|
|
|
Telford Work: The Internet Monk
Interview The
kind of Pentecostal I need to be around more often by Michael Spencer
I hope I can interview Dr. Work again, and deal
with some of his favorite subjects. He's a very diverse guy, and his
course syllabi and web site notes reveal quite a wide range of
intellectual passions. For now, he's got to put up with my
questions. So enjoy the interview, stop by telfordwork.net
and get to know him better. 1. How do your academic colleagues react when they hear you are Pentecostal? How do you respond to the "anti-intellectual" portrayal of Pentecostalism? Colleagues usually think my being Pentecostal is cooler, and less surprising, than you might expect. The world of academic theology includes people from all kinds of backgrounds. So the common stereotypes are less powerful. Here is an example of what I mean. When I interviewed for my first part-time position at Westmont, the religious studies faculty gave me a standard question: "Which theologians have been most influential in your life?" I gulped and answered: "Honestly, they would have to be Joseph Smith, Hal Lindsey, and Pat Robertson." They understood completely. We evangelicals often have "walks" that have taken us through pretty sketchy traditions in ways that have genuinely blessed us. This is true of every person I just cited in my own story. Smith (mediated to me by my Mormon then-girlfriend) taught me a key lesson in epistemology: that a believer isn't necessarily a pushover. Mormonism was an early and robust challenge to my confident modern atheism. Lindsey (mediated through my premillennial best friend and his mother) taught me that history and eschatology aren't opposites. Premillenial apocalypticism overturned my cultural progressivism. Finally, Robertson (mediated through my future wife's charismatic mother) taught me that the Holy Spirit is personal and opened up my theology to true Trinitarianism. I take these awkward debts not as testimony to youthful naivete but as a reminder that even so-called "anti-intellectual" traditions are often quite philosophically powerful and deserve respect. Fundamentalists, for instance, are commonly labeled anti-intellectual. Yet most fundamentalists I know are thoughtful, diligent in study, and logically rigorous to the point of rationalism. What they usually are not is intellectually cultured trained to live in an elite European academic theological subculture. That does make them anti-intellectual, in the sense that they are suspicious of those recent sociological aberrations known as "intellectuals." (Here see "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" by Tom Wolfe, in his recent book Hooking Up.) They are right to be. Intellectualism is not intelligence, not expertise, not insight, not wisdom, not accuracy, not brilliance, not even education. It's really just an attitude, and not a Christlike one. "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Cor. 8:1). The pastors at Christian Assembly, our Pentecostal church in Los Angeles, aren't intellectuals and have no desire of becoming intellectuals. It would set their ecclesial and missionary strategies back. Yet their liturgy and preaching are often brilliant. They value learning both in and out of school as long as it manifests itself in love. They are just tired of puffed up know-it-alls who think academic learning is better than other kinds of learning and equate degrees with power. In his book Simple and Profound, South African Pentecostal David du Plessis relates an exchange he had with an academic theologian. If I remember correctly, the theologian asked him what he thought of Rudolf Bultmann's program of demythologization. Du Plessis answered like a country lawyer: "I'm for it." "You are?!" replied the shocked European. "Sure," du Plessis replied. "Bultmann wants to translate the Bible into categories of the modern world. Pentecostals agree: The way the Spirit worked then is the way the Spirit works today. That's demythologization, right?" Pentecostalism could certainly stand to be more academically robust. But what self-respecting American would root for the hapless Bultmannian intellectual in that exchange? 2. How do you relate classic Pentecostalism and the contemporary Charismatic movement? Are they identical, or should they be differentiated? It's good to distinguish them, but not to oppose them. Pentecostalism takes institutional, ecclesial forms; charismatic Christianity doesn't necessarily. The former predates the latter by sixty or so years. The latter doesn't insist on the specific gift of tongues as necessary evidence of "Spirit-baptism," which I think puts it on more solid theological ground. Another important difference is that Pentecostals, with their longer history, institutional autonomy, legacy of separatism, and theological distinctives, have a purer liturgical style than charismatics. Charismatic Christians think and act more like the hybrids that they are. That makes Pentecostals more fun to worship with. 3. What would you say to those who only know the face of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity on networks like TBN or in high profile ministries like Benny Hinn? The same thing I would say to people who only know southern California by what they see coming out of Hollywood: come visit us before you pass judgment. I have several friends in the Reformed Church in America. You should see their eyes roll when someone brings up Robert Schuller. Just because Schuller is RCA doesn't mean the RCA is Schuller. The same goes for Pentecostals and charismatics. 4. The Internet Monk thinks Jack Hayford is not just a wonderful person, but a significant Pentecostal in the way he relates to other evangelicals and presents Pentecostalism. What do you think? I agree. I don't pay much attention to Hayford, but I attended Church on the Way several times and respect the church and his ministry. Both seem authentically Foursquare by which I mean ecumenically inclined as well as denominationally distinctive, generous in orthodoxy, culturally open, and neighborly toward outsiders. People sometimes tell me I look like Hayford. I would have preferred a comparison to, say, George Clooney, but not theologically. 5. Your journey has taken you from an atheistic response to liberal Protestantism to a positive response to evangelical Pentecostalism. What writers (or teachers) have helped you develop a positive, mature Pentecostal expression of your faith? Besides Pat Robertson, the influences are mainly practical rather than literary. I had a few Pentecostal friends in the late eighties right after college students at LIFE Bible College in Los Angeles and they exposed me to it in an impressive, appealing way. My family started worshipping at Christian Assembly in 1996, and we were at home. So I label myself a Pentecostal, even though I don't have the gift of tongues and don't buy the doctrine that tongues are necessary evidence of Spirit-baptism. (The church is okay with that, though I couldn't be ordained in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.) The people at our church were mainly raised Foursquare or Assemblies of God. They aren't always happy with the faith they were taught, but whatever they went through worked, because these folks get it. They know how to live, pray, sing, and preach the faith. I learn Pentecostal Christianity from them, not from books. I think that's true to the movement, actually. Pentecostal book-theology is often pretty poor. Historically, its substance was borrowed from fundamentalism and Dispensationalism, with Pentecostal distinctives tacked on rather artificially, if not contradictorily. But that weakness is less significant than it seems at first. Pentecostals rarely pay much attention to their own formal theology. To learn Pentecostal theology you have to go to where they pay attention: liturgy, spirituality, and resources and practices for spiritual growth. Go to a healthy church, sing their hymnody, learn to pray with them, and catch the rhythm of their Sunday liturgies. Dare to raise your hands when they do. Pentecostal theology is embodied rather than lettered. If that bothers you, then read Wittgenstein and pray for epistemological healing. 6. Let's talk historical Jesus quest. I'll drop some names. You give a sentence or two reaction.
7. Who would you recommend evangelical laity read to sort through the issues related to the current historical Jesus quandry? The Bible. ;) Actually, for both evangelicals and non-evangelicals my recommendation would be Proper Confidence or Foolishness to the Greeks by Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin locates historical criticism in a modernity that refuses to cede priority to Jesus Christ, even imaginatively. Both "conservative" and "liberal" Jesus quests cannot but fail if they put Enlightenment epistemology, including modern historiography, logically ahead of the Word incarnate who dwelt with us in grace and truth and showed us God's glory. On the details of the Jesus quests, I want to take a look at Philip Jenkins' book, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. My hope is that it would make a good recommendation, but I haven't read it yet. 8. How did you respond, as a scholar, to Mel Gibson's "Passion"? Does it help or hinder or presentation of Jesus to our culture? I didn't see it. In evangelical circles seeing the film became a kind of spiritual shibboleth, and I didn't want to be a part of that. I don't know whether the film will have helped or hindered knowledge of Christ in the wider culture. I have no idea what unchurched Christians' long-term reactions will be. However, within evangelicalism I am a little worried about it. After the film I spent a good deal of time explaining Catholic soteriology to some very confused and distressed Protestant students. Evangelical theology is a poor theological grid for interpreting passion plays, because passion plays presuppose a participatory rather than substitutionary doctrine of atonement. Evangelical students were liable to take the hypersuffering in the film (e.g., the traditional three falls of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross rather than the single fall in the gospels) as underlining their own guilt at making Jesus suffer instead of them. A friend of mine put his reaction to The Passion of the Christ beautifully: "For the first third of the film I was mad at the Romans for inflicting all that punishment. For the second third, I was mad at myself for doing the sinning that had to be paid back this way. For the last third, I was mad at the Father." This is a natural, if unusually candid, evangelical interpretation of the film. It was traumatic for my friend, and also for many of my students. They were greatly relieved to learn that Catholic soteriology reads the cross as human suffering appropriated by Jesus in solidarity with us, rather than as Calvin reads it. Few of the millions of evangelicals who saw the film this spring will have the benefit of that familiarity with the Catholic devotional context of the film, and I fear that they will labor through life with a profound misinterpretation of the cross. 9. The Internet Monk is not on the Rick Warren bandwagon, or on the "seeker sensitive" bandwagon in general. Should he be? How do you assess the "seeker" movement in evangelicalism? I don't know about Rick Warren; I haven't read him. It wasn't encouraging to read a review in Forbes that said, "If you skip all the stuff about God, this is great management advice," but hey, you could say the same thing about Proverbs. I think the seeker movement has been treated unfairly. The underlying impulse to criticize acculturations for the sake of evangelism is really just the domestic equivalent of the missiological effort around the world to make sure what we are commending to the world is good news for all peoples, not just a prior church culture. That is a healthy impulse. Sure, this can be done poorly and naively. Sure, the acculturations are often embodiments of the good news rather than adiaphora, and the resulting message is thinner than it needs to be. Sure, after the housecleaning new acculturations can creep back in just as anti-colonialist missiology left itself vulnerable to postcolonialism. It is right to be on guard against all these failures. But reacting against the whole movement is a cop-out. It falls back on the old imperialistic demand that you have to become like us if you want to be like Jesus. I worked with George Barna for a while and also spent some time working alongside him on the ground floor of a Willow Creek-inspired church plant. It was a wonderful, transformative experience. The people of the church were tremendous. The chance to get away from evangelical subcultural legalism was immensely liberating. The community we created was something my family still misses. However, our church plant was a failure, because the seeker-driven paradigm at the heart of Willow Creek's original strategy was flawed. Willow Creek has moved away from seeker-driven services in which worship is discouraged. That's great. Christianity is a contact sport. You can't learn it at a distance as you can up close, by participating, by following and living with Jesus rather than watching or judging him. Willow Creek's original model depended on a modern epistemology that doesn't work. I'm glad their pragmatism beat out their positivism! However, there is something better than pragmatism: discipleship. Christian Assembly, the church that made me a Pentecostal, practices "worship evangelism." We think the best place to meet Jesus and discover the Spirit is the worshipping church, because that is where we are with Jesus and in the Spirit. We invite strangers to act like disciples in prayer, praise, respectful hearing of the Word of God, and interaction in events like the Alpha curriculum. I am 100% on board with that. "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:31-32). However, Christian Assembly isn't churchy. We dress and act casually. Our music is rock/jazz/gospel/salsa/holiness-hymns. We applaud God like we would applaud the Dodgers. We explain things over and over. We ask guests not to contribute financially, because we want to close off a common misinterpretation among the unchurched that we only want their money. We don't use a lot of insider talk or technical language. We're sensitive to the lack of familiarity and passion that people have before they are disciples. We think of our local congregation as having a specific mission in the wider community, and we keep that mission up-front all the time. All this "seeker sensitivity" is a good thing, done relatively well. The introductory reading I would assign here for strengthening the theological basis for healthy seeker sensitivity is Lesslie Newbigin's Trinitarian missiology, The Open Secret. 10. The term "postmodern Christian" is a source of constant warfare at the Boar's Head Tavern. How would you define "postmodern Christian?" Does the term mean anything particularly helpful today? The term is variously construed, of course. As I define it, I consider it helpful. Modernity was a movement to dispense with the necessity of trusting others. It is located in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion when people tired of trusting either Catholics or Protestants. Getting beyond the anxiety, hubris, and false wisdom of that age is a good thing, because it means we are getting beyond our need to make Jesus jump through our epistemological hoops. "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah" (Matt. 12:39). No wonder modernity failed! James Wm. McClendon, Jr. characterizes continental postmoderns (Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault) as "most-moderns," because while they have abandoned the Enlightenment Project they are still mesmerized by its agenda of certain knowledge, propositional solidity, cultural progress, and individual autonomy. They aren't really postmoderns, at least not as much as others. I call them modernists on the rebound; having been dumped by the girl they want, they still can't get her off their minds. These thinkers have things to teach us (for instance, Radical Orthodoxy uses them somewhat fruitfully), but I can't follow their program. McClendon distinguishes these most-moderns from true postmoderns such as Wittgenstein, John Austin, Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, Newbigin, Nancey Murphy, and himself because these "Anglo-American postmoderns" really are over the girl. They are ready to go on in a world in which learning presupposes trust and offers confidence rather than airtight certainty. That's a world that is finally becoming hospitable again to the good news. The gate back to modernity is wide (though it is closing), but it leads to hell. As I watched a couple of leading postmodern evangelicals squirm under questioning at a recent Wheaton Theology conference, I realized that evangelicals have invested so much of our apologetics in Enlightenment structures that once we return to embracing theological tradition we have no leverage against classically Catholic and Orthodox notions of it. We have traded convictions of holy tradition like justification by grace through faith for convictions of individual autonomy and universal reason. That's not Protestant; that's modern. A considerable share of "conservative" enthusiasm for modernity and suspicion of postmodernity is coming not from faithfulness to Christian tradition, but from obedience to the demands of modernity. Being an opponent of that particular ideolatry makes me a vocal proponent of postmodern Christianity. (By the way, I meant to type "idolatry" in that last line, but I like the word "ideolatry," so I'm leaving it. Hey, maybe I have the gift of tongues after all!) 11. What did Pentecostalism supply that the reformation overlooked? Your choice of the word "supply" reminds me that many Pentecostals talk as if the movement were the restoration of a Christianity that disappeared after the apostolic age. One week of a Church history class will prove otherwise. So I would rather avoid the idea that Pentecostals supplied something that had been missing. What Pentecostals and charismatics offer the wider Church is only that we see something with unusual clarity and live accordingly. Aimee Semple McPherson's favorite Bible verse was Hebrews 13:8: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever." Lutheran and Reformed traditions acknowledged that truth, but Pentecostals (like some sixteenth century Baptists ) have been more faithful in honoring a few of its implications. Jesus hasn't changed since Pentecost. His mission hasn't changed. His work hasn't changed. His Spirit hasn't changed. His power hasn't changed. We have no ground for supposing otherwise Romanization, Constantinianism, infant baptism, cessationism, acculturation, and liberalism notwithstanding. More of the Church (and more of Pentecostalism) needs to stay faithful to that truth. 12. What does the Reformation emphasize that contemporary Pentecostal/Charismatics overlook? Justification by God's sheer favor through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Wesleyan traditions (and Pentecostalism is one) have a great deal to offer Lutheran and Reformed Christianity, but sometimes their gift comes at the expense of a really clear affirmation of justification. Many of my students need some pretty intensive catechesis in the basics of, say, Galatians as Protestants (including Wesleyans) have interpreted it. Justification has become obscured by devotionalism, emotivism, and even confessionalism. Another good Protestant emphasis is the sufficiency of the apostolic tradition (usually summarized, naively or not, as "sola scriptura"). Charismatic emphasis on charismata can lead to a cult of newness and revival that keeps looking outside rather than within the tradition for redemption. This ironically contradicts the central conviction I highlighted in the previous question. Finally, persecution. We aren't nearly as good at killing Baptists as you guys are. (Maybe that's because we are the Baptists.) John Ashcroft is no John Calvin! 13. Someone has said that evangelicals have never built their Notre Dame. Can evangelicals build/sustain a great university within recognizable evangelical orthodoxy? (Note: Or will it get as far as Sloan at Baylor?) I doubt it. But I wouldn't even want to try. Contemporary evangelicalism is more an ecclesial reaction to liberalism and a sociological phenomenon than a self-sufficient and comprehensive theological tradition. Our vitality depends on and contributes to the broader Christian tradition, rather than being purely internal. Furthermore, present-day evangelicalism is too diverse to be unequivocally supportive of the likely assumptions behind the project of building a great evangelical university. Finally, our distinctives are embodied in, and possibly contained within, the ephemeral structures of modernity that give the movement what coherence it has. All this is an inadequate basis for a great university. First, I do not believe that evangelical Protestantism is or should be theologically self-sufficient. A great university would have to be ordered according to the whole faith, not just a few factions. Evangelicals who take the harmful consequences of Christian division seriously will not be able to predict greatness for an institution that excludes brothers and sisters who fall outside our own recognizable boundaries. This is because Christians have historically used such boundary practices as confessions in sinful ways to separate ourselves into artificial communities. The whole faith is bigger (and other) than we have taken it to be. Second, I suspect that theological governance of academic disciplines would only work if the presuppositions of Constantinianism are correct, and I don't think they are. Third, even if evangelicals were the only one true Church, and even if Constantinians were right that ruling the world through force rather than persuasion is already part of our job description, evangelicalism today would still need to be healthier for an evangelical university to excel consistently. Do you really think our current preoccupations with evolution would support leadership in the sciences? Is the subculture that produces Left Behind going to support excellent historiography? I know that first-rate evangelical scholars exist in every field. But I am worried that the pressures on and within our movement's constituencies are too great for a university to become and remain world-class. I see why Catholics believe their theological tradition informs a Catholic university. (In fact, I wish more Catholics believed it.) I see why Calvinists and even Baptists do. I see why evangelicals with delusions of grandeur do. But I don't see why evangelicals with a realistic self-image should. I already mentioned Jim McClendon. I like his vision of the university, in the last chapter of his last work, Witness. It is properly free-church rather than explicitly or implicitly Constantinian, and properly missiological rather than merely catechetical. A university is the Church's gift to a culture, but it resides in the wider culture rather than the Church. 14. Can Christianity be too "Word" oriented? Can it be too "Spirit" oriented? How do you know when the proper balance is present? No, no, and not applicable! One of the weaknesses of modernity is that it draws dichotomies in the wrong places. This is one of them. Healthy faith doesn't balance Word and Spirit, because they aren't in tension. They depend on each other. We're supposed to be Trinitarians, not modalists! Healthy faith is radically oriented toward the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is no trade-off. I can think of communities that are insufficiently Word-oriented, insufficiently Spirit-oriented, and insufficiently Father-oriented. But the answer isn't balance, it's discipleship. One sign of progress would be if we stopped using modalist categories to describe the problem. I don't mean my answer to sound snarky. You have posed a wonderful question. I might just turn it into a paper topic in the class I am teaching this fall on the doctrine of God. 15. What would be your quick response to a dispensationalist who says all miraculous sign gifts have ceased? "God just told me you're wrong!" (Badabing.) A good response could have any one of a variety of entry points. I could critique Dispensationalism's illegitimate "Bible in a blender" hermeneutic, or its rather modalistic doctrine of God, or the modern (Hegelian?) western progressivism that subtly determines its multi-staged cosmic historiography. However, I would prefer to draw on the tremendous (and largely appreciative) critique of John Nelson Darby in R.R. Reno's In the Ruins of the Church to level a spiritual critique. Reno claims that Darby succeeded almost single-handedly in doing analytical justice to the massive failure of the Church, but that he failed in assuming that God would therefore abandon that Church. Reno convicts Darby and Dispensationalism of ultimately serving as the Christian excuse for distancing ourselves from communities of saints that would cause us pain. At bottom, Reno thinks Dispensationalism goes wrong morally. So, to go to the heart of the matter, I would ask that cessationist where his or her denial is really coming from. We have clearly "charismatic" programs for the Church in the New Testament, with no indication that the gifts change before the Second Coming. We have charismata continuing in the Didache and second and third century churches. We have ample testimony from responsibly critical Christians that signs and wonders continue to fit the New Testament pattern. We have compelling reasons in the stories of Israel, Jesus, and the first-century Church for rejecting dichotomies between natural and supernatural, creation and redemption, nature and grace. We have liturgical practices and formal doctrines of illumination and prevenient grace that appeal to special work by the Holy Spirit in order for hearers of the Word of God to believe. Given all that, what is it about signs and wonders that is so threatening that this movement has to go out of its way to deny them? Is it just too uncomfortable, too demanding, too dangerous for Jesus really to be the same yesterday and today and forever? 16. How do you view the gift of prophecy in the contemporary church? Have Pentecostal/Charismatics ruined a good thing by too much emphasis on "extra canonical" revelation in their practice of prophecy? "How do I view the gift of prophecy?" Who cares? I prefer to ask, "Are there prophets in the contemporary Church?" Are there people whose words do the work of Christ after the manner of his prophetic office? Of course there are. Every spiritual gift is abused. The showy charismatic ones are no exception. Newbigin's critique of Pentecostalism in The Household of God is profoundly on-target uncannily so, given Newbigin's relative lack of exposure to the tradition. All over the world the Church will be reaping the whirlwind of those abuses, probably for centuries. But has false prophecy "ruined" the gift of prophecy? Well, have Christians ruined the gift of preaching with centuries of false sermons? Let's say the answer is yes. After all, Christians are always ruining good things. The technical term for that is sin. Then what should we do about it? Stop preaching, or practice faithful preaching? Does God respond to ruination with rejection, or with redemption? By the way, authentic prophesying is no more "extra-canonical" than authentic prayer, hymn-writing, or preaching. It isn't fair to single out prophesying. Cessationism is not the answer to Montanism any more than Montanism is the answer to cessationism. 17. What theologian would you most like to have known, and why? John the Evangelist. (Hey, what's the use of being Pentecostal if I can't indulge in biblicism?) Many theologians leave me awed as I learn to peer between the lines of their writing to see the glory they have beheld. John awes me most of all. "Why not Jesus?" you might then ask. He doesn't count, because I already know him. If you mean "post-biblical theologian," then either Augustine or John of Damascus. I can't decide which is more important: advice from Augustine on the contemporary West, or advice from John of Damascus on Islam. 18. The Internet Monk has a well known phobia of today's twenty-something Christians. What kind of future do you see for the church as those in your classroom become the evangelical leaders of tomorrow? I can't generalize from my classroom to "the church" or even evangelicalism. But as I think toward their future evangelical communities, I see several challenges before my students. First, they tend to be poorly catechized. They haven't learned much Bible, and what they have learned has often been in "memory verses" abstracted from contexts. They have learned a "youth-group Christianity" tailored to their situation as adolescents but not suited to the lives they are beginning to inherit. They don't know much theology or Christian history, and have often been trained away from a deep appreciation of either. What specific liturgy they know comes in homiletical forms and songs that will quickly become obsolete. They have absorbed a consumeristic attitude toward the Church which gives them a ready excuse to leave communities and practices behind they don't like. At the same time, they are much better catechized into the practices of the wider culture: they are pretty fluent in the musical, sexual, technological popular cultures of their demographic circles, whether or not they fully participate. This gives them a rather fragile formation in the faith. Yet all these weaknesses are, in essence, consequences of something that makes evangelicalism strong: its readiness to inhabit contemporary cultural frontiers. We inherited it above all from evangelical Wesleyanism, which went further than Reformed, Episcopal, Lutheran, and other Protestants in adapting to the needs and opportunities of the industrial revolution, and which has never really stopped adapting. "Wesleyan entrepreneurial pragmatism" drives purists crazy, but it forms these same students to face their future with convictions that God is alive and present in whatever contexts they find themselves in. And do you know what? They're right. God is alive and present everywhere we go. And a mustard seed's worth of faith will bear fruit in that place. The extent to which contemporary evangelicalism is taking its cues from the liberal Protestant playbook of fifty years ago alarms me, but the movement has an underlying confidence in the reality and power of God that outweighs the problems. I see more renewal than disaster ahead. 19. What is the value of Creeds and Confessions in evangelicalism? Do they contribute to a healthy evangelicalism or a dead orthodoxy? Yes! I already appealed to Lessie Newbigin's critique of Pentecostalism in The Household of God. In the same book Newbigin critiques Protestantism (as well as Catholicism, but that is not pertinent to your question). Each of these three traditions has taken a good thing and turned it into a bad thing. Protestantism took the good thing of creeds and confessions, and turned it into self-justification that created and perpetuated schisms. Your question doesn't point to that quality of Protestant confessionalism, but it is important to highlight. Here is why: Schismatic vigor is easily confused with healthy zeal. When it "succeeds," it maintains the boundaries of a community that feels justified in being set apart from other communities of faith. Fundamentalists distinguished themselves by making separation a sign of faith. Yet the succeeding centuries have shown that the Spirit has remained fruitful and Christ has remained present in these other, forbidden communities. So the creedal practices have failed. They have become instruments not of faithfulness but of self-righteousness. Such communities are intrinsically weaker because they are maintained by sinful practices. "Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. This is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died" (1 Cor. 11:29-30). "Dead orthodoxy" comes from idolatry faithfulness to one's group rather than to the living Lord who constantly prods us outside our own boundaries to find him. (I need to do some further reading in this area: Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church or Hope among the Fragments.) For instance, if Nicene-Chalcedonian Christianity really were the last word in Christology, then there would be no explanation for either the vitality of Armenian and Coptic and Chalcedonian traditions, or the unprecedented recent reconciliation between them. The language failed all these traditions. Now it also succeeded in a sense, in that both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian confessions helped preserve Alexandrian Christologies that have turned out to be essentially similar. But insofar as these confessional practices underwrote centuries of mutual anathematizing, they were abusive. For another example, if Reformed orthodoxy really were as instrumental to healthy faith as its champions seem to think, we would see confessional Reformed communities thriving and communities of other confessions (as well as anti-confessional communities) fading. But we don't see those kinds of contrasts. Instead we see hard times among confessionalists, and churches both within and without their ranks in which the Spirit works powerfully despite how royally we have screwed things up. Now this doesn't make me an anti-creedalist. Anti-creedalism can have the same destructive dynamics as creedalism. "I belong to Christ" is not an appropriate answer to "I belong to Paul" (1 Cor. 1:12). Moreover, confessions of faith are exceedingly helpful when they are used faithfully rather than sinfully. I rely on them in my teaching. I force my students to memorize the Apostles' Creed. I helped Christian Assembly adopt the Nicene Creed as its definitive statement of faith. Confessional practices can be very, very helpful in remedying every weakness I already identified in my students' formation (see question 18) and in wider evangelical circles. The difference between constructive and destructive confession is eschatological. Are these confessions agreements among witnesses and invitations rather than demands for the world to see things as we have seen them? Are they submissions rather than self-assertions? Are they prayers and testimonies rather than laws? Are they provisional, subject both to what the Spirit shows us in Holy Scripture and all that the Spirit declares to us as belonging to the Son (John 16:13-16)? 20. What is the great book you want to write? Sorry, but so far I haven't had thoughts great enough to become a "great book." I can think of lots of great books I would like other people to write, though. For example, it is high time for another really good Christian interpretation of Islam. I would write it if only I were qualified. |
A few months ago, I
received a nice note from Telford Work. After investigating