Constructing Toward Catholicity

I grew up in the kind of church that plants churches without meaning to. What I mean is that their theological style (a quirky, unreconstructed mid 20th century Dispensationalism tied to a hard line four point Calvinism), posture toward other churches (virtually all of which were regarded as false churches), and unhealthy moral habits of the congregation and leadership (materialistic, arrogant, suspicious) all made church splits inevitable. Over time they had so many of them that probably a half dozen churches around town owe their existence, in one way or another, to my old church.

But mostly I don't see splits happening with them anymore and the reason why is probably interesting. With virtually any major conflict that happened prior to the mid 2000s the outcome was a church split. Since that time, there have been fewer splits and more people simply drifting away from faith altogether. But the probably interesting thing isn't necessarily that shift, but the thing that has stayed constant through all the years: Whether people leave and go to another church or leave and deconstruct before ultimately apostatizing, the thing that virtually never happens is a reconstruction ending with a more catholic Christianity.

Those who stayed Christian would found or find other churches that were usually just nicer, tamer versions of what they'd left. Those who left dismissed Christianity altogether, while still maintaining the rather bizarre and ahistorical idea that "Christianity" is synonymous with the thing they encountered in that church and, quite understandably, rejected.

What's odd, in other words, is that for all the thousands of people who have at one time attended this church and then left, very few found their way to a Christianity that isn't all those things mentioned above. They didn't find something historically rooted in the creeds and confessions of the church, something marked by traditional Christian piety, something that self-consciously saw itself as belonging to that thing C. S. Lewis described once as "terrible as an army with banners," the church catholic as she sprawls across time and space.

Indeed, as I exited that church as an angry and confused 17-year-old I was only dimly aware myself that such a thing existed. I knew with confidence that real Christians existed—I'd been around them all my life in my home. They were my parents. But I needed more than two Christian parents to help me sort through my own season of doubt and questioning—what would likely today be described as "deconstruction." After all, wasn't it possible that my parents were simply exceptionally good people whose goodness might be attributed to something other than the fact that a Jewish man who had lived 2000 years prior was actually God and had actually risen from the dead after being unjustly slain? They would've said no, of course. And I doubt I would've posed the problem to them at the time in quite those terms. But it was the problem. I had encountered the very thing Sheldon Vanauken wrote of so powerfully in his journal months before his own conversion to Christianity:

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity—and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order.

That was where I found myself in my deconstructing time. I'd lived with Vanauken's "best argument" for all my life, but had found that argument almost nowhere else despite the fact that virtually all the people I knew with any depth in my first 18 years were Christian. You can perhaps understand the problem.

It was Vanauken himself who offered me a way out, or rather it was Sheldon, his wife Davy, and their friend C. S. Lewis. By the time I picked up Vanauken's memoir, which is really more a conversion memoir than a love story, I had already read some of Lewis's work. I knew Narnia and Mere Christianity and Screwtape. I can't recall if I'd read anything else. Perhaps A Grief Observed. But A Severe Mercy, first mentioned to me by a friend at L'Abri, proved more determinative for me than anything I'd read by Lewis to that point, likely because it gave me a picture of Lewis the man and a picture of the Oxford in which Lewis and so many other "keen Christians" seemed so at home. It helped me see something I desperately needed to see: it showed me a Christian world, not just admirable Christian people.

What was this thing I found in Vanauken? I can't say better than he himself did in the fourth chapter of the book, "Encounter with Light," but I will attempt this: The Christianity that Vanauken encountered at Oxford was spacious, serious, and lofty.

It wasn't small, narrow, and repressive in the way the country club evangelicalism I knew so well was. At one point Sheldon describes he and Davy's pre-conversion faith as a kind of high paganism—a reveling in nature and human creativity, especially through the arts, but specifically defined by a constant movement upwards. Beauty was a ladder for them, but what it climbed to was not clear. A good life, certainly, and perhaps some kind of super-intelligent creative power that called the universe forth. But they couldn't say more than that.

What struck them about Oxford was not that it rebuked their paganism, at least not directly, but that it seemed to clarify and name it, perhaps even deepen it—and yet not in altogether welcome ways. On the one hand, this catholic (universal) Christianity they found at Oxford gave them ways to name the longings they felt, to name the things that had always delighted them, and even to define far more clearly the thing those longings pointed to. It told them where the ladder they'd always been climbing was actually going. And yet it turned out that where it was going wasn't, as Lewis wrote, safe. If they continued they would "know the meaning of things" and yet some of the things they cherished dearly would have to die. Here is Lewis in his first letter to Vanauken:

Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) wd. be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing even in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they cd. say to him 'Keep out! Private. This is my business?' Do you? Rats! Their first reaction wd. be (as mine was) rage and terror.

The catholic faith the Vanaukens found, precisely because it was universal, was large enough to offer consolation in ways they hadn't found elsewhere and yet also, precisely because of its spaciousness, rebuked certain things as well. One discover a world so large, after all, that its very breadth means certain things can't be allowed. A more expansive idea of health necessarily implies a more expansive idea of sickness.

Regarding its seriousness, the Vanaukens, both before and after their conversion, knew that being a Christian meant something definite—most of all it meant a definite affirmation of the resurrection of Christ. But other Christians across time would remind us as well that it meant a definite resolve to submit to Christ, no matter the consequences. This seriousness meant the materialistic "Christianity" I so often encountered as a child was best rendered in scare quotes and must be strictly distinguished from the real thing. More recently, it also strikes me that a seriousness about Christianity inherently excludes the sort of utilitarian or consequentialist reasoning so ascendant in our own unhappy day. Jesus did not attach conditions to our discipleship. He knew nothing of conditions under which hatred of enemies could be allowed, for instance. So neither should we.

The loftiness was, most of all, the thing that went to my heart on my first reading of Vanauken. At one point early in the encounter with light, Vanauken speaks of a memorable dinner he shared at one of Oxford's colleges. He speaks of being seated next to the college's warden and what he saw in that man's face and in that room:

I was placed next to Warden Sumner, and, during the dinner, he talked to me with the most charming courtesy. His face in the candlelight with the dark behind—all down the table one saw the scholarly faces and the white of shirt fronts, but the gowns merged into darkness_his face had the austere beauty of a medieval saint. All the long centuries of Oxford came to a focus in that fine-drawn beautiful face. It is engraved on my mind as one of the great things I have seen.

The thing Vanauken is marveling at is not the warden himself, but the entire world of that place. A former pastor of mine once said, while explaining to a group of indifferent college students why they should read the Bible, that we should all resolve to put ourselves in the path of that which is marvelous. It's always struck me as a perfect phrase, not simply because of its poetry but because of its quiet moral wisdom—a great deal of the moral life is not an active, self-consciously undertaken thing in which we are aspiring to be better. It is, rather, the accumulation of many acts of passive reception which are made possible by other choices we have made. The act of putting yourself in the path of the Scriptures every day will shape you. And the act of living every day the life that an Oxford don of his day could live in a place like that had shaped that warden. Vanauken was seeing where a life of moral seriousness and quiet devotion to the good could lead one–and it enthralled him. More than that, it told him what he was meant for—not perfectly or completely because it was still lacking the ultimately necessary reality of Christ. But it showed him something true and real nonetheless.

These qualities, of course, aren't the essence of catholic Christianity—the essence, I think, is found in the Scriptures, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the decalogue, and the common practices of the Christian church, carried on down through the centuries. You can have a kind of seriousness without catholicity. But the package that Vanauken encountered at Oxford and that I encountered in Vanauken and which, though I didn't realize it at the time, permanently defined my intellectual trajectory, can't be had without catholic Christianity, I think, for the lofty thing we ultimately are meant for is Christ himself, of course, and we voyage toward him through a life of moral and intellectual seriousness and find in him the spaciousness that so captivated the Vanaukens. At one point they speak of realizing what precisely Eliot meant when he described the Christian life as one of "complete simplicity / costing not less than everything." What they learned from Eliot, I learned from them.

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. Up to that point, the expressions of Christianity I had encountered were simply different forms of sectarian faith—a vapid progressivism or a parochial and narrow fundamentalism. Vanauken gave me catholicity, he gave me a way to love Jesus and confess not with reluctance but with joy that the man Jesus was also the Christ, our Lord.