Exceptional Benedict: A Middle Way of Adaptive Leadership Via Moderation and Grace

Exceptional Benedict: A Middle Way of Adaptive Leadership Via Moderation and Grace David Robinson (bio) INTRODUCTION In June 2005, a Protestant pastor arrived at Mount Angel Abbey, Oregon, on a Sunday morning in time for Mass. He was spiritually weary and in need of time away from full-time work as solo pastor of a growing congregation. Over the previous five years, he had made annual study retreats at Mount Angel Abbey. After Mass at the Abbey church on that June morning, he walked to the Guesthouse where he met the Guestmaster, and asked if it would be possible to stay the night for a much-needed study retreat. He had not booked lodging in advance, hoping an opening was available when he showed up, not knowing that the monastery normally did not host guests on Sunday nights because the Guesthouse staff also needed a day off. The Guestmaster saw the look on the pastor's face, smiled, and graciously said, "You know what, let's make an exception. Let me go get you a room key for tonight. You are welcome to stay the next couple of days as well." The Guestmaster, in making this exception, fulfilled a Benedictine principle in the Rule, emblazoned in bronze letters on the wall of the Guesthouse lobby at Mount Angel Abbey: "All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ" (RB 53.1). Benedict loved making exceptions, with dozens of exceptions found in the Rule, expressing Benedict's gentle heart of moderation and grace. One of the motives behind Benedict's exceptions in the Rule is the principle of moderation. Benedict promoted a middle way of adaptive leadership via moderation and grace. To better understand exceptional Benedict, this article explores his middle way of moderation as a pattern for adaptive leadership today, and surveys a variety of exceptions in the Rule. End Page 39 EQUAL AND OPPOSITE ENEMIES OF THE GOSPEL Benedict described the Christian faith as walking along a life path guided by the Gospel: "Clothed then with faith and the performance of good works, let us set out on this way, with the Gospel as our guide."1 In his book Shaped by the Gospel, Dr. Timothy Keller, founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, articulated two of the greatest dangers in our journey of faith. "The gospel has two equal and opposite enemies. . . . I often call them religion and irreligion; the theological terms are legalism and antinomianism. Another way to describe them could be moralism and relativism."2 Benedict walked a middle way between legalism and antinomianism, equal and opposite enemies of the gospel, calling others to join him along the "road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God's commandments" (RB, Prol. 48–49). In the opening chapter of the Rule, we read Benedict's rejection of antinomianism in his description of the sarabaites, . . . the most detestable kind of monks, who with no experience to guide them, no rule to try them as gold is tried in a furnace (Prov 27:21), have a character as soft as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions, they clearly lie to God by their tonsure. . . . Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden.3 Antinomianism abounds in contemporary post-modern culture with a widespread rejection of authority, an emphasis upon personal pleasure as expressed in Benedict's phrase, "whatever strikes their fancy," and individual experience promoted ahead of communal good. As Scottish theologian Sinclair Ferguson writes in The Whole Christ, Although in one sense antinomianism is the 'opposite' error from legalism, in another sense it's the 'equal' error, for it End Page 40 similarly abstracts God's law from God's person and character (which undergoes no change from old to new covenant). It fails to appreciate that the law that condemns us for our sins was given to teach us how not to sin.4 Antinomianism, according...