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The "Ecstatic" Heresy
Beneath the surface, a powerful heresy has taken hold of the
Episcopal Church. The heresy is rarely articulated, but our
leadership promotes aspects of it and many in the church resonate
to its fundamental claims. For example, whenever you hear people
saying that all language for God is symbolic, that the Spirit is
guiding the church into new truths, or that our historical and
cultural context goes beyond that of the biblical peoples, you
could well be in the presence of heresy.
The essence of this heresy is to deny that
God can miraculously act and speak. This denial takes many
forms, but the first and still most potent form is the theology
of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher is the
father of theological liberalism, and such theologians as
MacQuarrie and Tillich continue his ideas. It is the theological
perspective that has most affected the current leadership of the
Episcopal Church. For the sake of a title, I would call this
perspective the "ecstatic perspective," a name taken from
theologian Paul Tillich. Essentially, this perspective claims
that God is known in ecstasy, beyond the language of God's
speech.
The ecstatic perspective does not deny the
authority of Scripture, the Creeds, or the Prayer Book. These
are readily accepted. What is at stake is how these documents
are interpreted. Let me give an example, two different ways of
interpreting Isaiah 6. One of them I consider orthodox, the
other, the ecstatic approach.
Isaiah 6 is the account of Isaiah's call and
his vision of God in the temple. While in the temple, Isaiah saw
the Lord, "high and lifted up." He heard the Seraphim chanting
"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full
of his glory." Then the Lord spoke to Isaiah, "Whom shall I
send, and who will go for us?" Isaiah replied, "Here am I! Send
me." Then the Lord spoke again, "Go and say to this people: Hear
and hear, but do not understand; ..."
According to an orthodox understanding,
Isaiah literally heard God speak. He understood what God meant
when he said, "Whom shall I send?" As a result, Isaiah replied,
"Send me." God spoke again, giving Isaiah a message that Isaiah
then proclaimed to the people. In this event, there were things
that went beyond Isaiah's literal understanding. He could not,
for example, comprehend the intense holiness of God, so holy that
the Seraphim hid their eyes and Isaiah cried out, "Woe is me! For
I am lost ..." Even so, he heard the transcendent God speak. He
received a message he could understand with his mind and proclaim
to his people. He knew what God meant when he said, "Whom shall
I send?"
According to the ecstatic perspective, Isaiah
had an encounter with God, but he did not literally hear God
speak. Rather than God speaking, Isaiah had a profound sense of
God as the transcendent Holy One. Since human beings are
irreducibly verbal, Isaiah had to express this ecstatic encounter
in words. As a result, his imagination created a dialogue
between himself and God. But this dialogue did not mean that God
actually spoke. Rather, the statement, "Whom shall I send?" was
the result of Isaiah expressing in his own words the power of an
experience that made a claim upon him. As a result of this
claim, Isaiah did go and proclaim a message to the people. The
content of that message, however, was created by Isaiah in his
historical and cultural context, while the ecstatic experience
that led to the message came from a God whose glory cannot be
captured in human words in any literal sense.
What is the critical difference between these
two approaches? The critical difference is whether or not God
actually spoke to Isaiah. In the orthodox view, God actually
spoke. He uttered literal words that Isaiah could understand,
and as he spoke, he also revealed himself as Holy and
Transcendent. These two ways of being God, transcendent and holy
yet present and speaking, correspond to Father and Word or Son,
with God the Holy Spirit being that person of the Trinity that
realizes the revelation of God's spoken Word in subsequent
history.
By contrast, the ecstatic view believes that
God is always beyond concepts and language. In this view, one
encounters God, but only mystically, beyond the self and God as
speaking to each other. From this perspective, God never says
anything specific, objective, and concrete. Since God is beyond
language, every attempt to verbalize God is partial and
inadequate, with the result that differing partial truths, even
when they contradict, can be harmonized at a higher level in God.
This is why the Presiding Bishop will say,
How we all fit together, how our singularities are made sense of,
how our divergent views and different understandings of God's
intent are reconciled passes all understanding. All that we can
do is to travel on in faith and trust, knowing that all
contradictions and paradoxes and seemingly irreconcilable truths
- which seem both consistent and inconsistent with Scripture --
are brought together in the larger and all embracing truth of
Christ, which, by Christ's own words, has yet to be fully drawn
forth and known. (1)
The Presiding Bishop is not speaking in a
vacuum. He belongs to a tradition, a powerful theological
tradition that is taught in our universities, graduate schools of
religion, and seminaries. It is the ecstatic tradition, and
theologian George Lindbeck describes it with these words,
For nearly two hundred years this tradition has provided
intellectually brilliant and empirically impressive accounts of
the religious life that have been compatible with--indeed, often
at the heart of--the romantic, idealistic, and
phenomenological-existential streams of thought that have
dominated the humanistic side of Western culture, ever since
Kant's revolutionary Copernican "turn to the subject." (2)
Schleiermacher is the father of this
approach. He worked it out in terms of God as "object," and did
so for three principle reasons. First, he accepted the
conclusions of the philosopher Kant who claimed that God could
not be conceived by the mind the way we understand objects.
According to Kant objects have properties that we can understand
and talk about, things such as color, taste, location in space
and time. Further, objects affect us and we affect them. God,
for Kant and then Schleiermacher, is never an object. He is not
an electron, a tree, a cat, nor can his will be captured in
words. He cannot directly affect us, nor us him. He is only
present mystically. Secondly, Schleiermacher lived in a culture
profoundly affected by science. Science deals with objects, how
they affect each other in space and time. If God is never
objective, if God never has effects on other objects, then
science and faith would belong to two separate realms. Faith
would be concerned with a non-objective mystical experience,
science with objects in space and time. They would never
contradict. One result of this was that Schleiermacher did not
believe that God did miracles. If God did miracles, this would
make God like other objects, affecting things in space and time.
Thirdly, historical studies were showing that all knowledge,
including the knowledge of God, is relative to its cultural and
historical context. Schleiermacher embraced this and claimed
that the mystical experience of God was verbally expressed
according to one's cultural and historical context. This lead to
the possibility that all religions have the same mystical core,
yet express it differently according to their differing cultural
contexts.
By contrast, orthodoxy believes that God
speaks, that he has miraculous effects in space and time, and
that he has spoken words that hold in all cultural and historical
contexts. This orthodox claim comes from the fact that God the
Word became flesh, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among
us." (John 1;14) By becoming flesh God lived, spoke eternal
truths that are not historically relative, did miracles, was
crucified, and was miraculously raised from the dead. As this
happened, God the Son revealed the transcendent Father who cannot
be known unless he speaks his Word Jesus Christ. Such ideas
require a doctrine of the Trinity and Incarnation, doctrines that
were never developed by Schleiermacher in an orthodox fashion.
These two ways of understanding God, the
ecstatic and the orthodox, underlie the theological division in
the church today. These differences are not always clearly
articulated, and many persons have vaguely adapted portions of
each. When the matter is thought through, however, it can be
seen that these two views differ in virtually every dimension of
the Christian faith. I have prepared a comparative summary
showing these differences. The ecstatic perspective is listed
under "E," while the orthodox position is listed under "O." Here
is the summary.
A Comparative Summary
E1. In the ecstatic view, God in himself or in revelation
as Word is never objective. He is always transcendent.
O1. In the orthodox view, God is transcendent as Father,
but God the Word becomes objectively present as the words and
deeds of Jesus Christ.
E2. Theological statements use language and
literal language refers only to objective realities. Therefore,
in the ecstatic view, language applied to God is always symbolic
since God is ineffable.
O2. In the orthodox view, theological statements can
literally refer to God the Word who became objective. This body
of knowledge is the "faith once for all delivered to the saints."
Theological language can also contain symbolic aspects since the
Word reveals God the Father who is holy and transcendent.
E3. In the ecstatic view, Scripture is the
history of religious experience given objective content according
to the social and historical forms of ancient Israel and the
primitive church. Consequently, one must first hear the "Word
within the biblical words" in order to sense the Divine that
transcends all historical contexts. Then, once glimpsed, the
Word within the biblical words is expressed in contemporary
categories. The concept of "contemporary categories" allows
experience to become a norm transforming Scripture.
O3. In the orthodox view, the biblical Word has objective
content in union with the specific cultural context in which the
Word is spoken. Therefore, there is no "Word within the biblical
words," but the biblical words including their cultural forms are
the Word written. The Holy Spirit reveals the meaning of this
original objective Word in other cultural contexts, but never by
detaching it from its original cultural context. Experience is
not a norm alongside Scripture.
E4. In the ecstatic view, the task of
theology is to reinterpret the faith as relevant to new cultural
contexts. Faith is evolving since culture evolves.
O4. In the orthodox view, the task of theology is first and
foremost to clarify and preserve the faith once delivered to the
saints and to transfer it intact to each succeeding generation.
Certain aspects of revelation never evolve.
E5. In the ecstatic view, God is not
personal since personhood requires objectivity, a person over
against us that we can see, hear, understand, and affect. Since
God is never objective, God is never personal.
O5. In the orthodox view, God is personal, revealing his
objective self in the Word, the Son who became incarnate in the
man Jesus.
E6. In the ecstatic view, God does no
miracles since God cannot objectively affect the world at
particular points. Miracle working would make God an object and,
as Tillich would claim, this is blasphemy.
O6. In the orthodox view, God does miracles when God
becomes objective in the world of time and space. Every act of
God is miraculous, including revelation in which God addresses
the mind and will.
E7. In the ecstatic view, God never speaks a
"Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not" since this implies objectivity
in God's Word. Therefore, ethics usually concerns a principle,
love for example, which receives its concrete realization
according to the forms of a given culture. Since cultures
evolve, so do ethics.
O7. In the orthodox view, God speaks and his Word is the
ethical command. Certain biblical commands are valid for all
time.
E8. In the ecstatic view, the Holy Spirit
guides the church as it reformulates the mystical sense of the
divine in new theological and ethical categories according to new
cultural contexts.
O8. In the objective view, the Holy Spirit witnesses to an
objective and decisive revelation once and for all given in Jesus
Christ and preserved in Scripture.
E9. In the ecstatic view, doctrines are
secondary. Doctrines do not refer to God but to feeling, the
depth of reality, the horizon of being. Therefore doctrines can
be radically reinterpreted in terms of ecstatic categories.
O9. In the orthodox view, doctrines reveal God. They can
be variously understood, they reveal mysteries, but they cannot
be reinterpreted in terms of categories that have no objective
reference to God.
E10. In the ecstatic view, the doctrine of
the atonement loses its objective meaning since Jesus' act on the
cross did not objectively change our relationship to God. Rather
than altering our relation to God, Jesus is one who inspires us
to encounter the "justifying holy" in our own experience and act
accordingly.
O10. In the orthodox view, Jesus' atonement altered the
world's objective relationship to God.
E11. In the ecstatic view, sacraments
express the identity and on-going life of the church.
O11. In the objective view, sacraments are the means of
supernatural grace by which God changes people.
E12. In the ecstatic view, all religions are
ultimately one since the faith of each is an expression of the
holy or ineffable in the concrete forms of a particular culture.
O12. In the orthodox view, the particulars of a religion
matter, and therefore, the religions are divided by their
objective content.
E13. In the ecstatic view, the ascent to God
is an ecstatic union beyond the objective boundary of self and
God. At this highest level, dialogue, give and take with God,
disappears. All is bliss.
O13. In the orthodox view, spirituality is an encounter
with God, mediated by Word and Sacrament, in which God and the
person know each other as distinct selves who speak to and affect
each other.
E14. In the ecstatic view, those who affirm
a particular piety or religious preference constitute the church.
The ultimate sin is schism, to claim ultimacy for one's own
objective beliefs while denying that the beliefs of others are
equally expressive of the Ineffable.
O14. In the orthodox view, the church is constituted by
those who have been called by the incarnate Jesus Christ and
conformed to that Word by the Spirit. The ultimate sin is not
schism, but heresy, deviation from an objectively revealed
tradition.
E15. In the ecstatic view, science and faith
can never be in conflict since each belongs to a distinct realm.
Since God has no effect on objects, science can and does tell us
whether such things as the empty tomb, bodily resurrection, and
virgin birth really happened. Furthermore, since science can
show how certain human behaviors are affected by prior causes,
scientific inquiry is relevant for ethics.
O15. In the orthodox view, science cannot determine the
content of faith, even in objective matters such as the empty
tomb or the Virgin Birth. Nor can science specify behavior if it
conflicts with revelation.
E16. In the ecstatic view, the mystical
sense of God is given objective form by consciousness, which in
turn is shaped by political, social, and economic factors.
Therefore, the Infinite can be expressed in the various political
and social movements of the day. As a result, the gospel is
often turned into a political program championed by the church.
O16. In the orthodox view, the Kingdom of God has objective
enduring significance that stands over against all contemporary
social and political programs. Frequently, however, so-called
traditionalists do identify religion with political movements.
Prior to Kant, Schleiermacher, and the
scientific revolution, all orthodox theologians believed in the
bodily resurrection. All knew that God was transcendent, yet all
held that God revealed supernatural, objective, saving knowledge
in Jesus Christ. Suffice it to say, in light of the great
theological tradition of the church, the ecstatic perspective is
a heresy. It is a disease that has corrupted our church and will
continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The Necessity of Theology
Ecstatics do not deny the Scripture, the Creeds, or the
great documents of our tradition. They do not throw them away.
They love them. For them the Scriptures are the foundation of
our faith, the liturgy resonates with the Ineffable, the Articles
of Religion are a cultural treasure. They simply revise these
sources along ecstatic lines. That is why it is appropriate to
call them "revisionists." They revise Scripture, Creeds, and the
faith from an alien non-trinitarian perspective that has no sense
of the incarnation.
For example, in the present conflict over
sexual ethics, revisionists reduce the concrete particulars of
biblical ethics to a general concept of love and reinterpret love
according to changing cultural norms. They think they have the
authority to do this because they consider the resurrection to be
a symbol for the presence of the risen Christ in the Church.
From there it is but a short step to believing that they are
endowed with the qualities of his resurrected life, and
therefore, qualified to speak Christ's new truth in new
circumstances. And once these ecstatic assumptions are applied
to Scripture, Scripture itself reveals the truth of these claims.
I think of Hooker,
When they of the family of love have it once in their heads that
Christ does not signify any one person but a quality whereof many
are partakers; that to be raised is nothing else but to be
regenerated or endowed with the said quality; and that when
separation of them which have it from them which have it not is
here made, this is judgment; how plainly do they imagine that the
Scripture everywhere speaketh in the favour of that sect.
(Hooker, Lawes, Preface, III, 9.)
Since the revisionists honor Scripture and
tradition, they can worship, study, pray, teach, and promote
their agenda shoulder to shoulder with the orthodox while holding
utterly different conceptions of the faith. Only when we get to
something practical, revision of our language for God, sexual
norms, evangelism to those of other faiths, eucharistic
hospitality, do we notice any real differences. As a result, it
is not enough to simply say that Jesus called God "Father," or
that Scripture condemns homosexuality, or that Jesus commands us
to evangelize, or that the universal tradition of the church
requires baptism prior to Eucharist. The revisionists know all
this. They relativize these claims by viewing them as partial
expressions of an evolving faith that progressively expresses the
Indescribable. To effectively address their perspective, one
must penetrate their often conflicting and hazy statements,
articulate their critical theological assumptions, compare them
with Scripture and the great theological tradition, and reach
conclusions regarding truth and falsity, orthodoxy and heresy.
Anything less, anything less than real theology, will fail.
Needless to say, real theology scarcely
happens in the Episcopal Church today. How could it?
Revisionists believe that theology and doctrine are secondary
(see E9 above). Why do theology when the real truth is something
we experience in the depths of ourselves, something beyond the
particulars of our petty concerns? What matters is our sense of
the Sublime. Given that fact, what should we do? Share. Share
our experiences. Then, sooner or later, we'll come to the
profound realization that our differences are merely semantic,
that we really do love one another, and that we are all climbing
up the same mountain. This will lead nowhere. Only if there is
objective Truth can we make meaningful statements, go anywhere,
do anything. Only if we see the present confusion as God's
judgement upon us will we have a chance of repentance. Only if
our seminaries, our bishops, clergy, and laity, understand our
differences in light of Scripture and classical theological
tradition is there any hope for us. Until then, our
deliberations are like "springs without water and mists driven by
a storm." 2 Pet 2:17
Endnotes
1. "Glimpses of the Eternal Design," The Presiding Bishop's
Column, September, 1998.
2. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press, 1984, p. 21.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
robertsanders@iglide.net
Copyright, March, 2003.
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