The Snares of Truth
Some Further Reflections on Inclusive Orthodoxy
About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.
Earlier this year, I wrote a piece on the “fissures of Inclusive Orthodoxy.” About a month later, Ben Crosby—an influential and sincere proponent of Inclusive Orthodoxy—published a response:
Crosby engaged my piece with care, then drew attention to two subjects I had not broached: (a) the distinction between lay people and priests and (b) the extent to which Scripture combines confession with communion. I have taken quite a bit of time to think about how best to reply to Crosby’s piece because he deserves careful reflection, and the approach I want to take can go wrong in many ways.
I am here going to respond to (b), though in an indirect manner. More specifically, I will broach what it looks like to form community by reading Scriptures that can be read divergently. I say “indirectly” because I will approach this subject in terms of theological temperament rather than matters of Biblical interpretation or social formation—in terms, that is, of how theological claims are bound up with the characteristic affects with which we express them.
There is every risk that focusing on temperament will give the impression of being (or simply becoming) a matter of personal attack. This risk is grounded in my conviction that the content of Christian theology places a profound personal responsibility upon theologians. Sacraments do not depend on priestly character for their efficacy, but if I speak of grace without grace, then I falsify the grace of which I speak. I name this as a standard to which I should be held. Anything I write that betrays the Spirit of the grace of which I speak is cymbal-clanging.
This post also centers on a sermon preached by Stephen Elliott, who was the first Episcopal Bishop of Georgia, the only Presiding Bishop of the Confederate Episcopal Church, and an uncompromising proponent of racial slavery. There are good reasons to sit with the challenges that Elliott poses for contemporary Christians. But it would be very easy to read me as arguing that taking a particular stance on “orthodoxy” necessarily inclines one to white supremacist forms of thought. I am not making this argument, and I would argue against it. There are complex relationships between religious authority, orthodoxy, and racial hierarchy. Still, they are not the kind that can be limited to or held as necessarily following from any single mode of clerical authority or belief. I want to be clear that I am not ascribing any aspect of Elliott’s racial thinking to Ben in particular or those who affirm the sociological function of orthodox belief. Nor am I ascribing Elliott’s temperament to Ben. I am not reading Elliott as a cudgel with which to attack those who disagree with me, but as illuminating a risk that attends any attempt to ground one’s work in truth, and so my work as well.
Finally, I should make clear my theological commitments. In online discussions on orthodoxy, I have frequently seen people appeal to “truth” as the decisive factor. The idea seems to be that affirming the Christianity of those who deny orthodox beliefs entails treating truth as relative or otherwise asterisked. If one affirms the unshakeable truth of the resurrection, it makes no sense to hold that others can do otherwise and be truly Christian. For my part, I am convinced of the literal truth of Jesus’ bodily resurrection and other core Christian claims. My concern is whether one can or should articulate the Church as a community that is essentially delimited by the common confession of an unshakeable truth. My instinct is that rendering doctrinal truth a condition of Christian belonging can all too easily falsify that truth to such an extent that it becomes a snare for faith. This is not a matter of relativism. It is a matter of the claim that my faith has over my whole person, then of how my attachment to truth shapes how I belong to others.1
Ephraim’s Many Altars to Sin
At least seven times across Georgia in 1866, Bishop Stephen Elliott preached a sermon on Hosea 8:11: “because Ephraim hath made many altars to sin, altars shall be unto him to sin.” Elliott is preaching in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s military defeat, and his postwar sermons attempt to make sense of this defeat. Alongside the abolition of slavery, Georgia’s white Episcopalians were witnessing a change in their religious landscape. Northern abolitionist Christians were migrating south, whilst Black people who had been compelled to worship at white churches had left to create their own spaces of worship. Elliott had placed great emphasis on the religious formation of enslaved peoples, and he dedicated two sermons to trying to make sense of their departure once emancipated.
Elliott begins this sermon by warning that unbelief is creeping in upon the South. He proclaims that “there is, perhaps, no form of ungodliness more rife or more dangerous … than that which tempts us to believe that every kind of worship, if it only be sincere, is acceptable with God.”2 Woe to the world, he asserts:
when men learn—and learn it too from what are called ‘the churches of God’—that right and wrong are not to be settled by the Bible; that there is nothing positive in religion; that God has dictated no form of belief as essentially necessary to salvation; that He looks with no more favor upon one worshipper than another, provided each is equally sincere in his creed and in his practice.3
This learning renders worship and religion subject to human appetite, an appetite that “craves incessant gratification … until truth itself is abandoned, and every thing established by God is swept away from the altars of men.”4 Latitude regarding these fundamentals thus leads to idolatry and the overthrow of God’s order.
There is, Elliott notes, plentiful evidence for this overthrow in his present day. “Are we not,” he asks, “passing through precisely this experience? Is not our religious history fast verging upon this decree uttered by the prophet? Are we not dividing and subdividing into innumerable sects ... further and still further removed from the doctrine and discipline of Christ?”5 Elliott here expresses the white Christian consensus that Black religion, apart from white mastery, was characterized by “enthusiasm” and heresy, as well as the long-held Southern opinion that abolitionism was heresy of the highest order. The visible deterioration of doctrine then confirms this consensus. He continues, “are not ‘churches’ which we once hoped still clung to the truth of doctrine, abandoning that truth article by article, and adhering only to what suits their interest or their passions? . . . Look at the doctrines which are now publicly proclaimed throughout the land . . . doctrines of devils, fit only for execration and condemnation.”6 By allowing this deterioration, the church is “nurturing our own worst enemy within our own bowels; we are breeding an innumerable spawn of error that will finally consume us.7
What, then, should Elliott and his hearers do to stem the tide? They must hold to an eternal, unified, and fixed Truth that has been revealed once and for all. In Elliott’s own words:
it is an exceedingly dangerous thing for a Christian to tamper with Truth,—to make it at all subservient to any of the interests or passions of life. Truth is one and fixed; revealed by God through his inspired messengers, and written down for the use of man. It cannot be mistaken; for it is united in Christ, with that Life Eternal which we profess to be seeking for.8
The best intentions might guide those who seek to change this Truth. Elliott inveighs against them all the same, saying, “you are not Christians; because you are trusting in altars of your own, and upon which you are burning your various sacrifices.”9 These altars might be called “Integrity” or “Benevolence,” and they might be furnished with sacrifices of justice, honesty, and charity.10 They might be founded on the belief that “God is a spirit, and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:24), such that “worshippers imagine that a service of the heart, without outward profession, without forms or sacraments, must find favor with a spiritual God.”11 Whatever such altars might be dedicated to, however, “you will find at last that Christianity is a positive thing; that salvation is by one narrow road, through one straight gate; and that all altars save that One which has been stained with the Blood of the Lamb, are altars unto sin.”12 Georgia’s Episcopalians must therefore double down on their commitment to the forms and substance of right worship. Elliott challenges his listeners, “have you obeyed Christ’s commands? Have you been confirmed? Do you partake of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which Christ commanded you to do in remembrance of Him?”13 After all, “if you were a Christian, or wanted to be a Christian, you would do as Christ commands you: you would worship God where and as He instructs you; you would connect yourself with the visible Church; you would live upon His Spirit.”14
Elliott’s Significance for Us
Elliott’s words are familiar to me. In contexts far removed from the consolidation of white supremacist power—indeed, in contexts actively opposed to this power—I have heard them from people I love and respect. Elliott’s temperament is familiar to me as well. Lest it seem that I am trying to besmirch others by association, this is a temperament that I recognize most clearly in myself, when I so lose myself in the depths of my conviction that I see only error in those who think differently.
What, then, is the significance of Elliott’s preaching for Inclusive Orthodoxy? There are, I think, two intuitive ways of engaging this sermon. The first is to argue that Elliott has grasped no truth at all, and that his failure to see what is happening in Black churches as a work of the Gospel is a function of error alone. The second is to argue that Elliott has missed some aspect of the Truth he claims, for if he truly understood the Gospel he preaches, then he would repent of the convictions that committed him to the Confederacy. Both of these approaches strike me as evading the difficulty here, because both assume that if Elliott grasped the truth, then he would act truly—whereas the problem can more deeply lie in how he wields what truth he grasps.
Let us allow that Elliott is correct when he says that “truth is one and fixed.” And let us then allow that, when it comes to doctrine, Elliott has grasped this Truth if anyone has. Across his preaching and in his absolute unoriginality, he is nothing if not orthodox in these matters, and if he speaks a false word on the issues of Incarnation, Atonement, the Trinity, the Eucharist, justification, and sanctification, then so too what the Church Fathers say is false. The crucial point is not that there must be some error here. It is that Elliott holds these truths as giving him authority to declare that because freedpersons and abolitionists are wrong on matters of doctrine, they have nothing to teach him of this unchanging Truth. Indeed, they are not Christians and so cannot even approach Elliott when he communicates the body and the blood of Christ. Put otherwise, Elliott claims the right to deny the Christianity of those who deviate from doctrinal truth because of the temperament with which he modulates his faith—namely, his absolute confidence that because he speaks with the authority of Truth, he can insulate himself from the mere possibility that he might properly belong with and need to learn from those he condemns.
It is possible to hold Elliott’s conception of Christian truth without claiming this authority. It is possible to hold that Truth is fixed and eternal (even that doctrine should be uniform and unchanging) without claiming the right to deny the true Christianity of those who deviate from truth and so denying one’s full communion with them. Elliott claims this right not because of theological necessity, but because of a vicious myopia expressed in an authoritarian temperament. Elliott’s myopia is grounded in his commitment to white supremacy, of course.15 But his temperament can attach itself to any form of belief. It can lead me to close myself off from the world beyond my orthodoxies. And this closure can lead me into a deeper falsehood, even if I do speak the truth with this temperament. The truth I have becomes a reason to ignore the truth gifted to me by another, such that in my confidence, the truth becomes a snare (we might remember here that the Devil never tells Jesus a lie in the desert).
What, then, of Scripture and confession? Elliott preaches from Scripture. And crucially, he is right about Scripture—the Bible contains verses condemning all that Elliott condemns and praising all that he praises. It would require serious hermeneutical contortion to read these verses otherwise. The Bible is a book that disagrees with itself, however. And so the Bible can also be read in ways that counteract this reading, with other voices emphasizing the contingency and fallibility of right worship and sound doctrine, other stories illuminating the communion of God’s people beyond orthodox altars.
The deepest risk here is not then reading Scripture in a false way. It is doing so in a way that limits the reading community to a single interpretation—of taking a true reading of Scripture and using it to close one’s eyes and ears to those who read and confess differently. In my keenness to assert a correct interpretation, I can treat “Christian” as naming only those who read as I do, who love as I do, rather than those who read what I read, who love the person I love. This does not mean abandoning any reading of Scripture that binds communion to confession. It does mean that this reading should be characterized by a temperament that allows otherwise—for without this, we can use the truth to blind ourselves to those who hear other words in this self-same Word of God.
I am making a negative argument here based on avoiding a risk, rather than a positive argument grounded in the character of doctrine and the words of Scripture. Unavoidable word limits also render several aspects of this argument thin, to say the least. I will endeavor to offer more substantial and positive accounts in future writing, which is the least that Crosby’s engagement deserves. For now, I will simply express my sense that requiring LGBTQ+ and Black theologies to meet certain conditions of orthodoxy before counting as Christian can have fatal effects, quite apart from impoverishing my understanding of orthodox truth—and offer my conviction that God’s grace binds us together more strongly than consensus over the character of that grace.
If the response here is, “But theologians have articulated the Church as essentially grounded in common belief since the beginning!” my answer would be, “Yes, indeed.”
Stephen Elliott, Sermons by The Right Reverend Stephen Elliott, D.D., Late bishop of Georgia. With a Memoir by Thomas M. Hanckel, Esq. (New York, NY: Pott and Amery), 1867, 166
Elliott, Sermons, 167.
Elliott, Sermons, 169.
Elliott, Sermons, 169.
Elliott, Sermons, 170.
Elliott, Sermons, 172.
Elliott, Sermons, 172.
Elliott, Sermons, 173–4.
Elliott, Sermons, 173–4.
Elliott, Sermons, 173.
Elliott, Sermons, 174.
Elliott, Sermons, 175.
Elliott, Sermons, 175.
These conceptions of race are also, I am arguing in the early stages of my dissertation, theologically grounded, so this is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for theology.