Cory L. Seibel
Central Baptist Church/Sioux Falls Seminary
First Published 13th February 2018
The 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on a number of important themes: the nature of Christian tradition, the Church’s struggle to understand and remain faithful to its calling within the flow of history, and the various ways in which the Church has sought to foster constancy and innovation over the course of time. If we pause to do so, we can point to a number of significant historic developments that have influenced the way that we understand and approach issues of tradition, faithfulness, and change.
One phrase that is frequently associated with these issues within the Protestant movement is ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum, Latin for “the church reformed, always being reformed according to the word of God.” In this paper, I will briefly explore the significance of this phrase. I will suggest that it has come to reflect an understanding of the reformation of the church not only as a historical phenomenon, but also as an ongoing impulse that is meant to characterize the church’s life. This phrase contains important insights into how the vitality and integrity of the Church’s witness is preserved across time. More specifically, I will approach this subject from an intergenerational perspective. I will argue that each new generation has an important role to play in the ongoing reformation of the church. In fact, we will see that every Christian tradition can foster ongoing renewal by empowering each successive generation to discover the gospel’s call to faithfulness within its day.
Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda has been a widely cited axiom in recent decades. Despite this, its origins are the focus of considerable debate. Scholars widely agree that its usage did not originate in the sixteenth century; while the earliest Reformation thinkers certainly expressed the need for a “Reformed church,” they did not actually employ this phrase.1 According to Reformed scholar Michael Horton, the phrase is believed to have originated with the Seventeenth Century Dutch Pietist Jodocus van Lodenstein. By Horton’s account, it first appeared in a devotional written by van Lodenstein that was published in 1674.2
R. Scott Clark, a colleague of Horton’s at Westminster Seminary, challenges this explanation. He agrees that van Lodenstein employed the juxtaposition of “reformed” and “reforming” in his writing.3 In fact, Clark asserts that several of van Lodenstein’s Dutch Pietist forebears and contemporaries expressed similar ideas.4 According to Clark, however, van Lodenstein and the other Dutch Pietists did not employ the word semper or “always.” For Clark, this is an important point of clarification because it raises the question of whether the early reformers saw reformation as a “finite task” or as something ongoing.
Clark argues that the full phrase ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum is most likely attributable to a much more recent source: he identifies the twentieth-century Princeton Seminary professor Edward Dowey (1918-2003). In essence, he posits, the phrase in its entirety is a post-WWII invention, one that gained visibility and importance through the influence of Karl Barth.5
Despite the confusion and debate surrounding its origins, we nonetheless have good reason to affirm that this phrase has roots reaching back several centuries. As Horton expresses, “Although the Reformers themselves did not use this slogan, it certainly reflects what they were up to.”6 Because of the frequency with which it turns up within our modern discourse about the life of the church, we also can affirm that it is viewed as a phrase of some significance among contemporary church thinkers, as well.
While the origins of the phrase ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda are somewhat murky, many scholars agree that this phrase expresses an important and longstanding impulse of the Protestant Reformation. This being the case, it will be helpful to explore its meaning here briefly. Horton explains that, for van Lodenstein and the other Dutch Pietists who have been credited with the seminal ideas behind the phrase, “The Reformation reformed the doctrine of the church, but the lives and practices of God’s people always need further reformation.”7 The main concern of the Dutch Pietists, expresses Horton, was seeing the teachings of the Reformed confessions and catechism “become more thoroughly applied as well as understood.” Thus, suggests the Dutch theologian Leo Koffeman, the early Dutch Pietists were mainly concerned with “spiritual growth.”8
Over time, the meanings associated with ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda have continued to evolve and be applied in various ways. Anna Case-Winters, an American Presbyterian, notes that this phrase is sometimes “used as a springboard in all kinds of contexts and conversations, sometimes with little sense of how it arose” or what it meant among those who first employed it.9 Clark similarly suggests that the phrase often is appropriated to argue that “the church is reformed but needs to be changed in various ways.”10 Like Case-Winters, he recognizes that this meaning is nebulous and can simply be employed as a justification for reacting against pretty much anything about church life that one dislikes.
The confusion surrounding this phrase does not discount the feasibility of exploring its implications. Horton emphasizes our need for grasping the central point that even those churches that happen to describe themselves as “Reformed” are “always in need of being reformed.”11 As he expresses, “Like our personal sanctification, our corporate faithfulness is always flawed. From Horton’s perspective, “We don’t need to move beyond the gains of the Reformation, but we do need further reformation.” Case-Winters strikes a similar note:
Even our best endeavors and highest aspirations are prone to sin and error. Forms of faith and life in the church are no exception…We acknowledge that the church even at its best is a frail and human institution. We know that we ‘hold these treasures in earthen vessels.’ Edward Dowey, another church historian, has written that reform is the institutional counterpart of repentance. Recognizing how far we fall from God’s intentions, we continually submit all doctrines and structures to be reformed according to the Word of God and the call of the Spirit. The church is a frail and fallible pilgrim people, a people on the way, not yet what we shall be. The church, because of who we are, remains open to always being reformed. 12
Koffeman summarizes the matter pointedly: “No Church can fully embody the Church of Jesus Christ.”13 This “incompleteness,” he asserts, calls us continually toward reformation.
If the church is called to be “always reforming”—to engage in an ongoing process of reformation—generations must be understood as playing a crucial role in this process. We can affirm this in part for purely chronological reasons: all of human history has been shaped by the influence of a long line of successive generations. This is true of the church, as well. Across 2,000 years of church history and 500 years of the Protestant era, the church has depended upon the Spirit’s work in generation after generation to perpetuate its traditions and to preserve its vitality. The oft-cited aphorism that “The church is always only one generation removed from extinction” may be theologically problematic. However, it is a simple historical reality that the succession of generations is essential for semper reformanda—the reformation of the church as an ongoing reality.14
This being said, I would like to suggest that generations play a crucial role in the ongoing process of reformation for another reason, one that I describe as generational perspectivism. Sociologists tell us that each generation, through its shared “age location in history,” develops “a distinct biography.”15 Along the way, each generation also forms its own unique “generational style” and weltanshauung (or “worldview”) comprised of similar patterns of belief, values, behaviour, and ways of expressing generational identity.16 In essence, while this concept is too complex to be explored adequately here, the weight of the social scientific evidence enables us to assert that each generation develops a distinct “view-from-here” by which it understands the world. This “view-from-here” will have a family resemblance to that of their parents and grandparents; however, because each generation inhabits a unique place within history, its vantage point is distinct in ways that build upon, challenge, and, at times, even part ways with the assumptions of their parents.
As we contemplate the significance of generational perspectivism for the life of the church, we can describe its relationship to the need for ongoing reformation in a “negative” sense: as we acknowledge that each generation develops a historically-conditioned “view-from-here,” it is helpful to recognize that this generational perspective is particular and limited, not absolute. This means that every generation is prone to have perspectival blind spots: certain biases and prejudices, or values and priorities that are emphasized to the neglect of other matters. There is ample evidence in the history of the church to suggest that these blind spots sometimes distort our reading of scripture and its call to faithfulness. Every generation sees “through a glass, darkly” (I Corinthians 13:12), each in its own way. In his book Generational IQ, Haydn Shaw goes so far as to suggest that each generation is susceptible to specific “temptations” that are bound up with its particular generational biography and view-from-here.17 As church leaders in each generation wrestle with the ongoing task of reformation, their generational blind spots can certainly be exposed in the authoritative light of scripture, leading to repentance and reform. However, because we often are unaware of them, our biases, excesses, and oversights are bound to influence how we envision and express Christian faithfulness in our time. The various ways in which human finitude and fallibility is expressed in each generation thus contribute to the need for ongoing reformation. This is true in every generation, including our own.
The significance of generational perspectivism can also be seen in a positive light. Each new generation of church leaders seeks to discern the nature of Christian faithfulness within the uniqueness of its specific time, the specific challenges with which it is confronted, and the specific questions that arise in its lifetime. As the celebrated sociologist Karl Mannheim once asserted, generations grow up facing “different adversaries.”18 Thus, as each generation wrestles with its unique circumstances, it is provided distinct opportunities to gain fresh insight into the implications of the timeless, universal truth of the gospel and its call upon our lives. While, as I have already suggested, we do not always get it right, the opportunity to hear the voice of scripture within the circumstances of each generation can help to foster ongoing reformation. In some cases, this may even lead to challenging and correcting the sins of commission and sins of omission of past generations.
Garth Bolinder addresses this subject by asserting that the biblical worldview is “transgenerational” in nature.19 To illustrate this, he appropriates the testimony of Psalm 145: “no one can fully fathom the greatness of the Lord,…one generation can commend the Lord’s works to another, speaking of his mighty acts.” Bolinder suggests that this means it is impossible for any one generation to achieve the full and final expression of the faith. The fresh testimony of each new generation constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the call to Christian faithfulness.
In his book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, the American Presbyterian scholar Darrell Guder strikes a similar note. He asserts that by faithfully wrestling with the message of scripture within the contextual situation of each new generation, the church is enabled to foster the ongoing vitality of its witness. As he explains, “What is true of the original witnesses, preserved in the canonical record, continues true of witness thereafter from generation to generation. God’s people are called to carry forward this unique witness, to translate it into every new situation of history, so that the Word happened continues to be the Word witnessed, heard, responded to, and obeyed.”20 For Guder, this re-translating of the gospel within the situation of each new generation enables the church, in his words, to be “continually converted” through fresh encounter with the gospel. In essence, he is advocating for a generation-by-generation understanding of semper reformanda.
The “continual conversation” for which Guder advocates helps to safeguard the church against a pitfall that he describes as reductionism. As he explains, over time, the faith communities formed within a given culture tend to reduce their understanding of the gospel to that which has resulted from the interface of gospel and culture in that context. This “reduced” understanding of the faith becomes problematic, however, when “the sinful human desire to control begins to do its work.”21 Explains Guder, “We are constantly tempted to assert that our way of understanding the Christian faith is a final version of Christian truth,” and thereby to “enshrine one cultural articulation of the gospel as the normative statement for all cultures.”
Guder recognizes that this tendency is often motivated by a noble concern for preserving a particular vision of faithfulness within the church.22 While reductionism may be rooted in such good intentions, however, it poses great risk to the integrity of the church’s true calling. When the church becomes bound by a reductionistic understanding of its tradition, “the culturally determined nature of much of its life and structure is overlooked,” says the missiologist Howard Snyder.23
This reductionistic tendency severely limits the ability of each new generation to contribute to the ongoing reformation of the church. As missiologist Charles Kraft notes, “Most often the forms of the group in power have simply been imposed upon any new receiving group (whether the children of the group in power or the members of a different society or subsociety).”24 He adds, “Faith alone is not enough for [the group in power]. It has to be faith as understood by and expressed in terms of their particular subculture.”25 As we might expect, this prevents members of the rising generation from responding to God “in terms of their own subcultural structures.”26 Instead, they are expected to convert to a cultural form that is native to the world of previous generations.
The British Anglican scholar Andrew Atherstone cautions against the notion that the sixteenth century reformers, or the proponents of reform of any generation for that matter, “got it exactly right.”27 As he notes, some choose to assert that past reformers “purified the church and nothing more is needed….[A]ll we need to do is defend our heritage and the church will be safe.” He suggests that this perspective reasserts the ecclesia reformata, the church reformed, but loses sight of the semper reformanda, which prompts us to keep reforming. This is a significant point. As Atherstone expresses, “When reformation stops, deformation sets in.” Thus, for Atherstone, “reformation is not reassertion—the gospel needs to be continually reapplied, and our historic assumptions need to be continually reformed. Semper reformanda is a clarion call to throw ourselves energetically into the reforming movement…to shake the ecclesiastical status quo with all our might, and never give up.”28
Some scholars have set this discussion in overtly generational terms. For example, in describing ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda as a call to “reformation as a movement rather than a completed event,” the Scottish theologian A.T.B. McGowan says the following: “In our twenty-first century we face many complex issues, which earlier generations have not been required to face and it will not do merely to restate old ideas in the old familiar words and try to hide away from the modern world.”29 Horton also sees the call to ongoing reformation in intergenerational terms: “While the creeds and confessions remain treasures to be defended, we easily forget that they serve rather than substitute for the living confession of Christ as we return in each generation to the original well from which they are drawn.”30 According to these authors, while a generation must grapple with the nature of faithfulness in its time, some of the answers it discerns may not be sufficient for all time. Thus, it is essential for succeeding generations to be permitted to wrestle with the call to ongoing reformation within their respective lifetimes, as well.
While reductionism can lead to the deformation of the church, we can identify another potential pitfall that misses the mark of the true meaning of the ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda saying. Atherstone says that there are those in every generation who seem to possess a “sense of restlessness” and who are “always champing at the bit for continual change.”31 Those belonging to this camp, he says, run the risk of misappropriating the principle of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda in ways that leave the church at the mercy of the shifting Zeitgeist.32 Case-Winters sees this being expressed by some within our contemporary context. She notes that, while the cultural assumption at work in the time of the Reformers was that “what is older is better,” today our culture tends to “applaud the new and ‘innovative.’”33 As a result, ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda can be invoked to justify “captivity to the spirit of the age,” as Horton expresses.34 In this case, ongoing reformation is essentially deemed to be synonymous with liberal “progressivism.” However, like reductionism, progressivism cannot be an end in itself.35 This too is destined to lead to the deformation of the church.
This being the case, it will be helpful to make two important observations arising from the wording of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda.36 First, it is essential to remember that the meaning of this phrase is qualified by the words secundum verbum. These words remind us that the reformation of the church must always be pursued according to the Word of God. These key words must not be omitted from the church’s vision of ongoing reformation. As Koffeman affirms, “the Word of God…is the foundation of the Church.”37 Therefore, expresses Horton, “Not only our doctrine but our worship and life must be determined by Scripture and not by human whim or creativity.”38 The church therefore must submit “itself to the judgment of God’s Word” and ask “whether its confession and practice are in accord with Scripture.”39
Case-Winters shares this concern for the centrality of scripture, noting that the impulse of the Reformation is “neither liberal nor conservative, but radical in the sense of returning to the ‘root.’” The change that is needed is “change in the interest of the preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the word of God.”40 When reform is advocated, she argues, it “must find its grounding in Scripture.”41 This challenges both the conservative impulse of reductionism and the liberal impulse of progressivism. As Case-Winters articulates, “It does not bless either preservation for preservation’s sake or change for change’s sake.”42 Thus, in every generation, in order to promote reformation rather than deformation, both tendencies “must be brought in humble subjection to the word of God.”43
6.2 Ecclesia Reformata
A second key facet of a radical approach to ongoing reformation lies in the words “ecclesia reformata.” In saying that the church must always be reformed, we essentially acknowledge that we are rooted in a particular tradition, one that has been shaped by particular ways of confessing the faith. The British Methodist youth worker and author Fred Milson once expressed, paraphrasing John Donne, that “no generation is an island, entire of itself.”44 In other words, every generation is born into a cultural world that has been shaped by their parents and the generations that have come before them. Thus, as each generation of Christians strives to discern the nature of faithfulness within their time, they do not construct their understanding ex nihilo. Rather, they do so in conversation with the accumulated faith tradition that has been transmitted to them by prior generations.
However, each generation must grapple with what to do with the accumulated tradition that has been imparted to them by their elders. Jackon Carroll, sociologist of religion at Duke Divinity School, suggests that it is helpful to draw a distinction between traditum and traditio: “The former term refers to the core ‘deposit’ of the collective memory, while the latter refers to the core’s various adaptations as it is handed down from generation to generation.”45 In essence, each generation must make choices regarding what they will reassert, what they will discard, and what they will change or correct.
Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that, within any living tradition, we will find an ongoing internal argument regarding the “goods” with which that tradition is concerned.46 If we apply this principle to the life of the church, we can see that, as a particular expression of the Christian tradition is transmitted through time and into the particularities of specific contexts, it is normal for this tradition to be subject to dialogue and debate regarding its essence. This sheds valuable light on our discussion here. As Kraft expresses, “it is crucial that each new generation and people experience the process of producing in its own cultural forms an appropriate church vehicle for the transmission of God’s meaning.”47 In essence, the “internal argument” of which McIntyre writes must be seen as having an intergenerational trajectory, one to which each succeeding generation should be empowered to contribute. This helps to make possible ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda as a generation-by-generation reality. It enables the church’s tradition to remain a living one.
According to Atherstone, in order for the Reformed tradition to be honoured, there are a few crucial elements of this tradition that must be retained. He cautions that ecclesia reformata and semper reformanda “must not be separated.”48 As he explains, “The church is to be both reformata and reformanda, both reformed and reforming. The foundational truths of evangelical Christianity—expressed by…the five solas [sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solo Christo, soli Deo Gloria]—remain inviolable for ecclesia reformata.” For Atherstone, however, “Once those anchors are in place, and within those limits, radicalism is very welcome. But as soon as our innovations begin to undermine the foundations of the reformed faith, which is biblical Christianity, the church will come crashing down. These wonderful gospel truths, encapsulated by the solas, need to be clearly and enthusiastically proclaimed without hesitation in every generation.”
Koffeman notes that there are many different aspects of church life that may become the focal point of reformation. As he says,
Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Churches can develop new forms of diaconal work or missionary outreach. Pastoral work, Christian education and catechesis, liturgical forms, songbooks and Bible translations can be renewed. Such renewal is due to changing circumstances, new theological insights with regard to the missio Dei, and—together with these—a renewed understanding of the Holy Scripture.49
While Christians within a given generation may feel compelled to make changes of this nature, remembering that we are rooted in the ecclesia reformata can help to combat the sort of post-traditional “throwing the baby out with the baptismal water” that is common in some circles today.50 Rather than operating from a posture of generational chauvinism, one that takes a dismissive, “we know better” attitude toward past generations, we must adopt a posture of generational ecumenism, one that sees Christians of other generations as partners worthy of our honour from whom we have much to learn. As Atherstone expresses, “We are not better Bible expositors or theologians or reformers than they. Just as they faithfully proclaimed the message in their generation, without vacillation, so must we in ours.”51
Atherstone highlights several examples of ongoing reformation from various points in church history. His reflections upon the legacy of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) are especially relevant to this discussion of the intergenerational implications of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. According to Atherstone, “Kuyper was the leading conservative churchman in his day, and yet he spoke out passionately against what he called a false conservatism.”52 This “false conservatism” was something akin to what we have described above as reductionism. In his final message to his congregation in Utrecht in July 1870, Kuyper chose to reflect upon the words of Christ to the church at Philadelphia, “hold fast to what you have” (Revelation 3:11). As Atherstone expresses, this “was a bold appeal for them to engage in the present, not merely maintain the status quo of a previous generation.”53
In his message, Kuyper cautioned that “many are joining our ranks whose goal is not, as is ours, the victory of Christianity but merely the triumph of conservatism.” In his view, these people seemed to cry “Return! Return…to the age of our ancestors.”54 Seeing this, he offered this appeal: “No, you men who honour the fathers: first seek to have for yourself the life your fathers had and then hold fast what you have. Then articulate that life in your own language as they did in theirs. Struggle as they did to pump that life into the arteries of the life of our church and society. Then not being a dead form but a living fellowship will unite you with them, faith will be a power in your own life, and your building project will reach success.”55 In essence, Kuyper sought to encourage the inheritors of the Reformed tradition within his day to discover their place within the call of semper ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, a call toward the continuing conversation of the church within each new generation.
In recent decades, a great deal has been written about the differences that are evident among the living generations and about the impact that this reality has had within various Christian traditions. In just the last few years, a number of attempts have been made by members of rising generations to articulate visions of reformation for their specific faith traditions: A Seat at the Table: A Generation Reimagining Its Place in the Church within the Nazarene tradition, Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church, and Insights from the Underside: An Intergenerational Conversation of Ministers within the PCUSA.56 Each of these books represents a sincere effort to engage with the voice of scripture and with the Christian traditions to which these authors belong. However, they also voice questions and critiques that arise from the cultural world to which these young leaders are native. In every case, we find these young voices grappling with the shape of the traditions that they have inherited from prior generations and wrestling with the changes that may need to occur in order for faithfulness to be expressed within their generation.
One recent example of this that I find particularly instructive is a book entitled The Future of Our Faith: An Intergenerational Conversation on Critical Issues Facing the Church, by Ronald Sider and Ben Lowe. These evangelical authors begin their opening chapter with the following observations:
It doesn’t take being part of the Christian faith for very long before tensions between older and younger generations become apparent. We don’t see eye to eye on many things, whether it’s about stylistic issues such as worship music or Sunday attire, or about doctrinal or ethical issues such as sexuality or social justice. Such tensions are to be expected as incumbent generations seek to safeguard the traditions and institutions they have painstakingly built up, while rising generations react against the status quo and push reforms.57
Throughout the pages that follow these opening sentences, Sider and Lowe engage in dialogue around some of the most problematic theological issues facing the church today. The authors, one a Boomer and the other a Millennial, note that they approach this dialogue “from distinct generational contexts and perspectives…almost half a century apart in age!”58
Over the course of eight chapters, their dialogue progresses through a series of pressing themes, including the interplay between evangelism and social justice, relativism, marriage, homosexuality, discipleship, politics, unity, and God’s creation. While they readily acknowledge that this is not “an exhaustive list of generational differences,”59 they note that they have chosen these topics because they represent many of the most difficult tension points they see arising between people of multiple generations within the church today. These authors engage substantively with scripture, with the Christian tradition, and with their respective generational “views-from here.” Where possible, they extend affirmation, engage in lively debate, and offer constructive proposals for how the church may need to change as the mantel of leadership passes to a new generation. They identify ways in which the questions and critiques raised by emerging generations can help the church remain faithful in a changing world.
Sider and Lowe assert that it is essential for Christians within every generation to maintain the proper focus. As they express in their final pages,
Regardless of the question or problem, the key to moving forward faithfully…is that Jesus, as revealed to us in the Bible, must be our center…At the end of the day, we seek first the kingdom of God and trust that everything else, whether quibbles or questions or concerns or challenges, will be sorted out as well. We go out into God’s good but groaning world as we are sent, to make disciples of all nations and all generations, trusting in Jesus’s promise that he will be with us to the very end of the age. Generations come, and generations go. But Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Heb. 13:8).60
Sider and Lowe provide an encouraging, hopeful account of the ongoing reformation of the church as an intergenerational reality. However, as they emphasize, it is essential that each generation remain rooted in the witness of scripture and centred in the Lordship of Christ.
In this article, I have sought to make a case for ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda as a call for the ongoing reformation of the church, a process to which every generation should contribute. A proper understanding of this principle will aid each generation in avoiding the twin pitfalls of reductionism and progressivism, both of which lead to the deformation of the church. The words of Case-Winters provide a fitting conclusion to this exploration:
The backward and forward reference of reform invites us on the one hand to attend respectfully to the wisdom and Scriptural interpretations of those who have gone before us with humility. On the other hand, it pushes us to do more than simply reiterate what fathers and moths in the faith have said. Therefore, while we honor the forms of faith and life that have been bequeathed to us, we honor them best in a spirit of openness to the Word and the Spirit that formed and continues to re-form the church. The church, because of who God is, a living God, remains open to always being reformed.61
Amen. May this be so among the generations of today and throughout generations to come.
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———-, “Semper Reformanda,” in Tabletalk Magazine (October 2009); <https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/semper-reformanda/>
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Footnotes
1 R. Scott Clark, “Always Abusing Semper Reformanda,” in Tabletalk Magazine (November 2014); <https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/always-abusing-semper-reformanda/>
2 Michael Horton, “Semper Reformanda,” in Tabletalk Magazine (October 2009); <https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/semper-reformanda/>
3 Scott, “Always Abusing Semper Reformanda.”
4 Other scholars who have written on this subject provide comparable accounts. Specifically, Scott cites the Dutch Reformed theological Jacobus Koelman (1632-95), who was influenced by the thinking of his teacher, Johannes Hoornbeek (1617-66); Hoornbeek was a student of Gijsbertus Voetius (1589-1676).
5 Scott, “Always Abusing Semper Reformanda.”
6 Horton, “Sempter Reformanda.”
7 Ibid.
8 Leo J. Koffeman, “’Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda’ Church renewal from a Reformed perspective,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies vol. 71, no. 3 (2015), 2. <https://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ hts.v71i3.2875>
9 Anna Case-Winters, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda: Our Misused Motto,” in Presbyterian Today (May 2004); < https://pma.pcusa.org/ministries/today/reformed/>
10 Clark, “Always Abusing Semper Reformanda.”
11 Horton, “Semper Reformanda.”
12 Case-Winters, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.”
13 Koffeman, “Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda,” 5.
14 In my doctoral thesis, I state the following: “When viewed from a broad, catholic perspective, the oft cited aphorism that ‘the Church is always only one generation from extinction’ is an absurdity; that ‘the gates of hell will not prevail against it’ (Matt. 16:18) is a certainty rooted in the covenantal promise of God. However, that the church in its local manifestation is always in jeopardy of nonexistence is an empirical reality that has been demonstrated far too many times throughout history (e.g., the church of North Africa). Thus, every local congregation that seeks to embody a commitment to eschatological sustainability must seek to perpetuate its witness intergenerationally. In other words, we must take seriously the intergenerational implications of the church’s movement toward God’s future.” [Cory L. Seibel, “Intergenerational Reconciliation and Justice as Essential Dimensions of Missional Renewal in the Post-modern Transition” (PhD thesis, University of Pretoria, 2009), 68; available at <https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/28779>.]
15 William Strauss & Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 48.
16 J. Walker Smith & Ann S. Clurman, Rocking the Ages: The Yakelovich Report on Generational Marketing (New York: HarperBusiness, 1997), xv; Angie Williams & Jon F. Nussbaum, Intergenerational Communication Across the Life Span (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2001), 8; Jackson W. Carroll & Wade Clark Roof, Bridging Divided Worlds: Generational Cultures in Congregations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), 6; Lynne C. Lancaster & David Stillman, When Generations Collide (New York: Harper Business, 2003), 13-14.
17 Haydn Shaw, Generational IQ: Christianity isn’t dying, millennials aren’t the problem, and the future is bright (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2015), 21.
18 Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in The New Pilgrims: Youth Protest In Transition, eds., Philip G. Altbach & Robert S. Laufer (New York: David McKay Company, 1972), 116.
19 Garth Bolinder & James Emery White, “Should the Church Target Generations?” Leadership (Spring 1999), 105.
20 Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 61.
21 Ibid., 100.
22 Ibid.
23 Howard A. Snyder, Radical Renewal: The Problem of Wineskins Today (Houston: Touch Publications 1996), 136.
24 Charles H. Kraft, Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective—25th Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 224.
25 Ibid, 267.
26 Ibid, 265.
27 Andrew Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” Anvil, vol. 26, no. 1 (2009), 37.
28 Ibid., 40-41.
29 A.T. B. McGowan, Always Reforming: Explorations in Systematic Theology (Leicester: IVP Apollos, 2006), 14.
30 Michael S. Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 223.
31 Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” 31.
32 Ibid., 33; in making this point, Atherstone draws upon the work of Michael Welker, “Travail and Mission: Theology Reformed According to God’s Word at the Beginning of the Third Millennium,” in Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions, ed., David Willis & Michale Welker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 136-152.
33 Case-Winters, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.”
34 Horton, “Semper Reformanda.”
35 Ibid.
36 In the literature dedicated to discussing this phrase, there is a third important issue that I am choosing to relegate to a footnote for the sake of space: this pertains to the meaning of “semper reformanda.” Several scholars agree that this is properly translated as “always being reformed,” rather than “always reforming.” These authors note that this emphasizes the external agency of the Holy Spirit, rather than merely making reformation a human enterprise. This is an important point deserving more complete treatment (Case-Winters, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda,” 2; Koffeman, “Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda,” 3; Horton, “Semper Reformata”).
37 Koffeman, “Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda,” 3.
38 Horton, “Semper Reformanda”; Paul Haffner argues that this phrase expresses “the Protestant position that the Church must continually re-examine itself, reconsider its doctrines, and be prepared to accept change, in order to conform more closely to orthodox Christian belief as revealed in the Bible” [Paul Haffner, Mystery of the Church (Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2007), 117].
39 Horton, People and Place, 223.
40 Case-Winters, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda,” 1.
41 Ibid., 2.
42 Ibid., 1.
43 Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” 32; Koffeman (“Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda,” 3) suggests that the real issue thus becomes hermeneutics. While a full exploration of this point lies beyond the constraints of this paper, the basic point must be acknowledged here.
44 Fred Milson, Youth in a Changing Society (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 29.
45 Jackson W. Carroll, Mainline to the Future (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 10-11.
46 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
47 Kraft, Christianity in Culture, 247.
48 Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” 34.
49 Koffeman, “Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda,” 3.
50 Jackson Carroll provides an excellent sociological analysis of this post-traditionalist impulse in his book, Mainline to the Future. I was first introduced to the phrase, “throwing the baby out with the baptismal water,” as a way of describing the post-traditional impulse by Clayton J. Schmit in Sent and Gathered: A Worship Manual for the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 128.
51 Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” 36.
52 Ibid., 38.
53 Ibid.
54 As quoted in Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” 38.
55 As quoted by Atherstone, “The Implications of Semper Reformanda,” 39.
56 Shawna Songer Gaines & Timothy R. Gaines, A Seat at the Table: A Generation Reimagining Its Place in the Church (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2012); Andrew C. Thompson (ed.), Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2011); Neal D. Presa (ed.), Insights from the Underside: An Intergenerational Conversation of Ministers (Elizabeth, NJ: Broadmind Press, 2008).
57 Ronald J. Sider & Ben Lowe. The Future of Our Faith: An Intergenerational Conversation on Critical Issues Facing the Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016), 1.
58 Ibid., 4. While they acknowledge that they “can’t claim to speak for [their] respective generations,” Sider and Lowe write with the awareness that they “do speak from them” (5).
59 Ibid., 3.
60 Ibid., 216-217.
61 Case-Winters, “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.”
]]>Cory L. Seibel
Central Baptist Church/Sioux Falls Seminary
First Published 17th February 2017
The second chapter of Judges describes a significant generational transition within the life of the Hebrew community. Under the leadership of Moses, this fledgling nation had covenanted together to impart to their children a vital awareness of what God had done for Israel and a commitment to live in obedience to God’s law. Moses charged them, in Deuteronomy 6:12, to “take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” However, by the moment in the nation’s history depicted in Judges chapter two, something had gone seriously awry and the intergenerational transmission of this legacy had been disrupted. This is captured poignantly in Judges 2:10: “After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.”
In recent years, some observers have expressed fears that our society may be journeying through a period reminiscent of that critical moment in the history of the Hebrew people. A major factor that has enflamed these anxieties has been the widespread media attention given to the growing number of Nones within North American society. The category of Nones is comprised of those individuals who have chosen to respond to the religious affiliation questions on census forms and other demographic surveys by answering “none of the above.” When the Pew Forum released the results of its multi-year study of religious life in the United States in 2012, many were shocked to discover that nearly 20 percent of the population chose to identify as belonging to this category.[1] This percentage reflected a pronounced increase from 7 percent in 1990 and 15 percent in 2008.[2]
What was the greatest cause of alarm for many, however, was the discovery that, among members of the emerging Millennial generation, the growth of the None phenomenon was considerably more pronounced. In the 2012 Pew Forum study, nearly a full third (31 percent, to be precise) of eighteen to twenty-nine year olds described themselves as “unaffiliated” with any religion. The number of Millennial Nones in the US has since been reported as being closer to 35 percent.[3] This stands in stark contrast to the 11 percent of American senior adults who identify as belonging to this category. As Cathy Lynn Grossman summarized in her July 2012 Religion News Service article, Nones are “disproportionately young, often single, and highly educated.”[4] While the rise of the Nones is not merely a generation-specific phenomenon, there is clearly a discernable generational trend afoot.
As we turn our attention to the Canadian context, we find that a similar picture emerges. Studies examining the religious identity of young Canadians reveal that, in 2008, 32 percent of teens identified as Nones, a dramatic increase from 12 percent in 1984. By 2012, this figure had shown little change, with 33 percent of teens identifying themselves as Nones. Thus, despite perceptions that Canadian society is in a more advanced state of post-Christendom than the US, the numbers of young people who identify as Nones in both countries are nearly identical.[5]
A considerable amount of confusion and debate has surrounded the rise of the Nones. Within the Christian blogosphere, many commentators have struck an alarmist tone. Other observers suggest that this phenomenon is really nothing about which to be worried. This sentiment is reflected clearly in the title of Kaya Oakes’ recent book, The Nones Are Alright.[6] While a growing body of sociological analyses has helped to provide us with a clearer understanding of this segment of the population, for many of us significant questions remain. Who are these Nones, really? Where do they stand on matters of belief? Have significant numbers of the emerging generation simply chosen to turn their back on God, walk away from faith, and become atheistic or agnostic “nonbelievers”? Has the church somehow failed in transmitting a vital embrace of faith to the members of this generation? Some fear that we are, in essence, witnessing the repeat of Judges 2:10, the rise of “another generation who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done.” But are these anxieties warranted? Do they reflect reality?
A Closer Look at the Numbers
In his recent book, Generational IQ, Haydn Shaw suggests it is understandable that people of faith are prone to react strongly when they learn of troublesome trends among rising generations. The percentages reported in studies like those referenced above are not merely abstract figures. As Shaw expresses, they actually represent “our children, our friends,” and those who have been raised within our churches.[7] Nonetheless, notes Shaw, it will be helpful for us “to find a more accurate picture” to determine whether things are truly “as bad as we have heard.”[8]
If we pause to consider the emergence of the Nones in light of its historical development, we can appreciate how this category has come to be understood as being synonymous with atheism and agnosticism. Looking back to the 1930s and 1940s, an era in which there was considerable social pressure to conform to traditional patterns of religious affiliation, we can see that a mere five percent of the American population claimed to be Nones. At that time, this group was in fact composed predominantly of atheists and agnostics, those who were committed enough to their posture of non-belief to be willing to buck the conventional expectations of the day.[9] So, yes, at one point in history it would have been fairly accurate to conflate this term with “atheist” and “agnostic.”
However, over the last several decades, North American society has journeyed through the progressive disestablishment of civil religion and has become increasingly post-Christian in character. As a result, we have witnessed the removal of the singular “sacred canopy,” something which Peter Berger predicted in 1967.[10] In turn, suggests Joel Thiessen, the “widespread pluralism and diversity found in many late modern democratic societies, especially in Canada,” has helped to foster a growing acceptance of those who choose not to affiliate with traditional religious labels.[11] Because of these changes, the cultural milieu in which the members of the Millennial generation have been raised afford them greater freedom to identify as Nones, if they choose to do so, for a host of reasons other than being avowed atheists or uncertain agnostics. As Shaw notes, “Today more people feel comfortable saying they aren’t Christian,” or anything else for that matter.[12]
That being said, we have not yet tackled the central questions that were raised above and, thus, we must return to them now. Does all of this data about the growth of the Nones mean that significant numbers of the emerging generation have simply chosen to turn their backs on God and become atheistic or agnostic “nonbelievers”? Thiessen offers a straightforward answer to this question: “[I]dentifying as a religious none does not mean that one is an atheist or agnostic.”[13] As Christian Smith explains, “The category ‘not religious’ can include a variety of kinds of people.”[14] Thus, in the National Study on Youth and Religion that Smith conducted among American Millennials a decade ago, he sought to explore these differences by asking “teens who identified themselves as not religious whether they considered themselves atheists, agnostics, just not religious, or something else.”[15] This study revealed that only eight percent of nonreligious American teens (1.4 percent of all teens) considered themselves atheists. A virtually identical number considered themselves agnostics. This was a slightly higher proportion than the number of American adults (about 2 percent) who identified explicitly as atheist or agnostic.
A few years later, Smith returned to an examination of the religious identity of American Millennials during their young adult years. He chose to describe some of these young people as “irreligious.” According to Smith, those belonging to this category “were raised in nonreligious families or are ex-believers of some faith in which they were raised; emerging adults who identify as atheists or agnostics generally fall into this type.”[16] Smith notes that this category remains quite modest in size. As he expresses, “Irreligious emerging adults are small in number, comprising no more than 10 percent of the whole.”[17]
Based on his analysis of the evidence, Thiessen concludes that roughly one-fifth of American Nones are atheists. However, he reports that, in the Canadian context, roughly half of all adults and teens who claim to have no religious affiliation identify as atheists.[18] This assertion is consistent with the findings of Reginald Bibby. According to Bibby, while adult levels of belief have remained fairly steady, the proportion of teenagers who said they “definitely” believe in God dropped from 54 percent in the 1980s to 41 percent among Millennial youth in 2008. [19] Bibby concludes that there has been a discernable, “ongoing intergenerational shift” taking place, one that entails a progression “from tentatitiveness to agnosticism, and from agnosticism to atheism” among Canadian young people.
In reality, gaining an accurate picture of the number of Nones within the ranks of the Millennial generation is not an altogether simple or straightforward task. Kaya Oakes confesses that, when she set out to interview Millennial Nones across the US, she “expected that atheists would appear en masse.”[20] With time she came to discover that self-described atheists “were in the minority of those who responded to [her] queries.” However, she notes, the data does not tell the whole story. “In fact,” she says, “more people described themselves as not believing in God or a ‘universal spirit’ than describe themselves as atheists.”
This reflects the reality that, just as some Nones espouse belief but choose to avoid being defined by traditional religious labels, others have embraced unbelief, but are equally averse to being labeled. Smith’s research validates this claim. As he notes in his study of Millennial teens, “More than half (54 percent) of nonreligious teens do not accept those labels, but consider themselves ‘just not religious.’”[21] Along these same lines, Gallup has found that, when alternatives to yes or no are provided for the question “Do you believe in God,” the proportion of those who identify as non-believers increases.[22]
Oakes proposes that this resistance to the “atheist” label is attributable, in part, to the fact that “atheism today has a public image problem,” the result of a “new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism—an atheist fundamentalism” that has been championed by prominent figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.[23] Similarly, Thiessen suggests that some people choose not to self-identify as atheists because they are reluctant to be associated with these “fundamentalist atheists (or ‘new atheists’).”[24] As a result, many such individuals describe themselves as “humanist or secular or skeptical or agnostic.” In summary, notes Thiessen, due to the lingering social stigma attached to the term “‘atheist,’ the actual atheist population could be slightly larger than the survey figures suggest,” but “not as large as the religious none population as a whole.”[25]
Prominent American Atheist Dan Barker has sought to seize upon the growing number of Nones in the United States as evidence that “nonbelievers” are now the second largest “denomination” in the country.[26] In truth, as we have just seen, the data simply does not support this claim. Studies have consistently demonstrated that a significant percentage of Nones “are either ‘fairly certain’ or ‘absolutely certain’ that God exists.”[27] Many of these describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious,” but also believe “that belonging to an organized religion is ‘not at all important.’” Meanwhile, only a modest percentage—Thiessen places this number at 12 percent—“Strongly disagree that God exists.”[28]
Is This a Real Issue?
Based upon the evidence, in answer to the question of whether our moment in history bears any meaningful similarity to the generational shift we see described in Judges 2:10, we must conclude that this is obviously an exaggerated comparison. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that the numbers of atheists and agnostics has grown within the ranks of the Millennial generation, especially in the Canadian context—an intergenerational shift, as Bibby has expressed.[29] As he characterizes it, growing numbers of Canadians are living life “beyond the gods.”[30] But where does the church factor into this trend? To what extent do these young atheists and agnostics represent the church’s failure to transmit a vital faith to the next generation?
The Longitudinal Study of Generations conducted by Vern Bengston and his colleagues at the University of Southern California revealed that “nearly 6 out of 10 unaffiliated young adults come from families where their parents were also unaffiliated,” which he sees as indicating that many Millennial non-believers are in fact the products of the transmission of nonreligion “from one generation to the next.”[31] In other words, the parents of these young adults were themselves “nonbelievers.” If this is so, does it mean that the church is largely off the hook?
As several different studies reveal, a number of Millennials who have chosen to identify as Nones were in fact raised within Christian churches, but have chosen to leave the faith of their childhood behind. In fact, according to Pew’s research, the chief way the category of Nones has grown is by “switchers,” those who were raised within a religious tradition, yet who have chosen to “switch” to religiously unaffiliated.[32] Larry Alex Taunton reports that, in a nationwide study of atheists on American college campuses, most interviewees “had not chosen their worldview from ideologically neutral positions at all, but in reaction to Christianity. Not Islam. Not Buddhism. Christianity.”[33] Their background is in the church.
In his book, You Lost Me, David Kinneman suggests that many among today’s young “drop-outs” are journeying through a period of spiritual-but-not-religious “nomadism.”[34] In fact, suggests Kinneman, these “nomads” are far more common than atheistic or agnostic “prodigals,” as he calls them—roughly four times more common.[35] As he expresses, “Only 11 percent of young adults say that they grew up as a Christian but have deconverted entirely or converted to another faith…All things considered, a young Christian has about 1:9 odds of losing his or her faith entirely.”
With this group constituting such a small proportion of the overall None population, perhaps we might be tempted to conclude that they are mere statistical outliers, more deserving of being dismissed than discussed. Perhaps there is no story here, no true reason for concern. Reflecting upon the American context, however, Kinneman suggests that, “While this is a rare outcome, it is a very high number when you think about the estimated five million eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old ex-Christians encompassed by this statistic.”[36] Thus, observes Kinneman, “From the perspective of many Christians, prodigals are the more acute problem—and in one sense, that’s true.”
Indeed, not unlike the Hebrew people of old, Christian congregations desire to see the children and youth who grow up under their care have a vital encounter with faith, to choose to embrace this faith as their own, and to develop a sense of personal identity that becomes rooted deeply in this faith. Many churches invest considerable resources and energy in striving to encourage these sorts of outcomes in the lives of their children and youth.
Carol Lytch observes that, in the face of congregations’ efforts, the stances taken by individuals toward the faith traditions in which they were raised can fall into one of three camps:
So, what has happened in the cases of those who were raised within the church, but who have chosen to reject its faith? Or, as someone from within the church might phrase the question, what “went wrong” in these cases?
What Can We Learn?
Within the church, we might deem those who have categorically rejected faith (or suspended it, in the case of some agnostics) to be “extreme” cases. How could individuals who were brought up within the nurturing environment of the church choose to disavow theistic belief altogether? In truth, if we are open to their stories, we will surely find their experiences very informative. Their insights might even influence the way that we seek to form rising generations in the faith in the present and the future. Though space does not permit us to explore this fully, we will devote this final section to briefly considering a few key things that the church can learn from their varied experiences.
As was mentioned above, Kinneman describes agnostic and atheistic Nones who have left the faith as “prodigals.” He provides the following summary of those whom he sees as fitting into this category:
Prodigals’ views of Christians and churches are all over the map, largely dependent on how positive or negative their experiences were. Many prodigals are quite nuanced and logical in their reasons for disengagement. Most are more defined by and committed to their distance from Christianity than they are to their current spiritual perspectives. In other words, one of the identity-shaping characteristics of prodigals is that they say they are no longer Christian.[38]
What so many of these prodigals have in common, notes Kinneman, is that their “negative experiences with Christianity run deep.”
In his research, Kinneman identified two primary types of prodigals, which he categorizes as “head-driven prodigals” and “heart-driven prodigals.” Kinneman describes “head-driven prodigals” as
those who come to a point where Christianity is intellectually untenable. We might call them ‘head-driven prodigals,’ because their reasons for abandoning the faith are rational and, many times, well-reasoned—even if many of them also feel hurt by their church experiences. The ‘heart-driven prodigal,’ on the other hand,….are young people whose faith burns out in an extreme fashion, usually as a result of deep wounds, frustration, or anger, or of their own desire to live life outside the bounds of the Christian faith. They express their rejection of childhood Christianity in emotionally strong terms and may feel bitterness or resentment for many years after leaving the fold. Frequently head-driven prodigals define themselves by their new faith choices, while heart-driven prodigals focus on their denunciation of Christianity.[39]
Of course, “head-driven” and “heart-driven” prodigals are not pure categories. Says Kinneman, “As you might expect, may prodigals maintain a mix of head- and hear-driven factors that led them away from faith.”[40] Similarly, Taunton notes that, among the students he was involved in interviewing, the decision to embrace unbelief was often an emotional one: “With few exceptions, students would begin by telling us that they had become atheists for exclusively rational reasons. But as we listened it because clear that, for most, this was a deeply emotional transition as well.”[41]
This being said, many of those who have chosen to leave the faith were clearly motivated to do so, in part, for what they see as intellectual reasons. Indeed, three of the six reasons the Barna Group gives in their book Churchless for why Millennial Christians are leaving their churches are intellectual: Christianity is too shallow for them, churches seem antagonistic to science, and the exclusivity of Christianity is off-putting.[42]
Drew Dyck, author of Generation Ex-Christian, suggests that some Millennials who have left the church “love linear thinking, objective truth, and the Western tradition of rational thought.”[43] Many of these bright-minded young adults, he notes, “have been turned off by people with poor answers to their most vexing questions.”[44] He continues,
One study on deconversion found that ‘the most frequently mentioned role of Christians in deconversion was in amplifying doubt.’ How did Christians manage to ‘amplify existing doubt’? The study found that deconverts reported ‘sharing their burgeoning doubts with a Christian friend or family member only to receive trite, unhelpful answers.’ The outcome was predictable. ‘These answers, in turn, moved them further away from Christianity.’[45]
One lesson that we can learn from the experience of those who have walked away from the faith is that one’s doubts can either be “exacerbated,” as Oates suggests, “or soothed by community, listening, an honest response to questions, and care.”[46] Sadly, too many of the young adults being described here did not experience the church as a safe or helpful place in which they could process their questions and doubts sincerely. Ultimately, they walked away in disillusionment.
Dyck insists that, when young people raise questions or express uncertainties, “We don’t have to have all the answers.” Instead, what matters is that we take care to “validate the questions” young people are asking and that we model a concern for truth.[47] Shaw echoes this perspective. He notes that, when our children and youth express doubts, our first inclination is to attempt “to fix them—to find some technique that can pry their brains open while we shove our faith in.”[48] However, he urges us to relax and provide opportunities for young people to “think out loud” together with us.[49] Furthermore, he encourages us “to be vulnerable about [our] own struggles in faith.”[50] As Shaw suggests, “We don’t protect our young people’s faith by thinking they can’t handle difficult intellectual challenges. We protect them by helping them think through the challenges.”[51]
Doubt, asserts Kaya Oakes, is an issue with which every believer will grapple at some point: “For some, it will last decades. For others, it will cycle through their lives like a chronic illness.”[52] Indeed, she insists, some questions “will last a lifetime and will never be answered in a language that makes sense. One learns to negotiate them enough to stay in the church….or is just going…going…gone.”[53] Available adults have a role to play in helping young people learn to negotiate their doubts and to stay connected to their faith. What would it take for the church to become a place where youth could be afforded the sort of safe space that they truly need to wrestle honestly with their questions and doubts?
A second observation that can be made from the experience of these young prodigals is that their encounter with superficiality within the church contributed to their movement away from God. Taunton notes several themes that were voiced by the college-aged atheists that were interviewed in his study: 1) the mission and message of their churches was vague and 2) their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions. These same students expressed respect for those ministers who had taken the Bible seriously.[54] Clearly, these young people desired something more substantive from their church experience, but saw those desires go unmet.
Reflecting upon the concept of Moralistic Theistic Deism, the term coined by Christian Smith to describe the version of Christian belief he found among many Millennial youth and young adults, Shaw suggests that many Millennials have essentially rejected a version of Christianity that’s been “hacked—it’s not the real thing.”[55] What is troubling, however, is that they overwhelmingly claim to have learned this version of Christianity from their parents and other key adults. “What they think of as Christianity is lame,” he says.[56] This raises significant questions about how we envision what it means to form young people in the faith.[57] What are we modeling for them? What are we striving to impart to them? How do we provide for those who are ready to engage with the faith on a more substantive level?
A third brief insight we can gain is that the faith community has a powerful role to play in the lives of young people. This is evidenced in the way that hurt and disappointment experienced by some young people in the context of the Christian community has contributed to their loss of faith. However, it also is demonstrated by the accounts of many young atheists who have left the faith. Kaya Oakes notes that, “Even after departing organized religion, many nonbelievers miss what was good about it….community was foremost, followed by ritual or some sort of repeated set of actions, and often a sense of social engagement.”[58] This is a profoundly significant point. It raises big questions about how we envision the role of the faith community in nurturing and supporting young people during their crucial adolescent years. Recently, there has been a growing chorus of authors emphasizing the crucial role of the whole church in forming young people in the faith.[59] How can we move beyond the all-too-common “siloed” approaches to youth ministry and provide young people with the opportunity to participate more holistically in the life of the local church?
One final observation to be noted here is that faith formation is a time-sensitive matter. Taunton reports that the formative years of ages of fourteen-to-seventeen were decisive in the lives of the college-aged atheists that were interviewed in his study.[60] It was during these years that they decided to embrace unbelief. Similarly, Thom and Sam Rainer found that most dropouts “leave the church between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.”[61] Interestingly, this aligns closely with what John H. Westerhoff III says in his classic book, Will Our Children Have Faith?[62] According to Westerhoff, during the adolescent years, faith development occurs through affiliation (having the opportunity to participate and develop a sense of belonging) and searching (having the opportunity to grapple with one’s questions and uncertainties). These are the very issues that come to the forefront in the experiences of the atheistic and agnostic young adults being considered here: how their posture toward belief has been influenced through their experience of affiliation with the church and the sort of space they were given for their searching. This invites us to consider the intentionality with which we are attending to these developmental dynamics in the lives of adolescents. When we consider what is at stake, can we afford to be less-than-intentional in how we walk with young people through their crucial adolescent years?
Conclusion
At this point, it is hard to say what will become of today’s Millennial atheists and agnostics who no longer identify with the Christian faith. Kinneman’s choice to describe them as “prodigals,” a term rooted in biblical imagery, reflects his hope that they will one day return home.[63] Similarly, Oakes suggests that though “many of us walk away….faith is a tidal motion, an ebb and surge a push and a pull.”[64] So, we can hold out hope that, in the lives of these individuals, the story of belief and unbelief is still being written.
However, the story of future generations certainly has yet to be written. In Deuteronomy 6:20, Moses charges the people of the Hebrew community to be prepared when, in the future, their children would ask them about the meaning of what “the Lord our God has commanded you.” As we listen closely to the experiences of young atheists and agnostics today, we are provided an opportunity to learn some truly important things that may enable us to become more prepared to entertain the difficult questions raised by future generations with appropriate sincerity and care. And we can hope that they will choose to embrace the faith we endeavour to impart to them as their own, to be generations that truly knows the Lord and what the Lord has done for us.
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Barna, George & Kinneman, David. Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How
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Baxter, Jeff. Together: Adults and Teenagers Transforming the Church. Grand Rapids, MI:
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Bengston, Vern. L., Putney, Norella M. & Harris, Susan. Families and Faith: How Religion is
Passed Down Across Generations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1967.
Bergler, Thomas E. From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of American
Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.
Bibby, Reginald W. Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It
Matters. Lethbridge, AB: Prospect Canada Books, 2011.
———-. The Emerging Millennials: How Canada’s Newest Generation is
Responding to Change and Choice. Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books, 2009.
———-. “So You Think You Are Religious, Or Spiritual But Not Religious: So What?” Youth,
Religion, and Identity workshop. Presented at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, October 18-20, 2014.
Bindley, Katherine. “Religion among Americans Hits Low Point, as ore People Say They Have
No Religious Affiliation: Report,” Huffington Post Religion, March 13, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/religion-america-decline-low-no-affiliation-report_n_2867626.html.
Daniel, Lillian. When “Spiritual but Not Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising
Places, Even the Church. Nashville: Jericho Books, 2014.
Dean, Kenda Creasy. Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the
American Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Dyck, Drew. Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults are Leaving the Faith…And How to
Bring Them Back. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010.
Foster, Charles R. From Generation to Generation: The Adaptive Challenge of Mainline
Protestant Education in Forming Faith. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012.
Freedom From Religion Foundation. “Nonbelievers Second Largest ‘Denonination’ in Nation:
‘Nones’ climb to 19%,” last updated July 20, 2012, https://ffrf.org/news/news releases/item/15081-%C3%83%C2%A2%C3%A2%E2%80%9A%C2%AC%C3%85%E2%80%9Cnones%C3%83%C2%A2%C3%A2%E2%80%9A%C2%AC%C3%82%C2%9D-climb-to-19.
Grossman, Cathy Lynn. “Survey finds record 19 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans,”
Religion News Service, July 20, 2012. https://religionnews.com/2012/07/20/survey-finds-record-19-percent-of-religiously-unaffiliated-americans/.
Kinnaman, David. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking
Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011.
Lytch, Carol. Choosing Church: What Makes a Difference for Teens. Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox, 2004.
Mercadate, Linda A. Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Newport, Frank. “More than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God,” Gallup, June 3,
2011, https://gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believe-god.aspx.
Oakes, Kaya. The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers, and Those in
Between. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015.
Pew Research Center. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as
Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.” Washington, DC:
Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015.
———-. “Event Transcript: Religion Trends in the US,” last updated August 19, 2013,
https://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/19/event-transcipt-religion-trends-in-the-u-s/.
———-, “Nones on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.” Washington,
DC: Pew Research Center, October 9, 2012.
Powell, Kara E., Griffin, Brad M. & Crawford, Cheryl A. Sticky Faith: Youth Worker Edition.
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.
Rainer, Thom & Rainer, Sam S. III. Essential Church? Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts.
Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2008.
Shaw, Haydn. Generational IQ. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015.
Smith, Christian & Denton, Melinda Lundquist. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual
Lives of American Teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Smith, Christian & Snell, Patricia. Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of
Emerging Adults. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Taunton, Larry Alex. “Listening to Young Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity,” The
Atlantic, June 6, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/listening-to-young-atheists-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584.
Thiessen, Joel. The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
Walker, Mel. Inter-Generational Youth Ministry: Why a Balanced View of Connecting the
Generations is Essential for the Church. Traverse City, MI: Overboard Ministries, 2013.
Westerhoff, John H. III, Will Our Children Have Faith? Third Revised Edition. Harrisburg, PA:
Morehouse Publishing, 2012.
[1] Pew Research Center, “Nones on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation,” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, October 9, 2012), 9-10.
[2] Pew Research Center, “Event Transcript: Religion Trends in the US,” last modified August 19, 2013, https://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/19/event-transcipt-religion-trends-in-the-u-s/.
[3] Pew Research Center. America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015), 12-13.
[4] Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Survey finds record 19 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans,” Religion News Service, July 20, 2012. https://religionnews.com/2012/07/20/survey-finds-record-19-percent-of-religiously-unaffiliated-americans/.
[5] These figures, drawn from several different studies, were reported by Reginald Bibby during his Youth, Religion, and Identity workshop, entitled “So You Think You Are Religious, Or Spiritual But Not Religious: So What?,” (Presented at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, October 18-20, 2014). Bibby reports that, surprisingly, here in Alberta, nearly half of teens in 2012 (49%) placed themselves in this category.
[6] Kaya Oakes, The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers, and Those in Between (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015). In her book, Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Linda A. Mercadate also adopts an appreciative posture toward the religious lives of Nones. Conversely, Lillian Daniel provides insight into her perspective toward Nones in entitling her book on the subject, When “Spiritual but Not Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church (Nashville: Jericho Books, 2014).
[7] Haydn Shaw, Generational IQ (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015), 6.
[8] Shaw, Generational IQ, 179.
[9] Katherine Bindley, “Religion among Americans Hits Low Point, as ore People Say They Have No Religious Affiliation: Report,” Huffington Post Religion, March 13, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/religion-america-decline-low-no-affiliation-report_n_2867626.html.
[10] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday).
[11] Joel Thiessen, The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 97.
[12] Shaw, Generational IQ, 185.
[13][13] Thiessen, The Meaning of Sunday, 96. Similarly, Shaw asserts that “most Nones are not atheists, although I’ve seen blogs misrepresent them that way” (Generational IQ, 185).
[14] Christian Smith & Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 86.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Christian Smith & Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Thiessen, The Meaning of Sunday, 96. In reflecting upon the Canadian situation, Thiessen draws upon data reported by Reginald Bibby in his 2011 report, Beyond the God’s and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books).
[19] Reginald W. Bibby, The Emerging Millennials: How Canada’s Newest Generation is Responding to Change and Choice (Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books, 2009), 169.
[20] Oakes, The Nones are Alright, 17.
[21] Smith & Denton, Soul Searching, 86.
[22] Frank Newport, “More than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God,” Gallup, June 3, 2011, https://gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believe-god.aspx.
[23] Oakes, The Nones are Alright, 17-18.
[24] Ibid., 97.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Freedom From Religion Foundation, “Nonbelievers Second Largest ‘Denonination’ in Nation: ‘Nones’ climb to 19%,” last updated July 20, 2012, https://ffrf.org/news/news-releases/item/15081-%C3%83%C2%A2%C3%A2%E2%80%9A%C2%AC%C3%85%E2%80%9Cnones%C3%83%C2%A2%C3%A2%E2%80%9A%C2%AC%C3%82%C2%9D-climb-to-19.
[27] Oakes, The Nones are Alright, 4; cf. Thiessen, The Meaning of Sunday, 96.
[28] Thiessen, The meaning of Sunday, 96.
[29] Smith and Denton note that, in the NSYR, they “asked the 3 percent of U.S. teens who reported that they do not believe in God whether they ever once in their lives had believed in God. Sixty-six percent of them said that at one time they had believed in God; 31 percent (fewer than one-half of 1 percent of all American teens) say they never in their lives believed in God. Most of the very few teenage atheists thus at one point in their lives lost a previous faith they had held in God” (Soul Searching, 87).
[30] Reginald W. Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge, AB: Prospect Canada Books, 2011), 51-52. Bibby says that the emerging trend within the Canadian context is less one of secularization or revitalization, and more one of “polarization.” He suggests that the size of the “ambivalent middle” is shrinking as an increasing polarization develops between weekly attenders and “nevers,” affiliates and non-affiliates, theists and atheists.
[31] Vern. L. Bengston, Norella M. Putney & Susan Harris, Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 152.
[32] Grossman, “Survey finds record 19 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans.”
[33] Larry Alex Taunton, “Listening to Young Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/listening-to-young-atheists-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584.
[34] David Kinnaman, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011), 68. Shaw notes that, “at some point in their lives, one in three Americans leaves Christianity” (Generational IQ, 139); he also observes that this pattern “has existed during emerging adulthood for forty years” (143).
[35] Kinneman defines prodigals as “young people who leave their childhood or teen faith entirely. This includes those who deconvert (including atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones,’ those who say they have no religious affiliation) and those who switch to another faith. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to both as prodigals” (You Lost Me, 66).
[36] Kinneman, You Lost Me, 68.
[37] Carol Lytch, Choosing Church: What Makes a Difference for Teens (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 10-11.
[38] Kinneman, You Lost Me, 66. In his analysis of the Millennials who fit into this category, Kinneman offers a summary of the “the prodigal mindset,” which includes the following characteristics: They feel varying levels of resentment toward Christians and Christianity. Many still have positive things to say about specific people (e.g., their parents), but the overall tenor of their perceptions is negative. They have disavowed returning to the church. They feel deeply wounded by their church experience and do not plan to ever go back. They have moved on from Christianity. Prodigals describe themselves as ‘over’ Christianity. In leaving faith behind, they feel as if they have broken out of constraints (68-69).
[39] Kinneman, You Lost Me, 67.
[40] Ibid., 68.
[41] Taunton, Listening to Young Atheists.
[42] George Barna & David Kinneman, Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2014).
[43] Drew Dyck, Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults are Leaving the Faith…And How to Bring Them Back (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010), 74.
[44] Ibid., 101.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Oakes, The Nones are Alright, 104.
[47] Dyck, Generation Ex-Christian, 101.
[48] Shaw, Generational IQ, 144.
[49] Ibid., 150.
[50] Ibid., 149.
[51] Ibid., 214.
[52] Oakes, The Nones are Alright, 104.
[53] Ibid., 106.
[54] Taunton, Listening to Young Atheists.
[55] Shaw, Generational IQ, 107.
[56] Ibid., 109. Interestingly, according to Reginald Bibby, the atheistic apple apparently does not fall far from the tree. To describe the version of unbelief that he sees many Millennials espousing, he has adopted the term “Moralistic Therapeutic Atheism” (The Emerging Millennials, 183).
[57] I would recommend Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) as a helpful resources to explore to this question further.
[58] Oakes, The Nones are Alright, 34.
[59] For the reader desiring to explore this point further, I would recommend Kara E. Powell, Brad M. Griffin, & Cheryl A. Crawford, Sticky Faith: Youth Worker Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011) as a good place to start. Some other resources that would be helpful include the following: Mel Walker, Inter-Generational Youth Ministry: Why a Balanced View of Connecting the Generations is Essential for the Church (Traverse City, MI: Overboard Ministries, 2013); Jeff Baxter, Together: Adults and Teenagers Transforming the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010); Thomas E. Bergler, From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014); Charles R. Foster, From Generation to Generation: The Adaptive Challenge of Mainline Protestant Education in Forming Faith (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012).
[60] Taunton, Listening to Young Atheists.
[61] Thom Rainer & Sam S. Rainer III, Essential Church? Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2008), 15.
[62] John H. Westerhoff III, Will Our Children Have Faith? Third Revised Edition (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2012), 94-97.
[63] Kinneman, You Lost Me, 66-67.
[64] Oates, The Nones are Alright, 4.
]]>Oblate-Aboriginal Encounter in Alberta
Catherine Caufield
University of Alberta
[email protected]
Abstract: Revealing and documenting what went horribly wrong in the context of colonization and particularly residential schools in Alberta and the Canadian north is important for the historical record. The high degree of complexity of our multifaceted history includes stories of Native and non-Natives who served in remote areas of Canada/Alberta before the turn of the twentieth century within what, due to national and international politics, came to be primarily Anglophone settlement moving west. Acknowledging the range of stories, including those from Oblates and Aboriginal Christians, is a current challenge for individuals, communities, academics, and politicians in Canada. My experience as a non-Catholic participant-observer at an Aboriginal Ministries conference puzzled me, because what I saw there contradicted my reified conceptualizations of Catholicism and the dynamics between Aboriginals and clergy. Discourses outside of the Aboriginal communities and parishes that were represented at the conference—discourses that were familiar and comfortable for me—were single-stories strongly associated with the qualities of oppressor and oppressed. Yet it was clear at the various gatherings inside the conference that those dichotomous categories lacked nuance and were in fact deeply varied, complicated, sometimes overlapping, and definitely not neatly separated into victim and victimizer. Conversations seemed to indicate that Oblates had transformed the Canadian north through advocacy work and building infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, cooperatives, and communication networks—and the north had also transformed them. My beginning experiences in this fraught field indicate a bi-lateral, rather than uni-lateral, dynamic. This created a very confusing situation, because it challenged my previous understandings of relationships between Aboriginal peoples and Christianities.
Keywords: Oblates, Alberta, Aboriginal, Canada, Catholic
Statement of Original Unpublished Work: By submitting this document to the Editor in Chief of CJSCF I am making a Statement of Original Unpublished Work not submitted to another journal for publication.
Introduction
Scholarship on the Christian faith allows for exploration of confounding complexities as we live our humanness in the midst of challenging historical contexts. There are certainly no shortage of challenges. Human history is littered with war, conflict, betrayals, trade alliances, territorial expansion, conquest, and tactical victories as people, regardless of race, gender, religion, colour or ethnicity seek to obtain control of greater portions of the world’s resources. The waves of migration in the midst of, or following these upheavals and disruptions, uproots people either by force, or by choice. This is evident in the impact of the current exacerbation in the alternating ascendency of Albanians and Serbs, but also in the routing of the Cree by the Blackfoot, the defeat on the Plains of Abraham, the loss of Huron territories to Iroquois, the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant, etc. These transitions are, immediately and over time, accompanied by physical, social, cultural and linguistic disruption.
We can recognize that all humans share tendencies to greed and violence—regardless of the human and cultural cost—but, we also share propensities toward meaning-making: how do we explain our acts? This propensity gives rise to many stories, passed on through oral traditions or recorded in sacred texts, which codify violence and imbue it with meaning. Centuries later it can then be interpreted that it is religion that is inherently violent—rather than the human beings who act, and who construct meaning.
Karen Armstrong discusses this in much detail in her latest book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. What she points out is a seeming paradox: yes, religion can give meaning to violence: haShem commanded it, it is Allah’s will, in Jesus’ name; yet, too, religion can give a path to healing and reconciliation through spiritual disciplines (prayer, fasting, vision quest), ritual/ceremony (eucharist, sweat, dance), and reflective practices (confession, healing circles, study groups). This paradox of religion’s perpetration of violence and its healing capacity is reason to facilitate scholarship on the range of Christianities, the stances Christians take on social issues, the roles Christians play in society and the relationships between Christianity and other world views. This paradox informs the following analysis as it opens the possibility of enlarged consideration of the impact of Christianities on Aboriginal populations in Canada and Alberta. It does this through listening to oral sources of currently silenced Aboriginal Christian and non-Aboriginal voices of Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI), thus making a small contribution to providing important balance in this topical area.
Aboriginals in Canada
The most recent Canadian census, 2011, indicated a population of about thirty-three million. Of that one and a half million, about 4%, claimed Aboriginal Identity (Statistics Canada. 2011, Catalogue no. 99-011-X2011028). 64% of those claiming Aboriginal Identity self-identify as Christian; 36% of those claiming Aboriginal Identity self-identify as Catholic (Statistics Canada 2013, Catalogue no. 99-011-X2011007). This reflects the general Canadian population in which 67% claim Christianity and 39% of the overall Canadian population self-identify as Catholic. Of the 4% of Canadians who claim Aboriginal identity, 5% of that 4% (0.2% of Canadian population) claim to be followers/practitioners of Traditional (Aboriginal) spiritualities. When comparing the cited “Total Aboriginal identity population in private households by religion” with “Total population in private households by religion,” 1,870 non-Aboriginal Canadians claim Traditional (Aboriginal) Spiritualities (Statistics Canada 2013, Catalogue no. 99-004-XWE). The census data does not indicate numbers of people who are making use of more than one tradition, who are walking in two paths; nor do census numbers indicate depth of religious practice. This reflective comment in regard to a community in northern Saskachewan resonates with my experience in Latin American Indigenous communities[1] and with some of my conversations on Treaty 6 lands in what is now Alberta:
Most striking to me about the students, and the community as a whole, was their strong identification with Catholicism. In many ways, being Catholic was as important as being Dene: their religion was a key feature of their sense of self. (Bradford xi)
Generally, when people of Aboriginal ethnicity claim Christianity, wider public perception currently interprets this, politically correctly, not as Aboriginal agency but rather as religious imposition. Paradoxically, when non-Aboriginals claim Aboriginal spiritualities, this is viewed by many inside and outside of the academy as cultural appropriation. This puts non-Aboriginals in a situation in which they are either religiously imposing, or culturally appropriating. Ironically perhaps, these interpretations—imperialist imposition and cultural appropriation—are largely spearheaded by White interpreters: academics, therapists, politicians and lawyers (Waldram 383).
The current Canadian context follows in the wake of the anti-clericalism of 1960s-70s, and the historical revisionism of the 1990s. 1992 marked the context of the quincentennial of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas which lead not so much to celebrations of this event, but rather to re-conceptualizing history from the perspective of those who were not victors. These social and intellectual movements, combined with human avarice, contributed to creating fertile ground which allowed fomenting litigation against the Oblates to become widespread. This ultimately led to the most expensive class action suit in the history of Canada, and had a severe impact on the reputation and resources of the Oblates. The historical trauma that we rightly hear much about in relation to Aboriginal peoples, has in fact affected a range of people.
It seems ironic that a 1974 book by Oblate René Fumoleau, As Long As This Land Shall Last, is a scholarly work that indicates, early on—and by a Catholic religious—mutual, and community-engaged, research. This is indicated, among other things, in the title, which reflects the words of Chief Monfwi during treaty negotiations at Fort Rae in 1921, and also in the forward by James Wah-Shee who was then President of the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories. Tolly Bradford’s well-written and carefully documented Prophetic Identities further complicates the current largely mono-narrative with the story of Cree-Anglican priest Henry Budd.
The academic groundwork that has been laid in this area has relied on a diachronic and synchronic range of available written archival documents. This current academic paper engages some of these works by researchers such as Jim Miller, Raymond Huel, Kerry Abel and others and begins to incorporate oral materials, some of which are recorded interviews housed in the Royal Alberta Museum and some of which are personal interviews with living Plains Cree and OMI. “Begins” is the key word in the sentence above; the available oral material is enormous, wide-ranging, and complex. The surface has only barely begun to be scratched.
Historical Trauma
Historical trauma is a new label, an explanatory framework that, as described by James Waldram, an anthropologist at the University of Saskatchewan, places the plight of the individual within the collective, and the collective within historical processes that still remain in force (377). Waldram comments that “we do not yet know just how wide-spread [historical trauma] has become among sufferers, and to date it possibly remains more vivid within the purview of scholars, therapists, and political commentators, and elemental to national events such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (383). He observes that the idea that “Aboriginal people need to be educated about their experiences of trauma—even when they deny such experiences—is advocated in some of the literature” (381). He also points out the “tendency of researchers to assume faulty methods and concepts when Aboriginal communities displayed relatively low rates of posttraumatic stress disorder, rather than exploring more meaningfully the idea that the rates really were lower” (383).
Interestingly, according to Waldram, “Aboriginal people engaged in healing programs, where the understanding of these relevant historical processes is most acute, do not seem to recite the historical trauma narrative in any measure unless educated to do so” (382). This finding is cooberrated by Ronald Niezen in his research compiled in the 2014 book Truth and Indignation, in which he describes a pattern of templates and exclusion in the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Martha McCarthy summarizes some general perspectival points of tension in the citation below between those of hagiography, anthropology, and Aboriginal Christians:
Church historians tend to concentrate on the transfer of Christianity, neglecting the social and cultural changes which it exacted. Those at the other end of the spectrum, primarily influenced by anthropology, concentrate their judgements on the imposed ‘civilization,’ disregarding the validity of a genuine acceptance of Christian beliefs by those who received the evangelizing [. . .] The history of their acceptance of Catholicism show that these spirit-guided people were able to integrate the spirituality of Catholicism into their lives, fit its rules of conduct into their society like the traditional guidance of the elders, and find in its rituals and sacraments helpful spiritual contacts in times of trouble or joy. The Catholicism they incorporated became theirs; no one has the right to define it out of existence. (xx, xxi)
McCarthy, basing her comments on archival evidence dating back to the mid-seventeenth century in Canada, indicates Aboriginal capacity to blend perspectives and approaches, taking what was expedient and ignoring the rest. It would seem that it is “settler” populations that have been primarily struggling with “us” and “them” absolutism, particularly since the late 1980s-early 1990s, in the context of the quincentennial of Columbus’ voyages from Spain. The theology of inculturation of the faith articulates this historic, and ongoing, struggle between the boundaries of “us,” and openness towards understanding “them,” and to what extent to integrate, or not, perspectives of “others.”
And who are the others when Aboriginal Christians divide along traditionalist and Christian lines and then along Pentecostal and Catholic lines, and Christian Whites seek to incorporate traditional Aboriginal practices into liturgy?
The relationship between religious and Aboriginals can and has been constructed not as reciprocal but rather as “reciprocal,” meaning that discovering similarities and sharing was really just pretend, simply a veneer for self-serving motives. Nevertheless, in adding depth and texture to a reified history, Raymond Huel, Martha McCarthy, and Kerry Abel all point out that Aboriginals were not averse to “using” missionaries to obtain goods. Another reality is that within some communities, regardless of colour or race, Christianity has and is being leveraged for healing. And, similar to late nineteenth and early twentieth century Athabasca Country and Rupert’s Land, connections with this religion are being actively sought.
Directions in Aboriginal Ministry
At the 2012 annual Roman Catholic Conference on Aboriginal Ministry “Directions in Aboriginal Ministry” an Aboriginal participant addressed the mixed gathering of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians together with foreign-born priests being trained for service in northern and remote communities saying: “We reached out to them [religious][2] to join our families; we did that. What can we do so religious come with us again?”[3] This comment supported archival evidence[4] which indicated that religious were present in Aboriginal communities in the west at the invitation and request of the community in the past, and that there was ongoing desire on the part of at least this Aboriginal representative for continued interaction with those who had Catholic missionary vocations. Evangelization, as imposition, is most usually cited as the impetus for mission; however, often a desire or even obligation to help alleviate suffering in areas of the world that are under social, cultural and political duress, motivates people to travel far from home and family to live in difficult conditions, which is appreciated by those whose difficulties are thereby somewhat or wholly alleviated. At this same conference, Murray Chatlain, then Bishop of the Diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith, outlined some of the gifts he has received through his ministry, including a deepened connection with the spiritual realm.[5] This reflection points to a theological flexibility and willingness on the part of at least this representative within the Roman Catholic hierarchy to both seek to understand and, to some extent, enter into Aboriginal spiritualities. It also reflects some dynamism, rather than stasis, amongst those who are ordained into the church hierarchy.
Complexity of Lived Experience
As many Indigenous and non-Indigenous are aware, there is a far greater range of testimony than that which has been encoded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This came to light for me four years ago now, during a two-week long train-the-trainer workshop for health care professionals. I had arrived in the workshop milieu back in 2007, ostensibly as a researcher from the Faculty of Nursing, but quickly discovering that I had considerable healing work of my own to do. During that particular workshop, several years after my initial encounter, I was sitting in a sauna with several other women as we recuperated from an intense day of work in healing circles. One of the women shared her experience as a young child, being allowed to explore the inside of a little six-seater airplane with her siblings, and her horror when instead of leaving the plane when satiated with exploration, the little craft took off . . . and the years it took her to realize that the man, becoming smaller and smaller on the tarmac below, her father, had made the arrangements himself to have her sent to residential school. She was at the workshop in her capacity as a psychologist with a major centre here in Alberta, a profession and livelihood made possible for her through an externally funded education that now enables her to do healing work in communities in north eastern Alberta.
Some time after that, I was doing archival work at the Royal Museum here in Edmonton. There are many stories recorded there as part of the Oblates of the West Project directed by David Goa, founder of the Folklife Program at the Museum, which indicate both humans in difficulty, and humane response. This is the voice of an Oblate, who at the time of interview in 1991 was Provincial of Grandin Province:
I remember seeing a family very, very poor living in a tent in sixty below weather with little children and how miserable and how cold that was and trying to alleviate that suffering, trying to be present to that and understand what are the causes, why is it such, why are these people living so miserably, why are they so poor, and how can they live with dignity got me to get involvement in I guess what you would call structural transformation and social justice issues (Piché 1991, 10:40-12:50).
It was interesting to explore this rich archival record because much of it, like the encounter in the sauna, also challenged my previous understanding. As a Christian missionary, the Oblate’s response was not: “how can I impose my beliefs on you” but rather, “how can I help you.” It would appear that, consistent with the perspective reflected in what is now referred to as the theology of inculturation, Oblate-Aboriginal relations were generally responsive and interactive in nature. The evidence suggests that even prior to Vatican II understandings of “inculturation” informed Oblate activity in Rupert’s Land and Athabasca Country (present day Alberta).
Inculturation of faith
Inculturation of Faith is a theological framework that not only permits but encourages Roman Catholic missionary religious to understand the worldviews of those to whom they minister, in order “to hear, distinguish and interpret the many voices of our age, and to judge them in the light of the divine word, so that revealed truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood and set forth to greater advantage” (Gaudium et spes; 1965, paragraph 44; see fuller context of citation below). The essence of this constitution is reflected more recently in a comment made by Gary Gordon, then Bishop of Whitehorse, at the 2012 Aboriginal Ministries conference: “good medicine recognizes good medicine.” An OMI who spent years in the north expresses the application of this essence in practice: “What is there already and what do we bring. [. . .] it is in dialogue that we discover, we re-discover, our own faith through sharing it. New questions bring new dimensions of faith also” (Piché 1991). Although there is a notable shift in the understanding of mission among OMI themselves in the wake of Vatican II, the idea of inculturation has its roots in a small Jewish sect spreading into foreign cultures.
Metanoia, a Greek term for changed perception, is ever present in the Church. Inculturation is a recent term for the centuries old concept of the manifestation of metanoia in regard to insights and practices with particular regard to the mission of the Church. The term “inculturation” is fluid; it is not always understood in a consistent way. It has been a consideration for the Church from its earliest centuries as a fledgling and marginal sect within the Greco-Roman world, when it needed to define what its boundaries were as it expanded from its Jewish roots to the worlds of the Gentiles. Accommodation and adaptation to the varying contexts in which Christianity and later Roman Catholicism found itself seem to be dialectically based in the sense of a back and forth movement in which catechism is communicated to receivers—over a wide range of global communities—and in turn the cultures of those receivers influences shifts and changes in Catholic teachings over time. Explicitly putting cultural difference on the table has created an institutional context with some range of flexibility.
Documentation in the archives at the Royal Alberta Museum indicate that in essence inculturation is related to differing symbolic life.[6] Roger Hutchinson[7] observes that inculturation “go[es] beyond the mere search for solutions to particular problems [. . .] the apologies issued by churches and finally by the government are more usefully understood as contributions to ongoing dialogues than as solutions to problems.”[8] In her 1995 study of “the dialogue (and it was a two-way conversation) between the Oblates and the Dene in the first three-quarters of a century of their relationship” (xvii) McCarthy points out that “according to this theory [inculturation] the Christian message must assume its own life within many cultures without destroying them” (xvii). She continues with an observation which serves to highlight the place of Oblate missionary activity within the broader context of seismic international changes: “[Christianity] cannot continue as an imported religion, though, when European Christianity came lock-step with Western civilization, it threatened to do so” (xviii).
An Oblate who spent years in the north expresses it succinctly: “What is there already and what do we bring. [. . .] it is in dialogue that we discover, we re-discover, our own faith through sharing it. New questions bring new dimensions of faith also” (Piché 1991). As Achiel Peelman notes, “Nous ne savons pas d’avance quelle Église renaȋtra avec la Parole de Dieu qui est allée mourir dans la terre missionnaire” (“We do not know in advance what Church will be reborn with the Word of God that has gone to die in missionary land” 1988, 192).
This perspective is reflected in Gaudium et spes (joys and hopes), the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” one of four Apostolic Constitutions coming out of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965):
From the beginning of her history she has learned to express the message of Christ with the help of the ideas and terminology of various philosophers, and has tried to clarify it with their wisdom, too. [. . .] For thus the ability to express Christ’s message in its own way is developed in each nation, and at the same time there is fostered a living exchange between the Church and the diverse cultures of people (Gaudium et spes; 1965, paragraph 44)
Accommodation and adaptation to the varying contexts in which Christianity, and later Roman Catholicism, are responsively based in the sense of a back and forth movement in which the teaching of the church is communicated in a wide range of global communities, and in turn the way in which that teaching is heard and embodied has an effect on how the Church understands itself, and, it leads to shifts and changes in Catholic teaching and practice over time. While some of these changes occur locally, some resonate within the whole of the Church.
Gaudium et spes [joy and hope], is the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” one of four Apostolic Constitutions[9] coming out of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).[10] It states that:
From the beginning of her history she has learned to express the message of Christ with the help of the ideas and terminology of various philosophers, and has tried to clarify it with their wisdom, too. Her purpose has been to adapt the Gospel to the grasp of all as well as to the needs of the learned, insofar as such was appropriate. Indeed this accommodated preaching of the revealed word ought to remain the law of all evangelization. For thus the ability to express Christ’s message in its own way is developed in each nation, and at the same time there is fostered a living exchange between the Church and the diverse cultures of people. To promote such exchange, especially in our days, the Church requires the special help of those who live in the world, are versed in different institutions and specialties, and grasp their innermost significance in the eyes of both believers and unbelievers. With the help of the Holy Spirit, it is the task of the entire People of God, especially pastors and theologians, to hear, distinguish and interpret the many voices of our age, and to judge them in the light of the divine word, so that revealed truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood and set forth to greater advantage. (Gaudium et spes; 1965, paragraph 44; italics mine)
This document remains the reference point for the position of the Church on what was then referred to as “accommodation,” or “adapation” and has more recently evolved to “inculturation.” Of note in this document is the doctrinal declaration of a willingness, grounded in Catholicism, to engage with not only philosophers but with all as a means of clarifying the message of Christ. There is acknowledgement that Christ’s message can be expressed “in its own way;” that is, in the way of the particular context. Thus, perhaps ironically, this perspective is consistent with 1990s postmodernist views that it is in dialogue with “the other” that we see who we ourselves are.[11] This 1965 document advocates engaging with others for the stated purpose of helping the Church penetrate revealed truth more deeply to better understand it and to help all peoples live their lives consistent with spiritual truth. In the Roman Catholic world spiritual truth remains catholic, as in universal, Truth. Therefore, flowing from this perspective, “accommodated preaching” is promulgated as the law of all evangelization.
In 1962 the Jesuit J. Masson coined the term “inculturated Catholicism” (Lapointe n.d.). Evidently, this is prior to Gaudium et spes. It took almost fifteen years for the term inculturation to be used with its present theological meaning: at the 32nd Congregation of the Society of Jesus, December 1974 to April 1975 the term was officially used. It was then introduced to the 1977 Synod of Bishops on catechesis by the then Superior General of the Jesuits, Father Peter Arrupe. Pope John Paul II officially adopted it in his 1979 Apostolic Letter Catechesi Tradendae, and by this act gave it doctrinal value (Lapointe n.d.).
John Paul II subsequently created the Pontifical Council for Culture, 20 May 1982.[12] This council, later merged with the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers, is charged with engaging with those who profess no religion and with creating and nurturing relationships with various religious, governmental and non-governmental organizations.
A third Vatican reference related to this concept is from the 1985 final report of the Extraordinary Synod for the twentieth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council which defines inculturation as “the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity in the various human cultures.” Here, ironically at this twentieth anniversary celebration of Vatican II, the injunctions of the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes to hear, distinguish and interpret the many voices of our age in order to penetrate Mystery more deeply are reduced to absorbing the other in “Christianity;” that is, in Roman Catholicism.
In his Foreward [sic] to Martha McCarthy’s From the Great River to the Ends of the Earth: Oblate Missions to the Dene, 1847-1921 (a title taken from a line in Psalm 72), Huel comments that McCarthy has “identified the changes in Oblate missionary activity beginning as an initial proclamation of the Gospel, later encompassing education and health care and finally evolving into an intermediary role between the Dene and the federal bureaucracy. With respect to the response of the Dene, she demonstrates that the Dene were free to accept, reject or modify the teachings of the Oblates. The Oblate apostolate in the Mackenzie was a complex phenomenon. In addition to interaction with the Dene it necessitated relations with the Hudson’s Bay Company, Anglican competitors and the Dominion government and its agencies” (xiv).
Inculturation of the faith can be understand as a doctrinal nexus for the ongoing issues, concerns, and discussions around what it means to be situated as a Catholic in a world where there are others. The thinking around the ideas encapsulated by this term map a path through complex webs of inclusivity and diversity present in plural contexts, assisting in reflecting on the right approach or the best thing to do in actual, lived situations where there are differing spiritual lives. It is in this way that inculturation informed the work of the Oblates, assisting them in mapping a path together with Aboriginal peoples in response to significant English Protestant and other federally-supported immigration to the West, and thus within the newly forming civil life of Alberta.
Les Oblates missionnaires de Marie Immaculée (OMI)
In general, the term “oblate” refers to either clergy or laypeople affiliated in prayer with an individual monastery of their choice, who have made a formal private promise (annually renewable or for life) to follow the Rule of St Benedict in their private life at home and at work as closely as their individual circumstances and prior commitments permit. The technical term for these practitioners is “secular” oblates. Interestingly, as the secular oblate is in an individual relationship with the monastic community and does not form a distinct unit within the Catholic Church, there are no regulations in the modern canon law of the Church regarding them.
There are also a small number of conventual or claustral oblates who reside in a monastic community. The technical term for these practitioners is “regular” oblates. As committed volunteers, they share in the life of the community and undertake, without remuneration, any work or service required of them. They are not monks or nuns however. A conventual oblate may cancel this commitment at any time; and it is canceled automatically if, after consultation with the chapter, the superior sends the oblate away for good reason. Thus oblates, whether secular or regular, oblige themselves to God without binding themselves by profession and vows.
The Oblates who came to Athabasca Country and Rupert’s Land in the 1840s however, were different. They were part of a religious congregation committed to a consecrated life with a missionary charism. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and its claims of liberté, egalité et fraternité have rung down through the history of the West and continue to do so today, as have the effects of another historical development, the Enlightenment. The Romantic movement in art and literature was one response that arose following the Revolution.[13]
Spear-headed by the French priest Eugene de Mazenod, the creation of the OMI on January 25, 1816 was another response to the Revolution and an emerging modernity that had unseated the sociopolitical power of the church and marginalized non-empirical ways of knowing. Still during a period of Bourbon rule (1815-1830), and ten years after its formation, on February 17, 1826 the ultramontane[14] congregation of the Oblates was given recognition by Pope Leo XII. As noted, OMI are not oblates in the sense of “oblate” as discussed above (secular and regular) because the OMI do take simple vows and follow the Rule of St. Benedict.[15] However, particularly in the early history of Alberta, they tend not live in community.[16] In addition to the male OMI, there are a number of female orders of oblates, including the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the Oblate Sisters of the Holy Family, Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, Grey Nuns/Sisters of Charity, and the Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart and Mary Immaculate. Although all use the term “oblate” in their name, each has its own unique founding history and raison d’être.
Not only did the formation of the Oblate congregation take place in the wake of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, but also it had only been a century earlier that the steam engine had been invented (Spain, 1606 and England, 1698), creating possibilities for large scale manufacturing, rail and sea transport. In the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth century this new invention spread. European economies were rapidly industrializing, causing further decline in the feudal system as large-scale urbanization took hold. Following the decline of the last land-based global Empire, that of the Ottomans, at the end of the First World War, the rational positivism of the Enlightenment and the republican liberalism of the French Revolution intellectually contextualized ideas of nation, citizenship, democracy and rights in the radically changing social, political, and economic environment of the nineteenth century.[17] As Raymond Huel, historian emeritus at the University of Lethbridge, notes, “the Oblates [OMI] were the product of a specific age and culture and their outlook, values and aspirations were conditioned by that experience” (xiv). This does not however, preclude contemporary analyses to judge them solely through particular twentieth and twenty-first century values, interests, and aspirations!
Choquette asserts that “the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were the cutting edge of the Catholic ultramontane conquest of Canada’s northwest. Their apostolic methods were fundamentally determined by their Catholic doctrine and theology, which in turn determined specific policies, methods, and tactics in relation to Indians, their evangelization, their conversion to Christianity” (200). Choquette’s language is harsh, given the range of local, national and international forces at play during this period. David Goa, who was curator of Folklife at the Royal Alberta Museum working in the field with diverse cultural communities throughout Alberta from 1972 to 2002, comments:
In my many and various conversations with Oblates, time and time again, I have been struck by how they seek to hold the local community in high regard and also how they see, based on their faith that all are the image of God, the kind of presence they have had in these communities as also providing a safe haven for those who have become isolated or put upon. The genius of tight community and shared tradition and norms is certainly the web of relationships woven over time and binding no matter what. The presence of Oblates has, largely, I think, been deemed good by local communities when they were not in a hyper-political state. Coming and going from the rectory was as more common than going to the Hudson Bay store or hunting and fishing. It was also self-evident that the rectory was a kind of sacred place where you could also go if you found yourself in difficulty at home or in the centre of the community, a place for those marginalized (even for a brief time) to seek harbour. When I speak about the civil vocation of the missions this is what I am aiming at. It is not they provided an alternate or different space or place. Rather, they provided, or sought too, a new layer to what was there, extend the capacity of living together, over-time, so that reintegration might
become possible and health return (Goa and Piché 1998).
Huel observes that “the Oblate apostolate is [. . .] a frontier experience in which a French institution domiciled and adapted itself to the conditions in and the demands of the interior of the Canadian North West” (1996, xx italics mine). Huel’s observation supports the thesis that not only did the OMI have a significant impact on creating infrastructure in what were then remote areas but, reciprocally, those remote areas and their peoples had a significant impact on the OMI. Robert Choquette, whose research focus is conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the missionary fields of the Canadian Northwest, comments that “because of their Roman Catholicism, the Oblates had a decided advantage over their Protestant rivals in the conduct of Indian missions. The most fundamental reason for this advantage is the sacramentalism that is a basic characteristic of Catholic doctrine. Starting from a theology of continuity between nature and the transcendent, Catholics believe that any created object, person, or institution can be the locus and bearer of God’s grace. The Catholic thus tends to be much more appreciative of the ways of nature [and] of the ways of the Indian” (191).
The next section looks more closely at this sense of non-exclusivity in bearing God’s grace—what, as discussed above has become to be termed inculturation—as an orientation that underlay the interactive nature of relationships between OMI and various Aboriginal communities (particularly Woodland and Plains Cree, Blackfoot, Blood, and Beaver, Dene, Siksika, and Piegan, which are tribes located in what is now Alberta) particularly, although not exclusively, following Vatican II. “L’inculturation n’est pas une réalité nouvelle. La proclamation de la Bonne Nouvelle du Christ est un trait fundamental des Églises, ce kérygme s’est adapté aux diverses situations culturelles auxquelles les missionnaires furent confrontés. Cependant, ce n’est que depuis Vatican II que le term “inculturation” est employé systématiquement pour exprimer ce trait fondamental de l’Église” (“Inculturation is not a new reality. The proclamation of the Good News of Christ is a fundamental trait of the Churches, this proclaiming has adapted to various cultural situations with which missionaries were faced. Nevertheless, it is only since Vatican II that the term “inculturation” has been systematically used to express this fundamental trait of the Church” Peelman, Les nouveaux défis de l’inculturation 10). This observation refers to the way in which the fundamental trait of missionary work, preaching the Good News, has historically adapted to socio-cultural situations in the mission field.
Inculturation of the faith is not about imposition; it is about integration: to what extent are various perspectives compatible with Catholicism. And some are. As Gary Gordon, then Bishop of the Diocese of Whitehorse, commented at the Aboriginal Ministries conference: “good medicine recognizes good medicine.”
OMI in Rupert’s Land and Athabasca Country (Alberta)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, in what a century later would became the Province of Alberta in 1905, the population of Rupert’s Land (the watershed of all rivers and streams flowing into Hudson Bay) and Athabasca Country (the land around Lake Athabasca) was comprised of Aboriginals, fur traders, and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) officials. HBC was incorporated by the British in 1670 and had a monopoly on trade in Rupert’s Land. The Montréal-based North West Company was merged into the HBC in 1821.
In 1842 the secular priest, Jean-Baptiste Thibault, arrived at Lac Ste. Anne (Huel 1996, 47) as the first Catholic clergy in Athabasca Country. OMI Alexandre Antonin Taché arrived three years later[18] and subsequently made significant contributions to the development of civil life in what would become Alberta. Taché built missions within an administrative entity called the Vicariate Apostolic of Athabaska-Mackenzie.[19] This was in a context of an HBC in which “most of its officers in the Athabasca and Mackenzie districts were Anglicans who enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the Roman Catholic priests” (Abel 141). Kerry Abel observes that “the history of mission work in the northwest is as much a story of competition between sects [Roman Catholics and Anglicans of the Church Missionary Society] as it is a story of missions to [Aboriginals]” (114). John Webster Grant refers to the situation between religious groups, including Methodists, as a “contest” (100).[20]
Founded in 1861, St. Albert (Alberta) “became an important centre both for the diffusion of Roman Catholicism and for the preservation of French-Canadian and Métis culture in the west” (Webster Grant 147). A few years later the federal government was actively promoting settlement of west:
During the 1890s, the Council of the Northwest Territories abolished the use of French in the territorial assembly, in courts and in schools. Thereafter, English was to be the only language of instruction in Catholic schools, with the exception of the first few years of primary school, where French could be used only if the children did not know another language. Compromises were reached with the French population in the following years, and in 1926, the curriculum was modified to include some class work in French, a policy which was accepted with other ethnic groups as well. (“Francophone Communities”)
Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior at the turn of the twentieth century, was not in favour of bilingualism. The Francophone Émile Legal, who had replaced Vital Grandin as Bishop in St. Albert for example, was succeeded by the Anglophone Henry John O’Leary in 1920 (“Francophone communities”). Political preferences, in combination with preferential tariffs for those coming to the West from outside Canada, lead to increased immigration from Britain, the United States, and agricultural communities from Europe. These factors, including the increasing number of Protestant missions, challenged the Roman Catholic and francophone presence. In addition to intersectorial tensions between religions, government, and commerce with their related ethno-cultural aspects, there were other contextual elements to consider such as gold discovered in the Yukon in 1896 and oil in Fort Norman in 1920 (Fumoleau xxviii), factors which would have deep, far-reaching, and ongoing effects on the economies and physical environments into which the OMI forayed.
The skills of the Oblates were essential to the establishment of early Albertan settlements as they included carpenters, blacksmiths, farmers, ranchers, millers, and sawmill operators. Choquette comments that “as a rule, the Catholic missionary was more explorer and builder than theologian. Taché rushed to the defense of his men when they were accused of being to rough-hewn. He argued that their lives were all too frequently those of workers, swinging an axe, wielding a hoe, snowshoeing, fishing, farming, or building a cabin. Such activities, year in and year out, did not make for sophisticated men of letters, or theologians. However, it was such thankless work that had ensured the foundations of most of the Northwest’s first Christian communities” (194). In 1857 the OMI affiliated with the Grey Nuns who worked with them in major centres where they administrated schools, dispensaries, and charitable enterprises (Webster Grant 103).
Abel observes that “the Roman Catholic missionaries professed many concepts not much different from Dene tradition. The confessional, the charismatic religious specialist, the concept of fasting, and the wide charismatic religious specialist, the concept of fasting, and the wide range of saints/spirits who could intervene in the course of events may have been referred to with a different vocabulary, but the concepts were similar” (141). This is theoretical observation is reflected in a range of comments found in an extensive oral archive located at the Royal Alberta Museum, such as this excerpt from Oblate Camille Piché:
I remember sharing with George [Slavey, Willow River] one time when he started talking to me about the life of these people, like how they lived prior to the coming of the White man. What were their values and I was as—well I shouldn’t say astounded because I’ve always felt that very deeply, but it was very striking to hear George talk about that lifestyle in just about the same terms as the Acts of the Apostles does. He said we used to live together and help one another. If a person was in need, whatever the hunter brought back from the bush it was understood that the person in need, if there was a widow with children, she would get what she needed for her family so that nobody would be without. And people loved one another, people cared for one another. And I thought my goodness gracious how close that is to the Gospel ideal if you wish that is presented to us.
So in this case when we talk about development and removing somebody from the tent who would want to remove George from that setting and from those values. It is a question of simply rejoicing with him as a Christian that somehow his people and his culture and the God that he serves in a sense has taught him the pretty well the same values we have at the heart of our gospel message. And for George there was no separation between the Christian faith that he has embraced and the native spirituality that he has grown up with. And for me hearing him talk about that I certainly had no problems with it either. I truly believe that George to me represents in his value system, in his approach to life, his respect of creation and of the environment and the tremendous care he has for the people around him, taking care of his brother for thirty years in that little old house with his other older brother who is with him and nobody, that is not mentioned in any books or trumpeted all over the place, it’s just a fact of life. So that is one aspect, to be able to recognize the Gospel values if you wish that were there before so it is not a question of coming and bringing Gospel values as simply recognizing what is there already. (Piché 1991, 10:40-12:50 and 23:19-29:31)
Abel notes that:
The Roman Catholics provided more medical care and maintained a large orphanage at Providence that became a highly valued institution because it provided an alternative to infanticide in times of hardship [. . .] the Oblates made more of an effort to understand Dene traditions and cultural values, tending in the process to demonstrate greater sympathy towards them. Furthermore, the Oblates were more willing to tolerate these traditional ideas among the people who asked for baptism or took communion. The Oblates did not see a fundamental conflict between Christianity and the hunting economy [. . .] the Oblates [. . .] encouraged the use of such items [pictures, medals, rosaries, crucifixes, and other religious objects] as part of their traditional methods of reaching non-literate audiences. Because the Dene associated these objects with personal power, the Anglican refusal to supply them must have seemed most peculiar and suspicious. Were the ministers refusing to share their power or their secrets? The behavior of the priests was in some ways more consistent with Dene expectations and their ideas more consistent with Dene traditions. (141-142)
McCarthy emphasizes that “during this mission process the Dene also changed. They were not empty vessels into which the Catholicism preached by the Oblates could be poured. The history, religious beliefs, and changing circumstances of the Dene influenced their acceptance or rejection of the Christianity preached to them. If that faith had been totally alien, they would have rejected it altogether, or conformed only superficially. But when they accepted Catholicism, they did so, in many ways, on their own terms, in conformity with their own cultural and spiritual understandings. They accomplished for themselves much of what present mission theory calls ‘inculturation,’ long before that concept or ideal was expressed or accepted [. . .] over many years together, Oblate and Dene developed their understanding and acceptance of ‘the other’ and a shared belief” (xviii, xv).
Huel comments that “as a religious congregation whose purpose it was to work among the poor, the Oblates possessed an internal discipline as well as a sense of unity of action [. . .] the practice used by the Oblates in these popular missions, that is, living and working among the poor and instructing them in their own language, was not only pragmatic but readily modified to suit different conditions” (34). McCarthy adds: “though the OMI did not attempt to change the content of their theology, they did adapt to the Dene ways of learning, using methods originally developed to reach the poor of Provence [. . .] these methods accomplished, to some degree, the [mutual] inculturation favoured by theologians of today” (183). The question for this present work is: did the Catholic theology Inculturation of Faith determine the apostolic methods of the OMI, did their work contribute to formulating this theology; how did concepts that are now labelled “inculturation” determine specific “methods and tactics” (per Choquette) in relation to Aboriginals and their integration of Christianity?
Methods and tactics
There are several areas in which OMI were particularly active in Rupert’s Land and Athabasca Country: orphanages, language retention, agriculture, education, communication networks, and health care. Each of these will be glossed below with especial focus on the relationship between the material work and the intercultural incultuation stance between the Oblates and the Aboriginal peoples they encountered.
Orphanages
Huel points out that “in the early period of establishment the Oblates gathered abandoned orphans, the disabled and the elderly in their missions and provided the young with a modicum of education” (73). This comment reflects OMI responsiveness to one of the most immediate needs they saw in the communities: the killing of members whom the community could no longer support (Boyden, 2005).
Language
Choquette notes that “in all areas, the first priority was to learn the aboriginal languages, preferable before even setting foot in the mission field. In fact most Catholic missionaries did learn the Indian languages” (194). This, as noted above, in a context in which the native tongue of the majority of the OMI, French, was being minimized through government policy, immigration, and other missionary activity. Nevertheless, there were notable linguistic contributions made by religious which have served to preserve First Nations languages, leaving, in fact, extant repositories for present-day Aboriginals seeking to strengthen their knowledge of their ancestral languages. Émile Grouard (1840-1931) brought the first printing press to what is now Alberta and from Lac La Biche. He used syllabic type to produce works in Cree, Montagnais, Beaver, and Loucheu, including the life of Jesus in Cree and a Montagnais dictionary (Huel 2015, np). There was also the production of a prayer book in Cree syllabics and Albert Lacombe’s (1827-1916) Cree dictionary, which were made possible with the support of the Grey Nuns.
Agriculture
“In 1853 Eugene de Mazenod issued a statement of ‘Instructions on Foreign Missions’ that told Oblates that ‘every means’ should be used ‘to bring the nomad tribes to abandon their wandering life and to build houses [and] cultivate fields. The Athabasca-Mackenzie missionaries never really followed these orders, however, primarily because the missionaries themselves quickly learned that a sedentary, agricultural life was extremely difficult in the north. Their own gardens frequently failed, and they relied heavily on fish for food, like the people to whom they were ministering” (Abel 118). Nevertheless, after St. Albert was established in 1861 it “became the first major centre of agriculture in Alberta” (Webster Grant 147).
Communication Networks: Transportation and telecommunications
Generally the OMI relied on HBC transport routes and then on the railways; however, they were nevertheless instrumental in building roads as well as in establishing steamship routes, gaining a measure of independence from the HBC. In 1854 Taché oversaw the construction of a road between Lac La Biche and Fort Pitt (in present-day Saskachewan) (Huel 1996, 58). A sawmill was built by OMI at Lac La Biche (Huel 1996, 58) and in 1892 Grouard constructed one much further north at Lake Athabasca, which provided him with the materials to build three steam boats (Huel 2015, np). The Saint-Joseph plied the water between Fort McMurray and Fort Smith, the Saint-Alphonse between Fort Smith and the Arctic Ocean, and an unnamed boat served communities along the Peace River (Huel 2015, np). Choquette notes that the OMI also produced newspapers (1995, 1). During the 1970s Piché was instrumental in setting up a communications network in northern Alberta to facilitate inter-Aboriginal communication regarding use of their lands.
Health Care
After Second World War privately run church hospitals, orphanages and nursing homes were increasingly turned over to the lay sector.
Education[21]
Education is perhaps the most sensitive issue within the wide range of activities undertaken by the OMI in Canada’s northwest. Huel cautions that “abuse in residential schools must not be studied in isolation but within the context of the educational system in general and the family and society at large. Without this larger picture, conjecture will prevail and conclusions at best will be tenuous and tendentious” (1996, xxvi). Nevertheless, the educational issue has been, for the large most part, sensationalized and leveraged in a variety of ways that are not within the scope of this paper to unpack; however, others have begun to make forays into this politically charged field.[22]
Early on, in the mid-nineteenth century, Grouard was concerned with the disruption brought about in Aboriginal communities as increasingly large numbers of Europeans came west (Huel 2015, np). “The schools were begun out of necessity once the buffalo were gone and the fur trade collapsed. With small pox, Spanish flu, tuberculosis and such epidemics recurring frequently, the native population was decimated and the people destitute” (Piché 2006). In 1899 the federal Indian commissioner David Laird invited Grouard to participate in negotiating a treaty to protect the Aboriginals, pursuant to the provisions in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Huel comments that Grouard “was not optimistic about the outcome and suspected the true motive of the government was colonization” (2015, np). In the years following the signing of Treaty 8 Grouard lobbied the federal government for Catholic boarding schools for Aboriginals and by 1927 there were five of them in the Athabasca vicariate.[23] These schools also served as orphanages (Huel 2015, np), sites at which that the social services arm of the government used to house children that they had removed from their parents (Piché 1991).
McCarthy comments that “by 1921 many Dene were third-generation Catholics, who identified themselves as such. They shared in the sacraments and life of the Church, endured considerable hardships to attend the great religious feasts and held devout gatherings at their winter camps with their own spiritual leaders. Their Catholicism was distinctively Dene, much as many other branches of Catholicism exhibited unique characteristics. The institution was never quite as monolithic as it appeared to outsiders, despite the universality of its beliefs and rituals. Each branch of Catholicism preserved singular aspects while conforming to the teachings and practice of the Church” (xx).[24]
Post Vatican II
By the early 1960s church leaders in the north, such as Denis Croteau as Bishop of Mackenzie-Fort Smith (1986-2003), were conscientiously reflecting and acting to integrate Aboriginal and Catholic practice within fluid understandings of inculturation based on both doctrinal theory and experience in the communities. At the Aboriginal Ministries conference there was much excitement and anticipation of the imminent canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha,[25] a seventeenth century Mohawk woman who lived in a Jesuit mission just south of Montréal. In the context of the OMI transition to a post-Vatican II mission Peelman observes:
L’engagement de l’Église pour l’évangelization des cultures changera de plus en plus le visage concret de l’Église. Ainsi, la mission cesse désormais d’être un chemin à sens unique. Le rapport entre l’Église et les cultures est inévitablement un rapport réciproque. L’Église proclame l’Évangile dans les nouvelles situations culturelles de l’humanité tout en se mettant à l’écoute de ces cultures. Les cultures s’ouvrent au message du Christ tout en contribuant à l’humanisation de l’Église
The church’s engagement with the evangelization of cultures will increasingly change the outward face of the church. In this way, mission now ceases to be a one-way road. The relationship between the church and cultures is inevitably a reciprocal relationship. The church proclaims the Gospel in new cultural situations of humanity while at the same time disposing itself to listen these cultures. These cultures open themselves to the message of Christ and thereby contribute to the humanization of the church (1988, 192).
The beatification and canonization of an Aboriginal woman is one such outward face of the Roman Catholic Church. The argument in this paper has been that the seeds of this evolution were there decades before they filtered up into the highest levels of church hierarchy. On the ground the people whom, as some would posit, are the church, were already interacting with other cultures in reciprocal ways—changing them, and being changed by them.
McCarthy wrote in the early 1990s that “over the course of many years [the OMI] learned much from the Dene, how to survive and travel in the north, how to speak the languages of the people, what was acceptable and not acceptable to them. They also became aware of a Dene spirituality and world-view based on community sharing which, in many ways, was closer to early Christianity than was the more secular and individualistic nineteenth-century European Christianity they knew” (xvii-xviii). Inculturation of faith, practiced without such a label by OMI in the missions fields of the Canadian northwest, is now clearly an overt aspect of Roman Catholic theology in Alberta. It provides intellectual grounding upon which to discuss how to be oneself in a world where there are others, how to share oneself with others, and how to understand others as they are in their own terms. It has certainly been a painful journey for not only Aboriginals, but also for the OMI. Camille Piché, Provincial of Grandin Province from reflects:
Perhaps now, if these events (residential schools and Indigenous Residential Schools [IRS] litigation) can be understood as a certain purification of our mission, we can continue our ministry with a renewed dialogue. In-kind commitments will require that we work along with native people, or First Nations as they now choose to be called, and not for them. According to the agreement, ministry, projects, and programs will have to be approved and assessed by both the Oblates and the Aboriginal people. The Apology stated: “recognizing that within every sincere apology, there is implicit the promise of conversion to a new way of acting, we, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate of Canada, wish to pledge ourselves to a renewed relationship with the Native People of Canada.” We now have the occasion to do so. Oblates have now committed significant amounts of money and personnel to aboriginal ministry for the next 10 years, offering us the challenge of a “renewed relationship.” (2006, np)
This reflection articulates a perspective of recognizing, in hindsight, wrongful action—that however well-intentioned, harm was caused. And yet the commitment, dedication and loyalty remains. Although there has been discord, which lead to significant loss for the OMI both in terms of reputation and economic security, there is willingness to remain connected—and to help others. And, as the Aboriginal woman indicated at the Aboriginal Ministries conference, there is also willingness on that side to continue the relationship.
Living together with mutual recognition and respect
This article has glossed official documents regarding what has come to be termed “inculturation,” explained “Oblates” and in particular the OMI and their work in what is now the Province of Alberta, revealing that even prior to Vatican II understandings of “inculturation” informed Oblate activity in Rupert’s Land and Athabasca Country (present day Alberta).
This final section comments on Oblate, Cree, and Blackfoot relations moving forward. Roger Hutchinson, professor Emeritus of Victoria University in the University of Toronto forthrightly observes that “the pressing question is how native and non-native Canadians are going to live together with mutual respect in a shared future and shared country” (43). In the wake of the winding up of the Truth and Reconciliation events on June 2, 2015, Jeffrey Simpson wrote: “If the Chief Justice sees the history as one of ‘cultural genocide’—‘genocide’ being the most heinous of all collective crimes—then her court, as it has already demonstrated, will be or has become the country’s chief expiator.in-law of past sins, encouraging in the re-creation in present-day idiom sovereign ‘nations’ and territories within Canada, thereby deepening radical parallelism between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people rather than furthering a search for what we might have in common and what we might do together” (np, italics mine).
Inculturation provides a way of thinking that helps us to integrate the realities of living in culturally diverse contexts, and of being aware that the nature of our interactions are not one-way. Going forward, will developing a more complex understanding of OMI-Aboriginal encounters help us respond effectively to the challenges of healing from historical trauma? How does thinking labelled “inculturation” intersect with current Aboriginal perspectives regarding a shared future in a shared country? These questions remain active discussion points in the context of living together with difference.
Given the lived experience of OMI of moving through difficult and often painful relationships as a result of externally imposed parallelism, and their persistence nevertheless with the model that is available in the theology of inculturation of the faith, perhaps there is possibility here, should the broader Canadian public be willing, to include not only Aboriginals but also OMI, to learn from them and their experience as well in regard to furthering the search for evolving ways of getting to know the ways of “the other,” while also remaining ourselves, in the interest of our shared civil life in Alberta and Canada.
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Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Boyden, Joseph. Three Day Road. Toronto: Viking, 2005.
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Choquette, Robert. The Oblate Assault on Canada’s Northwest. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995.
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———. Camille Piché interviewed by David Goa, Curator, Folklife Program, Provincial Museum of Alberta. January 1, 1991.
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———. Proclaiming the Gospel to the Indians and the Métis. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996.
———. “Jean L’Heureux: Canadien errant et prétendu missionnaire auprès des Pieds-Noirs.” Après dix ans—bilan et prospective: les actes du onzième Colloque du Centre d’études franco-canadiennes de l’Ouest tenu à la Faculté Saint-Jean, Université de l’Alberta, du 17 au 19 octobre 1991. G. Allaire, P. Dubé and G. Morcos, eds. Edmonton: Institut de recherche de la Faculté Saint-Jean, 1992. 217-218.
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———. L’inculturation: l’Eglise et les cultures. Paris: Desclée, 1988.
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[1] See for example: “Challenges for a North American Doing Research with Traditional Indigenous Guatemalan Midwives.“ International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5.4 (December 21, 2006).
[2] The Roman Catholic Church distinguishes three general groups of people: religious, laity, and clergy. The term “religious” refers to priests, monks and nuns who are part of various religious orders who follow the Rule of the particular order and tend to live in community. A man may be a member of an order, a religious, as well as an ordained priest. Laity refers to Catholics who have not received Holy Orders (ordination); non-ordained religious are canonically laity because they do not receive Holy Orders, but rather take solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Secular, diocesan priests are the clergy who serve parishes (a geographical area with a church; several parishes make up a diocese).
In the language of the Roman Catholic Church the secular (sæculum) is still within the church, but outside the cloiser. Religious who follow a Rule and have also been ordained are considered “regular clergy;” those who have received Holy Orders but live outside the cloister are the “secular clergy.” The secular cleric makes no profession and follows no religious rule; they possess their own property like the laity (“The Obligations and Rights of Clerics.” Code of Canon Law Cann. 232-289).
[3] Directions in Aboriginal Ministry Conference, St. Albert, Alberta, July 17-21, 2012.
[4] While curator of Folklife at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (1972-2002) David Goa with Daivd Ridley and Henriette Kelker made a series of interview recordings, some of which have been transcribed, and are still remaining in the collections of the Royal Alberta Museum, Edmonton. See comments under “Complexity of Lived Experience” below.
[5] He also noted: time/flexibility; value of spirituality/leading prayer/connection with spiritual realm; openness, vulnerability (rather than pretense); generosity, sharing of gifts.
[6] David Goa, Curator, Folklife, Provincial Museum of Alberta in interview with Camille Piché, OMI, Provincial Superior, Grandin Province. August 13, 1998.
[7] For nearly three decades Roger Hutchinson has been based at Victoria University in Toronto, first in the Department of Religion, then at Emmanuel College (Toronto School of Theology), where he completed his teaching career as professor of church and society while serving as principal from 1996 to 2001.
[8] Roger Hutchinson. “Past Sins and Future Hopes: Residential Schools Apology.” Ethical Choices in a Pluralistic World. The Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public life. Camrose: Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta, 2008. 43-51.
[9] Lumen Gentium (the Church, 1964), Sacrosanctum Concilium (Sacred Liturgy, 1965) and Dei Verbum (Word of God, 1962).
[10] Other Catholic Ecumenical Councils include:
Nicaea I (325); Constantinople I (381); Ephesus (431); Chalcedon (451); Constantinople II (583); Constantinople III (680-681); Nicaea II (787); Constantinople IV (869-870); Lateran I; Lateran II; Lateran III; Lateran IV; Lyon I; Lyon II; Vienna; Constance; Florence; Lateran V; Trent (1545-1563); Vatican I (1869-1870); Vatican II (1962-1965)
[11] See, for example: Ignatieff, Michael. The Rights Revolution. Toronto, House of Anansi, 2000; Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition: An Essay by Charles Taylor. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
[12] Inde a Pontificatus, article 1 (John Paul II, 25 March 1993, motu proprio) merged the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers (founded in 1965) with The Pontifical Council for Culture (see https://www.cultura.va).
[13] In reaction to the collective focus on rational empiricism, Romanticism (±1800-1850) in literature and painting redirected the gaze from observation, reason and measurement to elements such as emotion, nature, imagination, and heroism.
[14] Ultramontane, “beyond the mountains,” refers to Catholics in southern France who continued to support papal leadership over national.
[15] For further information on the Oblates in Alberta, please see: https://www.ommi-is.org/, https://www.omi.ca/ and https://oblatesinthewest.library.ualberta.ca//eng/.
[16] For current activities, see Oblate Communications: The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. https://www.omiworld.org/
[17] For more detailed argument on the Oblates, and Alberta, situated within this large historical context of nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see my “Oblates and Nation-building in Alberta.” Religious Studies and Theology 32.2 (December 2013): 145-161.
[18] “Francophone Communities” in Oblate in the West: The Alberta Story. https://oblatesinthewest.library.ualberta.ca/eng/impact/francophone.html
[19] Vicariate of Missions of Athabasca-Mackenzie (1864), sub-divided into separate Viciariates Athabasca and Mackenzie in 1901; the latter was again sub-divided into Athabasca and Grouard Vicariates in 1927: Lac Ste Anne, Fort Chipewyan (Nativity mission), Fort Dunvegan (St. Charles mission), Fort Vermillion (St. Henri mission), Lac La Biche (Notre-Dame-des-Victoires), Grouard (St. Bernard mission), Brosseau (St. Paul-des-Cris), and Edmonton (St. Joachim). Notre-Dame-de-la Paix, Notre-Dame-des-Prairies and Rouleauville (all three within what is now Calgary).
Diocese of St. Albert (1862), sub-divided into the Diocese of St. Albert and the Archdiocese of Edmonton (1912).
For detailed information about the missions see Huel’s chapter “The Oblate Missionary Frontier” in his Proclaiming the Gospel to the Indians and Métis (1996).
[20] This dynamic can arguably still be seen in Albertan communities today with the addition of Evangelical Christian groups and Aboriginal traditionalists competing with Roman Catholics, Anglicans and United Church (Methodists).
[21] As well as educating others in a rapidly changing world, the OMI were also attentive to their own education. In 1917 the first theological faculty is set up at the Oblate Immaculate Conception Scholasticate in St. Joachim’s Parish, Edmonton. At that time diocesan seminarians attended the scholasticate along with those discerning a calling for the religious life. In 1927 however, the Oblates moved to Saskatchewan. The Archdiocese of Edmonton took over the building and called it St. Joseph Seminary (SJS) and it became a formation center only for diocesan priests. Following Vatican II, in 1969 the theology faculty of SJS became Newman Theological College (NTC) by an Act of the Alberta Legislature. NTC was then opened up to religious and laity. SJS remains on the NTC campus as a residence and house of formation for diocesan candidates to the priesthood; however, seminarians now constitute just one sector of the overall student body (https://www.newman.edu/AboutUs/History.aspx).
[22] See for example: Simpson, Jeffrey. “Fixating on the past makes progress difficult.” Globe and Mail. June 2, 2015. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/fixating-on-the-past-makes-progress-difficult/article24759214/; Niezen, Ronald. Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2013. Gatehouse, Jonathon. “The residential schools settlement’s biggest winner: A profile of Tony Merchant.” MacLean’s. April 4, 2013. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/white-mans-windfall-a-profile-of-tony-merchant/
[23] In 1901, at the request of Grouard, the Vatican divided the enormous vicariate of Athabasca-Mackenzie into two vicariates: Athabasca and Mackenzie.
[24] This has also been noted by me in my extra-Canadian experiences of Roman Catholicism, which have been most focused in México, Perú, and Ethiopia.
[25] Kateri was beatified by Pope John Paul II, June 22, 1980 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI at St. Peter’s Basilica on October 21, 2012.
]]>Ambrose University
First Published June 27, 2015
In a world where evil reigns, often the very powers of sin that enslave humanity are hidden, so that our blindness is a plague that perpetuates our enslavement. The task of the Christian historian in the world today, then, is to illuminate and thus empower the resistance of these sinful structures of evil which govern humanity. By exploring the murder of young Floridian Trayvon Martin in late February of 2012, a Foucauldian-Pauline approach to doing history will be explored within a broader perspective of the task of the Christian in the world today.
To first establish a context, Trayvon Martin was seventeen years of age when he was murdered on his walk home from the local convenience store. A native of Sanford, Florida, Martin was shot by the neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, who claimed to have felt threatened by Martin and to have acted in self-defense. Oddly, the youth was unarmed and did not display threatening behavior.
A media storm ensued immediately after Martin’s murder, when the Sanford police department failed to arrest Zimmerman on the basis of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. This legal concept permits self-defense even to the extreme of deadly force when “he or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony…” Zimmerman, appealing to this law, claimed he was justified by a threat to both the safety of himself and that of the community. As a result, the Sanford police department did not arrest Zimmerman until late April of 2012, despite Martin having been shot in February.
At the present time, Zimmerman is awaiting trial and public outrage persists. The prevalent explanation for Zimmerman’s actions has been racism. Toni Morrison, a black author and winner of the Nobel peace prize, represented popular opinion when she argued that Martin was not given justice due to racist vestiges from the slavery era in the United States. Widespread protest and condemnation of Zimmerman has supported this explanation; in a large part, Zimmerman has been characterized as a throw-back to a previous slavery era and evidence of a carry-over of racism from the past. Critics have sought to explain his actions through a progressivist framework; his behavior has been deemed to be out of place in the current North American, liberal society.
Popular explanations for Trayvon Martin’s death in February lend a means of delving into a Foucauldian-Pauline way of doing history. Rather than simplistic explanations, Foucault offers a more nuanced explanation of Zimmerman’s actions and thus empowers humanity through a more clear understanding of our present world. Progressivist understandings are challenged when Martin’s murder is re-examined through a Foucauldian framework that deploys the French philosopher and historian’s concept of governmentality. First, then, let us establish an understanding of this concept.
The basic idea within Foucault’s governmentality is that humanity is not free; in fact, humans are governed by and the product of a web of structures of power. In Foucault’s words:
It is my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity…the individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
These forces, or structures of governance, are an invisible, de-centered, and complex web of power that defines individuals’ thoughts and actions.
When delving into how this process actually works, Foucault argues that structures govern individuals through discourses, which are a certain way of speaking which defines the “normal,” and argues “this is how things ought to be.” Individuals, then, accept that definition of normal and make choices in an effort to be normal – as a particular discourse defines it. The result is that individuals, governed by a discourse, construct a framework for understanding reality and act in a manner that is in accordance with that constructed reality.
In turning back to Trayvon Martin’s murder, Foucault’s governmentality is very helpful. His concept lends understanding to Zimmerman’s actions beyond solely racism. In fact, the neighborhood watchman was acting based on constructions of reality that were governed by powerful discourses in Western society: a discourse of freedom and a discourse of delinquency. Rather than a throw-back to a previous era, Zimmerman is very much a product of the present, liberal society.
In first order, the discourse of freedom has been prominent throughout the history of liberal societies and argues that particular freedoms are the inalienable right of an individual. In the United States, this discourse manifests uniquely through the reasoning that liberty needs to be protected. The freedom to bear arms, in particular, has been closely married to this construction of reality concerning freedom. Evidence of this discourse is woven into Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law; in the United States, violence is empowered to protect values of liberty so central to liberal society. Thus, Zimmerman’s actions in February were governed by a prominent way of thinking in the current American liberal society, rather than constructed realities from a previous era in the United States in which racism was the norm.
In addition to particular constructions of freedom, Zimmerman was governed by a discourse of delinquency. Between 1920 and 1950, this powerful discourse arose in Western society to define young, non-Anglo-Saxon, and lower class individuals as prone to dangerous and harmful behavior. Theorists like Granville Stanley Hall were influential in defining the adolescent life stage as a period of biologically-determined deviance and misbehavior. Furthermore, impoverished youth – particularly in urban areas – were believed to be predisposed to immoral, criminal, and violent behavior. Lastly, delinquency was also a racialized profile: “the foreign-born [were] felt to be more inclined to deviance at all ages.” Aged, class, and racial prejudices were stoked in the first half of the twentieth century by social tumult that spanned two world wars and the Great Depression. Out of this period emerged a powerful structure of governance which painted an image of the impoverished, foreign youth as the source of social disorder and danger.
Thus, Zimmerman’s choice to shoot Martin on February 26, 2012 reflects a particular understanding of reality that was governed by powerful discourses in liberal society. The neighborhood watchman perceived danger based on a discourse of delinquency that created a strong fear of violence, particularly from young black men of a lower socio-economic status. Furthermore, his actions were motivated by a discourse of freedom that legitimized taking violent action against that which he understood as a threat to his freedoms. Discourses prevalent in liberal society today collided in the governance of George Zimmerman to result in the unnecessary and tragic death of a young man.
Foucault’s concept of governmentality lends understanding to the murder of Trayvon Martin, yet how does this discussion speak to the task of the Christian historian? In first order, Foucault helps explain the task of the historian in particular. For the French philosopher, the concern is not that humanity is not free; this is a given. Instead, the real danger is in the invisibility of the structures that govern humanity, which renders humankind unaware of its governance. Resistance, the “act of not being governed in a certain way and at a certain price,” becomes an impossibility and humanity is left impotent when power proves to be harmful. Consequently, Foucault argues that:
The real…task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the…violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
Just as Foucault’s philosophy is useful in defining the task of the historian, so too does the philosopher shed light on the Christian’s task. Oddly enough – considering Foucault’s vehement censure of Christianity – there are many parallels between Foucault’s governmentality and the Apostle Paul’s theology of structures. Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Theologian Stanley Grenz discusses Paul’s understanding of forces, which the apostle defines as structures that govern human existence; they are not spiritual beings, but rather are quasi-independent, quasi-personal, and intimately tied to human life. Grenz argues that for Paul, these powers were created by God for the purpose of governance. In Colossians 1:16, Paul writes: “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” However, because of the fall, these powers are now in opposition to Christ and govern and enslave humanity to evil.
Yet Paul offers hope, for he argues that Christ defeated the forces of evil through his crucifixion and resurrection. In Colossians 2:15, Paul writes: “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” Reflecting on Paul’s words in Ephesians 6:12, then, the task of the Christian historian is – through the power of Christ – to combat these evil authorities in the world so that humanity might be freed from enslavement and experience Christ’s redemption – a reality which will be completed with Christ’s return. Hendrikus Berkof offers an excellent summary of a Pauline theology of structures:
God reconciles the Powers – and not only men – with Himself through Christ’s death. This thought is strange to us; we usually think of reconciliation as an act relating only to persons. Here Paul uses it in a broader sense, as meaning a restoration of proper relationships. In this sense the Powers as well are objects of God’s plan of redemption. By virtue of this purpose they will no longer lie between man and God as a barrier, but can and shall return to their original function, as instruments of God’s fellowship with His creation.
Suddenly Foucault and Paul begin to share common ground and form an odd pair to shed light on the task of the Christian historian. Foucault’s structures of governance and call for resistance – though he certainly would not have agreed – draw many parallels with Paul’s “spiritual forces of evil” within the created order. In the case of Trayvon Martin, ways of thinking that were previously hidden are illuminated by a study of the past. History unveils structures of power that govern humanity. Furthermore, this better understanding provokes further questions that empower resistance: How do liberal understandings of freedom actually justify violence rather than instigate peace? In what ways does Western society today tie together ethnicity and criminal behavior in a manner that cultivates racial discrimination and hatred?
In a Foucauldian-Pauline approach to doing history, the study of the past illuminates structures of evil that govern and enslave humanity. Far from over-simplistic or formulaic interpretations, this task requires the historian to grapple with the complexity of the past. In the words of James Lagrand, historians must undertake the study of “the ‘messiness’ of history, its unexpected twists and turns, the surprise of finding evil people doing good things and virtuous, moral people revealing a fatal flaw in some of their actions.” In short, we must vigilantly and critically look into the past so that through our scholarship and testimony to history’s complexity, humanity might see the structures that enslave and resistance might become a possibility. The words of Kenneth Draper ring true: “I have no faith in progress but I believe the message of history is: this is not the way it has to be.”
This task of the Christian historian is simply part and parcel of the human temporal narrative, which is a dramatic story of God’s redemption. Created in God’s image in the beginning but enslaved to sin in the Fall, humanity has been the object of God’s saving work throughout the span of time. This task will be completed at the Parousia, when evil is overthrown and creation is made new. The ultimate hope, then, is “the hope for God’s renewal of all things, for his overcoming of corruption, decay, and death, for his filling of the whole cosmos with his love and grace, his power.”
As time moves toward complete redemption, however, God’s salvation is also being worked out in the present. Christ’s earthly ministry heralded the coming of the kingdom of God to earth: “The time has come,” [Jesus] said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” His life on earth began God’s saving work of making things new and setting wrong to right; as N.T. Wright puts it:
It is the story of God’s kingdom being launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched…
The Christian historian is part of this saving work of the kingdom, for God’s salvation is incarnate throughout the earth through the Church. Wright argues: “Jesus’ followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.” Thus, humanity – though enslaved to sin – is in the process of being redeemed even as it moves toward the ultimate redemption at the end of time. Christians, as the agents of this redemptive work of Christ, work within and as a part of the created temporal order to combat evil and bring God’s goodness to humanity.
As Perry Bush argues, “we need to reconnect our discipline to the needs and agendas of a broken world…as if peace and justice really mattered.” The reality of the human temporal experience is that though Christ has inaugurated the kingdom and is working out his salvation amongst humanity, evil continues to enslave and triumph. Consequently, as Christian historians called to be agents of Christ’s redemption, we must aggressively join in the struggle against “the powers of this dark world” and illuminate such evil so that humanity might resist, even as we eagerly await Christ’s return and evil’s defeat. And when we inevitably feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the task set before us, let us never forget Jesus’ comforting promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Bibliography
Berkhof, Hendrikus. Christ and the Powers, trans. John H. Yoder. Scottdale: Herald, 1962.
Emma Brockes. “Trayvon Martin Death Raises Issue of Racism in America, Says Toni Morrison.” The Guardian. April 13, 2012. https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/13/toni-morrison-trayvon-martin-racism-police (Accessed April 15).
Bush, Perry. “What Would History Look Like If “Peace and Justice” Really Mattered?” Fides Et Historia 34, No. 1: 49-55. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed April 4, 2012).
Chomsky, Noam and Michel Foucault. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature. New York: The New Press, 2006.
Comacchio, Cynthia. The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006.
Draper, Kenneth. “Becoming Christian in History Class,” Conference on Faith and History at George Fox University (Presented October 7, 2010).
“Florida Teen Killed by Watch Captain Said He Was Followed.” CBC News, March 20, 2012, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/03/20/florida-teen-killing.html (Viewed April 1, 2012).
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed.
C. Gordon. Trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshal, J. Mepham, and K. Sober. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Grenz, Stanley J. Theology for the Community of God. Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1994.
Katerberg, William. “Is There Such A Thing As “Christian” history?” Fides Et Historia 34, No. 1 (December 1, 2002): 57-66. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (Accessed April 4, 2012).
Lagrand, James B. “The Problems of Preaching Through History,” Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, ed. John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Moore, Scott H. 1997. “Christian History, Providence, and Michel Foucault.” Fides Et Historia 29, no. 1: 5-14. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed April 4, 2012).
The Florida Senate. “Chapter 776 Justifiable Use of Force.” 2011 Florida Statues, https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/Chapter0776/All (Accessed April 1, 2012).
Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2008.
]]>The King’s University College
First published December 10, 2013
Introduction
On 27 April 2012, the new South Africa turned eighteen. The rebirth of this former pariah nation, notorious for its history of dehumanization, was heralded as a beacon of hope for the world. In a year that saw continued ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the Rwandan genocide, South Africa’s transition from white rule to inclusive democracy imagined an alternative future for societies racked by racial and ethnic conflict. While the settlement was symbolized by familiar democratic instruments of voting booth and constitution, the struggle to end apartheid had been a deeply moral struggle, involving people of all races, Christians and Muslims, Jews and secularists. It also had been a global struggle with international and ecumenical participation, mobilizing churches, governments, and businesses in a concentrated effort to rid the world of a distinctively modernist form of racism. Hence the climax of that struggle, with its snaking long lines at voting stations, could be seen as a triumph for all humanity. The icons of that victory, people such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, were not only South Africans: they were, and continue to be, hailed as global citizens.
But all is not well. While South Africa boasts one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, and every five years since 1994 there has been a “free and fair” election, poverty remains endemic, unemployment continues to soar at nearly half the potential workforce, and the poorest still live in substandard housing. The country has been rocked by “service delivery protests” by people driven to activism by failed expectations. The blight of AIDS has torn through the population, stealing its future, while corruption in politics has brought disrepute into a party boasting two Nobel Peace Prize laureates. In recent memory are the xenophobic attacks of 2008 and 2009, where the homes and businesses of foreign African workers were destroyed. It’s true that a growing black middle class is beginning to taste the fruits of the new government’s economic policies. But within that new class is growing a culture of entitlement and greed. Many whites who remain beneficiaries of ongoing economic inequality have either fled the country, taking their skills with them, or remain behind secure walls of protection. But the biggest sign of distress is the cheapness of life, the everyday assaults on human dignity, and the desperation that drives people to sacrifice their own humanity for the gains of petty crime.
In 2010, as South Africa prepared to open its doors for the FIFA World Cup, a group of academics, activists, and artists representing business and law, the arts and the media, the church and the university gathered at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. Inspired by the great post-war gathering of humanists in Geneva in 1948, and meeting under the rubric of The Project for a New Humanism in South Africa (NHP), theirs was a pilgrimage into South Africa’s journey to humanization. Most of the participants and observers were South African, but there were also people from overseas who reflected the continued sense that South Africa represents something important for humankind. All shared a common concern for the emerging shape of that nation born again in 1994.
I was privileged to be present during this conversation and some of the follow-up meetings that produced a collection of writings entitled The Humanist Imperative in South Africa. In this article I will talk about the Project as a jumping-off point for reflection on theology, humanism, and the humanities. I will sketch the contours of a South African humanist vision discernible in the conversation. Taking note of the fact that it was a theologian who acted as impetus and facilitator of the conversation, I will suggest that South Africa gives us a particular window into what theology engaging the debate about humanization looks like.
The New Humanism Project
The NHP developed out of the work of John de Gruchy, a theologian widely known for his scholarship on the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Many of de Gruchy’s writings compared the situation in Nazi Germany to that of South Africa (de Gruchy 1984). Both Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa were situations of profound dehumanization in which the churches found themselves pulled between loyalty to the state and faithfulness to the Kingdom of God. In a tantalizing series of letters from prison, Bonhoeffer also had begun to think about the meaning of Jesus Christ in a world “come of age” ((Bonhoeffer 2009, 426–28). Bonhoeffer’s was a world where God was no longer considered a necessary postulate, a world become aware both of its potential for building just communities and its potential for destructive violence. Like many Christians in South Africa, Bonhoeffer had been led into alliances with secular people committed to social transformation. Already the author of a work on Christian humanism (de Gruchy 2006), de Gruchy more recently had been challenged by the question of whether the tradition of Christian humanism could address these concerns in a South Africa “come of age.” The NHP was his attempt to pose that question more widely (de Gruchy 2011b, 11–12).
De Gruchy identifies Geneva 1948 as precursor to the New Humanist Project, a conference at which the great theologian (and Bonhoeffer mentor) Karl Barth spoke. Nevertheless it may seem odd that a theologian would facilitate a project with the name “humanism” in it, and even stranger when that theologian has the audacity to play conductor in an interdisciplinary symphony—especially when these other disciplines reside in universities that (at least in Canada) have left theology behind. We are accustomed to identifying humanism as “post-theistic,” and, as George Marsden would put it, “most academics today take it for granted that to invoke a normative theological concern would be to contaminate one’s scholarship” (Marsden 1998, 30). But theology taking its place in facilitating a dialogue about humanism in South Africa is not so strange if we bear three things in mind. The first has to do with theology’s historical relation to the other disciplines, the second with theology’s specific relation to the South African past, and the third with theology’s relation to the needs of the South African present.
Theology was present at the founding of the university, and reigned for centuries as “queen” among the sciences. The story of how the disciplines have grown into autonomy with respect to theology (and eventually hegemony over theology) is well known (e.g., D’Costa 2005, ch. 1). While it long since has been dethroned, theology has developed a dialogical character: historically with the arts and other humanities, and more recently with the natural and social sciences. De Gruchy’s own work has expressed this trend, captured in the title of his Festschrift, Theology in Dialogue: The Impact of the Arts, Humanities, and Science on Contemporary Religious Thought. So understood, theology’s agenda is not so much “to harness the other disciplines in its service” as “to interact with them for the well-being of all life on earth” (Holness and Wüstenberg 2002, xvi). This dialogical character also reflects theology’s confessional scope, its claim that the world’s structure and character, its origins and destiny, bear the fingerprints of its Creator. Theology investigates both the transcendent source of all things and the ways in which all things participate in, or refer back to, that source. Christian theology is also cosmic in its apprehension of life in its various forms and complex dimensions, in the way creation as a diverse unity of particulars images the Trinity (Gunton 1998). But its chief focus is on the role of one creature created in the divine image (Gn 1:26–28), a creature innately curious about the world and its place in it. And so theology, as “helper” (Gn 2:18), constantly challenges the disciplines which study this multi-dimensionality to provide guidance into the one overarching human task to steward creation, to investigate its properties, and to unfold its possibilities in a way that imitates the activity of God.
Theology had a very particular (and notorious) role to play in the old South Africa. As the dehumanization that was apartheid had a professed biblical basis, it also carried a biblical and theological justification (Kinghorn 1990; Loubser 1987). This was a theology deeply wedded to romanticist notions of volk, but also shaped by natural and social scientific theories of race prevalent in the early twentieth century (Moodie 1975; Dubow 1995). As apartheid theology claimed human diversity trumped human solidarity so counter-theologies arose declaring this justification to be heresy (de Gruchy and Villa-Vicencio 1983). Theology was thus itself a site of struggle and an important shaper of resistance, a turning of the ideological weapons of the oppressor against himself. More than merely strategic, however, theology played an important, constructive role in bringing apartheid to an end. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission—that exemplary project of recovering the humanity of both victim and perpetrator—was theorized, debated, and populated by theologians and church leaders (Cochrane, de Gruchy, and Martin 1999). In many ways the involvement of theology in South Africa’s recent past is exceptional in the modern world, and so no talk of transformation is possible without enlisting theology to interpret South Africa’s past and present.
Theology’s role may seem well and fine for opposing a theocratic regime. But isn’t post-1994 South Africa supposed to be a secular state? Yes, it is. Indeed it was theologians like de Gruchy (de Gruchy 1995) who strongly advocated such a designation. Learning the lessons of the collapse of eschatology into politics, South Africa teaches a profound lesson about what happens when any regime identifies itself with the Kingdom of God. Recent theology supplements this insight by retrieving the Augustinian idea that “the secular”—the period in between the ascension of Jesus Christ and his second coming—designates not a space free from religion, but a time of waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom of God to come (Markus 1988; Mathewes 2007). The secular is a reminder that any form of the state is open to theological criticism precisely because it is not the Kingdom, because the time for the fullness of the Kingdom is “not yet.” This is analogous to the role theology plays in reminding each academic discipline that its knowledge of the part is not knowledge of the whole.
Theology (and a theological humanism) has a special task in present-day South Africa, a task de Gruchy identifies as “recovering ‘soul.’” What does this mean? Is it the role of theology in contemporary South Africa to make people more “religious”? It would appear not—not least because despite relatively high religious identifications (Hendriks and Erasmus 2005) South Africa’s many problems remain. Soul is not “religion”; neither is it an immaterial and non-empirical substance religious people possess. Rather, soul is a way of talking about “being in relation” (de Gruchy 2011a, 61). Soul names both that which makes us distinctively human and that life-long project of becoming human with others: in fragility, yes, but also open to mutual transformation. It connects with the biblical category of being made “in the image of God.” But soul finds its greatest challenge in the idolatry of consumer capitalism which reduces all human relations to relations of exchange quantifiable by economists and manipulable by corporations. Regardless of discipline or religiosity, soul speaks of the dangers of negotiating human existence “in an age which would turn us all into machines” (de Gruchy 2010, 378).
The idea of soul was a key link to the interdisciplinary discussions of the Project about what it means to be human. The natural scientists in the consultation rightly spoke of the ways humans are linked through evolutionary processes to the web of all life (something which anthropocentric humanisms have not always appreciated), that humanism has to deal with bodies and brains, drives and instincts (Solms 2011). But as humans we are also more than the sum of our biological parts. There were three key terms used by the discussants to articulate that “more than”: imagination, relationality, and morality. Each of these benefitted from the interdisciplinary conversation, even as the distinctive ways humans live imaginatively, relationally, and morally were spelled out. As will become evident, each links the humanities especially with nurturing a humanist vision.
It is the special task of the humanities to nurture soul, and this task is most evident in the way the humanities study the imagination. While present to an extent in all mammals (Solms 2011, 51), imagination is the motor of human freedom, the freedom to think, to exist, and to act otherwise. It is, as education activist Neville Alexander noted, the capacity to refuse to be restricted by the “given” (Alexander 2011). Imagination “reconfigures the world” in freedom. But freedom is not autonomy, if by that we mean independence from bodies, relations, and systems. Imagination is always in tension with the given: biologically with the capacities of the mammalian brain, and sociologically with the structures that make human life in community both possible and necessary, including the state, the economy, and the law. The possibility of imagining a different future cannot be thought apart from the debate about how to meet basic needs of food, shelter, and education (Martin 2010, 9). The imagination is always conditioned by local realities, as the natural and social sciences tell us. At the same time, the systems delineated by natural and social scientists are also the stuff of imagination (Martin 2010, 35). They are not inevitable—and the air of necessity they often carry can turn oppressive. They are partially constituted by and negotiated within the subjectivities of people—whether scientist or citizen. Structures call and humans respond. But every call to reproduce the given creates dissonance or slippage. In the words of religionist Bernhard Lategan, while we are shaped by systems, we are not determined by them; rather, we “dance” with their requirements (Lategan 2011, 26), inverting and subverting them in the name of a new imaginary.
If any people know what this means, it is South Africans. When one travels through South Africa one becomes aware of how much waste is created by that system called “consumer capitalism.” Existing on the fringes of cities are people who take that waste (empty Coke cans, discarded sheets of colourful advertising, bits of wire and corrugated tin) and use it to create works of art which entrepreneurs then peddle at traffic lights and on sidewalks outside shopping malls. Dumpsters are transformed into schoolhouses. The new Constitutional Court is built on the site of the famous “Number Four” block, created with bricks taken from the prison that once housed Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Such artistry creates images of hope out of the machinery of despair. The human imagination can be coerced and constrained by state, economy, and law, but it can never be exhausted by them (see Martin 2009).
Alongside imagination, there was a second key in the conversations to understanding what it means to be human: relationality. As theologian Denise Ackermann put it, to be human is to be in relation: to God, to other humans, and to the natural world (Ackermann 2011). Like imagination, relationality also carries resonances with other disciplines. The natural sciences speak of the anticipations of community and solidarity in the affinities non-human creatures display. The social sciences study the specifically human ways of forming relations—relations that receive imaginative impetus through language. And if the humanities form around anything, it’s the multiple forms of communication, the languages, that both shape and express who we are.
A particularly South African articulation of relationality is found in the concept of ubuntu, “a person is a person only in relation to other persons.” In the conversation, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane observed that for Africans all of reality (including non-human reality) is relation (Martin 2010, 9). Popularized by Desmond Tutu, ubuntu has become ubiquitous, almost a cliché in South Africa. Insurance companies, software programs, and self-help courses now all use the term. During the conversation, people complained that ubuntu has become a free-floating signifier, cut loose from its roots in traditional structures and practices (Martin 2010, 12–13). And yet the term captures something very important, something almost essential to the construction of an African (and Christian) humanism. Legal scholar Drucilla Cornell’s contribution fastened on the concept of ubuntu as “a universal, activist ethic,” which identifies being human as “relational all the way down.” This relationality is not simply a matter of person-to-person encounters, but reminds us that persons are born into relation (Martin 2010, 12). While it wasn’t mentioned during the meetings, theologians have gone so far as to say that ubuntu relationality serves as analogy to the persons-in-relation of the Trinity (Battle 1997, 98).
This raised a third theme in the conversation, one concerning the necessity of a moral imperative, a guiding vision for life in human society. As many contemporary philosophers and theologians have observed, morality requires narrative, a shared goal or goals that binds people together. This narrative is a collective, imaginative construct which answers basic questions about normativity. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has suggested an alternate term: “social imaginary”—something which provides the horizon for meaningful action (Taylor 2004, 23f.). Humans are imaginative creatures living a life of relationship, but the coherence of that life is found in a shared narrative about the past and present which is oriented toward the future. Answering the question “What are humans for?” this narrative gives purpose and direction to human endeavours.
While “morality” is often understood as the province of religion, even secularists within the conversation used the term—and with urgency. Humanism not only should describe, it should prescribe what human flourishing looks like under particular conditions. After all, it was a moral imperative, said Alexander, that stood behind resistance to apartheid (Martin 2010, 16). This moral imperative largely was lost in the years following the 1994 elections, South Africa’s “Prague Spring” in the words of business leader Bobby Godsell (Martin 2010, 28). The country has participated, he continued, in the corruption of “wealth,” which once meant weal (“well-being”), with accumulation. South Africa’s crisis at its coming of age is a deeply moral crisis, its failure a moral failure. All the participants agreed that the recovery of such a moral imperative was crucial for a human and humane future. All agreed that a moral imperative should enflesh human dignity and the affirmation of difference (Martin 2010, 13–14). While such a vision is creative and communal, it also calls for structures and systems that sustain its possibility (Martin 2010, 23). In other words, morality never happens in a vacuum, nor is it created ex nihilo. The term most often used for this within South African discourse is “nation-building”—the creation of an imagined community walking together into a future that captures a shared sense of justice, of obligation to the other.
So: imagination, relationality, morality—pointing to what it means to be human and shaping a distinctive way of being human in South Africa. At the risk of being overly schematic, we might summarize the conversation of the Project as “the arts of the possible in dialogue with the sciences of the actual.” But none of this is innocent. Imaginations can be good or bad, life-affirming or life-destroying. Apartheid was if nothing else a racialized imaginary, supported by scientific accounts of race. Relationships can be characterized by freedom and mutuality, or bondage and autonomy. Again, apartheid was known euphemistically among ideologues as “good neighbourliness.” Visions can be open to otherness and willing to grow from the encounter, or closed and hardened, even blind. As for morality, there’s no question that the old South Africa saw itself as taking the moral high ground against immoral liberalism and communism. In short, nothing is innocent or unambiguous—not even the concept of humanism.
Humanism was not one thing in the conversation. It was acknowledged as multiple, ambiguous, and contested (Martin 2010, 14, 32). Some of the natural scientists were concerned that the term itself undermined a basic continuity between humans and other creatures (Martin 2010, 7, 9). Other participants recalled how the term has often disguised under the genus “humanity” a particular construction of what it means to be human, and that that construction has in turn taken a colonialist and hegemonic shape in South Africa. The normative, rights-bearing human is white and male, self-governed and self-possessed, and seeking to manage and control (largely) that which is non-white, female, dependent, and bodily. Even the idea of human rights begs the question of exactly who is a rights-bearing human. This was argued by political philosopher Andre du Toit with reference to one of South Africa’s most famous liberal figures, Jan Smuts. Smuts, whose government was defeated by the National Party in 1948, ushering in five decades of apartheid, was a humanist. His credentials included a classical Oxford education and his work up to and including his involvement in the drafting of the United Nations Charter. And yet du Toit showed Smuts as “a white supremacist” who rejected out-of-hand the overtures of black moderates in his own country (Martin 2010, 13–14).
This tribalisation of humanism within modernity has led to a counter-assertion: anti-humanism. Associated with nineteenth-century figures like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, and more recently Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, anti-humanism proclaims the death of the subject. Our experience is an effect of unconscious economic (Marx) or psychological (Freud) forces, or the will-to-power disguised as virtue (Nietzsche) (Westphal 1999). But anti-humanism is also tied to modernity as its nihilistic underside. Anti-humanism places before us a world “in which centering words themselves have lost their referents, been emptied out, and in which educated persons have lost both the ability and the will to reach toward a common truth” (Jeffrey 1998, 66). The reduction of knowledge to power-struggle and the privileging of contestation over conversation belies the goal of ubuntu (not to say the Christian idea of communion). The ethical concern implicit even in post-modern anti-humanists, as Zimmerman and Klassen (2006) argue with reference to Emmanuel Levinas, begs the question of what standard should be applied to judge ideologies like apartheid in the past and the continued marginalization of the poor in the present.
Theology and Humanities Future
To speak of imagination, relationality, and morality, even inflected with the term “humanist,” is thus insufficient. As Karl Barth announced at the 1948 conference on a new post–world war humanism, the question of a human future revolves around nothing less than “God’s humanism” (Barth 2003, 2–12). God’s humanism, or what more recently has been called “incarnational humanism” (Zimmermann and Klassen 2006), is founded in the contention “that every man, and the universal truth concerning man, is to be understood from this particular man, Jesus Christ” (Barth 2003, 6). The Christian scandal of particularity concerns the true nature of human beings and the true character of God revealed in a poor Palestinian Jew whose life, death, and resurrection discloses the pattern of human life and the revelation of the divine image. Affirming the humanity of the poor and excluded, and challenging those who wield power conventionally understood, leads Christians to proclaim that the pattern for and model of authentic human life is found on the margins rather than in the centre of a modern society—including the centre called “university.”
Through this Christological claim (we might call it “the Christological imperative”) theology takes on a position of tension with reference to all humanisms. For while theology acknowledges the goodness of imagination and interpretation, it also claims that the human imagination (in the words of that great humanist John Calvin) is a veritable “factory of idols” (Calvin 1960, 108). The utopian societies of which we dream, including the utopia of “The Rainbow Nation,” come under the judgment of the Gospel to which theology bears witness. Nation-building itself can have an over-against, a rivalry with other nations. During this time when everything is provisional, including nation-states, the over-against is the Kingdom of God itself revealed in Jesus Christ and embodied in the sanctorum communio, the communion of saints. The moralities we construct, whether as sociological experiments or as literary projects, are judged as both too narrow in their selectivity and too certain in their absoluteness. If a humanistic morality tries to move beyond the confines of the local, as it by definition should, it becomes abstract platitudes rather than a specific program of action.
Theology also challenges the humanities precisely in their humanizing task. As David Lyle Jeffrey puts it, “humane learning [cannot] survive without a grand narrative” (Jeffrey 1998). Theology is tasked with imaginatively narrating the human story as recapitulated in the story of Jesus Christ, and with articulating the normative shape of that community remade in his likeness. And so it would seem to have a secure place among the disciplines which celebrate the human imagination. At the same time, Jesus is neither simply a character from literature (like Don Quixote) nor a figure from history (like Julius Caesar). Even less is Jesus a paradigmatic “good man,” a particular instance of a universal truth. He discloses (apokalypsis) the shape of humanity’s future, and at the same reveals the depths of its crisis, its fall away from God’s original intent. Thus theology is that discipline which claims to know in Jesus Christ the beginning and the end, and conducts its dialogue by framing the production of human knowledge in terms of where we’ve come from and where we are going. Theology is that discipline that names the time as “the secular”: the time in-between. The secular is the time in which the decisive shape of common humanity is disclosed to the church in faith but hidden from the fullness of sight (2 Cor 5:7). Rowan Williams has written in this regard,
The Church proclaims that there is one human destiny and that is found in relation to one focal figure, Jesus; but also that what this human destiny means cannot be worked out without ‘communion’, a relation of costly and profound involvement with each other and receiving from each other. (Williams 2005, 27)
Hence the church lives to unsettle by its very nature, living in “creative dissatisfaction” as “a compelling symbol of a humanity able to live by sharing and by loving, reverent mutual attention” (Williams 2005, 29). This means that the church cannot be one interest group among the rival many; rather, it is the sacrament of common human destiny. As sacrament, it is always locally embodied. As catholic, “it strives to show and interpret and share the gifts of one person or group or nation, offering them to all; and to each, it offers the resources of all” (Williams 2005, 31). The church represents that future “given coherence by Jesus, in which each human partner in communion has a distinct and unrepeatable gift to share, and cannot therefore be ignored or discounted” (Williams 2005, 39).
The other side of the critical task of theology is to discern pro-visionally the future in what Barth called “secular parables” (Barth 1961, pt. 3). Barth’s opposition to “natural theology,” or a revelation within culture which exists alongside the revelation in Jesus Christ, is well-known. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ interrupts the idolatrous narrations of the world, exposing their incipient nihilism which seeks to understand the world in itself, rather than as the creation of the triune God. However, “even in its obvious and dreadful confusion, [the world] is also the ongoing history of the good creation of God which cannot be destroyed by any confusion of man” (Barth 1961, 698). The world remains the same one created, redeemed, and reconciled in Jesus Christ—even if it does not yet acknowledge this. If this is the case, then we should expect the light of the revelation in Jesus Christ to shine in “lesser lights” which deepen the church’s proclamation of the Gospel. These “secular parables . . . in material agreement with [scripture] illumine, accentuate or explain the biblical witness in a particular time and situation, thus confirming it in the deepest sense by helping to make it sure and concretely evident and certain” (Barth 1961, 115).
These parables of the Kingdom, of a new humanity reconciled in Jesus Christ, embody both judgement and grace. They signal in grace the real presence of the future. But they also judge every attempt to bring that future into being apart from God. In secular time the present is suspended between memory and hope. Nevertheless, memory and hope give orientation and guidance to human activity, including the disciplines. And so theology calls the visual and performing arts, the natural sciences, the study of behaviour, and the investigation into histories and cultures to facilitate that flourishing which judges exploitation and injustice as distortions, even refusals, of the pattern for humanity revealed in Jesus Christ, and anticipates the eschatological shape of human and creaturely existence. In this way, theology, which is most at home (though never fully) in the humanities is linked to the shared project of becoming human together.
Conclusion
I believe that South Africa’s New Humanism Project can be read as such a parable of the Kingdom. For it brought together a diverse group of people, each contributing disciplinary and perspectival gifts. It was a parable because it recognized the in-betweenness, the provisionality of the times, that 1994 had not inaugurated the Kingdom of God in South Africa. And yet the imperative to learn during the time in-between what it meant to be human was clearly audible. It celebrated the gifts of being human: imagination, relationality, and moral vision. While it grieved at the distortion of such things in the South Africa that was coming of age, that grief was not without hope. But hope requires a narrative larger than the story of “the rainbow people,” or even “a just society.” Hope needs an imagination that reaches beyond the exigencies of history, a vision that sees all history taken up into the life, death, and resurrection of the God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth. Ultimately, theology is required to articulate the character of that hope. For that reason it was at home in the conversation, but also not fully home. No theology can be fully home in a world where violence continues to be the determining force in life, where human beings created in God’s image are treated as producers and consumers in a global factory, where the struggle simply to eat takes precedence over all else. Theology says “no” to all these things, but also discerns and articulates God’s “yes” in acts that presage the future Christians call “the Kingdom of God.”
We could say the same thing for theology in the humanistic university here in Canada. After all, we know what it is to live in an age dominated by the quantifiable, where progress has (almost) turned humans into machines, an age where “soul” is in jeopardy. The humanities map this dehumanization, and provide something of a catalogue of resistance. They provide parables of judgment and grace, of our broken past and hopeful future. The role of theology is to articulate these as pointing to something only God can bring, but also something God has brought in his invasion of our world in Jesus Christ, if we have eyes to see.
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Writing the “Anti-History” of Communism
Mark Sandle
Professor of History
The Kings University College
Preamble
A bit of personal reflection might shed light on the genesis of this paper. In 2006 while working in England I was approached to write a brief overview text outlining the history of communism. This started me thinking about how to do this. What story should one tell? Who are the central figures, the heroes and the villains? Then in 2009 I got a job in Edmonton at The Kings University College. One attraction of the post was the opportunity to write history from an explicitly Christian perspective. So I began reading up on what it meant to do Christian history. What does it mean to be a Christian historian? What difference might it make to the history I write? Most of the material I read came through the pages of Fides et Historia, but some also came through a number of different books and texts that I digested. Notable contributors in this regard were George Marsden, Ron Wells, Mark Noll, William Katerberg, and Eugene McCarraher.
What I discovered was that there was a lot of writing, reflection, discussion, and debate about what Christian history was—its approaches, methodology, themes, values, perspectives, etc.—as well as many people saying what it wasn’t. Much of it was very good, thought-provoking stuff. Quite a lot of Christian history (or history written by Christians) focused very much on religious history or the history of the church. There was a real paucity of material in other areas, however. Ronald Wells, writing in 2002, noted that
if Christian scholarship is to flourish in the discipline of history it must move beyond religious history to other historical subjects and fields. . . . My hope is that the success of religious history will cause a kind of intellectual draft effect; that is having established religion as a fully appropriate subject for historical enquiry, we can now also move forward to faith-based historical analysis of subjects other than religion itself.
Wells’ hope and my arrival at The Kings University College got me thinking, though. What would a Christian history of communism look like? How do you write from a Christian perspective about a system that was avowedly materialist, secular, and atheist in outlook? Would it be different at all? Would it be unrecognisable from my earlier versions?
Introduction: Where Does One Start?
One of the purposes of this paper is to explore the extent to which the field can be re-imagined. Is the most we can hope for to nudge the field in a particular direction or sharpen its focus? Or should we be looking to re-imagine the story completely, retell it in a way which conflicts with the existing narratives? How can the story be both recognisably and avowedly “Christian” and recognisably “historical” at the same time? To borrow an analogy from the gospels for a moment, should we pour new wine into old wineskins? Or do we need new wineskins?
The key consideration was which approach to employ in writing a Christian history of communism. Scholars have speculated about innumerable themes or approaches which can be used to write history from a Christian perspective. It would be foolish to try to utilise all, or even some of them. But I wanted to do more than just “add the church and stir,” and I also wanted to do more than just write something which was indistinct from all the other histories of communism out there. So I tried to select particular themes and ideas which were authentically Christian, but which also made sense for the subject matter at hand (communism, predominantly of the modern era). In the end I decided on the following ones, mainly because intuitively they seemed to fit best. My approach to writing a “new” history of communism is based loosely on the following three ideas.
The idea of anti-history is a writing of the past which is in some way a disruption to the commonplace/dominant narratives—a retelling of familiar stories, but subversively. There are precedents for this type of approach. Elements of this can be seen in the teaching methods of Christ as reported in the gospels. Jesus used the compelling phrase “You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .” This was I guess an early form of historical revisionism: recasting a familiar tale. Theologians and historians also have placed an emphasis upon the strangeness or otherness of the past. Stanley Hauerwas talks about making the familiar strange. Simon Schama noted how all history was a negotiation between familiarity and strangeness. Perhaps the fullest rendering of this approach comes from Johann Baptiste Metz. This idea of anti-history should not be seen as a rejection of the history in the academy per se, or as something which is inherently oppositional to everything that has been written. Rather it seeks to disturb or disrupt, using the familiar in unfamiliar ways, so as to render the reader uncomfortable, surprised.
The second approach is to emphasise the importance of utopian-redemptive themes: hope, metanarratives, time, and violence. One of the key elements in the history of communism is precisely the fact that it was and is—as both idea and practice—infused with notions of hope about the possibility of a future better world, underpinned by a radically distinctive conception of time, while simultaneously reminding us of the terrible cost incurred by humans as they justify almost anything in the name of this greater goal.
The final theme is linked explicitly to the life and teaching of Christ, what one might call the Jesus factor: who is my neighbour? When we write our history, we should do it with this question in mind. The question has to be answered in relation to both the dead and the living. The history of communism should be written to restore and dignify all of the actors—the heroes and villains, the sufferers and the exploiters, the timid and the brave, the bland and the colourful—who lived in the past. In our writing we can rediscover those who were lost, or bring back to life those who have been obliterated, or give a voice to those who were silenced. But the question “Who is my neighbour?” is not just a question with a past dimension; it also relates to our audience in the here and now. Writing about communism also can expose some of the hegemonic, destructive beliefs and practices of the present order and its prophets, and so potentially serve the cause of the downtrodden and the marginalised (our current neighbours), or point out those practices and beliefs which show us that another world is possible. The world does not have to be the way it is. Another world is possible.
The story of communism as it exists is an ever-changing one, and it exists in multiple forms. (As is the case with so much scholarly work today, though, very few people actually are examining the Big Story of communism. Scholarship is rather fragmented, detailed, and localised). This plurality of approaches and concerns, alongside the absence of “Big Picture” works, provides an interesting window for a Christian perspective to be written. Much of what I suggest below borrows from existing work. Other points are reworked.
So what might this history look like?
Beginnings: “But I Tell You . . .”
It is important to recognise the ancient origins of Soviet Marxist-Leninist communism, but at the same time to acknowledge the new strands that were brought to this ideology by the French Revolution, industrialisation, the 1848 revolutions, and the intellectual movements of German and French philosophy. In particular, it is important to recognise the continued existence of human communities which have sought an explicitly collectivist ethos: privileging the community over the individual, practicing radical egalitarianism, and seeking either to withdraw from the world or to display to the world a countercultural way of living. Historically, many of these communities—radical desert religious groups, monastics, radical groups in the English Civil War—were driven by religious motivations, seeking the spiritual benefits of lives of material simplicity and communal sharing. Into the nineteenth century we see similar aspirations with the emergence of the so-called utopian socialists, labelled thus pejoratively by Marx and Engels. People such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Etienne Cabet, distressed by the problems of early industrial society, all sought the solution in the creation of ideal-type communities. It is in this sense that we can see the continuities between ancient, early modern, and modern forms of communism: a critique of the problems of contemporary society and a communal-shaped alternative to them. To start the history of modern communism with Babeuf, Marx, Russia, or Lenin seems to me to cut it off from a longer history and also places it as part of a deeper human yearning, present in many different societies, for living life together. So the first question, “When does the history of communism begin?” can be answered by looking deep into history.
Hope
The second theme I would emphasise is that of hope: the dream of a better world which animated the Russian revolutionaries. Here we come into contact with one of the core features of a Christian history of communism: the utopian-redemptive metanarrative. William Katerberg argues that utopian-redemptive metanarratives allow us to imagine a new way of being, to rethink in radical ways things like consumption, the family, community, power, the nation. In particular, the utopian emphases—of a society of greater justice, harmony, peace, well-being, and co-operation—seem to chime with some Christian visions of a renewed earth. One of the central defining features of Soviet communism in its original incarnation was that it was a deeply utopian movement. Soviet communism’s adoption and adaptation of some of the “utopian” elements of Marx and Engel’s writings (although Marx would absolutely reject that label!) creates the opportunity for the historian to highlight the dreams of his future society, which would include some of the following features:
• no money
• material abundance
• no nations
• no political state and no classes
• no exploitation
• no war or conflict
• harmony, equality, and co-operation
• the division of labour is abolished, and where work is fulfilling, creative, and satisfying.
The best example of the Bolshevik interpretation of Marx’s ideals can be found in The ABC of Communism by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky.
The hope of a better future allows us to reflect upon alternatives to the existing ways of being, a critique of current practices and ideas which can perhaps open the way for measured reflection upon our own society, its practices, structures, and values. As Katerberg himself notes,
Redemptive-utopian narratives stand in contrast to and in opposition to the overweening pragmatic-conservative insistence that we deal with the real world “as it is.”
Just because things are as they are does not mean that is how they shall ever be. So, the presence of an alternative future serves to undermine any sense of the “permanence of the present.” This twofold idea—of a critique of the present and of an alternative future—contained within the dreaming and imaginings of the first Bolsheviks could be exemplified in many ways, for example by focusing upon a world without nation-states. The vision of a world without borders, flags, anthems, passports—and national and ethnic hatreds—is difficult to envisage given the centrality of the nation and the nation-state to contemporary politics and culture. But that is precisely what communism causes us to think about. Can we create different types of community not based around the idea of the nation? Can we create communities which do not divide us? I think in this respect the provocation to imagine a world without nations might lead us into interesting discussions about the nature of the church as a community which has overcome all distinctions and is creating a new type of humanity.
However, the foregrounding of utopian-redemptive themes in telling the story of Soviet communism also provides the opportunity to talk about outcomes. The efforts to force this type of society into being resulted, as we know, in regimes of violence and force. Deaths, and many of them, were justified by the imperative to create this society of freedom, justice, and harmony. When we begin to tell the story, we can see the chaos, destruction, and suffering caused. At the same time that we tell of the hope of the better future, we also have to tell the story of the victims, of the Canaanite victims of this secular promised land as envisaged by the Bolsheviks. So my telling of the story would start with two essential elements: a longer historical context and an intellectual context which highlights the centrality of the dream of a better future. But what about the telling of the story itself?
Humanising Communism: Victims and Villains, Death and Celebration
The normal arc of the Soviet communist story is to highlight the revolution, the civil war, NEP, Stalinism, and the Great Patriotic War as the key chronological moments of the period 1917–45, and this seems to me still to be a perfectly logical way of dividing up Soviet time. I think within this period a couple of components might be given particular prominence, and these ideas are united by a desire to humanise the study of Soviet communism. One aspect is focusing on the architects of communism. The historical writings on Lenin and Stalin tend toward the histrionic, and perhaps a more measured approach which seeks to humanise them, explain the complexity of their intentions, their situation, their values, and their actions is in order, not in order to whitewash them, but to try to understand why they did what they did. This is a crucial part I think in redeeming them as individuals from the pervasive judgement of history: avoiding the lopsided or one-sided appraisals. We know the destructive impact of sin, how flawed we are. There is an irony here. As the leaders of regimes which generated an enormous number of victims, they are in some sense victims of history (and historians): condemned by many, hagiographed by others. The “real” historical personage, the individual created by God, perhaps has been lost. Maybe it should be our job to recover them, to resurrect them?
The second way is to focus, as Metz enjoins us, upon those who suffered and died in this period: victims of war, hunger, ideology, disease, cruelty, cold. To focus upon the suffering of those who died, were tortured, separated from families, abused, and exploited is distressing but imperative. To remember the victims, not just in terms of numbers which are horrific but deeply impersonal, but as people, with hopes and fears and dreams, is essential. If we focus solely upon the struggle of the regime, its massive political and economic exertions, we run the risk, as Metz outlines, of writing a history of what has prevailed through struggle, a kind of neo-Darwinism. But in this regard it is crucial also to consider how we remember the victims; otherwise we run the risk of re-victimizing them. So if we tell the stories of suffering and death in order to highlight the evil essence of communism and its practitioners, are we using their deaths as part of our own political project in the present? We need to remember the dead, but remember them as they are (or were), to remember their suffering. Restoring the humanity of those who suffered and were lost, who struggled and survived, who coped resiliently with everything the 1930s and 1940s could throw at them, seems to me an essential and valuable task. Maybe as we write we can give them a voice, and allow them to speak to us, and we can bridge time and suffer with them.
Doubt and Faith
The postwar period of Soviet communism can be viewed in retrospect as the onset of the decline and fall of the whole experiment, although this is a disputed contention, some seeing the cause of the fall in Gorbachev’s flawed polices after 1985. In any case a few themes seem to suggest themselves.
The first is the question of the decline in faith: at some indiscernible moment it is clear that people stopped believing in communism. Of course it had always been impossible to measure just how much people actually believed in the ostensible goals of the regime, whether they were true believers or did not believe at all. Exactly how much “real” faith people had that Khrushchev could deliver on his promise of building communism by 1980 remains difficult to say. It is clear, though, that the regime itself, especially after 1964 and the transition from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, began to be much more goal-focused and present-minded, and far less concerned with the future state of affairs. Satisfying the basic consumer demands of the people began to take precedence over the long-term aims of building communism. Communism began to slip past the horizon until it disappeared completely, finally abandoned by Gorbachev in 1991, just before the system collapsed.
It is significant I think that the loss of faith in the idea preceded the collapse of the system. The loss of momentum and dynamism within the system itself is only partly attributable to the economic slowdown the system experienced after 1973. One of the lessons the Soviet experience gives us is of the importance of belief in sustaining the system itself. It was in many ways an ideocratic regime, designed and existing to create a particular type of society according to this (loose and ever-changing) blueprint. Once the ideas themselves ceased to have any currency, then the basic rationale for the regime came into question. The story of the decline of the Soviet system, on this reading, needs to incorporate the question of the loss of faith. Restoring the spiritual and the idealistic to explanations about the failures and decline of communism runs counter to many existing theories which privilege material factors (such as the economy or international relations).
In tandem with this loss of faith in communism was also a loss of faith in atheism. Numerous reports—at national and local levels, in the press and in party documents—attest to two key developments in the 1960s and 1970s: the campaign of scientific atheism to eradicate religious practice and religious belief had failed. People seemed impervious to the message, indifferent to the messengers. The massive efforts—resources, time, people—invested into the campaign for scientific atheism had proved utterly powerless to dislodge the beliefs and practices of devout religious believers, or to turn agnostics into atheists. The 1970s even began to see a revival of religion—among Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and the like—something which was of enormous concern to the CPSU given the Iranian revolution in Iran in 1979. The fact that religion and spirituality continued to flourish and grow, in spite of (or because of?) the intense efforts to eliminate it, is another key part of the story of the failure of the secular utopia. As Katerberg noted, religion has not vanished. The failure of secular utopias to address basic human needs (death, loneliness, identity) has opened the door for religion. The Soviet experience testifies fully to the inability of the secular utopia to bring about inner transformation (the battle for hearts and minds) and the persistence of religion and religious belief.
Endings
The final part of the story deals with the question of endings. The end of the USSR affords us a moment to reflect upon whether or not we should give up the dreams of radical alternatives that offer some sort of greater justice, peace, and well-being. Are the costs too high? Katerberg asks, “Are triumphalistic capitalism, technological globalisation and weary liberal democracy the most that people can hope for today?” Perhaps the story of the demise of Soviet communism can cause us to pause and consider. Perhaps hopeful history might produce a hopeful future.
Conclusions
This paper has sought to outline one way in which a Christian reading and writing of the history of Soviet communism might be produced, a story which is both familiar and strange at the same time. Interestingly, many of the themes outlined above can be found in the work of existing historians; some are derived from my own musings over almost twenty years of work in this field. There are many different ways in which a Christian history might be written fruitfully and valuably, and perhaps the multiplicity of possible approaches is one of the problems. There are so many ways to do it, it is hard to know where to start. But start one must.
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