Capacious Audacity

In Which I Read that Piece by James K.A. Smith

File: Reproduction of a drawing of the library of Leiden University in 1600 by Johannes Woudanus, AHM-F-43168-122.tiff - Wikimedia Commons

I can’t bring myself to blog about horsegiirL—sorry. Instead thought I would take a little gander at a piece that is going round and round on X. It is on the opposite side of the cultural divide, the world of evangelicalism, and thus is not very shiny or lurid, depending upon how you feel about pop culture. In fact, it is predictably tragic, for a well-known and mostly respected scholar has decided to chuck all his credibility into the social media void and bravely go where everyone else has gone with banal regularity. Who has done this? James K.A. Smith, the author of such books as You Are What You Love and On the Road with Saint Augustine.

I thought it would be useful to go through his piece, both for its tone and its logic, because it is instructive, I think, for how behind the times the affirming branch of Christian adjacent spaces are. It begins like this:

Over the past several years, Calvin faculty have had to learn a new language that includes words like synod and gravamina and status confessionis. This is because, in 2022, the synod of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—the governing body of the denomination—adopted a report on human sexuality which stipulates that “homosexual sex” violates the definition of “unchastity” in the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the confessional standards for the university. To use evangelical nomenclature, this means sex was deemed “a salvation issue” and hence one on which disagreement was disallowed. This decision had significant repercussions in the denomination because a number of CRC congregations, through a process of theological and pastoral discernment, have concluded that same-sex marriage can be a faithful expression of following Jesus for gay and lesbian Christians. A number of these congregations are now in the process of leaving the CRC and are likely to join other Reformed denominations (such as the PCUSA, RCA, or UCC) that accept same-sex marriage as a covenantal expression of discipleship for gay and lesbian Christians.

Well, yes, Professor Smith, those on the front edge of this issue for the last ten years have been able to easily observe and acknowledge that it is a “salvation issue.” Or, to say it another way, it is not something we can amicably disagree about and go on taking communion in the usual way. And that is because it goes to the question of what Scripture is. Either God can communicate to us in the Bible or he cannot. If he can, he has said plainly that there is only one kind of sexual activity that is allowed—that of one man and one woman together in a life-long marriage.