While attending church not long ago, I listened to a retired, genuinely earnest preacher make a curious point.
First, he referenced the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who stressed the importance of asking questions. With this in mind, the preacher then went on to boldly assert that all declarative sentences (i.e., those that don’t pose questions) presume perfect knowledge and thus rob us of any sense of mystery (“epistemic closure?”).
Later in the sermon, he reminisced about the Episcopal church in the early days of his ministry, back in the 60s. He talked about how it had been a thriving enterprise back then and how much it had meant to him.
He then offered this sad refrain. The average attendance, he said, on any given Sunday in the Episcopal church today, is only about 40 worshippers. He expressed sadness at this, noting how tragic it is.
But then came the coup de grâce: “How have things come to this?” he asked, altogether innocently.
In the receiving line after worship, I told him I appreciated his sermon but disagreed with him on one point – that not all declarative statements are devoid of mystery. To his credit, he agreed, though without explanation.
After all, to say “Jesus is Lord,” for example, is a declarative sentence, yet it hardly implies the absence of mystery. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Notably, the one thing I didn’t tell him was that by dismissing all declarative statements in favor of questions, he unwittingly may have offered a clue as to why the Episcopal church (and other Protestant mainline churches) has become a shell of its former self.
An effective preacher, that it, must take into account the spiritual and material challenges his hearers face. In our time, that means addressing the stark realities of current American culture, a culture that has, in effect, lost the script.
Which is to say that we live in a culture rife with social turmoil, moral confusion, and all manner of dysfunction. Contributing mightily to this societal decline is the collective loss of faith, the absence of spiritual grounding, or any real sense of eternal things.
For increasing numbers, church is simply a foreign entity, at best. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve officiated at weddings where the young attendees look around the church in an obvious state of stupefaction.
As such, let’s assume I know next to nothing about Christianity, biblical faith, or church culture, and decide to risk a church service some Sunday morning hoping to find a modicum of guidance, direction, and, yes, even practical tools to help me cope with everyday life. Then, let’s also assume that all the pastor has to offer is questions. I probably won’t go back. After all, chances are I already have more than enough questions myself. What I need are answers.
This is not to say that asking questions is unimportant. Asking questions is, in fact, vital to any form of learning. But does that then mean there are no answers in life?
Many pastors flatter themselves by presenting what they consider “sophisticated” questions about the faith, frothy delectations on the obscure, forgetting that many if not most of those in the pews haven’t yet been exposed to the basics (which, truth be told, is the fault of the pastors).
At best, it’s a bit like presenting a calculus equation to those who’ve not yet mastered basic addition and subtraction. At worst – which is far more often the case – it involves pseudo-intellectual obfuscations that seek to reimagine and/or politicize the faith. Such probing tends to raise more questions than it answers, as if the basics are obvious somehow or unnecessary even. Here pseudo-academic titillation supersedes truth-seeking.
Vanity aside, there’s another more basic reason for this obsessive focus on ambiguity over clarity. And it has to do, as stated earlier, with the times in which we live.
R.R. Reno has written extensively about our postliberal society and its obsession with what commonly is referred to as the “open society.”
After WW2, he argues, many determined that the rise of fascism had been due to a “closed minded” mentality. The concern was that “a frightened, disoriented populace turns to authoritarian leaders because people fear the uncertainties and responsibilities of modern freedom.”
After the war, American society had taken on a traditional morality that prized normalcy and conformity. Thus, many writers and intellectuals, especially in the 60s, expressed deep fears that bourgeois complacency might usher in a new authoritarianism. The solution? Crack things open.
This fueled “a consensus in favor of openness: the open society consensus. It took unity and stability for granted and focused on the failures, injustices, and dangers of an overly consolidated society.” Today, “the old, censorious morality no longer exists, much less dominates.”
“In Return of the Strong Gods” (https://climbingthewalls.org/beyond-the-twilight-of-the-gods/), Reno writes, “I argue that the open society consensus has become a flesh-eating monster. We are living in a deconsolidated and disintegrated world, one that lacks the strong loves and loyalties that anchor personal and collective life.
“We need a new consensus that recognizes that fascism, middle-class complacency, racism, and other dangers of an over-consolidated society were our grandfathers’ problems. Our challenges are quite different. They can be summed up as the dangers of drowning in a liquid world.”
Therefore, we need to “restore the stable anchors of spiritual, moral, and political life.”
In my last post (https://climbingthewalls.org/toward-the-sunny-uplands/), I suggested that we very well may be living within a generational “fourth turning,” a time of chaos and radical change that necessarily follows a period of societal “unraveling.” But because we are incapable of recognizing this change, or its necessity, we cling to the immediate past, for it’s all we know. The future, as such, must be just like the present.
As it is, an unraveling period is characterized by societal decline, radical individualism, and the dangers wrought by disunity and lawlessness. Thus the perceived need for caution, safety, and protection.
It’s also a period where nothing big is allowed to happen, where a professional consultant class is enlisted to carefully manage the inevitable decline with technical efficiency. The idea, stated or not, is to maintain the status quo, though it has been apparent for some time that the status has failed miserably.
Within such an environment, all genuine, substantive change spells only danger. Bold leadership and bold ideas are attacked in knee-jerk fashion. Hitler lurks forever in the shadows, behind every rock. No, timidity and acquiescence are the order of the day. Best play it safe.
It seems we’ve forgotten that leadership, or “will,” or human agency is not an evil in and of itself. For as with any and all human capacities, human agency can be used for either good or evil, for either sacred or profane purposes. Bold, visionary leadership, believe it or not, can be used for good, and isn’t always in the service of the Third Reich.
In the end, the problem with my pastor friend’s insistence on questions rather than declarative statements would seem to fit into this all too familiar cultural paradigm. We must be neither hot nor cold, “open” to all possibilities, and resistant to any and all claims to objective truth. We must accept everything, never judge, and speak of “love” in anodyne and inoffensive ways – Jesus as a bland 21st century “midwit.”
Yet as our culture continues to disintegrate and people are left increasingly without the necessary resources for effective living, the churches need to do more than just ask existential questions, as if no answers were available. To do otherwise is to give people more of the very same moral and spiritual rot from which they suffer already.