In a Far Country

The Rev. George F. Woodliff III

Two and a half years can be a long time, even though my life seems to be slipping away from me at an ever accelerating pace. For Episcopalians like myself, these past two and a half years since the fateful misstep of ECUSA’s General Convention in August, 2003, have been times of angst and disorientation–of looking through a glass darkly. During the first week in December, 2005, I worked with a group of volunteers from our church at Coast Camp Care, an Episcopal-Lutheran relief center for victims of Hurricane Katrina. While I was there, I rode down Highway 90 on the beach in Pass Christian and saw for myself for the first time the devastation, mile after mile of unbelievable devastation. In July of 2005 my family had been there on vacation and had stayed in my mother-in-law’s condominium which overlooked the beach. Nothing remains but debris, and a car is now in the swimming pool where my children swam this past summer. Being there was disturbing and disorienting and in many ways analogous to where I find myself today in the church. Therefore, I have been deeply grateful for any insight, any ray of light, that will help me get my bearings and sustain my course though these troubling times.

I continue to be grateful to Philip Turner, who has helped me understand how in the world the Episcopal Church has come to the verge of blessing something which several decades ago would have been unthinkable. In a survey of recent Episcopal history, he has traced a trajectory from the “Pike affair” of 1966 to our present time when “ECUSA’s God has become the image of this society.” [Philip Turner, “The Episcopalian Preference,” First Things (November 2003), pp. 28,31]

Now his colleague in the Anglican Communion Institute has written a book which I shall attempt to argue is one of the essential books for our times. Although it is written from a distinctly Anglican perspective, this is a book for all Christians, and especially Christians in the West, in our unique moment in history. The book is Hope among the Fragments (Brazos Press 2004), and the author is Ephraim Radner, who, as a Christian, combines profundity of intellect, erudition, and faith in an exceptional way. Another Anglican Christian who combines those same qualities was so impressed by this book that he wrote the following endorsement:

“This is potentially one of the most important contributions you are likely to read on the current tensions and conflicts over the church’s limits and identity. It wholly avoids the cliches of left and right and offers an unremittingly theological perspective on our troubles. It rescues the call to be a ‘biblical’ church from polemics and point-scoring. A deeply necessary book at this time.”

And who is this Anglican Christian who so strongly encourages us to read this “deeply necessary” book? None other that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.

What makes this book so extraordinary, so essential? It is Radner’s ability, based upon his comprehensive knowledge of Church history, to diagnose the Church’s wrong turn which has led to our current ecclesiological disarray and to prescribe a way forward that is Christocentric. The fragments in the title of his book are the fragments of the Church, and the hope comes from Christ, in particular from a certain way of encountering Christ in an ancient manner of reading Scripture, more of which later.

The marketplace plays a critical role in Radner’s reading of Church history. In the first centuries of the initial spread of the faith, Christianity was one among many contenders in the pagan marketplace of religions and philosophies. Christianity’s truth claims, however, were all-encompassing, and eventually the Church’s uniformity of truth replaced all the competing religions and philosophies. This condition lasted until the division of the Western Church in the sixteenth century which was followed by the violence of the religious wars in the seventeenth century. According to Radner, it was the revulsion toward that violence that led to the metamorphosis of Christianity, championed by John Locke, into a religion of tolerance. Over the successive centuries this new religion has evolved into a new marketplace–the religious marketplace of modernity where Christian churches compete against each other. One aspect of this new Christian reality is that the Christian message has become more spiritualized and thus less threatening to civic order while the Church has retreated more and more to the margins of the public square. All of this has resulted in a general impoverishment of the Christian witness which has been diffused among many thousands of ecclesiastical fragments.

So then where lies the hope amidst such a fragmented Church, such a fractured witness? Radner begins by quoting Philippians 4:9: “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do; and the God of peace will be with you.” Continue in the ancient practices and disciplines of the faith. Follow the good examples of George Herbert and Joseph Butler, and, in two short words that many conservative Christians in the Episcopal Church and many liberal Christians in the Anglican Communion may find difficult to hear, stay put. Why? “So that time, which belongs to God, can make its argument in a place where history has been sucked dry and where the forms of communal life remain the only cord that ties an individual to the power of a message rooted in God’s history.” [Radner, p. 50] These forms of communal life include worship, the Prayer Book, lectionaried Scripture, and adhering to the times and seasons of the Church year. There is also a great need to embrace anew doctrinal formularies, which of course brings to the minds of Anglicans the proposal by the Windsor Report for a Covenant for the Anglican Communion.

What lies behind so much of Radner’s thought is a deep conviction in the providence of God. He turns to that former Anglican, John Henry Newman, in his Tract 83 for the proposition that the form that providence takes is found within Scripture and that the Church can see itself and its history within these sacred writings, or as Radner phrases it: “the Church of Christ looks like the Scriptures that it reads.” [Ibid., p. 63] The figure in Scripture most profitable for the broken Church of today to study and reflect on is the figure of a broken Israel, an Israel in exile. . . waiting, waiting for the God of history to act.

The greatest gift which Radner offers the Church of our time is a way of waiting, a way of reading the Scripture, a way that has been lost for many, many centuries. It is the figural reading of the early Church Fathers. He first turns to Newman’s fellow Tractarian, John Keble, who in his 1840 essay On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church, articulated the fundamental principles which undergirded this method of reading the Bible. He then turns to an obscure person in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for an elaboration of this method and the benefits which can be derived from following it. The person is Jacques-Joseph Duguet, a devout Jansenist Catholic, and the sentence of his that Radner quotes at least three separate times is this: “The sweetest and most sublime occupation for a theologian is to search for Jesus Christ amid the sacred books [of Scripture].” [Ibid., pp. 91,93] What Duguet is offering is encountering the very person of Christ through the search for him in all of Scripture. Radner summarizes: “But through the reading of Scripture as a figurated text of Christ. This is Duguet’s striking claim. That is, that it matters how we read; that there is something morally at stake, even spiritually at stake; that Scripture and the Holy Spirit’s being are joined together in their redemptive work within the human heart.” [Ibid., p. 96] What this method of reading can lead to is no less than the transformation of the reader into the likeness of Christ.

If these claims are true, then Radner’s rediscovery and sharing of this method of reading Scripture could be as momentous as the discovery of the book of the law in the temple during the reign of Josiah. [2 Kings 22] That is, if the manner by which we read Scripture is as important as the reading itself, then the Church, the broken, fragmented Church, has the potential for encountering her Lord afresh in a new and revitalizing way. Moreover, there is also the possibility of this methodology acting as a magnet drawing the scattered fragments of the Church together as they mutually search for Christ in the Holy Word.

As great a gift as this is, Radner has done more for me than this with his book. He has opened my eyes to the reality of my time in a way that has not happened before, for his work has reminded me of two other seemingly dissimilar works based upon a similar premise. The authors of these other works have been heroes of mine. The first is the philosopher Mortimer Adler, and the book of his which Radner’s reminded me of is Ten Philosophical Mistakes (MacMillan Publishing Company 1985). Radner’s insight which led me back to Adler was the pivotal nature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Church history. The sixteenth century was a watershed because it introduced the idea of the freedom to choose one’s form of Christian belief and the correlative shift away from the basic belief in a uniform truth. The fragmentation of the Western Church which began in the sixteenth century was followed by the terrible violence of religious wars in that century and into the seventeenth century. It was this violence that led John Locke to advocate a personalized Christianity as well as toleration and pluralism. It was also the seventeenth century that gave us, in its embryonic form, the historical critical method of reading the Bible through the writings of Baruch Spinoza. It is precisely at this point that Radner makes a connection which I had previously never made: It was the fragmentation of the Western Church that led to this new method of reading the Bible. Since the Church could no longer point to itself as an example of Godly living and God’s providence through history, the Church’s history had to be bypassed to get back to the essential, authentic Jesus. “If Jesus could be described in a way that was independent of the ecclesial contradictions that had asserted themselves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, independent of what Catholics or Calvinists or Anglicans or Quakers or Baptists said, then perhaps the still vaguely apprehended salvation he promised might yet be salvaged.” [Radner, p. 171]

In his book Adler points out ten philosophical mistakes which have had serious consequences in modern twentieth century thought. The interesting observation which he makes is that, with very few exceptions, these errors were made in the beginning of the modern period, starting in the seventeenth century. Two of the perpetrators of these mistakes were John Locke and Baruch Spinoza, who were both mentioned prominently in Radner’s book. Some of these errors have helped to create the intellectual milieu within which the Episcopal Church has made its recent missteps. The errors made by David Hume and compounded by Immanuel Kant have resulted in the relegation of the knowledge or philosophy of moral values to the realm of mere opinion. That is, the only genuine knowledge we can possess is that of matters that are observable and measurable. Statements concerning moral values can only be considered personal opinions. Spinoza had posited the view that “whatever anyone desires appears good to that individual as a consequence of his desiring it. . . .Unless Spinoza can be shown to be wrong, there is no way of escaping the subjectivism and relativism that inexorably follows from identifying the good with that which is consciously desired by anyone or explicitly thought to be desirable to them.” [Adler, p. 116] Adler does proceed to demonstrate the error which was made by Spinoza by referring to an insight made by Aristotle in Book VI of his Nichomachean Ethics, but the damage has largely been done. Subjectivism and relativism are part of the cultural air all of us breathe, including Episcopalians.

Another philosophical error which has arguably been in the background of the Episcopal Church’s recent actions is the denial that there is such a thing as human nature. Adler quotes the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, for the assertion that “it is the nature of man not to have a nature.” [Ibid., p. 157] Adler challenges this statement and avers that “if moral philosophy is to have a sound factual basis, it is to be found in the facts about human nature and nowhere else.” [Ibid., p. 157] Adler contrasts those aspects of human life, such as manners, customs, dress, and cuisine, that are truly diverse and pluralistic, with those “common elements that will unite all human beings in a single, cultural community [which are] related to such essentials as truth in science and philosophy, moral values and human rights, man’s understanding of himself, and the wisdom that is the highest good of the human mind.” [Ibid., p. 166]

Adler’s explanation for these philosophical errors is the refusal of the philosophers in the early modern period to consult with such earlier philosophers as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. If they had done so, all of these errors could have been avoided. This refusal suggests an arrogance associated with the modern period which has continued up to the present. Each of these philosophers, beginning with Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Spinoza in the seventeenth century, “acted as if he were starting with a clean slate to construct for the first time the whole of philosophical knowledge.” [Ibid., p. 198]

The other author whom Radner has brought to my mind is truly one of the monumental figures of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven years ago he once spoke to America as an Old Testament prophet might have done. Indeed, he looked the part. The setting was the citadel of the intellectual elite of this country, and, as prophets are supposed to do, he spoke Truth to Power. As always, it was not well received. The place was Harvard University. The occasion was the Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises on June 8, 1978. The prophet’s name was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If you have not done so recently, it really does bear rereading. [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html]

At that time the Soviet Union, from which he had been expelled, was an extremely dangerous threat to the continued existence of the West. Solzhenitsyn knew all too well from personal experience the treacherous nature of that murderous regime, and yet he had concluded from his observations of America that the West was not a model that anyone should follow. He contrasted the spiritual strengthening of the people under the yoke of the Communist regimes with “the weakening of human beings in the West. . . .” Although he had lived under the Soviet regime’s strictest repression of any freedom of the press, he observed and lamented a different kind of repression in the West. “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.” He detected a loss of nerve and willpower among the American intelligentsia and leaders.

Then he asked himself how this evident decline in the West had come about. He concluded that it began “at the very root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment.” Then in words that need to be quoted at length he diagnosed the spiritual problem at the very core of the West’s existence:

“The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. The new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.”

Solzhenitsyn concluded his remarkable address with these prophetic words: “If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.”

I find the intersection of these diagnoses by Radner of the Christian Church, by Adler of Western thought, and by Solzhenitsyn of Western civilization very illuminating. From different perspectives and disciplines they came to the same basic conclusion: at the very beginning of the modern period, the West took a wrong turn, and this wrong turn has had disastrous consequences for the spiritual lives of the current inhabitants of our era. This insight runs so counter to the story of the ever upward progress of the West from the glory of the Renaissance to the flowering of the Enlightenment to the modern era. Implicit in their diagnoses is the apprehension that corrections were needed in many aspects of the Middle Ages; however, the corrections went too far and were not properly counter-balanced.

With respect to the Church, the perverse accretions and distortions in the Church of the time are well known. Corrections had to be made, and many heroic persons risked their lives for the truth of the Gospel. That is undeniable, but did Luther and others ever imagine that the Church would be shattered into thousands of competing fragments whose enfeebled witness to the Gospel has resulted in the hegemony of secularism and humanism in Western society? I believe that the initial steps which they took were taken with the utmost good faith, but it is difficult for me to imagine their endorsing the current fragmentation, shallowness, and enervation which passes for Christianity in the West.

Radner did not write his book in a vacuum. As an Episcopal priest, he has written his book in the middle of one of the greatest crises ever to face the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. In light of his recommendation to “stay put” within the Episcopal Church, it was evidently important for him to acknowledge in the clearest language his apprehension of the reality of the crisis. It is worth quoting at length his assessment of the current situation:

“Let me begin with some candor: I do not for a moment minimize the seriousness of the challenge, now mounted in many quarters within our various denominations, to the gospel as it has been handed down to us. I have heard the query raised by exasperated revisionists: ‘Why is the sexuality issue, for instance, one that seems to have broken the camel’s back? Did we not survive civil rights, women’s ordination, prayer book revision? Why are you conservatives so adamant on this topic?’ It is a good question, but also one that is straightforwardly answered. I would start with three responses. First, the extreme novelty of recent revisionary teachings on sexual behavior is unique in our church’s development and more than anything else offers up a seemingly culturally driven rejection of scriptural authority that has no precedents. One does not have to engage in the sometimes complicated theological and historical reflections pursued in various chapters of this book to realize this. The revisionary program over sexual behavior strikes at the core of our biblical faith. Second, the kinds of reasonings that seem to lie behind the revisionary trend in our denomination–reasonings based on controlling definitions of justice, love, inclusion, and so on–are so distant from the particularistic and defined words and actions of Jesus and the Christian tradition’s acknowledgment of his person that the revealed Christ appears to have become the servant of a greater principle that stands beyond him. This contemporary and perhaps only implicit form of the ancient Arian heresy–that Christ is to be identified with a reality not personally equivalent with God–strikes at the core of our catholic confession of Christ. Third, so many other Christians around the world perceive this threat clearly, and yet a significant and powerful part of our denomination seems oblivious to and even unconcerned at their pleas and warnings. This evidences a chilling lack of charity that strikes at the core of Christian communion.” [Radner, pp. 200-201]

As Radner indicated, the crisis affects other denominations beside the Episcopal Church. Richard John Neuhaus has recently commented on the brain drain that has been taking place in the Lutheran Church:

“Meanwhile, Carl Braaten, a theological luminary in American Lutheranism for four decades, has written a moving open letter to Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the ELCA. He notes that in recent years some of the most distinguished theologians in the ELCA have left for the Roman Catholic Church, or, in a few cases, Orthodoxy: Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Louis Wilken, Jay Rochelle, Leonard Klein, Bruce Marshall, David Eagerberg, and Reinhard Hutter. ‘They are saying,’ writes Braaten, ‘that the Roman Catholic Church is now more hospitable to confessional Lutheran teaching than the church in which they were baptized and confirmed.’ They are saying that the ELCA has become just another liberal protestant denomination. Karl Barth called liberal protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) a ‘heresy,’ which, says Braaten, is ‘an assessment with which I fully agree.’ He asks, ‘Are all these theologians wrong in their assessment of the ELCA?’ ‘They are not stupid people; they don’t tell lies; they don’t make rash decisions. They are all serious Christians. . . . The ELCA is driving out the best and the brightest theologians of our day.’” [Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square, First Things (October 2005), p. 82)

When eminent Lutheran theologians return to Rome en masse, something monumental is afoot, something of the magnitude of the Reformation. As I noted earlier, Philip Turner has traced the recent history of the Episcopal Church of the last forty years which has led to the current crisis in that church, and yet the exodus of theologians from the Lutheran Church suggests that the crisis within the Episcopal Church is not limited to that church but is part of something much larger, much more widespread that has been developing over a very long period of time. In 1923, J. Gresham Machen, late Professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, wrote a book which has become a minor classic, Christianity and Liberalism (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1923). Walter Lippmann praised it as “an admirable book. . .a cool and stringent defense of orthodox Protestantism.” In this book Machen argued that liberal Protestantism was really not Christian but had relinquished the distinctive Christian essentials of the faith. He then proceeded to demonstrate how liberal Protestantism differed from orthodox Christianity in the following essential areas: God and Man, the Bible, Christ, Salvation, and the Church. One example will suffice–the difference between liberal Protestantism’s view of Christ and orthodox Christianity’s view of Christ: “The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But he does not stand in a religious relation to Jesus. Jesus for him is an example of faith, not the object of faith. The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus.” [Machen, p. 85] The point is that the heretical Kulturprotestantismus repudiated by Karl Barth has been slowly developing over the past century and has now reached a critical stage where very serious, intelligent, and faithful Christians in different Protestant denominations are finally saying, “Enough!”

Ironically, one of these is a former Episcopal theologian who wrote a book counseling his fellow Episcopalians to “stay put” and remain in their church. He is R. R. Reno, and his book is In the Ruins of the Church (Brazos Press 2002), which, interestingly, was greatly influenced by an earlier book by Ephraim Radner, The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998). Reno clearly perceived the liberal Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church, to be “in ruins.” “The functional irrelevance of Scripture in North American-European magisterial Protestantism is widely acknowledged.” [Reno, p. 90] His prescription for the illness of liberal Protestantism is similar to Radner’s:

“Therefore the great theological imperative of our time is ressourcement, a return to the sources. This cannot be a piecemeal and creative recovery; rather, it must be a return to the sources that is marked by submission to their premodern methods and forms. To recover a coherent, public theological vision, we must train ourselves to think with premodern theologians whose lives and minds were disciplined by a no-doubt imperfect but nonetheless functional common life.” [p. 94]

In pointing to the methodology of the Church Fathers, Reno is agreeing with Radner’s thesis, and in his use of the word “submission”, he is pointing to an attitude or posture which, as I shall argue a little later, will be as important as the methodology.

Reno has also perceived the role the Episcopal Church has played in the larger movement of liberal Protestantism. In his review of a biography of Phillips Brooks by Gillis J. Harp entitled Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Rowman & Littlefield 2004), Reno observed that Brooks’ eschewing of Christian doctrine and his emphasis upon religious sentiments paved the way to the liberal Protestantism of the twentieth century. “In these features–the priority of feeling, insouciance about doctrine, nonchalance about historical-critical challenges to scriptural authority, and commitment to religious liberty–Brooks, as I say, embodied the emergent spirit of modern Protestantism.” [R. R. Reno, “The Great Delayer,” First Things (August/September 2004), p.65] In a positive sense Brooks did manage to delay “the de-Christianization of American elite culture.” However, as Reno discovered when he visited Brooks’ former church, Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, the policy of delay had run its course:

“On the visit to Trinity Church that I mentioned above, I found an aroma of orthodoxy about the worship (solemn procession, conventional hymns, dignified liturgy), while the sermon seemed to be seeking the classic Brooksian goal: faith for modern men and women. The difference between our time and Brooks’, however, is that the strategy of delay has run its course. Our elite culture has been de-Christianized, and the notional faith that I heard preached from the pulpit in Trinity that day amounted to pure concession, Unitarianism in vestments.” [Ibid., pp. 68-69]

Reno, who had seen clearly the ruins of liberal Protestantism and of the Episcopal Church and yet who had counseled staying put in those ruins, was received into the Roman Catholic Church in September, 2004. He understandably felt the need to explain this reversal in his position, and he did so in an article provocatively titled, “Out of the Ruins.” [R. R. Reno, “Out of the Ruins,” First Things (February 2005), pp. 11-16] He had come to the realization, he confided, that it was only “the idea” of loving the Episcopal Church that had been keeping him in the church. He was persuaded by St. Augustine, who after an exhaustive spiritual quest came to the realization that he was not competent to be his own spiritual guide: “What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?” [p. 12] Not surprisingly, Reno was also affected by another brilliant Anglican who converted to Rome in the nineteenth century–John Henry Newman. After much thinking about the Arian controversy and how it applied to the Anglican Church in his time, Newman came to the conclusion, in language that has echoes for our own time, that “the truth lay, not with the Via Media, but with what was called the ‘extreme party’. . . .” [Ibid., p.14] Dogma was essential for Christianity in Newman’s view. “Religion as mere sentiment. . . is to me a dream and a mockery.” [Ibid., p. 14] Newman finally concluded that “the basic rationale for Anglicanism lacked validity” and that it was “a midwife for a liberalism that led to atheism.” [Ibid., p. 14] Although Reno could not accept this last conclusion, he has determined on his own “that the Episcopal Church is disastrously disordered and disarrayed.” [Ibid., p. 14] Reno did express his sincere admiration for those faithful members of the mainline denominations who “stay put out of love for the fragments of the apostolic tradition,” [Ibid., p. 15] but he realized that he could no longer do that. “In order to escape the insanity of my slide into self-guidance, I put myself up for reception into the Catholic Church as one might put oneself up for adoption.” [Ibid., p. 16]

I had the privilege of meeting R. R. Reno and Ephraim Radner, who delivered papers at a conference on the Ten Commandments in January, 2003. Another presenter at that conference was Reinhard Hutter of Duke University, who has written an article on the virtual disappearance of the Decalogue from Episcopal and Lutheran liturgy. [Reinhard Hutter, “The Ten Commandments as A Mirror of Sin(s): Anglican Decline-Lutheran Eclipse,” Pro Ecclesia (Winter 2005), pp.46-53] According to Hutter, Luther saw the Ten Commandments as one of the three essential pillars for the teaching of the Christian faith along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. This high view of the Decalogue was reflected in the English Book of Common Prayer 1559, which provides that the priest shall “rehearse distinctly all the Ten Commandments, and the people, kneeling, shall after every commandment ask God’s mercy for their transgressions of the same. . . .” [Hutter, p. 50] Subsequent editions made this recitation more and more optional so that the Decalogue has been completely omitted in the Lutheran Church and very rarely included in the Episcopal Church. Hutter found that “the Anglican decline and the Lutheran eclipse of the Decalogue in Sunday worship are by no means aberrations. Rather, they fit surprisingly well into a larger ecumenical trend: the thoroughgoing antinomian character of contemporary liturgies.” [Ibid., p. 53]

The disappearance of the Ten Commandments from our worship services reminded me of something else that I experienced while I was in Pass Christian in December of 2005. I was in the car with my dear friend, Chris Colby, who is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Pass Christian. He was driving his car down Highway 90 and was looking for the street that led to his house, and for a while, he could not find it. Then it hit me: all the landmarks were gone. How are we to know the way home without the landmarks? For Christians, the Ten Commandments are important landmarks in a culture that is increasingly devoid of any spiritual or moral landmarks. If the Church of Jesus Christ is not to provide them, where are they to be found?

What accounts for this virtual disappearance of the Ten Commandments in American mainline church services? The autonomy of the Self in American culture, which is, in turn, reflected in these churches, demands it. This arrogant and antinomian attitude has been brilliantly described by the Eastern Orthodox theologian, David B. Hart:

“We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any ‘value’ higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want–but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusion of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable goals. . . . And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.” [David B. Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” First Things (October 2003), p. 47]

The Ten Commandments are an affront to our personal autonomy, an uncomfortable and unwelcome reminder that we are answerable to Someone other than ourselves. Thus, their banishment from our services of worship should come as no real surprise.

David Hart has done me another good service by introducing me to someone I had never heard of–Johann Georg Hamann, who is, in Hart’s own description, “by any measure, an obscure figure, little known outside the exclusive circles of a certain very rarefied kind of scholarship, hardly read at all even in his native Germany, and perhaps truly understood by next to no one.” [David B. Hart, “The Laughter of the Philosophers,” First Things (January 2005), pp. 31-37] Hamann, who was a friend and philosophical opponent of Immanuel Kant, viewed the Age of Reason as “an age of deepest darkness.” [Hart, p. 35] For further reading on Hamann, Hart recommends the recent scholarship of John R. Betz.

It is then to Betz that I am indebted for a more comprehensive introduction into the thinking of Hamann. [John R. Betz, “Hamann’s London Writings: The Hermeneutics of Trinitarian Condescension,” Pro Ecclesia (Spring 2005), pp. 191-234] Betz believes Hamann to be “a figure who is arguably one of the greatest, most prophetic, and, ironically, most forgotten Christian authors of modernity–the Irenaeus of his time. . . .” [Betz, p. 194] He was a German who went to London in 1757 and underwent a conversion experience through his reading of Scripture. In 1758 he wrote his London Writings [Londoner Schriften, Historisch-kritische Neuedition, ed. Oswald Bayer and Bernd Weissenborn (Munchen: C. H. Beck 1993)], which is the basis of Betz’ reflections on his thinking. Hamann’s conversion was so profound that the editors of Londoner Schriften, Bayer and Weissenborn, compare his reflections on it to Augustine’s Confessions and find a similarity in their biographies: “after much searching in the books of classical and modern wisdom and finding them ultimately ‘comfortless,’ Hamann turns to the books of Scripture, is seized by their hidden depth, and encounters therein, particularly in the history of Israel, the spiritual allegory of his life.” [Ibid., p. 195]

What is most significant for me is Hamann’s attitude or posture toward Scripture as a potential corrective to the posture of our times:

“Hamann’s London writings thus present a hermeneutics that is squarely opposed to the interpretive practices of the modern subject (not to mention the Jesus Seminar), indeed, a hermeneutics that overturns modern notions of subjectivity altogether. For it is no longer a question of how can ‘I’ (understood as an immediately self-present cogito, a pre-textual identity) understand the text, but rather a question of how the text understands and constitutes me. In other words, the priority shifts from the modern subject, which constitutes itself–say, through Descartes’ radical doubt–to the object, the text, before which, and in engagement with which, the subject first recognizes himself or herself as a person within the story that is told.” [Ibid., p. 199]

For the past several years I have thought about this difference in attitude toward Scripture in a very simple way: Do I sit under the Word of God, or do I stand over it? Hamann recognized this choice and understood that “one must be illumined by the Spirit of the one who inspired Scripture in order to understand it.” [Ibid., p. 201] Without this humility of being willing to be interpreted by Scripture, we simply “confirm, as in a mirror, what [we] already know a priori.” [p. 201]

Hamann’s attitude of humility toward Scripture is undergirded and informed by his theology which emphasizes and marvels at the humility of God, and, in particular, the humility of all Three Persons of the Trinity. I have never encountered such insights as Hamann’s about the humility of the Holy Spirit in being the author of Scripture:

“No doubt, few Christian authors have ever reflected so thoroughly on the humility of all the persons of the Trinity; and perhaps none, with the possible exception of Origen, has ever attended so carefully to the humility of the Holy Spirit in the writing of Scripture. To be sure, for Hamann, one must marvel not only that God became flesh, but also an author; what is more, that the Spirit, no less than the Son, would be subjected to the scrutiny and judgment of the world–in this case to the judgment of literary critics, whom Hamann elsewhere calls ‘high priests in the temple of good taste.’” [Ibid., pp. 212-213]

As well as the proper attitude in approaching Scripture, Hamann also addressed the appropriate methodology in reading Scripture. I was delighted to discover that it was the same methodology being reclaimed by Radner:

“But if his exegesis is guided by the theme of divine condescension (or if, rather, the former gave rise to the latter), it is also guided by the patristic principle that what is revealed in the New Testament is hidden in the Old: vetus in novo patet, novum in vetere latet. (And in this respect he maintained the practice of allegorical interpretation, even though his own Lutheran tradition tended to reject it). Thus he says, in perfect keeping with the church fathers, ‘The entire law of Moses was simply a figure of the knowledge and the truth that would be revealed in Christ.’ And similarly, ‘The Spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus. (Rev. 19:10) Throughout all of Holy Scripture, this rule serves as the cornerstone and must be the touchstone for all exegetes.’” [Ibid., p. 220]

Hamann’s apercu about the humility of the Holy Spirit in authoring the Holy Scriptures points toward the essential importance of that attitude in our approaching Scripture and reminds me how absent it is in our times. Hamann saw the folly and hubris of attempting to understand Scripture through reason alone. “Indeed, for Hamann, far from being immediately accessible to reason, there is no understanding of Scripture (or of any of the Christian mysteries) apart from the Spirit of humility in which it was written: ‘Humility of heart is the one required disposition and most indispensable preparation for the reading of the Bible.’” [Ibid., p. 204]

Perhaps I missed class that day, but I do not remember hearing in my theological training that “humility of heart is the one required disposition and most indispensable preparation for the reading of the Bible.” I do not remember hearing that anywhere in the Episcopal Church, ever. I have this growing awareness: The Episcopal Church where I grew up and have been all my life and the Christian Church in North America just might not be the way the ecclesia of Jesus is supposed to be. This is all I have ever known, but it just might not be the true norm. It may really not supposed to be fragmented into thousands of pieces. The message of liberal Protestantism just may not be the true gospel. Like the prodigal son, I may be coming to myself, looking around with new eyes, and discovering that I really am in “a far country.” [Luke 15:13] I am beginning to look at the religious landscape of America the way I looked at the post-Katrina Mississippi Gulf Coast: this is really not the way things are supposed to be. I have this growing awareness that the Church in the West for the past five hundred years has made a real hash of things, and it may just be that the anguish precipitated by the crisis in the Episcopal Church is helping me see what I was blind to before.

It took the prodigal son a while to return from the far country, and it will take us a while to return to where we are supposed to be. And the first step, it seems to me, is to come to ourselves and to realize that the current situation of the Church in the West is not the way things are supposed to be. Liberal Protestantism is ersatz; it just does not deliver the goods. Putting it in the even stronger language of R. R. Reno, “It is dead and cannot be revived, because it loves its own death.” [R. R. Reno, “The Great Delayer,” First Things (August/September 2004), p. 69] But the problem runs much deeper than liberal Protestantism. The Church is so fragmented that it has lost its witness. According to the research of George Barna, even in evangelical churches, the lifestyles of the members are no different from those of the unchurched, with equivalent number of divorces, etc. Some light. Some salt.

The factors leading to this parlous state are complex and varied, but certainly a key role has been played by arrogance–arrogance in the Church. And that suggests that a key first step must be humility, humility in admitting that we are eating the pods of pigs, humility in admitting that the Church in the West has become vapid and feckless. The forces of secularism have, on many fronts, won the day, because of our faithlessness, because of our arrogant and internecine battles, and there is not a bloody thing that we, in our own power, can do about it. It is time for those with eyes to see to cross these manmade denominational barriers and sit together with humility under the Word of God and cry out to God the Father, cry out to the Lord Jesus Christ, cry out to the precious Holy Spirit: “Help us! We are lost. We have sinned against heaven and before you, and we are no longer worthy to be called your sons and daughters. [Luke 15:21] We have, through our own sin, turned your beautiful Church into ruins. We are lost. Come into your Laodicean church and reorder and rebuild it and straighten out the mess that we have made of it. [Revelation 3:14-22] Only you can do this, but you can do this.”

The name for this kind of prayer, of course, is repentance, but it is a corporate repentance for the sins of the Church in the West for the past five hundred years which would include our fragmentation of Christ’s Church, our violence towards one another, our relinquishment of the uniformity of Truth, our accommodation of that Truth to the dominant culture, and our arrogance vis-a-vis Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers.

I believe that the Church Fathers and Duguet and Hamann and Keble and Radner are right. Rather than putting the Bible through our own Vegomatics, it is time for those of us in the Church in the West who are just tired of the way things are to come together in genuine humility seeking Christ (like the Wise Men we claim to be) in all of Scripture and then following wherever he leads. It is getting rather late in the day to continue muddling along, and the darkness is rapidly approaching.