James K. A. Smith put up an interesting post the other day, responding to a pointed question about his ecclesiology: Response to Deroo: Whose Church? Which Ecclesiology?

I basically just want to use this post to set out a contrast. Smith’s position is nicely outlined in the post itself:

Can I begin in a negative mode by identifying what the church is not? When I speak of the church, I am not thinking of the “one, true denomination” and certainly not thinking of my denomination—or some other denomination or communion that I romantically think is “the” church. I’m also not primarily thinking of a local congregation, though local congregations are necessary instantiations of the wider body of Christ. Furthermore, nowhere do I suggest the two definitions that Neal articulates (“those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God…” or “those who have the Holy Spirit inside them”) would be adequate to define an ecclesiology.

So what do I mean by “the church,” then? Let me try to improvise in response to that question. Neal is right to see my understanding of the church is “institutional” and bound up with “Nicene orthodoxy.” He also rightly highlights that I see the “the church” primarily as a community of practice, which I would articulate in the MacIntyrean sense.[2] As a community of practice, the church would be informed by a narrative and a tradition that specify and substantiate the “standards of excellence” for that community of practice (without which there is no community of practice[3]).

So perhaps I could say that the church is that trans-national community of practice (a “body politic”) rooted in the biblical narrative as specified by the “catholic” tradition of both the creeds and the liturgical heritage.[4] In the history of the church, our language for “standards of excellence” has been “canon.” As William Abraham helpfully emphasizes, the “canons” of Christian orthodoxy include more than “the canon”; they also include “ecclesial canons” which “comprise materials, persons, and practices officially or semi-officially identified and set apart as a means of grace and salvation by the Christian community. They are represented by such entities as creed, Scripture, liturgy, iconography, the Fathers, and sacraments.”[5] This is what it means when we confess the “one, holy, catholic, apostolic church.”

So the church is an international community of practice, a body politic, normed by the ecclesial canons of documents (“in which the very ‘canon’ of Scripture is a product of the canons of the ecclesia”), persons, and practices that have come to be part of the bedrock of Nicene Christianity.

In contrast, I’d like to quote from Peter Escalante, summarizing the magisterial Protestant position on what the church is: (more…)

Here’s a video of an Eastern Orthodox priest explaining (from his perspective) two views of salvation:

Here are my own thoughts on his words:

• There’s probably something for Protestant theologians of every stripe to disagree with in the depiction of Protestantism here. That said, even though this isn’t really a pure representation of any one Protestant view, it is representative of much of popular soteriology.
• The idea of God pursuing sinful man that he uses as an explanation of Orthodox salvation seems to be true in some sense for Reformed theology wherein God unconditionally elects and saves by grace alone.
• In another sense the same idea doesn’t work if one’s version of Reformed theology also includes limited atonement, then it would seem that some are pursued by God, but others aren’t.
• On the face of it, one of the appealing aspects of the Orthodox view is that it does more to make sense of Jesus’ life and ministry whereas so many Protestants seem to view Jesus life almost exclusively as a preamble to his death. While this is true in both versions, the Orthodox version seems to take a fuller view of that same life.
• This is one of these things where I have trouble with putting theological labels on myself, I have a continued interested Orthodox views of atonement and salvation, but in most other ways I think I’m pretty reliably Protestant.

Thoughts?

An Eastern Orthodox take on North America’s consumer church culture:

“St. Antony’s response to the Gospel reading in which Christ tells a man to sell all that he has and “come and follow me,” cannot be described as rational. St. Antony heard the passage read and heard it as applying to himself (not to everyone – but to himself). Giving away all that he had and entering the desert is the act of someone who is driven by their desire for God. When such is the case, “choice” is probably not the right word. “Obey” is more accurate. St. Antony’s “conversion” is the choice to obey. (more…)

I’m sure most of you out there have seen the above image. It appears, by turns, to be of both a young woman looking over her shoulder and an older woman at a three-quarters view. I was reminded of this image when reading and watching various advocates of multisite churches. Why? Well, I’ll get to that, bear with me. First let’s get back to the multisite-advocates:

Many of them have responded to various claims that multisite churches done through video-rebroadcast are not biblical by claiming that there is some kind of biblical warrant for having multiple smaller gatherings as parts of some kind of larger assembly of believers. Perry Noble does so here. But perhaps the best encapsulation of this sort of discussion is a video of Mark Driscoll, James MacDonald, and Mark Dever in which Driscoll and MacDonald gang up on Dever to brow beat convince him about the biblical call for multi-site megachurches:

Aside from the fact that Driscoll and MacDonald come across as huge jerks perhaps a little too aggressive, it’s interesting how they use the early church as evidence for a multi-site megachurch. (more…)

I’ve begun to read Walter Lowrie’s classic work The church and its organization in primitive and Catholic times: an interpretation of Rudolph Sohm’s Kirchenrecht, and less than 20 pages in I’m already encountering some thought-provoking gems. Here is one:

But no satisfying idea of the Church as a legally constituted society has ever been formulated, nor ever can be; for a legal constitution (whether jure humano or jure divino) is opposed to the nature of the Church. It is here the “visible Church” that is meant, the kingdom of God, which “is not of this world,” and never can be ruled by worldly means (by a polity conformable to the kingdoms of this world), but only by God’s Spirit. And yet the one point upon which all denominations of Christians are united (except the society of Friends [Quakers--AF]) is the belief that some form or another of ecclesiastical polity (legally constituted organization) is divinely prescribed, or at the very least is practically necessary for the maintenance of a visible Church of Christ; and, further, that some legal constitution has from the beginning been in force. (9-10)

It is somewhat shocking to hear someone so bluntly argue that the church is in fact not a polis nowadays. It’s more hip to follow the anabaptists (or at least, so it seems to me). And another:

…if the privileges and and authority which were enjoyed by a plurality of bishops in the congregation had been accounted theirs by right (in the strict sense — as depending upon a fact in the past which was uncontrollable in the present), the authority of the single bishop could not have been established, or at least not without a contest which would have left imperishable traces. Similarly, if the equal authority in the Church which was enjoyed by all diocesan bishops in the third century had been legally secured to them, — that is, if the Church had been legally organized, as the diocese or parish already was, — metropolitan, patriarchal, or papal authority could not have been successfully asserted. (10-11)

This argument is suggesting, in other words, if the earlier forms of church government were understood to be mandated by divine right, then the church never would have changed them. But they seem to have done so quite organically, which suggests that the church the whole world over in the first few centuries understood church polity to be an issue of human prudence only, not one where God had mandated only one correct answer.

Serving up some tasty links on a snowy day:

Thankfully, economists don’t design highways.

Who is really on the margins? A debate ensues.

The limits of neuroscience.

Another story on Protestants converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. (I’m curious whether this phenomenon is real or just one of those things that reporters keep repeating as a stock story like razors in apples at Halloween.)

It seems like a truism in some corners of Christian blogdom that the “evangelical collapse“ is either on the way or already here. Of those not abandoning the church to join the “nones” there seems to be several apparently mutually exclusive exit points. Evangelicals are going in the direction of the newly-popular Calvinists, or towards the emergent church, or over to Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy. As I noted, these all seem to be different directions. You have a group that’s getting all into Reformed theology, another group embracing continental philosophy and a third one going in for the ancient forms of church hierarchy. The temptation here is to say that evangelical protestantism is splintering off into all different directions, but what if all of these movements are of a piece?

There is something that all three of these share and that mainstream 20th-Century evangelicalism lacks and that is a method theological final appeal if you will. In the Roman Catholic church this is obvious: the Vatican, under the allegedly infallible rule of the Pope will set down the final ruling on anything and everything deemed necessary to live a good Catholic life. The Eastern Orthodox church doesn’t have quite so centralized a ruling body but there’s still a ruling hierarchy with the weight of apostolic succession behind it and body of tradition that is not handled lightly.

The Calvinists don’t quite have the same governing bodies, but they do have Calvin’s magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion as well as a body of subsequent Reformed literature to which they can appeal. (This point might annoy some Calvinists who have concluded that Calvinism is the obvious, self-evident conclusion that anyone should draw from reading the Bible and that Calvin merely pointed this out.) While the Calvinists lack a Pope (sit down, Mark Driscoll), they do undertake to rigorously guard their doctrine on a sort of ad hoc basis, convening committees to figure how much of heretic they think, say, N. T. Wright might be in their eyes.

The last case, that of the Emergents is a bit trickier and certainly not as clear cut, there is however, an Emergent star system of thinkers and leaders who carry a lot of weight though: Pete Rollins, Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle and so on. Moreover, there is a seriously philosophical framework with which at least some of them are associated. You probably know this generically as “postmodernism” but specifically they seem to follow the work of Derrida and Zizek most carefully. While not as cut-and-dried as either the rule the Vatican or Calvin’s theological tomes, they still have a robust underpinning to their theology in continental philosophy.

What was once thought to be an asset of evangelicalism, particularly in the “seeker-sensitive” Willow Creek model – user-friendly accessibility without too much strenuous theology – now seems to be that which most undermines evangelical coalition of churches. When push comes to shove many evangelicals don’t have a strong underpining for justifying what they believe. Now I know the stock answer is “we just believe in what the Bible says” but we all know that there’s a multitude of ways of interpreting such a claim. An example of where this can be difficult: If you see an apparent contradiction between two passages, how do you resolve it? The tools to go back and give a firmer grounding to one’s interpretation exist but for various reasons have been obscured by evangelicalism’s history in North America (read Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind if you want more on how this came to be). Now instead of going back and correcting some of the stuff that Noll’s book discusses, there are the ready-made alternatives I discussed above. This is why you have defections to Rome or Orthodoxy or why those that remain Protestant rush to embrace Calvinism’s rigour.

I shared some of my initial impressions of McLaren’s new book in my previous (somewhat rambling) post. In this post I want to narrow my vision a little bit and look at some of the theological currents running through the first part of the book. There are a number things that McLaren is talking about and I want to pull some of these strands apart and look at them individually.

• McLaren is looking at the atonement in a way that is outside of the Western (read: Augustinian) tradition. McLaren does not call out our man in Hippo by name, but he talks about how Western Christianity changed its views of these things (for the worse) in the 5th or 6th C. – pretty obvious hint there. The obvious place (at least for me) if you want to look for an non-Western view of the atonement would be the Orthodox tradition. Yet I see little or no evidence of McLaren looking East.
• McLaren is still holding onto the Anabaptist tradition into which he was born. The place where the church got it wrong was, in his view, at the Constantinian turn. Given the pacifist streak and the rejection of political power in many strains of Anabaptist theology, it is not surprising to see someone from the Anabaptist tradition uncomfortable with state power. Many, particularly in the neo-Reformed camp are much more comfortable with the church aligning with the state.
• McLaren does not take the creation account literally. Again this is something that would trouble some evangelicals but such a view is acceptable to even the current (conservative) Vatican.

All of this is, perhaps, a long-winded way of saying that there isn’t much that is actually new in McLaren’s book, though it may be new to some of his readership. I suppose in McLaren’s defense, it’s not a secret that he writes for a popular audience and isn’t necessarily try to break new intellectual ground. While his opinions may have antecedents in other strains of Christianity, McLaren is drawing a distinction between what he believes and what evangelicals have conventionally believed.

A number of bloggers have suggested that it’s for the best that McLaren has drawn these distinctions so that people will know who is on what side. I’m not so sure about that, what seems to have happened instead is that people are putting themselves into theological crouch positions where believers are asked to pick a “side” in this. This troubles me since one of the things that I have wanted to do more reading on is different Western and non-Western views of the atonement. If I end up incorporating something non-Augustinian into what I think about the matter are people going to say “Ah ha! McLarenite! Convene the heresy trial!” or something like that? Put another way: Someone (possibly N. T. Wright) has said that they think 1/3 of their theology is wrong, they just don’t know which third it is. If we have the humility to admit that we may be very wrong about lots in our theology we should have the ability to adapt our theology if we are convicted that we are wrong about something – choosing sides and making “teams” is not a great way to facilitate this.

I’ve been reading for a few years now in the “Catholic” Protestant orbit (perhaps best represented by theologians like the earlier George Lindbeck, Carl Braaten, Robert Jenson, and organisations like the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology), and a common assumption among those in this group is a kind of ecclesial infallibility. That is, basically, the assumption that the church is infallibly guided to remain correct in its teachings (on a carefully qualified field of issues).

For a while I unconsciously held to something like this view, but a number of issues have led me to become more self-consciously Protestant about this issue.

Firstly, Anthony Lane’s excellent paper “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey” (pdf) surveying views on this issue awoke me from my confusion: I had bought into the thesis that the Reformers held to what he calls the “coincidence” view, when in fact they held to what he called the “ancillary” view of the relation of tradition to scripture. As Lane excellently summarizes:

There are two important differences between this view and the classical coincidence view of Irenaeus and Tertullian. These patristic writers were concerned to show the identity of ecclesiastical with apostolic teaching while the Reformers sought to do the opposite. Furthermore they accepted the inherited faith because it was apostolic tradition whereas the Reformers accepted the (traditional) creeds only because they believed them to be scriptural. This is a significant difference. While the Reformers did not despise tradition they only accepted it if it was scriptural, Scripture remaining the final arbiter. Unlike the coincidence view the sola scriptura did not involve the unqualified acceptance of any tradition or of the teaching of any church and Scripture remained, formally as well as materially, the ultimate criterion and norms.

Secondly, I came to realize more clearly that the proof-texts offered for the doctrine of ecclesial infallibility do not work. i.e. John 14:26 is not a promise to the entire church for all time, but to the disciples who had already been with Jesus. Matt. 16:18 does not necessitate continuous doctrinal faithfulness on the part of the majority of professing Christians, and neither does 1 Tim 3:15 (that is, both could be true even in the face of the apostasy of the majority of professing Christians).

Thirdly, I came to see there are serious historical problems with the doctrine. The existence of “Robber Councils” implies that one cannot say that any council that claims to be ecumenical is automatically infallible, nor that the majority of bishops are automatically infallible. (Ultimately the answer to this objection is “but they were always overturned”; this however is useless for any individual Christian wanting to know the truth, because they don’t know what the future holds for any current consensus). Even Newman’s argument that the majority of laypeople remained faithful in the Arian crisis (where, for a time, the majority of clergy were Arian) fails historically. (See Michael Slusser’s paper,”Does Newman’s “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” Rest upon a Mistake?” Horizons, 20 no 2 Fall 1993, p 234-240, including the support from the eminent church historian RPC Hanson, who said Newman’s argument was a “romantic suggestion”.)

In the end, when it comes to the creedal orthodoxy of the Church (which, if it is to speak anywhere, is the only place the catholic church could possibly speak, the papacy aside), Calvin’s tactic seems to be the most faithful to reality:

What, then, you will say, is there no authority in the definitions of councils? Yes, indeed; for I do not contend that all councils are to be condemned, and all their acts rescinded, or, as it is said, made one complete erasure. But you are bringing them all (it will be said) under subordination, and so leaving every one at liberty to receive or reject the decrees of councils as he pleases. By no means; but whenever the decree of a council is produced, the first thing I would wish to be done is, to examine at what time it was held, on what occasion, with what intention, and who were present at it; next I would bring the subject discussed to the standard of Scripture. And this I would do in such a way, that the decision of the council should have its weight, and be regarded in the light of a prior judgement, yet not so as to prevent the application of the test which I have mentioned.

Councils should be respected as a subordinate authority. But this means, precisely, that individual Christians ought to respect them enough to know them, to understand them in their historical context, and to evaluate them on the basis of Scripture. In the end, I can’t see any other way to treat them.

In both friendly conversations and while reading blog comments from theological opponents (Roman Catholic epologist types), I’ve heard the objection to sola scriptura lately that under it, individual interpretations of scripture can be responded to with the objection “who says?”

I think in the end this is a misleading question. Consider other ancient texts like Josephus’ Wars of the Jews, or Homer’s Iliad. In cases like these texts, the fact that a historical scholar trained in reading ancient languages and in the historical contexts of those documents says the document says x is sufficient ground to believe them. They do not need the backing of a religious authority to commend belief on the part of non-experts.

In a situation where scholars disagree on documents such as that, the only way a consensus can come is by continuing the same process that created the divergent conclusions: grammatico-historical exegesis. In those cases, there is no putative religious authority to appeal to to solve the dispute. They simply must revisit the facts and see who has misconstrued them until they come to consensus.

When you ask, “Who says?” who is right in such a disagreement, the answer is really: “the text they are interpreting.” We need to remember that a text is itself a communication from a person, and communications are not infinitely elastic. They have definition and form (and thus the formal/material sufficiency distinction in Newmanesque theories about scripture and doctrine misconstrue the issue from the start; all communications implicitly already have form). In a dispute over what a communication says, ultimately the only way to resolve the dispute is to read again more carefully, to try our best to conform our minds to the form of the text.