic, credo-baptism stresses the truth of human free will that is both the beautiful gift and terrible responsibility of every human creature. It also underlines the God-given integrity we have as individuals and the way in which God seeks us out often as individuals.

Another thing that can be said for believer's baptism is that it portrays a very clear grasp on the truth that "God has not willed the church to be reproduced through biology but through witness and conversion." [1] In other words, Christianity is not simply a hereditary religion. Rather, following Christ as a disciple is something all are called to regardless of parentage.

As I said, while I find the above elements attractive and the arguments offered in favor of them to be sincere, I am not persuaded. First of all, I have this sense that everything attractive about credo-baptism is covered just as well in paedo-baptist tradition; we do, for instance, obviously seek out and baptize adult converts.

Second, and more importantly, I just don't feel that denying the sacrament of baptism to children fits with my larger understanding of the faith, most especially in its insistence upon the absolute centrality and primacy of grace, even while affirming human free will.

My basic take on why elements of Baptist tradition are attractive despite my overall disagreement is that, like most theological mistakes and even outright heresies, credo-baptism arises not so much out of originating something opposed to Christian teaching as it does from an over-emphasizing of one strand of Christian teaching at the expense of the corresponding part of the paradox.

So just as the ancient heresies fought by the Church fathers were erroneous because they overly stressed, for example, either the humanity or divinity of Christ and ended up denying the incarnation. I would allege that credo-baptism (though probably not tantamount to heresy) has mistakenly over-stressed the role of human free will in conversion and at the very least muddied up a proper understanding of grace.

By way of caveat, I should say that being a Calvinist, the way I would navigate this mystery might be entirely predictable because, in the words of Richard Mouw, "When Calvinists get around to attempting to explain the relationship between God's sovereignty and human freedom, we are so concerned to protect the former that we are willing to risk sounding like we are waffling on the latter rather than to imply in any way that God's power is limited." [2]

So any potential disputant could just allege that their position occupies the center of the paradox and it is the Calvinist who has erred too far to the side of denying human free will. This has certainly been alleged before. But, as I've already said, on the issue of baptism, Calvinists happen to be in agreement with the broadest and deepest streams of the Christian tradition. I've never even heard anyone argue for an early historical precedent of anti-paedo-baptism, excepting, of course, the highly disputed interpretations over baptismal precedent in the New Testament itself, which is an issue I can't address here. In general though, I would be suspicious of any major Christian teaching that is claimed to have been completely suppressed for 1400 years or so only to pop up again in the 16th century.

Because baptism is our entrance into full membership of the Church, our understanding of it will have a direct impact on our understanding of grace. If we want to keep grace in the center of our picture of the Christian life, it should be important not only to see grace at work in the sacrament of baptism, but to be unwilling to compromise on its working there in any way. Lyle Bierma writes, summarizing paedo-baptism in the Reformed confessions, that:

"Whether one is an adult being baptized after conversion or an infant being baptized before conversion, the situation is basically the same. Christ has shed his blood no less for washing the little children of believers than he did for adults. (BC) As the HC* says, both belong to God's covenant and community and . . . are promised forgiveness of sin . . . and the Holy Spirit, who produces faith. Both are called to embrace those promises by faith, the adult immediately and the infant as he or she grows older. Both are saved not by their baptism but by God's grace as they live in faith and obedience as members of the covenant community." [3]*

But it is not just a matter of technical freedom of will, the overall sense of the grace at work in a church that celebrates infant baptism and one that bars it, seems to me to be reversed in terms of who is in the driver's seat in the conversion of the sinner. Bierma again writes that, "baptism is primarily God's speaking to us, not our speaking to him. It is there that he signifies and seals an operation of grace that he performs in the context of a community that he has established. How can this salvation sola gratia (by grace alone) be any more graphically demonstrated than in the baptism of a tiny covenant child, helpless, uncomprehending, and wholly incapable of any meritorious work? Infant baptism sets before the church in sacramental shorthand the entire doctrine of God's sovereignty in the salvation of the elect." [4]

If you say that one can't be baptized as an infant, then you're saying that one can't become a Christian without a certain level of maturity, whether intellectual or moral. It seems to me that if you do this, you are making conversion to Christianity and the salvation it is all about, far too much a result of one's own effort and abilities. I believe, not just that one is saved through grace, but also that one is converted to the faith that affirms this truth through grace. (If one wanted to be dismissive, this would be the place to start throwing that dirty word 'predestination' around!) For me, one always and only enters the Church, whose threshold is baptism, through grace, with the relative understanding of a child, regardless of one's age or maturity. Affirming that we should baptize infants is a line in the sand that reminds us that our conversion, let alone our salvation, is not of our making.

The objection could be raised here that the boots-on-the-ground difference between most baptistic and Reformed churches, for example, is actually very slight because the former often practice infant dedication with adult baptism; the latter, infant baptism and adult profession of faith. This might be true. The pastor and writer Douglas Wilson wrote recently of the idea of a "wet dedication" as opposed to full covenantal baptism. To the extent that this distinction has been lost, the fault is probably that of insufficient doctrinal education in paedo-baptist circles. If Reformed believers know what they are about, then they will always understand the relative importance of infant baptism and adult profession.

The difference between the two might just be a matter of emphasis, but for me, the distinction of where the line for full Church membership lies is very important. I believe that my 5 month old son is just as much a member of Christ's church as his (hopefully) much more mature, obsessively analytical father.

Finally and in conclusion, I can't help squeezing in the following quote on baptism. It's from the mouth of the fictional pastor who narrates the story in Marilynne Robinson's exquisite novel Gilead.

"There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time." [5]

The very beauty and power contained in baptism, signaled to here, probably makes it nearly inevitable that it will be misused. Baptism requires, like every other creaturely gift we enjoy in this life, certain boundaries to keep it from eroding rather than contributing to the dignity of human beings. For me those boundaries are one baptism in the name of the one triune God.

_____

Notes.

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. The Radical Hope in The Hauerwas Reader. p. 512
Hauerwas here is not discussing baptism but the validity of singleness as a Christian vocation. The point stands as a possible asset for credo-baptism.
2. Mouw, Richard. Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. p. 27
3. Bierma, Lyle. Infant Baptism in the Reformed Confessions. Collected in, The Case for Covenanental Infant Baptism, edited by Gregg Strawbridge. Accessed on 1-16-08 at http://paedobaptism.com/bierma.doc
* "BC" & "HC" refer to the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism respectively.
4. ibid.
5. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. p. 23

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Atheism & Agnosticism Defined or, Why Christians are Agnostic, & Atheists Should be Too (With Diagrams!)

Atheism and agnosticism are both terms that are thrown around quite loosely and sometimes even interchangeably. Because of this, discussions between professed members of either group, or between theists and members of either, can be remarkably unfruitful.

One sadly typical battle between theists and atheists is that fought over which position requires more faith. This interaction usually features the atheist deriding the theist for holding beliefs without sufficient evidence and the defensive believer replying that the atheist requires even more faith because an atheist is alleged to be someone who claims to know so much about the universe that they are able to confidently rule out the existence of a God or gods.

First off, this is a bad tack to take because the theist here is granting the premise that faith has something inherent about it to be avoided. Not a good strategy for a believer to take in the long run. Second, and more importantly, hardly any atheists really occupy this rather sophomorically rejected position. (Some of our crop of 'new atheists' might be exceptions, but we'll leave that alone for now.)

To properly define these terms would require a lot of background definitions like, for example, of belief, knowledge, faith and doubt etc. etc. Upon these definitions rest those for the isms for atheists, theists and agnostics. Since I must here skip over that background work I will begin by provisionally defining theism as the holding of a belief in God or many gods who in some meaningful way transcend the created universe, including - essentially here - human ways of knowing. (In most of what follows, though I will discuss theism generally, I am primarily concerned with Christian theism. That Christian beliefs about the God revealed in Christ.)

Based on this definition, I take atheism to mean simply someone who lacks such a belief. So atheism's definition is purely negative, saying only what the atheist does not believe, and nothing about what they actually do believe. In other words, to be precise: an atheist doesn't believe there is no god, they just don't believe there is a god. The difference is subtle but important.

It seems here that the very language we speak expresses the assumtion that most people hold some kind of belief in a god such that the exception is denoted by negation. This fact is also recognized by the rather silly spin campaign of Dawkins, Dennett and others to rename people who share their perspective, 'brights' in a self-conscious imitation of the homosexual community's appropriation of the term gay. (I say the campaign is silly because of how fatuous the term 'bright' is in itself and of how unlikely any change in useage actually is, given the aforementioned preponderance of believers.)

The lines thus far, though sometimes treated sloppily are fairly clear. We can still talk about what counts as a theistic belief - what kind of G/god is needed to be the subject of the belief - but we know ahead of time that an atheist won't believe that that god exists.

Agnosticism, being the new kid on the block, is where things get really muddy.

The term agnosticism didn't even exist until it was coined in the 19th century by the famed bulldog of Darwin and debater of Bishop Wilberforce, T.H. Huxley. By his own description, Huxley intended agnosticism to denote something opposed to the certainty with which others seemed to hold their metaphysical views. In other words, to Huxley, believers and atheists seemed to be claiming to know a lot more than they could reasonably be expected to.

The problem with this opposition is in the implicit assumption that the only knowledge that counts is certain knowledge such that anything that can be doubted is not really knowledge. There is a huge philosophical conversation behind this, but suffice it to say that this is to set the bar for what counts as knowledge incredibly high. (Just to note in passing another thread this could follow, I believe part of the reason knowledge had become almost equivalent with certainty was an essential change in philosophical assumptions in the modern period.)

So in the world as sketched out by the Huxleyan agnostic, there would seem to be basically three options on the table based upon one's answer to two basic questions. (See Fig. 1) For the agnostic one must first decide if knowledge (taken to be certainty) of something like God is possible, then if it is, come to a conclusion about whether there is or is not something actually in existence to be named God. If agnosticism, as Huxley seems to set it up, is a live option, one who answers "no" to the first question is labeled agnostic, one who answers "yes", becomes either an atheist or a theist based on their answer to question number two.

Being skeptical about our ability to answer big questions like the existence of God wasn't invented in the 19th century. What Huxley really did was define a firm position wherein decision is withheld indefinitely on any serious question, the answer to which can be doubted.

Agnosticism is often described as the position that certain questions are undecidable. What I want to question is the degree to which belief one way or the other can just be withheld because one feels like it. So what if you've decided that knowledge of the divine is undecidable! Does that somehow free you from having any opinions leading you one way or the other, just an inkling perhaps? Maybe opinions and inklings don't count as beliefs, but how strong of an inkling would a Huxleyan agnostic have to have to be counted as actually believing or disbelieving that there is a god?

Since I have already discussed why most atheists are actually atheistic-agnostics. I'll now briefly discuss why the Christian variety of theists are really theistic-agnostics. (Again, a similar argument could be made for theists generically but I am less interested in that grouping, and further am less able to characterize the nature of any god other than the Christian God.)

There are basically two reasons why the orthodox Christian position should be recognized as agnostic. Most basically, we could just rest our argument on the simple assertion that for the Christian believer faith is always part of the mix. If faith is involved in one's belief, and the Huxleyan definition of agnosticism as being a lacking in certainty is granted, then clearly the Christian is an agnostic. Christians seek assurance, they cannot attain certainty the way Huxley thought of it. If you try to believe what a Christian believes, then you will inevitably have your doubts. Jesus certainly did.

Another way of putting this is to say that for the Christian, belief in God is also recognized as undecidable. The difference is that the Christian recognizes that a decision must be made on a matter that is at the same time undecidable. Christians, despite all evidence to the contrary, are not primarily about believing in God but in following Christ. Christ called us to follow him and the problem with a callinlg is that one does not first decide that a call should be responded to, one just responds, even if the response is to ignore the call. The disciple called by Jesus cannot wait for all the data to come in before deciding, he either follows or he does not.

This is why faith is a leap not a conclusion. If beliefs were easily decidable, the results would be as obvious as two plus two equals four. Arithmetic sums are not decisions, they are calculations and inevitably reached. For something to even count as a decision in the first place there must be some element of risking making the wrong decision. Anytime a decision is made, faith is there. If faith is there, then doubt is too. Faith, it must be said, is never inevitable.

The second point is just to point out that in simple historical terms the orthodox Church Fathers were those specifically opposed to the varieties of groups who called themselves, or were called by others, gnostics. As before, we should expect that those lacking what one group claims to have could be safely labeled using an alpha privative. Thus the orthodox believers opposed to gnosticism become: agnostics.

Now note, that this is all granting Huxley's characterization of a kind of binary choice between certainty and non-certainty. When I say that Christians are agnostic I only mean on these terms and in no way imply that Christian faith imparts nothing that could be called knowledge. I believe there is much that counts as knowledge that falls short of certainty, including specifically Christian beliefs. The gnostic opponents of orthodoxy weren't just advocating that Christians know things in the everyday way we use the word. Gnostics were those who presented the possibility of a kind of direct, unmediated experience or certain knowledge of God.

(This is as true now as it was then as the temptation to discard faith is constantly with us. Philip Lee wrote a very fascinating book, Against the Protestant Gnostics, that is both entirely engrossing and at times quite chilling. In it he writes about the areas contemporary protestants, especially evangelicals, share many emphases with the gnostics and are in danger of repeating the mistakes of those ancient heretics. This area of the interaction of modern philosophy, Protestantism and gnosticism is just crying out for more attention.)

Because I believe that both Christians and those we would usually call atheists share a sense of agnosticism, I would argue for keeping four options on the table, with a possible fifth for the really faint of heart. In my mapping (see fig. 2), the two questions are the same as before. If one answers "no" to question number one, thinking that certainty is not attainable in these matters, one might try to cling to position number five by not thinking about it at all, but one who is honest with oneself must admit that they either tend to believe there is no god or that there is. They are thus either an atheist, simply lacking belief in a god, or a theist, a believer who has their doubts at times. If one answers "yes" to being able to know about the existence of God with certainty, one is labeled, depending on their answer to question number two, either an incredibly (scarily) confident atheist or just some nutty sort of theist strongly resembling a gnostic. This last option could only be called heresy in a Christian light.

In short, agnosticism is either a position of epistemological false humility when presented as a distinct option or else it is already just a part of the make-up of the majority of your average red-blooded atheists and theists and most certainly what any reflective Christian should recognize themselves as.

I'm afraid that agnosticism as a stand-alone term causes much more confusion than it is worth. My apologies Thomas, you'll always have that debate to be remembered by.

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