The Ecstatic Heresy

I was just introduced to the writings of the Rev Robert Sanders through a friend of a friend. He was an Episcopal priest, who as part of the crisis in the ECUSA left that group and associated with the Anglican Mission in America, an orthodox missionary movement to the United States led by the Archbishop of Rwanda.

The first article I read, the Ecstatic Heresy, on Sanders website examines the drift of “revisionist” theology over the last two-hundred years. What intrigued me about it was that it parallels many of the issues Francis Schaeffer addressed in his critique of neo-orthodoxy. Sanders refers to a movement, which he attributes to Schleiermacher, as “ecsatatic” theology, a mystical system based not on the words of revealed scripture, but on the experience of a God-consiousness. In the end, Sanders, like Schaeffer, follows the clues to a place where proponents of a new system of theology use the same words as orthodox theologians, but give a very different meaning to the words, in fact teaching a completely false faith. Though Schaeffer and Sanders come from very different perspectives, Schaeffer a committed Presbyterian and Sanders an Anglican, there are parallels to the issues they faced in their different situations, and possible parallels to issues evangelicals face today.



What I appreciate about the article by Sanders is that it provides a great historical primer on what has led to the breakdown of orthodoxy belief in his particular church tradition. Many, myself included, decry the loss of orthodox and Biblical understanding, but few can articulate why it has occurred. Sanders explains it well. Quoting from the article, Sanders defines ecstatic theology:

“The ecstatic perspective does not deny the authority of Scripture, the Creeds, or the Prayer Book. These are readily accepted. What is at stake is how these documents are interpreted...Essentially, this perspective claims that God is known in ecstasy, beyond the language of God's speech."

Evangelicals have long staked their whole theological position on the authority of scripture. Scripture is and must be the final authority as Schaeffer strenuously argued. But orthodox Christianity has almost always recognized its authority. That is not the issue that faces the church today. The new question is who interprets scripture and according to what methodology? What “tradition” is authoritative has become the battleground of the 21st century church. The question is not “is the Bible authoritative” today, it is “who determines what the Bible means? And how?

Postmodern thinking is that words are only signifiers of something else, and words are ultimately signifiers of other words. Words are always suspect so all truth is known, not through words, but through experience, and experience is shaped by whatever community one happens to be associated with. Ultimately the text of scripture today is not the primary point of contention. It is the “experience” of God that results from interaction with the text that 21st century mavericks in both mainline and evangelical streams are concerned with, and that interaction is not focused on objective reading of words, but on an experience found in an encounter with them. This kind of thinking is not new, it existed in another form two centuries ago.

"… the ecstatic view believes that God is always beyond concepts and language. In this view, one encounters God, but only mystically, beyond the self and God as speaking to each other. From this perspective, God never says anything specific, objective, and concrete. Since God is beyond language, every attempt to verbalize God is partial and inadequate, with the result that differing partial truths, even when they contradict, can be harmonized at a higher level in God."

I suspect that this perfectly dovetails with the PM acceptance of the idea that contradictory statements can both be true, the willingness of the emergent generation to be open to the place of “paradox”. One need not be a full disciple of postmodernism to be shaped by its concepts. Nor does one need to know Schleiermacher to feel the effects of his thought on the church. Sanders gives several examples of how this mystical perspective affects specific theological issues. Sanders continues…

"Theological statements use language and literal language refers only to objective realities. Therefore, in the ecstatic view, language applied to God is always symbolic since God is ineffable."

If I understand Sanders correctly, he does not mean language is meaningless in the ecstatic view, but that language is totally inadequate to describe a God who is transcendent. But because words are inadequate, words only point to some inexpressible experience which must be interpreted.

"In the ecstatic view, Scripture is the history of religious experience given objective content according to the social and historical forms of ancient Israel and the primitive church. Consequently, one must first hear the "Word within the biblical words" in order to sense the Divine that transcends all historical contexts. Then, once glimpsed, the Word within the biblical words is expressed in contemporary categories. The concept of "contemporary categories" allows experience to become a norm transforming Scripture."

So what Isaiah said about God in his cultural context might mean something to people in his day, something inadequate and only mystically apprehended. What Isaiah’s words mean to us today in our cultural context might be completely different in detail but would somehow share the same “sense of the Divine”. Hence,

"In the ecstatic view, the task of theology is to reinterpret the faith as relevant to new cultural contexts. Faith is evolving since culture evolves."

Francis Schaeffer often warned against faith statements that held to a belief that the “word” of God is reliable, but not necessarily the “words” of God. Without objective content in the words, the meaning of scripture becomes completely and totally subjective. Religious experience is all that is left. Note the parallel Sanders describes.

"In the ecstatic view, doctrines are secondary. Doctrines do not refer to God but to feeling, the depth of reality, the horizon of being. Therefore doctrines can be radically reinterpreted in terms of ecstatic categories."

In other words, if the word “Trinity” gives one a sense of the transcendent, then it is of value, even if one does not believe that the Trinity truly describes one God in three distinct persons. Liberals, revisionists and radical evangelicals can easily speak of Trinitarian theology or “traditional” morality but mean something completely different from what historic orthodox faith has always meant.

"In the ecstatic view, God never speaks a "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not" since this implies objectivity in God's Word. Therefore, ethics usually concerns a principle, love for example, which receives its concrete realization according to the forms of a given culture. Since cultures evolve, so do ethics."

As I have argued in a number of posts, once historic, orthodox theology becomes unimportant, morality soon follows in the same path. And, Sanders here seems to be saying that since God, for the revisionist, can only be known in contentless religious experience, it inevitably follows that morality is in the eye of the beholder as well. It is the culture that determines the meaning of the text, rather than the text standing in contrast to the culture.

"In the ecstatic view, those who affirm a particular piety or religious preference constitute the church. The ultimate sin is schism, to claim ultimacy for one's own objective beliefs while denying that the beliefs of others are equally expressive of the Ineffable."

Clearly this is behind the constant cry of liberal ECUSA bishops that orthodox leaders must stay in the ECUSA and tolerate their heresy or else be guilty of splitting apart the church – as if repudiating everything the historical church has held dear for two-thousand years is not already a splitting of the church. I wonder if something similar may be behind the firestorm surrounding Brian McLaren’s ambivalence regarding homosexuality that was more concerned with the tone of McLaren’s critics than the content of his position. If heresy cannot be defined because doctrine is determined by nothing objectively reachable, then one must simply ignore differences and wait for some spiritual “feeling” of unity to erase all distinctions.

But this last quotation should be startling. It explains well why those who have totally redefined the faith of history refuse to do what most would think obvious, go and start another religion.

"Ecstatics do not deny the Scripture, the Creeds, or the great documents of our tradition. They do not throw them away. They love them. For them the Scriptures are the foundation of our faith, the liturgy resonates with the Ineffable, the Articles of Religion are a cultural treasure. They simply revise these sources along ecstatic lines. That is why it is appropriate to call them 'revisionists'. They revise Scripture, Creeds, and the faith from an alien non-trinitarian perspective that has no sense of the incarnation."

Schaeffer again, foresaw this type of thing as well. He spoke often of those who used “connotation words”, words that had a place in the memory of the general community. Because of that memory, when those words were used by liberal theologians they gave an illusion of communication. But because the words were totally redefined, that communication was truly an illusion. Sanders correctly identifies why it is possible for revisionists to say the right words, to recite the orthodox creeds, to say the right prayers and use the name of Christ as if they are one with those who remain orthodox, but to mean something entirely different by virtually every word, to in fact represent a different faith altogether.

The last phrase, “no sense of the incarnation” is absolutely key, I have come to understand. Orthodox theology has to stress that Christ truly became man, that he lived - was seen, heard, touched – that he suffered, died, was buried and rose in history. The incarnation is the objective connection between the realm of man and the kingdom of God. Schaeffer may have stressed the “propositional” nature of revelation at the expense of what is now referred to as an “incarnational” approach, but he would not have denied the latter, I believe.

The historicity of the incarnation was a huge part of Schaeffer’s thought. He taught that the “lower story” of human experience and the “upper story” of universal truths and spiritual experience are not hopelessly divided. They are connected by the propositional truth of God’s word and the historical fact of the incarnation. This is also a huge point of John’s epistles, that those who deny that Christ has come in the flesh are the very spirit of Anti-Christ, that the Gnostics who claimed a secret esoteric knowledge of the divine were teaching precisely the opposite of Christian truth which was historical, tangible, connected to creation.

Both Schaeffer and Sanders sound the alarm about what is in fact a heresy that completely redefines the Christian faith. The liberalism of Presbyterianism in the early twentieth century and the revisionism in the Episcopal Church today both hide heresy in orthodox terminology. The message is that compromise with revisionists is absolutely impossible. Whether the heresy of denying the objective value of scriptural content is found in mainline churches, evangelical churches or Roman or Orthodox traditions, compromising on the meaning of the plain words of scripture and the preservation of the apostolic faith is spiritual suicide. Christians who value orthodoxy must call heresy what it is, no matter how attractive or successful or orthodox it appears on the surface.