Editor’s Note: This article is the second half of a two-part series, “Reformed and Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians Together in Witness,” by the Rev. Cn. Dr. Kara Slade. Yesterday’s article called on evangelical and Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians to unite in answering “a few very basic questions:” who needs to be saved, and from what; who saves, by what means, and when; and who is Jesus Christ. The article discussed Charles Kingsley, an Anglican priest and outspoken white supremacist, as an example of the ethical horrors that Christian theology can perpetuate when unmoored from its foundation in Jesus Christ. In today’s article, Canon Slade discusses a second example of this theological unmooring, and offers some concluding thoughts on how Christian witness today can avoid similar ethical shipwrecks.

Karl Reiland: The Here and Now Salvation of a Healthy Heritage

My second example comes from the United States of the 1920’s, at the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.  In 1928, the Rev. Dr. Karl Reiland of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan (now Calvary-St. George’s) was one of four respondents to a question in Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment that asked “Is Christian Morality Harmful? Over-charitable to the unfit?” Amy Laura Hall’s concise summary of his comments bears quoting in full:   

‘Evolution is a term that applies to religion as well as biology,’ explained Reiland.  The ‘early Christian concept that the world should be despised is ‘a foot binding,’ a ‘drag on the progress of religious thought’ that ‘keeps the church from stepping out.’  Those who were willing to embrace an aptly evolved religion would recognize that ‘the first and foremost salvation of man individually, collectively and universally is the here and now salvation of a healthy heritage.’ As Reiland read the relation between ‘science and religion,’ the more conventional form of salvation - of one’s soul and body through a savior - is dependent on the securing of ‘sound, safe, and sane human beings.’  

Reiland understood his challenge as a clerical spokesman for eugenics…to be threefold: ‘to revive and accelerate progress along the higher levels of thinking; … to convince the religious conscience that whatever our creed, we are dealing with nature for the fundamental welfare of human nature; and lastly, to be prepared to discover that God was the God of biology before the Bible came on the scene.’ (11)

One of Reiland’s key allies in the world of New York Protestant liberalism was Harry Emerson Fosdick of the Riverside Church.  Both shared the conviction that the particularities of traditional Christian theology and exegesis were a barrier to progress, a retrograde ballast impeding the march to a better future. As my colleague argued in a paper on Harry Emerson Fosdick and his brother Raymond, entitled No Shortcut to the Promised Land, the emergence of this particularly American form of Protestantism in the Roaring Twenties cannot be read apart from its endorsement and financial support by the capitalist titans of the day.’ (12)

Kingsley and Reiland shared the belief that the particular content of Christian confession took a distant back seat to the imperatives of human progress, and that the role of the Church was to facilitate that progress.  They also shared a common language for describing those Christians with whom they disagreed, using rhetoric that theorist Johannes Fabian calls temporal distancing, marking themselves as present (or contemporary), but others as occupying a position of backwardness, childishness, superstition, or primitivity. As Fabian argues, this linguistic tactic denies others coeval status in time, placing them in a position of alterity from which they can be safely disregarded and excluded from the category of neighbor. (13) We may share the same geographical space, or even the same church, but if we occupy different times then we have actually precluded the possibility of relationship. In so doing, we have also short-circuited the possibility of church governance by collapsing theological and political disagreement into a divide between those who mark themselves as being in the present and those who are somehow marked as behind the times.

The church has changed very little in 150 years. All too often, we are still uncomfortable with reminders that sin really is everywhere, that it really is that bad, that we can’t fix it ourselves, that we need a savior whose name is Jesus Christ, and that we can’t usher in the kingdom of God by our own efforts. We balk at hearing that we cannot grasp the arc of the universe and bend it towards anything. But we, as human beings, are not the solution. We are the problem. 

In no way do I mean to suggest that any of our contemporaries are eugenicists or worse. I do mean to suggest that the eugenicists of the past thought they were supporting a moral, Christian project. And as a good Calvinist, I do mean to suggest that our vision today may be no clearer. I am resolutely pessimistic about the extent to which we can know or will the good, much less bring it about. What we see today as progress and baptize in its name may be the moral monstrosity of 2120. 

Unfortunately, some American Episcopalians are so keen to take the side of progressivism against fundamentalisms perceived or actual that they view their theology through precisely these lenses. There are good reasons for this, as many of our members come from churches whose theology is truly harmful. The realities of the trauma cannot be discounted or minimized. At the same time, new occasions teach new duties, in the words of James Lowell. We as a church cannot define ourselves only as what we are not, relying on a fundamentalist-modernist binary in which modernism is the only alternative to an elastically-defined fundamentalism. 100 years later, many Episcopalians still reflexively default to Harry Emerson Fosdick's famous question "Shall the fundamentalists win?" in framing how we understand and describe ourselves as a church.  

But I would like to suggest that is not the presenting question of our time, and that the postliberal approach represented in part by this magazine may offer another way forward. This is not a new position in the Episcopal Church. Even at the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, not all Episcopalians fell in line with the modernists. The Episcopal magazine American Church Monthly lamented that Fosdick and his allies were oblivious to "the unhappy fact that there are some people who are peculiar enough to have convictions," and that those "convictions do stand in the way of any such hazy, vague, anarchic agreement to disagree as he has in mind."  As historian Robert Miller writes, "the Riverside Church embodied Fosdick's vision of the future, but it was not, and could not be, the Living Church of the Anglo-Catholics." (14)  Earth and Altar is not the Living Church, and intentionally so, but a focus on the particularities and the peculiarities of Christian conviction is something that both Anglo-Catholics and Reformed Episcopalians like myself can agree on. 

What are those convictions? First and foremost, it is a shared confession that Jesus Christ is the incarnate second person of the Trinity: born of the Virgin Mary, crucified for us and for our salvation, raised on the third day, ascended into heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the quick and the dead. This is the beating heart of catholicity. The cross is the point from which we begin, and begin again, in our witness together. Faithfulness to the irreducible particularity of who we are in Jesus Christ should be at the heart of all our deliberations over the future of the Episcopal Church. And Jesus Christ must be at the heart of our conviction that the kingdom of God is his to bring in, and not ours. The world is not ours to save. The church is not ours to preserve. God does that in a continuous and sovereign act of Providence. God is the acting subject of our theological grammar, not us.   

How can we witness to these convictions together? One of my favorite images is Matthias Grunewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece (See Figure 2). Of course, it was one of Karl Barth’s favorite images as well, and it hung over his desk during the writing of the Church Dogmatics. Looking at it again recently, I realized that it encompasses all that I hope to do in my own work to bridge Reformed and Anglo-Catholic sensibilities in North American Anglicanism. Perhaps it describes something of the sensibility of Earth and Altar as well.

Here we see Christ on the cross. Here we see the objective event of our salvation. On the right side, in a move of artistic license, we see John the Baptist pointing to Christ to say he must increase, and I must decrease (John 3:30). This is the goal of Reformed theology: to point only to the sovereign God incarnate in the Word made flesh and his one atoning work once offered that is full, perfect, and sufficient. We need this relentless re-focusing in our church today, a reminder that the last word is not a concept but a person: Jesus Christ, who reigns over all as King and Lord. 

On the left, we see a very different image that I want to read as the particular charism of Anglo-Catholic theology and piety. We see John the beloved disciple, embracing Mary as she looks on in grief and adoration. This is the scene from John 19: “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” (John 19:25-27) 

As he reigns from the cross, Jesus re-configures all our relationships even as he gives us to each other as the church. That Church looks on to adore the broken body of Christ, that atoning sacrifice given for us: behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Here, Jesus gives us his mother to be the mother of the Church, the mother of us all. Here, whatever border there may be between Tracts for the Times and the 39 Articles, whatever chasm exists in our minds between one John and the other, is bridged by him who is the life and salvation of all of us together.

This essay is a redacted version of work first published in Theologies of Failure, ed. Roberto Sirvent and Duncan Reyburn, and that will appear in an expanded form in The Fullness of Time: Jesus Christ, Science, and Modernity, forthcoming from Cascade Press.

11. Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 257-258.

12. See Amy Laura Hall, “No Shortcut to the Promised Land: The Fosdick Brothers and Muscular Christianity,” Ex Auditu, Vol. 29.

13. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50.

14. Robert Moats Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 176.