Missing the point: the economy of salvation, stupid

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1992 by John Garvey

Take two sorts of Christian: one is a believer in the kind of theology that affirms people, a theology that says to any group you can think of - racial minorities, the oppressed, homosexual men and women - that they should understand themselves as good, as all right, as people who should fight for their own rights and, by extension, the rights of others. It celebrates the community that is formed in this struggle.

Another sort of Christian finds joy in belonging to an ancient tradition, handed on from the age of the apostles; it becomes fulfilled for him in liturgy beautifully celebrated, and he sees everything as beginning and ending in this eucharistic fullness. For this sort of Christian, the community is found in those who share this faith, and the world of dailiness is something of a distraction from the much deeper reality to be found in the Eucharist.

These two sorts of Christians would seem to be at odds. In fact, these admittedly oversimplified sketches seem to be descriptive of (for example) the liberal Protestant or Catholic on the one hand, and the Orthodox Christian or traditionalist Catholic on the other.

Both Christians find their faith assuring in very different ways, but they have this in common: faith is, for them, an affirming thing, something deeply assuring, something that fulfills them. They love particular visions of the church, and find those visions satisfying. This is not to accuse them of self-satisfaction or smugness; these visions of the beloved church can be accompanied by a strong sense of one's own shortcomings, one's sinfulness, the radical lacking that every serious Christian must confront.

The similarities in these points of view are, anyway, more impressive to me than the differences, because it seems to me that what makes both views most similar is what makes them both wrong.

Our relationship to God is not meant to assure or affirm us or satisfy us, nor is our participation in the Eucharist the whole point of our being Christian. The Eucharist is food for the journey, a taste of the bread of tomorrow - a tomorrow which has not yet come, and will never come on our terms.

While we can be aware of our own sinfulness, we can at the same time be satisfied with an experience of church, a vision, a kind of esthetic. The temptation is to rest there, to be consoled. This temptation (whether it takes a "progressive" or "traditionalist" form) must be resisted. Seen in the light of church history, it doesn't work.

At its dawn, Christianity affirmed none of the forms of paganism or Judaism present at the time. It is true that some aspects of - for example - the morality of Hillel were affirmed; Jesus did not take anything like an antinomian approach to the Law. At the same time, there is no evidence that he supported the liberation movement of his age, the anti-Roman zealots; neither did he support the establishment. Neither revolution against social injustice nor the continuing power of the religious and political establishment mattered, in the face of the Kingdom. The repentance called for, the transformation he called for from his followers (and from us), placed all members of the community before the presence and judgment of the living God, just as the prophets did.

The traditionalist loves to appeal to the calm of an unbroken and unchangeable approach to the apostolic faith, but it never existed. To take only one rather important instance, it was not until the fourth century that the Holy Spirit was explicably said to be God, by Saint Gregory Nazianzen. This was certainly accepted implicitly by Christians, but if you'll look closely at the structure of the Nicene Creed you will see that the Holy Spirit is not affirmed there to be one with the Father (as Christ is). Now we see this as "obvious" (as if any of these mysteries could be), because why else would the Spirit be "worshiped and glorified" with the Father and the Son?

There was, however, a reluctance to affirm this too glibly. In a similar way, the affirmation of Jesus' divinity was not made explicit because of some devotional fervor, but was brought about by a denial of that divinity. Part of this silence about matters we would consider essential was an appropriate reluctance to seem to move in any way from the strict monotheism that affirmed the Father as the source of everything. Christian trinitarian teaching is, of course, in fact monotheistic, but showing this to be the case is far from simple, and this language was the result of a difficult, intense, and often unpleasant struggle.

This formation of dogmatic language, and insisting upon its appropriateness, was never the point of the church. It was a necessity forced upon it. Traditionalists too often act as if the articulated results of this struggle were the reason for Christianity's existence, rather than a byproduct of something more important.

Where many of the progressive/conservative struggles seem to me to miss the point is in looking too much at the church as a structure for which we are responsible; this is a mistake both sides make. Such questions as the place of women in the church - probably the most important single issue the church faces - lead the progressives to bring structural and largely political arguments to the arena (invoking images of empowerment, second-class citizenship, etc.). Conservatives rest on history: it was not ever done this way in the past, and therefore it cannot be done now. They reduce the arguments of their opponents, making it seem as if the question were only a passing fad.