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.

Women in Ministry: Not Just a Position Paper

The small-but-vibrant Christian subsection of Reddit recently had a fairly productive and interesting discussion on the role of women in ministry. For my part, I mostly played around with different ideas, acted as devil's advocate, and in general trolled people. It helped me to develop some lines I've thought I've been having about this increasingly-controversial topic.

The reason women in many churches and denominations don't have as many ministry roles open to them as men primarily goes back to three passages written by Paul (I should mention that Catholics also believe that the fact that the original 12 apostles were men is significant, and that the church therefore does not have the authority to appoint women to their role):

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil. Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued, not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. And let them also be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. Their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus. (1 Timothy 3:1-13)

Paul, in telling Timothy about the qualifications for being an elder or deacon (servant), seem to imply that they must be male.

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control. (1 Timothy 2:11-15)

So women are also not supposed to teach or hold authority over a man.

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (1 Corinthians 14:33b-35)

Women should not speak in church at all? Ouch.

From these passages (also his section on head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11 and his instructions for wives to submit to their husbands), people have labeled Paul as sexist, misogynist, and patriarchal. The question persists: if these passages make us uneasy but we're not willing to write Paul off as an ignorant chauvinist or simply call these sections (and maybe whatever else in the Bible rubs us the wrong way) interpolations by later scribes, what are we to do about his instructions about women? Well, there are plenty of commentaries and other writeups on this subject giving you whatever position you may want to hear, so I'm going to exegete these texts surprisingly little and instead focus on situating them in their greater context.

Some comparisons

Before I get into what I've been thinking, let me try to defuse a bit of the tension that tends to charge any discussion of women's roles in church. In our culture we tend to be very suspicious of "sexism"--the denigration of one sex (women) by another (men)--in all its forms. We demonize sexism and contrast it with an egalitarian view that says that aside from a few biological odds-and-ends, there are no essential differences between men and women in value, ability, or potential. Anything men can do, women can do. Anyone who dares to question the essential equality of men and women or hints at the existence of gender differences is branded a sexist and summarily written off. We insist that gender doesn't matter, but the more we do, the more it seems to matter more than ever.

Obviously this makes things difficult for "complementarian" Christians who seek to apply Paul's words about gender relations in today's world. Though I'm fairly sure Paul would have affirmed that men and women were of equal value in God's sight, he didn't seem to see any conflict between this and seeing limitations to womens' abilities (preaching, teaching, and holding roles of authority) and rights, as we do today. Paul seems to have held a "different-but-equal" view of men and women, one that just isn't fathomable to modern western cultures, so he becomes a sexist to us and we see no further reason to listen to him. Unlike Paul, we simply can't conceive of any way to affirm the equal value of men and women without treating them equally.

An analogy should greatly help this make more sense. Imagine, if you will, the abolishing of all children's ministry so that all children of every age join their parents in church. On top of the crying babies we're used to, you now get kids randomly spouting off the tops of their heads, and the older kids (assuming they aren't completely tuned out) frequently having to ask their parents what's going on. You hear of other churches in your denomination that are, of all things, having youth as young as 12 teaching and even leading adults. One church has a 15-year-old lead pastor. You sigh inwardly with relief a few weeks later as your denomination releases a carefully-worded statement specifying that these positions should be held by adults, additionally clarifying that for the sake of harmony children looking for explanations about the proceedings in church should wait until after the service to ask their parents about it.

This analogy applies in several ways. Jewish women did not worship together with the men (the temple in Jerusalem had a "court of women" which was the closest they could approach); suddenly, when they converted to Christianity, the men and women were worshipping together, just as if children suddenly started joining their parents in church. You can imagine the difficulties this might cause. Placing restrictions on childrens' privilages to lead and teach adults (or even pragmatic ones like asking them to keep silent in church) is totally reasonable, but does this mean we consider children inferior to adults? Of course not!

Obviously this analogy isn't perfect. Feminists might bristle at my comparing women to children. Of course there are big differences between adults and children in maturity, ability, and wisdom, differences which have no analog between men and women. But as unthinkable as it sounds to have children holding positions of church leadership, keep in mind that this would have been somewhat less unthinkable before the invention of the "teenager" as a separate stage of life when they came of age at, say, 13 and were then effectively considered adults. Today, teenagers don't need to fully "grow up" until after college, if not later. What I am asking is: could the belief in essential differences between men and women (like the belief in essential differences between teenagers and adults), at least in part, create those differences?

What is happening when we angrily write Paul off for his statements on gender is that we're ripping his statements out of their ancient context and examining them in our modern one. It's no surprise that they seem more than a bit bizarre when we do this. I think we usually fail to understand how uncontroversial and ingrained the patriarchal view of gender was in Paul's time. We think that if that stick-in-the-mud Paul hadn't been so backwards and sexist, the church could have been egalitarian from its earliest days. Stupid Paul! But if there really were differences between men and women in the new churches (albeit culturally conditioned rather than inherent), we can't blame church rules differentiating between men and women, as if getting rid of them would have solved everything. I have trouble believing that anyone accused Paul of sexism in his time, or that any women bristled at their being excluded from ministry. Let's stop judging the past by the standards of the present and try to understand what Paul was saying in its original context.

Some qualifications

The first thing to notice is that churches who seek to directly apply Paul's instructions and therefore disallow women from being pastors or elders or teaching men don't go far enough. Paul clearly says in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 that they should not speak at all in church, for it is shameful for them to do so. I have yet to see a church that actually applies this verse rather than treating it as an artifact of Paul's culture.

Of more concern are instances of these teachings being violated in the New Testament. In sharp contrast to the subservient role Paul seems to assign them in these verses, women assume a variety of important roles in Jesus' ministry and in the early church. Much is made of the fact that all twelve of Jesus' disciples were male, but he had a smaller but equally devoted following of women, some of whom are the first to discover that Jesus' body is missing from His tomb. (Which is especially puzzling as the testimony of women was considered unreliable in those days) Paul asks that several women be greeted by name in Romans 16: Phoebe, "that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well", "Greet Prisca [Priscilla] and Aquila [her husband], my fellow workers in Christ Jesus", and Andronicus and Junia, who are "notable among the apostles". (Note: Junia's name is conjugated like a feminine noun, but we can't be sure that he/she is a woman) It's very hard to believe that these women could have become so significant in the early church if they never spoke in it.

Or Philippians 4:2-3: "I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life." Again, co-laborers with Paul in the gospel: hard to reconcile with not being allowed to speak in church.

An even stronger example is Acts 18, in which we are introduced to Priscilla and Aquila:

After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them, and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. ... After this, Paul stayed many days longer and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila. ... Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And when he wished to cross to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him. When he arrived, he greatly helped those who through grace had believed, for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus.

So when Paul gets to Corinth, he meets Priscilla and Aquila, fellow Jewish converts and fellow tentmakers by day. They decide to join him in his ministry and travel with him. Then, in Ephesus, we meet Apollos, a charismatic if somewhat ignorant man who is corrected and assisted in his ministry by Priscilla and Aquila. Without twisting the text, we are naturally led to conclude that Priscilla, a woman, is teaching Apollos, a man.

You may object: "Just because someone does something in the Bible doesn't mean it's okay or we're supposed to imitate them. Just look at the Old Testament--Abraham pimps out his wife, Jacob takes two wives and two concubines, Solomon takes hundreds, Moses is a murderer... We should follow Paul's clear teaching, not anyone's actions except Jesus." Well, Jesus didn't let anyone except the Father teach or have authority over Him, but He did give women pretty prominent places in His company (or at least let them speak), so maybe Jesus isn't the best example here either. (If you say that, you're in trouble) But besides the incongruity with Jesus' example, notice the double standard this approach places on the text. Paul is supposed to have been so chock-full of inspiration from the Spirit that he was able to write the perfect, timeless will of God to be unquestioningly followed by the church universal 2,000 years later, but he turns a blind eye to this will being disobeyed by his companions. I don't think inspiration works like that.

I'm not simply trying to argue that the verses where women do appear to teach or have authority in the church "trump" the ones where Paul says they can't because I want them to. Scripture doesn't work that way. I am trying to show that even for Paul himself, the issue of gender in ministry was not as black-and-white as we construe his words today. That even though he justifies his instructions for women with an appeal to widespread tradition (as in 1 Corinthians 14) or the creation order (1 Timothy 2), they may not be as universal as we think. Though there wasn't room for discussion on what to take from Paul's instructions in the churches they were actually directed to, there certainly is today.

Some conclusions

In this issue especially, and in other matters of church practice, I find that discussions often go back to trying to figure out, from the limited Biblical data in Acts and the epistles, what exactly the "early" (first-century) church was doing so we can follow their example--because the infallible Bible came from the early church, so we can trust them. If we give weight to the texts that seem to portray women in leadership roles in the first-century church, then it's okay for us to allow women to preach and teach today. If we find these less-than-convincing and focus on Paul's instructions to the contrary, then only men should teach men, just as it's always been. But the early church is not the ultimate example for the modern church. That role can only belong to Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27), who must be our example just as He was theirs. If the inspiration to write scripture actually made the church perfect, then great, that's been the goal all along, so God never would have withdrawn it. But the church is not perfect yet, but is still being perfected (Ephesians 5:25-27).

And if Christ is my ultimate example, then right now I can't explain (to myself or others) from His example why women should be kept from ministry. Though I desire to take all of Paul's writing seriously, I don't see how to apply his teachings about women in ministry in a way that doesn't denigrate or patronize women, that is consistent with the love of Christ we're supposed to have for each other. In my finite capacity to live as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, I'd rather set aside the lesser command, asking God to move in my heart to make sense of it, and hold onto the greater.

I've really been enjoying listening through Renovatus Church's Both & sermon series, which is largely about Biblical interpretation. In my post on καρδια, I wrote about the first sermon in this series, which uses the example of Acts 15 where the apostles deliberate on whether to require Gentile Christians to obey the Jewish law. They eventually decide not to hold the Gentiles to a a law that they have not done well at keeping themselves, except for a quick list: "to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood." Pastor Jonathan Martin rightly points out that there is no way they could have reached this conclusion with the kind of scripture-only Biblical-grammatical hermeneutics we base doctrine on today: the only scripture they had at the time was the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament), which did require Gentile converts to be circumcised and to obey the law. They do measure their Spirit-led experience against the text, but ultimately their decision is based on experience, not scripture. I see a possible parallel with our modern situation here.

As I mentioned in my last post on gender in the church, I come from a church background where I've seen women successfully participate in all levels of ministry. Both churches I grew up in (my "home church" and my mom's growing-up church that we would attend for holidays) have had woman pastors; in the latter case the church's only pastor for several years was a woman. Additionally, my mother has been ordained as an elder at my home church as it's navigating a long and difficult dispute with its denomination. In short, the only evidence I have heard that woman should not today lead in church ministry has been purely intellectual arguments directly from scripture, which has contrasted greatly with my actual experience in church. If Paul's command speaks to a universal reality of the sexes, I'd expect it to be affirmed, not denied, by experience.

The sermon in the Both & series I listened to most recently builds on this by looking at Genesis 32, where Jacob randomly wrestles with God and receives the new name Israel (which means "he wrestles with God"). Martin translates this into a metaphor for our own relationship with God and His word, which strongly resonates with me in how it captures the fact that loving God wholeheartedly is never easy. Looking back, I've learned the most from the Bible and grown the most when I've been wrestling with it actively rather than just soaking it up passively. The process of digging into the Bible in all its complexity and other-ness has been more transformative for me than getting a polished nugget of theological truth in the end.

His other point that stuck out to me was that "Scripture exists not to give us information about God, but as sacred space for us to encounter God and to wrestle with God." In other words, if our primary goal is simply to somehow reconcile these writings of Paul into a correct "position" on the "issue" of women in ministry, we've missed the point. The Bible is not a book of answers to doctrinal questions, but the word of God that is supposed to confront us, speak to us, change us: "Getting the right answer will not get you anywhere in the things of God...it will not transform you." This is almost forgotten in church debates like this when we seem to be shaking the Bible like a magic 8-ball until a clear, Official answer to our question floats to the surface.

What if God wants us to care about how we're using His word rather than just what we're using it to say? Ephesians 6:17 tells us that the Bible is the sword of the Spirit--but is it the sword that attacks unbelievers and your theological opponents, vindicating your correct beliefs and showing their manifold errors; or is it the sword that pierces "to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart" (Hebrews 4:12)? The Bible is the sword of the Spirit to wield against our sinful hearts, not the sword of the theologians to wield against each other; we can't be the Holy Spirit to each other.

I've hopefully made it pretty clear that I don't want to bar women from any role in church ministry. But if the point of scripture is to encounter God, if it is the sword of the Spirit to pierce our own hearts, it becomes very important that I believe this with humility--both toward God and toward others. Toward God in that I take seriously the fact that this isn't what Paul instructs, and the question of how my view and Paul's can be different is not resolved or closed off to God by any means. Toward others in that I believe it is fully possible to faithfully disagree with me; of course churches (like my own, for instance) that have all-male leadership can manifest the character of God; anyone who holds a different view isn't automatically that much more of a faithless fool. This isn't being weak or wishy-washy or not "taking a stand on God's word"; it is holding loosely to every nonessential trapping of our lives so we never let go or lose sight of the One who is truly essential to us.

Millenials and the Church and All That

The Spark

Apparently I missed some kind of memo in the Christian blogosphere to react ASAP to Rachel Held Evans' piece for CNN, Why Millenials are Leaving the Church. I'm a bit worried that people are so sick of hearing everyone and their dog's responses to it that no one will want to read this, but I feel I have only just gotten enough of a "handle" on the situation to write coherently on it.

You've probably read the original post; if not, I encourage you to do so just to see what all the fuss is about. Evans, attempting to represent the "millenial" generation, tells of her explorations of the reasons so many millenials are turning away from the religion of their parents. Research by the Barna Group has found that fully 61% of today's young adults "had been churched at one point during their teen years but they are now spiritually disengaged (i.e., not actively attending church, reading the Bible, or praying)". Barna points to six main reasons these young adults give for this disengagement:

1. Churches seem overprotective.
2. Their experience of Christianity was shallow.
3. They viewed the church as antagonistic to science.
4. Churches' attitudes toward sexuality were simple, repressive, and judgmental.
5. They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity as the "one true faith".
6. Hostility toward doubt and questions about faith.

This is hardly news. A few years ago the president of the Barna Group, David Kinnamen, published a book titled You Lost Me, focused on drawing conclusions from this data. (My pastor Cor has also hosted a discussion about it on his blog) It's an area of great concern for the evangelical church, with alarmists worrying that (evangelical) Christianity is just a generation from extinction.

Of course, everyone has their own reaction to this situation, and their desired ways to address it aren't always compatible. For her part, Evans speaks against the assumption churches facing declining youth membership often make that the way to bring the young people back is to make some style updates become "hipper" and "cooler"--get a rock band that plays praise music, serve lots of (good) coffee, have the pastors wear skinny jeans, get a cooler website, and so on. Surely that will bring the young people back to church, right!?

Wrong, Evans says. Instead, she identifies these kinds of responses as part of the problem, so lots of millennials are turning to more liturgical, traditional churches that concern themselves more with being authentic than with seeming "cool".

Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters, and we’re not easily impressed with consumerism or performances.
In fact, I would argue that church-as-performance is just one more thing driving us away from the church, and evangelicalism in particular.

She explains that, like every generation, millennials come to church looking for Jesus, and if they don't find Him there, they tend  to leave. They care more about substance than style. She advises churches to sit down with millennials and learn more about they are looking for from church rather than deciding for them.

Responses

Once this post went up on CNN, the reactions and counter-reactions (and counter-counter-counter-reactions, or whatever this post is) began to fly. David Koyzis claims she misses the point of "high church traditions" by viewing them as stopping points for independently-minded spiritual seekers: "Held Evans appears to see Rome and Constantinople as little more than exotic ports of call for a disaffected generation whose members nevertheless retain their own spiritual autonomy. In all things, including spiritual, they [millenials] jealously guard their right to choose, and their criteria for doing so tend to be idiosyncratic at best." To be Catholic or orthodox, he says, means setting yourself under spiritual authority, whose teachings millennials who left church for some of the above six reasons might not like.

Indeed, attending Mass and living as a Catholic is a matter of obedience, not merely of soaking up a “high-church” atmosphere with ancient roots while continuing to live as one wishes and following whatever agenda seems most congenial to the sovereign self.
Ultimately, the same can be said, not only of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but of any church communion taking seriously the normative character of the Christian faith. The way of the cross is always one of obedience. To come to the church with an idiosyncratic checklist of demands is to take the church as church less than fully seriously.

Then Morgan Guyton responds to Koyzis, pointing out how funny it is that Koyzis, a reformed theologian, has somehow been called on to represent Catholicism and Orthodoxy as "a matter of obedience" when it is really so much more than that. He goes over his own weekly experiences with visiting a Catholic mass (Guyton is Methodist and so doesn't obey the authority of the Pope), which is the kind of "cafeteria" approach to spirituality that Koyzis is criticizing, and explains how this kind of "soft syncretism" is really a good thing.

Guyton asks, is it good evangelism to criticize people taking their first steps in the Christian faith for these reasons? "Rather than mining “millennial” consciousness for delegitimizing deconstructions that you can use to zing them for their unsophisticatedness, why not let God continue to use these superficial considerations as prevenient grace?" Are we being encouraging greeters or ridiculing gatekeepers of our own perceived spiritual purity when dealing with seekers? In the end, Guyton seems to agree with Evans' critiques and argues that we shouldn't criticize millennials who share her concerns and are looking for authentic religious experiences that bring them in touch with Jesus while moving past these sticking points, however they find them.

There are still more varied responses. Scot McKnight questions whether the "cataclysmic change" predicted by evangelicals based on the Barna Group data is real at all, or if this is part of millennials' life cycle and we can expect them to increasingly return to church as they get older. Anthony Bradley points to the United Methodist Church as the embodiment of Evans' vision for the church and (rather bewilderingly) wonders if she might be stealthily shilling for the UMC. Trevin Wax stands up for evangelicalism denying that the issues Evans points to are necessarily problems and saying they are caricatures of what following Jesus really should look like:

When I read the Gospels, I’m confronted by a Jesus who explodes our categories of righteousness and sin, repentance and forgiveness, and power and purity.
I meet a Jesus who doesn’t do away with the Law of the Old Testament, but ramps up the demands in order to lead us to Himself – the One who calls us to life-altering repentance and faith.
I see a King who makes utterly exclusive claims, and doesn’t seem to care who is offended.
I see a King who didn’t hold back anything from His people, and who expects His people to hold back nothing from Him.

He essentially deflects whatever blame Evans is directing toward the mistakes of the church, saying that the real issues with sexuality are found in our messed-up culture; that following Jesus is about putting His desires for us ahead of our desire for the church; that millennials are especially leaving the kinds of churches Evans describes because they soften the countercultural message of Jesus and avoid convicting people. Basically, he says millennials, not churches, are the ones who need to "step up".

Similarly, Brett McCracken calls Evans out on what he sees as allowing the young to dictate what the church should be, instead suggesting that millennials "just shut up for a minute and listen to the wisdom of those who have gone before?" (These would be fighting words were McCracken not a millennial himself) He questions the whole "adapt or die!" mentality that values the whims of today's young adults over the wisdom of older and more experienced Christians in deciding the direction of the church as "chronological snobbery". He compares the image-focused attitude of the church, obsessed with what people think of it and how it can please them better, with a typical junior high student. The gospel is the gospel, independently of whatever we want it to be at the moment.

As a Millennial, if I’m truly honest with myself, what I really need from the church is not another yes-man entity enabling my hubris and giving me what I want. Rather, what I need is something bigger than me, older than me, bound by a truth that transcends me and a story that will outlast me; basically, something that doesn’t change to fit me and my whims, but changes me to be the Christ-like person I was created to be.

Finally, Jonathan Fitzgerald responds interestingly to both Evans and McCracken and tries to move beyond endless "conversation" to actually enacting solutions to the issues Evans raises by getting involved in our own churches rather than shopping around for a church that's already suits us perfectly. If Jesus is able to love His church with all its flaws, shouldn't we?

Yet Another Response

At 24, I fit squarely into the millennial generation as it is defined, unlike all the people I just cited except Brett McCracken and maybe Jonathan Fitzgerald. And yet I could barely be any less worthy to represent the nebulous, somewhat arbitrarily-chosen group of people designated by pollsters as "my generation". Wrapping up this whole category of people in the compact term "millennial" conveys the illusion that we are a coherent, neatly-defined group which we can converse about as a whole using sweeping generalizations. This is a mistaken notion. McCracken's description of millennials as a "#hashtagging, YOLO-oriented, selfie-obsessed generation" so completely fails to resemble me and many of my friends that I find it hilarious.

This is part of why I really appreciate Jonathan Fitzgerald's response, that we need action rather than conversation. It's not so much that actions speak louder than words; it's that actions, unlike words, are always concrete and contextualized, not hazy and nebulous. Millennials, like the rest of us, are individuals, not just a statistical demographic, whose relationship with these and other current issues in the church is unique and complex. Only once we start seeing them as individuals to be known rather than as members of predefined groups to be studied and concluded about can we be Christ to them, and they to us.

Besides that, I largely see the familiar liberal-Christian-versus-conservative-Christian argument being played out on the stage of the Barna Group data. Most everyone affirms the basic problem--fewer young people are attending church today than in years past--and rightly concludes that what the church needs, in the most general possible terms, is "more Jesus", but then disagreement arises over what, specifically, this is supposed to look like. More liberal Christians like Evans point to ways the church is pushing young people away that should be corrected; conservatives like McCracken are more likely to defend the church and either deny the problem or explain that the gospel is supposed to be offensive, so we shouldn't be surprised that people are turning from the church, which is supposed to represent Christ to them instead of pandering to their whims.

All this plays into a "rule for disagreement" I have, which is to try to understand the position you disagree with and make it make sense to you, rather than simply focusing on refuting it. Regardless of whatever vague demographic categories they are hidden behind, I don't doubt that the six issues raised by the Barna Group are serious ones worth our concern. Denying X current trend in church attendance among group Y does nothing to change this fact. Rather than denying that these things are problems or reaffirming that, say, the church is supposed to be concerned with sex or the exclusivity of salvation in Christ, conservatives need to honestly ask themselves, "Could these things really be problems somehow, with Millenials or others? Could I be part of those problems?"

Meanwhile, liberal-leaning Christians (with whom I increasingly identify) need to take seriously the possibility that they are expecting the church to conform to their own wishes and preferences (which may or may not be right, but definitely aren't perfect) rather than to the image of Christ. And this is where I see the value of Jonathan Fitzgerald's words, challenging myself more than others. It's far easier to point out the faults and areas of improvement we see in others than to work on our own (see Matthew 7:1-6). Assuming that the movement of young people away from the church is a problem, assigning responsibility for it to the church or to them won't help; only by shouldering it ourselves while trusting God to be enough can we begin to change it.

Us Versus Them

If you're been following the news much lately, you've surely heard about the "Occupy Wall Street" protest that's ongoing. Thousands of people are taking to the streets of Manhattan to protest...something or other. I wasn't sure of their goals until I read their statement. A related trend is stories from "The other 99%" from people struggling to get by in life, implicitly contrasted against the luxury the top 1% of America's wealthy presumably live in.

First, a quick aside from what I remember from economics class. Much of the protest is about decrying the perceived selfishness and greed of "Wall Street". (A convenient geographical metaphor for faceless corporations) The OWS statement specifically mentions "corporations which place profit over people, self-interest over justice..." They expect too much from businesses. We expect businesses--and individuals--to act in their own self-interest. The purpose of businesses is, first and foremost, to make money, not to improve their community or the environment or anything. (Unless this is what they're making money for doing)

Obviously there are countless ways for this to go wrong, as we've seen, which is why business needs regulation, so that we can expect corporations to also behave ethically and legally, which is often not the case. But the simple pursuit of profit is to be expected from businesses, not decried. Companies aren't beholden to public opinion but to their stockholders and their profit margin--the best way to make a statement to a corporation isn't a protest, but a boycott.

But that's just a minor correction. What really troubles--even frightens--me is the "us versus them" mentality I see behind both of these protests. It's an incredibly explicit, even objectively decidable division--"us" is the bottom 99% of earners in America, "them" is the top 1%. As history has shown over and over, painting the situation like this is one of the best ways to motivate people. Forget trying to learn and understand the complicated economic truth behind the recession--the super-rich are bleeding this country dry!

Occupy Wall Street is an example of the anger that blaming your problems on an external source can foster. I'm afraid of how ugly having all these disgruntled people in one place could become. If you're concerned about the direction America is going like the OWS protesters, know that positive change can only come if people start thinking rationally, compassionately, and above all, constructively. As one wise Jedi Master said, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."