Occasional Papers
from
The Cathedral

A forum for the People of the Diocese of Connecticut      Published by Christ Church Cathedral

Images of Salvation
Images of The Church

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D., Rector of Saint John's Church, Stamford, Connecticut.

      Twelve Step programs on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al Anon represent one of the fastest growing spiritual movements in the country. In many parish churches more people come to 12 Step meetings during the week than come to worship on Sunday. Like many clergy, I have had a chance to observe lives change as a result of involvement in these programs. My experience of 12 step meetings is that they often have a powerful spiritual quality. I coined a phrase to describe this quality - soteriological urgency.

In many parish churches more people come to 12 Step meetings during the week than come to worship on Sunday.

     Soteriology is that part of theology which is concerned with the topic of salvation. Soter is the Greek word for saviour or healer. The topic of salvation is concerned with asking questions about what is wrong with human nature and how it gets fixed. There are all kinds of ways of asking and answering this question: religious, therapeutic, political. Anywhere that question is asked and answered with passion, anywhere human beings find themselves crying out for help, anywhere that cry for help is heard and effective help received is a place where there is soteriological urgency. There are certainly parishes and moments in the life of the greater church when there is a vivid sense of soteriological urgency, when there is a sense that something which is a matter of life and death, both to individuals and the community, is taking place. For a great many of our people and parishes, for a great deal of our institutional life, this is not true. I believe that we can get some clues about what aids and what inhibits a sense of soteriological urgency in our church life from the 12 step movements. We should not expect to find a complete solution here, for the mission of these groups is narrowly focused in a way that is not possible for churches. They provide a limited but useful metaphor.

     All of these groups are founded on desperation. By definition the group is constituted by people who have unmanageable problems that they cannot solve themselves. This is the first step. People who believe that they themselves can fix what is broken in their lives do not come to 12 step programs. The group is founded on a frank admittance of the need for help. The second and third steps are specifically spiritual. "Came to believe in a power greater than ourselves that could restore us to sanity," and "Became willing to turn our lives over to the care of God as we understood him." These three steps create a charter of soteriological urgency. People are coming out of desperation, often as a last chance, as an only hope and looking for spiritual help from a power greater than themselves. This creates a community with a powerful and persistent sense of mission and purpose.

     People who participate in these programs are very clear that their mental and physical health depend on faithful participation in the program, which includes group meetings which are the primary vehicles of healing. Through meetings, participants gain insight, healing and nurture without which they understand they could not survive. They know that only through constant and dedicated participation in the life of the group can they hope to achieve and maintain serenity (the limited and carefully circumscribed definition of salvation). The organization of group life, the roles and responsibilities of members, the understanding of mission all have a consistency and spiritual power which is not always characteristic of church life. This creates a community that is marked by a gracious sense of acceptance and affirmation. Most participants treat the life of the community with great respect, recognizing that it is literally a matter of life and death for others as well as for themselves. They come expecting to be helped by their participation in the meeting and they are not usually disappointed, despite the variability of the quality of meetings. When one is desperate, one ceases, to be picky and finicky and can often make a meal of a scrap. The life of the group is animated by the fundamental conviction that God (higher power) is at work in the life of the group. Every meeting is marked by an eager expectation based on experience by most members that they will hear something valuable and helpful. Most participants feel that simple attendence is a benefit in and of itself without which their lives would be immeasurably more difficult.

     The feeling of a 12 step meeting is to me very akin to the feeling of the early church that I get from reading the letters of Paul. It is very unlike the feeling I experience in many parish churches and in my conversations with many church people. Church is often not perceived as a matter of life or death. People often bring to it, not a conviction based on experience that they will be helped where they feel helpless, but a kind of consumer consciousness. The question is not "how does the church make an impossible life possible?" The question becomes "how does it make a good life better through providing inspiration, beauty, intellectual challenge, fellowship or the opportunity to do good?" My perception is that many people who come to church do not perceive their own sense of soteriological urgency and do not connect that urgency with the message and life of the church. This is not to say that there is not often a sense of excitement and engagement in our churches. There are indeed many satisfied customers. But the satisfaction and commitment of customers is easily lost. The church in such a mode feels like the work experience of so many contemporary people. It feels like relentless competition and comparison. Under it all there is a feeling of tentativeness. To be a consumer is by definition to threaten to take one's trade elsewhere or to not purchase at all. When the church is in this mode, the clergy inevitably become service providers who bear an inordinate responsibility for the success or failure of the enterprise. They provide something which is not absolutely necessary and which is relatively expensive. This is hardly the position from which to engage in a prophetic ministry of any kind.

     This consumer mode that I have just described is very different from the sense of soteriological urgency that I found in 12 step programs. All of the 12 step programs are built on a conviction which is not characteristic of the most popular theological perspectives. The 12 step programs are, to put it theologically, anti-universalist. They each say in their own way, "no salvation outside the church." They do this in a very humble, non-triumphalist way. It is a practical, experiential conviction rather than a metaphysical proclamation. The effect, however, is the same. These programs present themselves as indispensable for people with these problems. "You may find a solution to your problem elsewhere through some other method than following this program, but I never have, nor have I known it to happen." The official theology of the program is a theology of soteriological urgency. What you seek is here to be had only in the meetings of this community, only in following this clearly defined way of life. It is in this conviction as the foundation for community life that 12 step programs are most unlike much of the contemporary church. It is the lack of a similar conviction about the reality of the church that robs our common life of the spiritual power I call soteriological urgency. The lack of such conviction also robs us of a clear sense of mission and the will to engage in evangelism. News is only really good if you cannot possibly live without it. The lack of such conviction turns the clergy into service providers and robs them of their real role as stewards of the mysteries of salvation. It can cause clergy to cling to their professional competencies which are important but not as important as their call to a unique mediation and proclamation of the reality of God's salvation which is uniquely available in the life of the church, in its preaching, its sacraments, its fellowship and its service.

     The two most popular images of salvation which are current in the life of the Episcopal Church and most mainline churches do not lead to images of church, mission or ministry which have soteriological urgency. The two notions of salvation that most frequently show up in national debate are the liberationist and the neo-evangelical.

     The liberationist point of view is strongly influenced by the struggle of women and minorities and South American liberation theology. It understands sin primarily in terms of patterns of social and political oppression and challenges the church to social critique and political reconstruction. Neo-evangelicals use language straight out of the tradition of the American frontier revival. The focus is on the reality of the supernatural, the necessity of personal conversion, the power of prayer and spiritual healing, the ultimate reality of divine judgment and eternal consequences, heaven and hell. There are variants, subtle and thoughtful combinations, but they are relatively rare. There are elements in our church not included in either of these broad camps. There are even a few doggedly orthodox who look beyond the present disputes to the Reformation, the Caroline Divines, and the Patristic period for inspiration, but they are so few in number as to be a truly endangered species. It is enough to say, Trinity School for Ministry, and Episcopal Divinity, School and you know that I am talking about something that is real enough.

     There is not room here to do justice to either one of these major options. They both bear witness to indispensable strands of the Christian witness. I wish to point to one element they share in common. In both the liberationist and the neo-evangelical view at their most popular level the church, sacraments and holy orders are not intrinsic to the vision of salvation. In both these views, salvation can be achieved or experienced quite apart from the church, its ministry or its sacraments. If salvation is primarily a matter of a verdict, guilty or not guilty, pronounced once and for all before the divine judge, then salvation is quite complete apart from any sacramental or ecclesial life. The church and its ministers have an instrumental value but not an intrinsic value. They can help salvation happen but are not saving realities in themselves. That is why the sacraments tend to be neglected in the historically Evangelical churches. The church is primarily a political reality, a voluntary association of the saved, not a mystical, soteriological, transforming reality. That is why these churches are so prone to schism. That is why we are becoming more prone to schism.

     In the liberationist view salvation consists in the reconstruction of consciousness and society, the overturning of the structures of oppression, internal and external. Again the salvation proposed is quite possible completely outside any participation in the church as a saving mystical reality which offers participation in the life of God. If the church and its ordained ministers serve the ends of liberation, well and good. If not, the church is disposable. This accounts for the attitude of entitlement one often encounters from proponents of the liberationist view. "Yes, the church must justify its existence by the commitment of all its resources to the political struggle."

     I recognize that church, sacraments, and holy orders are important in the piety of individuals in both these camps. I want to point to the lack of connection between the vision, the concept of salvation and the understanding of ministry, sacraments and church. Both of these theologies are low church theologies of salvation. The church, its ministry, its sacraments are in both these views valuable in so far as they can be shown to serve a salvation whose locus is elsewhere and for which church membership is at best an accoutrement, an aid. "I am a Christian who happens to be a member of this church." "My membership in the church supports me in my struggle for peace and justice." Both these statements are very similar. In neither case is the church a reality which provides an answer to the human problem which can be had nowhere else. In both views, questions of church order and the meaning of ministry are questions of expediency, what works. Neither of these theologies is likely to offer a truly catholic vision of church life which unites the vision of salvation with church order, the theology of ministry and sacramental life. The most popular theologies we have necessarily cut the nerve of institutional church life. The church, its ministry, its sacraments, its preaching and fellowship are not matters of urgent necessity. No wonder we often act bored and confused.

      Our most popular understandings of salvation are heretical. By heretical I mean what is classically meant by the word, a part of the truth masquerading as the whole. The inevitable result of heresy, historically demonstrated, is destructive conflict and schism. It is easy for me to imagine an Episcopal Church that is more and more characterized by destructive conflict and party spirit. It is easy for me to imagine this increasingly conflicted and confused church having increasing difficulty engaging the religious quest of an unchurched generation. We do things which are central to our identity, consecrate bishops, participate in the Eucharist, gather in conventions which we do not understand, which we can not relate to a doctrine of salvation and therefore cannot really recommend to the uninitiated. Our trouble with evangelism is at least in part that we don't know what to say. We do not know how to make a connection between these central elements of our church and the hunger of the world to have an answer to the human problem. Our reigning popular theologies do not give us a vision of salvation that leads us to think of church, ministry or sacraments as matters of soteriological urgency. Therefore it is nearly impossible for us to make a connection between these realities and those places where contemporary people experience soteriological urgency in their lives - those places where human beings experience life as a problem, a crisis which has no human resolution-those places where the fix of being human makes human beings cry out for God, for salvation from on high.

     The life of many of our congregations and most of our life beyond the congregational level, at the level of diocese and national church is marked by a lack of soteriological urgency. We often engage in this life with the feeling that the real action is elsewhere, on the barricade, at the charismatic convention, not here. We need a contemporary theology of salvation that is high church. I am not talking about ritual or aesthetic taste, but about an understanding which gives to the church, to the sacraments, t0 all the orders of ministers, a greater sense of soteriological urgency. We need a theology of salvation which grounds an understanding of the church as a saving reality, a real means of participating in the life and love of God, without which we neither survive nor thrive. Only such a church is worthy of our deepest commitments. Only such a church can expect men and women to bet their life and death upon its common life.

     I know I raise more questions here than I answer. That is the purpose of this paper. I hope what I have written may spark a conversation among us that has soteriological urgency. As we enter upon this conversation these words from Bishop Seabury's last charge to his clergy may help. "And you will own with me, that the strongest obligations lie upon us, to hold fast, and contend earnestly for, the faith as it was once delivered to the Saints-To abide by the government, support the doctrines, retain the principles, explain the true nature and meaning of the sacraments and offices of the Church, and endeavor to restore them to that station and estimation, in which the primitive Christians placed and held them. Error often becomes popular and contagious, and then no one can tell how far it will spread, nor where end. We must in such cases recur to first principles, and there take our stand. The Bible must be the ground of our faith. And the doctrines, practices, and old Liturgies of the primitive Church will be of great use to lead us to the true meaning of the Holy Books. Judgment and prudence must no doubt be exercised: But truth must not be sacrificed to prudence, nor must judgment be warped by attachment to system, or compliance with popular error and prejudice."