Believing by proxy

A short passage in Volume Three of Tillich's Systematic Theology sparked a lively discussion Tuesday. Tillich maintains that what it means to be a Christian at the most basic level is not believing that Jesus is the Christ, but wishing to affiliate with a community that does believe he's the Christ. Tillich wants to assure people who are struggling with the whole symbol-system that is Christianity that their doubts do not disqualify them from Church fellowship.

In other words, If you can't believe, rest assured that the Church can believe for you.

There's something right and true and proper about this. It agrees with the observation that my friend David once made in a sermon on Doubting Thomas. Despite his lack of faith, Thomas did not forsake the community of believers, nor did they cast them out. Because they kept faith with each other, an opportunity arose for Thomas to profess faith in the Risen Christ. I have shamelessly and without attribution incorporated this point into many a sermon on the Sunday after Easter (Doubting Thomas is always the gospel lesson for Easter two), and now I offer it to any desperate preachers out there reading this blog come Saturday night.

A logical but unstated corollary of Tillich's argument is that the Church as a whole, and its clergy in particular, are not free to doubt in a way that individual parishioners are.

This makes perfect sense to many. Oddly enough, I suspect that there are a lot people in the pews who doubt the Virgin birth, the resurrection, even life after death who would not be comforted if their pastor or their denomination voiced similar reservations. Far from it. They'd be aghast.

This situation sounds hypocritical, but in some sense it's necessary. Many doubters aspire to greater clarity and conviction in their faith. If the Church in its creeds and clergy doesn't uphold a faith that the laity doesn't hold but would like to hold, then how can they lead the flock? To lead, you've gotta be out front a little bit, not back there in the pack with the masses.

Lee once wrote,

Personally, I want my pastor to be more theologically conservative than I am. As a layperson I prize my freedom to explore theological possibilities and entertain outlandish and even heterodox theories. Not to say that we should have a double standard for laypeople and clergy, or that laypeople don’t have responsibilities to uphold the faith–we do, as part of our baptismal covenant. But someone who is called to the pastorate/priesthood carries a much heavier and more public burden to hew to orthodoxy in preaching, teaching, and leading worship.

and I think he's getting at this unstated but logical implication of Tillich's invitation to the doubters to hang in there with the Church.

And yet this situation does seem to be rife with problems. First, while Tillich, as any good Lutheran might, refuses to require any good works from believers, even intellectual ones, the idea that the Church can serve as a kind of faith proxy for the individual sounds just like the late Medieval Catholic system Luther himself so violently revolted against. 

Second, are we not in a situation where the laity outsource their discipleship to the clergy? They can believe that stuff, even if we can't or won't. And their lives can manifest the virtue of poverty, even if we can't or won't in our lives; we'll make sure of it by paying them accordingly! And I may hit every lesbian bondage-themed club in every distant city I travel to on business, but I expect my minister to preach and live traditional family values.

We have a word for people who believe that there are rules, only they're for other people: sociopaths.

Third, ordination is a yoke, but is it a muzzle? If a clergy person has fallen into the depths of despair, or is entertaining serious doubts about the faith (and these things do happen), don't we compound his or her spiritual dilemma by requiring him/her to hew to the party line whether he/she believes it or not? Don't we wind of making liars out of doubters?

There is a solution to this dilemma and that's to require the same commitment to orthodoxy and orthopraxis of the laity that we require of the clergy. Put differently, the high bar would be at the sacrament of baptism and the rite of confirmation, not the rite of ordination.

Only one problem: the laity would revolt. They might well view raising the price of admission to a level they could not pay if they weren't already in a form of hypocrisy all its own. And they might be right.

Mainline Protestants are largely Tillichian in their at-homeness in the world. We'll baptize practically anybody, even kids whom we know will never darken the doors of our churches again. We can worship God just as well at the beach as we can with our sisters and brothers around the communion table. Or so we'll tell ourselves this summer. In general, it's easier to join a mainline Protestant congregation than it is to get a job waiting tables at Ruby Tuesday. 

There's something not right about that situation.

The boundaries between Church and world are extremely porous. Half a century ago Tillich would have celebrated this condition, but given the Church's institutional malaise and feeble witness, one wonders if a brighter, whiter line needs to be drawn, not at the doors itself, but at the rites of formal entry.

Comments

[Camassia]

Raising the barriers to entry, initially at least, might put an even greater burden on the clergy. There'd be the whole, "Who are you, sinner, to say I'm not good enough to join your club?" phenomenon that has long plagued Catholicism. Especially since I don't see how you can tighten admission requirements without also tightening requirements for existing members, and thus start excommunicating people. So it might become even more hazardous for a cleric to show weakness or doubt.

In my extremely anecdotal experience, the discipleship/exclusiveness thing works the other way around. If a church has a strong culture, the members are self-selecting. I recall a Unitarian blogger remarking that, theoretically, there's nothing to stop Jerry Falwell from joining the church (this being back when he was alive), but there's no reason he'd want to. In a kind of similar way I removed myself from PMC. How you change culture in an old mainline church, though, I don't know.

[Camassia]

BTW, the old psych student in me is getting peeved at the way people are throwing around the word "sociopath" at every instance of callousness and duplicity out there. There's a point where medical terms degenerate into name-calling (observe the trajectory of the word "retarded").

[Marvin]

"Hypocrites," then?

[Camassia]

Hypocrites works. And I suppose it's more biblical ... at least in the translations I've read.

[Lee]

I think I disagree with Tillich's definition of what it means to be a Christian. Theoretically, on his account, you could have a Christian community made up entirely of people who wanted to associate with a community that believes Jesus is the Christ, but none of whom themselves believed Jesus is the Christ! That seems like a reductio ad absurdum to me.

If we're offering minimal definitions of what it means to be a Christian, I think a better one would be someone who sees in Jesus the word (or logos, or wisdom) of God made flesh and who follows him and tries to make him their Lord. In that sense, there can't really be faith by proxy. But I think the theological articulation of what it means to hold this faith leaves a lot of room for disagreement. It's in that sense that I want the church to err on the side of conservatism--to uphold the traditional theology (although not too rigidly!). But that doesn't eliminate the need for personal faith and commitment.

[Sabio Lantz]

In Buddhism, taking refuge in the Sangha (the community of believers) is one of the major tenants. All faiths realize that to keep their numbers, belief by proxy and even praxi by proxy must be considered an option if you want the whole family to attend.

So, are we discussing spiritual truths here or just human truths?