Ash Wednesday--
Growing up, I was largely unaware of the holiday at all, Lent--or any other Liturgical Year event--not being a typical Southern Baptist observance. My small-town Oklahoma experiences (largely bereft of Catholics) didn't prepare me for our mid-1980s move to south Louisiana, where it seemed that Catholics and Baptists waged an eternal cold war for Cajun souls. I had to learn to create a new mental box for Catholics, an addition to my childhood taxonomy of "Christians" (i.e., Baptists), "sort-of-Christians" (i.e., Methodists and other Protestants), and "Non-Christians" (e.g., Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hindus).
At the time, Catholics seemed to fall somewhere between "sort-of-Christian" and "Hindu." There was so much that was so different. Their crosses had Jesus still crucified on them. They called their pastors "Father" instead of "Brother." They apparently thought that Mary should be worshiped (not accurate, I know, but such was Baptist propaganda). And one day out of the year, everyone showed up to school with dirty foreheads.
I don't recall thinking too deeply about what the cross-shaped smudges meant. I just lumped the practice into my ever-growing category of "weird [i.e., non-Baptist] things Catholics do."
As I grew older, of course, my concept boxes changed. I asked my father once if he had a Catholic Bible because I wanted to see how their Bible recorded the story of Mary differently. Daddy of course informed me that the Gospel accounts were the same for both Catholics and Baptists. Interpretation and tradition, not the text itself, proved to be the distinguishing factor.
Moving into the Methodist Church (which my family did during my high school years) meant incorporating some more high-church, "Catholic-y" traditions and interpretations into my spiritual life, a practice I initially resisted. I have to admit, though, that the performer in me was thrilled to be able to join the club of smudgy foreheads. It took me a few years, however, to think through exactly what Ash Wednesday means, to realize that it was more than just a piece of liturgical theatre.
The little service I went to at noon today nicely encapsulated what I've absorbed. There about thirty of us gathered in our small chapel. We prayed, sang, and heard a short homily. Then came the ashes, to remind us of our mortality. Then another prayer. Then a silent exit from the chapel, with bowls of water to remind us of our Baptisms (the dialectical complement to mortality). Simple enough.
But in that brief service I realized a deep distinction from the faith of my Baptist childhood. For Baptists, the focus of Christian faith lies primarily in belief--faith in Christ and acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior. Baptists understand this core belief as manifesting in or prompting certain practices: walking down the aisle to get saved, giving a testimony, getting Baptized, taking the Lord's Supper. But these practices remain secondary effects, radiations of the belief in God's saving grace. It's belief, not practice, that saves.
My pastor in today's service titled his mini-sermon "Practice, Practice, Practice," inviting us to take advantage of Lent as a time to be aware of the practices that define us as Christians. The call to a discipline of awareness echoes a similar call made during Advent. I like to think of Advent and Lent as parallels, two sides of the same coin; both are times of preparation for the coming of God-With-Us. The Liturgical Year in general imposes on believers a call to remember, to keep in mind, to practice awareness of faith. In this understanding, belief accompanies practice, grows from it, rather than causing it. To believe is to do is to believe.
I'm reminded, for example, of the story (I've heard various versions from various sources) of a priest who was asked by a man how he could become a Christian. "I don't believe in God," the man told the priest. "I've tried and tried, but the faith won't come." The priest instructed him to rise at each dawn, kneel, and pray. "But I don't believe," said the man. "Pray every day as I've said," advised the priest, "and you will."
To my childhood Baptist self, and I think for many evangelicals, such advice runs counter to their understanding of how Christianity works. You pray out of belief, not to create belief. I remember hearing sermons warning of such fallacious thinking, sermons that pointed to passages like Matthew 7:21 ("Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven."). Prayer doesn't save; belief does.
But, as I've written before, belief--the feeling of conviction in certain truths--often proves uncertain. Belief wavers. Confidence gets shaken. Sometimes my faith (as feeling) seems so small that even a mustard seed could dwarf it. Does this mean that my Christianity--my status as God's adopted--wavers with my emotional or cognitive state? For many, many years I thought just that. Doubt became an enemy not just of faith but of salvation. Questioning my faith opened the door to hell.
That I now think differently stems from a number of sources and teachers, but I think my adoption of the Liturgical Year, with its Advents and Lents, has played an important role.
Certainly I'm cognizant of the dangers of empty practice, words and motions that really are nothing deeper than a display of piety. As the readings in today's service reminded us, Christ speaks harshly against such showiness.
Yet I have found a great deal of comfort, a ring of deep truth, in the practice of the Liturgical Year, in the idea of faith as a discipline of awareness and action that persists regardless of my emotional state. Like the service today, the discipline of faith warns me that mortality and loss happen no matter my feelings toward them. But that same faith reassures me that God works for my redemption and reconciliation, that the Spirit intercedes with deep cries, that Christ arrives and is with me always--even when I don't feel it.
Happy Ash Wednesday, all. Remember to remember.
More later,
JF
Showing posts with label Southern Baptist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Southern Baptist. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Baptist Roots Against the Christian Prison
Why is a Christian prison (proposed to be built in Wakita, OK) a bad idea? Let me count the ways. It side-steps some important prisoners' rights procedures (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program), it declines to declare exactly which kind of "Christianity" will be the right kind, its claims to efficacy (based on federal faith-based prison programs) are based on questionable statistics, and it communicates an image of penal religiosity that I thought went out of style after the Spanish Inquisition.
Oddly enough, though, I think much of my resistance--aside from those reasons above--stems from my upbringing as a Southern Baptist. On this blog I've sometimes treated my Southern Baptist childhood rather harshly. Certainly, I've left behind many of the theological features of my previous faith. But one Baptist tradition I think of as quite healthy concerns the longstanding Baptist suspicion toward governmental-church relations.
I would guess that most non-Baptists today would find it surprising to discover that the Southern Baptist tradition was for many years defined by its resistance to government involvement in the work of the church. Today, prominent Baptists like Richard Land regularly speak out in favor of religious right/culture war issues that invite government to dictate quite specific moral and even religious standards. Indeed, the very idea of a separation between church and state has become something of a religious-right (a term I generally dislike) bugbear, though Jefferson first spoke of a "wall of separation" between Church and State in a letter to a group of Baptists.
But religious liberty--the individual (or the individual church's) ability to decide for him or herself how to practice faith--has historically been a defining feature for Baptists. That many (perhaps most) Baptists now endorse some version of the "US as a Christian nation" notion represents a position that many historic Baptists would have found incomprehensible. Now, for present-day advocates of the "Christian nation" argument, the separation of church and state (more specifically, the establishment clause of the Constitution's First Amendment) still obtains. They simply interpret that clause as forbidding the state from actively controlling churches.
Perfectly acceptable to those who who endorse this line of thinking are proposals such as prayer in schools (by which they mean Christian-Protestant prayer), Bible-reading in classrooms (by which they mean Christian-devotional Bible reading), federal recognition of religious symbols and holidays (by which they primarily mean Christian--and maybe Jewish--symbols/holidays), teaching creationism in science courses (by which they mean a particular Christian view of creationism), prayers at government functions (by which they mean primarily Christian prayers), insistence on a strict definition of marriage and family (by which they mean a contemporary Judeo-Christian, heterosexual model)--the list goes on.
I find unconvincing the argument that these and other issues do not violate the establishment clause. Were advocates of prayer in schools to be as passionate for, say, Hindu or Wiccan prayers as they are for Judeo-Christian prayers (and what about praying in tongues?), I'd at least find their arguments easier to accept as honest. But the same religious right organizations that clamor for Christian expressions in governmental life tend also to protest vehemently when someone in government makes a non-Christian (especially Islamic) expression of faith.
And there's the problem (well, one problem--there's lots). It's the nature of most faiths to be exclusive. I don't expect Christians to endorse Islamic faith tenets, or vice versa. Sikhs are Sikhs, for example, because they believe that the Sikh understanding of divinity and spirituality is true in a way that the Christian or Baha'i understandings are not. Even universalist faiths believe that their "all-faiths-are-one" take on spirituality more accurately reflects reality than non-universalist interpretations do.
A faith may be tolerant of other believers, but tolerance presupposes an essential disagreement. One tolerates that which one does not agree with. That which you find agreeable by definition doesn't have to be tolerated; you endorse it. A state-funded expression of faith means that the state partakes of that faith's exclusivity. It may tolerate other faiths, but its essential preference for one faith above others will eventually show itself, if only by the absence of this or that symbol. Indeed, even the most general expression of faith by the state excludes those who eschew religious faith. And for a state to endorse a particular faith--formally or tacitly--is for the state to establish it, giving a subtly coercive undertone to that faith's otherwise normal expressions.
It's that sense of coercion ("yes, you can be any faith technically, but you should know that the US is a Christian nation") that Baptists have historically found unpalatable. Baptists themselves had, early on, been on the wrong side of such coercion in England, and the pain of that experience installed itself into the theological DNA of the denomination. They were for many decades after allergic to any perceived scheme to establish a state faith.
Exactly how a state might operate without endorsing a particular faith--or faith in general--is, admittedly, a vexing question. Religious-right critics have a point when they argue that scrupulous secularity on the part of governments is itself a kind of exclusivist expression of (non)faith.
But I can state more firmly my conviction--my historically Baptist conviction, I think--that Christianity has no business trying to take on state functions or trying to make the state into an arm of the Church. Christ repeatedly makes the point that his kingdom is not of this earth. "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," says Jesus, "and give unto God that which is God's." When people try to make him king, he slips away. When Peter draws a sword to defend Jesus, he gets a rebuke. Nowhere in the New Testament is there anything like a command to wage a political culture war or to try to get the government to adopt Christian statutes. Christian work is for Christians and churches, not governments and governmental institutions.
This includes prisons. Insofar as states are defined by the fact that they hold a monopoly on sanctioned violence (i.e., government alone may exercise legitimate violence against humans within a state), the policing and punishment (and, hopefully rehabilitation) of those who violate state laws is a state function. That states often outsource this function to private facilities--a dubious practice in and of itself, this making prisons a for-profit industry--does not change the fact that prison is a job for the state. Churches--Christian churches least of all--have no business running prisons in the US.
So says this former Baptist. (and this current one)
More tomorrow,
JF
Oddly enough, though, I think much of my resistance--aside from those reasons above--stems from my upbringing as a Southern Baptist. On this blog I've sometimes treated my Southern Baptist childhood rather harshly. Certainly, I've left behind many of the theological features of my previous faith. But one Baptist tradition I think of as quite healthy concerns the longstanding Baptist suspicion toward governmental-church relations.
I would guess that most non-Baptists today would find it surprising to discover that the Southern Baptist tradition was for many years defined by its resistance to government involvement in the work of the church. Today, prominent Baptists like Richard Land regularly speak out in favor of religious right/culture war issues that invite government to dictate quite specific moral and even religious standards. Indeed, the very idea of a separation between church and state has become something of a religious-right (a term I generally dislike) bugbear, though Jefferson first spoke of a "wall of separation" between Church and State in a letter to a group of Baptists.
But religious liberty--the individual (or the individual church's) ability to decide for him or herself how to practice faith--has historically been a defining feature for Baptists. That many (perhaps most) Baptists now endorse some version of the "US as a Christian nation" notion represents a position that many historic Baptists would have found incomprehensible. Now, for present-day advocates of the "Christian nation" argument, the separation of church and state (more specifically, the establishment clause of the Constitution's First Amendment) still obtains. They simply interpret that clause as forbidding the state from actively controlling churches.
Perfectly acceptable to those who who endorse this line of thinking are proposals such as prayer in schools (by which they mean Christian-Protestant prayer), Bible-reading in classrooms (by which they mean Christian-devotional Bible reading), federal recognition of religious symbols and holidays (by which they primarily mean Christian--and maybe Jewish--symbols/holidays), teaching creationism in science courses (by which they mean a particular Christian view of creationism), prayers at government functions (by which they mean primarily Christian prayers), insistence on a strict definition of marriage and family (by which they mean a contemporary Judeo-Christian, heterosexual model)--the list goes on.
I find unconvincing the argument that these and other issues do not violate the establishment clause. Were advocates of prayer in schools to be as passionate for, say, Hindu or Wiccan prayers as they are for Judeo-Christian prayers (and what about praying in tongues?), I'd at least find their arguments easier to accept as honest. But the same religious right organizations that clamor for Christian expressions in governmental life tend also to protest vehemently when someone in government makes a non-Christian (especially Islamic) expression of faith.
And there's the problem (well, one problem--there's lots). It's the nature of most faiths to be exclusive. I don't expect Christians to endorse Islamic faith tenets, or vice versa. Sikhs are Sikhs, for example, because they believe that the Sikh understanding of divinity and spirituality is true in a way that the Christian or Baha'i understandings are not. Even universalist faiths believe that their "all-faiths-are-one" take on spirituality more accurately reflects reality than non-universalist interpretations do.
A faith may be tolerant of other believers, but tolerance presupposes an essential disagreement. One tolerates that which one does not agree with. That which you find agreeable by definition doesn't have to be tolerated; you endorse it. A state-funded expression of faith means that the state partakes of that faith's exclusivity. It may tolerate other faiths, but its essential preference for one faith above others will eventually show itself, if only by the absence of this or that symbol. Indeed, even the most general expression of faith by the state excludes those who eschew religious faith. And for a state to endorse a particular faith--formally or tacitly--is for the state to establish it, giving a subtly coercive undertone to that faith's otherwise normal expressions.
It's that sense of coercion ("yes, you can be any faith technically, but you should know that the US is a Christian nation") that Baptists have historically found unpalatable. Baptists themselves had, early on, been on the wrong side of such coercion in England, and the pain of that experience installed itself into the theological DNA of the denomination. They were for many decades after allergic to any perceived scheme to establish a state faith.
Exactly how a state might operate without endorsing a particular faith--or faith in general--is, admittedly, a vexing question. Religious-right critics have a point when they argue that scrupulous secularity on the part of governments is itself a kind of exclusivist expression of (non)faith.
But I can state more firmly my conviction--my historically Baptist conviction, I think--that Christianity has no business trying to take on state functions or trying to make the state into an arm of the Church. Christ repeatedly makes the point that his kingdom is not of this earth. "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," says Jesus, "and give unto God that which is God's." When people try to make him king, he slips away. When Peter draws a sword to defend Jesus, he gets a rebuke. Nowhere in the New Testament is there anything like a command to wage a political culture war or to try to get the government to adopt Christian statutes. Christian work is for Christians and churches, not governments and governmental institutions.
This includes prisons. Insofar as states are defined by the fact that they hold a monopoly on sanctioned violence (i.e., government alone may exercise legitimate violence against humans within a state), the policing and punishment (and, hopefully rehabilitation) of those who violate state laws is a state function. That states often outsource this function to private facilities--a dubious practice in and of itself, this making prisons a for-profit industry--does not change the fact that prison is a job for the state. Churches--Christian churches least of all--have no business running prisons in the US.
So says this former Baptist. (and this current one)
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, September 5, 2009
The Grace of Queen Z
Prior to my family's switch from the Southern Baptist Church to the United Methodist Church, I had never give the idea of grace much thought. I knew that grace was a central part of my faith. We sang songs about how amazing was God's saving grace. But, in my Baptist upbringing, grace served at best as an adjunct to God's righteous judgment. Grace was God's withholding of our just deserts, i.e., hell. Being sinners, we deserve eternal hell. God, without having to, intervenes, offering us the chance to turn to Christ. That's grace for Baptists as I understood it.
The problem is that grace, in this configuration, gets mired in the same problems I've long had with hell-based evangelism (and hell-based faith) in general. Grace, in the Baptist view, works within a larger context of a God willing--even eager, depending upon the verses you choose to look at--to punish those who reject God. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God. God's forbearance is the grace for which we are to praise God.
Here's what rubs me wrong about this: suppose that you lived in an autocracy, under absolute dictatorial rule of an absolutely powerful ruler. Suppose that this ruler (Queen Z, let's call her) promulgates an endlessly complicated, intimate, and impossible-to-keep-perfectly set of rules for her subjects. It is illegal, for instance, not merely to make speeches against Queen Z in public but also to say anything subversive in private--or even to think about saying something against her. Ultimately, everyone in the society will at some point or another transgress this body of rules. The problem? Queen Z has established that, as much as she loves her subjects, she cannot be expected to tolerate fifth columnists. Anyone found guilty of breaking any of her laws, therefore, is condemned to painful death.
Obviously, this is a fantasy. But scholars and survivors of totalitarian regimes point out that his is how authoritarian governments in general operate. They create a set of laws so invasive and all-encompassing that everyone in the society is guaranteed to break them eventually. Everyone in the society is therefore guilty--and everyone knows it. Such societies also tend to encourage formal or informal systems of tattling, watching neighbors for transgressions and reporting those transgressions to the authority. For Christians, of course, the watchfulness of neighbors is moot since God (like Santa Claus) sees all and knows all. (Of course, this hasn't stopped Christian societies throughout history from adopting ideologies of informing-against, such as Puritan New England during the witchcraft trials or Spain during the Spanish Inquisition).
Back to the fantasy, though: Suppose Queen Z or her minions catch someone expressing some mild degree of impatience at, say, how inefficiently the trains are running nowadays. The person has transgressed the law and been found guilty. Just as the person, the convicted dissenter, the secret rebel against Queen Z--just as this person is about to face the tortuous execution, word comes down from Her Majesty: the sentence is remitted. The person can go free to sin no more.
Word spreads about how grace-filled Queen Z is. Rallies are organized to celebrate Queen Z's mercy and love for her people. And laws get added to the effect that questioning Queen Z's grace is itself evidence of capital-punishment-worthy treason. Grace thus functions as, yes, a kind of unearned mercy from the figure who is both offended and empowered to redress that offense. But grace also serves to occlude the fact that the figure's authority is unjust, that the offense should not have been an offense (or at least not a capital offense) in the first place. Grace ideologically short-circuits the question begged by the entire system: why is Queen Z worthy of honor in the first place?
It's difficult for me not to see the Baptist version of grace as operating similarly. God asserts a standard--perfection--that no human can possibly meet, and God specifies that the penalty for imperfection is an eternity in Hell. To call grace God's merciful snatching-away of his elect from that fate begs the question: what kind of just God would make any human transgression into grounds for an eternity--an eternity, mind--of unending, mind-blowing torment? Certainly, in such a grisly system, it's happier to focus on grace; it narrows one's focus to a less pathological feature of God's personality. But it's unsatisfying to a growing number of unchurched (or dechurched) people. And it's unsatisfying to me.
I was not, as a Baptist, as aware or articulate about my problems with evangelical soteriology as I am now. But I do remember that I tolerated grace as a part of faith rather than celebrating it. To focus on grace as a point of worship seemed to me on some level too much like praising the schoolyard bully for not spiting on me or tripping me as I walked by. "How merciful and graceful Biff is. I deserved tripping, certainly, but in Biff's wisdom Biff extended me the Grace of Passage." Distasteful.
One of the most surprising things about becoming Methodist, then, was learning a whole different way of seeing grace--a definition defined not by God's inaction (which, again, could be due to boredom or indifference as easily as it could be due to love--evangelical salvation does not require that God love humans, merely that God save them from divine judgment). Rather, the Methodist tradition sees grace as God's love-filled action, God's ceaseless efforts to make us one with God.
More tomorrow,
JF
The problem is that grace, in this configuration, gets mired in the same problems I've long had with hell-based evangelism (and hell-based faith) in general. Grace, in the Baptist view, works within a larger context of a God willing--even eager, depending upon the verses you choose to look at--to punish those who reject God. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God. God's forbearance is the grace for which we are to praise God.
Here's what rubs me wrong about this: suppose that you lived in an autocracy, under absolute dictatorial rule of an absolutely powerful ruler. Suppose that this ruler (Queen Z, let's call her) promulgates an endlessly complicated, intimate, and impossible-to-keep-perfectly set of rules for her subjects. It is illegal, for instance, not merely to make speeches against Queen Z in public but also to say anything subversive in private--or even to think about saying something against her. Ultimately, everyone in the society will at some point or another transgress this body of rules. The problem? Queen Z has established that, as much as she loves her subjects, she cannot be expected to tolerate fifth columnists. Anyone found guilty of breaking any of her laws, therefore, is condemned to painful death.
Obviously, this is a fantasy. But scholars and survivors of totalitarian regimes point out that his is how authoritarian governments in general operate. They create a set of laws so invasive and all-encompassing that everyone in the society is guaranteed to break them eventually. Everyone in the society is therefore guilty--and everyone knows it. Such societies also tend to encourage formal or informal systems of tattling, watching neighbors for transgressions and reporting those transgressions to the authority. For Christians, of course, the watchfulness of neighbors is moot since God (like Santa Claus) sees all and knows all. (Of course, this hasn't stopped Christian societies throughout history from adopting ideologies of informing-against, such as Puritan New England during the witchcraft trials or Spain during the Spanish Inquisition).
Back to the fantasy, though: Suppose Queen Z or her minions catch someone expressing some mild degree of impatience at, say, how inefficiently the trains are running nowadays. The person has transgressed the law and been found guilty. Just as the person, the convicted dissenter, the secret rebel against Queen Z--just as this person is about to face the tortuous execution, word comes down from Her Majesty: the sentence is remitted. The person can go free to sin no more.
Word spreads about how grace-filled Queen Z is. Rallies are organized to celebrate Queen Z's mercy and love for her people. And laws get added to the effect that questioning Queen Z's grace is itself evidence of capital-punishment-worthy treason. Grace thus functions as, yes, a kind of unearned mercy from the figure who is both offended and empowered to redress that offense. But grace also serves to occlude the fact that the figure's authority is unjust, that the offense should not have been an offense (or at least not a capital offense) in the first place. Grace ideologically short-circuits the question begged by the entire system: why is Queen Z worthy of honor in the first place?
It's difficult for me not to see the Baptist version of grace as operating similarly. God asserts a standard--perfection--that no human can possibly meet, and God specifies that the penalty for imperfection is an eternity in Hell. To call grace God's merciful snatching-away of his elect from that fate begs the question: what kind of just God would make any human transgression into grounds for an eternity--an eternity, mind--of unending, mind-blowing torment? Certainly, in such a grisly system, it's happier to focus on grace; it narrows one's focus to a less pathological feature of God's personality. But it's unsatisfying to a growing number of unchurched (or dechurched) people. And it's unsatisfying to me.
I was not, as a Baptist, as aware or articulate about my problems with evangelical soteriology as I am now. But I do remember that I tolerated grace as a part of faith rather than celebrating it. To focus on grace as a point of worship seemed to me on some level too much like praising the schoolyard bully for not spiting on me or tripping me as I walked by. "How merciful and graceful Biff is. I deserved tripping, certainly, but in Biff's wisdom Biff extended me the Grace of Passage." Distasteful.
One of the most surprising things about becoming Methodist, then, was learning a whole different way of seeing grace--a definition defined not by God's inaction (which, again, could be due to boredom or indifference as easily as it could be due to love--evangelical salvation does not require that God love humans, merely that God save them from divine judgment). Rather, the Methodist tradition sees grace as God's love-filled action, God's ceaseless efforts to make us one with God.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Bibe Believing and Women
To review: in the 1970s and 80s, the Southern Baptist Convention underwent a sea change in which the conservative forces essentially took over. These conservatives (opposed not by liberals but by "moderates") purged the ranks of the SBC's upper bureaucracy and its seminaries of non-conservatives, winnowing the wheat from the tares by means of a simple question: do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God?
Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.
Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.
I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).
I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.
Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).
Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.
For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.
To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.
Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.
Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thus were my parents on the losing side of the Battle for the Bible. As I've mentioned, both my mother and my father held graduate degrees (a Master of Religious Education for my mother, a Master of Divinity for my father) from Southern Baptist seminaries. It is a marker of how radically the SBC transformed that I generally have to qualify to other seminary-trained clergy that my parents got their degrees before the Big Shift happened.
Now, by the standards of more liberal denominations, my parents' training and (at the time) theological orientation likely fell solidly on the conservative end of things. By Southern Baptist standards, however, they were quite "moderate," becoming more so as the Takeover unfolded year after year.
I do not recall either of my parents ever strongly taking a stand on the inerrancy of scripture. They never in my memory came close to claiming that every assertion in the Bible is scientifically accurate, but neither did they campaign explicitly against such an assertion. I do remember times when my father presented passages such as those from Genesis or Revelation as possibly metaphorical rather than literal--a no-no for strict "Bible-believers." By the mid 1980s, however, the simple failure to affirm dogmatically the inerrancy of Scripture was itself viewed by the SBC as evidence of heterodoxy. While my parents did not occupy high enough positions in Baptist hierarchy to be themselves subject to an official test of faith, the culture of inerrancy-only trickled down to local levels, making it awkward to be a Baptist without insisting upon, say, a literal understanding of Revelation imagery (the flying scorpions, etc.).
I always had the sense that my mother's views of scripture were a bit more conservative than my father's. Yet her departure from SBC's rightward drift was no less ignorable. As a whip-smart woman gifted with considerable abilities, my mother did not conform neatly to the preferred SBC role of the wife (particularly the pastor's wife) as submissive help-mate. She did not hide her opinions, remaining "silent" in church as women are supposed to do. She took up leadership positions (at least, those offered by the church) eagerly and fulfilled them excellently.
Such agency from a female jarred with the SBC's growing culture of Bible-believing. I have in previous posts explored how inerrancy doctrine functions in maintaining the cycle of certainty/anxiety fueling conservative evangelical views of salvation. But of course inerrancy also functions to ratify certain social structures and stances as divinely inspired. Most configurations of inerrancy preserve men's political superiority over women as ordained and required by God. The Bible's presentation of women isn't exactly diverse; with some notable exceptions (Deborah, for example) scripture tends to categorize women in terms of their relationships with men: wives, daughters, mothers, widows, or prostitutes. True to the patriarchal cultures of Biblical peoples, men are allowed to act as free agents in the world in ways that women are not. Women, in general, belong to, or at least fall under the authority of, men (by blood or by contract).
Inerrancy doctrine argues that this system of gender relations isn't an accident of history but a kind of Command By Example: thus did God create the two genders, male and female. Now, current evangelicals will typically insist that they do not see females as constitutionally inferior to males (this is of course a departure from historical understandings of divine gender design). God creates the two genders with separate roles but with equal worth. Women are made to tend to the home and to children. They are built to sustain emotional ties, to be supportive, and to follow their husbands' lead. Men are made to protect and provide for their wives, giving totally of themselves to their spouses but never relinquishing their duty to lead.
For conservative Baptists then and now, feminism represented an unscriptural overturning of this divine plan. The equality of the sexes promoted by the Equal Rights Amendment threatened the distinction of the sexes that (conveniently) kept men in control politically and socially. Worse, the feminist impulse was seen as inspiring a truly awful bit of heresy: ordained female ministers. Like other culture war issues (homosexuality being one of the main ones currently), the question of women's ordination contained focused into one argument the underlying questions about Biblical interpretation and inerrancy.
To an inerrantist, the Bible--in the epistles--is clear: women are not to be preachers. They are to remain silent in the church (I Corinthians 14:33-35). It cuts no mustard to point out that this passage and others like it may refer to a specific situation in a specific church or to ask whether cultural norms from two thousand years ago ought to be applied today. Such historicizing (qualifying Biblical assertions as bound to a particular era or culture) is precisely the anti-literal trend that Bible-believers have resisted since the mid-1800s. Either the Bible is true in an unchanging way, they argue, or every assertion in the Bible becomes vulnerable to the charge of historical/cultural contingency.
Now--my mother did not so far as I know formally advocate for women's ordination during the Battle for the Bible era. But I doubt that anyone talking to her, anyone observing her activity in the life of the church, could doubt the fact that she saw herself as called to ministry, woman or not.
Thus, as the SBC lurched to the right, my parents--simply by staying still--moved to the relative left. Baptist churches were by the early 1990s no longer comfortable places for my parents to work.
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, August 21, 2009
BIble Believing in (truncated/simplified) History
So--after many successful years as a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Louisiana, my father found himself (in 1990/91-ish) unable to find a Baptist church willing to hire him for a wage sufficient to support the rest of us. What was going on? I mentioned the general oddities endemic to congregational church systems as well as the early 90s financial crunch.
A bigger issue, however, was the shift within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as a whole. I've referenced this before, but to recap: Over the course of the 70s and early 80s, the SBC as a denomination experienced a kind of slow-motion coup. The more fundamentalist/conservative wings of the church--using entirely legal means--won several key leadership positions within the upper administrative bodies of the Convention. These positions enabled the conservatives to purge denominational boards, agencies, and eventually seminaries of non-conservative people.
As is the case with any complex transformation, a number of factors (historical, cultural, geographic) colluded to make this shift possible. Most prominent among these, however, was the "Battle for the Bible," which I've also written about. Conservatives established a bright-line separation between themselves and everyone else with the doctrine of inerrancy: "Do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God"?
Now--some quick historical review. For most of Christian history (at least that part of history after the canon of scripture had been basically established) one could say generally that Christians viewed scripture as authoritative and reliably "true" in a general sense. Of course, only a thin sliver of Christians through the medieval and early modern periods actually enjoyed access to scripture (people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible in to the vernacular). Nevertheless, the question of the Bible's truth status played little if any role in the first millennium or so of Christianity. None of the many, many creeds churned out to weed heresy from orthodoxy mentioned anything about belief in God's Word as an essential Christian tenet.
What changed, to be brutally simplistic, was Martin Luther. Attempting to reform the Catholic (i.e., "universal") Church, Luther promulgated a number of departures from traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. Among these: sola scriptura--that Scripture alone, and not the edicts of the Popes or the traditions of the Church, serves as the proper basis of all Christian belief and action.
Very quickly, Luther's Reformation inspired Catholic breakaways throughout Europe, many of which began reading and translating the Bible in an effort to establish a uniquely non-catholic (or Reformed) set of creeds (the Westminster Confession of 1646 is a particularly influential example). These creeds notably incorporated belief in the authority of scripture as essential to Christian doctrine.
Reformation Christians soon found, however, that different people (or groups of people) can arrive at stunningly divergent understandings of what the same set of words on a page mean. Schism became and remains one of the defining tendencies of Protestant faiths. Parallel to this rise in "reading the Bible for yourself" trends, the Renaissance and after that the Enlightenment weaned intellectual Europe (and the Americas) further from dependency on the authority of Rome. "Sapare aude," said Immanuel Kant in his famous essay, "What is Enlightenment?": "Dare to think."
But thinking--the Enlightenment faith in the progressive possibilities of human reason--led many to turn a more skeptical eye on the Bible itself as a source of authority. In the 19th century, several northern European seminaries began studying the Bible not (or not only) as a sacred Word to be revered but (also) as a human document amenable to investigation by archeological, literary, and philological techniques. This "higher criticism" came to view the Bible as a patchwork collection of heavily redacted documents from a number of sources.
This higher criticism, as well as other 19th century cultural shifts (Darwinism being a particularly visible one), inspired in various Protestant communities (especially in the US) a counter-reaction, one which reaffirmed the Bible as error-free, complete, and utterly factual in all of its assertions (from creation to genealogies to miracles). This literalist reaction had a higher-education equivalen (mainly Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1800s), but it spread largely through loose networks of evangelists, speakers, and Bible colleges. "Bible-believers" (fundamentalist wasn't coined until 1920) practiced "Bible-reading," by which they meant a hermeneutic of plain sense.
The Bible, in this line of though, is perfectly understandable to any believing reader--no need for fancy education or philological analysis. God has preserved the Word, protecting it from corruption over the centuries and ensuring that it remains accessible to the common Christian. Its words are to be understood, where possible, in their simplest, plainest sense. The earth created in six days? Check. A global flood? Check. A talking donkey? A man swallowed, then vomited up, by a giant fish? A literal, bodily resurrection? Check, check, and check. Certainly the Bible uses metaphor or parable now and then (no one suggested taking every phrase literally), but these instances are obvious to the common reader and do not counter any commonsense understanding.
Over the twentieth century, as fundamentalism per se largely ceded ground to the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 50s, "Bible believing" remained (and remains) a defining doctrine of evangelicals, including Southern Baptists. Most evangelicals, however, tend not to define "Bible believing" in too terribly specific a way. "Do you believe the Bible?" Yes, of course. "Do you believe that God created the universe in six, twenty-four hour days?" Well..."days" might actually mean "age..." In practice, Bible-believing usually allows for a degree of variation in believers' interpretations.
When the SBC underwent its conversion (or rededication, depending upon your point of view), the conservatives gave "Bible-believing" a very narrow, very specific definition. Those who could not or would not declare themselves in favor of an utterly-true-every-word-every-fact notion of scripture had to go.
As far as I know, my father was never challenged formally with this litmus test. Nevertheless, the inerrancy purge in the SBC had ripple effects throughout the denomination.
More tomorrow,
JF
A bigger issue, however, was the shift within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as a whole. I've referenced this before, but to recap: Over the course of the 70s and early 80s, the SBC as a denomination experienced a kind of slow-motion coup. The more fundamentalist/conservative wings of the church--using entirely legal means--won several key leadership positions within the upper administrative bodies of the Convention. These positions enabled the conservatives to purge denominational boards, agencies, and eventually seminaries of non-conservative people.
As is the case with any complex transformation, a number of factors (historical, cultural, geographic) colluded to make this shift possible. Most prominent among these, however, was the "Battle for the Bible," which I've also written about. Conservatives established a bright-line separation between themselves and everyone else with the doctrine of inerrancy: "Do you believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God"?
Now--some quick historical review. For most of Christian history (at least that part of history after the canon of scripture had been basically established) one could say generally that Christians viewed scripture as authoritative and reliably "true" in a general sense. Of course, only a thin sliver of Christians through the medieval and early modern periods actually enjoyed access to scripture (people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible in to the vernacular). Nevertheless, the question of the Bible's truth status played little if any role in the first millennium or so of Christianity. None of the many, many creeds churned out to weed heresy from orthodoxy mentioned anything about belief in God's Word as an essential Christian tenet.
What changed, to be brutally simplistic, was Martin Luther. Attempting to reform the Catholic (i.e., "universal") Church, Luther promulgated a number of departures from traditional Roman Catholic doctrine. Among these: sola scriptura--that Scripture alone, and not the edicts of the Popes or the traditions of the Church, serves as the proper basis of all Christian belief and action.
Very quickly, Luther's Reformation inspired Catholic breakaways throughout Europe, many of which began reading and translating the Bible in an effort to establish a uniquely non-catholic (or Reformed) set of creeds (the Westminster Confession of 1646 is a particularly influential example). These creeds notably incorporated belief in the authority of scripture as essential to Christian doctrine.
Reformation Christians soon found, however, that different people (or groups of people) can arrive at stunningly divergent understandings of what the same set of words on a page mean. Schism became and remains one of the defining tendencies of Protestant faiths. Parallel to this rise in "reading the Bible for yourself" trends, the Renaissance and after that the Enlightenment weaned intellectual Europe (and the Americas) further from dependency on the authority of Rome. "Sapare aude," said Immanuel Kant in his famous essay, "What is Enlightenment?": "Dare to think."
But thinking--the Enlightenment faith in the progressive possibilities of human reason--led many to turn a more skeptical eye on the Bible itself as a source of authority. In the 19th century, several northern European seminaries began studying the Bible not (or not only) as a sacred Word to be revered but (also) as a human document amenable to investigation by archeological, literary, and philological techniques. This "higher criticism" came to view the Bible as a patchwork collection of heavily redacted documents from a number of sources.
This higher criticism, as well as other 19th century cultural shifts (Darwinism being a particularly visible one), inspired in various Protestant communities (especially in the US) a counter-reaction, one which reaffirmed the Bible as error-free, complete, and utterly factual in all of its assertions (from creation to genealogies to miracles). This literalist reaction had a higher-education equivalen (mainly Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1800s), but it spread largely through loose networks of evangelists, speakers, and Bible colleges. "Bible-believers" (fundamentalist wasn't coined until 1920) practiced "Bible-reading," by which they meant a hermeneutic of plain sense.
The Bible, in this line of though, is perfectly understandable to any believing reader--no need for fancy education or philological analysis. God has preserved the Word, protecting it from corruption over the centuries and ensuring that it remains accessible to the common Christian. Its words are to be understood, where possible, in their simplest, plainest sense. The earth created in six days? Check. A global flood? Check. A talking donkey? A man swallowed, then vomited up, by a giant fish? A literal, bodily resurrection? Check, check, and check. Certainly the Bible uses metaphor or parable now and then (no one suggested taking every phrase literally), but these instances are obvious to the common reader and do not counter any commonsense understanding.
Over the twentieth century, as fundamentalism per se largely ceded ground to the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 50s, "Bible believing" remained (and remains) a defining doctrine of evangelicals, including Southern Baptists. Most evangelicals, however, tend not to define "Bible believing" in too terribly specific a way. "Do you believe the Bible?" Yes, of course. "Do you believe that God created the universe in six, twenty-four hour days?" Well..."days" might actually mean "age..." In practice, Bible-believing usually allows for a degree of variation in believers' interpretations.
When the SBC underwent its conversion (or rededication, depending upon your point of view), the conservatives gave "Bible-believing" a very narrow, very specific definition. Those who could not or would not declare themselves in favor of an utterly-true-every-word-every-fact notion of scripture had to go.
As far as I know, my father was never challenged formally with this litmus test. Nevertheless, the inerrancy purge in the SBC had ripple effects throughout the denomination.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Confessions of a Southern Baptist PK: Transitions
Curiously enough, around the time that I began realizing that I needed a new kind of faith (a way to be a Christian without constantly saturating myself and others in self-centering, thought-stopping, soul-exhausting fear)--around that time my parents were going through a similar sort of crisis-of-faith.
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
My father, as I've mentioned, was a Southern Baptist preacher. That role had defined his life and the lives of the rest of our family. My sister and I weren't just children; we were PKs--preacher's kids (only later did I learn what kind of reputation PKs had). My mother, though she had a masters degree from a seminary--indeed, though she had gotten her degree before Daddy had his--she was a pastor's wife. Southern Baptists, citing Biblical injunctions for women to be silent and submissive, forbade women from serving as pastors, no matter how talented or called they may be. Instead, Mama's function, like those of pastors' wives in many conservative evangelical churches, was something like "unpaid associate minister." She headed up Sunday school classes, coordinated vacation bible schools, sang in the choir, organized home Bible studies and outreach ministries--a host of jobs, really. Practically any time Daddy had to be at church, Mama accompanied him (and vice versa).
Around 1988/89 (I was 13-14), we were living in a mobile home in a small town in southern Louisiana, where Daddy served as minister for the First Baptist Church. Daddy began feeling called to a different sort of pastoral ministry--the chaplaincy. To serve as a paid chaplain, one typically needs credits in CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE training generally takes place in the context of a large teaching hospital complex, where the chaplain-in-training basically undergoes a year or more of on-the-job training as a working chaplain. Since the tiny town we lived in had no such hospital or CPE program, we were faced with the option of moving. We could, my parents said, conceivably move anywhere we'd like. Now, such a wide-open option was pretty novel for my sister and me; we had up until then understood moving as something you did entirely at God's whim. God called Daddy to X place; we went. God called Daddy to Y place; we went. Having our pick of locations? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?
Nevertheless, we bypassed considerations of any other location than the one we had left some six years before: Oklahoma. My sister and I had lived the first part of our lives largely in small-town, southeastern OK, and we had long romanticized those memories into the "good times"--in contrast to the really wretched school systems we encountered in Louisiana.
Thus we packed up and moved back to southeastern Oklahoma. While Daddy looked around for a CPE program in the state and preached part time at a small church, Mama tapped into her pre-seminary days as a high school English and Spanish teacher and went to work (another novel experience). My sister and I were happy to be back in a state we identified with "home," even though the town we initially moved to was many times smaller than the one we had left. Soon, Daddy found a suitable CPE program in Oklahoma City, and we moved to a mid-sized sleepover town near there. Mama kept working as a teacher in a little town beyond that. After a year in the CPE program, Daddy decided to return to full-time preaching and began the process of applying to various churches.
A word about the Southern Baptist Convention: in contrast to many mainline denominations (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians), Baptist have a congregational structure. Individual churches enjoy a great deal of autonomy in determining their policies and in choosing their staff. Whereas a Methodist pastor participates in a tiered, formal, ecclesiastical structure and is appointed to a local congregation by his or her bishop, Baptist pastors are essentially free agents, hired and fired at will by a congregation in question. Applying for work as a Baptist pastor, then, functions much like applying for work in any job, save that most other jobs follow standard guidelines for job descriptions, contracts, hiring, etc. Churches too act as free agents, able to shape the pastor's job description, contract, and salary largely to their liking. A successful "call"--a simpatico between pastor and congregation--thus involves a unique mix of logistic, economic, spiritual, and political negotiations.
In my memory up to then, my father had never had much difficulty at that navigating those dynamics (as I grew older, I of course learned that there was much about our past churches that I had not perceived). I knew my father to be an excellent pastor, having experienced by then many, many other pastors in my life. His skills had not diminished. Congregations still responded favorably to him.
But for some reason he was unable to find a full-time position. Or, rather: my father was unable to find a church that was willing to pay him more than a part-time wage for a full-time position. One church in a nearby state, for instance, invited us to visit, met our family, heard Daddy preach, and enthusiastically voted to hire him--at a pittance of a salary. When Daddy frankly told them he could not afford to move his family there and live on that salary, the church reversed its vote. This pattern repeated in other churches.
Several factors were converging at once. First, smaller churches rarely have a good grasp on exactly what their pastor is worth. Particularly in congregational systems, individual congregations tend to develop (ferment might be more appropriate) a home-brew definition of what they expect a pastor to do, a definition often based upon hazy-but-glowing memories of old Pastor so-and-so, who was a Saint Upon the Earth. In no case is this definition limited merely to giving a thirty-minute speech every Sunday.
Churches expect pastors to be a combination accountant, administrator, teacher, counselor, event coordinator, childcare specialist, political advocate, marriage-maker, funeral-giver, hospital-visitor, community figurehead, and all-around friendly guy. And they expect pastors to provide these services on call, 24/7, backed up with the requisite (though unsalaried) pastor's wife, who is preferably herself gifted with a range of vital skills. But, since of course to the church none of this is actually work in the sense of clocking-in/clocking-out, pastors should expect to get by on a barely-above-the-poverty-line salary. Thus it was not completely surprising that a smallish church would balk at supporting a family of four.
Another factor: during the last 80s/early 90s, the nation was undergoing something of a recession. Budgets had become fairly tight. Churches were not able to pay much, and we were not able to accept little.
But one of the biggest factors in my father's difficulty landing a Southern Baptist pastorate was the change that had occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention itself, a change that threw my family's faith transition into sharper contrast.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Word of God Battle of the Bible (PK Confessions)
So--to continue with the whole inerrancy issue (i.e., the notion that the Bible is a cohesive, error-free set of divine propositional truths unblemished by any shade of contradiction or error).
As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.
Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.
There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.
What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.
For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.
At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.
The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.
The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.
By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...
As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.
Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.
There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.
What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.
For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.
At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.
The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.
The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.
By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...
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