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449 - Works and Grace: Reflections on Religious Practice Christianity and the Ubiquity of God |
Works and Grace: Reflections on Religious Practice
Christianity and the Ubiquity of God
By Wendy Farley
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450 - Works and Grace: Reflections on Religious Practice Christianity and the Ubiquity of God |
and enacted. God is like the prodigal's father who, in an undignified rush, gathers his gown around his knees, tearing down the road to embrace his rotten son. God is like a Samaritan whose heart bursts with compassion at the sight of -an alien and stranger battered by the side of the road. The events that accompany these teachings also convey this graciousness and inclusiveness: table fellowship with dirty and immoral people, conflict with authority, and friendship with women. The decisive parable is that of the Christ's own death and resurrection. Meditating on the meaning of these paradoxes is, in a sense, the life's work of all Christians. I shall, nonetheless, hazard an interpretation of a vision that emerges from the teachings and activities of the Christ.
The crucifixion witnesses to the allergy that exists between a Christian and a Roman sense of reality. It also enacts the vision of reality that the parables tell. In the suffering and death of what is most radically powerful-the incarnate God-the poverty of the logic of domination is revealed. The paradoxical power enacted in Christ's passion is the power to make live rather than the power that demands worship, obedience, money: the coins of imperial control. Everything about the logic of empire-control, social distinction, the worship of might, the neat correlations between punishment and justice or success and just desert-is condemned on the cross of Christ.
"Christianity includes a tragic flaw: If God is everywhere, God is also nowhere; if God does not require a particular practice, ritual, social identity, place, code of taboos, or system of symbols, then none of these can be employed to mediate God's presence.
The kind of power that creates a cosmos is utterly unlike that of emperors or soldiers. It is the power not of violence but of the fecundity to spin out beauty in as many forms as there are actual existents. It is not the power to harm or to kill but the power to undergo death without being destroyed. This vision tells us who God is and who we are. Against all common sense and against the realities of history, ultimate and divine power is revealed to be in a cup of wine, a piece of bread. It is like an old woman sweeping, sweeping, sweeping to find a lost coin. It is a young man broken on a cross. It is in the lilies of the field that bloom only for one day but are more beautiful than Solomon robed in a king's power. This is not the logic of might but the graciousness of God's presence. God is manifest in the cosmos and human history because the goodness of God radiates from God as gently and necessarily as warmth from the sun. This is a vision of who we are, too. Human beings are created by this kind of power because creation is good and human beings are good and the beauty of all created things singly and together is good. Against everything society says of us-that we are slaves or mere women or hated tax collectors or that
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we are superior because of our wealth or gender or political power, we learn instead that we are loved because that is what God is about; God is a lover of the world.
This idea and experience is a foundational insight of Christianity: God is already and always near us. God is near because that is the kind of reality God is. The power of Jesus' teachings and activities is to convey the immediate presence of God. Something of the spirit of this sense of the immediacy of God, together with our alienation from this reality, is captured in two children's stories. In The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald describes Curdie's first encounter with Princess Irene's great-great-great-grandmother. Irene sees the most beautiful room in the world, warmed by a fire of roses; she sits in the embrace of her ancient, beautiful grandmother. But Curdie sees only an old pile of hay in a musty, unused room. The scene has a parallel in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle. A small band of wicked dwarfs has entered heaven but sees only a filthy stable; they are offered the foods of heaven but perceive only a rotten turnip and dirty water. Our real situation is one that is spontaneously and immediately in the presence of God, if only we could wake up and remember who and where we are.
With this emphasis on the ubiquity of God comes a relativization of any particular thing that might mediate God's presence. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that it will not be on a particular mountain or in a particular city but "in spirit and truth" that God will be worshiped (Jn. 4:23). There are two sides to this story: God is not available to Samaritans because they worship on the mountain, not to Jews because they worship in Jerusalem. The other side is that God is available to both Samaritans and Jews. God is available everywhere to everyone, "in spirit and truth." Mountain and city are relativized: Neither absolutely conditions the divine presence. But both are possible examples of the concrete practices by which God is available to actual human beings, Perhaps, the most offensive piece of this logic is that God is not available only, or even primarily, to religious people who work hard and sincerely to honor God but even to riff-raff and sinners who are not fit for human society, never
mind the company of the Holy One.'
'THE RELATIVITY OF SOCIAL AND RITUAL DISTINCTIONS
In the discovery of the unconditional self-giving of God, two categories of mediation in particular are relativized: those social distinctions that
'It is an ancient piece of anti-Semitism to interpret the novelty of Jesus' teaching as an utterly new discovery that God is gracious rather than condemning, and that it is through faith rather than works that human beings are saved. Even the most casual reader of the Hebrew Scriptures cannot help but notice that grace, compassion, and justice are the most characteristic features of the Holy One of Israel. It is only by willful misinterpretation of rabbinic Judaism that the practices of Judaism are construed as intended to earn salvation. In fact, the casting of Judaism as a religion of works contrasted with the Christian religion of faith looks more like a severe case of projection than anything else. This preoccupation with works and faith and the demonizing of the supposed religion of works replays itself in the Protestant Reformation.
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make a complex and stratified society work and those ritual practices that make any religion concrete. The ubiquity of God to humanity means that God does not prefer Jews to non-Jews or slave owners to slaves or men to women (Gal. 3:28). These distinctions have to do with political and social realities but do not reflect privileged access to God. God is not present because of who the empire says we are but because of who God says we are. The erasure of social location as indicative of worth or ability creates a tension in Christian life: One must live out two identities at once, one decreed by society and one given by God.2 This tension proved too severe for the church and it reverted to the wisdom of the world very quickly. But the insight was not extinguished, and it flickers throughout Christian history; it remains alive today in feminist and liberation theology: a bruised reed that will not break, a dimly burning wick that will not be quenched (Isa. 42:3).
A second sense in which particularity is relativized is that of ritual. The omnipresence of God obviates the argument between Jews and Samaritans. If God can be worshiped everywhere, both mountain and city are rendered inessential. Israel's God, the creator of the world and the power of justice, compassion, and redemption in history, is not confined to the history or practices of that people. This is not itself news; it was not a characteristic feature of Hebraic or early Jewish teaching that God was a private deity available only to themselves. The break with Judaism is not over this understanding of the ubiquity of God but over, among other things, the significance of religious practice as a sign of membership in a community. In carrying the experience and message of the Christ around the empire, the particularities of Jewish practice became, for Christians, less essential than the message itself.
The insoluble difficulty of this emphasis on the unconditioned character of the divine presence is that the role of practice and tradition become problematic. The great genius of Judaism is so to relate its understanding of God to particular, concrete practices that it can travel the world over and remain Jewish, that is, retain a way of sanctifying the Name in any place: Babylon, Poland, the New York garment district, even the death camps. By contrast, Christianity includes a tragic flaw: If God is everywhere, God is also nowhere; if God does not require a particular practice, ritual, social identity, place, code of taboos, or system of symbols, then none of these can be employed to mediate God's presence. It is true that God is present and that the entire world is a sacrament to that presence, but we remain alienated from this reality and still require the "medicine" (as Augustine puts it) of concrete religious practices and mediators.3 In affirming the intoxicating presence of God to humanity, our reach ex-
2See also Augustine's distinction
between three different kinds of hierarchy: an order of nature or creation;
an order of utility or, as we might say today, social construction; and an order
of moral worth. It is the job of reason to distinguish these orders and to live
according to reality rather than utility (City of God, 11.16).
3Friedrich Schleiermacher's discussion of original
justice and the capacity of the whole world to mediate God-consciousness is
a particularly helpful exploration of this theme. See
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ceeds our grasp. In this gap between reaching and grasping, an anxiety asserts itself, and, with this anxiety, a number of perennial temptations and corruptions creep into Christian faith. These include a pronounced vulnerability to idolatry, which one witnesses in the obscene history of Christian imperialism. This temptation is present in the contemporary church's turn to fundamentalism. A second problem is the trivialization of Christian faith that occurs when religious practice is displaced by a preoccupation with words.
These problems are greatly intensified by Protestant theology and piety. In the first centuries of Christianity and then again in the sixteenth century, a series of shifts away from the ubiquity of God take up residence in Christianity and become preeminent. The first shift is from the teachings of Christ and his life to teachings about Christ. This shift is integrated with a rejection of Jewish (and, later, Catholic) practice and a denigration of practice generally. In these ways, the content of Christianity comes to be primarily belief about Jesus Christ. It is not the ubiquity and graciousness of God that remains primary but the revelation of God in Christ; it is not the activities of religious practice that make God present to a worshiping community but the activities of cognition: belief, faith, theology, orthodoxy. Christians do, of course, engage in ritual practices. But the decisive boundaries of Christianity are understood to be primarily verbal rather than practical4 A final shift occurs when the claim that God is unconditionally present to the world is sacrificed to the imperial logic according to which God is present only within the Christian community.
"When piety is limited to belief, to verbal formulations, to ideas about God, most of the human person is left out. "
In these transformations of faith, the ubiquity of God becomes more and more narrowly delineated. Access to God is constrained once by its limitation to the Christian community and a second time by its limitation to the cognitive process of belief. The first limitation inaugurates a long history of violence and intolerance. The insight that occasioned the break with Judaism as too narrow is transmuted into the claim that Christians alone are privileged to be near God. We who live in this corner of the cosmos on this tiny plot of land near the Mediterranean Sea during this thin slice of history who believe the exactly correct doctrine about Trinity, the atonement, incarnation, and scriptural authority-we alone condition
The Christian Faith, edited by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), esp. sections 59 and 60.
4Note Rebecca Chopp's discussion of the need to include not only "what we say" but also "what we do" in theological education (Saving Work: Feminist Practices of Theological Education [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995], p. II 1).
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the presence of God to humanity, to history, and to the cosmos. All of the rest of the suffering and lovely human race, the richness of religious practice that accompanies this race, the beauty of the natural world are denuded of the livingness of God and become a nothing, a wasteland, an abomination.
The second limitation results in an impoverishment of religious experience. The whole person is created by God. As the ancient critical principle put it, what is not assumed is not saved. The body, the senses, the emotions, the mind-the whole person is transformed for life with God by the incarnation. When piety is limited to belief, to verbal formulations, to ideas about God, most of the human person is left out. Teresa of Avila employed the image of an interior castle to capture something of the complexity of the human soul and its imperviousness to grace even when it believed correctly.5 Religious practice carries the experience of God into all of the closed off, disused rooms in this castle. By excluding concrete religious practices from mainstream Protestant life, the church destines its members to a faith that is, at best, partial and superficial and, at worst, corrupt and idolatrous.
A CRITIQUE OF PROTESTANT REDUCTIONISM
The radical graciousness of God relativizes all particular places and practices. But relativizing a practice is not the same as rejecting it. God is ubiquitous and transcendent. Nothing can contain or adequately express or mediate the reality of God. To confuse the mediator with God is idolatry. But if this nonidentity of God with any historical phenomenon qualifies everything to partiality, it also calls for concrete expression. The ubiquity of God means that a plurality of practices, rituals, places, and beliefs can mediate God to humanity.6 Protestantism has been saddled with a theological emphasis on words and ideas that confines the experience of God to the sphere of what Schleiermacher calls thinking and doing. On the basis of this overemphasis on words, Protestantism has seen in Jewish, Catholic, and all ritual something suspiciously like magic or "works righteousness." This means that Protestantism has failed to understand most of the world's religions. In doing so, it has shut itself off from the multidimensional and sacramental ways to God. If concrete religious practice is tantamount to magic, idolatry, or superstition, then by what means can we learn to hear God's word in the midst of a violent culture or taste God's presence in the midst of distraction and illusion?
What this means for the Protestant church in particular is that worship and the bulk of Christian life are limited to cognitive dimensions: reciting
5The whole literature of Christian
mysticism and contemplation reflects this sense of the multidimensionality of
the human being. See for example, Bonaventura's The Mind's Road to God or William
of St. Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love.
6Paul Tillich is very alive to this tension, seeing
in it the sacramental power of Christianity as well as its perennial temptations
to the demonic. See his Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 195 1), p. 21 1; idem, "The Kingdom of God Within History,"
in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
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prayers together, listening to a sermon. Many Christians also engage in political or social activities. Many build the local church into a real community that nourishes its members in times of crisis, pain, and celebration as well as in the daily upbuilding of Christian consciousness through stories, songs, and communal meals. But even when Christian life is lived in a vital community, the whole person tends not to be engaged. One might begin with belief, with assertions about God, with correct ideas or doctrine about God. But that part of the person that is responsive to words and ideas is not the whole person. To carry the taste of God into the whole person, more than belief is necessary.
The poverty of Protestant religious practice is even more problematic in relation to the impoverishment of Western culture by modernist and capitalist assumptions. For all the benefits these movements have brought us, they have reduced knowledge and understanding to formalism and, now, simply to information.7 This transformation of reason from a capacity for wisdom into a capacity for holding information is catastrophic when it is absorbed by religion. Memorizing Bible verses and repeating creeds become the primary expressions of a faith that mimics the form of knowledge at work in the broader culture. At the same time, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of reality are stripped away as merely subjective by the requirements of scientific formalism; in parallel fashion, the logic of the profit system reduces all reality to utility. The sense of reality as quantifiable information and resource at work in our larger culture is one that is deeply impoverished and fundamentally immoral. Essential to a Christian vision of reality is the goodness and beauty of creation. But Protestants have few resources to criticize or assist a society that has lost this sense of reality, having helped to empty creation of its sacramental power and nature of its non-utilitarian beauty. Just as Christians centuries ago permitted the images of imperial power to penetrate and ultimately displace the distinctively Christian understanding of power, modern Christians have allowed a secularized and desacralized sense of reality to obscure the absolute value present in the beauty of a cosmos, a world, and a humanity created by God. The reduction of Christianity to doctrine, belief, words has left precognitive experiences of reality to newspapers, television, political rhetoric, and the entertainment industry. Deprived of practices that might mediate a different sense of reality, Christians have few resources to resist this desacralized vision either in the community or in their own psyches. Traditional Protestantism is insufficient to meet the moral and religious crises present at the end of the twentieth century, and the ersatz solution of embracing fundamentalism will only intensify its spiritual crisis.
7This is not the place to recite this history, but see, for example, Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), parts 1-2.
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TOWARD A CHRISTIAN PLURIFORM VISION AND PRACTICE
If earlier centuries of Christians struggled with their faith in terms of belief, it is necessary for this generation of Christians to struggle to rediscover practices that will deepen their individual and communal life with God. The unconditional character of the divine presence simultaneously relativizes and requires the plurality of human experiences, cultures, and practices. We have tended to be good, in a sense, at preserving the relativity of practices but have not always appreciated the importance of concrete practices. It is difficult simultaneously to employ a practice that mediates the presence of God (whether a belief, Scripture, meditation, political activity, work in a community, or artistic work) and yet continue to hold it lightly, to remember that it does not absolutely condition the presence of God. Karl Jaspers reminds us that the transcendent cannot remain transcendent and yet become a knowable object. All ways of knowing the transcendent are themselves historical and, therefore, not universally valid. It is not impossible but only psychologically difficult to act according to truth without assuming it to be the only or absolute truth; "since it is not impossible, [we] must not skirt this highest demand of truthfulness which is only apparently incompatible with that of others."8
Not only the other faiths of the world but Christianity itself has a rich set of traditions and wisdom about the practice of faith. Bonaventura describes the "mind's road to God" as beginning with delight in the sensible world, in the beauty of nature. Catholic liturgy can employ the whole person in worship: smell, hearing, touch. Sallie McFague reminds us of the need to find a way to pray that will restore a sense of the nearness of God in nature.9 Meditative practices and prayer engage parts of the human person that discursive thinking does not. Roberta Bondi's new book, Memories of God, reminds us of the wisdom of the desert fathers and points to ways their practices could be reappropriated for Christians today. The Re-Imagining Conference is an example of the kind of thing that must happen if mainstream Protestantism is to remain spiritually alive: It must find concrete practices and images that allow the ubiquity of God to be experienced in the present.10
Can we hope that this valley of dry bones that is American society might live? Can we hope that the Christianity that must embody itself in the midst of a secular, violent, industrialized culture might not be a force of reaction or hostility but a flame of beauty and compassion? Even the
8Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existence
(New York: Noonday, 1955), p. 100.
9“This demands a new form of meditation in which
we call up concrete images of events, people, plants and animals, objects, places,
whatever-as long as they are particular, cherished aspects of our world-and
dwell upon their specialness, their distinctiveness, their value, until the
pain of contemplating their permanent loss, not just to you or me, but to all
for all time, becomes unbearable" (Sallie McFague, Models of Go& Theology
for an Ecological, Nuclear Age [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987], p. 187).
10As Rebecca Chopp writes, "Education, at least
within a feminist vision, is about forming persons to be symbolic constructors,
about training persons to be poets as well as interpreters" (Saving Work,
p. 112).
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most outrageous hopes may be possible because of the fecund grace of God, but they require, too, a humility that allows us to love God and not cling only to a narrow selection of God's gifts. These will be ways to God only if they are lightly held and not made into idols. The beauty and wisdom of a Christian vision can become a vital part of public discourse when it rediscovers practices that are local and concrete and invite the whole person and many-chambered psyche to delight in God. As we rediscover practices that deepen and sustain our passion for God, we must hold our practices lightly, remembering to love God and not the ways to God. In this way, a distinctively Christian sense of reality can remain alive even in the midst of our Babylonian captivity.