+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Most of you are accustomed to hearing me hold forth on theological propositions on which I have strong feelings one way or the other, but this morning I want to confess to a matter—or rather a constellation of issues—of some importance about which I am absolutely ambivalent, namely, prevenient grace and the extent to which it operates. In layman’s terms, the question is whether and in what manner may the activity of the Holy Spirit in one who has not yet accepted the fullness of Truth as we have received it in Christ Jesus be made manifest, and does this activity (if it is possible to begin with) enable some expression of divine wisdom without necessarily leading inexorably to something like Christian conversion.
There are a couple of reasons this thorny issue has presented itself to me this week. First it’s because of what I’ve been reading. I mentioned last week that I was rereading The Confessions, and if Augustine isn’t directly quoting scripture, he’s constantly alluding, both explicitly and implicitly, to ideas from Plato as filtered through Plotinus. I’m also, some of you know, in a reading group taking a year-long slog through Heinrich Bullinger’s magnum opus, the Dekaden, and the portion I read this week, quoted liberally from Ovid and Horace and Vergil. Bullinger was no crypto-pagan. He was a very serious, sometimes severe Swiss protestant reformer, and while he’d insist that scripture alone was the source of saving wisdom, he didn’t balk at finding wisdom elsewhere, too, even among the unregenerate. And of course the theologian most influential to yours truly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, is most famous for his use of the thought of Aristotle for informing his summation of all philosophy and theology.
The other reason for my thinking through this issue is this week’s lesson from The Acts of the Apostles. Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus reinterprets an obscure idol as a portent of the God of Israel and of Christ. To what degree is his statement “I perceive that in every way you are very religious” sarcastic and to what degree is it sincere? I suspect it may be a little of both. (Perhaps Paul is ambivalent about this issue, just as I confessed that I am.) Paul certainly condemns the superstition of the Athenian pagans, here, and he states in no uncertain terms that having now heard of Christ, they can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse.
That said, this scene strikes me as something more than Paul simply “baptizing” some pagan symbol, Christianizing it because it is close to hand and a useful evangelistic prop (though, no doubt that’s part of it). Those who read my newsletter article this month will know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, so I don’t think you need to suffer scruples over Christmas trees or Easter eggs or anything. But it seems to me that Paul may be going a step further, laying open the possibility that some little shard at least of Christian knowledge may by providence be revealed in some pre-Christian ideas and practices. Perhaps a few pieces of the puzzle, if only a God-given impulse to seek after truth, is present before the full explication of the Gospel.
Perhaps my ambivalence here is not so much with that proposition, but more with how it can be misconstrued or misapplied. I do not believe it useful (and I do believe it sometimes to be positively dangerous) to see ourselves as customers at some sort of “divine delicatessen” picking what one likes from a seemingly unlimited number of options. You may like grape jelly, liverwurst, stilton, and capers but you wouldn’t put them all on the same sandwich, presumably. Religions make non-cotenable truth claims and moral demands on us, and Christianity is, in a sense, a closed and coherent system. Being a closed system doesn’t mean that we should be closed-minded. One can exercise judgment without being judgmental, but exercise judgment we must.
So, I don’t believe wisdom in non-Christian ideologies which contradicts Christian truth to be possible. Carefully comparing and contrasting can be an interesting enterprise, and it can sometimes illuminate what it is we hold to be good and true, but I often worry that while “comparative religion” might be reckoned a sort of “graduate seminar” for those who are sufficiently grounded in his or her own tradition, we sometimes take it up the first semester of the freshman year of life. I’m committed to the proposition that in order to get our theology straight we should really stick to scripture and the church’s tradition and to praying for asking the Holy Spirit to illuminate our study of the same.
My cranky disclaimer out of the way, though, can we recognize the stirring of the impulse toward true religion in those who do not yet believe, in those who have lost their faith, and perhaps even in ourselves when we’ve spiritually wandered and dabbled. I think so, and perhaps this is part of what it means when we say we’ve been made in the image of God. Sometimes this is a long road with a lot of turns. I mentioned St. Augustine who had to try out Manichaeism and a more pagan-inflected neopaganism before finding the Faith. A few months ago I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth, who’s latest book I read earlier this year, who from irreligion became wiccan for a while before converting to Orthodox Christianity.
I wonder sometimes if the biggest hurdle in our postmodern age is not scientific skepticism but something like its opposite, namely the assumption in our society (bred by the fact that more than a thousand years of “Christendom” is now, for better or worse, coming to an end in the West), that Christianity is tame or vanilla or “basic” in the slang sense of that word. Perhaps it’s just too familiar, or we’ve made too many assumptions, because I’m here to tell you that Christianity is pretty strange when viewed objectively, and that’s one of our greatest strengths. We make metaphysical claims about eternity and truth and totality and situate them in a particular space and time, in a corner of first century Judea which could not be more foreign to us. And those of us Christians who worship in a way which is different from how the average American consumes culture and information (through popular music and screens of varying sizes as balkanized individuals) makes us even stranger.
Now, I’m the opposite of a hipster (you may have noticed) but maybe we need to highjack the approach they’ve taken in places like Portland and Austin and start making “Keep Christianity Weird” stickers and signs. I think this is a powerful counterpoint to the fragmented, consumptive, bland society in which we find ourselves in the modern Western world.
You see, I guess I do believe that whether or not Plotinus or Aristotle or the crowd of the Areopagus were crypto-proto-Christians, so many (perhaps most) of our fellows have this impulse which has led them to worship at the altar of an unnamed God. They are looking for connection, for rootedness, for something of substance and these are God-given urges. Too often the Athenian superstition takes hold, and we mistake something else (social media, success, a substance) as the offering by which we appease this idol, but are left even more bereft than when we arrived.
Here, the sense of St. Paul’s words can be our reply. I perceive that in every way you are very religious. You are in search of a great prize, a blessing. And yet you are flailing and failing. You have identified the goal, even if you’ve not made it explicit, because it is the same thing men and women have been searching for since the beginning. But you have not discerned the means. God has given you the desire, and he does not give us the desire for anything that is truly good without making a way to capture the prize. You desire stability in an ever-shifting world. You desire meaning among a people who have embraced nihilism in the guise of self-actualization. You desire wisdom while we are all amusing ourselves to death. Above all, you desire love—genuine unconditional love no matter how unlovely you falsely believe yourself to be. Here these things are to be found. God has led you to the door. You need only knock and it will open.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.