Dr. Platypus

The February edition of Baptists Today contained a letter to the editor expressing one Baptist’s opinion of ecumenical catholicity. In his words, BT “really opened a serious can of worms” in its December issue by running an article suggesting that Baptists could stand to be a bit less legalistic when it comes to receiving new members who were first discipled in other Christian denominations that practiced infant baptism. In the words of this letter-writer,

It is quite ironic that on the 400th anniversary of Baptists, one of their major publications should give space to attacks on believer’s baptism. With the December issue, the traditional definition of a Baptist church, “a body of baptized believers,” goes out the window.

It is also quite ironic that, in making this charge, this brother is found to accuse (among others) John Bunyan, one of the biggest names in Baptist history, of betraying the “traditional definition of a Baptist church”—for Bunyan was an advocate of the same policy of “open membership” that the offending article proposed nearly 400 years ago! In fact, if the letter-writer had acquainted himself with George R. Beasley-Murray’s Baptism in the New Testament—an exegetical tour de force by a Baptist scholar of impeccable academic and ecclesiastical credentials—he would have known that receiving Methodist, Catholic, etc. members without requiring re-baptism has in fact long been the majority opinion among British Baptists. That doesn’t mean that “open membership” is the correct policy for Baptist churches to embrace (although I think it is), but it does mean that some Baptists have thought so since the 1600s, and in some parts of the world the majority of Baptists still do today.

On this Shrove Tuesday, however, I mostly want to discuss the second part of the letter. After some rather condescending remarks about Christians in other denominations, the writer continues:

Also, not content to wreak so much havoc in one area, this same issue of Baptists Today tries to justify the liturgical ceremonialism and the papist trappings that our predecessors in the faith rejected and condemned.

The writer has a problem with liturgical ceremonialism. So do I when it gets in the way of an authentic relationship with God. The thing is: everybody has a liturgy and a ceremony! Growing up, there were certain phrases that I knew were going to be a part of any prayer that certain people prayed—even though they were all ostensibly praying extemporaneously! “Father we just want to….” “Lead, guide, and direct….” “Bless the giver and the gift….” You get the idea. We all get into ruts. That’s as true for the preacher or deacon in the sport coat as it is the one in the Geneva gown or the alb. Perhaps a new pastor at this writer’s church will some day suggest fiddling around the the order of service they’ve used for the past fifty years and we’ll see how much ceremonialism he’s willing to justify.

As to the “papist trappings” (do people still use the word “papist”?), I have pointed out in my old series on Ancient Christian Worship that many of the specific customs that apparently offend the writer go back to pre-Constantinian times. So do many customs that I have never seen or even heard of being practiced in any Baptist church—the sign of the cross, remembrances of departed saints, daily Communion, etc. (Okay, I make the sign of the cross when I receive Communion, but I don’t think anybody else does.)

The writer is of course correct that historically Baptists have rejected or even condemned these practices. But where do you draw the line? The Charleston tradition of Baptist worship featured clerical gowns, a structured order of service, responsive readings, and so forth. It was far more “liturgical” or “ceremonial” than the evangelical fervor of the Sandy Creek tradition. The New Testament itself indicates the first Christians continued to follow certain liturgical ceremonies they learned from their Jewish heritage: chanting the psalms, set hours of prayer, set prayer forms (such as the Lord’s Prayer), etc. Once you concede that God might in fact be honored by people putting some forethought into worshiping well, you open the door to at least considering the possibility that some customs of the greater church might be worth reclaiming. Just because some people might do them emptily doesn’t mean we can’t try to do them right.

It seems that some Baptists no longer identify Lent as the useless self-mortification and works (autosoterism) that it is. Most Baptists have stood for “faith alone” and rejected such ascetic practices as fasting, meatless Fridays, cutting tonsures in the hair, clerical garb, flagellations, and acts of penance as being the outward show of Pharisees.

When I was young, I did in fact identify Lent as “useless self-mortification and works.” Of course, that was before I knew anything about it! Since then, I have had the opportunity to read the Bible, where I learned that fasting was a common practice in both Testaments, and that it happened sometimes privately and individually and sometimes corporately as part of a group. (The members of the leadership group at Antioch were fasting together when God instructed them to set aside Paul and Barnabas for missionary work.) I also learned—and I admit I learned this as much from personal experience as from biblical study—that I’m not especially good at being holy or resisting temptation, so it would probably be a good idea for me to give special attention to these areas from time to time.

Like all Baptists (at least all the ones I know), I believe that a person’s standing before God is a matter of grace. I categorically reject the idea that anything I can do can make God love or accept me any more or less than he already does. But I also have a theology that is bigger than the “plan of salvation.” God loves me just the way I am, but he loves me too much to let me stay this way. Therefore, it is appropriate for me to search both Scripture and the witness of Christians who came before me for wisdom that will help me grow in my discipleship. Since I am firmly rooted in the “Free Church” tradition, I consider myself free to embrace whatever helps me keep my focus on Jesus, be it fasting (Mt 6:16-18; Acts 13:3), meatless Fridays (a subset of fasting), meaningful haircuts (Acts 18:18), symbolic clothing (Rev 4:4), or appropriate acts of restitution or penance (Mt 5:23-26; Jas 5:16). (I can’t find a biblical justification for flagellation, nor do I want to go looking for one. But seriously, has this person ever observed Baptist Christians literally whipping themselves in their religious fervor?)

He concludes,

I am Baptist. If I needed ritualism or if I thought God enjoyed seeing people lighting candles (magical vehicles for sending up prayers through sacrificial flames), I would join some faith tradition that features such religious frippery.

I am also a Baptist. I don’t need ritualism in the sense that I need more than the grace of God, but as a card-carrying member of the human race, I do need religious forms of some kind—that is a fact of anthropology and sociology.  I can’t get away from them, so I had better admit that fact and get on with choosing good ones. I doubt God cares one way or another about whether people light candles, but I know he likes the prayers that accompany them. And I do know (because I’ve read Exodus and Revelation) that God loves symbolic acts of worship.

Therefore, tomorrow night I’ll join with the other members of my Baptist church in receiving ashes on my forehead as a reminder of my humanity, my mortality, and my desperate need for more of Christ, his teachings, and his grace.

Another gem from Jeanie Miley:

We talk about the Ten Commandments, and when we do I always think about how God asked this young Jewish girl to put herself in the position of being censured and shunned, at the least, and even stoned to death because of the perception that she was breaking the law.

What was God up to, seemingly breaking his own rules to accomplish something so grand?

What was he doing, asking this young girl to put herself in the position of appearing to be scandalized by breaking the laws of her people?

Later, Jesus scandalized the religious culture of his day and turned the values of his day upside down, eating with prostitutes, touching the unclean, lifting up the downtroddent and making friends with women.  He befriended  the lowly, the outcast, the littlest and the least, and whenever the woman caught in adultery was brought to him, he dealt with her with unusual sensitivity, compassion and forgiveness.  I’ve wondered if Jesus’ compassion was born out of a memory of hearing stories of his mother’s plight.

Amen.

I’m thankful for…

• A little girl who likes Homer and Louisa May Alcott for bedtime stories.
• A little girl who interrupts the bedtime story to ask about words or expressions she doesn’t understand.
• A freshly painted guest room—and all the people who will use it.
• Just enough time at the end of my day or week to learn something new.
• A very loving, very understanding wife.
• The Mercer University Children’s Choir.
• Churches that believe in adult Bible study—I’d be out of a job without them!
• The ability to get some money out of savings, load up the car, and go visit family far away.
• The Adult, Too Sunday school class.
• The book of Genesis.
• The Macon Symphony Orchestra.
• The ability to buy a couple extra cans of vegetables for my church’s Crisis Closet.
• The Beatles.
• GoogleBooks
• Students who smile at me when they “get it.”
• Phở
• Dr. Rick Wilson’s continued confidence in my suitability to serve as an adjunct professor at Mercer University.
• The alphabet.

What are you thankful for?

Saints!  I think that basically, from the church’s point of view, what we need to do is form saints – people of faith, hope and love.

Thus says Glenn Hinson, one of my professors at the Seminary formerly known as Southern, and one of the major influences in my early appreciation of both patristics and Christian spirituality.

Wade Burleson is obviously a man of strong conservative convictions. While some are a bit miffed that he seems to have only recently realized the degree of hurt the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention inflicted on some of its members beginning in 1979, I for one am pleased that he now understands. We don’t all learn at the same speed, and there’s more joy in heaven… etc.

Anyway, read Burleson’s tribute to former President Jimmy Carter. I also disagree with President Carter about many things, but that shouldn’t keep me from recognizing a fellow believer in Christ when I see one.

Oh, and you might also want to read (or watch) Burleson’s sermon at the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Norman, Oklahoma a couple weeks ago.

Here is an observation worthy of careful consideration.

One of the great Prayer Book collects asks God that we may “love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise”. That is always tough, for all of us. Much easier to ask God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. But much less like the challenge of the Gospel.

Every Christian knows that this sentiment is true. We all love and desire things that God forbids—not because God is out to get us but because, if we ever received them, it would be harmful to our relationships with God, others, and/or self. Therefore, the challenge of the gospel is to invite God to change our desires, our loves, to line up with God’s holiness. And we pray for God’s grace beforehand, knowing the road is sometimes hard and we will not always succeed. And we pray as well for patience and a forgiving, welcoming spirit toward our brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing that their battles may be far harder than our own.

Oh, and here’s the statement in context.

There is a final avenue of exploration of the message of Hebrews that I would like to explore in terms of the anthropological concept of liminality, and that is how the author envisioned his readers conducting their earthly lives.

Attitude toward Earthly Life

There is indeed an inner sanctum in heaven that Christians may experience proleptically even now (4:16, 12:22, etc.). For the moment, however, our lives must be lived on earth, where there is no longer any distinction between sacred and non-sacred space. The context for our current divine encounter is beyond any fabricated sacred enclosure. With no sacred borders, there is no longer a realm of safe haven. We are to live our faith “out there” in the world, where acts of mercy, solidarity with outcasts, and bearing Christ’s shame are the components of our liturgy (10:32-34; 13:13, 16). Life in all its fullness, and indeed in all its worldliness, is thus the context in which we draw near to God through Christ (13:13). The spirituality of Hebrews, for all of its dualistic language, does not represent a retreat from the world. Hebrews ritualizes the practice of spirituality, but does not reduce it to a liturgy that can be performed somewhere and then left behind.

Timothy Radcliffe argues that, unlike other Christians, the author of Hebrews “makes the bold move of refusing to offer any alternative experience of the celestial liturgy” than that found in the no-longer-available Jerusalem cultus (“Christ in Hebrews: Cultic Irony,” New Blackfriars 68 [1987] 495). While this is true to a certain extent, it misses the author’s main point. Heavenly realities are in fact available to believers, but they do not always appear heavenly in their earthly incarnations.

One aspect of the phenomenology of pilgrimage is worthy of mention in this regard. That is that the pilgrim generally goes as one intentionally assuming the role of the stranger. In various traditions, pilgrims wear distinctive garb and go penniless, or else carry money only to give to the poor. Rather than blending in with the locals, they must be different; and in the process they willingly enter that limbo of statuslessness where authentic life transitions can be accomplished. It is thus no accident that Hebrews insists that believers identify with the poor, the mistreated, and the prisoners (10:32-34; 13:2-3).

This sacralization of all of life implies that need-meeting ministry is a fitting expression of one’s commitment to Christ. It is not something ancillary or preparatory to spiritual practice: it is an integral part. Furthermore, if all of life is the Christian’s act of worship, this suggests we look at the commonplace as an avenue for divine encounter. We must find a place in our spirituality for daily work, so that we might pray with Brother Lawrence, “Lord of all pots and pans and things… Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates!” (The Practice of the Presence of God [Revell, 1958] 11).

Herein lies an implicit repudiation of the isolationist mentality that sees the church as a fortress against the world. At the same time, however, this embrace of earthly life as the context for divine encounter does not imply an “anything goes” attitude. In fact, much of the suffering believers may endure in the world is a direct result of their failure to blend in with their surroundings. The author of Hebrews never suggests that Christians go out of their way to find persecution, but he is aware that a genuine commitment to Jesus often meets with society’s resistance. He therefore urges his audience to make the first move, to sever ties with the world that keep them from following Jesus authentically (12:1; 13:13). He can thus applaud the community for once cheerfully submitting to the plunder of their property (10:34). With no unnecessary worldly entanglements, the pilgrim people of God are free to seek the lasting city which is to come (11:15-16; 13:14). Such an attitude guarantees that believers will lead lives at a distance from the world, moving toward God who is to be found outside of human restrictions, creating sacred space where there was none before.

Liminality, the limbo of statuslessness one experiences in rites of passage the world over, is a fitting interpretive grid through which to read the cultic depiction of Christian existence in the book of Hebrews. To be sure, it is not the only valid interpretive grid, but I think it is a fruitful one. We have seen how the concept of liminality provides a key to Hebrews’ attitude toward outward forms of religious devotion. In this post I want to explore a somewhat more esoteric topic: the imagination.

Attitude toward Imagination

The author of Hebrews boldly asserts that his readers have in some sense already drawn near to the heavenly realities to which they aspire (they have “tasted of the heavenly gift” and of “the powers of the age to come,” 6:4, 5; see also 12:22-24). However one is to understand this assertion theologically, in practical terms it invites an engagement of the imagination on the part of the reader. Rituals operate on the level of symbolism and imagination. They move people, individually and corporately, into a realm where humanity’s creative energies are given free rein to renew society. In this sense all rituals are more or less liminal. Similarly, the cultic spirituality of Hebrews seeks to tell us something that cannot be apprehended through rational means.

Authentic spirituality should be about helping to foster the creative, right-brain aspects of existence. (It is certainly about more than that, but it just as certainly must include that.) Although the content of the Christian message remains the same, it is up to each new generation to embody the tradition in creative and imaginative ways. We must not, however, confuse imagination with one particular misuse of it, which is fantasy. Fantasy preys on human desires and fears, and is thus earthbound and egocentric. A healthy imagination, in contrast, is self-transcendent. Hebrews models a vital interplay between tradition and imagination that does full justice to both.

As but one example, consider the writer’s lavish use of the Old Testament texts, especially the Psalms, in explicating the meaning of the Christ event. A former professor, Dr. Harold Songer, once related how he had assumed the author of Hebrews had more or less randomly drawn on words and phrases from the Psalms that he thought referred to Christ, and that it would be fairly easy to find additional verses with a similar thrust. Then he put this assumption to the test. After combing the book of Psalms, Dr. Songer later became convinced the author of Hebrews had in fact exhaustively compiled every possible allusion to Christ in the Psalter. I’m not prepared to vouch for Dr. Songer’s thoroughness in reading the Psalms for potential christological types and allegories (although those who knew him would question his attention to detail only with great trepidation!), but I can attest to the author of Hebrews’ encyclopedic knowledge of the biblical texts, familiarity with classical Jewish and Hellenistics methods of interpretion, and ease of expression within the accepted canons of Greco-Roman rhetoric. The author knew his tradition inside and out, but he creatively re-appropriated it in the service of his proclamation of Christ.

While the imagination needs the support of a tradition to be fully creative, the tradition also needs new imaginative insights to stay alive. Unfortunately, the spiritual traditions of the West often prefer, like the first audience of Hebrews, to live in the past. Edward Robinson describes the problem in terms that one would easily identify with the crisis in Hebrews:

Tragically, our spiritual tradition has almost entirely become obsessed with self-preservation and a wholly disproportiate veneration for the achievements of the past. Unless the grain fall into the ground and die… A tradition that is not ready to see all its outward structures destroyed, all its conventional forms of expression abandoned, to give room for growth of the new, is already moribund. (“Enfleshing the Word,” Religious Education 81 [1986] 358)

Another aspect of this issue is that of “holy leisure.” Celebration, play, and even humor have oten been a part of ritual in preindustrial cultures. Christian worship as well owes itself to be playful from time to time. Some of this playfulness may be seen today in the festive, childlike atmosphere we embrace at holidays like Christmas (for Christians) or Purim (for Jews).

Finally, the role of the arts in the spiritual life deserve a closer analysis. Christians can stimulate the imaginative, creative side of spirituality by fostering a deeper appreciation for drama, music, and the visual arts as means of religious expression and religious encounter.

Since the author of Hebrews chose to express his vision of the Christian life in cultic categories, we should do him the favor of accepting that these categories were important for him and indeed a key to understanding his message. There are several ways of approaching Hebrews through the lens of ritual, but for now I’m interested in the concept of liminality—the status-reversing transitional experience at the heart of many rituals found in all human cultures. Among other things, attention to the liminal aspects of the message of Hebrews may help us understand the author’s attitude toward outward forms of religion.

Attitude toward Religious Forms

For the author of Hebrews, the major concern is not with the cultic presuppositions of his audience (he surely shared many of them) but with their valuation of particular cultic forms. It is inevitable that religion—any religion—will express itself with external manifestations. This is because of the social and psychological constitution of humankind itself. Christians are not exempt from this reality, and in fact I think a solid case can be made that the earliest forms of Christian worship, drawing from prior Jewish traditions, was in fact quite liturgical in form, though not without its spontaneous or “charismatic” elements (as I’ve discussed previously).

So, we’re stuck with outward forms—liturgies, customs, religious routines. The problem arises when we get fixated on them, so that we see them as an end in themselves and not a tool or guide to bring us into an authentic divine encounter. This, I think, was the pastoral concern the lies behind the book of Hebrews. The addressees were longing for the liturgical “good ole days” and didn’t see how their new experience in Christ measured up.

Hebrews examines the religious forms associated with the old covenant and finds them insufficient for living and preaching the authentic gospel. They may effect some positive results on a superficial level, but nothing more (9:9-10; 10:1-2; 13:9). The author never calls these things bad, but he is insistent that they do not compare with what his addressees now have in Jesus. Forms, therefore, are to be questioned and critically evaluated. Those that fail to measure up to the gospel are to be forsaken.

Hebrews thus posits a spirituality of letting go. Whatever externals we make the focus of our loyalties become our idols and keep us from experiencing God through the mediation of Christ alone. Numerous points of relevance come readily to mind. One would be the danger of religious legalism. Evelyn Underhill has noted the dangers ritualism and formalism present to a healthy view of outward religious forms (Worship [Harper, 1937] 34-37). Ritualism is the view that, for any good to come of them, the external expressions must be performed “just so.” It is marked by a great attention to the minute details of religious performance to the extent that one loses the overall picture. Formalism is an approach to ritual that concerns itslef with simply “going through the motions” with little thoguht for the significance of the practices. Both forms of legalism deny the proper place of ritual in spirituality because they deny the realities that always lie behind the ritual itself.

Another point of relevance is the area of liturgical reform, which continues to be a hot topic in churches. Rather than simply reclaiming the old worship forms from previous centuries or creating new forms in the image of Madison Avenue, the author of Hebrews would have us demonstrate critical judgment about the outward forms we would embrace. For him, worship in the gathered community was an enacted anticipation of heavenly realities:

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assemmbly of the firstborn who are now enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb 12:22-24; see Hans-Detlof Galley, “Der Hebräerbrief und der christliche Gottesdienst,” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 31 [1987-88] 72-83).

Since we humans cannot get away from the external contingencies of worship, we had better choose our rituals well!

In general terms, the attitude toward religious externals we see in Hebrews involves discerning what are our sources of religious, spiritual, and theological security. For example, the author does not deny the possible benefits of having formally recognized spiritual leaders in the community (13:7), but the “main point” of his treatise is that “we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens” (8:1). He does not disparage “regulations for worship an an earthly sanctuary” (9:1) including, no doubt, such things as baptisms and the laying on of hands (6:2). But these are merely the “basic teaching about Christ” (6:1). What matters far more is spiritual sacrifice the believing community offers: “the fruit of lips that confess [God's] name” and doing good and sharing from one’s material resources (13:15-16). We do these things confessing that, rather than trusting in any “lasting city” on earth, “we are looking for the city that is to come” (13:14).

Once our sources of security are located, they must be put to the test. Those that are found wanting must be discarded—no matter how precious they may be. Letting go may in fact lead to doing without, and there may be in Hebrews an apophatic undercurrent that would confess the inadequacy of any sort of external religious practice or assertion. After all, Abraham left his home and inheritance “not knowing where he was going” (11:8) and Moses “left Egypt” in pursuit of the invisible God (11:27).

This point is driven home in chapter 13, where the author’s concluding exhortations repeatedly use the word “outside”: “outside the camp” (13:11), “outside the gate” (13:12), “Let us then go out to him outside the camp” (13:13). In this passage we find the final resolution of Hebrews’ continuing theme of entering the divine presence. The author has worked with the motif of “entering” or “drawing near” since the beginning as a central metaphor for encounter with God (compound words with εἰς ["into"] at 1:6; 2:10; 3:11, 18, 19; 4:1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11; 6:19, 20; 9:6; 12:24; compound words with πρός ["toward"] at 4:16; 7:25; 10:1, 22; 11:6; 12:18, 22; the verb ἐγγίζω ["come near"] at 7:19). Here the imagery shifts to movement in the opposite direction. The substance of such an encounter now becomes clear: to approach God is to abandon the “camp” and accept Christ’s shame. With a stroke of the pen the old, comfortable boundaries fall. The author calls on his readers to abandon the camp—to abandon respectability, security, and conventional holiness, however they may be understood. There is thus grace to be found at the Christian altar (13:9), but there is also a personal cost.

At the very least, the quest for liminality in religious forms should suggest the importance of moving beyond the rationalistic patterns of much of mainline religion. Richard Baer, for example, notes the functional similarities between Quaker silence, high church liturgy, and glossolalia in that all three forms of religious expression tend to transcend the analytical intellect (“Quaker Silence, Catholic Liturgy, and Pentecostal Glossolalia—Some Functional Similarities,” in Perspectives on the New Pentecostalism, ed. Russell P. Spittler [Baker, 1976]). In so doing, these practices free other aspects of the self for spiritual engagement. I’ll discuss one possibility for contemporary application in the next installment.

What good is ritual? Doesn’t ritual get in the way of directly encountering the risen Christ in worship and turn Christians into numbed automatons who merely go through the motions, all the while becoming more and more dependent on an impersonal, institutionalized approach to faith? I have no doubt that ritual badly performed is every bit as soul-draining as the above sentence implies—and probably a thousand times more. But there is also much to be learned from a positive appreciation of the processes of ritual.

I believe this because the author of the book of Hebrews believed this. You can’t read far in Hebrews without realizing that the author knew his stuff when it came to the rituals of the Old Testament and early Judaism. A careful reading suggests he held these rituals in high esteem. He never once calls them bad; he merely insists that Jesus is better. Furthermore, his core argument—and his lasting contribution to Christian theology—is to depict the death and exaltation of Christ in ritualistic terms, despite the fact that there was nothing overtly ritualistic at all about these events as historical occurrences. Jesus was a layman who suffered a humiliating death outside the gates of Jerusalem, but for the author of Hebrews he was the Great High Priest who offered his own blood in the heavenly sanctuary as the definitive sacrifice for sins.

Why does the author of Hebrews tell the story in that way? What does he mean to tell us by couching common Christian teachings in the language of ritual?

Few if any Westerners in the twenty-first century share the cultic presuppositions of the author of Hebrews. Even if we agree with him, for example, that blood is necessary for atonement, this is the imposition of a particular Christian context. It is not the general assumption of our culture (and evangelicals who try to explain the importance of blood on rationalistic terms just dig themselves into a hole!).

In reality, all of our theological models are culturally conditioned. Even such a well-known image as that of God as Shepherd is not universally understood. If someone unacquainted with sheep and shepherds appreciates this image, it is through taking an imaginative leap. How much more then must we think ourselves back in order to appreciate fully Hebrews’ cultic depiction of spiritual realities.

Liminality as a Hermeneutical Key

One possibility for applying a thoughtful hermeneutical approach to Hebrews would begin with the anthropological concepts of rites of passage and especially liminality. Arnold van Gennep first suggested that a rite of passage has three distinct phases. First is the phase of separation that clearly demarcates sacred space and time. After this comes the phase of transition, often called the liminal or “threshold” phase, in which the subject of the rite passes through a period of ambiguity. Finally, the rite concludes with an aggregation or incorporation phase in which the subject returns in a new, relatively stable and well defined position in the total society.

“Liminality” has to do with the qualities that characterize transitional times of life, the betwixt and between experiences where social norms are inverted and even subverted. As Victor Turner has demonstrated (The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure [Cornell University Press, 1969]), liminality is at the heart of how rituals work in cultures all over the world. In itself, liminality is neither good nor bad. It is mystically potent, and as such it is a potentially dangerous element lending itself to the ambiguous and paradoxical (Christopher Crocker, “Ritual and the Development of Social Structure: Liminality and Inversion,” in The Roots of Ritual, ed. James Shaughnessy [Eerdmans, 1973] 70). One purpose of ritual is to harness this force for the good.

Turner has suggested that growing numbers of Westerners sense a need for the liminal. He further states that liminality is a category “suggestive for the understanding of many social processes and states found outside of ritual contexts” (“Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media,” Religion 15 [1985] 208). In this light, I suggest liminality—and humanity’s apparently universal need for it— as an appropriate category by which to forge a link between the New Testament world and our own.

By our standards, life in preindustrial societies appears tedious in the extreme. Ritual, however, interrupts the accepted routine from time to time to carry individuals, groups, and even whole peoples through life’s passages. These transitions are characterized by a loosening of normal social restrictions and obligations, thus permitting creativity and criticism of society and, paradoxically, reinforcing people’s commitments to society. As Turner observes, the need for such transitions is common today as well:

Many of us have highly stable status roles in massive bureaucratic and professional structures, often on a national or even international scale. Many of us clock in and clock out of factories. Others are tightly bound to the wheel of the market and Stock Exchange. We are held in the group of les villes tentaculaires. But only the observant in churches, sects, cults, and religious movements have well articulated ritual liminality. And these groups, too, become bureaucratized, and to a greater or lesser extent secularized; or else defiantly and rigidly desecularized. (“Liminality,” 212)

Certain qualities commonly associated with liminality escho the ideals of various strands of Christian spirituality. Among these would be humility, simplicity, obedience, egalitarianism, and acceptance of pain and suffering. Many of these figure prominently in the spiritual path the author of Hebrews sets forth. Christian authenticity, at least in this tradition, therefore becomes an institutionalized state of liminality where transition has become a permanent condition. Herin lies a clue toward a fuller understanding of the pilgrimage motif of Hebrews. It is “outside the camp,” in the liminal realm, that believers meet God (13:13).

Using the category of liminality as a point of departure, we can appreciate something of why the author of Hebrews chose to describe the Christian life in ritual terms.