What We Lost

It's refreshing to hear from a grown-up at the deeper end of the Protestant pool.

Always strive to excel,
but only on weekends. -- Richard Rorty

"I am Protestant largely by accident. I didn’t stumble into it; I was born into it. I was raised in a veritable Evangelical enclave with all of my relatives, all of my friends, and even the private Christian elementary and secondary schools I attended existing safely within the Evangelical fold. Yes, I had my “born again” moment of praying for Jesus to come into my heart, but I was 5-years-old at the time, and I have no memory of it. As much as Protestantism is supposed to be about deciding for yourself, I can safely (but uncomfortably) say that I was born Protestant...

What I’ve discovered by studying under and alongside Catholic theologians and priests and colleagues is that I could easily imagine myself in an parallel universe—coming of age in a Catholic enclave where the rituals, the aesthetics, and the idioms of American Catholicism were my bread and butter. Everyone has what philosopher Richard Rorty calls a “final vocabulary,” the words “in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives.” And my “final vocabulary” is unmistakably Protestant. I love the fire-in-the-belly conviction of a good biblical sermon, and abbreviated Catholic homilies always leave me wanting. My heart swells to some of the old swashbuckling Protestant hymns. I come alive in intensive Bible study with my fellow lay people—no priest or sanctioned theologians needed, just us and the Bible. But I could easily picture myself on a different path, under different circumstances...

The truth is, we Protestants lost a lot in the Protestant Reformation. We not only severed—or were severed from, if the passive is to be preferred—our connection to Holy Mother Church, we also lost some of the great insights and joys that were attached to that flawed but beautiful institution. We lost our ability to outwardly belong under the theological umbrella of the official church teaching while also happily and nonchalantly subverting those very teachings where they fail to resonate with our spirits (see: Julian of Norwich). We became so serious that we lost our theological irony...

The lesson I take from all of this is that none of our “final vocabularies” are ultimate and universal. The ineffable realities and experiences we try to wrap and dress up in our limited human language are never fully covered. Our institutions and theologians and statements of faith are imperfect vehicles. And we are all susceptible to the vagaries of history, all inevitably shaped by formative experiences beyond our control."

-- Mathew Taylor