Robert, I think your intervention comes at the right moment. With each new question I received and tried to answer, I found myself wondering whether the discussion was still helping us with Eric’s important opening post. So, to your question whether you have identified the issue correctly, my answer would be: nearly. I think you have identified the area, but I would state the issue a little differently.
I am not trying to decide who is allowed to call himself a Christian. Porphyry has persuaded me that a tradition can be sincerely inhabited while being radically reinterpreted. Nor would I assume in advance that every reinterpretation is simply a watering down. It may be honest, and it may sometimes be better than what it revises. The standard also cuts both ways. A conservative can conceal a real revision through forced harmonisation just as readily as a liberal can conceal one by emptying a formula. The questions I have been trying to separate are these: when an inherited formula is retained, what does it now affirm? Is the change of meaning visible to those who hear it? And, where someone speaks with the authority of a Christian community, what has that community given its members reason to expect from him?
Your example is certainly one possible case. If “Christ is risen” now means only that Jesus became a legendary source of moral and spiritual insight, I would want that meaning made clear. I may then think it is not what Paul meant, but that is a question about truth and continuity with the tradition. It is not automatically a charge of dishonesty. On leading assemblies, my claim was narrower than it may have looked. It was not about who may belong, or who must leave. It concerned whether an office that draws on personal witness can be exercised by someone whose settled conviction has moved materially away from what that office gives others reason to assume. That question belongs first to those who entrusted him with the office, not to the world.
But I want to use your question to go back to Eric, because I think we have answered one half of him and left the other half largely untouched. Eric made two objections. The first was paternalism and deception. Porphyry has, I think, largely answered that one. Where the changed meaning is open and available, the charge of pretence is hard to sustain. The second objection has hardly been discussed. It was that usefulness is not truth, and that at least some of the merit of doing good may be diminished when the good is done for mistaken reasons. Most of this thread has not answered that, because it was not aimed at it.
Suppose the fully transparent case: a congregation where everyone states plainly what the words now mean, where nobody is deceived and no one is being managed. Eric’s first objection lapses entirely. His second stands exactly where it was. Why are the words true, rather than valuable?
Eric, that is the part of your post I think we still owe you. Was deception what troubled you most, or was that the easier half? Is the harder question whether a tradition can be transparent, humane, and formative, while still not saying anything that is the case?
This is in fact my own question.
Can Christianity survive if it is not privileged in some way by society? What happens when it is but one voice in a competing marketplace? When it is a choice and not an obligation.
As dangerous as it is the modern political church, “Christian Nationalism”, is an utter admission of defeat. They cannot survive by convincing others of the truth of their point of view so they grasp for the coercive powers of society to maintain their privilege.
Not much help Tjalling but I think your questions are as yet to be decided.
>> The questions I have been trying to separate are these: when an inherited formula is retained, what does it now affirm? Is the change of meaning visible to those who hear it? And, where someone speaks with the authority of a Christian community, what has that community given its members reason to expect from him?
For my part, the issues I see still open are:
1) Formulae are not self-interpreting. Even if we admit authoritative and binding creedal formulae, those formulae need to be interpreted. A system that relies principally on propositions to keep itself together is inherently and fundamentally fragile. It invites an infinite regress of authoritative interpretations of authoritative interpretations of authoritative interpretations, ad infinitum. (This isn’t just a problem in religions, by the way, the same problem is seen in the US constitutional system: The judiciary is supposed to be the weakest branch of government, but as we sometimes see, they do something more important than making laws, they decide what those laws mean.)
2) There is something inherently messy about mashing personal testimony into the same role as guarding a tradition and speaking for an institution. Churches that expect their ministers to give sincere personal testimony and hand on an authoritative teaching unchanged are setting their ministers up either to lie to themselves or to their congregation, and possibly both. They can never really think for themselves, they can never really form their own sincere convictions, because thinking for themselves–considering the possibility that the institution could be mistaken, even if they would end up agreeing with the institution–would risk their livelihood and identity. You can never really say, this conviction is mine, if it was inherited and then enforced through coercion (even if that coercion was more subtle than a wrench to the knuckles.). You aren’t thinking honestly if certain conclusions are completely off the table from the start and can never be entertained as live possibilities regardless of what the evidence is. An institution can’t say, “We want you to think deeply and honestly and share your insights openly and sincerely with your congregation” while saying, “Certain conclusions are simply not available to you if you wish to remain employed.”
(This latter is a problem in confessional academia too: no one outside the bubble takes the opinions of scholars at schools that require faith statements at face value; everyone knows that they might get Mike Licona’d if they are too honest.)
I’m not certain what the resolution is for the individual (though I’m willing to cut them a lot of slack whatever they decide), but I do think we can make some progress in diagnosing the structural problems; and from where I sit, they run deep.
Porphyry, before taking up your two structural points, I want to keep the earlier questions in view: what a retained formula now affirms, whether a change of meaning is visible to those who hear it, and what an office has given people reason to expect. Your questions do not make those disappear, and Eric’s distinction between truth and usefulness also remains open. I do not say that as a complaint. The structural questions are real, but I want to make sure we do not let them replace the earlier ones.
On your first point, you are right that formulae do not interpret themselves. “He is risen” needs interpretation, as do “risen,” “body,” and “act of God.” A failure condition does not end interpretation. At most, it disciplines it by excluding some readings. But the need for interpretation does not by itself generate an infinite regress. That follows only if every interpretation must be authorised by a further infallible interpretation. A tradition need not make that demand. It can proceed through judgments that are fallible, public, and open to contest, tested against texts, historical context, usage, the wider body of belief, practice, and argument. This thread itself is an example. We have interpreted, disagreed, withdrawn claims, and narrowed others without anyone producing an infallible interpretation of an interpretation.
What prevents complete free play is not that the formula interprets itself, but that it belongs to a web of texts, memories, practices, and claims about what happened. That web does not mechanically fix a single reading, but neither does it permit every reading equally. I also grant that we reach the claimed event only through interpretive sources. There is no bare fact to which we can simply return without further judgment. The result is weaker than certainty, but stronger than saying that interpretation has no boundaries. Your constitutional analogy establishes the importance and power of interpretation. Judges do not merely apply words whose meaning is already complete. They help determine what those words will mean in practice. But that does not yet establish an infinite regress, or show that the text constrains nothing. Disagreement about interpretation is not the same as the absence of anything to interpret responsibly.
On your second point, I think you have identified a real structural pressure. Someone who is expected to testify personally, guard received teaching, speak for an institution, and perhaps lose income, identity, vocation, and community if his convictions change faces predictable incentives toward self-censorship, delay, and quiet reinterpretation. The structure does not compel dishonesty, but it can make honesty costly. A church cannot define such an office and then regard the costs it creates as solely the private problem of the person who holds it. Where I stop following you is the movement from pressure to incoherence, and from cost to impossibility. “They can never really think for themselves” seems too strong. The history of theology is enough to disprove the word “never.” Confessional office-holders have repeatedly concluded that their institutions were mistaken and have said so from within them. Confessional binding need not be a gag. It can be an interlocutor, something serious enough to argue with. I say “need not” and “can” deliberately. In some institutions it may function exactly as you fear, as a boundary within which the result has already been decided. In others it can be part of a genuine process of thought.
Having a confession is therefore not the same as forbidding thought. A community that says, “This is what we stand for, and a settled contrary conviction cannot be taught under this particular office,” has not necessarily forbidden anyone to reach that conviction. It has defined the office. But once confessional boundaries are joined to livelihood, identity, and belonging, the pressure is structural even where departure remains formally possible. How coercive it becomes depends greatly on whether a change of mind can be acknowledged without disgrace, destitution, or exclusion from the community itself. An honourable exit is still costly, but a church has some responsibility for whether it is made needlessly cruel.
There is one feature of the tradition in which I was formed that changes the shape of the question for me. The office is understood to be in the service of God, not simply of the congregation or institution. That does not remove institutional pressure. The church still decides, in practice, who may speak in its name and may judge an appeal to God over the church as either faithfulness or rebellion. But the institution is not, at least in principle, the final court of appeal. The possibility that the church itself is mistaken is built into any tradition that acknowledges a standard above its present judgment. That is not an abstract possibility for me. I was formed in a church tradition marked by the memory that a church can claim too much for itself. That is why I would not want a purely custodial office. I can regard custody and testimony as coherent together because the witness does not answer only to the institution whose teaching he guards.
Your Licona example is a fair warning. Whatever one thinks of every detail of that controversy, it shows how narrowly a confessional boundary may be drawn, even around someone who firmly affirms the central claim under discussion. That is a different fault from the one Eric began with. Hidden reinterpretation injures honest communication. Over-tight confessional control injures legitimate interpretive freedom. Any adequate account of institutional integrity must be able to criticise both, though for different reasons. The misuse of a boundary does not show that boundaries as such forbid thought. It shows that they can be drawn in the wrong place and enforced in the wrong way.
So I would put our difference this way. The joining of custody and testimony is not inherently dishonest, but neither is it institutionally innocent. It creates pressures that a church must acknowledge and take responsibility for. I think you are right to bring those pressures into view. Where I would not follow is the further claim that they make the combination incoherent, or honest thought impossible. Institutional design can make honesty easier or harder. It does not decide the matter entirely. Responsibility remains with the person, and also with the community that determines how much honesty will cost.
And after saying all that, I would still keep the earlier questions on the table, because the structural diagnosis does not settle them. The first concerns meaning. When a church retains a formula such as “Christ is risen,” what does the speaker now take it to affirm? Not only what does saying it do for the community, but what does he take to be the case about Jesus? The second concerns visibility. Can those who hear the formula discover that meaning? Or do the familiar words continue to suggest one claim to the congregation while the person speaking them has come to mean another? The third concerns office. When someone speaks these words as a minister, what has the community itself given its members reason to expect? Are they receiving an accurate statement of the institution’s teaching, the personal testimony of the person before them, or both? The answer cannot simply be assumed. It depends on how that community has presented and defined the office.
And behind all three remains Eric’s second objection. Suppose the reinterpretation is completely open, nobody is deceived, and the practice is humane, formative, and valuable. Why should the words then be regarded as true, rather than only valuable? Transparency may answer the charge of concealment. It does not by itself show that what is being said is the case. Those are the questions I would not want the structural discussion to leave behind.
Stephen, this is close to my question. You ask whether Christianity can survive as one voice among others, freely chosen rather than socially assumed. I agree with your reading of the American turn: reaching for political power to keep what was once assumed looks like an admission that persuasion has failed.
But China cuts across the larger claim. No comparable Christian privilege there, state control, at times outright repression, and the churches persist, inside and outside the official structures. It is not an open marketplace, so it does not tell us whether Christianity can win by free persuasion. I think that it does tell us that it does not need privilege to survive.
And surviving is not being true. The two meet at credibility and then part. A belief can outlast persecution and be false, just as it can enjoy every advantage and still be false. That is the point I put to Porphyry about the resurrection: spreading across half the world says nothing about whether the thing happened.
So America and China are two different tests. One asks what the faith does when privilege becomes pluralism. The other asks whether it endures without privilege and under pressure. Neither decides whether its claims are true. That is the question I wanted to keep separate.
Perhaps you are right that this question remains undecided. But it is the truth question that remains undecided, not the question whether Christianity can survive without privilege.
>> What prevents complete free play is not that the formula interprets itself, but that it belongs to a web of texts, memories, practices, and claims about what happened. That web does not mechanically fix a single reading, but neither does it permit every reading equally.
Well, that presume an extra-textual hermeneutic. I think looking at constitutional jurisprudence is instructive. SCOTUS has determined that a text granting Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce, by that fact grants it the right to prevent a farmer from growing crops on his own farm for his own use on the same farm. It has also determined that there is a Constitutional right to privacy under the “penumbras” of the first, third, fourth, fifth, and ninth amendments along with the due process clause; and then used that right to privacy as the justification for ruling that abortion cannot be outlawed. (To be clear, I’m not commenting on whether legalizing abortion is good or bad policy; I’m simply pointing out that depending on your hermenutic, the text doesn’t always give as much constraint as on might expect.) I don’t have any good examples at the tips of my fingers, but left-leaning SCOTUS-watchers frequently make similar complaints about the originalist wing of the court cherry picking historical examples to find things in the text that are not there on any plain reading.
The point is that a text is not nearly so constraining as it might appear, so long as the question of which hermeneutic to apply is left open. I’m not suggesting all hermeneutics are equally defensible, but adjudicating between them gets complicated and often ends with arguments about authority–like who gets to decide which hermeneutic is the correct one or which context is legitimately used to fix the meaning of the text, and even more basic, what texts are authoritative in the first place and what degree of authority do those texts have.
>> Where I stop following you is the movement from pressure to incoherence, and from cost to impossibility. “They can never really think for themselves” seems too strong. The history of theology is enough to disprove the word “never.”
That is a fair objection, and I concede that my initial statement was too strong. What I should have said is that those who continue to think with the institution will have a cloud over their conviction; they should always worry that they have engaged in motivated thinking.
I can speak with some experience on this point: As a Catholic, I was convinced I had examined and answered all the serious objections; I was convinced I could account for the eminent reasonableness of my faith; But, I can now see rather clearly, I had been engaged in motivated reasoning. That Catholicism was untrue was only a theoretical possibility, never a live possibility. When I came to a some argument against Catholicism, I approached it from the perspective of, “Based simply on the conclusion, I know the argument is mistaken, my job is to figure out what the mistake is” (just as when someone shows me a mathematical proof that 1=0, I know with certainly it must contain an error, and in evaluating the alleged proof I am looking for the error, not assessing whether 1 might actually be the same as 0). Yet I viewed myself as an intellectual, someone who wasn’t afraid to follow the evidence, and who wouldn’t shy away from addressing any and every counter-argument. I was the person who was ready and eager to get on a stage and debate anyone on the truth of Catholicism.
But it was all sophistry. I wrote many of my arguments down, and I can now walk you through them and point to precisely the moment I made a subtly disguised, but wild leap, or where I shifted the burden of proof, or where I applied an asymmetrical standard. But I did it really well. Well enough to convince myself and a number of other people besides.
To address the appearance of thread drift–the reason I am pushing on these issues is the question seems to be what can a congregation expect from its minister specifically with respect to transparency around sincerely adhering to a meaning of verbal formulae within some limit. I am testing whether the conception of ministry and the ecclesiology that sets those limits is not more fragile that it might appear for those comfortably within the system.
I’m thinking of the minister who dedicated his life to ministry, but after a decade or more after finishing years of seminary finds he can no longer honestly give assent to the institution’s creed in the sense that most of his congregation understands to be orthodox. If you are one of those congregants, it is easy to say, well, then he should be honest about it and not twist himself into knots of mental reservation to find a way to say the words with his own non-patent meaning.
But from his perspective there are a few things to note:
First, he sees himself risking significant retribution for his honesty. He likely fears losing his livelihood which is a very big deal; that is to say nothing of the social costs. And he sees those costs being exacted of him for doing what he believes is the right thing–he didn’t ask to stop believing the formulae in the way his congregation does.
I’m reminded of the example of Thomas More in a Man for All Seasons when told there was an oath that he was required to take: he knew how signing it would be understood, but he wanted to search to find any loophole that would let him subscribe in good faith:
“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes, Meg, then we can clamor like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping.”
(Of course, in the end he didn’t find it, and heroically died rather than subscribe to an oath he could not in conscience take. That speaks well to his integrity–he had the spittle for it–; but it is every bit as much an indictment of the fundamentally broken system that placed such a noble soul in the position of having to choose between death and integrity by forcing subscription to such an oath.)
If we see–as our hypothetical minister would–an institution threatening to punishing him rather harshly simply for being honest with himself, we may find some sympathy if he responds by wittily finding a way to go on without full transparent disclosure.
Now, I realize you have expressed sympathy for such a figure, admitted his sincerity, and have insisted the institution should not treat him cruelly, but I’m not sure how an institution that make the demands you have outlined can realistically not treat him punitively.
And there is a second wrinkle to his position that arises especially if he decides and admits he simply cannot go on (rather than wittily finding a way to continue somehow within the faith tradition). He may well feel that honesty compels him to publicly retract. If he he has been mistaken and people have and do still act in part based on his testimony, the honest thing, a thing that may bear real consequences for many people, would be to say plainly and loudly–I was mistaken, if you have changed your life because of my witness, know that I no longer believe and here are all the reasons.
But that isn’t what most institutions would want from him. I dare say most would want him to quietly go on an indefinite leave of absence for nondescript “personal reasons.” They might want integrity, honesty, and transparency when he is the only one bearing the consequences, but they are happy for him to keep his convictions to himself when it might cause doubts in their congregation.
Again, I feel this personally. I quietly resigned my teaching position when I had my crisis of faith, but I am still bothered that there are people out there who have made and still do make significant life choices in part because of what I said with undue conviction.
With that eventuality in mind, his finding a way to wittily stay in the tradition, rather than severing himself from it and saying it was all simply wrong, may be more intelligible all around.
An interesting absorbing conversation. Discretion limits me to just a few comments. (Meaning it serves the conversation better by listening than by commenting.)
Prophyry-
This isn’t just a problem in religions, by the way, the same problem is seen in the US constitutional system: The judiciary is supposed to be the weakest branch of government, but as we sometimes see, they do something more important than making laws, they decide what those laws mean.
And how interesting that our judiciary so often takes an almost Biblical approach to the Constitutional text. The “original intent” crowd has an almost fundamentalist view where one must always parse the literal meaning of the text while the “left” takes an almost liberal Protestant viewpoint, nodding at the text in order to update it for present circumstances.
An institution can’t say, “We want you to think deeply and honestly and share your insights openly and sincerely with your congregation” while saying, “Certain conclusions are simply not available to you if you wish to remain employed.”
But of course they do. My people gave much lip service to the idea of American religious freedom of conscience, as long as you wound up agreeing with what you were told. How often that was exactly what happened. And the self-delusion was maintained that we freely chose our beliefs!
I don’t have any good examples at the tips of my fingers, but left-leaning SCOTUS-watchers frequently make similar complaints about the originalist wing of the court cherry picking historical examples to find things in the text that are not there on any plain reading.
Perhaps second amendment issues? IN District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), SCOTUS ruled that DC’s gun regulations were so strict that they essentially resulted in a ban on personal possession of firearms. This was deemed unconstitutional on that basis. But they went further. They ruled that there was an inherent, unrestricted right based on the second amendment for individuals to possess firearms. The majority opinion was written by Mr Original Intent himself, Justice Anton Scalia.
Contrary to what many folks think this had never been the position taken by the courts who had always affirmed the right of government to regulate possession. The actual intent of the second amendment was not a “personal” right but to establish a method of national defense. In times of trouble (which never included invading other countries by the by) every able bodied man was expected to join government regulated militias, organized on a state and local level, in order to respond.
So essentially what Scalia, et al did was to create a new right not in the original text, the very opposite of what they always claim to be doing. The sort of thing that they claim horrifies them when the “left’ does it.
Tjalling-
But China cuts across the larger claim. No comparable Christian privilege there, state control, at times outright repression, and the churches persist, inside and outside the official structures. It is not an open marketplace, so it does not tell us whether Christianity can win by free persuasion. I think that it does tell us that it does not need privilege to survive.
But the church has a firmly established persecution paradigm. Persecution validates belief. (See Matthew 5, 11-13) If you’re coming after us that means there’s something to come after.
My question is, can the church survive, not persecution, but indifference? The church has never had to compete. It always assumed its place was at the head of the line.
And surviving is not being true.
I agree. But my interest is not in the teachings of the church being true which of course I already reject, but in the fate of a powerful social force that once dominated and now finds itself in historic decline. I find it fascinating to watch.
>> how interesting that our judiciary so often takes an almost Biblical approach to the Constitutional text. The “original intent” crowd has an almost fundamentalist view where one must always parse the literal meaning of the text while the “left” takes an almost liberal Protestant viewpoint, nodding at the text in order to update it for present circumstances.
Precisement.
The parallel is striking.
There are now several things on the table that deserve a proper response, and that will take me some time. I will take them step by step, without promising when.
Stephen, you are right. Your first post already spoke of a competing marketplace and of choice rather than obligation. Indifference is one possible outcome of that, and perhaps the hardest one. I also marked the limit of my own example: China is not an open marketplace, so it tells us nothing about whether Christianity can win by free persuasion.Your point about the persecution paradigm sharpens that. Persecution can confirm a group in its own eyes. Indifference is different: it offers no opposition around which a group can rally.
So let me answer directly. No, I do not think the church survives widespread indifference in the form it has had. Not the buildings, not the cultural authority, not the assumed place at the front of the line. Some of that I would not mourn. A church that needs to be assumed rather than chosen has already lost something.
What I do trust, without being able to demonstrate it, is that communities gathered around Jesus will keep re-emerging. The church has more than once outlived forms that seemed inseparable from it. That is a conviction, not evidence, and I will not dress it up as more.
But I want to add something that complicates your frame, and it is where my interest is not quite yours. You are watching a decline. On some flanks there is not decline but growth, and that is where my dismay sits, not with the emptying churches. A Christianity that promises health and wealth can grow. So can a Christianity fused with national and political power. What is best adapted to competition need not be what most resembles Jesus.
So the question becomes a different one for me. Not whether the church survives, but what survives when something bearing the name grows in numbers and influence. Sociological continuity and theological continuity can come apart. A body can gain members, money and influence while becoming less recognisable as what it claims to continue.
I should say plainly what standard I am using there, because otherwise this is just a way of calling whatever I dislike “not the real church.” My measure is not simply my own taste, nor whether something passes a doctrinal checklist. It is whether a form of Christianity remains recognisable when set beside Jesus. That is a theological judgment, not a neutral sociological one, and I state it as mine rather than as an observation anyone would have to share.
But the same distinction has been at work throughout this thread. If “Christ is risen” can retain its wording while losing the claim it once made, “church” can retain its name while losing the reality that name is meant to designate. Sometimes what endures is the name, the language and the power, and not the thing they once named.
So I share your interest in watching this, but not your position at the window. You are watching a social force decline. I am watching whether what continues is still recognisable as church when set beside Jesus.
Tjalling said:
A Christianity that promises health and wealth can grow. So can a Christianity fused with national and political power. What is best adapted to competition need not be what most resembles Jesus.
Although I’m no longer a Christian, I must say I am deeply saddened by the growth of prosperity theology. I was originally drawn by what I saw, rightly or wrongly, as a pacifist message and a concern for the downtrodden. Now, no eye of the needle is needed. Wide is the gate.
No doubt that last sentence of yours is true.
Porphyry, on hermeneutics.
You are right that my “web” presupposes a way of reading, and that there is no neutral standpoint outside all ways of reading from which we can judge between them. I cannot step outside that problem.
I notice something in your own examples. You say that originalists are sometimes accused of cherry-picking historical material to find things in the text that are not there on any plain reading. That charge only makes sense if some readings do better justice to the text and its history than others. If a text placed no limits at all, there could be no cherry-picking. There would only be picking, and the complaint would make no sense. The same applies when a reading is called strained. To call it strained is already to say that some readings fit the text better than others.
You say yourself that not all hermeneutics are equally defensible. That is enough for the narrower point I need: interpretation is disputed, but it is not therefore without limits. It does not mean that we agree on those limits, or that the text can settle every dispute by itself. It means only that better and worse readings remain possible, even without a neutral standpoint or a final judge.
There is a distinction I have found useful in my own tradition: between explaining a text and using it. A later community may take an older text into a wider argument without claiming that this later use was already its original meaning. That does not automatically make the later use legitimate, but the interpreter should at least say what is happening. Part of what gives the complaint about cherry-picking its force is that a later construction can be presented as though it were simply the plain historical meaning of the text. The distinction does not decide which readings or uses are defensible. It does prevent explanation and later use from being quietly treated as the same thing. That is close to the standard of transparency I have been pressing throughout this thread, now applied to the reading of texts.
This matters for the resurrection claim. Your constitutional examples concern what certain provisions may be taken to cover or imply. The limit I proposed was different. On the Pauline reading I have been defending, this is where the claim fails: if God did nothing to the dead Jesus, then the claim that God raised him is false. “Raised” can of course be reread as a claim about what happened in the disciples, the community, or the continuing meaning of Jesus’ life. But then it no longer names an act of God upon Jesus himself. That reinterpretation may be sincere and even valuable. It is nevertheless the shift I was trying to make visible.
One difference in the comparison is worth noting, and it does not favour me. Your examples involve a court whose authority can make one interpretation legally binding. Christianity as a whole has no such court. That is a genuine weakness: no interpretation is finally settled for the whole tradition. But it also means that no single ruling can fix a strained reading across all of Christianity. Readings remain open to dispute across generations, and they can lose their hold again.
And your question about who decides is not something I can treat as another tradition’s problem. It is not abstract for me. I come from a tradition shaped by what it cost when a church treated its own judgment about the confession as final and got it wrong.
The authority question remains real and unresolved. But it does not follow that the text places no limits on what we can make it say.
Porphyry, on the minister and the institution.
I think your revised claim is much stronger than “they can never really think for themselves.” You have withdrawn that, and what remains is harder: even if a minister can honestly reach a contrary conviction, can an institution whose office joins personal assent, public teaching, and speaking on behalf of the church respond without punishing him for having reached it?
My position comes to this. The contrary conclusion must remain a live possibility for him. The office need not remain available once that conclusion has become settled. But the loss of the office need not be arranged as punishment. That may sound hard, but I do not think it is harsh. A confessional church cannot promise that a settled rejection of what the office requires will have no consequences. If the office includes personally affirming and teaching certain claims, someone who no longer believes them may no longer be able to hold it. But consequence and retribution are not the same thing. The necessary consequence may be the loss of the office. Humiliation, suspicion about his motives, character assassination, social exclusion, pressure to keep silent and indifference to how he will support himself are added by the institution. They do not follow from having a confession.
The difference is practical and testable. Is he given time to examine whether his change of conviction is settled? Is there a confidential place where he can speak before every doubt becomes public? Is there any help through the financial transition? Is his service described honestly, without treating his change of conviction as misconduct? Is his departure from office described as an honest ending rather than as a betrayal? He may no longer want what the community holds, and no church can guarantee that he will still wish to belong to it. But it can refuse to cast him out socially or to treat him as morally tainted. A church cannot define such an office and then treat all the costs of leaving it as solely his private problem.
Your addition about More already contains something close to this distinction. The wrong was not simply that a boundary or an oath existed. It was that the state created a situation in which death became the price of integrity. But I read More in the play differently in one respect. He searched for a way to take the oath in good conscience. When he found none, he refused. He did not take it while privately preserving a meaning that depended on others understanding his words differently. The passage you quote is about not seeking martyrdom or rushing toward a terrible choice. It is not about manufacturing a private meaning that allows one to stay dishonestly. If anything, More shows that there may come a point at which the words will not bend any further, and a person knows that he has reached it. Would you agree with that reading? I would add, without pressing the comparison too far, that the positions are not equal. More faced an oath imposed by the state under threat of death. The minister once freely sought an office and made its confessional promises himself. That does not make the minister’s later position easy, and it certainly does not excuse cruelty toward him. But it matters when we ask what the institution may reasonably expect.
The severity of the costs therefore does not settle the question of communication. It makes his search for a way to remain humanly intelligible. It may greatly reduce how harshly anyone should judge him. It may expose serious fault in the church that created the trap. But if he continues to use words while knowing that the congregation hears a settled conviction he no longer holds, the difference remains. The injustice of the cost does not by itself make the communication transparent.
On your second wrinkle, I think you are right, and you are turning my own standard against the institution. If a church invokes personal testimony when that testimony creates confidence, but retreats into administrative language when the minister’s conviction changes, it is acting asymmetrically. An indefinite leave of absence for unnamed “personal reasons” may protect the institution, but it can also mislead the congregation. I have no defence of that.
I would make one distinction. What the former minister may owe is a truthful correction of his own testimony: those who relied upon it should be able to know that he no longer believes what he once taught. The form and reach of that correction should bear some relation to the reach of his earlier teaching. A full argument for why those people should now abandon the faith is a further act. It is a new testimony of another kind. He may be free to give it, and the church should not try to silence him outside his former office. But I do not think honesty alone requires the church to give that argument its own authority or to turn its worship into the platform for it.
There is room between a misleading disappearance and an unrestricted retraction from the pulpit. The congregation can be told truthfully that he can no longer affirm what his office required. He can be free to explain his reasons publicly in his own name. The church need not endorse those reasons, but it must not protect itself by inventing a vague or false account of why he left.
So I think four judgments have to remain separate. His attempt to find a way to stay may be humanly intelligible. His responsibility may be lessened by the severity of the costs. The institution may be seriously at fault for making honest departure needlessly destructive and then asking for silence. And yet the congregation may still be left in a relevant misunderstanding if familiar words continue to suggest a personal conviction he no longer holds.
A church may protect what it believes to be true. But it must distinguish consequence from retribution, and protecting truth from protecting itself.
BJH, that is exactly the contrast I had in mind. A form of Christianity may become wider, richer and more successful while losing the very things that once made the figure of Jesus morally compelling. “No eye of the needle is needed. Wide is the gate” says it painfully well. And what drew you, the pacifist message and the concern for the downtrodden, was not something alien to the gospels. It has deep roots in them. IMHO.
What I do trust, without being able to demonstrate it, is that communities gathered around Jesus will keep re-emerging. The church has more than once outlived forms that seemed inseparable from it. That is a conviction, not evidence, and I will not dress it up as more.
This is certainly true. Some commentators have noted the seeming revival of the concept of the “house” church even in tandem with traditional church services.
But I want to add something that complicates your frame, and it is where my interest is not quite yours. You are watching a decline. On some flanks there is not decline but growth…
The irony of the “success” of the Prosperity Gospel is that it avows exactly the point of view, wealth as an outward sign of God’s blessing, that Jesus explicitly attacks in Matthew!
Other more mainstream groups, not growing but holding their own, benefit from either, the return of members who had drifted away while young, or converts moving in from other flavors of Christian belief. The best example of this is the American Orthodox church which is seeing an influx of Protestant émigrés. A fascinating phenomenon.
What these groups are not seeing is an influx of fresh, previously unchurched converts from the outside, necessary for true growth over time.
But, as I suggest to my friends among the faithful, perhaps this is a necessary period of decline where the church can purge itself of those whose participation is predicated on something other than genuine commitment. In an illustration not always appreciated (understandably) by my friends, consider the tick-ridden dog both before and after the application of the medicine. The image of the “righteous remnant” is very familiar from the Bible. A loss of privilege is followed by a loss of pandering and exploitation. It is always instructive to note exactly who objects the most to this loss of privilege!
So I share your interest in watching this, but not your position at the window. You are watching a social force decline. I am watching whether what continues is still recognisable as church when set beside Jesus.
Understood. This is why as an outsider I don’t always feel the need to have an opinion. if you ask me what I think about women being ministers I will pass. Not because I have no feelings about women’s rights but because this is an internal matter. As an outsider I simply note that exclusivist attitudes contribute to the fact that so many folks are heading for the doors. I note the propensity on the part of fundamentalists not to take the hint but to double down. And then wonder why even more folks are deserting the pews!
My siblings and I’m sure some of the extended family are aware of all or at least much of this my so many people there would have been scandalized or questioning why I would receive communion if I chose to do so.
So what would be more of a scandal, that you participated or that you were seen not to participate?
I went to a church that practiced what we called “Closed” Communion. Meaning that participation in the Lord’s Supper was restricted to baptized members of our own church. This would occasionally create a bit of a stir among guests who were part of our denomination because we seem to be questioning their worthiness.
In the last years of my father’s life, when I came for a visit, I would accompany him to his church simply because I knew it pleased him to have his family around him. It had no more power over me so I felt no uncomfort* whatsoever. Interestingly I never had occasion to perform communion. I’m really not sure how I would have responded.
*Uncomfort is one of a series of archaic terms I am attempting to revive. (In this case mid-1600s.) Won’t you join me?
Not only am I a former Franciscan friar, but I am also a divorced Catholic, a former Catholic, and no longer a believer in any of the dogmas of the church, a wanna-be atheist who can’t quite bring himself to call myself an atheist (much prefer to call myself an apophatic agnostic but am secretly thrilled when people call me an atheist–proves the apophatic part is working).
When you feel frisky describe yourself as an “ex-Christian”. That’ll get an interesting conversation going!
Even as a believer I would happily refer to myself as a Christian atheist, perhaps even moreso now.
Ok Robert, you didn’t really expect that one to glide by me without comment, did you?
Your path is so obviously different than mine that I am compelled to inquire after your train of thought. Sooo…consistent with your own comfort level of self-revelation, please expand.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert
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