Tuesday evening I met up with some people I knew only from Twitter and who have various connections to the Emergent Church movement. The Anglobaptist who was there as well is the exception. It was a good and enjoyable and thought provoking evening. I also have a melancholy about the evening. I have been struggling to articulate what it was. And found myself distancing myself from the melancholy in analysis of our general situation of "emergence" but that just didn't do the encounter between us justice.
I will not, nor could I necessarily, recount our conversation and our stories that we told in brief. However, there were tensions, in each of us, and between us. We were okay with that, perhaps even reveled in them a little. The stories that were told were ones of moving away from one thing to something else, as well as discovery of faith in a more meaningful way: In these stories there were things rejected, and here is one possible source of melancholy. In these stories what had been rejected seemed to loom large behind what is now held. I know this tendency in myself and it rarely if ever serves me nor the search for God and Truth well. Mostly the melancholy comes from memories of sitting with a group of friends in L.A. from various backgrounds and churches: Roman Catholic, variously Evangelical and Charismatic and Mainline spending time in evangelical churches. I don't think the melancholy was missing those people and those conversations though I do miss them, but more that twenty two years ago when I first met this group (first calling themselves "Minds for Christ", eventually calling ourselves "The Society") we were dealing with pretty much exactly the same issues that came up in our conversation and telling of stories on Tuesday evening. Though with a difference: somehow those of the Society were more aware both of the previous history of evangelicalism which we were admittedly critiquing and we were more aware of a forms of Christianity that were not defined by either Progressive or Conservative, Modernist or Fundamentalist. Or in other words for us Christianity wasn't defined solely and primarily by the American context. The Society couldn't help but respond to the evangelical churches we were in who were threatened by young members of theirs reading Augustine, Calvin and Luther etc. for themselves, yet we were also aware of how the mainline churches even in their progressive stances that some of us were attracted to, did not by themselves serve us in our search for authentic Christian faith. We were seeking something beyond the American dualism. It was just a tad depressing to see how much that dualism continues to be something that remains a defining reality, perhaps even more so than it did 22 years ago.
So a melancholy hangs over my experience of Tuesday evening, because 22 years ago we in The Society were quite hopeful of our ability to extricate ourselves from American dualism and the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy and split: to find oneself still there to find the vortex of that controversy to be so powerful that one can't even escape it by being part of a denomination that has tried to bridge that split for most if not all of its history and starting an Ecumenical congregation, and founding an intentional Christian community. I search for the Church, not really other disciples of Jesus wandering about, though when I find said wandering disciples it is a joy, but I'd rather those disciples be also seeking to know not in the fuzy sentimental way of the free church and believers church, but in a catholic and truly incarnational way the church. And yes I know that a rejection is looming large in my search for the Church. This is part of the Melancholy I find myself in. For 22 years I have sought to live in the tensions, resisted fleeing to Orthodoxy or Catholicism at certain points I could have thrown myself into those contexts with evangelical enthusiasm, finding "liberal' and "conservative" or now "progressive" and "conservative" as poorly fitting clothing, and frankly in my opinion neither actually about being clothed in Christ in the final analysis.
Tuesday night reminded me that I have felt stuck for quite sometime, truly seeking to bridge and mend the divide isn't really what most American Christians are really interested in. We are interested in our journeys, which makes sense. but I have to ask to what are we all journeying? Not that The Society is some grand thing to copy, the results of our conversations is perhaps under scrutiny ambiguous at best. Several of us became and have remained atheist or agnostic. I don't think any of us returned either to the Mainline churches or evangelicalism. Some of us remained where we were, other's returned to the ethnic and orthodox churches of their families. Christianity in some general sense failed us, yet that it seems is what we are still seeking a generalized Christianity that can wear one of the coats of American dualism in a way we are comfortable with. I think I have given up on Christianity, what I am looking for is the Church, the mystical and real and tangible body of Christ. My fellow disciples of Jesus wandering about in this barren landscape we call America I invite you on that search, and have to admit that if that is not what you are looking for we probably wont walk long together.
My Melancholy is perhaps my sense that what I long for few others truly long for, what I seek few others seek. Also, from the outside it seems to be something few members of the two claimants to be the Church care much about, as they seem just as caught up in American dualism as everyone else. It seems an odd thing for an American Christian (of any stripe) to seek,yet here I am.
If it helps at all, the conflict between Modernism and Fundamentalism is in no way a purely American problem ... nor is it a only Christian problem. People in many differing faith traditions around the world are struggling with the same issues.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to be the Problem of our Time, the kind of thing that in 500 years someone will write a thesis about and tie together various movements and make it seem perfectly logical, but is depressing and confusing to actually live through.
Angeli
Angeli,
ReplyDeleteTrue, but there is a way it plays out in the States, that has its own patterns, which your hypothetical scholar probably will be able to parse better than I. Also, it is important to remember that while we say there is Fundamentalism in all cultures, the term is taken from an American Religious phenomenon and then applied to other cultural contexts with analogous but not exactly replicating situations. The application of the term fundamentalism to a global and non-American contexts is in Religious Studies circles and controversial if accpeted nomenclature.
In another post I would be interested in the global and contemporary phenomenon, in this post I am concerned with the particular history of American Christianity, and while my struggle and this is not without analogy elsewhere, there is I think something to keeping in mind the difference of the American Christian Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy that looks different than even how it has played itself out in England.
Ahh, but you have to remember that I've had my head stuck firmly in the religious controversies of 500 years AGO! :D
ReplyDeleteIt's remarkable when you pull back to that high level view how patterns replicate themselves around the emergence of their "modernism" (the revolutionary idea that Christians could interpret the Bible for themselves) versus their "fundamentalism" (no, the priesthood and scholarly tradition of the Catholic Church is the correct interpretation.)
Did it play out differently in England, France, Spain, Bohemia, the German states, the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, the Netherlands ... yes, absolutely, but the arguments were the same at heart ... and weirdly similar to the arguments now. Orthodoxy versus change. Tradition versus observation. Conscience versus authority.
I don't imagine this helps you at all.
I just want to say that these are big questions, noble questions, worthy questions. They are not meant to be easy. I think that's why people are so angry at religion just now.
Angeli
Larry:
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of unwittingly performing psychoanalysis, I would guess that the melancholy is simply your soul acknowledging the death of certain things and attachments.
I am not unsympathetic to your plight, though as you know I've taken a different path than have you. For me, the experience you describe of your past 22 years, was similar to the one I was in which last about twelve, though it took another five yeas to complete the last leg of the journey.
For those twelve years, like you, I was on the search of Christ's Body. But the torture of that search was parsing each eccelsial group through the grid of my conception of "the Body" and then suffering the Cartesian uncertainty that only a child of modernism (of whatever proximity to modernism's telos) could suffer. Then being disappointed when critical matters arose around which my conscience could not be quieted, followed by an exit from that body and the weariness that comes from the road. Each exit only made the pain harder and the melancholy darker.
I finally had to jettison the need/desire to parse both the answer to the question of where is Christ's Body and what about those who aren't in it? I knew I could choose the Church (whichever one that was) without also having to definitively answer the question of "what about those not in it?"
I also finally had to jettison my grid. It had proven spectacularly unsuccessful. Yes, yes, I've imbibed enough postmodernism (back in the day) to know that I'd never achieve pure objectivity, but neither did I think such was ultimately desirable, coming as it did from the modernist paradigm. I had to simply choose one group and examine its claims on its own terms. If it proved coherent, and if my experience also bore witness to that coherence, then I could drive my marker stake there.
You know how my story ends. I won't go in to it. But if to find Christ we must take up our cross, deny ourselves and follow him; it would make sense that to find his Body we would need to do the same.
Benedict,
ReplyDeleteThank you for this. Yes, if anything my life since receiving my M.Div. has been this path of death of certain things and attachments.
I relate very much to needing and desiring to parse the question of where is Christ's Body, though the second part hasn't ever been something I've been too concerned about. Since seminary I have been troubled by the fact that I can't escape that I am evaluating claims based upon my own conceptions of "the Body".
22 years ago the question of "the Body of Christ" wasn't there for me. I would have said that I was part of the Church, thought the church was fragmented. My first encounters and consideration of Roman Catholicism was more or less about whether my beliefs matched up with theirs and whether or not my beliefs were compatible with the church I had grown up in and was planning to become a minister in. That particular grid seems a poor basis to move though certain aspects, including ecclesiology, of both appealed to me to some degree. The the claims to being The Church did make me a bit uncomfortable. So, I stayed put. I have been invited literally in the case of the Episcopal church to change my allegiances from the ECC, but I did not accept.
Jettisoning of ones grid or grids is dificult. there is a certain logic that appeals to me of simply examining the claims of one group on its own terms, it is difficult for me as I want to examine competing claims and see how they stand up. And also the examining of a group on its own terms is in my experience primarily an academic exercise one does as scholar of religion, to understand the general phenomenon.
Though I have done this with the ECC, and more or less I have found it coherent, except in regards to ecclesiology. I have found our ecclesiology weak, but in this weak ecclesiology there is a longing that our theology can't answer. I wrote a paper on it in seminary. This longing sent me to where I am today pastoring Reconciler, prior of an intentional Christian community, conversing with Emergent Church folk. this has been the way of the cross for me. At each point I resist the denial and the death, at the moment I am uncertain of what exactly is this part of it. Perhaps is all I have claimed to be as a Christian up and until this point, all the possible answers. Perhaps it is the death we are all experiencing, and I wonder if I or anyone in our current condition can embrace this death and find true life. Will I entrust myself fully to Christ and the way of the cross?
"And also the examining of a group on its own terms is in my experience primarily an academic exercise one does as scholar of religion, to understand the general phenomenon."
ReplyDeleteI think I can see what you mean here, but again, for me it was taken out of the modernist/scholastic paradigm by the other part of my search parameters: "if my experience also bore witness to that coherence." I do not mean to lay my template on to your own lifeways, but in my experience, if I had found a group "more or less . . . coherent, except in regards to ecclesiology," I would have determined that I had not found that Body I was looking for.
Please understand, I'm not judging or making an evaluation. I'm simply speaking to your "twixt-ness" out of my own experiences. These are not infallible.
That is to say, it was precisely because I was looking for the Body that ecclesiology had to play as central a role in that coherence as did all the other things. There was no pulling of this or that thread. Either the weave held together as a whole or it did not.
I think if you read my accounts of my journeys (mostly written while I was in the thick of it), you will see in the early parts a heavy dose of thinking. It may not be as easy to see in the latter parts the centrality of the experience of the object of my search (how does one articulate core experiences like that?). But it was the experience that grounded the dogma, the dogma that structured the experience. It was both Christ and Church, Body and Savior.
By grace I was given foretastes of it. But when I took in Christ's Body and Blood in that first Holy Communion on the day of my chrismation, all my thinking all my desiring all my experiences were quenched in unquenchable fire. I was left with great silence and the great shout.
I cannot explain it. I can barely describe it.
I think I understand what you can articulate of your experience, and I think it could be helpful,and since I am seeking to understand my "twixt-ness" and as you say your experience is not a template to lay out on mine, it is finding where or where not these experiences overlap, and what if any help that may be.
ReplyDeleteI was attempting to say that I think my having stayed put in the ECC, creates an important dimension, especially because the question of the Body in the ECC is one it claims to be par to but does not claim to be exclusively.
Your account of your experience is compeling certainly, the ways it diverges from mine are what I am mulling over, as to whether or not and in what way that difference is or is not significant.