Interview with Charles Wallace

For my contact paper I interviewed Charles Wallace, the chaplain and one of the religion professors at Willamette. He is also affectionately known as Charlie Chaplain. I had had limited contact with him before the interview. I went to a service in the chapel my first Sunday at college, where his sermon was entitled "Do the Wrong Thing" and advised freshmen to explore the dark side of their personality, and not just do what was expected of them. It gave me a bad impression of him, because the sermon only superficially and inaccurately based on the Bible, and the whole service was fully of wishy-washy politically correct religious terms. Other encounters with him have been at various functions where he was called to pray and political-type rallies where he would provide a representative religious viewpoint. His prayers were always very formal, very unorthodox and politically correct/relativistic, and without any real Christian content. His political platform is very liberal, although he did provide a pretty untouchable allegorical comparison of the OCA to the Pharisees of Jesus' time.

This year I again went to the first Sunday service, but I was impressed this time because he spoke about worshiping God with our minds and challenged us to think seriously about it (what a beginning to this year of apologetics, philosophy and theology). He did manage to sneak in some silly stuff about wisdom as a female counterpart to God, but overall I was convicted by the way I had judged him. Since then I have wanted to talk to him more, and have been intrigued by his personality. I interviewed him in one of the eating areas on campus, and was unnerved by his piercing blue eyes at the same time I was reassured by his friendly and generous attitude. I explained again why I was interviewing him and where the questions were coming from, turned on my tape recorder and began to talk. What follows is a pretty accurate transcription, with some figures of spoken language taken out to make it more readable.

What do you consider the church's most perfect creed (or confession of faith) and why do you think so?

I think I'd probably go with the Apostle's Creed. It's the earliest formulation, it's rooted in the early liturgy, it's a baptismal confession. It's scriptural, it's not involved in a lot of the imperial politics the way some of the later creeds are, and it's not overly philosophically freighted in the way the later ones are. So I guess I like that one best.

What books and theologians have had the greatest influence on you?

Probably, in a general way and in the long run, Wesley, more than anybody else. But in terms of some contemporary people, the liberationists, Gutiérrez and people like that are the people I've read most recently who have helped form my beliefs or give them some substance.

What is the role of the theologian in the church and in the university?

I'd say the theologian is kind of a link between the two. For the church, the theologian has to keep the church honest, and relevant. They have to sort of be out front there, thinking through difficult things that are current on the one hand, but also connected with tradition. And I think sometimes the church is sort of doing their own pastoral thing, and they get out of touch with the tradition, but maybe also get out of touch with what some of the intellectual currents are. That's what the theologian is doing for the church; for the university, the theologian needs to remind the university of a broader spiritual heritage that the Enlightenment universities have trouble dealing with. So there's another dimension that Enlightenment epistemology doesn't recognize that the theologian can kind of continue to remind the university of.

Do you see it as kind of frustrating here to try and integrate spiritual things?

It's frustrating in some senses, because there's appalling ignorance of religious traditions around here. But on the other hand, it's a challenge that I enjoy, in trying to introduce transcendent stuff in language that people don't realize is transcendent, necessarily-- you know, the `cultured despisers' that Schleiermacher talks about. There are people on the faculty that I take it as a kind of a challenge to relate spiritual things to in language that doesn't turn them off. So... it can be done. I don't consider myself a theologian like Doug [McGaughey; a religion professor at Willamette] but in the practice of chaplaincy what I find enjoyable is trying to, you know, pray public prayers that are not going to turn my colleagues off with traditional piety, but still may, I hope, convey some of the spiritual depths of the tradition at the same time.

What is the Christian gospel and what is the best way to present or defend it in the modern world?

I'd say the Christian gospel, to boil it way down, is incarnate love. And the best way to present it and defend it is to incarnate love in the world. At times that will mean pointing to Jesus and the story of the church and the communion of the saints, and at times it will mean pointing to the same divine power that is out there in the world where occasionally Jesus is not named, but the Spirit is at work.

Do you mean things like human compassion?

Yes, at the very least those things are signals of the sort of transcendence or the sort of incarnation of love that Christians believe is fully realized in Christ. And so, I think the community needs to tell the story to itself, in order for the Christian community to maintain its identity and purpose. But, it needs to live out that love towards the rest of the world, and then be willing to talk about it when the world says "okay, what makes you tick?" But I'm not sure that leading with the Jesus story, particularly unmixed with living the Jesus story, makes any sense evangelistically.

What are the beauties and utilities of your theology, on the one hand, and what are its weaknesses and shortcomings on the other?

Well, I guess my theology is probably related to my personality, which is sort of hang-loose and not hard-core. It's more metaphorical than it is scientific in its general approach. I can take traditional stories out of the Scripture and feel very comfortable with them, because I can read and preach about the creation story and consider there to be profound truth in there, without saying, `if this is true then evolution is false." So my theology is based on that sort of metaphorical, literary approach to Scripture and also to the tradition. I really value tradition-- I'm a historian more than anything else-- I value the Christian tradition and the many byways that it presents through history, some I think more preferable than others, but I think there's a wide variety of ways of being Christian. So there's a kind of a relativity in my theology that makes it easier to adjust to a university campus, and to relate to people on this campus who are not necessarily believers. On the other hand, the down side of it is that I have to be a little more disciplined in my own spiritual life, my own spirituality and my relationship to the Christian community, to make sure that I'm not going completely relative inside. Probably that dilemma is a problem endemic to any Christian theology that takes incarnation seriously, because you're trying to be in the world, in the flesh, and there are all the problems that go with that, and the spirit can get lost sometimes. On the other hand, if you don't take that risk, life is not possible and you'll never relate to anybody.

This reminds me of a lot of things we talked about in Apologetics-- the task of making the gospel relative-- and the balance between transcendence and immanence in the character of God...

Yeah, I even see this in certain current Evangelical church practices, you know these churches that organize a big auditorium and make in look like a theater stage, and get rid of all the Jesus language, and they make you feel good, and they don't sing regular hymns, and there are people coming in all over but you wonder if you're not really just selling entertainment. You're entertaining people but you're not really challenging them. And I'm sure there's an answer to that where you bring them in and then give them the hard gospel, or something like that, but, you know, the televangelists, who are selling a product more than they're really preaching the gospel. The medium becomes the message a lot of times. And, that's a risk, you know.

What is a good life, and what good is life? What is a good death, and what good is death?

I think both death and life, to continue the theme I've already established, is contained in the love of God, and so, whenever the divine love can be revealed in a life, whenever appropriately loving connections can be made with others, in community and across communities, it is a form of good life. Whenever life and love can be nurtured in other people in a general sort of way, that's a good life. So it's not how much you make or how many cars you own or where you happen to have been born, or things like that. And I suppose a good death is of a peace with that. There's a book in the 17th century called Holy Living and Holy Dying, and it's like two parts of the same series. A guy named Jeremy Taylor wrote it, a high Anglican, and John Wesley read it and was very influenced by it. Wesley used to talk about Methodist die-well. And there was kind of a ritual involved there, where on your death bed you sang a psalm or you confessed that you were ready to be with Jesus, and everybody gathered around and sang a hymn with you, and it's a neat thought. That doesn't happen much anymore because of our hospital system; we don't die at home in our beds the way we used to. But that's a kind of a metaphor or a ritual that seems to me stands for the way that life and death together are all part of God's love.

We talked for a while after I was done with the questions, about the role of apologetics, the balance between adapting the gospel to a culture and preserving its own cultural integrity, Thomas Oden's theology and ecumenism. He sees apologetics as something that does more to hone the theology of the church community than convincing the rest of the world. He talked about a theologian at Yale who converted from Islam and characterizes Christianity as the religion that translates, and talked about the importance of translating the gospel into lingual and cultural forms even if that risks changing it. He had heard a little about Oden and was interested in his approach but skeptical about his polemicism and ecumenical vision, as well as his claim to be truly post-modern.

It is interesting to see the extent of his relativism, and his honest emphasis on love. What he told me in the interview about his general theology seemed much more orthodox than that which I had heard in his public prayers and such, which gave me the impression that he was tailoring what he said to what he thought I wanted to hear, just as he adapts public prayers to what his listeners want to hear. His criticism of evangelical entertainmentism (if that's a real word) and implied critique of loveless evangelism and praxis-less theology were very good things to hear. I think that he tends to get the two greatest commandments in the wrong order, and his emphasis on loving humans affects his theology and produces his kowtowing relativity. But his honest emphasis on love and practice of the faith are very good reminders to the world of evangelical theology, which far too often seeks greater knowledge of God without corresponding devotion to his command to love others, and often dogmatically evangelizes unbelievers without compassion.