At Semester's End

Last week, aside from a few incompletes that will straggle in over the summer, my TA & I completed the grading for the ethics course at Claremont. For all practical purposes, my semester there is finished.

It was a wonderful, albeit taxing, experience. The most challenging part for me was to come to terms with my own parochialism. For the last ten years I’ve become so accustomed to standing at the far left fringe of the group that represents the far right fringe of American society that I’ve never thought to ask how I would fare in a more pluralistic setting.

My first inkling that I was no longer in Kansas probably occurred the week we discussed the contemporary relevance of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully expected some debate as to whether or not Jesus’ commands were to be taken at face value, put into practice, applied to secular social concerns. What I did not anticipate was the handful of students who were put off by the notion that Jesus would command us to do anything in the first place. This in turn led to a larger discussion as to whether authoritarian words like Lord, kingdom, obedience or submission held any currency at all for modern day Christians, in light of the ways that such language has been used throughout the church’s history to legitimize patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, and various other forms of domination and social stratification.

I left class a bit discouraged that morning. If in a Methodist school of theology we could not assume a priori that we shared a basic belief in Christ as Lord (and not simply as friend), what was our starting point for further inquiry? Fortunately, our mid-semester break fell on the following week, so I had some extra time to reflect and regain my bearings. I want to be—have to be—attentive to the struggles of those whose subjugation has been justified or ignored by my faith tradition. At the same time, I can’t simply relinquish what I consider a central feature of the Christian confession: that my life is not my own, that I am accountable to Someone who is not in turn accountable to me, that God’s thoughts are higher than mine, that to flourish as a human being requires a subordinate relation to our Creator. To hold to this conviction does not require that I dismiss the criticisms of those who consider it an oppressive worldview. It requires, rather, that I remain attentive to other ways of thinking about Christianity, that I listen to those who might be able to see my ideological blind spots, and that I still speak confidently on the basis of the faith as I’ve known it thus far.

A few of the ministerial students live openly in long-term relationships with partners of the same sex—again, a phenomenon that doesn’t come into play much at Fuller. For the last decade or so, I’ve been moving toward a more embracing posture vis-à-vis homosexuality, a shift inspired in part through research and in part by watching the cruel treatment that the gay pastor of the Old Stone Church in Carnation received from the hands of his local colleagues in the early-mid 1990s. I would still not consider myself “welcoming and affirming”—a position I fear might too quickly excuse us from asking difficult questions about sexual ethics in general. But I am becoming convinced that whatever stand a local church takes on homosexuality must be hammered out in dialogue with the gay and lesbian people within its own sphere of ministry. If we heterosexuals haven’t enough acquaintance with specific homosexuals to listen to them, know their stories, and understand their interpretations of Scripture & theology, I don’t see how we can contribute anything insightful to the discussion.

About two months ago, I stepped out of my teacher role at the beginning of class to tell the students that I would be looking at CT-scan results the next day and to ask for their prayers, since I was unusually nervous at to what I might learn. After class, Marguerite, an older student who had participated in the Civil Rights marches in the 60s, approached me to ask whether I had time after chapel to meet with a few others who wanted to pray with me. About twenty in all, nearly half the class—gay people, liberationists, Unitarians, process theologians, as well as a few who hold to the confessional Biblicism that informs my faith—gathered to lay hands on me, calling on God on my behalf, uttering words of hope and encouragement and specific biblical promises, hugging me afterward, and telling me they loved me and were journeying with me.

Together they embodied an assurance that I’ve held abstractly for several years now: that my faith community is much larger and stronger than I sometimes imagine.