Pope & Circumstance?

“The senator has got to understand if he’s going to have - he can’t have it both ways. He can’t take the high horse and then claim the low road.”
- President George W. Bush
Florence, South Carolina
February 17, 2000

The metaphors are so thorougly mixed as to be almost poetic, and the terms lead me to wonder about ecclesiology: Can Christians have it both ways? Can we take the high church horse and still claim the low church road? (”And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye!” Though perhaps we should leave Calvinism out of this.) Can we sing “Down at the Cross” while genuflecting or shout a hearty “Amen” after reciting the Nicene Creed?

Ralph Wood of Baylor University thinks we can. In his book Contending for the Faith, Wood calls for what he terms “a Catholicized evangelicalism.” This crossing of the old purebred stock with its scrappy junkyard second-cousin could, Wood believes “produce a scandalous and non-adaptive Christianity that will endure.” To this end he calls for nothing less than a high-horse hybrid, a low-road chimera Christianity. “Surely,” he insists, “our final hope is that we shall become both Evangelical and Catholic - not only together, but also at the same time.” Otherwise, he laments, we are “invited out of the church catholic and Catholic.”

James Nuechterlein, editor of the theological journal First Things, isn’t so sure. In the October ‘01 issue of that publication he responds to a nascent expression of Wood’s ideas in a book review that predates Contending by three or so years. Nuechterlein is himself a Lutheran and thus inclined to be equally sympathetic to (and perhaps equally toward) both Catholicism and Evangelicalism. So what does Wittenberg have to say about an arranged marriage of Rome and Nashville? Well, he might send a gift but he won’t be attending the wedding. “Evangelicals and Catholics together?” he asks, and responds, “Of course. But not evangelical and Catholic at the same time.”

I don’t want to overstate Wood’s position. I do not understand him to call for any sort of official ceremony with Billy Graham receiving the host at mass and Benedict XVI jumpin’ pews in Brownsville. Of the two metaphors I’ve spun, marriage is clearly the less helpful. (I mean, extend it one step: that’s going to be a WHALE of a battle over whether to have the child baptized, although Wood, who argues from the depth of the Jordan that Jesus probably received effusion at the outside, might not foresee a big problem here.) My other image - cross-breeding - might be better, and a shift from zoology to agriculture might be the best. What Dr. Wood seems to advocate is a kind of cross-pollination, an engrafting that would let each species keep its distinct DNA but incorporate the strengths of its counterpart.

Nuechterlein still says no. As he sees it, “all systems of thought, religious and otherwise, are partial. They are also package deals. Their distinctive strengths come together with distinctive weaknesses. Neither in theology nor anywhere else can we maximize all good things all at once.”

So, Neutcherlein implies, the evangelical strengths which Wood himself acknowledges - “our missionary impulse, our emphasis on personal piety, our devotion to the Lordship of Jesus, our stress on upright moral living, our belief in Scripture’s final authority, and our conviction that the Gospel is not one among many ways to salvation” - inevitably invite the corresponding vulnerabilities which Wood also catalogues: the tendency for “our revivalism to leave converts cuf off from the sanctifying church, our decisionism to rest on sub-Christian notions of autonomy, our pietism to rob us of reverent worship, our devotionalism to lobotomize the life of the mind, our moralism to give us contempt for those who smoke tobacco and drink wine, our biblicism to make us ignorant of the bi-millennial Christian tradition, and our exclusivism to convince us that Roman Catholics are not Christians.”

Sluggers generally have low batting averages. Babe Ruth once claimed he could have hit .600 lifetime if he’d cared to but it would have meant dinking singles and the fans shelled out to see him swat homers. Every strength, Aquinas tells us, has the weakness of its qualities. Is it, as Joseph Conrad’s nameless narrator in “The Secret Sharer” reasons in accounting for a murder on shipboard, “all very simple. The same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworhty mutinous existence”? Must a murderous follow-through be the inevitable price of a heroic backswing? Is that the best we can do?

Personally, I hope not.

I say “personally” and “hope” instead of “ultimately” and “believe” because I’m talking preference here, not church polity, taste more than theology. Something in my Baptist head dislikes having my Christian feet dangling above the platform of history. It feels unsafe to lift up my heart if I don’t simultaneously bow my knees. I resonate with Wood’s speculation that “evangelicals have made a costly error in adapting Christian faith to the basic American assumption that to be free is to be a sovereign individual unencumbered by any aims or attachments that we have not elected for ourselves, nor by obligations to any communities that we have not autonomously chosen to join,” that our “voluntarist notions often cause us to violate the radically obediential and communal character of Christian faith.” I find that I hanker to do something deeply un-American because I might find it to be something deeply Christian.

“It delights me,” enthuses C. S. Lewis in his essay “Membership,” “that there should be moments in the services of my own Church when the priest stands and I kneel. As democracy becomes more complete in the outer world and opportunities for reverence are successively removed, the refreshment, the cleansing, and invigorating returns to inequality, which the Church offers us, become more and more necessary.”

Something in us responds to the opportunity to show reverence. When the exiled Earl of Kent returns incognito to serve the crotchety king who banished him, he explains to his sovereign, “You have that in your countenance/which I would fain call master,” then defines that quality as “Authority.” Or, in G. K. Chesterton’s famous phrase from The Everlasting Man, the Christian worshiper “not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.” To a short guy during the NBA playoffs, such language has a strong appeal.

I’m not talking here about kissing anybody’s ring. (Although, as Baptists watching the sans-culotte terror in the Southern Baptist Convention have learned, the free church often offers far less palatable body parts to be bussed. William F. Buckley was onto something when he said, “I don’t like rules, but they can be liberating.” Rules may keep me in bounds, but they also keep arbitrary tyrrany out of bounds.) But just yesterday I called my pastor and told him I’d been under conviction about my lack of missional practice and asked him to give me his direction regarding an idea I’d had to remedy the problem. I was essentially asking his permission - or not - along with his guidance, and asking that this permission come with the blessing of the congregation. And it felt as if someone had at last splinted a long-ago wrenched joint.

The high horse on the low road? Maybe, as Lewis also observed, what we’re really talking about is the deep church.

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