cultural

It doesn't take much searching to find theological critiques of "cultural Christianity," which for convenience I'll define as a social phenomenon in which people belong to a church primarily because of cultural, national, or social identification.

If I understand the critique correctly, it goes something like this: when church membership becomes something one acquires not out of personal commitment but simply because it is the thing one does if one is a member of a given society, then the church has lost a vital element of its life (what that element exactly is depends on the critic). Often the expression of cultural Christianity takes the form of an expectation that the church is there to provide a kind of spiritual service (baptism, weddings, funerals) to anyone regardless of their commitment to church outside those life-cycle events. The situation here in Finland differs legally  from that in the United States, in that the Orthodox Church of Finland and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland are both established churches. And yet, in at least some parts of the United States there are de facto established churches. Not in the legal sense but in historical and cultural senses.

However, today I don't want to focus on cultural Christianity per se, but rather upon its effects on clergy. What kinds of tensions emerge between vision and (for want of a better term) the "everyday"? (I'm thinking of the Finnish word arki here.) Or, perhaps more accurately put, between living with the knowledge of what one's tradition teaches about the existential meaning of being in Christ, and the equally weighty knowledge that many if not most church members are content with far less?

 

overburdened

Sometimes I think we load the Sunday liturgy with too many expectations. We treat it as if it were the only place we go to encounter God.

This is a distorted view. The Sunday service alone cannot bear the burden of sustaining a Christian's life in God. There must be more, of which the Sunday service is a part, a critical element to be sure, but still only a (privileged?) moment in a continuum. This is true for every member of the church, clergy and laity alike.

are clergy allowed to worship, too? Or: liturgical dispositions

I've been conversing with a friend of mine about the question of how the clergy themselves are able to worship when they are involved with so many aspects of the Sunday service. Although my friend belongs to a mainline Protestant church, I think the issue he raises can be found among clergy of a wide range of Christian traditions.

A standard definition of liturgy is "the work of the people," an idea rooted in the Greek word leitourgia. Unfortunately, what is the offering of praise and worship to God by the entire body of Christ has too often become merely an event to attend and observe. A show where the church's members expect to see the clergy do "their thing." That is, to do the work of worship for them.

In a sense this is understandable. Clericalism is deeply-rooted in the church. In addition, worship often is thought of largely in terms of things that are usually thought to take professional training (such as preaching, exegesis, playing and leading music).

There's also the issue of the basic meaning of a professional clergy for the spiritual life of the church. The existence of a professional clergy can - and has - fostered the expectation that they are the ones paid to be "religious" and embody the practices and values that rightly belong to all church members.

There is also in some traditions an unfortunate confluence of revivalism and secular traditions of spectacle and entertainment that shape expectations of what one expects of worship. Thus clergy become alchemists of religious experience, expected to construct worship that will produce the desired (and expected) feelings.

No wonder that in such a liturgical setting it would be difficult if not impossible for clergy to feel that they too are able to worship God.

I don't mean this post to do anything but muse a little on this problem, and maybe also to sketch the direction of future posts about it. So briefly . . .

First and foremost, there is the matter of the clergy's own spiritual life in general, and of how their liturgical role or roles form part of that life - or not. More fundamentally, we need to ask how clericalism has eroded and even destroyed the spiritual life of clergy.

There are deep liturgical issues at work here too.  Not simply questions about what worship is all about, but also about the relationships between worship and the nature of the church.  I also wonder about how deeply the liturgical movement really took root in the churches. Not just the Protestant churches, but in the Orthodox church as well.  Was all that work for naught?

There are wider issues of spirituality, ascetical theology, whatever you want to call it - but I need to think further before I can formulate something more precise.

does it have to be neo-Platonic?

Why not a form of Pragmatism? Or Personalism (it's been done before: read Berdyaev)? Or some variety of Existentialism? Simply because the Fathers used forms of Platonism (and Stoicism, for that matter) doesn't mean we're obliged to do the same.

I'm aware that this isn't a new thought. It still bears repeating.

perennialism

There's much to be said for at least some forms of perennialism. If I understand it correctly, perennialism claims that there is a kind of universal divine wisdom leading to salvation, and that salvation can be had by following any of the great world religious traditions.

However, a person has to choose a tradition within which to live, practice, learn, grow. All paths lead to God, but one still must choose a path. This is very different from a pick-and-choose approach to wisdom.

And yet, where it is modern is its meta-stance (if I may put it that way) towards all religious traditions. Some would criticize, and perhaps rightly so, the idea that one can stand somehow above all religious traditions and come to the conclusion that they are all equally valid paths to God.

Does perennialism stand or fall on this question? I don't think so.

losing catholicity

The Apologists argued in the second century that the Christians were a new people God had brought into being through Christ. The old divisions of people into nations no longer had any force in Christ. This argument, of course, goes all the way back to Paul. It is a foundation of the catholicity of the church.

Yes, I know - and I've mentioned it earlier - that Orthodox theologians in the twentieth century not infrequently contrasted Orthodox "catholicity in depth" with Catholic "catholicity in breadth." I think that argument was more about defending Orthodoxy's dubious embrace of nationalism, and scoring points against Catholicism, than positing a genuine ecclesiological principle.

Orthodoxy today needs to discover catholicity "in breadth." And in terms of this understanding of catholicity, what applies to the church as a whole equally applies to its theology and those who teach it. When the church in any particular place rejects ideas - and teachers! - because they come from someplace else in the world, because they are "foreign," the church denies its catholicity. It degrades itself, becoming a servant of the old tribal gods of nation, language, people, blood.

surviving the desert

This is the tentative title of a book I've decided to begin. It's "practical theology" in the sense that it will be about the uses of theology in times of alienation from, estrangement from,  disillusionment with, the church. Think of it as a work of what some traditions call ascetical theology. For surely it is a severe discipline to come to terms, creative terms, with the discovery that the garden of the church harbors a desert as well.

theology of transition

What would a theology of transition look like? Pastoral care, social and economic analysis, a revisiting of the meaning of work and human giftedness in an era of scarcity.