Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness: Part 1

In the last month, I have read Martin Thornton's Christian Proficiency, Donald Fairbairn's Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers, and a bit of Matthew Kelly's Rediscover Catholicism. 

Speaking from three different traditions (Anglican Catholicism, Reformed Evangelicalism, and Roman Catholicism) to three different audiences (the mid-century Church of England, modern American evangelicals, and Roman Catholics in the English-speaking developed world), these authors all come to fairly similar conclusions: that the purpose of the Christian faith is to make humans into the Body of Jesus Christ and restore each individual to the fullness of their humanity by participation in the common life of the Church and the Triune God. The end of the Body and each member is is theosis or "holiness."

Holiness, each author writes, is the route to renewal of the Church in a skeptical and/or disobedient age.  

The works differ, of course. Fairbairn is more theological. Thornton is more practical. Kelly is more accessible (a balance between praxis and light theology). But there are very strong commonalities to their prescriptions.

First, the holiness they discuss need not be an extraordinary holiness, limited to clergy and religious or those residing in the foreign missions. As Thornton emphasizes, all of us are called to evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience and to the stability of life that the Benedictine tradition teaches embraces all three. As Kelly emphasizes, holiness may be pursued in marriage, in singleness, in orders, and in religion. The lives of the saints need not to be sanitized but honest about their weaknesses and failings. And Fairbairn frequently emphasizes how ordinary human relations can be slowly oriented toward the relationships that subsist between the Persons of the Trinity.

Indeed, the holiness they proclaim is an ordinary holiness: one oriented around (as Thornton explicates most fully): a common rule of Eucharist, Scripture reading/common prayer, and private prayer but individually tailored to the needs of each soul. This ordinary holiness in its fruition becomes extraordinary, when acts of sacrificial love becomes as natural as breathing, so that we can say in all earnestness: "We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do" (Luke 17:10).

There is important differences. I find Fairbairn's problematization of our search for significance to be far more compelling than Kelly's problematization of "disobedience." I could make the potshot critique that complaining about our age's inclination to disobedience to divine will is what you'd expect from a tradition that has not yet repented for its domination by the lust for mastery. (Anglicans still have not either, after all.) Fairbairn is also concerned with obedience, but he helpfully justifies that obedience can be the means of love, which I found more helpful. 

However, diagnosing the collective moral problem of secular life in terms of significance rather than disobedience (to a tradition that in many places seems too vacuous against which to rebel) is compelling because of its explanatory value. A man recently testified in favor of elective abortion in Texas.

"When I was 23, a young woman I knew needed an abortion. More importantly to me, so did I.

"I wasn’t ready to be a father. Not in the least. I wasn’t prepared to be tied to this woman for the rest of my life. I wasn’t interested in any part of fatherhood. I had plans, and things I wanted to see, and do, and become.

"I like to think that, if it had come down to it, I would have changed those plans, and taken an interest, and prepared myself. But I didn’t have to find out, because abortion was safe, affordable, and accessible."  

The life of the unborn child in question did not fall to malice or any real incapacity of its father and mother. Instead, mother and father made a moral decision highly antagonistic to the worldviews of both Fairbairn and Kelly, because it would change what they would "see, and do, and become." In a world without God, Christ, and the life of the world to come, the quest to become "someone," to make a difference, and make an impact becomes the highest moral good.

We must be careful, lest the new quest for holiness described by the three authors sends us along the same kind of path as the secular world. Recall, for instance, what the Preacher says concerning the saints in the 44th Chapter of Ecclesiasticus. Most of the just are known to God alone.

In the second part of this post, I will consider what is necessary to make a vibrant, ordinary, and democratic holiness possible in the Episcopal Church and more conservative contexts along the spectrum of catholicity.