A Most Dangerous Word
For most of the first two millennia of latinized Christianity, rightly knowing and rightly confessing one’s positions on issues of Christian faith and Christian doctrine were, quite literally, matters of life and death. Today most of us have left the horrors of such times behind us. Primarily we have managed to do that because, in large part, we have left behind us those forms of cultural and political organization that require religious authority and a certain unity of religious opinion in order to maintain the civil stability necessary for their survival.
Admittedly, there are still today some few areas of the latinized world where doctrinal rectitude is more or less socially and politically mandatory. Even given that fact, though, few of us fear for our physical lives should we get some of the details wrong or, even worse, should we willfully adapt some of them to accommodate private or idiosyncratic credos.1
This shift to less violent—and considerably less fatal—ways obviously constitutes a marked improvement in human affairs. Apparently, however, it can no more free many of us from a kind of endemic, historic, ongoing absorption with “getting it right” than it can unsay the horrors of our history. The informing problem with this particular monomaniacal absorption is, of course, that there are almost as many “correct” arrangements of the finer points as there are distinct groupings within Christianity.
The very existence of denominations in the Protestantism born out of the Great Reformation bears stout and ongoing testimony to a Christian fascination with doctrinal particularities. Correctly parsing the Scriptures and intellectually resolving in a satisfying manner the apparent paradoxes in them, determining by precedent the acceptable levels of sacramental and liturgical practice, extrapolating and consecrating modes of personal conduct as requisite to divine acceptance—all of them are admittedly still the preoccupation of contemporary Protestantism as well as much of the raison d’etre for its many, many parts.2 Certainly there is no question, however, about the fact that the exquisitely hierarchal communions of the Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy that preceded Protestantism were, and still are, pathologically preoccupied with doctrinal correctness just as surely as their methods of arriving at resolution were, and still are, superficially at least, far less egalitarian.
Thus it was that, by the eleventh century, confession had come to be a bloody and deadly serious business, which is where we left our tale in part 1.
In the centuries following Rome’s conquest of Greece in the second century BCE, the East and the West had done business together out of enforced necessity. At times they had cohabited with varying degrees of mutual affection just as both had, at other times, exercised outright cultural animosity one toward the other. Most of the time through the centuries, the accommodation between the two had been simply an uneasy but accepted fact of life. It was, nonetheless, almost inevitable that at some future point an irreparable rupture would occur. All that would be required was for either Rome or Byzantium (in due time, Constantinople, of course) to have a head of state powerful enough and aggrieved enough to risk the potential dangers of secession and severance. That happened in 1054 CE.
The Great Schism of 1054 CE, when it finally did come, was obviously the final rending asunder of a cultural divide that had been festering for over a millennium. The filioque only provided doctrinal cover for a whole catalog of intensely felt cultural, spiritual, and political differences that had become too ubiquitous and too intrusive to be ignored any longer. The arts and philosophy and language of Hellenism and the more utilitarian attributes of Western culture had been caught for far too long in deadly gridlock, and only a question of the magnitude of the who, what, and how of the Holy Spirit seemed worthy of so great an arbitration as the times required.
Credo alone was not sufficient; it must become Credemus.
Notes
1. The general tendency in Emergence Christian theology is to question with real vigor and precision whether or not the connection between faith and doctrinal precision is essential to the soul’s salvation. Dogma, yes, but doctrine, not so much. That is, do one’s brainwaves and verbal utterances actually make one’s faith? Emergence Christians can often take this even a step further and reference those places of spiritual primacy where Jesus taught (as in his judgment of the nations as told in the Gospel of Matthew, for example) that a life is what constitutes and demonstrates a disciple, rather than a mind-set. Confession, in other words, has ceased to be so vital, and therefore, such a bloody battlefield.
All that having been said, though, one certainly can still find in Emergence Christianity some defining tensions among and between its member parts. Emerging Christians are not nearly as gender-inclusive as are Emergent Christians, for example; but then of course, neither Emergents nor Neo-monastics nor Hyphenateds are as homophobic as Emergings, either. Points of differentiation still exist, in other words; there still are metaphorical boxes to tick off and invisible lines not to be crossed. But there are also far fewer doctrines to be confessed than once there were and, by the grace of God and the ages, Credo—I believe—really is a far less danger-fraught word with which to begin a sentence.
2. A list of such discrete and distinguishable units, in and of itself, now approaches thirty-seven thousand worldwide by even the most conservative estimates.