O GOD OF EARTH AND ALTAR
An invitational essay from the Editor-in-Chief
I have to confess that “Earth & Altar” wasn’t my first choice for a name for this publication. I wasn’t exactly opposed to it, but I also wasn’t very energized by it. I campaigned pretty strongly for something else, and, while my acceptance of the name wasn’t begrudging, I finally gave in more from a spirit of cooperation and compromise than anything else. Perhaps I didn’t know the hymn well enough. Maybe the juxtaposition just didn’t seem right—why God of earth and altar rather than the much more logical heaven and earth?
Yet the longer I’ve sat with our agreed upon title, the more I’ve realized how well it fit our project. I should have gotten over myself and realized that G.K. Chesterton really did know better than me on this one: Earth and altar is in fact a better pairing to represent the totality of Christian existence and hope than anything I could have proposed. The heart of Christianity involves the recognition of the goodness of the world around us and God’s ultimate lordship over that world; at the same time, we recognize the sin and disorder of the world as it is now and hope for the recreation of all things that is the New Heaven and New Earth. Moreover, this New Creation isn’t just a future hope—it enters our world every time the resurrected Christ comes among us in the Eucharist. The pairing “earth and altar” indeed offers the best account of the arena of God’s great and gracious interactions with us and of our properly thankful response to God.
Earth & Altar as a title—and especially the “and”—also offers certain practical advantages. Over the last decade or so, there has been a steadily growing and increasingly vocal group of Christians who reject the idea that traditional, credal Christian teaching and a progressive social, political, and economic program are mutually exclusive opposites. This “inclusive and orthodox” group wants to affirm the insights about the cosmos gathered by contemporary biology, chemistry, and physics without jettisoning robust belief in the more “supernatural” aspects of historic Christian faith such as miracles, angels and demons, the virgin birth, or the bodily resurrection. Such Christians see no reason why embracing the content of the creeds and (not uncritically) engaging with the church’s traditions should get in the way of giving women and LGBTQ+ people full access to the sacramental life and leadership of the church. “Traditional” or “conservative” theological positions are therefore not only compatible with “progressive” policies such as racial justice and economic equality, but, for many, such social, economic, and political positions actually flow from these theological commitments.
The fittingness of Earth & Altar for this project goes deeper, however, than the clever use of an ampersand. The pairing earth and altar does not offer up an immediate or obvious indicator of the heart of the Christian faith and hope. Yet, if you sit with the title long enough, like I did, I think you’ll also find it fitting for expressing the core of the historic Christian faith. In like fashion, many people’s initial reaction to inclusive orthodoxy is surprise or disbelief, due in no small part to the false dilemma described above being the received orthodoxy for the last century or so. Here again, I think that many people will find that if they allow themselves to sit with the orthodox and inclusive faith posture they will at least be able to come to appreciate it as viable and coherent, even if they can’t fully embrace it themselves.
In many ways, Earth & Altar came out of the fact that many people, when they first encounter the inclusive and orthodox viewpoint, haven’t let themselves sit with it. Instead, they let their surprise morph into dismissal and derision. No doubt some of this dismissal happens because there is little space in the Christian public imagination for inclusive orthodoxy. Despite this faith posture being relatively common among academic theologians, virtually no popular literature or media outlet in the mainline Christian world consistently or full-throatedly promotes an inclusive and orthodox position (at least as we’ve come to understand both those words). Certainly there are Christian popular publications that embrace progressive political, social, and economic positions, but often while also remaining unconcerned with or openly hostile to the content of the creeds. Similarly, there are more than enough publications that purport to defend credal orthodoxy, but they frequently do so by forcing such belief to conform to a narrow political or economic conservatism, and sometimes to a conservatism far too willing to embrace or excuse white supremacy, xenophobia, and homophobia. It’s quite understandable that people have a hard time accepting the orthodox and inclusive posture as a viable and serious one when there’s no real public space for serious conversation about it.
It is also hard to see at least some of this dismissal or derision as unrelated to the demographics of many orthodox and inclusion proponents. At least in The Episcopal Church (my primary frame of reference for this conversation), an overwhelming majority of the orthodoxy and inclusion vanguard are younger GenXers, Millennials, and GenZers—quite a young group by Episcopal Church standards. While likely not in the majority in this movement, women, people of color, and those in the LGBTQ+ community also represent a significant and visible number of those who self-identify as orthodox and inclusive. Thus, it is difficult for those of us who have had our orthodox and inclusive views dismissed not to hear such attitudes as somehow connected to the marginal status that young people, people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people all too often already experience in the Church—especially for the many proponents of inclusive orthodoxy who inhabit the intersections of these marginal identities.
As this growing inclusive orthodox community, emerging largely from relationships developed on social media, began to take shape, a common sense of frustration at this perceived dismissive attitude came out as well. Funneling this frustration into an aggressively defensive posture felt justified, and there was a strong temptation toward adopting a bitter and mean-spirited rhetoric. Ultimately, and I think much more healthfully, the decision was reached to try and transform this frustration into something positive for the life of the church instead. The fruit of this decision was Earth & Altar. Rather than complaining about not having a place in popular church discourse to explore and explain inclusive orthodoxy, we’ve created one. The commitment to make this a space that tries especially hard to promote the voices of those historically marginalized because of race, gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, or geography came from our desire not to reinforce those structures that led to our initial frustration. More than this, though, I think nearly all of those who helped to get Earth & Altar off the ground would say that their commitment to providing a platform for those often overlooked by the church flows from our commitment to inclusive orthodoxy. Everyone involved in the creation of Earth & Altar has liturgical and aesthetic preferences, but attempting to limit the expression of inclusive orthodoxy to these preferences undercuts what inclusive orthodoxy is really about. Our robust embrace of the content of the creeds and the traditions of the church really points to God’s cosmic work of restoration meaning that we can hardly limit it to particular cultural, temporal, philosophical, or geographic manifestations.
For me, and for nearly all the people I have engaged with who identify with inclusive orthodoxy, this commitment is not merely or primarily about preserving the institutional church or promoting abstract tradition or doctrine. We instead feel a tremendous energy generated by real experiences of God as actually sovereign over the cosmos and by our being radically transformed for the better because that God actually became human, lived among us, died, and was raised from the dead. The institutional church is good, but only insofar as it invites others to have such transformative encounters. Correct belief and practice are helpful only insofar as they let people grow in the knowledge, love, and likeness of the God we encounter through Christ. Advocacy for progressive social, political, or economic positions in and out of the church means little if it does not do this also to give people the possibility of the fullness of liberation that comes from a right relationship with God and neighbor. Speaking for myself, I want to promote inclusive orthodoxy because, through it, I have experienced God’s grace and forgiveness, salvation from Sin and Death, and growth in holiness, but it is not my place to say such things are impossible elsewhere. I intend only to speak about what I have seen and heard. And all of this points to the fact that even the stated purpose of carving out a space to discuss and promote inclusive orthodoxy only matters if it helps make more room for people to have freeing, forgiving, healing, and sanctifying encounters with Jesus Christ.
There is a growing frustration in many corners of the church at the tepidness and timidity that seem to infect so much of mainline Protestantism, as well as a growing yearning for revival. As Earth & Altar advisor and friend Kara Slade pointed out a few weeks ago, we are one among many emerging publications, including The Hour, that promotes both an inclusive orthodoxy and the church’s young voices. Incredible numbers of young adults zealous to transform the Church are on the ballots for General Convention and are actually being elected. In light of this, a look at historical trends reveals something interesting about this growing frustration, yearning, and energy. The methodist/evangelical revival happened in the early 1700s. The Second Great Awakening came about 100 years later. The Azusa Street and larger pentecostal revival began in 1906. At just over a century out from this last major outpouring of the Spirit, it seems we’re about due for something big to happen in the church and the world. And if we look back to that first revival of the 1700s, we see that it came not from the Puritans’s nonconformist descendents where everyone expected it to happen, but instead from two high church brothers in a worldly, inattentive, spiritually deadened Church of England. There is no reason not to see The Episcopal Church and the larger mainline tradition as similarly positioned to be the ground from which our next revival emerges, and Earth & Altar hopes above all else to be part of that work.
So, without further ado, please enjoy Earth & Altar.
