By John B. Chilton

The second use of this catechism is to provide a brief summary of the Church's teaching for an inquiring stranger who picks up a Prayer Book.

-Book of Common Prayer, page 845

The Episcopal Church today is racked by divisions over sexual morality and the true interpretation of the Scriptures. Anyone who follows the news could not be blamed for concluding we are more about internal power and politics than outward mission and ministry. The Episcopal Church welcomes you, but who would want to visit?

And yet should an inquiring stranger drop in for a visit and pick up a Prayer Book they may stumble on the place to begin to appreciate us, our catechism. It is a remarkably clear-eyed and cogent outline of our faith, and sustains my trust that, with God’s help, Episcopalians are capable of discovering and teaching truth.

What does the catechism have to do with homosexuality or interpretation of scripture? Bluntly, what does it say about sin? It is not by chance that the catechism opens with the topic of our human nature:

Q. What are we by nature?
A. We are part of God's creation, made in the image of God.
Q. What does it mean to be created in the image of God?
A. It means that we are free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.
Q. Why then do we live apart from God and out of harmony with creation?
A. From the beginning, human beings have misused their freedom and made wrong choices.
Q. Why do we not use our freedom as we should?
A. Because we rebel against God, and we put ourselves in the place of God.

We are endowed with freedom of choice; our actions cannot be excused as being predetermined by our nurture or nature. The question is what choices are wrong and separate us from God.

Several pages on, we arrive at the first explicit mention of sin:

Q. What is the purpose of the Ten Commandments?
A. The Ten Commandments were given to define our relationship with God and our neighbors.
Q. Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful at all?
A. Since we do not fully obey them, we see more clearly our sin and our need for redemption.
Q. What is sin?
A. Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.

Being human we like to see rules and regulations listed – the more easily to find the loopholes, beat the system, and yet come out righteous. In the gospels the Pharisees serve as foils for Jesus. The Pharisees seek to catch him out on technicalities in the law. He responds with the offer of a relationship with God. We are offered not the security of a checklist of dos and don’ts to get right with God, but the challenge to believe, to stake our life, on a relationship with God.

Q. What is the New Covenant?
A. The New Covenant is the new relationship with God given by Jesus Christ, the Messiah, to the apostles; and, through them, to all who believe in him.
Q. What did the Messiah promise in the New Covenant?
A. Christ promised to bring us into the kingdom of God and give life in all its fullness.
Q. What response did Christ require?
A. Christ commanded us to believe in him and to keep his commandments.
Q. What are the commandments taught by Christ?
A. Christ taught us the Summary of the Law and gave us the New Commandment.
Q. What is the Summary of the Law?
A. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Q. What is the New Commandment?
A. The New Commandment is that we love one another as Christ loved us.

Regarding scripture the catechism says in part:

Q. Why do we call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God?
A. We call them the Word of God because God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible.
Q. How do we understand the meaning of the Bible?
A. We understand the meaning of the Bible by the help of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church in the true interpretation of the Scriptures.

Indeed. God does not stop speaking to the Church through scripture. The only question is, are we listening, and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, seeking true interpretation of the Scriptures.

In a recent interview, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori expressed the belief that it is our vocation “to keep questions of human sexuality in conversation, and before not just the rest of our own church, but the rest of the world.” Can it be that in God’s grace we are ready to come to a new teaching on homosexuality? To be unafraid to entertain doubts about existing doctrine? To ask the question, is there anything about homosexuality that is per se a misuse of freedom and a wrong choice? To ask the question, are our beliefs about homosexuality driven by unfounded fears, and a failure to live in love and charity with our neighbors?

To inquiring strangers and cradle Episcopalians, I ask you not to concentrate on my words, but to go and savor the inspired words of the Episcopal Catechism. The full text is available at a pew near you. See also the online sources of the Book of Common Prayer provided here.

Dr. John B. Chilton is an economist at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) specializing in applied game theory. He keeps the blog New Virginia Church Man.

"To become and to be a Christian is not at all an escape from the world as it is, nor is it a wistful longing for a 'better' world, nor a commitment to generous charity, nor a fondness for 'moral and spiritual values' (whatever that may mean), nor self-serving positive thoughts, nor persuasion to splendid abstractions about God. It is, instead, the knowledge that there is no pain or privation, no humiliation or disaster, no scourge or distress or destitution or hunger, no striving or temptation, no wile or sickness or suffering or poverty which God has not known and borne for [people] in Jesus Christ. He has borne death itself on behalf of [people], and in that event He has broken the power of death once and for all.

"That is the event which Christians confess and celebrate and witness in their daily work and worship for the sake of all [people]."
---William Stringfellow, My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic

Christian spirituality worthy of the name must steer clear of two pitfalls. On the one hand, we dare not let our spiritual lives become disembodied and abstract. To do so would be a denial of the Incarnation. Christianity is lived out in the world Christ lived and died for. As a central Christian testimony would have it, "God so loved the world..." (John 3:16). On the other hand, we dare not fall into despair when we notice the insufficiency of our own this-worldly action, considered in and of itself. Our action finds its meaning through witness to a victory already won by Another, who invites us to become his partners, without taking away the all too human character of our works. Because Christ has broken the power of death once for all, we are called to live as if death were not.

This stance, rooted in him, affects everything from our politics to our family and community life to the ways we suffer and grow throughout our lives. For the Christian, these are all a witness to the crucified and risen Lord, who has indeed broken the power of death. Because of this one saving event, Jesus Christ (in his mercy and justice) has the first and the last word. And, whether in the halls of Congress or the most intimate details of our human relationships, it points to our profound lack of faith and the pervasive power of sin that we still listen to other, far less gracious words. To be a Christian is to live out the implications of our baptism in the world as it is, without ever conceding the last word to scarcity or death.

For we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ's very own.

Bill Carroll

“The devil has suggested to us that we appropriate the things that were provided for our common use and hoard them for ourselves, so that through this covetousness he might make us liable to a double indictment and thus subject to eternal punishment and condemnation—the one, of being unmerciful, the other of putting our hope in hoarded up wealth instead of in God. For he who has wealth hoarded up cannot hope in God, as is clear from what Christ our God has said, ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ (Lk. 12:34). He, then, who distributes to all from the wealth he has stored up has no reward owing to him for doing this; rather, he is to blame for hitherto unjustly depriving others of it. Further, he is responsible for those who from time to time have lost their lives through hunger and thirst, for those whom he did not feed at that time though he was able, for the poor whose share he buried and whom he allowed to die a cruel death from cold and hunger (cf. Jas. 2:15ff.). He is exposed as one who has murdered as many victims as he was then able to feed.”

--St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 155-156.

St. Symeon’s teaching is remarkable only in eloquence, not in content. It is, more or less, the common social teaching of the Church fathers, rooted in the Holy Scriptures. For the fathers, all material goods are held in trust for God’s purposes. To enclose more than one needs to sustain the life of the body, when others starve, is a sin against them and against God, “the giver of every good and perfect gift.”

What then shall we do? We who have many good things, perhaps too many, as even those of us who live relatively simple lives by the standards of our culture do? We are to use these good gifts to show mercy. Not because that makes us especially good or deserving of praise, but because it sets our hearts free from any master less than God and rectifies an injustice that is in fact killing our neighbors. Almsgiving may look like charity to us, but it is in fact but one small step toward justice.

That this kind of teaching would almost certainly be decried as “socialism” today shows us how far we have departed from biblical values. We need Christian economists to talk about how wealth is distributed in our societies and how to organize economies to produce the goods we need efficiently and fairly. We need Christian business people who can generate wealth, not to hoard it but to use it for good and to share good things with those in need. But we also need to struggle against the ways that boundless greed traps us and harms our souls by dividing us from God and neighbor.

Bill Carroll

"Baptism is the sacrament of the extraordinary unity among humanity, wrought by God in overcoming the power and reign of death; in overcoming all that alienates, segregates, divides, and destroys [people] in their relationships to each other, within their own persons, and in their relationship with the rest of creation."

William Stringfellow, Instead of Death (New York: The Seabury Press, 1963), pp. 111-112.

As we turn the corner into Advent, we might begin with some revolutionary implications of the coming of Christ. For "the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

To paraphrase Karl Rahner, Christian baptism is an efficacious sign of a world already dripping wet with grace. Indeed, Christ has already come among us in mercy and justice. And yet, he is still the One who is to come. So long as we abuse God's gift of community and place it in the service of death, Christ's Advent is not yet complete in us, fully realized as it is in itself. In this holy season of preparation, we remember the absolute gratuity of Christ, in whom we are already reconciled, even as we await the consummation of his reign.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. His parish blog is at here

O admirable heights and sublime lowliness! O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! That the Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under the little form of bread!

Francis of Assisi, "A Letter to the Entire Order," paragraph 27, in Francis and Clare, The Complete Works (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), p. 58.

Like St. Francis, in his teaching on Christ and the sacraments, Martin Luther was fascinated by the way Christ appears “under a contrary.” In the manger, on the cross, and in the Lord’s Supper, the God of the universe appears where we would least expect. For Luther, hearkening back to the story of Abraham and the Letter to the Hebrews, this has to do primarily with the radical faith that clings to Christ and his promise where our eyes find little or nothing to see.

For Francis, the mystery of God hidden in poor, humble places has more to do with the social location of the privileged encounter with God. It is no accident that Francis chose to highlight this dimension of the Nativity story. This insight lay at the heart of his ministry with the lepers and new urban poor of his day.

Especially in his Christmas sermons, Luther also has a sense of the way in which the humble child calls us to renewed relationships with our neighbors:

Therefore since you have received enough and become rich, you have no other commandment to serve Christ and render obedience to him, than so to direct your works that they may be of benefit to your neighbor, just as the works of Christ are of benefit and use to you.

We find this same theme again and again in the great hymns of the Christmas season. Take, for example, the penultimate stanza of “O Come, All Ye Faithful”:

Child, for us sinners, poor and in a manger,
We would embrace thee, with love and awe;
Who would not love thee, loving us so dearly?

During the Twelve Days of Christmas, may we be renewed in our faith and in our commitment to the least of these. May we find ourselves enriched by the poverty of the Christ child, who “though he was rich, became poor for us.” (2Corinthians 8:9) And may we commit ourselves to share what we have and work, struggle, and pray for justice for all. For justice is what love looks like when it is lived out in public.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. His parish blog is at here

Thus, the Church is founded on Christ. It is His Church, the response to His call, the obedience to His will. It is important to keep this in mind, because Christians themselves often forget and being to view the Church as “theirs,” as an organization essentially called to serve them, to satisfy their spiritual and non-spiritual needs and demands. Yet the very word Church shows above all that is the union of those who are called to serve Christ, and to continue His work. It is service not to self but to God. ~Alexander Schmemann, Celebration of Faith, vol. I (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), p. 116.

This General Convention will no doubt see a flurry of activity about restructuring and much wrangling about the budget. All parties will play lip service to being mission-driven. There will be, as there already have been, a number of charges and counter-charges about who is giving into anxiety, resisting necessary change, and preserving a deadly status quo.

These words from Fr. Alexander Schmemann challenge us to a wider perspective. What would happen if we really did what we say we do at General Convention and prayed and listened for the voice of the Holy Spirit.

I submit that the Spirit would draw us deeper into the mission and ministry of Christ, calling us to forms of dying and rising that we have scarcely begun to imagine.
But this will only happen to the extent that we all remember that the Church belongs not to us but to God…and remain open to deeper conversion to each other and the world for which our Lord gave his life. It will necessarily involve renunciation of privilege and power and renewed dedication to the teaching and example of the Lord Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Again, as we climb higher, we say this. It [i.e. “the Cause of all”] is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving, or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing beings do not know it as it actually is and it does not know them as they are. There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth—it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial. ~Dionysius, Mystical Theology, v. in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988 ), p. 141.

That’s quite a few words about something about which nothing can be said. This passage from the conclusion of Dionysius’ Mystical Theology is the locus classicus for the relationship between apophatic, or negative, theology, and cataphatic, or positive, theology. Literal minded readers may trip up on the apparent contradictions in this dialectical text, which circles around a divinity that is utterly transcendent (even of divinity) yet gives itself out of sheer ecstatic goodness (even as it is beyond goodness).

Earlier, in his Divine Names, Dionysius insists on our need to use names, especially those given in Scripture, to approach God. And yet, in the end, we can speak only about “what is next to” God and not about God per se and even the term “God” is misleading.

In some ways, concrete symbols like the “Rock of Ages” or the “Lion of Judah” are less dangerous because we are less apt to confuse them for the “thing-in-itself,” as we might be prone to do with more relatively adequate symbols like being, goodness, or oneness.

Various theologians have various ways of living with the tension between assertion and denial. Not all would reach first for the Neo-platonic language of Dionysius. In the life of faith, we wrestle with a God who is really given yet remains Absolute Mystery.

Ultimately, there’s quite a bit in this brief chapter. The heart of the matter is this: God is not just beyond every assertion but also beyond every denial.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

The immensity of this work of Christ, a work incomprehensible to the angels, so St. Paul tells us, cannot then be enclosed in a single explanation, nor in a single metaphor. The very idea of redemption assumes a plainly legal aspect: it is the atonement of a slave, the debt paid for those who remained in prison because they could not discharge it. Legal also is the theme of the mediator who reunited man to God through the cross. But these two Pauline images, stressed again by the Fathers, must not be allowed to harden, for this would be to build an indefensible relationship of rights between God and humanity. Rather must we relocate them among the almost infinite number of other images, each like a facet of an event ineffable in itself. Looming large in the Gospel are the Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep, “the strong man” who triumphs over the brigand, ties him up and takes his spoils from him, the woman who rediscovers and cleans the drachma where the image of God lies printed beneath the dust of sin. Liturgical texts, particularly during Holy Week, have for their leit-motif the theme of the victorious warrior who destroys the enemies and breaks down the gates of Hell where, as Dante writes, “their banners enter in triumph.” There abound also in the Fathers images of a physical order: that of the purifying fire, and particularly that of the doctor who heals the wounds of the people. Indeed, since Origen, Christ is the Good Samaritan who tends and restores human nature wounded by brigands, that is, by the demons. Finally, the theme of sacrifice is much more than a metaphor. It is the culmination of a typology which participates in the very reality it announces, in the “blood of Christ” offered “in a spirit of eternity,” as is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where this image completes in death the legal symbolism. ~Vladimir Lossky, Orthodoxy Theology: An Introduction (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), pp. 111-112.

Much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes that there is a simple answer to the question of how Jesus saves, usually some form of penal substitutionary atonement. Since I’ve returned to the Bible belt, I’ve noticed this cropping up even more, but it is never really absent in a society where conservative evangelicals are the loudest Christian voices.

Lossky, drawing heavily from the Scriptures and the liturgy, as well as the Fathers, comes up with a number of metaphors, all of which surround the immense and ineffable mystery of the saving work of Christ. We might add to the mix or question Lossky’s particular emphases, but that’s beside the point I’m trying to make, namely that there is astounding breadth, even in the most traditional of materials.

I suspect that the attempts to zero in on one metaphor to the exclusion of others equally well attested in tradition amount, in fact, to heterodoxy. Penal substitution is, arguably, not present in the early tradition at all (though it is a kind of development of what Lossky calls the metaphor of redemption). In my view, the one-sidedness of zeroing in on a single metaphor, where Scripture and tradition are internally diverse, is the root of heresy in the worst sense. It is far more dangerous than the particulars of the option chosen. We can highlight certain metaphors and bring their implications into focus (even as we downplay or sideline others), without either undoing their tension with other voices in the tradition or subverting the provisional character of all true Christian witness. At a minimum, Christian witness is provisional because it dares to speak of the ineffable God.

Often, the early witnesses, like the contemporary Body, are diverse for a reason. Theology too, like the human beings who do it, stands at the foot of the Cross, waiting on the gift and promise that consummates all things in Christ. May that Gift, the Holy Spirit, bind us in charity and lead us now and always into Truth.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog