Our “Free Space” column, unlike the feature articles, is the opportunity for those outside of our circles to respond. It doesn’t imply editorial endorsement, but encourages the open exchange of ideas. -EDS
MR: You weren’t always a theologian. How did you become interested in this vocation?
EC: It is not exactly that I became interested in becoming a theologian. I started out studying religion. Religion is dangerous business. It generates a lot of problems. Religion has been the source of much violence and hatred throughout history, into our own day. I came to see that religions need constant care-pruning, feeding, and watering-to remain healthy and vibrant. In the course of studying religion, I started reading theology. By conviction, I believed that the theologian’s job is to help the tradition be the least dangerous possible. However, in the course of reading, theology seeped under my skin, shaping me in its own image. In fact, I met God through studying theology. I came to see that the theologian’s job is also to help people to know and love God better. So, I revised my original conviction. One way the theologian helps the tradition be as healthy as possible is to help people know and love God in ways that enable her and the society in which she lives flourish spiritually, morally, intellectually, and socially.
As I read great theologians I saw that they were correcting one another’s mistakes and addressing the wrong or unclear turns that the tradition had taken before them. Karl Barth, for example, was correcting Calvin; Calvin was correcting Luther; Luther was addressing issues in the medieval tradition; Anselm was correcting Augustine, and so forth. Each later theologian had the advantage of seeing how the earlier theology worked out over the long haul. Theology is a living conversation between the living and the dead. I ended up joining that conversation.
When I first became “hooked” on theology my husband bought me a T-shirt that read “Junior Theologian.” When it was clear that I would set my life in this direction he bought a sweat(!)shirt that read “Serious Theologian.”
MR: Your recent book, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine, announces from the outset that it arose “from reading classical texts of Christian theology slowly.” Can you explain this a bit?
EC: In reading St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of Christ’s passion, I saw that he explained tiny details of the story of Christ’s death with an eye toward the effect these otherwise insignificant details would have on the salvation of the world: he was lifted high upon a cross to clear the air; or, he stretched out his arms on the cross that all might come within the sweep of his saving embrace; or, the cross extends in all directions to reach to all the nations of the world. As I read with careful attention to detail and went back in history, I saw that the great theologians explained details of the story of salvation that seemed to be odd or unusual to us as intentional acts on God’s part to get our attention in a certain way. None of it was arbitrary; each detail was intended to affect us. I realized that Christian teachings not only explain the logic of Christian beliefs, but they expect to change us.
In reading the great theologians of the Christian tradition I saw that they puzzled over things that also puzzle us: Why did God put an innocent man to death to redeem us? It looks like God is either powerless, cruel, or simply not very clever. St. Augustine, St. Anslem, and St. Thomas all worried over this as well as other tricky questions. They developed answers that were designed to persuade doubters that God was really in control of the events of our salvation, and that when we take the time to understand them well, we will not only come to respect God but to fall in love with “him.” Their assumption is that God knows what “he” is doing. If things about the Christian story look odd to us, we must be missing something. God has chosen just this and no other way to deal with us because this way is best for us. When we thoroughly understand and take seriously who God is through what “he” has done for us, we will come to understand ourselves more realistically.
MR: You seem to believe that developing character and enjoying life-truly enjoying life-are the direct effects of theology, that knowing more about God in Jesus Christ and who we are in Christ, far from being obstacles to the practical life, are essential for it. Do you think this conviction is missing in a lot of churches today, as doctrine is increasingly marginalized or kept from shaping practice?
EC: Everyone has a theology. That is, everyone operates according to beliefs and values that shape their desires, behavior, and thinking. Character and attitudes are shaped not only by our personalities and the environment we grow up in-within the limits of our genetic endowment-but by our expectations as well: what we think we should want and not want, what we think we should have and not have, and what we think we should do and refrain from doing. Most people’s theology is implicit. We operate in the world most of the time without reflecting carefully on the motivations, values, and beliefs that actually guide us. Or, we profess certain beliefs and values but are actually guided in our daily activities by an operative theology that is somewhat different from our professed theology. One task of theology is to help people articulate their theology and synchronize it with what they profess. This is difficult. It is an important reason why theology easily becomes marginalized from the church.
Christian doctrines-beliefs about God and the world and practices that make those beliefs tangible-intend to shape those expectations, hopes, and responsibilities. When properly exegeted, they convey to us how we should conceive ourselves and what we should expect from ourselves and others. They convey to us our place in the universe, in relation to God, the physical world, and other people.
One of the tasks of doctrinal theology is to reshape the values and beliefs about ourselves and the world in line with God’s will and destiny for us. Who God is and how “he” is known to us shape how we understand our aspirations, our obligations, our talents. On the Christian view, true happiness is enjoyment of life as God wants us to practice it, and as “he” gives us leave to do so. Theology from this vantage point, then, seeks to help those who do not have time or the inclination to examine their implicit theology to become more self-conscious about it so that it becomes more explicit and better able to guide one’s daily life. Without a self-concept shaped by God’s being and actions, something else will come and shape it. The practices of Christian piety, private devotions, public worship, Bible study, participation in the sacraments and other spiritual disciplines hold us accountable to the faith we profess in our personal relationships and in how we spend our time and treasure.
MR: Even while proclaiming itself “postmodern,” much of contemporary theology and practice-in evangelical as well as mainline circles-seems to buy into the modern notion of progress and to apply it to theology. So, for instance, going back to retrieve some insight from Augustine, Luther, or Calvin is immediately labeled “repristination”-parroting the past. But you write, “In this regard there is no reason not to consider our theological forebears at least as intelligent and insightful as we are, despite our disagreements with them.” (1) Do you see the tide turning in this regard, perhaps as a result of changing views concerning the way we understand (i.e., hermeneutics)?
EC: Our age is in danger of cutting itself off from the past. We are living under the dangerous misperception that because we have more effective technology and science that we are smarter than people who lived before us who lacked these things. The strength of the economy is based on the ideas of novelty and consumption. What is used or “old” is to be cast away for what is new and untried. Change is thought to be a good in itself.
The fact that we have cars and computers may have little to do with progress in godliness, however. To theologize-that is, to seek to understand God, ourselves, and the world-based solely on our own time and place in history, gives us little critical distance on ourselves or on our theology. To some extent, theology has bought into the nineteenth-century ideology of progress and development. Now, while it is true that over the long haul, unfortunate turns in Christian teaching become evident and so available for correction, the notion that later is better and that we ought to overcome the past rather than learn from it, is a trap. It belies a smug attitude that says that we do not need guides to help us know and love God, and to guide the Church and its members. Learning from seasoned Christians does not mean slavishly adhering to their teachings. What they offer us, however, is a critical distance on ourselves that no one else can offer.
Despite our need for interlocutors who have different prejudices than we have, in order to offer us an other against whom we can press our ideas and who can press us beyond our own rationalizations and self-interest, I think it unlikely that the deep prejudice against the past will be broken through any time soon. The prejudice that the present is superior to the past is simply too deeply ingrained in the modern, and the postmodern sensibility to allow for much conversation on this point. The journey into the past will increasingly be undertaken by a few brave souls, like a space odyssey.
At the same time, I do see some cracks beginning to appear in our resistance to learning from the past, especially among evangelicals. Books are appearing and questions being asked about aspects of the Christian tradition that have long been dismissed out of hand. Practices of the church that have been discarded are being reconsidered. Many factors contribute to this including excellent recent scholarship, ecumenism, and shifts in the training of religious leaders.
Additionally, the decay of our culture calls for escape networks, places where people can go to be healed from the spiritual damage incurred from our economic and educational systems. The Bible and the church provide such havens, respite care from the rat race. At its best, the Christian way of life can inconvenience our secular assumptions. It ought to be a nuisance, challenging us to ask if God’s way for us in the thick of global capitalism is not other than consumption and novelty.
MR: What do you think that the reformers particularly could contribute to our situation today?
EC: By reformers, I mean those brave Christians, beginning with St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century, and continuing through the sixteenth who held up the need for ecclesiastical as well as spiritual correction of the church. In addition to St. Francis and those who lifted up the evangelical value of poverty as a protest to the wealth of the hierarchy, reformers of the church include Savanarolla, Julian of Norwich, and St. Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century. They were, in turn, followed by John Wycliffe and Jan Jus. Many of them protested current belief and practice, but never gained the political power necessary to effect widespread change. It was only in the sixteenth century that the magisterial reformers gained enough power to change the face of the Western Church.
If we think of the Age of Reform broadly as the four hundred years from Francis to the Council of Trent, we find many things that the reformers may contribute to our situation today. I will mention but two of them. One is that to benefit from the Christian faith people must understand it. The rise of the mendicant preaching orders, like Luther’s preparation of catechisms and the setting up of schools, all suggest that Christians who can articulate their faith have an advantage over those for whom the church may be a comforting place but who do not grasp the faith they profess sufficiently for it to guide their lives.
A second lesson we can learn from the reformers is that theology is tied to the context in which Christians find themselves. Paul’s letters-the backbone of Christian theology-were all written in response to specific needs. The theology of both Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther grew out of their worry over the pastoral needs of Christians who were paralyzed by fear at the wrath of God taught to them in their little corner of the Church. For his part, Calvin saw the antinomian effects of Luther’s teaching misunderstood, and sought to balance the teaching on God’s unconditional grace with teaching obedience to God’s law. The lesson we might draw from them is that theology responds to the spirit of the age. It is contextual, even if the truth of God it seeks to explain is not. That is why there cannot be any theology above careful criticism.
MR: Elsewhere you are critical of aspects of Calvin’s view of guilt and grace. But you write, “A secular age, like our own, that is no longer sure that we need help, or, even if we did, what help would look like, will have difficulty with Calvin.” (2) Some of us think that the evangelical movement, which in many respects has held out so much promise after the erosion of doctrinal commitments in the mainline, has tended in recent years to abandon theology in general and a serious theology of sin and grace in particular. What do you think?
EC: I am not in a position to judge whether evangelicals have abandoned a serious theology of sin and grace. What I do think is that it is time for a reconsideration of sin and a reconsideration of grace so that both can be proclaimed in ways that can be heard by the uncatechized who do not share the Christian vocabulary. Classical talk of sin and grace is difficult to hear in our culture. The church has tended to have a one-size-fits-all understanding of sin. As modern psychology has enabled us to understand temperamental and psychological differences among people, our understanding of sin must become more nuanced-aware that different people sin in different ways. At the same time, the permissiveness of our culture has led to some serious social and economic problems and to increasing levels of violence. It may be Christianity’s gift to the culture to be able to speak about the requirements of the law of God, such that our economic and social behavior as well as our sexual behavior are called to account before God.
One of Calvin’s greatest contributions to the Christian theological tradition was his focus on the greatness of God and the powerful stimulus of the fear of God’s judgment in helping us to understand ourselves better. Measurements for self-assessment seem to be in short supply in the age of self. Calvin’s writing stands as an important reminder that we are not to measure or guide ourselves by our own lights, but be humbled by and obedient to God’s will for us as best as we can apprehend it.
The Christian doctrine of grace has sometimes been cheapened into the idea that our behavior doesn’t matter, for God’s love conquers all if only we believe that it is so. The challenge for the preaching of grace in our day is perhaps to awaken a yearning for God in our culture. While we cannot force anyone into life with God, we can surely pray that God “himself” will entice those who need “him” (who doesn’t?) to take hold of “him” through the Incarnate One. We cannot command ourselves or one another to love God, only God can do that. But we can commend one another to God. The task of the church is to allow those who have-by God’s grace-come to yearn for God, follow that yearning into the presence of God in moral and spiritual union with Christ. That, it seems to me, is the witness to God’s grace that the church is called to make.
MR: Could you conclude with a few suggestions for reintegrating faith and practice in the post-Christian West?
EC: Practicing the Christian life is a refuge from the bloated and harsh culture that dwells within us. Here are a few suggestions for practices that grow out of the theological conviction that we are happiest when we glorify God in all that we do:
- Reclaim marriage as a sacrament, that is, as a means for practicing a holy life, a life united to God through Christ. Marriage sanctifies the human body and brings it under divine guidance.
- Uphold holy friendship. In John’s Gospel, Jesus calls his disciples friends, those bound to one another by his solidarity with them on one hand, and his solidarity with the Father on the other. The ecclesia is a community of friends bound together by their love for Jesus and subsequently their baptismal vows. Christian friendship requires great skill. A map for learning how to do it was charted by Aelred of Rivaulx in the twelfth century. Learning to be the church requires learning to be a friend. Perhaps the practice of foot washing can support holy friendship.
- Scripture enjoins us to be still and know God. Being still is virtually impossible in our society. We cannot stay socially or economically still, lest our careers, our businesses, and our relationships falter. We are wearied simply with keeping going. Suppose Christians were again to practice keeping holy silence, unplugging the wires and gadgets to which we are hooked up like a patient in intensive care, as if we can no longer live without them. Silence is a way of honoring God’s presence, even in the midst of our busyness. It is a sure way to abstain from sins of the mouth and to discern the leading of God.
- Reclaim the practice of Lent, in which Christians are invited annually to review their Christian witness and ministry, perhaps by being visited by other members of the congregation in their home or places of business. Lent is the Christian season of stocktaking. It is a time for Christians to build one another up in the Lord.
- Reclaim family prayer, Bible study, and hymn singing. Being a child and being a parent are quite difficult today. Teaching parents to bless and encourage their children as they grow into the full stature of Christ is perhaps one of the best ministries the church can undertake at the moment. Teaching parents how to teach young children to pray for friends, family members, teachers, and especially strangers (perhaps out of the newspaper) is a great and lasting gift.
- Reclaim the Sabbath. Sabbath is a time for restoring the soul. Abstaining from the marketplace and any activity connected to violence one day a week is a life-affirming practice. Rest is not the same as entertainment, or rather being entertained. Rest is time just to be. It is also time to exercise those parts of our minds and bodies that are neglected in the course of our work. Some persons are restored by being alone, while others are restored by social intercourse.
2 [ Back ] Charry, 218.
