Towards an Anabaptist Marian Theology

Theological feminists find much in the character of Mary, specifically within the magnificant. This, I believe, is quite right. This is also held by the majority of feminists that I have encountered.

These feminists, or at least the ones I like and have had fruitful conversations with, are wary of what I shall condense into the term: self-annihilation. Lets be honest, there is no way to get around the idea of obedience. Some feminists recoil at the idea, but personally, while I understand the logic, I do not believe that obedience is the real problem. Obedience can be a very good thing. It is a bad thing, however, to tell an abused woman to be obedient to her husband and send her back to him.

I confess, I have never wanted to be rid of obedience because the divine community is built on humility and bowing to one another in a healthy way. But I have been unsure how to voice another way while still meeting feminism’s legitimate concerns. In reading von Balthasar, I was confronted with obedience in a different sort of way, and more to the point, perhaps here is the beginnings of a legitimate obedience, although it requires some (or much, very much) outside help. So I couldn’t simply drop obedience for many reasons.

After a long time mulling, I think the true objection is that often obedience is seen with self-annihilation. This, this is not what Mary did. The incarnation to which she responded was not abuse, but gift. She chose participation in the work of God. Mary responded to the gift of the incarnation. Mary’s work was gift back to gift. It was not self-annihilation.

With Mary as an image of healthy discipleship, this Marian theology could make us all feminists in a certain way. I could certainly live with that.

This theology also means that anabaptist need a stronger theology of gift — grace and sacrament — which they/we have never been strong on in a multifaceted way. Should it look exactly like the Catholics? Of course not, however, that doesn’t mean that we should just end with the abstract notion of the community as grace.

Seeee, Other People See the Vote as Sacral

From fellow Alaskan, Shannyn Moore (Oh, by the way, the difference between her and I on this is that yes, the state does assert itself religiously. That and yes, democracy has shed blood — Bush’s we’ll democratize the hell out of Iraq comes to mind. Democracy is tyranny by the majority. I’ve read R. Niebuhr assert that, and heard Stanley Hauerwas say it. Democracy isn’t innocent.):

The Sacrament of Democracy

If democracy were a religion, voting would be the sacrament.

I grew up in what I call “The First Free-Range Organic Christian Church of Homer.” Sundays brought a message, fellowship, and a line of repentant souls taking communion-a remembrance of sacrifice.

The first time I cast my vote, it struck me as similar. The blood shed for my right to stand at a flag draped table and make my choice part of the collective wasn’t lost on me. I had one of those “Come to Jesus” moments and in 20 years I haven’t missed an opportunity to vote. Unlike Christ, the idea of democracy has never shed a drop of blood; patriots did. The same can be said of the suffragettes. Unlike the sacrament celebrated in religious ritual, elections should not be faith-based. The framers never intended our government to be run on trust; hence the myriad of checks and balances. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Election integrity is not about restoring faith in the system. Checks and balances are. When we vote, the agreement we all make is we cast our ballots for candidates who may not be the victor. We know that. Taking the risk of voting for a loser only works if you have confidence the process is beyond reproach. It is equally vital the winning candidate have an agreement the citizenry will follow their lead. Leadership can only be ordained if the people know their votes counted.

The past eight years have shown us the result of questioned elections. After election disasters in Florida and Ohio, a good portion of the country didn’t agree George W. Bush was legitimate. I know people who refused to call him President Bush because of the suspected election fraud.

Alaska has a rich history of questionable elections. 2008 has been no different. Anomalies prompt people to scratch their heads and watch just a little closer. From some reactions, you would have thought asking a question was “unpatriotic.” After reporting on the 2004 Election tampering, and knowing full well it was questionable, I wondered what this year’s ballots would tell us. Apparently, Alaskans have completely changed their “voting habits” to include: a mail-in preference, cross-ballot voting, and finally, registering to vote and then not showing up. Alaska headlines are screaming “record turnout!” But in truth, our percentage of voter turnout is still lower than our average historical Presidential election records show. So what? Does that mean we shouldn’t ask questions and get answers about reconciliation? As Americans we pledge to hold our leaders accountable; why wouldn’t we start by holding the process of elections to the highest levels of integrity.

The day after the election I was in contact with both the Begich and Berkowitz campaigns. I’ve been in very close contact with the Alaska Democratic Party which has filed Public Records Requests. Experts from around the country are more than happy to answer questions or to mull over possible explanations to the election anomalies. People much smarter than I are paying attention, and are asking their own questions. A reporter I’ve bumped into for several years called today. He wanted to know if I thought the current vote count in Alaska was still “stinky.” Another local asked if I thought the process was now legitimized since Begich was now leading Stevens. ARE YOU SERIOUS??? That my questions would hinge on partisanship is insulting and indicates a complete lack of understanding. Anyone who thinks we don’t need a more transparent election process because their candidate is in the lead is a pathetic partisan hack. Anyone who believes election integrity is a “fringe” issue mocks those who have died to either earn the right to vote or protect it. I became a voter registrar in February of this year. To want to count only votes cast for my party of choice is vulgar. Not watching the referee calls when your team is winning is to invalidate the game.

So do I still smell the mudflats? Yes. Do I know what the source of stench is? No. Could it be the late wafts coming off the 2004 election? Possibly. What I know most certainly is this: voting is a sacred right; a remembrance of those who fought hard and shed blood for a bulletproof idea. Guarding the integrity of elections is essential to our democracy and anything less is blasphemy….

Sign me up. I’m blasphemous.

Towards a Theology of Balance

I read through Louis-Marie Chauvet’s Symbol and Sacrament last semester. Interestingly, he posits: “Any theology that integrates fully, and in principle, the sacramentality of the faith requires a consent to corporality, a consent so complete that it tries to think about god according to corporality.”1

The touch of God, a gracious and loving touch — characterized by hesed — is the foundational understanding for the Christian life. It certainly was in the Old Testament, for it was from hesed that the promises of God flowed, and likewise in the New Testament, Jesus refused to shrink from the call to live God’s plan for the sake of humanity. The in-breaking of the basileia, in preaching and deed, was and continues to be predicated on love. All of this is, in a word, salvific.

Rightly understood, salvation is complex and far from limited to a spiritual idea: Sacramental theology is concerned with encountering the grace of God in our daily existence; Liberation theology is concerned with the oppressed/oppressor relationship as it works for justice towards peace; and Barth says the love of God can never be out done. All speak of God’s salvation because God’s daily, revelatory work is inherently relational, and therefore salvific. Also, again, the grace of God is extensive. In such an understanding, Salvation is for to the whole of humanity, in both personal and social terms. Each person is a physical being of blood living within an ecosystem — God built a creation that God cares for. Quite simply, to quote N.T. Wright, Jesus is Lord and the emperor is not.

A holistic notion of Salvation — a broad understanding of soteriology — demands a balance, or at the very least, a multifaceted understanding of the text. A holistic Salvation must pull from the entire canon, for the stead-fast love of God permeates the entire text. Such love, when properly embodied, stands against: supercessionism, spirit over matter, and even church over the rule of God. Quite simply, care for the poor is the Gospel and arguably, the church with the poor is the Gospel as well.

Importantly, such an idea of balance is not limited to embodying one tradition. Gary Dorrien’s thesis defining American Liberal theology, understands “liberal” as a mediating theology between “orthodoxy” (right belief) and secular culture. Dorrien calls it third-way theology. However, what I am advocating is not a third-way theology; rather, it challenges both liberal and conservative. Balance calls into question the tendency of liberalism to act like the Gospel of John doesn’t exist or has much positive meaning. Balance also challenges an opposite extreme, say fundamentalist dispensationalism, as it calls people to take seriously the doctrine of Creation. A laissez faire attitude concerning the earth and humanity by dispensationalists, or conservative American Christianity on the whole, isn’t necessarily due to the fact that the Earth will burn in their eschatology; instead, the lack of concern for God’s creation stems from a limited and impoverished theology of creation.

As a corrective, for example, many a “liberals” I think could profit from re-listening to Phyllis Trible and other feminists that favor a re-reading of or the confronting the texts of terror as an important thing, rather than tossing the text aside. However, for the “conservatives” listening to Phyllis Trible also seems important — there are indeed texts of terror and to not recognize it is to ignore what texts do to someone, to the body. And to Christ’s body. And to the body of Christ.

Simply put, I find that often the fault of many theologies is to fail to take seriously the complexity and entirety of the canon. And I wonder if we fail to do so because we fail to listen to one another well.

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1. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 155.

A Liturgical and Sacramental Definition

After finishing my Sacramental/Liturgical Guided Reading class, I’ve come up with a few definitions.

Liturgy: The event/experience of ontological space and action that functions as a Christological matrix of the grace of God.

Sacrament: Grace/gift/experience and understood by Christians in liturgy.

Sacramental: Experiencing the event of Grace.

The books that helped develop such an understanding were:
The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith by James F. White
Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual by Tom F. Driver
The Eucharist and Human Liberation by Tissa Balasuriya
Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology by Susan A. Ross
Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas by Siobhán Garrigan
Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church by Joseph Martos
Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Experience by Louis-Marie Chauvet

Chauvet on Ritual and Existential Memory

Thus, the ritual memory of Jesus’ death and resurrection is not Christian unless it is veri-fied in an existential memory whose place is none other than the believers’ bodies… To wash one another’s feet is to live existentially the memory of Christ that the Eucharist makes us live ritually.

It is precisely because the ritual memory sends us to the existential memory that the sacraments in general, and the Eucharist in particular, constitute a “dangerous memory,” in the words of Metz. It is dangerous for the Church and for each believer, not only because the sequela Christi (“following Christ”) leads everyone onto the crucifying path of liberation (as much economic as spiritual, collective as personal), but because this “following of Christ” is “sacramentally” the location where Christ himself continues to carry out through those who invoke him the liberation for which he gave his life. The ritual story at each eucharist, retelling why Jesus handed over his life, sends all Christians back to their own responsibility to take charge of history in his name; and so they become his living memory in the world because he himself is “sacramentally” engaged in the body of humanity they work at building for him.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 260-261.

Chauvet on Sacramentality and Faith

And for the best quote yet:

Just as empirical writing is the phenomenal manifestation of an arch-writing that constitutes language as the place where the human subject comes into being, so the sacraments can be appreciated as the empirical manifestation of the “arch-sacramentality” that constitutes the language of faith, which is the place where the believing subject comes into being. this arch-sacramentality is a transcendental condition for christian existence. It indicates that there is no faith unless somewhere inscribed, inscribed in a body — a body from a specific culture, a body with a concrete history, a body of desire. Baptism, the first sacrament of the faith, shows this well: the plunge into water, together with this “precipitate” of the Christian Scriptures, which is the mention of the names of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is a metaphor for being plunged into the body of signifiers — material, institutional, cultural, and traditional — of the Church: assembly, ordained minister, sign of the cross on the forehead, book of the Scriptures, confession of faith, remembrance of Jesu Christ and invocation of the Spirit, paschal candle… All these are symbolic elements that are inscribed on the body of every baptized person, his or her scriptural body on which they are bestowed as a testament. One becomes a christian only by entering an institution and in lettering this institution stamp its “trademark,” its “character,” on one’s body.

The faith thus appears to us as “sacramental” in its constitution, and not simply by derivation. Our existence is Christian insofar as it is always-already structured by sacramentality, better still, as it is always-already inscribed in the order of the sacramental. It is thus impossible to conceive of the faith outside of the body.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 154-155.

White on Protestant Liturgy

The major impediment to a richer sacramental life still seems to be the reluctance to see sacraments as present acts of God rather than merely human memories of God’s acts in the past. It is difficult for many Protestants to conceive of sacraments as God’s self-giving. Little sense of sacramental efficacy survives among many Protestants and, for that matter, among not a few Roman Catholics. For many, the Enlightenment decisively severed any connection between the spiritual and the physical.

The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith by James F. White, 140-141.