This interview took place between Susan Dunn-Hensley, Sharenda Barlar, and Beth Felker-Jones while they walked trails in and around Wheaton, Illinois. Susan's son, James Dunn-Hensley, was also contributing to the conversation. This is the first part of a series of interviews that will take place with faculty from Wheaton College as part of Dunn-Hensley and Barlar's 2020 virtual pilgrimage program.
Hereafter, each individual will be referred to with their initials: SD, JD, SB, and BFJ, respectively. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
SB: In your opinion, what role does sacred space and physical location play in Christian, specifically Protestant theology?
BFJ: Space and place function as fundamental aspects of embodiment, and so I would tie it into the bigger picture of theological things I always want to say about the body: God made it, it matters, it’s part of everything we do as we relate to one another and to God. There's no such thing as a displaced body. Since God created us as embodied creatures, right there we have an affirmation of our in-placed-ness and of our call to place. To love in the places where we are and to work and to pray and to relate to God in the places where we are. And when we have the chance to move to different places, to move in space, it better helps us to see how our more normal spaces work, and how we relate to God in the middle of this deeply fleshly world.
SD: Can pilgrimage be beneficial for contemporary evangelicals?
BFJ: For me, that’s a "yes--if we're careful," which I suppose I would say about a lot of things.
SD: We are so disconnected from God's creation, so disconnected from nature, that it seems like an act of worship to go back to nature.
BFJ: We definitely don't want to go in a direction of animism; it is definitely non-Christian. It is also non-western, so that for many of us westerners, it’s not really a temptation. We don't think of the world that way, we don't think of nature as having its own spirits.
SB: I think that that [animism] has been part of the reason why Protestants have tended to shy away from pilgrimage, because they're afraid of idolatry, of worshipping nature, of indulgences. [But] God made nature to see his presence.
SD: Indulgences are problematic and so is, in some ways, the theology of penance. However, I can't help but think that we are too easy with forgiveness. I feel like there should be some sense that “people have to restore the relationship.. . that perhaps people also should sacrifice – even suffer – a little bit.” I'm not suggesting that people need to suffer for salvation, but perhaps taking on a pilgrimage is a way to work out some of those things.
BFJ: This may be primarily my own experience and my experiences with friends, but I do worry that as soon as we let that [emphasis on penance] in, people think that they can't just come to God through Jesus. It’s easy to start to feel that we're not doing what we have to do.
The whole theology of suffering is really complicated, and obviously Christians have often placed a high value on suffering, rightly, because suffering is a sort of imitation of Christ, who suffered for us. Suffering is something we're willing to undergo for the sake of God and the sake of others. But we also need a correction there (and this is heavily [present] in the Christian tradition) that suffering is not good in and of itself. It is something we endure for the sake of others, for the sake of God, for the sake of other goods, but God is actually against suffering. He wants us to flourish, he wants us to have abundant life, he wants us to be in right relationship with God, creation, and each other. And I think it's really easy to say it's the suffering that’s the point, instead of it’s the love that’s the point.
Suffering has been lifted up [disproportionally], especially for women, especially for people of color, and that's a really important thing to think through.
SB: I think that when you do walk things like the Camino, it puts you in perspective of Jesus and his ministry. At least for me, and the students on the Camino, this idea of washing each others’ feet really brought [service through suffering] to life.
After walking and seeing how we can wash feet to care for one another's feet, and knowing that Jesus would walk from place to place and the disciples would walk from place to place, this idea of washing each others’ feet was not just to get them clean-- it was caring for one another. It was an embodied care.
SD: Matthew R. Anderson wrote in an article (“Post-Reformation Christian Pilgrimage and the Globalization of Sentiment,”) that “Whereas the medieval Christian pilgrim sought forgiveness, or gave thanks, while seeing a bit of the world in the bargain, the modern or postmodern pilgrim is most often seeking individual discovery, sanctioned by often tentatively-held religious impulses” (22). What do you think of this trend, and how do we as Christians combat self-centric impulses while on a pilgrimage?
We discussed [at a conference we are currently attending] whether pilgrimage is about community or about the individual.
BFJ: Oh yuck, we have that self-centered impulse in everything, don't we? ... I think [international] pilgrimage might lend itself to self-centeredness in a very special way, because you have to have a certain amount of privilege in order to buy the ticket and all of that. In general, we have work to do as Christians to help people to think about the problems of a vague, self-centered spirituality. There’s also that “Eat-Pray-Love” complex here as well.
SD: That was one of the most horrible books I've read, to be honest. Honestly, first of all, if someone gives you an advance [to write the book] before you even leave on your spiritual journey, of course you're going to have a spiritual experience. If you give me money, I’ll have [the experience]. It really was just so troubling.
SB: That idea of [self-centric pilgrimage] came up in the conference too, when people were talking about thin places versus thick places.
One person mentioned that [they] thought a thin place (as in where the veil is very thin between God and man) is nature, a place that inspires all. Somebody else had mentioned, “Well you know Jerusalem is a very thin place if you're a Christian, or if you're going there for a pilgrimage, but for other people it can be a very thick place because it’s full of a lot of animosity, and people, and noise.”
One of the things we brought up in the conference is if you get a book deal to find yourself, you're probably going to find yourself because you're being intentional about it. If you're looking for a thin place, if you're anticipating a thin place, if you're going with the expectation to have this moment, well then, more than likely you will have this moment. If you don't, you'll feel this profound sense of loss like you've done something wrong, which we've seen before when we've done surveys.
SD: Pilgrims often travel in order to reach a physical object, be it a relic, religious image, or sacred site. What do you think this emphasis on the importance of the image shows about prevalent pilgrim theology? How do you see the material world fitting into evangelical experiences with the divine?
BFJ: I think this fits too with a basic theology of creation. God made it and it's good, and it matters. Human beings are material and spiritual at the same time---everything we do is going to be both material and spiritual. I think God really graciously chooses to act through the material, in all kinds of ways, and sacraments are the pinnacle of that. There are a lot of things that are analogies for sacraments, even though they aren't sacraments themselves. God is being gracious to his creation, being gracious in his created intention for us, which is that we are material and spiritual at the same time.
I think Evangelicals have often been nervous about material things because of nervousness about Catholicism, about magical thinking, and those things are important things to bear in mind. But if we lose the material side of things, we, who are material creatures, are going to lose really important ways of thinking about what it means to be formed in the likeness of Christ.
Some Catholic scholars have claimed that Protestantism strips the faith of all its materiality, and that ruins everything. It would ruin everything, but some really good Protestant historians are clear, “no we don't.” And Luther's really good here.
SD: Do you think there is a biblical precedent for pilgrimage?
BFJ: This is not a question that I've thought a lot about. I'd be interested to know what y'all think about this. My first instinct is that there is not a biblical precedent for pilgrimage specifically, but that pilgrimage fits with the biblical sense of the importance of this world, the importance of what God is up to in this world, the fact that our bodies matter, that place matters. My first instinct would be that like a lot of the things we do as Christians, the Bible doesn’t expressly lay pilgrimage out, but pilgrimage fits with the big picture of a biblical way of thinking. Do y'all have better thoughts on that?
SD: Early pilgrimage was a trip to Jerusalem, so that might parallel the idea that the Jews would go to Jerusalem for Passover. In the early medieval period, Jerusalem was still THE place you wanted to go, but it became much more problematic because of the crusades. Because of the increasing dangers associated with traveling to the Holy Land, Europeans began to bring the Holy Land back to medieval Europe. At the Walsingham shrine in England, we have the representation of the Holy House where the Annunciation took place, so the English brought Nazareth to England.
JD: So playing Devil's advocate, though, if everyone’s going to Jerusalem from the day of Pentecost, then that's when God brings his Spirit, and now the Spirit, instead of everyone going to Jerusalem is actually sending everyone from Jerusalem out to the rest of the world, so it's like a reverse pilgrimage. Before we were coming to one holy place, but now when we think about it, it's the opposite, because you're starting in Jerusalem but ending at the end of the Earth, instead of the opposite.
BFJ: There's an ongoing “both and” in the Scriptures. Both Israel and the nations. I always talk to students about these “both ands” as things that we think have to be separate but the Bible holds together. One of the big conversations in contemporary theology is how we tend to overemphasize the nations at expense of Israel, which has made us complicit in anti-Semitism, which has also been bad for our theology of the body, bad for our theology of place, bad for our understanding of how God loves particular people and not generic people. So I think that a lot of times in these “both ands” in church history, we swing too far in one direction and then we correct a little bit and then we need to swing back and forth a little bit more to try to be faithful to something that, in the Scriptures, is one big whole. And certainly there are complications with how Christians, Jews, and Muslims think about each other, which is a part of thinking about Jerusalem, and that's really complicated and hard.
There's a little bit of this in [Augustine's] Confessions, when Monica is going to the sites of the saints' burials, and so on. And Augustine both praises her for it but also says she's right to submit to the church when they try to correct some of the excesses going on, and you see there a pretty early glimpse of a non-European, not-yet Catholic, wrestling with that “both and”.
SD: And it seems like we wrestle with that for the entirety of the Middle Ages. People do not wait for the Reformation to say, “This is excessive; this is not religious anymore. This is a tourist trap in some cases,” to use contemporary language.
SB: Is it Hebrews that talks about it? Or is it 1 Peter? But one of those passages talks about our entire life being a pilgrimage. So clearly there is a precedent for wandering, or that idea of liminality, that when we talk about pilgrimage, we're in the midst of a journey, not yet completed. So as Christians, if we're seen as sojourners and pilgrims, there must have been a precedent that we are on a lifelong journey with early Christians, even before this idea of Catholic pilgrimage.
BFJ: There is also actually a [Scriptural] contrast between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God. We are in danger of confusing the two. Also, I think that a good theology of Israel is something that would help us, as we think about how we sojourn.
SB: When we were talking about the Lord's prayer, when we say, "Thy kingdom come--" this idea of "His kingdom come--" what is that thin space? That is what we're seeking [through pilgrimage], where the veil is gone between his kingdom that we're longing for and then we're here on earth. On earth as it is in heaven.
BFJ: I think contemporary U.S. Protestantism is in a place where we tend to think, we were a little excessive in our rejection of Catholicism, and maybe we can reclaim some of these things, and that seems ok. But it is also interesting to me, whenever I have students from really strongly culturally Catholic countries, they sound just like Henry VIII. They want to shut these excesses down, and that's a reminder that this can really, really go wrong. So again, for me it’s a both-and.
Dr. Beth Felker Jones, who earned her doctorate at Duke University, teaches systematic theology at Wheaton College. She is a regular contributor to The Christian Century and is currently working on a theology of conversion titled Converting Love: Conversion Among the Loci for Oxford University Press. Dr. Jones’ most recent book is Faithful: A Theology of Sex. She is also the author of Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically, God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective, and The Marks of His Wounds: Resurrection Doctrine and Gender Politics.
Comments