love and loose holdings
Ours is a complicated world.There are Pentecostals and then there are Pentecostals. I have known what might be called earthy Pentecostals in my lifetime. In fact, my long time best friend and his father are of this sort – and they were not uncommon in the hollows of my youth. They might drink, smoke, and cuss, along with seeing demons under most rocks and speaking in tongues. There is the overboard spiritualization, but also a certain, unwavering tenderness. These might wear the garment of health and wealth, but they don’t really believe it, or they appropriate it through a sort of kenotic givenness to others – they pray for your health and wealth even as they are giving you the shirt off their backs. They know enough of mystery – they pray and believe that God gives and heals, but when He doesn’t they don’t ask questions, or, more importantly, they do not provide answers.
There is another “type” of Pentecostal – and these are the unearthy sort. For these, all things fall under the spiritualized economy of divine cause and effect – the universe is nothing but an assortment of answers. If you do not have, or you are not well, there is a reason. Inevitably these reasons are moral reasons, even when tied to the notion of faith. You are sick or in lack or under divine punishment of some sort because of a lack of this or that virtue. Obviously, this sort of theology is about as far from Orthodox Christianity as one can get. I have never in my life been able to relate to this sort of Pentecostal on a human level.
This year, through an odd set of circumstances, my family and I have had quite a bit of dealings with a particular Pentecostal of the unearthy variety. While I maintain friendships with a few earthy Pentecostals, it has been quite a few years since I interacted with an unearthy one. The recent experience has been most illuminating. It has helped me see how I have changed, theologically, in the years since I last encountered this sort of lived theology. It has helped me very much with regard to thinking about how and what I wish to parent my children, and present the Gospel to them.
Our unearthy Pentecostal is a moralist of the first order. If you err in this or that way, there will be a consequence. That seems fine at the surface, until it becomes more and more apparent that the unearthy Pentecostal loves the consequences meted out to those who err more than she loves those who err. Indeed, by all appearances, the rules are loved more than the God who gives them, or the persons who struggle to obey them. What is most important is that we submit to the divine order. That is what we know. That is what is real. With the language of “loving God” this person, so it seems, actually means “loving God’s simplistic cause and effect economy of punishment and reward.” The divine Person, for this Pentecostal, is not really a Person but rather an abstract mechanism of just order. The human person is simply an machine made to respond to that order – either through right action which results in health, wealth, and blessing, or wrong action which results in sickness (of various sorts), poverty (again of various sorts), and impending doom.
Whenever any discussion comes up that involves moral or spiritual complexity, a short, immediate answer is provided, such as “that’s what happens when people forget God,” or the like. If a person is found to be in error concerning any matter – dress, eating habits, overuse of over the counter medicines (instead of prayer with faith), attitudes, moral concepts, sexuality, theology (one must subscribe to a very narrow interpretation of some branch of Pentecostalism, or, suffer the inevitable consequences), marriage (any hint of egalitarian tendencies is a sign of befriending demons), politics (vote for born-again evangelicals only, somehow even if they are not in our branch of Pentecostalism and are therefore probably hell fodder, they are close enough to merit a divinely appointed place in the polis), education (people who go to colleges other than bible colleges are arrogant and have been brainwashed, public schools are always demonic, homeschooling is vital, but let’s not focus too much on the education, rather teach the kids how to work – little boys to be common tradesmen, little girls to be submissive housewives who are not to manifest intellectual gifts in any fashion), etc., etc., etc.
The above is a rather extreme example of American religious moralism, but it is not an uncommon one, and this sort of moralism can be found across the religious spectrum – both conservatives and liberals from all sorts of confessions. One can trade the key moral issues, but still arrive at an economy of grace or “grace” that is no more than cause and effect rote determinism.
Thinking of these deterministic moralisms has reminded me, of late, of a friend of mine from past years, Ken. Ken had been for many years a sociology professor at the relatively conservative Evangelical Baptist college in Minnesota. But for the most part I came to know him after that. In one of his classes on a given day, he was asked by one of his students what he thought of the morality of homosexual unions. As it turned out, Ken had been thinking about this issue for several years. He told the questioner that in his reading of the NT, and given his own theological commitments (his theological method, in other words), he could no longer construe what he felt was an honest argument against a monogamous, committed, lifelong relationship between two persons of the same sex. Ken thus answered this one question on this one day, and never taught anything with regard to it in his classes, as his classes did not involve this subject matter at all.
As it turned out, one of the students in the class that day attended the church of a well known Baptist pastor in Minneapolis, one who had written a book on “Christian Hedonism” (he is in support of such a notion), if that rings any bells. Let’s call the pastor Rev. John. Rev. John is a conservative in this Baptist association, and he was and is a self-appointed watchdog of said Baptist college, which he felt was straying too much toward godless liberalism. The student here happened to be riding in a car the very day of the classroom question incident, and he told Rev. John about it.
This caused a quick and fierce circle of events to take place. Though the student who told Rev. John about Ken’s answer was friends with Ken and wished him no ill, Rev. John went about his business as zealot. Ken was a tenured professor who had taught for years. But he was required to go before some faculty commission and give his views on homosexuality. He did so. The commission pointed out that Ken signed a statement of adherence to the doctrinal commitments of the college. Ken pointed out that the statement mentioned nothing of homosexuality (it does now), that he was committed to said doctrines, and that he felt his relatively new and tentative views on homosexuality were not in necessary contradiction of said doctrines. Ken also pointed out that in many years of teaching this instance was the first and only time he had been asked such a question on the matter, and that he did not teach anything regarding the morality of homosexuality in any of his classes, so he did not understand how his opinion on the matter was relevant to his position as a sociology professor.
To make a long story less long, Ken was forced from his position, a settlement was reached, and Ken left academia after the whole affair was over. He then went on to become a bus driver for the City of St. Paul, which is what he did for most of the time I knew him.
I would meet with Ken once every week or two, and we would read a book together, something social science oriented, and discuss it over tea. I found Ken to be a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word: humble, considerate, modest, careful, concerned, warmly and sincerely polite, disarming, and constantly kind. I know many persons who have known Ken, and all of them admire him. Only an ideologue of strict observance could dislike Ken. When I would come back from my meetings with Ken, my wife would comment that she liked how my meeting with him affected my own spirit. He had a distinct gentleness that seemed to naturally encourage a gentleness in those who came into contact with him.
With regard to his intellect, Ken was one of the most honest interlocutors I have ever had. With regard to homosexuality in particular, his thoughts on the matter seemed to me to be the least affected by popular ideology of any person I have ever engaged who held or considered holding the positions which Ken was attempting to work through. And on one very important point I happened to agree with Ken: given the theological method which Ken and his former college inherited, the arguments for opposing homosexual “marriage” were awkwardly constructed at best, and oftentimes completely incoherent. Ken was ostracized for his positions (actually they were not firm positions but more a series of complicated questions, and an admission that he could not hold to a certain moral point in the manner others did), and he would very much be considered “the enemy” by a host of “conservative” or “traditional” Christians today.
I have long wondered about this. I have plenty of Evangelical and conservative magisterial Protestant friends, and plenty of Orthodox friends, who use the pill. Some of these do so even after possessing knowledge of its abortificient qualities. Why are these folks allowed to the table of “conservative Christianity” or “mere Christianity” but those with views such as Ken’s not allowed? The question could also be put to me. I believe that a Christian can divorce, remarry, and still rightly receive Eucharist, in keeping with Orthodox canons. For some traditional Anglicans, many conservative and traditional Catholics, and a number of Protestants (think of the Anabaptists, for instance) this belief ought to exclude me from the merely Christian or the traditionally Christian circles. Such questioning on my part led me to the conclusion that there is no such thing as mere Christianity and that the oft used category of “conservative Christianity” is incoherent and not worth using, indeed, even harmful.
Longtime readers of this blog know my thoughts on pansexualism and the disordered regard of sexuality in our age. I disagree with the advance of “homosexual marriage” in its various manifestations, and I disagree with the advance of a cultural acceptance of homosexuality as a good for individuals, for society, and for culture. I surely and completely disagree with theological justifications for homosexual union, at least all of them I have thus far encountered, and I see no way in which homosex can ever be blessed by an Orthodox theology or praxis. Whether or not or to what degree someone defends homosex via ideology does not matter with regard to the question of whether or not that person is correct in his or her beliefs regarding homosex. I believe that Ken, on this issue, is wrong.
In spite of being wrong, or at least not in assent with the truth, concerning a serious moral issue, it seems that God has continued to bless Ken with a fair measure of, well, I cannot think of a better term, holiness. Indeed, he is a far holier man than I, as any person who knows us both would have to attest, were he to be honest.
I do not mean to suggest any antinomianism here. A priest or bishop who teaches that the Church should bless homosexual unions should be removed from ministry, in as loving and quiet a manner as possible. A layperson who asserts such should be gently corrected by a priest or bishop. What I am grasping for here is this: a person can be wrong about this or that and still be a person who loves God, and God, as He pleases, may bless such a person in a manner that is not easily predicted upon the lines of a given determinism. It seems that humble people who sincerely seek God will be blessed in spite of a whole host of erring ephemera. At the Cross, all tit for tat economies of grace are obliterated. There is no “well, that’s what you get when you forget God” because God’s giving of Himself is relentless and any expression of kenotic form in a human life is ripe for the reception of grace, whatever the other ephemeral conditions. And, of course, the Giver of Grace goes where He wills and as He pleases, completely unsubject to our terms and strategies.
It seems that we should be very careful in our determinations concerning where God isn’t. This is not to say that we cannot express what the Church teaches regarding what is right and what is wrong, but rather that we must not forget that the Church teaches a love that stands before and after moral formulae, and that God gives Himself in spite of deviation from the moral formula, so it cannot be relied upon to make totalizing final determinations about the nature of persons. It would seem that an Orthodox anthropology sees only one human activity, one human path, which has ever achieved a total finality – and that is the saving activity of the God-Man Jesus Christ hung dead on a Tree. No other human activity, or condition, or state is final, and even the Cross is not final by necessity, it is the finality achieved through free volition, as the infinite God-Man freely gives Himself infinitely to those He loves.
As I write this I remember bits of advice Ken gave me years ago – hold on to ideas loosely, because they are all tentative; the most loving embrace is expressed with a soft touch, firm grasping is a sign of fear, which has nothing to do with love; we all stumble to our “positions” whether we present ourselves as stumblers or not. In hindsight, it is clear to me now that Ken saw the world through the lens of forgiveness, his own need for it, and his ready willingness to grant it to all.
It has taken me too many years to begin to learn this – that the opposite of ideology is not freedom, at least not as freedom is conceived in any of its modern conceptions. The opposite of ideology is mercy.


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