Charles Taylor on Locating the Truth

Reading Charles Taylor

A few months ago, I finally made it through Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's landmark book, A Secular Age. I won't even try to respond to the book in general, which was the densest, richest, and most thorough analysis of the spirit of our time I've ever read; I can't claim to have internalized much of what Taylor put into it on first first. (I do highly recommend it, or James K.A. Smith's more readable guide to it) But I came across a passage toward the end of the book that perfectly articulated something I'd been trying to think about in Taylor's typical, fuzzily precise way, and I want to expand on and respond to it here. (If you happen to have the book, it is section 4 of chapter 20)

The context of this passage is Taylor (a practicing Roman Catholic) reflecting on Vatican II and the tensions between its theology and the "established Catholic tradition", exemplified by the decrees of the Council of Trent. In other words, "what should we make of the reform of Vatican II?" Taylor begins by saying:

Now there are two clear perspectives in which this can be seen. On one hand, we can postulate that what is at stake here is the ultimately and totally right understanding of Catholic Christianity. Then this issue is, who got it right, Vatican II or Trent, and/or in which respect? (p. 752)

Regarding Charles Péguy, a twentieth-century Catholic theologian whose thought was influential for Vatican II, Taylor says that in this perspective (emphasis added),

We would be dealing with his background in the way that is familiar from many debates in secular history. For instance, the way in which believers in Progress argue that earlier ages couldn't have been expected to see certain truths which are obvious to us, because they lacked certain knowledge, or a freedom from prejudices, and the like; or from the other side, the way supporters of traditional ways may argue that in the contemporary condition of moral decay, when the most basic decencies are under attack, we cannot expect that young people will be able to see the value of what has been lost. We describe backgrounds and perspectives, in other words, as epistemically privileged or deprived, as good or bad vantage points to discern some single truth. (p. 752)

To greatly simplify, this perspective involves the kind of thinking that says, "I'm right, you're wrong; here's why." There is a "single truth", and some parties are more "epistemically privileged", able to discern that truth, than others. Taylor goes on to describe the second perspective in which Péguy and Vatican II can be viewed:

The second framework in which we can understand this kind of study postulates that what is at stake is complementary insights. Neither is simply right or wrong about a single issue, but each bring a fresh perspective which augments and enriches our understanding. The issue is to see how these different insights fit together, and for this purpose filling out the background, the social/intellectual/spiritual context from which an insight comes can be very illuminating. (p. 752)

Taylor favors this second perspective, but in keeping with it, he argues that the first perspective is also necessary and can be the truer at times. There are some points at which "Péguy's views just contradict earlier established beliefs, and Vatican II changes the reigning ideas surrounding Vatican I; like the importance of freedom, the value of democracy, the centrality of human rights, the judgments made on other faith traditions, and so on." (p. 753) Pius IX's staunch opposition to democracy and human rights as incompatible with Christianity was "just wrong", yet nineteenth-century Catholics like Pius IX might have seen the dangers and weaknesses of democracy more clearly than we do today; we still have something to learn from them. Their insights and ours, in other words, are complementary. He gives a few other examples of how the views of nineteenth-century Catholics can complement those of twenty-first century Catholics, like the old principle that "error has no rights" and fasting guidelines. Of these he says,

We have to grasp these historical differences bi-focally; in one way, we are dealing with right/wrong issues, in which each change is a gain or loss of truth; in another with different avenues of approach to the faith from out of very different ways of life. A total focus on the first can blind us to the second. And this would be a great loss. This is partly because understanding another approach can free us from the blindness that attends a total embedding in our own. (p. 753) 

What Taylor is recommending is a way of conversing (or disagreeing) with historical or contemporary figures that attempts to view one's one perspective as complementary to the other's. In other words, you don't necessarily adopt another's view and may even say you disagree with it, but you seek to understand that view beneath the surface, discern the values and insights underlying it (which will often be more agreeable than their conclusion), and learn from them as far as is possible. Taylor further expands on this thought with another example, one likely more familiar to Protestants:

Christians today, for example, have to climb out of an age in which Hell and the wrath of God are often very faintly felt, if they are understood at all. But they live in a world where objectification and excarnation [a term Taylor defines as "the transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside 'in the head'."] reign, where death undermines meaning, and so on. We have to struggle to recover a sense of what the Incarnation can mean. But Jonathan Edwards, for instance, three centuries ago, lived in a world where the wrath of God was a powerful presence, and where thee difficulty was to come to an adequate sense of God's universal love. One can respond to this difference polemically, and judge that one or the other was bang-on right, and the other quite wrong. We condemn Edwards as caught in an old mode, or ourselves as having watered down the faith.

But we can also see it in another light. Neither of us grasps the whole picture. None of us could ever grasp alone everything that is involved in our alienation from God and his action to bring us back. But there are a great many of us, scattered through history, who have had some powerful sense of some facet of this drama. Together we can live it more fully than any one of us could alone. Instead of reaching immediately for the weapons of polemic, we might better listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn't strained to understand it. We will find that we have to extend this courtesy even to people who would never have extended it to us (like Jonathan Edwards)—in that respect, perhaps we have made some modest headway towards truth in the last couple of centuries, although we can certainly find precedents in the whole history of Christianity. Our faith is not the acme of Christianity, but nor is it a degenerate version; it should rather be open to a conversation that ranges over the whole of the last 20 centuries (and even in some ways before). (pp. 753-754)

It is hard for me to admit that I could have anything to learn about the Christian faith from one such as Jonathan Edwards, but Taylor makes a compelling case. That refusal to learn, to seek truth everywhere and from everyone, is just the flip side of my assurance that thanks to sound Orthodox teaching, I have finally "gotten it right" and can slip into something like Taylor's first perspective. It is sin. Taylor starts to put this composite perspective together:

This, of course, leaves us with an immense set of messy, hermeneutical issues: how the different approaches relate to each other; how they relate together to questions of over-arching truth. We will never be without these issues; the belief that they can finally be set aside by some secure instance of authority, whether the Bible or the Pope, is a damaging and dangerous illusion.

What this fragmentary and difficult conversation points towards is the Communion of Saints. I'm understanding this not just as a communion of perfected persons, who have left their imperfections behind them; but rather as a communion of whole lives, of whole itineraries towards God. ... Itineraries consist not only of sins. My itinerary crucially includes my existence embedded in a historic order, with its good and bad, in and out of which I must move toward God's order. The eschaton must bring together all these itineraries, with their very different landscapes and perils. (p. 754)

I agree with Taylor's identification of this conversation with the communion of saints; or perhaps equivalently, with Holy Tradition. Contrary to my first impressions of it, Tradition is not simply the collection of all the answers to theological questions that the Church has authoritatively settled upon over the millennia. Looking back at the definitions quoted in my post on Holy Tradition, several of them define Tradition not merely as a body of doctrines or teachings, but as "the life of the Church in the Holy Spirit", or "the living memory of the Church", as an ongoing "activity or dynamism". Put another way, the fullness of the truth of the Christian faith is found in Holy Tradition, but it comes to us not in the form of a formula or formal body of teachings, but in the form of a conversation spanning time and space, across the communion of saints. The Orthodox Church, with its absence of a secure, singular, "final" authority apart from Christ himself, seems like a uniquely conducive place for this conversation, this light-giving meeting of persons. In other words, I think Taylor is really onto something here.

And this gives us a second reason not to let the issue of final truth occlude the difference of itineraries. It is that the Church, as a communion of different peoples and ages, in mutual understanding and enrichment, is damaged, limited, and divided by an unfounded total belief in one's own truth, which really better deserves the name of heresy. (pp. 754-755)

Belief in the infallibility of the Church must not become this. I am not the Church. (The same is arguably true for the infallibility of the Scriptures) Taylor concludes:

I have described two different meanings we can give to the sense the contemporary convert has that she must move outside the established order. One sets us to look for the perfectly adequate historic order; the other invites us to a conversation which can reach beyond any one such order. The goal in this case is not to return to an earlier formula, inspiring as many of these will undoubtedly be; there will always be an element of imitation of earlier models, but inevitably and rightly Christian life today will look for and discover new ways of moving beyond the present orders to God. One could say that we look for new and unprecedented itineraries. Understanding out time in Christian terms is partly to discern these new paths, opened by pioneers who have discovered a way through the particular labyrinthine landscape we live in, its thickets and trackless wastes, to God. (p. 755) 

The Christian faith, I have heard it taught, is not a system of rules or teaching; it is in something like this sense that it is often said not to be merely a "religion". It is a journey towards and into the One who is Truth, and yet who transcends all that our minds can grasp. Charles Taylor grasps this reality and invites us to live accordingly.

(Dis)agreeing Constructively

The idea that Taylor's way of putting things helped me to articulate is that, as you might guess, theological discussion usually doesn't live up to the vision he lays out. Specifically, people tend to think from his first perspective—I'm right, you're wrong, here's why—and neglect the second—here is how our understandings complement and inform each other. The first perspective deals with rightness as a zero-sum game, like a military battle or, well, a game; the second handles it more like a cooperative venture, a group project. The danger of overapplying the second perspective is syncretism and naive gullibility. The danger of overapplying the first is more common and evident all around us; polarization, polemic, endless bickering, intractable controversies and debates. Instead of thinking cooperatively and coming to a fuller understanding of the reality than they could arrive at separately, each party assumes their "side" has to be correct at the expense of another.

A simple example of this is an interaction my wife and I share almost daily: when she tells me she loves me, I jokingly respond, "No, I love you," as if correcting her. The idea of marital love being a zero-sum game so that one spouse's love comes at the expensive of the other's is silly, but this pattern occurs more seriously elsewhere. For example, a phrase often used to respond to calls for gun control measures is "guns don't kill people; people do." This slogan sets two (I would argue complementary) families of responses to gun violence, gun control and improved prevention/mental health care, against each other. A simple religious example which I have commented on before is the controversy dating back to the nineteenth century over whether the Bible is "merely human" writing to be treated "like any other book", or if it is something more. In the course of opposing this conception as a denial of the Christian faith, theological conservatives came to adopt theories of Scripture that instead overemphasized its divine nature, such as biblical inerrancy.

I also saw this pattern of escalating reaction repeatedly while studying the history of modern theology. Deists and Enlightenment thinkers reacted to the ugly clashes of Orthodoxy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and proposed a religion based on pure, natural reason. Schleiermacher, responding to the growing conflict between religion and reason, proposed a way of doing theology centering around human religious feeling and experience rather than dogma, which would become the school of liberal theology. Theological conservatives and fundamentalists, reacting in turn to theological liberalism, doubled down on the divine authority and traditional interpretation of Scripture. Modern theologians, dismayed at what they saw as conservatives' silo mentality, proposed to demythologize Christianity, or tried to fuse Christianity and existentialism, or something else. Liberal, fundamentalist, process, neo-orthodox, liberation, and existential all developed in reaction to real abuses of teaching, and may even have formed around a kernel of truth, but they remain only fragmentary, incomplete perspectives, in part because of their need to distinguish themselves from what they react against.

This outward spiral of reaction and counter-reaction, also described by Taylor in A Secular Age, is responsible for a good deal of the theological diversity of modern Protestantism and Catholicism. It demonstrates how both of his perspectives are necessary. Rare is the case when a teaching is completely false and is rightly met only with denial. Sin is not creative; it corrupts that which already is, and so most beliefs will have an underlying kernel of truth to them. Critiquing a reasoned approach to just about anything will usually involve a mix of affirmations and denials: some tenets may be correct, others wanting; and even then, they may involve correct premises worthy of affirmation while proceeding from them wrongly.

The conversation Taylor points towards involves both of his perspectives; looking for truth in the wisdom and witness of others as well as identifying where they genuinely (and not just seemingly) conflict; discerning where someone's view is wrong and how it is merely incomplete. Ecumenical dialogue between different religious traditions will not get far without such a spirit of humility. And within a religious tradition, this attitude helps prevent divisions from forming in the first place, reminding individuals that they can never contain the fullness of the truth with which the Church has been entrusted; we must constantly be open to receiving it from others. The Church is the fullness of the truth, Orthodox believe, but I am not the Church and am not fit to speak for her. At least on an individual level, orthodoxy is always freedom from error, never having nothing left to learn. As in Taylor's example of Trent and Vatican II, we can and should seek out and learn from diverse voices and sources within the breadth of Holy Tradition as complementary sources capable of shedding light on parts of the truth we may be inclined to neglect.

It is a common Christian truism that we are not saved merely by having doctrinally correct theology. In the extreme case, reactionary, polemical thinking can lose sight of this reality as we become more concerned with refuting error than with loving the truth—when we make what we deny central to what we believe. Denial, in itself, is not redemptive, no matter how awful is the thing you are rejecting. Such adversarial thinking reinforces disagreement, even revels in it, rather than seeking to heal it. It is a form of the divisiveness I described last time. Nurturing "seeds of the Word" is more important than rooting out every last "seed of the adversary". One will hopefully get you a blooming garden, the other a barren plot of dirt.

About all those denominations...

A Bible study I participated in recently began with 1 Corinthians 1:10: "Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment." (NKJV) Responding to this, a friend remarked on the stark contrast between the vision of unity in this passage and the highly fragmented state of modern Christianity. Paul's words feel like a painful indictment of our disunity; how could we so completely fail to live up to them?

Pervasive interpretive pluralism

This question was very familiar to me, as I had just been rereading The Bible Made Impossible by sociologist Christian Smith, a book that was greatly influential on my journey through religious doubt (so much so that I bought a case of copies to give away, wanting others to read it). Its first half is a vigorous critique of an approach to the Bible which Smith calls "biblicism", which he characterizes as "a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability". (p. viii) In making his case, Smith draws attention to the widespread doctrinal diversity among Christians (particularly evangelical Protestants), a phenomenon he calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism", and which he argues renders biblicism impossible in practice if not in theory:

The very same Bible—which biblicists insist is perspicuous and harmonious—gives rise to divergent understandings among intelligent, sincere, committed readers about what it says about most topics of interest. Knowledge of “biblical” teachings, in short, is characterized by pervasive interpretive pluralism. What that means in consequence is this: in a crucial sense it simply does not matter whether the Bible is everything that biblicists claim theoretically concerning its authority, infallibility, inner consistency, perspicuity, and so on, since in actual functioning the Bible produces a pluralism of interpretations. (17)

The import of pervasive interpretive pluralism is that for virtually any Christian doctrine, from the major to the minor, there exists a range of teachings on it held by various churches and denominations, all claimed to be based on the Bible. Zondervan's Counterpoints series of books walk the reader through the variance on many such doctrines. From Smith and other sources, I've compiled a fairly complete list of teachings for which there exists such pluralism:

Theology proper:

• Christology (classical, kenotic, adoptionist...)
• The Trinity (though modern Unitarians arguably base their theology more on "rational" thought than the Bible, other groups like Christadelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, The Way International, and Oneness Pentecostals reject the trinity on biblical grounds, as did the early unitarians)

The Church:

• Nature of the Church (not as much variance as between Protestantism and Catholicism/Orthodoxy, but there is still different weight placed on the institutional nature of the Church between, say, an Anglican and a Baptist)
• Church polity (episcopal, presbyterian, congregational)
• Legitimacy of ordained ministry (i.e. how the "priesthood of all believers" is understood)
• Methods of church discipline

Worship:

• Legitimacy and value of creeds and confessions
• Styles of worship (traditional, contemporary, blended, choral or congregational singing, Psalms-only, use of instruments, regulative principle...)
• Use of images or sensory aids in worship
• Christian relation to the Sabbath

Sacraments and spiritual gifts:

• Baptism (infant/adult, significance)
• Real Presence in the Eucharist (the subject of the first division among the Protestant reformers)
• Continuation of spiritual gifts in the present
• Importance of the gift of tongues

Gender, marriage, and family:

• Women's roles in the church and the home (patriarchalism, evangelical feminism, complementarianism, egalitarianism...)
• Divorce and remarriage
• Birth control
• Corporal punishment of children

Societal issues:

• Capital punishment
• Slavery (there may be agreement today, but there was fierce disagreement between competing "biblical" views less than 200 years ago)
• Homosexuality
• Church-state relations
• War
• Ethics and use of wealth (private property, meaning of material success, tithing...)
• Celebration of [religious] holidays
• Christians' relation to culture

 Soteriology:

• The nature of salvation
• Nature/reality of total depravity and original sin
• Significance of a "conversion experience"
• Atonement theology (PSA, governmental, moral example, Christus victor...)
• Justification
• Role of good works in the last judgment (and the nature and number of the last judgment(s))
• Sanctification and its relation to salvation
• Eternal destiny of the unevangelized (exclusivism, inclusivism, universalism), and infants

Personal morality

• Wearing of jewelry/makeup
• Drinking
• Gambling
• Dancing
• Swearing oaths
• Asceticism and celibacy 

Eschatology:

• Imminence of the Second Coming (putting a definite date to it, expecting and planning on it in the next few years/decades, or simply living in readiness)
• Rapture and the Millennium (pre/post-tribulationist, premillennialist, postmillenialist, amillenialist)
• Understanding of the "antichrist" (the papacy, a figure in current events, or yet to come?)
• Role of the Jews in salvation history (a major distinctive of dispensationalism)
• Understandings of apocalyptic prophecy (preterist, futurist, historical, idealist)
• Nature of hell (eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, purgatorial universalism, C.S. Lewis' view...)

God's providence:

• Free will/determinism and predestination (Calvinism vs. Arminianism)
• Eternal security
• Nature of God's foreknowledge (unconditional or based on foreseen faith?)

The Bible:

• Bibliology; nature of the Bible itself
• Perspectives on Paul
• Relation between the Testaments
• Biblical inerrancy/infallibility
• Creation/Evolution
• Nature of the divine image in humanity (and to what extent or in what way has it been lost?)
• Historicity of Adam
• Biblical literalism
• Value of reason/rationality in faith

Pervasive interpretive pluralism is far from a recent problem. In a survey of other authors' takes on it, Smith quotes American theologian John Nevin, who lamented a similar situation in 1849:

It sounds well, to lay so much stress on the authority of the Bible, as the only text-book and guide of Christianity. But what are we to think of it, when we find such a motley mass of protesting systems, all laying claim so vigorously here to one and the same watchword? If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way . . . they are flung asunder so perpetually in their religious faith, instead of being brought together? (19)

However they may differ among themselves as regard to what it teaches, sects all agree on proclaiming the Bible the only guide of their faith; and the more sectarian they are . . . the more loud and strong do they show themselves in reiteration of this profession . . . It will not do to reply . . . that the differences which divide the parties are small, while the things in which they are agreed are great, and such as to show a general unity after all in the main substance of the Christian life. Differences that lead to the breaking of church communion, and that bind man's consciences to go into sects, can never be small for the actual life of Christianity, however insignificant they may be to their own nature. . . . However plausible it may be in theory, to magnify in such style the unbound use solely of the Bible for the adjustment of Christian faith and practice, the simple truth is that the operation of it in fact is, not to unite the church into one, but to divide it always more and more into sects. (19-20)

Smith does not argue that biblicism creates pervasive interpretive pluralism, but rather that it is unable to account for it, tends to exacerbate it, and is ultimately rendered superfluous by it. How, then, are we to explain it?

The problem of authority

Here is where I must play my Orthodox card. Non-Protestant Christians, myself included, generally attribute the diversity of teaching Smith describes to the principle of sola scriptura, and the problem of authority inherent to it. I'll try to describe this problem differently and more clearly than I did in my critique of sola scriptura in the Journey to Orthodoxy series, focusing not so much on the teaching per se as on how it is applied in practice.

A common definition of sola scriptura goes something like this: the Bible alone is the highest and final authority in matters of Christian faith, teaching, and practice. More thoughtful definitions will be careful to note that it is not the only authority, ascribing some legitimacy, usefulness, and derived authority to traditional Christian teachings, hymns, or creeds—insofar as they are based on the Bible. Under sola scriptura, all such formulations are seen as fallible human creations with no authority of their own, no claim on my conscience, except what they gain by speaking truly with the backing of the authoritative teaching of Scripture.

It seems like a modest and cogent enough proposal: try to peer behind, or beneath, all the layers of extra stuff that has been added onto the teaching of the Church over the centuries to glimpse the pure, undistorted Gospel in the pages of Scripture. But hidden inside it is a radically new stance toward human authority, which is placed decisively lower than the "authority of Scripture". No mere man has authority over my conscience; no earthly power can take the place of God's word and tell me what to believe. Human teachers and traditions may be helpful resources and aids, but the Bible always gets the final say. This rhetoric sounds well and good, seemingly recognizing our human fallibility, and I don't doubt that it is meant that way, but what gets forgotten is the need to interpret Scripture, and the inescapable subjectivity of this task.

This became an especially serious issue as sola scriptura came to be applied less on the level of large, often national churches (as it was in the early days of the magisterial Reformation) and more on the individual level, spurred by developments like the Radical Reformation, Pietism, and the Great Awakenings. Seen in this light, what sola scriptura entails in practice is that the individual Christian's personal interpretation of Scripture becomes authoritative for that individual; no one else can tell him or her how to read or what to believe. "The teaching of Scripture" comes to be identified in practice with "my interpretation of Scripture". Obviously, this becomes a problem when two parties hold conflicting "biblical" views. As pervasive interpretive pluralism shows, the "plain meaning" of Scripture on a given matter is rarely plain to everyone. How to determine who (if anyone) is more correct?

This new stance towards human tradition and authority makes resolving disagreements of interpretation nearly impossible. As interpretive authority is shifted from a common body or tradition to Scripture itself and (in turn) the individual reader of Scripture, there is no longer any way to hold together individuals or factions who are inclined to see things differently and cannot come to agreement between themselves, or to determine who among them (if anyone) is in the right. There is then little recourse except schism. This is the problem of authority. In traditional Christianity such disputes are resolved by calling a council, as in Acts 15 or the succeeding centuries of Church history, but when Scripture alone is finally authoritative, councils are merely exercises of limited human authority and can again be rejected if they are thought contrary to Scripture. Each party may well start his own tradition, believing himself to be upholding the true teaching of Scripture and the other to be unwilling or unable to discern it. The classic example of this is Luther and Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy, and such divisions have been continuing ever since.

A disclaimer: obviously, not every Protestant embodies this kind of divisiveness and insistence on the authoritativeness of one's own interpretation. Thankfully, most do not—and, not coincidentally, most Protestants don't form their own churches or denominations. So please don't read the above as an attack on or attempt to describe everyone who affirms the principle of sola scriptura. To whatever degree you participate in and uphold your church's body of tradition and doctrine, however much you seek to live in harmony and unity with other Christians who may or may not agree with what you believe (and you may be better at this than I am!), that is a very good thing; it is commanded by the Scriptures and expected of the Church. But I argue that it does not come from the principle of authority implied by sola scriptura, which, at its worst, has legitimated doctrinal divisiveness like that of early Christian heretics.

Orthodox Christianity holds a different attitude to authority and tradition, as I have written in my Journey to Orthodoxy series. The word "tradition" and its Greek equivalent, paradosis, both connote receiving something passed on or handed off. Doctrine is received from one's spiritual parents or teachers (as in 1 Cor 11:2 or Gal 1:8-9), rather than derived for oneself by an independent reading of the Scriptures (though we are of course encouraged to read the Scriptures and glimpse the faith through and in them). Holy Tradition, the life of the Church in the Holy Spirit originating with the apostles' teaching (cf. Acts 2:42), is said to be authoritative (in response to which claim sola scriptura asserts that final authority belongs to Scripture alone), the continuation of the authority vested in the apostles by Christ. The teaching of an individual, even a bishop, no matter how "biblical" it seems, cannot overrule the consensus of the Church originally received from the apostles and kept by their successors. The communal, shared nature of traditioned truth mirrors the communal nature of salvation as spiritual, transformative union with Christ (and, transitively, with each other). The human mediation involved is no cause for concern, and does not mean that Tradition is necessarily as fallible as you or I. God came to earth as a man, sent his Spirit onto men, and is saving and redeeming men. By his grace, we can become conduits of his truth, not obstacles to it that need to be cleared away.

The Church

The problem of authority is closely tied in with a distinctive ecclesiology—one of the areas in which, as noted above, there is substantial pluralism among evangelicals. But generally in Protestantism, an ecclesiology prevails in which the church is visibly divided but invisibly one, consisting of those God alone truly knows as his, in a way that is not essentially inhibited by the visible schisms among churches. Which institutional church you belong to is unimportant, it is thought, as long as you truly follow Jesus. The original, visible Church fell away in a "great apostasy", but in its invisible essence the Church continued through the centuries. Thus the phenomenon of pervasive interpretive pluralism, while unfortunate and confusing, does not mean the Church is divided into countless pieces; Christianity is just expressed in many different forms instead of one, and members of the true Church can be found in virtually any of them, believing and worshipping the same God earnestly and authentically according to their conscience, just as the more visibly united early Christians did.

But this redefinition of "unity" in light of such glaring division tremendously cheapens the unity of the Church confessed in the Nicene Creed. This "Church" does not enjoy anything like the unity Paul described in 1 Cor 1:10, and that the Orthodox Church has enjoyed (though never perfectly or free from the troubles of sin) since then. Even calling this state of disconnection and pluralism "the one Church" does violence to the term. It is unprecedented in Christian history to suppose that after a schism, both parties can still somehow belong to the "body of Christ", or to suppose that members of churches holding distinctly different faiths can both be part of the one Church. Paul and the other epistle authors have no such flattering or reassuring words for schismatics. Such sentiments are more Gnostic than Christian; when applied to the Church as body of Christ, they resemble the heresy of Docetism. As Smith quoted John Nevin earlier, "Differences that lead to the breaking of church communion, and that bind man's consciences to go into sects, can never be small for the actual life of Christianity, however insignificant they may be to their own nature."

The enabling effect of such an ecclesiology on schisms is this: if you or your church rejects/divides from someone you consider a false teacher, this individual is not obliged to repent and seek to be reunited to his old church, but can instead join (or start) a different church. His membership in the true Church, fully independent of his membership in a local church body, is never endangered by such interpersonal conflicts. In traditional Christianity, such a person would be told in no uncertain terms that he was no longer part of the body of Christ until he repented and returned to it. This, then, is why sola scriptura inevitably produces divisions among Protestants: because it legitimates schism, makes it a justifiable response in order to liberate oneself and one's conscience from what one views as false teaching, and, after doing away with any higher authority than individuals' interpretations of Scripture, leaves no other way to resolve doctrinal conflicts.

Traditional Christians have always applied the biblical teachings of the Church as the "pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15), temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27), against whom the gates of Hades will not prevail (Mat 16:18), to the visible Church, the one founded by Christ. The Church is identified with a particular body, a particular tradition, a particular faith; it is not an intangible abstraction that assumes a multitude of forms. The Lord did not come to Earth as a phantasm, but as a man. This Church could no more cease to exist than Jesus could return to earth as a mortal man to recreate it, contrary to his promises to return in glory (Mat 16:27). No one has the authority or the ability to divide the body of Christ and start another church than the one the Lord established. It would be unthinkable enough for the Church to vanish and then be recreated by mere men, even if they demonstrated the same unity of faith that the apostles did. But as seen above, modern claimants to represent "biblical Christianity" manifestly do not and have not. The blanket skepticism with which theories of the "great apostasy" treats all other prior and competing forms of Christianity makes it very hard to believe that your church has finally "gotten it right."

Tu quoque?

A possible objection to what I have been saying is that traditional Christianity is also divided. There are four main Christian communions all claiming apostolic succession and that they are the "one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church": the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Chuch, and the Church of the East, as well as numerous smaller churches that have separated from them (such as the Old Believers or Old Calendarists). Traditional Christianity, it seems, fails to practice what it preaches. Doesn't this then show that the true origin of schism and division among Christians is simply sin, and is thus ever-present and not new to sola scriptura?

This is a good question, and an important one to ask since Orthodox critiques of sola scriptura (mine included) can give the impression that rejecting it will result in perfect unity, which is of course not true. I would respond with two points. First, though traditional Christianity is not fully united, the difference in the number and depth of divisions between it and Protestantism is so great as to be qualitative. There is vastly more consensus and less disagreement; for instance, Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy are still strikingly similar in belief and worship despite having been in schism for almost sixteen centuries. The last major schism between churches claiming apostolic succession was the Great Schism in 1054. There is also nothing like Smith's pervasive interpretive pluralism; most of the issues listed above on which Protestants differ have never been controversial, because there has either always been general agreement on them, they are acknowledged to be of secondary importance, or multiple perspectives are recognized as being jointly valid. As I explored Orthodoxy, I found that it actually realizes the Protestant ideal of "in essentials unity; in non-essentials liberty; in all things charity".

And second, I would say that while sin is indeed the "cause" of schisms on a very high level, Tradition arguably helps to restrain and dampen the effects of sin on the unity of the Church, while sola scriptura fans the flames. Yes, the Orthodox Church has undergone schisms and some Protestants enjoy a great deal of unity and consensus within their church or denomination, but I don't think there is any systemic problem contributing to schisms in the Orthodox Church like the problem of authority I described above. Instead, I see Holy Tradition making it much harder to divide the Church, such that the three aforementioned major schisms were not instigated by individuals or congregations, but occurred between entire national churches with conceptions of the faith that had come to be irreconcilable, in part due to linguistic, cultural, political, and geographic disparities (rather than merely reading the same Bible in different ways). Even if one of the parties to these schisms continues to be the "one true Church" afterwards (as all agree to be the case), the sin that contributed to them is shared by all and mourned by all.

In the case of schisms among Protestant denominations, if there is "sin" involved in such schisms, it tends to be the other party's sin of denying the truth of God's Word and being led astray into error; thus, one feels right to reject and separate from them as false teachers worthy of condemnation, such as the Bible warns about (cf. Gal 1:6-9, Col 2:18-19, Jude 1:3-4)—in other words, to actually initiate the schism. The large number of Christian churches and denominations, it is thought, is due to existing churches falling into error, and authentic believers coming out from them and becoming separate. This inverts the old pattern: the schismatic party, rather than being the one condemned as in traditional Christianity, is instead said to be justified and a force for doctrinal restoration. Schism ceases to be violence against the body of Christ and becomes a mechanism for maintaining true doctrine, which is in turn an unrealized ideal the Church must journey towards rather than a treasure she was entrusted with by Christ and has held since the beginning. Sola scriptura, especially as it has been applied in the wake of the Radical Reformation, extends to all Christians the responsibility and authority to "rightly divide the word of truth" traditionally held by the bishops, the successors of the apostles. With such a multitude of little bishops, is it any wonder that there exists such a plurality of Protestant teachings?

The sea of relativism

In my own experience, Orthodox (or Catholic) claims to be the "one true Church" tend to be viewed by Protestants as deeply, problematically arrogant. But such a skeptical attitude toward any church claiming authenticity merely leaves one with the pervasive interpretive pluralism Smith describes, with multiple competing "biblical" truth claims on virtually any teaching or practice and no authoritative answers as to who may be right. The baseline of skepticism enabled by sola scriptura towards claims of absolute doctrinal truth actually bears much resemblance to the attitude of secular skeptics towards absolute truth claims in general. Absolute truth exists, evangelicals like to argue in a number of ways, yet while living with an unprecedented state of doctrinal pluralism and rejecting truth claims more absolute than their own.

There are several ways that Protestants manage this, and I don't claim to list them all here. For those who are content to accept and uphold the teachings of their particular church tradition, the reality of pervasive interpretive pluralism feels remote, and may not be noticed at all. The existence of other Christians who hold an irreconcilably different faith based on the same scriptural foundation need not bother someone who is able to receive and live in his or her own church's teaching with simple faith.

Many evangelicals take something of an a la carte approach to doctrine, not feeling strongly bound to any particular tradition, selecting beliefs from various traditions on the basis of their interpretation of Scripture and the Christian faith. The way I used to do this, at least, resembled deciding your positions on the "issues" at stake in a presidential election: this is what I believe on predestination, this is what I believe on women's ordination, this is what I believe about the nature of the Bible, and so on. This approach goes hand-in-hand with an ecclesiology that locates the one, invisible Church among true "followers of Jesus" across hundreds of different traditions. The subtext of such a theory is that maintaining an authentic, life-giving relationship with God through Jesus is of primary importance and what makes you part of "the Church", while what you believe is secondary and may well conflict with what others in "the Church" believe; what matters is how it bears on the relationship. Believers following the a la carte approach are well aware of the conflicting voices on a wide array of topics, but rather than a confused cacophony they merely see a variety of paths and options for arriving at a faith in accord with one's conscience.

At one time this individualistic approach, exemplifying the freedom to believe according to one's conscience guided by Scripture and unfettered by any human power, felt liberating to me, but in my doubt I realized this liberty was actually confining and profoundly relativistic. If my beliefs simply arose from my own scripturally-informed convictions, I had no confidence that they were true, especially if the scripturally-informed convictions of others led them to different conclusions. Even if I instead aligned myself to a church and accepted its faith tradition as my own, this merely pushed the problem of pluralism up to a higher level; did I prefer this church because it had most faithfully preserved the truth out of the wide plurality of denominations, or simply because it teaching was agreeable to me?

Despite its original intention of rescuing the truth of the Christian faith from its captivity under tradition, the attitude toward authority of sola scriptura ultimately made this truth even more unreachable and intangible. And for me, this was not a merely intellectual search; I found that I couldn't force myself to keep living a faith that seemed riddled with contradictions however I looked at it. This seemingly inescapable confusion about what is true, combined with an inability to trust any of the answers I found as anything more than my own preferences, is what I came to think of as the "sea of relativism".

In the midst of this confusion, Holy Tradition came not as an oppressive "teaching of man", or even primarily as a body of doctrinal truths more coherent and plausible than the one I had been attempting to construct, but as the soothing presence of Christ in the storm of my confusion. The Church established by Christ had not become diffused into this dreadful, unknowable pluralism, like a gas or an abstraction, revealed truth intermingled with human error. The gates of Hades will not prevail over this Church; how much less the arguments of men! Through the prayers and worship of the Church, through the sacraments, through the writings of the Fathers, and (of course) through the inspired words of Scripture, I can have an encounter with the living Christ not mediated by my own subjective interpretation of things (or by cumbersome human institutions and traditions). The only obstacle left after my confusion and doubt dissipated is my own stubborn, apathetic heart, in need of the Healer.

In conclusion

Even after months(!) of polishing, this post still ended up more polemical than I had hoped. Following the example of countless Orthodox teachers I've read, I am trying to rid myself of that habit; I don't need any other Christian tradition to be wrong to accept Orthodoxy as the truth. In this spirit, I'll try to bring this post full circle, back to the question my friend raised (or at least how I've kept it in mind): how do evangelical Christians concerned about the current state of Christianity as divided among hundreds or thousands of traditions (as I once was) respond to Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 1:10? The answer I've been pushing for through most of this post is simply "become Orthodox." But I don't presume to have convinced everyone or anyone, so in order not to leave you empty-handed, I will offer a few other thoughts.

The most basic thing, applicable to Protestants and Orthodox alike, is to avoid adding to the division and instead seek to embody the unity and agreeability Paul prescribes for the church in Corinth. Pray that God by his Spirit would fulfill these words of Paul in you: "I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." (Eph 4:1-3) Seek out and affirm points of truth (what St. Justin Martyr would call "seeds of the Word") in others' Christian traditions; this is the basic method of Orthodox ecumenical dialogue. When you do come to disagree on something, try to do so constructively, and to understand the reasons others believe as they do.

But this still does little to address the fragmented state in which evangelicals find their churches—the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism again. Perhaps the first step to applying Paul's words to this divided state is simply to recognize it. Even though you (hopefully) aren't personally responsible for it, you have inherited a form of Christianity that, more than any other, has failed to abide by Paul's words in 1 Cor 1:10, to preserve the unity of the early Church. So please, acknowledge this, and stop pretending it doesn't really matter in the name of humility or ecumenical goodwill. I have come to prefer the Roman Catholic Church's claims to be the original Church, even if I disagree with them, than the prevailing evangelical attitude that such claims are not necessary, or even possible. As I explained above, this attitude reeks of a relativism which evangelicals are right to reject in other contexts.

And finally, whether or not it leads you across the Bosphorus like it did me, I cannot recommend familiarizing yourself with Christian history highly enough. Some starter ideas from my own shelf: Justo Gonzalez has written an excellent, accessible, and fairly comprehensive history of Christianity from an evangelical perspective, as has Roger Olson. The late Jaroslav Pelikan's five-part series on the history of doctrine is a longer, denser read, but is magisterial in its treatment of the development of all three major streams of Christianity; in particular, I thank Pelikan for deepening my understanding of early Christian heresies and the legitimate theological concerns behind them, especially mono/miaphysitism and Nestorianism. And, if you're curious about my chosen church tradition, unfamiliar to western Christians as it so often is, you could always check out the book that led to my conversion. I have also written about paleo-orthodoxy, a movement within Protestant led by Thomas Oden (author of Classic Christianity) that seeks to rediscover the classical, ecumenical Christian faith through patristic study, to which I am grateful both for the translations of classic texts it has produced and for sparking interest in patristics among people whose familiarity with the subject often doesn't extend past St. Augustine.

Even if you don't think the early Church has continued to today or that Holy Tradition is anything more than the fallible attempts of of godly men and women to understand the Unknowable, studying church history can still give you a more historically founded perspective on your beliefs and show just what it meant for the Nicene Creed to affirm "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". You can study for yourself how we got from the church of the apostles to the vast multitude of churches we have today, and perhaps come to a diagnosis of your own as I did in this post. Connecting with the historical Christian tradition(s) is an important part of the spirit of unity I described above; it is unity across time rather than space. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."

Though I have not done a good job of representing it here, the unity the Church ideally enjoys is far more than doctrinal. The Christian faith has always, asymptotically, extended beyond human understanding, to the heights of heaven. The Church is the "passage" to heaven, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote, and the "vehicle" that takes us there is communion—the creed's "communion of saints", which is understood as a life-giving unity with and under Christ the head, transcending time and space as he does. This is the unity that St. Paul calls us to. Don't settle for less.

A Roundup of Evangelical Responses to Wayne Grudem

Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem raised quite a clamor this week with his inflammatorily titled article, Why Voting for Donald Trump is a Morally Good Choice. In it, Grudem argues that Christians should vote for him, despite his obvious flaws, because not doing so would be helping Hillary win and bring about disastrous consequences for our nation, whereas Trump promises to help fight abortion, protect religious liberty, and produce positive results for a number of other issues Grudem holds dear. I disagree with him, vehemently. I haven't been keeping up with the evangel-o-sphere much since my conversion to Orthodoxy, but I felt called back to at least dip my feet in by the audacity of the very existence of a Christian case for voting for Trump. There is no need for me to comment personally, though, since numerous and better-informed evangelical teachers and thinkers have already written some excellent responses to Grudem's essay from a number of different angles. I will link to and summarize them here.

Character matters

John Mark M. Reynolds delivers a scathing rebuttal to Grudem's character assessment of Trump as a "good candidate with flaws". Reynolds argues that Grudem attempts to brush aside Trump's flaws, which so overwhelmingly awful as to render him unfit for the presidency.

Donald J. Trump is uniquely unsuited for the most powerful job on the planet. He is morally unfit, unqualified, and advocating for him stains any person who does so. 

Just as saying a kind word for Mussolini is a perpetual shame to GK Chesterton, so in the same way, advocating for Trump will tar Grudem. I beg him to retract it or he will lose the moral authority to comment on politics for the rest of his life. Trump is that bad.

Of course supporting a flawed candidate is acceptable in principle; even Lincoln had his flaws. But Trump is much words. "We must vote for flawed men, but not for men who glory in their flaws," Reynolds reminds us. "Donald J. Trump is the least qualified, least fit nominee of a major party in the history of the Republic." Reynolds spends the rest of his time expanding and supporting this assertion; I will summarize his points.

• Trump continues to endorse many hoaxes and conspiracy theories: that Obama is not a natural-born American citizen, that vaccines cause autism, that climate change is a hoax engineered by China, that Ted Cruz's father had a hand in the JFK assassination. "It is ignorance combined with pride that does not care about the ignorance."
• Trump has not abandoned his support for torture.
• Trump makes openly racist and sexist statements, and refuses to apologize for them. he has called Mexican immigrants "racists" and called for a ban on all Muslims in the US. (Despite employing numerous illegal immigrants)
• Trump owns a strip club.
• Trump has done nothing to rebuke or distance himself from the support he has received from white supremacists and members of other hate groups. He repeatedly re-tweets anti-semites and racists. "To call such hideous evil “angry fringe supporters” is to look at the worst evil in the face and blink."
• "Trump has repeatedly had kind words to say for dictators including the butcher of Ankara and KGB Colonel Putin."
• Trump is in legal trouble in New York for calling his unaccredited school a "university". (A federal judge recently allowed a suit against Trump by former students to go to trial, after the election)
• "Trump lies like most of us breath[e]. ... This is not normal political behavior, but continuous lying so grand that Professor Grudem seems to forget one lie for the next."
• Trump was uninvolved in the rearing of his children, contrary to a point Grudem makes.
• Trump is indisputably a lover of money.
• Trump has promised to release his taxes, and has not.
• Trump has brashly asserted that he, and he alone, can save America. (And, more recently, that Clinton is the devil)
• Trump has induced a minor international crisis by stating, without precedent, that he would make America's defense of other NATO countries conditional on their putting in their fair share of military expenditures.
• Trump is the first presidential candidate to brag about his "manhood" in a debate.
• Trump "confuses Clinton’s Vice-Presidential nominee with a Republican governor of New Jersey. The man is ignorant of even the most basic facts about government and has no interest in learning."

Warren Throckmorton recalls a statement signed by 150 Christian leaders—including Wayne Grudem—in 1998, in the wake of the Monica Lewinski scandal. Part of the statement says:

We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy. Elected leaders are accountable to the Constitution and to the people who elected them. By his own admission the President has departed from ethical standards by abusing his presidential office, by his ill use of women, and by his knowing manipulation of truth for indefensible ends. We are particularly troubled about the debasing of the language of public discourse with the aim of avoiding responsibility for one’s actions.

"To my eye," Throckmorton continues, "a vote for Trump contradicts every paragraph in this statement." The statement continues:

But we maintain that in general there is a reasonable threshold of behavior beneath which our public leaders should not fall, because the moral character of a people is more important than the tenure of a particular politician or the protection of a particular political agenda. Political and religious history indicate that violations and misunderstandings of such moral issues may have grave consequences.

I would agree with this statement's sentiment. Throckmorton does as well, and says, "I see a shift from then to now in the willingness to tolerate character problems for political expediency. ... People like James Dobson, Eric Metaxas and now Wayne Grudem are telling us that it is our duty to throw this reasoning aside and lower or abandon the threshold." Jonathan Merritt offers another commentary on this flip from Clinton to Trump, concluding that "Conservative Christians were unwilling to extend mercy to a Democrat who asked for it but have offered it freely to a Republican who doesn’t want it. ... Trump-loving evangelical leaders should either apologize to Bill Clinton or admit, after all these years, that they, too, have a character issue."

On the issues

Another post by Throckmorton reiterates this contrast to the statement Grudem signed in 1998 and his support for Trump based solely on the political consequences, agreeing with the former against the latter. He argues Grudem's critique of Trumps character doesn't go far enough, making several of the same points Reynolds did, then moves to examine Grudem's overriding question: "Which vote is most likely to bring the best results for the nation?" Throckmorton examines Trumps's policy plans, issue-by-issue, to show that Grudem's assessment is highly optimistic. I will briefly list his conclusions on these (all of which cite at least some research):

• Immigration: Trump's promised deportation of 11 million(!) illegal immigrants is expected to cost the economy $400 billion, and lower the GDP by at least $1 trillion. Trump's promised wall is expected to cost at least $25 billion (unless, of course, Mexico pays for it).
• Taxes: Trump's promise to cut taxes with no real plan for lowering costs (except the standard promise to "cut waste, fraud and abuse") will massively increase the national debt.
• Trade, Jobs, and the Poor: Trump's proposed tariffs would greatly increase the cost of imported goods. The conservative National Chamber of Commerce believes his economic policies would lead to a recession, with millions of lost jobs. Trump himself dismissed the risk of a trade war, but it would be a great hardship for the poor.
• Healthcare: The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget believes Trump's proposed healthcare solution would cost more and lead to more uninsured. Strangely, he has also expressed support for a single-payer system, which Grudem probably doesn't want.
• Debt: Trump is expected to add $11.5 trillion to the national debt. Clinton is only expected to add $250 billion.
• Foreign Policy: Trump's stance toward Russia is highly ambiguous; he has both praised Putin and claimed not to know him. It's hard to believe he would be tougher on the threat posed by Russia than Clinton. He has also said he might not intervene if Russia invaded a NATO ally and might recognize Russia's invasion of the Crimea.
• Supreme Court and Religious Liberty: Supreme court justices are unelected and subject to checks and balances regardless of who is president. Few conservative legal scholars think the possibility of conservative justices outweighs Trump's numerous flaws; Roger Pilion states that "Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, to be sure, but the election of Donald Trump would so defile the party of Lincoln and America itself that it must be resisted. He is an aberration that we must get past, and quickly."

Throckmorton concludes:

If a vote for Trump is a moral choice, then I can’t see how a vote for Clinton is not one also. It probably comes down to which vision of the future each individual believes to be accurate. As I look at the evidence, I think Grudem sugar coated Trump and cast Clinton in the worst possible light. In any case, given how inadequate his analysis of Trump’s positions and character is, I think it is an abuse of his position as an evangelical leader to imply that there is a choice that good Christians should choose. If his standard no longer elevates moral qualities, then he needs to do a better job researching Trump’s proposals and what they portend.

Matthew Boedy (guest-posting on Throckmorton's blog) argues that "Grudem’s essay fails to live up to his own positive qualities for Christian influence on government." He refers here to a book Grudem wrote in 2010 arguing that Christians should have "significant influence" on government, namely "winsome, kind, thoughtful, loving, persuasive influence that is suitable to each circumstance and that always protects the other person’s right to disagree, but that is also uncompromising about the truthfulness and moral goodness of the teachings of God’s Word." (55) As a preliminary note, Boedy suggests that Grudem does not attempt to persuade so much as he dictates, arguing that voting for Trump is a moral obligation for Christians.

He then examines the core of Grudem's argument, the fact that Trump is more likely to nominate conservative Supreme Court justices than Clinton. His calling these justices "unelected" is highly misleading since, as Throckmorton also said, Supreme Court justices have always been unelected; they are selected by the executive and legislative branches, as part of the separation of powers. This fact will not change under Clinton or Trump. Obviously there is something in our system of government that can stop them: the election of a president who will appoint different justices (or the election of a senate that will refuse to confirm them). Grudem also follows a double standard in his description of the Supreme Court's activity: decisions he disagrees with are the work of "activist judges", but decisions he agrees with are perfectly fine. "He blatantly strips the court of any authority all the while saying his judges would rule in the opposite way but by the same manner." (Emphasis the author's)

Grudem's warning that Clinton could criminalize dissent rings hollow as he endorses a candidate who has already cracked down on reporters at his rallies, cultivates a hostile relationship with the media, and belittles and insults those who disagree with him.

Grudem argues that disqualifying Trump on the basis of his character constitutes reductionism, "the mistake of reducing every argument to only one factor, when the situation requires that multiple factors be considered." But Boedy responds that "to many in the church, character is not “an” element – it is the umbrella concern. It is not a “single issue” – it is the issue." This is why Grudem himself highlights character so much in his definition of "significant influence". It seems he is not holding Trump to the same standard to which he holds Christians seeking to participate in politics.

Kevin Vallier, writing for Bleeding Heart Libertarians, agrees with Grudem that Trump will probably be better than Hillary on the issues of abortion (by not being certain to appoint pro-Roe justices) and religious liberty, but argues that the latter is not as pressing or important as many other issues, and the former case is built not on certainty but on hope that Trump will follow through on his promises and keep moving "in a more conservative direction."

He then examines the other issues Grudem comments on, one by one:

• Free Speech: There is little evidence that Hillary will criminalize dissent or free speech. Like Throckmorton, he points out  that there seems to be much more risk of this with Trump, who has already threatened the free speech of those who criticize him.
• Taxes: Trump wants to cut taxes without a real plan to reduce spending, which will just increase our deficit.
• Education: Again, not as clear-cut as Grudem makes it sound; there is no indication Clinton is more hostile to school choice than Trump.
• Military: Our armed forces are far from "depleted", as Grudem says; we have the strongest military in the world with bases all over the world.
• Immigration: Obama has deported "huge numbers of illegal immigrants", and so it's misleading to talk about needing to "secure" our borders. Vallier also argues that Trump's attitude towards immigrants is deeply un-Christian; as Leviticus 19:34 commands, "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God."
• Terrorism: Trump is more non-interventionist, and Hillary is "a hawk"; it's hard to argue that Trump will deploy more force against ISIS or terrorists elsewhere. Also, Trump supports torture and Hillary doesn't.
• China and Russia: They don't "push us around", as Grudem says. "We’re the ones with military bases near their countries, and we’re the ones who have repeatedly interfered with Iran’s political institutions over the last several decades."
• Israel: Again, Hillary is, if anything, likely to be more pro-Israel than Trump, given his preference for non-interventionism. Trump has also shown no recognition of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians; "Christians should care about the plight of the weak and the poor, and that includes Palestinians."
• Energy: "If we want to be good stewards and to care for the global poor, we should be deeply concerned about our use of fossil fuels." Hillary is much better on this issue than Trump, who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax.
• Healthcare: It is an exaggeration to say that the ACA is "ruining the nation’s healthcare system"; it has indeed helped people afford insurance and treatment who couldn't before. There is also no reason to believe Trump will give us more free market-based healthcare; he isn't very concerned with market freedom.

Vallier moves on to some other issues which Grudem doesn't mention, but which he considers important: anti-poverty policy, justice for women and minorities, criminal justice reform, trade, and the rule of law. He generally thinks Hillary is to be preferred on these points as well (especially rule of law, for which Trump seems to show no concern). Vallier concludes that for the Christian, both Hillary and Trump are unacceptable choices, and proceeds to make a pretty good case for voting for Johnson instead. Johnson is far from a pro-life crusader, but he supports appointing originalists to the Supreme Court and returning abortion law to the states, two of the main measures Grudem hopes Trump will take against abortion, without the glaring (and honestly terrifying) character flaws.

Matthew Lee Anderson criticizes the pro-life case for Trump. He actually wrote this post before the RNC, but it is especially relevant now. After going over the reasons why he thinks Hillary is an unacceptable choices, Anderson says he remains convinced that "there are no grounds on which it is permissible or morally licit for a conservative Christian to lend their support to Trump by voting for him." He goes on to examine one of Grudem's central points, the argument that Trump is more likely to appoint conservative, pro-life justices to the Supreme Court.

This argument, he argues, is based on blind faith that there is a chance Trump will do as conservatives are hoping. Trump has consistently opposed himself to the Republican establishment, even after being nominated by them, and combined with his well-known tendency to contradict himself, his appointing pro-life justices as president is hardly a sure thing.

The argument also treats conservative justices as important enough to "trump" every other consideration. This attitude ironically plays into the trend toward judicial supremacy that gave us Roe vs. Wade, Obergefell vs. Hodges, and other such landmark cases. (This is similar to the point Boedy made) Supporting Trump solely for this reason will also tremendously devalue the pro-life vote; "every Republican candidate going forward need only offer the thinnest of overtures to pro-lifers to win their support, and that there will be nothing conservatives can do if such candidates do not deliver. ... By supporting Trump, pro-lifers make it astoundingly clear what kind of price the party has to pay to win their votes."

Anderson goes on to argue that Trump "has not merely lived in, but reveled in the moral atmosphere and commitments that stand beneath our abortion culture." (emphasis the author's) As Reynolds mentioned, he owns a strip club. He is, at best, a serial monogamist. He has bragged about the number of his sexual partners. When asked in an interview whether he had paid for an abortion, he dodged the question. Of course, Trump has not apologized or repented of any of these things, as he has not done for anything else. And Grudem thinks this man is the best hope of the pro-life movement?

Treating Trump's myriad flaws as the worthwhile cost of getting conservative justices, as Grudem does, degrades the pro-life movement. "It indicates that pro-lifers are willing to accept personal and cultural decay of our leaders for the sake of conservative judges and legal opinions. ... The pro-life movement can justify supporting Trump only by viewing his character, his known sexual vices, his unrepentant history of supporting abortion, etc. as acceptable side-effects that, in this case, are the cost of their hope for conservative justices." It separates the legal goals of the movement from "the broader cultural conditions pro-lifers are trying to establish to end abortion." Simply striking down Roe vs. Wade in today's culture and political climate would engender a massive backlash, in many ways of the reverse of what Roe itself did when the decision was passed. "But," Anderson points out, "if the recent history of morals legislation in this country is any indication, such a strategy does not work well over the long term. Judicial myopia leads to, in this case, cutting off the pro-life movements cultural nose on the slimmest of hopes of saving its political face."

He concludes his argument by saying, "as I see it, the choice pro-lifers face is whether they are willing to sacrifice their political lives in order to save their cultural and moral soul. I wish I had more confidence that they would choose wisely."

A more excellent way

Scot McKnight wrote my favorite response. He focuses not so much on examining Trump's character or taking Grudem's arguments to task, but rather on the significance of Grudem's endorsement (phrased as a moral obligation, as Boedy points out). He strongly warns against Christians aligning themselves (as Christians per se) with "the powers", or "the gods of this age", i.e. parts of the American political establishment. He continues with the wise and extremely quotable line:

The best way to seek the good of our nation is to be the church in the nation, not confuse the church and the nation. Evangelical leaders would be more evangelical if they refused to endorse political candidates.

In the rest of the short post, McKnight laments how strongly correlated conservative Christians have become with the Republican party. "What I care about is the dilution of the gospel and the alignment of Christians with a political party." His sentiments here are worth remembering for me, for Grudem, and probably for the other commentators I have linked to.

Finally, Amy Gannett describes the effect of Grudem's endorsement, and the aforementioned alignment of Christianity with Republican politics, on millennials. She again notes that Grudem does not give an endorsement so much as a moral imperative, and that he sets up a "hierarchy of morality" in which some moral values (such as religious liberty and the rights of the unborn) are to be valued and set above others (such as the equality of races and genders). By ordering his values thus and making this hierarchy so integral to his vision of Christian ethics, Gannett argues, he is "losing" millennials who feel strongly about social and racial justice and cannot simply weigh the scales and call Trump "good" as Grudem manages to.

We cannot call a candidate “good,” as Grudem does with Trump, who has made racist remarks. We will not call a candidate “good” who has demoralized and dehumanized women on national television. We will not buy into the hierarchy of Grudem’s proposed morals over others. Because Grudem (and others) are making this hierarchy of morality intrinsically related to the Christian life and theology, we will not stand with them.

Gannett concludes by warning against equating evangelicalism and American nationalism, in the same vein as McKnight. By and large, millennials do not consider America a "Christian nation", and we aren't able to look back on the "good old days" Trump promises to restore. "We don’t have a lot of national pride because we are waking up to the immense on-going racism that exists in our nation’s systems, the horrors of early American history, and the tragedies around the world that happen because every country has nationalists. So when you equate nationalism with Christian virtue, we’re out." Gannett concludes by asking evangelical leaders to reflect on where they have drawn their lines in the sand, to speak out against the evils Trump proudly stands for and not accept them.

May the Force be with you (and with your spirit)

Tonight I was reading Luke's genealogy of Jesus, trying to follow the Greek as much as I could (gripping stuff), and was richly rewarded by 3:26:

the son of Maath, the son of Mattathias, the son of Semein, the son of Josech, the son of Joda,

Or, in the Greek:

τοῦ Μάαθ τοῦ Ματταθίου τοῦ Σεμεῒν τοῦ Ἰωσὴχ τοῦ Ἰωδὰ

Notice that last name, the original spelling of "Joda". Its pronunciation should stand out to anyone familiar with the Greek alphabet...

"My beloved son you are; well pleased I am with you."

In addition to being the Lord, the Savior, the Son of God and the Son of Man, Jesus is also a Jedi.

To Know and Taste the Truth

Someone who has actually tasted truth is not contentious for truth. Someone who is considered by people to be zealous for truth has not yet learnt what truth is really like; once he has truly learnt it, he will cease from zealousness on its behalf. (Kephalaia IV.77; The Wisdom of Saint Isaac the Syrian, translated by Sebastian Brock)

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Last time I studied what St. Isaac was not saying in this passage, how he is not rejecting the positive biblical language about "zeal" for God or "contending" for the truth. This time I'll try to delve into the profundity of what he is saying as I have been exploring it for the last few weeks. Here is where some research into what more qualified writers have made of St. Isaac's words is in order.

Polemics and passions

Fr. Gregory Jensen, an Orthodox priest and chaplain, wrote in 2008 on Orthodox-Catholic relations and why they tend to degenerate into polemics, offering some helpful insights on healthy conversation that eventually intersect with St. Isaac's words. Using the example of how "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52), he argues that mental health, "the integrity of the person's cognitive, emotional and social functions", is not something automatically conferred by an encounter with God, but something we must learn and grow in, a natural part of human development. Summarizing his professor, he explains, "to live a constant human life means that we remain open in awe, trust, and gratitude to the Mystery of Being (God) and becoming (human life as a life of dynamic openness)." He incisively applies this to Catholic/Orthodox conversations (and inter-traditional dialogue in general):

We often talk as if the Catholic/Orthodox dialog is a conversation is between two different, even competing, traditions. In fact these conversations are always conversations between human beings who in their conversations with each other, make selective appeals to their own understanding of the past, both their own and the other's. Traditions, to state the painfully obvious, do not have conversations—only human beings can speak, can enter into a conversations. Tradition, as Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) has pointed out in Being in Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, only exist enhypostatically, that is, by way of the person. 

Too often conversations between Eastern and Western Christians are not understood as human encounters. In fact, I would suggest that the reason that our conversations are so often polemical, is because we imagine that there is nothing of ourselves in our talks with each other. Let me go even further, we are so often polemical because we are striving not to encounter one another. We do not wish to know the other, because not only do we do not wish to be know by the other, we do not know, or even wish to know, ourselves personally. Any human encounter is necessarily one that demands from me both self-knowledge and change. To refuse one or the other of these is to refuse the encounter, the gift of the other person and so to refuse to receive my own life as a gift from God. 

For too many of us, our attachment to our religious tradition is an escape, a refusal, of the dynamic and gratuitous quality of our own lives. We do not wish to grow, to change. Our conversations are polemical because more often than not, our thinking about ourselves is static and rigid. Catholic/Orthodox polemics—at least as we see them in contemporary practice—are only accidentally theological. In the main (and I will address this more in another post) our polemics reflect our own lack of wholeness, of balance, of our own lack of virtue. Or, to borrow from psychology, our encounters so often go wrong because of we are neurotic.

According to Fr. Gregory, our polemics, our defense of and contentions for "the truth" as we perceive it, are in fact a way of refusing authentic knowledge of ourselves and each other, of resisting needed change and growth by drawing doctrinal lines in the sand and refusing to see, much less step beyond them. But by shutting out others, by refusing to let ourselves encounter them as fellow humans (or even living icons of the Almighty) rather than just representatives of enemy traditions and threats to the "truth", we do the same to God. (cf. Matthew 25:31-46)

I am reminded here of how Andrew Louth wrote that truth-as-mystery, the really vital, weighty truth we encounter in the humanities and especially in religion, is of a sort that makes personal demands of you, that cannot be engaged with in a merely "objective", detached sort of way. Theological conversations are not simply abstract debates between rival systems of truth to determine which has the epistemological upper hand; they are human encounters like any other, and to treat them as less than this does not do justice to God, our neighbor, or ourselves.

Fr. Gregory continues in a follow-up post by applying John Zizioulas' description of tradition as existing "enhypostatically" to the subject of inter-traditional conversations:

Let me suggest that if the tradition only exists by way of the person, then tradition is not simply, or even primarily, an objective content. Rather tradition is a virtue and virtues wax and wane. In other words, a tradition is only more or less revealed by how I live my life. Complicating this further, is that I do not live or embody only one tradition. Rather each human life is lived as the intersection of multiple traditions.

Tradition is not merely a body or system of teachings; it is a way, a life, or (in the case of other "traditions", like where we live, where we go to school, or experiences that have shaped our lives) at least a part of how we live. All of these things contribute to how I, as an individual, come to experience and embody the Orthodox tradition. They also add considerable complexity, depth, and need for sensitivity to what we may be tempted to suppose is a simple, straightforward conversation between two rival forms of Christianity (or other traditions).

Add to this the fact that none of us are flawless representatives of our tradition. All too easily we can end up representing instead our own egos, our insecurities, the desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain that Orthodox call the "passions". Fr. Gregory warns that "unless we are well formed in the spiritual life, and psychologically sound, what we are mostly likely to give voice to is not the tradition of the Orthodox Church or the tradition of the Catholic Church, but our own passions. And this, I would suggest, is true regardless of the objective validity of any given statement that we might make." Speaking truly requires more than getting the facts right—again echoing how Louth wrote that holistic truth is not merely objective. Gregory gives an illustration:

The example I use with my own spiritual children is this, it may in fact be objectively the case that I am stupid and my mother dresses me funny, but it is unlikely that telling me this truth is sufficient to change my life. Still less is telling me this likely to encourage me to trust you and give you a place of authority in my life. And let us make no mistake here, in any conversation I have, I only listen to the views of those who I see as authoritative—I might or might not trust [their] authority, but I still must see them as an authority for me.

The great danger of polemics, he warns, is that in our rush to defend "the truth" it is all too easy to become oppositional and hostile, to cease acting and treating others in accordance with that truth.

Whatever the reason, sharp disagreements are inevitable when we are looking together at what divides us. Polemics, however, seem to me to begin with that sharp disagreement. In so doing, they are intellectually unchaste embodying as they do an underlying lack of respect for the limitations of both self and others. In our polemical attitude we are freed from any consideration of our own passions in the pursuit of the Truth. The fact that we often say things which are true does not remove from us the burden of intellectual dishonesty.

Truth as appetite

If we treat dialogue as merely an exchange and weighing of "objective" truths for which the persons involved are merely vehicles, we leave the personal dimension (which is closer to the level on which Truth actually exists) of the "rational" conversation to be governed by our sinful passions. University of Alberta professor David Goa, beginning with the quote by St. Isaac, describes more precisely how this happens. He sums up relativism and zealousness for the truth as two sides of the same coin, two related ways of "misunderstanding our deep desire for a firm truth. ... In both we see this human desire [for truth] turned into an appetite." What follows is a deep diagnosis of the polemical attitude:

Whatever we come to look at and care about is then forced into conformity with the idea, image, or ritual that we have erected as absolute. We begin to hang all our hopes and dreams on the truth of our chosen framework, our precious absolutes (including the relativists’ precious absolute that there is nothing of ultimate value). Our longing is captured by an absolute of our own making. It follows, almost without saying, that once we hang all our hopes and dreams on something that we claim as absolute, it is a short step to hanging all our fears on it as well. In this moment the holy longing of the human heart and mind that lies behind the search for absolutes becomes polluted. Zealousness for the truth frames how we see and understand and reshapes our response to the fragility of the life of the world.

It is this passion, this disease, that St. Isaac says we are freed from when we learn what truth is really like. But we are only open to learn what truth is like when our understanding of truth itself is transformed.

For the relativist, this transformation involves letting go of the rejection of absolutes. But his description of the one who is zealous for truth sounds uncomfortably like me:

The zealous, often religious men and women, have yet to walk through the valley of shattered absolutes. They erect elaborate temples of truth, statement-by-statement, fact-by-fact, temples that have turrets strategically located, each well armed and poised to fire at a moment’s notice. Both the relativist and the zealous are spiritual adolescents at best, and in our fragile world, where the news media often shape the public discourse, they have bonded with each other to divert attention away from serious encounter with “what truth is really like.”

Using public discourse about Islam as an example, Goa goes on to describe how parties (for example, political parties) that are diametrically at odds with one another can unwittingly work together to "contribute with equal passion to the emotional landscape that traps the human spirit somewhere between indignation, despair and cynicism." Both parties antagonistically use the pressure and the perceived threat posed by each other "to reduce complex issues and themes to what they have come to understand in their zeal." For the positions of the religious right and secular left, "truth has become coterminous with a selected set of facts, real or imagined." He then seeks to apply the line of thought offered by St. Isaac to this standoff:

For St. Isaac, zeal for truth is itself a symptom of a spiritual disease. Or, perhaps, it is a condition that tends to develop at a certain stage in the spiritual life and is itself simply a marker of that stage. It is the spiritual equivalent of adolescence where the young try out all sorts of ideas and actions with the conviction that no one else has ever had these thoughts or feelings and they are exploring them for the first time. How can it be that no one else has ever seen just how important and ultimate these thoughts and feelings are?

Recall what Fr. Gregory wrote about "mental health" as the the integrity and functioning of our natural faculties, something in which we should develop over the course of our lives. Zealousness for truth occurs when this growth is arrested by our stubbornly clinging to a certain set of facts as "the truth". And so, "one is stuck in the adolescent stage of the spiritual life."

Better than most wings of the Christian tradition, Orthodoxy has understood that the concern for truth and the question of truth are not anchored or bounded either by philosophical concepts or principles or by historical fact. Fact is not truth nor is truth merely fact. Truth is far beyond the reach of fact. That either philosophical ideas or historical facts are cast in the language of the Christian teaching does not make them any more a matter of truth. You can dress them up all you like, but they remain exposed for what they are, simulacrums for truth. They all indicate that one has not “tasted of truth.”

Goa is exploring the implications of what I glimpsed as I was investigating Orthodoxy, that Truth is not merely "that which corresponds to reality", but reality itself—the supreme Reality, God in three Persons. Statements of fact, while they may soundly describe this Reality, are not the Reality Himself. When we make something less than this Reality the "absolute truth" around which we orient ourselves, no matter how correctly it describes reality, we have replaced the Truth with something less than ultimately true. And this substitution, this idolatry, is the basis for "zealousness for truth".

We want the comfort of our truth statements, of our elevated theologically clothed philosophical doctrines. And we want them because we are addicted to the spiritual adrenalin we feel at the sudden rush of winning, at least in our own minds and hearts, the argument for truth. We want to be defender of the faith, the kind of person who knows he is right and takes pride in staking a claim to what is true no matter what the cost.

Orthodox are no strangers to this phenomenon, especially converts to the faith, who go through what is known as "conversion sickness" (as useful a reference as my lengthy series on becoming Orthodox is, I was probably in the throes of conversion sickness when I wrote it). Calvinists apparently go through it as well, calling it the "cage stage" (the word-picture implying that these zealous new converts need to be temporarily locked in a cage until they calm down to avoid hurting themselves or others). The remedy St. Isaac offers for this zealousness is to "taste the truth". Goa concludes:

We are called to better. We are called to better precisely because in Him who is “the truth and the life” we are freed from the habit of taking refuge in abstract notions of truth. If we taste of truth at every Eucharist we know better. If we taste of truth every time we, like the disciples, find ourselves in Emmaus breaking bread with someone we didn’t know we knew, we know better. We know better every time our hearts are moved with compassion.

No wonder St. Isaac says that when we learn what truth really is we will cease being zealous for truth, cease responding as if it were our place to defend and protect truth. If the history of religions teaches us anything, and I think it teaches us much, it teaches us that one of the most serious religious diseases is zealousness. It was a deep concern to Jesus as he walked the valley of the Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem. And he finally healed us of its bondage when he spoke from the throne of the cross to those who were contentious for truth, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Fr. Gregory, in his last post on the subject, finally cites both St. Isaac and Goa. After summarizing Goa, he concludes with his earlier point that

polemics, a zealous approach to the truth has a strangle hold on us because we do not wish to grow, to change. Our conversations are polemical because more often than not, our thinking about ourselves is static and rigid. Catholic/Orthodox polemics—at least as we see them in contemporary practice—are only accidentally theological. In the main (and I will address this more in another post) our polemics reflect our own lack of wholeness, of balance, of our own lack of virtue. We are, as I said earlier, neurotic.

To know the Truth

Drawing from multiple commentators, I hope I've painted a fairly clear picture of what he meant by "zealous" or "contentious" for truth. In contrast to the good, more metaphorical uses of these terms in the Bible to denote religious fervor and discipline, "zealousness for the truth" is, as Goa says, an appetite for certainty, our disordered passions—pride, insecurity, fear—hijacking our natural will's desire to know the Truth. We erect the system of our own perception of "truth" like a fortress, pledging to defend it against any and all threats, satisfying our appetite by zealously vindicating "the truth" as we see it over against the falsehoods that others have come to stand for in our eyes. In 1 Corinthians 11:16 the word translated into "contentious" is is philoneikos, literally "victory-loving"—a telling construction. Safe and secure in our fortress of facts, we don't authentically encounter God, ourselves, or others, but only the thrill and agony projected by our passions onto the contentious interplay of "truths" being lobbed across the great divide.

Implicit in Isaac's statement is that the truth we are zealous for is something less than the real Truth, which the "zealous" have not yet tasted. Zealousness for truth, as I have been describing it, entails the substitution of a rigid, constructed system of "truth" for openness to encountering and being changed by the Truth that exceeds all of our attempts to define and circumscribe it. When we move from reality to statements corresponding to reality, however correct the correspondence may be, we are removed a step from tasting the truth. This step back is the basis of the "human tradition" that Jesus (Mark 7:8) and the Reformers rightly deplored. Holy Tradition, if it is to be any different, must be the Church's Spirit-guided ascent towards, and life within, the divine Reality, never stopping to accept any lesser construction as ultimate. (Apophatic theology, "theology of negation", is one way of realizing this)

Our need to always be open to and growing is why an inherently parsimonious of minimal approach to truth, such as the Enlightenment ideal of questioning everything and basing one's beliefs only on what can be demonstrated by reason, is inappropriate for us. For if we refuse to accept anything that we cannot fit into our established system of truth, that cannot pass by the gatekeeper of our judgment, we make it impossible to grow in the truth, to be changed by it. We become "closed-minded". There is a similar danger to insisting on only "objectively knowing" the truth at the expense of subjectively engaging with it.

In the Orthodox tradition Truth is, most "truly", the person of Christ (Jhn 14:6), the "one who is", the ultimate Reality and the ground of all being. To know this Truth is to participate in him, to be known by him. Christ is the reality towards which all of our statements and doctrines are directed; they call us forward, to actually taste the Truth, to push past all lesser substitutes. (This is why no one is simply argued into believing, because belief is so much more than the acceptance of certain facts) Thus truth does exist "out there", independently of ourselves, as apologists for "absolute truth" are so quick to assert, but it does not exist independently of persons; rather, the Truth is a Person. The Truth objectively exists (in fact, he exists much more objectively than we do), but cannot be truly known objectively. To know God is to love God. (1 John 4:7-8) Relationships, intercommunion or sharing of life between persons, are much closer to the "natural language" of the Truth than mere words or propositions.

If this really is the case, then it is obvious that the Truth does not need our help, in contrast to systems of truth constructed by us. We need the Truth, he does not need us. And so it is that "tasting the truth" frees us from needing to be zealous on its behalf. Once we have actually tasted truth, our assurance and experience of truth is no longer based on a system that we construct in our minds and need to defend, but on reality, on living experience which is not in any way endangered by what others are saying; we know better. In Orthodox thought, knowledge is indistinguishable from participation. Tasting the truth, partaking in the truth, frees us from the neurotic doubt that drives us to zealously defend truth. The real problem is not the truth itself being somehow threatened, but simply people refusing it, preferring darkness to light, and we respond not by treating them as enemies to be polemically defeated, but by inviting them in.

Tasting the Truth

St. Isaac's words come as an answer to the intense concern I felt for the "unity of the church" and divisions among Christians during my period of doubt. I was grieved by the polemics, the doctrinal disagreements, and the schisms I saw among Christians, and not just because they made it impossible for me to find "true" teaching concerning my doubts without arbitrarily choosing the version I wanted to accept. I sensed that the state of division I felt immersed in was not the way things were supposed to be. While I no longer believe that the mystical body of Christ is divided in this way (praise God for this), this study of polemics has allowed me to see more clearly what was going on, and why theological debates are so intractable: one or more parties have made truth into a sinful appetite, substituted their own perception for reality, and dug into polemical trenches, ready to defend "the truth" against all threats.

The real kicker is that this can happen regardless of the "truth" of the position being defended, how well it expresses reality. Belief that you are in the right, no matter how well-substantiated, does not justify "zealousness for the truth", but rather is undermined by it. Humility, admission of our own weakness, removal of the plank in our eye are just as essential in discussions of traditions and truth as everywhere else. Faith in the Truth can invisibly slip into faith in ourselves as its designated defenders. Zeal for a "false" belief isn't just a matter of ignorance, illogic, bias, or faulty reasoning; it is a symptom of sin, a sickness of the soul. Proving a zealous person wrong, even if you somehow manage to do it, won't cure them of their zeal. Instead we must confront zealousness with patience, grace, and compassion, not contentiousness in kind, like any other sin.

Zealousness for the truth, the mirror image of postmodern pluralism and relativism, pervades our society (especially in election years). It characterizes a fair amount of the dialogue between Christians, especially those belonging to disparate traditions, as well as the constant skirmishes of the "culture wars". But reflecting on St. Isaac's words, I see the pattern he describes nowhere so clearly as in myself—as I feel threatened and angered by opposing viewpoints, build "temples [of truth] that have turrets strategically located, each well armed and poised to fire at a moment’s notice", or leap at opportunities to represent and defend all the treasure I have found in the Orthodox tradition.

Especially now, I am glad that St. Isaac did not speak of "tasting" the truth merely metaphorically, but concretely and intentionally. For in just three days, I will be received into the Orthodox Church by the sacrament of chrismation and finally, after a year and a half of visiting, partake in the mysteries of the body and blood of Christ. On that day, I pray that St. Isaac's words will be fulfilled in me as I taste the Word who gave himself for my sake.