2019 Conference Talk
The Benedictine Preacher
When first I was invited to speak at this conference on Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, I purposed to say something of an earlier attempt within American Protestantism to face the problem of an encroaching and hostile secularizing religious modernism which threatened to, and has actually been successful in, vitiating the Christian witness wherever it has been permitted to operate. This spirit, addressed by Pope Pius X in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, was being dealt with among Protestants of a number of denominations in 90 essays published between 1910 and 1915, gathered under the title The Fundamentals. Through the gift of two wealthy businessmen, an effort was made to send copies to every minister, missionary, professor of theology, YMCA and YWCA secretary, and Sunday school superintendent in the United States and other English-speaking countries.
In the early 1920s, those in sympathy with the conservative tracts were journalistically dubbed "fundamentalists," and within twenty years, fundamentalism itself divided into two mistrustful factions, the more separatistic of which continued to identify itself as fundamentalism while the more world-engaging group called itself "Evangelical," establishing the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. My original intent was to present a commentary on this continuing division as representative of two natural but defective ways to proceed in the world and thus as a cautionary tale on the grounds of the Benedict Option—and the use of the concept of mere Christianity as a way to address pre-emptively problems of this sort, while noting its consonance with the spirit of the original fundamentalists.
While I have been particularly well-placed by my own history, study, and experience to comment on this division, I found writing about the conflict increasingly distasteful, for it is too personal. Watching the development of Evangelicalism during the course of my lifetime (my father was a charter subscriber to Christianity Today in 1956, and I read it from early youth) has been something like watching the slow death of a friend from a congenital disease. By "congenital" I refer to a powerfully formative anti-Catholicism that has made it immune to mere Christianity—despite the affinity for C. S. Lewis it claims—the strength of which I have only realized later in life, which has in turn led to the terminal immunological disorder of inability to recognize egalitarianism as a doctrine of demons. Fundamentalism is and has always been ecumenically inert by intention, which I doubt any Christian body can innocently be. It appears the fundamentalists and the Evangelicals were both right in their negative assessments of one another, and this is a woeful tale which I decided I did not wish to rehearse at any length here.
So I leave this topic, which I am using as a kind of prelude, noting that the essence of the fundamentalist-Evangelical disagreement on Christian engagement of the culture has resurfaced recently in the Ahmari-French debates, in which many of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture observations are being mooted once again. On one side are those who, with Mr. Ahmari and the fundamentalists, whom I believe are right on this, regard modern culture as fundamentally anti-Christian, and propose thought and action in accordance with that understanding. On the other, with Mr. French, are those who believe in and promote a value-neutral public square in accordance with American constitutional principles. French's doubters regard this as mythological thinking, since they believe that the American public square is not, nor could it be, nor has it ever been, value-neutral (and so neutral with regard to Judeo-Christian faith and ethics) and that Christians should deport themselves in full cognizance of the hostile sea change brought in with the progressivist domination of culture.
I need hardly emphasize the significance of this debate to the questions raised by the Benedict Option, but have decided to leave it at that and move in this paper to one of the practical considerations that follows in this train, namely, the matter of Christian preaching in this new age during which we may reasonably expect an intensification of anti-Christian activity terminating in full-scale persecution, as it has in other places. For if the presidency of Mr. Trump is bringing us a respite from what I expected to be its beginnings under his opponents, I cannot see that it has encouraged anything like the moral reawakening that is needed. Indeed, Mr. Trump's confession that he has nothing to repent of removes him from both Judaism and Christianity and places him at the head of a morally static—at best—public square, which accounts, at least in part, for the division of opinion about him among Christians, evident even among the senior editors of Touchstone.
Getting Back to the Foolishness of Preaching
Having abandoned my original project, the mental machinery working on this conference project started up again when James Altena sent me an article by Hans Boersma titled "Fear of the Word" from the August 2019 First Things. Boersma, the St. Benedict Servants of Christ Professor in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House, began by noting that his best students in particular were afraid to preach. This fear was not that of Moses or Isaiah, who felt inadequate to the task because he was sinful or ineloquent or otherwise unformed, but because what young pastors or priests are called upon to preach today seems to involve such a high degree of abstraction from reality as perceived by their hearers. They sense they cannot credibly bridge the apologetic gap involved in what Barth called "the strange new world in the Bible," which is now not merely strange but so profoundly alien that the apologetic dove has no place to alight.
If this is what they sense, they are right, for we are now at the end of the Age of Apologetics, which is something those preparing for Christian ministry must understand, lest they be surprised or spend time fretting about what has always been true. These students are feeling the shock of the destroying blast which has in a sense removed their limbs—they can no longer "explain things," and it is good they feel it full force now while still in their studies, for in the resulting weakness they will find strength.
By the end of Apologetics I don't mean the end of giving "an explanation for the hope that is within us," which every Christian must at all times be prepared to do, but Apologetics as the attempt to bypass the implications of what St. Paul called tēs mōrias tou kērygmatos, the foolishness of preaching, in the belief that those who turn from the gospel, whether cultured or not, simply need to have it explained to them in rational and attractive terms to make it available to their souls—a myth that has extraordinary powers of penetration, and is found wherever the mind is thought to have greater powers than it actually possesses. The religious academy, liberal or conservative, which almost invariably stands over against the Church as the principal source of interpretive authority, lies at the center of that particular temptation.
At the bottom of this is, I believe, an actual theological error, the belief that unbelievers do not know God. St. Paul tells us however, that they know him and "hold the Truth in unrighteousness," so that the fundamental problem is not noetic, the need for explanatory information in which the schoolmasters trade—evidence that demands a verdict—but the moral depravity the cure of which is found in the Church and its ability to deal with sin. Apologetics as I have experienced it has been ambiguous on this point and often sounds as though the cure is in the evangelist's explanation. No wonder intelligent men seduced by this idea are afraid to preach.
It is time for the ambiguity to end and to get back to the unapologetic foolishness of preaching, for there is a place in all men where the one true God is known and heard along with what he requires of us, and so where no explanation is needed as if there were not—only clear recapitulation of what is already known and feared, the disease presented along with its cure. The gospel is good news to those who long to be saved, but that their Creator should will to redeem them and give them new life should not be a surprise, for all men already have good and sufficient reason to know his character. This should undergird the proclamation of the Church, giving its preachers confidence in what looks like, when in our day placed up against the ever-hardening and ever-mounting barrier of apologetic requirement, an impossible thing.
The Answer to Dissociation
What I found even more striking about Boersma's essay was his articulation of the answer to the discouragement of the dissociation caused by, on the one hand, reading the text in historical fashion (which we should do to the best of our ability) and, on the other, the Christological reading of Scripture by the preacher that lays hold of and conveys the Word of God with confidence. Boersma says,
Our dissociation arises from a lack of conviction that the Scriptures are indeed divine. The language of application illustrates the point. It's a dead giveaway when we find ourselves asking how to apply the biblical text. The notion that Scripture must be applied to our lives assumes a gap between what the text meant and what it means. The underlying premise is that the biblical text was written not about me or about us but about them, back then.
Boersma concludes, after a masterly exposition which I strongly recommend to everyone responsible for preaching the Word,
Advocates of purely historical exegesis [and I will add, whether they are "liberal" or "conservative"] ask the reader to trust the biblical scholar. That demand removes the authority of interpretation from the Church to the academy. Not surprisingly, it is often my best students whose confidence is most shaken by this shift. They quickly notice that academics seem never to be able to agree on anything, certainly not on how to interpret a given biblical text. . . . Arbitrariness, sometimes thought to be a problem in premodern interpretation, is actually the obvious Achilles' heel of historicist exegesis. David Steinmetz, in his essay "The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis" expresses the same insight: "Until the historical critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted, as it deserves to be, to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can be endlessly deferred. . . .
My advice is this: Follow the Church's tradition in looking for Christ in the Scriptures. By all means plunder the gold of the Egyptians when the opportunity arises: truth is found in sundry places. . . . But keep in mind why you came to this text. It was to know Christ Jesus and to be found in him. If Christ is the subject matter and you are in him, then you are there, along with the treasure itself. Don't be pulled out of that text, for that is the dissociation that yields the debilitating uncertainty we're all struggling with. Stick to the text, look for Christ, don't stop digging for the treasure that is there. You'll discover you're one of its gems.
The problem faced by Professor Boersma's students is not unique to them, but an arresting intensification of one with which all those who preach Christ have always dealt. The Lord spoke of this when he asked his disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" What they cited as the "opinions of men" were references to characters proposed to serve as interpretive lenses through which to view the Jesus-phenomenon. But when Peter gave the approved answer, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God," he was referring to something quite different: there is no historical interpretive lens of this sort available; the connection between Christ and those who preach him is a personal and living communion through which the gospel is delivered and by which only it penetrates the heart. This is not enthusiasm, but the Catholic Faith, and so the Lord said to its First Confessor, "You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church," thus indicating that the living and personal communion is also corporate, like that of the Godhead.
Resistance to the Creed
As the pastor of a mainline Protestant church, I was able to observe from that vantage something about preaching Christologically to a deeply secularized congregation that I didn't expect. It was this: the resistance I encountered to the mere Christianity I tried to preach was not first and finally to any particular doctrine but to the threat of the Christian faith as a whole. I expected the feminists to object to St. Paul, which they did, along with the old-fashioned liberals, who objected to the narrowness of a preacher they interestingly accused not of fundamentalism but Catholicism. But what I sensed was an underlying resistance to the whole Christian message, which became evident when I preached a series of sermons on the Apostles' Creed—which was regarded by my principal detractors as Romanism, even though the Creed appeared in the back of the denominational hymnal.
This church was one of those founded in protest to the establishment of the United Church of Christ, which most Congregationalist churches joined in the late fifties, not because the UCC was too liberal, but because it was too Presbyterian. The Congregationalism of an imaginary nonconfessional history was the binding principle of that denomination and the only religion demanded of its associated churches. But as a pastor whose first responsibility was to God and not to the National Association, I decided the church needed to define itself as unmistakably Christian if it was to move ahead, at least under me. To that end I laid before it that series of sermons on the Creed, which I had asked the church to affirm.
But it would have none of that—and not, believe me, because the Apostles' Creed was only a Western baptismal symbol. It simply was something the congregation would not profess because it excluded too many members and potential members who might "in good conscience" not believe it. And it was a creed, which the pastor was trying to force on a church that was bound by covenant and not by creed, these being regarded as naturally antagonistic.
I was surprised by the negative reaction to the series as a whole. It did not seem rational, and those who gave a clear reason for their opposition pointed to a tract written by Henry David Gray, one of the church fathers of the denomination, which made the completely ahistorical claim that the gift of true Congregationalism to the world was its affirmation of the freedom to believe and act what one thought best and still call oneself a Christian and be accepted as such by the church. Perhaps by now he has been able to moot that idea before Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.
This homiletical series on the Creed, preached in the middle of my pastorate, actually presaged the death of that church, for it knew me to be its last pastor if I did not rescue it from its looming demise—it hadn't the resources to call another, and the divided mind of the pastor and congregational leadership made it impossible to advance under my ministry. I resisted an attempt by my stubbornest enemy to oust me, stayed until the end, gave the church a decent burial, and have spent the rest of my life contemplating, almost compulsively, whether I could have done better in what I can only regard as my most signal failure—and deepest experience of the power of the lie—something that has bothered my conscience since then, and against the memory of which I desire the Lord's healing touch, not to mention his vindication.
Resistance to Submission
As to what happened, I feel objectively justified in placing personal offensiveness to the side, for most of the people liked me in spite of my narrowness and rigidity. (Where I am disliked, it is almost always for ideological reasons and not because of an unpleasant personality.) No, the offense here was in the faith I was preaching, and was in essence this: The faith of Christians calls for submission of the will to God in the manner of their Lord, who at the crisis of his life said to the Father, "Even so, not my will, but yours be done," and so went to his death. It is in this submission, in this servitude, where the believer paradoxically finds his freedom. John Donne had the theology exactly right:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free.
Freedom, however, is one of the pillars of modernist religion, as it is of the weak side of Americanism, and we must cease tolerating ambiguity on the point, for it means the very opposite of Christian freedom in submission of our wills to God, in which we become regenerated as a new self, according to his will and not our own. Even Christians find it easy to define freedom as it was by Schopenhauer (and Invictus is his prophet!) as the transcendental essence of the Self, as the spirit of man in his true and inward being, which to surrender to another nullifies the self.
To those devoted to this kind of freedom, preaching Christ is heard as proposing the extinction of all personal identity and meaning, of all individuation, of all independent existence, of all real freedom. It means thralldom to an alien will, fundamentally opposed to the autonomous person on the most elemental level. (They write handmaid's tales of dread about this.) Believers are afraid of submission too, but in the end, at their own crises, they decide to trust God and mistrust themselves. This, I believe, was the problem at the now defunct Pilgrim Congregational Church of Glen Ellyn, Illinois—its people wanted freedom, but not Christ on the terms offered by the Scriptures—and this refusal will be faced to an even greater degree of intensity by the preacher of the next age. It will require on his part a level of resolve and intelligent approach that is typical of times of persecution and will be different enough from what most of us have experienced thus far to be treated as "something else."
Expect the Cross
Returning to Boersma's article: his advice to his students and readers, which has also been my own, is to "follow the Church" in your preaching, interpreting all Scripture Christologically, and in doing so, you may forge ahead boldly, using historical-critical theorizing as ancillary and only when useful. (Read Fr. Reardon, who is a master at this.) This the Church has known to be right since the Lord tutored us on the basic Rule at Emmaus.
The response to Professor Boersma's essay that I sent to James Altena was, "This is a great article, and Boersma is right, but if a preacher is bold enough to preach the Scriptures fully, Christologically, and in the light of the Great Tradition, he will sooner rather than later preach himself right out of his job in whichever sect he belongs to"—and I make no exceptions here, for there is something in the Bible to offend every instituted religious authority. I do not believe I have ever seen a church that would tolerate such a man. He may slip through the gaps left by ecclesiastical negligence, but only by a special work of grace.
Remember the Lord: the people of his home church in Nazareth tried to murder him for his own Christological interpretation of the Bible long before the denominational authorities got their hands on him in Jerusalem. A priest of a kind now banned from the Episcopal Church told me the rector of his seminary gave fair warning to his graduating class (this would have been more than sixty years ago): "Men, when you receive your ordination, make no mistake, you are nailed to the cross. Do not expect anything else."
Well, it has been possible for a long time in our part of the world to expect something else, something much less dangerous. So I join my voice here with others who are making the same kind of noises to give fair warning: this must be the expectation now, and the expectation will inevitably alter the preacher's thoughts about his vocation and manner of living. He must expect more than ever to pay for the gospel he delivers quite literally with his blood.
To be more specific: the enemies of the Church, as we have seen in the anti-Christian totalitarianisms of the recent past, will seek to eliminate him, first for his influence among his own people, so his mission to pass on to them what he has received will be more urgent than ever. He will be more likely to live in or close to poverty, and for this he must be willing to forego a wife and family, even while he, like St. Paul, rightly claims the privilege of having them. He should expect a short and volcanic life. What he will see is what I believe all faithful ministers have seen in all times and places, but intensified, so his resolve must be especially clear-sighted and strong.
He will deliberately, for Christ's sake, free himself from the necessity of overlooking the wickedness in his church that he presently does for the comfort of a false unity and a secure living, for he will see with increasing clarity that by countenancing evil in the church, he is futilely and culpably trying to merge light and darkness, to yoke the ox with the ass. He will expect to be ill-spoken of as a necessity of his call.
Along with this, however, will come bon secours, the good help of God and far greater spiritual power than we see in the pastorate now. He will also find friends and fellow pilgrims in whose company he shall have joy and comfort. His life of trial will be almost intolerably rich, and his reward will be great on the white shores of the Far Green Country.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on apologetics from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
The Difficulty of Apologetics for Dead Souls in the Real World by R. J. Snell
31.2—March/April 2018
How Best to Face the Total War of the Anti-Culture by R. J. Snell
33.3—May/June 2020
On Flight & Fight in the Present Tribulation by Douglas Farrow
more from the online archives
31.2—March/April 2018
The Transmission of Christianity Is Not a New Task by Nathanael Devlin
33.3—May/June 2020
Bach's Cantata BWV 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbesteZeit (God's time is the very best time) by Ken Myers
29.4—July/August 2016
on Noticing That Modern Science Has Rendered Atheism Irrational by Harry Biltz
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