My Scylla and Charybdis

I have met a few serious Christians of the sacramental persuasion who maintain that the Lord's Supper has been transformative for them in some sense, but not many. And judging by the behavior of most of my fellow Lutherans over the years, I can firmly state without fear of contradiction that communion hasn't done much for them in the life-changing sense. Nor has Bible study done much to renew their minds, at least when it comes to important issues of the day involving morality. The visible church and the invisible one are definitely not of equal size.

As a boy, I endured two years of weekly catechetical instruction, including public examinations on the sacraments, the Office of the Keys, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and The Lord's Prayer. The expectation which was built up in me for the grand day of confirmation and first communion was considerable indeed, but the denouement was hardly climactic. In no small way the failure to experience anything significant played an important role in my subsequent efforts to seek out authentic spiritual experience, and drove me into the scriptures which I read cover to cover many times by the time I had graduated from high school. With a heady mix of sacred scripts and hormones, I ventured off to college to begin the long trek toward seminary. Instead, some wise soul should have handed me a copy of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and sent me packing to the Marine Corps. No such luck.

In time I began to appreciate just how much Lutheranism is a kind of mixture of Catholicism and Protestantism where sacraments and scripture represent "the means of grace," through which Christians hear the gospel, believe, and obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life. But the trinity of Lutheran beliefs clearly shows that the sacraments are secondary to scripture: grace unaccompanied by anything else, faith unaccompanied by anything else, scripture unaccompanied by anything else. The young Luther, once upon a time hiding from the authorities and unable to go to mass, says that he can take communion spiritually but no less actually simply by reading and believing the words instituting the Lord's Supper in scripture.

Nevertheless, baptism and the Lord's Supper are means of grace to be offered by the church because scripture shows that these sacraments were instituted by Christ to that end: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;" "This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." The more expansive list of sacraments in Catholicism was rejected because scripture did not say they were instituted by Christ. For Luther the priority of scripture is clear in the face of the traditions of the church, accumulated over centuries, which obscure it, and reformers contemporary with and subsequent to him ran with this, and in a distinctly non-sacramental direction which emphasized scripture's singular role.

Historical forces long in the making were at work here. The recovery of knowledge of the classical Greek and Roman worlds during the Renaissance through the intensive study of manuscript evidence inevitably led to a cultural change among churchmen in the age of Reformation with respect to the study of sacred texts. Everything depended on how one esteemed them, and on what questions were asked of them. Luther's discovery of Paul's gospel in his letters helped Luther solve his own personal spiritual problems. And his respect for Paul grew so great that he could be suspicious of the canonicity of a New Testament text like James which seemed to contradict Paul. One only wonders to what lengths Luther might have gone had he come to the texts with different questions, different assumptions.

If it had been true that "any classical text, in an age when all powerful knowledge was stored in books, had the character of a bomb that had fallen from a great height and could explode at any time" (A.T. Grafton, "The Renaissance," in The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal, Oxford, 1992), subsequent history, especially in the age of Enlightenment, would prove that the same was true of the Bible. Luther had settled on two sacraments, not seven, and on the Bible, not tradition, but in so doing the principle had also been established that an individual could plausibly make such decisions. He had lit a fuse.

(Originally posted 5/29/09)

Gather Round, All You Mothers

The second Sunday in May found us in a congregation of the Presbyterian Church, USA, which is abbreviated PCUSA. During graduate school days in Colorado, one wag among us used to say that stood for Party, Communist, USA, because of its leftward bent. No evidence of that on this visit.

The pastor told a delightful story about his own mother, who had a crush on Fred Astaire during the late '30s. She worked at a bank in New York in those days, and her crush was so famous among her co-workers that when Fred happened to be visiting the bank one day, he found out about it and took the time to go to the secretarial pool and take her for a whirl amongst the typewriters. For that story alone they should have charged admission.

John Varineau of the Grand Rapids Symphony made an appearance with his trio ma non troppo, playing "Trio for Two Clarinets and Bassoon" by Benedetto Carulli, and "Sonata A Trios for Two Clarinets and Bassoon" by Charles Avison, among others. That was a very pleasant surprise. They don't practice too much. They don't need to.

The sermon was in part about John 15:1ff: I am the vine, you are the branches, etc. The Christian life, whatever that's supposed to be or mean concretely, comes down to a metaphor: as a vine must bear fruit, so the Christian must abide in Jesus, apart from whom one can do nothing. By the time it was over, I kept having this image in my head of all these Christians running around needing to re-connect with Jesus as if they were power strips unplugged from the giant Jesus outlet in the sky, their three-pronged heads flailing about in the air as they aimlessly roam the earth.

If anything distinguishes the Protestants from the rest of Christianity anymore, it's this amorphous conception of the Christian life. The vast majority of the world's Christians are sacramentalists, and they don't need no stinkin' metaphors. They've got real, divine, body and blood to eat to stay connected to their God. In fact, eating it pretty much defines the Christian life. This is much simpler, which is why it's more popular. Just show up once a week, shut up and eat. See ya next time.

Abiding in Jesus for a Protestant is much more complicated and time consuming. For one thing, it means studying the Bible because abiding means his words must abide in you. Right there you've created what for most folks who take it seriously becomes a life-long industry for the sheer size of it. And once that starts, life fills up with all the data consumed, which become the spiritual "to do list." All the words on all the pages eventually coalesce and become a construct in the mind which, dare we say it, becomes indistinguishable from the God himself. Prayer becomes a conversation with oneself.

One way or the other, if this is the kingdom of God, I want out.