Playing church
It centers around a gay man in Seattle named Robert Fuller who, it is said, was terminally ill and chose to "marry" his partner and then do away with himself in a televised (!) series of mock-liturgical rituals following a Mass in which, unbelievably, members of the congregation (including a group of little girls receiving their First Communion) blessed him in contemplation of his commission of a mortal sin which would send him unshriven into eternity. Thank God, it appears that the priest was not involved, though one wonders at the fact that he allowed the travesty to take place.
The 2003 Joseph Fiennes movie Luther, which included Peter Ustinov's final role, as Elector Fredrick the Wise, had its flaws. Among them was the fact that Fiennes might have better been cast as Jesus (a role I understand he's even now undertaking) than as Martin Luther. As someone said at the time, Russell Crowe would have been more appropriate in the role than the gentle, soft-spoken Fiennes. Jointly endorsed by the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches of Germany, the film was an important ecumenical event in that respect alone, a mutual gesture toward reconciliation between the two largest branches of Western Christianity. And on the whole, it was an excellent film, which avoided demonizing anyone (Johann Eck, Luther's major antagonist, was omitted from the film altogether and his role in events filed by the somewhat more sympathetic papal legate Girolamo Aleandro) which offended the most defensive of Catholics only through its rather blunt depiction of religious abuses no reputable historian of any belief denies or minimizes today. Its reception was marred by the theological and church-historical illiteracy of many critics (the late Roger Ebert, for example, not only completely missed its relative even-handedness but branded dialog consisting of direct quotations from the parties in question "unbelievable") and the general disinterest of the media and the Hollywood community in general in the subject matter.
But possibly the film's most important actual contribution to human understanding was its depiction of Father Luther's compassionate treatment of a little boy in his parish who died by suicide, burying the child in consecrated ground contrary to canon law after throwing the crucifix his own confessor, Johann von Staupitz, had given him to remind him of God's mercy, on top of the casket in benediction. While the incident was fictional, it did dramatize Luther's belief that suicide was generally the act, not of a rebel against God, but of a soul overcome an assault by the devil to powerful to resist. A suicide, he insisted, was not necessarily lost, and it was wrong to be too quick to discount God's mercy to a soul fallen into a hellish abyss of depression of a kind which he, himself, knew all too well.
Comparatively few people know that the contemporary Catholic church, too, takes a compassionate view of suicide in such cases. While it teaches that it is, indeed, a mortal sin when indulged in willfully- as an act of defiance toward God and His providence- such is not the case when human responsibility is diminished by mental illness. The orthodox Christian tradition is far more generous in that regard than most in this secularized age, apt to know it only in caricature, realizes. But the case which Fr. Mankowski relates was no such desperate yielding to unbearable pain. It was an act of deliberate willfulness, taken in defiance of the clear teaching not only of the contemporary Roman Catholic church but of historic Christianity regardless of denomination.
Christianity may, indeed, view suicide with compassion. But it can never take it as an act to be celebrated.
Yet that is what happened in a Catholic church that day. Parishioners said their last good-byes to Fuller in the church basement after the Mass as a Gospel choir performed and Ave Maria was sung. Then the party was transferred to Fuller's apartment. The Catholic church- like historic, biblical Christianity in general- neither recognizes same-sex "marriage" nor the notion that sexual relations between people of the same gender are ever licit. But Fuller (a shaman, besides, somehow, being a Catholic) and his partner were "married."
After being ritually reminded of the significance of the act, and verbally acknowledging it, Fuller then injected himself with two syringes filled with a lethal combination of drugs obtained from a pharmacy while television crews recorded the event (one forgets that our society has gone far enough in its handbasket ride toward literal hell that there are states in which suicide is legal, and Washington is among them) and for some reason, Kaluha, his favorite alcoholic beverage. And so, he passed into eternity.
Fr. Mankowski uses the term "playing church" for the departures from the canonically-sanctioned liturgy which are so common in his tradition, as well as mine, these days, often of questionable taste and even, as in this case, in defiance of the very confession of the Church Universal, however one conceives of it. And he includes the mock-liturgical aspects of Fuller's blasphemous liturgical suicide. For me, personally, the term has another association. While I made it a habit of uncharacteristic discretion never to use the term out loud, even when I was a teenager I thought of the "mainline" (actually, liberal) denominations which seemed to consider the teachings of Christ and the Bible, in general, to be of no particular importance and felt free to ignore them whenever they pleased as "play churches." After all, if that was the way one approached God and Scripture, what was the point? Where was the earnestness, the reality? How did it differ from mere play?
And what, finally, is the point of going through the motions of going to church and praying and so forth if one did not take seriously the assumptions upon which these things are predicated? Self-deception, perhaps. A desire to convince oneself, and perhaps others, that one is something which one is not.
Hypocrisy, in other words- a quality of which Jesus was not fond and of which, to its credit, contemporary society also claims to abhor. Now, before anyone says anything, I also include myself in that indictment to some extent. While Fr. Mankowski and I would have some theological disagreements on the details of this point, what the Apostle Paul says of himself in Romans 7:14-25 is true of every Christian, and every honest Christian will admit it:
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
I can stand before God, not by my own righteousness, but only by the righteousness of Christ, my Substitute. Fr. Mankowski might express the thought differently, but even Roman Catholicism insists that the righteousness of Jesus is necessary. In fact, Fr. Mankowski's thesis- with which I agree- is that the difference between being the Church and playing church is a matter of life and death. Lex orandi, lex credendi.
But there is another way of "playing church" other than liturgical carelessness. As a former ELCA pastor, I saw this coming a mile away. Nobody at Wartburg Seminary back in the 'Eighties came right out and said that everybody is saved- that, as Fr. Mankowski put it, "we're all already 'in' the Kingdom of Heaven in the only sense that matters." The Scriptures and the Confessions were too plain for them to actually say that. Instead, it was communicated with a wink and a nod. But everybody got the point. Many and probably most of the preachers who were trained there were trained to proclaim a false gospel, and alien gospel. And it now has borne fruit.
The ELCA's Presiding Bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, came right out and said it in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. When asked about whether there is a hell, she replied, “There may be, but I think it’s empty.” Why? Because Jesus was "clear" in saying that when He was raised up "he will draw all people to himself.”
In other words, "we are all already in the Kingdom of Heaven in the only sense that matters."
Yeah, that was exactly the kind of thing they did back at WTS, and which I continued to observe throughout my ministry in the ELCA. One cherry-picks a verse, or a few verses, relatively few which, lifted out of context and sufficiently tortured, can be used to support a position which becomes considerably less "clear" when it is read in the context of just about everything else Jesus said on whatever the subject might be on which the reader disagrees with Scripture and the Faith. But Jesus said that He and the Father are one. He said that no one comes to God except through him. He said that no one can enter the Kingdom of God except through baptism, or at least the faith that receives it. He says that a person's attitude toward Him is crucial for salvation. He says explicitly that unbelief precludes salvation.
I include only the verses precluding universal salvation which come from the lips of Jesus Himself since it is He Whom Bishop Eaton quotes. I don't include what Paul or the other writing apostles teach, even when it's commentary by the evangelists on the words of Jesus.
What does Jesus mean when He says in John 12:32, "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself?" Well, if we read that verse in the context of John 3, it's hard to see how it can mean what Bishop Eaton thinks it means. If we consult 1 John 2:23- where the apostle writes that "No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also." Apparently, John himself disagrees with Bishop Eaton's understanding of John 12.
But what did Jesus mean? There is no question but that this is a difficult passage- and for that very reason cannot reasonably be isolated from John or the Johannine writings or the New Testament as a whole in interpreting it. Some expositors see a key in John 6, a remarkable chapter in which Jesus says that no one can come to Him unless the Father draws him. Does Jesus simply mean in John 12 that all the people who do come to Him will come to Him because He draws them? John's Gospel is written in Koine Greek rather than English, and Greek has different rules than English when it comes to how one expresses the relationship between subject and object. But it would be as reckless to assume that explanation of John 12 as to assume that Jesus is contradicting Himself in it.
At its last Churchwide Assembly, the ELCA made it official. It adopted A Declaration of Interreligious Commitment, a policy statement in which it officially broke with the position of Luther, the Confessions, and practically everything Jesus said about salvation, choosing to reverse the accepted principle of hermeneutics and interpret a large number of clear and unambiguous passages based on a few problematic ones:
The Lutheran tradition offers other reasons for caution about our claims to know. Luther said that no human could know another person’s relationship with God. What that person says or does gives us clues, but, ultimately, we cannot see into someone else’s heart (Luther, Bondage of the Will). Similarly, Luther insisted that we cannot know the inner workings of God. God has revealed God’s attitude toward us, overall purpose, and character, but the inner workings of God remain hidden. Hence, we must be careful about claiming to know God’s judgments regarding another religion or the individual human beings who practice it.
Note the rhetorical sleight-of-hand. We move- smoothly, though disingenuously- from our ability to see into the heart of another and ascertain whether he or she believes in Jesus to the idea that we dare not take people at their word when they say that they do not trust in Jesus as the basis of their salvation. But those are two entirely different propositions.
And then, there's this carefully-worded piece of sophistry:
There is another reason for caution. As mentioned above, the Lutheran tradition has understood the word “faith” to mean trust rather than affirming beliefs. Hence, we also must be careful not to judge our neighbors only on the basis of their religious beliefs, as they may or may not tell us much about how our neighbors relate to God. There is no substitute for exploring together what matters most to others and to us. The full story of the relationship between our neighbor and God is beyond our knowledge, and even our calling. In the context of inter-religious relations, we do not need answers to these questions in order to treat one another with love and respect, find ways to cooperate for the sake of the larger community, practice hospitality, or witness to the good news of God’s love, forgiveness, and new life in Christ. All we know, and all we need to know, is that our neighbors are made in God’s image and that we are called to love and serve them.
Well, no. It is certainly true that, as regards infant baptism, the Lutheran tradition acknowledges the possibility of non-cognitive faith in those incapable of cognition. Otherwise, by the criteria Jesus lays out, infants could not be saved at all! But the Lutheran tradition has always insisted that among those who are indeed capable of it, "beliefs" are kind of crucial to "believing," at least in adults. Luther, the Confessions, and our tradition, in general, has always insisted that as the Orthodox Fathers expressed it, justifying faith consists of "knowledge, assent, and trust." While it's certainly true that trust is the most crucial element in faith- otherwise "faith" in the Pauline and Lutheran rather than the idiosyncratic Jacobean sense of the word really would be nothing more than what "the devils believe, and tremble-" justifying faith always has an object, namely Jesus.
It also has substance. There is a great deal of truth in that second paragraph concealing its denial of the Christian Gospel. But deny it, it does. even back when I was a seminarian, I wondered why so many of my professors and classmates couldn't see that unless it has cognitive content- unless it involves "affirming beliefs-" the Gospel is gibberish and faith has no object. I doubt that the 97.48% of the delegates who voted to defeat an amendment which would have brought the statement into conformity with Luther, the Confessions, and the New Testament as a whole (including nearly everything Jesus said on the subject other than the verse Bishop Eaton cited) and adopt a statement which flat-out denies the Gospel.
You can't avoid it; C.S. Lewis was right when he wrote,
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher; he'd either be a lunatic- on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg- or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
If Jesus is telling the truth, there can be no question of anyone coming to God apart from Him, nor can there be any doubt that the faith which saves at least adults requires precisely "affirming beliefs." He has not left Bishop Eaton's "empty hell" or the ELCA statement's "we don't really know" open to us, either. He did not intend to.
Lex orandi, lex credendi. We believe what we pray. But what happens when we don't pray?
Decades ago, Will Herberg wrote a book called Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Kevin Schultz wrote a thoughtful update on its two theses in First Things back in 2006. The first of those theses was that while the Constitution forbids an "establishment of religion," as a practical matter we have three of them: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. But of the three, only Catholicism is even theoretically homogenous. There are three branches of Judaism- Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform- and all kinds of flavors of Protestantism. True, all are monotheistic religions that share a great deal. But a great deal also divides them.
Hence, Herberg's second thesis: in America, religions function less as belief systems than as sociological entities. Being a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew was- at least when Herberg wrote his book- the key to social acceptance in America. It was a concept perhaps best expressed by a misquotation of something President Eisenhower said a little over a month after his election.
What Ike actually said was, "...Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." He actually was expressing a profound insight from which modern secularists would benefit. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist. He believed in a kind of god, to be sure- one who created the world to work according to laws he built into it, and then wound it up like a clock to work according to predetermined laws, and then sat back to watch, declining to interfere in events or intervene thereafter.
But Jefferson (and many of the other less-than-orthodox Founding Fathers) realized something modern secularists have not. If one looks at history, the lesson it teaches is the one Mao drew from it when he said, "Power grows from the barrel of a gun." Whether it takes the form of the divine right of kings or the Chinese "Mandate of Heaven," the human experience leaves little doubt that whatever rights human beings have are the gift of those who have power, of governments and of the strong, to be granted to the weak or withdrawn as they see fit. Any other vision must appeal to a source higher than any government or general. Jefferson found it in "nature and nature's God," to which he appealed in the Declaration of Independence as the ground for his startling assertion that all of human history to the contrary, it was nothing less than "self-evident" that
...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Even a Deist like Jefferson realized that freedom and human liberty are counter-intuitive and can be defended only by the assertion that their source is one higher than any human power. Ike probably overstated his case when he said that our system of government makes no sense unless founded on "a deeply felt religious faith;" a convenient and mutually agreed-on fiction would do just as well. But the misquotation of Ike's statement which is often cited says something very different: "America makes no sense without a deeply held faith in God—and I don't care what it is."
That's the version Herberg knew, and he used it to illustrate the vague, watered-down "faith in faith" which really does underlie our national life. Robert Bellah took the concept further, writing an influential essay describing what he called "civil religion." It's not merely that we have an unofficial "religion" of Protestant-Catholic Judaism in the United States, Bellah argued; it actually has its own cultus, complete with a passion narrative (Lincoln, after all, was assassinated on Good Friday). The Founding Fathers and other historical figures are our saints, and we have a liturgical calendar that includes not only saint's days but other feasts and commemorations such as the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Veteran's Day. Lincoln himself called Americans an "almost-chosen people," reflecting a widespread sense of divine favor on a nation which rightly perceives itself as fortunate in almost every way- and at its worst, as therefore uniquely holy in the sense of being "set apart." That particular form of American exceptionalism often finds expression in a bogus but deeply-held belief that the Founders were orthodox Christians who- the First Amendment and their other writings on the subject of religion to the contrary- intended to found a Christian republic, Christianity being usually understood in a narrow and sectarian sense.
As warped a notion as it is, in some ways, it's the healthiest part of the whole mess. But it's time that we recognized that our cultural religion isn't Christianity, that in fact, Christianity is utterly incompatible with our cultural religion- and that where that cultural religion leads us is precisely to sacramental suicide.
And then, there's the book that first awakened me to this whole matter: Paul Murray Cuddihy's No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste. In it, he argues that the deterioration of religion in America has taken a final, fatal step: "American Civil Religion" has morphed into an American religion of civility. He acknowledges almost as an afterthought that it was American inclusiveness which brought to fruition a trend begun in Europe, but he seems to me not without good reason to be interested in the process especially to the degree to which it has defined American religious culture. This is not to deny that the trajectory of Western religious thought generally has followed the same drift into insubstantiality; the history of the Roman Catholic doctrine that extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church, there is no salvation) illustrates the point clearly.
But specifically, to be accepted by the larger American community, Cuddihy suggests, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike have been compelled to give up an aspect of its own self-understanding fundamental to its very essence. To attain acceptance by Protestant America, Jews found it necessary to give up at least the assertion of their identity as a people uniquely chosen by God. Catholics were allowed to continue to see themselves as, perhaps, the pure expression of the Christian faith, but no longer could they assert their claim too loudly to be truly The catholic Church- in the ultimate sense, an institution identical with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of the Creeds.
Protestants had to be somehow seen as in some sense sort of honorary Catholics in a sense remarkably similar to how Vatican II transformed Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century heretics into the Twentieth Century's "separated brethren." Even Jews, who reject the Incarnation entirely, have somehow been admitted to the club. In fact, religious belief of any kind seems to have pretty much vanished from Catholic soteriology in spite of the assertion of Hebrews 11:6 (ESV) that "without faith it is impossible to please him (God, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him."
Which brings us to the Protestants themselves. In A Sermon for the Early Christmas Service [Luke 2:15-20] [1521-1522]. Luther's Works, American Ed., Hans J. Hillerbrand, Helmut T. Lehmann ed., Philadelphia, Concordia Publishing House/Fortress Press, 1974, ISBN 0-8006-0352-4 [Sermons II], vol. 52:39-40), Luther wrote
Therefore he who would find Christ must first find the Church. How should we know where Christ and his faith were, if we did not know where his believers are? And he who would know anything of Christ must not trust himself nor build a bridge to heaven by his own reason; but he must go to the Church, attend and ask her. Now the Church is not wood and stone, but the company of believing people; one must hold to them, and see how they believe, live and teach; they surely have Christ in their midst. For outside of the Christian church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation.
Yet Bishop Eaton is hardly alone among those who claim to be Luther's followers despite being universalists. That inclination is widespread not only in the ELCA but in the churches of the Lutheran World Federation generally. I have little doubt that most of my seminary classmates embraced it, and embrace it now; one of our professors in particular was active in promoting at least the possibility that faith itself might not be all that necessarily to the doctrine of justication by faith. Apparently he has come across a copy of a letter written by a third party (and the accuracy of his citation of even that secondary source has been disputed) in which Luther is quoted as leaving open the possibility of a "second chance" after death who die without faith in Christ. Despite the lack of a primary source, it is argued on the basis of that letter that Luther didn't really mean what he said in that Christmas morning sermon and everywhere else in his writings, or changed his mind, or something, and ended up not being sure about his own doctrine of justification!
When listening to that professor's lectures in seminary, and his speculations as to what the Church Fathers and the martyrs would have said if they lived today, it often occured to me that his theology was not one which would make martyrs because the Gospel for which he argued was so insubstantial that nobody would consider it worth dying for. Nor, I suspect, would anyone outside the Church find it objectionable. To remove the scandal of particularity- the scandal of the Cross- from Christianity is to remove the Gospel itself to it.
It is such a denatured gospel proclaimed by those who play church among us today. Nobody would die for it. But as the case of Robert Fuller illustrates so tragically, that doesn't necessarily mean that cannot kill physically, as well as spiritually.
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