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The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin
Edward L. Smither
Yale University Press (2018). 230 pp.
“Eucharist, prayer, baptism: These things are blighted” (p. 137). So runs Lauren Winner’s provocative and contrarian thesis, contesting the fashionable emphasis on formative practices in both postliberal academic theology and popular Christian spiritual writing. In light of a Christian doctrine of sin and its corrupting effects, Winner argues for the “depristination” (though not abandonment) of practices as formative of virtue. On her account, Christian practices are indeed gifts, but they are damaged gifts that therefore also cause damage.
Importantly, Winner contends that the damage caused by Christian practices— specifically in this book the practices of eucharist, prayer and baptism—is not simply arbitrary or incidental to the practices themselves (although it can also be that). Rather, the damage caused is often “characteristic” damage, damage that belongs to the very form of the thing that is damaged. Her account relies on an understanding that all creatures have distinctive God-given forms. This is coupled with the Augustinian notion of sin as privatio boni. Together, these doctrines mean that creaturely forms are deformed by sin in ways that are characteristic to the form of the thing. The problem is not the practice in itself: eucharist, baptism and prayer are good gifts of God. Rather, it is that as fallen people we are damaged and so “receive things in a damaged way” (p. 145).
The power and cogency of Winner’s thesis is perhaps most easily grasped in her account of prayer as a damaged and therefore damaging practice. Winner gives several examples of the way prayer can become deformed, such as a church prayer chain that becomes a vehicle for spreading gossip under the guise of prayer requests. However, the bulk of this chapter focuses on accounts of prayer in diaries of slave-owning women in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. In the context of managing their slave-owning households, women like Keziah Brevard frequently asked God to grant them patience with and forgiveness towards their slaves. Yet these prayers sit uncomfortably alongside harsh criticisms, crude insults and severe violence towards these same slaves. Similarly, the prayers often ask God to teach the slaves humility and obedience. These prayers are the inward expression of a form of Christian teaching that emphasized to the slaves the Christian duty of obedience to their masters and trained the slaves to pray primarily for obedience. In this way distorted Christian teaching and piety served to reinforce and support the socio-political regime of the antebellum South.
In Winner’s argument, these deformations of prayer are not incidental to what prayer is, but arise from a corruption of prayer’s characteristic form. After all, in prayer we are encouraged to bring our desires to God and seek his help. This is because the chief good we seek in prayer is friendship with God, and friendship only flourishes where honest communication reigns. But what happens when our desires are for corrupt things? Or when our desires are—often unwittingly—shaped by and given in service to a corrupt social order? Even the wise teaching that the content of our prayers should be governed by the Lord’s Prayer as this gives us Christ’s own instruction regarding what to pray for is not enough. For the heart is deceitful and we are often blind to ways in which are distorted desires are out of step with the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.
If the chapter on prayer is the most compelling example of the book’s thesis, the chapter on the eucharist is the least convincing. Winner recounts the horrific history of allegations of Jewish host desecration in medieval Europe. Repeatedly, false allegations were made of Jews stealing a consecrated communion wafer and seeking to destroy it. There are tales of consecrated hosts being stabbed with knives and pouring forth blood, and other stories of crucifixes emerging from the hosts and hovering above them. However, such were the alleged powers of the transubstantiated host that it could not be destroyed and so overcame these assaults. Tragically, these fables then led to vicious violence against Jewish communities, often resulting in multiple murders. Winner argues that these evils, shocking as they are, are a characteristic deformation of the eucharist. This is because both the eucharist and the violence against medieval Europe’s Jews relate to Christian contact with Jewish flesh: the Jewish flesh of Christ, physically present in the consecrated host and the Jewish flesh of those persecuted for allegedly desecrating the host.
However, although it is sobering to be reminded of the Church’s complicity in such evils, it is better to view this as a wicked deformity of an already deformed understanding of the eucharist and the mode of Christ’s presence to his people in the sacrament. For the sake of the overall argument of this particular book, it might have been more immediately beneficial to consider ways in which the eucharist as sacramental meal in which Christ welcomes sinners to feast can be distorted. On the one hand, Communion can do damage by practices that unduly restrict who is welcome to the Table in a particular Church (for example, by requiring a particular view of sacramental presence in order to participate). On the other hand, it can do damage through practices that are unduly lax and fail to exercise adequate discipline, so welcoming the impenitent to the Table.
This criticism of the particularities of Winner’s chapter on eucharist should not blind us to the value of this richly written and challenging book. The Dangers of Christian Practice is a helpful corrective to unduly optimistic embrace of the positive formative potential of Christian practices. Winner is correct that a robust doctrine of sin renders such optimism naïve.
Nevertheless, helpful though it is, Winner’s own account of Christian practices as damaged goods remains within a basically postliberal mode. This is seen formally in the resources she treats as authoritative in developing normative Christian accounts of baptism and eucharist. She does draws on Scripture, not least in a particularly insightful and nuanced treatment of the status of families in the Gospels. But she also treats a range of historical liturgical practices as normative, thus appearing to elide the distinction between God’s Word and ecclesial practice. Materially, in her final chapter, although she emphasizes eucharist, prayer and baptism as God’s gifts, given for human use, she is less clear that the very action of the sacraments and indeed of prayer is principally God’s action (though without effacing the actions of creatures as secondary causes). That is, the sacraments are not just gifts given to be used, they are themselves instruments by which God distributes grace. What seems to be lacking here is an operative theology of the Spirit as the one who works to renew our fallen nature, not least through the sacraments and in our prayers as his gracious instruments. Reflection on this might then fill out the prescription for our response to the damaged nature of our practices. Certainly Winner is right that reflection on how we shape and are shaped by damaged practices should call forth human acts of confession, repentance and lament. However, more than this, it should call forth prayer for the renewing power of the Creator Spirit to come and re-form us and our appropriation of the practices of the gospel.
Matthew Mason is the Assistant Director of the Pastors’ Academy at London Seminary in London, UK, as well as an Associate Fellow of the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. He holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen.
