Keywords of the Moral Life: Holiness
Keywords of the Moral Life: Holiness
Naming Goodness Requires Being Able to Name the Damage Rightly as Well
We don’t live in a world unconcerned with holiness. But we do live in the world which has confused it for both social cohesion and purity.
Holiness, Hospitality, and The Christian University
I don’t regularly spend much time around undergrads these days. For the last six years, my positions in academic life, have revolved around graduate students, training, those who are preparing for a ministry in one way or another. And so, this semester has opened up the door more fully, as I have taken on coteaching a biomedical ethics course1. It’s been a nice surprise.
Yesterday, I sat with a cup of tea with a student I have never met before, having been connected by one of my friends on campus. He comes from a small town, and from a Baptist church, and spoke with a great deal of concern and his voice. There was no eminent crisis, but the desire for someone who knew something of being Baptist to help him make sense of where he found himself one semester into college.
I won’t go into great detail about all of the things we talked about : he’s young and trying to piece together his own church background against a much wider and bigger university. and when that happens, sometimes that’s difficult, and has significant challenges. But here’s the thing that stayed with me more than anything else. Our university, like most universities, works very hard to facilitate a common culture. And theologically, that lends itself toward emphasizing hospitality and empathy.
But his question was why no one talked about sin. By this, he wasn’t asking for utterances of prophetic judgment, or fire and brimstone. He was simply asking why there was a little talk of the need to repent, to be changed.
In one respect, his concern wasn’t entirely true: universities talk about infractions, violations of policy, dignity of all persons, and informal decorum all the time. But his question was more of a theological nature: he was hearing lots of talk of the kinds of Christian life people were expected to live, but never a call to conversion or repentance.
Knowing the office of spiritual life as I do, I’m fairly sure his story isn’t the whole picture, and that their office, and the university professors at large, desire greatly for their students to live Christian lives—to be fully converted— and to be disciples of the risen Lord, without question, and without apology. We talked for probably a good hour, and at the end of the conversation, I think some of his concerns were addressed, but that one comment continued to stay with me.
For better for worse, I think the assumption of most professors at a Christian university is that their kids have some exposure to question things: why would a person come to an explicitly Christian university and less they wanted both the academic goods, and the Christian framework? And so, both because the university isn’t a church, and because the assumption is that they’ve had some exposure to the gospel already, the emphasis becomes, put on helping them grow in the spiritual life.
But that in and of itself isn’t sufficient, I don’t think. As more than one Christian writer has put it, the Christian life is a life of ongoing repentance. And while hospitality may very well be framed as a kind of letting go of perceptions and prejudices, a form of social repentance which makes room for others, hospitality—as a form purely of welcome—can also provide a sense that the goodness we seek is one of social maintenance, agnostic to whether that socially maintained world is one created by God. This is, I fear, what most institutions do well: manage human difference through processes designed to create the least friction.
Holiness and God’s Sharing: Hospitality Reconfigured
Holiness, theologically, is an attribute of God. It names the perfection of God, and as such, helps to qualify how we speak of the other professions of God: love, peace, goodness, and so forth. But our being holy cannot shy away from this definition, lest we say that the holiness of God has nothing to do with what it means for God’s creatures to share this in some way. And so, from the beginning, to be included in God’s presence involves holiness and hospitality, not in ways which put them in opposition, but in ways which demand that they are necessary partners. And accordingly, we must set aside any forms of either which would make them at odds.
There’s an interesting pattern which emerges in the gospel of Luke around Jesus, is continually eating with sinners. At one point, I wrote about 40% of a book manuscript on it, which may yet see the light of day, but one thing which struck me continually was the way in which Jesus, his own holiness is shared with sinners. Through touch, sharing of meals, and healing’s, Jesus, his own nature is communicated through actions which create space for others, to inhabit the world in a restored in full way.
As God approaches us, it is something like a warming affect, as CS Lewis, illustrated in the first installment of the chronicles of Narnia. As Aslan’s country comes to life, winter recedes, and the children are forced to shed their winter coats, and embrace the warmth of day. It strikes me the God’s holiness, as embodied in Christ, is something like that: an inescapable invitation for us to live into the world as it is in Christ.
The student’s concern is illuminated here: in eating with centers and tax collectors, Jesus does not evacuate his nature in order to accommodate the presence of sinners, but rather the nature of his holiness is made full and most illuminated in the eating with sinners. And yet, it is not holiness that, I think, this student envisioned it as: in our conversation, he spoke of repentance as if it was a thunderclap always, that which enabled us to see our righteousness as filthy rags. But the holiness of God here is not like that: it is an attribute intrinsic to Christ, the Holy One of Israel, which warms, invites, and makes uncomfortable that which obscures our embrace of God’s presence.
And so, holiness calls for hospitality of others, albeit a hospitality which invites us to move beyond solidarity, the standing alongside one another, and toward holiness, which invites us into communion with God, and one another. This kind of invitation does so by removing those defenses of the self, which we no longer need. God’s presence has made us warm, and we have no more need for winter coats.
The Need for Wholeness, The Need for Purity
This dance with holiness goes awry in two ways: premature social wholeness, and the unflinching desire for purity.
In his recent book, The Need to Be Whole, the mad farmer, Kentucky author Wendell Berry, offers an account of how racial prejudice has done damage to both black and white Americans, and that both have become alienated from the land, and that the way in which slavery, reconstruction, and racial prejudice happened, were largely predicated on this alienation. It’s a subtle and challenging book, reframing the ecological challenges facing the world as ones which we all now inherit, but it’s also a book which I think misses the mark in an important way. For decades, Barry has been preeminently concerned with the decline of local communities and the loss of the land with them. And so, in this, perhaps his final book, he offers a compelling account of civic peace, which invites us to restore the common ground, upon which all people must depend, and letting that be the context in which we can more productively work on racial prejudice and injustice.
In some ways, Berry’s book echoes what my student was concerned with: a preoccupation for creating a hospitable world, in which differences can be discussed and understood. But in doing so, Berry’s book also underplays the specific way in which damage of racial prejudice occurs: his reluctance to get into a comparison of suffering for the sake of repositioning everyone into a common world of ecological degradation, doesn’t really help, and in fact fails to see that even in local places, there are hidden wounds which must be opened up uncomfortably for us to have anything like community. For people to be able to repent of sin means to be able to repent of sin specifically, and the way in which black farmers contributed to the demise of the land is not the same as the damage which their former masters committed.
To be sure, Berry is correct in saying that wholeness is not something that an individual can do apart from the presence of others. It is not an individual project, but one which is shared, akin to the way in which Christ bears the presence of centers to share God’s own holiness with us. And so while deficient in one way, Berry opens up a criticism of a different deficiency of holiness: purity.
Purity, as an alternative to holiness, does not seek to share the holiness of God so much is at seeks to preserve it by withdrawal. Purity operates by the old saw that God cannot be in the presence of holiness, a canard which is quickly dismissed by looking at nearly any passage in the Old Testament, in which God’s presence remains among a people who are continually in violation of the law. One doesn’t have to be on college campuses regularly to identify this notion of purity as it plays out in public discourse: any association with anything less than the most rarefied of social stances, is contamination, or worse, complicity. And as such, it must be routed out, cut out, or abolished.
The persistent demand that one must be changed before hospitality becomes a demand for endless scrupulosity, for a circumspection that goes down and down and down until all we have left are bleached bones without the flesh that makes those bones recognizable as individual people with anything interesting about them. It becomes management by a different name: self-abnegation, the obliteration of faults, not realizing that to be a human before the end of time is to have faults, and that be in communion is to learn how to bear with the faults of others and ourselves.
Only Holiness Saves Hospitality
If the aspirations of the Mad Farmer are correct, as I want them to be, then, the path toward wholeness—toward a holiness that invites us in— will require repentance, and repentance in specific kinds of ways. It is not enough to sidestep specific forms of damage, even if we do not want to keep the damage as the focal point of our life together. Keeping specific sins as the thing which we obsess over obscures the truth than sin is not the ultimate thing, but God.
Hospitality is inseparable from holiness, and that an open door is the only way that we can call one another home. But hospitality, divorced from holiness, it’s just niceness, and niceness over time, when left a sour, becomes silence about the things which are killing us. On this point, I will leave the reader to read Langston Hughes’s poem about hope when it is deferred.
Reading: Lots of student papers, case studies, and the gas gauge as I drove to Lubbock and back on Wednesday, and San Angelo and back this weekend. Tis the season.
Paying Attention: A few articles that have caught my eye as of late.
Germane to the conversation above, a really nice piece on mimetic rivalry and the search for justice, that current discourse can only promise to be fractured because it operates in mirroring our opponents.
A nice meditation on the future of humanity and the shape of Mary.
With Title 42 ending, once again the U.S. immigration system enters a new unknown space. This is kind of endemic with the US immigration system, and with migration in general: the constant flux and changing conditions. It makes it more understandable as to what it can’t be “fixed”, then, even if there are certain aspects of it, such as legal proceedings and processing of applications and DACA status, which can.
Those of you who haven’t regularly been around college-age students much since you were one: the reports are mostly true. College students are a bit more hesitant these days to ensure their opinions, and when they do, are a bit less equipped to be able to negotiate contrasting opinions. They’re still goofy, and, eager to learn and eager to prove off, but there is a greater sense of hesitancy to be wrong, I think.