Accountability

In my last article I detailed a way you could tell that “Progressive Christianity” was in fact an alternative to Christianity, namely that it held different things sacrosanct and considered other things blasphemous than Christians have since Apostolic times.  This month I will note another way in which we can see this truth demonstrated—to whom and for whom progressive Christians feel responsible.

In a recent Core Christianity podcast, Pr. Adriel Sanchez detailed an encounter he had with a “progressive Christian” pastor.  According to Pr. Sanchez, this pastor (who goes unnamed in the broadcast) was the author of a book arguing that the Bible does not proscribe homosexual behavior and that the Church had used the classic prooftexts in this regard to abuse same-sex attracted people since its inception.  Since the pastor was a neighbor, Pr. Sanchez had acquired and read the book.  His critical evaluation was that the “way in which he was approaching the Scriptures was incorrect; that rather than just letting them speak for themselves and understanding them in their context, he was twisting them and allowing—essentially—the current cultural social ethic to drive his interpretation of the Bible.”

Nothing too radical here.  This kind of critique of another theologian has characterized necessary dialogue within the Church in every era, from Irenaeus to the present day, on issues as diverse as whether Christians can ethically serve in the military to the nature of Christ’s Deity.  Indeed, though Pr. Sanchez has the advantage of time since the incident and not being engaged in a debate while presenting his story, he shows no non-verbal animosity while presenting his critique.

When he happened to have a chance meeting with this author in a local coffee shop, it seems that the conversation he engaged was handled civilly, if coolly, until Pr. Sanchez challenged the author on an issue core to their identity as pastors rather than mere theologians, pastoral rebuke as an expression of spiritual care.  Pr. Sanchez asked him, “As a pastor, when you have someone in your church whom you believe is doing something that you do think is sinful—maybe they’re abusive to their spouse or maybe they’re stealing or whatever it might be—how do you confront them lovingly as a pastor while challenging the sinful behavior?”  At that point his interlocutor after a moment of apparent shock said, “I can’t believe you asked me that question.  That was an offensive question to ask me, and [essentially] you should be ashamed of yourself.”  When Pr. Sanchez then tried to explain that he really did want to understand the other pastor’s position, the supercilious author declaimed, “No; you need to understand that you are offensive, and you need to accept that… and this conversation is over.”  Upon which he stood up and left.

I do an extensive treatment of this episode in my own podcast, but to summarize my observations, the pastor who walked away from the conversation with Pr. Sanchez clearly did not feel accountable to him as a fellow clergyman or Christian, a member of the “One Holy Catholic [Universal] and Apostolic Church.”  The issue of how to deal with these texts is a lively issue throughout the worldwide Church with most Christians (read: non-Western Christians) siding with Pr. Sanchez, but the other pastor still presumed to speak to him as a person possessing authority over him; “you need to understand… you need to accept.”

In what hierarchy did the author of the book possess more authority than Pr. Sanchez?  Clearly not the hierarchy of the Church. To what community standards did this pastor feel accountable? Whose good opinion did he crave or perhaps fear losing? Again, not those of a Church whose existence preceded him and that will endure until Christ “comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”  Did he by walking away from a conversation with a fellow bearer of the name of Christ show love for him, reason together with him, or even engage him in the sort of loving rebuke Pr. Sanchez queried him about to such great offense?  Did he even from his own point of view show love for the same-sex attracted individuals whom Pr. Sanchez might encounter in the course of his ministry?

No, the community to which and for which this pastor felt accountable was clearly not the “beloved community” of those baptized into Christ, but rather defined in some other way.

Though they were heretics, Arius, Valentinus, and Pelagius knew that their primary accountability was to the Church of Jesus Christ.  Though history has judged them to be in error, they fought for what they seem to have sincerely believed was its good and perhaps even what was necessary for the salvation of its members.  Indeed, they garner the appellation “heretic” only because they so earnestly fought for and remain accountable to the life of the Church Herself—because they are at least erstwhile Christians.

I believe that Progressive Christianity functionally (if not formally) quickly ceases to be Christian in any historically recognizable way precisely because of what this pastor’s behavior demonstrated, that it considers itself—and more importantly, the Church’s proclamation—accountable to standards that originate outside the Church and people whose lives are lived beyond its bounds.

 




Who Is Like the Lord Our God?

As a friendly commenter noted, my last article needed some serious editing. It is never good for me to find myself writing too close to a deadline; the result is always technically correct but dense, jargon-heavy prose that obscures what it seeks to clarify.  My apologies to all.

To restate succinctly what I was driving at in my last installment, in contrast to what any group might claim, we can tell what that group truly holds sacred on the one hand by what things, actions, and speech they extol and prescribe, and on the other, those at which they take offense.  Sacredness is defined for a group by what they revere and what they revile.  That which is prescribed constitutes the group’s dogmas or orthodoxy.  That which is proscribed or treated as blasphemous is like a photographic negative of the same thing, defining the sacred by contrasting it to its inverse, the profane.  This is a sociological and functional, not theological, definition of the sacred.

I ended my last article by saying, “Progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be formally Christian precisely because it holds different things to be sacred than does the Biblical, Apostolic faith … it represents a different religion, not a different way to be Christian.”

Though I differ with his work on many points, one thing that the enormously popular psychologist Jordan Peterson has helped me understand is that human thought is intrinsically and inescapably hierarchical.  Believing that we can actually think in a truly egalitarian manner is not merely logically, but neurologically incorrect; our brains could literally not handle the amount of incoming sensory data presented to it by the rest of our nervous system if it did not prioritize some information over others.  Thinking hierarchically is identical to thinking at all.

In a hierarchy, whatever occupies a higher position determines the relative value of everything beneath it.  Why in CPR training do they use the acronym “ABC”—airway, breathing, circulation—to anchor the care provider in the moment of crisis?  Because while the heart is needed to pump oxygen to the rest of the body, the lungs must be filled with oxygen before it can get to the heart, and the lungs can only be filled by artificial respiration if the airway is in turn clear.  The operation of that which is lower in the hierarchy is contingent upon the proper function of that which is higher.

What is true in an operational hierarchy is equally true in a conceptual hierarchy.  In fact, you can determine an idea’s place in a conceptual hierarchy precisely by identifying whether another idea is dependent upon or foundational to it.  Within a religious schema, this translates to what is holy, holier, or holiest.

While in seminary, one of my professors quoted one of his own graduate school mentors, lauding to us the sage wisdom that “your theology can never be any better than your anthropology.”  I made a phone call that afternoon to a mentor of my own, a double Ph.D. whose own generous but well-defined orthodoxy had catapulted him to a position of great responsibility in his own Christian tradition as an ecumenical theologian, to check whether my response was too reactionary.  “That,” he said, confirming my intuition in the carefully measured tone of voice I had come to associate with him at his scholarly best, “seems to me to be precisely backward.”

The sentiment commended by my professor placed humanity (or humanity’s assertions about God) above God’s revelatory self-disclosure.  In fact, its effect was to negate any possibility of the latter by placing humanity above God epistemologically.  This professor’s spouse, when presiding at the Eucharist during the final worship service I attended at that school, began the Lord’s Prayer with the unbiblical and self-congratulatory phrase, “Our father and mother in heaven.”  I refused to receive Communion that day not because her ego was out of control (the sins of the presider do not invalidate the grace of God) but because I was no longer sure it actually was the Eucharist, and that was because I was no longer sure the Christian God, the God that commanded His people to “have no other gods before Him,” was in fact being worshiped in that space.

If Christ is not “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), if it is not true that “if we have seen [Jesus], we have seen the Father” (John 14:9), and the Bible is not in fact a revelatory portrait of that Christ to us, something—in this case humanity—must replace the Triune God in the highest position within the religious hierarchy, whether historically Christian vocabulary is used to describe it or not.

By definition, that is some other religion than Christianity.