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“In Whose Name?”

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In the Autumn of 1994 there was a large gathering of United Church of Christ clergy at a church in the Metropolitan Boston Association of the Massachusetts Conference to discuss the use of inclusive language in liturgy, and especially in the sacrament of baptism. The United Church of Christ’s Book of Worship had retained the baptismal formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” but there was increasing pressure for changing this usage, and indeed, a show of hands among the gathered clergy indicated that the vast majority of those gathered were already using alternatives on an ad hoc basis.  The most popular form was “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer,” but other ones were used as well.

I was at the time the UCC’s representative to the Massachusetts Commission on Christian Unity, and had been defending and explaining my denomination for years with my brothers and sisters from other communions for our reputation of often playing fast and loose with the broad tradition in the name of innovation or reform. I had given a paper to that body on the Gloria Patri and Inclusive Language two years before.

The November issue of United Church News carried the story of the inclusive language meeting, and I wrote the following letter to the editor, which appeared in the next issue,  under the title “In whose name?”

November 16, 1994

To the editor:

I am deeply troubled by the use of alternative words for baptism as reported in your article “Inclusive language discussed” in the November issue of United Church News. Baptism “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” has been in continuous use in the Christian church across denominations since the first centuries of the church. The authority of these words is scriptural (Matthew 28:19), “dominical” (that is, they are words of our Lord), traditional (established over time) as well as ecumenical (established across space).

It is arrogant of us to say that our generation is wiser than previous ones, and must change this time–honored formula to fit the needs of the current age. The alternatives cited are preachy and didactic. They don’t baptize in the name of anyone, rather they explain what we are doing, as if God didn’t know. Underlying the revisions is the idea that our names for God are merely human metaphors to describe an un–nameable divine reality. But the Christian faith doesn’t speak of God in general, but God “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is true that apart from revelation we cannot adequately name God, but God has given us a name, so that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” specifically identify the Christian God. Deborah M. Belonick, in a discussion of the Christological and Trinitarian debates of the fourth century, concludes “In the theology of the early church, the traditional Trinitarian terms are precise theological terms. Therefore these terms are not exchangeable. Through them humanity encounters the persons of the Trinity, and through them relationships among members of the Godhead are defined.” She goes on to say, “There is no historical evidence that the terms ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ were products of a patriarchal culture, ‘male’ theology, or a hierarchical church” (Union Seminary Quarterly Review 40 (1985) pp 31–342).

The use of such “alternatives” gives us another god and another faith, opening up a Pandora’s box of individualistic and idiosyncratic revisions based on each person’s outlook. Such “alternatives” separate us from the practice of the universal church and contradict shared ecumenical agreements such as Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry and The COCU Consensus. The use of “alternatives” will mark the United Church of Christ as sectarian, and calls into question whether we are really a church as opposed to a collection of congregations.

Furthermore, “baptisms” using the revisions will not be accepted by other denominations, or even by other congregations in the United Church of Christ, whose governing rules call for membership by baptism “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Such “baptisms” will be a local rite only, baptizing the person into that congregation only, rather than into the body of Christ, the church universal.

I urge Pastors and Boards of Deacons to refrain from using such “alternatives”, and for Church and Ministry Committees to invite congregations who are using such “alternatives” to give an account of their practice.

Yours in Christ,

The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Floyd, Pastor
First Church of Christ, Congregational, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

The responses poured in and filled several pages of the letters section.  All but two disagreed with me for the usual reasons.  Of the two letters in support, one came from an elderly layman on Cape Cod who agreed with me that we should return to the King James Version of the Bible (a point I hadn’t made and don’t agree with), and the other was from my best clergy friend.  It was neither the first nor the last time that the world wasn’t beating my door down to get my opinion.

I do note with some satisfaction, however, that today many younger clergy, many of them women, are not particularly preoccupied with this issue as so many were back then, and have quietly returned to the practice of baptizing in the name of the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

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P.T. Forsyth thought “being true to ourselves” is a bad idea

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That great theologian of the cross, P.T. Forsyth (1848-1921) was a persistent critic of a kind of precious religiosity that flourished in his day and continues into ours.  His Victorian and Edwardian version was Romantic and aesthetic, human-focused and “spiritual” in that vaporous sense so popular still.  This brand of religion sought to reduce Jesus into a heroic religious genius and to see his cross as the apotheosis of human sacrifice.  Forsyth was having none of it.

And what would he have made of our time, when “self-centered” is no longer a slur but a widely approved lifestyle?  This section from The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christindicates that he thought that “being true to ourselves” is not such a good idea:

“. . . taking the Cross as the completion of Christ’s personality, I would distinguish between such completion, taken aesthetically, as the finest spectacle of self-realization by sacrifice to man’s tragic fate, and taken ethically, as the final moral act for man’s conscience and history before God. The one idea is artistic, like so much of our modern religion, the other is dynamic and evangelical. The one is a moral marvel, the other a new creation. We have had much to say in the name of religion about developing to flower and fruit all that it is in us to be, realizing ourselves, rounding the sphere of our personality, achieving our soul, being true to ourselves, and so forth.

That it is morally impossible that a real personality should be developed on any such self-centred lines, or made spherical or symmetrical by rotating on its own axis. To shrink your personality work at it; take yourself with absurd seriousness; sacrifice everything to self-realization, self-expression. Do this and you will have produced the prig of culture, who is in some ways worse than the prig of piety. So also if you would lose holiness, work at it. Do everything, not because it is God’s will, but because you have taken up sanctity as a profession—shall I say an ambition? Be more concerned to realize your own holiness than to understand God’s. Study your soul freshly and your Bible conventionally. Cherish a warm piety and a poor creed. But if you really would save your soul, lose it. Seek truth first, and effect thereby. Beware of ethical self-seeking. To develop your personality forget it. Devote yourself not to it but to some real problem and work, some task which you will probably find to your hand. The great personalities have not laboured to express or realize themselves, but to do some real service to the world, and service they did not pick and choose but found laid upon them. Their best work was ‘occasional’— i.e. in the way of concrete duty. They did not live for set speeches but for business affairs. They found their personality, their soul, in the work given them to do; given them because of that soul, indeed, but never effected by petting it. They found their personality by losing it, and came to themselves by erasing themselves. Their ideal was not, ‘I must become this or that’ or ‘I must produce my impression, and leave my mark’, but ‘I must will, I must do, this or that obedience’. To effect something is the way to become something. So Christ’s purpose, whether in His preaching or in His Cross, was not primarily to stamp His whole personality on the world in one careful, concentrated, and indelible expression of it, but to finish a work God gave Him to do; than which there is nothing more impressive for men. His purpose was, with all the might of His personality, to do a certain thing with God for the world. He was at the last preoccupied with God, which is the final way to command man.” (The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, New Creation Publications, 2000, p. 17-19.)

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Another Lifeline: Brevard Childs

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Brevard Childs, who died in 2007, was Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale University, and to my mind one of the great Biblical interpreters of his generation.  He provided many pastors and teachers in the church with the interpretive tools needed to do their work, and he bravely challenged the ruling canons of his guild as to how biblical studies should proceed.

I was trained in biblical studies in a day when form criticism and its various offspring ruled the day.  Exegesis often reminded me of taking a bicycle apart,  which is not hard to do, but putting it back together so that you can ride it takes knowledge and skill.  Child’s canonical approach allowed you to take the text seriously as scripture, rather than the starting point for a host of other questions from various disciplines.

In an interviewhe once said this about biblical interpretation:

“By defining one’s task as an understanding of the Bible as the sacred Scriptures of the church, one establishes from the outset the context and point-of-standing of the reader within the received tradition of a community of faith and practice. Likewise, Scripture is also confessed to be the vehicle of God’s self-disclosure which continues to confront the church and the world in a living fashion. In sum, its content is not merely a literary deposit moored in the past, but a living and active text addressing each new generation of believer, both Jew and Christian. Of course, the Bible is also a human work written as a testimony to God’s coercion of a historical people, and extended and developed through generations of Israel’s wrestling with its God. Biblical interpretation is a critical enterprise requiring exact handling of the language, history, and cultures of its recipients. The crucial hermeneutical issue turns on how one uses all this wealth of information. The goals of interpretation can be defined in countless different ways, but for those confessing its role as sacred Scripture the goal is to penetrate deeply into its content, to be illuminated theologically by its Word, and to be shaped and transformed by its gracious disclosure which witness is continually made alive by its divine communicator. The divine and human dimensions of Scripture can never be separated as if there were a kernel and a husk, but the heart of the Bible lies in the mystery of how a fully time-conditioned writing, written by fragile human authors, can continually become the means of hearing the very Word of God, fresh and powerful, to recipients open to faithful response.”

Child’s books still have a  prominent place on my bookshelf, and he remains one of my lifelines.

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In praise of Marilynne Robinson’s “The Death of Adam”

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I have just finished re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and I put it down with that peculiar brand of sadness that comes when you wish there was more of a great book in which you have been engrossed.

This is a great book. Who writes like this, especially about serious subjects like theology? Nobody, that’s who!

I first read this sometime shortly after it was published in 1998, and I must have been too busy and distracted by my pastoral duties to have properly taken in its achievement. This time around I took my time, which is what Robinson does. Last summer I read her novel Home as part of an on-line discussion group and some complained that she took too long to get to the point, but that is the point. In her novels events unfold much like in ordinary life, which also can’t be rushed, and she knows just what she is doing at all times. There is no filler.

Robinson employs English words to reveal her thoughts with apparently seamless felicity. If you have read her novels you know this. But these are essays, ESSAYS, about weighty matters yet one never feels weighed down by them.

I am hard pressed to pick out a favorite chapter, although her several in defense of John Calvin are hard to beat. She roughs up noted historians for misreading and misrepresenting him, and portrays him more as a French humanist than the tyrant of Geneva he seems to have become in the popular imagination. On this, his 500th birthday, one could find no better gift to give a thoughtful religious friend than this book.

Her essays on “Darwinism” and “Family” are so full of wisdom and common sense that you wonder where your own mind has been. Her reflections on Scripture in the chapter “Psalm Eight” should be read by every first-year seminarian who is scuffling with the documentary hypothesis. The writers of scripture were not merely witnessing to truth, but were creating art. Who knew?

A couple of times while reading her ultimate chapter “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion” I wanted to stand up and cheer, which is no small feat when you are reading in bed.

Her defense of liberalism as an idea, and criticism of it as a movement clarified my own tortured thinking on this. She writes, “As a principle, liberalism is essential to the sanity and humanity of this civilization. As a movement, it is virtually defunct. Those who have espoused it have failed it, in a way and to a degree that has allowed the very word to become a term of opprobrium.”

A little later in the same essay she uses her own Christian identity to illustrate her point: “The banishment of the word “liberal” was simultaneous with the collapse of liberalism itself. And however these events were related, the patient smile that precludes conversation on the subject means the matter is closed. To be shamed out of the use of a word is to make a more profound concession to opinion than is consistent with personal integrity.” She writes so pretty you hardly feel the knife go in.  “What is at stake?” she asks:

“Our hope for a good community. Liberalism saw to the well-being of the vulnerable. Now that it has ebbed, the ranks of the vulnerable continuously swell. If this seems too great a claim to make for it, pick up a newspaper. Trivial failure of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instances, and yet they change history and society. They also change culture.”

To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement. I am a Christian. This should not startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of Euoropean ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed.

Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool.”

How many of us can hum that tune exactly? And, finally, although she wrote this more than a decade ago, the following observation about our common life has not become the least bit shopworn in these days of Glenn Beck and Fox News:

“The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno and Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. . . . A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.”

That is the final sentence of the book. I await the next one. In the meantime, if you haven’t read The Death of Adam,you must.

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The Devil made me do it: C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” on the church

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C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, first published in 1942, still are as insightful and painfully funny as ever.  I revisit them from time to time, both in print and in the audio version with a deliciously wicked John Cleese playing Screwtape.  The premise of the book (which, let me be quick to say, is fiction) is that a senior tempter, Screwtape, is writing a series of letters to a novice tempter, his nephew Wormwood, to advise him as to the most effective strategies for procuring the soul of a man who is only called “the patient.”  One of my favorite letters is this one in which Screwtape has just learned that “the patient” has become a Christian, and he writes to Wormwood how this might not be entirely a bad thing and strategizes how to turn this against him.  The church doesn’t come off looking too good.  This is mid-twentieth century Church of England, but making the necessary changes, you just might recognize your own:

“MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes even our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of “Christians” in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His “free” lovers and servants—”sons” is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to “do it on their own”. And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?” You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won’t come into his head. He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy’s ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these “smug”, commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE”

(C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Geoffrey Bles, 1942.)
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Ruminations about the label “Wing Nut”

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I never cared much for William Safire’s political views, and often skipped his op-ed pieces in the New York Times where he was for many years the token house conservative, but I loved his column On Language in the NYT Magazine and looked forward to reading it every Sunday. His death on September 27 came as a surprise to me since he had written a column just weeks before, and the paper just said he was on hiatus. I guess he was. I miss him.

I thought of him yesterday when I blogged about Republican Congressman Nathan Deal from Georgia asking to see the President’s birth certificate. In that blogpost I wrote: “I have many fine, smart, and knowledgeable friends who are Republicans, and wouldn’t call one of them a wing nut.”

I was immediately faced with the kind of issue Safire often addressed, how to spell a neologism, especially one from the world of politics. Should it be wing-nut, wingnut, or what I finally went with, wing nut? All three are in use.

The word, of course, originally refers to a piece of hardware, a nut with wings that can be turned without the use of tools.

In its metaphorical usage in American politics it refers to a person of extreme political views, usually conservative. It is usually considered disparaging, and in my post I was careful not to call any particular person a wing nut. In my youth the operative term for a person with extreme views was that they were a member of the “lunatic fringe.”

I imagine the “wing” in “wing nut” comes from the far wing of a party, and the nut comes from the disparaging part, as in “he’s nuts.”  The term is often used to refer to right-wing talk radio hosts, and their TV counterparts.

That it is only the right-wing (or should it be right wing?) that get to be called wing nuts got me ruminating (always dangerous) about political labels in general and how they seem to be party specific. For example, I have heard of “dyed in the wool” Republicans, but never “dyed in the wool” Democrats. The only wool that is used against Democrats is “wooly-headed” (meaning vague or muddled) but never against Republicans. Is it because Republicans are never vague or muddled? I wouldn’t think so.

Republicans can be “staunch,” but not Democrats. I wonder why. Are they too vague and muddled to be staunch? I guess I better quit all this wondering before I go all Andy Rooney on you. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a wing nut.

(November 13 update:  I just learned that there is a AA baseball team called the Wichita Wingnuts, which caught my eye since my mother grew up and went to college in Wichita, Kansas, which also has of late seems to have more than their share of wing nuts in the sense described above.)

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Birthers? The Party of Lincoln today should be ashamed of itself

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I rarely step into the mucky ground of politics on this blog. For one thing, I don’t want to get hate mail and have my blog flamed. For another I am a person of generally moderate views and did most of my metaphorical bomb-throwing during my inflamed youth.

For the record I am a Democrat, but a lukewarm one, and I like it when there is some sensible opposition to my own party when they are in power, especially here in Massachusetts where Democrats are in a preponderance.

I have many fine, smart, and knowledgeable friends who are Republicans, and wouldn’t call one of them a wing nut. Well, maybe one. I read the New York Times with appreciation, but I don’t fool myself that it is particularly objective. I chuckle at the description of it as “the parish newsletter of self-satisfied liberalism.” I almost put “self-satisfied liberal” in the space next to political opinions on my Facebook Page. Instead I just put “yes.”

All this is prolegomena to what I am about to say, which is that I have never before seen an opposition party in this country ever so bent on the failure of their opponents at any cost as the Republican Party is now.  It makes me very sad.

I never liked the vitriolic Bush-bashing that I often witnessed for eight years, and never participated in it, despite my strong view that he was not good for the country or the world. Bashing G.W. Bush at a Massachusetts dinner party takes about as much courage as cheering for the Red Sox in a Kenmore Square bar. We are a nation of laws and not men, and I respect the office of President even when I dislike the incumbant.

I don’t take Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck any more seriously than I would the guy who breathes fire at the circus. They are entertainers, and the people who take their views from them are benighted. Democrats have John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who I admit are funnier and more ironic.

But I expect better from our elected officials than from our comedians. First it was Congressman Joe Wilson shouting out “liar” at the President during a speech to a joint session of Congress back in September.

Now, a few days ago, Congressman Nathan Deal, who is also a gubernatorial candidate in the Georgia Rebublican primary, announced that he is signing a letter to the White House with several of his Congressional colleagues asking for a copy of President Obama’s birth certificate. Deal also wants to take away the Fourteenth Amendment’s right for children born on American soil to be citizens.

I long for the days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil could have a beer together.  Where is the loyal opposition, who could horse-trade and compromise and advance the good of the country. These people today really just don’t like each other, and will not work together, even if the country is harmed by it.

And the country is being harmed by it. We have numerous significant issues before us that will impact our common life and the world’s for years to come. There are honest differences of opinion between the parties as there should be. But this kind of red-meat pandering to the wing nut base erodes the commonweal.

In Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, with the country on the brink of Civil War, he said: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

The party of Lincoln today should be ashamed of itself, and quickly recover the better angels of their nature.  This country needs a responsible opposition party and soon.

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>“A Word To The Calvinists”
 by Anne Brontë

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>

You may rejoice to think yourselves secure,

You may be grateful for the gift divine,

That grace unsought which made your black hearts pure
And fits your earthborn souls in Heaven to shine.
But is it sweet to look around and view

Thousands excluded from that happiness,

Which they deserve at least as much as you,

Their faults not greater nor their virtues less?
And wherefore should you love your God the more

Because to you alone his smiles are given,

Because He chose to pass the many o’er
And only bring the favoured few to Heaven?
And wherefore should your hearts more grateful prove
Because for all the Saviour did not die?
Is yours the God of justice and of love

And are your bosoms warm with charity?
Say does your heart expand to all mankind

And would you ever to your neighbour do,
–
The weak, the strong, the enlightened and the blind -­

As you would have your neighbour do to you?
And, when you, looking on your fellow men
Behold them doomed to endless misery,

How can you talk of joy and rapture then?

May God withhold such cruel joy from me!
That none deserve eternal bliss I know:
Unmerited the grace in mercy given,

But none shall sink to everlasting woe

That have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven.
And, O! there lives within my heart

A hope long nursed by me,

(And should its cheering ray depart

How dark my soul would be)
That as in Adam all have died

In Christ shall all men live

And ever round his throne abide

Eternal praise to give;
That even the wicked shall at last

Be fitted for the skies

And when their dreadful doom is past

To life and light arise.
I ask not how remote the day

Nor what the sinner’s woe

Before their dross is purged away,
Enough for me to know
That when the cup of wrath is drained,
The metal purified,

They’ll cling to what they once disdained,

And live by Him that died.

(On this Five Hundredth anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, many of us who proudly claim his tradition would want to repudiate the doctrines of double predestination and limited atonement so closely linked to his legacy.  Here Anne Brontë, the parson’s daughter, graciously does so in verse.)

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Where I Ruminate on the Trinity

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The Trinity is not a secondary way of talking about the Christian God within the framework of monotheism, but is in fact the very identity of the Christian God. Robert Jenson even argues “that the phrase ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ is a proper name for the God whom Christians know in and through Jesus Christ,” and I think that is right.

So in my view monotheism is not a very good starting point to think about the Christian God, although it has often been done. The Western theological tradition has often fallen into a residual Monarchianism, “a tendency to resolve a doctrine of the Trinity in the implicitly unitarian direction of a single and inscrutable divine sovereignty.” (The quote is from John E. Colwell’s Promise and Presence referring to his teacher Colin Gunton’s book The One, The Three, and The Many. And Gunton was a student of Jensen, so there is an intellectual lineage at work here).

The Trinity, in my view, is an inference from the Trinitarian shape of the Gospel narratives, and therefore (although never named as such in scripture) the most biblical of doctrines, even if it took centuries to develop. My friend Willis Elliot, in an e-mail to me about the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, affirms that even the process itself is Spirit-guided:

“From first-stage subordinationism to final stage trinitarianism is a long stretch, too long for Arius and most Christians until after Nicea AD325CE, the council at which Athanasius’ Greek-language Bridge to the Trinity won the day and persuaded Constantine to decide against Arius. It would have been a bridge too far for Augustine’s Latin unaided by the Latinization of Athanasian metaphysics: like Hebrew and Aramaic, Latin did not have the capacity to receive and convey the orthodox Christian doctrine of God. God’s choice of Greek as the founding vehicle of the Christian mind was itself revelational.”

But why a Trinity? Well, if God is God then obviously every form of dualism must be rejected. But God is also love, and love requires some manner of plurality within the divine unity. The Gospel story is a love story among the persons, a love spilling out beyond itself for us. Perhaps this is best apprehended in liturgy, where we pray “to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.”

“We pray our prayers to the Father ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord,’ because it is through his Son made man as Jesus of Nazareth that God has shown himself to us. In the words and deeds, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus we know what God’s attitude towards us is and that he is prepared to reclaim and remake us for himself. That is why Christians worship God not as a remote and distant mystery shrouded in the glory of his deity, but as the one who in his love has come to us, lived among us, died for us and triumphed over our enemies.”(The Forgotten Trinity, p. 5-6)

So the Gospel story is not merely the story of Jesus, but rather the story of Jesus’ relatedness to the Father through the Spirit, and the Father’s relatedness to the Son through the same Spirit. As Colwell puts it:

“The words and actions of the Son are the words and actions of the Father mediated by the Spirit. There is no action within the narrative that is not an action of the undivided Trinity. There is no action within the narrative that is not an action mediated by the Spirit. The Father’s love and calling to the Son is mediated by the Spirit at Jesus’ baptism. The ministry of Jesus is a demonstration of the Father’s kingdom in the power of the Spirit. The sacrifice of the Son is mediated to the Father by the Spirit. The Father’s raising of the son from the dead is mediated by the Spirit. At every point the Spirit is the agent of mediation between Father and Son.” (Colwell, p. 37)

This peculiar way we Christian’s have of thinking about and speaking about God is yet another “scandal of particularity.” Which is why interfaith dialogue (which I’m all for) that uses monotheistic commonalities as the starting point typically sells out Christianity’s particular understanding, and settles for a kind of a “theism plus Jesus.” But that view pervades our churches, too, so its not just outsiders who have trouble with the Trinity.

We teachers in the church share some blame for that. Nevertheless, the one God’s Triune self-relatedness is the true grammar of a Christian theology that would do justice to the Gospel narrative and give true definition to the language of grace. The Christian God really doesn’t make much sense without it.

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Rick’s Rich Ragu with Wild Mushrooms over Homemade Tagliatelle

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This rich meat ragu is my nod to a traditional Bolognese sauce. The wild mushrooms add a wonderful earthiness to it. OK, so I’m showing off just a little here with the homemade pasta, but you really don’t have to serve this sauce over fresh pasta. It is equally delicious over dried pasta such as Rigitoni or Penne. But if you are going to work all day on the sauce, use good quality imported dried pasta like De Cecco.

But if you have the time, homemade pasta is a wonderful thing, and it’s not really hard to make, but, trust me on this, it does take time. When my children were little, and my wife, Martha, who is a nurse, had to work at night, I would muster my little force and the kids would “help” me make fresh pasta. It kept them busy for hours, and at the end of the process we had lovely Tagliatelle hanging from all kinds of drying racks and everybody (and the kitchen) was covered with flour, and Mom didn’t even have to see it.

I have made this pasta several ways: with just a rolling pin and a sharp chef’s knife, with the pasta extruder on my Kitchen-Aid mixer, and with a stainless steel hand-cranked pasta machine. I like the latter best myself. I bought mine at the First Church tag sale many years ago, and it has made a lot of pasta at the Floyd household.

So if you have the better part of a day to hang out in the kitchen this can be a great project on a cold day. Your simmering sauce will fill the house with lovely aromas. And the ragu itself isn’t very hard to put together, although it takes a certain vigilance over many hours. But the nice thing about it is that during that time you can make the pasta, and at the end of the day you will have a lovely comfort food dinner that will delight everyone at the table.

For the Ragu

4 tbs butter

2 tbs extra virgin olive oil
¼ lb. pancetta, finely chopped
1 medium yellow onion chopped fine
1 carrot chopped fine
1 celery stalk chopped fine
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup whole milk
1/8 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
1 28 oz can good whole Italian tomatoes with liquid
2 pounds lean ground beef
1 oz. dried wild Porcini mushrooms

Salt and pepper to taste<

The pancetta is hard to cut fine enough by hand, so I cut it into small chunks and finish it in the food processor with the onions, carrots, and celery, and that keeps it from sticking to the blade.

Cover the porcini mushrooms with hot water and let sit while you do the next stages.

Heat oil and butter in a large heavy-bottomed skillet or casserole, and when the butter foams add the pancetta, onion, carrot and celery and sauté over medium high heat until it takes on some color and is beginning to brown.

Turn the heat down to medium and add the beef. Cook, breaking up the pieces and stirring, until the pink goes out of the beef, but don’t brown it. Add the white wine, turn the heat back up a bit, and let all the wine evaporate, stirring now and again. Turn the heat back down to medium and add the milk and nutmeg, and cook until the milk evaporates, stirring from time to time.

Add the tomatoes, squeezing them between your fingers into the pan. Pour the mushrooms through a sieve lined with cheesecloth (or a coffee filter) into a bowl and retain the liquid. Chop the mushrooms coarsely and add to the pot along with their liquid.

Bring it all to a very gentle simmer, partially cover, and literally put it on a back burner for as many hours as you can, stirring from time to time and watching your heat so it doesn’t start boiling. If you are gentle with this sauce it will reward you. How long? The one I made yesterday had at least six hours, but I would say at least three. It should reduce into a thick rich sauce. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper.

When you are ready to serve it, toss your pasta with just enough of the sauce to moisten it (it’s really rich) and serve bowls of sauce along with it so people can add more if they choose. Top each plate with freshly grated Parmegianno-Reggiano cheese and you’ve got a little bit of heaven on a plate. A salad and some crusty bread will round out this meal. For wine, a good Tuscan red or a Nebbiola-based wine will make you smile.

For the Tagliatelle

Do not be afraid to try this. The dough for this pasta has only two ingredients, flour and eggs. Some people are dogmatic about using pasta flour, but I just use King Arthur All-purpose Flour and extra-large eggs. For six servings I use three cups of flour and four eggs.

Put your flour on a clean counter or pastry board and make a well with it. Then break the eggs into the center of the well (see photo below) and with a fork beat them, while drawing small amounts of flour from the edge of the well. Don’t be impatient; you can do this! Just keep beating the eggs and drawing flour into them until you have a nice soft dough.

Put the dough aside and scrape off your board. Put flour on your hands and on the board and knead your dough for about 10 to 15 minutes. Add extra dough a little at a time until the dough is soft and pliable. When you stick a finger in the dough it shouldn’t be wet, but not too dry. You’ll know.
It is now ready for the pasta machine. The pasta machine has two parts, a set of rollers that rolls the dough, and the actual blades that cut the pasta into ribbons. Set the rollers on your machine for the widest width. Cut a piece about the size of a large egg, and put the rest under a towel so it won’t dry out. Run the piece through the rollers 6 or 8 times until the dough is smooth and isn’t sticky. Adjust the roller to the next smallest setting and repeat the process. Keep adjusting the rollers smaller until you get the dough to about 1/16 of an inch, then put it through the cutting blades and make your ribbons of Tagliatelle. You can put the pasta on a rack, or nest it into a small bundle (see photo below). Then start again with another piece and follow the above procedures until you have made pasta from all the dough. This takes some time, but is strangely calming.

When you are ready to cook the pasta, bring a good-sized pot of water to a boil and cook pasta for only about three minutes, then sauce with the ragu. Yum. This is why my kids call me the “Pasta Emeritus!” Enjoy.

(Photos: R.L. Floyd)