Thanks for all the supportive comments to my last post, as well as the encouragement to keep writing about it. It might jog me out of the languid once-a-week-if-that pattern of blogging I’ve fallen into lately.

I left off mentioning that I was initially drawn into Christianity by the “evangelical catholic” approach of the Duke school, and that I remain attached to it even though I see its potential problems. When I think back to when I first encountered it three and a half years ago, I think a lot of what appealed to me was the way it positioned the Christian community in relation to the state and the culture at large. This is one area where it borrowed heavily from the Mennonites, and so it takes a position of more “apartness” from both those entities than more mainstream traditions have.

Why does this matter to me? There are a lot of reasons, but when I think about it I realize I shouldn’t underestimate the impact on me of growing up in the shadow of the counterculture. To be born in the U.S. in 1971 is to come into a nation in deep conflict with itself. To grow up in the San Francisco area is to live practically in ground zero of that conflict.

My parents’ attitude toward the counterculture was always ambivalent. Neither one of them remembered the ’50s with any sort of nostalgia — my mother, especially, didn’t like being female in that environment — so they were not terribly bothered that the old order changed. But neither one of them really participated in it either. My mother did a civil-rights march or two, but for the most part they lived conventional upper-middle-class lives. Probably the biggest way it affected them was somewhat indirect: that they eventually divorced and my mother later moved in with a man without marrying him. That probably wouldn’t have happened to a family like mine before the ’60s, but it’s not “counterculture” per se.

Anyway, I grew up with this similar sense of belonging neither to the counterculture nor what was quaintly called the Establishment. To some extent in Marin in the ’70s and ’80s the counterculture was the establishment, as perhaps epitomized by my high-school chemistry teacher who used to play his Grateful Dead tapes in the background during labs. I always sympathized with the ideals of the counterculture but I was also always kind of square, especially in the compared to the libertinism that filtered down to the second generation.

My sense of alienation from both sides of the culture war increased after 9/11. I think now that it was no coincidence at all that my interest in Christianity flared up while America was in its post-9/11 fever dream. And I think when I was reading Telford describing the Duke school’s ecclesial vision of Christians as a community within the culture but not of it, honoring the authorities and guardians of earth but placing their faith only in the authorities and guardians of heaven, I saw what the counterculture should have been, the pieces it had been missing all along that made me unable to really believe in it. To bring Jesus into the picture gave order and shape to the counterculture’s fuzzy utopianism; replaced its self-indulgence with discipline; replaced the mandate to re-engineer society with a trust in the direction of history; excised the sex and drugs and romanticizing of Communist thugs. Going to PMC made this vision more concrete. I remember saying to somebody after I went there that seeing a church full of people who were so much like the ones I grew up around, and yet profoundly different, told me that my subculture could also be redeemed by Christ.

Of course, all this personal history raises the question of how much I’m actually seeing some transcendent truth, and how much I’m still trying to impress the folks back home. I have to admit that even though what I’m doing is a pretty radical thing to my family, I can see a lot of ways that being a Mennonite serves to justify me to the elders and peers of my youth. It’s a way of saying I’m still cool even though I don’t do drugs and sleep around, that I have political principles even though I feel mostly at sea in worldly politics, that I’m intellectual even though I’ve always had this flighty mystical streak. The Christianity of old Europe, that largely built the Establishment in the first place, would not accomplish all this; neither would completely checking out of Western culture and joining a convent in Korea, for instance. How much of all this is about God, and how much about me and my personal issues?

One thing that’s been interesting about meeting Christians of various stripes, however, is that I’ve seen how not only Mennonites feel this way. Even people in the oldest of churches seem to feel that being a Christian in America is to be at once both culture and counterculture. Conservative evangelicals insist that America is a Christian nation yet feel constantly beleaguered by mainstream culture. Catholics are the biggest single sect in the world but they watch both political leaders and average citizens ignore the exhortations of their popes. And despite the commanding Christian majority in America, anyone who opts out of premarital sex or abortion or general consumerism is going to feel themselves swimming against the cultural tide.

That’s the peculiar paradox of “tradition” in our society: the whole idea of tradition, of the unbroken chain that passes along social values through the collective unconscious, has become impossible. Even “traditional values” have become a conscious pose, things to be adopted and defended rather than received. Maggie Gallagher pointed this out in writing about the crunch cons:

There is something movingly pathetic in watching the Drehers drive through different religious identities, for example, searching for one that “fits.” Worshipping at a Lebanese Maronite (Catholic) Church, for example, because they like the taste of ancient tradition, even if they are neither Lebanese nor Maronite. Tradition itself becomes a kind of consumption item, to be produced and consumed by crunchy cons.

A true traditionalism would not be represented by people who move to Dallas, buy a nice bungalow and invite friends over for tasty organic cooked food. It would be led by people who advocate returning to the place you were born, where your kith and kin also live, because that is really where you belong, the thing in which your very self is rooted.

One reason Rod cannot do this, by his own account, is that he doesn’t have any such native tradition.

Neither do I. I can’t go back to where kith and kin live, because they no longer live in one place. And so no matter what I do (as Lee pointed out in a comment to my last post), I cannot be traditional. I can’t just receive a tradition; I have to decide what I believe. And this goes for church as much as anything else. A while ago I linked to an article in which Rusty Reno found himself in exactly that logical pretzel: he developed a theory as to why he should not assert his sovereign individualism by leaving his church, and then he realized that staying there was really being loyal only to the theory he’d developed. No matter what he did, there was no escaping the position of standing in judgment over any church’s doctrine.

All of this is a long way of saying that if Jesus has the power to redeem us traditionless people at all, it makes sense that he would redeem through the counterculture rather than expecting Western society to somehow repent of the whole thing and pick up as if nothing had happened. And I do derive some comfort from the fact that the first Christians probably felt the same way. That’s also why I sympathize with evangelical catholics’ belief that the church of ancient Rome provides a more useful model today than the medieval vision of a timeless natural social order. I think Yoder had a point that even where the New Testament seems to be declaring such an order, as in Romans 13 and Ephesians 5, it raises the question of why it is being declared in the first place. It goes against the nature of received traditions to spell them out like that; they should be simply assumed. More likely, then, those words were consciously posed against something else, and therefore cannot be removed from the stream of time and context.

As to what they were being posed against, well, there are a lot of theories about that. But certainly I feel that church’s position more than the church whose leaders anointed kings (and were often related to them), or churches who feel America once belonged to them and they have to take it back.

Oy, it’s been a rough Lent so far. I’ve been sick for a lot of it, though now I’m finally starting to feel human again. I gave up alcohol, which has proven to be much harder than last year’s discipline of going vegan. But probably what’s stressing me out the most is thinking about baptism.

I’ve had this vague intention, maybe more like a hope, that I would get baptized this Eastertide. Easter is the traditional time to do it, and so it became a sort of informal goal. I’ve even idly fantasized about how I’d like to do it, whom I’d invite, and that sort of thing. (This being an Anabaptist rite, there is some flexibility on this.) But the arrival of Lent has made this much more immediate, and brought on the need for some serious preparation. And it’s raised a lot of stuff I’ve been kind of avoiding.

As the few people who’ve been reading my blog from the beginning would know, I’ve changed a huge amount in the last three-plus years. I started out as a curious skeptic about Christianity, and now I sound indistinguishable from a Christian — indeed, sometimes I hear myself sounding downright dogmatic. But when it comes to it, my persona on this blog does not tell the whole story. I’ve had doubts about a lot of things, and I still have them. Some of it relates to personal matters that I don’t want to discuss here; but perhaps it will help me to discuss what I can. (Since there’s more than one issue going on, maybe this will turn into a series.)

One perpetual question I have, which I have sometimes brought up here, is: what is the true church? This an important question for a lot of reasons. For one thing, although the baptismal question of whether I accept Jesus as my lord and savior (or however Mennonites put it) seems like a straightforward yes-or-no option, the underlying question is exactly who this Jesus is that I commit myself to. Since I don’t know him personally, and since the Bible is too sketchy and weird to form a complete picture (sorry, sola scriptura fans), I need the help of some interpretive tradition. And this seems to be the way Jesus meant for it to be. As Lesslie Newbigin pointed out: “Jesus in his ministry took no steps to provide a written body of teaching. He created a community which would be enabled by the Spirit, after his death and resurrection, to grow into an ever fuller understanding of him and his message, and so to live as children in his Father’s house.”

The second reason is that, as the Lutheran hymn goes, “We are standing on the promises of God.” The church, as Christ’s bride, received a specific set of promises from Jesus; that his spirit would always been with her, that the gates of hell shall not prevail, etc. That doesn’t mean that no one outside the church can receive God’s protection or spirit actions — even in the Bible this happens — but the church is the only entity (after Israel) that actually gets a guarantee.

Of course, you’re going to get a lot of different opinions about what the true church is. Because I was brought into Christianity in the first place by Telford and the Duke mafia, I’ve mostly been exposed to the belief that the true church is actually the whole body of Christendom, sadly fractured but still the Bride. (Newbigin, whom I quoted earlier, was one of the big proponents of this.) I’ve long had trouble with this idea because it creates and image of God that’s so incoherent. I wrote about this at some length here (and now that I look back on it, I see I was already thinking about it in terms of baptism). I think there are some internal conflicts with the Duke school’s “evangelical catholicism”, as they call it, mainly that it defends a sort of Great Tradition view of the church while hewing to some positions that are definitely in the minority as far as tradition is concerned, like pacifism and women’s ordination.

One way to square this problem is to simply go with the “catholic” side of that argument, and say that the only valid church is one that can trace its existence all the way back to Jesus. There’s a lot to be said for that, especially given the promises from Jesus to the church that I mentioned earlier. I don’t give much credence to long-dead sects like Gnosticism or Arianism, however amusing it might be to defend them from what textual evidence there is, simply because God’s promises don’t mean much of anything if he lets his bride die off like that. A similar difficulty comes up with claims that seem to have the true church disappearing for centuries at a time, only to reappear at the Reformation or even later. Somehow, those sorts of claims make God less trustworthy, less like our adoptive father and more like an elusive, shifty character testing people to see if they’re smart enough to ferret him out of the alleged distortions of the mainstream tradition. I don’t see much support for such code-hunting in the texts themselves, however. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, not the clever.

Still, the “continuists” have their own problems. There are at least two churches that can plausibly trace their history back to Jesus — more, if you count the eastern monophysite sects (and I don’t see why not). And while God may seem less trustworthy if he is hiding within texts, there are also obvious trust issues with a God who allows the sort of corruptions and abuses within his church that led to the Reformation to begin with.

For me, I think the problem is that there are just some things in those churches that I can’t swallow. I don’t expect to be convinced of Jesus’ divinity as an objective fact, so part of my baptismal query to myself is more subjective: is this who I want to follow? Is this what my soul tells me is Truth? The evangelical catholic view, though I see its flaws, is still what drew me, and I am loath to give it up. In my next posts, I’ll go into some specific issues to explain what I mean.