In the last two posts we've sketched two of the important points made by William Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist about how the church (his case study is the Catholic church during the regime of Pinochet) mobilizes resistance to the torturing state. Specifically, the church/state conflict is over bodies with the church seeking to disrupt the state's unopposed power to do whatever it wants to the bodies of citizens (or anyone for that matter within the state's borders). The church contests this power by claiming these bodies. When the church does this the church becomes visible, a community who stands together against the actions of the state.

In this post I want to summarize three practices described by Cavanaugh that allowed the Chilean church to become visible, claim martyrs, create solidarity, and mobilize resistance to the state. The last of these practices--Eucharistic discipline--is the reason why I'm doing this series, to wrestle with Cavanaugh's argument about the need for denying communion to certain individuals.

So what are practices by which the church becomes visible?

1. Providing tangible support and relief for those victimized by the state
This seems obvious, but the key is to do this visibly and institutionally. In response to the torture and other state abuses the church in Chile established institutions that guided efforts to help and support the victims. These institutions became rallying points for those wanting to come together and resist the state. As Cavanaugh describes it:

Offering a wide range of programs covering legal and medical assistance, job training, soup kitchens, buying cooperatives, assistance to unions and more, these organizations became the focus of church resistance to the regime...the church provided a space in which organization could take place and social fragmentation could be resisted....

[These] organizations help to "knit the people together"...The church in Chile resisted [the] strategy [of the state to disappear the church by isolating individuals from one another] precisely by knitting people back together, connecting them as members of one another. 

Cavanaugh describes this action as Eucharistic in that it allows the persecuted body of Christ to come together and be visibly recognized by ts members and the onlooking state.

2. Subversive street liturgy
The state wanted to keep its activities out of the public view, to disappear the bodies. Resisting this, the church wanted to make the tortured bodies visible. This was accomplished in Chile by the Sebastian Acevedo Movement against Torture. Members of the movement would appear in a public place, perform a subversive act of liturgy, and then melt away. Sort of like a flash mob. Cavanaugh describes an example:

On September 14, 1983, a group of seventy nuns, priests, and laypeople appeared suddenly in front of the CNI clandestine prison at 1470 Borgono Street in Santiago [where most of the torture occurred] and unfurled a banner: A MAN IS BEING TORTURED HERE. They blocked traffic, read a litany of regime abuses, handed out leaflets signed "Movement against Torture," and sang.

Subversive street liturgy made the tortured body of Christ visible and made martyrs of previously anonymous victims:

Suddenly the invisibility under which the torture apparatus operates are shattered, interrupting its power. In an astonishing ritual transformation, clandestine torture centers are revealed to the passerby for what they are, as if a veil covering the building were abruptly taken away. The complicity of other sectors of the government and society is laid bare for all to see. The entire torture system suddenly appears on a city street. Techniques of torture are detailed, places of torture identified, names of victims and names of those responsible--including sometimes the names of the immediate torturers themselves--are made publicly known. Victims are thus transformed into martyrs, as their names are spoken as a public witness against the powers of death.

3. Eucharistic discipline
The final practice of making the body of Christ visible is the reason why we are doing this series. Specifically, one way the church resisted torture in Chile was denying communion to those involved with the torture program. The Eucharist was denied to torturers as they were excommunicated. This action drew a sharp line between the torturers and those being tortured. And in drawing this line the church clarified where the persecuted body of Christ was located. The body of Christ was visibly aligned with the victims over against the excommunicated torturers.

Cavanaugh making some of these points:

Unity in the church is much more than agreement on doctrine or the general ability of the members of the church to get along, nor is it just participation in a common project or community. It is participation in Christ, and so requires a narrative display of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unity is based on assimilation to Christ, and so the unity and the identity of the church are the same issue. Jesus was tortured to death. Tortured and torturers in the same church therefore threaten the transparency of the church as the body of Christ.

The gravity of an offense is often invoked in separating ordinary sins from sins meriting excommunication. I would argue that this not be understood as simply a matter of degree but of kind. In other words, excommunication is not reserved for those individuals who simply outdo the rest of the church's ordinary sinners in the number or degree of their sins. Excommunication is better understood as applicable to those kinds of sins which impugn the identity of the body of Christ. Excommunication, by definition, is for ecclessiological offenses. If, as I have already argued, the excommunicated person puts herself outside the church in the very act of her sin, then the sin itself must be construed as a sin against the body of Christ. I am arguing, then, that the use of excommunication should not be extended, but rather limited to those sins which threaten the very visibility of the body of Christ.

...

If anyone is to "discern the body," then it must become visible in present time. [It was the effect] of some state disciplines [under Pinochet] to render the church invisible, to "disappear" the body of Christ. The Eucharist, as the gift which effects the visibility of the true body of Christ, is, therefore, the church's counter-imagination to that of the state. Formal excommunication makes the church visible, if only temporarily, by bringing to light a boundary between church and world which those who attack the church have themselves drawn.

...

If Eucharistic discipline is rightly understood, then excommunication does not rend the unity of the church, but makes visible the disunity and conflict, already so painfully present, between the body of Christ and those who would torture it. Only when this disunity becomes visible can real reconciliation and real unity be enacted.

...

In the Eucharist the poor are invited now to come and to feast in the Kingdom. The Eucharist must not be a scandal to the poor. It demands real reconciliation of oppressed and oppressor, tortured and torturer. Barring reconciliation, Eucharist demands judgment.

I think you can see Cavanaugh's argument. If the church is to stand in solidarity with the victims of torture, claiming these bodies over against the state, a line needs to be drawn between the tortured and the torturer. Eucharistic discipline draws that line and, thus, makes the persecuted body of Christ visible.

In the next post I'll share some of the caveats Cavanaugh shares about excommunication (and some of these can be discerned in his quotes above) and locations where his analysis bumps up against the arguments I make in Unclean.

Part 4

In the last three posts I've tried to summarize the argument made by William Cavanaugh in his book Torture and Eucharist for the place of Eucharistic discipline (denying communion, excommunication) in the church. As noted in the last post,  Cavanaugh argues that in the face of the Pinochet torture program the use of excommunication by the church--denying the Eucharist to the torturers--was effective in making the persecuted body of Christ visible and, thus, a location of protest and resistance.

As I said in the very first post in this series on Monday, I wanted to write about Torture and Eucharist as Cavanaugh's argument has come up as a counterpoint to the vision of open communion I describe in Unclean where I use Jesus's radical ministry of table fellowship--his eating with tax collectors and sinners--as a model for the Lord's Supper.

How are we to make these two visions fit together, if at all?

A place to start is to think about the limits Cavanaugh puts on his own project. Specifically, Cavanaugh shares the worries we all have about excommunication. Cavanaugh recognizes the abuses that are concomitant with the practices of closed communion and excommunication. He does worry about top-down powerplays involved in purity policing. These are my worries and focus in Unclean.

Consequently, Cavanaugh is keen to point out that what he's talking about is a really severe situation, one of the most catastrophic moral breakdowns imaginable within the body of Christ--Christians torturing Christians. And in such extreme situations extreme counter-measures are required. Thus, Cavanaugh argues that excommunication shouldn't be reserved for failures of piety and hedonic excess. Excommunication should only be reserved for sins against the body of Christ, sins that threaten the ability of the church to be the body of Christ--the Persecuted One in the midst of the world. Torture is such a sin. By creating victims in the face of the Divine Victim, by nailing people to crosses under the sign of the Cross, by torturing at the feet of the Tortured One, and by persecuting under the eyes of the Persecuted One the church is no longer the church. Only by drawing a line between the perpetrators and the victims can God be visibly seen hanging on the cross in the midst of history and human affairs. (Incidentally, this is the same argument made by James Cone in his recent book The Cross and the Lynching Tree.)

If this is so, then how are we to sort out which sins deserve excommunication? To get at this Cavanaugh make a distinction between degrees and kinds of sin. We shouldn't think of Eucharistic discipline as being reserved for the really, really bad sins. It is, rather, reserved for a certain class or kind of sin, sins--like torture--that threaten the identity of the body of Christ as described above. A quote from Cavanaugh shared yesterday describing this:

The gravity of an offense is often invoked in separating ordinary sins from sins meriting excommunication. I would argue that this not be understood as simply a mater of degree but of kind. In other words, excommunication is not reserved for those individuals who simply out do the rest of the church's ordinary sinners in the number or degree of their sins. Excommunication is better understood as applicable to those kinds of sin which impugn the identity of the body of Christ. Excommunication, by definition, is for ecclesiological offenses. If, as I have already argued, the excommunicated person puts herself outside the church in the very act of her sin, then the sin itself must be construed as a sin against the body of Christ. I am arguing, then, that the use of excommunication should not be extended, but rather limited to those sins which threaten the very visibility of the body of Christ. 

This, I think, sits comfortably with my focus in Unclean. We are not talking here about excessive sinfulness, about the prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners Jesus associated with. We are, rather, talking about Christians who are acting violently against other Christians. These actions indicate that the Christian communion has been shattered and lost. Basically, the church no longer exists. Excommunication in this instance is simply the attempt to recover and resurrect the church in the face of its destruction. More from Cavanaugh on this point:

It should be apparent that this social practice [i.e., excommunication] is not based on any perfectionistic ethic for the church. My argument that torture, as an anti-liturgy of absolute power which attacks the body of Christ itself, should be met with excommunication is by no means an argument for the use of excommunication in general for other types of sin. This is torture, not theft or masturbation. If accepted, my argument would limit excommunication, to keep it from being used in the service of right-wing ecclesiastical politics. Furthermore, formal excommunication is not the only key to the church's visibility. It is not so much a solution as a recognition that something has gone terribly wrong.

I think these passages show that there isn't really a disjoint between Torture and Eucharist and Unclean. My concern in Unclean is with things like "right-wing ecclesiastical" powerplays, where a "perfectionist moral ethic" is used to judge people engaging in sins like "theft or masturbation." That is, I'm pushing back on using closed communion to morally police the congregation. As I read him, Cavanaugh would agree with me. His argument for excommunication is limited to situations where the social body of the church has been torn apart. And excommunication in this case isn't about fixing anything as much as it is a public declaration that the church--as a whole--has lost its way and has disintegrated into moral chaos. We might say that excommunication signals the failure of the church as a whole.

And it is important to note in all this that excommunication isn't being used to monitor the moral lives of Christians as much as it is being used to highlight the conflict between the church and the state, the conflict between the church and the principalities and powers. The Eucharist keeps alive the memory of Jesus as one tortured and killed by the state and functions as an ongoing sign and symbol that Jesus is Lord in the face of the principalities and powers.

According to Cavanaugh, then, excommunication is simply bringing to the surface a conflict that already exists. Excommunication doesn't create the separation and rift. Excommunication simply names the rift and brings it out into the open. And the goal of this isn't judgment but restoration and reconciliation. Cavanaugh:

If Eucharistic discipline is rightly understood, then excommunication does not rend the unity of the church, but makes visible the disunity and conflict, already so painfully present, between the body of Christ and those who would torture it. Only when this disunity becomes visible can real reconciliation and real unity be enacted.

Again, a key insight here is that "reconciliation" isn't about an individual member repenting of, say, some sexual sin and being welcomed back by the church. That is, the reconciliation isn't between the sinner and the judging church. It is, rather, the reconciling of two tragically divided groups of Christians, of the church reconciling with itself so that its resistance to the principalities and powers has moral integrity, force, and public visibility.

In the last chapter of Unclean I make an argument for open communion, basing this argument on Jesus's ministry of table fellowship with tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners. Since the publication of Unclean I've added to that argument in various posts here on the blog.

As I've made this argument in various places I've encountered counter-arguments and have discerned, in these conversations, that the most powerful argument many have encountered in favor of "Eucharistic discipline," closed communion and excommunication is the argument made by William Cavanaugh in his book Torture and Eucharist. (A H/T to Chris Haws for finally getting me to get Cavanaugh's book and engage this argument.)

I read Torture and Eucharist over the family vacation and want to devote some posts this week to summarizing and interacting a bit with Cavanaugh's argument.

Cavanaugh's book is an analysis of the Catholic church's response to the torture program under the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet took power in a coup d'état in September 1973. After taking power Pinochet's regime, particularly in the early years, intimidated, killed and tortured rivals and those not supportive of his government. Many Chileans were arrested in the middle of the night and never heard from again.

Cavanaugh discusses how the Catholic church was slow to respond to the torture but how it eventually gathered itself. According to Cavanaugh the slowness of the initial response had to do with bad theology, particularly Eucharistic theology. Eventually, the church found her voice in using the Eucharist as a "counter-politics" to the politics of the torturing state.

The argument begins with Cavanaugh arguing that the church in Chile had, in the years prior to Pinochet, accepted a division of labor with the state, a Gnostic division between the body and the soul. According to this division the state had control over the bodies of Chileans while the church would restrict its attentions to the souls of Chileans. This was, in essence, the classic separation between the political and spiritual where churches restrict their attention to issues of personal piety and withdraw from the political wranglings of the state. What is interesting in Cavanaugh's framing is how he identifies the political with the body--politics is essentially what the state is allowed to do to the bodies of citizens (and aliens within her borders). For the most part, we accept this power and when the state is working well we really don't notice this power. But the power is there. The state can incarcerate a body or demand, in times of conflict, that bodies go to war.

Torture, according to Cavanaugh, represents the logical outworking and endpoint of this power of the state over the body. In torture we see that the state can do whatever it wants to the body.

Thus we confront the problem when the church has withdrawn its claim over bodies, we see here the impotence of the church when she restricts her witness to issues of personal piety. Initially in Chile the church was in this powerless position, ineffectual and confused by bad theology in speaking out about how the state was using bodies because the church had ceded its own right to lay claim to bodies in the name of Christ. The church in Chile regained its footing when it began to exert its claim over bodies, to enter into a dispute with the state over the state's self-appointed right to do with bodies whatever it saw fit.

In summary, the church becomes "political" when it enters into a dispute with the state over bodies.

(This might seem to be an abstract conversation so let me give a few other examples.

Consider America's own torture program during the Bush administration. The American state claimed it had sole and unrivaled power over those bodies. The questions Cavanaugh helps raise are these: Did the church have any claim over those bodies? Or did the state stand unopposed?

Consider a different issue, the deportation of illegal immigrants. The American state claims it has sole and unrivaled power over these bodies. Again, the questions are: Does the church have any claim over these bodies? Or does the state stand unopposed?

Consider a final issue: capital punishment, execution. The American state claims it has sole and unrivaled power over these bodies. Again: Does the church have any claim over these bodies? Or does the state stand unopposed?

Other examples can be offered, and feel free to do so in the comments, but the point of conflict has been highlighted. The church gets "political" when it disputes the state's claim that it can do whatever it wants to bodies.)

Here is how Cavanaugh summarizes the issue:

[The] ecclesiology which dominated the Chilean Catholic church between the separation of the church in 1925 and the coup in 1973 had theorized the church not as a social body but as the 'soul of society.' The church would be responsible for the souls of Chileans, in effect handing their bodies over to the state for political and military duty. The church would supposedly form their individual consciences, and people would enter public life as individual Christians, but the church as a body would not act politically. I will argue that imagining that it could become society's soul, the church had already begun to forfeit its own discipline and to disappear itself.

The church in Chile began to recover her voice when she began disputing the state's claim to sole ownership of bodies:

In the face of constant accusations of interfering in politics, the church gradually made clear its refusal to leave bodily matters such as unemployment and torture to the state--in other words, to hand over the bodies of its members to the state.

In tomorrow's post we'll get to the next part of Cavanaugh's argument, that it was necessary for the church to lay claim to tortured bodies so that the church could be made visible. By laying claim to tortured bodies, by saying that these bodies bodies are "ours" and not the state's, the church rescued the tortured bodies from becoming anonymous victims of the state to making them visible martyrs of the church. And with the martyrs now visible and publicly recognized the persecuted body of Christ became publicly visible and able to prophetically resist the torturing state.

Part 2

We continue working through William Cavanaugh's book Torture and Eucharist.

According to Cavanaugh a strategy of the torture program in Chile under Pinochet was to "disappear" the body of Christ and, thus, deny the church the ability to stand in opposition to the state. The state would proceed with its torture program but never publicly or visibly attack the church. The state secretly arrested, tortured and killed individuals. Consequently, if the church wanted to oppose the torture program she would need to publicly claim those individuals as her own. This would make the conflict between the church and the state visible. And this visibility, that the state was torturing and persecuting the church, would function as a rallying cry for resistance, protest, civil disobedience, and standing in solidarity with the oppressed.

Basically, by keeping its actions clandestine and targeted at individuals (rather than institutions) the state hoped to avoid a public and institutional confrontation with the church and, thus, proceed unopposed. So if the church was to resist the state she would have to fight against this disappearance. She would have to pick a public fight. And the first step in this fight would be to claim tortured bodies as her own. To say, in effect, "If you torture them you torture us."

So what is needed in the fight against torture, according to Cavanaugh, are a set of practices that allow the church to resist being disappeared by the state, a way to make the persecuted body of Christ visible so that the church can pick a fight with the state and mobilize collective resistance.

The main way the church becomes visible is to claim the victims of the state as martyrs of the church. In operating clandestinely and moving against individuals the state hopes to fracture communities using fear to keep the population quiet and docile. If the state shows up at the Smith's house and arrests Mr. Smith in the middle of the night that's a sad and tragic thing for the Smiths. By acting against Mr. Smith as an individual citizen the church and Mr. Smith's neighbors are left on the sideline. The problem is between Mr. Smith and the state. So the church and concerned neighbors stay sidelined. What business is it of ours? It's just a sad and tragic day for the Smith's, but not for us or for the body of Christ. It's a private matter

This is what Cavanaugh means by the state disappearing the church. What right does the church have to insert itself in a matter between the state and Mr. Smith?

But if the church lays claim to the body of Mr. Smith--if Mr. Smith isn't an individual but one of us, a member of the body of Christ--then the church is collectively mobilized to protest Mr. Smith's disappearance and demand his safe return. This action makes the body of Christ visible with a group of individuals now identifying with each other and standing in solidarity with one another. Rather than picking off individuals the state now has to deal with the church. The battle has been joined between church and state and resistance can begin in earnest.

Here is Cavanaugh making these points:

If we are to understand properly the workings of terror and the church's response...we must see the strategies of disappearance and torture as ways to deny martyrs to the church...[because] martyrdom makes the church visible...torture works to create victims, not martyrs.

...

...the strategy of repression employed by the Pinochet regime in Chile [was] not the production of martyrs but rather the denial of martyrs to the church. The effect of the regime's strategy was to produce not martyrs but victims. Martyrs by their public witness build up the body of Christ in opposition to the state. For precisely this reason the regime's strategy was predicated on the elimination of spectacle, and therefore the disappearance of the visible church...Those that were killed had their bodies disposed of secretly, left in clandestine graves, dumped into rivers or the ocean, or dynamited...It was crucial to the Pinochet regime to have complete control over bodies. The regime understood perfectly well that the body could become a focus of resistance to the state's power. 

By laying claim to bodies--when you torture Mr. Smith you torture us--the church was able to resist the state's desire to deal with its citizens as isolated individuals, picking them off one by one. To resist the torture regime individuals needed to stand together in community, to recognize themselves as a social body, to identify themselves and each other as the body of Christ.

The techniques of invisibility which the secret police structure perfected were capable of fragmenting the church body while depriving the church of martyrs, visible witnesses to the conflict between the church and the powers of the world. The bodies of the martyrs make the church visible as the body of Christ.

In tomorrow's post we'll discuss three practices that allow the church to claim martyrs and "make a spectacle" in order to organize resistance to the torturing state.

Part 3

Over the summer it was a blessing and pleasure to get to meet and spend time with Chris Haw when Chris and I were both speakers at the Theology and Peace conference.

Theology and Peace is devoted to working out the insights of Rene Girard with the aim of producing more peaceable communities, locally and globally. So Chris and I talked a lot about Girard when we were together. But we also spent some time talking about Chris's recent conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Those were great and stimulating conversations, so I was really looking forward to Chris's book finally coming out, From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart.

The first part of the book is a spiritual memoir. While Chris was born into the Catholic faith he really fell in love with Jesus at Willow Creek during his high school years. During his time at Willow Chris became friends with Shane Claiborne. Chris eventually made his way to Eastern University where, with Shane and people like Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Chris became a part of the new monasticism movement. Two big themes emerge in these early chapters. The first is Chris's growing concern, after an exposure to Wendell Berry, with issues of sustainability. The second is Chris's activism in regards to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and war generally).

Following the new monastic impulse, after college Chris and his wife moved to a drug-infested and violent neighborhood in Camden, NJ. And across the street from their house was Sacred Heart church.

One of the things I really like about the new monastic movement is how many of these communities don't start or plant new churches. Rather, they go to the churches already in the neighborhood. So Chris started attending Mass at Sacred Heart. And, over time, this eventually led to Chris coming back to the Catholic church.

The first part of the book traces out this journey. For comparative purposes, the first half of From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart is very similar to Shane's memoir An Irresistible Revolution.

But what makes Chris's book different is the second half of the book where he gives his reasons for converting to Catholicism. The second half of the book is more theological and mainly addresses a variety of questions and objections people raise about Catholicism and the Catholic Church. For example, Chapter 9 is entitled "On Being a Part of a Terrible Organization" and it deals with Chris's conversion to Catholicism in the midst of the child abuse scandal.

Let me point out two chapters in Part 2 that I really liked, as these were the subjects Chris and I discussed last summer.

First, Chapter 6--"Murder and the Mass"--is a wonderful meditation on the Catholic Mass from a Girardian perspective. It's also in this chapter where Chris talks about William Cavanaugh's book Torture and Eucharist. Chris gets the credit for finally getting me to read Torture and Eucharist, which I recently blogged about (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). The main point of discussion between Chris and I last summer was about open (what I advocate) versus closed (what the Catholic church advocates) communion. But that's not the subject of Chapter 6. Again, Chapter 6 is about the theological and liturgical resources in the Catholic Mass that help make our violence and our victims more visible. Chris writes:

Instead of seeing the eucharist as my own private portion of sacredness, I came to see them as drawing me into Christ's profoundly different way of living in the world...When we eat together the Bread of Heaven, the Eucharist is a performance of uniting--both the people gathered locally and globally--and of making ourselves one with the Victim.

A theological resource here, one that Protestants generally lack, is a focus on the tortured body of Jesus. In Protestant churches you see crosses. But in Catholic churches you see crucifixes, a cross with a tortured body upon it. To be sure, many Protestants find this image problematic. Too gruesome and bloody. This is understandable if you are working with a view of atonement like penal substitutionary atonement. But from Chris's perspective (a perspective I share), a perspective informed by Girardian thought, the divinization of the tortured victim, a historically distinctive aspect of Christianity, is the greatest, most profound, earth-shattering and life-altering insight of the Christian faith. Christians deify the Victim, worship the Victim. And from this perspective I agree with Chris that the liturgical resources of the Catholic faith are better positioned to bring these themes to the forefront. I can see why someone who has been influenced by Girard would be attracted to the Mass, where the body of the Divine Victim is more visible (and mystically present). In fact, for very similar reasons I've begun to incorporate some Catholic devotions that dwell on the body, blood, and wounds of Jesus into my own prayer life.

Let me also mention another really great chapter, Chapter 8 "The Search for No Accent (Or, The Impossibility of Nondenominationalism)." This chapter is worth the price of the book.

In Chapter 8 Chris takes on the Protestant conceit of "nondenominationalism." This subject is of interest to me as I come from a faith tradition that describes itself as nondenominational. The basic idea behind nondenominationalism is that we can skip the history, traditions, and institutions of the church and just get back to Jesus and the Bible. When I look at my students' Facebook profiles under religion affiliation I often see "I love Jesus!" or "Jesus follower." The idea here is that you can cut out all the bad stuff about organized and institutionalized religion and simply be a "follower of Jesus."

In Chris's case he was working through the "nondenominationalism" of Willow Creek. What Chris came to realize was that Willow did have a creed and a tradition, that there were regulating traditions and beliefs. I came to realize the same about my own tradition. We claimed that our only guide to faith and practice was "the bible." But the more you poked around and questioned things the more you realized that "the bible" was simply a cipher for "the way we interpret the bible." In short, there is no such thing as "nondenominationalism." Nondenominationalism is an impossibility. You always have a bias, a stance, a hermeneutic, a regulating tradition, a stated or unstated creed. There is no "view from nowhere."

So the problem, Chris argues, is that "nondenominationalism" isn't being honest. Nondenominationalism pretends to not have a creed or tradition when these things are very much in play. Chris's argument is that the better move--the move Catholics make--is to have the tradition explicit and out on the table at the start of the conversation. That's the more honest place to start. What is less helpful, and perhaps even dangerous, is coming into the conversation pretending that you don't have a tradition or creed--pretending that your are unbiased, that you are "nondenominational." We see this mistake all over the place, particularly in evangelicalism where everyone is claiming that they are speaking for the bible while ignoring the fact that we are all engaged in the act of interpretation. Rachel Held Evans, in light of her new book A Year of Biblical Womanhood, recently made this very point:

The fact that the Bible lends itself to competing interpretations should be cause for celebration rather than dismay, for these competing interpretations among people of faith who love and value Scripture help bring us into relationship with one another and with God. They bring us into conversation.  They remind us that faith isn't simply about believing something in isolation, but about being part of a community.

What is perhaps most frustrating about engaging in such conversations within the evangelical community in particular, however, is that differences regarding things like Calvinism and Arminianism, baptism, heaven and hell, gender roles, homosexuality, and atonement theories often disintegrate into harsh accusations in which we question one another’s commitment to Scripture.  In some cases, folks are so committed to their particular views on these issues they seem incapable of making a distinction between the Bible itself and their interpretation of it, and so any critique of that interpretation is seen as a critique of Scripture itself!

Many Protestants have made this same observation. But Chris goes further as Catholics have a bit more to say about all this. Chris would argue that the divisiveness Rachel is speaking to--all these "competing interpretations"--is the fly in the ointment of the Protestant program, the crack in the foundation. Protestantism is unable, due to its structural flaws, to create the unified community of celebration Rachel envisions. 

The problem is this. Protestantism worships at the altar of individualism. In this Protestantism is the great handmaiden of the Enlightenment. The highest authority in Protestantism isn't God or the Bible. The highest authority is the individual conscience. If you don't like the particular teachings of a church you just walk away. Or start your own church. Thus the history of fracturing, spiting, and ramifying we've seen throughout Protestant history. There is one Catholic church. How many Protestant churches? Exactly. That's the point. And the problem. With the individual conscience as the final arbiter there is nothing that holds Protestantism together.

But Chris's argument goes even deeper. These divisions within Protestantism are often motivated by the conceit that you can get beyond or behind the tradition to the "real Jesus." But as Chris points out, there is no Jesus outside of the tradition. There is no pure Jesus, a Jesus uncontaminated by the tradition. In fact, the tradition is what gives us Jesus. Thus, to love Jesus is to love the tradition that brings you Jesus. The two are of a piece. To love Jesus is to love the church tradition that brings you Jesus.

Now, this is not a new argument. It is the standard Catholic line of attack against the Protestant project. And yet, I expect that most Protestants are unaware of this criticism. Nor have they wrestled with how they might respond. (BTW, Catholics know how we should respond: We should give up these nondenominational, back-to-the-Bible, "I just love Jesus" delusions and reconcile ourselves to the Tradition.)

This, I think, is where From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart is poised to very influential. The book is one of the most accessible presentations of the Catholic criticism of Protestantism and nondenominationalism that I've ever read.

And even if you ultimately disagree with Chris and Rome, exposing yourself to Catholic ecclesiology will help you puzzle through your own church issues and problems. For example, I've become much more sympathetic to the Catholic criticism of Protestantism as I've been shaken by recent events in my own local congregation. In the face of these crises, the question I keep asking myself is this: How is my church any different from Facebook? What binds us together past our "liking" this particular congregation? Because when the hard work comes--the work of accountability, discipline, discipleship, mission and sacrifice--mere "liking" isn't going to be strong enough to hold us together. In fact, I know--painfully so--that it's not enough. Because the minute we start to "dislike" our church we can just pack up and go somewhere else. It's spiritual consumerism at its best.

To conclude, I should perhaps end with the million dollar question.

In the end, did Chris convince me to become a Catholic?

Not quite. But I'll tell you what From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart did do for me and why you should read it. The book has made me a more reflective, restless and humble Protestant. (The book also rekindled my love for G.K. Chesterton.) The book has helped me internalize a Catholic perspective and sensibility that will forever shape how I view my faith and church. Chris's book will haunt me.

And for that, I'm deeply grateful.