Conference Talk
On Mrs. Jongke's Porch
The Basis of the Fellowship in Real Time by S. M. Hutchens
I am pleased to return after many years to Trinity, from which I took degrees in the early eighties, and served as Harold O. J. Brown's assistant. Assisting Dr. Brown meant doing things like fetching his lecture notes from a dusty pile on his office floor while he waited for them in front of a class. He had assured me they were right on top of his desk. When I finally found them and carried them in to him, he could not believe that this otherwise upright young man would deliberately lie about their whereabouts, since they were, in point of fact, in clear sight right on top of his desk. Well, no part of the teetering piles balanced up there was in clear sight either. I think he must have been teaching me humility, for he did not allow me any measure of triumph in the accomplishment of finding those notes.
The truth of this story is readily believed by anyone who knew Joe, this humble, lovable, absent-minded genius that I had come to Trinity to study with. I was never called upon to put out any of the fires he started in his office with that dangerous German coffee pot of his, but Trinity survived them—unquestionably, in the providence of God, so that it could host this conference.
On the Same Road but Differently Shod
Called upon numerous times to explain the basis of the Fellowship of St. James and its principal journal, I have most often found myself attempting to describe what might be called its dogmatic constitution—to give a rational, descriptive apology for what we are and are about. Such things have their place, but they never fit with entire satisfaction—indeed, they must be made to fit, for even agreement on the Creed, while standing truly for the fides quem of Christianity, has limited durability as a binding force among those who believe and confess it.
When Luther described the Church as a Haufen, a "heap" that gathered wherever the gospel was preached, he was attempting to bypass the technical, dogmatic, confessional approach in the service of accuracy, of a better fit, by use of more phenomenological than theological language. Others, like John Bunyan and C. S. Lewis, described Christian fellowship in terms of pilgrims falling in with each other on a road, so that their being-with each other may be thought of as the providential sum of an infinite complex of directed experience from a God who does all for each,and as a finding of the self in the faces of other selves, a definition of fellowship with strong mystical and Trinitarian overtones.
Indeed, if you were to ask me how I recognize the members of this fellowship, and gave me a little time, I would not cite you the description I wrote for the journal's masthead many years ago, but refer to our falling in with each other in terms of the recognition that we have been in the same school and studying under the same Teacher. I might tell you of misinterpreting Tony Esolen's smile when he first met us as one of detached amusement instead of, as he corrected me, happy relief at finding a group of men with whom he was fully at home.
One recognizes a mind formed in the same press, with the same concerns and disciplines—and most especially with the same loves. We are not so fortunate as to have our Eagle and Child, but we have Touchstone. It is the kind of friendship in which the central love and its flashes of recognition are so strong that differences can be moved to the margins, not as insignificant, but for later resolution. Often the accent we hear is foreign and the vocabularies are different (vocabularies we work on learning), but the same Lord is manifest in and magnified by these differences—and it is quite clear that we are trying to get to the same place by the same road, although, let us say, differently shod. And I will add that while Touchstone is and will remain a Christian project, we have seen non-Christians on this road as well, heading in same direction, toward the same Light, the Light that "lighteth every man coming into the world."
Another Necessity
It is not just this recognition of having the same Teacher that has been necessary for the formation of such a fellowship, but also the more detailed perception necessary for journalistic collaboration, perception of a similar level of aptitude, accomplishment, and yes, opinion, in the school, and it is this analogy by which I will explain what is to a good number of people the least explicable and least satisfactory thing about the association. We have even been accused of hypocrisy when we do not offer a place beside us to those who are perhaps of the same school, but whom we perceive as poor students, or who remain in the earlier forms (and are thus not very conversable) either because they lack understanding or have been hoodwinked, temporarily one trusts, by the Spirit of the Age. Because the spiritual hemorrhaging we must deal with is caused by this particular spirit, which is peculiarly that of our age, it is most acute, and in our triage operations here the wounds this spirit causes have first priority, while the treatment of other, older wounds are put off—we can only do what we can do, nor do we feel obliged to operate on every front.
This concentration and exclusivism is not popular in times when everyone's ideas are to be considered and affirmed and everybody gets prizes. I think all of us feel weighted in our work with the intuition that we are standing in what may turn out to be a historically important place. Nor can we escape the rather fearful perception that we are operating here as teachers, more responsible for guarding doctrine than for "dialoging" or valuing opinions because they are sincere, much less contemporary. What drew us together in the first place limits and controls our opera ad extra—our publications and conferences. Surely we are no more, but also no less, than a temporary conjunction meant to give place to other and greater works of God. The useful life of the fellowship may be expected in course to end, like that of the Ring.
Doubts & Hopes
But I return to considering its basis in that more exact but more difficult-to-describe convergence of directed experience, that leading of individual souls into fellowship through the experiences of life and the desire to interpret them so as to recognize meaning in them—meaning which grows heavier, as fruit grows heavier on the tree during summer—as they are meditated upon during the course of life. Since I know my own best, I will use it as an example. Each of my brothers in this college has, of course, his own story and could do the same.
I have titled this address "On Mrs. Jongke's Porch." This is a reference to the life and work of my grandfather, a fundamentalist minister and a good man. Grandpa regarded it as part of his pastoral duty to call not only on the members of his parish, but on everyone in his neighborhood as well, without regard to their religious affiliation or lack thereof. He found himself able to help many of them in many ways, and was loved and respected in his community.
One of the neighbors in this semi-rural area where lived and worked was Mrs. Jongke, an elderly Catholic widow from whom Grandpa bought his eggs. When he called on her, they frequently sat on her porch and chatted. We don't know what they chatted about, but may presume the subject often turned to the Lord and his Church, because Grandpa's daughter, my aunt, said her father once told her, "I don't think Catholics can go to heaven, but if they could, Mrs. Jongke would be right up there at the front of the line." Thus he reflected in his own way the doubts—as well as the hopes—of Lumen Gentium, Unitatis Redintegratio, and Ut Unum Sint.
What was it that my grandfather was seeing, or more properly perhaps, what was he being shown—what part of his predispositions and intuitions were being fed by his friendship with Mrs. Jongke? I don't think the fundamentalist minister in him would have appreciated the observation that he was showing evidence of nascent ecumenism, which, among fundamentalists, was no word to charm with. It was, in fact, the principal sin of Billy Graham, whom they also did not admire. Their dogma was this: "Catholics are not Christians, and can't go to heaven, because they think they are saved not by faith, but by getting baptized as babies and doing good works, and they don't believe in being born again."
The basis of a recognition of fellowship in real time, in existential reality, however, was Mrs. Jongke herself, whose testimony was sufficient to set my grandfather to pondering a difficulty, which he died before he could solve. I find, by the way, that my own faith seeking understanding can be described by saying that I have just taken up where my father and grandfather left off, having a closer look at what interested them.
An Odd Variety of Christian
I took up Grandpa's meditations about Catholics in the form of a dialectical exchange between three sources—my church, the Bible, and my Catholic neighbors—for I was raised in the shadow of St. Michael's Church, and my babysitter and many of my playmates were Catholics. I would compare notes with the more serious of them on what I had learned in church and Sunday school and they had learned in catechism class at
St. Mike's.
The Bible did not seem to weigh in very firmly on the question of whether Catholics could be saved, but because my father encouraged critical thinking in his sons on matters of faith as a Christian responsibility, I was allowed early on to become aware of a division between the Scriptures, on the one hand, and my church and its pastors on the other. They were two distinct and sometimes conflicting sources of authority, an observation that, of course, my church would not have endorsed—but my father, whom I trusted more than I did our pastors, did.
I noticed early on, for example, that whenever the minister agreed with the Bible, his interpretations were quite uncomplicated, but when he had a disagreement with what the Bible appeared to be saying, he would start to get inventive and technical, referring to the original languages (which I doubt if he knew) and putting the laity out of the hermeneutical loop by practicing what would be identified as priestcraft or Jesuitical hocus-pocus had it been done by a Catholic. This sort of prestidigitation effectively relegated, very early on, the distinctive opinions of my sect to nothing more than that, and left me open to listening to the quieter but stronger voice that was speaking to me in and through my larger experience, when I paid attention—and I did pay reasonably good attention.
Accordingly, I could hear what my guileless Catholic playmates were saying, and could come to my own conclusions through what they at a more advanced stage would have to identify as the bane of "private judgment." On the basis of what they told me of their faith, it seemed that the genus Catholic was an odd variety of Christian—an opinion from which I have never wavered—but their faith impressed me as essentially the same as mine. Doubtless, I thought, they were wrong about a good many things, but they seemed to be right about God and Jesus, and on the wrong things I was hardly from a tradition that could afford to throw stones, at least not very many big ones.
Where the Fire Comes Down
I was too young to be aware of the depth of the heresy I was contemplating when I thought that if they believed they were saved by doing good works, that would do the world, and themselves, a lot more good than harm if they were already believers, which they seemed to be. In fact, the Bible, with which my pastors had occasional conflicts, had certain passages that seemed to give pretty strong support to what the Catholics had to say about good works. Although I disagree with Newman's maxim that one cannot be deep in history and be a Protestant, if he had said that one could not be deep in the Bible and be the kind of Protestant I was, I would have been willing to take that under advisement.
We must give proper and respectful attention to the essentially dogmatic labors of formal ecumenism where knowledge of the other is won by sympathetic and orderly study of doctrine, with an eye toward clarity and accuracy of understanding, to the end that we may no longer be divided, no longer in error, and no longer at war. But I have come to regard formal ecumenism as in essence epiphenomenal, an altar that must, to steal from Charles Williams, be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another.
This I say because I suspect that the places where the fire actually comes down look less like conferences in Rome or Geneva, or even in Bannockburn, and more like the porch where Grandpa sat down with Mrs. Jongke, and upon whose extension I sat down in later years on another porch with my Catholic friend Paula to ask her what she learned that week in catechism—speaking willingly to each other not just because we found the company agreeable, but because we saw in each other intuitively (and by intuition I mean the sum of a thousand small but quite empirical observations) the work of our own Master, and desired him in the other. It is that form of experience through which I believe the Lord speaks in the gradual tutoring of an observing life in which there is a lesson in everything for those who are paying attention.
Outcroppings of Eternity
I once thought Chesterton had overplayed his poetic hand and was indulging in a bit of forgivable British chauvinism when he wrote "The Rolling English Road," but now I'm not so sure. He writes of a very plain and common thing, the English road, winding as though it were laid out not by a civil, or even an uncivil, engineer but by a drunkard, and not as though it winded about aimlessly, but to a glorious and surprising end. I have driven those dangerous English roads and, like the poet's impatient squire, cursed that drunkard for his drunkenness. I have found, however, that porches, like winding roads, can also take us, at length, to somewhere we want and need to be. Despite the appearance of commonness and unremarkability, their associations can make them outcroppings of eternity.
"My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green."And I will add to Chesterton my own brief bit of leaven,
That homely houses in this world have halls that go to heaven
Because the Lord who leads us will interpret his own rule,
Give meaning to our meetings and make every place his school.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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