Christianity According to Willimon
At the risk of opening some old wounds on this blog I submit Christianity According to Willimon:
"Christianity is a culture" (Pastor, 209).
"Being a Christian means to be someone who has been inculcated into a distinctive culture which, like any culture, has its own series of beliefs, words, myths, practices, rituals, and habits through which it demarcates itself from other worlds. More than that, it is our claim that this world, this culture--the church--is God's way with the world, the appointed means by which Christ is bringing all things unto himself" (Pastor, 211).
"Rather than construe the Christian faith as a set of interesting ideas to be affirmed, I think it is wise to present this faith as a set of practices to be inculcated, a set of habits to be assumed" (Pastor, 213).
I must admit that the previous conversation and these quotes from Willimon stretch me considerably to consider anew the role of the church and the "culture" of the church in answering the question: "What is Christianity." I am appreciating more and more this emphasis. And Criag should be please with the last quote above. At the same time, I fear falling too far into the direction of "communalism" or "communityism" and losing any emphasis on the personal. I realize my original defintion errored on being too personal and including nothing about the community. I fear that Willimon's thoughts may error by being too communal and not personal enough (though I am not sure he doesn't sneak the personal in there too).
Thoughts?
"Christianity is a culture" (Pastor, 209).
"Being a Christian means to be someone who has been inculcated into a distinctive culture which, like any culture, has its own series of beliefs, words, myths, practices, rituals, and habits through which it demarcates itself from other worlds. More than that, it is our claim that this world, this culture--the church--is God's way with the world, the appointed means by which Christ is bringing all things unto himself" (Pastor, 211).
"Rather than construe the Christian faith as a set of interesting ideas to be affirmed, I think it is wise to present this faith as a set of practices to be inculcated, a set of habits to be assumed" (Pastor, 213).
I must admit that the previous conversation and these quotes from Willimon stretch me considerably to consider anew the role of the church and the "culture" of the church in answering the question: "What is Christianity." I am appreciating more and more this emphasis. And Criag should be please with the last quote above. At the same time, I fear falling too far into the direction of "communalism" or "communityism" and losing any emphasis on the personal. I realize my original defintion errored on being too personal and including nothing about the community. I fear that Willimon's thoughts may error by being too communal and not personal enough (though I am not sure he doesn't sneak the personal in there too).
Thoughts?
posted by Tom Arthur at 10:08 AM
6 Comments:
You nailed my reaction, your highness. Of course I agree with the bishop. Also, I stand by my previous posts on the topic.
My dear Phil,
I share your concerns about the reduction of Christianity to culture. However, in support of Bishop Willimon, I must point out that you are reacting to a quote taken out of the context in his discussion and thereby misreading him. The context of the quote is one in which Willimon points out, among other things, that Christianity is not equal to American society. We have a distinctive language, rituals, etc., and when we pretend to be Christian without those distinctive elements, we miss the mark. In context, Willimon is ranting against those pastors who retreat from Christian language, rituals, traditions, etc. He, with Hauerwas, says you can't be Christian without them. He is not saying anything like Schori or others. Indeed, he makes your point about the resurrection himself in his book, co-authored with Hauerwas, on the Lord's Prayer. So please apologize and say some Hail Mary's for your sin against Uncle Will.
Re: Where did this culture come from? Where is postliberalism on this spectrum?
Short answer: Please see The Drama of Doctrine, (ch 7 I think)
Longer answer: Phil, I don't want to be a Protestant any more. I just want to follow Christ. But that's hard to do. I need a language that helps me conceive of that and a story that I can claim as my own, and a memory that enables me to see myself in that story, and habits that constantly reinforce what it means to live in praise of God. Again, all of that is encapsulated in the term "culture" as Uncle Will uses it. So, he says, don't apologize for our distinctive culture (understood as I describe it above), and don't retreat from it. Celebrate it. Practice it. Rehearse it every day. And when life offers something that the story doesn't give clear principles for, line yourself up between that story you received and the eschaton we know is its end, and improvise in the direction of the eschaton.
To me that does not necessarily lead to Rome or the East. It did lead me to an effort to connect to Canterbury and the non-Western world via Anglicanism. It does lead to the Eucharist and notions of church discipline. It does lead me to the belief that the authority by which we know how to follow Christ is sola scriptura (in the KJV sense), but also that sola scriptura and communion go together. We (a particular community of faith) find the truth revealed in scripture only in union with each other and not in disunity. Furthermore, because we believe in the eschaton, we can't justify our choice of schism on the basis of our own sense of urgency. If we are faithful, we are patient enough to seek an understanding of what Scripture says in communion (with those who actually confess Scripture as authoritative) before we act in ways to disrupt communion. So sola scriptura and unity are inseparable.
I offer the above as a first effort at describing where a postliberal response might be on the spectrum. Of course I presume the KJV idea of the theodrama when I speak of Scripture.
Phil, your idealizing Rome and Antioch (Constantinople doesn't exist and has too many syllables) when saying they are the only ones who can claim Christian culture. Fundi's claim Christian culture somewhat validly, (albeit through a misreading of scripture) as do Anabaptists, who are the impetus behind a lot of Willimon's rhetoric, I would assume. And your blanket statement contra Protestantism is not matched in your hesitently-forming-a-criitical-distance statement about Catholicism.
And H Richard Niebuhr is also behind a lot of this. He made the typologies which Yoder disagreed and (though I haven't read it) I bet Willimon utilized. And your typologies, my friend from Wheaton, seem to elevate Rome and Antioch again, without discussing what they are and what they mean.
And Craig, my friend from Annapolis, how does your view of unity in the particular effect your view of unity in the universal church, because you have clearly moved in the past year and so your unity has changed, kind of. That is convoluted, sorry. Should you move churches to find more faithful witnesses and how far until that turns into Lakewood? Sorry for the caricature, but I hope you get my gist and can respond.
Wilson, I was hoping to slip under the radar horizon on the subtle point you picked up. Ah, such idle hopes! The reality is that I don't yet know what I mean by "community of faith." So when I speak of unity, I am not sure who it is that ought to be united. I don't believe it can possibly be the church catholic, for even the apostolic churches were distinctive in their witnesses (the Johannine vs. the Pauline churches, for example). But I think the community of faith may be larger than the administrative unit, er, the congregration and, in our era, ought to transcend national boundaries. I think, for example, that it may be important for us to hold ourselves accountable to the global south and asian churches because our actions affect them as neighbors today. So I am currently thinking that community of faith means something like the Anglican Communion or the World Methodist Council (?), etc. Unity at that level is important because that community is, I think, the magisterium that arbitrates our understandings of Scripture. I'd love to hear other perspectives on this because I have only just begun to think of this in the past six months.
But, of course, your jab was also aimed at another point, methinks. If I read you correctly, you sting me once again regarding my infidelity to the Methodist church. But in that jab you equate unity with the loyalty an individual owes to a particular congregation/denomination. That seems to me an inaccurate way of thinking about unity. I think Unity is the desired state of the community of faith, and, as long as I am a member of that community, I pledge to subject myself to its discipline. However, my participation must be voluntaristic. We should always be able to hold the community accountable by leaving it when it chooses to walk apart from the authority of sole scriptura (in the KJV sense). And, I imagine there are many other practical reasons one might need to leave one community and join another, just as, in Methodism, one might leave one preaching house voluntarily or involuntarily and be welcomed at another. I have not yet crossed the bridge from the United Methodist Church into another community, though I clearly have moved in that direction. But even if I complete that step, I will see it as a movement back to my Wesleyan roots. Wesley was an evangelical catholic Anglican, and so am I. The only remaining question is whether or not Claudia and I decide that we can be evangelical catholic Anglicans in North Carolina better in the UMC or in the emerging orthodox Anglican churches. If I thought I could be a Methodist minister in the NC conference, I would probably do that. But, it seems that is not in the cards for me right now.
If I am mistaken in my thinking here, I welcome dialogue aimed at helping me see this more clearly. As I said, I have just begun to think of these things in the last year.
Craig,
I say raise hell with them. If you're really Wesleyan to the core, he didn't want to leave his Anglican tradition. He wanted to work within the setting he found himself. That could be interpreted in two ways:
1. Let's all go back to Canterbury.
2. Stay where you're at and don't ditch it.
I'm in on #2 and say, give them hell. If Wesley had accepted Phil's dire prediction about the ability to change (which by the way entirely neglects the power of the Spirit to transform), then you and I wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
Tom
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