In Which I Continue to Ponder the Writing of Scott Cairns

In an earlier blog I expressed appreciation for poet Scott Cairns' insights into insulting language when used about the church. While I applied his thoughts to my own experience, I did note that the pronoun "my," as applied to the capital-C "Church" referred to the Orthodox communion. Read carefully, his piece really says that the person who attacked Orthodoxy couldn't have known any better; as a Protestant (I use the term broadly; Cairns does not give the speaker's affiliation), this individual was part of the benighted wing of the faith that regards church as a consumer choice.

That I have read Mr. Cairns correctly and not uncharitably was confirmed when I scanned his more recent blog whose opening paragraph contains this sentence:

Having been brought up within a community of folks whose sense of who they were (Baptists of an exceedingly fundamental sort) was not nearly as strong as their sense of who they weren't (Catholics), I hadn't been offered much of an explanation along the way.

In reacting to the individual who spoke slightingly of his own Church, Cairns admits that he called that person's views "a b*****t characterization of Orthodoxy." I wonder: Could I tag his own statement as "a b*****t characterization of Baptist fundamentalism"? Well, no - because that would be uncharitable, and because my mother would get onto me for even implying such language, and because anyway Cairns admits he was wrong to phrase things that way. Still, his original point remains: Someone summarized a rich and complex theology in a single, dismissive phrase and it wounded him. I'd like a little Golden Rule here.

I grew up fundamentalist Baptist and I can affirm that we had a very strong sense of who we were: We were the heirs of John Smyth and Thomas Helwys and we believed in the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the miracles of Jesus and the reliability of the Bible, among other things. We had a well-stocked theology, if perhaps a stripped-down liturgy, less impressive than what the Orthodox Church has to offer. But even that was because we didn't think the gospel needed the special effects.

I am no longer a fundamentalist, I suppose, but I am still a Baptist and, though Scott Cairns does not extend to me the same charity he insists upon for himself, I also love my church; that would be the Lexington Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas (we Baptists are not big on abstractions). We do not have the history that Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism boast but we have striven mightily toward one end: to give the Bible back to a church from which it had been taken. We don't have saints and we certainly don't have ikons, but if we did our patron would be John Bunyan (a tinker) or perhaps Andrew Fuller (a professional wrestler), or C. H. Spurgeon (an autodidact with no university degree) or maybe Lottie Moon or Martha Stearns Marhsall. And she will be depicted, not in rich robes but in mufti. And she will be holding a Bible - perhaps upside down, but certainly open, a codex, not a scroll, in English, not the original languages.

I love my church. I love The Church. And I don't want anybody trash-talking either.