Coming To Faith (1)

My first week in Divinity School, I fell in love with its chapel-dominated residential quadrangle. On the southwestern corner of the quad sat a residential building, my own, named after the nineteenth-century American pastor and theologian, Horace Bushnell. It soon occurred to me that a proper respect for my surroundings should include gaining at least a minimal understanding of Bushnell's legacy, so I headed off to the library, picked out one of his writings pretty much at random, and started reading. It was Bushnell's classic study on Christian nurture (1847), and it affected me so much that I could not put it down until I had finished it.

The most important idea I took away from the book was that faith, developed gradually in a caring community of faith, can be just as much to God's glory as faith evoked in a single instant under the influence especially of revivalist preaching. I admit to having approached Bushnell's book with a bias already formed in his direction. Where I had come from, even though the shouting, stomping, and sweating forms of revivalism were somewhat looked down upon, the essence of revivalism still prevailed, as it does today in most forms of Christian evangelicalism: a personal, deeply affecting experience of Jesus Christ as one's personal Savior and Lord, openly acknowledged, is taken for granted as the only true entrance into the life of faith, and church folk who cannot claim such an experience are behind-in-the-race Christians whose reaching the goal line is still in doubt. As dusty as Bushnell's book was when I pulled it off its shelf, it was still like a breath of the freshest Connecticut air to me at the time.

Some of the problems I had with revivalism, and have now with evangelicalism, I know are rather petty in the grand scheme of things. Classical church music counts for little in this sphere of Christendom, but I should probably get over being such a curmudgeon about it. And as for all the uplifted hands and eyes business, I could simply stop looking when the cameras put the innocent so embarrassingly on display. But my other problems with this way of coming to faith are not so easily minimized. Appreciation of the fullness of Christian history --- especially the bad stuff that should never be repeated, but is --- counts for even less than the music I like, and serious probing of the scriptures counts for almost nothing at all. I concede that more than just lip service is paid by most evangelicals to the idea that conversion is only the beginning and not the culmination of faith. Even so, recounting, massaging, and laying on others what is in fact a very personal, private experience all too often seems the end in itself.

But Bushnell's understanding of the Christian life has its own problems --- although bad musical taste is not typically one of them --- and they are at least as serious as those with which revivalists/evangelicalists should be dealing. Properly dispensed, Bushnell argued, Christian nurture should leave people with a feeling that there has never been a time when they were not fully the Christian people they now are. Instead of being almost-Christians awaiting the next revivalist to scare them into commitments with nightmare-inducing apocalyptic fulminations, believers deserve to feel that they are always-Christians, formed in the image of their Master without ever having to think too much about it, and certainly without having to endure too many of those awful dark nights of the soul. (Actually, for nurture-ists, if I may call them that, even one such night is one too many.)

The obvious problem here is that, if Bushnell's idea is taken at face value, no Christian would ever have to decide for himself or herself to be Christian at all. Faith would become only affiliative in character, that is, a faith that "we" and "they" hold rather than a faith that "I" hold, for whatever reason "I" choose to hold it, whether on the basis of a conversion experience, thinking things out for myself, or whatever. On the matter of coming to a personally owned faith, the evangelicals are right: holding to someone else's beliefs is not enough. Beliefs must become one's own, for one's own reasons.

Where the evangelicals go wrong, though, is over their rejection of the importance of having one's own reasons for coming to faith. For them, only some reasons count --- theirs. Where, more specifically, the nurture-ists go wrong, and how proponents of both views can at last begin to get things right, is the subject of the next column.

A Postmortem On Pulpit Malfeasance

Many good things have come from this year's Presidential Primaries. Especially among the Democrats, younger voters got involved early and stayed involved, even if by themselves they could not determine the outcome. At the same time, among the Republicans, early concerns about the winner's age were finally trumped by perceptions of his competence. Now, there are real issues and very divergent perspectives on America's future to be debated, and many special interests along racial, ethnic, gender, age, and economic lines to be reconciled. A likely high voter turn-out in November (assuming in particular that the Democratic Party does not self-destruct before then) should provide just the kind of referendum that politicians typically wait for before actually doing something for the country instead of pandering to their own supporters.

Everyone I know has his and her list of not-so-good things that have come from this same political process. Not surprisingly, no two lists are identical. I would like to think, however, that there is at least one item that all share in common: the utterly disgraceful performances of three pulpiteers in particular, so mind-numbingly reprehensible as to occasion formal statements of dissociation by Senators Obama and McCain. Obama seemed especially cursed by preacher types. Apparently, Jeremiah Wright's black liberationist racism was not enough to turn him completely off, but Michael Pfleger's contemptible one-upsmanship from Wright's former pulpit finally did in the presumptive nominee's well-intentioned, and otherwise admirable, spirit of tolerance and church loyalty. What disturbs me especially about both flaps in Trinity Church is how many dudgeon-filled members may still be there after the Obamas found it necessary to leave the place. (Did you watch the reactions from the pews to Father Pfleger's spiritually obscene performance?)

And then there is Reverend John Hagee, for a time a bane of Senator McCain's existence. In this part of the country, at least, Hagee is well known to thoughtful Christians as one of the least thoughtful around, but also as one of the most effective, especially in rallying large numbers of similarly logic-challenged fundamentalists, creationists, Zionists, apocalypticists, and Catholic-haters from all walks of Christendom. Somehow, the Senator's staff failed to prevent him from expressing a naïve over-appreciativeness of Hagee's support early in the campaign, but finally discovered the handwriting on the wall and helped to extricate the former Episcopalian from what might have been fall-out on an order of magnitude equal to Obama's.

Floating serenely above these controversies was the almost indomitable Hillary Clinton, whose Methodism has never earned her the credit she deserves for trying to live her life in accordance with it. She, too, however, is not above using Sunday Services and pulpits to her own ends, and in this respect she was just as vulnerable as her opponents in both political parties were. Who knows what unseemly associations presently undiscovered might have eventually made the news had she gone on to be the Democratic Party's nominee? (Although the Methodist pulpiteers I know that she knows are pretty trustworthy, even admirable pastors. You know who you are, so take a quiet bow before you leave your offices today.)

As this campaign continues, Barack Obama and John McCain should share openly the ways that their faith and their faith-pilgrimages have informed and are informing how they think (in contrast with what they think) about the issues with which our society must deal in the years ahead. Hopefully, though, they will do the sharing in places other than Christian pulpits, unless their schedules can somehow be engineered to allow them to show up at the same church on the same Sunday morning and have at it, with God and not fawning preachers or frenzied parishioners as their judge. Politically active preachers easily forget that their parishioners, for the most part, constitute captive audiences of people too polite to give them the what-for they deserve when they conscript their pulpits for purposes of ideological wrangling and then dismiss arbitrarily all and sundry whose views differ in the slightest degree from their own.

God's great gift of freedom to every human being is powerfully manifested whenever people who are called to the ministry of preaching and interpretation use their own gift responsibly, especially by helping those to whom they minister understand better the complexities of the human condition, of societal change, and the difficulties of making progress on anything without encouraging and respecting the opinions of everyone who will be affected by anyone's decisions. I am thankful that the irresponsible behavior of three preachers who should know better raised as many hackles as it did. Maybe the reactions will remind other preachers who aim to speak God's truth rather than political ideology to speak that truth gracefully, intelligently, and with love.