Infallibility

Among the many contributors to Christians' getting cross-wise with each other, one of the most annoying is the claim of absolute certainty about how the core beliefs of the faith should be expressed in diverse social, cultural, and religious contexts. That there are such beliefs, "the marrow of Christian truth," as John Wesley put it, is beyond dispute. But what these beliefs meant in their original settings and what they can mean in the here and now is not.

For instance, it is hard to figure out how to answer Islam's challenge that the doctrine of the Trinity contradicts the spirit of monotheism, when the categories in which this doctrine came to full expression in the fourth century are understood by hardly anyone in the twenty-first. Closer to home are the many challenges to spelling out a definitive understanding of human sexuality in a tradition springing from, in all probability, never-married, celibate founders (St. Paul figures prominently in this discussion) who thought nothing of demanding that their followers leave hearth and home, at whatever consequence to the family members left behind, to be remembered only for their fecundity.

When facing challenges like these, relying on people who must have absolute certainty at all costs is not wise; they are too anxious within themselves to be trustworthy guides for anyone else. What some of them are willing to sacrifice for their (false) sense of assurance is simply too costly --- truth itself. And yet, the sacrifices go on, often to great acclaim.

One especially insidious way that this proclivity expresses itself is in the insistence upon an infallible foundation for Christian teaching, on the basis of which core Christian beliefs can be promulgated as not only without error, but as incapable of ever being in error, period. You have to stop and think about this a little, for its full force to set in. God, we have believed, does not and cannot make mistakes. But human beings who do neither? Or a Book that does neither? Or interpreters of both who cannot be wrong in what they say about the teachers and the books that have gone before them? Only very, very insecure people, or at least very, very spiritual people in isolated moments of panic, would consider even the possibility of setting up any human creature on earth as bearing in his or her own finite nature the infallibility of God.

As if to offset at the outset the outrageousness of the infallibilist hypothesis, infallibilists themselves put on a good show of reminding us that important distinctions are to be made between eternal truths and temporal ones, and that they claim infallibility only for the former. Some truths, in other words, are true for some times and situations and not necessarily true for others. Earlier prohibitions against women speaking in church illustrate well this second kind of truth. As should denials of their authority over men --- or should they? And now we get a glimpse into how the trouble begins.

Non-infallible along with infallible teaching? A nice try, but rarely a successful one. For one reason, already suggested, we never seem to be able to agree for very long on exactly which truths belong to which category. Coptic Christians still balk at trinitarianism, Protestant Christians still balk at transubstantiation, and thoughtful Christians still balk at taking the Book of Revelation literally. A much more important reason for resisting this dubious distinction is that it rarely stays in place anyway. Like the nose of a desert camel, once a theologian slips one infallible doctrine under the tent under the cover of darkness, there soon follow many others in the full light of day, until there is room neither to move nor to breathe.

Recent practice of the Roman Catholic teaching hierarchy illustrates this danger well. "Non-infallible" teaching, particularly in the area of human sexuality and social ethics, has come to assume the force even if not the name of infallible dogma which is not to be questioned, under the threat of being silenced and ostracized within the church. Some of the most profound and influential Roman Catholic theologians of the past three decades have already suffered these ignominies --- Hans Kung, Tissa Balisuriya, Leonardo Boff, and Charles Curran, to name just a few --- and there will be more in years to come. The leader of this new Inquisition has been none other than the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. I learned of this new Pope's selection from a dental assistant who was hearing it on the radio at just the moment my dentist had started drilling out a cavity. There's a sermon in there somewhere.

Odium Theologicum

Acrimonious theological debate, which many decry as the principal impediment to the mission of the church today, is no new thing. Aflame with zeal for loving good works as the earliest Christian communities were, those communities also housed more than a fair share of what we now refer to as our-way-or-the-highway types. And they did so in spite of their Lord's passionate hope that all of his followers would remain one in Him.

Before Paul could even get his first letter written, Jewish and Gentile Christians were duking it out over circumcision and dietary practices. Then, there was that strange band of spiritual cavaliers, the "pneumatikoi", whose sense of oneness in Christ was so individualized as to leave almost no place for communal faith at all. And before too much longer, full blown paranoia began setting in among newly persecuted Christians, whose afflicted seemed to have had nothing better to do than peer around corners in search of an anti-Christ among them. What is especially distressing about all these aberrations is how early they arose in Christian history.

From one perspective, there should be nothing surprising about the fact that conscientious and otherwise mutually respectful Christians are capable of losing it when some cherished opinion, tradition, or practice is suddenly confronted by questions and doubts, not to mention ridicule. After all, the church is the people of God, and as such, it is sometimes bound to act just like most other people do at their most defensive. That this "pilgrim people" believed itself to be about God's mission in the world counted for very little through the centuries in warding off both potential and actual fratricidal conflicts over what in the grand scheme of things ought to have been counted, in Paul's phrasing, as dross. (His Greek word was a little more pointed.)

But it is just this grand scheme of things that has proved so difficult to keep in view. How much grander can a scheme get than one according to which the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, is even now at work reconciling all of them and making them new? Just as families can settle too soon for too little of all that God envisions for them, God-loving communities ---Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike --- can and do remain hunkered down for too long in tight enclaves of arrogant believers bewitched by the notion that overwhelming hordes of infidels are threatening them from the four corners of a fallen world. Their cups of salvation are soon replaced by bowls of wrath.

The disturbing fact that lovers of God so easily become hateful of one another --- then, now, and perhaps into the distant future as well --- is as difficult to explain at an emotional level as it is painful to acknowledge. Even the faintest sense of God's magnificence, bountifulness, and mercies should be enough to cast out hostility toward oneself and others permanently. But it did not always work this way among those closest to Jesus in the flesh, and it does not always work this way for those who have to be content with knowing Jesus only in the spirit.

Emotionality aside, from a theological perspective, it is not difficult to see how a wrathful spirit can overtake a loving one in our churches. Two kinds of misunderstanding are especially pernicious contributors to the problem. The first comes from conflating essential, core teachings with time-bound, topical ones; it wrongly insists that the latter carry the same authority as the former. The second comes from disrespecting the fallibility of the human capacity to express divine things in finite words and images; it just as wrongly insists that there is a quality of infallibility about at least some church pronouncements whose denial inevitably jeopardizes salvation (someone else's salvation, that is --- never one's own.) Just how these misunderstandings are making current theological debates as acrimonious as they are will be the subjects of columns to come.

We have it on Jesus' own authority that the divisions which beset even his most conscientious followers both should and can be overcome. By God's design, the kingdom he announced is a social order within which there is to prevail a unity of spirit in bonds of peace. The moral imperative contained in this vision has been overlooked all too frequently in the troubled history of Christianity: toward those who do not understand the Word of God in Christ as we do, we are to act charitably, not wrathfully, and with an open mind instead of a vengeful heart.