Church and State

            Like many Americans I have followed the controversy over the federal government’s requiring Roman Catholic institutions like hospitals and schools to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives for their employees.  Roman Catholic bishops and many supporters from the Evangelical camp expressed outrage at their being required to provide a product they considered immoral.  The controversy was cast as a challenge to religious liberty and, perhaps ironically, the separation of church and state.  Now I don’t want to minimize the serious questions raised by the government’s actions.  But these are complex issues.  All of us, whether people of religious faith or more secular convictions find ourselves paying for things we would rather not support.  Many of us would rather have not seen our tax money go to the Iraq war or nuclear weapons.  I suspect that many atheists would rather not pay for military chaplains or vegans contribute to the salaries of meat inspectors.  

            Be that as it may, I had another problem.  I was concerned that the Roman Catholic Bishops and my (mostly) brothers in the Evangelical world were angling for a kind of de facto state church.  Certain parties within the Evangelical world have been pushing this agenda for a long time.  These are the folks who try to rewrite American history to make it seem that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson actually graduated from Moody Bible Institute.  The Roman Catholic Church well into the 20^th century was nervous about Democracy and generally in favor of freedom of religion only where the church was a threatened minority.  While that is certainly less true these days, I suspect there are many corners of the Vatican as there are in Colorado Springs that would prefer a kind of Christian monarch and the enforcement of one brand or the other of Christian morality.

            I am writing, however, to praise the secular state.  I have been convinced by Stanley Hauerwas on the one hand and Rodney Stark on the other that coziness with the state leads to the enervation of the church.  Hauerwas insists that when the church asks the state to do its work it suffers a fatal compromise.  Stark argues that privileged state churches become intellectually and spiritually flabby.  The church, he argues, requires vigorous competition from other faiths and philosophies to sustain its strength and promote its message.  The relative strength of the church in the United States is the result of such competition and pressure.  Even if Christians in the United States could agree on what constitutes “Christian morality” it would be disastrous for the task of enforcing that morality to be handed to the state.  The secular state, in other words, is good for the church.

            Besides all this like many, if not most Americans, I am deeply suspicious of hierarchical structures loudly telling me what I should or should not do and should or should not think.  Whether that hierarchy is in Washington, D. C., Vatican City, Colorado Springs, or Chicago I bristle when the voices from on high tell me how a Christian should think, vote, and believe.  I bristle not because I think there is no Christian way to think, vote, and believe but because I believe in the local church and what the Baptists call “soul competency.”  I am, after all, a Protestant.  Critical issues, I believe, are discerned together with brothers and sisters around the word of God and in service of the people of God.  They are discerned in humility and communicated with grace.  God’s people do not enforce, they persuade, they love, the bear witness.  So to the folks in Vatican City, Colorado Springs and Chicago—thanks but no thanks.  I’m doing OK with the Bible, the font and table, and my brothers and sisters at Resurrection Covenant Church.

John E. Phelan, Jr.

How?

How?

What do I do with my anger?
My beloved country is stained with cruel words, fractured by
jeering division and awash with impious posturing.
How do I love those who so eagerly hate?
How do I sustain those who so easily sneer?
How do I weep with those so indifferent to suffering and laugh with those so
ignorant of pain?
Do I gently point out latent racism?
Do I carefully question overt sexism?
Do I thoughtfully rebuke cursing of leaders?
Do I arch my eyebrows when the comfortably moneyed complain of taxes?

Or:

Do I remain silent for the sake of peace and smile for purposes of goodwill?
Do I silently curse their blindness and quietly rail at their ignorance?
Do I simply love that silent anger?
Do I fear to listen?
Am I cruel in my hiding and ugly in that silence?

How do I love them?  (These enemies who are not my enemies, but beloved of God.)

Do I seek love in hating?
Do I seek peace in cursing?
Do I seek hope in sneering?
Do I hang on them the horns of the scapegoat?

Fair Game?

Recently I have taken to sending emails to sports writers and political pundits.  I take the Chicago Tribune, a once proud newspaper fallen, like most other newspapers, on hard times.  Political columnists and sports writers are paid for their opinions.  And like most people I love to read the people I already agree with!  Now, having confessed my sins, I have been known to read people I frequently disagree with.  In the Tribune this is John Kass.  Sometimes I like what Kass has to say.  Sometimes he drives me crazy.  What troubles me about Kass and his brethren in the sports page, however, is not their opinions, but the way those opinions are frequently expressed.  I began emailing when I noticed that it was not enough to criticize the policy of a politician or the play of an athlete; the hapless individuals targeted by Kass et. al. were subject to degrading humiliation.  The attacks were frequently cruelly personal.  It was as if public figures by virtue of the fact that they held public office or started for the Chicago Bears were fair game for mockery and abuse.  Their failures, it seems, were not simply because they faced a recalcitrant economy or a good defense, but because they were bad people.

I have emailed Kass and at least three sports writers asking about this.  Is it really necessary to mock and humiliate your opponents?  Isn’t it enough to point out your disagreements and note their failures without sneering at them?  I have, of course, never received a reply.  I know that writers like Kass and his brethren on cable television are “entertainers.”  People on the left love to hear Colbert take down a bewildered conservative.  People on the right love to hear Glenn Beck mock a hapless liberal.  And so sportswriters and columnists are almost compelled to resort to nastiness to get and hold an audience.  I get that.  But there is something profoundly troubling about it all.  In spite of the fact that Kass is Greek Orthodox, Colbert is Roman Catholic and Beck a Mormon, they seem to have little regard for the words of the man they claim to follow: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43).  It is hard for me to see how you can love your enemies and mock and humiliate them.  It is hard for me to see how you can love your enemies and distort what they say. 

I have determined during this election cycle that I will not join in the mockery and abuse.  I am going to pray for both candidates—even if I can’t stand the positions of one of them (as is likely to be the case).  I will feel free to criticize positions and raise questions about decisions.  But I will not join in the hurling of abuse, lies, and distortions.  While I am at it, I would suggest that the church world could stand to call a moratorium on this as well.  The left needs to stop sneering at the “fundamentalists.”  The right needs to stop excoriating the “liberals.”  Raise questions about theology and practice, but stop denigrating and insulting each other.  We can do this without the personal abuse and cruel assertions that come far too quickly to our lips.  I have written and said a lot of things over the years.  I have not always been charitable or kind and I regret that.  It behooves all of us who write or speak to consider more carefully how our words, when they become intimate and personal, wound individuals and persons who love them.  How can we use our words to challenge and encourage?  How can we use our words to love?

 John E. Phelan, Jr.

A Baby Boomer's Apology

It perhaps goes without saying that the Baby Boomers are not the most popular generation around.  No one will call us “The Greatest Generation”, at least without a well-developed sense of irony.  We have an unenviable record of self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, and over the top narcissism that is obvious to all but ourselves.  In spite of our counter-cultural pieties we have sustained nearly unabated war, tolerated unprecedented destruction of our natural resources, and divorced our spouses and neglected our children at unforgivable rates.  We have, of course, wept crocodile tears over all this, but have not demonstrated the moral courage to face our unraveling the fabric of life’s very sustainability.  Many of us seem to face with indifference the very real possibility that our grandchildren will suffer the collapse of our consumerist economy, the exhaustion of our oil, the ruination of our agriculture, and the rise of demagogic politicians that will take advantage of their fears.  Whether we are liberal or conservative we seem to favor politicians who let us keep doing exactly what we want to do with varying levels of government support.  We want to live as we always have and leave the difficult challenge of cleaning up the mess we made to our heirs.

 All of this is bad enough and worthy of an abject apology.  But I want to apologize for something else entirely: what we have done to the church of Jesus Christ.  We have been every bit as narcissistic and self-aggrandizing in the ecclesiastical world as in the economic, political, and familial worlds.  The American church is a mess.  Whether you look at Mainline, Roman Catholic, or Evangelical churches, it would be hard to argue that any are characterized by Spiritual strength, moral integrity, and missional courage.  There are, of course, many notable exceptions and I am thankful for them.  But for the most part the culture looks upon the American church, justifiably I might add, with at best bemusement and at worst contempt.  When they think of the church they do not think of love, hope, and compassion but small-mindedness, arrogance, gnat straining and camel swallowing.  Sure the media looks for the worst, but it has little trouble finding it.  Having said this there are some specific things I want to apologize for:

1. The Mega-Church:  I am really sorry about this.  It is, of course, not surprising the Mega-Church rose among boomers.  We love the big deal and great entertainment.  We are the Woodstock generation and mega-churches are like Woodstock without the nudity and drug use.  We are the generation that believed if big is good massive is even better.  But the mega-church appealed to us for other reasons.  We liked the idea of its inhuman perfection.  We wanted every note perfect, every bathroom sparkling clean, every speech equally inspiring.  We liked the illusion that all was right with the world.  We were embarrassed by our parents’ churches.  We were doctors, lawyers, educators, CEOs and CFOs.  We didn’t want to listen to marginally competent choirs and shaky musicians.  We insisted that everything had to be perfect or we wanted nothing to do with it.  We also loved the anonymity.  The mega-church didn’t require much of us.  We could show up, enjoy the show, make a generous donation and go home to watch football.  We could pay someone else to take care of the kids and care for the hungry and hurting.  With Darwinian smugness we countenanced the destruction of many small neighborhood churches sneeringly insisting they obviously didn’t have what it took to keep up.  We insulted the competent pastors of such churches, humiliating those who evidently lacked the “leadership ability” to make it to a membership of 15,000.  Our best mega-church pastors have already figured out that things are off the rails, but the train will not soon be put back on the tracks.

2.     I am really sorry about the music.  My generation evidently believes that no decent music was written before about 1964 and after about 1975.  We are convinced that everything should sound like it was composed in ‘68 by the Rolling Stones even if it was written in 2012.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beatles and the Beach Boys.  I even love a good deal of what is called “contemporary” music (although some of it is about as contemporary as the television show Dragnet).  What I am distressed about is that we convinced ourselves and many others that what was sung and prayed by our parents and grandparents is only worthy of scorn.  We tossed out hundreds of years of Christian music, liturgy, and practice without noticing the baby flailing its chubby arms.  Some of the best of our younger generation of singers, liturgists, and pastors are discovering anew the riches of our Christian heritage, no thanks to us.  But many of us continue to cling to “praise choruses” composed in the 80s as if they were equivalent to Bach cantatas.  Others complain that the use of a prayer polished by generations of use is “too liturgical”, ignoring the blandness of our worship language and the poverty of our imaginations.

3. The boomers owe a big apology about what has happened with theology.  There is too much to say here so I will try to be succinct.  There seem to be two trends: one is a form of individualistic pietism that imagines I can choose my god or my theology like I choose pie over ice cream or the Packers over the Bears.  pietists select only the cream-filled and disdain the coconut-filled.  Not wanting to work all that hard, they select what appeals to them and ignore what is difficult or unpleasant to contemplate.  These people are found in every part of the Christian world.  They are our most ardent religious consumers, but they will only “buy” what they like.  They have trivialized the heritage of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth by seeking the lowest common denominator.  The second trend is the theologically rigorous.  They are the virulently traditional Roman Catholics, the snarky neo-Reformed Evangelicals, and the frantically hyper-conservative traditional Protestants.  They despise the idea of the religious cafeteria.  For them theology is a matter of eating your spinach whether you like it or not.  In their world all the questions worth answering were settled by Trent, or Calvin, or some synod or the other in the distant past.  They hurl anathemas with glee, sneer at anyone with the slightest disagreement or smallest question, and are, by my observation, generally unpleasant.  While they are an understandable reaction to the religious and moral indifference of their contemporaries, that doesn’t make them any more attractive.  I would argue that both forms of theologizing are the result of laziness.  Both refuse the challenge of rethinking and re-engaging the ancient faith in the modern world.  The first group imagines all the answers are the result of a merely personal decision.  The second imagines that all the answers were settled in the fourth or sixteenth or nineteenth century.  Both lack the humility, compassion, and hope to do the hard work of engaging the faith in this world.

4.  Perhaps the most inexcusable failure of the Baby Boomers and the church is our failure to promote justice for the oppressed and provide food for the hungry.  There are, thank God, many notable exceptions to this.  But for the most part it has been the generation that followed us that has raised this question most sharply.  We have no excuse for this since we grew up in the 60s with the Civil Rights movement.  Many of us marched for Voting Rights or protested the War in Vietnam.  But on the Mainline side we somehow imagined that electing Democrats was enough to promote justice and on the Evangelical side we agonized over whether evangelism and social justice belonged together.  We thought social justice was a “black issue” or a “liberal issue” or a “political issue” and so we left it to a handful of activists and politicians and made little effort to integrate such questions and concerns into the life of the church.  Even if we did it was an issue “out there”, not “in here.”  It was left to our kids to challenge us on this.  And so we salved our consciences by sending them on mission trips.

I could go on, but I am feeling bad enough already.  I know that many of my contemporaries will not agree with my list. Other readers will perhaps consider this column just one more example of Boomer arrogance.  If we can’t be the best, perhaps we can be the best at being the worst.  So be it.  But friends, we are leaving our children and grandchildren a huge mess to clean up.  Our self-indulgence will cost them dearly.  It seems the least we can do is say sorry.  But perhaps there is still time for us to begin helping them to clean it up.

John E. (Jay) Phelan

North Park Theological Seminary

Chicago, IL.

Failure of Empathy

Why would a college student secretly film his roommate having sex and post it on the internet? What was he thinking? He clearly was not concerned about the painful humiliation the roommate would experience—or he simply didn’t care. The outcome of his lack of empathy was a talented young man jumping to his death from a bridge. Why is it that people feel free to spew any kind of bile on the internet or Facebook? Do they imagine the disembodied other at the receiving end of their vituperation cannot be wounded—or do they simply not care? Why do people shrug their shoulders at environmental degradation, warnings of the effects of global warming or the growing misery of the declining middle class and the wretched poor? Are they genuinely unconcerned about the legacy they are leaving their children and grandchildren? Or are they motivated by their own comfort and pleasure above all? What is happening to us? Are we losing our capacity to identify with the other or to make any sacrifice for the common good? Are we growing so narcissistic, so inhumane, that we seek political and philosophical reasons to pander to our own petty indulgences?


I refuse to believe, for example, that anyone seriously believes the lunatic, ultra-individualistic, anti-democratic, self-indulgent “philosophy” of Ayn Rand. If her philosophy was actually followed there would be no human society. We would be reduced once again to what Rene Girard called “a war of all against all.” Only the most powerful, most vicious, least morally inhibited would prevail and that by brute force. Her vision approximates the world of Lord of the Flies. No. I can’t believe anyone takes her seriously. Her brash narcissism is touted up as a coherent vision of society and used by the greedy and powerful to justify what they were going to do anyway. It is an excuse for the powerful to keep the powerless in tow, for the already obscenely wealthy to become even more wealthy, and for adolescent fantasists to dream of life without moral limits.

What has happened to us? According to new studies by the University of Michigan this diminishment of empathy is not an illusion. Between 1979 and 2009 research on university students showed a significant decline in empathy. The studies of Sara Konrath, cited in the May-June issue of the Utne Reader, demonstrated that between those years “empathy plummeted.” The “greatest drop” was in “empathetic concern”—48%. “The second highest drop,” reports Konrath “was in “perspective taking, a measure of people’s innate tendency to imagine others’ point of view.” This fell 34%.

This speaks not only to the failure of society, but to the failure of the church. Are we helping members of Christian congregations to empathize with the struggles of others or are we rather enabling their narcissism by appealing to their already deeply ingrained consumerism and individualism? If we cannot address this in the church we will have difficulty addressing the growing viciousness of our indifference to and scorn for others in the wider society. The horrors of Ayn Rand’s vision may yet be realized.

Bell and Hell

I hesitate to add to the hype and hoopla surrounding Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins. But having read the book, I have been taken aback by the viciousness of the attacks on Bell. In fact, I find the outrage and fury surrounding the book more interesting than the books itself. Having read it I have to wonder where some of Bell’s critics have been. The first half of the book is firmly grounded in the work of our generation’s premier New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright. Bell acknowledges this in his “Further Reading” section at the end of the book. His exploration of hell draws from C. S. Lewis’ classic, The Great Divorce. While some have carped that neither Wright nor Lewis are true evangelicals, it cannot be denied that both are heroes to many who would count themselves as evangelicals. While Wright's work is relatively recent, Lewis' book was published in 1946. Lewis did not deny the existence of hell, far from it. He rather suggested that leaving the “grey town” for heaven may not be as easy as some of its denizens may think. When they arrive in heaven on their day trip from hell they are perfectly free to stay. But the vast majority returns to hell because they cannot have heaven on their own terms. Lewis makes it clear he is not trying to describe the geography of hell, but rather creating a fable. The fable addresses the profound and enduring love of God and our human capacity for self-deception and stubborn self destructiveness. Lewis would like to believe in universalism, but knows too much about human nature and values too highly human freedom to hold any hope for universal salvation. Roman Catholic scholar Hans Urs Von Balthasar wrote a little book entitled Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved. He held out the theoretical possibility of universal salvation given the freedom and love of God, but did not go so far as to say it would actually happen. Bell is not always easy to understand. Sometimes his poetic fancy gets away from him. But in the end it seemed to me he was saying something very like Lewis and Von Balthasar. You can choose hell if you want to. You can remain turned in on yourself and isolated from God and love. But the gates of hell are locked form the inside and the gates of heaven are never shut. As Lewis’ guide George MacDonald tells him in The Great Divorce, in the end you either say to God “Your will be done.” Or God says to you, “Your will be done.” In Lewis’ and Bell’s imaginations neither hell nor heaven are what many evangelicals expect. But then everything said about heaven, hell, and, for that matter God, is said via metaphor and analogy. Both Lewis and Bell are trying to integrate their understanding of God’s enduring love and God’s desire that all be saved, with the reality of human freedom and resistance. Love Wins is a provocative, engaging and quick read. But before you read Bell go to the sources. Take a look at Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright and The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. The response to Bell once again underscores the serious divisions in what is called evangelicalism. The neo-Calvinist crowd around Piper, et. al. has decided that they and only they are the arbiters of evangelical identity. Rob Bell has given them a convenient target for their wrath and a valuable dividing line. I’m with Lewis. I am not interested in being either “neo-Calvinist” or “emerging” but merely Christian. These ongoing recriminations are humiliating and hopeless. God help us.

Iona Story

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn and settle on the far side of the sea, even there your right had will hold me fast. Psa. 139:7-10.

Far/Near

It is a long way to Iona. Even if you live in Great Britain you spend a good deal of time on various modes of transport to finally make it to the holy Island. For me it involved a long, crowded flight to Heathrow, another one to Glasgow, a bus ride into the city, a three hour train trip to the west coast city of Oban, a ferry to the Island of Mull, an hour and one half bus ride on winding single lane roads across Mull, and, finally, another ferry to Iona itself. By the time you arrive it seems you have put as much time and space between yourself and your old life as possible. It seems that Glasgow is lost in the misty past—let alone Chicago. For me the distance was important. It became a great deal more than physical distance—it was psychological distance, spiritual distance. After fourteen years of joys and disappointments, celebrations and frustrations, I was near neither to myself nor to my God. Sometimes it takes distance to be able to see that. Sometimes you need to be far away to see again how near God really is. Iona is that kind of place—both far and near. It is remote and familiar. Splendid and ordinary. Immanent and transcendent. In its aching and simple beauty the carefully constructed defensive structure I had erected slowly dissolved. The rough places became, if not smooth, at least smoother. The thick places became thin. Of course, it is not hard to rebuild those structures. But for a moment—they were down.

Together/Alone

I knew no one on my trip or on the Island. I knew I would be in a room with three other men. When I arrived at the abbey I found myself assigned to a space on the second floor of the rebuilt dormitory section of the abbey. I could go out of my room, turn left and go through a door, down a flight of steps, into the abbey chapel. I could turn right, go up a few stairs into the abbey library. My three roommates were from Norwich in England. They were all well over 70 and had known each other all their lives. When they conversed with one another they were nearly incomprehensible to me. There were two bunk beds and I was in the top bunk. I had a flashback to being 10 years old and sleeping in cabins at Bible camp. It was close quarters but congenial ones. These were good men who, with their vicar and other members of their church, were like me trying to get close to God again. I treasured our time together.

There were about 45 of us in the abbey that week: mostly from Great Britain, but also from Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and the US. We worshipped together and worked together. I was part of a team that set up and washed up for the noon meal. I also was responsible for mopping the upstairs bathrooms every morning. But there was plenty of time to be alone: sitting in the cool, glorious abbey chapel with sun streaming through the windows, praying where prayers had ascended for 800 years; walking to the north end of the island to watch the surf crash, hear seabird cries, and gaze at distant islands or the pastel mountains of Mull; or sitting on my favorite bench in the still-ruined nunnery—the bench that read “In memory’s garden it is always summer 1973.” I loved being with my colleagues in worship and work. But even for this extrovert there was something profoundly healing about those times alone, with my books, my prayers, my memories—and my God.

Darkness/Light

I was instructed to bring a torch to Iona. I had momentary thoughts of Gandalf leading Frodo and company through the mines of Moria, and then I remembered that a torch is a flashlight for our British cousins. And if you left the confines of the abbey after dark, you needed a torch. There is very little ambient light on the island. Once you have escaped the pale pool of light over the main abbey door you are in pitch dark. There are only a few buildings on the Island, no glaring streetlights, nothing to relieve the darkness or blot out the stars. One evening, after our 9 PM service, we were invited by young Swedes and Norwegians on a confirmation retreat to the Island to participate in a Taize’ service in the St. Oran chapel. The chapel is in the middle of the ancient graveyard of Iona and is the oldest building on the island, dating from the 12th century. It is tiny and perhaps 50 of us were jammed into the small, cold, and dark space. Soon the warm, soft glow of fifty candles lit our faces. We sang, and chanted, and read. It was so simple. It was so profound. I remembered the Psalm—surely the darkness is light to you. Strong young voices and creaky old ones sang out of joy and hope and love. It was the highlight of my pilgrimage.

Heaven/Earth

In the end heaven and earth are wed. In the end we don’t go to heaven, heaven comes to us. In the end, God makes his dwelling place with his people. You can certainly go to Iona and see nothing but pretty scenery and interesting old buildings. But then, I could have stayed in Chicago and be transported into glory while praying in North Park’s Isaacson Chapel—as unlikely as that may seem! But those of us in education and ministry, who make a business out of praying and preaching and teaching, need to be reminded of the thin, gauzy veil between this world and the next. We can become numb worrying about the worship band or the sermon or the business meeting or that troubled marriage in the third row. We can begin to treat the living God like subject matter and our own lives like experiments in holy living. We can live once removed from genuine engagement. We can end up with the pastorate or the professorate, or the deanship as just one more role we play—a role we lose ourselves in. But every now and then, on a tiny, remote, holy island, we can remember once again, who we are, what we are about, and why we signed on with God in the first place. We can pull back the curtain, and for a brief moment hear the heavenly choir cry holy.

John E. Phelan, Jr.
North Park Theological Seminary
Chicago