What are the prospects for success of Ken Howard’s panoramic blueprint for the next future of Christianity?Paradoxy is, after all, an optimistic plan for transcending present divisions – terminal divisions in my experience – and portraying a way forward that majors on love and calls Christians back to basics. It is a good-will plan and therefore also a Marshall Plan.
But what are its prospects for success?
Its prospects for success are very good, for the coming generation. Its prospects for success are promising and most hopeful, for the coming generation. This is because Ken elevates the law of love over the love of law. He underscores the core element in Christianity, which is God’s one-way love for sufferers and sinners. This is Christianity’s core element, its defining characteristic, if there is one. Jesus means welcome. Jesus means grace. Jesus means forgiveness. Jesus means healing.
Jesus also means freedom. That was Ernst Kaesemann’s phrase not so long ago, and I believe it holds. People aren’t looking for new forms of imprisonment, new ways to inhabit better straitjackets. Yes, there is probably always some hankering after submission – our child nature’s longing to be told what to do.
But deep down, and for sure in the present day, people long for freedom. Christianity’s initiative to absolve and therefore give primacy of place to people in pain as well as offenders creates fellowships of freedom. We really don’t want to return to the house of bondage, even if it looks like we sometimes do.
Ken’s program has good prospects for success, and not just because of its major in grace. It also understands that organism has got to be set over organization. This is crucial. Institutional Christianity carries a big black eye these days, whether you consider the abuse-scandal in one large section of the world-wide church or the aftermath of “culture-war” Christianity in another of its sections.
The war in this country between ideological liberals and ideological conservatives came down to a no-win future. I think of the English rock ‘n roller Nick Lowe, and his song, “I live on a battlefield.” We have been living on a battlefield for a long time – almost my whole ministry of 35 years. But it started earlier than that.
I was reminded in Ken’s book of Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church, which was published in 1951. Brunner’s argument, which no one was able to refute and which was therefore quietly consigned to oblivion, runs parallel to Ken Howard’s: Jesus had no intention of founding an institution. He was rather intending a movement of invisibly-led characters called out of pain and personal distress by his intangible but immanent message of urgent love. We can hope that this new book will not suffer the same fate of forgetfulness that buried Brunner’s somewhere deep in the Marianas Trench.
There is another reason to be hopeful about this book concerning Paradoxy: It is a little like Good to Great, the 2001 book by Jim Collins about successful companies. Collins argued that you create the job around the person and his or her gifts, rather than trying to squeeze people and their individual talents into a formal (and often arbitrary) “job-description.” You start, in other words, with a gifted person, and work outward from there. The gifted person creates the job, in other words, and its potentialities. Success proceeds from there. Collins observed that successful businesses usually begin, and also grow, from an individual and their gifts. Then the “spirit,” as it were, creates and develops the direction of the business. He demonstrated this proposition almost beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Ken Howard understands that Christian churches and people need to develop in their own way, organically, as it were, without a lot of inherited pre-conceptions about structure. Will Ken’s idea be received? I don’t know. It never has been, historically, except in the cyclical renewal-movements that stir things up for awhile and then become either domesticated or exhausted. Even so, Paradoxy understands how living things sustain themselves. I believe Ken is exactly right, even if his doctrine of natural and spontaneous development were to be resisted by the structures he seeks to renew.
One final after-thought about Ken Howard’s bold book.
It may not work with the former generation, the generation just now passing, “most of whom are still alive” (I Corinthians 15:6). The “liberals” of the “recent unpleasantness” seem pretty determined. So appear the “conservatives” of the recent unpleasantness. In his once famous novel By Love Possessed, James Gould Cozzens invoked a basic principle of politics: Never force a person to define their position in such a way that they cannot later compromise. The culture-war position-taking that came out of ideological conflict in the church – and religious conflict can be as raw as it gets – became a drawing of lines that has not, so far, allowed for much concession, at least not until a time when the “smoke of old naval battles is gone” (Haiku by Jack Kerouac). The passionate desire for “clarity” that possessed conservatives and also liberals did not allow for a quiet, willing demolition of walls between parties.
This means that Ken’s inspired program may not fully succeed with recent veterans, left or right. But I believe it can and should succeed with our children and grand-children. In a way, it has to! If Ken’s barrier-breaking program does not succeed with them, then, in a way, Christianity itself may prove unable to be a future, at least in the secular West.
Looking back on Ken’s Paradoxy, from the standpoint, say of the year 2525, I hope it may be said then what T.S. Eliot said in “East Coker” concerning the “next step” of chastened experience: “Old men ought to be explorers.”
Paul Zahl +
April 23, 2010
The Very Rev. Dr.theol Paul F. M. Zahl is Dean/President Emeritus, Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, PA and Rector Emeritus of All Saints Episcopal Church, Chevy Chase, MD. Trinity describes itself as “an evangelical seminary in the Anglican Tradition. All Saints describes its mission as “to know Christ and make him known.” Both are associated with the conservative, evangelical wing of the Episcopal Church. Books by Dr. Zahl include: Who Will Deliver Us?: The Present Power of the Death of Christ (Wipf and Stock, 2008), 2000 Years of Amazing Grace: The Story and Meaning of the Christian Faith (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (Eerdmans, 2007), Re-alignment and the Episcopal Church: Where are We to Go, What are We to Think? (Trinity, 2005), and The First Christian: Universal Truth in the Teachings of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2003).
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