Mere Orthodoxy

My credentials as an evangelical Christian are considerable. I was raised in a Bible-believing home and church. I became a Christian at the New Wilmington Missionary Conference. I attended college at Westminster (named after the confession of faith that stands as a classic statement of evangelical doctrine) and seminary at both Gordon (now Gordon-Conwell) and Fuller. I worked for three years as a Bible instructor for Young Life Campaign.

But it wasn’t until this decade that a new stream of thought became a discernible current in my consciousness. It enriched my evangelical heritage, and, I believe, made my life a fuller expression of Christianity.

If belief in the centrality of Jesus and the authority of the Bible is at the heart of evangelical faith, then I can surely embrace that faith more warmly than ever. I know Jesus through the scripture, and scripture is meaningless to me apart from Jesus. But these dry doctrinal bones of mine were meant to live -- to be rescued from ethical impotence.

Somehow or other, whether it was my own fault or the short coming of my mentors, evangelicalism did not take me far enough into the kingdom. As I entered the '70s, my spiritual growth came from new quarters. Among these new influences was the Catholic Worker community in Los Angeles: the Ammon Hennacy House of Hospitality.

I’m not sure how it began, but my wife and I found ourselves volunteering to work one Saturday every other month at the Hospitality Kitchen on downtown LA’s Skid Row. We would arrive like aliens in a strange land at nine in the morning to prepare lunch for the mass of humanity already gathering outside the dining room door, eventually to circle into the rear alley in anticipation of bread, salad, iced tea, and rice or bean soup.

I had a sense of fright about these Saturday experiences. I could not see my own middle class personage reflected in the weather-beaten faces which moved anonymously through the serving line. These were not my kind of people. These were not bright-eyed Young Lifers at a weekend retreat; not seminarians parsing verbs; not evangelicals battling for the Bible. My life had been invaded by hundreds of shuffling feet. My God, this was the Third World!

It was not until later that I realized that these people were the ones Jesus had come to seek and to save. These were the meek who had an overriding claim upon the earth. And if I didn’t know them, if I couldn’t find myself among them, my evangelical faith would be aborted. I would finally suffocate inside my tightly drawn doctrinal web.

Anxiety over the purity of the faith is likely to paralyze the process of discipleship. A Christian friend once told me that above every other concern in my life, I should make sure that I never departed from the path of Calvinism.

But Jesus’ primary mission was not to establish orthodoxy or systematize truth. His mission was to fulfill the longings of the people of God -- so that the role of the faithful community would no longer have to be the search for and defense of right doctrine. He was right doctrine. The definition was clarified by flesh and blood reality. “I am the way and the truth,” said Jesus.

The community of faith is now free to base its life on the certainty of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The power to love flows from that certainty. The greatest witness to truth that we can raise is the example of our lives as truth incarnate.

“The one who loses his or her life shall find it.” This daily truth of death and resurrection in our own lives releases us from our enslavement to the abstract quest for propositional purity. This truth that we call the gospel has set us free.

The Catholic Workers did not change my basic theological belief. They did change the expression of that belief.

I had become comfortable with the task of defending my faith: of arguing for it and articulating it as persuasively as possible and of keeping it pure from heresy. The evangelical church seems to be hopelessly bound to that task.

I am not saying that there is no room for such an endeavor. Writing this article is part of my own modest contribution to the verbal delineation of truth. But this is not the focus of my life, I trust. And I am certain it was not the focus of Jesus’ life. In the post-resurrection era, truth becomes the springboard for action.

As an evangelical, I need to realize that love of my neighbor is the proof of my orthodoxy. Doctrinal truth is not an end in itself, but a means to the greater end of servanthood.

The Catholic Workers have helped me with this realization. And they have helped me to know the neighbor who is most in need of my love. In evangelical circles, Paul’s eagerness to “remember the poor” is perhaps the most overlooked exhortation of the New Testament.

In the last six years, largely because of contact with Ammon Hennacy House, Koinonia Partners, and the National Farm Worker Ministry, my life has shifted from a preaching ministry among the haves to a serving ministry among the have-nots. I like to think that I know Jesus better now than I did then and that I give a stronger testimony to the truth of scripture.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost, and the Catholic Worker has taught me to begin tearing down two walls in my life.

The first wall is the one erected by doctrine. Those who believe are in; all others are out. Some are going to heaven, some to hell. A lot of us evangelicals have never quite learned to accept this wall that has been built around the orthodox camp. Some of us have had the good fortune to see Jesus bulldozing his way through the cherished creed of his religious culture and of our own.

The second wall that I have begun to break down is the one between the rich and the poor. My evangelical heritage never brought home to me the absolute scandal of that wall, with Christians lined up mostly on one side and “pagans” on the other. The Catholic Workers help bridge the economic gap by their ministry to the poor and by their willingness to embrace voluntary poverty themselves.

I read recently of a renowned evangelical leader whose work was summarized as follows: “He has spent a lifetime in the defense of the gospel.” May God spare me from such a calamitous fate.

Jesus’ died for my sins. He was raised for my salvation. I do not need to defend this gospel so much as I need to implement it. I do not hold this truth up before the world to elicit belief; rather, the power of this truth propels me into the world to carry out the works of mercy.

This is in some ways a subtle distinction. But it is the reason my friends at Ammon Hennacy House are called “workers” rather than “preachers.” Their own outpouring of energy for the sake of the poor is a model of Christian mission, while their resistance to the militarism of our culture is an aspect of mercy that invites us evangelicals to reconsider our easygoing relationship with a brutal society.

I yearn for the day when the worker movement will capture the attention of evangelical pulpits and seminaries. Service to the poor should not be relegated to “special project” status, nor should it be discussed only in an isolated course or an occasional sermon. Service to the poor is what should take place, more than anything else, when people are “born again.”

But until evangelicals are freed to live out their creed, I will be indebted to the Catholic Workers for giving me a home away from home.

When this article appeared, Bill Lane Doulos was a free-lance writer and Sojourners correspondent living in southern California. He is co-author with Clarence Jordan of Cotton Patch Parables.