As the Rev. Andrew Teal arrived at general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last weekend, he was accosted by “one of the less helpful contributors” to the meeting, who called the Christian leader a “traitor” for worshiping with the Latter-day Saints. The protester also “heckled” those entering the plaza — asking them all, “Are you ready to die in your sins?”
Resisting the temptation of a “barbed” one-liner, the respected Anglican leader suggested to a BYU audience later that week that perhaps the protester had provided some fodder for his message. “There’s a lot of sin still living in me,” he said with good humor, before attesting that “the wonder of repentance is the joy of being able to keep on changing” because of Jesus Christ.
“And I want to thank you for this opportunity to bear witness to him,” he said, “in a place that I have come to cherish and love.”
As the invited speaker at last week’s annual Truman G. Madsen Lecture on Eternal Man, sponsored by Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, the Rev. Teal was unapologetic about his affection not only for the university, but for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its leaders. He reflected on his pilgrimage “coming here to Zion” with his wife, Rachel, while affirming his commitment to being an “adherent student of theology and history” of “fourth century Nicene Christianity.”
“We’re commanded to love, not necessarily to agree about every little detour,” emphasized the Rev. Teal, a celebrated scholar of Christian church history, while suggesting that in order to understand the “magnitude” of the Christian message, interfaith dialogue can help “plumb the depths of that majesty.”
The allure of an ‘absolute me’
“We often imagine that there’s an absolute me that no one else has a right to,” the Rev. Teal said, “and we think that’s the real me” — leading some to insist that self-image is inviolable, “don’t you dare tread on that holy ground.”
But “we only really find ourselves, our living self, in relation to others,” he said. And “we could never be who we are without each other, especially those with whom we make everlasting covenants.”
To be human, he added, is to be “participating in the physical and spiritual formation of an as yet unfinished humanity” — with human identity a “tangle of realities” that God is “drawing to himself, redeeming, glorifying, loving.”
Christians must be committed to “the abandonment of the inadequate, isolated and incomplete self,” he said. “I believe our Heavenly Father knows better than I do where I belong. I think his judgment is true.”
For that reason, “we can’t choose one aspect of who we are and say exclusively, ‘that’s who I am and you can’t argue with me.’” This is something, the Rev. Teal said, that his late colleague, Sister Benedicta Ward, once called “heresy, because it denies the wonderful reality of who we are, and more importantly ... what we shall be in the living God through the Atonement and Resurrection of … Jesus Christ.”
“We can refuse that, because we’re free,” he said, “but it is his truth, and therefore it is the truth.”
‘Unembarrassed’ by Jesus’ teachings
At one point, the Rev. Teal suggested that Latter-day Saints “bear a unique and important corrective and encouragement to other ancient Christian traditions to keep on pushing out into the depths of understanding that Jesus is the measure of humanity and divinity.”
Perhaps embarrassed at some of Jesus’s plain teachings, larger Christendom at times “uses words and images which move us away from a loving, personal God who is committed to us — come what may” into what he called the “God of the omni’s — the omniscient, omnipotent, and then the God of the not’s: immortal, invisible, and a God who doesn’t have a body, who doesn’t have a life or relationships.”
“We should never be embarrassed by the simple stories of the people of God,” he said, suggesting this is a temptation believers still face today. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is unembarrassed about rejoicing and celebrating and relishing a God whose love isn’t just an ideal absolute, but a particular” — a concrete being “that will thrill and change and transfigure not just me and you, my beloved friends, but the whole of creation, the whole of time, into eternity.”
“Dare we, as the Christian families across the world,” the Rev. Teal then said, “truly believe in a God who is not ultimately an unchanging philosophical idea, but a true, loving, eternal and Heavenly Father?”
‘The real Jesus’
The Rev. Teal referenced a Christian missionary in Asia who admitted that as a young girl, she “believed in Jesus, but didn’t like him much, because the impression she got was he was out to mark her and to condemn her and to exclude her.”
That was before she got to know “the real Jesus.”
“Every human who has ever lived is living now, or ever will be, is longed for by the wonder of the love of Christ,” he said, citing President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, at Oxford.
Admitting to his bias toward fellow English countrymen, the Rev. Teal also quoted Elder Patrick Kearon who, in his first address as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “insisted upon our rejoicing and being filled with joyful love” — using language which “makes you weep for joy.” The apostle described God as “removing roadblocks, rather than insisting upon them,” he said. This represents “an astonishing hope and powerful good news.”
Rather than only looking back at “wrongs,” the Rev. Teal said, “We have to believe in the astonishing invitation to travel into an ever-expanding reality, because God’s word never stops speaking, never stops redeeming, retracing and restoring.”
‘Hovering over all that is bent and broken’
This kind of a forward-looking orientation, the Rev. Teal suggested, may be connected with this faith community’s “insisting that its name is not another’s shorthand or slight, but saints who belong to those latter, rather than former, days.”
“Perfection lies ahead, drawing us and all creation into the fullness of the divine life of the eternal man.” Jesus Christ, the Rev. Teal said, shares “his own nature, his own reality, with us — eternal God whose children we are truly and really are.”
“We’re not saved by quadratic equations,” he added.
“God isn’t an idea or the cleverest argument, but the loving Heavenly Father” who stayed close to his son “even in the agony in Gethsemane and on the cross and in every human hell with which we hear the screams every day,” he said.
“The Holy Ghost hovers over all that is bent and broken and wounded in creation and fills it with the father’s glory at the right time.”
“All the grime and crime and abuse cannot be the last word,” he said — recalling an assignment in a cemetery in a poor part of Great Britain, where he felt deepened reassurance that “every life there in that cemetery would be raised by Jesus Christ.”