An Exercise In Missing the Point

How The Trinity Debunks Beth Allison Barr

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Besides finally coping with my shockingly overgrown rose bushes—not entirely my fault, there’s been too much rain to spend a satisfying moment in the garden—I finished up a review of Beth Allison Barr’s Becoming The Pastor’s Wife for the Christian Research Journal. I’ve already blogged about this book, so I don’t want to belabor my irritation. I doubt it would constitute a must read for those of you who read click on this blog for pleasure and not because you loath me to the depths of your core and are trying to figure out why I am wrong and wicked (does anyone even have time to do that?).

But today is Trinity Sunday, and I guess I have one final thought about the book, one that came to me as I read this passage from Isaiah, which comes around year after year, and can feel a little bit over familiar as a result:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!”

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Apparently yesterday was both a military parade of some kind of occasion and a protest march called No King day. Neither of those events, however, made enough of an impression that I felt compelled to stop cutting my rose bushes to read anything about them. It seems darkly funny, to me, that any mortal soul would announce that there should be ‘no king’ when such descriptions as Isaiah’s of God’s heavenly throne room exist and can be read about on any devise and even in old-fashioned bound books.

To be human, though, is to strive first for equality, and then for preeminence. The equality bit is a ruse, obviously. I desire to be regarded as of equal importance to you, but as soon as you grant me that coveted status, I will go on ahead and try to crush you under my muddy gardening crock, if that’s what I happen to be wearing. All of us are of one human family, we like to say, but I personally would like you to be quiet and listen to me. And the euphemism of my preeminence is “independence.”

Eleven times, in Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, Barr uses the term “independent leadership.” She believes, against mounds of evidence, that at various points in Christian history, women exercised “independent leadership” in the church. The mark of this curious claim is that they didn’t have to “depend” on their husbands in their ministerial activities. They organized the lives of other people without reference to men. They taught and preached and celebrated the Eucharist all on their own.

Men, down the ecclesiastical ages, obviously exercised “independent leadership,” doing what they wanted to, preaching to whomever staggered into church, teaching the dull and confused, burying the dead, feeding Christ’s holy Church with the bread and wine consecrated to be for us the Body and Blood of our Lord. Every cleric knows he can do whatever he likes without reference to bishop, moneyed parish matriarch, wife, or collogues. He just goes about his life “independently.”

Which is to say, the quest for “independent leadership” seems to me the oddest thing I have ever come across, as a Christian. It is like wandering around saying we should have no king. It is like buying a lot of stuff from Temu as a sign of your autonomy. It is like getting another tattoo to reveal your authentic self. It’s like Eve eating the fruit to gain enlightenment.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, no man exercises “independent leadership.” Even when he thinks he does he is mistaken. There is no such thing as an independent person. Every person depends on a vast throng of other people for life, meaning, and happiness. No one wakes up and puts on clothes he wove himself, eats food he brought forth by the power of his word, gets in a car he crafted from the sweat of his brow to go sit in an office in a church to do all his work by himself. He can’t open the door of the building without a key that someone cut for him with a machine invented by someone who knows how to do that sort of thing. He sits in a chair that some unimaginative company designed, to pour over a Bible that was written and translated and printed not by him but brought forth by the will of the Father through the Word of the Son superintended by the Holy Spirit to be mysteriously and miraculously put into the mouths and pens of mortal men whom God decided to use for that very purpose.

What does this mean, “independence?”

At the root of it, it is to be congratulated for being clever and good by God himself. And this is a great irony, because who is God?

He is a Being so Holy, so removed from corruption and hubris, that to be in his presence without atoning help is to go on fire and be destroyed forever. And within that Holiness, what a mere creature ought to notice is that dependence and love is the binding chord that holds the cosmos together. The Son, who shows us the Father in every word, movement, and gesture, did nothing on his own, but only did that which the Father gave him to do. He went forth, not counting equality something precious to be grasped, to give himself up as an atoning sacrifice for our sin so that we could not only survive but rejoice in the presence of the Father. In other words, it was God’s will and desire to remediate our ruinous independence that always leads to death, and to reincorporate us back into the dependent and happy relationship he intended at first. And this he does through the hidden work of the Holy Spirit who binds us ever closer to each other and to him.

And all of this is because of love. God so loved us that he gave us the gift of himself. And he helps us to love him and each other. We inch along, weak, helpless, confused, beset by many trials and tribulations. We don’t know our right hands from our left hands. Our minds and hearts are clouded by sin and strange ideas. But, mercifully and wonderfully:

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over many waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.

The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth
and strips the forests bare,
and in his temple all cry, “Glory!”

The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.
May the Lord give strength to his people!
May the Lord bless his people with peace!

Ok, so, be the dependent and helpless person you are and shove yourself into something bearable and get in that car and go to church where God will speak to you, bind up your wounds, feed you with himself, and strengthen you to help others along the way.

And come back noonish tomorrow for the Monday Livestream in which we will get to talk to David Roseberry. Hope to see you there!