Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).
Pecknold attended a magnet humanities school in Seattle, where a teacher introduced him to existentialist like Camus and behaviorists like B. F. Skinner. From Camus's Myth of Sisyphus he took away the message that life "is all meaningless, all I have is my friendships here, and that is it." And so one day in his teens, after a relationship with a girlfriend had broken up, he was suddenly struck, while driving somewhere, with the insignificance of our lives "on this tiny blue planet," and he had to pull the car over, simply shaking with the despair of it.It was shortly after that, in the darkness of his bedroom in his family's home, that Pecknold literally had a vision. "The room was illuminated, and the face of Christ came to me and said 'give me your life'…I think the face of Christ was very much like Eastern Orthodox icons (215).
i) I don't object in principle to modern-day visions of Jesus. But it's odd that a Christophany would have the appearance of a Byzantine icon. That's a stylized, unrealistic image of Jesus. If Jesus really appeared to Chad, why would he look like a work of art?
At Seattle Pacific University he encountered the countercultural side of evangelical Christianity, reading Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon's Resident Aliens...A NT professor at SPU named William Lane become a kind of mentor… (216).After chapel, we'd meet to talk, get some breakfast, then go hear Earl Palmer, who was a Presbyterian pastor at the University [Presbyterian] church [near the University of Washington campus]….then we'd go for a big long hike, or do something big in the afternoon, and then we'd go to St. Mark's [Episcopal] Cathedral for Compline (216).Those Earl Palmer sermons at University presbyterian Church, often invoking Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and C. S. Lewis, had their effect as well (217).
i) There's a twinge of nostalgia as I read these descriptions because his life crisscrosses mine. We were both students of Bill Lane. I used to attend concerts at UPres. A performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion lingers in memory. I used to listen to the compline service on radio, and I once attended the service. It was entertaining to hear Peter Hallock's florid recitation of 1 Pet 5:8. I drove past St. Marks hundreds of times.
ii) But with the partial exception of Bill Lane, Chad's Protestant experience was mainly progressive. Reading trendy theologians like Hauerwas, and sitting under PCUSA pastor Edwin Palmer, with his chic references to Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tolkien, and Lewis to impress university students.
But Chad kept coming back to the question of ecclesiology as primary, and with it the apostolic succession, which "mattered as something that God established to guard the deposit," something he did not see the Church of England doing. If the Church was indefectible, he increasingly thought, then somehow the papacy was too. "Papal claims are just extensions of ecclesial claims…If we want a really coherent Church, it has to have recourse to transcendent claims that govern it, and that has to be Scripture and Tradition, and they have to be juridically enshrined and protected, and that has to be through councils and it has to be through popes, because those are the divine vehicles through which God governs" (220).
i) The church can be indefectible even though denominations are defectible, because the church is instantiated in different denominations at different times and places. When they outlive their usefulness, the church is then instantiated in newer denominations. There's a constant process of turnover–like the human body, which loses old cells and gains new cells. The body, the structure, remains, but the composition undergoes continuous change.
ii) Like many converts to Rome, Chad doesn't begin with the historical phenomena of the church but with an abstract, Platonic ideal. It has to be this way, even though there's a glaring mismatch between the paper theory and obstreperous reality.
Yet when we went into Memorial Chapel and approached the shrine to Mary to pray about the two jobs, suddenly he felt that the eyes of the icon of Mary were on him, staying with him as he moved (223).
It's hard to take that seriously. The impression that the eyes of a painting (or icon) follow the viewer is a common optical illusion. Nothing miraculous. It has a scientific explanation:
And even if we didn't have a scientific explanation, it's still a naturally occurring phenomenon.
She stared me right in the eye, pierced me with her eye, and said, "I want you to go to Catholic University." (223).
How should we interpret his claim?
i) It could be a tall tale. That's not the first explanation I'd reach for.
ii) It could be a hallucination. I don't know enough about his state of mind at the time to have an informed opinion one way or the other.
iii) It could be supernatural but occultic. Notice the striking parallel between his purported experience and this:
14 Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. 15 The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed (Rev 13:14-15).
From a Protestant perspective, an icon of Mary is equivalent to a pagan idol.
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