Thinking Theologically

One of my goals when entering seminary was to become more adept and consistent at what I call “thinking theologically.” By this I mean looking at the world with more attention to God's action in the world, and, more importantly perhaps, to orient my thinking on a day to day basis to try and be in line with a greater divine purpose. What I'm hoping to do is move from approaching questions, problems, and issues with a “strategic approach” (what is the most efficient way to solve this issue?) to using a theological approach (how would God call us to solve this issue?).

I had an “a ha” moment in my class on Anglicanism. We were discussing the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886/1888. (For Episcopalians, check your BCP pages 876-888, for others, click here). In this effort towards ecumenicism, first the Episcopal Church and then the Anglican Communion tried to define what elements of Christian faith we considered essential or non-negotiable in inter-denominational dialog. We settled on four, essentially: 1. The centrality of the Old and New Testaments, 2. the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds, 3. Baptism and Eucharist, 4. the Historic Episcopate. It is the last one, the importance of having bishops considered to be in succession to the original apostles, that has often been one of the biggest sticking points in dialogs between Anglicans and churches that do not have bishops. Apparently, however, our intransigence on this point begins with Thomas Cranmer, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, who felt this was non-negotiable because bishops are actually in the New Testament (see 1 Timothy 3:1-2; Titus 1:7). They may not be in the Gospels, there may not be a line where Jesus says “You have to have bishops,” but he felt that the strong reference to bishops in the early church indicated that we really didn't have a choice in this matter, God wanted us to be organized this way.

Hearing that, I thought “a ha, he may not be 100% right, but at least that is an example of thinking theologically.” By this I mean that they didn't think strategically, which might lead you to say “you know, this bishop thing is getting in the way of the worthy goal of inter-faith dialog, let's dump it in the interest of moving things along,” they said “hey, how does God call us to be a church?” They then said, "hey, since we think the Bible is crucial to our understanding of what God calls us to be, we really can't blow off these texts that suggest that God's church includes bishops." Now, I can completely understand how other churches may have come do different understandings of how God has called them to be, understandings that don't include the Anglican fixation with the episcopate. I'm not saying that isn't a reasonable interpretation or even that I fully understand all the nuances of our own Anglican understanding of the theology of the episcopate. However, I did admire the way we approached the problem.

Practicing What You Read

I had an interesting convergence of personal struggle, class readings, and spiritual practice last week.

In a previous posting, I noted that the honeymoon ended, and I’ve had some frustrations, doubts, and questions about the way I’m doing this whole seminary thing. While my experience hasn’t entailed a crisis of faith or any fundamental doubts about my basic call to serve, I have spent some time wondering if I was called to be here, at this place, doing this study, this way. Since I thought I had discerned that I was supposed to be doing this, I’ve been rattled by these questions. I’ve found a deep need to try and reconnect with my call, to reconnect with my sense of God working in my life.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the Pelagius-Augustine of Hippo debate in not one but two classes. For those of you not immersed in early 5th century theological debates, this one centers on the relationship between grace from God and human free will. Pelagius was a great believer in the power of the human will. He argued that humans can freely choose to be good, can, in effect, use their free will to live a good life and achieve salvation. Augustine of Hippo, Mr. Original Sin, argued vehemently against this, emphasizing the total dependence of humans on God. He felt that even our ability to choose good is a grace from God. (For those of you who are or have been immersed in early 5th century theological debates, I admit that just generalized a great deal. In case you are wondering, as far as the Christian Church at the time was concerned, Augustine of Hippo won the debate).

Hearing this debate and pondering it in the midst of a personal struggle to reconnect with God, I found Augustine of Hippo’s viewpoint very amenable. Wrestling with doubts, doubts for which there really is no simple or obvious answer certainly made me feel, realize, and/or recognize that I am, in fact, highly dependent on God and God’s ongoing grace. I’m dependent on something beyond my own murky, cloudy desires; that even my own will is insufficient power in my own attempt to live in a right relationship with God. St. Augustine may have been wrong about some other things, but I think he nailed this one.

That realization hit me just as I was trying to find concrete steps to aid my ongoing discernment. I had been debating whether or not to go attend a small-group spiritual formation meeting. I had a moment of great clarity where I realized that A: If I am, in fact, admitting my dependence on God and B: If I continue to believe (as I long have) that one way to hear God is through community, I should C: Go to said group meeting. I did. It is a long-term commitment, that I’m following through, like a lot of this, on raw faith that if I keep working as attentively I can, and follow what I know in my heart and head, I will, through the grace of God, hear what I need to hear.

Angelus

The honeymoon between seminary and me ended this past week. A bunch of frustrations and doubts all hit at once and I felt very low about the whole enterprise. I wrote a very crabby blog that I've decided to sit on a little more, to see if I really mean it.

I'm climbing back out, I think, or at least climbing up a bit. I've been helped again by the bell (see earlier blog). A few weeks back in my class on Anglicanism we were studying the Anglican and Episcopal Church in Africa. The Episcopal Church had a strong mission presence in Liberia. This reminded me that my grandfather, the Rev. Fred Seddon (who I called Granddaddy), had been a lay missionary in Liberia before he was ordained a priest. The class got me interested in my grandfather's experience and I've spent a couple of weekends with my Dad (his son), looking at old photos, newsletters, etc., from Granddaddy's mission experience in Liberia.

This weekend, I read an old mission newsletter where one of his companions described a typical day at the mission station. I noticed that days at the mission were punctuated by ringing the angelus bell. Three rings -pray- three rings -pray- three rings -pray- nine rings. That's the bell that rings throughout the day here at CDSP. I've been cheered somewhat by that connection to my grandfather. There, across the decades is that darn angelus bell. It keeps ringing, calling, whether or not I feel up to answering at any given moment.

Taking the Bible and Truth Seriously

This past week I found myself doing two odd things. One would be odd to other people (or at least some of them) and one was odd to me. On the first count, I found myself reading and quoting the Bible right and left. This may not seem an odd thing for a seminarian to do, but remember, I'm an Anglican seminarian, an Episcopalian seminarian. We are frequently accused of not taking the Bible seriously. Folks outside our religion accuse us of this, as do other Anglicans from time to time. But the truth is, for a group suspected of not taking the Bible seriously I found myself reaching for my Bible on my iPhone (best app I've bought yet), where I can easily look up chapter and verse. I did this on average every 10 minutes as I wrote papers, read interpretive studies and moved slowly through my training. I will agree that we don't read this document in exactly the same way as everyone else who does, but let me tell you, from a seminarian's viewpoint we take it tremendously seriously. I've now had to read Leviticus front to back, the whole thing, not just a law or two, three times. You try that sometime.

The other odd thing I did was use that document to argue that there might, in fact, be some absolute Truths out there in the world. The anthropologist in me shuddered a bit as I did that. The whole focus of my anthropological training was to emphasize the contingent and culturally conditioned nature of most truths. Anthropology generally stresses “relativism;” that it is hard to judge a viewpoint without understanding, relatively, where it comes from, without understanding its cultural context. Now, back in Anthropology school, we danced up to the limits of this way of thinking. We did agree that some things – violence against women, children, etc. - might be bad under any cultural system, but we didn't go much farther than that. We never settled how to make those decisions. It's tough if you want to emphasize analysis rather than judgement. Well, if you are in the Truth-with-a-Capital-T business as I am now you don't get to dance away from those questions. Some Anglicans in other countries, in countries that now accuse we Episcopalians of not taking the Bible seriously, have tried to use the Bible to encourage women to stay with abusive spouses. I found myself arguing that, no, the document doesn't say that and that in fact it commands us to protect the most vulnerable among us. Furthermore, I argued that this was, in fact, God's message to us, perhaps one of the central tenants of that message. I found myself making Truth claims, something I'm haven't done much of before.

I have not yet found a completely satisfying approach to Truth that honors both my conviction that there is Truth in the world and my understanding that all of us approach it in culturally conditioned manners. I do still feel that our grasp of the Truth, whether we get it from our culture, or the Bible, or some other text, sacred or otherwise, is always tenuous, approximate. We have to take the tools we've been given, by those who have gone before, by our culture and others, to do our best to find our way. We also can't dance away from the Truth, it has real impacts on real lives for real people. We may need to do it humbly, reaching for that Bible every ten minutes, reading it, re-reading it, and thinking about what it says in light of our lives and the words of others. The advantage of a sacred text is that it gives a starting point for all those who hold the text sacred, it is a gift that can form a common beginning and reference for our endless human arguments. The Bible is not the only sacred text in the world, and while I will be happy to swear that it contains “all things necessary for salvation” (asked of all Episcopal priests), I don't necessarily feel that it somehow has a lock on all the Truth out there, or if it does that we are yet capable of seeing it. But it is a start. And we take it seriously.