Years ago, while serving my first church and with a Sunday off, my wife and I decided to worship someplace “completely different.” So we went to a Greek Orthodox church in Worcester, MA.
What I failed to consider at the time was that the entire service would be conducted in Greek. It was, in the literal sense, “all Greek to me.” I got nothing out of it.
A couple of months back, however, a family member’s mother died. She was Greek Orthodox, so the service was held in that same Worcester church.
At first I was concerned that I might not be able to find meaning in the service (I still don’t speak Greek). What I discovered instead was that the whole experience was uplifting and in ways I hadn’t expected.
Though maybe half the service was indeed in Greek, parts of it were not. But this time, I didn’t feel left out. In fact, I left the church profoundly moved.
Why? Well, for one thing, I allowed the incomprehensibility of the Greek language to wash over me, rather than struggling vainly to understand it intellectually (a real Protestant bugaboo). Much of the liturgy was sung. But rather than focus on the words, I found myself transported by the evocative, sinuous quality not only of the liturgy and the worship space, with its unfamiliar, Eastern-inspired icons, but the inimitable transcendence of what I was experiencing.
As the incense wafted up toward the heavens, I found my spirit also being drawn upwards. The focus of the service was not on the things of this world and its often pedestrian squalor, but on God, and the glory, magnificence, and wonder of God’s mystical, heavenly realm.
Too often in our Protestant churches (and I myself am certainly guilty of this), there’s a decidedly prosaic quality to worship. Our focus is on words, and this-worldly concerns, with little room for God’s spirit to pierce our narrow, precast mindset.
At its worst, Protestant worship is just too this-worldly. But in that Greek Orthodox setting, everything was arranged to draw the worshiper toward something higher, ineffable, mysterious – something Other. It was all about opening up the worshiper’s heart and mind to something both unknown yet, paradoxically, central to our existence here on earth. So this time, with a new receptive spirit, I left the church feeling spiritually alive.
In studied contrast, this past week I received my bi-monthly copy of the Yale alumni magazine. In it, there was an article about students who are the first in their respective families to attend college.
One student’s profile caught my attention, a young divinity school student. When asked what loving Jesus meant to her, she replied, “It means that I must embody love in the world.” Okay, a reasonably good start.
The second part of her answer, however, took a predictable turn: “It means,” she explained, “that I have to use my privilege as a middle-class white woman to fight against systems of oppression, and to build communities of care where everyone can flourish.”
Funny, I don’t recall hearing anything about this during the Greek Orthodox service. Of course, maybe it was fully addressed during the Greek portions of the service and I just missed it. Then again, perhaps not.
As I’ve said before in this blog, the problem with political and social “relevance” is that it forces, by definition, the transcendent into neat, prepackaged, this-worldly categories. When the most important subjects within the church are centered on contemporary ideas and sensibilities (which, remarkably, tend to change over time), religion must dance to its tune.
This impoverishes religion. It makes religion non-essential, if not irrelevant altogether. If contemporary political and social issues are paramount, and the church must march in lockstep to their dictates, the church necessarily becomes just another voice in the public square, and not a particularly unique or convincing one at that.
Which brings us back to our favorite 20th century church thinker, Walter Rauschenbusch. As I discussed in an earlier post, Rauschenbusch serves as the titular head of the Social Gospel movement, which sought to update the gospel to fit the emerging sensibilities of Modernist thinking.
Again, “objective” reason, science, as well as the newly-minted social sciences (with their unimpeachable “experts”), together with a big assist from the political sphere, constituted the wave of the future. Catch the wave or perish. There was simply no telling what wondrous things society could accomplish if we’d all just get with it. Utopia was right around the corner.
Notably, Rauschenbusch located evil in the structures of society, not within the souls of fallible human beings. Eliminate the structures of societal oppression and humanity’s natural goodness would burst forth.
Because the Mainline church historically was an integral part of the establishment in America, it was quick to jump on board the Social Gospel bandwagon.
As you’ll recall, in Rauschenbusch’s mind, the challenge was to hold the right sensibilities regarding social ills. The gospel either supported this idea or not. To fail this was to participate in the evils of the past. The enlightened future alone would bring about our redemption, and our salvation.
Yale Divinity School (pictured above) and others like it, continue each year to mint fresh new recruits for the Social Gospel army, no matter how completely and incontrovertibly the project has failed. At this point, it’s nothing more than a moldy, 100-year-old idea that’s efficacy has long since lost its luster.
Søren Kierkegaard, the brilliant 19th century Danish thinker, once referred to those who “fight for what has vanished.” The Mainline church, for its part, fights valiantly, albeit fecklessly, to obtain what no longer exists, if ever it did. Just ask our benighted YDS student.
Over the years, as the culture consciously moved beyond Modernism and towards Postmodernism, Post-Protestantism, Post-Christianity, if not sheer nihilism, the Mainline church appears unable to come to terms with the fact that it has lost its historic place at the table where important cultural decisions are being made.
Their stance is almost pathetic, as they try desperately to appear relevant and breathlessly up-to-date with the latest intellectual trends coming out of secular academia. Perhaps if we’re cool enough, or hip enough, or trendy enough, society will like us again, will respect us again.
But, alas, no one notices, or much cares. We’ve become, as Boston University sociologist Peter Berger once put it, “the caboose at the end of the cultural train.” We no longer lead or set the agenda; we just bring up the rear.
The Mainline church, in the end, still lives within the Constantinian conundrum. It wants to be a player on the cultural heights, but has lost its distinctive flavor, the one thing that separates the gospel from the things of this world, and the one thing, ironically, essential to the well-being of that same world – transcendence.
Which is to say, the transcendence to which the church points does not argue for a sectarian withdrawal from life, or from its social and political implications. It’s just that, as Kuyper pointed out, the church’s proper sphere is, and always has been, religion itself.
When the church falls into the Constantinian trap, its transcendence is subsumed by the predictable, claustrophobic, uninspired ordinariness of this-worldly thinking. In so doing, it loses any “relevance” it might otherwise have in the proper ordering of the world, the very world God created for human flourishing.
The only way the church can hope to make a genuine difference in the political and social spheres is, paradoxically, to reclaim its spiritual salt, formed by that which is unseen, unknowable, and beyond human apprehension.