Posted on 10/14/2004 5:55:33 PM PDT by xzins
The Ecstatic Heresy
Seeking a superficial unity, some denominational leaders opt for feelings over facts.
| posted 10/08/2004 9:00 a.m.
The conflict in the mainline churches is ostensibly about sexuality—specifically, homosexuality. But more than sexuality is at stake. The faith itself, the Christian faith, is being invaded by false teaching. Theologically, this heresy is rarely articulated. Rather, it works by feeling, an ecstatic sense that transcends petty verbal differences. Consider these three quotations:
The Dammann case does reveal continuing differences in the United Methodist Church concerning the issue of homosexuality. The Council of Bishops is painfully aware of this disagreement. In such moments as this, we remember that our unity in Christ does not depend on unanimity of opinion. Rather, in Jesus Christ we are bound together by love that transcends our differences and calls us to stay at the table with one another.
When they finished, all of us stood up and applauded, with a lump in our throats and a tear in our eyes, as we watched them embrace one another. Convictions were not reconciled that day, but two people who held different convictions were reconciled in Christ.
How we all fit together, how our singularities are made sense of, how our divergent views and different understandings of God's intent are reconciled, passes all understanding. All that we can do is to travel on in faith and trust, knowing that all contradictions and paradoxes and seemingly irreconcilable truths—which seem both consistent and inconsistent with Scripture—are brought together in the larger and all- embracing truth of Christ, which, by Christ's own words, has yet to be fully drawn forth and known.
The first quotation is from a March 25, 2004, statement by the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church in response to the trial of a lesbian Methodist minister. This trial reflected the deep divisions within that church. The bishops are "painfully aware" of these disagreements. Nevertheless, they feel that these differences are a matter of "opinion." These opinions, however, cannot negate our "unity in Christ" because "in Jesus Christ we are bound together by love that transcends our differences and calls us to stay at the table with one another." In other words, we can be in verbal disagreement, yet be unified at a higher level in Christ.
The second quotation is from an address by Douglas W. Oldenburg, moderator of the 1998 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly. In the climax of his speech, he portrayed two men who also addressed the assembly. The first was a homosexual Presbyterian pastor who passionately affirmed his sexuality, his call to ministry, and his understanding of Scripture. His speech was followed by an equally passionate address by a man who held utterly contrary views. Once these two speeches had been delivered, the two men embraced each other. At that point, the assembly applauded with tears in their eyes and lumps in their throats. Although these two men held different convictions, convictions resulting in starkly different behaviors, they "were reconciled in Christ."
The third quotation is from Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Like the others, he believes that verbal disagreements, different conceptions of truth—even truths inconsistent with Scripture—are unified in the "larger and all-embracing truth of Christ."
These men do not speak in a vacuum. They are influenced by a tradition, a powerful theological perspective that resonates in our culture and is taught in our universities, graduate schools of religion, and seminaries. I call this the "ecstatic" perspective, a term taken from theologian Paul Tillich. Essentially, this perspective claims that God can only be known in feeling, in ways that transcend the language of God or about God.
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is the grandfather of the ecstatic tradition. For Schleiermacher, the essence of the Christian faith is a mystical sense of the Divine. This feeling is beyond language since language refers to objects in space and time. God is not an object like other objects. He cannot be described as if he were an electron, a tree, or a cat. To do so would be to profane God.
Compare and Contrast
Let me give three examples of the ecstatic perspective, contrasting it with what I consider to be an orthodox understanding of Christianity. (I am speaking, of course, of theological tendencies, as rarely do people fall consistently into one group or another; the contrast is meant to illustrate two theological trajectories that are found in the mainline churches.)
Consider Isaiah 6. According to orthodoxy, Isaiah literally heard God say the words, "Whom shall I send?" Isaiah replied, "Send me." God spoke again, in language accessible to Isaiah, giving him a message that he then proclaimed to the people. In this event, some things were beyond Isaiah's understanding. He could not, for example, comprehend the intense holiness of God, so holy that the Seraphim hid their eyes and Isaiah cried out, "Woe is me! For I am lost." Yet even though God remained a deep mystery, Isaiah nonetheless heard the transcendent God speak.
According to the ecstatic perspective, the divine utterance "Whom shall I send?" is a poetic metaphor. Rather than literally hearing a particular message from God, Isaiah merely had a profound sense of God the transcendent Holy One. As a result, his imagination created a dialogue between God and himself. The mystical feeling that gave rise to the dialogue came from God, but Isaiah—as formed by his psychological, social, and historical context—created its verbal expression.
Both views, orthodox and ecstatic, understand that God is transcendent. But for the orthodox, the transcendent God speaks actual words. The supreme example of God's speech is the Incarnation of the Word, who reveals God in concrete deeds and words. These two ways of being God, transcendent and holy yet present and speaking, correspond to God the Father and God the Word (or Son), while God the Holy Spirit enables human beings to hear and obey God's spoken words. This view requires the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation. John 1:18 (RSV) states it this way: "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known."
The ecstatic view robs the Incarnation of its objective, concrete character by making the revelation in Jesus ineffable. From there, the Trinity is debased since ultimately there is no God the Word who comes from God to verbally reveal the Father.
Consider a further example, the Resurrection. If Jesus was bodily raised by God, then God acted physically at a specific time and place. This would make God an agent, as if God—like an electron, a tree, or a cat—was literally affecting matter. Ecstatics would not understand God in such a "crude" fashion. As a result, many ecstatics deny the bodily Resurrection. Many also deny biblical miracles, which they consider creations of primitive peoples who took felt experiences of the Holy and clothed them in language normally used for objects. By contrast, an orthodox perspective would trust in the biblical miracles, especially that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead, that the tomb was indeed empty.
Finally, consider ethics. Ecstatics do not believe that specific biblical commands were literally uttered by God. Rather, biblical people had a mystical sense of divine obligation that they expressed in the thought forms of their day. Since these thought forms are constantly changing, the ethical sense takes new forms under new circumstances. As a result, ethics changes as culture changes. From an orthodox perspective, however, God literally spoke biblical commands. Some of them were specific to the time and situation of the original hearers, but many of them, certainly the words of Jesus, are eternally valid.
Ten Differences
These two ways of understanding God—the ecstatic and the orthodox—underlie the theological division in mainline Protestant churches. These differences are not always clearly articulated, and many persons have vaguely adapted portions of each. When the matter is thought through, however, these two views differ in virtually every dimension of the Christian faith.
In addition to the examples given above, let me list ten principal differences.
A Church of Both/And
Ecstatics do not deny Scripture, the creeds, or the great documents of their traditions. They consider the Scriptures to be the foundation of faith, their liturgies resonate with the Ineffable, and the various confessions are a cultural treasure. They simply revise these sources along ecstatic lines. That is why it is appropriate to call them "revisionists." They revise Scripture, creeds, and the faith in terms of a non-Trinitarian perspective that has no real sense of the Incarnation.
Since the revisionists "honor" Scripture and tradition, they can worship, study, pray, teach, and promote their agenda shoulder to shoulder with the orthodox while holding utterly different conceptions of the faith. Conflict only arises when the church must deal with concrete issues such as revision of our language for God, sexual norms, evangelism to those of other faiths, or who is welcome to take Communion. At that point, real differences emerge.
As a result, it is not enough for orthodox Christians to simply say that Jesus called God "Father," or that Scripture condemns homosexuality, or that Jesus commands us to evangelize, or that the universal tradition of the church requires baptism prior to Eucharist. Ecstatics know all this. They relativize these claims by viewing them as outmoded expressions of an evolving faith that progressively expresses the Indescribable.
The ecstatic approach is ideal for denominational leaders seeking to maintain institutional harmony in the face of profound theological and moral divisions. It allows them to affirm a transcendent unity while affirming the contradictory beliefs and actions of their constituents. Such leaders may or may not have studied Schleiermacher, but their theology articulates the deepest values of our pluralistic culture—diversity, tolerance, and unity. Once these values assume theological expression and legitimacy, they function perfectly in the North American religious context.
But for the orthodox, it isn't feeling that brings life. It is a God who spoke his living words to them in Jesus Christ. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." (Mt. 24:35)
Robert Sanders is associate rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida. He received his Ph.D. in theology from the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California Graduate School in Berkeley, California. More of his writings can be found at http://users.iglide.net/rjsanders.
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But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. Galatians 1:8
But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. 1 Corinthians 5:11
When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? Galatians 2:14
Brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished. 12As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves! Galatians 5:11
Well said, Betty.
This is exactly what the pro-gay forces in the mainlines mean when they say, "God is doing a new thing."
They've had an imagining, a feeling, and that experiential event trumps scripture.
How?
Because it's the "god within them" that equals feeling that equals truth REGARDLESS of scripture BECAUSE the scripture is only the recounting of the "imaginings" of those who lived in those eras.
Good verses.
Paul wasn't nearly so "inclusive" as these folks, was he? In fact, he was at times downright exclusive.
Exactly, xzins! Yet scripture is not the mere imaginings of primitive peoples. For one thing, it seems to me Genesis must have been divinely given, for one cannot imagine how such primitive, idol-worshipping people as the ancient Israelites would have had the "sophistication" or the experience to have come up with the account of Creation given in Genesis.
Case in point: How would the primitive mind ever have conceived the idea of "nothing," from which creation was drawn forth by God's Will and Holy Word? In the primitive imagination, either the world was understood as eternal; or there was always a "something" that preceded the beginning of the world -- for instance, a vast ocean with a giant turtle in it, on whose back the world somehow magically comes to rest. The point is, the primitive mind is informed by naturalistic concepts; arguably, the "nothing" of ex nihilo creation is not a naturalistic concept.
Further, on the ethics front: Man did not conceive the idea of giving up worshipping idols -- by which the primitive thought he could make nature serve his interests -- on his own. The only way primitive man would have ceased an activity that he understood as indispensable to his own well being would have been that God commanded him to do it! And the ancient habit was so hard to break, that the Tribes of Israel frequently "back-slid" into idolatry, divine command notwithstanding.
In our times, we have "new idols" to worship, which frequently go under the head of "the god within." But let's face it, "the god within" is the main strategy of self-divinization: One becomes one's own idol of worship.
I can't imagine that this sort of thing is pleasing in the sight of God. For I strongly doubt that He ever repealed the First Commandment, which is the foundation of the divine covenant with Man. Indeed, the Second Dispensation inaugurated by the Incarnation of the Son of God in Christ renews this foundation.
Folks are telling themselves fairy tales these days, in order to justify what God does not justify.
An invalidly ordained priest is not a priest, but a layman, and is thus incapable of confecting a valid Eucharist. That is beyond dispute the common faith of both Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.
Now you can disagree about the invalidity of Anglican orders, but Catholics in communion with the See of Rome are not free to do so. Hence (with the exception I noted above), we do not and cannot consider the Anglican Eucharist to be anything more than a piece of bread. (If it's any consolation to you, there are some factions within Orthodoxy which say exactly the same thing about our Eucharist.)
By the way, your aside, "As you know, Roman Catholic laypeople do not partake of the Lord's Cup" is quite dated. In fact, the provision of the Eucharist under both forms is positively promoted under the new Rite (though we continue to believe that one receives the whole Christ whether one receives under one form or both).
An excellent point; one which is overlooked in the secular comparative religions texts: The more humans meddle, the faster religion devolves.
Re: "Non-Catholics don't have a "Eucharist"."
Anglicans would disagree, I bet Orthodox would disagree as well. I agree with you only because of my Catholic understanding of the word but they would not.
What a potent statement that is.
Folks are telling themselves fairy tales these days, order to justify what God does not justify.
Long before the 'hey I'm god' actually occurs though, the attempt is made to depose the One True God by a death of 10,000 denials and equivocations.
To the person who is able to see this, it is a horror as they witness each divine injunction being hollowed out.
And that is the sheer truth, AlbionGirl. Divine injunctions may not be gratuitously "hollowed out," without creating real, gave damage to the world in which we perceive ourselves as living.
This ties in well with the Oden Rebirth of Orthodoxy issues I have been so inspired by in the past year.
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