“More Than an Idea”
By Rev. Dr. Jeffrey A. Schooley
During my grad school years, I had an acquaintance who was prone to enraptured, affective proclamations about love and life. He was a philosophy PhD in his mid-20s, so I’m hoping we can forgive him. After all, feelings, expectations, and aspirations are borderline psychotic for everyone at that age and stage, to say nothing of studying philosophy.
I distinctly remember one particular time hanging out when he told me what he wanted in his ideal woman: “I want someone mythic” he said with a look inspired by a little beer, too much education, and the side effects of various glands in his body. I was less impressed. Already being on the cusp of my 30s and thus infinitely more mature than him [please note the sarcasm], I was also married for a few years at this point and had learned that everyone’s partner is mythic until you have to care for them during a stomach flu; no one is mythic after that.
Anyway, he’s married now and has a kid or two. Occasionally he pops up in my Facebook feed in between advertisements for thin hair and fat bellies (because that’s life in your mid-40s). His wife looks lovely, but nothing I’ve seen in their photos together make me think anyone will be writing metered verse about her. I don’t even think her face has launched a single ship yet.
I think about this mid-to-late-20s conversation often. (One never knows when a core memory is being formed, I suppose). I think about it because for all the lovelorn yearnings passing through the mill of an articulate brain, my old acquaintance was just being honest about some part of the human condition: Purpose. Wiggling beneath the skin – hiding in the corners of the heart – is this idea that we are here for a reason, maybe even a grand reason. There is this thought – maybe even an instinct – within each of us that makes us believe in greatness: our own, each other’s, the world’s. I’m sure there’s a beautiful French word (or a polysyllabic German word) for this phenomenon.
The more Romantic (in the classical sense of that word, hence the capitalization) or affective branches of Christian theology often uses the presupposition of this unnamed feeling to narrate our yearning for communion with God, the creation, and one another. And calloused though my tone may have been thus far, I don’t see any inherent flaw in this approach. Theology can be done from the top-down – meaning, we focus exclusively on God’s self-revelation through divine means like prophesy, the Spirit, and scripture, and only then do we explore who we are in that system – or from the bottom-up – meaning, we seek within ourselves some divine spark, some eternal flicker of light within our own hearts, souls, and experiences that point us beyond ourselves and toward the divine or the sublime. Both approaches have their shortcoming – top-down tends to flex too much; bottom-up tends to be too flaky – but analyzing any idea by its shortcomings may be a shortcoming itself. I, personally, tend to regard really good top-down theology (like that from Karl Barth or Stanley Hauerwas) as providing a good floor to theology, while the bottom-up types (especially your Liberationist theologies from women, queer folx, and people of color) give theology a high ceiling to progress toward. This is to say, there’s a way to carefully marry Traditional and Progressive thought and theology.
There’s been a slow and steady trend in theology wherein the bottom-up approach has displaced the top-down approach. Exact dates are debatable for this switch – some would place its origins at the feet or Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), while others would emphasize those aforementioned Liberative theologies that all began in the 1960s. The result of this shift is that peoples’ actual, lived experiences (read: bottom-up) are centered more than the ideals (read: top-down) of their lives. God, for instance, is less known by lofty terms like omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, and the like. In place of these high-minded (and thus, top-down) descriptions is language like friend, companion, partner, co-laborer. And though I’m commenting on this as if a detached scholar of a particular phenomenon, I’m very much part of this movement. Ask yourself which you’re more likely to hear from me from the pulpit: friend or omniscience? Companion or immutable? My God-talk is very much indebted to a bottom-up approach. And, to be sure, there are significant implications on the cultivation of the human soul based upon which approach is privileged.
I’ve been thinking about these aspects of the human soul in response to America’s pending 250th birthday. I’ve been thinking about this because America has always tended to present itself in a top-down manner. The refrain of democracy might be “government for the people, by the people,” but we typically celebrate “the idea of America” more than our real, gritty experiences of it. By that, I take people to mean that America – by definition – is an always incomplete project, but rather exists as an idea – a virtue, an ideal – that we dedicate our lives to striving after. But how different is this than my acquaintance’s desire for a woman who is “mythic”?
Recently, Princeton University historian Eddie Glaude, Jr. made some waves with the first sentence to his new book – America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. The controversial opening sentence reads thusly: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” The consternation of conservatives was predictable, but even some more liberal-minded folks tried to chide Glaude for his poor timing – after all, that’s not how one RSVPs for a birthday party. (Of course, liberals often struggle to differentiate between “polite” and “honest,” so maybe this response was also predictable).
I feel Glaude. I feel that emptiness where I’m told affection ought to attend. And I feel that, I think, because a bottom-up approach to the great American experiment invites us to first focus on our lived experiences of this country before focusing on the ideals of this country. Just as theology made a switch from top-down to bottom-up – just as I recommend finding a normal partner with whom to pursue the mythic rather than trying to marry a myth – I’m wondering if the social malaise surrounding America’s 250th isn’t a reflection of chasing ideals that seem systemically destined to stay perpetually out of reach. My real fear? “The idea of America” is just a form of propaganda designed to stymie my rejection of our worst offenses; “the idea of America” exists to justify every past sin by denying it definitional authority to the word “America.”
This is why (to invert Glaude’s words) “I do love Jesus and His Church, and always have, especially now.” I love that in Christ I’m not just invited to chase an ideal that I may or may not achieve, but just get to have holy community with Him and all His disciples now. I love that while the scriptures are full of myths and the specifics of our heavenly destiny is opaque, every present moment with Christ, in Christ, is already good, is already a blessing. It’s okay to believe “the best is yet to come,” while also still living in pretty good conditions, which strikes me as different from my experiences of being an America where “the best is yet to come” is lived out against a backdrop of inequality, vulgarity, prejudice, and injustice. In short, what I love about Jesus is that He is more than an idea.
Jesus’ Church exists to be an alternative witness to the ways of the world. Sometimes – though rarely – the world tries hard and does a few nice things and the difference between “Church” and “world” are minimal (public libraries are a good example of this; a place where information, entertainment, and community all coalesce in common ownership certainly sounds like “thy Kingdom come”!). Other times, though, the distinctions could not be more profound. It is here, then, that I find comfort in the Church, her practices, her mercies, and – most of all – her Lord.
Jesus is more than an idea. Thank God.
