"Outward Signs: Toward a Semiotics of the Eucharist" - paper by David Dault

The following is a draft of the paper I delivered to the Liturgy and Sacraments section of the 2009 Catholic Theological Society of America conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There was a good discussion that followed in the question and answer portion. I will try to have an audio of both up on my website soon.

n.b., some definitions: As explicated in the footnotes below, "CCC' and "USCCA" refer to various Catholic Catechisms. "RCIA" is the "Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults," the process by which adults are brought into the Catholic faith. The "mandatum" is an affirmation between instructor and Bishop that one's teaching will not be contrary to the doctrines and orthodoxy as defined by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. In Catholicism a Deacon is a specific ordained office of the Church, charged with care of the poor, teaching, and the sharing of Scripture. "Zwinglianism" refers to Ulrich Zwingli and his followers, whose ideas were very influential during the Reformation. Zwingli is probably most famous for his debate with Martin Luther over the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Zwingli hewed to the verse, "Do this in memory of me," while Luther repeated and eventually carved into the table in front of him and pointed repeatedly to the verse, "This is my body." So it goes.

This is a preliminary version. I plan to revise it for publication in the next few months. Please treat it as copyrighted, though you are welcome to contact me if you find a portion of it useful and would like to use it in your work. Thanks for reading!

I come before you today as an inhabitant of two very distinct worlds: in the first place, I am a Roman Catholic who teaches actively in my parish's RCIA program. I am an adjunct at Aquinas College, the local Dominican school in Nashville, and I have been given the mandatum by my local Bishop. So I am very firmly involved in this sphere of the Catholic world.

In the second place, I am also an assistant professor at a small, historically African-American Baptist seminary in Nashville, and my theological training has been exclusively through Protestant-based programs (I attended a Presbyterian seminary, and Vanderbilt, where I did my doctorate, is formerly Wesleyan, though it is now considered non-denominational).

Needless to say, these two distinct worlds offer quite a range from which to reflect upon the similarities and differences of Catholic and Protestant teaching and practices, and it is from such reflections that I offer my comments this afternoon. The time does not allow me to be as comprehensive as I would like, but perhaps what I offer here can be expanded in the question and answer portion, and will blossom into further conversations after the conference. We shall see.

In particular today I want to comment on the sacrament of the Eucharist. In RCIA, Eucharist is described and articulated in certain ways that, while technically correct, may lead to profound misunderstandings among those former Protestants who are contemplating making the journey to the Catholic faith, or who are already on it. So I hope this paper will both raise some awareness about these difficulties of understanding, and how they might be avoided, as well as offering a more refined language of articulation for both extra- and intra-Catholic dialogue.

The various Catechisms I consulted (the CCC and the US Compend) offer the following core definition: "The sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us."1 The CCC adds, "The visible rites by which sacraments are celebrated signify and make present the graces proper to each sacrament." This definition, and the discussions that follow it in the various catechisms are, I think, exact and helpful when treated in their context.

However, in my experience in RCIA, my fellow deacons and teachers will often not use the language of the Catechism I quoted a moment ago. Instead they substitute a phrase that, on the surface, may seem interchangeable, but (I submit) is not. This phrase is that the sacraments are, "An outward sign of an inward grace." Additionally, I should note that individuals going through catechesis have relayed to me that they have been told that the sacraments are, "ordinary things used for extraordinary purposes."2

Again, on the face of them, and in a proper context, these two statements are correct and proper. However, I want to highlight how they might be, and often are, heard by curious Protestants. To do this, I am going to take a quick detour through the discipline of semiotics, the "science of signs" popularized a little over a century ago by Charles Pierce, Ferdinand de Saussure and others. Semiotics, at its simplest, is a discipline which explores the relationship of communicative or symbolic systems and the things or states of affairs to which such systems refer. In semiotic parlance, respectively, the symbols referring are "signs," and the things or states of affairs referred to are "signifieds."

Without getting too technical, what is important to get out of this is that I am going to argue that Catholics and Protestants understand the "signs" and "signifieds" of the Eucharist very differently, and unless this difference is attended to properly, our attempts to articulate the Eucharist to inquirers will continue to lead to profound (and at points heretical) misunderstandings.

The language of the Catechism is careful to articulate that the relation between sign and signified in sacraments such as the Eucharist is not an arbitrary relation. When the Catechism defines the sacraments as signs "efficacious... and instituted..." to "make present the graces proper to each sacrament" this non-arbitrary relationship is stressed. The signs (the visible objects, the communicative elements) are non-interchangeable in such an articulation. There is a direct connection between (to use the words of the US Compend) the "visible reality [of] their outward expression" and the "invisible reality... [God's] gracious gift in redeeming us."3

The difficulty I keep seeing is that those coming to us from various Protestant faiths are coming from metaphysical systems that function with a very different relation between sign and signified. Take, for example, the Zwinglian forms of Eucharistic understanding (of which my Baptist students are prime examples). The language of the Baptist faith has dispensed with the notion of "sacrament" entirely, preferring instead to refer to the "Lord's Supper" and Baptism as "ordinances." The ordinances are, in the language of semiotics, signs without signifieds. In other words, when a believer is baptized or receives cracker and juice in a Baptist context, the metaphysic at work is that there is no "invisible reality," in the sense of the Catechism's understanding, at work. The actions performed are not "empty" in the sense that, for the Zwinglian (Baptists and others) the actions are commemorative (i.e., Jesus asked us to do them, so we do them). They are not, however, efficacious in the manner articulated by the Catechism.

While not all Protestant traditions are Zwinglian in this manner, many of them share this distrust of the efficacious and instituted relation between sign and signified. Hence, for example, the stories I would occasionally hear during my years at seminary about youth groups on mission trips substituting Coca-Cola and snack crackers in ad-hoc "Eucharists" presided over by (I would suggest) overly-enthusiastic youth pastors. The common denominator here among both the Zwinglian and non-Zwinglian Protestant traditions is a certain arbitrariness between the sign and signified in the sacraments. In other words, the "visible signs" that point to the "invisible realities" are, to a greater or lesser extent, understood to be interchangeable.

The roots of this arbitrariness are, of course, historically proper to the development of Protestantism in its many forms. It is precisely by loosening the "efficacious and instituted" relationship between sign and signified that allows the various Protestant metaphysical systems to claim quasi-Apostolic and grace-fully constituted practices. While I disagree ultimately with the veracity of such claims, it is not the place of the present discussion to argue the merits of such historical developments in Protestantism. Rather, I want to use these historical conditions to emphasize my point that inquirers from Protestantism must, as a result of these conditions, hear our articulation of the sacrament of the Eucharist differently than we intend it, as Catholics, to be heard.

So, for example, when we teach about the Eucharist, we teach that the grace efficaciously associated with the elements of wafer and wine enact a change in the state of the recipient with regard to sin and grace. In simple language, the sign is effective because it signifies a reality (Christ), which alters the reality of the recipient. Thus, when we talk about "outward sign" here, we Catholics have in mind something akin to the vows of a marriage or the conferring of an academic degree: the action, while symbolic, if inextricably tied to the unseen but present change in the reality of the recipient (i.e., one becomes espoused, or becomes a doctor, etc.).

This is not the way in which the word "sign" is heard, however, by those raised in Protestant metaphysical systems. In many Protestant understandings, efficacious change in the life of the believer never occurs (in the Baptist traditions of my students, for example, there is an active debate in the hymnals as to whether the sinner is "washed" or "covered" by the blood of the Lamb. In the former, the sin is changed through being washed clean; in the latter, the sin is ever-present in the believer, though rendered invisible to the Father through the actions of the Son). Even in those Protestant communities where some measure of change is understood to take place (e.g., Methodism, Episcopalianism, Lutheranism), there is a level of divorce between the sign performed and the change signified. I would offer that these bifurcations of sign and signified, in their many manifestations, arise from the historic objections to the sacraments and indeed the Church itself, as "instituted" in the sense meant by Catholic understanding.

Thus our catechumens will hear our simple explanation that a sacrament is "an outward sign of an inward grace" not, as we intend it (i.e., "this is the necessary, efficacious and instituted sign of the signified reality of grace"), but rather through these Protestant metaphysics I have described (i.e., "this is the unimportant, arbitrary and ultimately dispensable symbol that points to what is truly important: the invisible reality that operates apart from all 'institutions of men'").

Even more than this, it has seemed in my observations that (and this is true even with cradle Catholics) our catechists in RCIA have themselves begun to adopt the semiotic bifurcations of our Protestant cousins. By this I mean that as the catechumens ask for explanations of our definitions, I have seen catechists grapple for language and the metaphysic they come up with is not the one we have been discussing here, as articulated in the Catechisms. Rather, they find ready to hand the articulations that are prevalent in the southern-Protestant culture in which I am, and everyone around me is, swimming.

The result is that our RCIA catechesis itself minimizes and obscures the essential metaphysical and doctrinal differences at work in our articulations of the reality of the sacraments. Cradle Catholics may fail to spot this due to a lack of depth in understanding the various Protestant traditions out of which our catechumens are coming, and the profound differences in metaphysics at work among them. Conversely, catechists like myself who have been reconciled to the Church out of various Protestant traditions may ourselves misunderstand Catholicism at these essential points of difference. In other words, our catechesis can suffer greatly by being either too Protestant or too Catholic.

Where I hope this discussion of semiotics will prove most helpful is in encouraging us to take a step back and consider the many ways in which these terms "outward sign" and "inward grace" can be heard. The meaning of these terms, and how they are understood to relate, as sign and signified, to each other, are the very key to the success or the undoing of our catechesis in the Church.

In like manner a similar semiotic minefield surrounds the phrase I mentioned a few minutes ago, “Ordinary things set aside for extraordinary purposes." To the ears of a Protestant, this may still indicate an arbitrariness that we as Catholics do not and cannot mean. In fact, it might be more accurate in our catechesis to reverse the phrase to emphasize the disjunction between Catholic and Protestant thinking on this point. While it might overstate the point, suggesting that the primary created purpose of water is to baptize, and the primary created purposes in God's order for bread and wine are to be the elements of Eucharist (and that the aspects of these materials that we may assume to be primary--such as their qualities of nourishment--are in fact secondary) might at least accomplish the shock in the listener necessary to convey that something very different is at stake in our Catholic metaphysic.

Let me put this a slightly different way, with a tangible example. If sacraments are like stop signs, then the Protestant understanding of "ordinary things set aside for extraordinary purposes" might lead to the following humorous, though analogous, misconstrual, whereby we stumble one way upon a field of stop signs, growing like wild pumpkins in a patch. We shout "Eureka!" because we see that we can pluck them and put them on our street corners to help with our traffic snarls, and that they will work much better than the daisies we had been using.

A stop sign is not an "ordinary thing" in that sense. It does not occur naturally and then get set aside within a meaningful system for a new purpose. Instead it arises precisely out of the meaningful system itself. The "ordinary" place for a stop sign is no other place than a street corner -- in any other context (such as the wall of a dorm room), it is "extraordinary."

In a similar manner, we can argue that a sacrament is not an "ordinary" thing in the sense of a pumpkin in a patch. Instead, a sacrament is most "ordinary" in its sacramental and liturgical context. Thus water, wine, bread, and oil are not "set aside" to be used as sacraments, but are only "set aside" from their ordinary purpose when they are not being sacramental.

Again, to make such statements may ultimately overstate the case, semiotically. However, for our catechesis to become more effective, we might explore such shocking hyperbole, at least for its pedagogical utility.

Even if we ultimately reject such hyperbolic flourish, however, I will continue to maintain that our articulation of the sacraments, Eucharist and the others, to ourselves and our catechumens, would benefit from a thorough examination of how what we are saying is being heard, in light of the reality of the disparate and divergent Protestant metaphysics which surround us, and from which the majority of our catechumens come.

I look forward very much to your responses. Thank you for your time.

1 Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] 1131, cf United States Catholic Catechism for Adults [USCCA or "Compend"] p. 169.
2 Both quotations are anecdotal, and are a distillation of several conversations had in the presence of the author.
3 USCCA p. 168.

Teaching the essentials

If you know the Bible in four languages, your ego won’t allow you to teach the true essentials, which might be “follow the 10 commandments.”

This quotation does not come from a context of faith and belief. Rather, it was an example given in the hallways of the most recent Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting, as reported on Tim Ferris's lifestyle blog.

As a believer who also has an excess of academic training, I was struck by this turn of phrase. I think there is a lot of wisdom in it, and a call for caution on our (the academically minded's) parts.

Years ago, I heard tell of an exchange between two Quakers, one educated and the other not. The latter exclaimed, "The Lord hath no need of thy learning!" The other replied, "Perhaps, but the Lord hath less need of thy ignorance!"

What I like about the example from the investment meeting is that it offers the other side of the Quaker exchange, and rounds out the problem. As educators, we battle ignorance in our students (and, one would hope, in the Church at large). However, we can also get lost in our own egos, and lose sight of what is "essential" in all this.

But what is essential?

I recall a forum, a few years back, when some of my fellow theology colleagues in the Ph.D. program, and some faculty and friends, were gathered and discussing a paper chiefly concerned with the call to feed the poor, and how it might relate to the difficulties Tennessee was having at that time with its health-care system. The conversation turned to the matter of piety, and specifically whether it was the responsibility of professors to teach "the moral life" in addition to the "life of the mind."

I was shocked, I must admit, that there was debate in the room as to whether it was our task as educators simply to make students better thinkers, or better (that is, more moral, more loving, more charitable) people. I am firmly on the "better people" side of this debate.

As the Chinese say, "A clever mind is not a heart."

Moral formation, however, is hard work. It is easily resisted by students who are comfortable with their comfort, or who feel entitled to whatever entitlements they might currently be enjoying. The formation of virtues in students (or even the creation of conditions favorable to such virtues, if one is trusting the Spirit for the formation itself) is an easily and oft-frustrated endeavor. Even Socrates ended up thinking that such undertakings were difficult, at best.

More difficult still, of course, when teachers give up on the process. We also become comfortable with our comforts and entitlements. We become comfortable in the notion that our erudition is a substitute for piety - either in our students or in our own lives.

It is not. We may disagree on how the 10 Commandments are to be followed, but I submit that - as teachers of specifically Christian subjects - we do not have the option to debate whether they are to be followed in the first place. Nor do we have the luxury of communicating to our students that such commands of virtue and piety might be "optional." The world is suffering too much from such mistaken notions already.

In this season of family and forgiveness, let us pray for each other. I ask for my fellow teachers to pray for my ego - that my love of my own knowledge might never get in the way of what our Lord has told us is essential: doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly (with the least of these, and others). I will gladly pray for you as well.

Happy Birthday, John Milton

December 9th is the 400th anniversary of the birth of the author of Paradise Lost.

Celebrate with us by listening to a retrospective from NPR, as well as a bit of polemic from Stanley Fish. Enjoy.

Reading Providence: Part 2

"I feel like God wants me to run for President," Governor Bush confessed to a friend. "I really don't want to run . . . But I know God wants me to do this and I must do it." Such words surely sound dangerous to the liberal base of the Democratic party who hear them as further proof that our president is off his rocker. But in the days after 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq War evangelicals tended to agree with his conviction. Bush was our our Joshua! Our Gideon! Our David! I want to agree, in part, with the evangelicals.

So let's play a game! Let's try to read the story Almighty Providence has written for us so far! Let's presume Bush really did hear the voice of God (even if it was that still small voice in the recesses of his heart)! Let's say God did want Bush to be president!

But first I should issue a caution: This is a dangerous game to play, especially when the story one tells involves the deaths of innocents. I by no means want to suggest the burnt bodies of Iraqi children are collateral damage for the greater good. I actually want to tell a story that deconstructs itself, or at least deconstructs our habit to read the hand of Providence so close to history. My ultimate goal is to disable your political Donatism.

We should begin to read the hand of Providence by taking a quick look back at the history of modern Evangelicalism in America. At one point, you evangelicals were less politically cohesive. Many denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention managed to hold liberal and conservative Christians together by invoking the Protestant principle of the freedom of individual conscience. But in the late 1970s the conservatives in the SBC organized a takeover (aspects of their approach were repeated elsewhere). Their success was, in part, due to the way they were able to make certain complex theological issues seem very black and white by linking them an odd kind of evangelical orthodoxy (since Evangelicalism traditionally shuns the idea of orthodoxy). Thus, the average Christian was made to think that questioning the something like biblical inerrancy was spiritually risky. The same technique was applied to politics in the 80s. Every true Christian, it was argued, must oppose abortion and the "homosexual threat." Pro-family meant being pro-capitalism, pro-gun, pro-war, etc. Shocked at the progressivism of Jimmy Carter, Evangelicals helped elect Reagan to replace him. Both he and his successor, Bush Sr., were disappointments. They were conservative, but not really Christian. With the help of Ross Perot, Clinton managed to get elected despite Evangelical opposition. The Lewisnky affair made him a lightning rod for their ire, helping to unify them to support a real Christian: George W. Bush.

Behind Evangelical support for Bush is the belief that God best uses the pious. The same belief is often applied to preachers. Since the 17th century Evangelicals have believed that only a true Christian could effectively channel God's grace in (usually) his preaching and ministry.

The trouble with this idea is that it's heresy. Way back in the fourth century Christians called Donatists were saying the same thing. They thought every true Christian had to be baptized by a true bishop, otherwise her sins were not forgiven. The unanimous decision of the one Church was that God could do whatever God wanted to do with or without the help of the minister.

The same man who instrumented the suppression of the Donatists saw this same tendency when it came to politics. Some had a habit of baptizing imperial policy just because the emperor was Christian. In his encomium to Constantine Eusebius of Caesarea said that a Christian emperor could always be trusted to make Christian decisions. Augustine countered this view in his massive political book, The City of God. This thousand-page book is one big exercise in reading Providence. Looking at his own recent history, Augustine argued that a Christian emperor is better than a pagan emperor, but even Christian emperors make stupid decisions. In fact, he argued, God has even killed a few prematurely to remind us that God is the Lord of history, not the emperor.

So then, what do we make of George Bush's belief that God wanted him to be president? I say, why not! Maybe God did want George Bush to be president. Were his approval ratings higher, were the past eight years more successful, I'm sure it would have done nothing but reinforce Evangelical Donatism – the belief that piety is the most important quality to consider in a candidate. It is hypocritical for Bush's former supporters to ignore his statement now that it seems his time in office has been an absolute failure. Have you considered that maybe God just wants you to draw a different conclusion? Consider what has happened to the once mighty Evangelical base? It has fractured. Pat Robertson came out in support of Rudy Giuliana. James Dobson denounced the president of the NAE. Obama supporters can buy this.

Maybe God wanted Bush to be president so that he could do just that: fracture the Evangelical base. Maybe the God of history has judged the sins of his people in history. Their murder of innocents! Their scorn for the poor! Isaiah cries out against you!

[S]hew my people their transgression...they take delight in approaching to God...Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? [the LORD answers,] Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness...Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward. (Isaiah 58.1-8)

You care so much about abortion that you ignore the facts! No president, not even a Christian president, has had any impact on abortion rates in this country! Your saber rattling before the Iraq War resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children! Is that pro-life? Was the ineptitude of this administration in the face of Katrine pro-life? Is foreclosure pro-family? When crime goes up because the economy slants toward the wealthy, don't innocents suffer then? Don't children die?

You wanted a Christian president! God gave you one! Look what has happened! So, let me put this in terms you can understand, "What is God trying to tell you?" Should you have supported Huckabee in the primaries just because he was a Christian? How faithless to ignore the hand of Almighty Providence!

For my part, I can draw no conclusion but the logical one. If God wanted Bush to be president, it was to shake you out of your heretical belief that a Christian president is a good president. A Christian president will not make the country Christian. If anything, Bush has had the opposite effect. Nor will a Christian country do anything about abortion. Let's be honest, as much as I despise abortion, this one isn't going away. If it does, the consequences would be tragic (picture the Prohibition, but with coat hangers). Instead, maybe you should begin to think about which president will fulfill the words of the Lord to the people of Israel. Which president will call us as a nation to call us to undo the heavy burdens, clothe the naked, and let the oppressed go free?

From the Episcopal Primate

Katherine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, spoke at length with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air last week. I have been following the heated conversations in Anglicanism these past years with great interest, and I found this interview helpful in getting Bishop Jefferts Schori's, and the American Episcopal Church's, perspective on the controversies.

You can listen to the interview online here.

Welcome to the Quiet Revolution

Your socialist revolution is coming thanks to nearly 30 years of intense laissez-faire capitalism! Karl Marx predicted that the continuing disenfranchisement of the proletariat by the petty bourgeoisie would result in the eventual overthrow of the capitalist system. Of course, Marx did not fully appreciate the survival instincts of capitalism. It held on for a lot longer than he thought it would (for the record, we have never seen a truly communist country). Instead, we are experience a quiet revolution. You are witnessing it! Lehman Brothers has collapsed. Others may follow. On top of that, with the recent acquisitions of Fannie, Freddie, and AIG, you are now in the insurance and mortgage business! Welcome to the beginnings of socialism!

This collapse is not the result of a popular revolution. It is more like an implosion. Welcome to "trickle-up economics!" The trickle-down, or supply-side, theory says, in a nutshell, that giving tax breaks and incentives to those with the most will lead to prosperity for all. How asinine! Reagan, whose administration popularized this idea, failed to see that a supply-side system transforms Adam Smith's rather benign virtue of self-interest into full-blown greed. Tell the rich that they should have more, that having more is good for everyone, and you give them a license to do whatever they can to get whatever they want (which, by the way, is everything). This includes screwing you!

Beginning in the 1980s a major shift occurred in the way credit card companies started doing business. Instead of giving consumers small lines of credit at higher interest rates, they started focusing more on fleecing the consumer. Credit card companies now make most of their money in fees, which they couch in a lot of small print and legalese. I'm a smart guy. I am pretty close to being called "doctor," but I have never been able to understand the language in a credit card agreement.

Now, let's take that same philosophy and apply it to the mortgage industry. Let's give people with bad credit loans they cannot afford. Let's hide extra fees and interest rate hikes in agreements they cannot understand. Then let's get a lot of fast-talking, self-interested sales associates to hawk those mortgages and see if all the boats will rise. But eventually people get squeezed so much that there is nothing left to give.

The result? The market trickles up. The squeeze we have been feeling on the bottom is finally starting to affect those greedy bastards at the top! Here's a news flash Wall Street, you cannot continue to use a business model that builds your success on the backs of the poor and middle class! You can only trick people for so long into giving you money. Eventually they are going to run out of money, and then the system that you built to make sure you get your money (collections, foreclosures) will come down so hard and so fast on so many people who have so little left to give, that you will find yourself with nothing left to get.

Reading Providence: Part 1

A few weeks ago, Thomas Nelson Publishers offered readers the opportunity to receive a free book in exchange for a blog review. Free book? The opportunity was too good to pass up. This review will be followed by another reflection on orthodox Christian politics and the gift President Bush has given us. I am building toward a thesis. When President Bush was governor of Texas, he confessed, "I feel like God wants me to run for President . . . I really don't want to run . . . But I know God wants me to do this and I must do it." In the next couple of posts I want to make the case that Bush was right.

Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of Barack Obama. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008. ix + 147pp. $19.95.

In Mansfield’s view Barack Obama’s journey to faith is a journey to find his "tribe." In six brief chapters the author describes the religious and cultural "swirl" of Obama’s childhood, his adult conversion, the influence of his beliefs on his politics, and the larger implications of his faith for the current political climate.

The son of an atheist mother and a polygamist Kenyan father, who abandoned his family for greener pastures, the first chapter depicts Obama growing up with few stable markers of identity, only later to stumble upon his "tribe" at Trinity United Church of Christ. This is followed by a reaction to the church and its controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Though Mansfield sharply disagrees with black liberation theology (even if he doesn’t entirely understand it), he seems to genuinely respect both pastor and church. The third chapter focuses on Obama’s "postmodern" faith, a pluralistic faith, full of doubts. Mansfield seems perplexed at some of the candidate’s beliefs, and responds in simple, one-sided ways to some of Obama’s more complex, multifaceted statements about religion. The next chapter examines the relationship between those beliefs and Obama’s politics in light of the 2004 debate with Alan Keyes, who said that Jesus would not vote for Obama because Obama is pro-choice. Since those debates, Obama has attempted to holistically relate his religious and political beliefs, arguing that in American democracy purely religious convictions must be translated into concepts that can be broadly debated. The author notes that conservative Christians see this distinction as an attempt to dispense with genuine faith for a popular civic religion.

The final two chapters consider Obama’s faith in the current political context. Chapter five contrasts him to other politicians like John McCain, for whom religion is integral to having good character, but ultimately private. The author depicts Hillary Clinton’s humanistic religion as a mechanism for coping with her husband’s infidelities. He ends by bemoaning Bush’s failure to effectively blend religion and politics. The final chapter intimates that Bush has actually set the stage for Barack Obama. The divisive way religion has been used by the Right has created an environment suited for using religion to advance liberal concerns. Though Mansfield will not vote for Obama, he asks if the Bush years have not offered "the nation an opportunity…for healing and grace?" What we need, he says, is a "common devotion to God" that can "break cycles of poverty, challenge strongholds of racism, reinforce ethical conduct among the powerful and the powerless, deliberate on the morality of war before it is declared, and end the moral scourges of our time."

Some daft bloggers have accused this book of being propaganda for the Obama campaign, a charge that only makes them look more ridiculous in light of the evidence to the contrary. First, Mansfield has clearly stated he will not vote for Obama because of his support for abortion. Second, though the book tries to achieve balance, structurally, the section focusing on Obama’s religious beliefs ends with a rather stark description of some of his pro-choice decisions. Third, though Mansfield is fair to Jeremiah Wright, he clearly thinks some of his theology is "off-kilter," noting that "he [Obama] can clearly be at home with anti-American sentiment."

I suspect the real reason for these bloggers ire has something to do with Mansfield’s refusal to depict Obama as a wild-eyed, covert Jihadi bent on imposing Shari'ah on the American people. Or maybe they wanted him to depict Obama as an opportunist, faking true religion to get votes (Mansfield does depict Obama as a heretic). Though arguing from the particular proves nothing, maybe it will ease the minds of some of these bloggers if I told them that, though I was hardly an enthusiastic Obama supporter to begin with, this book made me much less comfortable with my decision to vote for him in the Fall.

The real problem with this book is not its laudable effort to be fair, but in the rather "flat" way it deals with complex theological issues. Mansfield indicates that Obama’s faith is genuine but misguided. However, the way he deals with Obama’s beliefs makes me wonder whether the author’s understanding of Christianity is not too simple, or if his memory is not too short.

Examples of Mansfield’s theological and historical naivete are too numerous to mention. For the record, I do not fault him for these mistakes. My point is simply to demonstrate that the faith Mansfield thinks is "traditional" and "orthodox" is not necessarily either. For instance, (1) Mansfield thinks that Jesus taught our souls go to heaven after we die, when the afterlife is something the church has wrestled with for about 2000 years. (2) He thinks interpreting the Bible is easy and straightforward, when, in fact, each of us uses a "canon within a canon" to interpret the Scriptures (Dault would speak of a "covert magisterium"). (3) Mansfield simplistically thinks revelation means the Bible, excluding James Cone’s view that revelation means liberation, when actually, for Cone, it can mean both. (4) The author thinks Obama’s description of Christian meditation means he prays to himself. The evidence he gives for this is both weak and silly, and not worth a response (56). (He should read some of the Eastern and Western mystics.) I could go on...

My point is not to defend Obama’s religion. Actually, I sharply disagree with a number of Obama's theological views. But I also disagree with Mansfield. What fascinates me about this book is the way he "thinks past" Obama (despite his laudable attempts at gravitas). I will not speculate about Mansfield’s theology outside what I can gather from this book, but the hints offered by his responses to Obama are illuminating. Anything that seems to rub against the grain of white, middle-class evangelicalism, an evangelicalism that thinks the meaning of the Bible is simple and obvious, is dismissed as "postmodern," selecting "its own truth from traditional faith, much as a man customizes his meal at a buffet." We can talk later about whatever postmodern faith is supposed to be (it’s a blanket term, a little like Tillich calling something existential), or whether Obama is a postmodern Christian. But, we might also ask if the brand of Christianity Mansfield seems to espouse is as traditional and orthodox as he thinks it is. I think not!

I agree with Mansfield's reading of the Bush years. Though I cannot be certain, I am willing to bet that he voted for Bush in both elections. In that case, could his regret be a sign of the working of Providence? I believe Bush when he says that he is a Christian, and I believe him when he says he thinks God wanted him to be president. Why not? If God could harden the heart of Pharoah to deliver the Hebrews from the land of Goshen, why couldn't the Holy Spirit warm the heart of George Bush to deliver American evangelicals from their political Donatism?