Special to United Methodist Insight
A great gift to my life was to serve for several months as a chaplain of sorts to a rehabilitation and eldercare facility. I was still pursuing an education, but the director of the facility sensed a deep need on the part of the residents. I was to offer weekly devotions. On occasion, he hoped I would help facilitate Communion. As I was not yet ordained, he instructed me to invite the leadership of one of the residents, a retired Salvation Army Officer, who would consecrate elements and guide me in distributing them.
Age and infirmity had warped the old man’s hands and stooped his stature. He was still clear in mind and firm in resolve. He pushed the wheelchair of his wife, another resident of the eldercare facility, from one place to another but always stopped to acknowledge the other residents along the way. His goal, manifestly, was to brighten the corner where he was and to encourage his fellow travelers. He did that by extending love, gentleness, mercy, and tenderness to each person.
In his presence, the decisions of the past and the realities of the present which defined each life were pertinent only to the degree to which they each and all called for divine mercy. The vagaries of age and infirmity, the roughness and beauty of life had placed all on the same plane and robbed him of the prerogative to judge others by his standard to the same degree he once might have. Each resident had value. Each person was affirmed and would be fed the bread of life; their reaching for the cup of mercy would be celebrated by him without exception. I learned much about ministry in these fleeting moments, but even more about personhood. He would be a pastor to every person.
That Western Civilization has been on a long journey towards the appreciation and celebration of personhood is hardly contested. In the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and well into modernity the values of the individual’s right and liberty to go in search of self-understanding and determination put down deep roots. For individuals in this society, this has practically meant greater freedom to explore and name their own experiences of self. It has meant to establish on their terms, their personhood.
In some circles, inexplicably, these hallmarks of modern Western Civilization have become a suspect cause. Dr. Timothy Tennent, president of Asbury Theological Seminary, for instance, has pointed to personhood and debates surrounding its exploration and development as a cause of much of the fragmentation of Western Civilization, American Political life, and the practical theology of the people called Methodists.
In Tennent’s recent address to the opening convocation of ATS, he went so far as to state that transgender persons were emblematic of the long cultural journey that Western Civilization has experienced. The very existence of transgender persons and LGBTQIA+ persons generally in the public space seems to be demonstrative of the core rottenness of the traditions of Western Civilization for Tennent, which to his thinking has come unmoored from a traditional paradigm of heteronormative family.
What is so troubling about Tennent’s address is that he picks on some of the most vulnerable persons in our society today, when he calls out transgender personhood in the way he does, for the sake of making a larger point about the societal emphasis on self-exploration and self-definition in personhood. Transgender persons already face a cascade of legislative and legal action in states across the country. Tennent’s piling on, while not out of character, is not even slightly consistent with the call of Christ to care for “the least,” the marginalized among us.
It is additionally problematic, that Tennent disingenuously represents the work of Charles Taylor and the gifts of modern society’s focus on the self as he extends his attack not just to trans persons but the entire modern project. Taylor, a noted contributor in tracing the philosophy of personhood, is quick to celebrate the virtues of this turn-to-self especially in terms of the value of authenticity. Taylor’s register regarding these shifts is not limited to lament, as Tennent’s is without exception.
Furthermore, Taylor’s sense of direction for communities of faith would be quite divergent from the direction Tennent pursues. Taylor argues for communities of faith to maintain an open take towards persons who in this journey of self-identity find themselves outside of what was once considered a normative standard but is now seen as an oppressive regime. (A Secular Age, 766-767).
Such an approach to personhood demands empathy of course. It demands that we listen to the stories we are told by fellow travelers without the expectation of coercing them into a different cultural mold. We study the shape of these stories of self for marks of the Triune life of God, that these might be celebrated and affirmed. These will inevitably include stories of marginalized persons whose personhood is marked by deep memories of manifold hurts related to their economic status, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, age, etc. These stories would not be told and could not be understood if this cultural trend toward an emphasis on self-understanding and definition was not present. These trends are not a threat, however, but rather a gift that allows us to affirm the dignity and worth of each person and each story.
A Christian response to the personhood of any person can never exist only in an academic or intellectual vacuum, in theory but not in loving practice. The great lesson of my time in the senior living facility, a witness of the last days of the earthly ministry of a Salvation Army Officer was that the Christian community’s response to claims of personhood should never be weaponized, nor should persons be further victimized. Through the tender words and gentle touch of love, I learned that the response to every personhood is always pastoral care.
If the United Methodist Church is to have a future beyond its institutional morass, it will not be because different people come to read Scripture in the same way or because different kinds of people accept to live in the same culturally conditioned molds, but rather only because different people come together to affirm the personhood of all. This, and nothing less, is at stake. This and nothing less can overcome the institutional morass and waves of disenchantment in the society writ large. This and nothing less is worthy of being considered the Way of Jesus Christ.
Works Cited:
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA. 2007.
Tennent, Timothy. Timothy Tennent.
The Rev. Glenn Knepp is an Elder in the Indiana Conference of the UMC, currently serving Lapel Ford Street UMC in Lapel, IN.