What Christianity Is Not. Douglas John Hall
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than a manner of honoring the mystery of God and the things of God—all the things of God: that is, the heavens and earth and “all creatures great and small,” including our own strange and perhaps impossible species.
The Intention of this Study
My intention in the chapters that follow, then, is simply to apply that way of negation to the question about Christianity itself. At a time when definitive statements about a religion—any and every religion—are bound to occasion immediate dispute and rejection, may we nevertheless preserve something of the integrity of the Christian faith by trying to identify what it is not?
Recently I attended in our university an interesting doctoral oral examination. The basic question of the dissertation being examined was whether the eschatology of Augustine, as presented in his magnum opus, The City of God, could have any relevance for feminist theology. It was a good thesis, but an extremely difficult one—more so, I think, than appeared on the surface. As a result, the examiners found themselves frustrated and floundering at many points. Could one, they wondered, legitimately compare a theology developed in the context of fourth-century Rome (already in a state of decay) with theologies emerging out of contemporary Western societies more than a millennium and a half later?
In the final moments of the long examination, the chair or pro-dean of the examining committee, himself a Muslim, was moved to ask, “Are there not perhaps many Christianities?”
That was a very perceptive question, and the one that had been begged throughout the discussion. It is also the question that we must ask ourselves here. With a modicum of knowledge of church history, one realizes that Christianity has indeed shown up throughout these twenty-plus centuries in many different forms and guises. And when one encounters Christians from other parts of the world today, one is often struck more by differences than by similarities—differences of spirituality; differences of moral concerns; differences in attitudes toward the Scriptures, church authority, tradition, politics, sexuality, and so forth. Whole Christian denominations are torn apart by such differences. Meetings of ecumenical bodies are often bedeviled by them. Globalization has only increased our knowledge of the bewildering variety of Christian communities and types. Some suggest that the present-day split between Christians of the northern and the southern hemispheres, in this respect, is fraught with more ecclesiastical grief than the Great Schism of East and West in the eleventh century, traditionally dated 1054 CE.8 Right here on our own continent are diverse and—at least in some cases—wholly incompatible expressions of this ancient faith, all insisting that they are bodying forth Christianity. It is tempting, therefore, as it was for the examiners of that thesis, to conclude that there are simply many Christianities.
But that, it seems to me, is a too-easy way out of what is certainly a dilemma. I am tempted to say that it is in fact an evasion of the problem. Where it is not the product of sheer weariness or indifference (a mood that was certainly observable in the aforementioned doctoral examination!), it courts a numbing relativism and leaves serious Christians in the lurch. Are we to say, simply, that there are all these sorts of Christianity, one as legitimate as the next, so take your pick? Are we ready to give up on the biblical and traditional mark of Christian unity—simply to leave out the word “one” when we repeat marks of the church in the Nicene Creed and elsewhere, and opt for this smorgasbord of Christianities that characterizes the worldwide religious scene today?
I do not wish to imply that Christian unity translates into uniformity. It never has and never will. Indeed, it never should! Nor do I wish to suggest that we should, or can, aim for some immutable, permanently true definition of what authentic Christianity is. It seems obvious to me that in the twenty-first century we cannot and should not even attempt to construct binding definitions, in whatever form, of what constitutes true Christianity. Of course many would like to do that, provided their own definitions were the ones accepted! But surely we have learned enough from history to realize that, besides not resolving anything, such regulatory definitions would only add to the estrangement, suspicion, and violence that already exists among Christians and churches. Few of us are ready for the kinds of excommunications, denunciations, damnations, and burnings at the stake (well, yes—probably that too!) that would prove the logical course of such a procedure.
But neither, on the other hand, can we settle for the status quo, with its plethora of churches and sects and causes and creeds and moralities all claiming to be expressions of Christianity. We cannot rest easy with that existing situation, however we may tolerate it in the meantime, because some of these alleged Christianities are dynamite. They are brimful of potentiality for chaos and violence, overflowing with the very stuff out of which “religion kills.” Perhaps in an earlier, less volatile age than ours, there was room for the kind of laissez faire that simply left in abeyance the question of truth or legitimacy or authenticity. But we know now that this is not our present situation. In today’s world (the world after 9/11, if you wish), what Christians think and do, and do not think or do, matters not only to other Christians but to the whole species—affects indeed the future of the planet. We Christians, who in our heyday as Christendom thought we could control everything, in our humiliated and reduced state are apt to underestimate our own responsibility for the preservation of life. We have become very concerned, many of us, about the Islamic faith, which we feel threatens the planetary future because so much of it seems to have fallen into extremism. Where are the moderate Muslims?, many Christians ask. But Muslims might just as legitimately ask, Where are the moderate and responsible Christians? For in large areas of the Muslim world the Christians, when they do not show up as plain proselytizers, seem the chief spiritual force of imperial Western societies that want to rob Eastern and other peoples of their birthright, and thus foment hostilities.
No, we may not, I think, prescribe what Christianity is and must always be. Even if we could do that, theoretically, it would be a disastrous project, adding untold weight to an already chaotic and potentially lethal religious situation. It would also, of course, be completely impracticable, even absurd. But what we may and can and ought to do, I shall argue here, is to hold up to one another in the churches and to those who care in the world at large some of the ways in which Christianity is being misrepresented and made part of the world’s problem, not its redemption, by groups and movements and causes that identify this faith with some of its parts and elements and associations writ too large. Perhaps we may no longer speak clearly of the essence of Christianity, as did nineteenth-century theologians and historians like Adolf von Harnack; but surely—humbly, more tentatively, yet with a certain confidence born of faith and historical necessity—we may still have a sufficiently shared sense of the “kerygmatic core” or “heart” of this faith—its Innerlichkeit—to be able, in the face of these dangerous misrepresentations of it, to say what it is not.9
3. Richard Dawkins, copied from an article on Dawkins in Wikipedia.
4. See in this connection the conclusion and afterword of this study.
5. Sermo 52, 16: PL 38, 360. I was delighted to see this phrase quoted in the Christmas 2005 encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI titled Deus caritas est [God Is Love] (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 53.
For a fuller examination of the thought of Augustine on this subject, see the complete translation of Sermon 52 by the Rev. R. G. MacMullen on the Internet at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf106.vii.iv.html/. The pertinent passage reads: “What then, brethren, shall we say of God? For if thou hast been able to comprehend what thou wouldest say, it is not God; if thou has been able to comprehend it, thou has comprehended something else instead of God. If thou has been able to comprehend Him as thou thinkest, by so thinking thou hast deceived thyself. This then is not God, if thou has comprehended it; but if it be God, thou hast not comprehended it. How therefore wouldest thou speak of that which thou canst not comprehend?”
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