I had
reason again this week to be thankful that I am a Pietist. For reasons buried deeply within Vatican
paranoia the Roman Catholic Church decided to take aim on that most dangerous
group of ecclesiastical miscreants and malcontents: American nuns. The nuns were evidently spending too much
time caring for the poor (which Rome acknowledged was admirable) and not enough
time working against abortion and gay marriage.
I will leave it to Rome and the nuns to settle their differences, but I
was struck once again by breath-taking power assumed by the Imperial Church. Rome from the peak of its lofty pyramid
assumed the right to reshape the ministry of the nuns by fiat. Now before anyone accuses me of Catholic
bashing let me first say that, yes, I know, as they famously put it, “The
church is not a democracy.” And furthermore, yes, I understand that the nuns
should have known what they were signing up for. But I would say even more: the imperial
church is not located only in Rome. It
is found in many cities and in many denominational offices. The Imperial Church has been a plague on the
people of God since almost the beginning.
Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Spiritual problems cannot be solved by
administrative techniques.” But that has
not stopped the Imperial Church from trying.
The Imperial Church loves uniformity.
It loves agreement and cooperation.
It loves unquestioning obedience and feathers unruffled. The spirit-fired, prophetic-inspired, charismatic
free lances are quickly co-opted or destroyed.
This is as true of the Imperial Church today as it was in the fourth
century. And this is true whether the
Imperial Church is Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, or
Southern Baptist. This is true whether
the Imperial Church is bound by creeds and confessions or officially, at least,
non-creedal. Ironically the church
acting most imperially these days is a church, historically at least,
non-confessional: The Southern Baptists.
Not only are they squeezing the life out of their faithful critics, they
are lusting after official recognition and specious power in Washington,
D.C. Within the larger Evangelical
sphere the Imperial Church is represented by the solemn, neo-reformed heresy
hunters who sniff out the theological faults of others with a typically rigid
intransigence insisting on the proper pronunciation of various theological
Shibboleths, especially “penal substitutionary atonement”.
In all
fairness, the Imperial Church has plenty of advocates on the left as well as
the right. For some in the the left-wing
of the Imperial Church taking the Bible seriously is an embarrassing faux pas; suggesting
that Israel may not be completely responsible for the problems in the Middle
East will get you kicked out of the Social Justice clubhouse; and believing
that people need to hear the good news and respond to Jesus’ offer of grace and
forgiveness will get you branded a Fundamentalist. Years ago in one of his monologues Bill Cosby
suggested that most parents are not interested in justice, they want quiet. And the same is true of the Imperial Church:
line up, take your medicine, and don’t make waves. The Imperial Church is well represented by
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who was terribly annoyed that Jesus had shown up
when they had just gotten things settled down.
The motto of the Imperial Church seems to be, who needs the Spirit when
you’ve got committees.
My people,
the Pietists, saw through the Imperial Church.
They saw through Rome and they saw through the high church Lutheranism
that seemed intent on strangling the life out of the vital beast Luther had set
loose on the continent of Europe. They
saw through the self-satisfied and well-connected Anglican Church of the 18th
century. They saw through the rickety
state churches in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany and the unofficial state
churches of the United States. They
sought a living faith, founded in the Scriptures, in warm-hearted worship of
God, and commitment to care for the poor, homeless, helpless and hopeless. They were wary of creeds and confessions
because they had seen them distorted into tools of control and considered them
insufficiently rooted in the Bible. They
insisted that so-called “lay people” were also priests (following Luther, of
course). They had their faults. They could be legalistic. They could be simplistic. They could be anti-intellectual. They could be a pain in the neck. But at their best they sought to bypass the
Imperial Church with its stranglehold on God and find their way back to the
“living water.”
Pietism is
messy. Organizing Pietists is like the
proverbial herding of cats. So Pietist
denominational leaders are always tempted to take their cues from the Imperial
Church, to rein in their adventuresome or silence their irksome. In his London concert of a few years ago,
Leonard Cohen gave a long list of pharmaceuticals he had taken over the years
to deal with his various emotional difficulties. At the end of this litany he commented, “But
cheerfulness kept breaking through.” And
so it is with the Spirit. No matter what
the Imperial Church attempts to do, no matter how strong the administrative
soporific, the Spirit, and all the messiness that entails for the Imperial
Church, will keep breaking through.
Thanks be to God.
John E. Phelan, Jr.
