Neither Slave nor Free, Black nor White, For All Are One in Christ: Religious and Racial Reconciliation in the Episcopal

Diocese of Maryland

By: Daniel Randazzo

A thesis submitted to complete the requirements for the Master of Arts in Theology program at the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Submitted on March 12, 2010.

Approved

_____________________________________________________________Dr. Christopher Dreisbach, Thesis Advisor

_____________________________________________________________Dr. Dennis Edwards, Thesis Reader

_____________________________________________________________Dr. Michael J. Gorman, Dean of the Ecumenical Institute at St. Mary's Seminary and University, Baltimore, Maryland

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Table of Contents

Abstract..................................................................................................................................... 4

Introduction.............................................................................................................................. 6

Chapter 1: Racism in the Episcopal Church............................................................................. 12 Slavery in the Episcopal Church.................................................................................. 14 Separate and Unequal.................................................................................................. 18 The Church and the Civil Rights Movement................................................................. 27 Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 33

Chapter 2: Formulating a Hermeneutic of the Body of Christ................................................. 35 The Body of Christ in the Gospel of John..................................................................... 38 Pauline Solidarity in the Body of Christ....................................................................... 40 The Body of Christ in Recent Contextual Theologies................................................... 46 A) Eco-Feminism in Sallie McFague's The Body of God................................. 46 B) Creation Spirituality in Matthew Fox's The Cosmic Christ......................... 47

C) Black and Womanist Theology in Kelly Douglas' The Black Christ........... 49 The Body of Christ in Franciscan Theology................................................................. 50 Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 54

Chapter 3: Racism as Sin.......................................................................................................... 56 The Evils of Racism...................................................................................................... 57 Sin as Rejection and Exclusion..................................................................................... 63 Sin as Mutual Exclusion and Abandonment................................................................. 69 Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 71

Chapter 4: Interdependence in the Body of Christ................................................................... 72 Communities of Interdependence.................................................................................. 73 Looking Towards a Framework of Reconciliation........................................................ 83 Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 85

Chapter 5: Founding the Work of the Commission in Franciscan Spiritual Practice............... 86 Humility......................................................................................................................... 87

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Penance......................................................................................................................... 88 Eucharist....................................................................................................................... 89

Communal Prayer.......................................................................................................... 90 Study.............................................................................................................................. 91 Solidarity with the Marginalized................................................................................... 91 Joy................................................................................................................................. 94

Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 98

Bibliography............................................................................................................................. 100

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Abstract

An Abstract of the thesis of Daniel Randazzo for the Master of Arts in Theology, presented March 12, 2009.

Title: Neither Slave nor Free, Black nor White, For All Are One in Christ: Religious and Racial Reconciliation in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland

In light of the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Eugene Sutton as the first African American

bishop of the Diocese of Maryland on June 28, 2008, the Diocese decided to embark upon on

examination of the racist practices of its past, with the intent of pursuing religious and racial

reconciliation in the Diocese. One framework that the Diocese considered was that of a truth and

reconciliation commission (TRC), similar to the recent commissions in South Africa, Chile, and

Peru that sought political reconciliation.

As I researched those previous commissions, I came to the conclusion that the TRC for

the Diocese would actually have a far different mandate from the others. Racism in the church is

not only political, it is also theological. Any ecclesiastical TRC must therefore base itself firmly

on a theological foundation, one that seeks to repair the separation and exclusion that a theology

of racism engenders. Once a theology of interdependence is constructed, it must then be applied.

I have decided to first repair the narrative of the Diocese by constructing a history of the

impact that racism and its attendant structures made upon the Diocese. The division inherent in

such racism impacted theology, leading to a segregated church. Reconciliation can only occur

when church theology is focused on the interdependence of all people through Christ; thus, it is

necessary to establish a hermeneutic of the Body of Christ through which all future efforts at

reconciliation can be viewed. Using this hermeneutic, we can see that racism breaks down the

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Body, and is sinful, for it separates humans from God. At this point, it becomes necessary to

examine what a community of interdependence would look like, in terms of its theology and

rituals of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. I decided that the liturgical and theological

tradition of the Anglican Franciscans would provide a comprehensive framework for the TRC to

use toward reconciliation. With seven specific symbols and rituals, the TRC now has an Anglican

theological framework within which to seek religious and racial reconciliation in the Diocese.

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Introduction

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled ourselves to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.2nd Corinthians 5:16-21, New Revised Standard Version

On June 28, 2008, in the Washington National Cathedral, the Rev. Eugene Sutton was

consecrated as the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. While gaining a new bishop is

always a notable occurrence in the life of a diocese, and of the church in general, this specific

consecration, for this specific diocese, had an arguably greater significance. The history of the

diocese came into sharp relief that day due to the ethnic and racial background of the incoming

bishop. For Bp. Sutton, the descendant of African slaves, was ascending to the same seat that had

previously been occupied by Bp. Thomas Claggett, who was not only the first bishop of

Maryland, the first bishop consecrated on American soil, and the bishop after whom the diocesan

retreat center was named, but he was also a slaveholder.1 In a real and significant way, the

diocese had, with this election, made a definitive statement of its rejection of racism and the

legacy of slavery. One would not be mistaken for rejoicing in the obvious effort on the part of the

diocese to exorcise the demons of racism from within its very heart.

The diocese, gathered as one, departed the National Cathedral that afternoon, united as

1 Daphne Mack, “Eugene Sutton consecrated as Maryland's first African American Bishop.” Episcopal Life, 13 June 2008. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_98423_ENG_HTM.htm. Accessed 8 January, 2009.

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one in the incredible and grace-filled moment that they had all witnessed. Yet, Bp. Sutton's

consecration had not miraculously wiped the slate clean of the history of racism and segregation

that had created an atomized diocese, split along geographic, class, cultural, and race lines. In

light of this reality, the diocese, at the initiative of Bp. Sutton, decided to create a Truth and

Reconciliation Commission to examine the roots of the divisions in the diocese, especially the

legacy of racism.2 Towards this end, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set down a list of

seven tasks that would define its work3:

1. Continue to research and publish the history and legacy of slavery in Maryland.2. Study how racism continues to affect all of us today.3. Help all diocesan institutions, committees and parishes to become models of racial

reconciliation.4. Instruct the diocese on how to use its resources to address racism.5. Survey and celebrate the ways the diocese already addresses the effects of slavery and

racism.6. Provide inclusion training for all members of the diocese.7. Design and lead pilgrimages of reconciliation throughout Maryland and beyond.

Accomplishing even half of the tasks on this comprehensive list would be a considerable

achievement. The tasks seek to expose the roots of division in the diocese by coming to terms

with the history of slavery and segregation, as well as the continuing legacy of racism in not only

the culture of the diocese, but in the institutions and structure of the diocese itself. The

Commission also recognizes that much progress has been made in racial reconciliation, which

should be celebrated, and used as the roots out of which continued progress can develop. These

are effective and practical steps for institutional reconciliation.

And yet, it is this same, rather mechanical, approach to the reconciliation of the diocese

2 Jack Pannell, “Press Release,” website for the Tutu Institute for Prayer and Pilgrimage. 24 November, 2008. http://www.tutuinstitute.org/pr-112208.html. Accessed 8 January, 2009.

3 Jack Pannell, interview by Daniel Randazzo, 14 October, 2008.

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that seems incomplete. While the diocese is in fact an institution, it is also the Body of Christ,

which has been subjected to centuries of sinful separation. As all Christians, including

Episcopalians, are baptized into the Body of Christ, they are no longer rich or poor, black or

white, urban or rural, but all are brothers and sisters in Christ. The diocese has a long history of

ignoring that radical reality, and it is that very sin that is at the root of the divisions that exist

amongst the members of the diocese. Racism played, and in some ways still continues to play, a

significant role in creating and perpetuating the separation of the Body of Christ and subjugation

of some of God's children. Establishing racism as the primary hermeneutic for examining the

rifts in the diocese would not only limit the commission's vision of the problem, but would also

ignore the rather obvious fact that for the church, all efforts for reconciliation must be seen

through the hermeneutic of the Body of Christ. A hermeneutic of the Body of Christ allows for

understanding the sin of racism as sin, that is, a distortion of the will of God for God's creation.

This emphasis on racism as sin opens up space for reconciliation to be understood as the

interaction between penance and forgiveness, both offered and accepted with love. True

reconciliation in the Body of Christ will occur only if people seek reconciliation with others as

brothers and sisters in Christ, as they also seek reconciliation with God.

This is not to say that the Commission is working on the wrong tasks. Far from it. In fact,

true penance can be granted only when one understands how one has sinned against another, and

how one might amend one's life and actions in order to walk the path of re-reconciling with

another. Examining the tasks through a hermeneutic of the Body of Christ illustrates, though, that

the list is incomplete and requires a shift in focus back towards the end of all efforts at

reconciliation in the church-towards reconciliation with God. It should be noted that this is not a

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completely new or unique effort in the history of the church. Many godly men and women have

devoted their lives to seeking reconciliation with God. I believe that St. Francis, however, stands

as a representative of this effort, as his life's work reminded the church of its duty to minister to

all of the members of the Body of Christ, especially the poor and oppressed. Franciscan

emphases of humility, penance, Eucharist, communal prayer, study, solidarity with the

marginalized, and joy provide a complete structure with which to frame the work of the

Commission. This structure not only assumes the tasks that the Commission has already laid out,

but it also allows for a liturgical and prayer component to be included and understood as

essential to the work of the commission.

In the course of this study, I will begin in the first chapter by examining the legacy of

racism in the Episcopal Church in general, and in the Diocese of Maryland in particular. I will

seek to demonstrate that racism has been embedded within Church structures and theology since

its founding, and how racist practices continued to be normative for the Church through the end

of slavery, leading to the creation of an alternative black church through the systematic

segregation of black Episcopalians from white Episcopalians. This legacy will be examined

chronologically, by examining the place of racism in the Church during the periods of slavery,

the segregated Church of the post-Civil War era, and the efforts at repentance and reform during

the period of the Civil Rights Movement.

The second chapter will begin to develop a theological anthropology of the human person

as a social being, within the Body of Christ. As God is relational, existing as Trinity, the human

person who is created in the image of God and one with the Body of Christ in the Incarnation

must also be understood as relational. The Body of Christ is not only a physical reality, where all

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human persons share in the physical incarnation of Jesus, it also exists as a divine reality where

Christ brings all of creation into the divine through his life, death, and resurrection. This has

significant scriptural support from the Pauline epistles, especially in the twelfth chapter of the

First Letter to the Corinthians. I will examine the image of the Body of Christ in the scriptural

witness, as well as in extant and developing contextual theologies, such as: mystical, Franciscan,

feminist, black and womanist, and creation theologies.

Building upon the example of segregation in the Episcopal Church presented in the first

chapter, as well as in the work of Howard Thurman and James Cone, I will seek to demonstrate

in the third chapter that racism is inherently sinful. I will first examine the Trinity as an image of

God as an interdependent relationality. As the Body of Christ brings all of humanity into

relationship with God and with each other, then humanity is meant to exist in an interrelated

community with each other and with God. I will trace the development of the Christian

understanding of sin from individual rejection of God's will for humanity towards an

understanding of sin which incorportates a social component. Sin is a break in relationship

between human and God as well as between humans. In this construct, racism is sin for it

destroys the interdependent relationality of the human person with other humans and with God,

and as such breaks the bonds of the Body of Christ.

The fourth chapter will seek to examine what a community of interdependence would

look like, in light of the work of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in their book, Resident

Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Hauerwas and Willimon present a clear, concise and cogent

explication of the practical reality of a Christian community which puts the ideals of

interdependence in the Body of Christ to use. This chapter will serve as a reflection on the

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practicality of implementing the vision of interdependence in the Body of Christ. I hope that after

establishing the “real-world” practicality of such an “idealistic” vision, I can then present a

framework for what such a “Christian colony” would look like in an Episcopal context.

I contend that Franciscan spirituality presents just such a context. I will examine

Franciscan spirituality from the perspective of using Franciscan spiritual practices to heal the

wounds that ruptures in the interdependence of the Body of Christ have caused. I will seek to

root these practices in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Recent events in the Anglican Communion demonstrate the necessity of this examination

of healing ruptures in the Body of Christ. As issues of theology and efforts to grab worldly power

and influence threaten to cause permanent and irreparable breaches in the unity of the Anglican

Communion, the Communion might be well served by remembering Paul's admonition to

reconciliation recited above, from 2nd Corinthians: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new

creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!...So we are

ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of

Christ, be reconciled to God.” We are all members of the Body of Christ, and are all made new in

this Body. Let us all seek to act as such, and seek to remove all human barriers to true

reconciliation to each other in this Body.

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Chapter 1

Racism in the Episcopal Church

The Episcopal Church in Maryland has been marked by racism and its correspondent

institutional expression, segregation, since its founding. This situation was not unique to the

Diocese of Maryland, however; Anglicanism in the territory of the North American continent

permitted the perspective of white supremacy to exist in Anglican parishes by the failure to

preach against it and actively engaged in promoting the theological bases of racism. Many

dioceses, including the Diocese of Maryland, actively participated in the slave trade, deriving

significant monetary benefit from the commerce in slaves as well as the work that slaves

performed on behalf of dioceses, clergy, and individual parishes. When slavery was finally made

illegal, and the law was enforced after the end of the Civil War, Anglicanism failed to make any

significant attempts at rectifying the structural and economic injustices embedded in the

institutional structures of the Church. Many dioceses and parishes are still benefiting from the

proceeds of the slave trade, in the forms of antebellum-period church structures as well as church

endowments.

The Episcopal Church failed to engage in any meaningful attempts at the desegregation

of their parishes and church structures once slavery was outlawed. The Church followed the drift

towards widespread segregation that had taken hold in many communities in the American South

which found formal, institutional expression in the Jim Crow laws. The Episcopal Church

engaged in the active disempowerment of free blacks and freed slaves by removing them from

parishes, establishing very few alternative parish structures, and providing sub-standard training

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to the clergy sent to serve those parishes. The Church created a parallel sacramental structure for

blacks to participate in, and barred them from complete participation in “white” sacraments

performed by “white” clergy. This led to a movement amongst many Episcopalians, both black

and white, to make the segregation permanent, whether through the “Back to Africa” movement,

or the creation of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the AME-Zion Churches.

These efforts at permanent segregation were never completely successful, however.

Blacks remained in the Episcopal Church, albeit in small numbers,4 and centered in urban centers

and the “Black Belt” of the American South-states with a high African-American demographic

which are located along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. This partition did have the effect of

ingraining a sense in American society, and especially in black culture, that “you can't be both

black and Episcopalian.” Black Episcopalians were therefore not only marginalized by the white

churches, but were also discriminated against in black society.

Once the Civil Rights Movement forced “white” parishes to recognize that the structures

of segregation were beginning to crumble, the church made hesitant steps towards integrating the

black and white sections of the Church. These steps were often made, however, to the detriment

of the traditions and resources of black parishes and parishioners. One significant exception was

the General Convention Special Program (GCSP), which sought to make dramatic efforts at

structural and economic redress to correct the effects of one hundred years of segregation. The

GCSP only existed from 1967-1973, and was eventually forced to complete its work

prematurely due to a lack of financial support from the wider Church. The GCSP served to

highlight the cultural gap and power differential that existed in the Church between black and

4 Lewis states that between 4 and 6 percent of all Episcopalians are African-Americans. Harold T. Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), 3.

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white parishes. Its efforts at rapid reform failed, due in part to the racism still present throughout

much of the Church at this time, as well due to the fact that the social conditions that the GCSP

sought to solve quickly would prove to be more intractable than one economic stimulus program

could resolve.

The GCSP was the last major effort at rapid institutional change. After 1973, formal

segregation in the Church ceased to exist. Institutional integration moved at a steady pace,

leading to the elimination of any parallel sacraments. Black clergy were permitted to serve at

white parishes. Black clergy were installed as bishops of integrated dioceses, oversaw the

ordinations of white clergy, and even were granted pastoral oversight over white clergy. Racial

integration in the Church since 1973 has consisted mainly of efforts to bridge the gaps present in

the church made clear by the GCSP. These efforts have met varying degrees of success, however,

in large part due to the sheer weight of the long history of institutional racism in the Episcopal

Church.

Slavery in the Episcopal Church

Slavery was not only legal in antebellum Maryland, it was widespread, and permeated

every aspect of the culture and economy of the state. Nearly every landowner in the state owned

slaves, and nearly every aspect of the economy was impacted by the proceeds from slave labor.

In fact, tobacco and cotton were often used as currency. This practice was considered enough of

a common practice in the Chesapeake region for the Virginia legislature to pass a law in 1705

which imposed a fine of ten thousand pounds of tobacco on any clergyman who married a black

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person to a white person.5 Many clergy in the Diocese of Maryland were landowners, as were

several bishops. Far more landowners were members of parishes in the diocese and would pay

their pledges in whatever currency was available to them. Many landowning families not only

gave their regular pledge, but also gave generously of their wealth to establish and increase

endowments of established churches, as well as to plant new congregations. When an antebellum

church needed to be built, or re-built, landowners in the congregation would offer goods and

service in kind as a pledge to the church. This often meant that the landowners would offer the

services of their slaves to do the work. The slaves would, of course, not receive any

compensation for their efforts, while the church would benefit from the labor either freely

offered or offered at a discounted cost. In blunt terms, therefore, the Episcopal Church in

Maryland both directly and indirectly benefited from slave labor.6 In fact, many Episcopal

churches survived and thrived in large part from the direct and indirect proceeds of slave labor.

The upshot of this for the Diocese of Maryland today is that every Episcopal church in Maryland

that was built before the Civil War, and today possesses and benefits from any endowment with

roots in antebellum Maryland, is still reaping the benefits of slave labor.

Slaves were either forced to attend services in their masters' churches, sitting in the

balcony or in the back, or were relegated to worshiping in shacks provided for them by the

plantation owner.7 If they worshiped in a separate community, the slaves were not offered the

services of a seminary-trained clergy person, for where would a slave go to receive theological

training? Despite these challenges, slave communities across the South developed vibrant and

5 Robert Prichard, A History of the Episcopal Church (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1999), 17.6 The corporate Church of England in the colonies even engaged in the slave trade. As Prichard notes on p.60, the

mission branch of the Church of England, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, purchased two slaves in 1741, Harry and Andrew (these men did not likely have last names, as such appellations were considered unnecessary for property), to evangelize to slaves in South Carolina.

7 Prichard, History, 112-113, 145-146

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complex forms of theological expression, with creative integrations of the Bible offered to them

by the white clergy with their own experiences of God's presence.

The theology offered by white clergy was based in white superiority, divine

establishment, and the blessing of the status quo: God created blacks as inferior humans who

needed the protection offered to them in slavery, whereas whites could act as caring parents and

guide them to salvation in Christ.8 Whites acted as God's agents in the salvation of the black race.

As one prominent white Episcopalian stated during Reconstruction, African-Americans

“constituted an essentially 'ignorant and debased race' who threatened the health of American

society.” He trusted, however, “that with the guidance of white church people they could still be

'elevated to self-support and self-control.'”9 This paternalism was not based, on the whole, in any

manner of ill will towards blacks. Many white clergy believed that just as God used the apostles

to guide the pagan world to the saving truth of the Gospel, they were doing the good work of

spreading the Gospel amongst people so debased that they needed to be protected from

themselves, and to be guided towards the truth of their place in God's kingdom.10 This

hermeneutic provided divine sanction of slavery, in both the Old and New Testaments, and only

served to strengthen the faith of the white clergy in this theological position.11 On the whole,

whites did not consider blacks intellectually or spiritually capable of understanding the Bible

enough to preach it effectively or truthfully. Yet, just as the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40

was able to grasp the truth of the Gospel from Philip, whites did understand that God at times

would grant some blacks the grace of transcending their lesser nature and having the ability to

8 Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 12-13.9 Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr, Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights (Lexington, KY: The University of

Kentucky Press, 2000), 10.10 Douglas, The Black Christ, 13.11 Douglas, The Black Christ, 16.

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preach the Gospel. Some white clergymen would therefore train slaves how to read the Bible, as

well as offer them basic training in pastoral care and preaching, so that they could also minister

to their own people. While this is a far cry from offering African-Americans seminary training

and ordaining them as priests, these short steps at least opened a space for that to occur once

slavery was deemed illegal and declared theologically incorrect after the Civil War and during

Reconstruction.12

Segregation was not exclusively a white/black, slave/master, dynamic. Free blacks

engaged in segregation as well, discriminating against slaves who sought to attend churches

established by free blacks. William Levington, the pastor of St. James Free African Protestant

Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland during the decades before the Civil War, engaged in

the project of establishing St. James on a more stable footing, including the construction of a

church building as well as engaging in missionary activity amongst the black population of

Baltimore, both slave and free. His efforts were not appreciated by all of the members of his

congregation, however. A significant minority of free black congregants attempted to block his

missionary activity, due to the desire to remain separate from slaves in worship and in the

administration of the sacraments. Levington fought these efforts on theological grounds, stating

that the thrust of the message of Paul is towards inclusion of all people in Christ, “whether bond

or free ye are all one in Christ Jesus, for he that is called in the Lord being a servant, is the Lord's

freeman. Of a truth God is no respector of persons.”13 Levington goes on to remind his

interlocutors that the ground donated to build “their” church had been donated by a certain James

Bosley for the purpose of building a church and school “for the benefit of the African race

12 Prichard, History, 146.13 George F. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (Baltimore, MD: Church

Advocate Press, 1922) 94.

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forever.”14 The force with which Levington delivered his argument suggests that Levington

considered the opinions of the free blacks who advocated excluding slaves to be a significant

threat to his efforts at full inclusion.

Separate, and Unequal

Once the system of chattel slavery was ended, blacks were free to worship in their own

churches if they pleased, with their own preachers. The question that arose, however, was where

exactly would they worship? Who would preach to them? What form would their worship take?

Would they continue attending the churches of their oppressors, following the forms of those

churches, not being permitted to worship fully in those churches, or would they strike out on

their own, creating alternative structures to those of the white churches? Many did go ahead and

create their own churches, often with the blessing of the white churches; for example, the African

Methodist Episcopal and AME Zion denominations have their roots in the Episcopal and United

Methodist churches, yet were created as exclusively black communities of faith.15

The Episcopal Church did not demonstrate much interest in maintaining black

membership during this period, remaining indifferent to significant gains in attendance among

the black population. This is in part due to the fact that the only theology that had ever been

developed to attend to the needs of black people in the Church was for the “primary purpose of

ensuring their bondage.”16 Harold Lewis notes that when the “fetters were broken, those former

slaves who remained in their master's church were met with reactions ranging from astonishment

14 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church , 94.15 Prichard, History, 112.16 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 173.

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to discouragement to benign neglect to abandonment.”17 The Church began to engage in the

“back to Africa” movement, developing theology to explain why blacks had the right and

necessity to return to their homeland. Yet, this effort proved unsuccessful, for proportionately

few black Episcopalians decided to take the opportunity to emigrate.

If they decided to continue in the Episcopal church, blacks were sometimes not even

offered an opportunity to continue worshiping in the white church, for they were now not

welcome anymore. There is a long history of blacks being removed from pews and ordered to

continue to sit in the balcony, or even being barred from entry altogether. They were forced to

build their own church buildings, using either their own resources, or using donations offered by

white members of the congregation who could just as easily have been seeking to keep blacks

from worshiping in their church by ensuring that they could build their own church, as they

could have been acting out a sense of Christian charity. The messy truth about this situation is

that often people acted out of both concerns, seemingly at the same time.18 After having

expended their efforts on building the white churches, and on having the fruit of their labors used

to endow the white churches with property and security, blacks were forced to create their own

communities without either of these advantages.

This lack of funds and resources, including clergy leadership, forced the free blacks of

Baltimore to devote their energies to the creation and sustenance of only two black churches in

the city-the aforementioned St. James, and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal.19 The black

community realized the advantages that strong, vital parishes gained for the community, and

were thus quite reluctant to ever engage in any activity that could ever lead to the weakening of

17 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 173.18 Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church, 113, 146.19 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 96.

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either of the parishes. This reticence led church leadership to block any efforts at growth, when

numbers and monetary donations could have sustained such growth. Forty young adult members

of St. James sought to establish St. Philip's Mission in another, newer section of Baltimore. The

mission began to thrive, yet the local bishop, Rev. Whittingham, was concerned that the

continued growth of the mission could harm St. James, and sought to re-unite the churches. The

system of racial segregation in the Diocese of Maryland had thus led to the efforts of church

leadership to stymie the growth of active black ministries in the city.

When the Episcopal Church finally decided to allow for the possibility of black priests,

and for the necessity of training them in the Gospel, the church opened the Bishop Payne

Divinity School in Petersburg, Virginia, an exclusively black school, separate from any other

white institution. This separation was quite intentional, for the education given to the black

seminarians at Bishop Payne would be useful only in serving “colored congregations.” The

American Church Institute for Negroes, under whose aegis fell the Bishop Payne Divinity

School, was established to develop “limited and specialized education, in order that they could

function in and uplift members of the own community, and even be of 'service' to the white

community,” except, of course, there was no expectation that these priests would ever enter the

mainstream of Church work-that is, being granted the opportunity to serve in white churches.20

Lewis notes a rather remarkable comment made on this subject-remarkable because of the fact

that it was the white president of Columbia University, Seth Low, who made the comment in

1889, expressing frustration at the seeming injustice of the situation that black clergy were

placed in. Low stated, “we have in our diocese of Long Island a colored presbyter of marked

ability, but what is his outlook? He has reached the acme of his opportunity now. He is at the

20 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 173.

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head of a colored congregation, but that is all.” 21Segregation in the Episcopal Church had

therefore quite intentionally created two separate ordinals, ensuring that the sacraments

performed by black clergy would never be deemed equal to those of white churches.

The seminary would be perpetually underfunded and neglected, so much so that by the

time the seminary closed in 1949 the seminary's “dilapidated buildings and inadequate

curriculum” would embarrass Northern Episcopalians.22 The churches that these priests would

lead would be lumped in “special Missionary Organizations” apart from the diocesan structures

of the white churches, but still under the care and authority of the white diocesan bishop.23 This

situation of paternalistic segregation would continue for nearly a century. While the Bishop

Payne Divinity School was finally closed and subsumed into the Virginia Theological Seminary,

and the separate diocesan structures were finally disbanded, the two communities were still

worlds apart.24 The black churches, on the whole, remained economically inferior to the white

churches, while the ethos of separation had been imprinted on the churches of both communities.

Arnold Hamilton Maloney, a black Episcopal priest from Trinidad and a 1910 graduate of

General Theological Seminary, remarked on the difference between the white and black churches

in a lengthy comment that is worth repeating in its entirety here:

The “white church” and the “colored church” are not the same thing. They represent two distinct psychological phenomena. In the former the people congregate to render “service”...They pay God a call to offer their help in the difficult problem of guiding the course of the world. They make God their debtor. They bring Him down to them. To the latter, the church is a “meeting place.” It is here that the talent for racial leadership is developed. It is here that the literary and dramatic faculties of the race have the freedom of range to revel in the more refined and ennobling regions of art. It is here that the problems of home and of the community are threshed out. It is from this social meeting place that the souls of Negroes soar up

21 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 164.22 Shattuck, Episcopalians and Race, 37.23 Shattuck, Episcopalians and Race, 13.24 Shattuck, Episcopalians and Race, 40.

21

“to meet their God in the skies.”25

It is interesting to note that segregation in the Episcopal Church was so complete that

after 1910, an Episcopal priest felt so disconnected from his fellow clergy and lay brothers and

sisters in the Church, that he could confidently speak of two separate churches, with two distinct

cultures, worship styles, and even theologies and views of God. The Episcopal Church was

apparently quite successful at creating separate churches and sacramentals: according to

Maloney, the very idea of what “church” meant, and thus what Eucharist and “body of Christ”

would also mean, was distinctly different between the two churches.

Michael J. Beary relates one glaring example of this divide in the life of Edward T.

Demby, the Suffragan Bishop for Colored Work in Arkansas and the Province of the Southwest,

which included Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and New Mexico.26 Demby was

sitting in the rear of a church in Arkansas, with four of the black priests under his charge. They

were attending a service officiated by the acting Bishop of Arkansas, Edwin Saphore, held at a

local parish led by the Rev. William Holt. The presence of the black priests and bishop at the

service was marked by segregation, for not only were they forced, including the bishop, to not

participate in the service at the altar, they were also forced to sit in the rear of the church. In

Anglican ecclesiology and sacramental theology, the bishop is considered the primary officiant at

all services, and must therefore be offered the place of service at the altar, before any other clergy

are granted the right to stand at the altar. The bishop may elect to have any other person take his

place, yet it is the bishop's place to do so. As Demby was officially one of the Bishops of

25 David T. Shannon, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation. ed. Cain Hope Felder. 99-102. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991) 104.

26 Michael J. Beary, Black Bishop: Edward T. Demby and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the Episcopal Church (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001) 1.

22

Arkansas, he should have been given the opportunity to stand beside Saphore at the altar. By

confining Demby to sit in the congregation, Saphore committed a distinct offense to Demby both

personally, and to his sacramental role as bishop. Saphore was stating through Demby's

exclusion that Demby's episcopate existed in a separate place than Saphore's, and as such, that

his episcopal authority and the efficacy of the sacraments performed by his hands were only

binding upon blacks.

Their presence was considered by the white clergy to be a magnanimous welcoming

gesture, for Demby had dismissed the initial offer of an alternative service for the black clergy in

the basement of the church. The white clergy then surprised Demby by coming to an apparent

“change of heart,” by beckoning the black clergy to receive Eucharist at the same rail as the rest

of the congregation-but, only after the entire congregation had already received the sacrament.

The effect was to ensure that the black clergy would be forced either to deny the offer of joining

in communion with the congregation, or to receive Eucharist at the altar at such a point in the

service that no white person would have to share the altar with the black clergy, or receive after

the black clergy at a rail that had been “tainted” by their presence.

The white clergy thus made the Eucharist a ground for ensuring the supremacy of their

ordinal over that of the black clergy. Demby was, according to Beary, at odds with himself: “he

sat stoically while his long-established habit of accommodation made war with the clear moral

imperative rising up within him. He must not, at all costs, allow himself to be forced across that

vacillating frontier separating discretion and Uncle Tom.”27 Demby decided to protest, and told

his priests to refuse the offer.

Herbert Thompson, Jr., a retired Episcopal Bishop of Southern Ohio, offers a more recent

27 Beary, Black Bishop, 1.

23

example of such discrimination against him and his priesthood, due to his race. While a student

at General Theological Seminary (GTS) in New York in 1962, he joined several of his classmates

on a trip to Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS), located in Alexandria, Virginia. The GTS

students were supposed to be hosted by VTS students and staff, in their homes. When the

organizer of the event called out Thompson's name. Thompson stepped forward, which caused

the organizer to look shocked and surprised. The organizer told Thompson and his wife to stand

aside, and to wait, and that he would return to Thompson later. The Thompsons were forced to

wait for two hours, until they were eventually shown to a wing of the dormitory that had just

recently been cleared in order to house them. When Thompson returned to GTS and furiously

related his humiliation, the dean of the school, Lawrence Rose, wept. Thompson was shocked at

the dichotomy between the two responses to his status as seminarian and aspiring priest.28

In 1971, after having served as the pastor of a black congregation in Brooklyn for several

years, Thompson was chosen by the bishop of Long Island, Jonathan Sherman, to “break the

color line” in Suffolk County by serving as the rector of Christ Church in Bellport, a wealthy

white community on Long Island. Both Thompson and the vestry, or leadership council, of Christ

Church, were quite reluctant to obey the wishes of the bishop in this matter. After listening to the

pleas of both white and black clergy colleagues that this was the best chance to “break the color

line” in the Diocese, Thompson decided to accept the post. Shortly after he arrived, he was

approached by three members of his parish. They stated their objection to his priesthood in no

uncertain terms: “the vestry may have elected you, but we did not, and we will never receive

Communion from your black hands.”29 Again, a clear statement that to some in the Episcopal

28 Herbert Thompson, Jr. “A Black Bishop's Journey: To Reconcile, To Heal, To Liberate, To Serve.” Anglican and Episcopal History, 74, no. 4 (September, 2005): 458.

29 Thompson, “A Black Bishop's Journey,” 473.

24

Church, even up to 1971, sacraments performed by a black priest were considered almost

repulsive.

Such attitudes have led many in the black community to question whether, as Harold

Lewis, a historian whose work often examines the role and place of African-Americans in the

Episcopal Church, relates, “there is something incongruous about being black and

Episcopalian.”30 The economic prosperity and social power of many individual Episcopalians has

often translated into economic prosperity and social power for many Episcopal parishes, leading

to a perception in the black community that the Episcopal Church is the church of the

establishment, which a black person would decide to join for the sole purpose of social and

economic advancement. As John Melville Burgess, the retired bishop of Massachusetts and the

first black diocesan bishop, once noted, “I personally have experienced the ostracism of being a

member of a minority religious group, having doubts cast upon the validity of my Christian faith

and experience, of being the butt of jokes about liturgy and ritual.”31

Herbert Thompson, Jr., relates a similar experience during an interview that he was

conducting with Malcolm X. Thompson approached Malcolm X in a bookstore in Harlem in

1962, to request the interview. Malcolm X “stopped, listened and then asked, 'What seminary are

you attending?' I said, 'The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church.' He looked

at me wide-eyed and asked incredulously, 'What in the world is a black man doing in the

Episcopal Church?'”32

In response to that question, black Episcopalians have appealed to two of the core tenets

of Anglican theology and ecclesiology-the Incarnation and the catholicity of the church-to

30 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 2.31 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 3.32 Thompson, “A Black Bishop's Journey,” 459.

25

remind the Episcopal Church of its own beliefs, and as such to claim equal right to place in the

life of the Church. According to John Booty, the doctrine of the Incarnation calls upon all

Episcopalians to recognize that creation has interpenetrated the human experience to such an

inextricable extent that all of creation is now interconnected. From this follows the obligation to

“defend that creation against abuse, especially defending human beings who, in the light of the

Incarnation, are endowed with human dignity and worth, no matter what their individual

condition may be at any given moment.”33 The church's catholicity, or universality, is based on

the concept which states that the Church is actually one, unified and whole in Christ, and as the

Body of Christ cannot be limited by any temporal construction or constraint, the Church

therefore is not limited to any specific time, culture, location, or especially, physical

characteristics. The Church catholic is the Church open to all. The incarnation and the church's

catholicity have often been placed in tandem in the arguments made by black Episcopalians. In

such arguments, the incarnation makes all people equal before God, as all are made holy in

Christ, whereas the catholicity of the church ensures that as all are equal in God, the Church

must welcome all members of the Body of Christ. Lewis states two statements to such effect,

made in 1886 and 1910, respectively, by Dr. Anna Julia Cooper and Rev. John Love. Dr. Cooper

“proclaimed,

'We believe in the Holy Catholic Church. We believe that however gigantic and apparently remote the consummation, the Church will go on conquering and to conquer till the kingdom of this world, not excepting the black man and the black woman...shall have become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ.' (italics original)”34

Rev. Love states a similar message:

33 John Booty, The Episcopal Church in Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1988), 148.34 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 5.

26

“To be like him (that is, Jesus) the church must embody a religion essentially the same in any age, grand and enduring, a religion which changes not however the world may change...like the Holy Gospel, not for a day but for all time, not for one individual but for all classes and conditions of men. [sic]”35

These, and similar arguments, served to frame the argument for equality in the Church as

one which looked to remind the Church of its own values, and to demonstrate how it was failing

to uphold its own standards. This argument has been shown to be quite effective, for as Lewis

notes, the “Episcopal Church, hoisted by its own petard, has often been prodded into doing the

honorable thing, in order that it might at least appear to safeguard its integrity.36

The Church and the Civil Rights Movement

Harold Lewis once called the Church a “non-prophet organization,” a sarcastic attempt to

describe the extent to which the Church has often been viewed as the church of the

establishment, and the church of order.37 As Lewis states, the Church is “a body that has not,

historically, set a moral example for the nation to follow but has rather taken the lead from the

mores of the nation.”38 This is a rather damning claim. The Church's failure to combat racism

until well into the second half of the Twentieth Century may serve to show the truth in this claim.

Yet, once change was forced upon the country, and the church, by the Civil Rights Movement,

the Church as a corporate body moved in dramatic fashion to repair the cultural and social

damage imposed upon the Church by centuries of segregation, as well as the structural and

35 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 5.36 Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat, 12.37 Harold T. Lewis, “Racial Concerns in the Episcopal Church Since 1973,” Anglican and Episcopal History, 67,

no. 4 (December, 1998): 467.38 Lewis, “Racial Concerns in the Episcopal Church Since 1973,” 467.

27

economic disparities suffered by black Episcopalians.

The Episcopal Church from the beginning of the civil rights movement in 1955 through

the Selma-Montgomery March, could generously be labeled “dispassionate” about the civil

rights movement. The church did not impede the actions of individual activists on either side of

the movement, and permitted a few to make radical statements and perform radical actions

decrying and undermining, as well as lauding and supporting, the system of racial segregation in

the South. The church failed to act to support either side in any concrete fashion, however. Many

Episcopal churches in both the North and South upheld both the de facto and de jure segregation

in the denomination, by participating in the rampant “white flight” from the inner-city by moving

their church buildings, and by not enforcing “open door” policies passed by the Episcopal

National Council. The National Council itself failed to take a stand on the civil rights movement

by bowing to white Southern pressure at every Council meeting and General Convention prior to

1963.39

Southern clergy would even seek to block the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement in

their parishes and dioceses. Bishop Charles Carpenter of the Diocese of Alabama provides a case

in point. Bishop Carpenter pursued a course that wavered between outright indifference and

active undermining of the actions of the movement, frequently speaking out against the actions

of clergy not under his episcopal oversight who entered Alabama to work for the civil rights

movement. He would often quietly support the actions of vestries in his diocese to maintain the

status quo and traditions in their churches, even if this included upholding the segregation of

their churches.40

39 David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr, The Episcopalians (New York: Church Publishing, 2004), 134-5.40 S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed are the Peacemakers (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Louisiana State University Press,

2001), 167-170.

28

Notable amongst this backdrop of avoidance were the actions of the Episcopal Society for

Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU). Formed in 1959 by two priests, Cornelius Tarplee and John

Morris, an employee of the National Council and a rector in South Carolina, respectively,

ESCRU sought to eliminate segregation in the Episcopal Church, in turn leading to a completely

racially-integrated Church. ESCRU's strategy for achieving its goals was heavily influenced by

the non-violent strategy and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, by pursuing a program of

pressure for change at the national level, as well as by participating in sit-ins and protest

demonstrations throughout the South.41 The actions of ESCRU finally inspired the presiding

bishop, the Right Reverend Arthur Lichtenberger, to speak out in 1963 in favor of civil rights,

and, in August of the same year, the House of Bishops to endorse civil rights legislation and the

upcoming March on Washington. The witness and persuasion of ESCRU members inspired

many in the Church to travel to Selma, Alabama, to participate in the Selma-Montgomery

march.42 The efforts of ESCRU towards achieving integration sometimes served to actually

undermine economic justice and structural equality in the Church, however. Many black

congregations were closed, in the belief that members of those congregations would then join

local white congregations.43 While the purpose was to achieve integration, the reasoning for

closing the black parishes, and not white parishes instead, was based on an economic model of a

“successful congregation.” The black parishes were often small, economically-impoverished

parishes located in similarly impoverished areas; nonetheless, the parishes were often centers of

the life of their community. This strategy often served to diminish the witness of these parishes,

and challenge the efficacy of their ministry. ESCRU was not attempting to act out of racist 41 Hein, The Episcopalians, 136.42 Charles W. Eagles, Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (Tuscaloosa,

Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2000), 27.43 Lewis, “Racial Concerns in the Episcopal Church Since 1973,” 470.

29

impulses, yet its actions resulted in imposing racial categories and judgments of superiority on

the work of the black parishes. Ironically, these parishes were often impoverished and acting

under “mission” status due to the very policies of segregation in the Church that ESCRU was

attempting to end with its efforts at integration. The tide was turning in favor of civil rights, yet

the church still failed to take more concrete and effective steps to ameliorate the underlying

causes of the poverty and discrimination that African-Americans still suffered in the South, as

well as the North.

In 1967, in response to the claims made by the civil rights movement, and the alarm

caused by the wave of riots in many inner-city neighborhoods across the country in 1967, the

Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. John Hines, moved to create a grant program aimed at funneling

money to programs active in the alleviation of poverty and oppression for the nation's poorest

citizens.44 While the program was not without controversy, and did not last long, the fact that it

was created and initially endorsed by a church demonstrated that the Episcopal Church as an

institution was finally beginning to recognize the severe social problems plaguing the country,

and attempting to take clear and concrete steps to divert resources and effort to ameliorate them.

This program was quite unusual, for not only did it demonstrate a radical departure from the

consistent emphasis of the Episcopal Church on segregated church structures and the utter failure

of the Church to rectify the economic disparity of the “black church,” it was also the first such

program amongst the major Christian denominations. The Roman Catholic Church even sought

the advice of Bp. Hines when it developed its own, similar program of economic and structural

reparations.45

44 Hein, The Episcopalians, 136.45 David L. Holmes, “Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and the General Convention Special Program,” Anglican

and Episcopal History, 61, no. 4, (December 1992): 397.

30

The program had four aspects:

The Episcopal Church was to reorder its budget priorities.

The Church was to spend approximately $9 million in the period 1967-1970 to bring “the people of the ghettos into areas of decision-making” and to increase their self-determination.

This “empowerment money” must be given to community organizations that the residents themselves control.

The Episcopal Church should appeal to other American religious groups to join in “full-scale mobilization of resources” dedicated to heal the wounds of racism.46

Bp. Hines was seeking, in no uncertain terms, to effect a rapid turnover of economic

resources and power to minority communities, both Episcopalian and non-Episcopalian. The

organization was to be led by an African-American, the offices of the Special Program would be

located in minority communities, and the Special Program would consider applications for

funding from both Episcopalian and non-Episcopalian community groups. Leon Modeste, a

black social worker from Brooklyn who was also a life-long Episcopalian, was chosen to lead the

organization. He established the policy that any member of GCSP staff must meet certain criteria

that would ensure that they would be welcomed in the communities with which the Program was

seeking to work: that they understood the situation of the poor, that they had worked previously

for the empowerment of the poor, and that they had to be credible to those in society who had

dismissed organized, mainstream Christianity.47 These criteria were not specifically intended to

bar Episcopalians from staff positions-yet, due to the overwhelming majority of Episcopalians

who were either middle- or upper-class, even amongst the black members, few Episcopalians

ever served on the staff of the Program.

46 Holmes, “Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and the General Convention Special Program,” 397.47 Holmes, “Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and the General Convention Special Program,” 399.

31

The Program was surely a prophetic attempt at reparative justice and racial reconciliation.

Yet, the Program was unfortunately ahead of its time, and failed to recognize that the Church was

not prepared to make such a radical commitment to rectifying structural inequalities. During

floor debate on the measure during the 1967 General Convention, one lay deputy, with insightful

foresight, laid out the areas of tension which would prove to be the undoing of the program. He

stated that he did not object to the

Episcopal Church giving grants to organizations of the poor through diocesan and ecumenical channels-for the Church retained control over such grants. But he warned that the GCSP's plan to award church offerings with no strings attached to minority groups who sought economic or political power was a “wrongful use” of church funds that would “alienate thousands” of Episcopalians and undercut many equally important missionary, educational, and ecumenical programs.48

His words were prescient, for many dioceses and parishes did begin the very next year to

react to the GCSP by withholding their annual pledges to the national church. Dioceses from

across the Church withheld a portion of their pledges, yet the opposition was focused in the

South and Southwest. The dioceses did indeed object to granting money to controversial groups

engaged in political work. Some of the most objectionable grants included a $45,000 grant to

Malcolm X Liberation University, located in Durham, North Carolina, whose mission was to

train “Negro Americans to set up an independent nation in Africa.” A $40,000 grant was given,

over the strenuous objection of the bishop of New Mexico and Southwest Texas, to Alianza

Federal de Mercedes, an organization that fought for Hispanic land rights. This action led the

bishop of that diocese to withhold his diocese's entire annual pledge to the national church.49 The

opposition to the program grew, while the money available to the national church to fund the

48 Holmes, “Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and the General Convention Special Program,” 398.49 Holmes, “Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and the General Convention Special Program,” 405.

32

program dwindled dramatically. The core of support for the program also shrank, as the

conservative opposition who had been complaining about the radical nature of the program was

eventually joined by others who began to complain that the program was not radical enough. By

the General Convention of 1973, the program was obviously causing significant damage to the

Episcopal Church, and the Convention voted to terminate the program.

Conclusion

During his address at the 1973 General Convention that saw the termination of the GCSP,

Bp. Hines made a plea for the Episcopal Church to be prophetic, in the mold of Old Testament

prophets-that is, to preach for social justice, even at the expense of denominational unity and

economic strength. He then invoked Gandhi, reflecting on his famous dictum that for starving

people, God can often come in the form of a piece of bread. He made the connection between the

sacrament of the bread of the Eucharist and the “sacrament of our brother,” where eucharist as

Body of Christ is translated from physical bread into the Body of Christ as each and every

human being.50 While in future years, the Episcopal Church would make radical stands on the

full integration of women and homosexual persons in the sacramental life of the Church, the

Church would never make as radical a stand for racial equality as was made by the GCSP.

As the years passed, as the Civil Rights Movement changed not only political realities but

the consciousness of the church, these structural and economic realities have stubbornly

remained. The consecration of the Reverend Michael Curry as the Bishop of the Diocese of

North Carolina demonstrates this ambivalence. Bp. Curry had spent time serving an Episcopal

50 Holmes, “Presiding Bishop John E. Hines and the General Convention Special Program,” 411.

33

parish in Baltimore before he was elected by the Diocesan Convention as the next bishop. His

election as the first black bishop, in not only in the Diocese of North Carolina but also in a

former Confederate state, was historic. Yet, this occurred only as recently as 2000, and Bp.

Sutton and Bp. Curry are currently the only two African-American bishops still serving in this

region. Diversity in the episcopacy is of course not the only measure of racial reconciliation for

the church, yet, diversity in church leadership is telling.

34

Chapter 2

Formulating a Hermeneutic of the Body of Christ

And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create one humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body, through the cross, thus putting to death the hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.

But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly; promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.Ephesians 1:22-23, 2:14-19, 4:15-16, New Revised Standard Version

The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians lays out in these three passages much of the

scriptural basis for understanding the gathered community of all Christians, the church, as the

Body of Christ. Through the physical body of Jesus Christ, God offers the way of peace and

reconciliation to all people, bringing all of humanity under the head of Christ. Paul echoes this

sentiment, reflecting in 2 Corinthians that, “the significance of the death of Christ with respect to

the world is ultimately summed up in the idea of reconciliation.”51 The Body of Christ abolishes

all previous barriers to unity amongst the various divisions of humanity. Through Christ, all

humanity is granted the opportunity to share in the life of the community of the Trinity. Christ

makes available to humans living in the kingdom of human existence a glimpse and a foretaste of 51 W. Hulitt Gloer, An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul's Understanding of New Creation and

Reconciliation in 2 Cor. 5:14-21 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 188.

35

the life of the Kingdom of God.

It is essential to note, however, that this reconciliation can only occur due to the initiative

actions of God. As Ben Witherington argues, “had God not sent the Son to die, humans could not

have been reconciled to God, regardless of human desire or goodwill.”52 God saw the necessity

of reconciliation, understood that humans would have been incapable, and took the initiative to

achieve the reconciliation through the Body of Christ. In one sense, humans had little choice in

the matter: God desired reconciliation, and without consulting humanity, the conditions of their

relationship with God have fundamentally changed. This reconciliation also came at a significant

cost-again, a cost that humanity was not given the choice of deciding whether to pay or not. For

Paul, Christ not only died for all of humanity, but also brought the death of humanity into

himself, thereby dying in place of humanity. Christ is “humankind's representative”53 who

accepts the cost of reconciliation on behalf of humanity, and through his resurrection brings all of

humanity into the divine life, and thus restores the “state of intimacy between humanity and

God.”54 One should not read into this a diminution of free will, for our free will would have been

completely unable to achieve this reconciliation. This actually demonstrates the enormity of

God's love of, and desire for union with, humanity. Paul recognizes that God saw an

unbridgeable gap between humanity and God, and out of love for humanity, built a bridge across

the gap using the Body of Christ as the bridge.

Ephesians 4:15-16 takes the Body of Christ imagery to its logical conclusion, echoing the

physical body imagery of 1st Corinthians 12:12-37, proclaiming that to achieve the entirety of

God's will for the church, we must all be knit together as ligaments in a body, all serving the 52 Ben Witherington III, Conflict & Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2

Corinthian. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 398.53 Witherington, Conflict & Community in Corinth, 394..54 Gloer, An Exegetical and Theological Study, 196.

36

purpose of the head of the body, Christ. These passages therefore develop the image of the

church as the Body of Christ in progressive stages: first, from a transcendent reality achieved

first through the will of the Christ, where Christ sweeps away all human-ordained divisions,

second, establishing a divinely-ordained unity, and third, finishing by reminding all that while

through Christ all are granted citizenship in the Kingdom of God, this citizenship requires a

commitment from each citizen to do the necessary work to make real in the human plane what

was already real in the divine plane.

The Body of Christ stretches out to humanity, inexorably bringing all of humanity into his

embrace, yet at the same time grants humanity the opportunity to take responsibility for making

that divine reality into a human reality.55 While we have little choice whether or not we will be

joined to each other in the Body, as this is the divine prerogative, we are given the absolutely free

will to respond in kind, or to reject God's offer. Ephesians 5:5 leaves open the possibility that we

may not actually make this choice. We are asked to respond to God's hand reaching for us by

reaching out our own hand back to God, both in worship to the transcendent God, and in service

to the immanent God. As Matthew Fox quotes Edward Schillebeeckx, “historical responsibility

of the church is to be taken seriously...If any book lays the foundations for a political theology in

the New Testament, it is Ephesians.”56

It would be instructive to keep aware of this passage and its implications as we examine

the issue of unity versus abandonment in the Episcopal Church through a hermeneutic of the

Body of Christ. For while the Body of Christ can heal all brokenness and division, God requires

our efforts and consent in order to work through us to bring to completion the institution of the

55 Russell Philip Shedd, Man in Community: A Study of St. Paul's Application of Old Testament and Early Jewish Conceptions of Human Solidarity (London: The Epworth Press, 1958), 181.

56 Matthew Fox. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1988) 92.

37

Kingdom of God on earth. The interconnectedness of the Body of Christ provides an essential

foundation for understanding how individual humans are actually brought into the life of the

interconnected Trinity, through theosis. Theosis binds humanity at once with God in Christ, and

with each and every other member of the Body of Christ, thereby uniting humanity through the

divine presence present in all of humanity.

Reconciliation in the Body of Christ therefore has both a “vertical” and a “horizontal”

dimension.57 If sin is to be understood as separating ourselves from the will and presence of God,

then the interconnectedness begun in the Body of Christ inevitably makes all segregation and

racial supremacy a sin, for they not only declare one part of God to be superior to another, but

they also seek to create division within the Trinity, which is actually an indivisible unity. In this

chapter, we will examine the image of the body of Christ as presented in the following: the

Gospel of John; the Epistles of Paul, with a special focus on 1st Corinthians; four contextual

theologies- the ecofeminism of Sallie McFague, the creation spirituality of Matthew Fox, and the

Black Christ of black and womanist theology; and finally, as understood in the Franciscan

tradition.

The Body of Christ in the Gospel of John

We become one in Christ's body, and corporately become the Body of Christ. Jesus

explains this process in John, with the image of Jesus' body as the vine, and the church as the

branches:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in

57 Gloer, An Exegetical and Theological Study, 202.

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me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. (John 15:1-11, New Revised Standard Version)

We thrive only if we abide in Jesus and in his love. We are forever bound to Jesus, for just as

branches cannot live for long cut off from the life and nutrients that flow through the vine, we

cannot survive separate from Jesus' body. It is exactly, and only, when we cut ourselves off from

the Body of Christ that we wither and die. As all branches are all connected to the same vine, all

members of the Body of Christ are inextricably bound to each other through the Body.

We can choose to ignore this reality, or to shirk the responsibility that comes with being

bound to Christ. The consequences of these unfortunate choices are quite painful, yet we are free

to make the choices ourselves. The challenge is that while we are autonomous in our decision-

making, we cannot limit the consequences of our choices to just ourselves. The choices of one

branch affect every other branch. We cannot decide that the choices of our single congregation

will not affect every other congregation in the diocese, for this is impossible. The alienation and

pain of one congregation is felt by all, as are the joy and hope of one congregation shared,

through the vine of the Body of Christ, with all other branches connected to the Body.

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Pauline Solidarity in the Body of Christ

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul is responding to what he understands to be

dangerous trends towards segregation and class superiority in the Christian community in the

Roman city of Corinth. In 1:10-11, Paul establishes the purpose of his letter:

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.

In the remainder of the first chapter, Paul reminds the Corinthians of the Christ that they had

been made members of through their baptism, the Christ that was humble, low, despised, foolish,

weak, and most importantly, crucified. Baptism changes the individual person irrevocably,

bringing the person into a complete incorporation into the Christ-event, such that “the death of

Christ and his burial (symbolized by immersion under the water) become the Christian's own

death and burial too.”58 This change establishes a new social reality, which makes all previous

social distinctions irrelevant and meaningless, subsuming them into the greater meaning of unity

in Christ. The Lord's Supper, therefore, did not create solidarity, interdependence and unity

amongst the members of the Body of Christ; instead, it solidified and reinforced an already

extant reality. It conflated time, bringing the ecclesia into both a remembrance of Christ's death

and a vision of the eschaton and Christ's return. The central story of the Christian myth is

therefore encapsulated in ritual practice.59

According to the reports that Paul cites, however, many in the Corinthian church had

58 David G. Horrell, Solidarity and Difference (London: T & T Clark International, 2005), 103.59 Horrell, Solidarity and Difference, 107.

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instead imported the injustice of outside status classifications and privileges into the ecclesia,

especially during the Lord’s Supper. Coutsoumpos provides a succinct explanation of exactly

what was occurring during the meals:

The church at Roman Corinth was composed of people from different social strata, the wealthy and poor, as well as slaves and former slaves. It was customary for participants in the Lord’s meal to bring from home their own food and drink. The wealthy brought so much food and drink that they could indulge in gluttony and drunkenness. The poor who came later, however, had little or nothing to bring, with the result that some of them went hungry and could not enjoy a decent meal.60

The poor were often forced to arrive late due to the nature of their labor both inside and outside

of their homes; labor that the wealthy were not required to engage in to nearly the extent of the

poor. The wealthy, therefore, brought food that they intended to consume either by themselves,

or to share amongst a small few. They consumed it without concern for the poor members of the

ecclesia, who might be forced to eat by themselves, or would go hungry due to their inability to

bring any food with them.

The wealthy were even using the physical layout of their homes to establish and enforce

Roman class distinctions in the ecclesia. Most, if not all, ecclesiae would meet in the homes of

wealthy Corinthians. These homes were designed in the Roman manner, with an outside atrium,

or courtyard, which could hold a large number of people, yet provide none of them with the

opportunity to recline comfortably. These homes also had a triclinium, a dining room with

couches lining three walls, which could comfortably accommodate only nine people. Granted,

some homes may have included more than one triclinium. Even then, however, not every

member of the ecclesia could be accommodated. The better-quality food and wine would be

60 Panayotis Coutsoumpos, Community, Conflict, and the Eucharist in Roman Corinth (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2006), 102.

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served to the guests in the triclinium, who would be “protected” from the indignity of mingling

with the lower-status people forced to eat the meal out in the atrium.61 The Corinthians had

imported their Roman values into the Lord’s Supper. Yet, according to Paul, these injustices

“represent an abuse so crucial as to render their gathering no longer really the supper at all (1

Cor. 11:20): their meal fails to be an enactment of oneness, of corporate solidarity, and instead

demonstrates a despising of the fundamental” presence of Christ in the ritual.62

After spending the first eleven chapters of the letter decrying the divisive practices of the

Corinthians, in the twelfth chapter Paul turns to describing what the Body of Christ is actually

like. In vv. 1-11 Paul removes any appeal to superiority on the gifts of the Spirit, arguing

forcefully for parity amongst the gifts. This is in response to a faction in the ecclesia which had

emerged who endeavored to create a hierarchy of status in the community based on the gifts that

the Spirit had bestowed on each person. Paul states categorically in vv. 4-7 that while the Spirit

may manifest itself differently in each person, it is the same Spirit which is acting. As God

cannot be said to have hierarchies within the Godhead, there cannot be any hierarchies amongst

those who demonstrate the working of the Spirit within themselves.63 Verse 6a reminds the

Corinthians of the absolute parity of the workings of the Spirit: “but it is the same God who

activates all of them in everyone.” Paul then removes any claim to human agency or superior

human qualities in the receiving of spiritual gifts: “All these are activated by one and the same

Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”

Paul then provides, in vv. 12-31, his most complete examination of the gathered baptized

61 Richard B Hays, Interpretation-A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching: 1st Corinthians (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997), 196.

62 Horrell, Solidarity and Difference, 109.63 Margaret Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press,

1992), 268.

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Christians as the Body of Christ. Paul describes his understanding of the place of the individual

believer in the Christian community as a body, composed of many parts, each with a unique and

essential purpose for the overall good of the body. Through their baptism, each individual

Christian was joined into one Body of Christ, and shared in one Spirit.

In verse 14, Paul states his theme for the remainder of the passage: “Indeed, the body

does not consist of one member but of many.” Paul then establishes the necessity of diversity in

the body, remarking that if the body were entirely comprised of one member, such as the hand,

then there would be no place for any of the other members of the body. His choice of parts is

crucial in this section, for he focuses first on aspects of the body that would be considered

essential: hearing, sight, the hands, and scent. Paul is laying here the foundation for his later

argument that each member of the body has an equally important part to play in the body, by

demonstrating with parts of the body whose importance is uncontested the foolishness of leaving

any of the parts out of the body.

Paul was not specifically innovative with his use of this metaphor. The metaphor of the

political life of the community as a body has parallels in Mediterranean political theory and

philosophy ranging back to the 5th century B.C.E. The similarities between Paul's description and

those of other philosophers are striking. Plutarch cites the same four body parts as Paul, while

many other texts parallel his personification of the body parts. Paul's “differentiation of personal

gifts and contributions within the community...is one of the most common applications of the

body metaphor for the state in antiquity.”64 The idea of the members of the body rejoicing and

suffering together, as one unit, also has roots in Hellenistic Judaism. In sum, Paul was using an

argument for unity that was quite familiar to his audience. His rhetorical skill is demonstrated

64 Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation, 159.

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here, however, for he uses a metaphorical tool commonly used to justify hierarchy, social order

and status within the polis, seemingly to justify the Corinthians's reversion to Roman notions of

the same. In the next set of verses, however, Paul takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion-

one that neither the “body metaphor” tradition nor the Corinthians had seemingly taken into

consideration.

Paul shocks his readers at vv. 22-25, as he grants equal place for each part, and even

shows how what are considered the “least honorable,” and least desirable, parts only appear to be

so-the normal body hierarchy is actually only an apparent, surface hierarchy.65 Paul argues that

the weaker parts are actually the most vital, for they serve vital functions such as reproduction

and the elimination of dangerous, poisonous waste from the body, keeping it safe and healthy. 66

In this way, every part is claimed to be essential, to have a divinely-ordained purpose, and that

the body needs every part to be acting to its full potential, following the will of God, in order for

the entire body to be healthy. Diversity, not uniformity, is what’s called for.67 Each part has

strength and honor in a certain way-some parts are granted a power that seems like weakness to

the world, while others are granted a power that seems like weakness to the body. Paul states that

we can now understand how important the individual is in the Christian community, for in v. 26

he says “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice

together with it.”(NRSV) In this way, Paul says that for the whole body to work toward justice

for all, all parts must be unified. This is a complete reversal of the hierarchical social order of

Roman Corinth, where often the poor suffered alone, while the powerful were honored alone.

The Body of Christ is both a physical, earthly reality, and a figurative reality. The Body is

65 David G Horrell, The Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 180-1.66 Witherington, Conflict & Community in Corinth, 259.67 Loretta Dornisch, Paul and Third World Women Theologians (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 32.

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an earthly reality for it depends on human acknowledgement of the immediate, practical

ramifications of membership in the Body for human action towards the weaker members of the

Body. At the same time, the Body is also a figurative reality in that while each individual

member is

individually entire within themselves...the Body of Christ encompasses their bodies not as a single physical organism as though an individual's small but entire body composes a literal hand or foot of a larger physical body, but as a figurative body of which their individual physical bodies are, figuratively, parts.68

The Body of Christ is therefore a reality that exists for the individual person who understands his

responsibility for his fellow members of the body, and acts upon it, as well as for that same

person who feels an ineffable connection with God, and through God, with the entirety of

creation. This image holds two realities in tension-particularity and corporate identity in Christ.

This apparent paradox holds the corporate entity of Christ in which individuals, communally

growing into one body, in tension with a retention of an individual identity that is not fused into

Christ's identity, but transformed through relationship with Christ, and through Christ, with

others.69 The key concept is the centrality of the place of God in this connection for the

individual person-it is only through God that either the physical or figurative reality can be

understood.

The power of this image lies with its poetic mystery-just as Thomas a Kempis speculated,

that “what good does it do you if you dispute loftily about the Trinity, but lack humility and

therefore displease the Trinity,” similar attempts to secure an “exact” definition and anthropology

of the Body would miss the point.70 68 Robert H. Gundry, Soma in Biblical Theology, with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1976), 230.69 William Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 155-6.70 Alister E. McGrath, ed., The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,

2007), 219.

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The Body of Christ in Recent Contextual Theologies

A) Eco-Feminism in Sallie McFague's The Body of God

In The Body of God, Sallie McFague presents an image of God as body coterminous with

the entirety of creation, where the creation is actually the Body of God. The creation, in

McFague's understanding, is the entirety of the known, and potentially unknown, creation-the

entire universe. McFague takes the creation story in Genesis 1 very seriously, where all that God

creates, God touches, and wherever God touches, God exists. This model provides a critique to

the human body-focused image of the Body of Christ, arguing that not only does the image of a

male deity fail to include the female body, it also fails to recognize the entire creation as holy,

sacred, and infused with the spirit of God.

The traditional Body of Christ model has permitted humans to consider themselves as

above and outside of the entire created order and not beholden to take responsibility for the

effects of human action on the created order, as opposed to integrated completely in the created

order with a significant commitment to steward the creation for the good of the entire created

order-again, taking very seriously the stewardship responsibility placed in human hands by God

in the creation story of Genesis 1.

This model also attempts to resolve the paradox of the co-existent transcendence and

immanence of God in the traditional Body of Christ model. Instead, the Body of God model

“allows us to think of God as immanent in our world while retaining, indeed, magnifying, God's transcendence. The model of the universe as God's body unites immanence and transcendence. At once a powerful image of divine immanence, for everyone and everything comes potentially a sacrament of God , it is also, though perhaps not as obviously, an image of divine transcendence.71

71 Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 20.

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The Body of God's insistence on placing humanity in its proper context leads to a

rejection of traditional views of theological anthropology where humans “are just below the

angels,” “the only creatures made in the image of God,” who are sinners because they use their

capacities to rebel against God, or, on the other side of the theological spectrum, are so broken

that their entire existence is a rebellion against God.72 Instead, the Body of God presents human

sin as a failure to understand and keep within proper boundaries, instead acting in such a way

that our self-expression and life impinges on the self-expression and lives of others in creation.

McFague's model offers a helpful critique to the traditional insistence on human

exemplarism in the entirety of creation, while her concept of sin provides a necessary corrective

to a Western society that permits and even encourages rampant acquisitiveness, to the detriment

of both the creation and other humans. Her model also provides a helpful image for

conceptualizing the co-existence of divine transcendence and immanence at all times, in all

places. Yet, by seeking to encompass all of creation into the Body of God-an understanding of

the creation that is actually far closer to reality than any exclusively human-centered

understanding-McFague's model might actually prove to be too large, paint a picture of a God

who is almost too distant, and in so doing, not serve the immediate pastoral necessities of any

enterprise focused on reconciling humans to each other.

B) Creation Spirituality in Matthew Fox's The Cosmic Christ

Matthew Fox has been the theologian most closely connected with the movement known

as Creation Spirituality, the forms and theology of which have been sketched in detail in his two

72 McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, 113.

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works, Original Blessing and The Cosmic Christ. In many ways, the image of God presented in

Creation Spirituality is similar to McFague's. Whereas McFague describes the coterminous

existence of God with the entirety of creation as demonstrating the concurrent transcendence and

immanence of God, Fox chooses to use the language of panentheism vs. theism. For Fox, theism

is the model of most traditional Christian theology, whose most prominent modern expositor

would be Karl Barth. Theism is the idea that God is outside of us, while panentheism instead

argues that God exists within us, and we exist in God. There is therefore an interpenetration of

God and human.73 The irony of this perceived distance from “traditional Christianity” is that this

language appears to echo the language of Paul, as well as the language of theosis in the Orthodox

tradition.

There is much to commend Fox and creation spirituality, not least of which is its

optimism about the human capacity to acknowledge the divine within us, or the “Cosmic Christ”

which is linked to all of creation, and which will link us to all of creation. Fox is heavily

influenced by the mystical tradition in Christianity, which has long stressed the interpenetration

of God and man, and taught that humans already possess God within themselves-they simply

need to open their hearts to the inner presence of God in themselves and in others in order to

achieve communion with God. This cosmology is a refreshing corrective to the traditional

insistence on a distant, uninvolved and unemotional God, as well as to a humanity too broken to

ever be worthy to commune with God.

As with McFague, this model may prove to be insufficient and not completely applicable

to the practical and rooted pastoral concerns of reconciliation amongst and between individuals

who have perpetuated horrible acts of sin upon each other. The model of creation spirituality

73 Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, 134.

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simply does not deal with human sinfulness in any concrete and substantive way, which is

ultimately why it is an insufficient model to use when confronting the sin of racism.

C) Black and Womanist Theology, as described in Kelly Douglas' The Black Christ

As opposed to the previous two models of God, the Black Christ of black and womanist

theology is in no way a cosmic reality. The Black Christ is an absolutely particular and human

understanding of God. The Black Christ, as first explored in the work of James Cone, is the

highly contextualized Christ as liberator of the oppressed-who, in the context of black and

womanist theology, are humans who are “black,” as opposed to “white.” Cone uses “Black” as

an ontological symbol for all of those in a white racist society who are oppressed. Cone defends

his understanding of Jesus as “black” by arguing that as God the Christ lived as a member of a

poor, oppressed class and culture, Jesus demonstrates God's profound solidarity with the poor

and God's role as liberator of the oppressed. In this construct, sin is oppression forced upon

“black” people by “white” people-where black and white are physiological traits. “Black” and

“white” are also traits of the heart, where a white person chooses to engage in the oppression of

black people, or whether they choose to repent of their sins and the sins of their society and

instead choose to stand in solidarity with black people.

Cone states that

First, blackness is a physiological trait. It refers to a particular black-skinned people in America, a victim of white racist brutality. The scars of its members bear witness to the inhumanity committed against them. Black theology believes that they are the only key that can open the door to divine revelation. Therefore, no American theology can even tend in the direction of Christian theology without coming to terms with the black-skinned people of America.74[italics original]

74 Douglas, The Black Christ, 60.

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Kelly Douglas presents a womanist perspective on the Black Christ where she seeks to

correct the overly male focus on Christ as the Black Jesus. Douglas accepts the necessity to see

Christ as the oppressed, as well as the liberator of the oppressed, and also acknowledges that sin,

in this construct, is the oppression of subject classes by those who hold power. Douglas expands

her view of the Black Christ to a

multidimensional and bifocal analysis that confronts all that oppresses the Black community as it impinges upon the community or is harbored within. This means that Christ is a sustainer, liberator, and prophet in the face of such evils as racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism.75

Both the hyper-contextual concept of the Black Christ in Cone's black theology, and the

more multidimensional, yet still contextual, concept of Christ as Liberator in Douglas' womanist

theology offer a practical and useful pastoral tool for reconciling in the aftermath of a sustained

situation of racial sin. Seeing Christ as one of the oppressed who is also the Liberator of the

oppressed is empowering for an oppressed people who have been systematically disempowered

and whose status as complete members of the Body of Christ has been continually called into

question. Yet, reconciliation requires a recognition of the divinity of all persons engaged in the

work of reconciliation. Neither “white theology” nor “black theology” is complete, for in Christ,

“there is no Jew nor Greek,” no black, and no white.

The Body of Christ in Franciscan Theology

The interdependence of all in the Body of Christ is integral to Franciscan theology. St.

75 Douglas, The Black Christ, 109.

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Francis of Assisi viewed his entire world through the lens of Christ. All of creation was sacred

because God made it, and because Christ became one with it. God was within all of creation, and

joined all of creation to Godself. One can see the extent to which Francis understood all of

creation to be of God in his poetry praising God. These are some verses that are representative of

this corpus:

You are love, you are wisdom. You are humility, You are endurance. You are rest, You are peace. You are joy and gladness, You are justice and moderation. You are all our riches, And you sacrifice for us. You are beauty. You are gentleness. You are our protector, You are our guardian and defender. You are our courage. You are our haven and hope. You are our faith, Our great consolation. You are our eternal life, Great and wonderful Lord, God almighty, Merciful savior.76

Most high, all-powerful and good Lord, To you are due the praises, the glory, the honor, and every blessing.To you only, O highest one, are they dueand no human being is worthy to speak to you.Be praised, my Lord, with all your creaturesespecially by brother sun, by whom we are lightened every day.77

The first poem is taken from a collection of work entitled Praises of God, while the

second piece includes the first lines of his Canticle of Brother Sun. Francis understood all of life

to fall within the arms of Christ, including every aspect of what constitutes human existence. As

Praises relates, God in Christ provides all that humans would ever require, or desire-sustenance,

beauty, safety, structure for our lives, hope for the future, even wealth. Christ is all-powerful, yet

is the definition of gentleness and meekness. What is most telling about this passage is not what

Francis believes God to be, but what Francis does not include in the life of God, and by proxy,

the life of humanity. Missing is the martial imagery of God as conqueror or king. Also missing is

any statement connecting Christ to any divisiveness or judgment. Justice is paired with

76 The Message of St. Francis. (New York: Penguin Studio, 1999) 35.77 Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, 112.

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moderation, while they are both framed by joy, gladness, and riches. Extending even further,

bracketing riches is sacrifice, while joy is preceded by peace. Justice is therefore integrally

linked to joy and peace, while moderation is understood in the framework of simplicity and a

rejection of any sense of riches as material wealth. Divine power, justice, and peace, and by

extension, human power, justice, and peace, therefore lie in apostolic poverty. Francis reframes

justice from a retributive enterprise to a reconciliatory endeavor between God and humans

requiring not only the sacrifice of humans to each other, but the sacrifice of God to humans. In

the Kingdom of God, humans and God are interdependent, though God's generous outpouring of

the entirety of God's love to humanity, through Christ.

This immeasurable divine generosity is celebrated in the Canticle as Francis revels in the

exorbitant generosity of God towards each and every part of creation. Francis understands

creation to have the capacity to respond in honor and praise. He shares this conviction with

centuries of Christians, for the Bible itself calls upon creation to praise God. Francis adds a

simple twist on this concept, and in so doing, completely reframes our entire perspective on the

unity of all humans, and of creation. Francis believes that all creation is inextricably

interdependent, as a family, with Christ as the mother and father. The life of Brother Sun is

intertwined with Sister Moon, while the logic of creation is made null in light of the divine logic,

as Brother Fire and Sister Water are also completely interdependent. Matthew Fox explains this

shift: “Notice how the Cosmic Christ-'the light who enlightens all who have life'-is present in all

creatures, and therefore, all creatures are brother and sister to another. Francis takes seriously the

idea of the family of all creation, the interconnectivity of all creatures. All are bound together and

connected by the divine light.”78

78 Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, 113.

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For humans, both Francis and St. Clare understood the interconnectivity of creation to be

most fully expressed in the sacramental and prayer life of the Church. Seeing the unity of the

Body of Christ in the Eucharist is central in Franciscan theology and spiritual practice, yet

viewing this focus in an exclusively liturgical framework would fail to fully comprehend what

Francis and Clare taught. The physical reality of bread and wine, consecrated and shared by the

gathered congregation spoke to several realities at once. Franciscan theology emphasizes the

generosity of the divine gift of presence in the Eucharist, which as it is distributed to the gathered

community, unites the congregation as the Body of Christ.

This unification is not inaugurating a new reality, but rather a reconciliation of a present

reality. The Eucharist serves to heal divisions in an already extant, unified, Body of Christ.

William Cavanaugh illustrates this action in this poetic phrase: “[the Eucharist] is a literal re-

membering of Christ's body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of

many in His sacrifice.”79 The theme of human responsibility to respond to God's generosity is

central to Franciscan thought as well, for transforming our lives to reflect the reality of our unity

in the Body of Christ meant that we must first recognize that we are the image of God. As Ilia

Delio explains, “Bonaventure sees the congruent relationship between God and humanity

specifically in the relationship between the Word and humanity. The human person is an image

of God not in the general sense of being 'like' God, but in the specific sense of being 'like' the

Son. That is why Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, shows us what it means to be an image

of God in our humanity. The human person is created as an Image of God and that Image is Jesus

Christ.”80 We first recognize that we each, individually, are the image of Jesus Christ. We then

79 William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 229.80 Ilia Delio. Clare of Assisi: A Heart Full of Love. (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2007) 28.

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recognize that by receiving the Body of Christ, the Eucharist, we are rejoined to each other and

to God. As Shedd notes, “it is not the sacrament [Eucharist] which is holy, but the unity of the

Body.”81 Finally, we can become aware that we are called upon to make the reconciliation

between each person and God affected by the Eucharist a reconciliation in the gathered

community, as Christ cannot be divided.

This demands that we take our life as community, as church, quite seriously. We cannot

accept any inequality in the Body of Christ, nor can we accept any division. As we are the image

of Jesus Christ, we must reflect the generosity and sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Our common

life must be centered around mutual self-sacrifice and generosity towards the other. What is most

challenging about this is that we must live in this reality at all times, so that we can come to the

Eucharist reconciled. While the Eucharist will reconcile our divisions, we can only respond

effectively to this reconciliation by living every day in the discipline of the life of a disciple of

Christ.

Conclusion

A hermeneutic of the Body of Christ provides a lens for viewing the dynamic relationship

of God with humanity, and of individual humans with each other, as one of interdependence,

interconnection, and relationship in and through Christ as crucified Jesus and risen Christ. This

interdependence is the only complete hermeneutic for understanding a God who is defined by

relationship, a God who exists as Trinity, three in one, where each member of the three is bound

in love with all of humanity. Any rupture in this interconnected relationship, or attempts to bar

81 Shedd, Man in Community, 191.

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any member of the Body from achieving the complete will of God for him- or herself, must be

understood as sin. It is in this context that we will examine racism as sin in the next chapter.

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Chapter 3

Racism as Sin

I am guilty of “racism”-at least to the extent that, unconsciously, I have thought of the Negro as a permanent appendage on a basically white society, to whom I had obligations, as to an unfortunate relative; I don't think that consciously I have ever agreed to this, but I am sure that my easy acceptance of the white role in society which I play is in fact “racist,” and in fact is now seen as such by my black companions. And if they are to find their way into an integrated society, in which they are treated with the dignity you and I would want them to have, I am quite prepared to believe they must go through a time of intense polarization-a time of rejection of integration-until they feel they in fact have power to take a meaningful place in our society.82 -Stephen Bayne, Episcopal bishop, writing to a friend in 1968.

The Episcopal Church had begun to realize the immorality of church policies towards

African-American Episcopalians by 1967, and the General Convention Special Program (GCSP)

was a well-intentioned effort to repent of those policies. The Church made attempts at reform in

several areas of church life, including sacramental life, economic disparities amongst parishes,

and structural changes in leadership. These efforts were necessary to address the immediate

issues of a segregated Church. As the history of the GCSP attests, however, these efforts were not

entirely successful in achieving all, or even some, of their goals. Stephen Bayne was a white

bishop who was highly involved in GCSP who also understood the difficulty facing the project,

as well as any effort to achieve the Church's goals of repentance, reconciliation, and integration.

The quote printed above points to three of the core issues facing the efforts of repentance and

reform: first, the necessity for white people to acknowledge the racism inherent in the structures

82 John Booty, “Stephen Bayne's Perspective on the Church and the Civil Rights Movement, 1967-1970,” Anglican and Episcopal History, 64, no. 3 (September, 1995): 365-366.

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and theology of the Church; second, the need for white people to repent of the sins of

commission and omission that helped to build, develop and sustain the culture of racism in the

church; and third, for black people to forgive white people and be willing to reconcile with them,

moving forward in a new, integrated Church.

The Church has engaged in efforts to address the four issues of acknowledgment,

repentance of sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The proposed Truth and Reconciliation

Commission for the Diocese of Maryland is yet another effort in a long line of attempts. The

foundation upon which the success of the current Commission in achieving its goals will rest is

lies with the development of an understanding of racism as sin. Unless an action is

acknowledged as a sin, it cannot be repented of in any Christian context, nor can any person seek

God's grace in forgiving such sin, or even the grace of reconciliation with those who have

perpetuated such sin. In order for any productive development of an understanding of how God's

reconciliation will be achieved through the interdependence of all people in and through the

Body of Christ to occur, we must first understand how the sin of racism destroys the unity of the

Body of Christ.

The Evils of Racism

The work of Howard Thurman has been influential in documenting the evils of racism,

most especially the racism inherent in the Christian church. He presents a picture of a philosophy

which is irredeemably evil, and which taints every aspect of human life that it touches.

According to Thurman, the Church had become a tool for society, and had become incapable of

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taking anything resembling a prophetic stand against the institutions of society, including the

institutionalized racism of segregation. Thurman was clear on this point, stating that “it cannot be

denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and

the powerful and against the weak and oppressed-this, despite the gospel.”83 To be clear,

speaking of these conditions in the past tense does not in any way affirm that they are past

realities. No matter whether institutionalized racism still exists in the current American situation,

the Church is still at risk of being appropriated by society to grant legitimacy to the values of

society over and above the values of the Church. As James Cone reminds us,

churches are often incapable of attacking the root cause of oppression, because they are beneficiaries of the socio-political system responsible for it. It is because churches are so much a reflection of the values of the society in which they exist that they also have a serious credibility problem among people who regard their poverty and imprisonment as a by-product of an unjust social order.84

The Episcopal Church is not immune from these same societal pressures, as the previous chapter

attests.

Thurman presents, in Jesus and the Disinherited and The Luminous Darkness,

specifically, a useful framework for understanding the effects of racism on both oppressor and

oppressed. He understands racism as a complete nullification of all life and block to the

development of any sense of identity.85 He believes that racism is not only damaging to the

oppressed, but to the oppressor as well. Ironically, the oppressor is only able to maintain the

nullification of the oppressed by placing his own entire culture, society and self-understanding at

83 Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949), 31.84 James Cone, “What is the Church?” in Hammering Swords into Ploughshares-Essays in Honor of Archbishop

Mpilo Desmond Tutu. eds. Buti Tlhagale and Itumaleng Mosala. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986), 142.

85 C. Anthony Hunt, The Search for Peaceful Community: A Comparative Analysis of the Thinking of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr., 83.

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the disposal of the oppression itself. The existence of the oppressed therefore becomes essential

for the self-identity of the oppressor, and they develop a toxically co-dependent relationship. In

these two books, Thurman presents an outline of the three main evils of racism, both for the

oppressed and the oppressor: fear, deception, and hate. The following outlines his ideas on these

evils.

A) Fear

1. A deep sense of insecurity develops in any person who feels as if he does not

completely belong where he is.

2. This insecurity becomes fear when the sense of not belonging actually becomes

oppression.

3. Fear is justified, even necessary, when the threat of violence is used as a weapon

by the oppressor to maintain the structure of limitless power over the powerless.

4. The fear of a person lifts that person to a level of pre-eminence that should only

belong to God.

5. This policy of fear freezes the social status of the oppressed.

6. Segregation engenders fear in the oppressed, as it can only be established between

two groups that are unequal in power and control.

7. Segregation gives the oppressor the ability to visit the world of the oppressed, but

the fear of reprisal boxes the oppressed into their own, limited world.

8. Fear can become a generational phenomenon if the elders of a community counsel

a child to limit her expectations for what her life can be.

9. Religion is often used as a tool to justify oppression.

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10. The fear of an unknown, mythically dangerous oppressed “other” engenders a

sense of fear in the oppressor.

11. This sense of fear leads the oppressor to shield her conscience against any sense

of wrongdoing on her part in perpetuating the segregation.

12. The constant existence of a threat leads to a constant state of fear.

13. Even though fear is the safety net which the oppressed use as a protection against

complete nervous collapse, this constant state of alert will most probably lead to

the person's complete physical and mental death.

B) Deception

1. Oppression presents the oppressed a situation where her word will never have any

value, for she can never meet her oppressor on equal terms.

2. Any sense of community or honesty is impossible between the oppressed and the

oppressor-victory becomes the only thing of value.

3. The oppressor, recognizing that the oppressed has no incentive for honesty,

assumes that the oppressed will always act deceitfully, even if she is actually

acting honestly.

4. Deception will inevitably tend to destroy any sense of ethical value that either

oppressed or oppressor possesses.

5. When survival becomes the main focus of one's life, all sense of morality is

abdicated to the pursuit of survival. The deceiver, after shedding any moral

presuppositions, becomes a walking lie.

C) Hate

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1. Hatred begins in a situation in which there is contact without fellowship, devoid

of any of the primary overtures of warmth and fellow-feeling and genuineness.

2. Hate wills the nonexistence of another human being, and undermines the very

being of the other by affirming his non-existence and accepting this affirmation as

true and authentic.

3. Ill will, when embodied in a human being, becomes hatred walking on earth.

4. For the oppressed, resentment from bad treatment leads to bitterness, which in

turn leads to hatred.

5. If the oppressed accept their treatment and non-existence as normative, they can

grow to accept that they truly are worthless, and will begin to hate themselves.

6. In the face of such crushing blows to self-worth, in an effort to maintain any shred

of dignity, the oppressed will begin to use hate as a tool against the oppressor.

7. Hate of the oppressor can give the oppressed the only tool for achieving

connection within their community-a common hatred of the oppressor.

8. In the end, hatred destroys the individual and all that he might hold sacred.

The absolute evil of racism and segregation becomes quite obvious when presented in

such a linear way. Racism's component evils all follow a gradual progression from a compromise

of the values that give meaning to the lives of both the oppressed and oppressor to the eventual

spiritual, mental, and even physical death of the oppressed, as well as in some cases, the

oppressor.

The evils of racism are easy to locate in the institution of slavery, for slavery foisted the

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rather absurd deception of the non-existence and in-humanity onto persons that were, quite

obviously, humans. This deception was therefore foundational to the relationship between slave

and master. As Thurman notes, racism creates a rather odd, and toxic, co-dependency between

slave and master. The slave only really existed in relation to his master, as a tool for serving the

master.86

This relation of dependency actually backfires upon the master, however, for a master can

only exist in the presence of a slave. The proliferation of the racist Jim Crow segregation laws

attests to this fact. Instead of actually adhering to the stated intent of the U.S. Supreme Court's

Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling (1896)-that laws which created a separate, but equal, situation were

legal, the former slave masters created a situation where African Americans were placed, yet

again, in a situation of servitude and dependency. The oppressor discovered that he could not

maintain any sense of identity without his counterpoint, the oppressed black.

The evil of segregation is a more subtle form of non-existence, for it forces the oppressed

to participate in a social structure which strips them of dignity in what could be considered

analogous to “a million tiny cuts.” It constantly reminds the oppressed that while opportunity

exists for some in society, it does not exist for them. Segregation then forces the oppressed into

the humiliating position of having to explain to the children why not only the child, but the

parent as well, are not worthy to engage the world on equal terms with the oppressor. In his

Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. responds to the charge lain against

him and the Civil Rights Movement that they are acting impatiently in the face of a steady, yet

slow, progress towards equality and integration. King responds with a very lengthy list of the

86 Clarice J Martin, “The Haustafeln (Household Codes),” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, Cain Hope Felder, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 214.

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numerous and multi-faceted humiliations and injustices perpetrated against African-Americans

because of the system of segregation. King concludes by saying that after his interlocutors have

been forced to deal with any of the humiliations listed, when they are “plunged into an abyss of

injustice where they experience the blackness of corroding despair,” then they “will understand

why [blacks] find it difficult to wait.”87

Sin as Rejection and Exclusion

For much of the history of Western Christian theological thought, sin has been considered

through the lens of the individual person. The individual makes a choice to ignore God's specific

commandments, or laws. God's will is enshrined in God's laws, as stated either in the Bible or in

a “natural law” that one could read through the thoughtful application of reason. These laws were

established by God for the purpose of achieving God's will for humanity and creation. This will

entails ordering the use of human free will towards the glorification of God by humanity and

towards human salvation through human acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior.

Once Augustine made his very powerful argument for the existence of original sin,

however, the Christian understanding of sin was opened to include a concept of an inherent

brokenness in human nature imputed onto humanity from Adam's “original sin.”88 The sin of

Adam left the concept of the misuse of individual free will intact, yet argued that human free will

was irreparably broken, and would inevitably lead humans to make individual choices that were

consistently going to contravene God's will. The concept of original sin is not universally 87 Martin Luther King, Jr, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

James M. Washington, ed. (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 293.88 Augustine of Hippo, “Augustine on Fallen Human Nature,” in The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition,

Alister E McGrath, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 416

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acknowledged in all modern theologies of sin, however. Original sin plays a vital role in some

conceptions of sin, such as the Reform tradition, while feminist theology either does not consider

it important, or rejects it all together.89 I feel that the doctrine of original sin not only diminishes

the potential for human goodness, it also fails to recognize the social and structural aspects of

sin.

The church exists as a human expression of God's will for glorification and salvation,

either as the main conduit through which salvation and glorification flow between humanity and

God, or as the community of believers in which humans receive the guidance and sustenance

necessary in order to lead the individual believer to salvation. The communal nature of

Christianity is a significant aspect of Roman Catholic liturgical and moral life, whether through

participation in a communal sacramental life, or through the existence of a universal, or

“catholic,” church.90 Communal elements are less inherently obvious in Protestant traditions, yet

the emphasis on communal worship and support is deeply embedded in the Protestant ethos.91

Beyond ecclesiology and liturgics, questions of morality and sin in the Western Christian

theological tradition have been overwhelmingly presented as matters pertinent to the individual's

relationship with God. This is based on a theological anthropology of the human person where

God exists beyond the human person, forever apart from a sinful humanity. The most prominent

modern expositor of this doctrine was Karl Barth. Barth categorically denied any understanding

of God that did not recognize the unbridgeable gap between humanity and God: “The Gospel is

not a religious message to inform humanity of their divinity, or to tell them how to become

89 Daphne Hampson, “Daphne Hampson on Feminist Approaches to Sin,” in The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition, Alister E McGrath, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 479-482.

90 “The Second Vatican Council on the Nature of the Church,” in The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition, Alister E McGrath, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 529-532.

91 Stanley Hauerwas, “Stanley Hauerwas on the Importance of the Church,” in The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition, Alister E McGrath, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 540-542.

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divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from humanity. Salvation comes to them

from him, and because they are, as human beings, incapable of knowing him, they have no right

to claim anything from him.”92 Humans, due to their incapacity of ever gaining any true

knowledge of God or of God's will, will therefore inevitably sin. Salvation, therefore, can only

come directly from God to human. While this salvation may be a corporate action that God

performs on behalf of the entirety of humanity, individual humans can only receive salvation on

their own behalf, and not in any way aid the salvation of any other person. If salvation is

understood as salvation from the consequences of human sinfulness, then the individual sinner

must look to God for salvation from his individual sin against God.

This individuated conception of the human person and sinfulness is by no means the only

theological statement about human nature and sin. Emil Brunner, Gustavo Gutierrez, and

Miroslav Volf have all argued for a more comprehensive, corporate understanding of humanity

and sin.

Emil Brunner rejected Barth's concept of the “complete otherness of God,” instead

proposing a partnership between God and humanity-the “I-thou” relationship. The core

expression of this relationship is love, both the love of God for humanity, and the love of

humanity for God. Brunner resurrects free will, making the argument that only a truly “free” will

is capable of granting God what God desires: “a creature which is not only, like other creatures, a

mere object of His will, as if it were the reflector of his glory as Creator.” God desires for

humans more than simply a reflexive action which grants love simply because that is what the

creature is created for. Rather, God desires “a free spiritual act, a correspondence to His

92 Karl Barth, “Karl Barth on the Otherness of God,” in The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition, Alister E McGrath, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 225.

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speaking. Only thus can His love really impart itself as love.”93 This partnership results in an “I-

thou” relationship. Only a free “self,” or “I,” can respond to a thou- “only a Self which is self-

determining can freely answer God.” God must grant humans freedom of will in order to freely

receive back from humans the glorification, partnership, and love that God desires of humanity.

This implies, of course, that in order for humans to freely respond to God's call for our

love, that humans must already possess the ability to recognize God, and to be able to share with

God the love that God desires. If one follows the concept of “like following like,” then the

inevitable consequence must be that humans possess a spark of the divine and the divine love

within their nature. This is not to deny that God is still “other,” and that humanity works with a

handicap which so readily bars humanity from being in relationship with God, nor of sharing

love with God. The “I-thou” conception of the divine-human relationship simply opens the door

for a deeper interaction between the divine and the human. As James Cone states, “God is active

in human history...if God is not involved in human history, then all theology is useless, and

Christianity itself is a mockery, a hollow, meaningless diversion.”94

This interaction also opens a space for sin to be understood less as a contravention of

God's moral code in a legalistic sense, and instead brings the concept of love into dialogue with

human sinfulness. Again, this is not to say that the relationship between the withholding of love

and sin is a purely modern conceit. In fact, John's Gospel speaks consistently about how the

disciples should love each other as Jesus has loved them. The First Letter of John states quite

simply that “God is love.” (1 John 4:8). Gustavo Gutierrez makes a plea for Christianity to return

to a concept of sin based on love and service to each other, as opposed to a legalistic contract

93 Emil Brunner, “Emil Brunner on the Image of God,” in The Christian Theology Reader, Third Edition, Alister E McGrath, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 465-466.

94 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 6.

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between God and human. Gutierrez states that humans are meant to be in full communion with

God and with most complete fellowship with other human beings. Salvation comes in loving in

the same complete way as God does, “to enter into the circle of charity which unites the Three

Persons of the Trinity.”95 Accepting this reality is salvation. Human relationships are based on the

foundation of love of God for humanity, and love of humans for each other.

Sin is rejecting this foundation, and to refuse to love each other, and God. To sin against

each other is to reject human companionship and relationality, and to see God in the other. As

Matthew reminds us in his text, Jesus stated that “anything you did not do for one of these,

however humble, you did not do for me.” (25:45). Sin must be more than individual guilt-it must

have a social dimension. We must not act merely out of obligation towards God's law when we

act towards our fellow human beings. We must instead act out of a feeling of love and service

towards our fellow human, whom we must treat as we would treat Christ.

This forces us not to separate ourselves from our brothers and sisters in Christ. Love is

not simply expressed in action or feeling towards another person, in a directive manner. Love

must engage in relationship. Augustine reminds us, love cannot truly exist without a lover and a

beloved. If God is love, then God is relationship. God is the relationship between God and

human, and between human and human. To extend the argument further, God is therefore

existent in every single person, for humans cannot truly love each other without God. With great

apologies to Barth, God is far from “other”-if we take Matthew seriously, God is in fact

completely engaged in human relationship. To break the bonds between humans, to break the

bonds of love, would be to break bonds with God, and therefore, to sin.

Miroslav Volf expresses this interaction in terms of exclusion and embrace. Every time

95 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (London: SCM Press, 2001), 187.

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we “exclude” others from relationship with us, we sin. Volf uses the terminology of sin in

relation to exclusion for the express purpose of naming as sin actions and attitudes normally

considered “virtues.” Volf uses Jesus' frequent disregarding and dismissal of the Jewish “purity”

laws against sinners as examples of virtues of holiness and purity gone horribly awry. The Jewish

people had forgotten the communal nature of God's desire for the holiness of the Jews. God did

not desire some of the Jews as “lights to the nations”-God actually desired all Jews to serve as

lights. Each Jew had the responsibility to aid every other Jew on the path towards holiness and

the right relationship with God. To exclude any Jew from fellowship due to a perceived

transgression of purity would be to act as God. Only God possessed the right to pass judgment on

humanity and its sinfulness.

This is not to say that Jesus sought to embrace sinful or evil behavior, or to state that there

were times when humans were not deserving of correction for their sinful behavior or attitudes.

Jesus instead sought to bring the “impure” into fellowship in order to show the love of God

towards them. “The mission of Jesus consisted not simply in re-naming the behavior that was

considered “sinful” but also in re-making the people who have actually sinned or have suffered

misfortune.”96 Jesus as Redeemer of Mankind sought the redemption and healing of all of

mankind. This could only occur through the expression of love for all, and human love for God.

Engaging Brunner, Gutierrez and Volf in conversation, therefore, would result in the

following series of moral statements: To segregate ourselves from our brother in Christ would be

to segregate ourselves from Christ, and to break relationship with God. To deny the full humanity

of a brother in Christ would be to deny the full humanity of Christ. To create a separate

96 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 73.

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sacramental for our sister in Christ would be to create a separate sacramental for Christ. To go

further would belabor the point. Sin is social. Our actions never simply harm ourselves. Every

time that we fail to act out of love towards ourselves or towards others, we are failing to love

God.

By acting a certain way towards each other, we are acting a certain way towards God.

There is therefore an irrevocable link between humans and God, an interpenetration of the

human and divine. Sin is rejecting, excluding, marginalizing, violating, and hampering the full

human expression of our brothers and sisters, for by so doing, we are sinning against both our

brother as brother, and our brother as a vessel for the divine spark of God. We are not only

harming our brother, we are disobeying God's commands to love God above all, even the God in

the “other” that is different from us, that we do not understand, that we fear. The implication of

this for this examination is that racism and all of its attendant institutions, actions, philosophies

and theologies are incontrovertibly and irredeemably sinful.

Sin as Mutual Exclusion and Abandonment

In a way, during the last century, the Episcopal Church moved from a form of exclusion

of blacks that sought to dominate, to a form of exclusion where both blacks and whites in the

diocese sought to abandon each other. The church moved from a place of subjugation of one

group over another, to a place where each group simply decided not to interact with the other.

While the subjugation of one community by the other may have been the root cause of the

current abandonment, both communities are culpable in perpetuating the separation. The

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difference between these two modes was elucidated by Miroslav Volf:

[One] strategy of exclusion is to assign to the other the status of inferior beings. We make sure that they cannot live in our neighborhoods, get certain kinds of jobs, receive equal pay or honour; they must stay in their proper place, which is to say, the place we have assigned for them. As Lucas Beauchamp's neighbours put it in William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, they must be “niggers” first, and then we may be prepared to treat them as human beings. We subjugate so we can exploit them in order to increase our wealth or simply inflate our egos. This is exclusion by domination, spread all over the globe in more or less diffuse forms...[Another] form of exclusion is becoming prevalent not only in the way in which the rich of the West and North relate to the poor of the South but in the way that suburbs relate to inner cities, or the jet-setting “creators of high value” relate to the rabble beneath them. It is exclusion as abandonment. Like the priest and the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan, we simply cross to the other side and pass by, minding our own business (Luke 10:31). If others neither have goods we want nor can perform services we need, we make sure to keep them at a safe distance. We close ourselves off from them so that their emaciated and tortured bodies can make no inordinate claims on us.97

How are we able to come to a place of reconciliation, let alone a place where we can understand

the fact that our separation is perpetuating the sins of racism and subjugation if we cannot even

share the same physical space, occasionally share a meal together, or even worship together in

the same place? Recognizing the bond that we all share in Christ is essential for accomplishing

any reconciliation. This bond takes the form of our love for each other in Christ. Joseph Liechty

explains how this process works in a practical sense:

[One] characteristic of inner disposition is harder to name, but still more crucial, and functions as the fuel for reconciliation. In terms of the dynamics of personal reconciliation it is easily named: it is love, in the entirely unsentimental sense of concern for another and a willingness to extend oneself for that other. The same applies to social and political reconciliation, but love is not a usable term for such purposes, so I borrow a phrase from Byron Bland, director of the Stanford Center for Conflict and Negotiation. Bland describes reconciliation as driven by the sense that somehow “we belong together”: “reconciliation,” he says, “involves a profound rediscovery that those who have been deeply divided in the past do

97 Miroslav Volf. “A Theology of Embrace for a World of Exclusion,” in Explorations in Reconciliation: New Directions in Theology, ed. by David Tombs and Joseph Liechty. (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 25.

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indeed belong together in the future.” This profound sense may be the result of high idealism or of a kind of revelation or of social analysis or even of grudging realism-that is, unless we have a future together, however distasteful and distressing that notion, we have no future. But whatever the reasons, without this sense that “we belong together,” reconciliation will not happen.98

As Christians, we understand that we are bound together. This reality exists whether we

act accordingly, or even acknowledge it in any way whatsoever. The challenge lies in whether we

will be able to accept this reality in our current situation, as humans living in the world. We must

accept Liechty's proposition, for it not only speaks to our physical reality but also to the divine

reality. In a practical, this-worldly way, we will never achieve reconciliation without finally

acknowledging that our status quo of abandonment, exclusion, and atomization is exactly what is

perpetuating our sin, and holding us back from following the will of God that we thrive as a

community of faith. Through Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, we are bound together with

God in a new covenant, a covenant in Christ's body and blood.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have examined the implication of interdependence, and the

breach of interdependence in the sin of racism, on the relationship between God and human, as

well as between human and human. In the next chapter, we will examine what form this

interdependence takes in the person of Jesus Christ, who as Incarnation of God as human, gives

actual form the interdependence between God and human.

98 Joseph Liechty. “Putting Forgiveness in its Place: The Dynamics of Reconciliation,” in Explorations in Reconciliation: New Directions in Theology, ed. by David Tombs and Joseph Liechty. (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006) 67.

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Chapter 4

Interdependence in the Body of Christ

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

(Matthew 5:43-48, NRSV)

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live within the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.99

-Martin Luther King, Letter From Birmingham City Jail

The beauty of the above statements by Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., respectively, is

that they present an ideal of Christian life which takes the interconnectedness inherent in the

Body of Christ seriously, and commits to abiding by such principles. The challenge of such

statements-that is, apart from the obvious danger of equating the words of Jesus with King's-lies

with the question of practicality. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” is grand

rhetoric, yet how exactly does it apply to a community riven by broken relationships and

centuries of hurt and pain? As James Cone states, “the acid test of any ecclesiastical statement is

99 King, A Testament of Hope, 290.

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whether it has taken sufficient account of the actual world in which liturgical confessions are

made.”100 Before we engage in any discussion about the composition of a framework for

reconciliation in an interdependent community, we must determine the composition of a

community of interdependence.

One of the best recent explications of the consequences for interdependence in a Christian

community is the work of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, in their book Resident

Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. After examining the implications of their vision of an

interdependent Christian community, I will then present what I believe are the implications of

their vision on the work of the Diocesan Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Communities of Interdependence

In their book, Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon embark upon a

rather ambitious project. In their own words, “this book is about a renewed sense of what it

means to be a Christian.”101 Inherent in this statement is the radical nature of their project-not

only do they seek to breathe new life and energy into what being Christian “means,” but they

also assume that the nature of Christian identity requires a complete reappraisal, that they of

course provide. This project is based on the theory that what we currently understand as

“Christianity” is actually at best a misrepresentation of Jesus' message, and at worst a complete

capitulation of Christianity to the state and to culture. The authors make the radical claim that

over the centuries, the Christian church has lost touch with the true message of Jesus, thereby

100 Cone, “What is the Church?,” 144.101 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989), 15

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tainting the entire swath of Christian history and theology with the theological compromises that

are necessary to achieve any kind of synthesis between Jesus' radical communitarian message,

embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, and the values of wealth, power, and nationalism.

In light of this reality, the authors call upon the Christian church to return to the life of

community called for by Jesus, and as lived out in the early Christian church. The earliest

Christians lived in an eschatological expectation that their way of life, and their community, was

a true embodiment of Jesus' teachings, and, if lived faithfully, would usher in the impending

Kingdom of God. This expectation gave them the strength and hope to endure centuries of

persecution and death.

The authors use the language of a “Christian colony” composed of “resident aliens” in a

world at times ignorant of, and at other times openly hostile to, their message of a God who

spoke truth. The God that they proclaim also permitted himself to be killed in a demonstration of

divine love, forgiveness and power that does not make “rational sense,” in any manner that any

Roman, or post-Enlightenment person for that matter, could rationally comprehend.

They embrace the opportunity that it represents to proclaim the adventure that is salvation

in Jesus Christ. They do not view salvation as an individual experience, however; in fact, they do

not entirely recognize Christianity, or religion, as an “individual” experience that is only

understood as an individual relationship with God.102 They view every aspect of an individual's

experience of Christianity through the lens of the church community, and even go so far as to say

that one can only make the individual decision to become Christian, acquire the virtues necessary

to live a Christian life, receive the support necessary to remain a Christian through the inevitable

trials of living a counter-cultural life, and be guided through those trials, in the context of the

102 Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, 52

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Christian church community.

This point is vital for understanding their vision of the radical Christian life. The

Christian cannot be a Christian outside of a community, for as God is a relational Trinity, God

can only be understood in relationship. We cannot see God except in the face of the other. Two

theologians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Desmond Tutu, both stress this relationality in their

thought.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book, The Communion of Saints, presents a vision of

individual human as social beings who are actually composed of three parts, or “elements”: God,

person, and community, which Bonhoeffer refers to as the “basic ontic relations of social being

as a whole.” As social beings, therefore, humans cannot exist without those three elements, nor

“outside” of them. “It is in relation to persons and personal community that the concept of God is

formed.”103 One cannot speak of God without implying community as well as person, for neither

community nor person exists without God, or without each other. Each person is therefore

inextricably linked with both God and with every other person, for while God's existence is not

dependent on community or persons, the individual person cannot really be said to exist without

relation to her community or to God. The community lives within the person, and the person

within the community, with Jesus Christ as the force which gives it purpose and meaning.

Bonhoeffer takes this a step further, however. As person cannot exist without God or

community, nor the same for community without person and God, then the church is crucial in

some sense for Jesus as well. “The social significance of Christ is decisive. He is only present in

the church, that is, where the Christian community is united for brotherly-sisterly love through

103 Josiah Young, III, No Difference in the Fare (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 53.

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preaching and the Lord's supper.”104 Bonhoeffer presents here the classic Protestant “marks of the

Church,” as defined by John Calvin: preaching of the Word of God and the proper administration

of the sacraments. According to Bonhoeffer, the daily life and practice of the Church are

essential for Jesus to be present, and for humans to be able to “see” and recognize God and God's

work. Bonhoeffer is stating here that God can only be experienced in a communal way, through

the daily interactions of individuals in community, worshipping God.

Desmond Tutu also views personhood in light of community, as expressed in the

complex African epistomological concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu in Xhosa means “humanity,” but

the concept behind the word is far more complex. A direct translation of the concept has yet to be

accomplished, but it could mean anything on a spectrum between “each individual's humanity is

ideally expressed in relationship with others” and “a person depends on other people to be a

person.”105 In other words, Tutu understands the human person as inexorably social-the

individual does not exist on his own, as a sole actor. The individual can exist in any meaningful

sense only in conversation and relationship with his community.

As a created being, however, the individual does not simply exist in a web of relationality

with her fellow human beings. As creature, the human being is also made in the image of God,

and therefore is marked as imago dei. We are all the imago dei, and therefore see God in each

other. Yet, as person is only understood in relation to other persons, then imago dei is only

understood in relation to others. We can only comprehend the acts of God in the world in relation

to others. This viewpoint, incidentally, demonstrates the African roots of the African American

Christian hermeneutic of personhood, which also sees the “unity of the African American with 104 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, Geffrey B. Kelly and E. Barton Nelson, eds. (New York:

HarperOne Publishers, 1995), 57.105 Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu. (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press.

1997), 39.

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all humankind, both in creation and in redemption.”106

Tutu would agree with Hauerwas and Willimon in viewing the community as essential for

the development of the Christian into an integrated person. Tutu would stress, however, that the

development of virtues can only occur in the context of a program of training the individual

Christian in the spiritual practices, such as the true worship of God and discipleship. Without

regularly engaging in these practices, the Christian will be unable to see Christ.107 These

practices are meaningless outside of a Christian community, however. Tutu would also agree

with Bonhoeffer, therefore, that the person can never see Christ outside of the Christian

community that is fully engaged with the daily life of worship and the training of discipleship.

Hauerwas and Willimon state unequivocally that Christians cannot proclaim a Christian

ethic of the Sermon on the Mount while also proclaiming an ethic of the world, which they state

often involves domination, subjugation, and neglect of the very people whom Jesus claims as

blessed and amongst whom we are called to live and work. This ethic, finally, must be reflected

in the lives and ministry of the clergy of the church. The church requires leaders able to lay claim

to the awesome gift of leadership that God bestows upon them, and to neither be tempted to

collude with the world, nor to view themselves as more worthy to proclaim the Gospel message

than the congregation that God has granted them to serve. For the church to become a colony of

resident aliens, the church requires strong and vibrant leaders trained and willing to foster and

nurture that colony.

Hauerwas and Willimon present a compelling vision of the Christian life, one where the

individual Christian is only understood in relation to his or her place in a Christian community.

106 David T. Shannon, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, Cain Hope Felder, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 101.

107 Michael Battle, Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me (New York: Seabury Books, 2009), 60.

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Paul Wadell, in his book Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, adds Aquinas' understanding

of this truth: “the deepest truth of our being is that collectively we are made for intimacy and

communion with God, and nothing else will content us.”108 A vital aspect of this understanding is

the central role that narrative and story play in defining who we are as Christian individuals, both

of our own story and of the community's story, the Bible. These separate narratives are woven

together in the context of the community, where Christians make the story of the Bible their own

by bringing it to life in the active witness of their communal life-with the story of Jesus as the

primary focus of what Christian witness embodies. As James Cone helpfully reminds us, “every

ecclesiastical statement is at the same time a christological statement.”

Wadell affirms the centrality of story in the moral life, especially the story of Jesus.

Wadell defines the end purpose of the moral life as happiness, and claims that “a life of

happiness requires being initiated into the story of God that comes to us in Jesus and becoming

part of the community that promises to make that story its own.”109

The authors do not view the Christian community as a monolithic entity which demands

obedience from its members; however, nor do they claim that the community proscribes

individual human expression. The community instead provides the opportunity for individuals to

express their human identity-that is, as children of God, loved by his Son, Jesus Christ. As

Aquinas states in the Summa Contra Gentiles, “the ultimate end of all things is to become like

unto God.”110

With this opportunity comes a responsibility for each other, for our education, and if

108 Paul Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008), 26

109 Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, 136110 Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Contra Gentiles,” in From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian

Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, et. al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 110.

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necessary, for our edification. John Howard Yoder speaks of this process as one of “binding and

loosing,” reflecting Matthew 18:15, 18, where it states, “If another member of the church sins

against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to

you, you have regained that one. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in

heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” This implies that we have a

responsibility for each of us to hold the other in the community accountable to the commitment

that we each have made to the community, including the commitment to abide by the standards

of the community. This process is not in any way designed to punish, exclude or alienate, but as

Yoder describes it, “the intention of the procedure is reconciliation...out of this utterly personal

exchange, comes the confirmation (or perchance the modification) of the rules of the community,

which can therefore be spoken of, with the technical language of the rabbis, as having 'bound' or

'loosed.' Every element in the passage cited from Matthew 18 has something to say to the way

we think today about decision-making in the context of faith.”111 Our lives, as Christians, are not

our own anymore. Our lives have communal significance, our lives have communal

consequence, yet, our lives also have communal support and succor.

The importance of story for Christian identity is expressed here as well. The main

Enlightenment project for Christian identity was the one inaugurated by Immanuel Kant, which

attempted to see humans as individual moral agents, separated from the entire range of our

experiences, traditions-basically, everything that is constituted in our our “story.” While we may

be the only people who can view our lives through our own eyes, those eyes are conditioned by

the community around us who shapes us. As Wadell notes, “our deepest moral convictions are

111 John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 27.

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formed by the relationships that shape us, the experiences and practices that define us, the

traditions that have formed us, and the communities with which we have aligned our lives.”112

Hauerwas and Willimon focus on the virtues as the main tools that enable Christians to

live as Christians, in community. Laws, sin, conversion, conscience, freedom, and all other

aspects of the individual Christian life are all considered as aspects of how the community

functions, yet the virtues are considered the primary tools that we use in order to discover how

we are to best live in community with one another in a way that is pleasing to God. Wadell

agrees, stating that “the most satisfying life for humans is the virtuous life embraced as

completely as possible now...we cannot acquire the virtues necessary for goodness without

friends.”113 Hauerwas and Willimon would simply substitute the “church” for “friends.”

This communal life is seen as the avenue through which Christians bring the love of Jesus

into the world, by welcoming all persons into the community, regardless of what burdens their

unique situations might place upon the community. Justice, in the eyes of the authors, is only

present when the love of God is available, and provided, for all.

This understanding of justice demands a “radical unselfishness” where others in the

community are not viewed as a resource to be exploited, or as a means to an end. Martin Luther

King, Jr. reflected on this point in light of the intersection of the sanitation workers' strike in

Memphis in 1968 with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Levite and the priest both asked

the question, “if I stop and help this man, what will happen to me?” In light of the risk of

engaging in the sanitation worker's strike, King stated that the question is “not, if I stop to help

the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office

112 Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, 139113 Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, 27-28.

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every day and every week as a pastor?” Nor was the question, “if I stop to help this man in need,

what will happen to me?” Instead, King argued that the question must be the same question that

the Samaritan asked about the injured traveler: “If I do not stop to help [them], what will happen

to them?”114 Justice can thus only occur if we ensure that we do justice first.

The most important role of the Christian community, therefore, lies in the creation and

sustenance of a witnessing Christian community, reflective of the love of Jesus for all people, as

expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon calls upon us to spread the love of Jesus

amongst all people; though, not because we are called upon to bring justice into the world, or to

transform culture into a culture more reflective of Christian values. Rather, the community is

called to spread the love of God amongst all people simply because that's what God does, and

that's how God envisions God's kingdom. The community, as a precursor to the Kingdom, is

therefore called upon to act as if the Kingdom already existed here, on earth.

Dorothy Day agreed wholeheartedly, and the Catholic Worker movement is a perfect

example of this in action. Day sought a “reconstruction of the social order”115 based upon the

Sermon on the Mount, which would be reflected in her Catholic Worker houses-communities

where every single member of God's kingdom was welcome.

Hauerwas and Willimon realize that this is in complete contradiction to the two other

main strands of understanding how God calls upon God's people to act. The one way sees a

dichotomy between good and evil, often equated with a specific understanding of the Christian

life, and seeks to separate from that which is seen as evil, in an attempt to remain pure and good.

The Anabaptist witness, as expressed in the Schleitheim Confession of Faith, is emblematic of 114 King, A Testament of Hope, 284-5.115 Katherine De Sutter Jordan, “The Nonviolence of Dorothy Day,” in From Christ to the World: Introductory

Readings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, et. al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 444.

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this strand of thinking.116 This statement was unanimously agreed upon by a group of Swiss

Anabaptists in 1527 in Schleitheim, Siwtzerland. The confession established the main points of

Anabaptist belief with regard to baptism, “the ban” or excommunication, communion,

“separation from evil,” pastoral leadership, violence, and oath-taking. Each point stresses the

need to separate from those who were not considered righteous in order to maintain the

righteousness of the community.

The more prevalent viewpoint, and in the end, the viewpoint that Hauerwas and Willimon

focused so much attention on showing the inadequacies of for the purpose of replacing, was the

viewpoint expressed by H. Richard Niebuhr in his book, Christ and Culture-that of the church

getting involved in culture, of the Christian even claiming his membership in the state as a

positive aspect of his identity. Niebuhr expresses this understanding most succinctly: “we come

into being under the rules of family, neighborhood and nation, subject to the regulation of our

action by others. Against these rules we can and do rebel, yet find it necessary-morally necessary,

that is-to consent to some laws and to give ourselves rules.”117

The proposals laid out by Hauerwas and Willimon are radical in the sense that they run

counter to the majority of thinking on Christian ethics at least post-Enlightenment. Strands of

their thought are present in minority corners of the Christian church, such as the Anabaptists and

the Quakers, and in the thought of a few foundational Christian thinkers, such as Aquinas, and

the writer of Luke/Acts. Their thesis that the early church considered community in the way that

Hauerwas and Willimon view community is borne out in the scriptures themselves. Any

116 The Swiss Brethren, “Excerpts from The Schleitheim Confession of Faith,” in From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, et. al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 285.

117 H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Meaning of Responsibility,” in From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics, ed. Wayne G. Boulton, et. al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 197-8.

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argument against their thesis must contend with the powerful truth that the Gospels do assert the

vision of Jesus as a non-violent, anti-establishment radical who lived in a radically inclusive

community, and taught his disciples exclusively in the context of the community. Hauerwas and

Willimon make a powerful argument when they state all one would need to do is to read the

Gospels to see that Jesus taught that this form of life was the form that God desired, and that

every theology and ethics that fails to meet this standard is acceding to human weakness, and

should not be considered as anything less than flawed.

Only by living in a community of radical equality, where each of our individual gifts are

celebrated and recognized as divinely given, can we ever achieve a society where the destructive

zero-sum game of false status and power does not hold sway. We will only be able to achieve this

society if we all imitate Christ and die daily to our individual selves for the greater glory of God.

Looking Towards A Framework of Reconciliation

The Diocese of Maryland proved with the election of Bp. Sutton that, in many ways,

racist paternalism had been entirely rejected and buried within the consciousness of the diocese,

and that the church was looking to mark an entirely new chapter in the handling of race relations

in the diocese. And still, the diocese is faced with the reality that many in the diocese cannot

move forward towards the proclamation of a united diocese until they are granted the opportunity

to achieve a greater place of equality in the diocese, and the opportunity to give voice to their

memories, kept silent for so long. As Archbp. Desmond Tutu stated,

If we are going to move on and build a new kind of world community there must be a way in which we can deal with a sordid past. The most effective way would

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be for perpetrators or their descendants to acknowledge the awfulness of what happened and the descendants of the victims to respond by granting forgiveness, providing something can be done, even symbolically, to compensate for the anguish experienced, whose consequences are still being lived through today. It may be, for instance, that race relations in the United States will not improve significantly until Native Americans and African Americans can get the opportunity to tell their stories and reveal the pain that sits in the pit of their stomachs as a painful legacy of dispossession and slavery. We saw in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how the act of telling one's story has a cathartic, healing effect.118

And so, as Archbp. Tutu explains, reclaiming memory and truth-telling are an essential

aspect of reconciliation. By telling stories, we can acknowledge wrongs done, repent and ask for

forgiveness, have it be offered, and then walk towards reconciliation.

Yet, in several key ways, the situation presented to the diocesan Truth and Reconciliation

Commission is different from other commissions, including the famed South African TRC, and

requires a different hermeneutic and framework. For one, the sins perpetuated on the current

members of the diocese are sins of omission and ignorance, and not of significant physical or

emotional violence. The diocese is not faced with deciding whether to grant amnesty to people

who have committed crimes. The diocese is also not considering coming to terms with the strife

endemic to political transition. The Commission's tasks are not political-they are theological.

And so, the hermeneutics used in examining political conflict, such as racism, are not effective

hermeneutics for a theological enterprise. Of course, politics informs the theological, for humans

reside in a political world as well as a theological one, and both spheres bleed into each other. As

Christians, however, we believe that God has created an alternative reality, an unbreakable bond

amongst all Christians by virtue of the grace of God, represented in baptism and renewed in the

sharing of communion.

118 Desmond Tutu. No Future Without Forgiveness. (New York: Image Books, Doubleday, 2000) 278-9.

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Conclusion

While human reality exists on a horizontal plane, where the sin of racism is played out in

all of its virulent forms, divine reality exists on both a vertical and horizontal plane, bringing all

creation into reconciliation with itself by virtue of Christ's humanity, and all creation into

reconciliation with God by virtue of Christ's divinity. Therefore, we must formulate any efforts at

reconciliation, such as any diocesan Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, along the lines of a

hermeneutic of the Body of Christ. In the next chapter, we will examine how Franciscan spiritual

practice provides an applicable framework for placing the work of the Commission within a

hermeneutic of the Body of Christ.

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Chapter 5

Founding the Work of the Commission in Franciscan Spiritual Practice

It is imperative that we begin to understand the reconciliation process of the diocese as

one where we are not simply studying and remembering the legacy and pain of racism and

slavery, not just offering a much-longed for and much-needed space for memory to be reclaimed

and celebrated, and not simply addressing the structural realities that have permitted the sin of

separation to continue, but are actually asking God to forgive our sins of racism, separation, and

abandonment, and to grant us the grace of reconciliation with God and with each other in Christ's

body. This effort will require that we work within a framework that recognizes not only the

necessity to celebrate and reclaim memory, but also to provide a way of placing that reclamation

in the form of sacrament, all undergirded with a profound and all-encompassing emphasis on the

Body of Christ as the main way that Christians can see each other. Franciscan spiritual practice

provides just such a framework.

Francis found perfect joy in absolute obedience to the Gospel message to live in

simplicity, keeping nothing for himself, seeking repentance at all times, living amongst the poor

and marginalized in his society, doing all in his power to ensure that he reflected the Gospel

message of love as sacrifice for the good of the other. This has been called the “active” side of

Franciscan spirituality. The “contemplative” side of Franciscan spirituality is just as vital-that of

prayer, receiving communion, studying God's word, and meditating on, and in, God. Francis saw

these as two sides of the same coin, and understood that both were essential to achieving a full

life of service to God. Modern Franciscan spiritual practice reflects these integrated aspects of

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the active and contemplative life with a rule that is entirely in spirit, and in part in letter, the same

rule that Francis established by his rather challenging example. As I am discussing reconciliation

for an Anglican church, I will speak from the perspective of the Anglican Franciscan tradition.

This tradition has its roots in the fervor of the Oxford Movement, when Anglicans sought to

remember the reconciliation between Catholic and Reformed that served as the theological

foundation of Anglicanism. I will examine the role that seven different aspects of Franciscan

spirituality play in the work of reconciliation. These aspects are humility, penance, Eucharist,

communal prayer, study, solidarity with the marginalized, and joy. I will use extensive quotations

from the Principles of the Rule of the Third Order, Society of Saint Francis, when explaining the

Franciscan understanding of these seven aspects of Franciscan spirituality. These quotations can

be found on the website of the Third Order, at http://www.tssf.org/principles.shtml.

Humility

We always keep before us the example of Christ, who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and who, on the last night of his life, humbly washed his disciple's feet. We likewise seek to serve one another with humility. Humility confesses that we have nothing that we have not received and admits the fact of our insufficiency and our dependence on God. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said, “No spiritual house can stand for a moment except on the foundation of humility. It is the first condition of a joyful life within any community. The faults that we see in others are the subject of prayer rather than of criticism. We take care to cast out the beam from our own eye before offering to remove the speck from another's. We are made ready to accept the lowest place when asked, and to volunteer to take it. Nevertheless, when asked to undertake work of which we feel unworthy or incapable, we do not shrink from it on grounds of humility, but confidently attempt it through the power that is made perfect in weakness. (Living with the Principles of the Order, Days 22-24)

Humility is the first practice mentioned for it is in many ways the foundation for all of the

other practices in this framework. Placing oneself in a position of humility allows oneself to see

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the needs of the other without one's selfish needs and desires clouding that vision. Humility

allows us to be able and willing to release our grip on our own claims and to see the other as

having right to his claim. Humility centers us in love, for it allows us to see the other as beloved

by God. Humility also prepares us to do the hard work of acting on our love for the other. Quite

often this work may seem at first to be beyond our capacities, or below our station, and yet

through humility we become open to the reality that because God calls us to do this work, it

cannot be beyond our capacity, nor below our station, for God gives us each the work that God

has created us to be able to achieve. This work may also call upon us to make sacrifices not only

of our time and our presumptions, but also of the privileges and wealth afforded to us by sake of

our station. As Richard Foster states, we must come to accept that Jesus teaches that the authority

of God does not recognize the outward symbols of power and privilege that human authority

leans upon in order to grant it legitimacy. Divine, or spiritual authority often holds none of these

signs of privilege, yet is far more legitimate than any human authority.119 Humility will allow

members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to continually see Christ in the other

person, to listen to Christ speak through each other's stories and perspectives, and to be

continuously willing to sacrifice their own positions in order to serve the needs of each other.

Penance

We seek to love all those to whom we are bound by ties of family or friendship. Our love for them increases, as our love for Christ grows deeper...We are on our guard against anything that might injure this love, and we seek reconciliation with those from whom we are estranged. We seek the same love for those with whom we have little natural affinity, for this kind of love is not a welling-up of emotion, but is a bond founded in our common union with Christ. (Living with the

119 Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco, CA: HarperSan Francisco, 1988), 122.

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Principles of the Order, Day 26)

Penance flows from humility, for it calls upon us to take the necessary steps to release

that most precious of our possessions, our pride. Our pride is a form of self-love, placing our

projected, imagined image of ourselves over and above our actual selves, sinful and depending

entirely upon God's love and upon others. Penance calls upon us to examine both our actions and

inaction, asking God to show us when we acted out of love for God and others, and when we

sinned against others and God. Penance creates the space for us to, in humility, ask for

forgiveness from those whom we have harmed, and to offer our neighbor the opportunity to

allow God to bridge the gap between us and our neighbor that was created by sin, and to grant

true reconciliation. By this the community is healed. The challenge that we face with penance is,

when faced with our sin, to depend on the mercy and love of God to give us the courage to

repent. Our sin can often be so surprising, and unexpected, that we can reject our culpability. One

challenge that may be faced by the Commission is to remember that all are culpable in the sins

that have created our current rifts, and to seek repentance in a state of complete humility.

Eucharist

The heart of our prayer is the Eucharist, in which we share with other Christians the renewal of our union with our Lord and Savior in his sacrifice, remembering his death and receiving his spiritual food. (Living with the Principles of the Order, Day 15)

As a sacramental church, the Episcopal Church believes that communion is an outward

and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, that as the gathered community shares in the

body of Christ, each member is reconciled to the other, unified as one Body of Christ. We believe

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that through communion, Christ's sacrifice can create a bridge between those in the community

who may be in conflict, and can heal the divisions in the community. As Marion Hatchett states,

“the common sacrifice and the common meal, shared by the community at certain intervals, are a

part of every culture, even the most primitive. Such sharing reinforces the cohesion of family,

clan, group, and community. Those who eat together share ideas, values, actions, beliefs, and

loyalties as well as traditions and sacred history.”120

In a very practical sense, all Episcopalians share the words of the prayer book, and

through common worship, all gathered together make a visible statement of unity in Christ, and

as all are equally welcome to receive communion, we make a visible statement of our individual

equality in the eyes of God. As they are tasked with seeking reconciliation within the Episcopal

Diocese of Maryland in specific, and between the diocese and God, communion must be an

essential aspect of the work of the Commission.

Communal Prayer

We seek to live in an atmosphere of praise and prayer. We aim to be constantly aware of God's presence, so that we may indeed pray without ceasing. Our ever-deepening devotion to the indwelling Christ is a source of strength and joy. It is Christ's love that inspires us to service, strengthens us for sacrifice. (Living with the Principles of the Order, Day 14)

The words listed above speak eloquently about the place of prayer in our lives as

one significant way of communing with God, resting in God's presence and healing our

divisions. Whether our prayer consists of song, meditation, chant, liturgy, contemplation,

scriptural reading, or locating God in God's creation, prayer is our source of strength, for

120 Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 289.

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we connect with Christ through prayer. As stated above, as Episcopalians, we are already

blessed with a powerful tool for healing the divisions in our community in the Book of

Common Prayer and in our heritage of communal prayer. The Commission should call

upon the diocese to consider praying for each member as well as the work of the

Commission. Each member must also be engaged in a regular practice of prayer, as

individual prayer roots us in God's presence, and aids us in bringing our full selves to the

task of communal prayer.

Study

“This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” True knowledge is knowledge of God. We therefore give priority to devotional study of scripture as one of the chief means of attaining that knowledge of God that leads to eternal life. As well as the devotional study of scripture, we all recognize our Christian responsibility to pursue other branches of study, both sacred and secular. In particular, some of us accept the duty of contributing, through research and writing, to a better understanding of the church's mission in the world: the application of Christian principles to the use and distribution of wealth; questions concerning justice and peace; and all other questions concerning the life of faith. (Living with the Principles of the Order, Days 17-18)

Through study, we grow in knowledge about Christ, as well as the work of God in the

world. Study also gives us greater insight into the roots of the divisions within our community, as

well as the most effective ways of healing those divisions. The seven tasks of the Commission,

as laid out in the Introduction of this thesis, already all fall under this category.

Solidarity with the Marginalized

We set out, in the name of Christ, to break down barriers between people and to seek equality for all. We accept as our second aim the spreading of a spirit of love and harmony among all people. We are pledged to fight against the ignorance,

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pride, and prejudice that breed injustice or partiality of any kind. We fight against all injustice in the name of Christ, in whom there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for in him all are one. Our chief object is to reflect that openness to all which was characteristic of Jesus. This can only be achieved in a spirit of chastity, which sees others as belonging to God and not as a means of self-fulfillment. We are prepared not only to speak out for social justice and international peace, but to put these principles into practice into our own lives, cheerfully facing any scorn or persecution to which this may lead. (Living with the Principles of the Order, Days 7-9)

We are called upon to serve any who are hungry, poor, in prison, sick, or are on the

margins of society, for it is then that we are serving Christ. This is not to say that only the

economically disadvantaged are Christ, for hunger can come in many forms; the rich can often

be in lonely prisons of social expectations, and sickness strikes rich and poor alike. Yet, often the

most vulnerable and voiceless in our society are found at the margins. Francis felt called to

minister to those relegated to these margins, shedding any advantage possible in order to permit

no barriers of class or economic status to separate him from the most vulnerable. He made a

lifelong effort to imitate Christ by becoming weak in order to be strong.

Francis saw the necessity of shedding oneself of the carapace of material wealth, as well

as the social power that accompanies wealth. Francis began to view wealth, even the possession

of one's clothes, as a barrier that could be used to separate humans from God, as well as from

each other. His father's wealth enabled Francis to be distant from, and even “superior” to, the

poor of Assisi-including the servants who worked in his father's shop. In order to truly free

himself to do the work of the Lord, as he understood it, he needed to break the control that his

father's wealth, positions, and expectations held over him.

William James reflects on Francis' insistence on the total abandonment of money and

possessions in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience. James likens dependence on wealth to

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an addiction, as powerful as the addiction to any drug:

So long as the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel...A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence...Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically wakeful patient keeps by the bed; he throws himself on God, but if he should need the other help, there it will be also. To give it up definitely and forever signifies one of those radical alterations of character which came under our lectures on conversion. In it the inner man lives in a new center of energy...Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life we find this recurring note: Fling yourself upon God's providence without making any reserve whatsoever-take no thought for the morrow-sell all you have and give it to the poor-only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive.121

In a famous scene, Francis stood in the midst of the public square and declared before the

entire town and the bishop of Assisi that: “because I want to serve God from now on, I am giving

back to my father the money about which he is so distressed and also my clothes...Up until now I

have always called Pietro di Bernadone my father. In the future I will only acknowledge our

Father who is in heaven.”122 Francis then proceeded to strip completely naked, folding his clothes

neatly into a pile, and then laying on top of the pile every piece of money that he still had in his

pockets.

By placing such a distinct emphasis on exposing the sins of racism and the institutional

structures that have perpetuated racism as a sin of both commission and omission in the Diocese,

the Commission is giving voice to the voiceless and the silenced. The Commission stands in

solidarity with the marginalized only if it seeks to remove any and all spiritual, economic, and

power structures that separate the members of the Body of Christ-even if this includes actions of

121 Adrian House, Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life (Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring Press, 2001), 103.122 House, Francis of Assisi, 69.

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restorative justice, such as reparative measures.

Joy

We, rejoicing in the Lord always, show in our lives the grace and beauty of divine joy. We remember that we follow the Son of Man, who came eating and drinking, who loved the birds and the flowers, who blessed little children, who was a friend to tax collectors and sinners and who sat at the tables of both the rich and the poor. We delight in fun and laughter, rejoicing in God's world, its beauty and its living creatures, calling nothing common or unclean. We mix freely with all people, ready to bind up the broken-hearted and to bring joy into the lives of others. We carry within us an inner peace and happiness, which others may perceive, even if they do not know its source. This joy is a divine gift, coming from union with God in Christ. It is still there even in times of darkness and difficulty, giving cheerful courage in the face of disappointment, and an inward serenity and confidence through sickness and suffering. Those who possess it can rejoice in weakness, insults, hardships and persecutions for Christ's sake; for when we are weak, then we are strong. (Living with the Principles of the Order, Days 28-29)

For Francis, joy came only with perfect obedience to the will of God. We are created by

God, in the image of God, to do God's work-anything beyond this distracts us from our purpose

and can cloud our ability to bathe in the light of love flowing from God. This is not to say that

Francis did not lose his temper, have despair, or find himself in dark places. He focused so much

of his attention on God, however, either in contemplation, in prayer, in worship, in penance, or in

work amongst the poor and marginalized, that (if we believe the accounts of his life), he was

never apart from God and rarely far from feeling joy. His infectious joy inspired so many that in

a very few years he had gathered a fellowship around him of thousands of people, and had

created an entirely unique, in that age, way of following Christ.

Joy is, in many ways, the epicenter of Franciscan spiritual practice. This can only be

understood in the context of what joy means to the Franciscan tradition. The opening scene of

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Roberto Rossellini's seminal classic, The Flowers of St. Francis, provides an effective illustration

of how joy in the Franciscan tradition is not only an emotion, but also a state of wholeness, of

being a complete human, incarnated by the Living Christ. As the scene opens, we see Brother

Francis and his companions returning to their home in Rivotorto, after having received

permission from Pope Innocent III to pursue their life of evangelical poverty, preaching and

service. This should be the moment of their greatest joy and triumph. Instead, Rossellini chooses

to remind us very insistently of the transitoriness of human triumph and joy. The brothers are

shown walking in ankle-deep mud along a rutted track, drenched from the freezing cold rain that

had apparently been falling for quite some time. The brothers begin to engage in a conversation

about what they would preach to the people about, once they are granted the opportunity. Brother

Bernard, seemingly unperturbed by the weather, states, “This is what I would preach to the

people: I will teach them what you must do to find true peace.” Brother Rufino immediately

interjects, saying, “Joy!” Brother Bernard excitedly continues, saying, “Exactly! Because joy,

like true peace, begets ardent desire in the human heart. The joy of which I speak is that joy it

feels when it tames the passions that tormented it. The joy we feel today is the result of this

struggle divine goodness has inspired within us.” Brother Juniper asks Brother Bernard, “would

you explain in your own sweet way how this joy is attained?” Brother Bernard looks to heaven

and asks, “Would you follow Christ in poverty and humility as he has done?” At that, the men

run off, playing in the rain and mud, yelling passionately, “Joy! What glory! May all men attain

this!”

Brother Giles slips in a massive puddle, stands up, and stares intensely at Brother Francis

as if he has just had a thought that pulled out his legs from underneath him. He begins to query

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Brother Francis insistently, asking, “Why you? Why you? Every man wants to see you, hear you,

obey you. You are neither handsome, nor great, nor noble.” Brother Francis bows his head

slightly, and peering at the ground, he resignedly sighs. He quietly answers Brother Giles by

saying, “Because God found no more humble creature on earth. Because he saw among sinners

no one more vile than me. So that men would see that every virtue and good comes from him.

Glory be to God forever.”

In this short scene, we see an excellent summation of the Franciscan enterprise and

charism. Human life is only lived in its most complete way when everything that separates the

human person from intimate connection with God is swept aside, leaving only the creature

gazing at the Creator in deep love. This is achieved in three specific ways: obedience to the will

of God, removing attachments to all material goods, and finally, a recognition of the Creator in

each and every aspect of the created order, including each and every human being. Poverty and

joy go hand-in-hand in the Franciscan tradition. The oft-cited paradox of the Franciscan life is

“to be poor is to be rich.”

We are created by God, in the image of God, to do God's work-anything beyond this

distracts us from our purpose and can cloud our ability to bathe in the light of love flowing from

God. This kenotic love opens our hearts for Christ to enter, making Christ alive in the believer123.

Franciscan tradition teaches that our life becomes suffused with the joy of the Creator for the

created once the created is filled by the Creator-it is an inevitable and inexorable reality that once

we open our heart to God, our heart is now vulnerable to being grabbed by God, and filled to the

brim with powerful emotions of love and joy.

By keeping their focus always on their task of seeking reconciliation amongst the

123 Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2004), 3.

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members of the Body of Christ, the Commission will rest in the joy that comes from obeying the

will of God for all to be reconciled to God in Christ.

With joy, we have come full circle. For what can be more joyous than to be secure in the

knowledge that all who are reconciled to Christ are made new, a new creation?

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Conclusion

The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will require the commitment of

each member to a process of profound personal and spiritual growth. As has been demonstrated

above, the process of reconciliation and healing is at its heart the process of discipleship to a God

who was so generous as to become human in order that humans could enter into the life of God..

God became fully human as Jesus, in order that God could live a complete human life, including

death, all out of a love that desired nothing less than that all humanity would be unified in God

through the incarnate Word. The Commission will be faced with the challenge of reminding the

Episcopal Diocese of Maryland what being the Body of Christ means, teaching us all through

their work and example. We in the Diocese are faced with an equally challenging task-to make

the work of the Commission our own. We must all continue to seek to become disciples of Christ

in our local congregations. We must pursue efforts at reconciliation within our church

communities, and with the communities that we live in. Finally, we must re-enter, refreshed after

Eucharist and communal prayer. The work of the Commission is really the work of all churches-

that is, to become church, to reflect our true selves as the Body of Christ.

Sr. Ilia Delio is a Franciscan sister and scholar who writes extensively about the unique

Franciscan spiritual and activist charism, and its place in Christian faith communities. In the

following passage, I believe that she sums up the full impact of the work of reconciliation in the

Body of Christ. Imagine what a church, what a Body of Christ, we could become, were we to

take her words and message seriously!

Prayer that leads to the imitation of Christ is urgently needed in our world today, although we seem to be far from this goal. Privatism, individualism, consumerism

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and other “-isms” all work against a public expression of gospel life. On one hand we lament the fragmentation, disparity and abuse in our world, and on the other hand we privatize the fact that Christians are gospel people. If we truly believed that Christ is the center of our life and world, that each of us is a member of the body of Christ, and that body is incomplete without us, that the fullness of Christ encompasses all peoples, all races, religions, and cultures, indeed the entire universe, would we harm our neighbor? Injure or abuse the earth? Kill our enemies? Ignore the poor, the homeless or the outcasts of our society? If we truly believed that all is Christ, would we continue to crucify Christ? Or would we act according to the law of Jesus : love, mercy and compassion? Would we be willing to lay down our lives out of love for the sake of the other? If we truly believed that Christ is center of the universe, would we be so private about the Good News we hold so sacred? Thomas Merton once wrote that only in union with Christ, who is the fully integrated Person, can one become trans-personal, trans-cultural and trans-social. Only in union with Christ, the One, can a person be united to the many since, as Word and center of the Trinity, Christ is both the One and the Many.124

124 Delio, Franciscan Prayer, 154-5.

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