Third way

Review: Claiming the Courageous Middle

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Cover image of "Claiming the Courageous Middle" by Shirley A. Mullen

Claiming the Courageous Middle, Shirley A. Mullen. Baker Academic (ISBN: 9781540967046), 2024.

Summary: Claiming the courageous middle in a polarized time as a risky and redemptive adventure of pursuing a hopeful future.

Since 2016, and perhaps far longer, I’ve lived in the middle. I cannot identify with either of the extremes in our polarized society. I’m not a moderate. I describe myself as a “third way” person, whose life is shaped by Jesus and his kingdom. And neither the left nor the right encompass what I believe is the Bible’s vision for a flourishing society. I’ve often felt lonely in that place and wondered what I have to contribute.

Shirley A. Mullen gives me hope that I am not alone. She even uses the “third way” language I’ve often used to describe the role of Christians in society. She describes a home not unlike my own that fostered both devotion and a love of learning. But she was encouraged early to step boldly and not defensively into both. Her grandfather told her that if something showed Christianity not to be true, he wanted her to know. She traces her journey through academia to the college presidency at Houghton College. There, she found herself often in the middle of groups that wanted her and the college to take their side. And she discovered the power of staying in the middle, and the courage, and risks that involved.

The Power of the Middle

Mullen contends that the middle is a place of courage and not a place for the wishy-washy. Firstly, it is courageous to remind people of their finiteness and fallenness, to adopt the posture of a humble learner. Secondly, the middle calls for a willingness to explore complexity and ambiguity to find better solutions rather than settle for the simplifications that substitute for solutions. Finally, the middle seeks the common good rather than defining the world as “us/them” and “winners/losers.”

But is the middle way biblical? After all, there are truths to believe or deny, commands to obey or disobey. And Mullen acknowledges this but also points to an underlying narrative of God working redemptively amid a fallen world where each person continues to have infinite worth before God. To illustrate her point, she highlights examples of Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Esther, Paul, and Jesus himself as those who worked in middle spaces.

However, the middle space is a risky space. It means the possibility of being attacked on both spaces. As a historian, she offers nine examples in history where this was so. And as a college leader, she speaks of the dangers of loss of trust, the loss of cohesion in one’s base, and creating unfulfilled expectations. But the other side of risk is benefits, and she sees a number of these. Among these are gaining a larger perspective on the issues, finding new options that serve both sides, and building new community on common ground.

Having cast the vision for the middle space, she gets down to the practicalities of claiming the courageous middle in a polarized time. Beginning with remembering our stories and framing one’s convictions, she encourages finding a community of kinship, apprenticing, and finding places to work redemptively in the church and the world. Toward that end, she offers a number of examples of individuals and organizations, both Christian and secular, working in the middle space.

Concluding Thoughts

I found this both a bracing and encouraging call to step into the work of the middle way. Mullen cites the many places in higher education, in civic affairs, and other places where good work may be done. Yet it seems like a “mustard seed conspiracy,” to use a phrase from Tom Sine, one that works in small and perhaps hidden ways.

But what about the powerful national interests battling each other? I sometimes wonder if the only way to change that is a subversive one of taking the air out of their efforts by grassroots efforts that engage citizens in a better way. Hopefully, they will demand better behavior from those who serve them in political office. Claiming the courageous middle in a polarized time seems like a long game. While Mullen offers a few examples of people who were in it for the long haul, like William Wilberforce, we need more examples and instruction on persisting over the long haul. That just might be a good idea for her next book!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Blessing and Burden on the [Third] Way

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three-waysHumorist and actor Robert Benchley, in a piece for Vanity Fair in 1920 said,

“There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.”

Benchley succinctly describes our penchant to divide the world into opposing camps and to align ourselves with one of them. Then in a witty twist, he provides a third option–of seeing the world in a way that does not do so.

I’ve written in the past on the idea that those who call themselves Christ followers are a People of the Third Way. In fact, one of the earliest referents to followers of Christ was to refer to them as “the Way” (Acts 9:2). Early on, this group, particularly as Gentile adherents joined those of Jewish descent in following Christ, did not fit the conventional way of dividing the world into Jew and Gentile. Some other name was needed. Eventually, the term Christian (“of Christ”) was used of the mixed Jewish and Gentile community in Antioch by outsiders.

I was recently at a conference that brought home to me the blessing and burden of being this people of the [Third] Way. The conference focused on the Magnificat, and of our calling as like that of Mary. One of the observations made by a conference speaker was that Mary came neither from the ruling class nor was part of a radical counter movement. She was a very young women, perhaps as young as thirteen, from a hill country town of Nazareth. God chooses to enter the world, and accomplish God’s redemptive purposes through this apparent nobody–a non-entity on the political map of her day. And she says “yes” to the blessing of, and the burden of bearing the Christ into the world.

There was indeed blessing. To be the one who is chosen of God to birth this one who incredibly is fully God and fully human. To be an instrument of bringing God’s saving work into the world. To birth one whose rule would outlast every power and every movement of her day.

And there was burden. Of course the burden of every child-bearing woman of carrying a baby for nine months. But there was more. Doing so under what seemed suspicious circumstances–who is the father? Doing so under the forced migration of the census, a naked wielding of Roman power. Doing so under the threat of Herod’s genocide and the life of a refugee. And there was Simeon’s prophecy of the great, and yet terrible destiny of her son “(and a sword will pierce through your own soul also) (Luke 2:35).”

Being a Third Way People is never easy. Most of us are “burden averse.” We just want the blessing, which is why I think we align ourselves with one pole or another of the dichotomies that our human systems create. We choose to be “conservative” or “liberal”, “Left” or “Right”, “Red” or “Blue”, “orthodox” or “progressive”. We identify with movement slogans like “creation care” or “responsible stewardship”, “Black lives matter” or “All lives matter.” It makes life simpler–you don’t have to wrestle with the tension of the truth of “the other” and the living in community with “the other.” But life is also smaller, and a constant struggle for survival in a zero sum world.

The challenge for Third Way People is different. It is to walk in the tension of blessing and burden, of truth and grace. Another speaker at our conference proposed that we most flourish as human beings when we live in the paradox of being both strong and weak, living with the authority to use our gifts and the vulnerability of our sins, failings, and blind spots, and of a world deeply in pain.

What does that tension look like for me? One is the tension of coming from a lower income, working class neighborhood, and working among the educated elite–sectors of society that tend to hold each other in contempt in our current socio-political life. Another is working in a historically “evangelical” organization committed to “the faith once delivered” and “the communion of the saints” while also seeking to be “ever reforming” as we seek to bring the good news of the kingdom into every corner of the university world addressing people who have experienced injustice and pain because of ethnicity, because of their sexuality, and sometimes because of their encounters with culturally captive forms of Christianity. It means working in a marketplace of ideas in which I see reflections of the glory of the Creator in every discipline of the university, and the effects on thinking of human alienation from that Creator.

How does one live in the tension of the Third Way, the tension of blessing and burden? Again, there is the example of Mary, who said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Mary didn’t understand how she would conceive a child without a man or work out life with all the complications such a pregnancy would bring. She simply said “yes” to the Lord to live with the tension of bearing Christ into the world. Some time back I read a book titled, The Way is Made by Walking. I often want to know the way, to work out how to “walk in the tension” in my mind, before I walk in it with my feet. It seems that Mary’s message is that we walk the way by saying “yes” to what we know, by trusting where we do not, and by cherishing Christ who dwells within who we bring into the world. Mary walks to Elizabeth, to Bethlehem, to Egypt, to Nazareth, and ultimately to the cross. In it was blessing and burden. Because of her and through her son, a Way was made for us all, and a calling to be the People of the [Third] Way.

 

 

 

 

The Challenge of “The Third Way”

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220px-Holbein-erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus, by Holbein

I’ve written in the past about the idea of Christians as “third way” people, who refuse to be drawn into the polarities of which our culture seems so fond. Such people are “both-and” people who prefer the perplexity of paradox to the simplicity of either-or.

I’ve been reading a biography of Erasmus, which suggested to me that there are particular challenges to pursuing this course. Erasmus might be considered the first among humanist scholars. Among his greatest works was a fresh Latin version of Jerome’s Vulgate New Testament, with the Greek text alongside. It was the text Luther used to translate the New Testament into German.

First and foremost he was a scholar, yet he happened to live during the time that has come to be known as the Reformation. As an “apostle of reason”, he argued against some of the excesses of the Church, its monasticism, its scholasticism, and other corrupt practices. Yet he never saw himself as other than a faithful Catholic. He hated taking sides, even though both Catholics and Reformers wanted to claim him. Devotion, moral practice, and the quiet life of a scholar were more important to him than theological disputes. Reading his dispute with Luther on the freedom of the will, one senses how much he detests being drawn into this sort of thing, as different as night from day to Luther. Seeking a “middle way”, at points he had to flee to avoid danger to life and limb from both sides. There were no “here I stand” moments, nor was there martyrdom, as friends like Oecolampadius and Thomas More faced. He died a quiet death as an old man after completing his last publishing projects.

Erasmus’ reputation is that of a great humanist scholar but not that of a hero of the faith, Catholic or Protestant. At times, it seems like he simply thought the conflict between The Church and the Reformers as irrational and that a compromise could be found. He did not want conflict, he wanted quiet. His life reveals what may be true for many of us who believe in a “third way”. Because we don’t like us versus them, we often hope that simply a rational statement of the “third way” will be enough and we can go along with our own lives, while the rest of the world comes to our way of thinking.

It doesn’t seem to work that way too often. As Erasmus found, the “third way” can be the third angle on which the other two triangulate! Perhaps the real test comes at this point. To be a “third way” person is to choose the life of a reconciler, a peacemaker, but this involves wading into the messiness of the either-or and doing the hard work of creating a vision of both-and out of these either-or polarities. Sometimes it is the peacemaker that ends up getting killed, either physically or metaphorically!

Perhaps what is critical to choosing the third way is that this is cannot be “feel good” compromise but a principled way, which for Christians is rooted in the “both-ands” of our theological and lived worlds. This implies hard-thinking and hard choices. And that may suggest why it is often the way not taken….