On the Need for Ecclesiological Education Among Evangelicals Born-Again Yesterday
February 11, 2006
As he has been saying many times of late, Fr. Neuhaus is dead-on right that Evangelicals and conservative Protestants in general have a rough date with ecclesiology looming, at least those with eyes to see and minds to think. The rest? I’m afraid the odds favor the Gates of Hell via the well-established pattern of division into mutally reactive “progressive” and “conservative” camps despite ample fence-riders and above-it-alls. This is a very sad, disastrous development in the making.
Check the Leadership Journal department of Christianity Today International, which has evangelical pastor-CEOs and other Church Inc. leaders as its main audience. Here’s a piece by a pastor/focus-group leader writing about the evangelistic/growth value of stripping the word “Baptist” from his church’s name, which is only thinkable because that sort of change has become merely cosmetic, reflective of a forgotten and discarded confessional identity and tradition.
This is typical fare for LJ, and I suppose they and the pastor who wrote this piece would defend attenuation as really being something more positive, perhaps a way to appropriate many different traditions. I have seen that well-established denominations will often tolerate this virtual disowning or dumbing-down of their corporate identity within their ranks if financial and membership results make it easy to discern the Lord’s will.
No doubt pastors uncomfortable with the “labels” under which they were presumably ordained would wish to differentiate themselves from the cafeteria Christianity that characterizes liberal Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and the neo-neo-evangelical emergent church movement that appears to have gained much traction with CTI or at least the LJ. For my part, I see too much essential similarity.
Consider the LJ editors’ relatively new blog, Out of Ur. It is unapologetically a shill for the “emergent church” movement, which is construed as “Abraham” versus non-emergent “modernist” evangelicals, who are analogically associated with the summodeist inhabitants of ancient Ur. Evidently their false God is “Reason,” and evidently Reason is the sort of baby to toss with the bathwater. Fideism is the new fashion, as it ever is when Protestants applying reason to scripture find themselves in predictable frustration. The new Abrams rhetorically ask, “Was faith ever about reason? Was our calling ever about what we ourselves could deduce, plan, or enact? If it was, then it was never Divine. Instead, as pilgrims in a new culture, we find we must trade linear thinking for mosaic, sight for faith…” A mental mosaic? Maybe that is a sub-pop-post-modern recoining of bricolage, though it seems at odds with the Ur escapees’ fear of “syncretism.”
Alongside typical, ultra-divisive protestant arguments regarding homosexuality, this week’s Out of Ur finds a series of posts in which pastor Dave Terpstra of “The Next Level Church” (I kid you not) instructs readers that the “spiritually mature” will often leave “the church” indefinitely because they have outgrown its ability to spiritually nourish their faith.
Maybe Terpstra’s church should be renamed “The Penultimate Level” or “We’re Getting There (We Hope).” The Out of Ur gang is more forthright with their disorientation: “Like Abram, we have a call from God to leave familiar land and venture to a strange place where we hope things will turn out well. Like Abram, we might wonder how we’ll know when we get there.”
Terpstra at least is aware of the problem. He writes, “I’ve wondered if some followers of Christ simply outgrow churches.” He believes this points to a failing in “the church,” “churches in general,” and “the local church:”
Speaking in generalities, churches do not specialize in people who have been following Christ for years and who are deeply questioning and reexamining their beliefs. It’s especially difficult when people who reach stage four are in positions of influence and leadership. Churches, from the mega to the mini, are designed to help people mature in the external areas of service and discipleship, not the internal struggles of identity and meaning.
The more Terpstra uses the word “church,” the more uncertain I am of what it means to him theologically, even as it becomes clear he is talking about church in the mundane sense of his own world of experience among independent, non-/post-denominational, substantially post-protestant evangelicalism. Clearly Terpstra does not see this rarefied purview itself as the root of the problem he is trying to understand, and it is a good question why this is so. Why is ecclesiology such a blind spot?
Mark Noll, in an interview for IgnatiusInsight.com regarding his book Is the Reformation Over? noted that he and his co-author did not realize that different teachings (or the lack thereof) regarding the nature of the church define the really critical difference between Evangelicals and Catholics (and the Orthodox and most confessional Protestantism) until they’d been working on their book for a year and a half–and after thirty years of teaching a lot of Catholic history. This is worth further attention later, but in the mean-time, see what ex-evangelical, ex-Muslim, Orthodox blogger Daniel Larison has suggested as an explanation of this evangelical blind-spot.
Evangelicals with Terpstra’s kind of ecclesiological blank-slate strike me as having acquired an anarchic ecclesiology by default, without even knowing it, or without appreciating the risks and negative consequences. They are in the position of a married man, legally separated from his wife, who has fallen victim to amnesia. He cannot recall ever having been married. From his own standpoint, this man’s marital problems are “solved.” He has no immediate or pressing difficulty with the woman who was his wife because he does not know her. From the standpoint of the wife and others, the man’s situation is tragic and perverse.
To Terpstra’s credit he does see a real (though not very new) problem among conversion and growth emphasizing free-church protestants who lack the theological and practical resources of sacrament and catechesis common to the historic, hierarchical churches who have been taking Christians “to the next level” for up to two thousand years. Might Terpstra look to them for some insight then?
As Noll and many others have noted (confirming my own experience as well), “Most ex-Catholic evangelicals … were not well catechized, and often their Catholic experience was nominal, mechanical, or (in some instances) abusive; by contrast, many ex-evangelical Catholics reasoned themselves into Catholicism from articulate evangelical positions.” In other words, immature Catholics are more likely to become evangelicals, while maturing evangelicals are more likely to become Catholic. Terpstra ought to consider that phenomenon and its possible relation to the losses he has witnessed. If some evangelicals mature into the Catholic church, Orthodoxy, or even more traditional forms of Protestantism, do those churches and their relatively more common catholic ecclesiology, their notion and experience of history and tradition (not to mention sacramental life and the experience of the church as sacrament) point to what is most lacking in free-church evangelicalism?
Suppose it happened that pastors like Terpstra came to see things this way. Some, in fact, do seem to bend in that direction. Noll has for years seen as necessary and laudable the Evangelical appropriation of bits of Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic tradition. In the Ignatius interview, he mentions “Daniel Williams of Baylor, a Baptist who has written two books challenging evangelicals to value tradition much more highly.” And at that point I have to question if this is really going to be good enough simply to make an orthodox and relatively coherent Evangelicalism sustainable over the next 50+ years. Tradition is not something to simply value or appropriate. That is what the magisterial Protestant reformers tried to do, insisting on their catholicity, denying sectarian labels and charges of innovation, and not intending to destroy the idea of a Christian culture. I describe their mindset as one of attenuated traditionalism; that is, it is a mindset that attempts to support while also undermining and moving away from “the traditional.” By “the traditional” and “a traditional mentality,” I mean a habitual state of mind in which authority to which one properly owes one’s fidelity and obedience, especially textual and political authority, is understood to rest on–as a Weberian scholar has put it–“the sacredness of an order whose origin [is] shrouded in the deep past” and thus “the claim that the order had always existed.” Tradition of this sort is something to reside, dwell, and rest in, as Harry Blamires put it in The Christian Mind, a key precursor to Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. (Blamires’ is in many respects a better, deeper book reminiscent of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.) Tradition must become inheritable, or always-already inherited, to be wholly itself. It must become a gift of givenness, given to the point of being so formative it is ineradicable even from minds that turn against it. It must be so given that it is liable to be taken for granted, in need of rethinking and renewal–but without schism and interminable question-filled “conversations.” On that note, I leave you to consider the following therapeutic tonics.
An insistence on the subversive potential of tradition is valuable in a culture where self-styled ‘traditionalism’ is more often than not invoked in the service of reaction. But there are problems about privileging the notion of unsettlement as much as [Rowan] Williams does. Tradition on this account can seem a never ending argumentative seminar, constant upheaval without any point of rest or leverage. Yet if unsettlement is built into the vocabulary of Christian self-understanding, there is also a venerable Christian vocabulary of solidity, dependability, confidence in a faith once revealed to the saints, tradition as a rock. Argument has its limits. The believer is not always to be at the mercy of the scholars, and there must be ways of deciding when at last a particular problem has reached resolution, an argument has come to an end In Rowan Williams the see of Canterbury has its best theologian since St Anselm. As it happens, the new Pope is probably the best theologian to hold the see of Peter since almost as long. Like Archbishop Williams, Benedict XVI is steeped in patristic thought and much given to reflection on the religious value of the past. In his new role, however, Joseph Ratzinger embodies a quite different set of emphases and affirmations, an understanding of tradition precisely as settlement, his office an embodiment of the Church’s confidence that the voice of Christ is, at least occasionally, heard in answers as well as questions. Ratzinger on Williams on the past: now what a seminar that would be.
–Eamon Duffy, reviewing Why study the past? The Quest for the Historical Church, by Rowan Williams, in the Times Literary Supplement
Let us consider what Locke is actually doing [in Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, in which Locke proposes to restore the true core of Christianity: the acceptance of Christ as the Messiah, the belief in the one God, and genuine repentance and submission to the law of Christ.
Christian doctrine as it has grown in the tradition of the church is not an arbitrary addition to the Gospel. It is the labor of generations in the attempt to find an adequate expression to the substance of faith in the historically changing economic, political, moral, and intellectual environment of Mediterranean and Western civilization.
The Christological struggles of the early centuries absorbed into this expression the Hellenistic intellectual culture, and the Scholasticism of the high Middle Ages absorbed into it the corpus Aristotelicum. In general, the history of Christian doctrine is the process by which the substance of faith is built into the civilization of man. It is a process that started in the immediate environment of Christ, and it is still going on. The precipitation of the process in the New Testament represents, for all that we know, a phase that has already advanced materially beyond the generation of Jesus’ immediate followers. Locke ignores this problem of the historicity of the Christian spirit. But beyond this statement it is not easy to formulate with precision what he has actually done.
At first sight one might say that, through his return to the New Testament phase of the process, he has deliberately thrown out the intellectual civilization that has been built into the expression of the relation of man to the divine ground in his soul. That is quite true. And the ease with which Locke gets rid at one fell swoop of the whole patristic and scholastic intellectual culture has remained paradigmatic for the wholesale civilizational destruction in which the politically predominant movements of our time engage. Nevertheless, the situation is much too complicated to be covered by the brief formula of throwing out a body of tradition. Above all, this formula ignores the problem of the historical process.
A tradition is not a block that can be thrown out. One can throw out a tradition only by throwing oneself out of it. This feat, however, is not so simple as it looks to the naive minds that who believe they can return to a “primitive” Christianity without returning to the civilizational state of “primitive” Christians. This feat, if realized socially, would imply the complete destruction of contemporary civilization, not only under its intellectual aspects, but also economically and technologically. This is not Locke’s intention.
Locke and those who follow him in his course go on to live and to participate in a civilizational environment that has been formed into the remotest wrinkles of its intellectual language by the very tradition they try to remove. Hence, the attempt to return to the earlier phase will result not in a genuine removal of tradition (which would imply the rebuilding of a civilization on a new basis) but in a far-reaching devastation of the intellectual form of contemporary civilization [termed here primitivization].
… . In the light of [comparisons with Warburton, Montesquieu, and Rousseau], Locke’s return to the New Testament looks very much like a beginning of historical romanticism, like an early case of the return to a historical “myth” for the purpose of assuaging the disorder of the age. The common characteristic of such returns is the open or implied critique of civilization, the assumption that the substance has seeped out of its institutional and intellectual forms, the suspicion that perhaps these very forms have killed the substance, and the growing conviction that the meaning of existence can be recovered only by the destruction of the incubus.
–Eric Voegelin, Collected Works, vol. 24 (The History of Political Ideas, vol. 6), Chapter 4, “The English Quest for the Concrete,” sec. 2f., “Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, pp. 173-174, 179.
The psychological boundaries by which the old culture had sought to understand the nature of man and predict his behavior were useless when he was no longer inhibited by the pressure of traditional community; and, experienced concretely in a more complex setting, human acts proved too ambiguous for neat classification. […] When man still clung to the old culture, he seemed to have become, in spite of himself, a trespasser against the order of the universe, a violator of its sacred limits–literally no man’s land–he had been conditioned to avoid. But his predicament was even worse if this experience had taught him to doubt the very existence of boundaries. He then seemed thrown, disoriented, back into the void from which it was the task of culture to rescue him. And this, I suggest, is the immediate explanation for the extraordinary anxiety of this period. It was an inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning.
–William J. Bouwsma, “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture”
This is On the Need for Ecclesiological Education Among Evangelicals Born-Again Yesterday in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Mark Noll’s Evangelical Mind is Moving To Notre Dame | Next: Geena Davis Urges Feingold to Pull Out | TrackBack (2) | Comments (0)
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