"Excarnated" Christianity

Doctrine is important, but Christianity is also an embodied faith.

It’s interesting that Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age was so popular with many evangelical leaders given that it is the most effective critique of Protestantism I’ve seen.

One of Taylor’s points, aimed at Calvinism especially, is that Protestantism “excarnated” Christianity. In the Incarnation, God becomes a flesh and blood human being. By contrast, excarnation empties Christianity of embodied aspects, in broad sense.

In essence, excarnation reduces Christianity to a set of propositions one believes, and a set of inward dispositions of the heart. What makes something “sacred” is not an attribute of the thing itself, but rather the spiritual motivation behind it.

Famously, in Protestantism, sacred vocations such as monasticism are rejected. Instead, all vocations are considered as sacred callings. The sacred aspect of one’s vocation comes not from the work itself, nor from some sacralizing act such as consecration, but rather the fact it the Christian is doing it for the glory of God.

I’m sure this overstates things, but there’s clearly something to it.

We see this in the way that much of the evangelical world prioritizes correct doctrine to the exclusion of basically all else, and often defines a good or true church overwhelmingly in terms of doctrine.

Clearly, correct doctrine is very important. Many of the New Testament epistles were written to combat false teaching or bad doctrine. Jude says to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

One of the most terrifying verses in the Bible is Romans 10:2, where Paul says, “They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” In other words, there’s a point at which people who are zealous for the true God are nevertheless unsaved on account of defective doctrine. That should speak to the importance of getting it right.

But this is far from the only thing stressed in the New Testament. After all, you know who has perfect doctrine? Demons (James 2:19). And Paul also famously writes, “If I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” Unity in the church - embodied community - is also a huge theme in the New Testament, one that Christ himself directly links to the willingness of people to accept the gospel (John 17:21).

One implication of excarnation is that contemporary Protestants de facto believe that doctrines and practices are free floating principles that can be adopted without connection to the human community that created, embodied, and sustained them.

This is one of the weaknesses of contemporary American “Anglicanism.” From what I see, the overwhelming majority of people in the Anglican Church in North America are converts. That’s true of most of their clergy as well.

Can you really have Anglicanism in the absence of a material heritage of Anglican community? The real historic Anglican church in the United States is the Episcopal Church. Now, it’s true that the Episcopal Church has largely abandoned traditional Christian doctrine. And perhaps no mainline denomination is more hostile to traditional believers than the Episcopal Church.

But can you simply take the historic doctrine and liturgical practices of the Church of England, and implement them in a community of people who are almost all adult converts, and end up with genuine Anglicanism?

When I raise this point, ACNA people are quick to note that a few Episcopal dioceses moved over. Other individual Episcopal congregations have managed to join as well. And there are also churches whose origins are in various African immigrant populations that also have a historic link to Anglican practice.

These are certainly solid links to Anglican historical practice in parts of the ACNA, but it does not seem that most people in the ACNA world are especially connected to that.

It’s the same with the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in the northern US. It is essentially all converts to Presbyterianism. And the clergy appears to be mostly converts as well. Remember: Tim Keller himself was an adult convert to Presbyterianism.

I have made a point to attend and watch as many mainline Presbyterian churches as I can. One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture of mainline Presbyterianism is completely different from that of the PCA I’ve experienced. In fact, the cultural differences are often more significant and noticeable than the theological ones. These northern PCA churches have much more in common with mainstream evangelicalism than with historic Presbyterianism in my view. This is one reason they have been unable to form elites or fulfill other functions that mainline churches used to perform.

(The PCA in its Southern heartland may be very different, and quite a number of churches there were mainline congregations that split off. Covenant PCA in Nashville only dates to the 1980s but feels very Presbyterian. So what I say about the PCA only applies to what I’ve seen in the north).

Could a group of people with no history as Presbyterians take the Westminster Confession of Faith, the catechisms, and the Book of Church order, and begin practicing real Presbyterianism?

To some extent yes. In other ways, probably not. So much of human institutions and culture is tacit. It’s in the things that aren’t written down. And it’s in the way that things which are written down are understood and practiced.

And even easier thought experiment to illustrate this would be to ask whether someone with no Christian background who picked up a Bible and read it would be likely to derive what we think of as Christianity from it? I think it’s highly unlikely. I very much doubt they would come up with Nicene trinitarianism, for example.

Obviously, these are extreme examples to help illustrate the idea I’m talking about. The point is that the embodied aspects of our beliefs are very important. Christianity is much more than just believing correct intellectual propositions (though of course it includes that).

There’s an analogy to the the various claims that America is an idea or a creed, and thus that anyone can become an American. There’s certainly a sense in which this is part of the truth. There is a creedal aspect to America. Immigrants have come here and become productive members of society. And even if they personally never fully assimilated to American culture, their children and grandchildren certainly would to a great extent (though not without changing American culture in the process, of course). During World War II, for example, Italian-American soldiers who participated in the invasions of Italy discovered that they were not actually as Italian as they had thought, and were much more American than they had believed.

At the same time, if America is an idea, then it should be possible to recreate America in the absence of Americans. Imagine if we replaced all the native born population of the country with newcomers, all of whom gave assent to the American creed. Would it still be America? Again, certainly not.

Guest contributor Benjamin Mabry noted that our constitution is a written document. But American government and political life is not merely a reflection of our constitution and laws but of our embodied way of life. He said something to the effect that, “The real constitution is us.”

You can bring newcomers into a community, but at some point, when the ratio of newcomers to cradle members reaches a certain point, assimilation breaks down and the reverses direction. This is part of the reason why people in boomtown cities like Austin will claim that their town has “lost its soul,” lost what made it special.

This also happens to religious communities. Someone on Twitter yesterday posted a now-deleted tweet saying that the large influx of converts into some US Orthodox parishes was likely to overwhelm and transform Orthodoxy in America unless the priests were very insistent on making their catechumens understand that they are totally ignorant, and most of what they think they know is actually wrong.

I know a woman who was raised Catholic but converted to Orthodoxy after marrying a Greek American man. She asked how long it would take to fully assimilate into the Orthodox church and was told it would probably take ten years to rewire her brain and culture from Catholicism to Orthodoxy.

But would she assimilate at all if instead of being one of a few converts in a church full of lifelong Greek American Orthodox people, she joined a parish that was 75% converts?

The Catholic church in America is probably majority cradle Catholics, which gives it the ballast necessary to assimilate converts, and to ensure that the sensibilities of converts don’t come to dominate the church. But I wonder about the traditionalist Catholic movement. How many people in these Latin mass parishes grew up in a Latin mass environment (or were even raised Catholic at all)?

Now America is a protean, dynamic nation. People don’t stay rooted in old traditions to the extent they do elsewhere. We move around, change churches, change professions, reinvent ourselves. It’s a country whose people and institutions are always being remade, even where the forms remain.

This is who we are. It’s not bad to be in a church full of converts.

But we should recognize the implications of that. Too many people seem to truly believe that they are authentic bearers of a historic Christian tradition - in some cases that they are the only legitimate bearers of that tradition - simply because they affirm certain confessions and practices.

They may be carrying part of that tradition, but it is admixed with a significant amount that is new. The result is something that’s very different than what came before, something that’s potentially even in conflict with material parts of the historic tradition one has adopted.

Again, that’s not all bad. There’s a lot about the past I don’t like. But we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about what we are doing just because we have the correct doctrine (or think we do at any rate). Christianity is an embodied faith.

For further reading, see my essay on how modern evangelicalism is culturally alien to historic Protestantism.

Cover image: Westminster Abbey by geo pixel/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0