The Reverend Dr. Peter C. Moore’s Address
in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul,
Diocese of Springfield:
The Missing Ingredient in Mainline Church
Life Today
Springfield, Illinois - September 25, 2004
We are here today
because we believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God
unto salvation to all who believe.
We are here today
because we believe that the Gospel is True – not just helpful to those who
need help, but True for all men and women on the globe.
We are here today
because we believe that there has been no scholarship, no new discovery,
no new intellectual fad that has disproved the age-old conviction that
Jesus Christ is Lord, and that he is Lord of all – or no Lord at all.
We are here today
because we believe that human nature has
not changed, and that the issues for which the Gospel was the answer in
the First Century, and in the Twelfth Century, and the Nineteenth Century
are still the issues that the Gospel speaks to today: sin, failure,
brokenness, rebellion in the heart, disintegration in the family,
lawlessness in the nation, and lost ness from God.
We are here today
because we believe that the Church of Jesus Christ is in trouble, and that
we may be part of the trouble by our half-heartedness, our accommodation
to the culture, and our willingness to tolerate all manner of heresy in
the name of Christianity. We’d like to change that – in ourselves and in
the Church to which we belong, and which we love.
We are here today
because a portion of the Church is asking us to bless something that we
cannot bless, something that our consciences just can’t get around. We do
not hate homosexuals. We may have friends or family members who struggle
with their sexual orientation. We love all people and extend to them the
same grace that we believe that God in Jesus Christ has extended to us.
But we cannot come to the conclusion that committed homosexual
relationships are the moral equivalent of committed heterosexual
relationships – that gay marriage or gay partnerships are good and right
in the eyes of God as long as they are loving, consensual, tender, and so
forth. We just can’t believe that. Everything in our experience,
everything we read in Scripture, everything Christians have thought
through the ages, and everything that the overwhelming majority of
Christians in the world today think has convinced us that we cannot bless
these relationships, and that a bishop of the Church who espouses them and
lives in one doesn’t make it right.
We are here today
because beneath this presenting moral issue lie a host of troublesome
theological issues that have eroded people’s confidence in the plain
reading of Scripture. Without denying the existence of theological
problems, we nevertheless believe that orthodox, biblical, creedal, Prayer
Book, Anglican teaching is correct. What we’ve been taught all our lives
is not some throwback to the Dark Ages. It is the light that lightens
every one who is coming into the world – it is the light of Christ that
burns in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it.
We are here today
because we love God, and we’re trying to love one another, and we believe
that however unworthy we are, God has stooped down to our level in the
Incarnation, and has greeted us as brother, friend, Savior, Master and
King.
We’re here today
because we want to lift high the cross of Christ, confident that if we
lift him high, if we proclaim his great sacrifice for our sins, he will
draw all people unto himself.
Finally, we’re here today
to celebrate orthodoxy – and orthodoxy comes from two Greek words: “ortho”
– right, and “doxa” glory. Orthodoxy is the right kind of glory. It is not
just a head trip, a creedal affirmation, a set of words that happen to
bring assent from the historic Christian community through the ages –
valuable though that would be. Orthodoxy is our way of praising God for
who he is and what he has done. It is giving glory where it is deserved –
to the immortal, invisible, only wise God, and to Jesus Christ and the
Holy Spirit. Orthodoxy is our “yes” to what God has revealed of himself in
his Word.
THE REALITY WE
EXPERIENCE
But we are part of a Church that claims to
be orthodox and yet refuses in its General Convention to stand by the
Creeds, the Articles of Religion, the Bible, and the plain meaning of our
own Prayer Book. It appoints judicial committees that conclude that we
have no core doctrine on issues that are tearing the Church apart. It
winks at members of the House of Bishops who spend every waking day
speaking and writing against everything that the Church has held dear. It
has been told by the worldwide family to which it belongs that after
careful review, they’ve concluded that it neither understands the Gospel
accurately nor preaches it faithfully.
What has gone wrong? Where have we gotten
off the track? Why are we the pariah of the worldwide Church? Why is our
Presiding Bishop almost shunned in the international fellowship of
Bishops? Why is a Commission issuing a report as I speak that will put the
Episcopal Church on record as having strayed too far, and having put
itself beyond the pale?
The answers to this are complex and many.
But the pain of these issues is experienced daily in the pews of churches
just like this. Let me share with you an experience I had in what many
would consider a pretty typical Episcopal Church.
THE “NEW” GOSPEL
It is Sunday morning and I am sitting in
the pew of a suburban New York City parish. The little gothic church
building is nestled in a valley amid rolling hills where white fences
separate lovely homes. It is a beautiful replica of an English country
church. In the pews alongside of me are well-heeled gentry who greet one
another with studied politeness. Someone once said that there are
basically three types of Episcopal churches: the urban, the suburban, and
the bourbon. This one is decidedly a bourbon parish! I am listening to the
rector preach on Genesis 3 – the Fall.
“You must understand,” he says, “that the
Fall is not really a descent for humankind, but rather an ascent. Adam and
Eve, in choosing the apple, chose for the knowledge of good and
evil. It was not the disaster traditional Christian theology has painted
it. Instead it was a rise into sophistication, awareness and
understanding. The human race needed to move from innocence into
self-conscious action in its progress towards compassion and grace. This
is why Jesus Christ can be for us the apex in the evolution of human
nature.
The message would have jarred me out of
somnolence had it not been so familiar. On a previous visit to the same
church I had heard something similar. That time the then rector was
preaching on Christ as our “Advocate.” It all sounded great until at the
climax of his sermon he said: “Now picture yourself standing before God at
the judgment. The books are opened, and you cringe at the thought of what
might be revealed. But Christ stands at your side and says to the Father:
‘Father, this child of yours is really not so bad. There is still a great
deal of good in her. She has done her best, and tried hard. Your image is
still there, not perfectly reflected, but still there. Be kind towards
this your child. Show your love and mercy.’”
Whether either preacher realized it, and I
am not sure that either they or their congregation did, both managed in
their sermons to render the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection,
and the work of the Holy Spirit unnecessary. The service of Holy Communion
that followed on each occasion could only be called a tasteful and
well-choreographed re-presentation of a non-event. By minimizing the
reality of sin, these two rectors had scuttled away any need for God to
make a costly sacrifice of himself on the cross, and at the same time they
had turned the penitential dimension of the service into an unhealthy
exercise in breast-beating.
AVOIDANCE OF SIN
As I left I began to wonder if this might
not be typical of many churches in America today? Not many would be as
brazen as these two rectors who whitewashed essential parts of the
biblical tradition, but these days sin is rarely talked about and almost
never denounced. It is as if sin, having been relegated in the popular
mind to the baser lusts of the flesh, can now be dismissed by a culture
anxious to celebrate the flesh as a newly discovered gift of God.
Think of how far we’ve come from the days
in the 19th. Century when a staunch evangelical like Manton
Eastburn, Bishop of Massachusetts, would address cultured congregations
like Trinity Church, Boston as “vile earth and miserable sinners, worms
and children of wrath.” Although educated people may not have liked that
then any more than they do today, most of them stayed to hear more.
Today, however, reflecting the mood of a
“kinder, gentler society”, a society that thinks we might wage a more
sensitive war in Iraq and that that might persuade Al Queda to reverse its
stated policies of terrorism, we either drop the Confession, or we
re-write it. When the 1928 Prayer Book was revised and we were given the
1979 Prayer Book, certain phrases were discretely left out. We no longer
had to say that we were “miserable sinners,” nor did we have to say that
the “burden of our sins was intolerable.” In fact, some have suggested
that we might re-write the entire Confession. It might sound like this:
CONFESS YOUR __?___
“Benevolent and easy-going Father, we have
occasionally been guilty of errors of judgment. We have lived under the
deprivations of heredity and the disadvantages of environment. We have
sometimes failed to act in accordance with common sense. We have done the
best we could in the circumstances; and we have been careful not to ignore
the common standards of decency. And we are glad to think that we are
fairly normal. Do thou, O Lord, deal lightly with our infrequent lapses.
Be thy own sweet Self with those who admit they are not perfect, according
to the unlimited tolerance that we have a right to expect from thee. And
grant, as an indulgent parent, that we may hereafter continue to live a
harmless and happy life and keep our self-respect.”
It was H. Richard Niebuhr who surveyed the
sad state of liberal Protestantism and wrote in his book The Kingdom of
God in America: People today “want a God without wrath to take man
without sin into a kingdom without justice through the ministrations of a
Christ without a cross.”
Intellectuals call this progress. But is
it progress? Psychologist Karl Menninger wrote a book entitled What
Ever Became of Sin? In it he argued that sin is a hopeful category
because it holds out the possibility of correction, change and remedy.
Without sin, we wonder what is the cause of the malaise we all feel and
project as blame and criticism. A world without sin leads to the nonsense
described by Robert M. Hunt at Harvard. After a course he taught on the
Holocaust a majority of students considered the rise of Hitler inevitable,
leaving no one responsible for the slaughter of six million Jews. Hearing
this one scholar commented: “No fault history, no fault corporate
wrongdoing, no fault cheating on tests…it’s all of a piece.”
MODERN PROPHETS
It seems that it often takes someone
outside of our American context to bring us up short about our
shortcomings. In an article in the New York Times (7/6/75) about Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, William Shannon wrote: “He is a uniquely Russian prophet who
became an exile in the wilderness of the West. He speaks of sin and shame
and redemption, concepts which our neo-pagan society with its secularized
atmosphere and deeply corrupt popular culture can barely comprehend.”
This harks back to the time when a number
of great thinkers wrote an article in the London Times entitled:
“What’s Wrong with This world?” Various philosophers waded in with this
theory or that. But G. K. Chesterton wrote a terse letter to the editor in
reply: All Chesterton said was: “What’s wrong with this world? I am.”
But why do our churches, with all of our
rich sober reflection on the twisted state of human nature and our deep
spirituality of alienation and redemption fail to teach and preach about
sin? Are we fearful of turning the bulk of churchgoers away? A famous
rector, describing one of his upstanding members once said: “She has every
virtue except a sense of sin.”
TRANSLATION EFFORTS
The strange thing is that many of the same
people who would wince at any mention of sin in church are prepared to
read about it in best sellers. Take the writings of psychologist M. Scott
Peck, whose books have sold in the millions. In his Road Less Traveled,
Peck has a fine section on Adam and Eve. I wish that the rector of the
little gothic church had read him, and even used him rather than dishing
up his own evolutionary optimism. Peck writes that he always had had
difficulty with the concept of original sin, but now he believes that it
can be understood as the “ubiquitous nature of laziness.” Adam and Eve
could have debated with God: “We are curious as to why You don’t want us
to eat any of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We
really like it here, and we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but your law on
this matter doesn’t make much sense to us, and we’d really appreciate it
if you explained it to us?” Not saying this revealed a fundamental
laziness, says Peck – an unwillingness to get God’s side of the story
before they acted.” “Each and every one of us, more or less frequently,
will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step.
Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all
lazy.” Not a bad try for a lay psychologist and far better than the
optimistic dribble dished up in the sermon I heard.
A theologian once said: “Every heresy
begins with an inadequate sense of sin.” Think about that. If heresy
begins with an inadequate view of sin, then orthodoxy beings with an
adequate view of sin. Perhaps here is the clue as to what has taken over
mainline Protestantism, including the Episcopal Church in this country?
CHILD ABUSE?
Historically it is evangelicals, of whom I
consider myself one, who have a great tradition of bringing people to a
conviction of sin. In ages past it was thought to be a precondition to an
experience of Grace. I am reading the new biography of Jonathan Edwards,
America’s greatest theologian. Edwards, who lived in the 17th.
Century, ended his life as President of Princeton University, but before
that was a Congregational pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was he
who preached the infamous sermon: “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” –
the sermon that as someone said New England has never forgotten, and never
forgiven. That sermon and others that Edwards preached in a scholarly,
monotone voice helped kick off a deep work of God that pre-dated the Great
Awakening a Century later.
What most people don’t know is that as a
young man, growing up on the banks of the Connecticut River, Edwards tried
again and again to be sure that he was truly saved. His father, a Puritan
pastor, taught that until there was a deep sense of sin, a deep
humiliation before God, no one could be sure that they had been truly
saved. Edwards had a rebellious streak towards his father, but at the same
time he wanted to prove to him that he had truly been converted. “Have you
come under true conviction of your sin?” his father would ask him, not
willing to take anything but the genuine article for an answer. Today
psychologists would rail against Edwards’ father and call what he did a
form of child abuse. But, because Jonathan Edwards took sin completely
seriously, he broke through, profoundly experienced Grace and became the
means through whom a mighty awakening fell upon the colonies.
Today people are very sensitive to the
manipulation of emotions, and any form of brainwashing. This may be why
preachers who dwell on the darker sides of our natures are lampooned and
out of favor. But this should not lead us to minimize sin. Instead it
should help us to see that conviction of sin and the experience of grace
are two sides of the same coin. One rarely happens without the other.
It is the knowledge of Christ Jesus that
brings a sense of our own unworthiness. As Blaise Pascal once said. Pascal
was a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards’, though the two never met. Pascal,
the famous French mathematician and philosopher, had a deep experience of
Grace that touched hundreds, thousands of French men and women in his time
and nearly brought a true reformation to French Catholicism. Pascal once
said: “To realize our misery and know nothing of God is mere despair. To
know God, and yet know nothing of our wretched state, breeds pride. But if
we come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, we find our true equilibrium,
for there we find both human misery and God.” This echoes St. Paul’s own
insight in Romans 2:4 that it is not our repentance that enables us
to know God’s mercy, so much as the opposite: “Do you not realize that it
is God’s kindness that is meant to lead us to repentance?”
AWARENESS OF NEED
My plea this morning, as we celebrate the
truth of our Faith, is that we reclaim a classical Christian doctrine
about sin. Idealistic and naïve views of human nature will never lift us
to the heights of Trinitarian faith, because the Word of God only speaks
to sinners. Until our parishes ring with preaching and teaching that
reflects the richness of our biblical heritage, particularly its insight
into the nature of the human condition, our pews will continue to be
sparsely populated and coffee hour will be a polite social occasion rather
than a time of rich fellowship.
You and I cannot read the Bible with the
Spirit’s illuminating without gaining a sense of sin. French theologian
Emile Cailliet, who taught at Princeton Seminary for years before he died,
told the story of how the Bible brought him to faith. He was a convinced
atheist, but a seeker. He determined as a young scholar to read the great
philosophers in order to discover the truth. He read for ten years, and at
the end admitted to himself that he was confused and no nearer truth than
at the beginning. He then decided that he would write his own philosophy.
That began another ten-year pilgrimage that led to notebook after notebook
of jottings and writings. Again, at the end, he sensed a futility and lack
of enlightenment. Coming home one day he discovered his wife reading the
Bible. “Get that book of superstition out of this house,” he demanded.
“But Emile,” she said to him, “It’s really good. I’m getting all kinds of
help from it; and you should read it too.” Cailliet agreed to read the
Bible. He read and read, and his eyes were opened. Years later, looking
back at his conversion, he said this: “At last I found a book which
understands me.” [Not a book I understand, but a book that understands
me.]
TWO TEMPTATIONS
Only a recovery of a sense of sin will
save us from two of the great temptations of our time. First, to think
that the inventions of modernity will save us. The church is
particularly prone to this sort of thinking. If we can grow mega churches,
have large numbers at events, build bigger church structures, and gain
acceptance in the wider culture, then we will really make an impact on our
times. The spirit of this age – really the post-modern age -- is
anti-intellectual, efficiency-oriented, therapeutic, anti-authority and
above all market-driven.
I was asked recently if I wanted to go
over to China and teach Christian ethics in a Chinese University for a
couple of months. Surprised, I asked my friend, why would the Chinese
government allow, even encourage, Christians in the West to come and teach
about Christianity in their state-controlled universities? Aren’t they
atheists? Don’t they wonder what we would teach?
My friend, who knows China very well, said
that the Chinese government really believes that there is a connection
between Protestant Christianity and the success of capitalism. Of course
they are right, historically. They believe that there is something
pragmatic, down-to-earth, about orthodox Protestantism – perhaps it’s
sense of sin, and its sense that a frugal, honest, hard-working, ethical
life leads people to greater productivity and to a desire to show by their
works that they are saved by grace -- that leads to the growth of
capital. So they want us to come and teach.
Yes, but aren’t they worried about more
and more converts? I asked my friend. “Well, you have to realize that what
the Chinese government permits it controls.” In other words, if they
invite you, they own you. You can’t go too far astray.
What the Chinese government has seen is
the pragmatism inherent in orthodox, biblical Christianity. It fits neatly
into a market-driven mentality, and they are prepared to tolerate our
crazy theology in order to get the results that they are looking for.
Well, if they are tempted, so are we. It
is quite possible to see Christianity as the answer to a cultural problem:
the way to redeem the social order, the way to promote capitalism, the way
to under gird traditional values, the way to stop the slaughter of the
unborn, and so on. But these are the temptations of modernity – the use of
Christianity for pragmatic purposes. The truth is true because it is true,
and we celebrate Jesus Christ today not because he can make the trains run
better, but because he is our Savior, our Lord, and our King. Thomas Oden
warns that fiber optics and nuclear medicine and modern communications can
bring great benefits to humanity. But “can they save us from sin, or
render life meaningful or heal guilt or arrest boredom or liberate from
idolatry?”
And the second temptation that we have
that only a sense of sin will save us from is the temptation to think that
the church should be perfect. When we begin to think that the
eschatological hope can be fully realized in the here and now, that all
the blessings of tomorrow can be here today, perfect knowledge, perfect
love, perfect healing, perfect relationships, we forget that sin exists in
us as well as in those we call “revisionists.” Consequently, we become
grumpy, self-righteous and arrogant.
It was Flannery O’Connor who once said:
“All your dissatisfaction with the Church seems to me to come from an
incomplete understanding of sin…What you seem actually to demand is that
the Church put the kingdom of heaven on earth right here and now, that the
Holy Ghost be translated at once into all flesh…You are asking that man
return at once to the state God created him in, you are leaving out the
terrible radical human pride that causes death. To have the Church be what
you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God
in human affairs…A candid reading of the New Testament epistles ought to
shatter once and for all the myth that the church can ever be perfect here
on earth.
REVIVAL
One last point before I close. I am
convinced that the spiritual awakening we all pray for, work for, and wait
for -- and without which our Church is headed towards obsolescence -- will
bring with it a sense of brokenness and sin. It is this awareness that has
characterized the decades long African revival in that part of our
Communion which is the most vibrant. I am not asking for a grim kind of
sobriety that eschews all joy and celebration. John Wesley once said that
“sour godliness was the devil’s religion;” and Augustine said that it was
a “certain seeming hilarity” among the Christians he met that drew him to
the faith. But I am speaking about the brokenness that causes students to
stay up all night praying, quietly weeping, asking forgiveness for one
another for the ways they have wounded each other that is a foretaste of
revival. I am speaking of the church that in remembering 9/11 searches its
souls not to excuse the madness and hatred of our enemies, but to ask what
we might have contributed to the world’s terrible sense of judgment on our
society. I am speaking of the kind of honesty in a Christian community
that comes to grips with the subtle sins of the spirit, the not so-subtle
sins of the tongue, the semi-respectable sins of greed and jealousy. These
are the signs that God is at work, and they will lead not just to ortho-doxy,
in the usual sense, correct theology, but also to ortho-praxis, the
right kind of living.
The reason why revisionism is so
attractive to so many is that it allows one to have one’s cake and eat it
too. It allows people to be religious – up to a point. Revisionists above
all want to avoid the furrowed brow, the serious voice, the fixed gaze,
the made-up mind. What bothers them about us is our “intensity.” We really
think this is all True, and we’ve committed ourselves to Jesus Christ. Our
mind is made up. We’re intense, serious, resolved, and – in their view –
quietly fanatic.
In his book Christian Doctrine, J. S.
Whale wrote: “Sin, some say, is not to be taken seriously, or to be
worried about. It is something that both the individual and the race
gradually ‘get over’ in time. As some wag observed about the adolescence
of the Quaker, George Fox, “he had sown his wild oats, but they were only
Quaker Oats.” That is, he grew out of his youthful difficulties and
humanity will do the same.
We want to erase the idea of sin from our
minds. The Bronx Zoo in New York City built an exhibit entitled: “The Most
Dangerous Animal in the World.” Crowds of children and others would line
up, walk the little stairway, and peer into the dark hole that was the
only opening. Their eyes would scan the darkness, and the – to their
surprise – come to rest on a perfect image of themselves. I am told that
there were so many complaints about the exhibit that donations actually
began to drop. The trustees removed the exhibit.
Unfortunately, neither George Fax nor
history itself would bear out this naïve reading of the human condition.
The Fall was not a step up into sophistication, but a terrible descent
into rebellion and alienation. The “mark of Cain” is upon us all. As
Chesterton said, “the doctrine of original sin is the only directly
observable Christian doctrine.” You just have to read the newspaper, or
look in the mirror.
This means that if God is to pour out his
blessing on this diocese, on our parishes, on you and one me, we must
re-learn what Jesus said, that it is “those who mourn” (the state of their
sins) who are the truly blessed.
- The Rev. Dr. Peter C. Moore
is the former Dean and President Emeritus of Trinity Episcopal School for
Ministry
