I just finished a week of co-teaching a course for nine military chaplains. It was an “intensive”–which means all day, every day, for five days. I did something like this about two decades ago, at the Chaplain School at the Rhode Island Navy Base. My memories of that earlier time are very positive ones, and this past week, teaching in our Doctor of Ministry program,  only reinforced my sense of the importance of the ministry of military chaplains.

In our course last week, we covered topics in theology and ethics with reference to military life. My co-teacher, Russ Spittler, himself a longtime Navy Reserve Chaplain, did an amazing job of relating 1 Corinthians to the realities of military life. And Anne Tree, my research assistant, got some great discussions going on case studies.

One thing that stood out for me is how comprehensive the chaplaincy is as a ministry. Military chaplains are dealing with marriage and family issues, youth culture, sexuality, cross-cultural communication, multinationalism, treatment of prisoners, questions of authority, legal challenges–and in all of that, the most fundamental realities of life and death.

One aspect of military life that is not often acknowledged is the importance of community. The 1989 film Glory–I highly recommend it–is about a platoon of African-American soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Near the end, they have agreed together to face a military maneuver that will mean certain death for all of them. Sitting around the campfire the night before their final battle, they talk about the importance of sticking together, even in the face of death, and one of them remarks that he sees no alternative for himself. “I ain’t never had family before,” he says.

There is an old tradition in Asia of the “warrior monk.” I thought a lot about that last week. Like monks, people in the military have a strict discipline, one that is designed to nurture certain virtues: loyalty, solidarity, a spirit of sacrifice, courage, fidelity (semper fi!). For many young men and women entering the military, these patterns are brand new. For some of them, this will even be their first experience of something like “family.”

I have done my share of marching against wars and criticizing prominent aspects of American foreign policy. For all of that, though, I have great respect for the military. And I have an even greater appreciation for those who wear the chaplain’s cross on their uniforms. People who serve as chaplains are often viewed with suspicion by both their sending churches and their military peers. They often struggle alone with complex theological and ethical challenges. The ones that I spent time with last week are the best and the brightest of “warrior monks”!

I hope Rebekah got an “A” on her paper. She is a student at a Christian college, taking a course on Christ-and-culture topics, and she wrote her paper on my views. In addition to reading a few of my books and entries on this blog, she wrote to ask me some questions. When I answered, I also told her I would love to read her paper when it was finished. She sent it to me with this comment: “I found much of what you said insightful, though there were points in which I disagreed with you.”

I found her disagreements encouraging, for two reasons. One is that, in expressing her basic concern about my overall approach on Christ-and-culture topics, she is getting at something very important. Rebekah worries that I sometimes seem to be doing “a balancing act” in dealing with views with which I disagree, and that there is a danger that I can encourage “relativism.” She has that right. I do walk a tightrope often, and doing so for a Christian is a very dangerous business. After I read her paper, I wrote to tell her that I also consider it dangerous not to walk the tightrope. Too many Christians simply slip into relativism, while others condemn views they have not really worked at understanding–and in that failure we might be missing out on some things that God wants us to take seriously. But for all of that, the balancing act is no easy thing, and it poses some real threats.

The other point of encouragement for me is what Rebekah’s paper demonstrates about the importance of Christian liberal arts education. I have visited many evangelical college campuses, and I am consistently impressed with the quality of the education taking place there. Under the tutelage of very fine faculty members, gifted students are struggling with the big questions in extremely creative ways. Anyone who worries about the direction evangelicalism is taking in “the culture wars” should spend a few days on an evangelical campus. The students that I see in those settings are getting ready to present a very different image of evangelicalism to the larger world. They are bright, they are asking wonderful questions, they are well-informed about what is going on in the world–and best of all, they care deeply about being faithful to the gospel. They even worry that folks like me can be a little too wishy-washy at times. I am glad that they worry about that. I hope Rebekah received an “A” for expressing her misgivings about my views!

There is a very strange ad in the current issue of Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine. Billed as “An Appeal from Faithful Catholics to America’s Bishops,” it issues this plea: “Please Protect the Body and Blood of Christ from Pro-Abortion ‘Catholic’ Politicians.” I don’t pretend to be able to give advice to Catholic bishops about their sacramental policies, but I certainly don’t think that in either their theology or mine the Body and Blood of Christ need to be “protected” from Catholic politicians who defend Roe v. Wade.

Actually, I may end up being a part of a group that does give some kind of Eucharistic advice to the Catholic bishops. I am presently co-chairing, along with Bishop Patrick Cooney of the Diocese of Gaylord, Michigan, the official Reformed-Catholic dialogue. The four Reformed denominations are the United Church of Christ; the Presbyterian Church (USA), which I represent; the Reformed Church in America; and the Christian
Reformed Church.  We are just finishing up a few years of talking about baptism and will soon get started on the Eucharist.

In the Reformed congregations in which I was raised, there was never any suggestion that the Table needed to be protected from threats posed by sinners. Indeed, it was the other way around: we were the ones who needed protecting. We were constantly warned against eating and drinking “unworthily,” lest we do so “to our own damnation.”

I broke with that tradition of “fencing the table” in two stages. The first occurred in a kind of instinctive manner. When Phyllis and I first moved to Pasadena, we worshipped frequently at All Saints Episcopal Church, in good part because they had a active program working against South African apartheid, and having worked hard on that issue in my Grand Rapids days I joined the cause at All Saints. Each Sunday when the time came for the Eucharist, the rector, George Regas, would say in a gentle Southern drawl,
“Wherever you are in your journey of faith, we welcome you now to this Table.” Even though I had questions about the theology at work there, that felt right to me.

One Sunday I noticed Dr. Art Glasser in line to receive communion at All Saints; Art is a conservative Presbyterian (PCA), but his wife Alice was an active member at All Saints. The next day I went to Art (a Fuller colleague) and asked him how he worked all of that out theologically. “Oh, Richard,” he said, “long ago I was convinced by John Wesley that the Eucharist has an important evangelistic function!”

That too seemed right to me, but I still had to get past the I Corinthians 11 passage about eating and drinking unworthily, which had been so prominent in my upbringing. When I actually studied the passage in its context, I made my peace. Paul begins by chiding the members of Corinth for making a gluttonous meal out of it. They were overeating, and even getting drunk on the wine. It is with that in mind that he tells them that they are treating as if it were just another meal, and by not approaching the Lord’s Supper with respect they are risking judgment. There is nothing in what Paul says that would suggest that an honest seeker who is drawn to the Table without yet having a well-formed faith will be damned for partaking.

I hope that my thinking about the Eucharist will get further clarified in my forthcoming discussions in the Reformed-Catholic dialogue. To be sure, I doubt that my Catholic partners will be very interested in any practical advice I might have to offer. But if anyone does ask, I’ll tell them that, on my reading, the Crisis ad is very confused. While, like the persons who published the ad, I don’t agree with the pro-abortion politicians, I do hope they will continue to feel drawn to the Table of the Lord.

I just took a moment to google “G.A. Studdert Kennedy” and discovered that his book of poems, The Unutterable Beauty, long out of print, is online at http://www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/dasc/TUB.HTM.

Kennedy (1883-1929), known best in his day as “Woodbine Willie,” was a British army chaplain during World War I, and wrote his poems to capture the speech patterns of the soldiers to whom he ministered on the Western Front. I was first introduced to these poems in grad school, by a philosophy professor from Wales, who had served as a chaplain in World War II and found much spiritual strength in Kennedy’s poetry. Years later, a former student, who had discovered “Woodbine Willie” while working on a doctorate in Scotland, gave me a copy of The Unutterable Beauty. I read the poems regularly these days as a devotional exercise. Here is one of my favorites, appropriate for Holy Week. It is meant to capture a soldier’s feelings for the spiritual condition of his young son, but it is clear that “Woodbine Willie” knew of what he wrote–and I dare say, most of us also know the sentiments all too well.

 TO PATRICK

I gave thee life, my little son,
     And thou art part of me; Which part?
Would God I knew the Truth,
     Then were my soul set free
From fretting fears all down the years,
     From dull anxiety;

Lest I have given thee that part,
     Which makes my angel weep,
That underworld whence lusts and lies,
     Like vermin, crawl and creep
Across my visions and my prayers;
     Whence selfish passions leap

To slay the very thing I love,
     To crucify my Lord,
To strangle Jesus in my soul,
     With coils of evil cord,
And force me spit my sins upon
     The face my soul adored.

Fain would I give thee those bright wings
     On which my spirit flies,
To talk with angels on the heights,
     In solemn sweet surprise,
And win from Him, who is the Light
     The poet’s open eyes.