HOLIER THAN THOU

Jesus promised us the kingdom; what did we get? The Church!

                                                                                                ~Adolph Harnack

Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda. (The church, always reformed, always in need of reforming.)  ~an expression of the Protestant Reformation

I am a hopeful ecumenist, encouraged by the apparent waning or blurring of denominationalism, so it always both startles and bothers me when I realize that I am still aggravated by a few issues of the sixteenth century Lutheran reformation—issues such as the nature of the priesthood.

This came to mind a few months ago while watching a 60 Minutes segment on the priest sex scandal in Ireland, and more recently on the occasion of the announced resignation of Pope Benedict, during whose "watch" the Church's response to these scandals came under increasing scrutiny and criticism.

Let me be quick to acknowledge that there have been plenty of sexual boundary violators in my own Lutheran fold, and I agree that the solution to this Roman Catholic catastrophe has to be found within the Roman Catholic Church and not in finger-pointing suggestions from protestant onlookers, even as I, ironically, humbly offer an observation based on Lutheran theology. So, to the possible challenge, “What gives you the gall to say anything at all about this?” I can only reply that what follows is the same thing I offer my Roman Catholic friends in conversation over coffee.

Also, I understand the Lutheran Church to be a reform movement within the Church Catholic (Martin Luther never intended to start a new “church”), and it is in that spirit that I have the temerity to comment.

Although the cause of each case of sexual abuse has to do with the mental or sexual health of each individual priest involved (and leads critics within the Roman system to wonder about an approach to priest-formation that perhaps engages young men at a too-early stage in their psycho-sexual development), and although the strictures of celibacy are an easy target for speculation (an issue beyond the scope of this essay), the thing that makes sexual abuse by priests a grave spiritual crisis for Roman Catholics is the ontological holiness of the priesthood.

Some will hear this as an understatement of the obvious, others will say, “Huh?” Let me explain.   I know that “ontological” is a big old sophomore philosophy term, but it’s at the heart of this sad situation. It is a word that has to do with the very essence of being – of one’s nature. In Roman Catholic doctrine, the priest, at his ordination, becomes a holier person in his essential self, in his “being.” Compared to the laity, he is, quite literally, “holier than thou.” He is, in fact, holy in the same way that Christ is divine while still being human. In the words of John Cardinal O’Connor:

We become priests at ordination. There is an "ontological change" in our spiritual nature. Such is a profound mystery. Is it too bold an analogy to compare the change to Christ the Son of God's retaining His Divinity while becoming a man? At ordination an ontological change takes place. (Emphasis the cardinal’s.)[1]

This perceived holiness not only makes a trusting person vulnerable, it also elevates the criminal act to a crisis of faith for Roman Catholic laity and a crisis of integrity (not to mention public relations) for the hierarchy. As a laywoman in the 60 Minutes piece puts it, “They covered it up because the priest is supposed to be perfect.” (In Ireland, these ontologically superior beings are now allowed to be in the presence of children only under the supervision of another adult!) Although refreshingly open, the archbishop in the 60 Minutes interview doesn't address the issue of elevated priestly holiness. To my observation, it is never mentioned in churchly or journalistic discussions of this matter. But it is central.

By contrast, the reformation view is that all Christians are priests (needing no intermediary to approach the Divine), and that a member of the clergy is one of these priests who is ordained to a certain function (the care and ministry of word and sacrament), not to a different level of holiness. If the pastor plays a spiritually important role, it is because the word and sacraments, not the person, are important. What happens at ordination is a call to do a job for the community, not a transformation of one’s being.

  

For good biblical and practical reasons, a pastor is – and ought to be – expected to live an “exemplary” life. But even though a kind of folk-theology causes many a protestant layperson to think of the pastor as especially “holy,” Roman Catholic doctrine assures everyone – the layperson, the hierarchy, and the priest himself that he, in fact, is, and bases the priest-people relationship on this holiness.

When a protestant pastor commits an abuse, great damage ensues (worthy—because it’s in my own clan—of a much hotter essay than this), and each individual case is every bit as devastating as that perpetrated by a Roman Catholic priest. But, I suggest, it seems not to have the effect of a church-wide (or world-wide) spiritual crisis because of the ultimate leveling of function (vs. ontology); the Lutheran pastor is not, in the final analysis, understood to be holier than the parishioners he serves.

What is beginning to sound like a lecture is actually an expression of frustration. And to the charge, “You’re just rehashing a centuries-old debate,” I plead guilty. I continue to hope and pray for the healing of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic breach. I worship lovingly with my Roman Catholic friends. But ecumenism means speaking honestly to one another from the strengths of our traditions, and in this case Martin Luther got it right. Roman Catholic priests need to come down an ontological peg (while the Church itself comes to honest terms with the causes of this epidemic). Of course only a new reformation will allow this. It happened before; it will happen again. Semper reformanda.

---

[1] Vatican article.

NOTHING DOING

Much of the argument made by the so-called new atheists is actually against the church and religion; they ironically offer little material proof of the non-existence of God. (Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great would more accurately have been titled Religion is Not Great.) I am sympathetic: The history of religion and the church is rife with one screw-up after another, and includes some very despicable characters. But no matter how much the Dawkins-Hitchens crew shares my antipathy for “religion,” this gives them no more evidence that there is no god than I have that there is.[1]  Richard Dawkins is straightforward enough to title one of the chapters in his God Delusion, “Why There Almost Certainly is No God” (emphasis mine). I don’t think Dawkins et al. realize the degree to which people of faith harbor doubts of our own. (“Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief.”) This is why I prefer the word “faith;” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated, “Jesus didn’t come to make us religious.” You want a slam on religion? Read the Bible! But don’t let the misbehavior and hypocrisy of the folks you find there distract you from the question of whether there is a god.[2]

I agree with Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary biologist and science writer (and agnostic) who, in his book Rocks of Ages proposes that faith and science are not opponents but partners in the search for truth.  Some on both sides, however, insist on turning the conversation into an argument, and the red herring at the center of the debate is evolution.  For the person of science to say, “Evolution proves there is no god,” or the religious creationist to warn, “We must not subscribe to evolution, because if it were true it would prove there is no god,” are equally ignorant statements. Evolution is simply a theory of organic development (and a fine one) and does not touch on the primal questions of the existence of god, or creation out of nothing.

Gould the scientist taught that, by definition, science is unable to have the final word about ultimate matters of meaning, purpose, and “what was there before…?” According to Gould, “Why is there something and not nothing?” and “What was there before there was something?” are not scientific questions. Science can only work with “something.”

But in a recent book, A Universe From Nothing, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss claims to prove that quantum mechanics can, in fact, cross the bridge between nothing and something, and answer the age-old question purely scientifically. In reading his thesis, however, it turns out that what Krauss means by “nothing” is more like “nothing much.” In a clever and elegant New York Times Book Review article, the philosopher David Albert muses:

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: …Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? The laws of relativistic quantum field theories (on which Krauss bases his case for an “eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world”)… have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place.

I have often wondered why most cosmologists are apparently so incurious about the meaning of “nothing” and the question of “what was there before…?” It is often, to use an over-used phrase, the elephant in the room. I’m impressed that David Albert has tackled the elephant.

Krauss, by the way, protests that his philosophical and religious critics have co-opted the meaning of nothing. He takes issue with the fact that they apparently intend it to mean “nothing.”

In an essay entitled The Origin of the Universe, the theoretical physicist (and self-described atheist) Victor Weisskopf provides an intricate description of the instant of the primal explosion – the “Big Bang” – using mathematics and the quantum mechanics vocabulary of energy fluctuations, false vacuums, and inflation. Then he concludes,

We now come to the more philosophical question: What existed before the primal bang? …The origin of the universe can be talked about not only in scientific terms, but also in poetic and spiritual language, an approach that is complementary to the scientific one…. A remarkable musical description of the primal bang is found at the beginning of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. A choir of angels sings darkly and softly, “And God said, ‘Let there be Light’.” The entire choir and the orchestra burst into a fortissimo C-major chord with  “And there was Light.” There cannot be a more beautiful and impressive artistic rendition of the beginning of everything.

I agree with Weisskoppf that this is poetry – poetry that is not an opponent but a partner with science in the search for truth. Why is there something rather than nothing? And what was there before there was something? The questions remain.

---

[1] Even-Steven

[2] The use of “God” in this conversation is not a reference to the Judeo-Christian divinity, but to an uncreated, infinite, non-material force or being that brought everything that is – material, energy, time – into existence. I am, of course, interested in Christianity but this is not an essay on my personal faith, and it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

NO THANKS

I had an epiphany while attending a stewardship workshop a couple of years ago. (Stewardship is a profoundly rich concept that has gained a very boring reputation because it has become synonymous with “fund-raising” – which is like defining poetry as “making up rhymes.”) The presenter was emphasizing the need to “thank, thank, thank” those who give, and my epiphany was this: Nobody gets thanked in the Bible. (Well, Paul does thank a couple of people who “risked their necks” to save his life, but that’s about it – and certainly no one is thanked for giving. Paul’s style instead is to lift up the contributions of the impoverished Macedonians in order to shame the wealthier Corinthians into giving more.)

I have become convinced that a “thanks”-based approach to stewardship is short-sighted, unbiblical, and an insult to the giver, who doesn’t give in order to earn thanks, but out of a compulsion of faith and love – a variation on the old spiritual, “How can I keep from singing?”

This is not to say that Paul and other biblical writers are not purveyors of gratitude – It’s just that the one who is thanked is God. “I thank my God every time I remember you…” is Paul’s expression of gratitude for the “partnership in the gospel” that the Philippians’ have shared with him.

Jesus is not so magnanimous. Here is Jesus’ thanks to those who have accomplished something good:  “When you have done all that you were ordered to do, say. ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done.’”

Now, I have to confess that my  “epiphany” may be a little self-serving because I do not, in fact, thank people enough – for all kinds of things. So I’m thinking of having some thank-you cards made up. To be true to my convictions I can't simply say, "Thank you," so I’m trying to decide between having them inscribed with, “I thank my God for you…” or “Dear Worthless Slave…” Hmmm….