Searching for God # 34

 In  the same piece in anglicaninl.org, entitled, Why the Roman Catholic Church Is Rising in England-and What It Reveals About Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, April 17, 2025, also from The Anglican, by David Roseberry, April 15, 2025 we read:

Islam and Incognito Christianity

In our modern Western world, Christianity has long been personalized. It’s about me and Jesus. We say, ‘Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship. But is that really true? Is that all it is? Isn’t there a moral code that comes along with it? Didn’t Jesus teach something?

In any event, the rise of Islam in the UKus presents a stark contrast. Islam is clearly a religion-public, practiced, and patterned. You can see it in the dress, the prayer times, the dietary rules, the fasting seasons. And the result? People know who Muslims are and, for the most part, they know what Muslims believe. There’s no ambiguity.

Roman Catholicism reflects a similar structure. It offers a religion, not just a relationship. There are rhythms, holy days, moral expectations, and communal identity. It’s not something you keep hidden.

Meanwhile much of Anglicanism—especially true in American Episcopalianism- is what could be called incognito Christianity. It’s quiet, sometimes even shy, about its convictions. But in a world filled with loud convictions, that approach can feel uncertain.

People respect the visible. They trust what is practiced. As Muslims show a coherent, embodied faith, some Christians might be waking up to the belief that private belief alone isn’t enough. They want a faith that shapes life, not just inner thought……

So why is the Roman Catholic church rising in England while the Anglican church declines? Because Catholicism offers clarity in a confused age. It offers rootedness in a restless time. It offers a visible, practiced and morally serious faith in a culture increasingly adrift. And above all, it offers conviction—the kind that draws you in, even if you’re not sure you believe it yourself.

Oh, how I wish Anglicans would pay attention to this last point. We need to return to something sturdy, global and lasting. That used to be called The Anglian Communion. Now it is in tatters.

Memo to Mr. Roseberry:

Your provocative piece, ensconced in sociological data, as well as cultural aspirations (and alleged failures to meet them) challenges not only Anglicans, but all Christians who seek, not merely to compete in numbers, dollars and public opinion polls with other faiths, but also in terms of the potential of enhanced spiritual, moral, intellectual and philosophical and psychological life.

The ’personalized relationship with Jesus’ suffers from a literalism, and a kind of implicit barterism from which many Christian faiths suffer. The adage WWJT (or WWJD) emblazoned on t-shirts in the United States, in the 1990’s was a blatant examples of the kind of reductionism to which this paradigm falls victim. As if, to know precisely and accurately, self-righteously and historically and traditionally affirmed and confirmed the ‘mind of Jesus’ as the guiding beacon of moral, ethical, spiritual and holy light for humans were even feasible, imaginable. And as if such feasibility and imagination were to be without either spiritual hubris or theological apostasy.

Archbishops continually changing their minds, a church, first to permit contraception, and first to permit divorce and remarriage and then  even to contemplate equality of genders, and then the ordination of gays and lesbians, these are all rendered ‘skeptical’ and even almost ‘flakey’ in your assumption of the culture’s perception. There is nothing stable, study, dependable and reliable about changing one’s mind, especially when it comes to attempting to approximate and to represent God and Jesus Christ Resurrected.

We might all wish to be reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s quotes:

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

And also: He who has never hoped can never despair.

And: I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can.

Words ‘progress’ and ‘whole community’  jump out from these brief epithets.

What is the relationship between God/faith/church and ‘progress’? And what is the relationship between ‘whole community’ and God/faith/church?

There is a cogent, and compelling argument to be made that the Anglican church (at least in North America) has failed miserably to articulate a clear commitment to a theological ‘conviction’ in terms that the western culture can and will grasp not only intellectually, but also ethically and morally and liturgically and culturally. While there is conviction in and among participants within the deep and profound discussion, debate, discourse, and tensile interactions around all of the many questions to which the church ‘community’ has sought ‘answers’ or responses, bearing in mind, together, the theological principles and precepts of The Anglican faith, the public glams onto the headlines rendering the Anglican faith a kind of ‘pioneer’ or ‘voyageur’ or ‘discoverer’ or ‘adventurer’ in theological and ecclesial terms.

Some less skeptical or cynical critics could and have described the Anglican church, in this respect of confronting tough personal and societal questions, as being ‘hyperactive’ and perhaps even somewhat risk-taking, as opposed to those faith communities that prefer to maintain some of their established ‘convictions’. Cynics have taken over the field is depicting Anglicans as ‘flakey’ and ‘believing in nothing’ given that change, for them is incompatible with the Christian faith, as they perceive it and as they believe and practice it.

The convergence of corporate ‘model’ thinking, acting and especially of ‘branding’ brings into direct confluence the dominating energy in many church communities: the intersection of the faith ‘tenets and practices and beliefs’ with the secular culture. The sacred and the secular and the tension between, and how that tension is both perceived and incarnated, poses an active question for any God-seeking man, woman or child. The vernacular and the public discourse is replete with language and perceptions based on numbers, dollars, size, public image, public reputation and social credibility it ‘confers’ on those who choose to sit in the respective pews of the various churches. And in the vortex of that tension, questions about what comprises the ethic and moral expectations of individuals, given that the churches have staked out, for themselves and their adherents, the ‘good (and moral and ethical) life’.

In the West, capitalism dominates the political and cultural modus operandi, as well as the mind-set of individuals both with the corporate and the public domains. Individual successes and failures are hung both as trophies and as albatrosses on the necks of those who succeed and those who fail, respectively, even if without respect in the latter cases. Both the secular society and the faith community are complicit in this dynamic drama. Sin, itself, has been so privatized and personalized, almost as a ‘sustaining structural beam’ of both the culture and the cathedral.

As a direct and also an indirect concomitant of this privatization of both secular and social success/failure, the ‘whole community’ is implicitly offered and swims in waters infested with a kind of immunity, impunity and freedom from effective, shared and systematic critical scrutiny. For these last several months, on the American television networks, the personal private ‘sins’ of the occupant of the Oval Office have dominated the coverage, without effect and also without shame or guilt or contrition on the part of the despot, while the cultural health of the society has deteriorated to the point of being ‘on life support’ as many observers have unequivocally documented. p

It is as if the private and personal malfeasances of the chief executive have only been emboldened by the tidal wave of objective, factual and legal attack. The ‘straw-headed’ regal-imitating act of carrying a Bible for a photo-op to an Episcopalian church in Washington depicts the depths of the depravity, both of the culture and the religion that permitted it. (Of course, he had to walk along a public sidewalk, where  the church has no jurisdiction.)

Convictions, especially those founded on both the Hammurabi and the Decalogue Codes, have been with us for centuries. Stability and public order, are cornerstones of public trust and security. And just as the jurisprudence today leans on the precedents of past jurisprudence, it is not surprising that many would feel that  a similar template would/could/should apply to the religious institutions, if they are to retain public credibility.

Public secular laws, while historically and traditionally and culturally mounted on ‘perception edifices’ to which we have all been indoctrinated, have Christian Jewish and Muslim indebtedness. Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you  reverberates as a common and often echoed ethical, moral and religious ‘star’ to be both aspired toward and to hold as firm and consequential. There is a moral and shared dependency implicit in such a maxim. And yet, in a moment of crisis, when one’s unique vulnerability and even perhaps one’s perceptions and feelings of safety and security are in doubt, it is often beyond the reach of many to strive to incarnate that universal maxim. Indeed, which of the worlds faiths would be so bold as to claim that its history demonstrates a higher and more consistent adherence to the universally shared, and socially and politically even treasured aspiration?

Just as holding fast to a specific set of maxims, while perhaps a strong bonding ‘hold’ on those who choose to join, may or may not best offer opportunity to exemplify the ‘golden rule’.

Let’s take a look at abortion for a start. The expecting mother, delighted, along with her partner, that she is about to have a new baby, is told that her baby suffers from an incurable defect or illness and perhaps will not survive delivery, or beyond two or three months thereafter. The conviction that abortion is contrary to God’s gift of life and thereby is forbidden, leaves the mother no choice. Her despondency, despair and loss of both hope and the visions and dreams of that child’s growing into maturity are, like feathers in the breeze, escaping her’s and her family’s reach. Is the option, along with her doctor (and partner) of terminating the pregnancy, whether or not to carry the infant to term might impact the health and wellness of the mother, defying the ‘golden rule’? If you or I were party to such a situation, I can only hope that our faith would be engaged in opening us to the therapeutic option of an abortion, both to alleviate the suffering of the infant and the mother and family. And, is the concrete obligation of carrying that baby to term consistent with a perception of God whose narrative and precepts sing harmoniously and consistently of love of the most vulnerable?

Social prestige, secured under the rubric of a ‘branding conviction’ (think Lexus’ pursuit of perfection) is little more than a straw house of the Three Little Pigs. How could it represent an ineffable, ephemeral, unknowable force, presence, or deity with absolute clarity and certainty?  The very expectation of such a fixed ‘dogmatic’ prohibition represents one of the many moral and ethical prohibitions that have comprised the foundational attempt to serve, to worship, to hold in awe, and to envision and embody discipleship for and of God. And, we have to keep in both mind and perspective, that Jesus was himself a disturbing influence on what was then the establishment of his time and place. Conventional wisdom, traditional archetypes, expectations of the secular world were, in general and in specific, find wanting several times by Jesus. And for his ‘willing surrender to the violence of the conventional society,’ without having committed any wrong, even in his death he embodied the model of a sacrificial victim who opposed violence and death.

It is rather difficult to square the circle of ‘conformity to a specific ‘rule’ or prohibition to the man of Galilee, except to try to emulate, in Tolstoy’s great epic, his themes from the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessings on the humble, meek, mournful and merciful, instructions to love one’s enemies, forgive others and not seek revenge, with an emphasis on internal righteousness over external actions and the golden rule….both in specifics and in summation, seem to express both a state of mind and heart that is neither translatable nor containable within a specific dogmatic church prohibition. It is the prohibitions, specifically, that cause this scribe most theological difficulty. This template reminds one of the man who asked the Irishman for directions and was told: “First you do not go on that road!”

Religious rules have the advantage of clarity and conformity, with an implicit reward for their ‘keeping’ and practicing….and therein lies another objection. Any prescriptive relationship that even hints at some form of classical conditioning seems to be a reductionism of both God and the complexity of human nature a complexity of which any and all deities would be full aware.

Another objection to the ecclesial model of both theory and praxis of Christian theology is that the institutional ‘dictation’ of how to live, representing a complete and uncontested representation and emulation of the mind and will of God carries with it a degree of self-righteous pretension and hubris. Jews, for their part, are open about searching for the mind and intent of God in each situation, based on their reading and reflection of the Torah.

Objective truth, as contained within specific ‘dogmatic’ rules and teachings of prohibitions, while providing a ‘cover’ of some standard to which a faith community can adhere, brings with it the avoidance or denial or dismissal of subjective and imaginative truth.

Two of the most challenging and also rewarding concepts in human culture and individual human life are: God and love…and in the Christian lexicon, the phrase God is love comes from 1 John 4:8: Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. As the essence of His being, not merely an emotion, love, again a (the?) most aspirational and hopeful and both sought after and desired, even necessary experience for all human beings, irrespective of one’s faith tradition or community.

Some would argue that a parent loves his/her children and thus the prohibitions of the parent are analogous to those of the church as the ‘bride of Christ’ with God  the Father of the people of his church. And in this light, one can envision some of the writings that have prompted the church’s adoption of prohibitions, some of which are also incorporated with the Decalogue itself. And the theological argument of the relevance and theological significance of Old to New Testament brings out another of the dichotomies with which the church has struggled. Man and nature, God and nature, the holy/sacred and the secular, the saved and the unsaved, the sinner and the repentant and forgiven one, the tension between ‘time looking forward in adoption to change’ and time ‘remaining firm in Christian principles’….and within and between any or all of these dichotomies, lies a river of energetic investigation, of personal reflection and of institutional opportunities to continue to seek God, the Holy, Jesus, and the matter of faith as it applies to each person’s pilgrimage.

The Anglican church, while a seeking institution for searchers, more than a champion of ritual and liturgy, without abandoning either of the latter, (although it may wish to separate crown from church) may have some time to reflect on its commitment to ‘pursue’ and ‘to seek and to hope to find’ the illusive ‘alchemy’ of glimpsing the radiance and relevance of God’s love, without apologizing for being only a branch (a denomination) rather than the original tree (Catholicism)….surely we have developed more religious, and spiritual maturity than is embodied in  that specious yet historical theological metaphor!

Enhanced human living and loving, of God and of each other, irrespective of the design of the sanctuary, or the prohibitions of the ecclesial dogma, remains a distant and as yet pastel and fleeting rainbow in the heavens of all faiths, including all of the Abrahamic faiths.

Shalom!

jta