Reformed and Reforming, United and Uniting

My exemplars in comparative theology were Catholic. As Francis X. Clooney and Catherine Cornille have pushed me to think about the boundaries within comparative work and about the importance of identity and commitment to one’s own tradition, I have appreciated these promptings to align my work within the field. However, the shape of the questions has not always quite fit my formation. I certainly felt the gravitational pull of the five-point Calvinism in which I was raised, aware that the very thought of looking to other faith traditions for insight and dialogue could be anathema. However, the broader Protestant traditions instilled in me another sense of the theological task, focused on 1) the importance of being reformed and always reforming; and 2) the role of difference in the quest for Christian unity.

Two Protestant Principles

My undergraduate education at Calvin College (now Calvin University) cracked open a few windows of possibility for interreligious learning. I learned about John Calvin’s teaching of the seed of religion (semen religionis) and awareness of divinity (sensus divinitatis), even as Calvin’s own teaching about the total depravity of humanity pulls against the idea that this seed and this sense could get us very far in true knowledge of God in Christ.

I also became acquainted with Karl Barth’s popularization of the idea that “the Church must always be reformed” (semper reformanda), a notion rooted in the reality of God’s inbreaking revelation in Christ that encounters us in every historical moment. The church is reformed and always reforming. I took this as an invitation to wonder what God has to say to us in our historical moment, how divinity interrupts our assumptions and helps us understand the sins and errors of the past.

In the postcolonial era in which I began my studies, it certainly seemed as if Western Christian theologians were learning new things: about God’s covenant with the Jews, about how Orientalism and colonial mindsets had dehumanized non-white people and denigrated their sense of divinity, how deeply culture permeates revelation and our understanding of it. Comparative study became a way to be always reforming, now in dialogue with the truths that others know.

Uncomfortable with the continued exclusions of my home traditions (of xenophobia, sexism, and cisheterosexism) I did not stay in the Calvinist enclave. In time, I would be ordained in the United Church of Christ in the United States, a denomination whose sense of semper reformanda led it to form a union of Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church (both already uniting denominations) in 1957. Reformed and reforming, united and uniting.

After moving to Toronto, I was admitted as a minister into The United Church of Canada, another united and uniting denomination. Also connected to the Reformed heritage, its founding appealed less to historic principles such as semper reformanda, but it was self-conscious and explicit about the necessity to restate the tenets of the Christian faith in every age. After the 20-article Basis of Union in 1925, the denomination produced three more statements of faith in 1940, 1968, and 2006. Like the United Church of Christ, the United Church of Canada is not a creed-binding church, but it asks its ministers to be in “essential agreement” with its theology. The denomination’s theology has ranged across emphases on the social gospel, neo-orthodoxy, liberalism, and liberation theologies.

A Case Study

After outlining the above principles, I turn to a brief case study on how comparative study is “reforming” the notion of sin I inherited. Studying the nondual Saiva tradition of Kashmir has helped me grapple with the reality of unity and difference that my UCC formation roots in the Trinity (three-in-one) and to Jesus’ prayer “that they may be one” (John 17:11). Its metaphysic has helped me to think more expansively about the different ways embodied and social situations intersect with teachings about (1) who we are created to be; (2) how this has been distorted, or sin; and (3) how we can be restored and redeemed.

·       The nondual Saiva concept of the mirror of consciousness helped me think about (1) multiplicity in the imago Dei (the divine image in which humans were created) because, in that system, the universe and conscious beings reflect the divine in thirty-six parts (tattvas). There is no single factor, such as the rational faculty, that encompasses the divine image and that, then, can be used to exclude and rank human beings in proximity to God.

·       Multiplicity is a feature of other doctrines, as well. Both the Christian tradition and the world’s religious traditions posit a variety of (3) religious ends (or ‘salvations,’ as Mark Heim famously put it).

·       The remainder of my presentation will reconsider the second moment in the problem-solution trajectory: (2) sin.

Again, nondual Saivism offers a helpful intervention. Six of the tattvas, or parts of the divine image, are limitations. Divine consciousness limits itself through the power of the first, maya, to veil the unity of all things. This allows beings to interact in a differentiated world. The other five represent specific limits: in time, in place, in satisfaction, in knowledge, and in power. To put a contemporary framing on this teaching: our social location limits us. These limitations, while not inherently “sinful,” smudge or obscure the unity of consciousness (they are part of mayiyamala) and thus provide multiple opportunities to distort our inherent union with the divine and each other.

Constructively, this insight encourages me “always [to be] reforming” how my tradition talks about sin. The paper will conclude with a sketch of how the multiplicity of the limits of embodiment and social location expands a Protestant doctrine of sin to encompass the individual and the communal, the sinner and the sinned-against, willful acts and generational traumas.