David H. Fisher Instructor in Theology
The School of Theology
University of the South Sewanee, Tennessee
published in The St Luke’s Journal of Theology Vol XVIII no 4 1975
and reproduced here with the necessary permissions
Preface
If the leaders of any ecclesiastical organization at present existing were transported back to the sixteenth century, and stated their full beliefs, historical and doctrinal, either in Geneva or in Spain, then Calvin, or the Inquisitors, would have been profoundly shocked, and would have acted according to their habits in such cases. Perhaps, after some explanation, both Calvin and the Inquisitors would have had the sense to shift the emphasis of their own beliefs.(1)
It is more than a year since an event took place which is not likely to secure universal approval for inclusion in the church’s calendar as a feast day – although some might agree to make it a fast day! Since that time, even the briefest survey of a growing pile of articles and newspaper clippings indicates that all of us have “acted according to our habits in such cases”: there have been subsequent “illegal, irregular, or invalid” services held in divers places, and the ponderous legal machinery of the church has been set creaking into motion, with prayers that it will not self-destruct in five seconds – or years. Most of us, however, are left in a kind of ecclesiastical and theological limbo. Like the tragic-comic figures in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we hope for the arrival of Monsieur Godot, that problem – solving paragon who will resolve the messiness and ambiguity of our situation, and meanwhile, we wait.(2)
The following comments are made in the hope that a theological reflection on the symbolic meaning of the events of July 29th in Philadelphia may be of use in this period of waiting.
The comments set forth here are not an attempt to resolve the much debated issues of canonical status. Daniel B. Stevick, one of the church’s leading canonists, has already written an article entitled “What About the Canons? “(3) in which he defines the secondary place of canons within the life of the church:
The church is not constituted by law; it is constituted by the gift and act of God; it exists for worship, witness, and service. The church’s primary account of itself is not juridical, but theological; and theology is an explication of the gospel; and the gospel is a loving, freeing, dignifying act of God for all people. The church always has direct access to that gospel by which its life is led and corrected. The gospel can lead into new forms of obedience and ministry, and when that happens, canons must scramble to keep pace.(4)
Dr. Stevick provides several instances in which canonical forms have recognized de facto decisions taken within the church: the rise of monastic communities within Anglicanism followed by canonical recognition; new marriage canons written after new patterns of marriage had been developed in society and met responsibly by pastors; canons now being drafted to cover the position of bishops who assist in dioceses but have not been elected as suffragans or coadjutors. He further poses what he believes to be the proper question for ecclesiastical law-breakers: not the simplistic “Have you broken the law?” but “Has your conduct been faithful to that account of Christian faith, community and life to which both you and the institutional church owe obedience and by which you and the community are willing to be corrected? Has your action brought the implication of the gospel into fuller engagement with the life of our time?”(5)
Nor, finally, are these comments an attempt to resolve the complex and highly technical theological issue of the validity of the Philadelphia ordinations. The report issued by the Reverend Professors Richard A. Norris, Eugene R. Fairweather, J. E. Griffiss, and Albert T. Mollegen at the request of the Rt. Rev. Robert R. Spears, entitled “A Report on the Validity of the Philadelphia Ordinations,” constitutes in my opinion a definitive judgment on that question.(6) Whether the arguments will be convincing to all within the church is, of course, one of the issues open to debate at this meeting. Here, it must suffice to state that the central issue is not whether or not the ordinations were, or were not, valid; it is assumed that they were. Rather the issue is, What is the most adequate theological interpretation of the symbolic intent of the event? If, in other words, it is granted that the bishops intended to ordain priests, and the deacons involved intended to be ordained priests, there is also the question of symbolic intent, extending beyond the immediate intent to ordain.
“The symbol gives rise to thought”
These words, taken from the concluding chapter of Paul Ricoeur’s work, The Symbolism of Evil (7) suggest the course to be taken in these reflections on the Philadelphia ordinations of July 29. By its very nature, any symbol, whether in the form of a text or an action, constitutes a basis for reflection. In the context of Christian liturgy, it is equally true that the symbol of the Eucharist gives rise to action. The words of dismissal at the conclusion of the second rite in Services for Authorized Use indicate this imperative: “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.” (8) Communion with the Risen Lord within the context of the community of faith, within the context of his Eucharistic presence, leads inescapably into the diaconal and kerygmatic life of the church as a pilgrim community.
It is clear, from a reading of the letters written by the participants in the Philadelphia ordinations, that a major thrust of their symbolic act was towards an actional response, which they, by their words and deeds, intended to evoke fromVthe church. At the same time, one of the tasks of theological reflection is to uncover the symbolic world, the mythos, underlying any given symbol. This is true principally in the hermeneutical process of the interpretation of the texts of Scripture, but it is also true in the case of symbolic actions. The symbol gives rise to thought. This means that we need to understand that world which gave rise to the symbol, and to classify (so far as it is possible to do so while respecting the integrity of the text or action) the symbol into its proper genre or type.
The mythic context
Men act in large measure, in the light of the futures which they envision or project. But the raw material for their action comes from remembered ideas, words, events, images and models. Thus, their search for usable futures in any era will be grounded in their view of particular pasts. At some times a past will seem easily accessible; at other times, very little in it will speak directly to a later generation: it will seem useless for the formation of the future and thus for the present. (9)
These words by Martin Marty in his book, The Search for a Usable Future (10) indicate the scope of our investigation. We are to look, in the first place, for those remembered ideas, words, events, images and models out of which those who acted in Philadelphia proceeded.
In their open letter, the ordinands state that:
Our primary motivation is to begin to free priesthood from the bondage it suffers as long as it is characterized by categorical exclusion of persons on the basis of sex. We do not feel we are ‘hurting the cause’, for the ’cause’ is not merely to admit a few token women to the ‘privilege’ of priesthood. We must rather re-affirm and recover the universality of Christ’s ministry as symbolized in that order.(11)
The three ordaining bishops stated, further, in their open letter, that:
This action is therefore intended as an act of obedience to the Spirit. … it is intended as an act of solidarity with those in whatever institution, in whatever part of the world, or whatever stratum of society, who in their search for freedom, for liberation, for dignity, are moved by the same Spirit to struggle against sin, to proclaim that victory, to attempt to walk in newness of life. We pray this action may be, as we intend it, a proclamation of the Gospel … (12)
Finally, the Rt. Rev. Antonio Ramos, Bishop of Costa Rica, in his statement to the press, suggested that:
The basic issue as I see it is the following: Is the Church committed to and an instrument of the liberating Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, through his life, death and resurrection has abolished and broken down the walls of separation, freeing us to be fully human? . . . This event today stands as a prophetic witness on behalf of the oppressed. (13)
These texts, taken together, suggest both an affirmation and a rejection of certain images and models from the past of the Christian tradition. Negatively, the image rejected is that of a subordinate status for women as an oppressed group within the church, symbolized cultically by the dominance of an exclusively male priesthood. Thus, part of what was being rejected was the association of priesthood with masculinity, and not only masculinity, but with some of the historically founded images associated with masculinity in tradition. These include assertiveness, powerfulness, domination, and control, against which, at least implicitly, the model of the priesthood as a servant priesthood was being set forth. In short, part of the rejected image was an image of priesthood as masculine, in the name of the universality of Christ’s servanthood, and in the name of those who have been oppressed by the masculine priesthood in its institutional form.(14)
At the same time, the overtones of the three bishops’ statement, and Bishop Ramos’ statement, indicate that the event was also a rejection of images of male dominance and sexism within our Christian past and our contemporary culture. Thus, the act of ordaining women to the priesthood was intended not only to minister to the church and its ministry, but at the same time to proclaim the church’s solidarity with those throughout the world, women, poor, black, oppressed, who were and are struggling towards freedom and dignity against their several forms of bondage. In this sense, the action was an action of Christ against culture, proclaiming the transcendent freedom of God to man against the human forms of bondage symbolized by sin. (15)
Prophetic actions, such as the event in Philadelphia, always imply a condemnation of the negative, yet at the same time affirm the positive. In the passages cited, the positive is clearly the notion of freedom in Christ, of Christ as the liberator from all forms of bondage, whether those are culturally and historically derived, or implicit in man’s nature as fallen. The Biblical text emblazoned on the altar frontal was Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Professor Robin Scroggs, in a recent article, “Paul and the Eschatological Woman: Revisited,” (16) has attempted to carry out a detailed examination of authentic Pauline teaching, and there notes of the Galatians passage that “This is clearly a fragment of a baptismal formula that Paul is here quoting. The church, not just Paul himself, proclaimed the complete equality within the community of all people and groups. Distinctions between groups remain. Values and roles built upon such distinctions are destroyed.” (17) He goes on to examine the only two texts within the authentic Pauline canon (18) which might be cited in support of a male supremacist position, 1 Cor. 7 and 1 Cor. 11:12-16, and concludes that the real Paul has a theology of liberation, a baptism of liberation, and a practice of liberation, with the ultimate citation being, not Gal. 3:28, but 2 Cor. 3:17: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (19)
The force of Professor Scroggs’ argument is that the central Pauline proclamation is a proclamation of freedom in Christ, of which the formula in Galatians 3:28 following is but one example. In response to Professor Scroggs, Professor Elaine H. Pagels, the scholar of Gnosticism, notes agreement with Professor Scroggs’ thesis that Paul had indeed a vision of human liberation, but that “… he is not able to sustain that vision without ambivalence.” (20) According to Professor Pagels, Paul, while able to sustain the thrust of his vision in his treatment of the divisions between Jews and Gentiles (in violation of his own childhood training and deepest religious convictions) was nevertheless unable to challenge the institutions which regulated discrimination and subordination of slaves and women:
Certainly he recognizes both slaves and women, like the Gentiles, as full and equal members of the community of Christ. Within the shared life and worship of the community he both advocates and practices equality with them. . . . But, in passages cited by Christian slaveholders until recent times, he urges slaves to realize that they do not need abolition of slavery to know themselves as”freedmen in the Lord”; the married woman is to acknowledge her traditional subordination to her husband (1 Cor 11)…. This seems a double standard: to continue observing kosher laws is to deny ‘”the freedom for which Christ died,” but to continue observing social, political, and marital laws and conventions remains acceptable, even commendable! Although the “new humanity” has transformed the entire relationship between Jews and Gentiles, Paul does not allow it to challenge the whole structure of the believer’s social, sexual, and political relationships.(21)
She finds the roots of Paul’s ambivalence in his desire for both liberation and order, and proposes that, while accepting gladly his powerful conviction that “in the Lord there is liberty,” we cannot defer the promise of equality between the sexes to an indefinite future, to the eschaton. Further, she reminds us that we may need to deal with the fact that change in traditional social forms will involve us in a good bit of disorder, emotionally, socially, and politically: “Liberty and order are much less compatible than Paul (or many of us) apparently would like to believe.” (22)
This debate between two New Testament scholars illustrates some of the problematic features of an attempt to fashion for ourselves a usable future, out of certain images within our tradition. Anglicans, in particular, with our reverence for decency and order, may need to re-evaluate that reverence in the light of the gospel and in particular in the light of the symbolic event of Philadelphia. For if we are to take seriously the Biblical basis for this action, the Pauline images employed in the act, the consequences stretch far beyond the immediate issue of the ordinations in Philadelphia. The consequences open up the whole debate within the church over the status of charismatic gifts, over revision of our liturgy, and over priorities for mission in the last quarter of the twentieth century. If we are to live, as a pilgrim community, under the image of Christ as our suffering liberator, the consequences imply more depth of theological reflection than has been forthcoming thus far. (23)
An acted parable
The preceding discussion may have begun to clarify some of the images, positive and negative, within the Christian past, out of which those who acted in Philadelphia proceeded. There still remains the question of the genre of the act. At the risk of extending a Biblical category beyond its proper limits, I propose that ordinations can best be understood as an acted parable, in which the familiar and common were used to image the new and unexpected. Acted parables only make sense within an open community, a pilgrim church, which, as Marty suggests, . . cannot demonstrate that the Church is one or holy or catholic or apostolic. It is each of these by mandate and promise, in genesis and fulfillment, hidden under symbols of intention and frustrated by finitude in the present situation.”(24) A parable, by its metaphoric connection between the familiar and the unimaginable, is an attempt to go beyond the “frustrations of finitude.” T. S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets, bemoaned the inadequacy of words which strain and break, but he knew, as all poets do, that words— and symbolic getures, which are a kind of speaking—are all that we have.
The category of acted parable is, I believe, particularly apt because of the combination of the 1928 Prayer Book rite, the presence of bishops consecrated by and for the church, to accomplish a new thing, both for church and for world. The action was, as the authors of the report on validity state, an ecclesial action. “That it was just that is most clearly attested by the fact that they, and the persons whom they ordained, are presently under discipline in the Church for the irregularity of their act. They (the bishops) acted neither apart from the Church nor independently of it, but extra-legally within it. Their action, therefore, was precisely not that of episcopi vagantes; it was an ecclesial exercise of episcopal order, carried out in response to, and with reference to, a communally-based conviction and desire. (25) Yet just as the action was, as it were, rooted in the life of the church, it was also a call to the church to undertake a journey beyond itself. Like the call of Abram out of the comforts of Haran, the call from Philadelphia was and is a call to new forms of witness which go far beyond the immediate question of women in ministry. The true measure of the efficacy of that call will lie not only in the specific response of the church in General Convention to the question of what to do with eleven women priests and four bishops, but also in the posture which the church assumes in relation to a whole range of questions. From the reaction thus far, according to habit, the efficacy of the call seems in doubt.
In a sense, New Testament scholars tell us, the entire life of Jesus was a parable, a parable of God’s relationship to man and the world, (26) in which the inherited images of God as judge, ruler, and wrath are combined with images equally present in tradition but muted, of patience, love, humility, and suffering. There have been and will be consequences to us all from what took place at Philadelphia, and not the least of these may be the recovery of some sense of humility and testing by suffering, out of which, in hope, a redemptive future may come. If it does, the acted parable which combined old rites and new hope will have borne fruit.
The task that is set before us as a community of theologians is always a reflective task, one which seeks to discern, amidst the conflicting images of hope and despair, sin and redemption, the place where the gospel speaks. It is a task which demands sensitivity, not only to the intentionality which lies behind our experience as a community, embodied in tradition, but also a sensitivity to the place and time in which we stand, in which we are called to act out the life in Christ that is ours by faith. I believe that Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in his book, The Christian Future, sets out the parameters of that task, toward which this essay has been a contribution. He says:
The fear of the custodians of the Christian faith, that the spirit of the time is wrong, is as useless as the pride of men of the world that the spirit of their time is always right. This spirit must be made to serve. God is the father of all spirits. And we have not understood Him to the degree to which He demands our understanding, befoje we have made the spirits of all times interacting and contemporary. (27)
To make the spirits of all times interacting and contemporary: that was what was involved, parabolically, in Philadelphia. And Rosenstock-Huessy holds out a promise that follows on that action:
If we have the courage to do this, we may enjoy the rhythm of peace. For peace is not sleep and the torpor of non-movement. Peace is not suspended animation. Peace is the rhythm of a community which is still unfinished, still open to its true future. (28)
The question raised by the acted parable in Philadelphia is, Does the image there presented call us towards our true future? (29)
NOTES
1. Alfred North Whitehead, “Immortality,” in Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (La Salle: Open Court, 1951), p. 700. The context of Whitehead’s comment is his sustained protest against what he called the “fallacy of the perfect dictionary,” the notion that exactness and absolute precision in philosophical or theological terminology serve as the proper goal of the respective fields. The essay cited ends with the words, “The exactness is a fake.” The difficulty in attending to the theological symbolism of an event as ambiguous as that of July 29th is, on a process theological understanding of the nature of a dogmatic statement, no more difficult than any attempt to formulate a doctrine with pretensions to absolute precision.
2. The image of Godot as a “problem-solving paragon” is taken from Hugh Kenner’s essay, “The Cartesian Centaur,” in Martin Esslin, ed., Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965). Godot, according to Kenner, . . typifies “Cartesian Man in excelsis, the Cartesian Centaur, body and mind in close harmony: the mind set on survival, mastery, and the contemplation of immutable relativities, the body a reduction to uncluttered terms of the quintessential machine,” but concludes that, “It is plain why Godot does not come. The Cartesian Centaur was a seventeenth-century dream, the fatal dream of being, knowing, and moving like a god” (ibid., pp. 56-61). Part of the whole protest of women engaged in the renewal of the Church’s life is directed against precisely this sort of dualistic dream; see, for example, Rosemary Ruether, Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1972).
3. Daniel B. Stevick, “What About the Canons?” unpublished full draft of an article prepared for The Witness magazine.
4. Ibid., p. 7.
5. Ibid., p. 11. Bringing the implications of the gospel into fuller engagement with the life of our time is a complex process. Johann Baptist Metz, in his essay on “Prophetic Authority,” in Jurgen Moltmann et al. Religion and Political Society (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1974;, pp. 175-209, wrestles with the problems of this task, suggesting that “The Church is the public memory of the freedom of Jesus and also the proclaimer of a freedom that is still coming to man. This freedom is God’s eschatological history of liberation, constituted in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. . . . Wherever the eschatological character of freedom is forgotten and the history of freedom is regarded as completed and fulfilled, ‘freedom’ becomes an idea which justifies totalitarian domination of one man, class, race, nation, or group over another” (p. 205).
6. Richard A. Norris, Eugene R. Fairweatner, J. E. Griffiss, and Albert T. Mollegen, “A Report on the Validity of the Philadelphia Ordinations,” unpublished ms. H. E. J. Cowdrey, in an article on “The Dissemination of St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Holy Orders During the Later Patristic Age,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 20 (1969): 448-481, presents a clear and lucid treatment of Augustine’s understanding of validity, and suggests that, “What he (Augustine) taught was not a contradiction of Cyprian’s position, so much as a decisive stage in its gradual revision…. As Augustine . . . made the point, outside the Church, a man might validly receive the sacramentum: the external ministerial act that God’s work in Christ guaranteed; only inside it could he have the res (effectus, virtus) sacramenti: the spiritual benefit that accrued when the recipient was received into the unity of the Church” (pp. 450-452). Sounder scholarship would have rendered impossible a judgment of invalidity, even on the assumption, disputed in the report, that the ordinations in Philadelphia constituted either a de facto orde jure schismatic act. As several commentators have noted, the resolution of the House itself flirts with, if it does not actually commit, an illegal act, to the extent that it appears to have the force of a declaratory judgment by that body sua sponte, for which there is no existing canonical authority!
7. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). I have deliberately refrained from giving even a cursory summary of the growing literature on the hermeneutics of symbols and texts, g
8. Authorized Services 1973, Expanded Edition (New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1973), p. 68.
9. Martin E. Marty, The Search for a Usable Future (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 11. Marty clarifies further his suggestion when he notes that “To speak of the sense of a useless past, then, is not to take a nihilist’s view of historical life but rather to point to the creative possibility of the moment” (p. 12). The same note is sounded by Richard R. Niebuhr in his Experiential Religion (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1972), when he suggests that, “In order therefore to live in the church as a communion building up to a new and true humanity, he has to begin by reconstituting himself out of the confused materials his (radial man’s) times afford him. He has first to collect himself. The inventing that is a coming in, an act of moral imagination, requires a sister action, that of forming or collecting oneself. . . . The inventing of faith is not the fabricating of faith. Religious man can no more fabricate faith than homo intellectus can originate reason. Inventing is being witness to the throwing of a different light upon the familiar. … So the Christian of the radial world invents his faith. He is compelled to do so, because the Faith of the Church. . . is an accomplished thing, in which he has no part” (pp. 21-22). Further support of the dimensions of this task is proposed by Shunji F. Nishi in “Toward a Prolegomenon to an Apologetic Theology,” The Anglican Theological Review, Supplementary Series, no. 4 (September, 1974):92-117.
10. See . 9 above.
11. An Open Letter.
12. An Open Letter of the Bishops.
13. Press Statement, p. 2.
14. For a fuller treatment of the dimensions of this rejection, see the paper by Dr. Ruth T. Barnhouse in this issue.
15. The theme of political theology, and theology of liberation, is a topic too vast for treatment here. In addition to the works cited above, however, see Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973), the several works by Moltmann on this theme, and Dorothee Soelle, Political Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972).
16. Robin Scroggs, “Paul and the Eschatological Woman: Revisited,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974): 532-537. Professor Scroggs cites the original article JAAR 40 [1972]: 283-303 which provoked a good deal of controversy from several quarters.
17. Scroggs, “Paul. .. Revisited,” p. 533.
18. The question of the authenticity or inauthenticity of writings traditionally associated with Paul is, of course, a matter for continued debate among New Testament scholars. Scroggs, however, makes this a major point in his presentation when he says, “The authentic Paul must be separated from the pseudo-Paul. That means the elimination of the letters to Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastorals from consideration because most scholars believe these to have been written in Paul’s name after his death. All the chauvinist passages usually quoted against Paul are in this secondary literature, with one exception. The one exception is 1 Cor 14:33&-36, where women are admonished to keep silent in church meetings. They are not even to ask questions. For several reasons scholars have considered for years the possibility that this passage is a later insertion into the original letter. Chief of these is that it blatantly contradicts what Paul has just finished saying in 1 Cor 11, where women, he clearly states, not only can ask questions but can also preach and pray publicly” (ibid., p. 533).
19. The most extensive treatment of the liberating context provided by Jesus’ ministry is Ernst Kasemann’s Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), although the same theme receives some discussion in Leander E. Keck, A Future for the Historical Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), and in Peter C. Hodgson, Jesus:Word and Presence (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).
20. Elaine H. Pagels, “Paul and Women: A Response to Recent Discussion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42(1974): 544.
21. Ibid., p. 545. There may, of course, have been practical reasons operating here. As Pagels notes, following Cartlidge, the distinction between Jew and Gentile was, from the perspective of the larger society, a sectarian squabble. However, from the perspective of the larger society in which we find ourselves, the issue of women’s ordination is seen in the same light. .. .
22. Ibid., p. 548. Robert Bellah, in his recent book, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), reminds us of the historical and political dimensions of this conflict when he suggests that “If these acts of liberation did not contain elements of antinomianism and anarchism they would not be genuine, for the old authority must be radically broken before the new order can be born. But unless the free act of liberation moves rapidly toward an act of institution or constitution, an act not of throwing off the past but of establishing the future, then even the liberation itself turns into its opposite”(p. 34). Taking due note of the tension between liberty and order is not a call for anarchism, but it is a call for considering a wider context. Whitehead provides one of the most extensive of contexts available to contemporary thought for combining elements of freedom and order in his process cosmology in which elements of determinacy are combined with elements of radical freedom.
23. Niebuhr, in Experiential Religion, evokes the task of considering consequences when he calls on “radial man” “… to map anew the changing shapes of the religious and other great fields of human thought and action. He must become the cartographer of the times in his own mind…. He is himself both the terrain and the scale of projection. This is enough to make any man uneasy,” p. 17. The immediate probable consequences of embracing the kind of diversity represented by the Philadelphia ordinations is a living out of the historical heritage of Anglican comprehensiveness and tolerance at a depth as yet unplumbed.
24. Marty, Search, p. 82. The image of the church as a pilgrim community was the central argument put forth by me and others in our recent article in the Virginia Churchman in response to the work of the Theological Committee of the House of Bishops. Marty notes the limitations of the pilgrim metaphor: “The pilgrim metaphor seems at first too modest, too feminine, too passive: the Church is seen as a victim of history, unable to establish its claim anywhere. Or it may have a sectarian tendency toward lack of responsibility for culture: let the world set itself up, and then let the Church make its way rejecting almost everything,” but he continues that “The positive rejoinder to such charges takes its root in the doctrine of high risk = high yield. Venturing as a pilgrim, exilic, displaced, diasporal church is an act of faith; promise is on the side of such acts” (pp. 142-143).
25. Norris et al., “Report,” p. 13.
26. See especially Leander Keck, A Future for the Historical Jesus, pp. 243-249.
27. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future: Or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 243.
28. Ibid. Metz makes the same point when he says, “Traditionalism could never be a theological characteristic of the missionary Church of Jesus Christ; traditionalism is a characteristic of the sect. … Whenever the Church does not face up to the challenges of the modern history of freedom, it runs the risk of itself becoming a sect, and thus losing its identity. The Church, as the Church of the Son, cannot preserve its identity by cutting itself off from the ‘strangeness’ of the historical world. It is the characteristic mark of the Church that it cannot possess its identity simply by the pure reproduction of its own traditions” (Religion and Political Society, p. 195).
29. After completing the text of this article, further reading in the work of Victor Turner, and, specifically, his Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), as well as personal conversation with Professor Turner during a visit to Sewanee, convinced me of the applicability of his analysis of a social drama, and of his concepts of liminality, structure, and communitas, to a more adequate understanding of the Philadelphia event. Lacking training in the field of anthropology, I have refrained from re-writing the entire article on this basis, but would summarize theses arising from Turner’s work as follows: those who acted in Philadelphia were attempting to establish, and established, a sense of communitas within the structured church through an action which breached the norms of that structure. The event was characterized by features of liminality for the participants. Further, in terms of the analysis of a social drama presented by Turner, we have passed through the phases characterized breach and crisis, and are now in the phase that Turner calls redressive action, in which, “In order to limit the spread of crisis, certain adjustive and redressive ‘mechanisms,’. . . informal or formal, institutionalized or ad hoc, are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system” (p. 39). In his discussion of this phase Turner commends special attention to it, and further notes:
It is in the redressive phase that both pragmatic techniques and symbolic action reach their fullest expression. For the society, group, community, association, or whatever may be the social unit, is here at its most “self-conscious” and may attain the clarity of someone fighting in a corner for his “betwixt and between,” and, as such, furnishes a distanced replication and critique of the events leading up to and composing the “crisis”. . . . When redress fails there is usually regression to crisis. At this point direct force may be used, in varied forms. . . . Where the disturbed community is small and relatively weak vis-a-vis the central authority, however, regression to crisis tends to become a matter of endemic, pervasive, smouldering factionalism, without sharp, overt confrontations between consistently distinct parties (p. 41).
If these theses and Turner’s analysis are correct, then unless the church as a whole finds means of redress agreeable to all parties, either before or by Minneapolis, 1976, the results may be what so many fear with some justification: the continuing Balkanization of an already divided church.