Dead Christians Society

In the spirit of Dorothy L. Sayers's appreciation of our modern need for ancient creeds, I offer the following piece I wrote a few years back: 

Tangling with Wolves
Why we still need heresy trials
Chris Armstrong

July 1, 2003, Christianity Today

United methodist bishop Joseph Sprague publicly denies that Jesus rose bodily, that he is eternally divine, and that he is the only way to salvation. He has been charged four times with teaching heresies, and four times denominational representatives have acquitted him.

This is not a lone incident. For decades before his retirement, Episcopal bishop Jack Spong publicly repudiated nearly every line in the Nicene Creed and yet was never disciplined by his denomination. Examples could be pulled from Congregational, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches. Mainline leaders seem to perceive heresy as somehow an outmoded concept. Or, at least, they see the heresy trial as an inappropriate venue for addressing such teachings.

Whatever their reasons, we are mistaken if we think modern objections to the prosecution of heretics come from sloppy thinking. To put the best face on it, such extreme leniency arises, rather, because many people are repulsed by the ways orthodox Christian belief has been defended—in particular, how heretics have been prosecuted and punished.

Much more has been at work in historical heresy trials, George H. Shriver insists in his Dictionary of Heresy Trials in American Christianity, than a simple desire to protect the faithful from bad doctrine. "Politics, jealousies, power struggles, anti-intellectualism, miscommunication, limits of knowing, grudges, personal animosities, confusion of ethics with doctrine" have all entered into the picture, coloring not only the motivations of would-be defenders of the faith, but their actions as well.

Indeed. One need only think of the closed, secret trials and torture implements of the Inquisition. Shriver's conclusion: "The heresy hunters have…often allowed themselves to pervert Christian ethics in their pursuit of their goal of discrediting persons they have labeled 'heretics.' "

The truth of this objection to "heresy hunting" is only too clear from church history. But those who would use this historical evidence to attack all forms of heresy prosecution find it convenient to ignore one small fact: Apart from Jesus, no one has ever been exempt from mixed motives and unsavory methods.

This means that the process of defining orthodox belief has always been mediated by, as historian R. Scott Appleby puts it in a U.S. Catholic article, "human agents who have a tendency to let their own passions, misunderstandings, and political rivalries intervene."

So?

So, read the Old Testament. Or review the squabble between Peter and Paul over circumcision. The Holy Spirit has always found it necessary to work with the human materials at hand. And those materials have always been the same—not pretty. There was metaphorical (and sometimes real) blood on the floor of every one of the early church councils at which orthodox Christian doctrine was defined and embodied in creeds.

Yes, it does take faith to believe that the decisions of these councils actually reflect belief as God would have it. It is the same act of faith that allows the Christian to look around a church, see the assortment of annoying and downright unsavory characters occupying the pews, and affirm that the church is still, somehow, the "body of Christ."

The popular image presents the heretic as a courageous, powerless loner, exploring what fellow Christians refuse to explore and paying the price at the hands of unprincipled church leaders motivated by entrenched prejudice. This holds no more water than the picture of the heretic as a black-hearted subversive and orthodox leaders as saints riding in on white horses.

To take just one example, think of Arius. This was the man whose teaching that Jesus Christ is less than fully divine (for a modern version, talk to a Jehovah's Witness) rocked the early church and led to the first ecumenical council. He and his followers were far from a weak, oppressed minority beset by power-hungry orthodox leaders. As Tom Oden puts it in his Rebirth of Orthodoxy, they "lived by collusion with political oppressors. They had plenty of intellectuals and power manipulators on their side, while orthodoxy had to be defended largely by nonscholars and laypeople, by modest men and women of no means, by lowly persons who had no training or special expertise but understood their lives in Christ."

On the other hand, Arius's opponent Athanasius, the bold Christian thinker whose leadership helped move the Council of Nicea to condemn Arius, was no triumphant political manipulator. He was "exiled a half-dozen times and chased all over the Mediterranean world during the Arian times." The example can be multiplied on both sides.

To be sure, the inquisitorial practices of some past heresy hunts have left a permanent stain on the church—although the scale of what we might dub "heresy abuse" is often overblown. (Contrary to popular fiction, being charged before one of the Spanish Inquisitions was not a guarantee of an auto-da-fé. Statistical studies show that fewer than 2 percent of those charged were condemned to death.) Still, we must not deny or defend travesties that did occur. At the same time, we must recognize the depth of the problem heresy trials have attempted to address. In most cases, not political but pastoral concerns have driven the church to prosecute teachers of aberrant doctrines.

The problem is that the preached word has power—one way or the other. Every Sunday, unsuspecting people enter churches shepherded by those whose theological openness leads them to teach things we used to call heresies. What they hear in such teachings is not just divergent opinion. It is potent misdirection, capable of turning the sheep away from salvation.

And this is the nub. As a teacher of mine once put it, if Jack the Ripper is abroad in your town, killing people and mutilating their bodies, the city's leaders must track him down and render him unable to inflict further harm. And if, as the historic church has always—until today—agreed, a person insists on teaching beliefs that threaten the eternal lives of all who hear them, that person must be disciplined and his harmful teaching rendered null within the church.

It is easy for a comfortable "Christian" society to demonize the mechanisms the historic church has developed to deal with heresy. But to wink at heresy is to suck the life from faith.

Heresies are worth fighting against, through the same kinds of mechanisms that the church has always used. Yes, these mechanisms are tainted by politics and pride. But somehow still, we must believe, they have been used and will continue to be used by the Holy Spirit for the health of his church. In Appleby's words, "What we hold devoutly to be true, what we identify as the very core of our Christian identity, has come to us through the imperfect channel of human history."

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine.

"Saints come in all varieties. The only kind that seems to be rare in real life is the spineless and 'goody-goody' figure familiar to us in the feebler sort of pious fiction and stained-glass windows of the more regrettable periods. There are as many types of saint as of men and women, and most of them are people of great character. There are stormy and complex souls like Augustine of Hippo, with his burning sense of sin and his passionate love and dread of physical beauty, pouring out treatises, sermons, memoirs, apologetics, amide the distracting cares of a busy bishopric, travelling for ever between the city of the world and the City of God. There are anchorites, fleeing this world altogether, and devoting themselves to solitude and prayer: some, sweet and gentle like the desert Fathers; some, harsh and fanatical like Simeon Stylites, perched in austere discomfort upon his pillar. There is Francis, the 'troubadour of God', going barefoot among poor men and singing out his love to God and man and the whole creation: there is Albertus Magnus, toiling conscientiously at his vast commentaries upon Aristotle--certainly no singer, but the conspicuous glory of the Schools. There is Albertus's still greater pupil, Thomas Aquinas, a man to whom virtue seemed to come naturally, whose towering intellect completed his master's work and co-ordinated Greek learning and Christian revelation into a comprehensive system of Catholic doctrine. . . . There is little Theresa of Lisieux, meekly practising the Way amid the trivial duties of daily life and in the face of cramping family opposition: there is mighty Theresa of Avila, the eagle of contemplation, ruling her nuns with that fierce practical ability in which great mystics so often excel, and quite prepared to take God to task, with a tongue as vigorous as Job's and a good deal tarter, when He moved in ways more exasperatingly mysterious than usual. Stubborn martyrs, subtle theologians, ardent missionaries, cloistered contemplatives, homely pastors, brilliant administrators, obscure social workers, orators whose spell-binding eloquence could move multitudes and shake the thrones of princes, the saints seem to have little in common except a heroic love of God and a flaming single-mindedness of purpose.

Dorothy L. Sayers, "Introduction" to Richard of Chichester by C. M. Duncan-Jones (1953), excerpted in Dorothy L. Sayers: Spiritual Writings, selected and introduced by Ann Loades (Cambridge: Cowley, 1993).

From the notes for one of my Bethel Seminary lectures--a few thoughts on the world Sayers (and Lewis and Tolkien and so many other worthy and productive Christian writers) faced:

The twentieth century: Paganism anew

[Credit where due: in the following section, I'm repeating what the brilliant Richard Lovelace taught me in a class at Gordon-Conwell seminary back in the 1990s:]

Whatever the exact causes, there was a spiritual vacuum that created a space in Europe for the dictatorships and totalitarian systems of the war years. This was a time of real crisis—a Twilight of Western Thought—whose effects are still with us today.

In the 20^th century, the Paganism that some had been dabbling with during the period of the Enlightenment resurged and invaded the arts. In 1913 you get, for example, the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps—the Rite of Spring—a ballet in which a young girl adores the earth as a goddess, then dances herself to death as a sacrifice. As it turned out, this was one of the most influential pieces of music in the 20^th century—almost every composer who followed was touched by the melody or the harmony or the rhythm of this piece of music.

The 20^th-century Christian cultural theorist Francis Shaeffer has an interesting concept—the line of despair. It says that those working in a given culture have a certain amount of "capital" given to them by religion which they can spend. But if you are living in an era without religion, you will cross the line of despair, and produce art expressing chaos or deep pain, like Munch's "The Scream" (painted in 1893) or pagan stoicism like Hemingway.

T. S. Eliot, the author of great emblematic poem of the 20^th century, The Waste Land, observed after his own conversion to Christianity that Europe was engaged in an all-out battle between the Christians and the Pagans.

I don't want to give the impression that all the arts were irredeemably corrupt. Despite these manifestations of this new paganism, the Christian base was always there, under the surface. You see it in the novels of William Faulkner, though he had a messed-up life. Even Stravinsky converted, in 1925, to Russian Orthodoxy. And he began to write church music, and to return to writing classical music of a more traditional sort.

The Loss of Tradition and the Fragmentation of the Self

[Here I'm turning from Lovelace to some of the intensive thinking I did in putting together my dissertation:]

To sum up, I believe what the materialist turn of the 20th century did was to pull the moral rug out from under people. If everything was a matter of atoms and evolution, no longer was there any higher law or "map" to guide our behavior.

In broader terms, what has happened in the modern period—at least in the Modern West—can be described as a "problem of the self." This problem, as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes it, is that modern people have lost the traditional frameworks or maps that had for generations and centuries oriented people as successful, secure, coherent selves.

With the onset of modernity, these old traditional, moral maps became fragmented, questionable, unstable. Now, once individual reason has been raised to the status of final authority—through the extravagant claims of science, played out to their logical extreme in the thought of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, no moral or spiritual framework for identity—for knowing who we are as "selves"—is shared by everyone and can be taken for granted as the unquestioned framework.

So in the modern era, the human self has become a "problem" in a new sense.

In the 16^th century, we have Martin Luther, standing on the doorstep of modernity, struggling to free himself with the massive structure of congealed, dysfunctional churchly tradition—especially the "superstructure of penance"—that definitively determined the meaning of all his "thinking, feeling, and acting."

In the 20th and 21st centuries (a new world that Luther perhaps helped create), we have millions of people who are much more likely to face the opposite problem from the one Luther faced: not that tradition over-defined their lives, but that now the structures of society have been rooted out and our cultural and moral environment is in disarray. The psychological term for people in this condition is anomie. It means a pervasive alienation and purposelessness.

The problem is not the problem of pluralism—that is, competition between various traditions that are coherent, but mutually contradictory. Rather the problem is one of incoherence. There are no consistent, integrated traditions out of which individuals live their lives, and by which they discover their identities. The problem is not that our lives are caught up in pluralistic competition between traditions, but that we live them in a piecemeal way, without access to any coherent tradition.

Again, we can see the root of this modern fragmentation. It came originally from that fatal insistence of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant on the authority of individual reason above all else. In the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the only test of truth is the test of reason, and each person must judge every question for him or herself.

By those lights, all traditions are dangerous and oppressive, because they condition people's lives in so many ways—implicit as well as explicit, emotional as well as rational, and so forth. And so we must do away with them, and we are left patching together with an incredibly difficult task—the task of patching together a self, let alone a society, out of the fragments of old traditions and the relativism of the modern, scientific, pragmatic creeds.

Such was the world Dorothy Sayers faced. And it is ours today, too, a fortiori.

Tolkien and his Christian literary peers wrote for people who did not know the faith, or did not like it, or did not think it important—"a public which knows no History, no Classics, no Theology, and has almost forgotten its Bible," Dorothy L. Sayers complained.

"At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily," said Flannery O'Connor.

T. S. Eliot described the writers (and readers) of the day as "those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism."

This was the reader to whom writers like Tolkien, Sayers, Eliot, O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene wrote. Yet Tolkien's books were less obviously Christian than theirs. He did see his Lord of the Rings as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work." He even expressed some frustration that readers did not see this. But in writing Christian truth to a swiftly secularizing modern world, Tolkien took a different tack.

First, he only wrote stories. He wrote nothing directly Christian or apologetic. C. S. Lewis wrote apologetics, literary criticism, theological studies, allegories like The Great Divorce, and whatever The Screwtape Letters is. Williams wrote apologetics, biographies, histories, and theology. Sayers wrote apologetic essays like "Creed or Chaos?" and theological works like The Mind of the Maker. Waugh, Eliot, O'Connor, and Walker Percy all wrote essays on the faith and reviewed religious books for secular magazines.

These writers used their literary gifts to present the old arguments in a new way. Tolkien did not do this at all. Besides his stories, he wrote a few academic papers on early English literature and just one essay, "On Fairy-Stories," giving his own religious ideas in any explicit form.

Second, he did not give his stories an overt religious meaning. Almost all his peers wrote stories whose Christian meaning was fairly obvious. In Lewis's Narnia Chronicles, Aslan, an obvious Christ-figure, tells the children that they were brought from earth to Narnia so "that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." At the end of Sayers's play The Zeal of Thy House, the archangel Michael argues theology with the main character. Eliot wrote poems with titles like "Ash Wednesday" and reflected on prayer in his poetry and his plays. In O'Connor's Wise Blood, a young man tries to establish the "Church of Christ without Christ" and The Violent Bear It Away is the story of a boy called to be a prophet.

Last week we looked behind the recent headlines about "Elvis Priestly," a Canadian Anglican minister who has integrated a jump-suited impersonation routine into his sacred services. We surveyed a few of the many points at which Christians have co-opted popular artistic forms in order to get their evangelistic message across.

This week, we ask the questions: how have Christians historically reacted to such forays into popular forms? And how successful have the resulting products been in themselves—that is, as songs, plays, novels, and so forth, quite apart from their message? Of course, we can only touch the surface of these issues. But with Elvis now in the (church) building, this seems a worthwhile use of a few minutes.

Let's begin with Christian novels. Despite the widespread churchly acclaim for Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), America's conservative Christians have not always been pleased with the novel as a genre. For much of the twentieth century, for many of the faithful, "novel reading, like other worldly amusements such as dancing, card playing, and attending the theater, was considered suspect." (Rabey and Unger, Milestones). Surely Jesus wouldn't waste his time with such trivial entertainments.

Yet something has happened in the past two decades. In 1979 and 1985, Janette Oke and Frank Peretti brought the erstwhile "secular" genres of the romance novel and the fast-paced thriller into the Christian mainstream with their novels Love Comes Softly and This Present Darkness. And whatever objections may linger, sales in the millions testify that these and a thousand titles like them—can you say Left Behind?—fill a need. The Old Guard's suspicions notwithstanding, the Christian novel is here to stay.

Fine. But a book is a static thing, and reading a private matter. What about Elvis, gyrating at the altar? Surely this is not just a potentially trivial or time-wasting pop culture invasion, but downright sacrilegious!

This reaction is not, of course, a new one. For example, in her 1942 radio serial, A Man Born to be King, the devout Anglican author Dorothy Sayers had an actor deliver gritty, colloquial lines as Jesus himself. For the time, this was a daring move, as it was illegal in England (and continued to be so until 1968) for a stage actor to portray any divine person. The proscription did not apply to radio, but outraged complaints poured in. As one shocked listener put it, "a sinful man" must not presume to "impersonate the Sinless One." To do so "detracts from the honour due to the Divine Majesty."

Though Elvis impersonation hardly blasphemes a sinless original, such pop-entertainment spectacles in church do raise similar questions of due honor to God. No doubt many among the twenty-first-century faithful, inured though we are to a stunning array of pop-culture evangelistic efforts, would echo the conclusion of that flustered listener to Sayers's radio play: "Could anything be more distressful to reverent-minded Christians?" One guesses such a reaction contributed to the Canadian Anglicans' decision to proscribe "Priestly's" act.

Others have argued that the problem with such Christian co-optations of popular forms may be not that they perpetrate sacrilege, but rather that they purvey saccharine. Sayers herself warned those tempted to use the play form to push for conversions, "If he writes with his eye on the spiritual box-office, he will at once cease to be a dramatist, and decline into a manufacturer of propagandist tracts. … He will lose his professional integrity, and with it all his power, including his power to preach the Gospel" (Dorothy Sayers, "Playwrights Are Not Evangelists").

Christian filmmaker David Cunningham, director of the gritty (and, by most accounts, aesthetically and narratively successful) To End All Wars, updates Sayers's warning by applying it to "Christian" films made not by filmmakers but by "evangelists trying to use film." Such efforts are bound to compromise story, realism, complexity, leaving only an unsatisfying pablum.

In the end, it may be that eager, culture-savvy preachers who use popular forms to convey the gospel risk foisting on the world impoverished—even laughable—expressions of those genres. And in so doing, they may well do what they would never wish to do: compromise the message of the gospel itself by hitching it to a poor-quality product.

So to anyone out there growing their sideburns and brushing up their sneer, in hopes of joining Mr. Priestly in leading "the king's" faithful to faith in The King, take heed:  "Caveat gyrator." If you want to borrow from the world, as Jesus and Paul did, to get across the message they preached, be prepared to do the thing right. Gospel kitsch may get some notice in the short term, but it's only a matter of time before people notice it doesn't touch the deep things of life or the true grandeur of the evangelium.