The Mask That Makes Us Honest?

Written by Michael R. Walker

Tuesday, 22 April 2008 00:00

I just read an interesting article on MSNBC, about video game addictions. What gets people addicted to these things so much that we've heard stories about neglected children, destroyed marriages, and even death by self-neglect - seriously, read the article - for the sake of the game world?

The article is likely right in pointing to the appeal of the "social" nature of many of these games, such as World of Warcraft. And it tells of one married couple where the man loved gaming, but his wife felt neglected. Desperate to save the marriage, she agreed to start playing the game with him. Eventually, they went their separate ways in the game, since she couldn't keep up. But she found other friends in the game and plays it all the time. Asked about the allure of the virtual world, here's how she replied: "People in the game are a lot more genuine then they are in real life,” she says. “Being hidden behind this mask of your character, you’re able to be a little more open and honest with people because they don’t know who you are."

You can probably guess what I'm going to say about this heart breaking sentiment. Set aside for a moment the fact that she entered this "other world" to be with her husband but is now on her own separate voyage in that world with others she feels accept her and care for her (they give her "gold" to use in the game, for instance). I don't want to sound like a typical basher of "virtual communities" - I'm a Facebook devoté. But it does say something about the harshness of our human communities (or even our marriages) when many find that, in order to be "a little more open and honest with people," we must don the mask. Note the deep irony in this woman's words. She's being honest - true to herself, saying what she really thinks, etc. - when she's "hidden behind this mask." In other words, in order to be herself, she must be someone else. In order to be present as our self, we must not be present to ourselves. (This kind of thing is unfortunately common in marital affairs, too, where often we embrace self-alienation as a means of self-expression - step out of our own lives in order to get what we think we really want.) It's a tortuous cycle.

Pascal once said, "Human beings must be known to be loved." And yet our frail and disordered condition tells us that to be loved, we must not be known. And there is plenty in our own experience of life to lead us to this conclusion: when we give ourselves to be known, love is not often what we receive in return. So we do not give ourselves and are not known, and are therefore unloved.

As a Christian, I do believe that God in Jesus Christ is the only one who both knows us completely and loves us unconditionally. And the simple call to love others as we have been loved by God should be seen as a radical way of life that undercuts the self-alienation that plunges the human self into an empty abyss. It's a call to stop the tortuous cycle, in our own lives and for the lives of others. When others let themselves be known, we are called to offer them in return the love that we have received. And we can give ourselves to be known, because the security of our own souls is not hanging in the balance, waiting for acceptance in return. We have already received it and with it can overcome any this-worldly rejection.

So, the article convicted me. Too often you'd be fair to characterize me the way the woman in the article characterizes our society. Hopefully without sounding trite, it's safe to say that the more Christians embrace the simple but profound call to mutual self-giving, the fewer hearts we'll leave to search for acceptance in a different world.

The Notebook

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

William Abraham on the Unity of the Church

Some notes from William Abraham's article in Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, where his task is to reflect on the phrase of the creed about the church as "one, holy, catholic and apostolic."

A few introductory quotes on the challenge of ecclesiology in the modern era:

"Ecclesiology is one area in theology where there is enormous temptation to think in abstract and utterly unrealistic terms. We find it difficult to think historically, concretely, and realistically" (p. 178).

"We need a theological vision of the church that does three things. It allows us to acknowledge reality as we find it empirically in teh church as it is and as we can predict it will be in the future. It provides a narrative of the divisions and chaos in the history of the church. And it acts as a norm that can deepen our experience, call us to accountability, and evoke a straining toward renewal and revitailzation at a crucial juncture in our history" (p. 179).

Abraham's brief sketch of such a theological vision of the church begins by describing the church as the work of the Holy Spirit in manifesting the reign of God in the world. He then focuses on what, then, is the referent in the creed's confession of "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church." What did the Holy Spirit establish at Pentecost? He stresses that it must be read as referring to "a historical people with definite institutional continuity and history from one generation to the next." This was the experience of the church in its first centuries of existence (assuming, we should note, that we do not consider the great variety of groups it is now easy to identify as heretical on the basis of the creed). Thus, he rightly finds abstract definitions of the church that allow for the variety of Christian divisions that exist today unacceptable, whether they appeal to the "invisible church" or the Reformation "marks of the church" as applied at the congregational level.

How then can we identify the church the church today? He doesn't really answer this question, for it is basically unanswerable if the creed is indeed referring to "a historical people with definite institutional continuity," given the divided condition of the church since the division of East and West and much more so since the Reformation.

In the end, Abraham's desire is to lift up the creed's descriptive phrase about the church as a norm after which we should all strive in our present divided condition. We cannot rest in our divisions or come up with clever ways to legitimize them. At the same time we can't simply say various denominations are not works of the Spirit. His solution to this is to suggest, along the lines of Ephraim Radner's proposal (in The End of the Church) that the church is in a similar situation as the divided kingdom of Israel: God was not working in and through them as he had, not in fullness, but nor had he withdrawn himself altogether. In the church today, God is "remaining faithful to his covenant and continuing to pour out his Holy Spirit," but "has withdrawn the fullness of his blessing, waiting patiently until we repent of our manifold sins and disorders" (p. 186).

Among his practical proposals for striving toward the creed's description of the church are the necessity of recovering "the full canonical heritage of the church of the first millennium before the split between East and West," and that "we must find a way to relativize our varied epistemological commitments" (that he thinks have often come as a result of confusing the canon with epistemological criterion, a misuse of the canon and an improper exaltation of epistemology in the life of the church that has catalyzed and continued to justify many Christian divisions).

Who Really Cares About Christian Unity?

In a January 2001 article in First Things, entitled "Who Really Cares About Christianity Unity?", Bruce Marshall reflects on the divided nature of the (western) Church today, in dialogue with key aspects of Ephraim Radner's argument in his The End of the Church. His overall point: the Church at this point can expect its own death, which it has asked for, mostly by persisting willfully in disunity, by not having a common eucharistic life and by preferring its own division to meaningful (eucharistic) reunion. This the Church has done for a variety of reasons, though he pins much of the blame on the convenience of separation as the result of one-upsmanship and as a catalyst for more successful sheep-stealing, clearly not laudable reasons for persisting in division.

The Church is made one and receives life through the eucharist, but when we think we're celebrating the eucharist in our persistently divided churches, our "sectarian eucharists" result in eating and drinking judgment against ourselves (1 Cor. 11:26-29). Hence, if we are united to Christ at all, we are united in his death through baptism, which is still a (truncated) source of unity across denominations. Being united in Christ's death but not in his life means together (in our disunity) we can expect death.

The Lord will bring about resurrection in the Church after its death, but what we can expect on our own horizon is demise. And no particular group can escape this judgment. Just as the remnant in divided Israel was sent into Exile along with the rest, so too will those seeking genuine Christian unity today be subject to the Church's death. And just as a remnant returned to the Land of Promise to rebuild, so too will God raise up a future generation at some point to reveal the glory of Christ's resurrection.

Both Radner and Marshall undercut the theological justification for the Reformation. While admitting the Church can also suffer death by abandoning the truth, Marshall then states that one cannot "accept disunity" to preserve the truth, because one cannot pit the Gospel against the Church, for such would be to say "we have Christ's command to dismember his own body--the same body that, as the New Testament teaches, Christ does not despise, but nourishes, care for, and loves unto death (cf. Ephesians 5:29).

Radner and Marshall ilft up Jansenism as an example of how to both pursue the truth and insist on maintaining ecclesial unity in the face of church powers that deny the truth. Of course, Jansenism was unable to survive. And so the conclusion: better to die while seeking "to commit the destiny of the Church and the cause of the gospel to God alone" than to die by dividing the Church. Of course, this whole framework seems to presume that a united body that celebrates something it calls the eucharist cannot cease to be Christ's Body, hence to divide such a body is always to divide the Body of Christ.

Marshall was Lutheran in 2001. He has since entered the Roman Catholic Church.

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