Q&A: Rev. Ken Howard On "Paradoxy" In The Christian Church

In his recently published book, Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us and Them, Reverend Ken Howard argues the Christian church is being threatened by divisions and disagreements. At his own church in Darnestown - St. Nicholas Episcopal - Howard said he has worked with a diverse community to find ways to come together amongst differences.

Raised in the Jewish tradition, Howard attended seminary and became an Episcopal priest in the 1990's. He has drawn on both his outside perspective of Christianity, as well as his experiences within the church organization, along with years of study of theological history to propose a new way for people to come together in faith.

Patch recently sat down with Howard at his church to discuss the development of his ideas and his hopes for the conversation the book will inspire.

A condensed and edited version of that conversation follows.

Patch: How long have you been developing the ideas in this book?

Howard: In some ways you could say I've been thinking about the ideas ever since I became a believer. I grew up with parents of different faith traditions - my mother was Jewish. My great grandfather was a rabbi in the orthodox tradition in Belarus. My dad was sort of a non-practicing tradition of a west-Texas Congregationalist, so there was always this sense that there was something wider than one tradition going on.

It was just amazing to me to observe all these different traditions within Christianity fighting with each other, over what looked to me to be kind of small things. From my standpoint, they all believed in Jesus; they all held up the idea that the core things lie in the relationship to it.

[In Seminary] I tried to determine the reason that the early fathers gave for excommunicating Jewish believers in the early church. What I really came to believe in was that it was a terrible mistake; that it was caused not by their belief system. But the main thing that got them thrown out was that they wanted to worship in a Jewish way.

So the thesis that I wrote [in Seminary as a Master of Divinity student] was basically following that whole transition and beginning to put forward the idea that neither in belief or practice defining Christianity in fact as a religion was really correct. That it was really a relationship, that Paul and Jesus were not interested in starting a religion, it was really irrelevant to them.

Patch: In your book you reflect on the history of the Christian church and make projections for it's future. What is the significance of this present time in history?

Howard: At so many levels we are kind of shifting our understanding of what it means to be a community. We can also see it reflected in politics. Where you have on the one hand you have people who are left or right, really more interested in defeating the other side than actually accomplishing something themselves, versus a real desire for moving beyond that. I think Obama was able to articulate that but so far has not really been able to achieve, maybe in part because people want it really bad but they don't believe it can happen.

Scientists are now realizing that there is no way for human beings to observe reality without changing reality. One person unaided can never get to the truth. If you have two people, with different opinions or different points of view to observe the experiment you find you get a little bit closer to the truth, and if you have three people doing the experiment from different points of view, you get a little bit closer to the truth. In that argument, in bringing those different points of view together then we can finally begin to get somewhere.

Patch: Can similarities be drawn to the current state of national government and politics?

Howard: David Brooks of the New York Times wrote an article on this, called "A Case of Mental Courage". He used the term metacognition, the ability to stand outside and observe yourself. He said it's totally missing from our discourse today. He spoke about how both Democrats and Republicans will fight the reality of things because it threatens the positions we already hold. We'd rather hold our positions than know the truth.

He used for example the surge, in Iraq, on the liberal side everyone was saying it wouldn't work, and it ended up working.  You could make the logical arguments like at what cost, but people on the left weren't making those arguments. They were trying to deny that it was working, until it became too obvious that it was. The amount of vehemence and anger that was being focused on people who were saying that it was working was amazing.

And of course it goes the other way as well, you have tea party people and republican rank and file that will do the same thing. They will say if Obama is putting it forward then I have to oppose it.

Patch: In your book you write about the recent trend of people describing themselves as spiritual instead but not religious. Why do you think that is?

Howard: In the book, I talk about there being three ways we've thought about church that are failing us now.  The first one is this thought we've had since the enlightenment, that we can be certain about things. And with all the advances in science, we know that's not true anymore.

Another is the idea is that Christendom, that you can have some kind of uniformity by exerting control or power, that you can have uniformity and that uniformity will unite us, that's false. 

And then the last thing that I see as falling is organized religion itself. Christianity was never meant to be an organization — I think it was more meant to be a movement.  The original believers referred to it only as "The Way".

I think that's what's happening where people are saying I'm spiritual and not religious. They're saying spirituality has to be something other than rules. 

Patch: Do you identify yourself as more liberal or conservative?

Howard: I reject those labels. I would say that I'm very orthodox, that all those things the church has traditionally believed, I believe. When it comes to the specifics as how you live that out, I am hard to peg. On certain issues people will think I'm very conservative, on other issues they'll think I'm a raging, radical liberal.

For example, in the issue of sacredness of life. I would have to say that I'm pro-life, which would make me conservative in some people's eyes. Although I believe people are called to make their own decisions about that, which would make me liberal in some people's eyes. But then I am entirely non-violent, and I am opposed to war and yet I understand that there are times in which there are no other options, but war. But at the same time, that doesn't make war good. That makes war an utter moral failure. People have a real hard time pegging me.

Patch: Do you still practice Jewish traditions or observe the Jewish holidays?

Howard: We celebrate them at home. We do things like Hanukkah at home, other seasons of the year we'll celebrate as appropriate. I'll often do a Hebrew blessing over the meal at home. Every service I do here at St. Nick's, the blessing that I do at the end is Adam's blessing. I say it in Hebrew and then say it English so they know what I said. Every other year we do a Seder here. I do a pretty authentic sader, and reflect, what could this mean to us as Christians.

Patch: What kind of feeback have you received about the ideas in the book?

Howard: Since the book has been out, I've really been surprised at the positive response to it. As I've made presentations on it, what it has felt like to me, is that people have had some level of deep yearning in finding some kind of way to transcend this kind of false choice, saying we have to be enemies or we have to be in total uniforminty to be friends.

Nobody has had the language to either critique it or articulate another way. It's almost like I've been introducing another language. I don't think the book is a be all and end all, it's the first stab at kind of articulating a theology, it's a new thing. 

Patch: You talk about the book as starting a conversation. How do you hope those conversations and discussions will continue?

The publisher is giving out a thousand copies to clergy across the country and they're giving it out to bishops in all the mainline denominations across the country.

I really do think that this is one of those shifts that happen. When paradigms shifts happen, they happen. You don't stop them. You can ride it or you can miss it. You can try and fight it and get drowned. If you want to survive you have to find a way to ride it. I think if people can learn to think this way, then the church can survive and thrive in a somewhat different form and can be kind of a beacon to society about how society might be.