Free to Leave, Free to Stay

Fruits of the Spirit and Church Choice

Jana Marguerite Bennett, Melissa Musick Nussbaum

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781556358999
  9781498211291
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630874278
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Our known world, the world of twenty-first century Americans, is shaped and defined by consumer choice. The premise of consumer choice is that somewhere the perfect fit between product and purchaser exists. In the books on changing traditions the consumerist tone prevails--fundamentalists looking for an even more literal interpretation of Scripture, Protestants "going home" to Rome, feminists heading to the womyncentric sacred grove, conservatives fleeing inclusive rites, Catholics embracing the independent seeker church. But the consumerist impulse masks the kind of prayer and discernment necessary for living in Christian community and for following God. Twenty-first century Christians do make choices, but the hope is that they do so because they follow God. How then is one to answer the question of whether to stay or leave? Through meditating on the fruits of the Spirit that Paul addressed to the church at Galatia, a community that had several of its members wondering whether to stay or leave, Bennett and Nussbaum offer sage reflections about what it means to be led into and out of Christian communions.

1

Choice

Melissa Musick Nussbaum

The Lord says, is what you want

The terrible free? And I say

To the Lord, Lord speak

—Mia Nussbaum, “The Chapter of the Rending in Sunder”

The Galatian church should have split in two. There were those in the church who believed that circumcision, the ancient sign of Jewish male identity, was the legitimate sign of Christian male identity as well. There were those, like the apostle Paul, who believed no Gentile convert needed to undergo circumcision in order to join the Christian church. Imagine a world with neither reliable anesthesia nor antibiotics, and the dimensions of the crisis are clear. This is no public acknowledgement of a creed or a going down into the waters of baptism; this is surgery.

The Galatians to whom Paul writes were not Jewish converts to Christianity. They were pagan converts and Paul’s own disciples. Other Christian missionaries had come after Paul, preaching the necessity of male circumcision. These “Judaizers,” as Paul called them, argued that the way to Christ ran through the Jerusalem temple, with all its laws and practices. Paul argues that, for Gentile converts, the Jerusalem temple, with all its laws and practices, led not to Christ, but to slavery.

The Galatians have a choice: become Jews first, and then followers of Christ, like the original apostles and brothers in Jerusalem, or follow what Paul calls “the gospel I preach to the Gentiles” (Gal 2:2b). Paul’s gospel begins not with the flesh, as suggested by the physical mark of circumcision born by Jews, but with the Spirit. He asks the Galatians, “After beginning with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?” (Gal 3:3b).

Paul is making his argument against those he says “who are disturbing you and [who] wish to pervert the gospel of Christ” (Gal 1:7b). He rails, “O stupid Galatians!” (Gal 3:1a) and pleads ill health (Gal 4:12a–15). He defends his position as God’s position.

Now I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel preached by me is not of human origin. For I did not receive it from a human being, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ. (Gal 1:1–12)

He works mightily to win, or win again, these believers to his side.

Paul knows they have a choice, to follow him or the Judaizers. He acknowledges this in the letter when he writes,

I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter to the circumcised, for the one who worked in Peter for an apostolate to the circumcised worked also in me for the Gentiles . . . (Gal 7b–8a)

There are devout Christians who are both circumcised and not, and Paul clearly wants to keep the Galatian converts he has won both Christian and uncircumcised.

Paul knows the Galatians have a choice, but he does not want to suggest that the choices are of equal value. Why can’t pagan converts submit to Jewish law as long as they believe in the crucified and risen Christ? Paul answers by way of another question:

Now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and destitute elemental powers? Do you want to be slaves to them all over again? (Gal 4:9)

He is comparing the slavery of idolatry to the slavery of the Jewish law and offers only two positions: Christ and freedom or the Law and slavery.

How are the Galatians to make a choice? How are they to act in true liberty, as “freeborn sons”? With either choice, there will be a rendering, a tearing apart from beloved leaders and from beloved brothers and sisters.

Despite Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel of John that “They may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me” (John 17:21a), these painful splits and leave-takings, accompanied by the recriminations Paul heaps upon rival evangelists, have been part of the church since the first century.

The question is not, Will Christians leave one denomination, or tradition, for another? The question is, How does a Christian distinguish between the pew fatigue—insipid hymnody, uninspired preaching, parish snits—that makes every church-goer want to run screaming from the assembly, and the true leading of the Holy Spirit, a leading that may bring one to go, or stay? How should the choice—to leave or to remain—be made?

Theologian R. R. Reno has defended both sides of the divide. In his book, In the Ruins of the Church, he makes the argument for staying in the Anglican Communion.1 Three years later, he chronicles his reception into the Catholic Church in an article, “Out of the Ruins,” published in the theological journal First Things. Reno sees his original decision “to fight for orthodoxy in mainline Protestantism” as a stand for truth and against a culture he describes as “one of leave-taking [that] champions the seeker as the hero of the spiritual life.”2 He contrasts the mythical seeker with Benedict’s Rule and its vow of stability. Reno writes,

The sinful soul will twist and turn to elude God’s grasp, and for monks, this is manifest in the all-too-human tendency to wander from place to place in an effort to find a congenial community and a sympathetic abbot.3

The layman’s question, Reno argues, is very like the monk’s:

What are we to do in this jungle of denominationalism? Are we sinful men and women equipped to embark on a project of deciding which churches are best? When church becomes a choice, will we not guide ourselves to our own self-destruction?4

And yet, church does become a choice for Reno, when he leaves the Anglican Communion and is received into the Roman Catholic Church. But “choice,” even as he freely makes one, is the concept Reno rejects:

I put myself up for reception into the Catholic Church as one might put oneself up for adoption. A man can no more guide his spiritual life by his own ideas than a child can raise himself on the strength of his native potential.5

Reno uses the language of adoption, and the language of powerlessness. Infants, and more rarely, children, are adopted. Adults are almost never adopted, and yet Reno is an adult, chronologically and in Christ. An infant may not be able to raise himself “on the strength of his native potential,” but an adult can, and does. Reno is no infant, no child. He is a mature believer, one of Paul’s “freeborn sons” who has made a choice in liberty.

Why is “choice” such a scary word? The very freedom God offers to Adam in the Garden of Eden attracts and repels us.

You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and bad. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die. (Gen 2:16a–17)

“You are free.” Free to choose. Those are haunting words, containing, as they do, the choices we make for life or for death.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis addresses the terror and delight of human freedom:

God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which is free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared to which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.6

Part of the problem may be linguistic. Even for Christians who accept the teaching of God’s gift of free will and the choice such a gift implies, common usage affects our understanding. Certain nouns are wedded to certain modifiers. “Choice” in the twenty-first century is either “pro” or “consumer,” both troublesome notions for orthodox Christians. Those modifiers cover the full range from life issues to justice issues.

“Pro-choice” means the license, for example, to choose to accept or reject the humanity of an unborn child or a comatose adult based on the needs, not of the unborn child or the comatose adult, but of the caretaker whose life will be burdened by their care.

“Consumer choice” means the license to arrange one’s life according to material preference or desire. If prison ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Authors’ Note
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Choice
• Chapter 2: Self-control
• Chapter 3: Faithfulness
• Chapter 4: Gentleness
• Chapter 5: Kindness
• Chapter 6: Goodness
• Chapter 7: Patience
• Chapter 8: Peace
• Chapter 9: Joy
• Chapter 10: Love
• Conclusion: There Is Life after Conversion
• Bibliography