Evangelical Imperative or Heretical Imperative?

The clash of religious cultures is not confined to the Middle East; it is right here in this country, indeed on this campus, and it is increasingly experienced among and between Christians of differing perspectives as well as between different religions. As Episcopalians we are threading our way as faithfully as we can between different versions of Christian faith and practice, most obviously between aggressively evangelical and community-nurturing versions of the faith.

[Media attention has focused on this culture clash in recent days, both in the New York Times and on NPR’s Fresh Air program, as recently as yesterday.]

I am tempted to say that we are caught between two imperatives: the evangelical imperative of the gospel, and what sociologist Peter Berger calls the heretical imperative of our time – the inescapable necessity of self-conscious religious choice [the Greek root of the word heresy means choice] in a world that can no longer be experienced from within a single and self-evident religious “truth.”

In 1835 the Episcopal Church added to its name the phrase, Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, linking its whole identity and purpose to the “Great Commission,” (as those final verses of Matthew’s Gospel are often called). Every Episcopalian was understood to be under the evangelical imperative, part of a Church on the move to spread and share the Gospel in parts unknown, most prominently at that time the vast pioneer territories of the northern mid-west. Jackson Kemper, a priest of immense energy, courage and vision, became the first “missionary bishop,” and spent decades pioneering the Church’s presence in the inhospitable frontier terrain of the mid-19th century. [His legacy includes Racine College, and Nashotah House, an Anglo-Catholic seminary that continues to uphold Kemper’s high church devotion to ritual and beauty in liturgy.]

It is virtually impossible to put ourselves in Bishop Kemper’s position from our own vantage point within the multi-faith, multi-cultural institution that is Princeton today, an institution whose own Christian roots are now little more than an attenuated historical relic and, for many, more of an embarrassment than a foundational pillar, for all practical purposes largely ignored. How would Jackson Kemper have reconciled the religious tolerance we prize so highly with the unequivocal call to convert and baptize all nations? And indeed, how do we?

In her autobiography, The Spiral Staircase, comparative religion scholar Karen Armstrong writes of her developing insight that absolute certainty, the conviction of one’s own rightness, is the enemy not only of religious authenticity, but also of the humane (also Christian) values of compassion and humility as well.

“Margaret Thatcher ... was going to put the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain. To many she seemed the answer to the long decline of the seventies, but to me she was a symbol of the dangers of certainty. With her hectoring rhetoric, upholstered, buttoned-up clothes, rigidly upswept hair, and unfaltering propriety, she seemed to epitomize an attitude of unquestioned and unquestioning superiority. ...” A huge increase in homelessness correlated with a hugely increased preoccupation with money to become the hallmark of the Thatcher years in Britain. “As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman.” Ironically, agonizingly, Armstrong had experienced the very same phenomenon in the convent where she had spent seven, in many ways damaging, years in her quest for God.

Whether reluctantly or not, we in this time and place are unequivocally under an “heretical imperative” that the pre-Vatican II nuns of Karen Armstrong’s convent could never acknowledge. We know we cannot avoid making choices as to whether and how we will embrace a life of faith, nor as to whether and how we may authentically share that faith with others. Perhaps St. Paul’s tone in writing to the Corinthian Christians can model for us a faith that is confident yet not triumphal, collaborative and humble, centered in Christ. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth .... no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” [1 Corinthians 3]

Jackson Kemper knew how to share the gospel of Christ while respecting an alien culture, though he can have had no doubt that he was under the mandate of an “evangelical imperative.” It seems that he paid sensitive attention to the indigenous Indian population of the American heartland, encouraging translation of liturgy and Bible into their native languages, and honoring the natural courtesy, reverence, and awe that marked their worship.

Thanks be to God!