Senator Josh Hawley versus the Celtic Christian Monk Pelagius

 

Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico, via Associated Press

The senator who gave the mob headed to the capitol last week a raised-fist salute in solidarity and is among those senators who rejected the vote of the U.S. electorate even after the melee that followed has taken on one of my Celtic saints and heroes, Pelagius. In “The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage,” New York Times columnist Katherine Stewart wrote [January 11, 2021]:

In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius—a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago.

Apparently, Hawley takes issue with Pelagius’s view that, as Stewart puts it, “grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.”

Reading this sent me back to my “go-to” guy for Celtic Christianity, the Rev. Dr. J. Philip Newell, a Church of Scotland minister who has served St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh as well as Iona Abbey, a Celtic Christian community off the coast of Scotland, both of which I’ve visited. I’ve studied and taught several of his books and attended a weekend course he led at Columbia Theological Seminary here in Georgia.

In Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality, Newell explains that, until recently, as translations of Pelagius’s letters have become available, what was known about him came from his opposition, none other than Augustine of Hippo and his school of thought, whose concept of “original sin” and human depravity (echoed in John Calvin and the Scottish Reformation) was at odds with Pelagius’s view that we are basically good, in Newell’s words, “his conviction that every child is conceived and born in the image of God.”

Pelagius’s letters offer other positive food for thought:

The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God’s eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly.

People do not argue about whether generosity and forgiveness are good or bad; they know that they are good.

You will realize that doctrines are inventions of the human mind, as it tries to penetrate the mystery of God. You will realize that Scripture itself is the work of human minds, recording the example and teaching of Jesus. Thus it is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond with your heart and your actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is becoming like him.

A person who is rich and yet refuses to give food to the hungry may cause more deaths than even the cruellest murderer.

There are some who call themselves Christian, and who attend worship regularly, yet perform no Christian actions in their daily lives. There are others who do not call themselves Christian, and who never attend worship, yet perform many Christian actions in their daily lives. Which of these two groups are the better disciples of Christ? Some would say that believing in Christ and worshipping him is what matters for salvation. But this is not what Jesus himself said. His teaching was almost entirely concerned with action, and with the motives which inspire action.

My own two cents: early Christians understood “belief” in Jesus to be not mere assent but devotion to and practice of his principles.

Newell explains Pelagius’s view that “the Church becomes liberator rather than custodian of salvation. It provides the key that gives access to the treasure of God’s life instead of being the source of that richness; the treasure is already present, though hidden, waiting to be unlocked, in every person.”

Hawley’s attempt to deny the U.S. presidency and vice presidency to President Biden and Vice President Harris reminds me of the church politics in the scheming of Augustine to get Pelagius declared a heretic by both Empire and Church.

Related posts:

What about Sin?

The Soul Feels Its Worth

What I Don’t Believe What I Do Believe

This brief article is helpful:

White Christian Nationalists Want More Than Just Political Power

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Copyright © 2021 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Means of Grace

I took this photo of Howard Rice leading a retreat 

for the Lazarus Project and West Hollywood Presbyterian Church 

at Mt. Calvary Retreat House in Santa Barbara in the 1980's.

At the risk of copyright infringement, I cannot resist quoting an entire passage from Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality: An Introduction for Believers. It summarizes everything to be said for the spiritual life in Christian terms, and I am quick to add that Howard practiced what he preached:

God is love, and the experience of God’s love is one that meets our basic need for love so that we can be free to love others. Without receiving love, we cannot love others, no matter how hard we try. That is why spiritual experience is so linked with self-giving love for others. The heart of the experience of God is an inner knowing that “I am loved, loved beyond comprehension, beyond my earning or deserving.”

This deep knowing of the soul is the shattering of the otherwise inexhaustible need for love, which drives us to keep ourselves in the very center of the universe and to evaluate everything on the basis of how much it meets our needs. The person who knows love is able to love; the person who has been in the presence of the Divine Lover is filled to the brim with a sense of satisfaction of that need and can let go and share love. That is why truly great mystics are always such powerful figures and are often revolutionary.

They have a vision of how things might be that is not blurred by fear of what might happen to them. They are powerful because their vision has broken down their need for being loved. They have been liberated from their own inner needs, and they are empowered to go out and challenge the powers of evil in the world. They know, from their own experience, that the power of evil within them has been broken by the power of God’s love [p 166].

Rice goes on to explain the two-fold range of such love. One is to care for those closest to us, neighbor and family. The other is to care more “long-range,” to be involved in transforming structures so that those structures may care for others, what John Calvin would call “the most remote person” and what Jesus called “the least of these.” The first is personal. The second is political.

You can see how this echoes the early monastic movement, the Desert Mothers and Fathers who went out into the wilderness of the Middle East in the third and fourth centuries to pray. They pursued their spiritual disciplines not simply to save themselves from being corrupted by collaboration with the empire, but to be able to reach out to save others from the “shipwreck” they saw as civilization.

What Christians from the Reformed tradition often overlook is that the history of Christian spiritual practices from the centuries since Jesus is our history too, as the split between Catholic and Protestant only just occurred in the 16^th century, long after the spiritual contributions of such figures as Arsenius, Benedict, Catherine of Siena, Claire, Francis, Hildegard, Ignatius, Julian of Norwich, and Syncletica, to name a few in alphabetical rather than chronological order. And the split between Eastern and Western Christianity occurred in the 11^th century. So we share with Catholic and Orthodox traditions more combined history than separate histories.

Howard Rice’s book reminded me of this when he surprised me with the notion that John Calvin actually used the Benedictine spiritual practice of lectio divina, contemplating a sacred text meditatively.

In an appendix to Monk Habits for Everyday People, Dennis Okholm explains Protestant resistance to monasticism:

+ It implied a two-tiered or class system of Christian community that was believed schismatic.

+ Monastic vows seemed to contradict justification by faith alone.

+ “Idleness,” a mistaken belief that monks were not doing their part as Christian ministers.

Howard Rice notes a central distinction of Reformed spirituality: a desire for union with Christ as the way to union with God. He notes that what we call spirituality Reformers called piety, a word that today carries self-righteous connotations.

Rice writes of Reformed congregations, “The familiar vow once used when people united with the church was the promise to make diligent use of the means of grace,” the use of spiritual practices to be receptive to, not to earn, God’s grace.

And the endgame was still the same. In the words of Richard Baxter, “to prevent a shyness between God and thy soul…”

I am pleased to announce that my friend Connie Tuttle has had her delightful book published, A Gracious Heresy: The Queer Calling of an Unlikely Prophet. I wrote about it in a post five years ago, Nativity Stories. My blurb describes it as “containing extraordinary stories extraordinarily well told.”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Is Marriage Sacred?

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use in public gatherings with attribution of author and blog site.

At dinner with a close friend during a time when I was writing a book on same-gender marriage, I was stunned by his blunt rebuke to my musings about the spiritual dimensions of marriage.

“There’s nothing sacred about marriage,” he said matter-of-factly.

Now, granted, I wrote in my book that author Jonathan Rauch said at a book-signing that he believed the one thing that most prompted resistance to marriage equality was people’s association of marriage with something sacred, even if they weren’t religious. And thus I spent pages in my book deconstructing the notion of marriage’s association with the sacred, which makes the rethinking of marriage a deeply held taboo. Variants on what is held up as “traditional marriage” are thus suspect to the dominant culture, especially those of same-gender love, yet another taboo.

But I had come to the conclusion that marriage is, in fact, a spiritual discipline attempting “to give a future to a present love,” in the words of Christian ethicist Margaret Farley. Just like joining a spiritual community, cultivating a prayer life, developing an ethic of justice and mercy, or following a vocation, committing oneself to marriage is a means to grow spiritually.  In the book I quoted a romantic “chick flick” in which the protagonist, a woman, says regarding her relationship, “It’s not so much about monogamy. It’s about focus.” Spiritual disciplines are about focus, or, to use the Buddhist term, mindfulness.

As I reflected afterwards on my friend’s words, it occurred to me that their ability to jar me came from my very different view of the world. I see everything as sacred, or having sacred potential. As Henri Nouwen wrote in Creative Ministry, “The whole of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself.” The mystic Meister Eckhart said that even a caterpillar is so full of God a sermon would prove unnecessary!

That’s why I so readily see the sacred or sacred potential in the marriage of same-gender couples as well as opposite-gender couples, and why I fail to comprehend those whose vision of the holy fails them when it comes to same-sex marriage.

Martin Luther called marriage a “divine and holy estate of life” and “church of God” that was to take in and care for strangers much as monasteries and cloisters did. John Calvin claimed marriage as a vocation equal to all religious vocations, containing a holiness closer to the reign of God than a cloister. Anglicans held that marriage was a little church that served as a “seminary of the Church and Commonwealth.”

I concluded in my book, As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage, that “we might best view marriage as a little monastery, a contemplative order of the partners in marriage themselves, who have reined in conflicting desires in order to focus on one another (and their children, if so blessed) to love and honor and in some sense obey, obey as in mutually trusting one another’s spiritual leadership.”

Such definition does not exclude Luther’s understanding of marriage as providing hospitality to strangers, Calvin’s understanding of it as a calling, nor the Anglican understanding of it as a church and seminary where worship and education occur.

Nor does it exclude same-sex couples.

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Chris is available to give presentations and workshops on marriage in the Bible and Christian tradition as it relates to same-sex marriage. For more information, click here.

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