Monthly Archives: November 2007

Against Confessional Diversity

Posted by on November 30, 2007 15 comments

A common impulse in the face of the division of the Christian church is to look for unique pearls of distinctly Christian wisdom and beauty in the various different traditions of the Christian faith.  In so doing, we construct some notion of the divergent streams of the Christian faith as different and uniquely beautiful tributaries of one Christian stream, each of which has its own “distinct contribution”.  It is a common, and I think, profoundly modern liberal sentiment that each and every stream of the Christian tradition possesses shards of the Christian wholeness which should be appreciated and appropriated by the truly pious and refined Christian.

This tendency can lead one from a liberal sentimentalism about all roads leading the same place, or an ultramodern ecclecticism which plunders all the various traditions of their interesting bells and whistles for the sake of creating some new, perfect kind of church.  This is a particularly evangelical and American proclivity, exemplified, for example in Brian McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy.  His egregiously long subtitle proclaims that he is a ”missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed- yet hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.”  I will leave aside the obvious stupidities of such a cumbersome proclamation.  If people don’t realize that the concept of an “Anabaptist/Anglican” makes no sense whatsoever, I won’t be able to convince them of it.

The point is, however that this impulse to skim elements off the top of the various streams of the Christian tradition assumes that the existence of all these traditions is a fundamentally good thing.  That is the proposition I wish to call into question.  This is not to say that the church should not bear within herself the fullness of human diversity and culture.  Rather, it is to say that the various “traditions” of the Christian faith are only intelligible in the context of the church’s history of schism and division.  As such they are not goods to be celebrated, but the result of sin for which we must strive to repent.

The stains and scars of schism have left no part of the church untouched.  Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Anabaptism, all confessional streams of Christian fellowship have been shaped into the distinctive bodies that they are through their complicity in schism and division.  As such, the wholeness for which the Christian church longs will not be found by trying to figure out what distinctly Roman, Eastern, Reformed, Lutheran, or other such traditional distinctives we can all embrace.  Rather, the wholeness and unity to which we are called in Christ will only be realized when all Christians come together in the most abject posture of repentance and penitence.  There will be no reunion for the Church without repentance.  And they way toward such repentance is not to look for how we can all appreciate our distinctiveness as specific ecclesial bodies, it will rather be found in the abandonment of such distinctives in weeping, confession, and prayer.  How that might come about, only God knows.  But the Triune God is the one who calls things into existence which did not exist, who declares that those who were formerly no people are now the people of God, the one through whom the things that are nought bring to nothing the things that are.  Therefore I have hope.

A Church Without Theory?

Posted by on November 29, 2007 24 comments

In a theological autobiography of his conversion to Catholicism, Rusty Reno makes a very interesting statement about the ‘non-theoretical’ nature of the Roman Church:

The ocean needs no justification. It needs no theory to support the movement of its tides. In the end, as an Episcopalian I needed a theory to stay put, and I came to realize that a theory is a thin thread easily broken. The Catholic Church needs no theories. She is the mother of theologies; she does not need to be propped up by theologies. As Newman put it in one of his Anglican essays, “the Church of Rome preoccupies the ground.” She is a given, a primary substance within the economy of denominationalism. One could rightly say that I became a Catholic by default, and that possibility is the simple gift I received from the Catholic Church. Mater ecclesia, she needed neither reasons, nor theories, nor ideas from me.

Now, I for one deplore the fragmented world of denominations and the proliferation of independent Bible churches.  But, I think that Reno’s statement here is made more of romantic fantasy than reality.  “The Catholic Church needs no theories”?  This is pure lunacy.  All social bodies are in some sense constituted by the ideas and commitments (“theories”) which perpetuate their particular ethos.  Catholicism not only needs theories to prop it up, it is full of them.  The theory of apostolic succession, of papal primacy, of transubstantiation, etc.  All of these theological distinctives are formed on the basis of a theory, an explanatory framework that is offered to people as an object of faith to which they must commit themselves.

Unless Reno is using the term “theory” in some wildly elastic sense, I don’t see how his comments can really have any meaning.  How is a person whose theological convictions compel him to become a Methodist doing something which is formally or epistemologically different from someone whose convictions compel them to convert to Catholicism?  In both cases people are simply acting in concert with their convictions, the act of the one is not somehow more “theoretical” than the other.

The idea that the Catholic church is this utterly given, self-justifying ocean of stability is one that I have often encountered.  However, I think that such rhetoric does little more than express the ecstasies of new converts who feel they have “come home”.  This isn’t to say that such experiences are illegitimate or to be despised, only that they cannot be taken seriously as theological claims. 

In the end there is no escape for anyone from the vulnerability of living by conviction in the world of chance and change.  We are not given a bedrock security of sheer, unquestionable givenness in which we can find epistemic and existential serenity.  Such rhetoric ignores the fundamentally apocalyptic nature of the church.  The church exists between the aeons and her entire existence is one of warfare.  The church is not a serene ocean of givenness and security, but the site of primordial conflict between Christ and the powers of this age.  If we are expecting to find a church in which we will be submerged into an ocean of self-justifying security and givenness we will always be disappointed, no matter what communion we choose into.

None of this speaks to whether we should be Catholics or Protestants, the point is that converting to Catholicism, or any denomination in search of some sort of unshakable security blanket is a quixotic quest that is best abandoned.

Diverse Polities in Unity?

Posted by on November 29, 2007 17 comments

In his book, Priest and Bishop Fr. Raymond Brown makes the argument that, theoretically it should (or could) be possible for different forms of church polity to coexist in one communion.  He argues:

The likelihood that in Paul’s lifetime some of his Churches that had no bishops lived in fellowship with Churches that had bishops suggests the possibility of two such Churches living in union today.  The probability that not all the presbyter-bishops of the years 80-110 could trace their position back to appointment or ordination by an apostle suggests the possibility of our openness to Churches with an episcopate that (by our standards) is not in historical succession to the apostles.

Fr. Thomas Kocik criticizes Brown’s proposal on the basis of the position of the Catholic church that “the episcopate in communion with the successor of Peter is divinely instituted and essential to the one Church, which exists in and is formed from the particular churches”.  This is, I think the standard response of official Catholic ecclesiology.  However, I think that Fr. Brown’s point deserves more consideration.  If the monoepiscopate is essential to the church, what are we to say about the many churches in the first century that Brown describes?  It does seem that there was a plurality of church forms in the early centuries of the church (indeed as late as the letter of 1 Clement, it seems that the church of Rome itself was ruled by a college of presbyters rather than a single bishop).  If this early diversity of church structure falls within the conditions for ecclesiality, why should such diversity now be regarded as necessitating a division?

At the very least it seems prima facie true that if a plurality of church forms and leadership structures was no impediment to intercommunion in the early churches, there is no reason in principle why it must be a point of division today.

Theology as the Supspension of Disbelief

Posted by on November 27, 2007 16 comments

Trying to define theology will always be perhaps the biggest theological task that theologians undertake.  More often than not major disagreements in theology often come back to central divergences in the self-understanding(s) of what theology is.  While this “wrangling over words” will certainly never come to an end, I have a proposal for how theology might be helpfully understood, or at least helpfully described.

I believe that theology is the suspension of disbelief in light of God’s action in the world.  Skepticism and demythologization are the essence of atheology.  To be a theologian, one must respond to what seem to be miracles in this world as though they truly are miracles for which no other explanation can be given.  In fact theology is the absolute refusal to offer a final “explanation” of anything at all.

Theology suspends “rational” disbelief by doxologically exulting in what God has in fact done among us.  Theology is what Ricouer would call a form of “second naivete” in which we passively allow ourselves to be drawn into the post-critical joy of doxology and feasting rather than attemping to assimilate the wonders before us into an atheological “explanation” of our world.

As such, theology is the absolute embrace of an enchanted view of the world in light of God.  Theology requires us to respond to God’s action in the world in faith and thus, we must confess the world as the location of the riches of divine grace, life, and abundance.  Theology forbids us to ever enter into mechanistic calculations or formulations that could render the miracles of God intelligible.  Theology requires, rather that we suspend our refined and cultured disbelief and join with the trees of the field in clapping our hands for joy at what God has done.

Theology calls us to believe in a world that defies calculation.  A world in which the barren woman becomes the mother of children.  In which enemies feast together at a table of peace.  In which the dead are raised.  In which the things that are despised and rejected bring to nothing the thind that are high and lifted up.  In which those in the ash heap are lifted up and seated with the princes.  Theology calls us to believe that every mountain shall be leveled and every valley raised up.  It calls us to abandon our management of the world on the basis of an epistemology of domination and control.  It presents us with mysteries - the mystery of resurrection and exodus – which cannot be explained or assimilated.  Not if they are, in fact the happening of God among us. 

Theology is the refusal to disbelieve.  It insists that water runs downhill because it loves running downhill.  That birds sing to each other because they cannot stop laughing.  That apples fall downward because the world is magical.  This is the world into which theology invites us to come and play, to eat and be satisfied. 

It may be that this is far too stupid and nonsensical a vision of theology to do the heavy lifting that we all think theology should do.  But I don’t care.  At the end of the day, all theologians ask the world to believe in miracles.  No matter what syllogisms and summas we construct, at the end of all things we either end up apostatizing into atheism or expositing the Song of Songs on our deathbed.  All theology, no matter how rhetorically brilliant and philosophically compelling ultimate asks all people everywhere to believe that God is not the explanation for all things, but the end of all explanations.  Theology is the call to suspend our disbelief, throw off our cultured despising and be drawn into never-ending singing and dancing.

Consuming Jesus: A Review

Posted by on November 26, 2007 4 comments

There has been a massive influx of Christian literature and criticism regarding the multifaceted behemoth of “consumerism” in recent years. What could be dismissed as a faddish form of cultural criticism has begun to take hold in Christian communities across denominational and confessional lines (insofar as such lines still really exist in protestant Christianity). Up until now the bulk of such writings were actually coming from Roman Catholic theologians (such as Eugene McCarraher and William Cavanaugh) and mainline protestants (such as Daniel Bell and Stephen Long). With the addition of Paul Metzger’s new book, Consuming Jesus, we now have a distinctly evangelical contribution to this growing body of Christian literature. While some evangelical Christians from the more “emergent” stream of Christian thought have offered a great deal of reflection on consumer culture (see David Fitch’s book The Great Giveaway for example), most of them have done so from the framework of taking leave of evangelicalism (at least as much as possible). Metzger, by contrast clearly speaks from within the broad American evangelical tradition as a distinct voice of loyal opposition.

In so doing, he offers us an excellent book which deserves a wide reading among protestant Christians who are concerned about the state of the church’s unity and mission in our world of global capitalism and its attending veneer of bourgeois consumerism. Metzger, in speaking from within the evangelical tradition draws from distinctly evangelical resources (particularly Jonathan Edwards’ theology of the religious affections) in seeking to speak prophetically and practically to the evangelical churches who, by and large remain segregated along racial and economic lines throughout the United States.

Framed with a forward from Don Miller (of Blue Like Jazz fame) and an afterword by his primary inspiration, John Perkins (the profoundly Christian social rights activist and community developer), Metzger tells the story of the evangelical withdrawal from such theo-political issues as racialization and poverty through an analysis of the fundamentalist debacle in the early twentieth century, and the persisting problems of the political agendas of the Religious Right which dog us up to the present day (Chapter 1). He then goes on to explore how the invisible hand of consumer preference and affinity groups shape evangelical churches into segregated and unfaithful sub-cultures which seek to appeal to the “felt needs” of strikingly homogeneous bodies of believers (Chapter 2). Following these historical and theological excoriations of the failures of the evangelical tradition to confront race and class divisions in the church, Metzger moves into a theological “reordering” of the evangelical church’s vision and practices in the remaining four chapters of the book.

He first turns to the dynamics of consumerism in shaping the life of evangelical Christians and how Christ’s defeat of the powers and principalities informs our engagement with the powers of consumerism and racialization (Chapter 3). He colorfully tells this story through J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagery of the Balrog of Morgoth’s confrontation with Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. He then moves into an analysis of what is, in may ways the central fixture of the evangelical identity: the experience of encountering Christ as one’s Savior who transforms the heart of the believer to love God and others (Chapter 4). Through an investigation of the trinitarian and affective theology of Jonathan Edwards, Metzger argues that evangelicals are unfaithful to their own distinctive spiritual legacy when they do not envision the transformation of the heart through the Spirit as impelling them to love all humankind and break down the divisions imposed between people by racialization and consumerism.

Following his discussions of the atonement and the heart-driven transformed life of Christians, Metzger turns his attention to the corporate life of the body of Christ, exploring how consumerism restructures the “sacred space” of Christian gathering and worship (the common metaphor for and example of this being the act of “trading stone altars for coffee bars”). He explores how the purging of sacred symbols, such as the Lord’s table from the places of Christian worship have had the deleterious effect of removing crucial elements of Christian social formation (Chapter 5). The eclipse of the Eucharist and the sacramental imagination of the church in evangelicalism evacuates the church of its central call to unity and communion, which is more necessary than ever to the consumer church of racialization and classism. Finally, Metzger moves on to explore the dynamics of how the church must embody its mission in “building beloved community” in the face of the market forces that seek to determine the shape of our lives (Chapter 6). In conversation with Martin Luther King Jr., John Perkins, and others, Metzger articulates a vision of “redistribution” which has the power to reshape the ecclesial social lives of evangelical Christians and have a profound impact on building a more just society.

The book ends in a beautifully constructed vision of the great eschatological banquet which should animate the Christian social imagination and empower Christian witness and action in a world shaped by the powers of market forces and consumer preference. The final solution to the problem of consumerism lies ultimately in the banquet table of the Lord to which all are called, and at which all are welcome.

On the whole, the book is a distinctly evangelical tour de force, powerfully challenging the evangelical church’s acquiescence to the forces of consumerism and commodity fetishism in the United States. Eugene McCarraher has written strongly about the “highbrow moralism” that passes for prophetic critique in many Christian discussions of “consumerism”. His cautionary words are well-grounded and needed. Consuming Jesus, I think passes any such test, if for reasons that may not be clear to every reader. Having had the privilege of knowing Dr. Metzger personally and offering what meager assistance I could in the various stages of this book’s genesis, I can assure the reader that what they read is not the abstract musings of an academic, but the galvanized conscience of a passionate and grounded ecclesial Christian. These reflections on the consumer church come from no ivory tower, but from the trenches and the tears of ecclesial life and practice. I encourage the strongest hermeneutic of love to those who would read this book. It has much to teach Christians of all traditions, but most of all I hope that evangelicals will take its message to heart and begin to lean anew how to embrace the sacramental imagination that tends towards unity, and a fresh vision of the church’s catholicity as the location in the world where the Triune God’s love longs to draw people from all races, classes, and backgrounds together into a beloved community in which difference leads not to separation, but to communion, feasting, and joy.

Non-Episcopal Ministries

Posted by on November 25, 2007 2 comments

I concluding his excellent and utterly honest historical study of the origins of the episcopate in the church, Francis Sullivan makes this statement which I found quite encouraging as a non-Roman Catholic.  I’m curious what other Roman Catholic Christians would think of it.

I believe that we have sound reasons to hold that Christian ministry, in order to be fully valid, must be related to Christ and his apostles through the historic succession maintained in the college of bishops.  At the same time, I believe that we have tended to pay too exclusive attention to the conditions we believe are required for the validity of ministry and have not sufficiently explored the implications of the fruitfulness of a ministry which may not meet all the conditions we believe are required for validity.  One implication, which certainly needs deeper exploration, concerns the ecclesial character of communities that have not retained the episcopate, but which for centuries have led numberless Christians to grace and salvation through the effective preaching of the Word of God and a fruitful pastoral ministry.  I do not believe we have done full justice to such communities when we simply declare that they are not churches in the proper sense.

–Francis Sullivan, S.J., From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (New York: The Newman Press, 2001), 236.

Episcopacy in the Early Church

Posted by on November 21, 2007 21 comments

I’m currently reading through the Apostolic Fathers (Michael Holmes’ translation is excellent, I highly recommend it).  When I was reading the Didache I came across this passage:

Therefore appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men who are humble and not avaricious and true and approved, for they too carry out for you the ministry of the prophets and teachers. (15:2)

So, it seems that perhaps the earliest catechal document we have from the early church instructs congregations in a given city to appoint and ordain their own episcopal overseers (who are, of course ostensibly in communion with overseers from in all other local churches).  Moreover, if we have have local churches consecrating their own bishops, how does that jive with any straightforward theory of apostolic succession?

Reformers or Saints: What Does the Church Need?

Posted by on November 21, 2007 6 comments

In his apologia for the origin of the modern Roman Catholic Church flowing directly from the earliest Church, Kenneth Whitehead makes this statement:

The early church has not disappeared.  She is with us still.  Reformers, again by whatever name, are not so much needed by this Church as are those who aspire to be saints – those determined to follow Christ seriously and to fulfil God’s holy will by employing the means of sanctification that Christ’s Church continues to provide.

This reminded me of the account of Bonhoeffer’s conversation with Catholic pacifist, Jean Lassare in which Lassare told Bonhoeffer that he hoped to perhaps one day become a saint.  Bonhoeffer replied that he wished to learn to have faith.

Regardless, what do people think of this line?  Does the church need saints or reformers?  Can a reformer be a saint?  Can a saint be a reformer?

Theological Musings on Global Captialism

Posted by on November 21, 2007 7 comments

The following are three abriveated talking points that I presented at a class I am taking on cross-cultural communication and Christian mission.  I’m curious to see what people might think of them. 

Capitalism is Heresy. Capitalism, for Christians should be understood as a heretical way of shaping human life; a way of life that is idolatrous. From a theological perspective, the ultimate problem with capitalism is not that it creates more poor people than other alternatives or that it trains us in greed (though both of those things are probably true). The problem with capitalism is that it de-forms human desires and social relations. It trains us to view all things and people as commodities to be used and dominated. It is what Augustine called the libido dominandi run wild.

Capitalism is Indestructable. From a Christian perspective the most insidious thing about capitalism lies in its ability to absorb counter-movements into itself. Capitalism produces its own antibodies, making them part of its own system. A great example of this are the anti-globalization movements which have become happy fixtures within the capitalist economy. The quintessence of global capitalism are the chic T-shirts, made in Chinese sweatshops bearing the “World Without Strangers” logo. Or Bono’s “Product Red” campaign which encourages people to buy certain products from chains like Gap and Reebock because a “a portion” of the proceeds goes to poverty relief – while the products themselves are made by children under the age of 10 in textile factories in southeast Asia. The point is that capitalism as we know it today is basically an indestructible, unopposable system.

The Kingdom of God is the “Solution” to Capitalism.  The solution to the sins of capitalism is not another economic system such as socialism. The solution is the Kingdom of God; a kingdom which we do not construct or manipulate, but which we receive. This is not a pie when you die “solution” because the Kingdom of God is indeed present now in the life of the church. Whenever the deformed desires and social relations brought about by capitalism are healed through the reconciliation brought about in Christ, we are given hope. The downfall of the economic empire of Mammon lies ultimately in God’s hands. But we see his hands at work through us when we are able to welcome those different from us, when former enemies eat together in peace, when we see people no longer view others as obstacles and commodities to be dominated, but as gifts to receive with love. The Christian response to capitalism is not to find another economic system by which to overthrow the current system, it is rather to find ways of living in the disruptive spaces of freedom which God creates even in the face of a seemingly intractable empire. Even in the darkness of captialism’s hegemony God has not left himself without witnesses. There remain the seven thousand who do not bow their knees to the Baals of our far sexier pantheon of captitalism’s anemic gods. The question for is how far we are willing to go to be numbered among that remnant in which it is clear that the kingdom of God rather than Mammon is running our lives.

Questions for Catholics

Posted by on November 20, 2007 9 comments

Here are a few questions regarding how practioners of the Catholic faith understand certain aspects of their practice and theology.  Anyone who would care to resond is welcome and I look forward to hearing what people have to say.

  1.  What does the Sacrament of Reconciliation mean to you and how does it affect your day-to-day life?  How does Catholic teaching on reconciliation motivate you to deal with conflicts with other Christians?  Does going to confession at times function as a substitute for confessing to people whom you have wronged?
  2. What is your experience with the Catholic laity as a whole?  What level of participation and understanding do you sense among Catholic congregants on a broad scope?
  3. Do you have any experiences with indulgences?  Please tell if you do.
  4. How does Marian devotion impact your spiritual life (if it does)?
  5. What does “infallibility” of the teaching office of the church mean in your view?
  6. What differences do you see between the participation, general sense of identity and commitment between people who were raised Catholic and people who have converted to Catholicism?

Thanks to whoever will indulge me with answers to some of these questions.  I hope this kind of inquiry can be a form of the sort of “spiritual ecumenism” that Vatican II calls for.

Constantinianism and Ecumenism

Posted by on November 19, 2007 11 comments

One of the key points of contention between Free Churches and all other Christian communions lies in their posture towards what is commonly (and crudely) called “Constantinianism”.  While figuring out the precise definition of what constitutes Constantinianism has filled entire books, at the simplest level we can say that Constantinianism constituted at least a certain sensibility about the logic of Christian participation and investment in political affairs of the Roman Empire (or the Byzantine Empire, or the Holy Roman empire, or the Frankish princedoms, or whatever).  After Constantine it was more or less assumed that the church was part of (perhaps the definitive part of) the social structure of the world and had certain responsibilities and privileges that derived from that status.  The overarching point is that churches which accept the basic structure of Constantinianism assume that the church is in some sense the “spiritual” and “religious” chaplain of the social order.  It is the religious part of the social and political fabric of the nation in question which supports the powers that be through attending the spiritual needs of the people and providing a conscience to the wider society.

Now, to be sure I don’t want to paint too monolithic a picture of the post-Constantinian church.  There were a great many Christians, both within monastic and lay movements, and within the church hierarchy throughout the centuries which stood against the idolatrous use of power and violence.  However, there were also a great many forms of complicity with such forms of power.  While Jesus insisted that his followers are to be servants to one another in contrast to the Gentiles who lord it over one another, the post-Constantinian church was often unable to embody the kind of kenotic, self-dispossessing leadership that Christ mandated.  Political power in the world just doesn’t lend itself to one who would empty himself and the church, willy-nilly ended up often transposing the cruciform power of Christ with the triumphalist power of the crusader’s sword or the inquisitor’s rack.

Of course, in many respects Constantinianism is a thing of the past.  Churches no longer have the same level or sort of power to shape political affairs in the world as they once did.  However, the basic structure of Constantinianism does remain in most churches.  Not simply through a sort of folk relgion that conflates Christianity and patriotism (as annoying as that is), but through a basic assumption that the church is to serve as a sort of “leaven” in society, stabilizing it, making it more moral, more just, more generally habitable.  Although much of the church’s immediate power is gone, there is a general social conservatism that remains among most churches today.  They, more or less, view their duty to the world (at least in the West), as one of helping to preserve and transform social life in the wider society.

The Free Churches, by contrast have stressed that the church is itself a society that is, in a very real sense incommunicable to the unbelieving world.  The kind of transformed social relations that are inherent to the gospel message cannot be “communicated” to those who reject the gospel message in anything other than an invitational sense.  The church has, according the Free Church vision, no mode of social transformation to offer the world than conversion, baptism, and repentance.  As such the church cannot become the chaplain of the social order (even the occasionally-dissenting chaplain).  The church, on the Free Church self-understanding has a supra-national unity which qualifies and controls all other allegiances and loyalties.  As such, the Free Churches have rejected the use of violence in defense of justice.  Since the unity of the church supersedes all other loyalties, Christians cannot allow foreign political powers to order them to kill one another without making a mockery of the Eucharist and the call to discipleship.  Likewise, since the church’s missional mandate involves all creation, Christians cannot make war on unbelievers as their mission in the world is to bring the gospel to everyone.

The point of all of this is that the ecumenical vision of the Free Churches is profoundly shaped by the rejection of the Constantinian synthesis.  If Christians are not free to wield any power other than the power of the cross, and if there is no worldly political formation which can truly claim the allegiance of Christians, then what would “full, visible Christian communion” look like?  The Free Churches are not interested in a merely structural union or federation of churches which does not repudiate the Constantinian settlement.  “The nature of the unity we seek” is a supra-national political unity which stands against all other loyalties, directly in competition with the claims of our contemporary Empires and Caesars.  Within the “Free Church ecumenical style” (Yoder), there is no room for movements towards reunion that do not take the radically particular character of Christian ethics with the utmost seriousness.  Whatever unity we seek, it will come at the cost of death and resurrection for all if it is the unity of the gospel.  And that unity cannot be based on a common denominator or a structural integration.  It must be based on the all-embracing call of Christ to a life of non-coercive, kenotic, cruciform discipleship into which all are welcomed as brother and sisters.

Versions of Catholicity

Posted by on November 17, 2007 17 comments

“Since their inception, Free Churches have represented for both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church the quintessence of what is uncatholic.  Because catholicity qualifies all other essential attributes of the church, all the ecclesiological capital sins of Free Churches can be understood as transgressions against catholicity.  The Free Church understanding of unity, of holiness, and of apostolicity is problematic because it is uncatholic.  The unity of Free Churches in uncatholic because it lacks concrete forms of communion with all other churches, that is, with the whole church.  Their holiness is uncatholic because it is exclusive; according to the Free Church idea, all who do not consciously believe and live commensurately are to be excluded from the church.  The apostolicity of Free Churches is uncatholic because it lacks connection to the whole church in its history, which is assured by  the successio apostolica.  Moreover, the specific ecclesiological characteristic of Free Churches resides precisely in their understanding of unity, holiness, and apostolicity.  Were they to become catholic, they would, according to the argumentation of the episcopal churches, have to surrender their very identity.  A catholic Free Church is a contradiction in terms; it understands itself as free precisely with regard to those relationships that would tie it to the whole and thus make it catholic in the fist place.

“This picture changes significantly from the Free Church perspective.  Together with other churches deriving from the Reformation, Free Churches have from the very outset subscribed to catholicity and have simultaneously denied this attribute to the Catholic Church.  The unity of the Catholic Church is uncatholic because the Pope (or bishop), to use Luther’s words ‘declares that his court alone is the Christian church.’  Its holiness is uncatholic because it maintains a distance from its sinful members (casta meretrix) and is never willing to pray for the forgiveness of its own sins (ecclesial sancta et immaculata).  The apostolicity of the Catholic Church is uncatholic because it insists too much on the form of preserving apostolicity (succesio apostolica), binds church doctrine to certain formulations from the past, and in this way renders them uniform.  According to Free Church argumentation, the Catholic (and implicitly, Orthodox) Church refuses to accept its own particularity, and thus denies (full?) catholicity to other churches.  This sort of exclusive claim to catholicity is from the Free Church perspective narrow, intolerant, and thus profoundly uncatholic.  To be catholic, the Catholic and Orthodox churches would have to understand themselves as churches among other churches.  But by doing so would they not surrender their own identities?”

–Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1998), 259-61.

And now for something completely different!

Posted by on November 16, 2007 8 comments

Alright, I know you guys are all expecting some big theological post about how I’m converting to Catholicism or about how Catholicism is actually the antichrist, but those will have to wait.  Right now I have something far more important to say.

Tim Kring, if you kill off H.R.G. (a.k.a. Noah Bennett), so help me Jesus I will hunt you down and exact my revenge with ruthless commitment and reckless abondon.  I will turn all my unbridled focus towards gaining the fullest retribution possible should this terrible event occur.  Consider yourself warned.

I am as serious as a heart attack here people.  If H.R.G. dies I’m going to fly into a rage and never watch Heroes again.  Jack Coleman, I love you and hope you get to act on Heroes for a hundred years.  Should you ever have need I will rise up and do your bidding.

The “Gathered” Church vs. the “Given” Church

Posted by on November 16, 2007 6 comments

“The Believers Church tradition…has been based on the concept of a ‘gathered’ church as opposed to a ‘given’ church.  Being gathered intends to be dynamic and voluntary, while being given speaks of the church as established and settled in its accumulated order, formalized wisdom, and standardized sacramental practices.  Being gathered highlights the responsiveness of faith in relation to the ongoing work of God’s gracious Spirit; being given easily degenerates into merely the inevitability of institutional legitimacy and dominance.”

–Barry Callen, Radical Christianity: The Believers Church Tradition in Christianity’s History and Future (Nappanee, IN: Evangel Publishing, 1999), 121.

To be Steeped in Hisory is to be…Anabaptist?

Posted by on November 15, 2007 15 comments

In a helpful article, “Anabaptism and History” John Howard Yoder explores the often raised questions about the alleged “ahistoricism” of the Radical Reformation tradition.  He insists that the Radical Reformation tradition of “restitution” requires, not an ahistorical consciousness which longs for a mythical “Eden” in which the church was perfect, but rather a rigorous Christian historiography.  In fact, as Yoder shows very convincingly the Anabaptist tradition must be more historically conscious than normative Catholicism or Protestantism.  By claiming that some sort of “restitution” is necessary for the present faithfulness of the church, it is incumbent upon the Anabaptist tradition to show precisely how and why this is so through being radically immersed in history:

An ahistorical bias is incompatible with restitutionism; historiography is theologically necessary.  By standing in judgment on particular fruits of historical development such as the church/state linkage, episcopacy, and pedobaptism, restituionism accepts the challenge to be critical of history and thereby to take it more seriously than do those for whom some other criterion than the New Testament determines the faithfulness of the church.  A classical Tridentine Catholic affirmation of the teaching authority of the hierarchy, or a classical Hegelian affirmation of the revolutionary power of the Spirit of Western culture is “serious about history” in the sense of accepting the results of the particular evolution of certain institutions in European experience.  It however need not and perhaps cannot deal with history critically, since it has totally affirmed its own path as its norm.  Dialogue is by definition questionable.  On the other hand, a view which criticizes what has come into being in the course of history, on the ground of criteria which themselves are also drawn from within the course of history, is thereby obliged to be concerned with historical data in a way different from those traditions which claim each in its own way to be the “mainstream.”

In contrast to the common Catholic assertion that the Reformation, and the Radical Reformation in particular requires one to abandon history, Yoder argues that the Anabaptist tradition is in fact far more critically historical than the alternatives:

Only when one assumes that the choices leading to where we are now were right, can one equate the criticism of those choices with the rejection of history as such.  Thus the course of history becomes its own justification.  It can be judged only be immanent criteria; thus the contingency of the present is denied.  Only a reference point in the past can be equally accessible to all and a judgment on all.  Only the normativeness of some past afford us  critical leverage on the present.

Moreover, Yoder argues that this restitutionist view does not require one to deny that the history of the church is a “historical progress under God”.  One need not, and indeed must not from the standpoint of restitutionist historiography argue that the “fall of the church” means the annihilation of the church, or the complete apostasy of the church.  It requires one to be specific and critical in the making of historical-theological judgments about where and how the church has gone wrong and continues to go wrong in its life.

The fact that in every age particular dimensions of apostasy are identified, denounced, and dismantled, is a way of discerning the real substance of salvation history.  Thus…the doctrine of restitution does not deny but rather enables real historical progress under God.  It does so by identifying in each age the criterion of progress, namely the capacity to identify the new forms of apostasy, so as to restore accordingly a redefined faithfulness.

Moreover, Yoder goes on to further specify the historicist nature of belonging to the Anabaptist tradition.  Radical Reformation Christianity does not simply have an interest in history for the sake of finding where things “went wrong”.  Rather, Christians in this tradtion must take history seriously because the fact of the church’s ability to fall into apostasy requires them to take their own participation in history with an even greater seriousness:

Radical reformation is not history-oriented only in the sense of needing to study how things went wrong.  It is also historicist in that it affirms the character of man as a being who within the temporal order makes decisions which themselves determine history.  To speak of the present or the immediate future as an age of restitution by the Spirit is to take the uniqueness of every moment, and the importance of every decision, more seriously than when one sees the career of the church as an unbroken gradual climb and one’s present institutional and doctrinal stance as obviously the best possibility for the present.  The radical reformers read their Bible because they took their own time seriously as one more kairos of choice between fall and renewal.  A picture of past and present made up of crucial particular choices, on each of which the future depends, is far more earnest than one in which an indefectible church and a pious government have things so in hand that only natural catastrophe and the exotic infidel are to be feared.

Regardless of whether or not one accepts Yoder’s Anabaptist historiography and ecclesiology, his comments should at least give pause to those who so readily throw Newman’s phrase that “To be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant” as if it were a self-evident truth.  There are more modes of serious Christian historicism than the Roman one, and they should be engaged rather than simply dismissed as “ahistorical”.  I believe Yoder’s construal of an Anabaptist historical consciousness constitutes a well-articulated and powerful perspective which deserves to be taken with more seriousness than has often been the case.

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