Category Archives: Anabaptist Theology - Page 2

More Yoder, More Tradition

Posted by on April 25, 2008 Comments Off

“What we then find at the heart of our tradition is not some proposition, scriptural or promulgated or otherwise, which we hold to be authoritative and therefore exempted from the relativity of hermeneutical debate by virtue of its inspiredness.  What we find at the origin is already a process of reaching back again to the origins, to the earliest memories of the event itself, confident that that testimony, however intimately integrated with the belief of the witnesses, is not a wax nose, and will serve to illuminate and sometimes adjudicate our present path.”

–John Howard Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition”, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1984), 70.

Yoder on the Authority of Tradition

Posted by on April 24, 2008 2 comments

“We are not talking about ‘the authority of tradition’ as if tradition were a settled reality and we were then to figure out how it works.  We are asking how, within the maelstrom of the traditioning process, we can keep our bearings and distinguish between the way the stream should be going and side channels that eddy but lead nowhere.  Can we do this by some criterion beyond ourselves?  The peculiarity of the term ‘tradition’ is that it points to that criterion beyond itself to which it claims to be a witness.  We are therefore doing no violence to the claim of tradition when we test it by its fidelity to that origin.  A witness is not being dishonored when we test his fidelity as an interpreter of the events to which he testifies.  That is his dignity as witness; he wants to be tested for that.”

–John Howard Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition”, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1984), 77-78.

Martyrdom: The Refusal to Ontologize Evil

Posted by on January 18, 2008 Comments Off

“Martyrdom denies tragedy and refused to ontologize evil by physically accepting the others’ lack of good.  Participation in the Eucharist creates martyrs, not victims.  It positions us in the divine economy, which, while it is lived out in the temporal city, resists the categories of tragedy and sacrifice, and envisions an apocalyptic hope in the final imitation of Christ: resurrection.  Resurrection is the end of sacrifice.  The divine/human gift exchange, manifested by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (and followed by those who call him Lord), creates an apocalyptic world that ends tragedy.  It is a world where the other, the martyr (as one among many “others” placed outside the walls of the territorial city), not only makes politics possible, but demonstrates true politics by witnessing to the kingdom that has arrived and is still to come.”

–Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottdale: Herald Press, 2007), 25.

Baptism, Voluntarism, and Violence

Posted by on January 10, 2008 19 comments

One of the critiques often leveled at the Anabaptist churches is their alleged voluntarism.  The practice of believers baptism and the rejection of infant baptism has often been critiqued on the basis of how it seemingly ties together the human activity of personal commitment to discipleship with God’s divine act of saving grace.  In other words, it is alleged that refusing baptism to those who are unable to make a commitment to discipleship denies the gratuitousness of the grace of God and rather, in a Pelagian fashion makes the work of grace dependent upon our act of repentance.

To make a full argument against this characterization would be far more extensive than is possible here.  However, I want to underscore two fundamental points that are often neglected by critics of Anabaptist baptism.  First, the fundamental political reason why the Anabaptists rejected infant baptism was due to the way in which baptism in the context of medieval Christendom was basically coterminous with allegiance to the sovereign.  It not longer signified a break from the world, an induction into a radically new form of life in the Spirit, but rather sanctified and fused the world of domination and violence with the church in a synthesis that was contrary to the gospel.  As such, believers baptism, in addition to having stronger biblical support seemed the only way for the act of baptism to be reformed in a way that would enable it to “say” what baptism is supposed to proclaim.

Second, fundamental point that must be understood about the relationship between believers baptism and grace is rooted in the commitment of the Anabaptists to nonviolence.  Fundamental to the Free Church ethos is firm devotion to the teachings of Christ on non-coerciveness and peacemaking.  The reason that baptism is refused to those who are unable to make a profession of faith is because membership in the community of the cruciform Lord cannot be coerced.  No one can be born into membership in the community of the Spirit, they must be reborn into it.  To apply baptism to an infant does not yield an image the sovereignty of grace, but rather of grace as coercion.  The reason that baptism is only offered to those capable of making a confession of faith is because of the conviction that the radical grace of God is ultimately nonviolent and non-coercive.  God’s grace does not foist itself on us but rather woos us, drawing us to the Father, through the Son in the Spirit.  The insistence on believers baptism, far from denying the gratuity of grace is rather a testimony to the non-coercive nature of the event of grace as one of gift and response. For adherents of believers baptism the gift of baptism can never be imposed, it can only be recieved.  Properly understood, believers baptism is not voluntaristic in the least, but rather is a testament to the fact that grace of the triune God is not coercion, but liberation, new life, indeed the glorious creation of a new world.

For those who would critique the practice of believers baptism, I think these two points should be taken with much greater seriousness, and I have seen very little substantial engagement along these lines.  The tradition of the Free Churches with their insistence on the baptism of believers constitutes an important challenge to the practice infant baptism which should at least be taken with seriousness by exponents of the mainline tradition.

Also, for those wanting to see some of my further thoughts on this issue, as well as some qualifications about infant baptism, see my earlier post on Baptism, Voluntarism, and Politics.

On Still Being Against Constantinianism

Posted by on January 8, 2008 20 comments

In a recent post there has been a lively discussion about whether or not it is viable to talk about Constantinianism as a sort of “fall” of the church.  The broader question seems to be whether or not it is possible to identify a decisive point at which a systemic declination of the church historically took place.

Now certainly there have been far too many idealized narratives of the pre-Constantinian church as some sort of paradisaical community.  Likewise it is certainly true that the post-Constantinian church produced some of the church’s greatest saints.  In other words, any simple narrative of the church’s corruption is almost certainly tailored in ways that don’t reflect historical reality or a properly theological ecclesiology.

However, I am hesitant to jump on the bandwagon of those who write of Constantinianism as a bogeyman laking any historical substance or theological import.  There are a few important things to understand about the Anabaptist critique of Constantinianism that I think people tend to pass over far too quickly in the effort to dismiss the Anabaptist witness. 

First, “Constantinianism” as an ecclesiological phenomenon is attached to the historical figure of Constantine in merely a symbolic way.  No one is contending that as soon as Constantine signed the edict of Milan that the church suddenly became a bloodthirsty hierarchy of militant imperialists when before it had been the pristine community of sojourning saints.  Nor does an ecclesial posture critical of Constantinianism require one to believe that the church descended into apostasy and had to be re-founded.  Its only fundamental contention is that the Roman church as an institutional whole deviated from the ecclesial self-understanding and practice that is mandated by the Apostolic doctrine and the gospel of Jesus.  This is not to imply that holy practice and true Apostolic doctrine were not present in the church throughout its history, only that they were often eclipsed by human corruption and apostasy, and that the structures of the post-Constantinian church contributed in a central way to this reality.

Second, the Anabaptist critique of Constantinianism does not name a particular political theology, or a critique of the state as such.  Rather, it argues against a particular mode of ecclesial self-understanding which took root through a complex historical process culminating in medieval Christendom.  In other words, the critique of Constantinianism is primarily an argument about the church’s own self-understanding.  The fundamental Anabaptist contention is that the ecclesial self-understanding of the medieval church had shifted in ways that were in need of radical reformation.  Here is a fundamental point for understanding the Anabaptist critique of Constantinianism.  Constantinianism does not name a simple historical occurrence, but rather any mode of ecclesial self-understanding which believes that the church is fundamentally congruent with the powers that be in the world.  The need for this particular attitude to be critiqued is, I contend, far from passé.

Third, the critique of Constantinianism calls into question not only the church’s doctrine, but also it structure as a fallible human construction, rather thand a divinely-mandated hierarchy.  For the Anabaptists, church structure is in principle always open to radical restructuring, or even complete reconstruction on the basis of the movement of the Spirit who always seeks to renew the church to rightly carry out its mission.  In other words, the Anabaptists, in identifying the real problem of the church as its self-understanding as fundamentally “at home” in the world, were arguing that the very shape of the church needed to be re-formed.  This is the fundamentally contentious point in free church ecclesiology.  The very point at which the Roman church maintains its infallibility (the papacy and the episcopate) is the same point at which the radical reformers identify its corruption.

It is certainly the case that blanket narratives of declination are neither historically nor theologically helpful.  Constantinianism has often been narrated as just that and such narrations should be rejected.  However, I have yet to be convinced that the sort of ecclesial self-understanding that was engendered in the post-Constantinian church has ceased to be a pressing problem.  As such, I still find myself with the Anabaptists in striving to argue for and embody an alternative sort of ecclesial polity and practice which understands the church as a fundamentally diasporic people who can never find themselves fundamentally “at home” until the final descent of the New Jerusalem.

Diasporic Theology

Posted by on January 2, 2008 22 comments

One of the crucial emphases in the theology of John Howard Yoder is on the church as a fundamentally unsettled peoplehood.  The church, rather than being a given, secure, stable entity is constantly interrupted by the Spirit of Christ who continually calls her into question.  The grace of God, on Yoder’s view is not a supplemental aid which “perfects” nature, but rather the radical interruption of the presence of God in Christ which is always the “original revolution”.  As such, Yoder rejects an account of ecclesial identity which purports to offer closure.  There is no unproblematic or uncontested articulation of ecclesial identity.  The church, for Yoder is not a landed but a landless peoplehood.

In articulating this vision, Yoder draws substantially on the emergence of diasporic Judaism in the Old Testament and the Second Temple period.  The sort of self-understanding that emerged from the exile was one in which the people of Israel moved from a located, stable, and established identity under the Davidic monarchy to a distinctly dislocated, unstable, and disestablished dispersal among the nations.  For Yoder, this diasporic posture of living “out of control” among the nations forms the context for the early Church’s own self-understanding as a scattered peoplehood who live lives of constant openness to being disestablished and called into question by the Spirit of God.

It is this diasporic understanding of the church that undergirds Yoder’s ecclesiology which always holds that the church may stand in need of radical reformation in all the forms and structures of its life.  The church does not so much offer us a bedrock of stable identity and security as it provides a Spirit-constituted space in which the disruptive grace of God moves, unsettling and interrupting the “natural” lives of human persons.  The church does not offer a place of self-legitimation where we can give an unproblematic account of our identities, but rather names the social context in which  our particular narratives and identities are made more complicated. 

The task of the church is to make it harder, not easier to talk about God because the God to whom the church bears witness is always and only present to the church as non-necessary gift.  Because the presence of God is always a gift, it is never something that is within our control.  It is always a gift rather than a given.  The presence of God is always disruptive, opening up new vistas in our lives, calling us beyond the previous horizons of what we thought were givens.  In regard to all this Yoder’s diasporic theology which resists closure and self-legitimation is a much-needed corrective to the common tendency for Christians to search for an unproblematic and final elucidation of ecclesial identity.  We do not inhabit the givenness of the heavenly Jerusalem; rather we are called to a receptive openness to the apocalyptic newness of the Triune God as we live diasporically in the world as the scattered body of Christ.

Radical Ecumenism

Posted by on December 31, 2007 1 comment

“A theological conception of unity is radical precisely in that it is out of our control.  It unsettles us and takes us uncomfortably beyond ours desires for mastery, possession, and ownership. … For conservatives, ecumenism is an instrumental and strategic task of bringing the other to our side; for liberals, ecumenism is an expression of the giveneness of a unity that is merely misunderstood, such that the work of unity is an exercise in developing better lines of communication; for the radical, unity is an unwarranted and often unwelcome gift that defies and interrupts our sentimental and self-legitimating strategies of closure and reduction.”

–Chris K. Huebner, A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Scottdale: Herald Press, 2006), 79-80.

The Precarious Nature of Christian (dis)Identity

Posted by on December 20, 2007 1 comment

Right now I’m utterly enjoying Chris Huebner’s recent book, A Precarious Peace.  In it he offers a series of “Yoderian reflections” on theology, knowledge and identity.  His central concern is to engage in theology from the paradigm of John Howard Yoder’s “methodological non-Constantinianism.”  What this meant for Yoder went beyond the simply historical narratives of how Constantianianism transmogrified the church into medieval Christendom.  Rather, for Yoder, methodological non-Constantinianism meant the refusal to impose a sort of closure or certainty on any and all aspects of Christian thought and life.  Central to Yoder’s understanding of the church and theology was the ultimately disruptive, dislocating, and destabilizing presence of Christ.  Thus, Huebner asserts that “Yoder never finally assumed that he knew what peace was.”  The peace of Christ is not something for which  a stable and totalized account can be given.  Rather, the peace of Christ always interrupts and destabilizes our notions of peace by revealing our multi-leveled complicity with violence. 

Huebner’s book proceeds in three sections, the first centered on Mennonite theology and practice, the tradition from which Huebner hails and in which he remains.  He argues for a disestablishing of Mennonite theology, seeking to question the common assumption on the part of the historic peace churches that they have “got peace right.”  Here he questions the idea of “narrative theology” as a methodological paradigm for doing theology, and engages with Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy on the concept of ontological peace and gift. 

His second section moves into a discussion of disowning knowledge where Huebner explores the possibility of a pacifist epistemology and the nature of truth and martyrdom.  Again the focus is on moving from an understanding knowledge as mastery in which the objects of knowledge are “given” to an martyrological understanding of truth as always interrupting and disowning our attempts to master it.

Huebner then moves on to the issue of Christian identity, which, he argues must be constantly dislocated if it is to be faithful to the apocalyptic word which calls the church into being.  This is the part of Huebner’s book which I find perhaps most helpful.  In a great many of the discussions of ecumenism and ecclesial identity that take place in Christian circles seems to be the quest for a distinctly unproblematic account of Christian ecclesial identity.  All Christians who care about unity and the church’s integrity vis á vis the world, it seems are in search of (or have found, some claim) some such unproblematic and final account of the identity and form of the church.  What Huebner helpfully shows is that such a quest for an unproblematic identity is at odds with the shape of the gospel itself.  The gospel dislocates our identity and continues to do so over and over again.  The gospel is always apocalyptic, always disruptive, always supervenes on our attempts to develop a secure and unproblematic account of ecclesial identity. 

Being the church means being constantly put into question by the peace of Christ, by the love of Christ, by the unity of Christ.  Being the church means remaining in the struggle to be open to the radically disruptive and unsettling newness that consistently shatters our world as Christ’s presence continually confronts and interrupts us.  Against the siren’s call to discover some sort of unproblematic account of ecclesial identity in which we have achieved total closure, Huebner calls us into the vulnerable and risky drama of being dislocated, disestablished, and called to disown that which we through we knew.  The drama of discipleship is one of constant dispossession and interruption.  The proper mode of Christian faithfulness is to avoid seeking to tidy up the messy drama of Christ’s interrupting presence, but instead to allow ourselves to be disestablished and dislocated, and to discover within that very experience of disruption the new creation of the triune God breaking in on us.

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.

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.

The Anabaptist Option: The Only Consistent Alternative to Catholicism?

Posted by on November 14, 2007 10 comments

In my recent posts on ecclesiology and ecumenism I have posted a lot on the proper self-understanding of the role of the Reformation within the Roman Catholic church.  In general I have argued that those standing in the tradition of the Magisterial Reformers should understand themselves as a protest movement in exile within the Roman Catholic church.  To be a Lutheran in particular, and to a lesser degree to be Reformed is to stand in a very particular relationship to Rome, which ostensibly could change at any time should the right set of conditions arise (what those conditions are is disputed, but the point is nevertheless the same).

However, in these discussions I have not engaged another important Christian tradition, namely that of the Radical Reformation.  Unlike the Magisterial Reformers, the anabaptists did not conceive of themselves as seeking to “reform” the Catholic church.  Rather, they saw themselves as returning the way of Jesus for the sake of the restoration of his church which had been lost in the medieval Catholic church and had not been sufficiently addressed by the Magisterial Reformers, particularly in regard to how both the Catholic churches and the Reformation churches remained wed to the power of the various European princes for the sake of security and influence (i.e. the Christendom problem).

My point in all this is not to begin advocating for an anabaptist view of the church, though that is really the tradition in which I am situated.  My point is that ecumenical discussions between churches stemming from the Magisterial Reformation and Catholics will be quite different from those between Radical Reformation churches and Catholics.  Their historic self-understandings are profoundly different.  The anabaptist tradition does not view itself so much as a reform movement within the Roman Catholic church as a return to Christ’s call to discipleship which had been lost in the Catholic church and not fully restored in the protestant churches (How severe this “loss” of the way of Jesus was in the Catholic church is, of course answered variously by different exponents of the Radical Reformation tradition).

As I’ve gone about wrestling with the question of Catholicism and Protestantism, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that being part of the classic Reformed, Lutheran, or Anglican traditions would not make much sense to me. There are certainly good reasons for Christians in those traditions not to convert to Catholicism, but I’m not sure that if I were in any of those traditions that I would find them persuasive on their own.  However, as a Christian standing in the tradition of the Radical Reformation, the questions are quite different.  The question is not so much, “Have the proper reforms taken place yet?” as “What is the church Jesus founded supposed to look like?”  On that point I think that in some ways the anabaptist vision is the only consistent and permanent alternative to Catholicism.  And from here on out my posts on ecclesiology and ecumenism will work harder at looking at that particular question.

Baptism, Voluntarism, and Politics

Posted by on June 6, 2007 15 comments

In my last few years of theological stumbling around, I’ve found myself becoming quite a bit more “ecumenical” than my younger evangelical self would once have been comfortable with.  And, of course any of you who know much about my interests, know that Hans Urs von Balthasar, and much of contemporary Catholic theology has become incredibly influential in my thinking. 

However, I still find myself to be, at the core, a free-church anabaptist.  At least of some sort.  Principally, I am an anabaptist in my beliefs about Christendom and specifically how the church must be an alternative culture in the midst of the nations in the world.  In this brief bit of theological rambling I want to look a bit at how our practice of baptism shapes and is shaped by how we undertstand the church in relationship to the world.

A comprehensive treatment of the logic of anabaptist baptism is found in Thomas Finger’s A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, which is a very thorough and balanced historical and theological study of anabaptism. Lee Camp’s account of baptism in Mere Discipleship also shows the logic of anabaptist baptism in a very accesible way.  It was primarily because of the conflation of baptism and citizenship under Christendom that the anabaptists insisted on viewing baptism as an initiatory act, entered into in faith whereby one’s allegiance is given to God and his people (the church) over against other social formations. The practice of infant baptism essentially inscribed all persons at birth into the church by virtue of the fact that they were part of a nation with which the church was conflated. That is why the anabaptists felt compelled to reject it — because of its enmeshment with the Constantinian settlement.

Now, are there ways of practicing infant baptism that are not Constantinian? I certainly think so. Nor do I dismiss the legitimacy of infant baptism out of hand (leaving aside for a moment the discussion of biblical warrant).  However, I think the connection between baptism and discipleship is eroded when infant baptism becomes the standard practice.

Today, proponents of infant baptism strongly draw a correlation between baptism and circumcision in ancient Israel.  And that connection is, of course undeniable, at least on one level.  Namely, they are both signs of being included in the covenant community.  But the crucial question is how one comes to be included in the church versus how a child came to be included in biblical Israel. For you this answer should be obvious. We enter into the church through God’s act of justification by grace through faith. If entry into the church is based on justification by faith, it seems at best theological awkward to confer baptism on infants where personal faith and discipleship cannot become a factor in their inclusion in the church (except through their parents as Luther argued, though I don’t think this holds much water).

It seems to me that infant baptism can undercut the distinctiveness of the church as an alternative social reality because it renders church membership a function of a different social reality, either through the family or through the state. If one’s identity as a member of a “Christian nation” or a “Christian family” is enough to place one inside the church, it seems to me that the distinctive nature of the church’s social reality as a community created de novo by the work of the Spirit which transcends nation and family ends up getting eclipsed.

Finally, while infant baptism does have a long history in the tradition, the tradition is not unambiguous about the practice of baptism. There were standard practices of delaying baptism until death because of different medieval theologies of the impossibility of postbaptismal sin. None of this serves to refute or support infant baptism, but I do think we need to acknowledge the variety in the tradition on this topic.

And if cultural realities are factors in how we are to rightly embody our sacramental practices, the real question before us is what mode of baptism captures the essence of what is being “said” (vera visibli) in baptism? To my mind anabaptist baptism and the clear imagery contained therein of passing from one life and one social reality to another most rightly “says” the truth about what baptism is.  In administering baptism to believers who committ their lives to following Christ we say that there is indeed a break between our “former way of life” and our new life in Christ.  Our citizenship is transferred from Babylon to Jerusalem.  And none can be born in Jerusalem, we must be reborn as children of the Jerusalem from above.  Only then is she our mother.

Believer’s baptism is not about some sort of voluntarism, in which we get baptized because we made a choice to join a voluntary association of individuals.  It is about recognizing that Christ’s call to discipleship requires full allegiance and committment from the one who emerges from the waters.  Believer’s baptism is, in my view the most inherently and rightly polictical mode of practicing this sacrament.  It presents what is at the center of the Christian faith, that in Christ we die and rise again with him into the realm of his Lordship, his Kingdom.  The life we rise to with him is precisely the life of following him, of continuing to traverse the road from Jerusalem to Golgatha.  Baptism is indeed our induction  into the community of faith, but most centrally it is the stripping off of one mode of life – life in the flesh – and the putting on of a new life – life in the Spirit.  These considerations, in my view lend credibility the the tradition of believer’s or disciples baptism.  The politics of baptism must never be forgotten.  In baptism we die to the powers of Babylon and are reborn into the cessation movement of the Lamb. 

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