December 7-9 I will be attending a conference at Northern Seminary in Chicago called, A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future. I am excited to see what the speakers have to say about gaining a better understanding of our position as evangelicals in the context of a movement that has been going on for thousands of years. I have leaned heavily on the work of Robert Webber and he one of the leaders of this movement. It is important to me to explore ways to remain connected to the larger body of believers and this is one way that I believe we can see reform begin to happen in our churches.
Read through "The Call" and think about how it could change the way you understand and experience life in community with other Christians, whatever form that might take.
A Call To An Ancient Evangelical Future
Posted by David at 10:21 PM
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9 comments:
What is wrong with finding what is good and right in Christianity and using for the advancement of the kingdom. This article is just another attempt to break down the unity that this movement is attempting to create. I will always side with those who are attempting to find areas of common ground among brother and sister of the fgaith than those who insist on exploiting our differences.
Anonymous,
One of the contirbutors to "Back & Forth to the Future
A Critical Symposium on A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future", wrote
"The emerging worshipers and the ancient futurists want to borrow some of the trappings of a time when Christianity was countercultural (dark rooms and candles simulating catacombs, for instance) while embracing primary aspects of contemporary cultural libertarianism"
Was Christianity only countercultural for a short time in history?
Is it possible that these movements are more nuanced than these critics realize or want to admit?
While some of these critics' concerns are perhaps valid (authority being a notable concern), they seem at times to be more interested in orthodoxy over orthopraxy. This type of critique is coming in a similar fashion from evangelicals who look at these movements in suspect.
The emergent and ancient/future movements seem to be more concerned with trying to bridge the large divide between modern evangelicalism and historic Christianity. This is countercultural.
It would appear that these movements welcome the critique from both sides and gladly stand in the gap, seeing the the value in "all" Christian traditions.
However I do hope that those involved and/or sympathetic to the movements (myself included), continue to see them as the vehicles of reform that they are and not ends in themselves. This would lead to an unfortunate continuation of division in the body of Christ.
Check out:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0308/public.html#haeresis
Thomas Oden is one of the prime movers in the “confessional movement” to reclaim catholic substance for oldline Protestantism. He is also a key participant in the project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. In his recent book The Rebirth of Orthodoxy (HarperSanFrancisco, 212 pp., $24.95) he strongly affirms the Vincentian canon set forth by Vincent of Lerin (d. circa 450). Oden renders the canon this way:
“In the worldwide community of believers every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.”
Roger E. Olson teaches theology at Baylor University, a Baptist institution, and he has his reservations. He writes:
“We must remain open to the possibility that the Word of God—not some new revelation or personal opinion—may correct or supplement what the Church has always believed. Otherwise we must condemn Luther, for surely his doctrine of justification (simul justus et peccator) cannot be found within the consensual teaching of the Church before him (at least he did not think so, nor do most contemporary historical theologians). For that matter, can one find Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification in a moment in the consensual tradition? What about the Synod of Dort’s doctrine of limited atonement? Most significant for many evangelicals is that one cannot find believer baptism only (including ‘rebaptism’ of persons already baptized in the triune name as infants) in the consensual tradition as Oden defines it... Are Baptists heretics? He does not say it, but it would seem so by Vincent’s canon and Oden’s logic. If not, why could there not be contemporary steps away from the ancient, consensual tradition of the Church insofar as they can be established by appeal to Scripture and not to private opinion, philosophy, or culture? In matters of theological examination of Christian teachings old and new the ancient, consensual tradition of the Church gets a strong vote but not an absolute veto.”
In sum, if St. Vincent and Oden are right, much of Protestantism is wrong, and that can’t be right.
That puts Olson’s complaint a bit too simply, but only a bit. These are knotty questions that will not be untangled anytime soon.
Thomas Oden is no doubt well aware that the Vincentian canon does not mean that there was ever a time when every single Christian or group of Christians believed exactly the same thing about everything. In the early centuries of the Church, there were maddeningly diverse and often conflicting beliefs on core issues such as the human and divine natures of Christ, the unity and trinity of God, and much else. That is why there were disputes, synods, and councils in which the tradition of identifiable continuity appealed—before there was agreement on which texts constituted the New Testament of Scriptures—to the authority of the apostles and apostolic churches. This early came to be called the “rule of faith” (regula fidei), of which St. Vincent’s formula is one expression.
Adjudication of differences by appeal to the rule of faith continues to this day in all Christian communions that intend to be catholic, and is, of course, most carefully observed in the churches called Catholic and Orthodox.
It is easy to say that “the Word of God—not some new revelation or personal opinion—may correct or supplement what the Church has always believed,” but it is in fact the opinion of a person or group of persons about the Word of God that is set against the continuing tradition. This is what John Henry Newman called the tyranny of “private judgment,” which is not unlike heresy—from haeresis, meaning choice.
As I say, these are questions that have been with the Church from the beginning, and metastasized into numerous institutional divisions in the sixteenth century.
Check out J.R.R. Tolkien:
The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness — which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St. Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!) Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history — the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of it branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils.
If one radically edits the past before appropriating it, then it is no longer the past that one is appropriating, but a version of the present."
Ancient-futurist-emergents think that they are drawing closer to the so-called "Ancient" Churches (extant, not extinct) by aping them.
I don't think I can get "closer" to my rich neighbors by coveting their possessions and then stealing them so I can be "just as" rich as they are.
First of all stop posting anonymously, if you really want to have discussion have the courage to stand behind all of your posts by leaving your name.
You said, "I don't think I can get "closer" to my rich neighbors by coveting their possessions and then stealing them so I can be "just as" rich as they are."
Wow. It's amazing that these are the kinds of thoughts that people think on this subject. It's as if you believe that some parts of the Church hold a patent on their particular style or doctrine. Like I said before this is the kind of divisiveness that is destroying the Church.
After having some time to think about these posts and trying to remove myself from feeling personally attacked, I am left confused. Where is this fear coming from? Are these people afraid that evangelicals will find what is good and right about mainline denominations and then do it better? Much of this seems to be baseless fear because evangelicals are waking up to realize that the Church has a much richer tradition that we are a part of than just the last one-hundred years in America.
The Tolkien quote best describes my thoughts on this subject. The Church has been growing and developing over thousands of years and as Christians in the current age we can now see why some things have been trimmed and pruned. But the tree remains, not just the trunk or the leaves or the branches but the whole tree. Is it wrong for the leaves to acknowledge that they are a part of the tree and thus can accept and claim what is good and right about the tree? It seems to me that what you are saying is that it is all separate and there can be no acknowledgement of the whole by the parts. If this is the prevalent thought in Christianity, it is easy to see why the body of Christ is so dysfunctional. Yours is a dangerous concept of individualism and division.
All of this is why I try to avoid labels and rather attempt to personally and corporately find ways to connect to the Church catholic. By remaining clustered in separate denominations, and raising up defenders of our particular beliefs and traditions we are doing a grave disservice to the gospel. If I am wrong in this belief then so be it, I would rather err on the side of grace and unity than perpetuate the petty divisiveness of some Christians.
Evangelicalism has thrived on the Christian expressions least friendly to tradition, ordination, liturgy, and ecclesiastical authority.
The authors and endorsers of this statement, however, do not see the relationship of Evangelicalism to ecclesial Christianity (whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Magisterial Protestant) as quite so antagonistic. The giveaway here is the prologue’s assertion that Evangelicals need to recover “the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation, and the Evangelical awakenings.”
This construction of Christian tradition is troubling on several levels, from the notion that Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism are each equal in guarding the faith, to the idea that the ancient Church provides the blueprint for Christian unity. These expressions of Christianity are divided on several substantial points and do not regard the others to be equal guardians of the faith—hence the division between Eastern and Western Christianity, and among the Western churches.
At the same time, doing an end run around the historical developments that led to these divisions—those in the Middle Ages, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and those in the modern era among the Protestant denominations—has its obvious appeal. But it also implicitly trivializes the points at issue that have defined Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Reformed Christianity (not to mention Puritanism, Methodism, and the several denominations to emerge from those traditions). Christian history is a messy affair, and a call to reverse the past is akin to putting the genie back in the bottle.
But the point not to be missed is the Call’s elevation of the Evangelical awakenings to a tradition on a par with Constantinople, Rome, Geneva, Wittenberg, and Canterbury. Just to mention these cities is to expose the problem. Evangelicalism does not have a capital city; in the United States, Wheaton was an unofficial one, but then Colorado Springs rose up to be a more active hub of parachurch activity.
The reason for such rootlessness is Evangelicalism’s suspicion of the forms that define ecclesiastical bodies, such as creeds, liturgy, and ordination. George Whitefield spoke volumes when, in 1739, while preaching in different pulpits and to mixed audiences, he said, “It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it.”
As the latest historical scholarship has shown, this indifference to form was essential to the Evangelical movement. It stemmed from a conviction that mediation of any kind, whether Catholic or Protestant, posed a barrier to direct communion between God and the individual Christian. Ecclesial forms, the logic went, could be faked; they could result in nominal Christianity or dead orthodoxy.
Evangelicalism, accordingly, sought authentic or genuine faith, unencumbered by rites, dogma, and clergy. As such, born-again Protestantism is a new and highly modern form of Christianity, one that regards dependence on churchly mediation, whether through catechesis or creedal subscription, sacraments or ministerial blessings, pastors or priests, or councils of bishops or presbyteries, as in tension with rather than constituting a personal relationship with Christ.
I need clarification on how you are defining the word "evangelical". Are you defining it as a subculture of American Christianity? Are you defining evangelicalism as a group of people who are concerned with proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world?
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