Natural resources
Tradition without orthodoxy
by J. Rebecca Lyman

Last year I bought a satisfyingly heavy tome by Cheryl Mendelson entitled, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. Mendelson confessed herself to be of rural background, and the keeper of many lost traditions of housewifery. A child of rural grandmothers myself, but feeling rather deficient in the area of household management, I bought a copy and spent an enjoyable hour reading. Never had I loved housework so much as when I found it rationalized, and marshaled into an authoritative and accessible text!

Housekeeping, of course, has everything to do with theology, which, as we know is the art and science of creating routine, order, pleasure and safety out of the dangerous, chaotic and delightful existence we share with God and each other. As Mendelson points out, "The way you experience life in your home is determined by how you do your housekeeping." The way we experience our daily existence is equally determined by how we do our theology. Jesus may have used parables of sweeping and lamp-keeping to describe life in the reign of God, but until now most theologians have had either too little experience or interest in ordinary physical routines to repeat the metaphors.

Recovery of ordinary experience

Post-modernity, if you can still bear the phrase, has led to the rehabilitation of the material and concrete, our acceptance, if not expectation, of diversity -- and our recovery, therefore, of neglected and silenced voices. To speak of ordinary experience is simply the only way to begin to understand who we may be, both in ourselves and in relation to others.

So theology, it seems to me, has been delivered back into flesh and history, back into what, in her poem, "Natural Resources," Adrienne Rich calls, "The enormity of the simplest things:\ -- a universe of humble things,\ and without these, no memory\ no faithfulness, no purpose for the future\ no honor to the past."

Such humble history has always been problematic for theological schemes. I don't need to argue for the multiplicities of experience which history reveals: Quakers and Anglicans tell very different stories about the Restoration. I also don't need to wax nostalgic about the retrieval of the ordinary. Most of the sources and voices have been ignored or suppressed. They do not need intellectuals to call them into existence to give their lives meaning. It is rather their daily living which has supported everything else.

Who, then, preserves the continuity of faith?

"Natural Resources" I define as this basic reality of human existence, our lives as embodied, individual creatures of God. This resource transcendent orthodoxy could not and cannot embrace. "There are words I cannot choose again," writes Rich. "Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence\ before the raging stoic grandmothers: ... My heart is moved by all I cannot save\ So much has been destroyed\ I have to cast my lot with those\ who age after age, perversely,\ with no extraordinary power\ reconstitute the world."

"Orthodoxy" is a word we cannot choose again as the current intellectual and social landslide brings the raging stoic grandmothers face-to-face with the Fathers of the Church.

In my complacent liberal piety, "orthodoxy" seemed to me for a long time to be a harmless artifact, rather like a chasuble, which reminded us of the past in aesthetically pleasing, but largely irrelevant, ways. Yet, my condescension and others' rush to old norms are part of the same cognitive and emotional binary landscape of orthodoxy: To avoid extinction or dilution, we seek to define the one true faith -- and how can our particular group still define itself as best of all? Often we Christians talk about ourselves and God as if we were the lead actors in a complex drama with badly behaved supporting actors, e.g., Jews, pagans, Hindus, Muslims and heretics. For the most part we have labeled others to identify what we are not: The Jews are the stubbornly "chosen people" -- not us. The Muslims are violently exclusive -- not us. Pagans are superstitious and syncretistic -- not us. Heretics are systematic and overzealous -- not us.

Tradition rendered transcendent

How did we get to this? As Daniel Boyarin suggests in his book, A Radical Jew, Paul's vision of universality which included all people -- Jews, Greeks, women, slaves -- was based on transcending physical particularities in a new community. However, what could such radically inclusive universality rest on, if not singularity? Baptismal unity thus stood in stark contrast to the divided world, yet this transcendent universality naturally defined difference itself as opposition, especially in the context of persecution and apocalyptic beliefs. By the time of Augustine, all humanity could be divided into two cities: "In the wide world inhabited by so many different peoples with divergent religions and manners, infinitely divided in their language and clothing, there have, nevertheless, always been no more than two kinds of groups of human beings, which we can call two cities."

Contextually, Paul and Augustine are giving explanations for their religious practice: They are creating "tradition." But their voices usually come to us out of context, as disembodied texts of a transcendent truth and we forget that, in reality, historical life and religious identity were a mess: The grandmothers went to synagogues for centuries, read all sorts of texts and led lives not entirely determined by official speech. Christians read a Hebrew bible, wear Late Roman vestments, argue in Greek metaphysics and preserve European goddess festivals. This is okay, but just don't lie about it.

Ensuring identity and truth

As a Christian, I do believe that "We've a story to tell to the nations." But there are historical and theological consequences of how we tell our story about our devotion to Jesus as the decisive revelation of God. In the discourse of transcendent orthodoxy our proclaimed singularity has for the most part hampered interfaith dialogue, prompted us to lie about our origins, and made the reality of our own interior diversity hell.

Historically, "orthodoxy" emerged from the 2nd century to the 5th century as a powerful means of ensuring identity and truth in the midst of sectarian conflict and state persecution. Diversity is not denied in orthodoxy, but it is disciplined by hierarchy. "Orthodoxy" ordered the "traditions," i.e., the oral and written stories about Jesus, and tested the "authority" of individuals who claimed to be "apostolic." I am not sure the varied urban centers of Christian mission needed "orthodoxy" to survive. Orthodoxy flowered, I believe, because within Roman culture itself unity and diversity were threatening spiritual and political issues. The yearning for a unity on a human scale to match the transcendent God and the perfect peaceful order of the cosmos was shared by many. If tradition is the "passing on" of faith or story, orthodoxy is the codification of a certain telling of the story -- what may be included, what must be left out.

Thus, ancient "orthodoxy" thrived, I believe, not merely because of imperial power -- it would be nice to blame it all on politics -- but because its transcendent, hierarchical ordering mirrored the hopes of the urban patriarchal churches to stabilize human experience and mediate the divine mystery. Because everyone believed in an underlying Platonic unity, the few, fragile words of the creeds -- themselves the products of compromise -- were enforced as the necessary signifier of the higher One. Orthodoxy, defined as eternal and unchanging, ensured differing classes, races, places and even theological opinions held together on earth as it was held together in heaven. Heresy was rebellion against God and the community, a willful destruction of saving truth.

The problem with this theological picture, of course, is history -- I have yet to find one willful heretic; most "wrong" people were struggling with new questions of belief and practice. Yet, to preserve the unchanging transcendent truth, "orthodoxy" must lie about motivation or content and create the "dead wrong" to highlight its "living truth." As one scholar, now bishop, said to me, "It doesn't matter historically what the heretics actually taught -- it is all a foil to create orthodoxy."

So our peace of Christ rests on constant policing of demonic error which may not have existed? The temptations of this sacred binary view coupled with institutional power can defeat even the best of our born-again saints: If Augustine of Hippo, the doctor of grace, can justify coercion to end controversy in the church, we are all in trouble.

Without the diverse, articulate voices of the urban Greek East, orthodoxy in the West soon became obedience to the sole apostolic church, Rome. We paraphrase Foucault that "orthodoxy became the prison of the church" as theologians and believers alike were warned of the ease of error: The uninsulated wires of heaven can burn without ecclesiastical electricians.

True consensus fidelium

Wait, you say, what about all that stuff out on the fringes, those monks in tubs, the mystics, or Gregory the Great using pagan sites for worship? Yes, contrary to the experts or the ideology, many voices, many ages, many people existed in active, faithful lives whose theology was probably as flawed as Arius or as perfectionist as Pelagius, but in the great inchoate center of "Christian mystery" as ordinary experience, this did not destroy anything.

This persistent faith in the face of everything is the true consensus fidelium. The Reformation finally broke open the ideology of a single Christendom and the Enlightenment completed the theological diaspora of Christianity. Individual reason, the printing press and the democratization of power challenged the old central view. Yet mutual persecution for doctrinal error was merciless. At the end of the religious wars of the 16th century, Christians knew themselves to be neither alone in the world nor one.

Exile to America and elsewhere offered opportunities to found New Jerusalems, but secular tolerance kept breaking in. Do you remember that diversity and the political rights of dissenters in England drove Newman into Catholicism? Infallibility emerged as a reaction to democracy and modern science. Orthodoxy as romanticism bloomed in the 19th century. Breaking up is hard to do.

Orthodoxy, therefore, as a social and spiritual discourse fulfilled a unifying, but ultimately deadening role: The complexity of categories and transcendent authority promoted either passivity or rebellion. The violent enforcement of orthodoxy in Christian history is the necessary consequence of seeing an institution as the agent and protector of transcendent truth. Let us be clear. This righteous violence is not merely unfortunate, it is a blasphemy, the replacing of God by the church.

"Everyone knows Christians are non-violent, except Christians," commented Gandhi. The sins of ideological violence and genocide which are justly laid at the feet of modern secular states must also be traced back to our own religious passions. "Orthodoxy" was our failure in the desert: We didn't mean to choose physical security, personal power and a divine insurance plan over the way of the servant Jesus. We did, indeed, think we could drink the same cup and bear the same cross. I judge the ancestors no more harshly than they judged themselves. If, like Cranmer, Christians must recant our recantation, the struggle for integrity is worth the public humiliation.

Don't only blame the old white guys

"Orthodoxy" therefore is no mere chapter of our past, perpetrated by a lot of old white guys who have nothing to do with me or my Jesus, but in fact a living legacy of sacralized hegemonic speech, exclusive attitudes and minimal tolerance for those who disagree with us. We have paid in blood for our creeds, our liturgy, our vernacular Bible, our racial integration and the right of women to preach. We have burned each other, not "they" have burned "us." I am today heir of both persecutor and persecuted. Orthodoxy, therefore, cannot be the language for the stoic raging grandmothers. Even as "progressive," "dynamic," "radical" or "repentant" it cannot engender adequate humility, openness, renewal and surprise, for it must conceal its own historical humanity -- out of anxiety, out of love, out of passion for the truth. This temptation to replace a living God by an enforceable code continues to violate the justice, the graciousness and the true mystery of the Holy.

Embracing our world as human beings means accepting our particular contingent being -- imperfect and provisional as our theology must also be. It means respect and acceptance for eventual disagreement and the mess of negotiation which frees all voices to speak. "Tradition" is the art of human memory, renewal and continuity. Based in incarnate agents, "tradition" has fewer pretensions to divine transcendent power or singular authority. It is retrieved and renewed in the transmission of each human generation. The contextualized voices of Paul and Augustine reveal their Jewish and African heritage, their spiritual strengths and limitations. Add in Macrina, Hildegaard and Absalom Jones: Have we lost authority or started to find true catholicity? Do we see the spectrum within light, the reality of the particle which is sometimes the wave?

To be followers of Jesus, Christians in the end must refuse the temptations of hegemonic speech and action. Coercion does not fit the teaching rabbi who dined with everyone and accepted his death -- nor the Word which emptied itself, not counting equality with God a thing to be grasped. The Syrophoenician woman won the argument, the rich young man just walked away and the most consistent condemnation in the gospels is for those confident in righteousness, constant in self-serving prayer and smug in authority, who lay burdens on others they do not bear themselves. We can be passionate lovers of Jesus, but we can no longer be passionate haters. We cannot tell our stories as if there are no other stories of God to be heard.

Jesus: Venn diagram of attributes

To embrace plurality -- social, religious, scientific, experiential -- as a gift of God presents a daunting challenge. Daniel Boyarin has noted that history has given Jews only the gift of "perpetual, creative, diasporic tension." As our Reformation wears on, might we, too, learn that only our multiple theologies and histories will reveal the breadth of life in the Spirit? True catholicity lies ahead, not behind. Jesus must be a Venn diagram of attributes, with lovers and followers attached on many sides. If the faithful love and self-offering of Jesus were the theological norms, which stories would you tell me? Before the eyes of the raging stoic grandmothers, such tales could no longer be romantic or abstract. I do not know if our stories could bring us together yet, but what if the diversity of the stories was the point? "Peace is relation with another ... the inassimilable other, the irreducible other, the other unique. ... Peace is the incessant watch over this alterity," wrote the philosopher Levinas in light of the Holocaust. What if our catholicity was our protection of each other's conscience, our care of diversity as reflecting the will of a creative and good God and our acceptance of dissension based on renewed humility before a redeeming mystery? Our only security rests in this continual re-membering of our lives in God through the prism of Jesus' life and death, our contingent humanity always loved, never abandoned, infinitely wrong and forgiven as children of the risen Christ. Beyond orthodoxy is faith.

Let me end in my grandmother's kitchen. It is a hot and humid Michigan afternoon. My grandmother, my mother and I sit around the kitchen table drinking lemonade. I am enjoying listening to my grandmother gossip. My mother, the minister's wife, never does and my teenage soul is weary of her spiritual foot on my neck. My grandmother tells of the Methodist Women's Society outing to visit a local African Methodist Episcopal Church. "But, you know, they didn't eat anything, because you know whose hands made the cookies ..."

"And whose hands," interrupted my mother in a voice I had never, ever, heard her use to her mother-in-law, "and whose hands do you think have always made the cookies in your town?" Silence. We were repressed Midwesterners; we just drank more lemonade. Perhaps my mother did not change my grandmother, but her interruption changed me. I went to integrated public schools, I didn't know anyone with a maid. Yet, my world cracked open at the passion in my mother's voice as she exposed this violation of divine and human hospitality, of what women offer to other women, what basic justice the children of God owe to each other.

"What were you doing?" she seemed to ask my grandmother. "Who did you think you were?"

What are we doing? Who do we think we are? This is how, around kitchen tables in otherwise forgettable afternoons, the Gospel is made flesh, how "age after age perversely\ with no extraordinary power we reconstitute the world."

J. Rebecca Lyman is Samuel M. Garret Professor of Church History at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. This piece is an abridged version of a paper by the same title that she delivered at this year's Ephiphany West conference, Beyond Orthodoxy: Embracing Christian Pluralism Past and Present.