Reversion to Type
As yet another sign of grace, I have just received an honorary doctorate for doing nothing from my alma mater, Berkeley at Yale. In the service, I heard an excellent sermon by their Dean, Andrew McGowan, on which I want to reflect here.
McGowan began with the patron of the seminary's chapel, St. Luke, and thought about what kind of medicine He offers. To describe the wrong answer, he offered the famous quotation by the great Yale theologian, Richard Niebuhr, about liberal Protestantism: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” McGowan then equated this implicit indictment with a more recent summation of liberal Protestant sentiment. Smith and Denton, in their study of the beliefs of contemporary teens, came up with “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Each word underscores our own autonomy, God serving as a resource around the edges. These phrases certainly adhere to much of the discourse of our own Episcopal Church and indeed to a recess in each of our hearts.
The history of my seminary is one with stretches of just this kind of cultural accommodation in the optimistic American mode, interspersed with episodes of awakening to the more radical kind of healing offered. Maybe something similar is always true if the Church. We might think of the liturgy as a kind of wake up call embedded in the Church's ordinary life.
Peace,
+GRS
