My Friend Michael

Nine Volumes and a New Kind of Encounter

The manuscripts arrived in my life by a route that I will describe only as indirect, which is to say that they passed through several intermediaries before reaching my desk, having been passed along by people who thought, correctly as it turned out, that they would interest me.

My first reaction was honest ambivalence. An American Protestant apologist writing at book length about the Battle of Civilizations was not, on the face of it, the kind of thing I would normally have taken up voluntarily. I carry no particular prejudice against American Protestants — some of the most serious theological minds I have encountered in my career have been exactly that — but the genre suggested a certain kind of confidence that I was not sure I had patience for.

I was wrong in a way that I found, upon reflection, instructive. The manuscripts were not what I expected. They were the work of a man who had clearly gone to the text — directly, seriously, repeatedly — and who had emerged from it with something real. Not merely academic. Lived. The kind of theology that comes from someone who has been changed by what he believes, not merely from someone who believes correctly.

I made notes. Considerable notes. There are passages in the margins of my copies that represent arguments I intended to have with the author in absentia. Some of them I have since had with him in person and found that he either persuaded me or held his ground with enough scriptural precision that I had to take his position seriously. Both outcomes are useful.

• • •

What surprised me, when our conversations began, was the directness.

Michael does not lead with deference. This is, in my experience, unusual when one is in conversation with a Cardinal. People generally — not always, but generally — calibrate their positions when they discover they are speaking with someone whose office carries institutional weight. Michael calibrated nothing. He came in at the same level he would have come in at with anyone else whose theological positions he wanted to examine, which is to say: directly, with specific questions, willing to push back, willing to be pushed back.

I found this refreshing. I find it refreshing still. The conversations we have at this table are among the few I have in which I feel confident that what I am being given is what my interlocutor actually thinks, rather than a version of it edited for ecclesiastical consumption.

He won me over, if I am honest, not by his arguments, though the arguments are often good. He won me over by his spirit. There is a quality in Michael that I have learned to recognize across many years of pastoral life as the mark of genuine encounter with the living God — a quality that is, paradoxically, both very certain and very humble, that holds conviction without rigidity, that takes truth seriously without taking itself too seriously.

The fruit of the Spirit, Paul says, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I am not making a canonical judgment. I am reporting an observation. These qualities are evident in the man across this table, and they were evident to me in the pages of the manuscripts before I met him, and they have been confirmed by every conversation since.

He came to me as a challenger. He stays as a friend. The distance between these two things was shorter than I expected, which is a grace I did not anticipate and am grateful for.

• • •

What his work gave me — what nine volumes of serious, Spirit-breathed engagement with the questions of Christian life gave an old Roman Cardinal who thought he had read most of what needed to be read — was a mirror.

Not a flattering mirror. A truthful one. The kind that shows you what you have stopped seeing because you have stopped needing to look.

When you have been inside an institution for sixty years, the institution’s categories become your categories. You begin to see the faith from inside its containers, which means you see the containers as much as you see the faith. A man who has never lived inside those containers and who came to the text directly — through Scripture, through prayer, through the accumulated experience of a life lived in genuine dependence on God — sees different things. He sees what the containers are supposed to hold and what they sometimes fail to.

This is the most valuable thing an ecumenical friendship can give: not agreement, but a different angle of vision. Michael and I do not agree on everything. We agree on Christ. We agree on Scripture as the Word of God. We agree that the Gospel is not a set of propositions to be defended but a person to be known and followed. We agree that the measure of theology is whether it produces disciples, and the measure of disciples is whether they are becoming more like Jesus.

On these things — the things that actually matter — we are closer than our respective traditions might predict.