Entwined with us
A character in John Updike's Bech Is Back describes his wife's WASPish Episcopalianism this way: "Many of her crowd went to church as faithfully as they played tennis and golf and attended rallies to keep out developers. Yet, their God, for all his colorful history and spangled attributes, lay above the earth like a layer of icy cirrus, a tenacious and diffident other whose tendrils failed to entwine with fibrous blood and muscle."
The Episcopalians in southern Sudan described by Jason Byassee in this issue do not fit that stereotype of Episcopalians, nor, for that matter, do most of the Episcopalians I know. Yet as usual Updike puts his finger on central theological questions: Is our God distant, ethereal, hypothetical? Does our religion operate on the same plane and by the same rules as middle-class and upper-class American culture?
There was a time when I thought it was important for Advent churchgoers to grapple with Christianity's central intellectual claim about Jesus. I even thought it good to review the fourth-century controversies about whether Jesus was of the "similar substance" or the "same substance" as God. There is only a one letter difference in the Greek words, and seminary students lose a lot of sleep trying to remember which is which.
