Posted by Ginny Tosken [GinnyT] on April 07, 1999 at 21:11:09 {HTWDI6pmYgZVkmusePk.Fbqv3I7Em.}:
On a recent foray to the bookstore, this title caught my eye: The Ironic Christian's Companion by Patrick Henry (yes, that's really his name). I like some of this man's ideas, and thought I'd share a few paragraphs.
Ginny
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Once upon a time the term "Christian" meant wider horizons, a larger heart, minds set free, room to move around. But these days "Christian" sounds pinched, squeezed, narrow. Most people who identify themselves as Christians seem to have leapfrogged over life, short-circuited the adventure. When "Christians" appears in a headline, the story will probably be about lines drawn, not about boundaries expanded . . .
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For hundreds of years Christians whose relatives killed themselves were told by the church that those relatives had committed an "intrinsically evil" act, an unforgivable sin, and that they were in the place where Dante's Divine Comedy puts them, the seventh circle of hell. As recently as 1912, The Catholic Encyclopedia declared that the church "condemns the act as a most atrocious crime and, in hatred of the sin and to arouse the horror of its children, denies the suicide Christian burial." Few churches these days say anything so heartless (the 1983 Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law quietly drops suicides from the list of those denied church funeral rites), and I have not been burdened with a theology that writes my father off as lost. [Henry's father committed suicide.] But I could imagine what it was like in earlier times for people like me: tormented by the image--drawn by those who were acknowledged to know--of an unbridgeable chasm between God and the one they loved.
As my imagination took hold, I became angry. What does it mean about Christian certainties that they so often change? By what right, during all those generations, did the church, which now acknowledges that there is hope for suicides and no longer segregates their corpses, presume to know otherwise? It is not enough to say that doctrine develops, or that it takes time for the church to come to full understanding, or that historical perspective precludes holding earlier generations to our standards. History teaches us to be skeptical of our certainties, especially when those certainties exclude people unlike us.
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[Building on F. Scott Fitzgerald's statement that 'the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function' . . .]
In 1979, the imagination of two of my students provided an unexpected resource for reaching the equilibrium of being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time. Phillip Kloeckner and John McKinstry, sophomores in "Introduction to the New Testament," found that they could not answer, on the basis of the biblical text itself, the question of whether salvation is by faith or by works. The syllabus offered the option of a creative project in place of a traditional term paper, and Kloeckner and McKinstry, capable musicians, chose several "salvation by faith" passages and several that promote "salvation by works," and wrote "Cantata for Resolution of a Paradox." The individual movements are clever and give musical expression to the contrasting ideas. But the stroke of genius is the piece's conclusion: It fashions the paradox into a double fugue, a musical double helix in which both faith and works twist and spiral, imitate and counterpoint each other, so that musically they are inextricable one from the other. The score resolves the faith/works problem by dissolving it in a cascade of sound.
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