All can be saved
This is the third of a three-part article.
By Donald Schell
Stuart Schwarz’s book, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, digs deep into the archival records of the Spanish Inquisition to offer a what I can only read as the Holy Spirit’s relentless subversion of church efforts to guard power and insider status (whether by making state sanctioned baptism a ticket to belonging as in England or by shunning those who converted as in Spain).
As a secular historian Schwartz is tracking how Western society came to regard tolerance as a moral value (and the path he follows begins quoting church leaders declaring tolerance a serious sin). All through the records of Inquisitors’ questions and the transcribed witness of the accused on both sides of the Atlantic (major colonial centers in the Spanish colonies had their own local Inquisition), Schwarz finds the voices of ordinary faithful people who, in the name of God, of Christ, and of their understanding of Christian theology continued to protest scapegoating, condemnation, and marginalization of family members, neighbors, and friends, and strangers.
In the massive court records of the Spanish, Portuguese, and New World Inquisitions, Schwartz finds theologians, parish clergy, monks, nuns and ordinary lay people who, on trial and under oath, sometimes facing execution for heresy persisted in declaring
that God could save whom God pleased,
that Jews and Muslims could be saved according to the law they had received,
and that Christ wanted none killed in his name
(propositions most contemporary Episcopalians would readily accept).
Schwartz emphasizes that he found this witness of compassionate protest (and skeptical resistance) not just in the trial records of devout, theological trained teachers and clergy, but in literate but otherwise untrained laypeople and even in illiterate tradesmen whose experience of other people moved them to question official church teaching.
For believing scholars, new vision (and renewal of a more ancient vision) came from study of Bible and theology.
Sometimes the most ordinary Spaniard who had lived among Moors (or sailed with Anglicans or lived in the English West Indies) found God at work in the kindness and goodwill and prayers of Muslims or Protestants.
Scripture, tradition, and human experience gave people back to one another, made all sorts and conditions ask where God dwelt or simply saw fallible human grace and glory in all people. Some pioneers of open-heartedness were also agnostics or atheists who espoused tolerance from a human belief that we needed each other and from deep skepticism that a world where so many suffered could have anything to do with God. Their unstoppable, courageous witness for compassion finally closed the Inquisition.
But what does this four hundred year old argument teach us about baptism?
Everywhere we turn we find a bind -
Most Episcopal clergy that I know and most of our theologically reflective laypeople disavow the necessity of baptism to deliver people from God’s wrath or hell.
Most Episcopalians positively recoil at the idea that un-baptized babies go to hell.
But we want to claim that baptism bestows an otherwise unattainable spiritual good whether it’s “salvation” (though with classic good-mannered Anglican reserve we won’t say salvation from what) or whether it’s “initiation into the Body of Christ,” or whether it’s “becoming a child of God,” or “becoming one with the People of God,” or simply getting or doing whatever it is we “need in order to receive communion.” All these formulations leave us asking what we’re saying about the rest of humanity.
The simplicity and single-mindedness of Lynn’s joyful photo, like the daring early voices for grace that broke all bounds, prompts me to ask whether trusting desire might wash away our investment in the compulsions, necessities, and scrutinies of purity that divides us. Whether or not the girl at the font is thinking about baptism - none of the compulsions or consequences we’ve been considering haunts her moment at the waters. In this moment the font, the water, and baptism mean exactly what she sees and feels, what she has seen and felt. Seeing and feeling unleash desire. Testing waters we know are sacred, she tries out her embrace of a wider world.
As a church founder in mission to an increasingly un-baptized American population, I quit wondering who must be baptized and to what end. My experience was that when our congregation sustained a deep welcome, accepted who people as they came and listened for the Spirit’s nudging them to grow and be more, that baptism beckoned strongly to all and that most, sooner or later, would answer the question, “Do you desire to be baptized” with a simple, emphatic “yes!” And thirty years’ experience of making an unreserved invitation of all to communion, says that letting God satisfy people’s simple, immediate desire for communion will move them to desire baptism.
The baptismal rock in the photo is outdoors, wholly outside the walls of the church. That font doesn’t stand guarding the church door. Altar Table greets each visitor with its invitation to taste communion in Christ. And beyond the Table, the font waits, promising the fullness of life in Christ.
It makes Gospel sense that the font is out doors. Walls keep the weather out and make a safe place for worship. Each baptism at this rock “outside the walls” draws us out from worship to the open sky, unsheltered and in the world. And even more than Jesus’ wilderness baptism in the Jordan, baptism here outside the church recalls the baptism that Jesus’ words in Matthew, Mark and Luke keep warning and promising his disciples lies ahead for him and for them, baptism on the cross. Outside the walls of the holy city, beyond the bounds of self-consciously sanctified community, in solidarity with all humanity, even the worst of us, Jesus death embraces God’s fullest work of reconciliation, Christ living and dying in communion with even the worst of us.
Jesus’ baptism leaves the safety of the city behind to burst the gates of hell. 17th Century England and Spain give us hair-raising cautionary tales about the dangers (to people and to baptism itself) any time baptism is the gate back to insider status. Golgotha strips from us our hopes of being an insider and hanging on to power. When Jesus died outside the city walls, the sinless one made sin, dying literally cast out and ‘accursed’ for hanging on a tree, he invited the dying thief to feast with him in paradise – where in group is left behind forever. Dying between condemned criminals Jesus invites us into the fullest human communion that must include even those we’re tempted to say have ‘no place,’ those whose absence from the Table diminishes us and the Body of Christ.
As Charles Wesley wrote,
Love like death hath all destroyed,
Rendered all distinctions void.
Jesus’ example makes it clear that desire for solidarity with all humankind may cost very dearly. Some of Jesus’ followers have learned to flinch at the name ‘Christian,’ because that name, in our culture, has come to mean the exact opposite of the communion in which Jesus died. “Christian” names an in-group with membership requirements in belief and practice as strict as any other ordinary group. “Christian” voices in public routinely condemn outsiders and judge, shun and cast out members. I have gladly baptized people who were reluctant to call themselves, “Christian,” but who knew they wanted to follow Jesus learning to live “on behalf of all and for all.” If we’re to continue to call ourselves “Christian” we’ve got to live without designating ourselves insiders.
Paradoxically recalling the exclusion, exile, stigmatization, and scapegoating that Jesus embraced in his baptism on the cross, seems wholly consonant with World War II Jewish philosopher and classical scholar Simone Weil’s decision to follow Christ but NOT be baptized lest she seem to be choosing Christian insider status for herself that cost her solidarity with the rest of humankind. Weil’s rejection of baptism tells us as much about what baptism must be as it warns us of what it can no longer be.
I am grateful to have presided at many joyful baptisms of adults, children, and babies. And for myself and all those I’ve baptized, and for all my sisters and brothers in Christ, my hope and prayer is that the waters of baptism (and the life in Christ we live, falteringly from our baptisms but somehow still persevering) wash from us the presumption of ANYTHING that separates us or ‘sets us apart’ from the Love of Christ for all humanity.
In the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa argued that all humankind together bore the blessing of being made in the ‘Image of God,’ and that nothing less than the whole of humanity could be the Body of Christ. Baptism in Christ, baptism into the scorned sinner’s death he suffered outside the walls, baptism into the communion he embraced with the worst outcasts gives us what Jesus’ lived and died to establish, lives that belong to all, selves we find in communion with the Other.
Jesus asks us, “Do you desire to be baptized – with me?”
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.
Donald,
If I'm reading you right, you and I are not too far apart theologically.
I continue to have some reservations about some of the liturgical changes you advocate, though I can see why you do so with integrity. I also continue to believe in adhering more closely to rubrics and canons. Should those change, I could be brought along, though I would probably continue to take a more conservative position during the debate.
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October 10, 2010 9:21 AM
Hi, Donald,
Thank you, for this wonderful meditation. Somehow it reminds me of Artist's and Writer's Retreat at St. Dorothy's.
Over Labor Day Weekend the Retreat is attended by Christians and non-Christians alike. There exists mutual respect and it is a given that nobody is trying to convert anyone. We also have a chapel service on Sunday which, of course, is entirely optional. The communion we have in the chapel during the service is in fact additional to the communion we share at every meal during the retreat. We are in communion with each other sharing bread and wine and also sharing our experiences as artists and the progress of our artistic endeavors. We share through grace: different backgrounds, different media, different but the same in the challenges of finding space, internally and externally, that space where we are allowed to engage the creative process. There is no insider outsider paradigm.
And when we come together in the chapel I always strongly feel the absence of those who choose to stay away. Maybe they are staying away because they hit gold and need to stay with it writing, composing, painting or thinking. Or maybe they don't have a religious belief. In either case it is their choice, respected and understood BUT it doesn't diminish their absence and my sense of missing them, their thoughts, observations, their presence.
So I was so glad, selfishly so, when one of our group who is not religious in a Christian sense and doesn't usually attend the chapel service, did attend at our last retreat. She stayed with us during the songs and scriptures and sharing and then stepped outside during communion. That was all well and good but then I noticed someone get a piece of bread, the body of Christ, to take out to her and then the same with the wine, blood.
I was moved by this. I don't know if the bread and wine was received, accepted, by the person who stepped out; I don't know how she felt. I prayed she didn't think we were trying to convert her but I knew she already knew that (after all of these years) and she wouldn't have come if she thought we were going to try and convert her.
For the person taking the communion out to her I felt like saying: it is not really necessary, we share every meal together; this is a formality. But I didn't have a right to interfere: it was between them to work out and who am I to set up roadblocks to someone's impulse toward inclusion, communion. However awkward I felt about it, my instincts shouting "Let it be", I had to step back and allow the communion to go forth. I had to allow their interaction to be their interaction. Of course, if harm were intended that would be different.
What I am trying to say is that I see and feel this compassion and grace you describe in the actions of the witnesses of the brutality of the Inquisition and also the powerful example of Simone Weil. The interaction is complex and confusing and full of potential error and potentials also for extending grace on every side. We stumble through it always I hope, straining to hear the still, small voice inside the hurricane and commotion of our education and practice.
How to be in communion without being or requiring some sort of insider handshake? I learned that at St. Gregory's, am still learning it in my life.
Thank you, Donald, for your example.
Love, Cheryl
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October 10, 2010 12:59 PM
Donald,
I had more to say and may post those portions in your first of these three.
Taking up with Bill, to open one's heart to this grace explicitly given and Named as Jesus Christ can be conceived as cross-up-taking, humility, life-embracing, liberation. Some conceive this largely as reversal, such as the King hangs from a Tree, or the Lord is a servant, etc. I think we have sometimes overextended reversal tropes missing how conflations in our history, as you note such as Lord and Master Jesus with Lord and Master Jones, have led to justifications of domination in Jesus’ Name, ironically making reversal language mute or even violent until some other facet of Jesus is taken up in liberation's name. Sometimes rather than reversal, we need explicit language, such as the Commandments or Beatitudes. These may function within a larger trope of God’s reversal of fallen human values, but they give us something to fix on more concretely that is direct and to the point. They look like reversal to us or uprooting only because of our fallenness. They can also be experienced as getting more earthy, which is what "becoming divine" looks like in clay creatures.
So I ask, What does that life of grace look like explicitly through the lens of Christ? I continue to hearken back to Benedict's Ladder of Humility (not humiliation) or to the Beatitudes, but also to our long history of beginning Holy Communion with the Summary or their concrete expressions for vital social matters, the Decalogue.
As Stringfellow would argue, to explicitly be open to Christ is to undergo setting aside success, acquisition, fame, fortune, domination as definition of the abundant life and what it means to be human. The abundant life is one that acknowledges to God and to all others our shared creaturely vulnerability, our need for one another, and our facing death among other things.
Is this not a Pauline conception of baptism into Christ's own life and death? And at the same time, from a different angle, john's being born from above?
That is to say that to explicitly profess openness to and be given to grace in the Name of Christ will change us. Where I continue to wrestle with CWOB is with the conception of God's hospitality at the Altar Table without clarification that in some real sense, this grace will kill us--make us into persons more like Christ, persons who receive our self from God first and foremost (I say this for many of us who have been taught not to have a self at all) and that this is self created to go out of ourselves in upbuilding and care for others and all creatures, and less selfish and self-centered. To invite without understanding or reflection or community support may put others in danger of not having a framework for their dying or invite them to die when they have no clue that partaking will do just that. To invite without understanding or reflection or community support may lead to failure to put in relationship God’s self-gift in Holy Communion with how we should concern ourselves about distribution of food among ourselves and for all people. But I also know in reading your own pieces that mine are contextless concerns. As you put well, Gospel ways of being at work within the context of St. Gregory’s may give partakers a framework of what it means to receive God’s hospitality and to explicitly take it up oneself, may give a framework in practices for folks experiencing and embracing being changed, of dying.
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October 10, 2010 2:13 PM
My heart leaps with joy at your words. There is something about baptism that can not be pinned beneath our words. The outward and visible sign of mystery of grace. Water is the most important thing for life - we recognize that in baptism. For me it also says -- people belong first to the God who created them - they are not objects of our possession. Emerging from the waters we know ourselves as beloved of God -the community is called to "will" to support each one. We had a speaker at our convention this weekend who is a priest in Cairo and grew up in W. Senegal - he talked about Muslims who follow the way of Christ - no discussion of being baptized - but the power of the Way to transform all
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October 11, 2010 11:26 AM
Donald:
Growing up in a secular liberal Canadian culture, with 85% of my community considering themselves either “spiritual but not religious” or “atheist,” I hope that your reflections here will become normative content amongst baptismal and liturgical theologians alike. Christians in a pluralistic secular society will make no headway if they continue to claim a moral or spiritual superiority over others. That language or unstated theology will continue to isolate Christians from others and confirm the suspicion held by many of our non-relevance to an emerging world community.
Tom Harpur in Water into Wine: An Empowering Vision of the Gospels, points out that following Constantine, exponentially more non-Christians were killed in the Colloseums of Rome by Christians than Christians were killed by the previous pagan regime. To function, indeed to survive, in the Post-Constantine Roman Empire, baptism was not an option. Harpur explores the misguided understanding the church assumed for baptism and reflects that “Baptism means claiming our Divinity not removal of Sin.”
Thomas Keating is a proponent of the Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel in which our interiority is always highlighted. The ‘tyranny of the false self’ perpetuates itself according to our instinctual needs for power/control, affection/esteem and security. These ‘energy centres’ become our false programs for happiness and begin in childhood. Keating also includes our ‘group over-identification’ in which our need to belong overshadows even our conscience. The need to be well-perceived by others, to belong to the ‘right’ group, and to feel justified and supported in condemning others outside or who do not fit in is a need shared not by an emerging religious identity of the Roman Empire some 2000 years ago, but by all, today. Whether it is political partisanship, religious affiliation, national or ethnic identity, much of our self understanding and meta-narrative is shaped and formed by this hidden need to belong, to be right, to be justified. Indeed, when the deepest motivations to ‘desire baptism’ are steeped in these waters – as often many of our spiritual longings in fact are – we need to take a step back, as you suggest, and survey the landscape.
At a recent Clergy Conference, I had the pleasure of hearing from Rev Dr Gary Nicolosi speaking on “Reimagining Church for a Post-Christian World.” As a footnote to his talk, Gary related the concept of ‘Open Baptism,’ whereby he advertised that on a special Sunday, his church would ‘baptize you and your kids, no strings attached.’ No requirements, no preparation – just show up.
You could feel the room fill with oxygen as frozen clergy suddenly forgot how to exhale. The opportunity was that the community came together that Sunday and showed their support and loving hospitality. They had the newly baptized persons’ contact information who now would receive the parish newsletter and some follow up. Further, an invitation for some mystagogy was offered. I may not have my figures correct, but that Sunday he baptized some 40 people, and 130 by the end of the year. Of that 130, close to 40 became regular parishioners.
Reflecting on my own journey – I was baptized and confirmed at the age of 13 in a period of spiritual zeal and discovery while at an Anglican boarding school – only to leave the church the following year and seek elsewhere. I found myself belonging to an Eastern tradition where I received a wonderful formation and preparation. It was only because I happened to have been baptized Anglican that I wandered into an Episcopal Church in rural West Virginia, where there happened to be a Centering Prayer group, and where I happened to find a crumpled up pamphlet in the narthex behind a little table advertising a silent retreat led by a brother from the Order of the Holy Cross that my fate was sealed.
I applaud your exploration here, Donald, a few of those who attended Gary’s ‘Open Baptism’ had an experience which led them to the table. And maybe when the interior questions emerge, when the fruit ripens those who did not join the community, will at least have a place to land, as I did. And maybe those who never darken a church doorway again will receive an Anglican funeral and someone sitting in the back pew might happen to hear the Spirit and show up some Sunday and receive God’s Self-Giving at the Table.
Baptism can become the deepest commitment and compelling response to a God who loves without measure and invites us to become “participants of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4) It does not need to be so at the preposterously arrogant exclusion of other paths, nor does it mean having a ‘tapas’ spirituality drawing a little from here and there.
Commitment, and obedience to a path means being confronted with all its hills and valleys, not having things your way, all the time. For steel to become a beautiful sword it must pass through the hands of the blacksmith in the forge. By going here and there, sampling from every flower, in the words of Murat Yagan, “ you will never become a bee – just a wasp who never produces honey.”
Surely, Tom Harpur is inviting a deeper exploration of baptism and indeed the sacraments to a place of reverence and holy wonder and awe as we imagine who we truly are called to be. To embrace the fullness of our tradition both East and West, and even to draw upon wisdom from others, outside, to begin gathering a wider grasp of St Gregory’s vision of the totally of humanity as the Body of Christ. A totality, I for one, want to be a part of.
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October 12, 2010 12:43 PM