Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology

Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology

Review of Susan Campbell, Dating Jesus (Boston: Beacon, 2009).  By Mark Hamilton at the 2010 Christian Scholars Conference, Lipscomb University

On picking up this book, I frankly expected to hate it.  What could be more clichéd than a story of a self-conscious young person growing up in a suffocating, oppressive conservative religious group and then coming of age (read: becoming secular and successful back east)?  Such memoirs have become a sort of rite of passage, a passport to the guild of the literati, and whatever artistic merit or intellectual bite they may once have had has long since sunk into the swamp of the smugness and overweening ignorance of what passes for our culture’s post-Christian elites.  Had my fears come true, my own pitiable role as reviewer would then be either to defend practices and beliefs I have worked my adult life to correct or at least temper, or I would have had to join in the flagellation of the unwashed – or, in this case, fully immersed but still unenlightened – an even more contemptible form of life to which the odious word quisling might well apply.

Fortunately for me, and for you, Susan Campbell’s book is not exactly what I expected.  It is better than that.  She speaks honestly of the struggles of her childhood growing up in churches of Christ (small c, big c) in Missouri, her incipient feminism that could not see why a loving God would silence half the human race in God’s own house, her struggles with family and with the vagaries of what she calls, with a refreshing refusal to be apologetic, hillbilly culture.  Though sometimes meandering and repetitive, this memoir of a life tells well the story of a woman who loves Jesus but is mighty uncomfortable with some of his followers.

Any reviewer must ask why he or she should review another person’s work.  I can only assume that my assignment does not derive solely from my having been raised on the other side of the Boston Mountains as Ms. Campbell or having been, like her, a Bible bowl champion at Green Valley Bible Camp (where, by the way, I was baptized in June, 1977 at the age of 12), or my also having been bitten by a German shepherd while door knocking (I was door knocking, not the German shepherd).  I can only assume that my role is to represent those who experienced many of the intramural debates and mad restrictions she describes but stayed around anyway.  It’s not just that fundamentalism broke off inside of me, as she says her brother put it to her about them both, but that I have become something other than a fundamentalist but found a home here anyhow.  At least I hope that’s why I’m here.

Let me explore that role for awhile, then.  Campbell’s work raises for me a number of questions.  The first and most obvious is, why do some people stay and others leave? It is tempting to reduce the answer to the differences in our genders and the roles gender plays in Churches of Christ.  It would never have occurred to me, for example, to entitle any memoir of my life so far in this movement with the overtly, if self-mockingly, erotic way for which Ms. Campbell opts.  Here, however, Campbell is in good company with Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, whom she mentions, and Teresa of Avila and a host of others she doesn’t.  Also, to be honest, I remember my distinct discomfort as a teenage boy in singing the hymn “Safe in the arms of Jesus, safe on his gentle breast,” and feeling more than a little threatened – can you unman a boy? – by that.  Eros’s strange affair with logos, and especially the Logos, plays in more than one way.

Yet life is never simple, and gender has never been as simple as an outsider would imagine by reading Campbell’s book.  It’s not just that we boys who were clumsy or bookish were at least as uncomfortable at the sports-oriented world of Green Valley as Campbell could ever have been.  It’s also that strong women did the most vital work of our congregation.  Many of them felt that the work of waiting the Lord’s table and all the rest was somewhat beneath their dignity.  Good enough for the men, important, but not all that crucial.  And I have often heard some of those women dissecting sermons and pointing out the mistakes the preacher made, not unkindly, but as a sort of warning to us men, especially us aspiring preacher boys, to get it right.  There was, and is, even in the most restrictive and closed environments in our churches, a sort of leaven at work, a clandestine theological discourse that is often richer than the public one and often at cross-purposes to it.  No, things are never quite as clear-cut as they seem.

Now it is also clear that my call to be a minister, which came even before my baptism, and which I would learn only much later to identify as a call, entailed a great deal of affirmation from both men and women and opportunities.  I preached my first sermon at 13 and was a boy preacher in Crawford County throughout high school.  I engaged in a written debate with a Nigerian Jehovah’s Witness when I was 15 or 16, an experience that Campbell had in her own way floating in a lake in the Ozarks.  There were rewards for such precocity.  But there were also distinct and painful punishments when I came home after a semester or two of college full of second thoughts and questions and ideas.  So the expectations do cut both ways.  With opportunity comes responsibility, not always in an easy to understand way.

At the same time, I think that staying and going are about more than just gender, just as they are about more than individual choices or sheer random variation.  They concern the structures of resources and responsibilities. And this seems to me to be the nub of the problem.  How can a religious movement that we both love, one of us enough to leave and another of us enough to stay, reform itself?  What resources lie within it for such a thing?  As someone who is experiencing that reform – it is not wishful thinking – let me talk about what I see.

Two words perhaps capture this: longing and loving.  Take the longing first.  At the risk of sounding like an exegete of bad country music, let me ask what this movement longs for.  Campbell herself says it well when she describes Churches of Christ as “frontier revivalism frozen in amber” but adds

“If that sounds grim, it isn’t.  If it sounds soulless, it isn’t that, either.  The traditions plant in the believer – even someone who walks away from the church – a deep and soulful need (38).”

What is this longing?  What makes people do the crazy things they do?  Why have so many parts of our little group, or not so little, actually fought over issues that seemed to most Christians idiosyncratic at best?

Part of the answer must lie in the sheer cussedness and stubbornness of Southerners, especially those from the working classes that mostly fed our congregations until the past generation or two.  Stubbornness was an adaptive skill, a way of defending oneself against the powerful.  But surely beneath that obstinacy at least sometimes lies a commendable willingness to defy the structures of power, a healthy conviction that, if God is real, human pretensions to mastery are not.  This is why my grandmother, who finished only the eighth grade but raised four kids to go to college and served as an elder’s wife and made a huge garden besides, could sing with such enthusiasm, “I’m satisfied with just a cottage below… I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltops.”  No irony there, no snideness, but deep longing.

Behind the overly literal readings of the Bible, the inflexible and often self-defeating adherence to trivial or even specious ideas, and the blindness to social corruption lies a deep longing to do the will of God.  You don’t need to date Jesus when you’re part of his bride. Or to put things a little more formally, at our best, Churches of Christ long for what another Campbell, Thomas this time, proposed as the basic attitude of the uniting church he sought to build:

[A]ll that are enabled, thro’ grace, to make such a profession, and to manifest the reality of it in their tempers and conduct, should consider each other as the precious saints of God, should love each other as brethren, children of the same family and father, temples of the same spirit, members of the same body, subjects of the same grace, objects of the same divine love, bought with the same price, and joint heirs of the same inheritance.  Whom God hath thus joined together, no man should dare to put asunder.  D & A, Proposition 9

This vision seems compelling enough for our contemporaries, and if we can recapture it, we can avoid giving our sons and daughters the same sorts of tortured theologies and self-understandings that Campbell describes.  We can do so because longing implies loving.

What is it we love?  The surprise for me in Dating Jesus’ version of Churches of Christ was the relatively little attention Campbell played to singing, except when mentioning the atavistic, tribal, almost primitive attachment we sometimes have toward a cappella music.  For me, this was and is one of the most life-giving aspects of our tradition.  More than just a curiosity, like the Amish’s refusal to wear buttons, it is a practice through which we have done our best theology.  It has been ecumenical in that we have sung the hymns of those with whom we would otherwise have had strong disagreements.  It has given us powerful ways to speak of our love for God and people.  It has inspired our faithful actions and challenged us in our self-indulgence.  Though I fear for its survival, given its current captivity to the schmaltzy side of the Christian liturgotainment industry, it has been and to some extent still is our language of love.  “There is a name I love to hear…”  “there is a habitation built by the living God.”  Perhaps the recapturing of that love will serve us in good stead.

Finally, I am grateful for Dating Jesus because, even if she is too polite to say so, Ms. Campbell calls on the church, and on Churches of Christ in particular, to do a better job of remembering its first love and find language and practices that articulate it for everyone, including baseball-playing tomboys from Missouri.  She has helped us do that, and for that we must be grateful.