Serving up spiritual nourishment for every follower of Jesus
Tag: History
We are part of a great company — the “Communion of Saints” — that has lived out the story of God’s redeeming love in diverse times and places. Our history gives us a larger context for our lives, along with a rich heritage of insights and practices to support our life of faith.
Can anyone really understand the Holy Trinity? Many people have fought and wrestled and argued over how to understand God through the many different ways that God is revealed in the Scriptures.
We approach this topic from two angles this week. First is the Gospel reading from John 3:1-17. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night to try and figure out what Jesus is all about. Jesus doesn’t give a direct answer. Instead, he talks about the Holy Spirit, and God’s only Son given for the love of the world.
A Long Struggle to Articulate the Nature of God Faithfully
From there, the church through time has extended and developed its understanding of the nature of God through prayerful study in community. You may have noticed that the word trinity doesn’t actually appear in this reading, nor indeed anywhere in the Bible. Jesus just talks about God, the Son, and the Spirit, but he doesn’t say anything about how they all relate. Are they the same? Are they different? That was left for the following generations to wrestle with.
So, we must turn to how Christians have articulated the one God as three ‘persons’ in the centuries that followed. This is the reason we celebrate Trinity Sunday, the great feast of the church that takes place this week.
Knowing God More Through Understanding the Holy Trinity
Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is just a dry, dusty intellectual exercise! Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity is the best way the Christian faith has found to capture the heart of a God who is both perfectly united and relationship-driven, willing to dive into the messiness of human existence. Paradoxically, the mystery of the Holy Trinity gives us the clearest possible picture of who God is, and who we are in relationship to God.
Please join us around the virtual table this week for this celebration of God as unity and trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Prayer occupies a central place in our lives as followers of Jesus. Prayer assumes that God is not distant and impenetrable, but that we can approach God, and that God listens and is somehow reachable in our prayer. Our liturgical tradition describes just one of many ways to express prayer to God.
If we can communicate with God, we can also listen to God. People have developed various ways of prayerfully listening to God through the Bible, through silence, by meditating with words or images or music, and in community. In all of these, we presume that prayer helps us to relate closely to God, and that God is in fact relatable. This is why we have chosen “How do I pray best?” as the second in our series of six questions every Christian needs to ask.
Called to Worship God
Two thousand years of followers of Jesus–and millennia of people walking with God before then–have practiced ways to call themselves and each other to the worship of God. We do not pray alone. We can rely on their work and wisdom as we both grow in prayer and deal with all those things that can make us forget God: boredom, wealth and ease, distractions, hardships, fears, attractive things, lies, and the many wanderings of our own hearts.
Deuteronomy 8 records Moses teaching God’s people as they are preparing to enter the Promised Land, reminding them about what is most important. Over and over, he says, Remember the Lord your God. Donot forget God. Remember how God has led you. If our relationship with God defines who we are, prayer helps us remember. How do you personally remember God and walk with God each day? How do you turn toward God who calls you into relationship? What are the ways you hear yourself called back? How do you hold the anchor of your life?
How Do You Pray?
We are complicated beings, and so people pray in different ways. And people pray differently in different seasons of their lives. Is serving others your prayer? Do you meet God walking in the woods? Gazing at the sacred image of an icon? Memorizing scripture? Wrestling through questions of faith? Sitting in the sanctuary? Pouring your heart out with a small group? Gathering with your church family? Moving your body? Do you give your prayer voice in music or art? Do you meet God in silence? In the suffering? What are the touchpoints of your life?
Perhaps start by asking if you have gifts and interests that you can turn toward your relationship with God. Are there ways of prayer toward which God seems to be nudging you at this time? Then remember that God is already here, and sometimes we just need ways to be reminded.
The only way each of us can truly discover how we love to meet God is by taking the journey of prayer, learning from others, growing in love. Because that’s the heart of it. Every model and method of prayer has the same aim: to give ear and expression to our relationship with God, centering our lives on Christ who seeks us.
This is based on a talk from our 2021 Lenten learning series, Re-boot Your Spiritual Life. You can watch the full version here:
Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. . . . But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? . . . Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?
Dorothy Day
In this series on the 20th Century, I have been trying to show how this eventful era has forced Christians to face some hard questions. In answering those questions, we have had to learn some hard truths and expand our understanding of the faith.
This dynamic came up again during the Great Depression in the person of Dorothy Day (1897-1980). In her response to the great questions of the day, we see a profound challenge to the church at large: “Whom is the church for?” In one sense, it seems like there is an obvious answer to this question: the church is for everyone. Ideally, that would be true.
The Church in the Halls of Power
In reality, since the time of Constantine (272-377 AD), this hasn’t been the case. While there have been some important exceptions, church leadership has largely associated itself with the rich and powerful in society.
Especially in Europe, Bishops and Kings have traditionally worked closely together. In the French Revolution, the Catholic church stood with the collapsing monarchy against populism and democracy. In Russia, at the brink of the Communist Revolution, the church was closely allied with the Tsarist regime as the protector of Holy Orthodoxy. Here, too, it was opposed to worker’s rights.
The Great Depression: A Time of Worldwide Turbulence
For those of us born long after these events, it is hard to appreciate the turbulence of the world in which Dorothy Day lived and began her work in 1932. It is important to understand this world, and how it shaped her answer to the question: ‘Whom is the church for?’
Dorothy Day didn’t answer the question in a systematic theology textbook. She worked out the answers in a world that seemed to have failed. World War I had devastated much of Europe and had destroyed millions of lives. The Spanish Flu had killed millions more. Within two decades, the Great Depression hit with a vengeance, destroying wealth and agriculture. Millions found themselves in poverty and out of work. This drove labour unrest, agitated in part by the rise of worldwide communism following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Different churches responded to these events in a variety of ways. I want to focus here on Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day: An Unlikely Saint
Day can seem like an unlikely candidate for sainthood. She had a passion for peace and justice, but it didn’t start in the church. From an early age, she was a journalist and activist, working on the staffs of several socialist publications. In 1917, she celebrated the Russian revolution’s toppling of the Tsarist regime, but her anarchist sympathies kept her from loving the authoritarian Bolshevik government.
Throughout the early 1920’s, she lived a bohemian lifestyle. All the while, she continued her journalism, covering everything from striking iron workers to interviewing Leon Trotsky. Then in 1925, she found herself to be pregnant during an affair with the English botanist, Foster Batterham. This surprised her because she had thought herself unable to conceive following an earlier abortion, which she later called “the great tragedy” of her life.
Rethinking Religion
Becoming pregnant was a great joy for Dorothy Day. Out of this joy, she started rethinking religious faith. She had always assumed that religion was just what Marx called ‘the opiate of the masses.’ Religion was supposed to be a crutch for suffering people to give them hope. But here she found herself praying, not because she was unhappy, but because she was so happy. She later explained it like this: “The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.” She came back to faith and had her daughter baptized. Batterham left, having no desire to be a father.
A New Vision
Coming to faith didn’t change Day’s convictions about peace and justice. She was as passionate as ever. Everywhere she looked, she saw the sufferings and injustices that the masses of humanity were enduring. What changed was her vision. When her leftist friends struggled to understand her new interest in faith, she told them that Jesus was promising the new society of justice they were looking for. Faith just gave her the next step.
Peter Maurin, Co-Conspirator
In 1932, she met Peter Maurin. He was an odd fellow. Day later described him as “a genius, a saint, an agitator, a writer, a lecturer, a poor man and a shabby tramp, all at once.” During the Great Depression, he had lived with a parish priest. He did odd jobs, all the while devouring the priest’s library. He read everything from Aquinas to St. Francis to the papal letter on Labour, Rerum Novarum.
When Maurin met Day, he outlined his vision. He felt that it wasn’t enough to denounce injustice. Instead, one must also announce a new social order and try to live it out. His vision had three parts. First, to create a newspaper to tell the story of this new vision. Second, to create Houses of Hospitality in which the poor could obtain shelter, food and clothing. And third, to create rural cooperatives. In this vision, Day discovered what she was made for. Where Maurin never had the ability to put his ideas into reality, Day found her calling.
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement
She moved quickly. The first issue of the Catholic Worker was published on May 1, 1933. It has been in continuous publication ever since. The newspaper focused on what it meant to imitate Christ in the midst of the Great Depression. For Day, dealing with labour issues was central. Her biggest competitor was the Communist Daily Worker. Day opposed the Daily Worker’s promotion of class warfare, Marxism, atheism, and abolition of private property. She envisioned a publication about ‘work and men and the problems of poverty and destitution and man’s relationship to his brothers and to God.’ The newspaper was hugely popular and influential, running a subscription of over 100,000 early on.
Houses of Hospitality: Meeting Christ in the Poor
Day wasn’t just a journalist. The hopelessness of the unemployed millions shook her profoundly, and she felt the need to spend the rest of her life serving them. This was the role of the Houses of Hospitality, places where volunteers committed to live and work alongside the poor as well as to serve them. People would stop in for meals and encouragement by the hundreds.
“As far as Dorothy could tell, (Christ) demanded the readiness to wash vegetables, cut bread, and clean up after hundreds of noisy, often ungrateful guests, day after day, year after year.” 1
For Day, this work was all about Jesus Christ. She cultivated the unique ability to see Jesus everywhere: “Wherever she turned, Dorothy saw Christ up on his cross. One of her rules of life was to seek the face of Christ in the poor. She found him there, and in so many other places. Christ was the person in line for soup and bread; Christ was the drunk woman having the same conversation over and over again; Christ was the enemy combatant; Christ was the priest she disagreed with; Christ was the young person begging for spiritual direction; Christ was in every reader she wrote for.”1
The Fight for Justice
Day never stopped agitating for justice. She continued to support unions and the rights of workers. She showed up on picket lines and wrote about them in her paper. In California, she stared down the police. People called her a communist. She was jailed, shot at, and ridiculed. The FBI continually investigated her.
Her lowest point came from her commitment to pacifism. She denounced the U.S. entry into the Second World War, which caused her to lose thousands of subscriptions. None of it disturbed her. She always felt that she was just walking the way of the cross. Day kept her focus on Christ until the day she died in 1980.
Solidarity with the Poor
Through it all, she only owned a creaking bed, a writing desk, an overflowing bookshelf, a teapot, and a radio. She followed the tradition of the many Christians who lived in poverty out of love for the Gospel.
What made Day different was that she represented a new kind of holiness. It wasn’t just about prayer and sacrifice, though she was very faithful in church attendance and daily prayer. It also wasn’t just about serving the poor, though she did this daily for decades. The newness in her expression of faith in Christ came from her commitment to live in solidarity with the impoverished masses and to struggle with them in the path of justice.
Hers was a very political Christianity. I began this reflection with Dorothy Day’s guiding question, ‘Whom is the church for?’ Her life embodies her answer: above all things, the church should stand in solidarity with the poor, because one finds Jesus there. As her master said, “I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink… whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25: 35-40)
Dorothy Day’s Lasting Influence
Day’s witness has forced several generations of Christians to ask hard questions about the church’s relationship with the politically influential. We will return to this question in the reflection on Oscar Romero. Day’s story has had such an impact on the church because her holiness is so obvious, her vision so clear, and her commitment is so compelling. Many people, even in her lifetime, saw her as a living saint. She had no patience with this. Her reply was always, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”
1 From the introduction to The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus by Dorothy Day (Plough Publishing House, 2017). This is a compilation of quotes from her various writings.
When we look at the world in the 21st century and ask, “What is the fastest growing and most dynamic group of Christians in the world?” The answer is simple: the Pentecostal churches. There are a half billion Pentecostals around the world, and their number is second only to the Roman Catholics.
According to Christian History magazine, Pentecostal churches are growing at a rate of 13 million worshippers a year. The largest church in the world is a Pentecostal church in South Korea, where, before Covid, they would have a weekly worship attendance of 240,000. Areas such as Latin America and Asia, which were Roman Catholic strongholds, are rapidly turning Pentecostal. As this series of reflections is about 20th century events and movements that deeply affected our understanding of the Christian faith, we must include Pentecostalism. In fact, The Dictionary of Christianity in America wrote that Pentecostalism is perhaps “the single-most-significant development in twentieth-century Christianity.”
Every day in every way things are getting better and better.
Popular saying before World War I
World War I marked the beginning of a new era. In Europe and North America before the war, there was a general feeling of optimism about the future of humanity. Because of the success of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and the hope of the various revolutions of the 19th century, people anticipated the eventual creation of a just society on earth.
The ferocity of the Great War chastened that optimism. Many people were surprised at how strong the call of nationalism was on the human psyche. The Western Liberal project had to rethink the question of human nature and society. The same introspection had to happen within the Liberal theological project begun by Friedrich Schleiermacher as well. The person who threw the bombshell into Schleiermacher’s project was the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). (Note: Barth is pronounced as if it had no ‘h.’ It rhymes with ‘part.’)
Nobody can come to grips with the drama of history unless he recognizes that most of the evil done in this world is done by people who do it for good purposes.
Krister Stendahl (1921-2008)
In a world gone pagan, what is a Christian to do? For the world is gone pagan. Members of the body of Christ are tearing one another, and His body is bleeding as it once bled on Calvary, but this time the wounds are dealt by His friends. It is as though Peter were driving home the nails, and John were piercing the side.
William Temple (1881-1944)
In this series, we are tracking hard-won truths about the Gospel that the church has learned through the course of the 20th Century. In the next two articles, we will be looking at the Mainline Churches’ central learning after the end of the First World War: how easily the Christian faith can be corrupted by nationalistic fervor.
Is it possible to disagree with someone and still appreciate their work and the project they engaged in? I believe that it is, and this is the spirit in which I write the next two reflections. In this reflection, I will be looking at the pioneer of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Next time, I will examine the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy, looking specifically at Henry Emerson Fosdick and Walter Rauschenbusch.
I don’t agree with any of these figures. I believe that their answers were limited and perhaps naïve. (Of course,I write that in full knowledge that many people will read my own reflections as limited and perhaps naïve.) However, I think their project was extremely important at a time when Christian faith could have faltered,being abandoned altogether or retreating into an anti-modernist fundamentalism.
They chose a third way. As Stanley Grentz put it: “While agreeing that theology could not simply return to pre-Enlightenment dogmatic orthodoxy, they refused to accept post-Enlightenment skeptical rationalism as the only alternative. For this new breed of intellectuals the only way forward in the aftermath of the Enlightenment lay in incorporating its basic thrust and engaging in a search for new ways to understand the Christian faith.” In other words, they were tryingto articulate a vibrant Christian faith in serious conversation with Modernism. This is my own project in this series of articles. It is important to know about these thinkers because they set the agenda for all subsequent mainline Protestant engagement with Modernity. In many ways, we are still answering the questions they raised.
Moving Faith from the Head to the Heart
Have you ever felt that faith was so much more than creeds and doctrines and dogmas? That faith was more a matter of the heart than the head? Have you ever felt that you were deeply connected to God and the world in ways you couldn’t explain? Have you ever thought that maybe you don’t need all of the clergy and church stuff, and that you could just go out into the woods and commune with God? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have probably been influenced by a theologian you may never have heard of before: Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Most people understand vaguely that Christianity in the 21st century is in a different world than it was a hundred years ago. In this series of articles, I hope to highlight the story of how and why we find ourselves in a different world. These are meant to be short reflections about what I believe are key moments when we learned something new and important about the Gospel. Today, we’re looking at Modernism and the Catholic Church. I believe that the lessons learned are the tools we need to move forward in this odd time of being church.
Make it new!
Ezra Pound (1934)
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every branch of our spiritual and material civilization we seem to have arrived at a critical turning-point. This spirit shows itself not only in the actual state of public affairs but also in the general attitude towards fundamental values in personal and social life.
Max Planck (1932)
Over the next two reflections, I want to talk about the reaction of the churches in the West to the phenomenon of Modernism. In this reflection, I will talk about the Catholic response, and the next one will be the Protestant response.
It is hard to overstate how important this moment in church history was. All of the big themes that we are talking about in the church today either come out of this era, or they come from responses to it. During this time, churches divided into groupings that are close to what we now call conservative and liberal. This is where the tendencies and trajectories of the next century begin. To understand ourselves in the 21st century, it is important to understand Modernism.