I recently read Victoria Loorz' book, The Church of the Wild. The book actually has a lot of value in shifting our thinking and acting in a more ecological direction. I found a lot to love in it. But for some reason she feels a need to digress into early Church history with disastrous effect. I reference this because it summarizes so well the story concocted under Modernity to "explain" Christianity and the Church. Here is what she wrote.
One of Constantine’s first agenda items was to get the religion in order. He had attributed his military success to placing the symbol of the Christian religion on his soldiers’ banners and shields. This led him to end persecution of Christians and eventually adopt the religion as his own (albeit on his deathbed.) But at that time, there were many different interpretations and expressions of Christianity throughout the kingdom, and that was causing conflict. Plus, a religion that asserts a single ruling identity for the deity would be helpful to remind folks that there was a new solo emperor too.
The fight was on for who was going to control the narrative of the newly legal church of the Roman Empire. Dissenting voices were shut down. And a war over the nouns of God was raging. The doctrine of the Trinity—a conceptualization of a single God with three parts—was forming through debates and fights and power trips.
So Constantine personally invited three hundred or so of the 1,800 bishops in the empire and escorted them, free of charge, to the imperial palace in Nicaea (now Bursa, Turkey, a lovely lakeside city). The bishops—all of them male, of course—were to come to agreement about the hotly debated hierarchy of the Godhead nouns, something their Hebrew predecessors never thought about. Defining the noun-ness of God “correctly” was an ongoing obsession of men with power.
The Nicene Creed was the result. These early church fathers—literally called the patriarchs—used language as a tool of dominance. From what I’ve read, the whole lot of them were power hungry, cloying for position and recognition, and they attacked one another mercilessly. These were the men who controlled the narrative. The Nicene Creed was meant to settle the God-noun argument and condemn any who dissented as heretics. And it’s been used since then as a statement of orthodoxy, with slight adaptations, throughout history.
The Council of Nicaea didn’t end the rivalry, though. For another sixty years, the debate over how to arrange the nouns of three entities to describe one God continued. People were excommunicated, exiled, and even killed over it. Finally the emperor Theodosius I ended the debate by imperial decree in 380: Nicene Christianity became the official state religion, complete with harsh condemnation of anyone with different ideas of what Christianity looked like, calling them “mad men” and persecuting them with a “divine authority.” The pope commissioned a revised set of Old Latin gospels to be used authoritatively by the Roman Catholic Church. These were called the Vulgate, meaning “for the commoners,” which is ironic because the commoners didn’t read Latin—only the priests did.
In this sanctioned Vulgate version of the New Testament, the decision was made to use verbum (word) to translate logos for the opening hymn of John 1. Verbum means just one single vocable, the smallest fragment of language that has meaning: a single word. While it doesn’t make grammatical, contextual, or historical sense, it does make a point. Word (verbum) fit the objective of the “single supreme authority” of the now official Holy Roman Empire Church.
After all, allowing Conversation (sermo) to define the essence of Christ could encourage those dissenting voices to be heard. No. They had been effectively shut down. Word was better. No back-and-forth, no room for dissent, no changes. Just the one and only Word, the last word, the capital-W Word. The inarguable Word, the end-of-discussion Word, the everyone-else’s-word-is-heresy Word. The hierarchy chooses Word, and so it remains Word.
End of conversation.
Loorz, Victoria. Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (pp. 119-121). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.
Here we get a succinct rendition of the standard conspiracy theory about Christian beginnings approved and propagated by Modernity. We often hear this sort of thing from people deeply damaged by their background in conservative evangelical or Catholic churches. In reacting against them, some, like Loorz, apparently feel a need to reject Christianity altogether. To justify this, she misrepresents early Christian history in a simplistic, self-serving, and indeed pejorative and defamatory way. I find it difficult not to take personally her gratuitous insults directed at the spiritual tradition I follow.
Now, Loorz does not claim to write as a historian, so my critique here may seem unfair. But I find it irresponsible for an author to simply repeat nonsense. And she really doesn't need to! Her book has a lot of value otherwise, and deleting this couple of pages would not have damaged her argument at all. But a lot of writers exhibit this tendency. Rather than focus on the good things they want to say, they seem to feel obligated to invent and frame an enemy to condemn and blame for their situation. They will spin the historical record and even just plain make stuff up. Loorz repeats some of the usual assumptions of Modern thought: the bias against communities and tradition, the assumption that only the worst forms of Western Christianity exist, the idea that somehow the Spanish Inquisition represented the basic agenda of the church from the beginning. That sort of thing.
In her blanket rejection of Orthodox Christianity, Loorz also defames a lot of the people she manages to quote favorably in other parts of her book, all of whom affirmed and lived by the same Nicene Creed that she has decided comes from a bunch of power-hungry men and their vicious, conniving Emperor. This list includes: Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Thomas Merton, the entire Celtic church, Howard Thurman, and Richard Rohr. One would think that perhaps she could have approached with a tad more humility these people and trust them to have a clue about their own faith. But apparently she does not. She seems to feel she knows better.
"There were many different interpretations and expressions of Christianity throughout the kingdom."
Here we find a central part of the Modernist propaganda about the early church. This makes it sound like it was a hodgepodge of groups, all with valid and roughly equal appeal and constituencies. On the one hand, apparently many different groups did exist which had different takes on Jesus. However, we find nearly all of them on the fringes of the faith. On the other hand, while we have no way of getting to actual numbers, judging from the extant manuscripts and recorded contemporary testimonies, an overwhelming majority of Christians in the early centuries participated in the mainstream Orthodox tradition of the Apostles, who actually knew Jesus.
"A religion that asserts a single ruling identity for the deity would be helpful to remind folks that there was a new solo emperor too."
Of course, prior to Constantine the emperor was considered a god, so for him to recognize another, higher God than himself would have meant rather a demotion. Plus, it's not like Constantine ruled as the first solo Emperor who therefore needed to justify his reign by imposing monotheism; his predecessors were all polytheists. The relationship between the Emperor and the Church remained complicated, shifting, often adversarial, and took centuries to get finalized, largely with the Church emerging in the higher position. By no means did the Church simply carry out the Emperors' bidding. Loorz' simplistic and uninformed depiction of this does her readers a disservice.
"The fight was on for who was going to control the narrative of the newly legal church of the Roman Empire. Dissenting voices were shut down. And a war over the nouns of God was raging."
No one "shut down" all "dissenting voices." The Council of Nicaea included bishops who followed Arianism, a belief that Jesus was not coeternal with God but a human whom God uniquely blessed. In fact, the Emperor probably would have preferred Arianism to prevail, and several of his successors did oppose the Church on these kinds of questions. The fact that "dissenting voices" existed and needed to be heard is why they called Councils in the first place. Loorz anachronistically reads her understanding of Medieval Catholicism and 20th century totalitarianism into the 4th century. This tells us more about her than it does about the Church at that time.
"The doctrine of the Trinity—a conceptualization of a single God with three parts—was forming through debates and fights and power trips."
No one with a rudimentary understanding of Christian theology would say that the Trinity is "a conceptualization of a single God with three parts." The doctrine appears in Scripture, but it did take a few centuries of conversations and debates within the Church to settle on a final, consensus articulation. She pejoratively describes this process as "debates and fights and power trips." Okay. But that does not doctrine was dictated by the Emperor with "dissenting voices" "shut down." She does not make clear how these "debates and fights and power trips" differ from the kind of "conversation" she advocates all over this book.
"Constantine personally invited three hundred or so of the 1,800 bishops in the empire and escorted them, free of charge, to the imperial palace in Nicaea."
Loorz here slanderously insinuates that the Emperor personally cherry-picked the bishops and bought them off by wining and dining them to get their approval of his nefarious plan. In reality, the Church selected the bishops, many of whom had bitter memories of brutal persecutions by the same soldiers that now welcomed them. Two of them even came from Persia, Rome's traditional enemy where Constantine had no jurisdiction.
(Loorz says that "patriarchs" wrote the Nicene Creed; the Creed actually came out of a gathering of bishops. She also expresses indignation that people back then would actually use terms like "patriarch" and "hierarchy," given their negative connotations today... as if she expects people in the 4th century to somehow have a clue about 21st century political speech.)
"The bishops—all of them male, of course—were to come to agreement about the hotly debated hierarchy of the Godhead nouns, something their Hebrew predecessors never thought about. Defining the noun-ness of God “correctly” was an ongoing obsession of men with power."
In those days, civic and religious leaders tended to be all or mostly male. This was not something the Church or the Emperor connived to do for this specific meeting. Loorz has this thing about languages based on verbs being better than those based on nouns, and she apparently feels that the desire for precision in theological language was "an ongoing obsession of men with power." I do not know which "Hebrew predecessors" she means. The prophets? In any case, she prefers languages other than Latin and Greek, which she has decided are hopelessly patriarchal. Fine. But people spoke those languages at the time. Does she feel they should have used some language she deems better but no one actually spoke?
The Nicene Creed, of course, contains more than just these oppressive "nouns." Some of the most significant aspects do concern actions: "was made," "begotten," "came down," "was crucified," "was raised," "proceeds," "is worshiped and glorified," "will come again," and so on. Indeed, the most important word in the Creed, the one most hotly debated, was an adjective, homoousios.
"The Council of Nicaea didn’t end the rivalry, though. For another sixty years, the debate over how to arrange the nouns of three entities to describe one God continued. People were excommunicated, exiled, and even killed over it. Finally the emperor Theodosius I ended the debate by imperial decree in 380: Nicene Christianity became the official state religion, complete with harsh condemnation of anyone with different ideas of what Christianity looked like, calling them 'mad me' and persecuting them with a 'divine authority.' The pope commissioned a revised set of Old Latin gospels to be used authoritatively by the Roman Catholic Church. These were called the Vulgate, meaning 'for the commoners,' which is ironic because the commoners didn’t read Latin—only the priests did."
Loorz attempts to make the work of the early ecumenical councils sound ridiculous, as a silly debate over the arrangement of nouns. Whatever. (Insert eye-roll emoji.)
Maybe she refers to the schism of the "Oriental" Orthodox, who followed slightly different variations of Christology? If so, misunderstandings mainly caused this tragedy and it indeed cost many lives. They seek to heal this separation even today. But nevertheless there remained more diversity within Orthodoxy than Loorz apparently knows about. We see that from the different liturgies and missional approaches used, East and West. But yes, the Empire's attempts to impose uniformity had terrible consequences.
Loorz does not make clear that with her sentence beginning "the Pope" she is talking about events several centuries later. The term "Vulgate" refers to the Latin version of the Bible held in common by the Western church. It has nothing to do with a class distinction between "commoners" and priests. And for a while Latin did serve as the vernacular language of the people. It didn't become only for priests until centuries later, and then only in the West.
"In this sanctioned Vulgate version of the New Testament, the decision was made to use verbum (word) to translate logos for the opening hymn of John 1. Verbum means just one single vocable, the smallest fragment of language that has meaning: a single word. While it doesn’t make grammatical, contextual, or historical sense, it does make a point. Word (verbum) fit the objective of the 'single supreme authority' of the now official Holy Roman Empire Church."
Loorz exhibits breathtaking historical ignorance here. The Holy Roman Empire wasn't formed until around 800 CE around the Frankish Kingdom, in the West. Neither does Loorz understand the difference between the Eastern and Western Churches. The bishop of Rome does not take on the title "pope" until 1083. By then he did not have any authority over the Eastern Church at all. And I have no idea what she means by "single supreme authority." Perhaps she got it from the novels of Philip Pullman.
After all, allowing Conversation (sermo) to define the essence of Christ could encourage those dissenting voices to be heard. No. They had been effectively shut down. Word was better. No back-and-forth, no room for dissent, no changes. Just the one and only Word, the last word, the capital-W Word. The inarguable Word, the end-of-discussion Word, the everyone-else’s-word-is-heresy Word. The hierarchy chooses Word, and so it remains Word.
This argument sounds just silly, as if everything hinged on one Latin term. Especially since the original remains the Greek logos. How can she complain about all this debating and fighting, and then complain about "no back snd forth, no room for dissent, no changes"?! The Church's understanding of the essence of Christ continued to evolve over centuries. "No dissenting voices"?! the Ecumenical Councils were vigorous debates between people holding different opinions. I have in my library shelves and shelves of books offering different opinions about scripture and doctrine, over 2,000 years of vigorous conversation.
Maybe she imagines that the Church refused to include some particular other "dissenting voices"? Who, may I ask, does she mean? Well, due to Loorz' association with people like Hal Taussig, I wonder if she doesn't somehow imagine that the Church should have included the so-called "gnostic Christians" some of whose books Taussig says we need to add to the New Testament. I don't know. However, mainstream Christianity separated itself from the gnostic movement for very good reasons long before Nicaea.
One of the things I have learned about people spouting conspiracy theories is that if you don't agree with them they whine about "not being heard." The Church heard the gnostics loud and clear. Irenaeus wrote a whole, long book about them and their doctrines, which he carefully studied. They just refused to go along with them because it would have corrupted the core of the faith. Maybe the Church did listen very carefully to the voices Loorz wants to include, and just decided not to follow them.
I admit that I have little grace in my heart for people who get books published and then just willfully get facts wrong, using those errant readings to defame many good people. She could have easily remedied this by spending an afternoon on Wikipedia. Indeed the book would have been fine if she just deleted this whole section. But she needed a scapegoat, I guess. But if I can't trust her on this, how am I supposed to trust her about anything? This passage doesn't even help the main argument of her book except to foment resentment and grievance, inventing evil enemies on whom to focus a death-ray of paranoia and rage, and blame for one's problems. It made me impatient with the rest of her book, especially the pages-long conversation with the deer.
All that being said, I otherwise mostly enjoyed her book. And her notion of a "wild church" remains an inspired vision. The Bible contains a great deal of chronically overlooked nature imagery that we certainly need to recover and lift up.
Loorz is free to go out and form her own religion. She wouldn't be the first. She is even free to call it somehow "Christian" or somehow connected to Jesus. That's been done already too. (Mormons and some Unitarians call themselves Christian.)
But there are very good reasons why the Church placed the focus squarely on Jesus Christ and took the time and energy necessary to carefully articulate what this means. The doctrines she dismisses as the product of a pernicious waste of bad men's time -- the Trinity and the two natures of Christ -- are actually essential and constitutive for Christians and Christianity. They basically mean God is a community of mutual love and God was uniquely present in creation in Jesus. In truth these doctrines, had she taken the time to study them at all, actually make her point. For the communal love of the Trinity is embedded in all creation, and through the human Jesus' divinity we realize our own. Jesus Christ reveals the radical Presence of God in creation and in humanity. I would have thought that something Loorz would appreciate.
Of course, she would not likely have gotten any of that from her evangelical church. Indeed, the meaning of these doctrines has largely been lost to the Western Church. This is on us. Her ignorance is understandable, at any rate.
It is the Church's job to recover these doctrines and articulate their deeper and broader meanings. We need to be about this work and build on it in expressing a faith that does indeed see God's Presence in creation and works to walk on the earth more lightly in humility, thanksgiving, appreciation, listening, reverence, and peace.
+++++++
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