Why the focus on the hireling priest?
Just a thought from a Quaker perspective…
It seems a fair reflection of the general political-religious discourse today that pastor Wright is confounded with the religious community that Obama joined. Well, maybe Obama has emphasized the pastor Wright as part of his inspiration, but in his speech today he also spoke of the congregation at large:
Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
In his emphasis on the community as well as the pastor, Obama seems to work tacitly from the sort of premises that make Quakers skeptical of the “hireling priest” as the only significant link between the congregation and divine Spirit. But overtly he has to stick within the parameters of the general discourse concerning “church” and “priest.”
The Greek word for “church,” according to a bible scholar in my meeting, translates better as “meeting” in the Quaker usage. It’s not the building, and certainly it’s not the pastor or priest.
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Update: Here’s another spin on the same theme, Obama and his Church. Ed Kilgore quotes roughly the same paragraphs as above, and comments:
… it’s an argument that the church is the embodiment of the community it serves, with all its imperfections …. This is a very old, very “Catholic” idea of the church as an organic expression of “the people” as they happen to exist. It is likely to be baffling to those white Protestant Americans who think of church membership as more of a matter of consumer preference, doctrinal agreement or family heritage … and who also probably don’t understand why Obama didn’t just choose a different congregation the first time he heard something objectionable from Wright’s pulpit.
In my own musings, I get a lot of mileage out of the concept of “catholic,” and its counterpart in the idea of a “covenanted” community which one might choose to join or leave. This distinction was pivotal in the period that fostered the early Quaker movement.
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